Adam Rayski (14 August 1913-11 March 2008) was a Franco-Polish

intellectual best remembered for his involvement with the French

resistance.
Adam Rayski
Born 14 August 1913
Białystok, Belostok Oblast, Russian empire
Died 11 March 2008 (aged 94)
Paris, France
Occupation Political activist and journalist
Organization FTP-MOI
Political party Polish Communist Party
French Communist Party
Movement Anti-fascism, French Resistance
Spouse(s) Idesza Zaromb
Contents
Communist activist

Rayski was born as Abraham Rajgrodski to a family of Ashkenazim

(Yiddish-speaking Jews) in Białystok, which at the time was part of the
vast Russian empire.[1] After the First World War, Białystok became part
of Poland. Active in the Communist Party of Poland, he was expelled from
his high school as a trouble-maker.[2] In common with many other Eastern
European Jews, Rajgrodski was attracted to Communism because it promised
to dissolve all nationalities, religions and ethnicities, thereby
rendering the "Jewish Question" moot.[1] Accounts differ about his views
towards Poland. The French historian Stéphane Courtois claimed that
Rayski "hated" Poland.[2] By contrast, Rayksi's son, Benoît Rayski, has
denied Courtois's allegations. Benoît Rayski claimed that his father was
deeply attached to Polish culture and literature, and wanted to
"integrate" very badly into Polish society.[1]

Under the Sanation military dictatorship that ruled Poland from 1926 to
1939, the Communist Party was illegal and the police were often looking
for him.[2] He adopted as his alias the name Adam Rayski, taking the name
Adam because in the Bible Adam was the name of the first man created by
God, which reflected his belief that Communism would create a new
civilization.[1] He also chose the name Adam after Adam Mickiewicz, who
was his hero.[1] He took as his surname Rayski because Rayski is a very
common Polish surname, allowing him to not attract attention.

In 1932, he immigrated to France, where he studied journalism at the

Sorbonne. In 1933, he joined the Jewish section of the French Communist
Party.[2] In January 1934, he joined the Main-d'oeuvre immigrée (MOI)
section of the PCF (Parti communiste français-French Communist Party).[2]
That same month, the MOI launched a Yiddish language newspaper Naye Prese
(New Press), which Rayski contributed to as a journalist.[2] As his
French improved, he also started writing articles for L’Humanité, the
main newspaper of the PCF..[2]
Rayski wrote extensively about the Spanish Civil War in Naye Prese. In
his first article, written right after the botched coup d'etat of 17 July
1936 led to the civil war in Spain, Rayski- reflecting the Popular Front
policy dictated by the Comintern-called for an union of all leftists and
liberals against fascism.[3] The news of the German intervention in
Spain, which began on 24 July 1936 led him to warn in article on 1 August
1936 that fascism was on the march, which caused him to urge that France
strengthen the alliance with the Soviet Union, and for French leftists to
campaign against French supporters of the Spanish Nationalists.[3] Rayski
labelled General Francisco Franco and General Emilio Mola, the two
leaders of the military junta trying to overthrow the Spanish republic,
as the heirs to the Inquisitors who persecuted Jews in the Middle
Ages.[4] Throughout the civil war, he urged that Jews join the
International Brigades fighting for the Spanish republic, as he used
highly emotional language to link the Spanish Nationalists with the
persecution and expulsions of Spanish Jews in centuries past.[5]
Inverting the language of the Nationalists who professed to be engaged in
a Catholic "crusade against Communism" that sought to evoke the militant
crusading spirt of the medieval Reconquista against Islam, Rayski accused
the Nationalists of quite literally wanting to take Spain back to the
Middle Ages.[5] The Spanish Civil War was to become something of an
obsession for him as most of the articles Rayski wrote in Naye Prese
between 1936-38 were about Spain.[3]

The Franco-Israeli historian Renée Poznanski called Rayski a man who was
intergrated into French society by the means of his "militant Communism"
as the PCF came to be a surrogate family for him.[6] Rayski came to be
deeply attached to French culture and in particular attended the theaters
of Paris.[6] The American journalist Anne Nelson described Rayski as
wearing "natty suits" and a black fedora hat, which he always wore
regardless of the weather.[7] Rayksi was well known for his fiery,
passionate temperament, which was reflected in his writing style.[7] In
1938 he married Idesza "Jeanne" Zaromb, a fellow Polish Jewish immigrant
to France who would be his liaison agent during the World War Two.[2]
Their son Benoît was born later that year. In 1938, Leo Katz, the editor
of Naye Prese was expelled from France, and Rayski together with Louis
Gronowski became the new co-editors of Naye Prese, continuing in that
role until the French government shut down Naye Prese in the fall of
1939.[8] Naye Prese was one of the three main Yiddish newspapers in
Paris; the other two being the Zionist Parizer Haynt and the Bundist
Unzer Shtime.[8] Naye Prese had a daily circulation of about 10, 000 in
1936.[9]

The German-Soviet non-aggression of 23 August 1939 caused him much

anguish. In an editorial of 27 August 1939 in Naye Prese, Rayski blamed
the "shifty policy of France and England" for the non-aggression pact,
arguing that the Soviet Union had been in negotiations to join the
Anglo-French "peace front" intended to protect Poland, and insisted it
was Anglo-French policies that had driven the Soviets to sign the
non-aggression pact.[10] In the same editorial, Rayski also blamed the
Danzig crisis on Adolf Hitler, arguing that it was German threats to
Poland that had pushed Europe to the brink of war.[10] On 1 September
1939 Germany invaded Poland and on 3 September 1939 France declared war.
In an editorial on 4 September 1939, Rayski broke with the Soviet line,
writing: "Hitlerism, which from the start has built its existence on the
massacre of Jews, has now taken the road to worldwide massacre...We enter
the war on the side of the French people...For France and for our
people!"[10] Rayski expressed his hope that France would soon win,
writing: "Let the name of Adolf Hitler disappear forever! Cursed for
always, the idea of National Socialism! No one wanted this war except
Hitler and his clique...He will drown in the sea of blood that he has
unleashed."[11]
World War Two

In early 1940, he joined a regiment of the Free Polish Army stationed in

France, and fought in the campaign of May-June 1940 during the German
invasion.[12] In June 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht, but
escaped from the POW camp he was being at outside of Nantes.[12] Under
the terms of armistice signed on 21 June 1940, France was divided into
two zones with Germany occupying all of northern France plus the entire
Atlantic coastline while most of the south of France remained unoccupied
(Italy was also to claim an occupation zone in the Nice area following
the armistice of 24 June 1940). The French government, which had
relocated to Vichy, retained control of the police forces in all of the
zones of France.

On Bastille Day 1940 he returned to Paris.[12] Rayski began to republish

Naye Prese under the new title Unzer Wort (One Word).[12] In July 1940,
he was a founder of the Jewish resistance group Solidarité.[13] Rayski
defined the purpose of Solidarité as: "Some kind of propaganda and above
all information was a sine qua non of the organization of
resistance".[13] In April 1941, he went to unoccupied zone in the south
of France to assist with helping the Spanish Republican POWs escape from
the internment camps at Gurs and Vernet.[2] In May 1941, he went to
Marseille where he established an edition of Unzer Wort for the south of
France.[12] Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union
that started on 22 June 1941 was greeted with Rayski with almost
palatable relief in an editorial in Unzer Wort, leading him to write:
"And so for us to become ourselves again-that is Jews, Frenchmen,
antifascists, we needed Hitler's aggression, termed "criminal" against
the "homeland of socialism"".[14] On 24 August 1941, Rayski learned from
listening to Radio Moscow's Yiddish language broadcasts that the Germans
were systemically massacring Jews in the occupied areas of the Soviet
Union.[15]

In September 1941, he became the national manager of the MOI, leading him
to return to Paris. In November 1941, an article in Unzer Wort, he first
revealed the existence of the Drancy camp outside of Paris, which he
called the "French Dachau".[12] The first deportations of Jews from
France started in March 1942. At the time, it was announced that this was
part of a process known as "resettlement in the East" under which the
Third Reich had created an utopian homeland for Jews somewhere in Eastern
Europe, to which all of the Jews of Europe would be "resettled".
Initially, the claim of the mysterious Jewish homeland in Eastern Europe
that no-one had actually seen was widely believed in France, even by most
Jews, and through most French people did not believe the alleged homeland
was the paradise that the Nazis had promised, few could imagine the
truth.[16] Rayski was aware that Operation Barbarossa was the "war of
extermination" as Hitler had labelled it, but he initially believed that
the Jews from France being deported were being used as slave labour.

In April 1942, he helped to found the Francs-tireurs et partisans -

Main-d'oeuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), the immigrant section of the French
Communist resistance.[12] Rayski appointed Boris Holban as the military
commander of the FTP-MOI for the Paris area.[12] At the same time Rayski
was active as a journalist in the underground newspapers, namely J'accuse
and Fraternité.[2] Both during the war and afterward, Rayski was very
critical of the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF), which was
created in November 1941 to administer the Jewish community in France. On
7 June 1942, all Jews in the German occupied zone of France were ordered
to wear at all times a yellow star of David badge with the word Juif
written on it.[17] The UGIF in a statement urged that Jews wear the
yellow badge with "dignity", which led Rayski to condemn the UGIF as
abject collaborators who willingly went along with Nazi measures out of
the hope that it might improve conditions for French Jews.[17]

On 15 July 1942, Rayski was returning to the room he rented in Paris

under a pseudonym together with false papers that declared him to an
Aryan, unaware that his wife was trying to flee Paris that day with their
son.[18] As a résistant, Rayski felt it better to live apart from his
wife.[18] On that day, he recalled that his major concern was the
unpleasant smell in the summer heat caused by the sauerkraut that German
soldiers were always eating in the outdoor restaurants of Paris.[18] At
about 4: 30 am on 16 July about 4, 500 French policemen began an
operation known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup to arrest every single Jew
living in Paris.[19] On the morning of that day, Rayski described the
scene he saw as he entering the Paris Metro:

"I was descending the stairway leading to the quasis, when I saw
before me, buses turning in the direction of the Grenelle bridge, today
the Bir-Hakeim bridge. Their unusual appearance struck me instantly. On
their back platforms, you could see policemen surrounded with packages,
suitcases and all sorts of bundles...Before crossing the bridge, the
buses slowed down and I could see some faces. No more possible doubt,
simply from the grief of their expressions, I knew what was going on. My
knees buckled under my body, I had to lean against the rail. The comrade
I met at the meeting place confirmed it. "Yes, it is a massive
round-up"".[20]

Rayski spent all of that day, known in French history as Black Thursday,
trying to contact his wife to see if she and their son had had
escaped.[19] Rayski was greatly relieved to find that both his wife and
his son had escaped the grande rafle (great round-up) of 16-17 July
1942.[21] After hiding their son away with a teacher friend of his wife,
Rayski spent the night with his wife at his room, where he noted that she
was shaken by the grande rafle that she had might difficulty sleeping and
held him tight, saying she was so afraid that he had been lost that
day.[22]

In August 1942, he founded the National Movement against Racism

(MNCR).[2] The MNCR was essentially a continuation of the work of
Solidarité in providing support for those in hiding with serving as an
early warning system, but only with Gentiles involved.[23] Between August
1942-April 1943, Solidarité and the MNCR provided the false papers that
allowed 607 Jewish children to be placed with Gentile families in the
Paris area.[23] In 1990, he recalled about what he learned in the summer
of 1942, saying: "A Polish man escaped from Warsaw that summer, in
August, and told us about the decision to exterminate the Jews".[24]

From the fall of 1942 onward, he wrote pamphlets in French, Yiddish and
Polish warning Jews that "resettlement in the East" did not mean moving
to some utopia for the Jews said to be vaguely located somewhere in
Eastern Europe as the Nazis were promising, but rather their
extermination.[25] In his pamphlets, Rayski warned that to take part in
the "resettlement in the East" would mean death, and urged Jews to go
into hiding to escape the "resettlement in the East". Rayski learned from
a Spanish Republican soldier who from the Gurs camp who been handed over
by the French authorities to work as a slave for the Todt organisation in
Poland who had managed to escape back to France that there was a camp in
Silesia called Auschwitz where Jews were being exterminated via
gassing.[25] Rayski found the man credible, but suffered much doubt about
whatever he should publish allegations based upon a source that he could
not confirm, and he deeply hoped that his story was not true.[25] Despite
his doubts, in an article in J'accuse published on 10 October 1942,
Rayski stated that about 11, 000 Jews from France since March 1942 had
been exterminated via gassing at Auschwitz.[25]

Rayski observed that a disproportionate number of the members of the

FTP-MOI were veterans of the International Brigades who had fought in the
Spanish Civil War, providing a great advantage as these were men who had
experienced combat and were well accustomed to handling guns and
bombs.[26] Rayski also noted that a disproportionate number of the
FTP-MOI were like himself Jewish, which provided a certain desperation to
their efforts since for them, the victory of the Third Reich would mean
their extermination.[26] Rayski argued that for ordinary French people,
that if Nazi Germany won the war, France would remain occupied, but the
French people would continue to exist while for himself and all the other
Jews in the world, they would all cease to exist in the event of a German
victory, making their underground struggle a matter of existential
importance. Rayski recalled: "We brought together many young Jews without
parents or homes in action groups of three people. During the winter of
1942-43, we had about 300 people, mostly young people, in the Jewish
groups of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans".[26] Rayski remembered the
principle problem was the lack of weapons, recalling: "Antiquated pistols
didn't always come with the corresponding bullets, so we had to consider
switching over to bombs".[27] Rayski was greatly helped by Cristina Luca
Boico, a Romanian student at the Sorbonne and the FTP-MOI intelligence
chief who supplied him with material for making bombs from the chemistry
department at the Sorbonne.

Some latter day controversy has been caused by the fact that most of the
attacks staged by the FTP-MOI were made by men as the FTP-MOI generally
did not employ women as assassins.[28] This was especially controversial
as during the same period, women were active in fighting as guerillas in
the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Greece. About a quarter of the andartes
(guerrillas) of the National Liberation Front in Greece were women.
Rayski defended the choice of men as assassins for the FTP-MOI, stating
it was suicidal for the FTP-MOI to engage in sustained shoot-outs owning
to the disparity in firepower and numbers, and as such its members had to
make attack swiftly by throwing a bomb and/or firing a few shots before
making an equally swift retreat.[28] Rayski argued that men were better
suited for making the "lighting fast" retreats by running down the
streets of Paris as swiftly as possible than were women as he maintained
that the conditions that allowed for more sustained fighting in the
forests of Russia and the mountains of the Balkans did not exist in
Paris.[28]

He later stated that the greatest mistake that the FTP-MOI ever made was
to accept Lucienne Goldfarb, better known as Katia la Rouquine (Katy the
Redhead), into its ranks. Goldfarb, whose parents and siblings had been
deported in the grande rafle of 16-17 July 1942, joined the FTP-MOI in
late 1942, saying she wanted to avenge her family.[29] Unknown to Rayski,
Goldfarb was a prostitute and a long-time police informer who used her
police connections to secure herself immunity from being deported; in
exchange for immunity together with regular cash payments, Goldfarb
infiltrated the FTP-MOI for the French police and due to information
supplied by her, the French police made their first mass arrests of
FTP-MOI members in March 1943.[29] Over the course of one night, the
French police arrested 80 FTP-MOI members.[30] Despite the fact that her
entire family had been exterminated at Auschwitz, Goldfarb felt no regret
at her actions, and seemed to be motivated only by greed as she worked
for the same police force that had deported her family.[29] The French
police used their favorite filature (spinning) methods of watching the
movements of one FTP-MOI member, if necessary for months, in order to
learn about his or her contacts, and then to follow the others, in this
way building up a comprehensive picture of the structure and membership
of the FTP-MOI.[31][30]

As the police pressure increased, Rayski recalled: "On May 2, 1943, the
leadership of the Jewish section met and demanded two things from the PCF
leadership: First, that the organization, which felt surrounded by the
police, withdraw in order to cut the spinning mills, to save our
executives and therefore to preserve the future of combat. Then, to
consider the gradual transfer to the southern zone of Jewish, political
and military organizations, so that our fighters regain support from the
Jews of the southern zone. The management's response was very clear: we
were told that "Communist cadres are not made to remain in reserve" and
we were criticized for our "capitulatory" attitude. As disciplined
Communists, we bowed".[30]

Rayski was greatly moved by the news of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of
1943. He first learned about the uprising by listening to the French
language broadcasts of the BBC.[32] In an editorial of 15 June 1943 in
the Yiddish language underground newspaper Unzer Wort he wrote:

"Rise up for final combat against Nazi barbarism! Hear the cry of
millions of our brothers tortured in the Polish camps and ghettoes! Near
at hand is the day when Hitler's band will have to account for its
crimes. This sea of blood will never be calmed nor will the innocent dead
be silent. The specter of defeat haunts Nazi bandits. It appears to them
in the faces of the millions of their victims who rise from their tombs,
emerge from the flames and death factories. They spread out like a
formidable army, behind them march the living, all of the persecuted, all
of humanity, to remove from the surface of the earth all traces of Nazi
barbarism."[32]

Rayski noted that both J'accuse and Fraternité were meant for Gentile
audiences, and both newspapers gave extensive coverage to the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising.[32]

Throughout his career as a résistant, Rayski promoted the idea of

unifying all of the Jewish groups into a sort of Jewish Popular
Front.[33] In April 1943, at a meeting in Paris it was agreed to merge
Solidarité, the Union of Jewish Women, the People's Relief, the Union of
Jewish Youth, and a number of other Jewish groups into a new group, the
Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid (Union des Juifs pour la
Résistance et l’Entraide-UJRE).[33] Afterwards, Rayski devoted his time
towards persuading other Jewish resistance groups into joining the
UJRE.[33]

Due in part to the information supplied by Goldfarb, the French police

launched a series of raids between May-July 1943 intended to end the
FTP-MOI once and for all.[29] Rayski wrote that: "By late July, nearly
the entire Jewish leadership had fallen" as the police had arrested over
60 MOI leaders.[29] By the end of July 1943, only Rayski, Sophie Schwartz
and Léon Chertok were left of the MOI leaders who had founded the FTP-MOI
in April 1942 with the rest all dead.[29] Rayski believed there was an
informer in the ranks of the FTP-MOI and had the FTP-MOI intelligence
chief Luca Boico start an investigation. The investigation led to
Goldfarb, whom Rayski ordered to be executed as an informer. Goldfarb was
able to escape the FTP-MOI assassins, going on to be become a madam of an
expensive brothel that catered to rich and powerful men after the war
while remaining a police informer, becoming a sort of underworld
celebrity in France.[29]

In July 1943, Rayski who was wanted by the police relocated to the south
of France, which he felt he would be safer.[2] In a memo he wrote in
December 1943, he stated: "We must succeed in involving the majority of
the Jewish population in the fight against the enemy, both in the
Resistance and in the defense of their own existence".[33] Rayski called
for the end of the division between Israelités (assimilated French Jews)
and the Juifs (the insulting term for immigrant Jews), saying it was
necessary "to widen our influence among French Jews" with the aim of
"achieving the full unity of the Jewish population of France".[33] In the
same memo, Rayski also asserted that he refused to consider "any
hierarchy of atrocities committed by the Nazis" when it came to "to give
priority to the Jewish question or the question of the deportations of
the French [a reference to the STO]".[34] In January 1944, he was one of
the co-founders of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de
France (CRIF). At the time it was known as the General Committee for
Jewish Defense (CGD)- an underground organization whose mission is to
help Jews.[2]

At the secret conference that founded the CRIF, Rayski represented the
Communists, Fajvel Shrager represented the Bund, and Joseph Fischer
represented the Zionists.[35] The debate about Zionism proved to be the
difficult subject at the conference as Fischer and the other Zionist
delegates insisted that the group issue a statement in favor of a Jewish
state in Palestine, to which Rayski was opposed to.[35] In an attempt to
find a compromise, Rayski put forward a proposal that the CRIF declare
its support for a Jewish homeland in the Soviet Union, which may have
been a reference to Birobidzhan, the Jewish homeland that Stalin created
in the Soviet Far East on the banks of the Amur river on the border with
China.[35] Another compromise proposal put forward by Rayski was for the
CRIF to declare its support for a federal state in Palestine, where the
Jews and Palestinian Arabs would share the Holy Land after the war.[35]
The debate about whatever the CRIF should declare its support for Zionism
or not was quite heated and Rayski at one point stated if the CRIF should
"pledges allegiance" to Zionism, he and other Communist Jews would not
join the CRIF.[35] Rayski took an anti-Zionist position, writing at the
time "the CRJF could well accept the point of view of the Zionists but,
in that case, it would not be the Representative Council of French Jews
but the Representative Council of Zionists".[35] Rayski felt there was a
need for "an understanding with the Arab population" of Palestine to
prevent a Jewish-Arab war in the Middle East after the expected end of
the British mandate and declared that the concerns of "French Jews" were
vastly more important to him than "foreign territories".[35]

The conference was unable to agree to a charter for the CRIF, and not
until the summer of 1944 was a charter finally issued.[35] The charter
was very much a compromise about the Palestine question as the CRIF
demanded the "immediate abolition of the 1939 White Paper" and declared
its support for "the demands of the Jewish Agency and other relevant
bodies" without actually stating what those demands were.[35] The CRIF
also declared its support for "national coexistence and friendship
between all parts of society" in the Palestine mandate, for the "broadest
understanding with the Arab population" and for equality for the
"non-Jewish residents of Palestine".[35] Rayski who was living in Lyon
took part in the first public meeting of the CRIF on 5 September 1944,
just two days after the city had been liberated.
Post-War

After the war, Rayski was awarded the Medal of the Resistance and the
Croix de Guerre.[2] In May 1945, he attended a conference in New York,
where delegations of various Jewish groups from around the world met to
discuss ways of aiding Holocaust survivors.[30] In June 1945, the PCF
dissolved the MOI, which marginalized Rayski.[36] It was French Communist
policy to encourage Communists from Eastern Europe who taken part in the
resistance to return to their countries of origin in order to make the
Communist resistance appear more French.[36] Rayski's friend Boris Holban
returned to Romania while he himself felt very strong pressure to return
to Poland.[36]

In September 1949, he returned to Poland, where was active as a

journalist. Rayski was appointed an undersecretary in the Information
ministry whose task was to manage the entire Polish media.[2] Courtois
called him a "Stalinist apparatchik".[2] Rayski was by his own account
disillusioned with life in Stalinist Poland, recalling: "Man was
degraded. The harshness of the everyday battle for life carried him back
several centuries...An egocentrism which had nothing in common with the
individualism of bourgeois society and was rent by the laws of
competition dominated everyday relations".[37] Rayski recalled that
atmosphere in Warsaw in the early 1950s was one of fear and dread with
even members of the Central Committee living in constant terror about the
possibility of Joseph Stalin ordering a purge of the Polish United
Workers' Party.[38]

At about 3 am on very cold night in February 1950, Rayski was awaken with
a call to report to the Central Committee at once.[38] Upon arriving,
Raysk met Jakub Berman who told him that the party's newspaper, Trybuna
Ludu, was going to run an article attacking Władysław Gomułka as a
"foreign agent".[38] Berman took the article as a sign that Gomułka would
soon be charged with high treason, which Berman took as the beginning of
a purge of the party.[38] Rayski concluded that through Gomułka was
indeed charged in 1951 that the much dreaded purge did not place owing to
the "cautious, but firm will" shown by the Polish Communist leaders in
quietly resisting Soviet pressure.[39]

On 28 June 1956, a workers' uprising against the Communist dictatorship

broke out in Poznań. Through the uprising was put down by the Polish
Army, the Communist regime was on the defensive and many expected a
revolution to break out in Poland at any moment. As an undersecretary of
state, Rayski played an important role in liberalizing the Polish press
in the summer of 1956, which helped to set the stage for the Polish
October revolution later that year.[30] During the Polish October
revolution of 1956 that saw a nationalist faction in the Polish United
Workers' Party led by Gomułka overthrow the Stalinist leadership of the
party, Rayski was accused of Courtois of having pursued an ambiguous
line.[2] Rayski disapproved of the bargain struck by Gomułka at a
dramatic meeting of the Central Committee on the night of 19 October 1956
with Nikita Khrushchev who arrived unannounced in Warsaw that night under
which he promised to keep Poland within the Soviet sphere of influence in
exchange for greater autonomy within the Soviet bloc.[30]

In July 1957, he was dismissed for writing articles critical of the

Communist dictatorship, which led him to return to France, where he
announced that he had resigned from the Polish United Workers' Party. He
was convicted of treason in absentia by a Polish court.[40] Courtois
denied that Rayksi had really defected, claiming he was still loyal to
the Communist regime, and was operating in France as a spy.[2] On 6
October 1959, he was arrested by the French police, who accused him of
passing information to Hermann Bertele, a Polish spy operating in
Paris.[2] In July 1961, he was convicted of espionage for Poland and
sentenced to 7 years in prison.[2] Following lobbying by several
resistance fighters, in March 1963 President Charles de Gaulle pardoned
Rayski.[2] In an undated document, Rayski writing in the third person
declared: "A. Rayski, who is no longer in agreeement with certain ideas
of the Communist Party, has preferred to reclaim his independence.
Nonetheless, he maintains a faithful memory of the past, which allows him
to evoke with great honesty the actions of the resistance of Communist
Jews. He directed the UJRE until 1949".[41]

Rayski worked as a historian, writing several books about the subject of

Jewish resistance in France. In 1985, he published his memoir Nos
illusions perdues ("Our Lost Illusions") about his life in Poland from
1949 to 1957.[2] In Nos illusions perdues, he was deeply critical of the
Communist regime in Poland, which he called a "dictatorship" and a
"totalitarian regime".[2] Rayski appeared in the 1985 documentary Des
terroristes à la retraite (Terrorists in Retirement) by Mosco Boucault to
discuss the allegation that he and the other FTP-MOI members were
Communist terrorists.[2] During L’Affaire Manouchian of the 1980s, he was
a prominent defender of Boris Holban against the allegation that he was a
police informer who had betrayed Missak Manouchian.[42] Rayski argued
that the man who betrayed Manouchian was Joseph Davidowicz, the political
commissar of groupe Manouchian, whom Holban had killed on 28 December
1943.[42]

Rayski proudly noted that during the trial of SS Hauptsturmführer Klaus

Barbie in 1987 that the prosecutor Pierre Truche introduced his wartime
writings as evidence that the true nature of the "Final Solution to the
Jewish Question" was known in wartime France against the claims of
Barbie's defense lawyer Jacques Verges.[43] Verges had claimed during the
trial that Barbie had no idea about what was happening to the Jews sent
for "resettlement in the East", claiming that for he all knew that the
homeland for Jews said to be vaguely located in Eastern Europe to which
the Jews were being "resettled" was a real place.[43] In response, Truche
brought in Rayski's wartime warnings as evidence, leading him to conclude
that if Rayski, a man with no special information about the Third Reich
knew that the "Final Solution" was really genocide, then it was not
possible that a SS Hauptsturmführer such as Barbie could claim ignorance
about the true nature of the "Final Solution".[43] In 1989 together with
Stéphane Courtois and Denis Peschanski he published Le sang de l'etranger
: les immigres de la MOI dans la Resistance, a well regarded history of
the FTP-MOI.[44] In Le sang de l'etranger, Rayski, Courtois and
Peschanski established the majority of the attacks on German forces in
the Paris area between 1942-44 were the work of the FTP-MOI.[45]

On 8 May 1990, he spoke at a rally in West Berlin at the site of the

Wannsee Institute, where he talked about the prospect of impeding German
reunification.[24] At the time, he stated: "One question remains for
today and tomorrow. Is there something in the German nature that
predisposes them not to genocide, but to hate of the other? I have no
answer. Perhaps the democracy in West Germany tells us there is no truth
to that fear. But that is for the Germans to show us, now and in the
future."[24]

As a historian, he was greatly opposed to the thesis of alleged Jewish

passivity in the face of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". In
1998, he wrote: "Has the time not arrived to restore to the millions of
victims, by the means of scientifically rigorous and documented research,
their status as combatants who were vanished during an entirely unequal
combat?"[46] In 1992, Rayski's best known book, Le choix des Juifs sous
Vichy - Entre soumission et résistance, an account of Jewish life and
resistance in France during the occupation was published.[44] In a review
of The Choice, the historian Richard Cohen felt that Rayski had erred in
his picture of the French people as being basically opposed to Vichy
antisemitism and of being essentially supportive of the Jewish
communities.[47] In another review of The Choice, the historian Lars
Rensmann called it "...arguably the most detailed and comprehensive
account of the Jews and Jewish resistance under Vichy France".[48]
Rayski's thesis of French Jews as being very far from the passive
subjects of history has been widely accepted as he noted that most French
Jews who escaped deportation took action themselves to avoid that
fate.[45] His tombstone in Paris bears the inscription "Adam Rayski
1913-2008 He was a Communist and a terrorist when he had to be".[40] The
use of the phrase "terrorist" on his tombstone appears to be meant
ironically. His son Benoît Rayski is a prominent intellectual in France.
Work

Le soulèvement du ghetto de Varsovie et son impact en Pologne et en

France , co-written with Georges Wellers, André Kaspi, and Bronia
Klibanski , Paris: Center de documentation juive contemporaine, 1984.
Nos illusions perdues , Paris: éditions Balland, 1985.
Qui savait quoi?: L'extermination des juifs, 1941-1945 , co-written
with Stéphane Courtois , Paris: éditions La Découverte, 1987.
Le sang de l'étranger - les immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance ,
co-written with Stéphane Courtois and Denis Peschanski, Paris: éditions
Fayard, 1989.
Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy - Entre soumission et résistance,
Paris: éditions La Découverte, 1992, translated into English as The
Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance.
L'Affiche Rouge: Il y A 50 Ans Paris : Délégation à la Mémoire et à
l'Information Historique, 1994.
De Gaulle et les Juifs (1940-1944) , Paris: publié par l'Union des
résistants et déportés juifs de France, 1994
"The Jewish Underground Press in France and the Struggle to Expose
the Nazi Secret of the Final Solution" pages 616-628 from The Holocaust
and History The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined,
edited by Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Books and articles

Black, Jeremy (2007). The Second World War: The home fronts. London:
Ashgate. ISBN 9780754626435.
Brossat, Alain; Klingberg, Sylvie (1983). Revolutionary Yiddishland A
History of Jewish Radicalism. London: Veso. ISBN 9781784786083.
Cohen, Richard (December 2008). "Review of The Choice of the Jews
under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance by Adam Rayski". The
Journal of Modern History. 80 (4): 939–941.
Drake, David (2015). Paris at War 1939-1944. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. ISBN 9780674495913.
Hill, Ronald (1992). Beyond Stalinism Communist Political Evolution.
Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781135193973.
Gildea, Robert (2015). Fighters in the Shadows A New History of the
French Resistance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN
9780674286108.
Gerrits, André (2009). The Myth of Jewish Communism A Historical
Interpretation. Amsterdam: P.I.E. Peter Lang. ISBN 9789052014654.
Jackson, Julien (2001). France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944. Oxford
University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780191622885.
Nelson, Anne (2017). Suzanne's Children A Daring Rescue in Nazi
Paris. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781501105340.
Poznanski, Renée (2001). Jews in France During World War II. Waltham:
Brandeis University Press. ISBN 9780874518962.
Poznanski, Renée (2004). "On Jews, Frenchmen, Communists and the
Second World War". In Jonathan Frankel (ed.). Dark Times, Dire Decisions
Jews and Communism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 168–198. ISBN
9780195346138.
Rayski, Adam (1998). "The Jewish Underground Press in France and the
Struggle to Expose the Nazi Secret of the Final Solution". In Abraham
Peck (ed.). The Holocaust and History The Known, the Unknown, the
Disputed, and the Reexamined. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp.
616–629. ISBN 9780253215291.
Rensmann, Lars (January 2010). "Review of The Choice of the Jews
under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance by Adam Rayski". Journal
of Contemporary History. 1 (45): 227–229.
Semelin, Jacques (2018). The Survival of the Jews in France, 1940-44.
Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780190057947.
Sprout, Leslie A. (2013). The Musical Legacy of Wartime France. Los
Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520275300.
Sweets, John (2003). "Jews and Non-Jews in France During the Second
World War". In David Bankier and Israel Gutman (ed.). Nazi Europe and the
Final Solution. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. pp. 361–373. ISBN 9781845454104.
Wasserstein, Bernard (2012). On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before
the Second World War. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 1416594272.
Zaagsma, Gerben (2017). Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades
and the Spanish Civil War. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 1472505492.
Zuccotti, Susan (1999). The Holocaust, the French, and the Jews.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 9780803299146.

References

Mihaely, Gil (30 September 2017). "Rayski, le dernier des Ashkénazes".

Causeur. Retrieved 2 July 2021.
Courtois, Stéphane (19 March 2008). "Adam Rayski, responsable de la
section juive du Parti communiste français". Le Monde. Retrieved 1 July
2021.
Zaagsma 2017, p. 67.
Zaagsma 2017, p. 5.
Zaagsma 2017, p. 5-6.
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Wasserstein 2012, p. 260.
Poznanski 2004, p. 175.
Brossat & Klingberg 1983, p. 140.
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