Two Men Dead

Two Dead Men

Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich were two Poles whom most people had never heard of. Yet the news of their executions in Russia raised an international rumpus last week.

Both were Socialists. Ehrlich was leader of the Jewish Workers Federation in pre-war Poland; Alter was president of the Polish National Council of Trade Unions. Both were also avowed antiFascists, anti-Stalinists.

According to Polish accounts, the Russian secret police caught them when Russia and Germany split up Poland in 1939. They were still in Russian prisons when Moscow and the Polish Government in exile signed a "friendship pact" in 1941--an agreement which by no means established complete friendship between the Russians and the Poles (see p. 34).

Exiled Premier Wladyslaw Sikorski made the two men members (in absentia) of his temporary Polish Parliament. Poles in London and the U.S. tried to obtain the pair's release, and arranged for visas to the U.S. Trade-union leaders, Jewish organizations and such U.S. figures as Raymond Gram Swing, Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie also urged the Russians to release the two Poles. During his trip to Russia in September 1942, Willkie made his plea direct to Stalin, and four weeks ago cabled another plea to Russia's Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov. Last week Moscow gave its answer: Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich were already dead.

Lost Cause. In a heavy-handed manner which did U.S.-Russian understanding no good, Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinoff announced the deaths in a letter to A.F. of L. President William Green. Litvinoff said the two men fled to Moscow in 1939. They were sentenced to death in August 1941 for subversive activities, but were released at the Polish Government's request.

"However," said Litvinoff, "after they were set free, and at a time of the most desperate battle of the Soviet troops with the Hitlerite armies, they resumed their hostile attitude, including appeals to Soviet troops to stop fighting and conclude peace with Germany. For this they were again tried before the Soviet Supreme

Tribunal in December 1942, and convicted and once more sentenced to capital punishment. The sentence has been carried out. . . ."

Cried Norman Thomas, pale repository of Socialist hopes: "Such a policy profoundly menaces the achievements of a just and lasting peace. . . ." That was a large, loose statement. More prophetic of troubles to come was the fundamental clash between Polish and Russian national interests (see p. 34).

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