Henryk Erlich

Born in Lublin, Henryk Erlich received a traditional Jewish as well as a secular education at Warsaw University. As a student, he became active in the Bund, collaborating with Bronislaw Grosser, and moving to St. Petersburg following the 1905 revolution. He married Sophia Dubnow in 1911 and, following the Bolshevik revolution, moved back to Warsaw with his family in 1918. There, he brought the Bund into the parliamentary political sphere and edited the Yiddish newspaper Folks-tsaytung. In 1931, through his efforts and after the party’s suppression by the Soviet regime, the Bund became a member of the Labor and Socialist International. After the outbreak of World War II, Erlich went to the Soviet Union, where he was imprisoned, interrogated, and sentenced to death, but then released, to help establish what later became the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He continued to use his networks to maintain a unified Jewish anti-Nazi front. He was soon rearrested, along with Victor Alter, and again harshly interrogated. In 1942, Erlich hanged himself in his jail cell.