Adam Rayski RIP

Kyt · Apr 17, 2008

Adam Rayski | Times Online Obituary

Adam Rayski was a leading communist activist in the West during the years when Hitler’s Nazis were ascendant in Europe and during a crucial phase of the Cold War that followed.

When Soviet communism established its rule over Eastern Europe in l945, Rayski returned to his native Poland to become a minister in its government. But his commitment to his Jewish origins and a certain independence of mind made him an uneasy bedfellow for Stalinists. They ordered him back to Paris in July l957 to set up a publishing house as cover for a new phase of clandestine action.

When that cover was blown he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment by a French military court in l961. Some of his old comrades from wartime resistance days in France were then in government, and they effected his release after he had served only two years. When he came out of prison, he gave up political activism for the anonymity and stability of a bourgeois French family life.

Adam Rayski, born in 1913 as Abraham Rajgrodski, came from the lower ranks of East European Jewish society. His parents were shopkeepers and house-to-house traders. But one of his uncles was a leading figure in the Polish Communist Party, and that is the path he chose for himself in his teens.

The anti-Semitism of the right-wing regimes that ruled Poland during the interwar years also helped to drive him down that route. A gifted organiser and administrator, he became secretary of the Communist Party in Bialystok while still in his teens.

That attracted the attention of the Polish police, and by the time he was 20 he had fled to Paris. He was soon in charge of the Jewish section of the French Communist Party. Since he was fluent in Polish, Russian, French and German, he well qualified to help to organise the stream of Jewish refugees that flooded into France during the 1920s and l930s from the dictatorships of central and Eastern Europe. He was given funds to publish a Yiddish paper for them, Naie Presse (New Press), while he for his own part was still learning the craft of journalism on the French communist daily newspaper L’Humanité.

In May l940, as Hitler’s armies rolled over Western Europe, Rayski was conscripted into the Polish-exile army in France. But when, a month later, France surrendered he rejoined the Communist Party and began five years of underground work. In particular he was sent to the area of France ruled from Vichy by Marshal Pétain’s regime to help communists to escape from the concentration camps at Gurs and Le Vernet. He also organised underground fighting units, mostly Jewish. In addition he brought out two underground papers, J’Accuse and Fraternité. And in January l944, while the Nazis were still occupying Paris, he took part in the creation of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF) which survives to this day as the French equivalent of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

After the war Rayski’s spell in government in Warsaw lasted less than ten years. It was brought to an end by the first East European revolt against the Soviet Union in l956. As the Stalinists tightened their grip on government after the revolt, Rayski was kicked out of the government and sent back to Paris. There he was arrested two years later, in October l959, handed over to military justice, and condemned for taking part in Polish spying operations in France.

His spell in prison appeared finally to have cured him of his attachment to communism. He took an administrative job with a Jewish welfare organisation. And the memoirs he published in l985, when he was 73, he called Nos Illusions Perdues (Our Lost Illusions). In the book he writes frankly of the naked dictatorship of the communism which he had experienced. He also took part in several documentaries.

Rayski remained subject to security until his death, and details of his family are secret.

Adam Rayski, communist revolutionary and wartime agent, was born on August 14, 1913. He died on March 12, 2008, aged 94
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