Fighting on all Fronts, page 11
However, Fianna Fail now made a tactical error. As well as trying to push through the Trade Union Bill they imposed a Wages Standstill Order to break the strike wave. The Dublin Council of Trade Unions—from which the ITGWU had withdrawn because of the presence of the WUI—responded by setting up the Council of Action and began to publish its own paper, Workers Action, to get around the censor. It denounced Fianna Fail’s measures as the first step to “corporative organisation made up of workers and the employers under the control of the government”.38 This was a reference to the contemporary campaign promoted by the Catholic bishops to implement Catholic social teaching through such a form of organisation. In June 1941 the Council of Action organised a massive 20,000 strong demonstration and Larkin symbolically burnt the trade union bill from the platform.39 Another huge demonstration took place in October. The scale of the opposition persuaded the Labour Party to come out strongly against both measures and they experienced a spurt of growth. In 1941 the Labour Party had 174 branches but by 1943 this had risen to 750.40
However, the growing links between the ITGWU and Fianna Fail meant that this massive display of opposition was not translated into industrial action. The result was a defeat for the unions as the Trade Union Act was pushed through with minor amendments and an extensive system of wage regulation was introduced via an Emergency Powers Order. In the immediate aftermath, however, the anger against these measures translated into electoral support for the Labour Party and a weakening of Fianna Fail’s base in the Dublin working class. In 1942 Labour won many extra seats to become the majority party in Dublin Corporation. At the 1943 general election its share of the vote rose to 17 percent—a full ten points more than it had received at the start of the era of Fianna Fail dominance in 1932. Nationally, Fianna Fail’s vote dropped from 51 percent to 41 percent.
The party responded by forging an alliance with the Catholic bishops and ITGWU bureaucrats to launch a Red Scare which one writer described as “the most effective in the state’s history”.41 The Catholic Standard, a paper with a circulation of 80,000 at the time, spearheaded the campaign. Using its access to Special Branch files—undoubtedly supplied by Fianna Fail—the paper ran regular exposé articles against known communists.42 A small number of Communist Party members had, in fact, joined the Labour Party after the Communist Party had voted to dissolve its Dublin branch in 1941. This led the Fianna Fail minister McEntee to denounce Labour leader William Norton, as “the Kerensky of the Labour Party” who was “preparing the way for the Red Shirts”. The Labour Party leadership responded by promptly setting up a commission of inquiry and expelling a number of these individuals.
However, the real target of the campaign was not the tiny handful of Communist Party members but Larkinism. “Larkinism” was a term that summed up the popular sympathy which the Dublin working class had for Jim Larkin and his three sons, who played leading roles in the Workers Union of Ireland and who typified a militant approach to trade unionism and left wing politics. Larkin had also joined the Labour Party in 1941 and was elected to a Dail seat in 1943. The ITGWU attempted to block his nomination and, when that failed, they disaffiliated from the party. Seven members of the Dail (TDs) who were closely linked to them broke away to form the National Labour Party.
The formation of the anti-communist National Labour Party has sometimes been presented in terms of a long-standing personal feud between ITGWU leader William O’Brien and James Larkin, leader of the WUI. But while a personal animus no doubt existed, there was far more to it. Its real roots lay in the ITGWU’s retreat from Connolly’s revolutionary syndicalism. It had evolved to a position of embracing Catholic social teaching and attacking socialist ideas. This in turn was part of its wider journey to embracing the 26 county state, which was also using a form of Catholic fundamentalism to unite its population around it. The upsurge of militancy at the start of the Second World War and its political after-effects in the 1942 local and 1943 general election served, in fact, to crystallise all these tendencies. The result was the formation of an axis of anti-communist Catholic fundamentalism that united the ITGWU and the National Labour Party with the Catholic bishops and Fianna Fail.
One factor which helped this alliance gain considerable hegemony over workers was the approach that left wingers took to the Second World War. The Communist Party was an insignificant force in the South but it was a different story in the North. Within two years of the invasion of the Soviet Union the party had grown to 1,000 members as it embraced “the patriotic war”. The party had moved from being a subversive body to one where its pamphlets were distributed to thousands of households and its meetings even advertised in Unionist Party publications. Around the party was also grouped a looser alliance of left wing trade union officials principally in the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (ATGWU), which was the main British-based union in Ireland.
The Northern Irish working class responded to the war in quite contradictory ways. In the largely Protestant section of the workforce support for the war effort was combined with deep seated plebeian cynicism about the elite leading it and a determination to maintain some control over their working lives. The Catholic section of the workforce was simply indifferent and sometimes downright hostile. This combination led to an occurrence of considerable “lack of discipline” in the workforce. The number of strikes—particularly in aircraft, engineering and shipbuilding—grew considerably. Although Northern Ireland accounted for only 2.5 percent of the insured UK workforce, it accounted for 10 percent of the working days lost.43
In October 1942 a strike at Short and Harland over Sunday working and overtime led to the sacking of two shop stewards. In response the Belfast Shop Stewards movement was formed to link together all the major factories in the city to spread the strike. The Communist Party, however, took a position that “a strike, no matter under what circumstances it takes place, cannot be supported by our party”.44 Naturally this met with considerable hostility from the workers. On 25 February 1944 the largest wartime strike took place when 3,000 workers at Harland and Wolff shipyard came out to demand a pay rise. By 24 March 20,000 workers were on strike as a solidarity movement spread across the city. The Belfast Shop Stewards movement again led the struggle and five of its leaders were jailed. This only led to further solidarity action and Belfast was soon in the grip of a virtual general strike. Once again throughout these struggles the Communist Party was implacably opposed to the strikes. It manoeuvred behind the scenes to defuse the conflict and the shop stewards were released on bail. The strikers, however, won a pay rise and more autonomy for their shop stewards.45
Communist Party opposition to strikes arose from their uncritical acceptance that Britain was fighting an anti-fascist war. This position also led them—and the wider left—to constantly challenge the neutrality of the South. The main forum for this occurred inside the Irish Trade Union Congress, a 32 county body that linked all unions together, and in the Labour Party to which many unions were affiliated. Communist Party officials from the North openly attacked neutrality and promoted the line of their Belfast party leader, Billy McCullough, that neutrality was “a matter of grave concern to democratic opinion” because it put Ireland “out of step with the rest of progressive mankind”.46 This view was echoed by the leader of the ATGWU, Sam Kyle, who spoke against neutrality at a Labour Party conference, claiming that Ireland “could not be indifferent to the national rights of France, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and Czechoslovakia”.47 The significant omission from this interesting list was countries such as India, which had been colonised by the British Empire and therefore excluded from the category of those with national rights.
O’Brien and the ITGWU aptly exploited this blind spot of the CP and the left Labourite union leaders, attacking the fact that the British Communist MP Willie Gallagher, for example, was willing to “shout and applaud for Churchill”.48 By laying claim to his own conservative version of Ireland’s anti-colonial legacy, O’Brien gained a cover to cement his alliance with Fianna Fail. Soon after ITGWU-sponsored TDs split from the Labour Party, a split also took place in the trade union movement. A group of Irish-based unions, principally around the ITGWU, broke away from the Irish Trade Union Congress ostensibly over participation in an international event deemed a breach of Irish neutrality. Fianna Fail’s strategy of dividing the labour movement on nationalist lines had borne fruit. They responded to the formation of the Council of Irish Unions—which was formed to oppose British imperialism, British-based unions and communist influence—with enthusiasm. An internal circular within the government stated that “it will be our policy to build up the Council of Irish Unions and to treat it as the most representative organ of Irish union opinion”.49
Conclusion
The war years saw a considerable degree of class struggle on both sides of the Irish border, which led to a short spurt of growth in left wing parties organising in these respective areas. This level of class struggle is often hidden in conventional accounts of the era, which treats nations as one in their desire to line up on one or other side of geopolitical divides.
However, class struggle in itself does not always lead to political clarity on the left. The tragedy of the period is that a small left was clearer than nationalist and Unionist forces in seeing the danger of Hitlerite fascism, but it decided to take an uncritical stance about Britain’s motive in fighting that war. In particular, the left ignored Britain’s attempt to shore up its empire against its German rival and so played down the genuine grievances that the mass of people in Ireland—or India—had with colonialism.
This blind spot was used by Fianna Fail and the union allies to forge a hegemonic alliance, which tied the labour movement to the 26 county state for decades afterwards
NOTES
1 F S L Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (Fontana, London, 1973), p558.
2 M Hastings, All Hell Let Loose (Harper, New York, 2011), p67.
3 R Fisk, In Time of War (Andre Deutsch, London, 1983), p470.
4 Irish Independent, 27 December 2013.
5 B Tonra, Global Citizen and European Republic: Irish Foreign Policy in Transition (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2012), p154.
6 Red C Poll, 11 September 2013, www.pana.ie/download/Pana-Neutrality-Poll-September-2013-Pie-Charts.pdf
7 J Connolly, “Ireland and the War”, Irish Worker, 17 October 2014, www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/10/irewar.htm
8 Dail Debates, vol 35, col 478, 12 July 1928.
9 J Bowman, De Valera and the Ulster Question (Clarendon, Oxford, 1982), p209.
10 Sunday Times, 21 March 2010.
11 Fisk, 1983, p80.
12 Basil Brooke Diary, 24 May 1941, PRONI D/3004/D/32.
13 Fisk, 1983, p80.
14 “Neutrality, Censorship and democracy”, State Papers Office, S11586A Aiken to Government.
15 JA Murphy, Ireland in the Twentieth Century (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1975), p103.
16 Bowman, 1982, p208.
17 T Brown, Ireland: A Cultural and Social History 1922-85 (Fontana, London, 1985), pp215-216.
18 P Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2013), p145.
19 Fisk, 1983, p95.
20 Minutes of Fianna Fail Party parliamentary party meeting, 19 October 1944.
21 C Nic Daibhead, Sean McBride: A Republican Life (Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, 2011), p126.
22 P Ollerenshaw, 2013, p41.
23 J Boyer Bell, The Secret Army: The IRA 1916-1979 (The Academy Press, Dublin, 1979), p177.
24 P Ollerenshaw, 2013, pp45-46.
25 B Hanley, “‘Oh, Here’s to Adolf Hitler’: The IRA and the Nazis”, History Ireland, no 3, May/June 2005.
26 A Hoar, In Green and Red: The Lives of Frank Ryan (Brandon, Dingle, 2004), p243.
27 Hanley, 2005.
28 Hanley, 2005.
29 ITGWU, Fifty Years of Liberty Hall (ITGWU, Dublin, 1959), p89.
30 Congress of Irish Unions, Annual Report and Conference Proceedings (1945), p54.
31 Cork Echo, 15 May 1941.
32 McEntee to Secretary, Department of Industry and Commerce, 17 March 1940, McEntee Papers, P67/229, University College Dublin archives.
33 ITGWU, Conference Proceedings (1940), p21.
34 The Torch, 2 September 1939.
35 Labour Party, Conference Proceedings (1941), p109.
36 E O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824-1960 (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1992), p146.
37 Memo, Department of Industry and Commerce, 28 April 1941, SPO file S11750, National Archives Dublin.
38 O’Connor, 1992, p145.
39 O’Connor, 1992, p144.
40 Labour Party, Annual Reports (1942 and 1943).
41 M Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland (Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1984), p197.
42 McEntee speech, 4 June 1943, McEntee Papers P 67/364.
43 B Black, “A Triumph of Voluntarism? Industrial Relations and Strikes in Northern Ireland during World War Two”, Labour History Review, vol 70, (April 2005), pp1-19.
44 Milotte, 1984, p204.
45 Milotte, 1984, p205.
46 Milotte, 1984, pp193-194.
47 Labour Party, Annual Report (1941), pp106-107.
48 ITUC, Annual Report and Conference Proceedings (1945), p157.
49 Minister for Industry and Commerce Instructions to all Departments, 23 May 1945, Department of Labour Files, W63, National Archives.
3
Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe: ‘Never say there’s only death for you’
Janey Stone
Never say there’s only death for you.
Though leaden skies may be concealing days of blue—
Because the hour we have hungered for is near;
Beneath our tread the earth shall tremble: We are here!1
—Hersh Glik, song inspired by Warsaw Ghetto uprising
Hitler’s “Final Solution” meant genocide for Europe’s Jewish population: 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, 3 million of them in Poland. Only 5 percent of the Jewish population of Poland survived. Anti-Semitism could take no more dreadful form.
Following the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Russia invaded two weeks later and it was all over by 27 September. Hitler gained control of 48 percent of the country which was then divided into two parts. The Nazis annexed outright the western part of Poland, which became a part of “greater Germany”, and controlled the remainder of the occupied area through a regime called the General Government. Later a third region was added when Germany occupied the area previously occupied by Russia.
Immediately following the invasion Jews were subject to attacks and atrocities but following the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 the Nazis constructed the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka. From July 1942 Operation Reinhardt initiated the systematic annihilation of the Jewish population.
But we must not see the Jews simply as victims. There is a widespread misconception that the Jews went passively to the gas chambers.2 Consider the following from Henri Michel, a historian of the Resistance in Europe:
Hundreds of thousands of Jews allowed themselves to be torn unprotestingly from their work and their homes, stripped of their possessions and taken they knew not where; finally they climbed docilely and apparently without fear into the trucks which took them to the door of the simulated “bath-houses”; when to their horror, they discovered the fearful truth that they were in a gas chamber, it was too late either to escape or to sell their lives dear.3
This chapter will prove that chilling and inhuman image wrong and outline the widespread resistance that did occur. It focuses on Poland as the epicentre of the Holocaust.
Class structure and politics of the Eastern European Jews
Yiddish speaking Jewish communities lived in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years among other populations which had not yet fully established modern nation states, creating a web of tensions and conflicts. Denied the legal right to own agricultural land until the 19th century, Jews concentrated in towns where exclusion from many economic fields led to a restricted range of occupations. The resulting competition laid the basis for hostility among ordinary people. At the top end of the class structure meanwhile, Jews historically played particularly important roles in finance and trade and owned between 60 and 90 percent of Poland’s banks by the end of the 19th century.
With the urbanisation of the 19th and 20th centuries the primarily religious Jewish communities of the Middle Ages were secularised and exposed to the phenomena associated with the rise of capitalism—the mass market and the rise of the industrial proletariat. They organised into trade unions very early compared to other workers in the region, beginning in the 1890s in the Pale of Settlement.4 In 1938 there were 98,000 members of Jewish trade unions in Poland. In the inter-war period half the workforce in Poland was made up of self-employed craftsmen such as tailors and watchmakers. Jewish industrialists on the other hand were reluctant to employ Jewish labour and put their class interests first even amid the increasing anti-Semitism and high unemployment of the late 1930s.5
