50 Facts About Adam Rayski

Adam Rayski was a Franco-Polish intellectual best remembered for his involvement with the French resistance.

Benoit Adam Rayski claimed that his father was deeply attached to Polish culture and literature, and wanted to "integrate" very badly into Polish society.

Adam Rayski 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.

Adam Rayski chose the name Adam after Adam Mickiewicz, who was his hero.

Adam Rayski took as his surname Rayski because it is a very common Polish surname, allowing him to not attract attention.

That same month, the MOI launched a Yiddish language newspaper Naye Prese, which Adam Rayski contributed to as a journalist.

Adam Rayski wrote extensively about the Spanish Civil War in Naye Prese.

Adam 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.

The Spanish Civil War was to become something of an obsession for him as most of the articles Adam Rayski wrote in Naye Prese between 1936 and 1938 were about Spain.

Adam Rayski came to be deeply attached to French culture and in particular attended the theaters of Paris.

The American journalist Anne Nelson described Adam Rayski as wearing "natty suits" and a black fedora hat, which he always wore regardless of the weather.

Adam Rayski began to republish Naye Prese under the new title Unzer Wort.

Adam Rayski defined the purpose of Solidarite as: "Some kind of propaganda and above all information was a sine qua non of the organization of resistance".

On 24 August 1941, Adam 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.

Adam Rayski was aware that Operation Barbarossa was a "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.

Adam Rayski appointed Boris Holban as the military commander of the FTP-MOI for the Paris area.

On 15 July 1942, Adam Rayski was returning to the room he rented in Paris under a pseudonym with false papers that declared him to be an Aryan, unaware that his wife was trying to flee Paris that day with their son.

Adam 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 escaped.

Adam Rayski learned from a Spanish Republican soldier who had escaped from the Gurs camp and been handed over by the French authorities to work as a slave for the Todt organisation in Poland, who had subsequently managed to escape back to France, that there was a camp in Silesia called Auschwitz where Jews were being exterminated via gassing.

Adam Rayski found the man credible, but suffered much doubt about whether he should publish allegations based upon a single source that he could not confirm, and he deeply hoped that his story was not true.

Adam 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.

Adam Rayski 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.

Adam 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.

Adam Rayski remembered the main 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".

Adam Rayski was greatly helped by Cristina Luca Boico, a Romanian student at the Sorbonne and the FTP-MOI intelligence chief who supplied him with materials for making bombs from the chemistry department at the Sorbonne.

Adam Rayski argued that men were better suited for making the "lightning 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.

Adam Rayski later stated that the greatest mistake that the FTP-MOI ever made was to accept Lucienne Goldfarb, better known as Katia la Rouquine, into its ranks.

Unknown to Adam Rayski, Goldfarb was a prostitute and a long time police informer who used her police connections to secure herself immunity from being deported.

Adam Rayski was greatly moved by the news of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.

Adam Rayski first learned about the uprising by listening to the French language broadcasts of the BBC.

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

Adam 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 Adam Rayski ordered to be executed as an informant.

In July 1943, Adam Rayski, who was wanted by the police, relocated to the south of France, which he felt he would be safer.

Adam Rayski called for the end of the division between Israelites and the Juifs, 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".

At the secret conference that founded the CRIF, Adam Rayski represented the Communists, Fajvel Shrager represented the Bund, and Joseph Fischer represented the Zionists.

The debate about Zionism proved to be the most 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 Adam Rayski was opposed to.

At most, Adam Rayski was willing to issue a statement declaring a general opposition to British imperialism in the Near East and to the 1939 White Paper issued by the British government, which drastically limited Jewish immigration to the Palestine Mandate, both of which the Zionists found insufficient.

Adam 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".

Adam 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.

Adam Rayski was appointed an undersecretary in the Information ministry whose task was to manage the entire Polish media.

Adam 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.

At about 3 am on very cold night in February 1950, Adam Rayski was awakened with a call to report to the Central Committee at once.

Adam Rayski was convicted of treason in absentia by a Polish court.

Adam Rayski, who is no longer in agreement with certain ideas of the Communist Party, has preferred to reclaim his independence.

Adam Rayski worked as a historian, writing several books about the subject of Jewish resistance in France.

Adam Rayski appeared in the 1985 documentary Des terroristes a la retraite by Mosco Boucault to discuss the allegation that he and the other FTP-MOI members were Communist terrorists.

Adam 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.

Adam Rayski proudly noted that during the trial of SS Hauptsturmfuhrer 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.

Adam Rayski's son Benoit Rayski is a prominent intellectual in France.