Voice of the Youth [Yugnt Shtime]
May 1941, No. 5(6)
Long live the First of May!1
To the working masses in Poland!
For the second [year in a row], the first of May finds us under the heavy burden of Hitler’s occupation.
The conquered peoples suffer under the yoke of total slavery. The guilt of the propertied classes, the heavy mass of dark interests of the capitalists, imperialists, ammunition dealers—all of this burdens the shoulders of the working masses of Europe... We and the other peoples of Europe have not had time to erect the great edifice of people's freedom on the war ruins of 1918; we do not have yet a powerful dam against violence and aggression. And now, twenty years later, capitalism and fascism have pushed the world down into a new abyss of slavery and death.
Armies of European gendarmes are realizing the goals of German, Italian, and Japanese imperialism under the slogan of the "fight against the English plutocracy."2
These armies convey with them the most terrible political oppression and social exploitation, they convey the most base methods of terror and provocation, wrapped up in the disgusting lies of hypocritical propaganda.
Their march has been accompanied by friendship agreements with the Soviets, who have bared their animal face to reveal a strange stronghold of a traitorous revolution, a people betrayed, and total slavery.
The world is sinking in lies and crime.
A powerful and invincible impulse towards freedom is developing in opposition to the assailant. The English people maintains its positions in stubborn defense. Across seas and oceans, in Africa and China, in the mountains of heroic Greece and Yugoslavia, our brothers in uniform, workers and peasants from almost every country in the world, lead the struggle against the aggressor "for our freedom and yours."3 In the underground movements of occupied countries, workers' groups are gathering new strength for further struggle with the greatest enemy. A powerful and general resistance movement against the occupier continues. The occupier seeks to strangle the aspirations of millions of modern-day slaves in the drunkenness of racial hatred that he has incited. He seeks to drive away their vision of the Day of Judgment4 with countless murders and crimes. Yet his efforts are in vain.
This struggle that embraces all the peoples of Europe is the expression of the decided will of the masses to determine their own fate. The foremost goal within this struggle is the destruction of Hitlerism and Fascism. We can see better and more clearly today, thanks to our own experiences and suffering: it will not be possible for the world to develop properly, there will be no place for social or political freedom, and the building of socialism will remain out of the question—until this most vile and murderous form of exploitation is exterminated from the face of the earth.
Men, women, Comrades!
German propaganda seeks to weaken our position with arguments regarding the interests of the English plutocracy and the war against them. We say openly: the calculations of English City5 capitalists are foreign and repulsive to us, yet the position of the English people is close and dear, as is the pursuit of freedom for all peoples in the world.
Our power lies in the international solidarity of the working masses, in the shared idea of striking down totalism.6 Our power will awaken and blaze up, embracing the world with the bloody flames of liberation and revolution.
All systems of slavery will perish in this fire—whether capitalist, Hitlerist, or totalist. Not only the plans and schemes of the present-day occupiers will be burned in this fire but also the calculations of all capitalists and imperialists around the world. All hopes of building up fascism, whatever its form, will be burned in this fire, as will all systems of totalist slavery.
The folk masses are conscious of the fact that all forms of oppression and exploitation must be annihilated, so that the world can be jolted onto new tracks.
The folk masses strive towards a deep, revolutionary change that will destroy capitalism and with it, consequently, the foundations of imperialism, chauvinism, and fascism. They strive towards a change that will firmly establish a new, just, socialist economy with a system of people's democracy. They strive towards a change that will deliver power to the [world's] peoples, that will build peaceful, international coexistence on the basis of equality and freedom.
The struggle that is being waged is not a defense of the old [social] relations that were incapable of insuring the world against the death of millions of people; this is a fight for a new world of liberated labor and liberated peoples.
Men, women, Comrades!
In the world struggle between the forces of barbarism and progress, between Hitlerism and democracy, the worker masses of Poland, led by a real instinct of consciousness, have found the right path. This path leads them through the defense of Warsaw and other cities to the current, stubborn resistance that they maintain in all domains of life.
What is Hitlerism? Distress, seizures of people, executions, horrible concentration camps and labor camps, in which thousands of people meet a terrible death, the crime of expelling masses of people to their hunger and death, the crime of the ghetto—hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated behind walls, persecuted and robbed of all human rights—this is Hitlerism!
Tens and hundreds of fighters for freedom have been wrenched from the lines of battle—but the fight continues, and the new, independent Poland will be born from it. It will not be capitalist or fascist, it will not be led by the nobility or the bourgeois—but rather a republic of the people, of peasants and workers. Those who would want to see in Poland a prison of social slavery should not aspire towards power! Defended by the working masses and liberated by them anew, Poland will be a land governed by them. It will be a land of social and national justice, a true fatherland for the working masses of Poland, a land that finds itself in brotherly union with the free peoples of liberated Europe.
It will destroy privilege and liberate labor!
It will destroy national hatred and will build up true brotherhood!
It will break the prison bars forever, it will throw down the ghetto walls, it will tear off the wires from the concentration camps!
It will redress the wrongs that have fallen for years on the shoulders of the working masses of all nationalities!
Long live the international solidarity of the folk masses!
Long live a Europe of free peoples!
Long live an independent people's Poland!
Long live freedom and social justice!
Long live socialism!