Uncredited Photographer Members of the “Ihud” (Unity) Group, a Section of the Palestine Communist Party Founded by Leopold Trepper (Back Row, 2nd from Left) and Dedicated to Bringing Jewish and Arab Workers Together. Also in the Group, Yehezkel Shreiber (Back Row, 4th from Left), Leo Grossvogel (Back Row, On the Far Right) and Hillel Katz (Seated, 3rd from Right), Tel Aviv 1925
After being driven from the Palestine Mandate by British police, on account of his militant activities, Leopold Trepper returned to Europe, where he eventually became head of the most significant Soviet espionage group in occupied Europe, known by the nazis as the Red Orchestra. This spy network was so successful that it actually provided the Soviet Union not only with the date of the nazi invasion of the USSR, but the number of troops and armaments and their distribution, information also provided in similar form by a Soviet espionage network based in Tokyo under the leadership of Richard Sorge. Needless to say, on Stalin’s orders, this information was ignored. Shreiber, Grossvogel and Katz, all pictured in the photo, became agents in the Red Orchestra network, and all lost their lives to the nazis. Trepper survived being captured by the nazis and escaping only to be imprisoned by the Soviets upon his return to the USSR, where he languished for many years.
“…I belong to a generation that has been sacrificed by history. The men and women who came to communism in the glow of October, carried along by the great momentum of the rising revolution, certainly did not imagine that fifty years later nothing would be left of Lenin but the body embalmed in Red Square. The revolution has degenerated and we have gone down with it.
What? Half a century after the storming of the Winter Palace, with ‘deviations’ being treated by electric shock, the Jews persecuted, Eastern Europe ‘normalized’-with a system of coercion of this kind, people dare to talk about socialism!
Is this what we wanted, was it for this perversion that we fought, sacrificing our lives in the search for a new world? We lived in the future, and the future, like the paradise of believers, justified the uncertainties of the present.
We wanted to change man, and we failed. This century has brought forth two monsters, fascism and Stalinism, and our ideal has been engulfed in this apocalypse. The absolute idea that gave meaning to our lives has acquired a face whose features we no longer recognize. Our failure forbids us to give advice, but because history has too much imagination to repeat itself, it remains possible to hope.
I do not regret the commitment of my youth, I do not regret the paths I have taken. In Denmark, in the fall of 1973, a young man asked me at a public meeting,’Haven’t you sacrificed your life for nothing?’ I replied ‘No.’
No, on one condition: that people understand the lesson of my life as a communist and a revolutionary, and do not turn themselves over to a deified party. I know that youth will succeed where we have failed, that socialism will triumph, and that it will not have the color of the Russian tanks that crushed Prague.” Leopold Trepper, “The Great Game” 1975
Trepper, 1925
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