“Sofia Poznanska, From the Palestinian Communist Party to the Red Orchestra
During the conference “Solidarity with Palestine of a new kind”, which was held in Brussels-Belgium on November 6, Anne Vanesse presented her book on “Sofia Poznanska”, whose profits from the sale were affected to the psychological support for children at the “Beit Jala” hospital. 37 books were sold on this day of the Conference.
This book recreates the biography of this fighter, who was able to get rid of the Zionist ideology active in the circles of the European left at that time and turn to communism.
Anne Vanesse devoted an entire chapter of the book to Najati Sidqi, the first Palestinian Communist in Jerusalem, and his involvement in discussions on the “national question”, which was the center of important dialogues at the time. In this chapter, she also touched on the attempts of the Communist International from its headquarters in Moscow to Arabize the predominantly Jewish Palestinian Communist Party.
The book included an introduction written by “Geert Cool”, Belgian activist at the “Socialist Party of Struggle” and a contribution by French historian “Gilles Perrault”.
Sophia Poznanska, born in Poland on June 8, 1906, helped found, in 1925, a clandestine cell of the young Palestinian Communist Party. Opposed to Zionism after her first experiences in a kibbutz of the Zionist left, she joined the spy network of “The Red Orchestra” set up by Leopold Trepper and whose information transmitted to the Soviet services was decisive in the war against the Nazis.
The anti-colonial struggles in Palestine, the Spanish Civil War and the anti-fascist resistance are the threads that weave the history of the Red Orchestra. Sophia Poznanska was arrested by the Gestapo on December 1, 1941 in a hideout in Brussels. She put an end to her life on September 28, 1942 after ten months of atrocious torture, without revealing the code of the encrypted messages sent by her network.
