The Holocaust As It Happened 1941-1945: Unser Tsait Our Time, Greetings & News From Poland - Paperback

by Lena Szmerling (Translator), Chana Rubin (Translator), Pesach Steinberg (Editor)

Unser Tsait (Yiddish אונזער צײט; German Our Time) was a Yiddish monthly magazine of the Bundists in Poland. Published in Warsaw in the 1920s, it was the party's theoretical organ, in which its leading figures such as Viktor Alter and Henrik Erhlikh set the theoretical agenda.

A Yiddish magazine by Russian-Jewish emigrants was published in the USA under the same title. For a long time, "Unser Tsait" has also acted as a publishing house (Ferlag Our Tsait).

The series of publications primarily serves as a mouthpiece for the Bundists; the first issue appeared in February 1941 and defined itself as the organ of the Jewish Socialist Workers' Party of Poland in exile.

At that time, the main task was to bring the crimes of the Nazis against the Jewish people before the world public and to provide any help. The reason for this was, among other things, the suicide of the Bundist Arthur Ziegelboim, who just barely escaped to London. His farewell letter was printed in Unser Tsait, which said, among other things:

"... I wish that the handful of Polish Jews who remained from the original population of several millions may see the day of liberation of a new world of freedom and the justice of true socialism."

- from Arthur Ziegelboim's farewell letter

Other political persecutions were also a topic in the early years, including the fate of some socialists in their cooperation with the Soviet Union, such as Viktor Adler and Henryk Erlik. Among the theorists of political science, the approaches of Vladimir Medem (1879-1923), the first leader and main ideologue of the Bundists, came up for discussion.

The magazine was also a medium for the promotion of minority rights and Yiddish culture, insofar as it has survived despite Stalin's "Stalinian purges "in Eastern Europe or by the emigrants.