On a summer day in 1935, a short man with a thoughtful face walked through the old district of Sumy. He was simply dressed, like a worker, but he still wore a broad military belt, which was a heavy reminder of his service in the Polish army.
The man's name was Przybiski, and he walked from the OGPU office in Sumy, where he was once again invited for a debriefing. Once again, he was berated for ignoring operational work. The curator shouted, "Przybski, either you give us information or you will be sent to where Makar never drove his cattle." This time, they did not give him any tasks, only promising that they would deal with him as a troublemaker if he continued to ignore their orders.
The Chekists didn't even ask him, a defector from Poland, if he wanted to be an informant. They pushed a piece of paper for him to sign and ordered him to monitor his fellow countrymen. However, Przybiski could never bring himself to become an informer.
After leaving the frightening building in the center of the city, Icek returned home and that evening told his wife how the authorities reprimanded him for not cooperating. The next day, he met his friend Leon Indyk in the street. "Why are you so gloomy, Icek?" Indyk asked, after greeting his friend. Icek didn't hide the truth, "Leon, I went to the OGPU and they gave me a task - to watch you and report back to them regularly."
Przybylski thought his confession would shock Indyk, but the latter, looking around, whispered: "Icek, I received exactly the same assignment at the same place, only they ordered me to watch you." The workers looked at each other carefully, shook hands firmly, and without saying another word, went their separate ways. Thus, a state secret of the Soviet Union was revealed: the country of workers and peasants was held together by widespread denunciations.
Icek Przybylski, a Polish immigrant, lived in Soviet Ukraine for only four years, but during this short period, he became completely disillusioned with his new homeland. Low wages, housing problems and shortages of industrial goods were minor issues. The Soviet Union, which he once passionately defended, turned out to be a cynical totalitarian dictatorship, where workers lived even worse than under the Piłsudski regime.
Przybiski ended up in Sumy after many trials. He was born on March 25, 1906 in the town of Bielchatow, located near Lodz. During the interwar period this city was known as the Polish Manchester, and the textile industry formed the backbone of Lodz's economy. All the Przybyski families had been involved in this industry for generations.
Icek's parents, Chaim and Chaya, had nine children: three daughters (Sucher, Reizel and Sara) and six sons (Rivka, Icek, Tovia and David). The eldest, Sucher, became a rabbi. In 1915, their mother died during World War I. After her death, Reizl took care of the children. Icek was 9 years old when she died and had to work to support his family. His father suffered from tuberculosis and could not work at full capacity. The boy carried wood and water and tried to bring home some money. At 14 years old, he got a job at a textile factory after learning the family trade from his dad.
Working hard since childhood, Icek, who came from an Orthodox Jewish family, rejected religion. Instead, he enthusiastically embraced the ideas of Marx and Engels, which he believed would lead to the liberation of all working people. Since 1924, the young man had already been in the ranks of "Union of Workers and Laborers in the Polish Textile Industry", consistently voting for the "Red Faction." At the same time, like all his friends, Icek became a member of the left-wing organization, "Zukunft," the youth wing of the Bund party.
Young Przybylski was a typical revolutionary of his time. As a member of Zukunft and the Weavers' Union, he sang in the workers' choir and distributed leaflets and newspapers. Once, when his entire family went to a photography studio during one of the Jewish holidays, Icek staged a real protest. The photographer put his rabbi brother, Sucher, in the center of the photo, all the other men looked at the camera properly, and only Icek, with his clean-shaved face, posed rebelliously, holding up the Bundist magazine, "Walka," ("The Struggle").
In the late 1920s, Poland, like other European countries, experienced a severe economic crisis. Traditional Polish antisemitism intensified to such a degree that a spark could ignite mass pogroms in the country. National problems were especially evident in the army, where Icek, when drafted into the second battalion of the 25th Infantry Regiment of the Polish Army, realized from day one that conditions were even worse in the armed forces than in civilian life.
On the first day at the unit located in Piotrków Trybunal, the recruits lined up on the parade ground. The command shouted: "All Jews, step forward!" Not all stepped forward, but later in the soldiers' barracks, the new arrivals faced a second check. Those who hid their origins on the parade grounds were subsequently given a hard time, though the other Jews did not fare any better. They were constantly assigned the dirtiest jobs: cleaning toilets and stables. Sometimes for fun, the commander would spit on the floor and a Jewish soldier was obliged to clean it immediately amid the laughter of "żołnierzy" (soldiers).
Icek Przybłyski had no intention of tolerating these humiliations. Serving at a post near the town of Oleśk in the Zhitomir region, the soldier thought daily about how close he was to the border of the Kingdom of the Happiest Workers, where the Jewish question had been resolved and anti-Semitism was punished by law. Icik considered the rumors reaching him about horrors taking place in the USSR to be false capitalist propaganda. Finally, on Sunday, June 9, 1929, when all Catholic soldiers marched to mass in a neighboring town, leaving mostly Jews as guards, Icyk Przibłyski, in his military uniform with all his equipment and rifle, quickly ran into a border grove. After penetrating several hundred meters into the neighboring state, deserter encounter Soviet patrol. He informed Red Army soldiers from the 19 Border Guard Unit he had voluntarily cross over bourgeois Poland in the USSR.
The Polish soldier was quickly interrogated at the scene and escorted to Olevsk. There, on July 11th, 1929, at a meeting of the special Soviet-Polish Commission, Icek Prybylski again expressed his desire for political asylum in the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities did not object, and Polish officials did not protest much, only demanding the return of military property – the rifle. After passing OGPU verification and obtaining temporary documents, Iczek, on the advice of a local Jewish man, went to Minsk. However, he could not find work in the capital of Belarus. After appealing to authorities, he was sent as a professional weaver to the "Red Textile Worker" factory in Sumy, arriving there in late September, 1930.
On his first working day at the factory, a political refugee strutted around in his Polish military uniform. Fellow countrymen approached Przyblicki to introduce themselves, and it turned out that there was a large population of Polish immigrants in Sumy, some of whom worked at the same factory. According to them, contrary to Soviet propaganda circulating in the West, local conditions were quite specific, and soon enough Icek could see this for himself. Shortly after, the workshop announced the unification of workers into a commune, but after lengthy arguments, it was proclaimed as a commune and within a month it became a living embodiment of the Russian proverb "two plows while seven wave their hands," but fortunately for Icek and his colleagues, this experiment didn't last long and the commune was disbanded as an example of leftist deviation.
However, life wasn't all about propaganda. At the factory, Icek met a Jewish girl - Klara Haya Weksler. Klara worked as a designer at the enterprise and soon married the young immigrant. A year later they had a daughter, whom they named Rosa, after Icek's sister, Reisla, and four years later in 1935 another girl, Sala. Having refused to cooperate with the OGPU as an informant, and opening up to his fellow countryman, political emigrant Leon Indyk, Icek Przybiski couldn't imagine that full immersion into Soviet reality was yet to come.
In early 1936, major changes occurred at the Sumy wool factory. Like everywhere else in the Soviet Union, Stakhanovite methods of work were introduced. The management did not ask for the workers' opinions. Iczek Przybylski, who was elected by his colleagues to be their union organizer, had set an example for others by volunteering to operate three looms at once. Work intensified, but Iczek, a good specialist used to European rationality, refused to continue operating three looms after a few days. Speaking at a meeting of workers, he declared that the looms in the workshop were positioned incorrectly, making it difficult to monitor the production process properly. His colleagues, who were unenthusiastic about increased work quotas, murmured in agreement.
Management was extremely displeased with this. Such a dedicated worker, who others looked up to, had dared to criticize an important social campaign! In response to Przybylski's criticism, one female employee began exceeding the quota on three looms, although the quality of the fabric and the condition of the looms was no longer discussed by management. Besides management, the secret informer Uchkov, who monitored employees at the factory on orders from OGPU, also drew "appropriate conclusions" about the situation.
But real trouble came after Przybylski got into conflict with another immigrant from Lodz – Abram Horn. Having arrived in Sumy in 1934, Horn was even less accustomed to Soviet ways than Przybiski. Colleagues criticized him because unlike Icek he constantly tried to be cunning and demand various privileges. However, he got away with everything until one day, when while on sick leave, he went to the cinema, where he ran into face to face with Przybyski. Icek who served as insurance delegate for medical issues was forced to report the incident to the factory committee. At the end of month, Horn did not receive payment for sick days. After that, his compatriot found Przybyska in the workshop and ominously declared "I'll destroy you thoroughly so you never see your children again". And Horn kept promise…
On March 21, 1937, Abram Horn, as a witness, found himself in the office of Assistant Operative Commissioner Piotrovsky at the Sumy City Department of NKVD in Kharkiv region. The junior lieutenant asked him to tell about the counter-revolutionary activities of Przybilsi, a Polish defector who worked at a wool factory. He began recording the testimony carefully.
According to Abram Horn, when he arrived in Sumy in 1934 and met Icek Przybylski, the latter immediately began telling him about exploitation of workers in the USSR. The witness claimed that Przybiski advised him to return home to Poland or, at worst, apply for membership in the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine: only Bolsheviks could somehow survive in Soviet Union. Furthermore, Horn insisted that at the same time Przybyski told him horror stories about people dying on streets of Ukrainian cities, such as how an ambulance team refused to help someone who was exhausted, laughing into the phone saying "Why should we help if he's still alive?".
Horn also told the NKVD officer Piotrovsky that Przybiski regularly sent letters to his younger brother, a Bundist, about the difficult situation in the USSR. In these letters, he repeatedly hinted that his brothers and sisters who remained in Lodz should not even think about joining him. Przysbiski sent copies of these letters to the Bundists, who published them in their press. He also sent them copies of the letters from his own sister, Davidovich, who once worked in Sverdlowsk and desperately complained about the living standards of the working class.
Whether these testimonies were completely false can't be said. According to relatives, Icek really did write to Poland warning them not to come to the USSR under any circumstances! Shortly after his interrogation, Horn came for Icek Przybylski. On August 13th, 1937, Fedorov, an operative commissioner from the Sumy city department of the NKVD, arrested the weaver in his workshop and took him to the investigative prison in Sumy.
According to the case files on Przybblski, the first interrogation took place on September 2nd, 1938. During this session, he "confessed" to Piotrovski that he had sent slanderous letters to Poles and fled to the USSR not for ideological reasons but to avoid army hazing. A month later, on September 30th, another officer of the Sumy NKVD interrogated him, Lieutenant Zhukov. He forced Przybyski to explain why he exposed himself as an informant to Leonid Indyk.
Przybylski later described in his petitions for a criminal case review the way the interrogations at the Sumy NKVD were conducted in summer-fall of 1937. Refusing to slander himself or his fellow Polish refugees, he condemned himself to the abuse that lasted for several days. The arrestee sat on the edge of a wooden stool in an interrogation room and was subjected to constant insults. He was not allowed to stand up or move. After many hours, Icek became completely exhausted and lowered his head. One of the investigators hit him in the face, demanding he sit straight. "Lift your head!" he yelled. "You're not visiting your father-in-law here! No protocols were recorded during that time. Only after several weeks of abuse did the arrestee sign a protocol that he had never read by September 2.
The criminal case initiated against Lieutenant Kudrinsky in June 1939, the acting head of the 8th Department of the Kharkiv NKVD, spoke eloquently about the practices of the Sumy NKVD during the Great Terror. Kudrinski, who led the Sumy department in 1937, together with his subordinates, Fedorov, Fadeyev, and Zhukov, extracted "sincere confessions" from innocent people through abuse and threats. Their favorite torture was to keep the unfortunate person in a single position for hours, leaving the prisoner with no choice but to admit to things they had never done. If that didn't work, the NKVD agents would beat the arrestees with a ruler, a stool, and even a specially prepared log.
Despite the "effectiveness" of these investigative methods, in the indictment prepared by investigator Zhukov on October 1, 1937, he could not pin Article 54-6 of the Ukrainian SSR Criminal Code (espionage) on Przybiski. Based on self-incriminating evidence from the arrested political refugee, testimonies from imprisoned Abraham Horn (arrested on the same day as Icyk Przibiski), and intelligence information, the investigator charged Icyk with "mere" anti-Soviet activities. The indictment also noted the fact that he had "self-disclosed" to another informer and refused to work for the NKVD.
The case of Icek Przybylsky was considered not in court, but at a meeting of an inter-departmental extra-judicial body – the so-called "dvoika", represented by Commissar for Internal Affairs Yezhov and Prosecutor of the USSR Vyshinsky. On October 21st, 1937, the dvoika sentenced Przybysk to 10 years of corrective labour in camps. He was immediately transferred to the Ukhta-Izhemsky correctional labour camp of the NKVD of the USSR, located in the Komi ASSR.
The convicted man's wife, Klara Khaya Przybils, who had given birth to another daughter, Sura, during the investigation, was thrown out of her apartment by Chekists in January 1938. The NKVD officers and woolen factory managers presented this as an act of goodwill, saying that she should be grateful that nothing worse had happened to her. The young woman with children had to live in damp and cold basements, and nobody even thought about responding to her complaints about her husband's illegal conviction.
The case of the rehabilitated immigrant seemed to move forward only after the arrest of Kudrinsk, the chief of Sumy Cheks. Kudrin was declared mentally ill, and numerous violations committed by him and his subordinates were revealed, prompting an additional investigation into Przybilski's case.
But despite exclusively positive reviews about the convicted man from colleagues, neighbors and acquaintances who had never heard anything anti-Soviet from him, the investigative unit of NKGB for the Sumy region made a truly Jesuitical decision. Since the main witnesses in the case – woolen factory employee Abram Horn and Frunze factory turner Leon Indyk – had been executed a couple of years earlier and their testimonies couldn't be re-verified, Chekists refused to review criminal case decision. To support their position, NKGB investigative team mentioned in their May 3 conclusion, 1941 that Icek Przybiski was being operatively investigated by NKVD operational-Cheka department as "suspected of espionage".
What kind of espionage could have taken place in this northern camp remains unknown. During his imprisonment, Icek Przybylski had to perform hard labor in logging. In the harsh climate, where winter temperatures reached minus 50 degrees, prisoners had nothing to protect themselves from the cold. Following the advice of an older prisoner, a medical worker with a conviction, Icek used machine oil or grease on his face to prevent frostbite. To avoid scurvy, which affected the prisoners, he used pine resin found in garbage cans.
In the camp, prisoners were constantly haunted by hunger. During times of desperate food shortages, Przybyski had to resort to extreme measures: he cut up his Polish military leather belt and boiled it together with mushrooms he had gathered in the forest. Another time, while going to the forest to cut trees, the inmates managed to steal a collective farmhorse harnessed to sleighs. They killed the animal near the logging site and buried it in snow. The prisoners ate horsemeat for several months, until only gnawed bones remained. Such theft could have resulted in death sentences for Icek and his companions, but starvation was much more frightening.
Besides vitamin deficiency, prisoners also suffered from sodium deficiency. Taught by experienced prisoners, Przybiski, who sometimes cleaned railway tanks, scraped off deposits rich in sodium from walls. Crushed stone turned into salt that Icek traded for additional bread rations.
However, it wasn't just hunger and cold that troubled the inmates. At times, Icek had to fight back against hardened anti-Semites who were numerous among the prisoners. One of them, a large brute, literally wouldn't leave Przybylski alone. After telling this to his doctor friend, Icek received sound advice: "When he starts bothering you again, concentrate and hit him between the eyebrows above the bridge of his nose." When the brute once again started insulting Icek and getting physical, the former political refugee followed the advice, managing to strike the aggressor with all his might. The blow to the spot indicated by the doctor caused the bully's nose to bleed uncontrollably. The anti-Semite was taken to the infirmary and never bothered Icek again.
On August 13, 1947, Icek Przybiski was released after serving a 10-year sentence at Ukhtizhelag. Following the advice of other Jewish prisoners, he moved to a city with a large Jewish population – Chernivtsi. There, he started working at the "Textilshchik" factory.
However, soon he received terrible news from his relatives and former neighbours: his wife Klara Khaya Przybyska, who fought until the end for his release, his youngest daughter Sura and middle daughter Sala had died during the war, and his eldest daughter Rosa had been placed in an orphanage – but no one knew where. After searching all over the Soviet Union, Przysky finally found Rosa. She was already an adult, and her father barely recognized her.
After the war, people dreamt of only one thing – a peaceful life. Iczek Przybylski started a new family with Lyuba Goikhberg, who was from Bessarabia. In 1949 and 1950 the young family had two children: Tsalik and Alexander. As intensely as Iczek had searched for his eldest daughter, he searched for his family that had been left behind in Poland. He found out that three of his brothers had moved to Buenos Aires, and other family members who had not left Lodz had been killed in Nazi concentration camps. In order to spend the rest of his life near his relatives, Iczek decided to move to Argentina, where he could get away from the totalitarian regime. The opportunity came through Poland, which agreed to accept repatriates from its citizens. Jews were allowed to leave Poland freely, but first they needed to go through Poland.
After submitting documents for repatriation, Przybiski decided to seek rehabilitation from the government before departure. Based on this, Soviet authorities would have had to acknowledge that he was wrongfully imprisoned in the camp. Since 1939, the former Polish refugee repeatedly filed complaints, categorically denying all accusations and demanding justice. And he managed to defeat the system! The case of Icek Przibiski was reviewed by the Military Tribunal of the Kiev Military District on March 19, 1957. The decision of the Special Council of the NKVD of the USSR from October 21st, 1837 was overturned and the case against Pribiski was dismissed due to lack of corpus delicti. Icek kept his certificate of rehabilitation like gold: he wanted to show the free world he had been imprisoned without reason by the Bolsheviks. When leaving the USSR, he feared that border guards might confiscate it, so the document was sewn carefully into a child's pillow.
In 1958, after lengthy bureaucratic procedures, the Przybylski family left for Lodz. Initially, they were unable to immigrate to Argentina, as President Arturo Frondizi did not accept anyone from socialist countries for several years. However, in April 1960 the Przbylska family went to Brazil, and only after obtaining residency there were they able to reach their final destination – the port of Buenos Aires, where Icek was greeted by his brothers Tovia, David and Haskel, along with their families. After not seeing each other for over thirty years, the surviving family members were finally reunited and embraced.
In Argentina, Icek Przybylek showed his rehabilitation documents to local communists, but they lived in luxury in Buenos Aires and could not believe the atrocities of "Soviet paradise", which they zealously defended from their comfortable offices. Having once believed in communist utopia, but quickly becoming disillusioned, Icek endured his confrontation with the system. He refused to condemn people to prison or death. After going through all the trials with his head high, losing his family and loved ones, he created a Jewish family and raised children in a free country. In Argentina, he worked at a factory owned by his brothers, and he passed away in Buenos Aires in 2001 at the age of 92. But a hero never dies, he lives forever in the hearts of people.
06.01.2025
Bibliography and Sources:
Przybylski, Calik. "Autobiography." Unpublished manuscript, Buenos Aires, March 2020.
Przybylski Icek Khaimovich, State Archive of Sumy Region, Fund: R-7641, Inventory: 1, Case: 579
Icyk Szmulowicz PRZYBYLSKI
Memories of Dr. Calik (Carlos) Przybylski (recorded in October 2022).
Sora Sala Przybylska, Clara Haya Przybylska // Yad Vashem. Holocaust History Memorial Complex.
Icek Przybylski
1906 – 2001
