December 12: The Naftali Botwin Company

The Naftali Botwin Company, an all-Jewish, Polish-based unit of the International Brigades in Spain, was formed on this date in 1937. The Company had about 150 members from Poland, France, Belgium, Palestine and Spain. They published a Yiddish newspaper and bore a flag with the words, “For your freedom and ours,” in Yiddish and Polish on one side and in Spanish on the other. Among its fighters was Olek Nuss, a Yiddish poet who wrote the company’s anthem. The Botwins also included the only two Arabs in the International Brigades, one of whom was from Jerusalem and spoke Yiddish. The company went into action against Franco’s fascist uprising in February and March, 1938. Only 18 of the original company survived. After Israel’s Six-Day War in 1967, all of the memorials to the Botwin Company in Poland were taken down by the government.

“Jew, worker or man of the people, wherever you might be: in France, in Poland, in Romania, in Palestine or in America, wherever you live, where you work and suffer, know this: your hope for the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is being decided today in Spain. Worker, intellectual, or simply Jew of the people, without distinction of political tendency or social class, try to forget all that separates us and retain all that unites us.” —Yiddish broadcast on Spanish radio, 1938, translated by Mitchell Abidor