Olivia Pawlowski
HONS 2011J
Hunter College-CUNY
Professor María Hernández-Ojeda
The Narrative of Jack Bjoze by Olivia Pawlowski
Personal Statement
While Jack Bjoze’s service as a soldier in the Spanish Civil War amounted to ten months and eleven days, his commitment to the war effort, its cause, and its veterans lasted a lifetime. Throughout his life, Bjoze fought for his beliefs despite scrutiny from the FBI, backlash from the American government, and discrimination from those who opposed his beliefs. He faced injuries in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II that cut his active duty short but he remained a soldier at heart long after. He brought his courage from the war front to the home front and used the same charisma to combat anti-fascism as a leader of the VALB, Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Although Bjoze’s integrity and resilience were present in his actions before, during, and after the war, many of his personal interviews showed a side of him that was demure and humble. His complexities as an individual are what ultimately drew me to him and, as I delved deeper into his files at the Tamiment
Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives, I felt a kinship with him, who is a Polish-American just like me. Despite his passing in 2005, Bjoze continues to touch the lives of many and this narrative is a remembrance of his contributions as a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Narrative
History, as it studies the past, is grounded in all that is human – life, death, experience, and sacrifice. Because people are the lifeblood of history, historians fail in their endeavor to retell history as an objective truth. Studying the Spanish Civil War has revealed to me the complexities of human life and experience, and the inability to claim any one truth as universal. History, then, is essentially a narrative sewn together by the stories of people’s lives. The story of Jack Bjoze is one of a hero of the Spanish Civil War.
Bjoze was born on July 28, 1913 in Lomza, Poland to parents Herman and Alta. A few years later, his father immigrated to the United States and became a citizen on July 22, 1922, just a few days shy of his son’s tenth birthday. For the better part of his life, Bjoze interchanged between his father’s last name, Bjoze, and Goldstein, the last name his father assumed after he was granted his American citizenship. By choosing to go by Jack Goldstein, Bjoze identified more with his American identity and less with his Polish roots. The Spanish Civil War, however, pushed him to question the American ideals he had for so long believed in.
As a youth, Bjoze began developing a keen understanding of the social and political climate in the United States. Residing in New York City for the majority of his life, Bjoze recalled in an interview the primary reasons he jumped to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War: unemployment, long “bread lines,” and the looming “danger of Hitler coming into power.” In 1935, Bjoze made his political affiliations clear by registering to join the Communist Party at the age of 24. He remained politically aligned to the Communist party for the rest of his life, valuing their emphasis on public ownership and the incentivization of hard work for the betterment of society. When Bjoze heard of the ideological split dividing Spain into two factions, the Republicans and the Nationalists, his empathy for the Republican cause and his anti-fascist sentiments prompted him to sail to Spain on the S.S. Aquitania in January 1937, the same year the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was born.
Bjoze was one of the first 3,200 American volunteers who chose to halt their lives in America to fight a war in a foreign country. While other members of the Lincoln Battalion who arrived later had to brave through the Pyrenees, a mountain range, on foot, Bjoze and his comrades arrived early enough to drive across the border legally into Spain by bus. The school in which he trained was located in Barcelona and the school consisted of not only other Americans but Germans, Czechoslovakians, and British people as well. In an interview with PBS, Bjoze recalled the limited time they spent at the school training before they were cleared for armed combat:
“It was about ten days of drill, then the use of the rifle, and then we spent the rest of our time training on machine guns and proper camouflage. We had very little tanks or artillery until we got into action.”
Bjoze and his fellow combatants were specifically trained in the art of guerrilla warfare, behind enemy lines. Their covert military tactics helped the Republicans push back against the Nationalists and, as their fighting continued, Bjoze rose through the ranks from a private in a machine gun squad to a lieutenant and finally to a battalion commissar. As a leader, Bjoze made a conscious effort to lift the spirits of his men and, for one particular trench vigil, he ensured a steady supply of hot coffee in order to boost morale. Because “people were afraid” and “there were reasons to be afraid,” Bjoze sought ways to ease their suffering. In an interview, Bjoze recalled the tactics he and other officers employed in order to increase morale:
“There was only one thing we had that had any significance and that was making the men aware of what they were fighting for, and how much it meant to them, and what the alternatives were. In the Fascist Army, the men who showed fear were shot, and there the fear of being shot was used to counteract the fear of battle.”
While the Nationalist side employed scare tactics in order to keep their soldiers loyal, Bjoze and other officers on the Republican side believed that reminding their fellow comrades of what they were fighting for would give them the courage they needed to continue fighting. Even though Bjoze recognized that as a leader “you are not always in a position to spend the time with each man to convince him” to remain part of the war effort, Bjoze and other leaders motivated their men by encouraging them, ultimately earning their loyalty.
His role as a battalion commissar came to an end, however, after a sudden injury left him wounded. Despite his shrapnel injury, Bjoze sailed back to the United States in 1938 with a renewed vigor and a staunch determination to continue assisting the soldiers in Spain and other veterans at home. He quickly became employed as the executive secretary-treasurer of the VALB and first on his agenda was to combat the restrictions facing veterans who were interested in obtaining commissions in the U.S. army. Almost 500 veterans enlisted in the army after they returned home from the Spanish Civil War but many found themselves denied service or placed in units with Nazi sympathizers and pro-fascists. Veterans affiliated with the Communist Party faced particular difficulties because the war department continually found ways to keep them from entering Officers Candidate Schools. In retaliation, front organizations, alongside Bjoze, began to bring this discrimination to light. As a politically active Communist, having signed the party petition in 1940, Bjoze resented their mistreatment and wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt to stand up for the American veterans; however, opposition against the veterans continued and, at the outbreak of the Second World War, some were kept from going overseas. Bjoze remained undeterred and began attending conferences, forming rallies, and hosting fundraisers in order to fight for the rights of the VALB. From August 20 to August 24 in 1943, Bjoze was a delegate of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Conference, which had a dual mission of aiding incoming Spanish refugees and restoring the Republic.
The veterans at home, however, remained Bjoze’s main concern and he increased his efforts to rehabilitate and aid the veterans of the brigade. That same year, he led a campaign by alerting the press to the discriminatory government policies preventing American veterans from reenlisting in the war effort. A news article by investigative journalist Drew Pearson exposed the government’s policies and, even though military officials denied the existence of laws banning veterans from active duty, veterans found their requests for deployment accepted at a faster rate and they finally began leaving for service overseas. A year later, Bjoze reenlisted in the war effort as well, this time to fight in the Second World War.
From his first day of active duty on February 1, 1944 to his honorable discharge on December 17, 1944, Bjoze showed an unwavering commitment to the American war effort. Like the men who fought in the Spanish Civil War alongside him, he found that he, too, entered his second war with greater courage. While his service was short-lived because of another medical emergency–he received treatment for neurocirculatory asthenia in October 1944 at Camp Butner, North Carolina and was deemed unfit for further physical training–he refused to let his injury define him. On December 18, just a day later, he signed up for the Enlisted Reserve Corps and served his country as a clerk for the duration of the war. His occupation as a clerk saw no foreign service nor any participation in battles or military campaigns but his continued support of his country awarded him the World War II Victory Medal and the American Theater service ribbon. After the war ended in September 1945, he returned home to continue his work as the leader of the VALB.
In 1946, Bjoze began refocusing his efforts on ending General Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain. On April 13, he organized a rally in Madison Square Park and distributed more than 20,000 leaflets that detailed the Lincoln Battalion’s contributions to the Spanish Civil War. He described the civil war as a battle for “peace and democracy” across the world and he directly criticized America, France, and England for their non-intervention policy during and after the war. He considered those who did not want to support democracy in Spain as “traitors”and his powerful rhetoric would soon put him under surveillance of the FBI, who believed him to be a spy. Bjoze, however, was not a spy; he was simply passionate, outspoken, and, with his favorite tweed suit donned, unstoppable.
Two years later, on January 7, 1948, Bjoze’s commitment to his cause was tested as he protested the execution of two leaders of an anti-fascist resistance movement in Spain; he, along with 16 other protesters, was arrested and dubbed a “foe” of the Franco regime. His arrest, however, unfazed him and, a little more than a week later on January 16, 1948, Bjoze arranged one of his largest demonstrations, a mass picket line with over 250 people participating outside the Spanish Consulate on Madison Avenue. The crowd, armed with pickets that read, “Break off relations with Franco Spain!,” “No Room in New York for Fascist Consulates,” “Avenged Murder of Zoroa and Nuno,” “Boycott of Spanish Olives and Wines,” and “115,000 imprisoned in Franco Spain,” gathered in solidarity against the violence of Franco’s dictatorship. For an hour, the protesters united in memory of their fallen communist comrades, who were executed by Franco’s police because they were branded as terrorists of Spain. Franco’s Spain left little room for the differing ideological factions of the Republican side and the executed communist leaders were just two more individuals who, like hundreds of thousands of others, died because they opposed Franco’s idealized vision of Spain.
Throughout his military career, both on and off the battlefield, Bjoze faced opposition not only from foreign governments but also from his own government at home. The onset of the Cold War in the 1950s introduced growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The McCarthy Hearings throughout 1954 and 1955 exasperated these tensions as Senator Joseph McCarthy began a televised witch-hunt of communists within the U.S. army and the Department of State. Although his sensationalist claims were a ploy to remain popular among the American public and were largely discredited, his rhetoric stirred a paranoia among Americans and became representative of the growing divide between America and the Soviet Union. That divide, however, was less prevalent among the veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Even though the United States held a non-intervention policy during the war, the Soviet Union provided the Republican side with much-needed arms, those weapons falling directly into the hands of many American volunteers. As the United States continued its proxy wars with the Soviet Union, it began investigating its own citizens for possible acts of espionage. Bjoze, who was ideologically aligned with the Soviet Union but a loyal American patriot nonetheless, found himself at the center of a long and winding FBI investigation as it searched for his old Spanish Civil War comrade, Morris Cohen, whom he met in 1937, towards the end of his service.
That same year, Bjoze was approached at the Paris World’s Fair by a Russian leader of an International Brigade who needed American volunteers to enlist in a special guerrilla warfare school outside of Barcelona. Bjoze recommended several veterans he thought would make good guards, drivers, and kitchen staff, one of them being Cohen, who eventually gained notoriety as a Soviet spy during the Cold War. Only later in life did Bjoze make the connection between his innocent recommendation and Cohen’s involvement in Russia as a spy. The FBI, however, began closely monitoring and surveilling Bjoze at the end of the 1940s and continued to question him for years thereafter. In one interview with an agent, he exclaimed: “I am a loyal citizen and loyal to the government of the United States!” Despite the American government’s position on Cohen, Bjoze didn’t believe in classifying him as a traitor because “Russia and America were allies” during the Spanish Civil War. Bjoze never saw his comrade again.
Conclusion
Throughout his life, Jack Bjoze proved himself to be a serviceman to his country, its veterans, and the Spanish Republic. Despite the United States’ opposition to American involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Bjoze showed no hesitation in joining his fellow countrymen at the front lines. The war in Spain represented an ideological struggle that threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people and Bjoze entered the war not only as a soldier but as an ally of the Republic. Despite the political factions present within the Republican side, Bjoze joined thousands of volunteers who were unified under a common fight for freedom and democracy. His commitment to the war effort transcended battle lines and for decades he strove to better the lives of his fellow comrades in the Lincoln Battalion and Spanish refugees of the war. While each American volunteer of the Spanish Civil War may be remembered differently because of the subjective nature of historical narratives, my retelling of Bjoze’s life is ultimately a narrative about courage, bravery, and loyalty.
Notes
1.Bjoze, Jack. Interviewed by PBS. Red Files, 1 Aug. 1999,
http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/kgb_deep_inter_frm.htm. Accessed 20 May 2017.
2. Red Files interview.
3.Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Vertical Files: Individuals; ALBA.VF.002; 1; 80; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
4.Red Files interview.
5.Red Files interview.
6.Red Files interview.
Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Complaints of Discrimination during World War II, 1941-1946; ALBA.069; 1; 14; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
7.Red Files interview.
8.ALBA.283.
9.Jack Bjoze: Freedom of Information Act Files, 1944-1959; ALBA.283; 1; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
10.Red Files interview.
11.ALBA.283.
12.Red Files interview.
Works Cited
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives Vertical Files: Individuals; ALBA.VF.002; 1; 80; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
Bjoze, Jack. Interviewed by PBS. Red Files, 1 Aug. 1999,
http://www.pbs.org/redfiles/kgb/deep/kgb_deep_inter_frm.htm. Accessed 20 May 2017.
Jack Bjoze: Freedom of Information Act Files, 1944-1959; ALBA.283; 1; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Complaints of Discrimination during World War II, 1941-1946; ALBA.069; 1; 14; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
