A worldwide campaign for the liberation of former “Red Orchestra” leader Leopold Trepper was launched here today. French author Gilles Perrault announced that the Polish authorities have just turned down Trepper’s fourth request for authorization to leave the country and join his sons in Israel. “We want Trepper and we will get him come what may and by whatever methods we might have to use,” Perrault said.
“All methods are fair and right in fighting anti-Semitism and in trying to help save a man who stood up to Hitler and the Gestapo and helped us win the second World War” Perrault stated. The committee which will be set up and launch the campaign is neither anti-Communist nor anti-Polish, the French writer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He added “it is not our fault if Poland and its anti-Semitism stink. Neither is it Trepper’s fault.” Perrault is the author of a historic study on Trepper and his war time organization the “Red Orchestra.”
ANTI-SEMITISM CAREFULLY PREPARED
One of Trepper’s sons, Michael, now a lecturer at Copenhagen University said that his parents were living in total Isolation and are “desperately lonely and sick.” Trepper himself has suffered two strokes and Mrs. Trepper, who will be 66 years old in March, has had a nervous breakdown. “Both are under constant police surveillance. Policemen live in the same building with them, their mall is opened and their telephone tapped,” Michael Trepper said.
He and Perrault also said that permission is refused for Trepper to leave the country “to prevent him from revealing the truth about Polish anti-Semitism.” The two men explained that the 1967 flare-up of Polish anti-Semitism was, contrary to official Polish claims, not due to the Six-Day war, but had been carefully prepared and planned by the Polish government.”
“A special section led by a colonel and consisting of about 100 special agents had been working on this project for about one year before June 1967,” Perrault said. Michael Trepper added: “My father who protested about this in a letter addressed to the former Secretary General of the Polish Community Party (Wladyslaw) Gomulka knows all about this.”
Leopold Trepper – about whom the JTA recently released a three-part feature – led for the duration of the war a special espionage network known as the “Red Orchestra.” Nazi documents revealed after the war that Heinrich Himmler himself feared the activities of the network which became known as the best in the world.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
