MILITANT SOCIAL DEMOCRAT. Zygmunt Zulawski impressed me more than any man I met in the "reborn " Poland. From his sickbed this 67-year-old democratic Socialist thundered his denunciation and scorn of Communists and craven Socialists who are trying to impose an alien culture upon his country. The thing which irritates him most, perhaps, and of which he spoke first, is that he is silenced by the censor. He still writes, but his articles are cut to pieces, the heart taken out of them. Under the semi-dictatorships of Pilsudski and Colonel Beck, Zulawski managed to publish articles and books on Socialism, denouncing the regime. But after the " revolution triumphant " he cannot even answer the vicious attacks made upon his character and program. Born in 1880 in the mountains of Galicia, then under Austrian rule, Zulawski studied zoology at Cracow University but gave up a promising scientific career to devote himself to social problems. As a Socialist he was refused a governmental post. He went to work in the mines of Boryslaw as a common labourer. He became a trade union organizer and rose to the secretaryship of the Miners' Unions and later became secretary of the Trade Union Federation of all Galicia. During the war, while wounded and 'in hospital, he was accused of high treason by the Austrian Government for his part in a demonstration. He went into hiding until the end of World War I. Then· he joined with Witos, Tertil and Daszynski in working for the independence of Poland. In 1919 he was elected as a deputy of the Polish Socialist Party to the Sejm or Parliament from the District of Chrzanow and subsequently from Cracow. He simultaneously became general secretary of the Trade Union Organisation and was one of its foremost leaders for the next two decades, until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Zulawski was a member of the executive committee of the International Federation of Trade Unions and of th·e international Labour Office in Geneva. He was elected president of the Social 25 BibliotecaGino Bianco
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