IT was only shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 that Abram Faynsilber, a member of the General Jewish Worker's Union of Poland, known as the Bund, met Henryk Erlich on a prisoners’ transport from Moscow to Saratov. Erlich had been one of the most important representatives of the Polish Bund during the inter-war years and now, like Faynsilber himself, was a prisoner of the NKVD. Erlich was also a member of the Central Committee of the Bund, editor-in-chief of the Folkstsaytung, and, with Wiktor Alter, a delegate of the Bund to the Executive Committee of the Socialist International since 1930.

Henryk Erlich, born in 1882 in Lublin and a member of the Bund from 1903, had earned a law degree and worked as a lawyer and publicist in St Petersburg. He became a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet after the February Revolution of 1917. In the summer of 1918 he returned to Poland. Wiktor Alter, who was born in 1890 in Mlawa and joined the Bund in 1904, had finished his engineering studies in Belgium and lived in England during the First World War. From 1919 Erlich and Alter were both on the Central Committee of the Polish Bund and represented their party in various national and international bodies. While Erlich continued his work as a lawyer and wrote at the same time, Alter centred his activities on the Jewish trade union and co-operative movements. With the German Wehrmacht approaching Warsaw, Erlich had left the city on 6‒7 September 1939, in accordance with the general advice of the Bund's Central Committee. On 6 October he was arrested in Brześć and charged with anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary activities.

Ten years after they shared the ordeal of the 1941 prisoners’ transport from Moscow, Abram Faynsilber gave an account (in a memorial book for Erlich and Alter, written in Yiddish) of what Erlich had told him about his time in Moscow's NKVD prison: