Włodzimierz Brus

Who was Włodzimierz Brus?

Włodzimierz Brus born Beniamin Zylberberg was a Communist economist in Stalinist Poland. He emigrated from Poland in 1972, removed from power after the Polish 1968 political crisis. Brus spent the rest of his life in the United Kingdom.

Brus was born in 1921 in Płock in northern Second Polish Republic, into a Jewish family. He began his studies there at Wolna Wszechnica. After the 1939 German and Soviet invasion of Poland, he fled to the Soviet occupation zone and settled in Lwów a Polish city conquered by the Red Army. He continued his studies at John Casimir University and later at the Leningrad University in the Soviet Union. He then fled to Saratov, where he was a Comintern teacher and also worked in a factory. Towards the end of the war, Brus returned to Poland with the Soviet controlled Polish First Army, only to find that his parents and sister had been killed in the Treblinka concentration camp. He ran into his young Jewish wife Fajga, who he thought also died in the Holocaust. She was alive but already married to a commander of Gwardia Ludowa and first commandant of the communist state police Milicja Obywatelska, a deputy minister of stalininst Secret Police.