[2] In common with many other Eastern European Jews, Rajgrodski was attracted to Communism because it promised to dissolve all nationalities, religions and ethnicities, thereby rendering the "Jewish Question" moot.
In his first article, written right after the botched coup d'état of 17 July 1936 led to the civil war in Spain, Rayski- reflecting the Popular Front policy dictated by the Comintern-called for a union of all leftists and liberals against fascism.
[3] The Franco-Israeli historian Renée Poznanski called Rayski a man who was integrated into French society by the means of his "militant Communism" as the PCF came to be a surrogate family for him.
[8] During the 1938 crisis over the Sudetenland, Rayski followed the Comintern line that a front of the Soviet Union, Britain, and France should support Czechoslovakia against the demands of Germany.
[9] In the same editorial, Rayski also blamed the Danzig crisis on Adolf Hitler, arguing that it was German threats to Poland that had pushed Europe to the brink of war.
[13] In April 1941, he went to the unoccupied zone in the south of France to assist with helping the Spanish Republican refugees escape from the internment camps at Gurs and Vernet.
[12] Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union that started on 22 June 1941, was greeted with Rayski with almost palpable relief in an editorial in Unzer Wort, leading him to write: "And so for us to become ourselves again-that is Jews, Frenchmen, antifascists, we needed Hitler's aggression, termed "criminal" against the "homeland of socialism"".
[14] On 24 August 1941, Rayski learned from listening to Radio Moscow's Yiddish language broadcasts that the Germans were systemically massacring Jews in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union.
[16] Rayski was aware that Operation Barbarossa was a "war of extermination" as Hitler had labelled it, but he initially believed that the Jews from France being deported were being used as slave labour.
On 7 June 1942, all Jews in the German occupied zone of France were ordered to wear at all times a yellow star of David badge with the word Juif written on it.
[21] After hiding their son away with a teacher friend of his wife, Rayski spent the night with her at his room, where he noted that she was so shaken by the grande rafle that she had difficulty sleeping and she held him tight, saying she had been so afraid that she had lost him that day.
[2] The MNCR was essentially a continuation of the work of Solidarité in providing support for those in hiding while also serving as an early warning system for upcoming rafles, but only with Gentiles involved.
[23] Between August 1942 and April 1943, Solidarité and the MNCR provided the false papers that allowed 607 Jewish children to be placed with Gentile families in the Paris area.
[24] From the fall of 1942 onward, he wrote pamphlets in French, Yiddish and Polish warning Jews that "resettlement in the East" did not mean moving to some Jewish utopia vaguely located somewhere in Eastern Europe as the Nazis were promising, but rather being exterminated.
[25] Rayski found the man credible, but suffered much doubt about whether he should publish allegations based upon a single source that he could not confirm, and he deeply hoped that his story was not true.
[25] Rayski observed that a disproportionate number of the members of the FTP-MOI were veterans of the International Brigades who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, providing a great advantage as these were men who had experienced combat and were well accustomed to handling guns and bombs.
[29] By the end of July 1943, only Rayski, Sophie Schwartz and Léon Chertok were left of the MOI leaders who had founded the FTP-MOI in April 1942, with the rest all dead.
Goldfarb was able to escape the FTP-MOI assassins, going on to be become the madam of an expensive brothel that catered to rich and powerful men after the war while remaining a police informant, becoming a sort of underworld celebrity in France.
[2] In a memo he wrote in December 1943, he stated: "We must succeed in involving the majority of the Jewish population in the fight against the enemy, both in the Resistance and in the defense of their own existence".
[35] The debate about Zionism proved to be the most difficult subject at the conference as Fischer and the other Zionist delegates insisted that the group issue a statement in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine, to which Rayski was opposed to.
[35] Another compromise proposal put forward by Rayski was for the CRIF to declare its support for a federal state in Palestine, where the Jews and Palestinian Arabs would share the Holy Land after the war.
[35] Rayski felt there was a need for "an understanding with the Arab population" of Palestine to prevent a Jewish-Arab war in the Middle East after the expected end of the British mandate and declared that the concerns of "French Jews" were vastly more important to him than "foreign territories".
[37] Rayski recalled that atmosphere in Warsaw in the early 1950s was one of fear and dread with even members of the Central Committee living in constant terror about the possibility of Joseph Stalin ordering a purge of the Polish United Workers' Party.
[38] Upon arriving, Raysk met Jakub Berman who told him that the party's newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, was going to run an article attacking Władysław Gomułka as a "foreign agent".
[38] Rayski concluded that through Gomułka was indeed charged in 1951 that the much dreaded purge did not place owing to the "cautious, but firm will" shown by the Polish Communist leaders in quietly resisting Soviet pressure.
[30] In July 1957, he was dismissed for writing articles critical of the Communist dictatorship, which led him to return to France, where he announced that he had resigned from the Polish United Workers' Party.
[44] In Le sang de l'etranger, Rayski, Courtois and Peschanski established the majority of the attacks on German forces in the Paris area between 1942 and 1944 were the work of the FTP-MOI.
"[46] In 1992, Rayski's best known book, Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy – Entre soumission et résistance, an account of Jewish life and resistance in France during the occupation was published.
[44] In a review of The Choice, the historian Richard Cohen felt that Rayski had erred in his picture of the French people as being basically opposed to Vichy antisemitism and of being essentially supportive of the Jewish communities.
[47] In another review of The Choice, the historian Lars Rensmann called it "...arguably the most detailed and comprehensive account of the Jews and Jewish resistance under Vichy France".