Henri Polak

Henri Polak (1868-1943) was a Dutch trade unionist and politician. Polak is best remembered as a longtime president of the General Diamond Workers' Union of the Netherlands (ANDB) and as a founder of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1894. Targeted as a Jew, a socialist, and a trade unionist, Polak was arrested by the Nazis in 1940 but died early in 1943 before he could be deported.

Henri Polak was born 22 February 1868 in the Dutch city of Amsterdam. He was the son of a diamond cutter and jeweler names Mozes Polak and his wife, Marianne Smit. He attended a Jewish primary school until the age of 13, at which time he was pulled out of school to go to work to help support his parents' large family as an apprentice diamond cutter.

In 1886, following an argument with his father over a girl he was seeing, Polak left his native Holland for London where he continued to work as a gem cutter. It was there Polak was exposed to the ideas of Marxism as well as to the history and practice of the British trade union movement. Polak also came to be deeply influenced by the Marxist theoretician Franc van der Goes at this time.

While still in England Polak married Emily Nijkerk (1868-1943) in the summer of 1888.

Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1890, Polak immediately became involved in the Dutch labor movement. He joined the Social Democratic League (SDB), a pioneer Dutch Marxist political party in that same year. He also became very active in the Netherlands Diamond Workers' Association. In 1893 he joined the editorial staff of De Nieuwe Tijd (The New Age), a Dutch socialist magazine.

Polak gained fame as the founder and first chairman of the General Dutch Diamond Workers' Union (ANDB), established in 1894. The ANDB was the first Dutch union to include a substantial number of Jewish members and Polak was revered for his emphasis on building order, education, and respectability among the fledgling union's members. Polak's commitment to improving the cultural activities of union members, many of whom were formally marginalized and ghettoized in Dutch society, was as important to many union members as his ongoing efforts for the improvement of wages and shortening of the workday.

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