Comments on Jan Tomasz Gross's "Upiorna Dekada 1939-1948"
Matters related to compensation for Poles and Jews for damages suffered
under Nazi and Soviet occupation.
By: Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
(Prepared for the bimonthly ARCANA in Kraków.)
cont.
[...]
Arab oil versus the pogrom in Kielce.
Stalin signed in Yalta a pledge to hold free elections in Poland. The
Soviets broke
this pledge and used various propaganda means to draw the Allies attention
away
from this fact. They exploited the horrible Jewish tragedy, about which
the world
was beginning to learn the gruesome details. The Soviets used the
accusation of
Polish anti-Semitism to justify their protracted occupation of Poland,
while at the
same time the NKVD staged pogroms in all satellite states, in particular in
Poland.
The 19th century ritual murder accusations of the Black Hundred and the
Tsarist
Okhrana were recycled by the Soviets. Of the many pogroms in 1945 and 1946
only the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1945 was exploited worldwide by Soviet
propaganda. The pogroms in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and eastern
Galicia as well as the Kielce pogrom was conducted under close control of the
NKVD in order to generate an exodus of Jews who otherwise would not emigrate.
The American Ambassador to Poland was convinced the date of the 4th of July
was chosen for an efficient dissemination of news among the American Jewry on
the anniversary of the American Independence, a day free of work (Arthus
Bliss-Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed, New York, 1948). A month later a bloody
pogrom was staged in Bratislava, Slovakia, where participants of a veterans'
convention were ordered to march to Jewish quarters where they committed
crimes
similar to those in Kielce. Needless to say, Gross treats the Kielce
events as
genuine proof of Polish anti-Semitism.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Kielce pogrom, the post-communists exerted
much effort trying to whitewash the NKVD and UB which engineered and
controlled the pogrom, while blaming it on a Polish mob. It bears repeating,
however, that innocent people were tortured and executed within a week
after the
pogrom, after a show trial which lasted only a few days. The strength of the
post-communist grip on Poland makes the correction of these mendacities
difficult.
I have personally discussed the Kielce events with Israeli Judge Mrs. Sara
Dotan.
She was assigned to supervise in 1996 in Tel-Aviv the deposition of Israeli
survivors of the Kielce pogrom for a report prepared by post-communist
investigators Zbigniew Mielecki and others. Judge Dotan stated that she
was most
shocked to learn from the witnesses that the Kielce murders were committed by
soldiers and Catholic priests.
I tried to explain to her that apparently the witnesses mistook the
military shirts
equipped with white neck bands for Roman collars. Apparently some of the
uniformed men from the Soviet terror apparatus in Poland (such as soldiers
from
the Blocking Companies of the Second Infantry Division stationed in Kielce,
soldiers from the Internal Corps as well as the uniformed riot police) were
assigned
to stage the pogrom. Apparently, they were given civilian coats and pants
to feign
the role of a Polish mob. By wearing the regular military shirts they
appeared to
the Israeli witnesses as having had the Roman collars now popular among the
Catholic clergy visiting the Holy Land.
The tragic events known as the Pogrom of Kielce of 1946 were demonstrably a
part of Soviet postwar global strategy. The Soviets ruthlessly exploited
Jews for
Soviet political purposes.
In New York on July 7, 1946 the Society For The Promotion Of Poland's
Independence issued a Declaration On the Kielce Crime. The declaration was
signed by prominent historians Henryk Askenazy, Oskar Halecki and others. It
stated:
(...)The Warsaw regime, receiving its orders from Moscow and acting
strictly in
obedience to them has (...) [pursued] policies planned methodically and
aimed at
compelling the Jews to leave Poland and to embarrass the British Government in
matters pertaining to the Palestine problem, and, furthermore, to aggravate
the
political crisis in the Near East, to envenom Judeo-Arab antagonisms. It is
indeed for that purpose that the Warsaw regime endeavors to squeeze in the
remnants of Poland's Jewish population which has succeeded in escaping
Hitler's
massacre, into American and British zones of occupation of Germany."
The Soviet attempt to destabilize the oil-rich Near East also included the
opening of
the Iron Curtain to hundreds of thousands of Jews, many of whom went to
Palestine to join the struggle for the independence of Israel. The
emigrating Jews
were armed with Czech weapons given to them by the Soviets. Bernard Lewis
(Semites and Anti-Semites. New York: W.W. Norton 1986) states that the Soviet
Bloc was the only source of weapons used by the Jews during the decisive
struggles
in Palestine. The decisive moves by the USSR in the UN on the recognition
of the
State of Israel were a part of the strategy to make the Islamic owners of
the Near
East oil fields dependent on Soviet weapons and political support. The
Soviet aim
was to blockade the supply of Arab oil to the United States and its allies
as well as
to generate a fanatical hatered of the Muslim world against the West.
Crime during catastrophic events
One can endlessly cite criminal acts and moral failures inside the Ghetto
walls and
outside of them. The courts of the Polish Home Army (AK) associated with the
Polish Government-in-Exile in London condemned to death and executed traitors
and criminals. All over the world cataclysms offer an opportunity for
people to act
on their worst instincts.
In the United States it is a standard procedure to call on the national
guard to
protect the population against widespread looting and crime during
catastrophic
events. No one in America considers such crimes to be a national disgrace.
Anti-Polish propaganda practiced by Gross and others like him demands that the
Polish Nation accept the behavior of individual criminals to be sins of all
Poles.
The Holocaust Museums
Gross quotes Józef Lipski'sTwo homelands ("Dwie Ojczyzny"),
"...anti-Polonism is
as bad as anti-Semitism or as anti-Ukrainism," and then goes on to
criticize Poland
for not copying American museums of the Holocaust. Unfortunately, these
museums practice anti-Polonism and spread the myth about Polish complicity
in the
Holocaust. Large exhibits of the 1946 Pogrom of Kielce are shown as the
Polish
phase of the genocide of the Jews.
There is nothing in the Holocaust Museums on the German megalomaniac
interpretation of the theory of evolution which says that life is a mortal
struggle for
the survival of the fittest. The Germanic race was supposed to be the
fittest, as
opposed to Semitic and Slavic races. Marx strengthen the confusion when he
came up with his theory of history according to which the law of the jungle
was
justified in the political struggle between nations or social classes.
The Holocaust Museums do not show how Marx and Darwin provided fertile
ground for the development of anti-Semitism which percolated in the German
society throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as German
racism and
the ideals of German superiority gained ground. At the same time Wagner's
operas
were strengthening German megalomania and Nietzsche's dream of supermanhood
pleased the Germans. While Bismarck's regime toned down anti-Semitism, it
directed its hatred towards Polish Catholics. Bismarck marked the Poles for
destruction in order to assure Germany's rule over Prussian territory. While
Bismarck's anti-Catholic campaign was being conducted in parts of Poland
occupied by Germany, mixed German-Jewish marriages were occurring quite
often. The children of those marriages were taught to say that they were
totally
and unconditionally German. But anti-Semitism kept growing, sustained among
other reasons by a resentful realization that Jews played a prominent role in
German society.
