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.
[...]
Forcing of Jews to be executioners both in ghettos and death camps.
The Holocaust Museums should show how racist sentiments were at the root of
opinion that the German defeat in 1918 was due to Jews and how anti-Semitism
became the rallying force for politicians and demagogues in the Weimar
Republic.
In this atmosphere, the descendants of mixed Jewish-German marriages leaned
over backward to prove that their loyalties lay with Germany rather than with
Jewry. Therefore, when Hitler came to power, many members of such families
volunteered for the job of solving the Jewish question. Among such people were
von Heydrich, Globocnik, Eichman, Knochenn, Dannecker and many others.
These people represented a "pathological Jewish self-hatred," to use the
words of a
Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger (SS-Alibi of a Nation 1922-1945, Engelwood
Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1951 & 1981). In particular,
Reitlinger
points out that when SS General Reinhard von Heydrich became responsible for
the program of extermination of the Jews, he arranged it so that the Jews
themselves were forced to be executioners of Jews, both in ghettos and death
camps.
As a result, an average Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto dispatched over
2,200 persons to the gas chambers of Treblinka. At the Umschlagplatz in
Warsaw,
where Jews were loaded into trains going to Treblinka, Jewish policemen
offered
food in the railway carriages to entice hungry inhabitants of the ghetto to
enter.
The most horrible dimension of the Jewish tragedy in World War II was that
German planners made the Jews themselves execute the Jewish genocide. The
abominable activities of the extortionists (szmalcowniki), or gentiles who
collaborated with the Nazis as "racial Germans" (the volksdeutsche) or other
collaborators, was of marginal importance in the genocide of Polish Jews.
The real
destruction was done with active participation of Jewish Councils and Jewish
Police. This aspect of the Jewish tragedy has been carefully hidden in the US
Holocaust Museum, which instead prominently features such "Polish" elements as
the Kielce pogrom.
Reconciliation versus tradition
Traditional Jewish hatred of the Poles developed during the partitions of
Poland. It
was much more common than Jewish hatred of the Germans. This was mentioned
by the Polish writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka during the Holocaust, when she was
appealing to Polish gentiles to sacrifice for the cause of saving Jews
within the
Zegota program financed by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London.
Today Jewish hatred of the Poles manifests itself in the use of
generalizations when
dealing with accusations. Jewish students are often taught that the
Holocaust would
not have taken place if the Poles did not want it. While teaching about the
Holocaust, an animal farm rendition of the genocide of the Jews is used
("Maus" by
Art Spiegelman) showing Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as swine.
Some of the colleges in America include this animal farm as obligatory
reading. If
ever this cartoon rendition of the Holocaust is translated into Polish and
published
in Poland, it will offend many who remember how the Nazis referred to the
Poles
as swine.
In the conclusion of his Ghastly Decade Gross equates Polish anti-Semitism
with
Hitlerism in Germany, Stalinism in Russia, and legally- sanctioned slavery and
racism in the United States. This is highly unfair. Anti-Semitism never was
legally
sanctioned in free Poland. When Poland was a Soviet satellite the Warsaw
regime
carried out Moscow's orders whether in Kielce, or in 1968, or at any other
time
during the entire history of Peoples' Poland.
Gross writes: "The Poles - because of the Holocaust - must study the
history of the
persecution of the Jews in Poland. Otherwise they will not be able to live in
harmony with their own identity." The insinuations included in this
statement are in
contrast with what Simon Wiesenthal wrote in Krystyna, a Tragedy of Polish
Resistance: "In Polish history, the relations between Poles and Jews never
were
simple." On his eightieth birthday Wiesenthal said: "I know what kind of role
Jewish communists played in Poland after the war. And just as I, as a Jew,
do not
want to shoulder responsibility for the Jewish communists, I cannot blame 36
million Poles for those thousands of [wartime] extortionists (szmalcownicy)
[who
were common criminals]."
Conclusion
The separatist Polish Jews described by Bashevis Singer are no more. Today
Jews in Poland are a part of the Polish Nation, and they follow the
conciliatory
advice of Simon Wiesenthal.
During the Second World War Poland was devastated and plundered by the
Germans and the Soviets. Jewish possessions in Warsaw were devastated,
together
with the possessions of all the inhabitants of the Polish capital. After
the war the
capital was rebuilt from ruins with great effort and sacrifice of the
Polish people. So
it was in other Polish towns. The Polish population was systematically
robbed by
the Germans and the Soviets. All claims for restitution for damages
incurred in the
years 1939-1989 should be settled without regard to creed or ethnic origin.
Unfortunately, Gross, despite his scientific credentials, is practicing
propaganda in
the spirit of the statements made by the Secretary General of the Jewish World
Congress quoted at the beginning of this text. Gross' propaganda helps
those who
make demands for ransom to be paid by the Polish Government to compensate for
crimes perpetrated in Poland by the Nazis, the Soviets, and by common
criminals.
