Modern Jewish American discourse about the Holocaust typically remains myopic, self-obsessed, and one-sided. It is what Jewish scholar Peter Novick calls “collective memory” (i.e., a kind of legend). “Collective memory…,” writes Novick, “is not just historical knowledge shared by a group. Indeed, collective memory is in crucial senses a historical, even anti-historical. To understand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities of protagonists motives and behaviors. Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes.” [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 3-4]

Because so much of the Jewish disaster occurred in Poland, this country is especially singled out for attack in Jewish polemic. “Over the last thirty years,” notes Lawrence Weinbaum,     “much of world Jewry has displayed a keener sense of hostility to Poland than to Germany itself. Poland, not Germany, is often seen as  the ultimate place of evil… Part of the hostility to Poland is based on the entirely false impression that Germans chose occupied Poland as the venue for the death camps because they could court Polish cooperation in carrying out the Final      Solution. Although there is no historical evidence to support this contention, it has gained very wide currency and credence… Careless references to ‘Polish extermination camps,’ rather than German or Nazi camps, also played a part in fostering this perception… Popular literature, not always based on objective scholarship, has also played a leading role in shaping the popular image of Poland. Novels (and subsequent film aptations) by popular writers such as Leon Uris (Exodus, Mila 18, QBVII), Gerald Green (Holocaust), and others have done much to influence the way we think about Poland,  and the impression gained from these books has generally been negative. In such works Poles are often portrayed in a worse light than the Germans and it sometimes seems that the burden of guilt for the Holocaust has been shifted to the shoulders of the Poles.” [WEINBAUM, p. 7]

In 1982, Jewish American author Laurence Weschler noted that “over and over, prior to my Polish trip, I encountered sheer hatred [by Jews] of the country and its people, cold fury in reminiscences of the anti-Semitism that, it was claimed, pervaded Polish society in the years before and during the war.” [WESCHLER, p. 28]  Thus prepared, Weschler was stunned to find that the Jews who actually live in Poland do not share Jewish-American mythologies about the place. As Weschler says, after a series of interviews with Jews in Poland:

     “Over and over, I hear the same assertion from this man and his

     young Jewish friends, and they all give me substantially the same

     reasons for making it. What follows is, in all fairness, a simplification,

     but the basic premise is consistent: that the Poles have never been

     anti-Semitic at heart. They have always been highly nationalistic,

     a proud, suffering people deprived of and longing for their state.

     In the past, they were faced with a large Jewish population — a

     population whose very size proves the prior openness of the Polish

     people, and particularly of Polish nobility, to Jewish immigration.

     The Jews tended to keep to themselves, in ghettos of their own

     choosing. It is easy to understand how during the eighteenth and

     nineteenth centuries the highly nationalistic Poles might have

     conceived of these self-possessed Jews as aliens in their midst…

     During the late nineteenth century, according to this view,

     capitalism, a foreign import, came to Poland by way of the Germans

     and native Jews. Many of the most visible and most brutal large-

     scale enterprises — especially textile plants — were owned by Jews.

     ‘Polish resentment is understandable,’ I am told. During the twenties,

     this explanation goes on, the Poles finally achieved their state,

     but ten percent of the population was Jewish, and the Jews were

     still largely concentrated in self-contained communities in urban

     centers. Many people — both Poles and Jews — felt this presence

     to be troubling, at once alien and too large. Zionists had their

     Polish supporters. Other Jews, meanwhile, were active in the

     Communist Party and were devoted to the Soviet example —

     this in a country and among a people who had only recently

     thrown off Russian imperialist yoke.” [WESCHLER, p. 31-32]

Richard L. Rubenstein also notes that the

      “Post-Holocaust awareness of the genocidal potential of anti-Semitism

      has also effected historical investigations often with distorting effect.

      Because of the objective innocence of the victims, Holocaust studies

      have tended to emphasize what was done to the Jews rather than those

      elements of conflict and competition between Jews and non-Jews that

      could have contributed to the tragedy … There has been a persistent

      tendency to treat hatred of Jews and Judaism as a form of moral and

      psychological pathology … Regrettably, the interactions, economic,

      political and social between the two communities, as distinct from the

      actions against Jews by Christians, are seldom dealt with in retrospective

      inquiries into the evolution of anti-Jewish ideas and policies.”

      [RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 87]

Many Jews, like prominent polemicist Alan Dershowitz, completely overlook the suffering of the Polish people, their own history, their own culture, and their own nationality to obnoxiously proclaim that Poland (the site of most of the Nazi concentration camps) “can only  [my emphasis] be a Jewish cemetery with no tombstone.” [DERSHOWITZ] What was the wider story of the sufferings in Europe during World War II? What was the context of the Holocaust? We all know what happened to the Jews; it is heralded everywhere. But what was happening to other people?

In the first two years of the German invasion of Poland, the ill-treatment of Poles was worse than Jews, so much that Poles would sometimes don the Nazi-enforced “Yellow star” marker for Jews to blend in with them. [LUCAS, p. 34-35] On August 22, 1939, Hitler declared the necessary killing “without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need.” [GUMBOWSKI, p. 59] Hitler also planned that “the destruction of Poland is our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation of living forces … Be merciless! Be brutal! … The war is to be a war of annihilation.” [LUCAS, p. 4]

William Shirer writes that:

               “Hitler … wanted … a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources

               would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people

               would be made slaves of the German master race and whose

               ‘undesirable’ elements’ — above all, the Jews, but also many

               Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them —

               would be exterminated. .. The Jews and the Slavic peoples

               were the Untermenschen — subhumans. To Hitler they had

               no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs,

               might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves

               of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of

               the East, Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw, to be permanently

               erased but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other

               Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied

               them … As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically

               ordered that Leningrad was to be ‘wiped off the face of the

               earth.’ After being surrounded it was to be ‘razed to the

               ground’ by bombardment and bombing. Its population

               (three million) was to be destroyed with it. [SHIRER, p. 937]

As Charles Sydnor notes about the Nazi invasion of Russia, beginning on June 22, 1941:

    “A three mile-wide strip of territory stretching the length of Eastern

    Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains erupted in

    a torrent of fire and flying steel as German aircraft, artillery, and

    armor blasted across the Soviet frontier. In the violence of its initial

    collision, the immensity and ferocity of its subsequent development,

    and the profligacy of its destruction of human life and resources, the

    German-Russian conflict transcended anything then in the human

    experience. To the men of the SS Totenkopfdivision, who were

    to fight exclusively against the Russians until the end of the war,

    the campaign became a grim crusade of extermination.” [SYDNOR,

    C., 1977, p. 138-139]

“The Poles” concedes a rare Jewish author, Eva Hoffman” in the Nazi hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior races — slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi plans, for eventual extermination.” [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6] “The Nazi leaders” noted Jewish author Raphael Lemkin (the inventor of the term genocide,”), “had stated very bluntly their intent to wipe out the Poles, the Russians; to destroy demographically and culturally the French element in Alsace-Lorraine, The Slavonians in Carniola and Carinthia. They almost achieved their goal in exterminating the Jews and gypsies in Europe.” [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 100]

And as Richard Lukas notes about conquered Poland: “The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews…. this [Polish Gentile] holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms — namely, the as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known.” [LUKAS, p. ix] (In nearby Ukraine, notes Myron Kuropas, an estimated 14.5 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 Jews were lost… through deaths, deportations and evacuations. The war also destroyed over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns and some 28,000 villages.”) [KUROPAS, M., 1995]

Twenty million tablets of cyanide for the gas chambers were discovered after the war in Nazi storehouses, many times the numbers necessary to exterminate Jews only.  At one gas chamber site — Kulmhof (Chelmo) — a group of 5,000 gypsies were among the first to be murdered. Others exterminated there included convoys of non-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia (“These children were killed just as the Jews were”) and even a busload of nuns. [GAS, p. 91-92]  At Buchenwald, 250 Gypsy children were the first to be gassed. [HANCOCK, p.55] Throughout the territory of German occupation, people of all nationalities, and specifically invalids, the sick, and homosexuals, were subject to institutionalized murder, by gas or otherwise. The last gas chamber murders at the Mauthausen site were 181 Austrians who were against the Nazi regime.

Nazi Germany had clearly stated policies concerning surrounding European countries and their inhabitants of Slavic descent:

“By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be ‘assimilated,’ mostly by shipping them as slave laborers to Germany. The other half, ‘particularly’ the intelligentsia, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, ‘eliminated.'” [SHIRER, p. 938]

Nazi mistreatment of prisoners of war, particularly Russian Slavs, was notorious:

“Dr. Otto Brautigam, deputy leader of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories wrote  … It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps…”

The conceptual dehumanization of the Slavic people by the Nazis was not far behind the portrayal of Jews. Jews, however, were believed to pose a greater immediate threat, an innately alien and antagonistic element within German society, dimensionally international, conceived to be far more powerful in influence than Poles. Jews were to be exterminated first in a “Final Solution,” the Slavs later, except those to be used as slaves.

“Martin Boorman, Hitler’s party secretary … wrote a long letter to Rosenberg [another Nazi official] … ‘The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don’t need them, they may die … The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable…. Education is dangerous… [SHIRER, p. 939]  Chaim Kaplan, eventually murdered by the Nazis, noted the conditions for his maid after the German invasion: “When the Nazis confiscated our apartment, they permitted our Christian maid to remain. She is exempt from the Nazi Nuremberg laws, they raped her. After that they beat her so that she would reveal where I hid my money.” [KAPLAN, C., p. 46]

The Nazi occupation of Poland was intended to de-Polonize the entire country and reconstruct it in a Germanic image. Polish names of towns and places were torn down and replaced by German ones (exactly as the Jews of Israel have done in replacing Arabic geographical names with Hebrew ones). “Property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation.” [SHIRER, p. 944] “The planned deportation [of Poles to the Auschwitz concentration] camp,” says Franciszek Piper, head of the Historical Research Department of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, “of tens of thousands of men, women, and children from the Zamosc region — foreseen as one of the first bridgeheads for Germanization in eastern Poland — demonstrated the Nazis’ goal of exterminating the Poles, which they only achieved to a small degree.” [PIPER, F., Political, p. 15]

Hideously monstrous medical experiments on Jews by sadistic Nazis is well known. But  “Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans… At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates — the ‘rabbit girls’ they were called — were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to ‘experiments’ in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water.” [SHIRER, p. 979]  Priests were also tortured and experimented upon at Dachau. [GOLDBERG, M., H., 1979, p. 223]

There were grandiose medical visions for others who were not Jews: “An S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler … that … the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity should be sterilized.” [SHIRER, p. 979]

The suffering of millions of non-Jewish Poles, Czechs, Russians, Gypsies and other nationals and ethnics during the Holocaust era has been completely forgotten and overlooked in our own time. (Between December 1939 and August 1941, the Nazis even murdered 50,000 Germans — defined as “mentally sick” — with carbon dioxide gas in chambers disguised, like other mass murder sites, as showers. [ARENDT, p. 108]  Among the murdered were even Germans who protested against the Nazi treatment of Jews — people like clergyman like Bernard Lichtenberg and philosopher Kurt Huber. [RUBENSTEIN, p 188-189]  Even Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp of Jewish Holocaust symbology, was instituted by sending to the gas chambers 300 Poles and 700 Russian prisoners of war. [LUCAS, p. 38]

The numbers always cited for people murdered at Auschswitz (and the Holocaust in general) are only guesses and estimates — citing this fragmentary document or that, and then presuming from there — and they vary widely. While Franciszek Piper claims 90% of those who died at Auschwitz were Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ascribed 2.5 million Jewish and l.5 million non-Jewish dead to the place. Scholar Norman Davies echoes whatever he read that one-quarter of the Auschwitz dead were non-Jews. Whatever the case, Auschwitz has become the consummate symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and Judeo-centric discourse has completely appropriated the human misery of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, concentration camps in general, and the neglected whole of World War II as an ethnocentric pillar of their own specialized victimization.

As Polish/Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz notes, “the meaning of the word Holocaust [has undergone] gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities.” [LUKAS, p. ix]  Unlike other European nations, underscores Milosz, “there was no collaboration between Poles and Nazis. There was no collaboration. This should be said clearly, because there was no Polish pseudo-government under the Nazis. The Polish population was treated by the Nazis as the next to be destroyed and the Poles knew that.” [MILOCZ, p. 37]

Although far fewer in numbers, the people most directly parallel to the Jewish situation in World War II were the Gypsies (Sinti and Romani). By any criteria, their own catastrophe alone under German fascism ruins modern Jewish claims to “Holocaust uniqueness.” There are numerous surviving documents attesting to Nazi policy of complete annihilation of Gypsies, including a memo from the Office of Racial Hygiene stating that “all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination.” [HANCOCK, p. 43]

Ian Hancock, a University of Texas professor and himself of Romani heritage, has struggled for years to call attention to the disaster that befell his people. “It is abundantly clear,” he says, “that some historians see only what they want to see, that a very blind eye is being turned in the direction of Gypsy history, and that when the Romani genocide in Nazi Germany is acknowledged, it is kept, with few exceptions, carefully separated from the Jewish experience.” [HANCOCK, p. 40]

Hancock has discovered Jewish resistance to the intrusion of the Gypsy story on Jewish sacred turf to be widespread. Sometimes the undercurrent of Jewish exclusionism is revealed to be nakedly racist:

      “The director of one Holocaust center referred to me as a troublemaker; 

      another writer on the Holocaust called my discussion of the Romani case

      in the Jewish context ‘loathsome.’ A representative of the United States

      Holocaust Memorial Council, whom I have never met, told a researcher

      who called to find out how to reach me that I was a ‘wild man.’ People

      have walked out when it was my turn to speak at conferences about the

      Porrajmos [the Gypsy “Holocaust”], and one former professor at the

      university where I teach adamantly refused even to mention Roma and

      Sinti in his regular course on the Holocaust. There is an element of

      racism evident in the Jewish response; after all, Gypsies are a ‘third world     

      people of color’ … At one presentation I gave at a Hillel center, I was

      interrupted by a woman who leaped to her feet and angrily demanded

      why I was even comparing the Gypsy case to the Jewish case when Jews

      had given so much to the world and Gypsies were merely parasites and

      thieves. On another occasion a gentleman in the audience stood up and

      declared that he would never buy a book on the Holocaust written by a

      Gypsy.” [HANCOCK, p. 55-57]

(Adamant Jewish conviction of intrinsic superiority — and elitist distinction — over Gypsies is reflected in famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz’s autobiography:

     “‘I admire old tribes,’ said [a German baron], ‘I once traveled for weeks

     with Gyspies, and I found them fascinating . You realize Gypsies have a

     tradition as old as the Jews, don’t you?’ I confessed ignorance of Gypsy

     tradtion, but the next day, as the baron and I sat at the airport, I said

     thoughtfully, ‘I’ve been thinking about the Gypsies and the Jews, and it

     seems to me that for better or worse, the Jews have given the world

     Einstein, Freud, Marx, and for that matter, Jesus Christ himself — but I

     can’t think of many Gypsies who’ve changed the world, can you?’

     Even that bloody awful baron had to laugh and say, ‘Touche.'”

     [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 306] )

Among those few Jews who publicly supported the Gypsy’s struggles for attention to their own “Holocaust” history was famed “Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal once described the run-around he experienced at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum in his efforts to get a Gypsy on the museum thirty-member governing board. “I felt the attitude of the Holocaust Memorial Council to be unjust,” he said, “… I received a number of copies of other letters in which all kinds of people had approached [Council head Elie] Wiesel with the request that he should support the claim of the gypsies.”[WIESENTHAL, p. 222-223] Only after Wiesel left as head of the group was a Gypsy allowed to sit on the Council.

“The Nazis selected the Jews as their first candidates for annihilation,” notes Israeli Boas Evron, “but the Gypsies were extirpated with equal thoroughness and much larger and more ambitious plans were afoot for the enslavement and piecemeal extermination of the Slavs (Soviet losses during World War II are estimated at twenty-five million people, only a minority of whom were soldiers).” [EVRON, p. 51]

In 1999, in Atlanta, Georgia, Jewish-dominated Holocaust politics explicitly censored the Nazis’ mass murder of homosexuals. As the Atlanta Jewish Times notes

     “The Georgia Holocaust Commission caused a rift with the city’s gay community.

     The commission made repeated headlines in January with the deletion of two

     paragraphs from a Holocaust teacher’s guide about gay and lesbian

     persecution. The incident triggered a confrontation between the gay

     community and the commision … The drama peaked with the forcible

     removal of gay activist Harry Knox from a commission meeting at

     [Jewish commission director Sylvia] Wygoda’s order.” [ATLANTA

      JEWISH TIMES, 6-18-99]

Jews commonly claim that 6 million of their numbers were exterminated in the Holocaust. “The ‘Six Million figure,'” notes Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, “often invoked in characterizations of ‘The Holocaust,’ points out the problem of stressing [Jewish] uniqueness over commonality. The truth is that eleven million people were killed in the concentration camps. Nearly half of these are excluded in most characterizations of ‘The Holocaust,’ and this seems to imply that Gentile deaths are not as significant as Jewish deaths.” [GARBER, p. 208]

Wladyslaw Krajewski, another Jewish commentator, today still lives in Poland. He notes his own problems in dealing with uninformed western Jewry who seek confirmation of Jewish myth, a conviction of blanket Polish anti-Semitism, and not the truths of World War II:

      “When my wife and I were in the United States [for a visit], we also

      had to argue with those who ascribe anti-Semitism to the Poles en

      bloc, to the [Polish] Home Army, and so on … In general, there is

      a prevalent stereotype among [non-Polish Jews] according to which

      they are always victims (as indeed they usually are). Many people in

      Israel, and more so in the United States, think that the terror was

      directed exclusively against the Jews during the German occupation

      [of Poland] (as indeed it was primarily directed against them). They

      are unwilling to believe it when they are told that large numbers of

      Poles also fell victim to German terror. They say that such people

      may have fought in the resistance movement or aided Jews, but that

      only the Jews (and perhaps the Gypsies) were persecuted without

      reason. Such judgments result in large part from ignorance (although

      no one admits to being ignorant). Such things are not said by the few

      Jews living in Poland, who are better informed about the German

      occupation of our country.” [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 103-104]

Some scholars have suggested between four and five million Jewish deaths in the World War II years. Jewish scholars Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, among others, estimate the number of Jewish dead to be between five and six million. They are all guesses and estimates. No one knows anywhere near with certainty an exact figure. No matter, all these sums are unfathomably staggering and the suffering incomprehensible. But rarely heard is the fact that the Nazis also exterminated up to 7 million Christians in these same death camps. For every two Jews executed there, suggests Jewish author Max Dimont, three Christians were slain too. Slavs and gypsies, Russian prisoners, the Polish clergy, the Polish resistance movement and its intelligentsia were also decimated.

15 to 20 million people were killed in Europe. [ENCY BRITT, p. 716] Three million Polish Jews died as a consequence of Adolf Hitler, as did three million Polish Christians. Three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war alone perished in Nazi captivity. Throughout the world, the number of people who died because of World War II is estimated to be a numbing 50-64 million human beings!  [ENCY BRITT, 18, p. 716] Where are the monuments to them — humanity at-large, devoid of clan and tribe allegiances — a museum that affirms that every single life in that grisly pile was precious, sacred, and unique in human history.  There is no such museum. There is no such monument. We never hear about them.  There are only monuments to Jewish suffering. Why?

However pained Jews are for their own horrible losses, by the end of the twentieth century Jewish mourning had become a politic that is deaf to the screams of others. To view the atrocities of the Third Reich in the larger view as crimes against humanity do not serve the Zionist and nationalist principles of the Jewish state of Israel nor even the general Jewish religiously-inspired sense that they are somehow “different” than others: “chosen.” The fact remains that the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews did not occur in a velvet box protecting others from hideous injury. Violence and atrocity was everywhere, in every direction. It was war, a World War, and profoundly maniacal people were struggling to annihilate anyone not part of their racial and ideological clan.  But Zionists and other Jews remind us  — relentlessly and incessantly — only that the Nazis violated Jews on a profound scale, and ignore the rest of the festering agony of it all.

The Holocaust gave modern Israel final legitimization to be born. For the Zionists, Hitler conclusively proved that life in the Diaspora was precarious and that gentiles could not, in the long term, be trusted.  In times of social upheaval, it was believed that Jews might again be scapegoated. The Holocaust effectively united Jews throughout the world in a way that race or religion couldn’t.  It remains important to Zionists that the extermination of Jews in Europe be viewed myopically, distinct from all other phenomena, distinct from the extermination of all other people.  All that mattered to Germany was Aryans. And all that matters to Israel — and its many Diaspora supporters –is Jews.

In 1979 the head of a Jewish-American delegation to Warsaw, Eli Wiesel, objected to the fact that Poles speak of World War II “victims in general … We speak of Jews. They mention all of the victims of every nationality, of every religion, and they refer to them en masse. We object … The Jews were murdered because they were Jews, not because they were Poles … And so we told our Polish hosts: ‘If you forget the Jews, you will eventually forget the others. One always starts with the Jews.'” [LINENTHAL, p. 31] “It wasn’t enough to give [Poland] our parents and grandparents, our brothers and sisters,” complained another Jewish delegate, Lily Edelman, “… We also had to leave them a billion dollar tourist industry.” [LINENTHAL, p. 31]

Not only does Judeo-centric myopia and self-obsession singularly recognize, memorialize, and even celebrate, Jewish victimization in World War II. Not only are non-Jewish co-sufferers ignored; they are, worse, subject to scorn and attack for not “saving the Jews.” Many Jews even bitterly complain that the United States should have “done something more” to save their brethren, as if Jewish lives were more important, more innocent, than any of the millions of others who died. It is hard to imagine what such critics have in mind, when America was already engaged in the utmost act of aggression and violence against Germany: war.

The people who are most subject by Jews to insult, complaint, abuse, prejudicial stereotyping, and hatred — sometimes seemingly even more than the German Nazis themselves — are the Poles. Polish Christians are commonly accused by Jewish writers to have “handed Polish Jews over to the Nazis” and/or turned their backs from saving them. “Poles were indifferent to, if not supportive of, the ensuing Nazi massacre of the Jews,” charges Barry Rubin, in a very, very common Jewish slander, routinely glossing over the mutually desperate situations of Poland, Jews, and enormity of World War II.

Jews, after all, had for centuries positioned themselves as exploiters of the Polish peasantry, in league with the oppressive aristocracy.  There was little love for Jews by the Polish people and Jewish reputations were terrible. A pre-war Polish nationalist party, the National Democratic Party, for instance, objected to Jewish influence in the country, that the Jewish ten percent of the population “constituted an alien element detrimental to national unity. It feared that the very high proportion of Jews in the professions (estimated at thirty per cent of the lawyers, doctors, architects, and so forth), the Jewish monopoly in retail trade and finance, and the avoidance by the Jews of physical labor in mines, factories, and on the land amounted to barring the way of poor Poles to social advancement.” [KORBANSKI, p. 18-19] Polish feelings about Jews in Poland based upon their historical relationship may be ascertained by some old Polish proverbs about them:

             * The peasant gleans, the Lord squanders, the Jew profits.

             * The Lord plots the ruin of the peasant with the Jews.

             * One mountain will not meet another, but the gentry will

                always meet the Jew. [CALA]

With some exceptions among individuals, and with the exception of self-aggrandizing commercial concerns, Jewish communities largely functioned as insular, self-absorbed, elitist, and self-positioned “strangers” in Polish society. The gulf between Polish Christians and Jews was enormous.  (In pre-Holocaust Poland the intermarriage rate between Poles and Jews was one per cent). [WISTRICH, Intro, p. 4] It was self-imposed by Jews from the earliest times of their stay in Poland, and echoed by their Polish neighbors. “Ethnocentrism,” notes Tadeusz Piotrowski, “was a two way street.” [PIOTROSKI, p. 38] Most Jews chose not to assimilate into Polish society whatsoever (many could not even speak Polish) and had few links of good will to the surrounding non-Jewish people. 

“In prewar [World War II] Poland,” notes Wladyslaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew, “Of course, the majority of Jews did not regard themselves as Poles. Growing up for the most part in Jewish environments, they observed only the Jewish customs and religion, spoke only Yiddish at home, and generally spoke Polish poorly.” [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 96-97]  Norman Salsitz notes growing up in a Jewish community in a Polish town and discovering that “many” Jews didn’t even know what the Polish flag exactly looked like. [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 73] In 1936, Jewish voting patterns in Poland (in their self-governing kehillah organizations) revealed a 38 percent vote for the Bund party (a group emphasizing a Jewish, asopposed to Polish,identity), 36 percent vote for Zionist lists (the return to Israel group), and religious Orthodox (religiously anti-Gentile) and “middle-class” groups at about 23 percent. [GITELMAN, Z., 1997]

Whatever Jewish politics, Norman Salsitz notes that, like many Jewish communities in Poland, the 2,000 Jews in his hometown were “95 per cent … observant, pious people.” [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 140] This, we may fairly presume, would include all the separatist and anti-Gentile ideology that Orthodox Judaism entails. As far as my district goes,” noted Israeli professor Chone Shmeruk, in reflecting upon the Warsaw neighborhood where he grew up,

      “it was exclusively Jewish. The only non-Jews there were the janitors

      who usually had small apartments near the entrance. Most of the Jewish

      residents spoke Yiddish … As far as Warsaw goes, a street like

      Karmelick, for instance, was exclusively Jewish. There was a Bund

      elementary school there with all classes taught in Yiddish. There was

      no Polish element there and contacts with Poles were few or none. I

      did not visit Polish homes and they did not visit mine. I did not really

      have any Polish friends. My friends from school or the courtyard were

      Jewish … When a Jew left the northern district, it was perhaps not like

      going to another city, but rather going somewhere unknown … If you

      went to a park it was to be a ‘Jewish park’ … There was a chasm

      between the Jewish and Polish districts in Warsaw.” [SHMERUK, p. 326-328]

Jewish self-segregation was the norm for most Jews of Eastern Europe. Raphael Patai notes the vast gulf between his Jewish grandparents in the Hungarian village of Pata (from about 1880 to 1920) and the non-Jews around them:

     “My attention was focused on the almost complete separation that

     existed between the life forms of that Hasidic Orthodox Jewish family

     and the other five equally religious Jewish families of Pata, on the one

     hand, and those of the hundreds of Christian Hungarian families of

     the village, on the other … I received the distinct impression [from

     documents and interviews with relatives] that the life of my grandfather

     and that of the Hungarian peasants of Pata had practically nothing in

     common … The contact between my grandparents and the peasants

     of the village was confined to the occasions when the latter stopped

     by [my grandparents’] store to make their small purchases. To this

     might be added the twice-daily trips my grandmother had to take to

     the village well until about 1902 [until they had a well dug on their

     property] … Apart from this, my grandfather lived entirely in the

     world of Jewish tradition, primarily that of the Talmud. He knew

     nothing of the cultural traditions of the Pata peasants … One reaches

     the conclusion that this Hungarian Jew lived in practically complete

     cultural isolation from his purely Hungarian environment.” [PATAI, R., 1971, p. 136-137]

Alan Levy notes famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s attitude towards his non-Jewish neighbors in Poland:

     “Having lived among Poles from birth, grown up with them, and attended their

      schools, Simon knew that ‘to them we were always foreigners. Mutual understanding

      was out of the question. And even now that the Poles, too, had been enslaved and

      were next on Hitler’s list for extermination, nothing had changed: there were still

      barriers between us.’ Sometimes, this estrangement grew so strong that Simon ‘no

      longer even wanted to look at Poles. In spite of the conditions and the risks inside

     the [concentration] camp, I would have preferred to stay there. But I didn’t always

      have the choice.’ [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 42]

“Jewish separatism,” notes Jewish author Eva Hoffman about Poland, “was also an active choice, and it also had its consequences. It means that Jewish individuals and communities cultivated their own alienness, and that although they were willing to engage in contractual relations with the Poles, they did not wish to enter into a shared world with them.” [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 63] The firm root of this Jewish separatism from Poles endures today. As Jewish American Victor Seidler noted in 2000:

     “I know that my father had come from Warsaw but in no sense did

     I think of myself as ‘Polish’…. When I gave my lecture at the Polish

     Academy of Sciences, I was introduced as someone with Polish

     ancestry and I had to clarify that my family was Jewish.” [SEIDLER, V.J., 2000, p. 47]

Jewish revulsion for Christians in Poland, their classical disdain –even hatred — for them, and the Jewish enforcement of the huge gulf between Jews and Poles, is reflected in this account by the best known Jewish polemicist about the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, here describing his childhood in Poland:

     “[Christian] rituals held no interest for me; quite the contrary. I turned

      away from them. Whenever I met a priest in I would avert my gaze and

      think of something else. Rather than walk in front of a church with its

      pointed and threatening belfry, I would cross the street. To see was as

      frightening as to be seen; I worried that a visual, physical link might be

      created between us … All I knew of Christians was its hate for my people

      [Jews]. Christians were more present in my imagination than in my life.

      What did a Christian do when he was alone? What were his dreams made

      of? How did he use his time when he was not engaged in plotting against

      us?” [WIESEL, A Jew, p. 4-5]

In a novel Wiesel wrote, called Dawn, Sylvia Barack-Fishman notes a disturbing undercurrent, common — as we have seen — in the traditional Jewish worldview:

      “Wiesel’s protagonist comes to the startling conclusion that Jews must

      learn ‘the art of hate’ in order to guarantee their physical survival.

      ‘Otherwise,’ he argues, ‘our future will only be an extension of the past.'”

      [BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 281]

Jewish “hate,” as we have seen, casts a wide net. Even a Roman Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe, canonized by the church and heroized in Poland for voluntarily dying at Auschwitz that another man might live, is dismissed by one Jewish magazine these days as the former editor of “a mass-circulation anti-Semitic Franciscan weekly.” [TOMASZEWSKI, p. 47]

Reflecting the tone of Jewish disdain for Christians, one of Jewish novelist Max Shulman’s characters in Potatoes are Cheaper declared that

     “If [my mother] happened to see [a nun] on the street, she made a

     circle three times, said Shma Yisrael and ran to kill a chicken.”
     [NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 96]

That isn’t really fiction. Moshe Rozdial reflects the usual Jewish polemic and apologetic about Jewish racism and hatred of those around them:

        “If I could be really honest, growing up around holocaust survivors, especially

     grandparents who had been part of village life in Poland, my clearest memory

     of anything that relates to churches was the way my grandmother would spit

     three times, you know, tu! tu! tu!, like in Fiddler on the Roof, to ward off

     evil spirits, every time she would walk past a church steeple. The cross has

     really been more a burden to Jews, than for Christians to bear. For my Bubbe,

     my grandmother, it represented the wrath of Satan, swooping down on a

     helpless people when they were not vigilant to warding off the evil eye. She

     saw Nazism as just another version of Christianity, hoardes of Aryan

     barbarians, swooping down with their broken cross, to do the work that the

     church had laid the foundation for, for a thousand years. I remember walking

     down the street with my hand in hers, feeling that tug and knowing, almost

     instinctively that if I look up I’d see a cross atop a roof, as she reflexively

     crossed the street to avoid walking directly in front of the church. Muttering,

     Nevelah! Nevelah!

        Do you know what that means? The impurity of the dead. Any dead thing.

     Any dead thing, that by Jewish law, could not be touched in any way, so

     as not to be defiled by spiritual purity. That’s what Bubbe thought of the

     crucifix and ultimately, the church … She’d spit three times, more if she

     was in a dark mood, and walk out of her way to avoid the site. The

     dead Jew on the cross was a Nevelah to her, a presence that has always

     defiled her life, Jewish life. A symbol of death and human corruptness, to

     to my people. I know it’s not politically correct to say these things to you.

     We Jews are always watching our tongues, when it comes to Christianity.”

     [RODZIAL, M., WINTER 1999]

A yeshiva student, Rachmiel Frydeland, notes how it was growing up Jewish in the pre-war town of Chelm: “I had no contacts with Christianity at all. On the way to school we passed a Roman Catholic church and a Russian Orthodox church, and we spat, pronouncing the words found in Deuteronomy 7:26, ‘ … though shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing … Why should we say such horrible words? The [Christian] people looked so pious. They came from surrounding villages to worship, and they never bothered us.” [FRYDLAND, p. 55]

Abraham Sterzer grew up within a Jewish life in Eastern Galicia. “Our rabbi,” he says, “insisted that we Jewish children spit on the ground and utter curses while passing near a cross, or whenever we encountered a Christian priest or religious procession. Our shopkeepers used to say that ‘it was a Mitzveh (blessed deed) to cheat a Goy (gentile).'” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 39]  Anna Lanota recalled that her Jewish community in Poland “had a somewhat unfavourable attitude toward other nations — maybe even contemptuous. There prevailed the feeling that we were the chosen people.” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 39]

The first prime minister of modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion, once recalled his childhood among non-Jewish children in Poland:

      “Somebody would perhaps throw a stone, or start an argument, and very

      often it was the Jews who started first. We used to get the upper

      hand.” [KURZMAN, D., 1983, p. 50]

Jewish commentator Elias Tcherikower notes the nature of Jewish shtetl (Jewish community) culture in Eastern Europe:

     “Jews were not regarded, nor did they regard themselves, as

     Russians or Poles who differed in religion and occupational

     concentrations from the majority population … Jews constituted

     an autonomous, isolated, self-enclosed, and collectively

     responsible social entity. The goings-on in the outside world

     certainly impinged upon the Jewish community, but were regarded

     as being as the same order as natural events; most often, as natural

     catastrophes. There was, relatively speaking, little social interaction

     that mattered between Jew and non-Jew. What was of significance

     was what went on in the Jewish world, in the world of the shtetl…

     Above all, the shtetl was a community of rigid religious orthodoxy…

     The shtetl’s frame of reference was the Jewish community. Outside

     was the world of the goy, the alien … Loyalty to this hostile, alien

     world was nonexistent.” [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 4-6]

As Jewish Holocaust survivor Nechama Tec notes about traditional Jewish separatism, self-imposed estrangement from non-Jews, and resistance to assimilate into Polish culture (which had virtually insurmountable consequences when any Christian Pole sought, at constant risk of his or her life, to hide Jews from the Nazis):

     “In 1939, of all the European countries, Poland had the highest

     concentration of Jews. They made up 10 per cent of the country’s

     population. As the largest community of Jews in Europe, Polish Jews

     were also the least assimilated. They looked, dressed, and behaved

     differently from Polish Christians … In prewar Poland, more than half

     the Jewish children attended special Jewish schools. Enrollment in

     religious school, in turn, discouraged mastery of the Polish language.

     Thus, in answer to a 1931 census inquiry, the overwhelming majority

     of Jews mentioned Yiddish as their native tongue (79 per cent) and only

     12 percent gave Polish as their first language. The rest chose Hebrew.

     Jews and Poles lived in separate and different worlds, and their diverse

     experiences made for easy identification. It has been estimated that

     more than 80 percent of the Polish Jews were easily recognizable,

     while less than 10 percent could be considered assimilated.”
     [TEC, N., 1986, p. 12]

Jewish anthropologist Samuel Heilman notes that the Hasidic ultra-Orthodox literalist movement, founded in the eighteenth century, became the dominant Jewish world view in Eastern Europe. “In several generations,” he observes, “[the Hasidic movement] absorbed huge numbers — perhaps a majority — of the region’s Jews.” [Heilman refers here to the “region” of Eastern Europe, including Podolia, Volhynia, Galicia, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine] [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 21] In 1992 Heilman wrote a book about the Hasids in Israel (whose ancestors were from Eastern Europe) and, even there, the following is the profoundly separatist and ethnocentric world view he found still reflected by 11- and 12-year olds in the Hasidic school system. Showing a school class a map of Israel,

     “I asked each boy if he could tell me what lay to the east, the south,

     the north, and the west [of Israel], each time pointing my pencil to

     the area in case they did not know the bearings of the compass.

     Again, no one knew … Next I asked each boy to tell me the names

     of the surrounding countries, without necessarily specifying where

     they were in relation to Israel. In response, one boy began to list

     cities in Israel … Perhaps the most revealing answer came from one

     youngster who, in reply to the question of what bordered on Israel,

     confidently answered that Israel was surrounded by ‘chutz la’aretz.’

     ‘Chutz la’aretz’ is the Hebrew expression that most Israelis use to

     refer to the rest of the world. Literally, it means ‘outside of the Land

     (of Israel),’ abroad. In this boy’s mind the world was neatly divided.

     Just as there were goyim and Jews, so similarly there was Israel and

     chutz la’aretz … It struck me that in the world they inhabited, the

     information I had asked them was simply not important. They had

     a different map of the world … The large territories were not Russia,

     Germany, or Poland. They were named after cities of importance

     to the hasidim of Zvil: Apta, Lublin, Mezerich, Berdichev, Chernobyl.

     Cities had become countries.” [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 233]

Stephen Bloom’s 2001 book about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave (the Chabad Lubavitchers, founded in Lithuania) in Postville, Iowa, give a clear example of what relations must have been like between many Jews and Poles and Eastern Europe before the rise of the Nazis. Jews in the Iowa town don’t want to touch Gentiles [BLOOM, S., p. 96], they resist eye contact with them as they walk down the street [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 86], they have no knowledge or interest in Gentile life around them [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 114], they appeared “obnoxious and imperial” to local people, [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 161], they cheat local merchants [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 323], and they use oil in their candelabras because oil, which doesn’t mix with other liquid, symbolizes Jewish separateness from all others. [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 182] “Wherever we go,” one Chabad leader said, “we don’t adapt to the place or the people. It’s always been like that and always will be like that. It’s the place and the people who have to adapt to us.” [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 209] “Postville people, by and large, were tolerant,” says Bloom, “… [But the Hasidic Jews] were downright rude. They seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious, especially when it came to business dealings … At first, the locals welcomed the Jews, but even the simplest offer — a handshake, an invitation to afternoon tea — was spurned. The locals quickly discovered that the Jews wouldn’t even look at them. They refused to acknowledge even the presence of anyone not Jewish.” [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 48, 51]

As Norman Salsitz notes about his Jewish youth in Poland:

     “Most Poles were devout Catholics, and we Jews followed in

     the path of orthodox Judaism. Poles who were Catholics were

     automatically Poles; Poles who were Jewish were never

     referred to as anything but Jews. In look, in dress, in behavior,

     there was usually no mistaking the Pole and the Jew. Then, too,

     Poles all spoke Polish, Jews mostly Yiddish … Acquaintances

     among Poles and Jews were common, indeed nearly

     inevitable in a town the [small] size of Kolbuszowa; but close

     friendships were practically nonexistent.”
     [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 242]

Another Jew who a survived World War II as a child in Poland, Yehuda Nir, notes that when the Nazis came it was in the best interests of his affluent family to pretend that they were non-Jewish Poles but

    “we kept delaying our move to the ‘Aryan world.’ Our hesitation reflected

    a fear of the unknown, an inability to project ourselves into the role of

    Christian Poles, Catholics. Although we had known many Catholics quite

    well and have lived with the Nowickis for almost a year [Nir doesn’t

    explain this: they lived in the same apartment building? In the same

    house? Why?], they were always seen as strangers, goyim, the

    people on the other side of the fence. We felt we didn’t know enough

    to fully identify with them, that at best we could only mimic them.”
   [NIR, Y., 1989, p. 31]

“The Poles never thought of us as Poles,” says prominent Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, “and we didn’t either.” [RUBIN, p. 192] Nonetheless, before the war, when Poland was still able to assert its nationalist will, on April 12, 1933, the German Ambassador to Warsaw, Hans Moltke, reported to his superiors that “the Polish foreign minister warned him that any retaliation against Polish Jews or any others of Polish extraction living in Germany would be met with dangerous Polish countermeasures.” [BLACK, p. 112]

Poland was invaded by the Nazi war machine in 1939 and totally overcome and decimated in a matter of weeks. The Nazi blitzkrieg consisted of 1,800,000 soldiers, 2,500 tanks, over 2,000 aircraft and naval warships. Three million Polish Christians died during World War II, a figure equal to that of Polish Jews who perished.  40% of the national wealth was destroyed, 10% of the non-Jewish population was killed. [BART. p. 16] How were Poles to save Jews when they had first to struggle for their own lives and families?

In 1989 Stephan Korbanski, the “last surviving leader of the Polish Underground State during German occupation,” wrote a book complaining that “the charges leveled by the Jews against the Poles for allegedly sharing responsibility for the Holocaust by not preventing the slaughter of the Jews are groundless, unfair, and slanderous. An individual or nation can be blamed for denying help which could be given, but not for failing to do the impossible.” [KORBANSKI, p. vii]

Korbanski notes that German ordinances declared the death penalty for anyone (and often his or her family) caught helping Jews and that, nonetheless, the Jewish Historic Institute in Warsaw has documented by name 343 Polish Christians (and 101 others who cannot be identified) who were murdered for helping Jews escape the Nazis. The Association of Former Political Prisoners, mostly inmates from Auschwitz, estimates the number of Poles murdered for helping Jews at 2,500 (the Maximilian Kolbe Foundation has identified by name 2,300 Poles). [KORBANSKI, p. 67]  Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal notes that an “incomplete list of Poles executed for sheltering Jews numbers 521 families.” [WIESENTHAL, 1989, p. 216]

The Jewish-American author Jerzy Kosinski wrote:

         “My parents and I were saved by Poles. I was hidden and transferred

         from one place to another and that with my looks! I look … like the

         stereotype of a Jew on a Nazi poster.” [KORBANSKI]

Korbanski underscores the fact that all Polish secondary schools and colleges were closed by Nazi invaders, the Polish language was forbidden, libraries and book shops were burned, the Polish language press was outlawed, Polish cemeteries were destroyed, and everything Polish was renamed in German. “Only one church was left in each county; all others were burned or closed.” [KORBANSKI, p. 23] In the early days of the Nazi invasion, Polish priests, political leaders, landowners, officials, teachers, lawyers, and doctors were routinely executed. Many of those who escaped were sent to Polish concentration camps to die. In the town of Bydogoszcz, over 20,000 inhabitants were liquidated for their defenders’ role against the initial Nazi onslaught. 9,000 Poles were shot in the streets of Warsaw in one year alone. During Nazi occupation Poles were killed for “not getting off the sidewalk to make way for a German approaching,” for “illicit fishing, for slaughtering a pig for their own use, for stealing fruit from orchards, for riding a train without a ticket.” [KORBANSKI, p. 24] Ethnic Germans, indigenous to parts of multi-ethnic Poland, served as spies.

Even the Pole Jan Mosdorf, head of  “a right wing organization of a nationalist and anti-Semitic character,” who was imprisoned at Auschwitz risked his life to help — and sometimes save the lives of — Jewish prisoners. [SWIEBOCKI, p. 206] Mosdorf, said one Jewish prisoner, Mojzesz Maslanko, “had a big heart and helped Jews. I personally received a large amount of help from him, which perhaps decided my survival.” [SWIEBOCKI, p. 206] Mosdorf was executed by the Nazis in 1943.

Meanwhile, while the Poles were invaded and occupied from the West by Germany, communist Russia attacked from the East. Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland resulted in the confiscation of everything from banks to sawmills. Churches and other religious centers were closed or destroyed. Over a million Poles were deported, mostly to Asiatic Russia. Among the deportees, some 500,000 ended up in labor camps where many died. [BART. p. 18] Members of Poland’s religious and political infrastructure were executed; Korbanski notes that up to 100,000 Polish political prisoners were murdered by the Soviets by mid-1941.

Korbanski, as a leader of the Polish underground, and others began to report to the outside world what was happening in Poland, including the situation of the Jews. They even had a Jewish liaison in the Warsaw ghetto. Members of the Polish “Home Army” even made a number of attempts to blow up the walls and open the Jewish Warsaw ghetto, but were repelled by German defenses. [KORBANSKI, p. 57]

In a review of Korbanski’s book by David Engel, a Jewish professor at New York University, Korbanski’s first-hand account and perspective (and the suffering of the Polish people) were summed up with these last sentences:

         “Mr. Korbanski will never have to deal with the problems raised by the

          book; he passed away shortly after it was released. How sad that the

          final work of a man with so much to his credit is a splenetic diatribe,

          falling at times far below acceptable scholarly standards to the level of

          gutter literature.” [ENGEL, A New Jewry p.]

This kind of arrogantly insulting attitude is not unique to Mr. Engler, but reflects an important current in post-Holocaust Jewish thinking. The “problems raised in the book” are not with Korbanski’s defense of the Polish people against continuous and relentless Jewish impugnment; it is with the likes of modern Judeo-centric propagandists like Engler.

What especially grates Engler the wrong way is this kind of comment from Korbanski:

        “The [Jewish] consensus which emerged (in the early periods of Nazi

         occupation) was the unanimous belief that only total submission to all

         the Nazi orders and industrious work for the Germans might offer

         chances of survival until the end of the war. The [Jewish] watchword

         was: “This is not our war; it’s the war of the Poles against the

         Germans.” All the Jewish problems were to be dealt with by the Jewish

         Council (Judenrat), headed by former Polish senator Adam

         Czerniakow and formed by Germany themselves. That doctrine of

         submissiveness remained in force for two years, during which the Jews

         in the ghetto did not ask the Poles for any help or weapons.”

         [KORBANSKI, p. 44]

The well-known Jewish historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, supports such a notion that “the reaction of the Jews [to the Nazis] is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance …  [Jews] had learned (over 2,000 years) that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies.” [HILBERG, p. 662, 666] Well-known Jewish psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concurred:

         “A certain kind of ghetto thinking has as its purpose the avoidance of

          taking direct action. It is a type of deadening of the senses and

          emotions … One can … degrade oneself so that one will be permitted

          to survive.” [HOROWITZ, p. 143]

A Nazi lieutenant and head of an execution squad wrote that “the execution of the Jews is simpler than that of the Gypsies. One must admit that the Jews go to their deaths very composedly; they remain very calm. The Gypsies, however, scream and wail and move about incessantly as soon as they get to the place of execution.” Desperate Gypsies were known to even use stale bread as last resort weapons. [HANCOCK, p. 48]

A Polish-Jewish historian in the Warsaw Ghetto, and eventual victim of the Nazis, Emmanual Ringelblum, expressed bewilderment that Jews did nothing to resist their fate. “Jews,” he wrote in 1942, “were evacuated under a guard of Jewish policemen. Not one of them escaped, although all of them knew where and towards what they were going … One gendarme is sufficient to slaughter a whole town.” [BART., p. 19]

While Jews en masse simply acceded to their horrible fate, engendering the contempt and disdain of Poles, about 350,000 Poles sustained a continuous fight against the Nazis in underground resistance groups throughout Poland. Another 100,000 were members of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and by the end of the war the Poles constituted the fourth largest Allied army. And, unlike other European countries under German rule, there was never organizational Polish collaboration with the Nazis. [BART, p. 16]

“The Jews did nothing [to resist the Nazis],” says Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, “until they had nothing left to lose, when they started an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19, 1943 and in Bialystok shorty afterwards.” [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 20]  The Warsaw Uprising is the cornerstone of modern Jewish/Israeli mythology about Jewish “resistance” to the Nazis in World War II. The last surviving member of the uprising, a doctor who never left Poland, Marek Edelman, has been visited by many Jewish delegations over the years who sought insights and details of the last stand of Warsaw’s besieged Jewry. “On several occasions,” notes Norman Davies, “[Edelman has recounted] his sense of dismay at numerous meetings with people who only want him to confirm their preoccupations. … Edelman [however] had made his terrible gaffe, ‘Do you really think it can be called an uprising'”? [DAVIES, p. 22]

Dow Marmur noted a visit by Edelman to Canada to give a talk to the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation, and the clash between Diaspora mythologies and those of first-hand experience in Poland. Edelman, says Marmur, was

      “the last surviving member of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, in

      that capacity, he has earned an important place in twentieth century

      Jewish history … He said relatively little about anti-Semitism in Poland,

      although he answered all the questions put to him. The reaction from

      Jews was often hostile. We wanted him to say something else

      and when he did not, we were furious and let him know it  … I

      am pleading for a general effort to understand him and people like

      him; they are our fellow Jews, and his personal contribution to Jewish

      history surpasses that of all his Canadian opponents put together.”

      [MARMUR, p. 49]

Stephan Korbanski was central to Polish underground resistance activity and his perceptions are highly credible. As critic Engler himself concedes from his professorial armchair:

              “[Korbanski] transmitted a number of radio messages to the West

              concerning the systematic murder of Polish Jewry … including the

              operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Korbanski was also

              responsible for arranging the trial and execution of collaborators,

              including some of those who blackmailed Jews in hiding … In

              recognition of these activities, in 1980 he was honored by Yad

              Vashem as a Righteous Gentile …” [ENGLER, p.]

But Engler just doesn’t like Korbanski’s centrally located view of Polish affairs and that Poles have their own perspective of history. Korbanski’s indictment of Jewish communists of the secret police agencies in the post-war destruction of Poland is especially galling. Korbanski writes that

          “To realize his plan of seizing total control of Poland, Stalin formed

          two teams: one to satisfy appearances and the Western Allies, the

          other to actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the Polish

          communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob Berman, who

          knew Stalin well.

          The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins, which

          exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy of

          Poland’s independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites,

          whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their

          residence … [KORBANSKI, p. 73]

          The principal instrument of Berman’s power was his total control of

          the Ministry of State Security, which began — under Stalin’s

          instructions — to liquidate all centers of Polish opposition, often by

          simply murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland’s

          independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]

Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek also “admit [that] the Jewish youth and proletariat played an important (‘although not exclusive’) role in the apparatus of oppression.” [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18]  One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 94]  With Jews representing about 10% of the Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in communism, “in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the [Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities, frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the] statement that ‘in small cities like ours, almost all communists were Jews’ does not appear to be a gross exaggeration. [SCHATZ, p. 96]

In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 “Jews constituted 51 percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians).” [SCHATZ, p. 96]  In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97]  They were also 54 percent of the communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and “occupied most of the seats” of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers’ Party and Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that “in Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews.” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 36]  [SCHATZ, p. 97]  Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the Polish Communist Party included a “firm stand against anti-Semitism.” [SCHATZ, p. 100]

Furthermore, the symbology of three very high level Jewish officers — Minc, Berman, and Zambrowski — in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions,  “became a lasting part of anti-Semitic vocabulary.” [SCHATZ, p. 206]  “All three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews.” [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63]  As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now “due to the Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland’s government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have.” [SCHATZ, p. 207]

Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in 1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty: “Representatives of [the Nazis’] former arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone and have been received with royal honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi’s ‘friend’ Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about race.” [KAPLAN, C., p. 84]

Stephan Korbanski also notes that the Soviet Communist secret police

     “team assembled by Berman [whose brother Adolf was chairman of

      the Jewish Committee in Poland till 1947, when he immigrated to Israel]

      [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 85] at the beginning of his rule were all

      Jewish — Vice Minister Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman

      Romkowski) [who once interrogated Korbanski], and other high officials

      like General Julius Hibner (David Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security

      police chief Joseph Swiatlo, Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg), ‘Colonel

      Czaplicki,’ and Zygmut Okret. These were not the only Jewish officials

      who oppressed Poles in the name of communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a

      member of the Communist Council of State, has stated that ‘it was

      unfortunate that all the department directors in the Ministry of State

      were Jews.'” [KORBANSKI, p. 78]

“Jacek Rozanski,” notes Polish author Jacek Borkowicz, was “director of the Investigative Department of the Polish State Security Ministry” and was “sentenced in 1955 to five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957 sentenced him to fifteen years]” for “using inadmissible means of persuasion during interrogations … Son of a prominent Warsaw Yiddish-language journalist (on the pro-Zionist ‘Hajnt’), Rozanski was a dedicated communist who .. maintained his Jewish identity until the end.” [BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344] “All the detainees described [Rozanski] as an exceptionally cynical and sadistic psychopath who liked to torture prisoners needlessly,” notes Jewish author Michael Checinski, “… Rozanski’s Jewish origin was then common knowledge, in spite of his Polonized name.” [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 80]

The aforementioned Anatol Fejgin was head of the “Tenth Department of the Polish State Security Ministry — the special unit answerable to the Party First Secretary and concerned with spying on the communist leadership [and he] was sentenced at the same trial in 1957 to twelve years’ imprisonment.” [BORKOWICZ, p. 344]

Jewish author Michael Checinski notes the post-World War II case of Semyon Davidov who

      “held the relatively modest post of head of Soviet advisers in Poland.

      But no serious operational decisions on any question pertaining to

      political provocations or police terror could ever be taken without

      Davidov’s consent. On the one hand, Davidov and his personal

      network supervised the activities of the Soviet advisers in all the

      mainstays of real power in Poland (the armed forces, security

      service, party apparatus, state administration, and industry). But

      he also was responsible for overseeing the entire Polish apparatus

      of terror.” [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 51]

Abel Kainer (a pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew) adds that

         “The archetype of the Jew during the first ten years of the Polish

         People’s Republic was generally perceived as an agent of the secret

         political police. It is true that under Bierut and Gomulka (prior to 1948)

         the key positions in the Ministry of State Security were held by Jews or

         persons of Jewish background. It is a fact which cannot be

         overlooked, little known in the West and seldom mentioned by the

         Jews of Poland. Both prefer to talk about Stalin’s anti-Semitism ….

         The machinations of communist terror functioned in Poland in a matter

         [sic] similar to that used in other communist ruled countries in Europe.

         What requires explanation is why it is operated by Jews. The reason

         was the political police, the base of communist rule, required personnel

         of unquestionable loyalty to communism. These were people who had

         joined the Party before the war and in Poland they were predominately

         Jewish." [KORBANSKI, p. 79]

“The feeling that Jews are oppressors probably sounds absurd to many westerners,” wrote Stanislaw Krajewski, under his own name. “The only sense it has derives from the Jewish participation in the oppressive rule in Poland, and in particular the fact that a lot of Jews looked favorably at the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939.” [KRAJEWSKI, p. 50] Most Poles did not look favorably at such a scenario. World War II was a struggle for them on two fronts — in the West against the Nazi fascists, and in the East against the Russian communists.

Even a Jewish scholar/polemicist like Robert Wistrich, who expresses astonishment that one-third of West Germany after World War II still felt that anti-Semitism was primarily caused by “Jewish characteristics,” concedes that

          “After the Polish communist seizure of power in 1948 there were

           indeed a number of Jews like Jakob Berman, Hilary Minc, and

           Roman Zambrowski, who did play key roles in the party, the

           security services, and economic planning. No doubt they were

           considered by Moscow as being less susceptible than the Catholic

           majority to Polish nationalist feelings, though in the eyes of many

           Poles they were little better than agents of a foreign, semi-colonial

           power … the anti-communist underground was convinced that

           Jews were deliberately betraying Poland.” [WISTRICH, AIE, p. 271]

In another, related, example of the usual sharp double standard of Jewish morality and responsibility, in an article entitled, “Lithuania May Charge Jews for Crimes Against Humanity,” in December 1997 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the Lithuanian response to a Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United States Congressmen to the president of Lithuania, insisting that he “put suspected [World War II] criminals on trial.” Kazys Pednycia, the prosecutor general of Lithuania, “alarmed local Jewish leaders” by announcing that his office “would not only study the massacres of Jews committed by both Germans and Lithuanians during the war, but also crimes committed by Jews against Lithuanians when the country was under Soviet control.”  “Of course there were Jews who suffered from Lithuanians,” said Pednycia, “But there were also just the opposite cases, and we all know that.” “The presence of Jews in the Soviet secret police,” noted JTA reporter Lev Krichevsky, “has prompted many Lithuanians to share the sentiments expressed by the prosecutor general.”  The chairman of the Jewish community in Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius, responded to the prosecutor’s comments about Jews by declaring them “absolutely false,” “non-ethical,” and “historically wrong.” [KRISCHEVSKY, Lith, p. 16] In 2000, Lithuanian requests for the extradition of Nahman Dushanski and Simion Borkov from Israel, for the mass murder of Lithuanians during World War II, were denied by the Jewish state. [MELMAN, 2-10-2000]

Jewish pre-eminence in communist terrorist police organizations in the Ukraine was the same. A Canadian of Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, notes a 1997 volume published in his homeland entitled “The Jewish Conquest of the Slavs.” It was produced by Security Service of the Ukraine, today’s state police agency. In tabulating the nationalities of 183 biographies in the volume of leading officials in the terrorist Soviet secret police agencies (the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak notes, on average, about six out of ten such people were Jewish. This percentage doesn’t include, of course, those who successfully hid their Jewish identities, a practice common in Eastern Europe. As Prytulak concludes,

     “One possible reason that Jews incessantly paint the false image of

     themselves as victims of Ukrainians is because of the reality that

     Ukrainians have been among the foremost victims of Jews … A

     more thoughtful examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism

     reveals many reasons for viewing it — at least in some of its  

     manifestations — not as an irrational and unexplainable and

     gratuitous hatred, but as a natural and understandable antipathy

     from an acquaintance with Jewish misbehavior.” [PRYTULAK]

Richard Rhodes notes the prominence of Bela Kun and other Jewish communist elite in Hungary, and future (Jewish) nuclear bomb scientist Edward Teller’s family there:

     “The leaders of the Commune and many among its officials were

     Jewish … Max Teller warned his son that anti-Semitism was coming.

     Teller’s mother expressed her fears more vividly. ‘I shiver at what my

     people are doing,’ she told her son’s governess in the heyday of the

     Commune. ‘When this is over there will be a terrible revenge.'”

     [RHODES, R., 1986, p. 111-112]

Bela Kun, notes Louis Rapoport,

     “a Jew, [was] the cruel tyrant of the 1919 Communist revolution in

     Hungary and later Stalin’s chief of terror in the Crimea.”
    [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 56]   

In Russia, the “home” of communism, the preeminence of Jews in oppressive state departments, including the terrorist secret police, and the enforced starving of millions, was the same. [See details — Genrikh Yagoda, head of the secret police; Lazar Kaganovich, head of the “Apparatus of Terror,” Jewish dominance of the Soviet concentration camp system, et al — earlier] As Richard Pipes notes: “Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect which is known in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918-1920 remains concealed.” [PIPES, R., 1990, p. 823]

The following observation is written by a Jewish author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the normal Jewish framing of Russian perception about the subject as irrationally anti-Semitic:

     “There is a tendency in Russian intellectual circles “to view the

     Bolshevik Revolution as an essentially non-Russian phenomenon,

     which took place under the influence of the minority nations in the

     Russian empire, chiefly the Jews. There are those who regard the

     political terror as a phenomenon connected mainly with the Jews

     (this element is to be found in, or inferred from [Nobel laureate]

     Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the [communist] oppositionist, and

     Valentin Kataev, the official writer). Such an attitude is also

     behind militant anti-Semitism, born in publicistic writings and

     in belles-lettres, portraying the Jews as plotters who, since Peter

     the Great, have sought to harm Russia and are now corrupting

     Soviet society. In this manner anti-Jewish pogroms and measures

     in the past are presented as protests against exploitations.”
    [ETTINGER, p. 21]

In communist Poland, according to Pinek Maka (a Jew), the Secretary of Security for Silesia, the number of Jewish officers in the dreaded OSS (the secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much as 75% of the total) — merely in his own jurisdiction. [SACH, p. 175]  Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek Edelstein, estimated that 90% of the Jews of Kattowitz disguised themselves with Polish names. Josef Musial, the Vice Minister for Justice in Poland in 1990, suggested that most officers in the OSS throughout Poland had been Jewish. [SACK, p. 183]

In 1992, when Shlomo Morel, a Jew still living in Poland, was interrogated by Polish authorities who were looking into his past as the commandant of a post-World War II communist concentration camp for Germans and nationalist Poles, “Shlomo went home, wrote a cousin in Israel, asked him for $490, and the next month, in January 1992, took the first plane that he could to Tel Aviv,” leaving his Catholic wife behind. [SACH, p. 166] In an interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised him that he must not write about the story of Jewish dominance and brutality in the OSS “because it would increase anti-Semitism.” [SACH, p. 169]

Surviving prisoners under Morel’s rein had testified that:

      * “The commandant was Morel, a Hun in human form.”

      * “The commandant was Morel, a Schweinehund without equal.”

      * “The commandant, Morel, appeared. The clubs and the dog whips

           rained down on us. My nose was broken, and my ten nails were

           beaten blue. They later fell off.”

       * “The commandant, Morel, arrived. I saw him with my own eyes kill

           many of my fellow prisoners.” [SACK, p. 167]

After World War II, writes Richard Lucas, “Jews in [Polish] cities and towns displayed Red flags to welcome Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish soldiers, and filled administrative positions in Soviet-occupied Poland. One report estimated that seventy-five per cent of all the top administrative posts in the cities of Lwow, Bialystok, and Luck were in Jewish hands during Soviet occupation …  The entire character of the University of Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war, the percentage of students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent; Ukrainians 15 per cent; Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12 per cent, and 85 per cent, respectively.” [LUCAS, p. 128] 

“The evidence, “observed Jewish commentator Aleksander Smolar, “is overwhelming: large numbers of Jews welcomed the Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory the image of Jewish crowds greeting the invading Red Army as their liberator.” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 50] “Thousands of Polish survivors’ testimonies, memoirs, and works of history,” notes Polish scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski, “tell of Jewish celebrations, of Jewish harassment of Poles, of Jewish collaboration (denunciations, manhunts, and roundups of Poles for deportation), of Jewish brutality and cold-blooded executions, of Jewish pro-Soviet citizens’ committees and militias, and of the high rates of Jews in the Soviet organs of oppression after the Soviet invasion of 1939.” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]

Testimony to the Jewish Polish response to the Soviet invasion of Poland includes the following Jewish accounts, from the archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust organization in Israel:

     “When the Bolsheviks entered the Polish territories they displayed a great

     distrust of the Polish people, but with complete faith in the Jews … they

     filled all the administrative offices with Jews and also entrusted them with

     top level positions.” [from the town of Grodno]

     “I must note that, from the very first, the majority of positions in the

      Soviet agencies were taken by Jews.” [from the town of Lwow]

     “The Russians rely mainly on the Jewish element in filling positions,

      segregating, naturally, the bourgeois from the proletariat.” [from the

      town of Zolkwia]

     “A Jewish doctor recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed

     themselves into a ‘komsomol,’ toured the countryside, smashing

     Catholic shrines.” [near the town of Jaworow]

     “Whenever a [pro-Soviet] political march, or protest meeting, or some

     other sort of joyful event took place, the visual effect was always the

     same — Jews.”  [from the town of Lwow]

        [PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 – As Piotrowski notes, these comments have

        been edited out of an English translation of the source volume,

        originally published in Polish]

“The victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and carried out by his Jewish subordinates,” says Stephan Korbanski,

      “during the first ten years of the war numbered tens of thousands.

      Most of them were Poles who had fought against the Germans in

      the resistance movement. The communists judged, quite correctly,

      that such Poles were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet

      rule and were therefore to be exterminated. The task was assigned

      to the Jews because they were thought to be free of Polish patriotism,

      which was the real enemy.” [KORBANSKI, p. 79]

Korbanski then goes on to name and detail 29 more Jewish officials (beyond the ones earlier mentioned) of the communist elite that held positions in suppressing Polish nationalism. But political winds in the communist world shifted drastically.  Between 1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish communist officials were purged from Kremlin ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link to Israel’s 1967 military victory over the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs and Jewish Russian loyalties — per Israel — were put into question. [KORBANSKI, p. 85]

“In places like Gleibwitz,” writes John Sack, “the Poles stood against the prison walls as Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!,’ shot them, and told the Polish guards, ‘Don’t talk about this.’ The guards, being Poles, weren’t pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks, the office’s brass [of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to Stalin, for they thought of themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots … Stalin … had hired all the Jews on Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them into his Office of State Security, his instrument in the People’s Republic of Poland. And now, 1945, the Poles went to war with the Office, shooting at Jews in Intelligence, Interrogation, and Imprisonment.” [SACK, p. 139]

All this, of course, including the Poles own struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the role of Jews in the brutal communist oppression of Polish nationalism, traditional self-imposed Jewish estrangement from Polish society, and Jewish docile acquiescence to Nazi rule is part of the unscholarly “gutter literature” that the likes of David Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.

In 1984, a Polish journalist, Teresa Toranska, had this interchange with Jacob Berman, the despised Jewish former “Minister of State Security” in post-war communist Poland:

        Berman: “I was against too large a concentration of Jews in certain

                       institutions … it wasn’t the right thing to do and it was a

                       necessary evil that we’d been forced into when we

                       [communists] took power when the Polish intelligentsia

                       was boycotting us…

                 Q:  In 1948-49 you arrested members of the [Polish] Home

                      Army Council of Aid to Jews, the ‘Zegata’ … Mr. Berman!

                      The security services who were all or nearly all Jews arrested

                      Poles because they had saved Jews during the [Nazi]

                      occupation, and you say the Poles are anti-Semites. That’s

                      not nice.

        Berman:  … It was wrong that that happened. Certainly it was wrong …

                      It was a small group, but very dedicated, and it took

                      enormous risks to look after Jews during the war.”

                      [TORANSKA, p. 321]

Toranska also talked to Roman Werbel, a prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major Polish communist journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality wrought by Jewish security officers upon Poles in fomenting anti-Semitism:

                 “Beating causes degradation not only in the person who is beaten,

                 but in the person doing the beating as well. So it’s better to shoot

                 someone than to beat him … There are principals you have to

                 stick to in beating, however Johnny has to be beaten by Johnny

                 and not Moshe … I can see now that there were too many Jews in

                 the security services.” [TORANSKA, p. 109]

Jewish apologist Michael Checinski (whose world view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent anti-Semitism model, whereby even in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews are themselves considered victims of an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an anti-Semitic communist regime) argues that

     “while by coincidence or evil design, Jewish officials were often placed

     in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for

     all the regime’s crimes …[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 62] … Jews — and

     especially those with Jewish names or striking Semitic features — could

     be placed in the most controversial posts (for example, those dealing

     with Church affairs or the campaign against the political underground)

     and thus deflect antiregime feelings into anti-Semitism. This policy was

     implemented not only in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe, where

     the new [communist] governments, ruling only with the military support

     of the Soviet army, were seen by their own peoples as puppets.”

     [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 63]

In 1999, the government of Poland was still seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus (now living in England), who in the post-World War II communist regime was Poland’s chief military prosecutor. Polish investigators, noted the Jerusalem Report, say “that Brus … played a key role in the trial and execution of a hero of the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf … The anti-Communist Fieldorf, hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but posthumously pardoned in 1989, was an intelligence officer in the underground Polish Home Army in World War II.” [WINNER, D., p. 37]

In 1994, the New York Times discussed the case against Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a well-known German Jewish literary critic who had emigrated from Poland. “He was forced to admit his involvement with the Polish secret police from 1944 to 1950,” says Carol Oppenheim, “after his name turned up on the front page of a Warsaw newspaper publishing excerpts from a secret Polish intelligence archive.” [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

“Hundreds of Jews,” writes Jewish author John Sack, “were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered Germany … [SACK, p. 6] … Many [officers of the OSS] were Jewish boys but few used Jewish names   … [SACK, p. 39] … The talk was in Yiddish, mostly … About three out of four of the officers — two hundred rowdy boys  — in the Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland’s large industrial city] were Jews … They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that belonged to a [Polish prisoner].” [SACH, p. 40]

There is a profoundly disturbing — and continuously recurring — Jewish moral double standard behind Jewish efforts nowadays to impugn the Poles, in order to shirk their own responsibility for Polish “anti-Semitism” and the terrible Jewish situation under the Nazis.  Jewish propagandists/scholars regularly charge that Poles were immorally complacent during the Nazi extermination of European Jewry (as Poles themselves were being slaughtered).  They are still looking, a half century later, for scapegoats for the shame of their own people. Few can face the extremely sensitive issue of Jewish complacency — and even active participation — in their own liquidation.

Stanislaw Krajewski, Jewish and still living in Poland, notes that the traditional separatist tenets of Judaism even engendered a willing acceptance of their push by the Nazis into the doomed Jewish ghetto of Warsaw: “The self-separating orthodox circles have been criticized for their cultivation of a ghetto mentality. How strong this mentality was may be seen from the fact that when the ghetto was established in German-occupied Warsaw in 1940 some Jews expressed satisfaction: at least Jews would be separated from the goyim [non-Jews].” [KRAJEWSKI, p. 15, CJ REL, no. 3, 87, pp. 8-25]

Chaim Kaplan notes the many Jews who had the chance to flee to Russia immediately after the Nazi invasion of Poland: “The so-called leaders of Jewry fled for their lives early and three million Jews have been left orphaned, abandoned to the claws of a cruel beast that knows no pity. Unorganized emigration to Soviet Russia has therefore increased … In tens of thousands our youths flee to this ‘Russia’ from the inferno waiting them under the rule of Nazism … Finally the Soviet government noticed them. True Bolshevism cannot live side by side with financiers, middlemen, black marketeers, exploiters, and extortionists. Didn’t Communism come to uproot all such things from the world?” [KAPLAN, C., p. 77]

The Israeli social critic Israel Shahak — who spent his own childhood in a Nazi concentration camp — notes with cynical irony the fact that so many Jews today express outrage that, as they see it, “the whole world stood by” as the Jews sunk into the Holocaust. Shahak severely points out that according to the double standard moral dictates of Orthodox Judaism, Jews are, incredibly, themselves forbidden from saving non-Jewish lives. Citing talmudic references, current rabbinical writings in modern Israel, and the great Jewish religious philosopher Maimonides, Shahak writes that “the basic talmudic principle is that (non-Jewish) lives must not be saved.” [SHAHAK, p. 80]  “As for Gentiles,” wrote Maimonides, “with whom we are not at war … their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued.” [SHAHAK, p. 80]

The profoundly divisive nightmare of Jewish-Polish relations under Nazi rule  — each people terrorized into the basest struggle for self-survival — might be epitomized in the testimony of Z. Maszudro, immediately upon his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp: 

       “Then the gaze of the [Nazi] construction officer fell upon two Jews

        whose strength had given out. He ordered a Pole named Strzaka to bury

        the two men, who could hardly stand on their feet. Strzaka froze with

        horror and refused. The construction officer took the shovel and beat

        him with it. He ordered him, ‘Lie down in the trench immediately!’

        Thereupon he forced the two Jews to cover with dirt the prisoner lying

        in the trench. The two men did it out of fear for their lives, hoping to

        escape the same gruesome fate themselves. When only Strzaka’s head

        still peered out, the construction officer called, ‘Halt.’ and had him

        pulled out again. Now the two Jews had to lie in the trench, and the

        construction officer again gave Strzaka the order to cover the two with

        dirt. Slowly the trench filled with dirt; one shovelful after another was

        dumped in. The face of the Polish comrade was contorted with terror

         … But the construction officer stood next to him with the look of a

        wild animal that hypnotizes its victims.” [HACKETT, p. 195]

A few Jewish scholars have surfaced over the years to lay the unpleasant story of the Jewish role in their own European extermination on the table. The Jewish historians Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt — both widely maligned and vilified by the mainstream Jewish community — were among the first to explore Jewish leaders and organizations that were used by, and cooperated with, the Nazis to betray and exterminate their own people.

Arendt notes that

          “The Jewish Council of Elders were informed by Eichmann [a high-

          level Nazi administrator] or his men of how many Jews were needed

          to fit each train, and they made out the list of deportees. The Jews

          registered filled out the innumerable forms, answered pages and pages

          of questionnaires regarding their property so that it could be seized

          the more easily; they then assembled at the collection points and

          boarded the trains. The few who tried to hide or escape were rounded

          upby a special Jewish police force.” [ARENDT, p. 102]

          “The final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was … done entirely by a

          Jewish police force…. To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the

          destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter

          of the whole dark story …” [ARENDT, p. 104]

          “In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the

          highly assimilated Jewish communities of the Central and Western

          Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East … Jewish

          officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and their

          property, to secure money from the deported to defray the expenses

          of their deportation and extermination … They distributed the Yellow

          Star badges…. In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestos

          that (Jewish leaders) issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their

          new power.” [ARENDT, p. 105]

“[Nazi official] Eichmann mentioned, “says Arendt, “and there is no reason to not believe him, that there were Jews even among the ordinary S.S. men, but the Jewish origin of [important Nazis like] Heydrich, Milch, and others was a highly confidential matter.” [ARENDT, p. 178] Such commentary elicited a firestorm of outrage from fellow Jews, including attacks from the Anti-Defamation League and the World Jewish Congress. “Arendt was accused of virtual treason against her people,” says Jeffrey Isaac, “for effacing the line between the gulf between the guilt of the Nazis and the innocense of the Jews.” [ISAAC, p. 23]

Yet even as severe a critic of Arendt’s views as Zionist author Marie Syrkin  concedes that “in regard to the evil role of the Jewish police there can be no dispute.” [SYRKIN, p. 191] And the Jewish leadership (the so-called Judenrat, the administrative Jewish Council) at-large under the Nazis? “Whatever the heavy sins of the Jewish Councils,” continues Syrkin, “let those certain they would have first chosen death for themselves and their families judge them.” [SYRKIN, p. 192] Fair enough. So why not accord this judgmental leeway and same moral standard to the Poles too, whose complete family unit was subject to instant execution for any individual caught helping a Jew?

“One of the most important historians of the Warsaw ghetto,” says Haim Breseeth, “[was] Emmanuel Ringelbaum. Writing about the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat, he criticized the co-opted leadership with the seminal words: ‘We are going like lambs to the slaughter.” [BRESEETH, p. 195] Most Jewish leaders kept the horrible truth of what was in store for their people hidden from them, either for “humanitarian” reasons or fear of resultant panic and chaos.  Arendt notes that Leo Baeck, for instance, the head rabbi of Berlin, “believed Jewish policemen would be ‘more gentle and helpful’ and would ‘make the ordeal easier’ (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them.”)  [ARENDT, p.]

Which is to say, their own skins. “Everywhere,” notes Anthony Heilbut, “Amsterdam, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest — it was the same. Jewish leaders compiled lists of persons and property, ‘secured money from the deportees  to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination,’ and organized the efficient evacuation of whole communities. On occasion the leaders even selected a few people to be saved — and those tended to be ‘prominent Jews’ and functionaries.” [HEILBUT, p. 421]  Earlier, complained Chaim Kaplan in 1939, “the Joint’s [a Jewish help organization] official representatives have all left us. The leaders of Polish Jewry pushed themselves to the fore in peaceful days when a monthly salary of 1200 zloty, equivalent to that of a senator or a deputy, attracted them; but in time of danger to us — and to them as well, if the truth be told — they fled for their lives. Will their sin be remembered on the Day of Reckoning? I doubt it.” [KAPLAN, C. p. 96]

Kaplan later wrote about conditions under the Nazis in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1942, as he knew and experienced them:

      “To go from one matter to another on the same subject — from the

      Judenrat to the Nazis; that is, from the actions of one degenerate

      to those of another degenerate; they are both on the same ethical

      plane … There are lists of ‘suspects,’ and for everyone on the list

      the sentence is death … Sometimes the greedy Nazis conspire with

      some worthless Jew. They share one pocket; both lie in wait for the

      loot of innocents and for their blood; both fill their houses with the

      wealth they have stolen and robbed …  But robbing doesn’t last forever,

      and when the partnership breaks up it is not convenient for the thieving

      Nazi to have a Jew know his secrets. The remedy for this is to get rid

      of him … Thus Perlmutter, the president  of the Judenrat of Mlawa,

      was killed by his German overseer, whose hand had never left his

      while both of them looted and robbed and grew rich. And so it was

      with the ‘Thirteen.’ [“A group of Jewish Gestapo informers headed by

      Abraham Gancwajch”] … They thought that they could live in the

      shadow of the Gestapo, that it was a special privilege to be close

      to an iniquitous, wicked regime. And behold — they have gotten their

      just deserts. Thus may they be destroyed!” [KAPLAN, C., p. 339-340]

Among the most notorious so-called “elders” of the Jewish community, appointed by the Nazis, was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who was a child molester at a Jewish orphanage before the war. [LEITER, R., 7-20-2000, p. 27] Despite his allegiance to Nazi directors, he too met his end in a concentration camp. Some Jewish Council members, notes Simon Wiesenthal, “did the only thing they couild, under the circumstances, by following Nazi regulations to the letter. Others were corrupted. They accepted favours, juggled names, hoping against hope that they might save their own skins. Other Jews collaborated with the Nazis of bartered others’ lives for their own. Some Jews were concentration camp trustees. Sometimes they helped their fellow inmates; sometimes they didn’t.” [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 85]

As long as such people in the Jewish leadership, its sycophants, and Jewish prisoners were cooperative with the Nazis in helping to exploit and kill other Jews, there was always hope — rarely realized — that the betrayers might come out of it all alive. But just on this count alone  — that the Nazi might kill anyone for as little as a sidewise glance, why should Poles — who had been in competitive conflict with Jews for centuries (while Jews maintained themselves as essentially a separate country in Poland), and who were actively fighting the Nazis while the Jews did virtually nothing  — be held to a higher moral standard than Jews about Jews, when some Jews themselves sold off their own people with little or no moral compulsion at all, and despised Poles?!  And why on earth should Poles have been expected to rescue Jews at every corner when their own life situations were also in doubt, when Jews themselves were even turning in their own kind, in huge numbers, primally straining for personal survival?

Jewish author Norman Salsitz noted three well-known Jewish betrayers to the Nazis in his small hometown, Kolubuszowa (total population 4,000; half Jewish), in Poland:

     “Enemies there were among our own ranks — not many, mind you, but

     with nearly everyone else against us betrayal by fellow Jews was all

     the more devastating … When we saw [one] speaking to German police

     and going in and out of military headquarters, we understood that he

     enjoyed a privileged position … When bribes had to be given to German

     officials he served willingly as an intermediary, taking a portion of the

     money as his ‘share.’ He warned of upcoming raids on our houses and

     seizures of property and persons, but suggested how, for a sum of

     money, all might be averted. We paid him, suspecting that most of the

     time no such raids were planned, that such talk was merely a device

     to line his own pockets. But who could be sure? … Regarding a second

     informer in town, Shmul Czolik, no one was likely to be surprised by his

     actions … Money put into Czolik’s hand hands usually meant an end to

     that [Nazi] ‘threat’ … That he terrorized the town for a time is certainly

     no understatement … Then there was Pearlman, a thoroughly

     contemptible creature who also joined in the ranks of the informers in

     town … Though Jewish, he identified his fortunes with the Germans.”

     [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 261-264]

Upon liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, prisoner Jacob Rudinger told Allied interviewers of an incident that shocked him deeply. Near the end of the war,

       “Senior block inmates decided to destroy the documents of all Jews

       since the SS [the elite Nazi killing corps] had threatened to force all Jews

       out of the camp [to their extermination] the next morning. The next

       morning the SS carried out roll call … They ordered all Jews to move to

       the left wing of the block. I explained to the two SS men that I had no

       documents to show who was a Jew and who was not. About 200 of the

       400 Jews moved to the left wing … My room attendant and I were able

       to bring approximately 100 of the 200 Jews into the block again. Then

       something happened I would not have believed possible. A Jew

       approached an SS man and declared that there were still many Jews

       in the block. The two SS men went back into the block and brought

       out approximately twenty more Jews.” [HACKETT, p. 325]

Jews could even betray their own over petty arguments. As Dana I. Alvi noted:

     “In November, 1944, one of the Jewish women we saved argued with a

     group of Jews and brought the Germans who then killed 18 people,

     including her nephew and her elderly sister. One man survived … For

     us, and the Jews who passed through our home, the greatest fear was

     that someone from the [Jewish] ghetto would betray [us]. The names of

     Jewish traitors are a record in the history books authored by Jews. The

     photos of Jews being pulled out of their hidings in the ruins of the

     Warsaw ghetto are testimonials to such betrayals. No other people but

     their own Jewish acquaintances knew of those hidings.” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 67]

“Two [of my] relatives,” adds Eva Hoffman, “died because of an act of betrayal by a fellow Jew — a man who, in the hopes of insuring his own survival, led the Germans to a hiding place.” [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6]

There were even predators like Stella Goldschlag, also Jewish, who worked undercover for the Nazis searching for hiding Jews. “Stella,” notes Peter Wyden, who knew her, “had stalked fellow Jews throughout Berlin and betrayed them to the Gestapo which deported them to die in concentration camps. She functioned much like an executioner on behalf of the Fuhrer’s ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem.'” [WYDEN, p. 17]  Goldschlag survived the Nazi era and has been living — unlike former Gentile Nazi collaborators hunted down by international Jewry all over the world — an undisturbed life in Europe.

Even in the art world, the Jewish Wildenstein family (prominent European art dealers) have come under fire in recent years for evidence that they had undercover dealings with the Nazis. As the Jewish Week noted in 1999,

     “The Wildensteins aren’t the first Jews to be accused of profiteering

     off Nazi plunder … Such incidents weren’t uncommon in the chaos

     of postwar Europe. Countless more cases have surfaced of Jews

     who worked for the Nazis to save their own skins.” [GOLDBERG, J. J., 6-18-99 p. 14]

Tadeusz Piotrowski notes the dimensions of the Jewish Holocaust little heard about these days:

     “There were Jewish szmalcowniki (blackmailers). There was a Gestapo-

     sponsored Jewish militia (Zagiew-Zydowska Gwardia Wolnoschi, or

     Jewish Guard of Liberty, led by Abraham Gancwajch) and the Society

     of Free Jews (Towarzystwo Wolnych Zydow, under Captain Lontski),

     whose members spied on the Jewish underground. There were the Jewish

     Gestapo brigades and Jewish Sonderkommando units. There was Jewish

     police force (Jupo). There were camp ‘trusties.’ (Kapos), retrievers

     (Abholder), raiders (Ordner), stool pigeons (Spitzel), scouts (Fahnder),

     and catcher (Greifer) of Jewish descent …   At his trial [prominent Nazi

     official] Adolf Eichmann testified that the Nazis regarded Jewish

     collaboration as ‘the very cornerstone’ of their anti-Semitic policy.”

     [PIOTROWSKI, p. 66]

By the beginning of 1942, the Gestapo-directed Zagiew alone had about 15,000 Jewish agents. [PIOTROWSKI, p. 74] “Former inmates of the Nazi concentration camps,” adds Norman Finkelstein, “typically testify that the Kapos were, in the words of Auschwitz survivor Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, ‘harder on the prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did.” [FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 63-64]  (For what it’s worth, although of enormously less gravity, this harsh treatment in some ways echoes that afforded fellow Jews by Jewish overseers in an immigration barracks in America in 1882: “The Father, or manager and taskmaster over the immigrants, was an American Jew who looked down upon the earthly beings, as the immigrants were called and not in a friendly tone. His assistant, the Hungarian Jew, was a brazen scoundrel and treated the immigrants like cattle. The other Russian Jews, who through flattery managed to secure soft jobs, imitated them in behavior … [Leading to a an eventual riot of Jewish immigrants that was quelled by 100 policemen], the Father‘s assistant slapped a weak woman who had implored him [to give her] several drops of a certain medicine. He also threatened her lady friends with a revolver when they reprimanded him. After breakfast, a delegation went to see the Father with complaints agaisnt his assistant, but the latter gave them a rude reception.”) [SHPALL, L., 1957, p. 103, 107, 108]

Emmanuel Ringelbaum wrote with disdain about the Jewish police who suffocated his people under Nazi rule:

     “Jewish policemen also distinguished themselves with their fearful

     corruption and immorality. But they reached the height of viciousness

     during the resettlement [transfer of Jews to concentration camps]. They

     said not a single word of protest against this revolting assignment to

     lead their own brothers to the slaughter. The police were

     psychologically prepared for the dirty work and executed it thoroughly.

     And now people are wracking their brains to understand how Jews,

     most of them men of culture, former lawyers (most of the police

     officers were lawyers before the war), could have done away with

     their brothers with their own hands … Very often, the cruelty of the

     Jewish police exceeded that of the Germans, Ukrainians, and Letts…

     Victims who succeeded in escaping the German eye were picked

     up by the Jewish police … Those who didn’t have the money to

     pay off the police were dragged to the wagons … For the most part,

     the Jewish police showed an incomprehensible brutality … Merciless

     and violent, they beat those who tried to resist … Every Warsaw

     Jew, every woman and child, can cite thousands of cases of the

     inhuman cruelty and violence of the Jewish police. Those cases

     will never be forgotten by the survivors, and they must shall be

     paid for.” [PIOTROWSKI, p. 68]

Israeli human rights activists, and Holocaust survivor, Israel Shahak, notes that

      “My memories (and memories of all survivors who are honestly

      ‘talking among themselves’) tell me that at the time [of the war]

      we Jews hated the Jewish policemen, or the Jewish spies for the

      Nazis in the Ghetto, much more than we hated anybody else.”

      [PIOTROWSKI, p. 75]  

Holocaust survivor Marcus David Leuchter recalls that “the brutality of the Jewish police force was unexpected; in the number of people they caught, they even exceeded the demands of the Germans.” [LEUCHTER, M., 2000]

Of course, times have changed and things are recontextualized. Such stories are a grotesque embarrassment to the myths of the Holocaust, they are only rarely addressed in obscure academic corners, and few people today are aware of them. And while angry Jewish scholarship fingers Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and other Nazi collaborators as moral beasts to be hunted down still today throughout the world, parallel Jewish criminals are never even mentioned. Popular Jewish convention demands collective Jewish innocence and a correspondingly collective Gentile evil. Period. In this context, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski addresses today’s chronic double standard held for Jews and Poles in the World War II situation:

         “While the Polish masses are criticized or condemned for their

          reluctance to help the Jews … a double standard is applied towards

          those members of the Jewish community who worked in Jewish

          Councils … [They] are excused, on the grounds that they had little

          choice, much more willingly than those Gentiles whose caution or

          fear prevented them from offering help to Jews … Most Poles

          particularly resent this application of a double standard to those

          Jewish individuals who were active in, and high-ranking members

          of the Communist Party, and especially the security police … No

          one … can claim that he or (very often) she had to be a member of

          the Stalinist political force or judiciary and, for one reason or another,

          had no choice but to torture and kill their innocent political

          opponents.” [BARTO, Conv, p. 29]

Still another Jewish enforced double standard of moral judgment is that going on today in today’s Czech Republic. As Carol Oppenheim notes, there is “the struggle in the Czech Republic by Jews and Sudenten Germans for legal restoration of homes that they were pushed out of almost fifty years ago. Germans are challenging the [Czech] government over a law that gives homes back to Jews making claims but refuses to consider the claims of Sudenten Germans for houses taken between 1945 and 1948, the very period when Jews figured prominently in the [then ruling] communist administration.”  [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

Despite all the historical conflicts between Poles and Jews, some Poles did rescue Jews from the Nazis. Some Poles did die for basic human principles. In fact, more than 2,500 Christian Poles were executed for aiding Jews. [CERAMI] Over 2,000 Polish Christian citizens are honored as Righteous Gentiles at Israel’s Vad Yashem. (This does not include the many that cannot be formally documented). “Every Polish Jew who survived in occupied Poland,” notes Eva Hoffman, “(rather than in the Soviet Union), did so with the help of individual Poles and of organizations set up for the purpose of aiding Jews. This was help offered at enormous risk, since sheltering Jews carried with it the penalty of death.” [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 7] But few Jews don’t want to hear about Christians who saved Jewish lives. Rabbi Harold Schulweiss, who has lectured on the subject to many Jewish audiences, notes that: “By and large, in most audiences, I found a resistance to my message. What was my obsession with ‘them’ [Poles] they seemed to ask.” [CERAMI] (Even Liwa Gomulka, a Jew, and eventual wife of post-World War II Polish communist head Wladyslaw Gomulka, “refused to see an old Polish woman who had hidden her during the Nazi occupation and had come to her for some small favor.”) [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 143]