4/17/2015
Posted on 04/20/2015 11:05:04 AM PDT by SJackson
Responses from Jewish community come after Poland summoned the US envoy in Warsaw over article written by FBI director James Comey which touched on Poland's alleged responsibility for the Holocaust.
Leaders of the Polish Jewish community weighed in on the side of their government on Monday in its spat with the United States over Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust.
On Sunday Poland summoned the United States' ambassador in Warsaw over an article written by FBI director James Comey which touched on Poland's alleged responsibility for the Holocaust during World War Two.
Writing in the Washington Post, the senior lawman explained the reasoning behind his decision to send all trainee FBI agents to visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Comey said in the article: "In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do."
Poland says the passage wrongly implied it was complicit in the Nazi genocide of European Jews and the country’s Jews seem to agree.
“The director clearly wanted to make an important moral statement,” said the country’s American-born Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich.
“His intention was positive and good. However, even an unintended distortion of history is nonetheless a distortion of history and disrespectful to the Polish nation. To lump Poland with Germany as the same is false and hurtful [and] his use of words was imprecise and [could be] easily misunderstood to be a distortion of historical facts.”
Piotr Kadlcik, the immediate past President of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, said that he doubted that Comey wished to offend Poles.
“From my perspective he was referring to the group of German collaborators active throughout the entirety of Europe,” he said. “I agree that choosing both Poles and Hungarians (being an active part of Axis) was a wrong choice, but I do not think that it was done on purpose.
What saddened me was the national outcry that had an impact on the Anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.”
Poles marked the Jewish uprising against the Nazis at a ceremony held Sunday afternoon in Warsaw at the monument to the ghetto heroes in front of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Polish authorities and visiting Israeli youth joined Warsaw residents at the commemoration.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out on April 19, 1943, and lasted for a month. It was the first military action of underground organizations against Germany and the first urban uprising in occupied Europe.
Severyn Ashkenazy, the President of Beit Warszawa Foundation Jewish Progressive Community of Poland, was even harsher than his orthodox counterparts, telling the Post that he “can only hope and pray that the FBI is better informed than its director.”
Comey wrote that he requires his agents to visit the Holocaust museum both because he wants them to “learn about abuse of authority on a breathtaking scale” but also because he wishes them to “confront something more painful and more dangerous…humanity and what we are capable of.”
Why can't the FBI Director speak for HIMSELF regarding his "intentions" and his "distortion of history" (aka - Lies)?
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Hungry was a member of the Axis powers. The Director could lump them with Italy, or France (Vichy). Poland's government, their only government, was headquartered in London. And early in raising the alarm about the slaughter of European Jews, only to be ignored. An to request bombing the rail lines, and dropping arms. To be ignored. I presume the Director missed European history in college. I hope he not only apologizes, but acknowledges his mistake. He should learn about abuse of authority on a breathtaking scale that in Poland it was Nazi authority.
They should follow up that visit with visits to Wac, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
The “JV Team” is our own government.
Clean shirt, new shoes ... Free Republic doesn’t miss a thing ....
Well, the Director is off-base; maybe he only misspoke and meant to refer only to those IN Hungary, Poland, etc. (not “OF” Poland, etc.) who had been collaborators.
But that said, Poland (aside from a very few individuals) didn’t lift a finger to save the Jews of Warsaw when they rose in revolt (the anniversary of which is now being observed). 400,000 people were taken away to death camps
under their very eyes.
Two years later, when the rest of Warsaw rose against the nazis, no one lifted a finger to help them.
Maybe God would have worked things out differently for them if they had been willing to be a bit more active...
You could chalk it up to stupidity or malice. I’ll go with stupidity, until more info comes out.
Finish up with with Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. There is where the real abuse happens.
Poland was invaded and conquered by Nazi Germany in the Fall of 1939. It was under Nazi occupation and control until the end of WWII.
Poland had no means by which to help the Jews of Warsaw.
It is certainly where the abuses are formulated and authorized.
To reiterate, the Polish government was in exile in London.
Much of Poland was annexed into Germany proper, including Auschwitz. The rest of Poland was governed by the General Government, which was not a puppet regime, but governed Poland as a German colony. The ultimate plan was to exterminate the Poles and open the territory up for German colonization. This was Hitler's plan for "lebensraum."
Other occupied countries, such as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, etc., were government by Nazi puppet regimes.
Most of the puppets cooperated to some extent in deportations to the death camps. Hungary resisted until a German coup resulted in a change of government in early 1944. In only a few short months over 400,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz under the personal direction of Adolph Eichmann, one of the most shameful events during that shameful time.
I think Comer should be sentenced to a day in the Museum.
Not only was Poland conquered and occupied, the Germans had enacted a brutal program designed to decapitate Polish leadership at all levels by killing anyone who could serve as a nucleus for resistance. Politicians, military, local officials, clergy and so on. There were few left to lead by the time of the Warsaw ghetto deportations.
Ordering agents to visit doesn’t mean he did.
Good point.
FBI director denotes great ignorance of history or great malice against Catholic nations in order to please his Muslim boss.
Poland was the only Nazi occupied country where to hide a Jew was condemned by death. Nevertheless, Polish Catholics hide Jews risking certain death. In fact, as many Christians, mostly Catholics, as Jews, died at the extermination camps.
According to historian William J. O’Malley, S.J., “to the genocide of six millions Jews we have to add nine to ten millions Slavic victims (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs) who were eliminated-not in war, not as saboteurs, not as guerrillas, but sorely because they were Slavic.”
The Nazi’s genocide, based on race, should also include half a million gypsies who, just as the Slavs, were executed because they were not member of the superior race, the Aryans. The Nazis in Poland alone murdered more than 3 million Catholics together with over 3 million Jews. (13)
About 2,800 clergymen were interned between 1940 and 1945, at Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Among them, 2,579 were Catholic clergymen, 109 Protestants, 30 orthodox and two Moslem clergymen. The Catholics came from 38 nations; 1,780 were Polish, 447 German and Austrian, 109 Czech and Slovaks, 50 Yugoslavs, 156 French, 63 Dutch.
The auxiliary Polish Bishop of Wladislava died of typhus while imprisoned at Dachau. At least 1034 died in the camp, some victims of medical experimentation by the infamous Dr. Rascher. In 1940, 800 priests died in Buchenwald, 1,200 in 1942 and 3,000 in 1943. And that was just in Buchenwald.
As O’Malley, pointed out, “That figure, surprising as it might be, does not include the clergy or nuns who were shot, beheaded or tortured to death in squares and alleys and jails all over Europe…In France, in February 1944, the Gestapo had arrested 162 priests, of whom 123 were shot or decapitated before ever reaching any camp. According to the International Tribunal at Nuremburg, 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen and 300 at Sachsenhausen, and there were hundreds of other camps in the network. Nor does the total figure of 2,771 take into consideration that one-quarter to one-third of those shipped to any camps often arrived dead.” (14)
Polish Cardinal Stephan Wyszynski, in his prison memoirs, notes that he was the only member of his ordination class who escaped the concentration camps; seven died in Dachau; of the six who survived the concentrations camps, several soon died as the result of torture and medical experimentation. It is estimated that the Nazis imprisoned half of the Polish clergy.
Millions of Catholics were victims first of the Nazis and later of the Communists. Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage. When Msgr. Andrew Szeptyckyi was consecrated as Archbishop of Lwow of the Ruthenians, he asked the Pope during the ceremony, an explicit vocation for martyrdom. With that idea he approached Himmler personally on behalf of the Jews; their fate rent his noble spirit. There were many Catholics such as Oskar Schindler and St. Maximilian Kolbe who in brotherly love risked and even offered their own lives in behalf of the Jews.
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