At Auschwitz, a Jewish journalist confronts his anti-Polish bias

JTA ^ | January 25, 2017 | Cnaan Liphshiz

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you'd like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

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[Gay State Conservative]

IIRC Simon Weisenthal,the famous "Nazi Hunter",said that approximately 11 million people were killed in the camps,about 6 million of whom were believed to be Jewish.

There was surely enough barbarity to go around back then.

[marktwain]

I had an interesting conversation with a Polish survivor of WWII. He had been an officer in the Polish underground, commissioned at age 16 or 17, I forget. He was an accomplished linguist, and said it was an important skill for him to survive the war.

I asked about people hiding Jews, and he recounted a story of a family of Poles that hid a family of Jews all through the NAZI occupation. When the Russians occupied the town, the Jews went out, and immediately denounced the family that had saved them, as anti-communists (the Jews saved were Communists). The family of Poles was immediately arrested (they were probably sent to the gulag or shot).

Of course it cannot be confirmed. But I heard several of his stories, and they all hung together rather well.

[babble-on]

http://www.jankarski.net/en

Saw Slawomir Grunberg’s film about Karski last night.

[babble-on]

Wow, what an absolute crock of shit.

[SJackson]

Have not seen the film, but a great man. One of the most famous quotes (Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter) surrounding his meetings with American officials.

A man like me talking to a man like you must be totally frank. So I must say: I am unable to believe in what I have just heard, in all the things that you have just told me.’

It's frequently not made clear that Justice Frankfurter didn't disbelieve Karski's reports, he was unable to due to his position. Not exactly a example of courage, but more honest than FDR, who discounted him.

[marktwain]

And you know this because?

[SJackson]

Anything is possible.

[pierrem15]

When the story of Jedwabne and the other towns where Poles attacked Jews surfaced, the first thing I noticed was that all of them had been in the Soviet zone of occupation.

I don't recall ever hearing any stories of Poles attacking Jews in 1939.

I read that, according one elderly Pole, the Jews had welcomed the Soviets as saviors from the Germans.

That would not, of course, have gone over well with their Polish neighbors, who would have called such actions treason.

The terrible problem for both Jews and Poles was becoming the grain to be ground between the millstones of competing political and national struggles across central Europe.

[marktwain]

Anything is possible.

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Lots of Jews were Communists. Lots of Communists are fanatical.

I recall a Soviet Movie (The Forty-First) about shipwrecked lovers during White and Red wars in Russia. In the movie, the woman is a Communist, the man a White Russian (anti-communist). At the end of the movie, a ship is sighted. It is a White ship, so the Red woman kills her lover to prevent him from being rescued.

That was considered the height of moral behavior by the Communists.

[pierrem15]

after the Nazis turned their land into a cemetery for Jews and other undesirables

He's being euphemistic: the Germans turned Poland into a human slaughterhouse.

The death camps for the Jews were obviously the worst sites, but there is almost no town you can see in Poland that doesn't have plaques on the streets commemorating the places where Poles were executed in German reprisals.

As a young girl, my mother-in-law was forced to watch 300 people be machine gunned. She said once that she could never have imagined seeing human blood run like water in the gutters.

[SJackson]

He's being euphemistic: the Germans turned Poland into a human slaughterhouse.

True, though while doing it Germany considered it their land.

[PapaBear3625]

Russian writer Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, got into trouble over his last book, "200 years together", for getting into topics like the role of Jewish communists.

In a review by The UK Guardian:

In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

...

Yet he added: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."

How much of the animosity towards Jews in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, was actually animosity against the Communists that so many Jews apparently aligned with?

[rmlew]

Lots of Jews were Communists. Lots of Communists are fanatical.
One correction. Lots of communists were apostates from Judaism to a cult dedicated to the cultural genocide of Jews and Christians. Communists are fanatical

[marktwain]

The impression I got from the Polish resistance fighter was that the Jews that were rescured betrayed their saviors because they were Communists, not because they were Jews.

He had many fascinating stories. I wish I could have listened to him for a month, instead on only one night.

[marktwain]

One correction. Lots of communists were apostates from Judaism to a cult dedicated to the cultural genocide of Jews and Christians.

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A good way to put it.

[PapaBear3625]

I think we’re both on the same page. Communists are inherently loathsome creatures, ready to betray anybody for the Cause. When people observe that a lot of Jews are Communist, the taint carries over to the whole Jewish community, much like the behavior of the black underclass taints the perception of the whole black community.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Polish writer Ryszard Kapscinski (1932-2007) describes in his book Imperium what it was like to experience the Soviet and German occupations--he was seven when the Soviets occupied Pinsk (now part of Belarus), where he was then living.

Geraldo Rivera on "Fox & Friends" recently asserted that the reason why the US was unwilling to let Jews in who were fleeing Germany before WWII was the fear that they were Bolsheviks.

[rmlew]

Quite a bit. Many anticommunists were unable to understand communist antisemitism, which started with party section dedicated to destroying Judaism and Jewish culture, and that Stalin liquidated them for moving to slowly, as he set up his own final solution to the Jewish Question of a death march to Siberia under the pretext of the Doctors Plot has been all but erased from history, largely because Stalin's fake plot killed him. (He fired the competent doctors and the new ones refused to break his door down and intervene, when he was dying.) The communist revisionism and Russian antisemitic delusions is protected and promoted by leftists of Jewish descent, who hide or downplay communist antisemitism and refuse to acknowledge that every communist regime with more than a handful of Jews in the country persecute Jews and are or were part of the Communist International plan to destroy Israel. Russian nationalists are unable to see the crimes of Russians, and seek to blame anyone but Russians. (Ukranians are no different. In 1920, they choose union with Communist Russia over Poland, and have spent almost 100 years screaming about Jews.) Since the foundation of the Rus, Jews have been the outsider and other. While ex-Jews were disproportionate supporters of communism compared to ex-Christian ethnic Russian, the most disproportionate support came from the Latvians, and the Latvian Rifle Regiments formed the basis of the Red Army. Latvians are ignored, like the people disappeared from communist photos. Marx and Engels were German former Lutherans. The Bolshevik leadership was transported to Russia, funded, and armed by the German high command no one except me uses the phrase "Germano-Bolshevism". (I do so because the truth drives neo-Nazi untermenschen insane with anger.) The senile rant of Solzhenitsyn is a prime example of this chauvinistic delusion.