Posted on 10/30/2013 2:04:01 AM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
On July 10, 1941, half the residents of Jedwabne, a Polish village 85 miles northeast of Warsaw, murdered the other half. The mob, led by the mayor, were Catholics; their 1,600 victims were Jewish, slaughtered over several nightmarish hours with bats, knives, rifles and other improvised weapons. Those who survived the massacre were then rounded up in a barn donated by a local farmer, which was then set ablaze. A plaque erected at the site blamed Nazis for the massacre, but, in fact, Nazis had only authorized it. Locals walked by the plaque for half a century, knowing the truth, but saying nothing.
Jedwabne's terrible secrets were at last laid bare in Neighbors, an explosive account of the massacre by Princeton University historian Jan T. Gross. That 2001 book shattered carefully held myths, promulgated by Communist leaders, that Poles were only victims of World War II, not perpetrators. (Poles -- who unlike many European countries never officially collaborated with the Nazis -- lost close to 6 million citizens to the Nazis, or about 17 percent of the population. Just over half of those were Jewish.) Now, 12 years later, comes Aftermath -- premiering stateside Nov. 1.
It's a film inspired by Jedwabne that has forced the country to once again face certain unthinkable aspects of its past. Since its October 2012 premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival, the movie has been a lightning rod. Major news outlets have dismissed it as anti-Polish propaganda, its non-Jewish star Maciej Stuhr has been the target of vicious anti-Semitic attacks, and its producer says he has been blacklisted by the country's national film council. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at hollywoodreporter.com ...
I think there was a similar mis-directed blame story yesterday.
What we have here is that a massacre occurred. The fact that it occurred in a particular country (Poland) at the hands of people with a particular religion (Catholic).
And what is the point of this story? That we should hate the Poles and the Catholics of today for an event in the past? Is that not itself bigotry?
The article supposes such bigotry leading to massacre is “bad” yet then seems to want to justify another bigotry. It seems the author is as much a hypocrite as any self purported “good person church-goer” that participated in the massacre.
I think the truth here is that this type of horror can be inflicted by any country and by people of any religion.
Doesn’t Buddhism flourish in the Asian communist countries? Doesn’t Protestantism flourish in the states where slavery was prevalent?
The fact of the matter is, when it comes to the horrors imposed by the Nazis, the country and religions are irrelevant.
Nazism itself is a belief. Regardless of country or creed, the thing ALL Nazis had in common is that they were SOCIALISTS.
It is socialism that should be pointed to as the demon here.
Governments have killed far more people than religions have.
Of those, the socialists have killed the most.
The enemy is not Poles, not Germans, not Catholics:
THE ENEMY IS SOCIALIST.
Guess that explains why they just built the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, in the area where the Ghetto was.
Or Katyn, which the Soviets blamed on the Nazis.
I lived in a small town near Ramstein for almost 20 years. In this small village....I came to note one day that there were two Jewish cemeteries in the local area. Both had gravestones that kinda ended around 1940.
It’s safe to say that there were a number of Jews in this little farming community in the 1930s....between my village and the next one over. I can only guess that roughly thirty farms were operated by them. Then one day...they were picked up.
It’s a curious thing that the village doesn’t talk on. I came to realize that around 1940...my village and the next one over....combined into one community. This unification lasted until 1947, and they divided. The farm property belonging to the Jews? Likely disappeared into the paperwork of the unification and the breakup of the two towns.
Some German families got the property and no one said much. It’s not a Catholic community, but there are two heavily favored protestant churches in the local area. One of the churches was barely 500 feet from the Jewish farming section.
My humble guess is that a lot of religious behavior got out into the Nazi business....and lots of people did their brand of pay-back.
At the very least, the 1,600 count of victims is a gross exaggeration. Forensic exhumations in 2000 revealed 340 remains in two separate mass graves in the torched barn. The entire Jewish population of Jedwabne was 757 at the time of the pogrom, and some survived the massacre that day.
In terms of collective guilt, their own suffering and the Jews they turned in, killed or even hid the Poles suffered the most yet the vast majority of Poland's Jews were ashed on Polish soil under Nazi occupation of course.
Poland is in an unique position for the following reasons:
1) She had the great misfortune to be geographically positioned between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
2) She was invaded by both these vicious regimes.
3) The majority of the killing of Jews and others was done on her soil.
4) There are enough cases where the Poles, being very Antisemitic initiated their own killings and several pogroms EVEN AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER when Jewish remnants returned to their former homes, they were killed.
5) Poland suffered horribly (NKVD-Katyn Forest massacre) and Soviet domination.
6) The Jews in the Warsaw ghetto withstood the Nazi onslaught and held out nearly a full month!
7) When Polish Nazi fighters finally revolted, the USSR let them be slaughtered by the Nazis before moving in and taking over.
The Poles are a proud and nationalistic people never
submitting to foreign rule but while they suffered horribly, they find themselves at the epicenter of controversy regarding the accuracy of what happened to her society and soul in WWII and the Jews who used to thrive there.
A bust of Stalin is a symbol and if a mall is built on a concentration camp, it is more than erasing a symbol, it is erasing a dark chapter in the history of a people who are still trying to deal with it all.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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Thank you for your response; I don’t know who to believe.
I lost most of my extended family to the Nazis in Germany, Poland, and France (with noted help by the locals in France to try to kill my family) and then those who survived were not exactly loved by the British when they arrived in what-is-now Israel.
Right or wrong, I tend to immediately believe the worst in Europeans, in general, with little hesitation, so I am happy to read something that gives me pause.
Greed works both ways. Jewish businessmen might feel justified in driving a hard bargain with Christians. There were real-life Shylocks. Blacks like Sharpton get rich by baiting whites and profiting from the suffering of his parents and grandparents. This whole reparations things is a form of revenging oneself upon one’s neighbors for the crimes of their parents.
A concentration camp is more like the site of the twin towers. Which is why the survivors did not want any building on the site of what is, in effect, a graveyard.
Makes no logical sense. Poland tends to let everyone fight through and to not make trouble. They themselves lost millions of folks to the Nazis, so how do a people like that kill half the other population while the Jews supposedly did nothing?
Makes no sense. IMO it was Nazis with weapons and numbers.
Why is it that the Nazis had no problem with using Ukrainians as guards at the death camps....but you never heard of Poles being used as camp guards?
Another factor is the role of propaganda.
Remember that before those areas were occupied by the Nazis, they were occupied by the Soviets.....And the perception was (fairly or unfairly) that Jews were more loyal to the Soviets than to the Poles, and that the Bolsheviks had a number of Jews in leadership roles (ignoring of course that Stalin was a vicious anti-semite as well), and in those areas millions of Poles were uprooted, either killed or sent to Siberia, and the perception was that the local Jews benefitted from it. Again, is this the truth? I cannot say, but that is what was widely believed....So naturally when the Nazis took over the areas, they used this to try to inflame the local Poles against the Jews.
Poles are not very proactive anyway. If they hated soviets, they would not buy their line.
When Nazis came along I doubt things went smoother with the Poles.
They would invite the armies in rather than lose buildings, but the rest to me sounds ridiculous and quite a stretch.
Whatever the Poles may have done, pales in comparison to what happened in Croatia during the war. And the Church definitely there has things to answer for, as well as Slovakia with “Father” Tiso.
National Socialism (NAZI) combined the nationalism of the Right with the socialism of the Left to create a party attractive to a broad swath of people. The Nazis were anti-capitalist, anti-big business and (contrary to U.S. labor propaganda) encouraged trade unionism. As Germany moved into war the Nazis relaxed their demonization of big business because they needed the industrial sector for the war effort.
FWIW - a critical review of Chodakiewicz’s book:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/104/241goska.html
Incidentally, the movie wasn’t well received in Poland.
I read a Nat. Geo. article years ago that examined the ‘5,000 Jews left in Poland.’ Of course, that was years ago, but still.
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