Posted on 01/27/2017 4:44:23 PM PST by SJackson
OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — I did a shameful thing on my first visit 20 years ago to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In a guestbook outside an Auschwitz museum exhibit featuring information on 70,000 Polish non-Jews who were murdered here, I downplayed the significance of their deaths by writing: “Your pain is no credential here, it’s just the shadow of my wound.”
Those words — a quote from a Leonard Cohen song that I abused as a high school student from Israel while touring the camp that my grandmother had survived — resurfaced in my consciousness last month on my latest visit to the site, this time to attend a five-day journalists’ seminar.
Like eight other colleagues from publications such as The New York Times, Agence-France Presse and Britain’s Press Association, I signed up for the seminar to finally gain a truly structured understanding, based on observation and deliberate study, of the sprawling site that I had visited at least a dozen times on brief assignments.
We got what we came for — and more. During the seminar, the first-ever designed for journalists by the museum, we saw a dozen restorers carefully polishing some of the 3,800 suitcases of Holocaust victims.
“It’s drudgery, but when the faded name once again appears on the leather, it’s like giving a headstone to a person without a grave,” Maria Swieton, a 30-year-old restorer at the lab told me. In addition to suitcases, the museum also has 110,000 shoes and 4,500 artworks.
Our tour was the first time media were allowed access to a pilot preservation program that will cost tens of millions of dollars aimed at restoring Auschwitz barracks. Implemented for the time being on just two of the some 450 structures on the museum’s grounds, the program involves encasing them in huge tents, replacing unsalvageable parts with material fashioned to match the originals, then taking apart and cataloguing the barracks furnishings before reassembling the buildings and reinforcing the foundations.
It was an inspiring demonstration of the dedication of Polish authorities and the international donors to the Auschwitz memorial fund, whose goal is to not let the world forget what happened here and educate approximately 2 million people who visit the museum each year.
Yet as the chill of the place worked its way to my bones — both metaphorically and physically, as again I had come without sufficient winter gear — my mind kept drifting back to my grandmother who survived Auschwitz, my relatives who perished here and that Cohen lyric. I wondered what made me write it — and if the ugly sentiment was connected to the aggressive attempts by Polish authorities to control public discourse about the Holocaust.
I broke from the group early one night and walked a lonely half-mile through the icy paths of the Auschwitz I complex. Long after the closing hours of the now deserted museum, I shivered under the yellow lights of lamps that the Nazis had Polish slave laborers install here.
The quote came back to me as I passed the gallows of Auschwitz I — the first part of the death camp that the Germans initially built in 1940 for Polish prisoners and by 1941 used to keep also Soviet prisoners of war. Eighteen months later it became a slaughterhouse for 1.1 million Jews, 25,000 Roma and 15,000 prisoners of war.
I specifically recalled the story of Janusz Pogonowski, a fighter for the Home Army underground, who in 1943 stood with 11 other non-Jews at those gallows while camp commander Rudolf Hoss read out the sham verdict for plotting to escape. Instead of waiting to be executed, Pogonowski kicked the stool from under his own feet as a last act of resistance.
In addition to killing 3 million Polish Jews, the Nazis also killed 3 million Polish non-Jews, mostly civilians. I saw hundreds of their portraits – haunting mugshots of men and boys with extinguished eyes and striped uniforms — alongside photos of Jewish inmates on the walls of Blocks 5 and 6.
What could have possessed me, then, to write that callous and disrespectful sentence 20 years ago?
With hindsight, I was able to see that my competitive attitude to grief was an unwanted inheritance from my grandparents and parents, all of them Polish speakers. More than a teenager’s outburst, the gesture was rooted in a troubled, bloody legacy of shared grief, grudges, nuances and caveats that continue to bedevil Polish-Jewish relations to this day.
Like many Polish leaders before him, President Andrzej Duda says the Holocaust and World War II were tragedies that underscore the shared destiny of Jews and Poles. He also likes to highlight the actions of more than 6,500 Poles who saved Jews during the Holocaust — the highest number of any country in the world.
In line with this view — that Poles and Jews are united by the devastation caused by the Nazis — Duda’s right-wing government last year passed a bill that criminalizes terms like “Polish death camps” instead of “Nazi death camps.” And the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum insists that journalists use the term “German-occupied Poland” when referring to the country during the Holocaust.
But my Poland-born grandmother did not think of Polish non-Jews as fellow victims as she was marched by retreating Nazis from Auschwitz into Germany. Severely emaciated and exhausted, she also feared being caught by Pogonowski’s Home Army. Its fighters, in addition to recruiting and helping to save some Jews, also participated in anti-Jewish pogroms that made some Jews fear the partisans more than the Nazis.
During the Nazi occupation, thousands of Jews were murdered by Poles in at least 20 towns and cities, including Jedwabne, where hundreds were butchered in 1941 without German interference.
Ironically, my grandmother and her dying friend decided they would escape the march only in Germany, where a German farmer and a soldier – perhaps a defector – saved her friend’s life and saved my grandmother’s badly infected arm from amputation. After the war and living in Lodz, her husband, my grandfather, taught my father how to fight children who called him a “dirty Jew.” Then they were let out of the country, but stripped of the Polish nationality, in 1957 during a period of relative liberalization following the death of Joseph Stalin.
Like countless other Jews of Polish descent, such stories formed the background of my understanding of Poland and colored it with a bias.
I know I’m not the only one.
Last year Rabbi Zev Friedman, dean of Rambam Mesivta High School in New York, rallied with his pupils outside the Polish consulate to protest Warsaw’s curbing of free speech. They complained about the opening last year of a criminal probe in Poland against a Jewish historian who said Poles killed more Jews during World War II than Poles killed Germans. The historian was suspected of “insulting the honor of the Polish nation,” which is an offense according to the country’s penal code.
Historians agree that collaboration in Poland was immensely less prevalent than in nearly all the countries in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania and Hungary. Poles are responsible only for a tiny fraction of the victims of the Holocaust.
Yet Friedman also wrote in a statement about the rally that Poland is trying “to rewrite history and deny the significant role that Polish citizens had in perpetrating the Holocaust.” He added: “I’ve heard many survivors speak of the glee that their Polish neighbors had when Jews were being mercilessly persecuted.”
Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, has heard those claims, too. And while he acknowledges that some Poles perpetrated atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust, he called testimonies saying this was prevalent “not historical accounts but reflections of the horror experienced by people who survived the Holocaust in Poland.”
I got a window seat on the plane bound for my home in the Netherlands — a country which, unlike Poland, had during World II a quisling Nazi proclaimed as its leader by Adolf Hitler. The sun was setting on the homes of ordinary and honest people who, 75 years after the Nazis turned their land into a cemetery for Jews and other undesirables, are still struggling to come to terms with their nation’s tormented legacy.
A good friend of mine was a dedicated Communist in his youth. He worked in a hospital and was “turned” by a former Wehrmacht officer that was a patient in the hospital.
The former officer challenged his beliefs and gave him references to read.
My friend came to Christ and spent the rest of his life working very effectively to undo the damage he had done.
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2016/10/prayer-and-answer-with-mike-vanderboegh.html
Good start. Sadly, too many people are unaware that 6 million Poles were killed in World War 2 and half were non-Jewish. The Nazi and communist campaigns of mass murder against the leadership, intelligentsia, and clergy of Poland is all too often forgotten.
That’s entirely possible. Some Jews were filled with hatred for Poles who saved them. I think they resented the fact that the Polish state, the Polish society and peopel survived while everything Jewish was wiped out in Poland.
This comes through rather well in the following documentary:
Description excerpt: “This award-winning documentary tells the dramatic and emotional story of a Jewish father who journeys with his two ultra-orthodox adult sons back to Poland to try to find the Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis. To his sons, like many offspring of Polish Holocaust survivors, this is a country whose people are incurably anti-Semitic and beyond redemption. His hope is to instill in his insulated and narrow-minded sons the power of interfaith tolerance and trust.”
The grandfather was the one hidden - at incredible personal risk - by the Christian family. The family told him essentially, “If you get to America, remember us one day (i.e. send us some money if you succeed in life).” The grandfather did succeed but absolutely refused to help the Polish family. His son took it upon himself to hunt down the family with his two adult sons (who are clearly anti-Christian, anti-Polish bigots) to support the effort but give in. They are changed by what they discovered.
It’s available on Netflix I believe.
Another documentary I saw centered around a Jewish American survivor of the holocaust who had became a success on the textile business. His whole family and just about every Jew in a particular Polish town had been wiped out. He ended up meeting and working with a Polish historian who was trying to research what happened and how. The most interesting scene was when he returned to the town and encountered an old man who knew his father. He asked him why didn’t the Poles do anything to help the town’s Jews when the Nazis came for them? The old man told a story. In the story, he admitted that he had been a poacher and had killed two deer. He took the deer to the father of the Jewish-American man who ran a successful and prosperous business in town and they made an agreement on a price for the deer. Then the father refused to pay the price he had agreed to. He ripped the man off. When the Jewish American man heard the old Pole tell this story he went nuts denying his father would ever do such a thing. It was telling. The old Pole seemed very sincere in his story. There was no logical reason for him to make up such an elaborate story for such a question. The Jewish American man, robbed of his family, naturally only remembered (or only knew) about their good points and couldn’t imagine they would have traits that made enemies. None of that excused anything, of course, but it was a fascinating insight into how people thought at the time.
The veracity of the story recounted above is hard for us to validate or disprove.
We weren’t there, and it’s difficult for us to even envision a situation where what was recounted would even be possible.
What was left of war ravaged Europe, was an abject craphole where old ethnic and political rivalries were free to seek their revenge against the other depending on who had the upper hand at the time.
>Good start. Sadly, too many people are unaware that 6 million Poles were killed in World War 2 and half were non-Jewish. The Nazi and communist campaigns of mass murder against the leadership, intelligentsia, and clergy of Poland is all too often forgotten.
The Nazi’s murdered 40 million Slavs and no one seems to care.
Very true. Here is another story from the Polish ex-pat:
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2014/06/assembling-gun-in-occupied-poland.html
“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?”
Well, quite a bit if you believe people from much of Eastern Europe. If you read old books from the 30s and 40s, you’ll see plenty of references to the fact that Bela Kun and 32 of his 45 commissars were Jews. This was such a common refrain that historian still make not of it: http://tinyurl.com/h64cva7
I find this of considerable interest as I am reading Gulag Archipelago one and two for the second time, and have noticed how many jewish names appear amongst the interrogators, the camp overseers, literally the slave drivers in the camps, although the author never points to their origins.
5 KEY POINTS
1. The Kiel mutiny inspired revolutionary councils to appear in German cities, leading to the abdication of the kaiser.
2. In November 1918 both Scheidemann (SPD) and Liebknecht (Spartacists) proclaimed a new national government.
3. The Spartacists formed a communist party then launched an attempt to take over Berlin and the Weimar government.
4. The revolution was defeated after the SPD mobilised several units of Freikorps, who crushed the revolution in days.
5. In May 1919 another socialist revolutionary government, this time in Bavaria, was also suppressed by the Freikorps.
Then they weren't really Jews, since Communists are atheists.
Secular Jews. Non-observant.
Doubtful. The tendency of many Jews towards the various forms of socialism is one of life's many conundrums.
At least they weren't Syrians, fleeing today's warzone.
There may be terrorists among them!
All of that is true. But its intent in this thread was clear.
Its purpose was to say that all the Jews were communists and that they therefore deserved to be slaughtered. So fuck that guy.
WE think no differently today.
One person's life experiences are totally different from another and a vast understanding gap exists; almost to the point of calling the other guy a liar.
I have this image continually brought to mind...
What happened with Stalin, was that he was a non-Jew in the middle of a group which was largely of Jewish ethnicity. The original members of the Politburo were Lenin(partly Jewish ethnicity), Leon Trotsky(Jewish ethnicity), Joseph Stalin(Georgian), Lev Kamenev(Jewish ethnicity) and Nikolai Krestinsky(ethnicity disputed, but one source says Jewish origins).
In the process of consolidating power, Stalin probably decided to eliminate those who might feel more solidarity with fellow Jews than to him.
Very worthwhile post.
What I like best about the best FReepers and “conservatives” generally is that they too are not ashamed to confess, to transform, to reflect, and to see the world with fresh eyes.
This psychological bravery is not shared by any of my friends or family members on the so-called left.
And then there's the Holodomor, the deliberate famine which Stalin imposed on Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an estimated 2.5–7.5 million Ukrainians.
When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainians initially treated them as liberators. If Hitler had been less stupid, and treated the Ukrainians as potential allies, he might have won on the Eastern Front.
Modern-day Jews mostly accept non-believers of Jewish descent as Jews (while not accepting Messianic Jews as being Jewish any longer).
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