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To: LarryLied
Making excuses for the brutal murder of Jews at Jedwabne are you now?
8 posted on 07/09/2002 5:27:05 PM PDT by xvb
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To: xvb; meema
Those who collaborate with an invading army sometimes pay the price. Fact of life. Excerpts from a paper read at the Polish—Jewish dialogue, Houston Holocaust Museum, March 1, 1998:

. . . .in the Soviet-occupied part of Poland, Polish intelligentsia perished in Katyn and in the Gulag. Twenty-one thousand were murdered at Katyn, Bologoe, Dergachi. A million and a half went to the Siberian gulag. Show me another nation in Europe that suffered the fury of two of the most murderous regimes in modern history.

Yet even in these circumstances, at least one million people were involved in sheltering Jews (Lukas 150). In these circumstances, everyone of them was a saint, a hero, deserving no fewer accolades than Raul Wallenberg who was sheltered from Nazi retribution by his nationality, wealth and social status. In contrast, Poles who helped Jews were protected by nothing. . . .

It has to be said, bluntly, that while the interests of Jews and Catholics were the same concerning the Nazis, namely, the Nazis were a sworn enemy, in regard to the Soviets these interests did not coincide. For the Jews, the Soviet Union was a possible refuge from the horrors of Nazi occupation. For all too many Jews, the Soviet Union was a land of promise.

A significant part of the secular Jewish community in Poland greeted the Soviets as friends and collaborated with them in every way until the mid-1950s, thus contributing mightily to the destruction of Polish economy, culture, and population. Similar things could be said about the Polish-Soviet war in 1919, when mendacious gossip of "pogroms in Poland" was spread by Marxist and non-Marxist Jews in the West, to prevent the creation of a non-Marxist independent Polish state (Norman Davies, God's Playground, vol. 2, Columbia 1984, 262-3). In contrast, for Polish Christians the Soviet Union was, from the beginning, the country of the Gulag, a sworn enemy bent on destroying the Polish identity. . .

In Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, 1988), Professor Jan Gross says: "For the record, it must be stated unambiguously" that when the Red Army attacked Poland, it was welcomed by smaller or larger but, in any case, visible, friendly crowds in hamlets, villages, and towns. These crowds were largely Jewish . . .
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/498/thompson.html


9 posted on 07/09/2002 6:25:28 PM PDT by LarryLied
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To: xvb; All
People want to constantly quibble over who killed whom 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 200 years ago, etc. The alarming fact is that during the 1930s and 1940s millions of people all over the world died horrible deaths. All because people of this group didn't like people of the other group.

It looks like we are heading in that direction again, and I don't think there is anything we can do to head it off because unfortunatly, that is the nature of humans. We just haven't evolved enough to get past that sort of thing.

29 posted on 07/10/2002 1:58:05 AM PDT by DBtoo
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