May 14, 2001 Madam Condaleza Rice Special Assistant to the President Blacksburg, for National Security The White House Fax (202) 456 2883 Dear Madam: During the coming June visit by President Bush to Of course, any person should have equal rights to recover personally his or her inheritance in Already on April 19, 1996 the Reuters Agency reported that the real estate tycoon Rabbi Israel Singer, General Secretary of the World Jewish Congress stated that "More than three million Jews died in By now, a number of class-action suits against It could become a serious threat to This would result in a control over the largest single conglomeration of Polish assets by a foreign body and would lead to a political and economic de-stabilization of Moreover, this could well also open up endless German claims for property lost in I include information about the current hate I am a disabled survivor of sixty four months of Nazi prisons and concentration camps. I hope that this letter will be useful in the preparation of the visit to Sincerely, I.C. Pogonowski, author, among others, of "Poland, An Illustrated History", Hippocrene Books Inc.,NewYork,2000, "Jews in Poland",and "Poland:A Historical Atlas." "...And accusations are not the end of it. For after the accusations come American organisations demanding apologies, American lawyers demanding compensation and American politicians demanding unconditional support for the State of Here, I would like to take an opportunity to thank Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Prof. Jerzy Robert Nowak, Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz, Mr. Edward Moskal, Senator Antoni Macierewicz and many other distinguish Polish historians, writers, politicians and ordinary Poles, who sacrifice their time, effort and very often are subjected to various pressures for their unwavering fight against powers that want to destroy Poland and throw her on her knees. Krzysztof Janiewicz powrot |
 CONFRONTATION
AMONG "NEIGHBORS"A Conference at the By T. Ron Jasinski-Herbert |
SPECIAL REPORT
CONFRONTATION
AMONG "NEIGHBORS"--
|
| Comments
on John Tomas Gross's Ghastly Decade 1939-1948 by Prof. C.I. Pogonowski |
Who is Prof. Ivo Cyprian Pogonowski? I will only quote from The Sarmatian Review: "Pogonowski is a truly remarkable American of Polish background, a genuine role model who combines Benedictine devotion to work, fidelity to the best ideals of Polish history, and an ability to achieve some success in American public life. A recipient of a recent Polish American Prize, Pogonowski is one of those "bright points of light" which every ethnic community has to have to remain viable and to justify its existence in a broader spectrum of American society. He is the author of" During the WWII he was a prisoner in such concentration camps as He wrote critique on the John Tomas Gross’s book "Ghastly Decade 1939-1948" that analyses how and why Mr. Gross writes his books, and what tactics he is using to achieve the outcome that he desires. Below is excerpt from this work. Comments on John Tomas Gross's "Ghastly Decade 1939-1948" Matters related to compensation for Poles and Jews for damages suffered under Nazi and Soviet occupation. Reuters Agency reported from Israel Singer, General Secretary of the World Jewish Congress stated that "More than three million Jews died in Today some Jews are estimating the value of Jewish assets lost in Jan Tomasz Gross wrote three essays in the spirit of this kind of myth. They were published in Kraków in 1998 by Universitas under the title of "Upiorna Dekada, 1939-1948. (Ghastly Decade 1939-1948)." On 118 small-size pages the author accuses the Polish Nation of complicity in the genocide of the Jews. This propaganda effort is surprising when coming from a writer of serious works. A symbolic buzzard eating dead flesh is shown on the cover the Ghastly Decade 1939-1948. It resembles communist propaganda posters, especially the famous "spit-soiled dwarf of reaction of 1945." The decade "1939-1948" does not represent any distinct period in the Polish history. It does, however, include the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the exodus of Jews from Eastern and Gross falsifies quotations in order to make his points. On page 56, he changes the meaning of a sentence in the diary of Dr. Zygmunt Klukowski (Dziennik z lat okupacji Zamojszczyzny - A diary of the years of occupation of Zamojszczyzna). Gross insinuates that in October 1942, Poles murdered some 2300 Jews while the Germans deported for execution 934 other victims. The deception is achieved by the omission of quotation marks; this changed the meaning of a crucial statement in the original diary, in which reference was made to locally stationed German gendarmes. Self-defence and national identity under the occupation. The ethnic Poles considered German and Soviet invaders as equally dangerous, while many Jews searched for security on Soviet side. The Poles were naturally preoccupied with saving their nation, which was exposed to massive executions starting two years before the Holocaust. From the beginning of the war, the Germans were committing mass murders on the Polish civilian population, especially throughout western Gross does not recognise the fact that helping Jews was a part of the resistance against the Nazis. Illogically he cites the fact that more Poles were engaged in the armed resistance, than in saving of the Jews as a proof of Polish anti-Semitism. In order to understand the desperate struggle of the Poles in the face of the greatest catastrophe in Polish history and the general disinterest of the ethnic Jews in the fate of the Polish state, one can quote statements by the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) in Death penalty for helping Jews was unique to The essence of the policies of the Nazi government at all times was the implementation of the doctrine of the Lebensraum, or "German" living space. The aim of the Gross disregards these facts, and on the page 41, he gives the following illogical title to a chapter: On the fact that the prevailing Polish anti-Semitism also was the reason why the Poles who helped Jews were brutally and totally murdered by the Germans. Then on page 60, Gross writes: "how was it that the people who sheltered Jews during the war, did not like to admit it after the war. (...) It was believed that anyone helping Jews got rich" and therefore could be robbed or repressed for "breaking the local code of behaviour." Gross does not mention the fact that it often was difficult to admit to one's neighbour that by sheltering a Jew one was risking one's neighbour’s life without his knowledge -- it was easier not to tell one's neighbour about the "time bomb" next door and therefore not to celebrate the fact that it did not explode. One could consider how much more Polish gentiles could have done to avert the tragic fate of the Jews in a situation where Polish gentiles could not prevent the killing of millions of Polish Christians, and when the Polish Nation itself faced genocide. It is difficult to find a Polish gentile family which did not experience the loss of close relatives under the German and Soviet occupation. In central Also important was the Soviet policy to nominate Jews to very visible posts in the Communist terror apparatus in order to shift the blame for Soviet crimes to the Jews. This perfidious Soviet policy did not facilitate a postwar admission that one risked one's and others' lives while sheltering the very people whom later became Soviet executioners in Arab oil versus the pogrom in Stalin signed in 19th century ritual murder accusations of the Black Hundred and the Tsarist Okhrana were recycled by the Soviets. Of the many pogroms in 1945 and 1946 only the The American Ambassador to On the fiftieth anniversary of the I have personally discussed the I have tried to explain to her that apparently the witnesses mistook the military shirts equipped with white neck bands for the Roman collars (which were not worn by Polish priests in 1946). Apparently some of the uniformed men from the Soviet terror apparatus in The tragic events known as the Pogrom of Kielce of 1946 were demonstrably a part of Soviet postwar global strategy. The Soviets ruthlessly exploited Jews for Soviet political purposes. In (...)The Warsaw regime receiving its orders from Moscow and acting strictly in obedience to them has (...) [pursued] policies planned methodically and aimed at compelling the Jews to leave Poland and to embarrass the British Government in matters pertaining to the Palestine problem, and, furthermore, to aggravate the political crisis in the Near East, to envenom Judeo-Arab antagonisms. It is indeed for that purpose that the Soviet attempts to destabilize the oil-rich Near East also included the opening of the Iron Curtain to allow hundreds of thousands of Jews, many of whom went to Crime during catastrophic events One can endlessly cite criminal acts and moral failures inside the Ghetto walls and outside of them. The courts of the Polish Home Army (AK) associated with the Polish Government-in-Exile in In the The Holocaust Museums Gross quotes Józef Lipinski, the famous professor of economics, who wrote Two homelands ("Dwie Ojczyzny") "anti-Polonism is as bad as anti-Semitism or as anti-Ukrainism," and then goes on to criticize Poland for not copying American museums of the Holocaust. These museums practice anti-Polonism and spread the myth about Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Large exhibits of the 1946 Pogrom of Kielce are shown as the Polish phase of the genocide of the Jews. There is nothing in the Holocaust Museums on the German megalomaniac interpretation of the theory of evolution which says that life is a mortal struggle for the survival of the fittest. The Germanic race was supposed to be the fittest, as opposed to Semitic and Slavic races. Marx strengthened the confusion when he came up with his theory of history according to which the law of the jungle was justified in the political struggle between nations or social classes. The Holocaust Museums do not show how Marx and Darwin provided fertile ground for the development of anti-Semitism which percolated in German society throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as German racism and the ideals of German superiority gained ground. At the same time Wagner's operas were strengthening German megalomania, Nietzsche's dream of supermanhood pleased the Germans. While Forcing of Jews to be executioners both in ghettos and death camps. The Holocaust Museums should show how the racist sentiments were at the root of the opinion that German defeat in 1918 was due to Jews and how anti-Semitism became the rallying force for politicians and demagogues in the In this atmosphere, the descendants of mixed Jewish-German marriages leaned over backward to prove that their loyalties lay with As a result an average Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto dispatched over 2,200 persons to the gas chambers of Treblinka. At the Umschlagplatz in Reconciliation versus tradition Traditional Jewish hatred of the Poles developed during the partitions of Today Jewish hatred of the Poles manifests itself in the use of generalisations when dealing with accusations. Jewish students are often taught that the Holocaust would not have taken place if the Poles did not want it. While teaching about the Holocaust, an animal farm rendition of the genocide of the Jews is used ("Maus" by Art Spiegelman) showing Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as swine. Some of the colleges in In the conclusion of his Ghastly Decade Gross equates Polish anti-Semitism with Hitlerism in Gross writes: "The Poles - because of the Holocaust - must study the history of the persecution of the Jews in Conclusion The separatist Polish Jews described by Bashevis Singer are no more. Today Jews in During the Second World War Poland was devastated and plundered by the Germans and the Soviets. Jewish possessions in Unfortunately, Gross, despite his scientific credentials, is practicing propaganda in the spirit of the statements made by the Secretary General of the Jewish World Congress quoted at the beginning of this text. Gross' propaganda helps those who make demands for ransom to be paid by the Polish Government to compensate for crimes perpetrated in Excerpt from the critique written by Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski prof. I.C.Pogonowski, POLISH PANORAMA, 0000-00-00 powrot |
| Response
to Sarasota Herald Tribune Prof. I. C. Pogonowski |
Neighbors by I. T. Gross Sarasota Herald Tribune, Assoc. Press, p.9, March 13, 2001. Some years ago Professor Jan Tomasz Gross wrote a well-documented book entitled Revolution from abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Apparently Professor Gross has now worked his passage back into "politically correct society" with his recent Neighbors, also published by Princeton University Press. Relying principally on recollections of a Polish-Jewish Communist official (Szmul Wasersztajn aka "Calka"), Gross has produced a thin argument to the effect that In 1941 Polish civilians from the village of Jedwabne drove 1600 Jews into a barn and burned them to death. The geometrical improbability of the spectacle aside (the farmer who owned the barn owned only four acres), one wonders how such a scantily researched book can receive the instant cachets of the same journals which had simply ignored Revolution from Abroad There seems to be a pattern of alleging murders of Jews in areas of Furthermore, nobody denies that there were evil individuals in the Polish population who did murder Jews during the War. But they carried out their crimes understanding that they were explicitly forbidden by the Polish Underground government and carried the death sentence from that government. In Israel, within a short walk of the Yad Vashem memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is the site of Deir Yassin, where the Stem Gang/Irgun activists of Yitsak Shaniir and Menachem Begin (later Prime Ministers of Israel) slaughtered all the men, women and children in the unfortunate Arab village on April 9, 1948. This is an example of an organized atrocity against civilians committed by an official national body. Nothing like that was ever carried out by any official organization of Polish Catholics during the horrific years of World War II (in which over three million Polish Catholics died at both Soviet and German-Nazi hands). We have long passed the time when Poles should feel they have to dedicate time and energy to answering "national guilt" charges like those made in Neighbors. After a fifty-year occupation of Prof. I. C. Pogonowski, , 0000-00-00 powrot |
| REPORT OF
REV. FR. EDWARD ORLOWSKI |
translated by: Thaddeus Mirecki original page at: Polish American Congress
Pastor of the Parish of Jedwabne,
After
completing the seminary, for 14 years I was an associate pastor in various
parishes, including 3 years in Lipsk on the Dean of the Jedwabne Deanery Jedwabne, June 10, 2001 Every day at dinner, at supper, Fr. Jozef Keblinski would tell me about what happened in Jedwabne; among other things, he spoke about the burning of the Jews. From his reports, which he repeated many times, I know the exact sequence of those events. From July 1 1998 I became the Dean and Pastor of the Parish in Jedwabne. (…) Why do I feel entitled to speak out in the matter of the murder of Jews in Jedwabne? Because I had very detailed information about the events of this murder of the Jews from Fr. Jozef Keblinski, who told me about it many times. Thanks to that, I consider myself an indirect witness. The roots of the matter go back to 1939, when the Germans came to Jedwabne, but on the basis of the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact they yielded the place to the Soviets. When the Soviets arrived, the Jews greeted them with flowers, they took over positions in the city government, they formed from the Jewish youth a Soviet militia and they began cooperating with the NKVD. The cooperation consisted giving the NKVD detailed information, and because in October of 1939 a resistance movement had been formed, there was a facility for training in guerilla warfare for three counties: Lomza, On Pentecost in 1941, the NKVD came with units of the Red Army, and a battle was fought there in which some partisans were killed, but many more soldiers of the NKVD. After this event, there began the most cruel deportations. The Jews prepared lists of patriots, of the most valuable people, the educated, who were to be deported as quickly as possible. The Jews participated actively in the arrests, they would lead the NKVD people to the dwellings of the deportees, and together with the NKVD, they drove them off in horse-drawn wagons to the rail station in Lomza. The wagons were escorted by Jews armed with rifles. The mothers and wives of those arrested pleaded with the Jews, their neighbors, to allow their husbands and sons to escape on the way to the station. The Jews allowed no one to escape – there is no known instance of assistance in anyone’s escape. The most tragic was the last convoy, just before the entrance of Germans into Lomza, just before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. There was not enough time to load all of the people on the huge train of cattle cars. The remaining ones were put into a prison, awaiting the next transport. On June 22 1941, the Germans entered Lomza. The prisoners forced the doors, got out of the prison and returned to Jedwabne, where they met the Jews who had escorted their convoy. The homes of the Poles had been taken over, families had been deported into the depths of On July 10 1941, the Germans organized the liquidation of the Jews in Jedwabne. For a few days preceding this liquidation they gathered the Jews to work in the town square, for the purpose of pulling up the grass from the square; after that work they would let them return home. The second day they repeated this experiment, and it was only on the third day they decided to murder them. So it was that in the third day the Jews were burned. Fr. Keblinski lived in the rectory which the Germans had handed back from the "Selsoviet." The Germans had their headquarters in the Old Pharmacy. The Germans returned the rectory to Fr. Keblinski. For a short time, the German chaplain lived there together with the priest. Because Fr. Keblinski knew German, by necessity he acted as interpreted between the Poles and the Germans, the Jews and the Germans. Fr. Keblinski found out from the Germans that the Jews were to be destroyed, because one of the gendarmes passed along the information that a unit of 240 German commandos had arrived in On the day when not only the men, but also women and children were gathered in the town square, Fr. Keblinski went to the headquarters of the high officer who was directing the entire action and tried to reason with him: if you consider the men guilty because of their sympathy for Communism, surely the women and children are not guilty. And he heard in response: "Do you know who’s in charge here? Don’t meddle, if you don’t want to lose your head and want to stay alive." He opened the door and yelled in a loud voice: "Raus!" Fr. Keblinski left the post, he felt totally powerless. On posts there were signs warning that anyone who hides a Jew, or allows one to escape, is subject to being shot, along with three generations of his family. He saw how the Poles were forced, herded out into the town square, for the purpose of guarding and leading the Jews to the barn. But nobody, not the Jews, not the Poles, suspected what would be the final outcome. The Jews went with their everyday articles, calmly, without suspecting what awaited them. Fr. Keblinski estimated that there could have been 150 to 200 Jews. About the moment itself we know only that there was an explosion, then cries; I know that the Jews attempted to escape from the barn, but the barn was tightly surrounded by armed Germans. Only the Germans were armed; certainly, they did not agree to give arms even to Karolak, a German agent whom the Germans named as mayor. The action of the final killing of the Jews was solely and exclusively the action of the Germans; Poles were forced to stand guard under threat of loss of life. From the testimony of a Jew in a legal case before a regional court in Lomza, it is unequivocally apparent that the Jews were burned in the barn by Germans. At least three Poles were pushed into the barn and burned there, they were pushed by the Germans and burned there along with the Jews. The Jews carried with them their everyday articles, they had spoons, forks, the butcher had a knife. The Jews did not know that they were going to their deaths. That knife was intended for ritual ceremonies. Rev. Edward Orlowski Translation: Thaddeus Mirecki Ks. Edward Orłowski, Polish American Congress, 2001-06-10 back to the english home page |
| Between
the hammer and the nail |
Not only the Germans "pacified" villages Excerpt from the book "The Story of Two Shtetls", published by The Polish Educational Foundation in The Story of Two Shtetls Bransk and Ejszyszki: An Overview of Polish-Jewish Relations in Northeastern Poland During World War II (Part Two) - revised and expanded (Toronto and Chicago: The Polish Educational Foundation in North America, 1998) Pages 99, 114-16: Anti-Semitic Pogrom in Ejszyszki? An Overview of Polish-Jewish Relations in Wartime Northeastern by Mark Paul OTHER CIVILIAN MASSACRES: One of the earliest and most gruesome episodes was the "pacification" of Naliboki, whose aim was the liquidation of the nascent pro-Home Army underground organization in that townlet. The Polish and Byelorussian villagers had formed a self-defence unit to fend off Soviet and Jewish marauders. In Soviet eyes, their chief "crime" was that they had rebuffed overtures from the Soviet partisan command to fall into line.[1] The joint Soviet-Jewish assault on Naliboki occurred on May 8, 1943. One hundred and twenty-eight (or nine) innocent civilians, including women and children, were butchered in a heinous pogrom that lasted almost two hours. The Jewish factions that did most of the pillaging and murdering of entire families awakened from their sleep were the Bielski (" Everyone is in tears. The plunderers did not omit a single homestead. Something was taken from everyone. Because he resisted, they killed the father of my schoolmate and cousin, Marysia Grygorcewiczówna. The "soldiers of Pobeda" and "Jerusalemites" took with them the pigs and chickens which they shot, flour, as well as other provisions. They wanted to live! But they took the lives of others. They did not come to fight. … In the space of almost two hours, 128 innocent people died, the majority of them, as eyewitnesses later testified, at the hands of the Bielski and "Pobeda" assassins.[2] The Soviet report prepared by General Platon on May 10, 1943 gave the following-grossly embellished (e.g., there was no German police garrison in Naliboki!)-Version of this reputed "military operation": On the night of May 8, 1943, the partisan detachments "Dzerzhinsky" … "Bolshevik" … "Suvorov" … under the command of the leader of the "Stalin" Brigade … by surprise destroyed the German garrison of the "self-defence" of the townlet of Naliboki. As a result of two-and-a-half hours of fighting 250 members of the self-defence [referred to by its Byelorussian name of "samokhova"-M.P.] group were killed. We took 4 heavy machine-guns, 15 light machine guns, 4 mortars, 10 automatic pistols, 13 rifles, and more than 20,000 rounds of ammunition (for rifles), and a lot of mines and grenades. We burned down the electrical station, the sawmill, the barracks, and county office. We took 100 cows and 78 horses. … I order the leaders of the brigade and partisan detachments to present those distinguished in this battle for state awards. In this battle, our units lost six dead and six wounded. Praise to our brave partisans-patriots of the Fatherland.[3] Other villages, such as Szczepki and Prowzaly, and the townlet of Kamien Nowogródzki met a similar fate in the early months of 1944.[4] These exploits are strangely missing from memoirs of the Bielski partisans and from sanitized Holocaust histories.[5] Ironically, in August 1943, a few months after the massacre in Naliboki, as part of a massive anti-partisan operation known as "Operation Hermann," some 60,000 German troops descended and, with the assistance of Lithuanian auxiliary forces (attached to the SS) and Byelorussian police, rounded up the civilian population of dozens of villages in the area of Naliboki forest suspected of supporting the partisans (some 20,000 villagers were deported to the Reich for slave labour) and burned down their homesteads.[6] Among those murdered for the crime of aiding partisans and Jews were a number of priests: Rev. Józef Bajko and Rev. Józef Baradyn from Naliboki, Rev. Pawel Dolzyk from Derewna, and Rev. Leopold Aulich and Rev. Kazimierz Rybaltowski from Kamien.[7] Tuvia Bielski and many other Jewish partisans vividly recalled this German operation. "One night I sent Akiba and a number of people with him to the When our people came to the village, they saw numerous German forces. The village was illuminated with the powerful lights of military vehicles. Akiba returned with empty hands, but the information he had was important. Some time later the farmers told us that the number of Germans that were in the village that night was in the thousands. … After a while we found out that the Germans had gathered all the farmers of the In the same way, the Germans burned at that time seventeen villages and hundreds of farmers' homesteads. Also, the The intention of the Germans was, as our agents informed us later, to destroy the villages which were close to the forest in order that the Partisans would not be helped by them with supplies and places to hide.[8] NOTES: [1] According to Krajewski, the foremost authority on these events, a self-defence group was created in Naliboki in August 1942, at the urging of the Germans, as a condition of not carrying out a "pacification" of this small town in the wake of a nearby assault by Soviet partisans on German troops. The townspeople were given a small quantity of rifles (22) and basically guarded the town against marauding bands. The self-defence group did not engage in military confrontations with the regular Soviet partisans and in March 1943, under the leadership of the local Home Army commander, Eugeniusz Klimowicz, reached a non-aggression agreement with Major Rafail Vasilevich, the local leader of the Soviet partisans. In April, when the self-defence group was summoned to the [2] Waclaw Nowicki, Zywe echa (Warsaw: Antyk, 1993), 98, 100. [3] This order is reproduced, in Polish translation, in Gasztold, "Sowietyzacja i rusyfikacja Wilenszczyzny i Nowogródczyzny w dzialalnosci partyzantki sowieckiej w latach 1941-1944," in Sudol, ed., Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 wrzesnia 1939, 281-82. Eugeniusz Klimowicz, the Home Army commander, was charged with various crimes in Stalinist Poland, among them for activities directed against Soviet partisans! The death sentence imposed on him by a military tribunal in [4] Kazimierz Krajewski, "Nowogródzki Okreg Armii Krajowej," in Jaroslaw Wolkonowski, ed., Sympozjum historyczne "Rok 1944 na Wilenszczyznie": Wilno 30 czerwca-1 lipca 1994r., (Warsaw: Biblioteka "Kuriera Wilenskiego," 1996), 54; Krajewski, Na Ziemi Nowogródzkiej, 388; Gasztold, "Sowietyzacja i rusyfikacja Wilenszczyzny i Nowogródczyzny w dzialalnosci partyzantki sowieckiej w latach 1941-1944," in Sudol, ed., Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 wrzesnia 1939, 277. According to Krajewski, 14 villagers were killed in Prowzaly in retaliation for an attempt to organize a local self-defence group. Seven families were wiped out in Szczepki. [5] The only Jewish account the author has come across that appears to refer to the massacre in Naliboki is one related by one of the Jewish partisans involved in the assault to Sulia Wolozhinski Rubin, his mistress (at the time), and recorded by her almost twenty years later. It is replete with lapses, obvious concoctions and a remarkable lack of detail (place name, date, chronology, etc.), which is surprising given that her husband is said to hail from Naliboki and would have taken part in the massacre of his former neighbours. The reason given for the assault is also highly dubious, since there was no compelling reason for anyone to have to pass through the isolated townlet of Naliboki (which was not in proximity to Dworzec) other than to forage. Moreover, the decision to launch the assault was entirely in the hands of the local Soviet partisan command. Sulia Rubin's hearsay account is as follows: "There was a village not far from the [Dworzec] ghetto which escaping Jews would have to pass on the way to the forest, or partisans would pass on the way from the woods. These villagers would signal with bells and beat copper pots to alert other villages around. Peasants would run out with axes, sickles-anything that could kill-and would slaughter everybody and then divide among themselves whatever the unfortunate had had. Boris' [Rubizhewski] group decided to stop this once and for all. They sent a few people into the village and lay in ambush on all the roads. Soon enough signaling began and the peasants ran out with their weapons to kill the 'lousy Jews'. Well, the barrage started and they were mown down on all sides. Caskets were made for three days and more than 130 bodies buried. Never again were Jews or partisans killed on those roads." See Sulia Wolozhinski Rubin, Against the Tide: The Story of an Unknown Partisan (Jerusalem: Posner & Sons, 1980), 126-27. As for the hostility of the local population, in another part of her memoir, Rubin recalls that when she fell sick, she was sheltered by villagers in nearby "Kletishtche" [Kleciszcze] for three weeks until she recovered her strength. "Kletishtche was a planlessly scattered, muddy village laid between two deep forests. The houses were wooden and primitive, but as clean as possible and the local peasants were good people." Ibid., 134-35. However, in an interview conducted in 1993 for the documentary film "The Bielsky Brothers: The Unknown Partisans" (Soma Productions-written and produced by David Herman; reissued in 1996 by Films for the Humanities & Sciences), Sulia Rubin, who is interviewed together with her husband Boris Rubin at her side, provides a different version, now claiming that the assault on Naliboki was carried out by her husband when he learned that his father had been nailed to a tree by some villagers: "His father Shlomko … was crucified on a tree … Boris found out. That village doesn't exist anymore. … 130 people they buried that day." It is difficult to understand how a pivotal event like that, had it occurred, could have been omitted from her detailed memoir. Moreover, the claim that the decision to attack Naliboki was Boris Rubin's is quite simply a concoction. This documentary, however, does inadvertently underscore the true source of the conflict with the local population. As one of the interviewed partisans put it, "The biggest problem was … feeding so many people. Groups of 10 to 12 partisans used to go out for a march of 80 to 90 kilometres, rob the villages, and bring food to the partisans [i.e. partisan base and family camp]." [6] Zygmunt Boradyn, "Stosunki Armii Krajowej z partyzantka sowiecka na Nowogródczyznie," in Zygmunt Boradyn, Andrzej Chmielarz, and Henryk Piskunowicz, eds., Armia Krajowa na Nowogródczyznie i Wilenszczyznie (1941-1945) (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 1997), 112. Other "pacifications" carried out by the Germans on a massive scale in this part of [7] Mieczyslaw Suwala, "'Boze, cos Polske' w Puszczy Nalibockiej," in Udzial kapelanów wojskowych w Drugiej wojnie swiatowej (Warsaw: Akademia Teologii Katolickiej, 1984), 386. [8] Albert Nirenstein, A Tower from the Enemy: Contributions to a History of Jewish Resistance in Excerpt from the Mark Paul--s book "The Story of Two Shtetls", Canadian Polish Congress, 0000-00-00 powrot |
| Foreseen
expiation The President of IPN has already passed his judgment. |
translated by: Emilia Wisniewska Jewish leaders in the The President of IPN will meet with activists of the Americal Jewish Commitee on Monday evening in During the meeting, the President has declared his intention to promptly explain the matter of pogrom and end the investigation 'already in April or May'. Professor Kieres stressed, as well, that the plans have been made to replace the existing plaque on the monument in Jedwabne, which indicated Germans as perpetrators of the murder with a new table informing that Poles committed the murder. KWM, PAP KWM, PAP, http://www.naszdziennik.pl/stcodz/polska/20010303/po31.shtml, 0000-00-00 powrot |
| Letter to
the newspaper "The Age" in Christopher Janiewicz |
"The Age", Online News Editor: Gary Hughes Email: ghughes@theage.fairfax.com.au Dear Mr. Hughes: I would like to voice my strong objections regarding the article "Poles' day of shame exposed" by Paul Heinrichs, published in your newspaper on Sunday 18 March 2001. The above mentioned article is prejudicial and slanderous towards Mr. Heinrichs is using the interview with the widow of Mr. Bienstein (Neumark) and the book "Neighbours" written by Prof. John T. Gross. With due respect for Mrs. Bienstein, I will refrain from detailed analysis of her late husband's testimony. I will only say that Mr. Bienstein's testimony is quoted only once in the book by Prof. Gross and even then, not in regard to the day in question, but in regard to the Soviet occupation of Jedwabne. (Page 33, Polish original) By saying, "...Although some details of the massacre provided by Janek Bienstein in 1980 figure in Sasiedzi..." Mr. Heinrichs would like to create an impression that the book contains or is based on large portions of Mr. Bienstein testimony, when it is clearly not. Perusing the first few pages of Jan Tomasz Gross' book "Neighbours" one's hopes rise that here we will learn the truth about the crime of Jedwabne. The author is being introduced as a noted historian (by education he is a sociologist), professor of political sciences of the Gross names various sources that he relied on. Unfortunately, as one reads his book, one is assailed by doubts whether the version presented in it is trustworthy. Although Gross mentions various sources and refers to numerous historians, yet in his argumentation he is relying on the statements of one man only - Szmul Wasersztejn, a Jew living in the town, but according to some witnesses, not present there during the massacre. (Teodor Eugeniusz Lusinski to the When on the subject of the witness testimonies and methodology that a historian should use in analysing his sources and then disseminating his findings, I would like to mention the statement that Prof. Gross himself made in the book "Neighbours": "As far as the craft of the historian who deals with the era of the gas ovens is concerned, I think we must radically alter our attitude toward the sources. Our initial attitude toward each testimony of near victims of the Holocaust should change from the inquisitive to the affirmative." This is a startling statement because it would be practically tantamount to abandoning the scholarly standard. In each instance, if possible, historians must attempt to verify the sources, testimonies, recollections and memoirs against other documents. A history scholar needs to apply a rigorous litmus test to each testimony by checking it against other witness account and contemporary documents: Jewish, German, Polish, and Soviet. Finally, he has to divide recollections into first- and second-hand observations and classify their reliability accordingly. Unfortunately, Prof. Gross doesn't adhere to such standards in his book. That's why "Neighbours" should be classified as a literary work and not as historical research, ergo not factual in every aspect. Further Mr. Heinrichs, following a lead of prof. Gross, mentions trials of 22 Poles sentenced for the crimes allegedly committed in Jedwabne in 1949. Indeed, prof. Gross is extensively using their testimonies in his book, therefore one can say that the whole book is based on their testimonies and the testimonies of Mr. Szmul Wasersztejn and Mr. Finkelstejn. That would bring us to the next problem with prof. Gross's methodology and integrity. In the matter of the Polish witnesses, Gross is extensively using the testimonies of people who were interrogated by the U.B. (Communist State Security) in 1949. That organisation was well known for extracting statements from the suspects by using such methods as torture, sleep depravation, beatings and the threat of deportation to Most of the accused recalled their "confessions" in front of the court. This was not only an act of self-defence. It was also a sign of bravery. After all, the accused were immediately returned to the "tender, loving care" of secret police officers, who had tortured the confessions out of them in the first place. The confessions were in accordance with a preordained scenario, unofficially promoted by the Communist leadership who promoted the idea that Polish society was "fascist" and "reactionary", what was supposed to create an explanation for the repressive regime and an excuse for the West inaction. Prof. Gross himself writes extensively on this subject on pages 21, 23, 24, 25, 26. (Polish original). Yet, it would appear that such facts have no meaning to him, because throughout his book he extensively uses the testimonies of Karol Bardon, originally sentenced to the death penalty, which was commuted to a 15 years prison sentence. Any man subjected to such circumstances would tell anything that the interrogating officer wants him to say, simply to survive. What sort of pressure did the interrogating officers exert on him? Testimonies and confessions obtained by such methods wouldn't be admissible in any court of law in any democratic country. In regard to the Jewish witnesses' statements, they are very contradictory in some important parts. For example, Mr. Heinrichs mentions in his article "Some of the Jews committed suicide rather than face their attackers." Is he aware that there are two eyewitness testimonies regarding such an incident, testimonies that totally contradict each other? To such an extent, that one testimony blames Poles for the active participation in the suicide, with another testimony saying that Poles tried to prevent the intended suicide and attempted to rescue the two women in question. Then there is a problem with prof. Gross's statement that there was no Germans present in Jedwabne, and that after he had done an extensive research of the German archives, he didn't find any documents mentioning the town of Jedwabne. On such basis prof. Gross arrived to the conclusion that citizens of that town, on their own volition murdered their Jewish neighbours. But according to the latest research, such documents exist in the German Federal Achieves in So, now the question would arise, did prof. Gross really researched those archives, or didn't he? There are many such questions one can ask after analytically, not emotionally reading prof. Gross's book and comparing his statements with various sources and researches done by Polish recognised historians. Many questions could be raised about the methodology used by prof. Gross. There is a very important problem with the number of victims, According to historical sources such as the Soviet census conducted in 1940, only 1400 Jews were in the Jedwabne region, which also included the outlying town of If we also take into account the number of Jews that fled approaching German armies, this would put into serious question the number of victims in Jedwabne. Never mind the size of the barn that couldn't accommodate 1600 people. Also, according to the most recent news, archaeologists have localised the mass grave of the Jewish population in Jedwabne. In the opinion of prof. Andrzej Kola from the UMK Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, the grave is approximately 5 meters long and 2 meters wide and could contain approximately 300 bodies. If one wanted to analyse the whole book, such work would take many more pages, so here I have mentioned only a very few examples. The lack of scientific honesty on the part of prof. Gross, has been commented on by numerous historians, among others by Dr. Sławomir Radon, chairman of the College of IPN (Polish National Remembrance Institute) conducting the present investigation headed by the public prosecutor Radoslaw Ignatiew. They accuse prof. Gross of drawing premature conclusions without a solid research of Polish and German archives and following up all possible leads. Then Mr. Heinrichs mentions the statements made by the Polish President Kwasniewski and Prime Minister Buzek. Here I would like to draw Mr. Heinrichs's attention to the fact that neither of them is a historian. They didn't conduct any investigation into the Jedwabne matter, the current investigation by the appropriate investigative body hasn't been concluded as yet, and that the various statements made by politicians usually don't have much factual value in such circumstances. Our own politicians from time to time are prone to make statements that are not corroborated by facts or are not necessarily truthful. Why in Mr. Heinrichs opinion, should Polish politicians be any different or better informed? So why, as is Mr. Heinrichs's opinion, should statements made by politicians convince the majority of Polish academics, nota benne professional historians with the highest scholarly honours? Or anyone else for that matter? Does he remember some very "truthful" statements made publicly and under oath by the American ex-President Bill Now, in regard to the interview conducted with prof. Gross on the subject of the works by prof. Strzembosz and the collaboration with the Russians by many members of the Jewish population. Ironically, prof. Strzembosz in his proof of Jewish collaboration with Russians, quotes earlier works of prof. Gross himself, now in the archives of the Hoover Institute, containing reports of this collaboration. Is prof. Gross blessed with such a short memory that he forgot his own book published in 1983 under the title "In the 1940 they exiled us to But I don't wish to enter a discussion with Mr. Heinrichs or anybody else regarding who did what sixty years ago. Evil people were on both sides. The article that prof. Gross speaks about to Mr. Heinrichs, and written by prof. Strzembosz, is far from being "the most significant of the articles". Far more significant would be, for example, the article written by prof. Strzembosz and published on the 15.03.2001 "Germans forced Poles to participate in Jedwabne murder". Also, at this moment of time he is conducting further historical research into the case of Jedwabne, and also new facts, contradicting the very thesis of prof. Gross's book, are coming to the fore nearly every day. So, maybe, as Mr. Heinrichs says, the "soft pedal" approach and general attitude of sections of Melbourne's Jewish community and Mr. Nadworny is the right approach to have and the antagonising attitude of Mr. Heinrichs is the wrong one? After the meeting held on 18.02.2001, that marked the end of the visit to Shouldn't he take such an approach before writing his book? First historical research and investigation, and then the writing of the book afterwards, based on facts uncovered by such investigation, not the other way around. Now it is too late to leave the matter of Jedwabne to the historians. Prof. Gross has already done a lot, or maybe even irreparable damage, by publishing his book without doing proper historical research, and by stating a lot of sweeping conclusions and inflammatory statements in it. To conclude, I would like to advise Mr. Heinrichs to do some research of the topic next time, before he writes another offending article. I would advise him to research historical sources and works of the professional historians, not to draw conclusions based on badly researched literary works of sociology professors. Or maybe he should make a career in writing science fiction novels? Christopher Janiewicz PS. The article in "The Age": http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/03/18/FFXCJ5M6EKC.html Krzysztof Janiewicz, , 0000-00-00 powrot |
| To Ms.
Anne Roiphe from "The by Jaroslaw Waszczuk, Tuesday, July 24, 2001 |
To Ms. Anne Roiphe: Re: " Dear Ms. Roiphe: The title for the article "Poland Offers Apology 60 Years late" is very misleading for readers of The New York Observer. Do you really believe what Gross wrote true story? Mr. Gross is Polish -Jew whose parents had to leave In your article you have pointed , history, church , Most of them landed on American soil and I am wondering how it is happen, that USA, the country where communism is prohibited gave shelter for high rank communist's aparatchicks for the only reason, because they were Jews. Gross story looks like a vendetta for 1968. Why his parents and other Jews who had to leave I believe that Jews were murdered in Jedwabne. However, I still don't know how it is happen and who is responsible for this terrible and horrifying massacre. It wasn't proven in any court. I am man of principles and court should decide who committed this murder and how it is happen. Mr. Gross's book is a lynch and nothing to do with law. I would like to hear how Mr. Gross and witnesses would be testified in open court. Does not matter if it would be Israeli court or I agree with you that Kwasniewski's apology was stupid and irresponsible as well offensive to most of Poles in and out of Best regards Jaroslaw Waszczuk jwc189@mediaone.net Jaroslaw Waszczuk, , 0000-00-00 powrot |
| Protests
and actions taken by the Polish Government in exile against the extermination
of the Jewish population by the German Government 1939-43. |
INTRODUCTORY NOTE The purpose of this publication is to make public the contents of the Note of December 10th, 1942, addressed by the Polish Government to the Governments of the United Nations concerning the mass extermination of Jews in the Polish territories occupied by In the course of the last three years the Polish Government has lodged a number of protests with the Governments of the civilized countries of the world condemning the repeated violations by Germany of International Law and of the fundamental principles of morality since September 1st, 1939, i.e. since In the Note of May 3rd, 1941, presented to the Governments of the Allied and Neutral Powers the Polish Government gave a comprehensive survey of the acts of violence perpetrated against the population of In the hope that the civilized world will draw the appropriate conclusions, the Polish Government desire to bring to the notice of the public, by means of the present White Paper, these renewed German efforts at mass extermination, with the employment of fresh horrifying methods. * Ministry of Foreign Affairs December 10th, 1942 Your Excellency, On several occasions the Polish Government have drawn the attention of the civilized world, both in diplomatic documents and official publications, to the conduct of the German Government and of the German authorities of occupation, both military and civilian, and to the methods employed by them "in order to reduce the population to virtual slavery and ultimately to exterminate the Polish nation". These methods, first introduced in 2. At the Conference held at St. James's Palace on January 13th, 1942, the Governments of the occupied countries placed among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty of, or responsible for, those crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them, or participated in them". Despite this solemn warning and the declarations of President Roosevelt, of the Prime Minister, Mr. Winston Churchill, and of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, M. Molotov, the German Government has not ceased to apply its methods of violence and terror. The Polish Government have received numerous reports from 3. Most recent reports present a horrifying picture of the position to which the Jews in The Polish Government consider it their duty to bring to the knowledge of the Governments of all civilized countries the following fully authenticated information received from Poland during recent weeks, which indicates all too plainly the new methods of extermination adopted by the German authorities. 4. The initial steps leading to the present policy of extermination of the Jews were taken already in October 1940, when the German authorities established the The Jews were allowed to take only personal effects with them, while all their remaining property was confiscated. All Jewish shops and businesses outside the new ghetto boundaries were closed down and sealed. The original date for these transfers was subsequently postponed to November 15th, 1940. After that date the ghetto was completely closed and its entire area was surrounded by a brick wall, the right of entry and exit being restricted to the holders of special passes, issued by the German authorities. All those who left the ghetto without such a pass became liable to sentence of death, and it is known that German courts passed such sentences in a large number of cases. 5. After the isolation of the ghetto, official intercourse with the outside world was maintained through a special German office known as "Transferstelle". Owing to totally inadequate supplies of food for the inhabitants of the ghetto, smuggling on a large scale was carried on; the Germans themselves participated in this illicit trading, drawing considerable incomes from profits and bribes. The food rations for the inhabitants of the ghetto amounted to about a pound of bread per person weekly, with practically nothing else. As a result, prices in the ghetto were on an average ten times higher than outside and mortality due to exhaustion, starvation and disease, particularly during the last two winters, increased on an unprecedented scale. During the winter 1941-1942 the death rate, calculated on an annual base, has risen to 13 per cent, and during the first quarter of 1942 increased still further. Scores of corpses were found in the streets of the ghetto every day. 5. At the time when the ghetto was established the whole population was officially stated to amount to 488,000, and in spite of the appalling death rate it was being maintained at this figure by the importation of Jews from 6. The outbreak of war between 8. It has been reliably reported that on the occasion of his visit to the General Gouvernement of Poland in March, 1942, Himmler issued an order for the extermination of 50 percent of the Jews in Poland by the end of that year Herr Himmler's departure the Germans spread the rumour that the Warsaw ghetto would be liquidated as from April, 1942. This date was subsequently altered to June. Himmler's second visit to 9. The liquidation of the ghetto was preceded, on July 17th, 1942, by the registration of all foreign Jews confined there who were then removed to the Pawiak prison. As from July 20th, 1942, the guarding of the ghetto was entrusted to special security battalions, formed from the scum of several Eastern European countries, while large forces of German police armed with machine guns and commanded by SS officers were posted at all the gates leading into the ghetto. Mobile German police detachments patrolled all the boundaries of the ghetto day and night. 10. On July 1st, at 11 a.m., German police cars drove up to the building of the Jewish Council of the ghetto, in 11. On the morning of the following day, July 22nd, 1942, the German police again visited the office of the Jewish Council and summoned all the members, who had been released from the Pawiak prison the previous day. On their assembly they were informed that an order had been issued for the removal of the entire Jewish population of the In conformity with German orders, all inmates of Jewish prisons, old-age pensioners and inmates of other charitable institutions were to be included in the first contingent. 12. On July 23rd, 1942, at 7 p.m., two German police officers again visited the offices of the Jewish Council and saw the chairman, Mr. Czerniakow. After they left him, he committed suicide. It is reported that Mr. Czerniakow did so because the Germans increased the contingent of the first day to 10,000 persons, to be followed by 7,000 persons on each subsequent day. Mr. Czerniakow was succeeded in his office by Mr. Lichtenbaum, and on the following day 10,000 persons were actually assembled for deportation, followed by 7,000 persons on each subsequent day. The people affected were either rounded up haphazardly in the streets or were taken from their homes. 13. According to the German order of July 22nd, 1942, all Jews employed in German-owned undertakings, together with their families, were to be exempt from deportation. This produced acute competition among the inhabitants of the ghetto to secure employment in such undertakings, or, failing employment, bogus certificates to that effect. Large sums of money, running into thousands of Slates, were being paid for such certificates to the German owners. They did not, however, save the purchasers from deportation, which was being carried out without discrimination or identification. 14. The actual process of deportation was carried out with appalling brutality. At the appointed hour on each day the German police cordoned off a block of houses selected for clearance, entered the back yard and fired their guns at random, as a signal for all to leave their homes and assemble in the yard. Anyone attempting to escape or to hide was killed on the spot. No attempt was made by the Germans to keep families together. Wives were torn from their husbands and children from their parents. Those who appeared frail or infirm were carried straight to the Jewish cemetery to be killed and buried there. On the average 50-100 people were disposed of in this way daily. After the contingent was assembled, the people were packed forcibly into cattle trucks to the number of 120 in each truck, which had room for forty. The trucks were then locked and sealed. The Jews were suffocating for lack of air. The floors of the trucks were covered with quicklime and chlorine. As far as is known, the trains were dispatched to three localities -Tremblinka, Belzec and Sobibor, to what the reports describe as "Extermination camps." The very method of transport was deliberately calculated to cause the largest possible number of casualties among the condemned Jews. It is reported that on arrival in camp the survivors were stripped naked and killed by various means, including poison gas and electrocution. The dead were interred in mass graves dug by machinery. 15. According to all available information, of the 250,000 Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto up to September 1st, 1942, only two small transports, numbering about 4,000 people, are known to have been sent eastwards in the direction of Brest-Litovsk and Malachowicze, allegedly to be employed on work behind the front line. It has not been possible to ascertain whether any of the other Jews deported from the 16. The Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto so far included in the first instance all the aged and infirm; a number of the physically strong have escaped so far, because of their utility as labor power. All the children from Jewish schools, orphanages and children's homes were deported, including those from the orphanage in charge of the celebrated educationist, Dr. Janusz Korczak, who refused to abandon his charges, although he was given the alternative of remaining behind. 18. The deportations from the 19. It is not possible to estimate the exact numbers of Jews who have been exterminated in [This statement hides the fact that 1,222,000 Polish Jews were absorbed into the 20. The Polish population, which itself is suffering the most grievous afflictions, and of which many millions have been either deported to Germany as slave labor or evicted from their homes and lands, deprived of so many of their leaders, who have been cruelly murdered by the Germans, have repeatedly expressed, through the underground organizations, their horror of and compassion with the terrible fate which has befallen their Jewish fellow-countrymen. The Polish Government are in possession of information concerning the assistance which the Polish population is rendering to the Jews. For obvious reasons no details of these activities can be published at present. 21. The Polish Government as the representatives of the legitimate authority on territories in which the Germans are carrying out the systematic extermination of Polish citizens and of citizens of Jewish origin of many other European countries consider it their duty to address themselves to the Governments of the United Nations, in the confident belief that they will share their opinion as to the necessity not only of condemning the crimes committed by the Germans and punishing the criminals, but also of finding means offering the hope that Germany might be effectively restrained from continuing to apply her methods of mass extermination. I avail myself of this opportunity to renew to Your Excellency the assurances of my high consideration. L. S. EDWARD RACZYNSKI. Extract of Statement made by the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. St. Mikolajczyk, on behalf of the Polish Government, November 27, 1942, at a special meeting of the Polish National Council; and text of Resolution adopted by the National Council: The Polish Government, in the fullest understanding of their responsibilities, not neglecting their duty to inform the world of the mass murders and bestialities of the Germans in We are fully aware of the fact that the fundamental condition of an effective counter-action against the German programme which, in relation to Poland is best expressed by one slogan - TO DESTROY THE POLISH NATION WIPING OUT THE TRACES OF ITS EXISTENCE - is to shorten the time of suffering and resistance for the Poles in Poland and to defeat the enemy quickly. THAT is why the previous appeals from The persecutions of the Jewish minority now in progress in Himmler's order that 1942 must be the year of liquidation of at least 50 per cent of Polish Jewry is being carried out with utter ruthlessness and a barbarity never before seen in world history. Every one of us knows the details, so I will not go into them again.... From In the name of the Polish Government, I support this protest of Poles in I can only hope and pray that the protest of the Polish Government and that of the Polish National Council which represents all the groups 6f Polish society, will shake the conscience of the world, will find its way to quarters where decisions speeding up military action are taken, that it will bring about an intensified help for those who are still alive, that it will strengthen on the Allied side the determination to punish the crimes and serve as a warning to the assassins whose crimes, duly registered, will not escape a just punishment and who soon will feel the hand of justice fall heavily on their backs. After the Declaration of Mr. Mikolajczyk, the Polish National Council unanimously adopted the following resolution: The Government of the From the beginning of the conquest of the territories of the Republic, the bestial occupying power has subjected the Polish nation to an appalling policy of extermination, to such an extent that by now the Polish population has been reduced by several million. Now the occupying power has reached the summit of its murder-lust and sadism by organizing mass-murders of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Poland, not only the Polish Jews but also the Jews brought from other countries to Poland with the purpose of exterminating them. The German murderers have sent to their death hundreds of thousands of men, women, children and old people. Their purpose is to enfeeble the Polish nation and completely to exterminate the Jews in The Polish Government, the Polish National Council, and the Polish Nation at home, have often protested against the German crimes, and announced that a just punishment would be meted out to these offenders against mankind. Lately the Polish Government has submitted to the Polish National Council the draft of a law providing for the punishment of the German criminals. In the face of the latest German crimes, unparalleled in the history of mankind, which have been carried out against the Polish nation, and particularly against the Jewish population of Poland, the Polish National Council again raises a strong protest and pronounces an indictment before the whole civilized world. The Polish National Council solemnly declares: By its heroic attitude at home the Polish nation is gathering its strength for the day of just retribution, amidst unspeakable sufferings. The Polish National Council appeals to all the Allied nations and to all the nations now suffering together with the Polish nation under the German yoke, that they should at once start a common action against this trampling and profanation of all principles of morality and humanity by the Germans, and against the extermination of the Polish nation and other nations, an extermination the most appalling expression of which is provided by the mass-murders of the Jews in Poland and in the rest of Europe which Hitler has subjected. To all those who are suffering and undergoing torture in Poland, both to Poles and to Jews, to all those who are taking part in the struggle for liberation and for the preparation of a just retribution on the German criminals, the Polish National Council sends words of hope and of unshakeable faith in the recovery of freedom for all. THE DAY OF VICTORY AND PUNISHMENT IS APPROACHING Text of a Broadcast by Count E. Raczynski, Polish Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs (December 17th, 1942). I am speaking to you tonight on a subject, the immensity of which I would like you to realize to the full. I would like to make you understand how real is the tragedy, which is taking place not so very far from the shores of this island, on the Continent of Europe on the soil of For more than three years the Germans have consistently done everything they could to hide from the eyes of the world the martyrdom of the Polish nation, the like of which has never been known in the history of humanity. But "when we would keep silence the very stones will cry out." After receiving from Poland reports of a further intensification of the German terror, the Polish Government considered it their duty to send a note to all interested Governments drawing their attention to the horror of the situation and reminding them that what Germany is aiming at is: to reduce the population to virtual slavery and in the end to exterminate the Polish nation. More particularly the Polish Government communicated to the Governments of the United Nations authentic information on the mass slaughter not only of those Jews whom the Germans overwhelmed in Poland, but also of the hundreds of thousands of those whom they have transplanted from other countries and imprisoned in the Ghettoes, which they have established in our country. The note states that according to the reports in possession of the Polish Government, of a total of three million, one hundred and thirty thousand Polish Jews, more than one-third, has already been exterminated, and ends with the appeal for "condemning the crimes, punishing the criminals and devising means offering the hope that Germany might be effectively restrained from continuing to apply her methods of mass extermination." This morning, the Governments of the United Nations of the European Continent united their voices with those of the Powers m a solemn declaration, expressing their unshakeable determination to cauterize with red-hot iron the evil which so dangerously infects the German people. It is tragic to contemplate that this policy of extermination applied to the Jews by the German Government is being carried out with the active help or, at least, support of a considerable section of the German people, while the remaining part of that people allow it to pass in silence. I know that in a totalitarian regime it is not easy to protest, but the occupied nations nevertheless find the means to manifest their will and their opposition to the barbarous methods of When I think of the German nation, so powerful in its armed might and owning so gigantic a war machine, and at the same time so cowardly accepting the destruction of an entire race, the representatives of which, such as Heine, Mendelssohn and Einstein contributed so much to the glory of Germany's civilization and, on the other hand, when I think of my own nation, which itself is being massacred and nevertheless is capable of such acts of defiance and compassion as the demolition by Polish workers of a part of the wall which surrounds the ghetto of Warsaw, then I cannot help thinking how small is this mighty German nation-and how measureless is its infamy. Civilized words and remonstrances are today of no avail where that nation is concerned. The bloody crimes call out for justice without mercy, and the assurance that even now they will receive their answer in ever more telling deeds as the might of the United Nations grows and as the hour of judgment approaches apace. , , 0000-00-00 powrot |
The Sarmatian Review">
| The
Disabling Mode: Poles in Jewish Discourse Ewa M.Thompson |
Let me say at the outset that as I understand it, we are engaging here in a secular and not a theological conversation. We are meeting here as two ethnic groups, Jews and Poles - both Americans. It is the secular aspect of our identities that is the focus of our encounter. From our American Polish standpoint, there are three segments of Jewish-Polish relations which need correction and further discussion. The first has to do with independent As the Jewish American historian Joseph Rothschild wrote, "interwar It was in these conditions that the Shoah took place. True, the Shoah overshadows Polish suffering. But it does not wipe it out. Between three and four million Polish Christians were killed during World War II by two sides, Nazis and Soviets. In a book titled Maus, a Jewish American cartoonist, Art Spiegelman, presented the Polish people in World War II as secure pigs, who looked indifferently at Jewish suffering. That such a racist and mendacious book is taught in American schools and universities today is a great injustice to Poles. And this is happening today, even as we speak, and not in some remote point in the past; and it is perpetrated by educated and supposedly responsible people, teachers and university professors. This book is also prominently displayed in the In spite of the terror imposed on The third segment of Polish history which needs correction in American Jewish memory has to do with the Polish-Jewish relations under the Soviet occupation in 1939-41 and then again, in the decade following World War II. A book published by Princeton University Press and titled Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, says that when the Soviet army attacked in September 1939, it was met, consistently and repeatedly, by friendly Jewish crowds. After these greetings there took place arrests, executions and deportations to the Gulag of persons who were predominantly Polish and Catholic. Poles expect the responsible members of the Jewish community to recognize that there took place, in the first two years of World War II and after the war, a massive collaboration of Jewish Poles with the Soviet occupiers, a collaboration which contributed to numerous Polish Christian deaths and family tragedies. Joseph Stalin appointed Jakub Berman as the virtual dictator of Polish Americans urge the responsible members of the Jewish community to recognize that Jews were not just victims of history, but also actors in history. They made choices, acted, and sometimes committed crimes. The crimes committed against the Polish nation by people like Jakub Berman in the years of Stalinism, between 1945-1953, are a blank page to most Americans, Jewish and Christian alike. They are now being slowly uncovered by the courts of independent That so many Jews lived in Many Poles have noted that there prevails in this country a nearly total impenetrability to Polish discourse among many Jewish intellectuals. The authority of hundreds and thousands of books, articles, movies, speeches and artifacts has weighed heavily on Polish ability to enter the discursive mode. The unwisdom of constructing a world view from which I would like to conclude with a quote from the Foreign Minister of Poland, Dr. Bronislaw Geremek, who said during a recent NewsHour interview: "When you see a man who is a survivor of the *Chief Military Prosecutor Helena Wolinska who in 1950 ordered the arrest of the hero of Polish Resistance, Home Army General 'Nil' Fieldorf (subsequently executed); who also ordered the arrest of former Polish Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's father, left Poland with her husband in 1968 alleging that the reason was anti-Semitism. Efforts are under way to extradite her to This paper was read at a Polish-Jewish dialogue held in the Holocaust Museum Houston, 29 March 1998.
From: The Sarmatian Review, January
1999
Ewa M. Thompson, The Sarmatian Review,
0000-00-00 sarmatia@rice.edu powrot |
| Why
didn't Gross come to Jedwabne? |
translated by: Stefan Poniecki, Calgary 2001 J E D W A B N E On the 10th of July 1941, in the small town of - A judgment has been pronounced without a trial. We have been slandered and spat upon - say the indignant inhabitants of Jedwabne on the 7th of February 2001 at an agitated meeting with the public prosecutor Radosław Ignatiev of the - Why didn't Gross come to Jedwabne? Why didn't he talk with us instead of assuming a priority that it is we and not the Germans who are responsible for these deaths? - they ask. They do not want to talk with journalists because they are convinced that their statements will be distorted or censored. (The names of Jedwabians and their statements are known to the Catholic Information Agency. The majority of them made statements before prosecutor Ignatiev, but those cannot be revealed until the completion of the investigation). - I request of you to relate everything that you know, everything that you have seen, what you have heard from people near to you. Only in this way will we get to the truth, this is your only chance to repulse the accusations which you consider untrue - Mr. Ignatiev appealed to the inhabitans. CIA established that Szmul Wasersztajn, the crown witness, whose statement is the basis of reconstruction of events by Gross, after the war worked for the Office of Public Safety (U.B.) BACKGROUND The question of Jedwabne forces us to go back to the up to now not completely explored and unsettled period of our history of the last 60 years, a period which saw a tragic entanglement of fates of Poles, Jews, Germans, Russians, and to a lesser degree, other inhabitants living in the eastern neibouring territories of the Polish Republic. Even a superficial attempt to recreate the history of this region during World War II brings up questions which to this day have no satisfactory answers. Up to the beginning of the war in 1939 Poles and Jews lived in the eastern territories of Problems surfaced with the outbreak of the war. Two totalitarian systems: fascism and communism released evil in people and brought upon us misfortune - says Rev. Edward Orłowski, now parish priest of Jedwabne, formerly for three years vicar to Rev. Józef Kembliński, administrator (deputy parish priest ) of the Jedwabne parish in the years 1940 - 1945. First came the Germans. However when on the 17th of September Soviet troops invaded The martyrdom of the Jews commenced with the outbreak of the German-Russian war on the 22nd of June 1941. The Germans occupied in a few days the eastern parts of It is an incontestable fact that Jews who found themselves in Jedwabne were driven on to the main square, herded into a barn and burned alive. What is contested is the number of Jews killed, the sequence of events and the participation in the crime of Germans and Poles. Credibility of Gross' version Perusing the first few pages of Jan Tomasz Gross' book "Neighbours" one's hopes rise that here we will learn the truth about the crime of Jedwabne. The author is being introduced as a noted historian (by education he is a sociologist), professor of political sciences of the University of New York, author of essays on the subject of Polish-German-Jewish relationships in the years 1939-1948. Gross names various sources that he relied on. Unfortunately, as one reads his book, one is assailed by doubts whether the version presented in it is trustworthy. Although Gross mentions various sources and refers to numerous historians, yet in his argumentations he is relying on the statements of one man only - Szmul Wasersztajn, a Jew living in the town. This crown witness of Gross in This fact was established by Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz, who has been researching this period of Polish history for many years, on the basis of depositions of two reliable witnesses who were interrogated by Wasersztajn at the UB after the war. Strzembosz draws attention to the credibility of sources and witnesses on which Gross relies. He underlines for example that Wasersztajn's story is too spacious and "all knowing" for someone who in that moment of time himself was obliged to hide and fight for survival. Gross does not quote, for example, the reports of members of Anders' army deposited in the Hoover Institute, now also available in the Eastern Archives in Warsaw, which differ considerably from the author of "Neighbours" on the subject of "pogrom" in Jedwabne and the matter of Jewish collaboration with the Soviet authorities. The author of "Neighbours" relies also on the files of the trial of 22 Poles dealing with the pogrom in Jedwabne conducted by the Office of Public Security (UB) in Łomża in 1949 and in The lack of scientific honesty has been commented on by numerous historians, among others by Dr. Sławomir Radoń, chairman of the College of IPN (Institute of National Memory) conducting the present investigation. They accuse him of drawing premature conclusions without a solid research in Polish and German archives and following up all possible leads. It is significant that Gross did not visit Jedwabne, did not bother to contact witnesses or participants in the crime and talk with them. Gross merely quotes current depositions of Poles based on notes made by journalists, e.g. Agnieszka Arnold, on the occasion of her making the film "Neighbours" in 1998. The role of the Church In view of doubts as to the honesty of Gross' exposition, KAI decided to investigate the probity of some of the contentions concerning men of the Church contained in the book. In Gross' book priests are not in the forefront, they are kept rather in the background, accused obliquely as the "ideologists of the crime." Gross suggests that if priests act as brakes on pogroms, they do it not for moral and religious reasons, but rather as a means of obtaining tributes. In the quoted testimony in "Neighbours" of Menachem Finkelsztajn describing the murder of Jews in the neighbouring Radziłów we read: "We were sure, that the Jews were murdered. Who murdered them? Polish murderers, dirty hands of people from the underworld, people blinded and driven by animal instinct after blood and loot, taught and nurtured over decades by the black clergy which was building its existence on racial hatred." The author of "Neighbours" mentions two priests and the bishop of the diocese of Łomża. Describing the relationship of the Catholic priests and the two religious communities in Jedwabne, Gross stresses that almost to the outbreak of the war the relationships between the local priest and the rabbi were good, and that Jews "fared no worse than anywhere else in Poland." However it was no idyll: "Apart from regularly occurring tense moments such as the time around Easter, when priests were evoking in their sermons the picture of the Jew as God's assassin, there was always the potential of some evil happening through a simple coincidence of circumstances." Such a coincidence was the murder of a Jewess and shortly thereafter the death of a Polish peasant in 1934. The populace of the town interpreted the death of the Pole as a revenge for the murder of the Jewess, and a pogrom was hanging in the air. So the generally respected Rabbi Avigdor Białostocki in company with Jony Rothschild paid a visit to the local parish priest (which is mentioned in the Souvenir Book of Jedwabne). Gross asserts that "This episode fits exactly within the norms of Jewish existence which accepted that the threatened community almost always knew in advance of the approaching scourge (just as they knew of the approaching extermination "actions" during the occupation) and took it as natural, that in such situations the civil and religious authorities were due a tribute for taking care of them and averting the anticipated calamity." This time the calamity was averted and the relationship between the leaders of the two communities continued as before. Up to the time - writes Gross - when, just before the war, arrived a new parish priest of nationalistic sympathies. Here Gross writes an untruth. If he had checked this information in the history of the Łomże diocese, he would have found that Rev. Szumowski was the parish priest of Jedwabne from 1931 to July of 1940 when he was arrested by the NKWD for organizing the movement of resistance. Just before the war there was no change of parish priest. From Gross' account it appears that either the alleged pogrom of 1934 was averted by the priest in spite of his nationalistic leanings, or by the predecessor of Rev. Szumowski - Rev. Andrzej Gawędzki, the builder of the church in Jedwabne 1921-1931, later a prisoner in Buchenwald and Rev. Józef Kembinski - vicar of Jedwabne at the beginning of the war and administrator of the parish after the arrest of the parish priest, remembered years later that a local Jew collaborating with the NKWD also took part in the arrest of Rev. Szumowski. Another clergyman mentioned in the book of Gross is Bishop of Łomże Stanisław Łukomski, whom Gross accuses of accepting from the Jewish delegation a silver candelabra, yet failing to save the Jews of Jedwabne from the pogrom. Ross writes: "The leaders of the Jewish community sent to the Bishop of Jedwabne a delegation which took with them beautiful sliver candelabra, with the request that the bishop assure them of his protection and intervene with the Germans that a pogrom do not take place in Jedwabne. One of the uncles of the witness from whom this report stems, went with the delegation to Łomża. And indeed, the Bishop of Łomża kept his word for a time. However the Jews were placing too much faith in his assurances and would not listen to warnings from sympathising Polish neighbours." However, as research by KAI shows, while the Jewish delegation, according to Gross, was supposed to be meeting with the Bishop of Łomża, he was not there because he was hiding from the Soviet occupants - predominantly in Tykocin and Kulesze Kościelne. This information confirm numerous documents in the diocesan archives of Łomża, and most of all recordings of the bishop himself. The southern part of the diocese during the war was in the care of the auxiliary bishop domiciled in Ostrów Mazowiecki, while the northern part remained in the care of Bishop Łukomski, when he was there. After the start of hostilities in 1939, the bishop's residence was sequestered by the military and devastated by two conquering armies. When the German-Soviet conflict erupted on June 22 1941 and the Russians left the area, Bishop Łukomski decided to return to Łomża. In part VII of his memoirs he describes his steps as follows: "Wanting to return to Łomża as soon as possible, but knowing that the bishop's palace and the curia were occupied by the Germans, I wrote to the German military authorities in Łomża requesting that the dwelling be cleared of soldiers. Upon receiving from the Commandant the reply that there is no hindrance to my return and that suitable accommodation will be assigned to me, I left for Łomża on the 9th of July." The question arises, how did the delegation, which was to hand the bishop the candelabra, know that he would be in Łomża? The murder of the Jews took place on the 10th of July, Bishop Łukomski was negotiating by mail with the Commandant before he returned to the capital of the diocese. Were these negotiations so open that everybody in the area knew that the Bishop of Łomża was returning from banishment? This puts the veracity of this report under a question mark. Bishop Łukomski mentions that he did not move into the assigned quarters until August and only then started officiating. "Having taken over the quarters in August of 1941, many repairs were required. The household was made functional from offas found on location." This information confirm chronicles of Benedictine Sisters of the Holy Trinity Abbey in Łomża 1939-1945 written by S. Alojza Piesiewiczówna. Under the date of July 8 1941 she wrote: "Bishop Stanisław Kostka Lukomski returned to Łomża". The bishop himself gives the date of July 9th, but even if some delegation took off to see him with silver candelabra, how to explain that "the Bishop of Łomża kept his word for a time"? The pogrom in Jedwabne took place next day, at the latest two days after the return of Bishop Łukomski to Łomża, if the notation of the Benedictine Sisters is correct. In his memoirs Bishop Lukomski writes also about the annihilation of the Jews. His notations are not those of an indifferent man, but of a person looking with horror at the bestiality of Hitlerites. As to the attitude of Bishop Lukomski vis a vis the extermination of Jews, can bear witness the reports of priests who lived at that time in the diocese, e.g. Rev. Kazimierz Lupinski who recalls a verbally transmitted instruction of Bishop Lukomski not to grant absolution to Poles who took part in murdering Jews by the Germans.
The years 1939-41
The perusal of Gross's book raises further doubts. Gross attempts to
trifle with the co-responsibility of Jews for the persecution of Poles in the
period 1939-41 under Soviet occupation. For example, the betrayal of the
Polish unit stationed in the region of Jedwabne, he ascribes to some Pole.
According to the inhabitants, and also according to the report of Rev.
Kemblinski passed on to Rev. Orlowski (the present parish priest who had been
Rev. Kemblinski's vicar) it is explicitely the Jewish inhabitants of the town
collaborating with the NKWD who betrayed the Polish Partisans.- It's the Jews who were the first to spoil the good relationship with the Poles, and from that time on something cracked - related Rev. Kemblinski. The problem of collaboration of the Jews with the Russians discusses at length and proves its existence Prof. Tomasz Strembosh, inter alia in article "The Silent Collaboration" in Rzeczpospolita from 27-28 January 2001. N.B. Prof. Strembosz in his proof of Jewish collaboration with Russians, quotes earlier works of Jan Tomasz Gross, now in the archives of the Hoover Institute, containing reports of this collaboration. Alas, in "Neighbours" we do not find them. At the unusually heated meeting of the inhabitants of Jedwabe with prosecutor Ignatiev of IPN, which took place in Jedwabne on the 7 February 2001, the older men were maintaining categorically that the time of Soviet occupation was the worst of the whole war and were stressing that during that period, less than two years, more Poles were killed and deported to Siberia than during four years of German occupation. It is estimated that from Jedwabne itself 300 persons were deported or killed. For these crimes Poles blame Jews collaborating with the NKWD. An elderly, modestly attired woman related how on the 20th of June 1941, i.e. two days before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war and the invasion of German troops, the Russians deported her family of six people to Another inhabitant of Jedwabne, whose father was tortured by Jewish functionaries of the U.B., was asking Prosecutor Ignatiev whether he could sue the Jewish hangman who delivered Poles to the Russians and tortured them, but now is living in the CRIME The number of Jews murdered and the participation of Poles in the crime evoke strong emotions. Gross maintains that 1,600 Jews were burned and that it was the Poles who did it and who for several days prior maltreated and tortured them. However, the census from 1940 gives the number of Jews living in the whole district as 1,400, of whom a considerable part escaped with the NKWD before the Germans to - Why are we being accused of killing 1,600 people and an exhumation is not being allowed? Their burial site is known; no barn in those times was big enough to hold 1,600 people - voiced a participant at the meeting with Prosecutor Ignatiev while clutching in his hands the weekly "Wprost" carrying the interview with Gross. The Jews oppose an exhumation for religious grounds. According to Rev. Kemblinski in July 1941 there were not even 800 Jews. Prof. Strembosz established a similar number of victims (less than 800) in his research. According to the Jedwabians and Rev. Kemblinski the events of July 10 took a different turn. As early as July 8th Jedwabne was surrounded by German police and nobody could leave the town. For three days the Germans were herding the Jewish population on to the main square and ordered them "to weed the lawns". On the third day they ordered them to dismantle Lenin's monument and then herded the assembled crowd into Bronislaw Sleszynski's barn and burned them. The inhabitants of Jedwabne admit that Poles also took part in the pogrom, because, as they were stressing in the meeting with the prosecutor of IPN, you will always find scoundrels and bandits. They also draw attention to the fact that some Poles, against their will, were coerced by the Germans to drive the Jews. The Germans were dragging young men out of their homes, arming them with clubs and forcing them to form a cordon around the Jews. Commenting on the depositions extracted out of them during the trials of 1949 and 1953, the Jedwabians remember with fear that those were the times of UB when methods were being applied of such a kind that anybody would admit anything. A man whose father was being tortured during the investigation suggested to the prosecutor that he check who was the judge and prosecutor in the trial, and he would find that both were Jews. From reminiscenses of Rev. Kamblinski we would find that when the German police arrived, he tried to intervene on behalf of the Jews (he spoke German well), and prevent an extermination in Jedwabne. They however merely shrugged their shoulders, saying that that's their order which they have to obey. They surrounded Jedwabne, had dogs with them and coerced the Poles to participate in the murdering (under escort). Whoever was standing by was given a club and was forced to use it on the Jews. According to Kemblinski, if it happened that some Pole abused a Jew, then it was largely because he considered the Jews above all as Soviet confidants and was taking revenge for the sufferings of people dear to him. For a pogrom sufficed a few policemen and a group of coerced Poles, the remaining Germans were surrounding the town preventing any escapes. The Jews were not trying to defend themselves nor escape, were just passively obeying. How many Poles were murdering the Jews of their own volition, out of revenge, out of greed, or as Gross would have it, out of anti-semitism? According to Gross, all grown-up inhabitants of the town. According to the Jedwabians, those were isolated instances. What is the truth? Gross' book is a voice on behalf of this terrible crime, a subjective voice, often emotional, journalistic, drawing unjustified conclusions. It is not a historical study, because even a superficial analysis shows serious failures in methodology. The book cannot also be considered as objective if only on account of the approach to sources quoted by the author, about which he writes himself. Gross maintains that one must affirm everything what the victims of Holocaust say: "Our stance in relation to the statements of the would be victims of the Holocaust should change from doubtful to affirmative, simply because accepting what they give in their account, has indeed happened; we would be prepared to admit the fallacy of such an assessment only when confronted with convincing proofs to the contrary. Into the trap of such an assumption falls the author himself who bases the whole book and passes judgment on the account of Szmul Wasersztajn, a funcionary of the Security Office. The book "Neighbours" is to appear in English in the Gross's conclusions, built on questionable factual ground, have already begun its independent life in the social consciousness. Certain circles consider Gross's book as unimpeachable and constructs on it a series of conceptions, such as atonement of Poles for the pogrom. Stanislaw Krajewski, co-chairman of Polish Council of Christians and Jews (Jewish delegate on this ouncil) demands a spectacular expiation with the participation of representatives of State and the Polish church. Gross demands the erection of a new monument in Jedwabne with an inscription that 1,600 Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbours; he adds that the monument could be financed from money taken from one collection tray in the Jedwabne church. There is no doubt that in Jedwabne took place a terrible masacre of the Jewish population, that Poles took part in it and they owe Jews a plea for forgiveness. Yet it is necessary to present all the surrounding circumstances objectively so that the act of apology takes place in the spirit of truth. We do not hide that we tie with the investigation of the IPN the hope of getting to the objective truth. Prosecutor Ignatiev during his meeting with the inhabitants of Jedwabne declared that he must get as many relations of the events of eye witnesses as possible, and also of those who heard them from the mouths of their near ones. He stressed that in an investigation the nationality of the perpetrators is not important, important is the establishment of truth, facts, independent of whether it should come to light that the murderers were Poles or Germans. "If I find that a Pole was the murderer, I shall accuse the Pole." Since the publication of Gross' book, the present parish priest Rev. Orlowski had visits from journalists, among others from the socio-cultural Jewish publication Midrasz (appearing in John Paul II spoke many times about the necessity of Christians atoning for the sins committed in the past. He himself was asking forgiveness for evil inflicted on the Jews at the hands of Christians. At the same time He stresses that at the basis of admitting guilt must lie honest truth. The Vatican document of the International Theological Commission "Memory and Reconciliation - the Church and Sins of the Past" underlines that establishing the sins of the past to be atoned demands above all a correct historical verdict which will be the basis of a theological assessment. In his book "Neighbours" Gross postulates that Poles have revised their history and admit their guilt. For this to happen, they have to see themselves in the mirror of truth. A book lacking scientific honesty is certainly not going to bring it about. It is to be hoped that the investigation will bring forth a correct historical assessment. The president of IPN foresees that the investigation will wind up in April or May 2001, the time ripe for a "theological assessment." The words of Rev. Orlowski about the living and dead inhabitants of Jedwabne: Poles, Jews, Russians and Germans - draw attention to a different perspective of the problem, namely what shape should present relationships between nations take, what measures should be taken in order that Jedwabne does not foster hate and aggression, that it unites instead of dividing people. Should not in the eventual expiation for the crime, "the catharsis of memory" of which John Paul II speaks, take part representatives of all the nations concerned? Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna. KAI, Katolicka Agencja Informacyjna, 2001-02-23 back to the english home page |
| JEDWABNE
AND THE SELLING OF THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Lukas |
The Polish American Journal May 2001 Selling the Holocaust is a gigantic enterprise that has less to do with preserving the memory of Jewish victims than exploiting the Holocaust for political, ideological and economic purposes. The consequence is that history has become a major casualty. In the absence of any quality control on the type of books that are published, Holocaust historiography is subject to a kind of To have a book published by a major publisher on the Holocaust, the author must meet only a few criteria: Does the book depict Jewish victimization in pristine terms (i.e., nothing negative or compromising about Jewish behavior)? Even if the book tangentially deals with Christian victims of the Nazis, does the author drown these Christians sufficiently in anti-Semitism to compromise their victimhood and emphasize their role as victimizers in order to main the sovereign wartime experience of the News? Better yet, does the author depict non-Jewish groups, especially Catholic Poles, as either Nazi collaborators or accomplices or perpetrators of atrocities? If these criteria are met, then it is extraordinarily easy for an author to garner notoriety for his book in leading American newspapers and news magazines, which are notoriously unsympathetic with the Polish dimension of Polish-Jewish relations. This is what has happened to Professor Jan T. Gross, a Jews who emigrated to the West from Gross is not a professional historian, but a sociologist, an important point in analyzing the merit of the book. Gross's thesis is that Christian Poles were solely responsible for killing 1600 Jews in the His explanation for the atrocity is that anti-Semitism made the Poles do it. Polish-Jewish relations had been good before the war, would the Poles suddenly decide to kill their Jewish neighbors? Gross presents the tableau of hundreds of Poles mindlessly slaughtering Jews because now, quite suddenly, they despised them and lusted after their property. Is this scenario really credible? What had changed in Polish-Jewish relations? Gross dismisses a critical fact -- Jewish treason in eastern Eastern Poland was inhabited by Poles, Jews, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and others who fought, brutalized and betrayed each other in one of the worst place in wartime Europe in June, 1941, the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Soviets, who had occupied eastern There is a mountain of documentation which shows that in this area, occupied by the Soviets during 1939-1941, a significant number of Jews collaborated with the Soviets in the arrest, deportation and death of thousands of Poles. Jedwabne Jews were no exception. When the Soviets reconquered the area from the Germans in 1944-1945, Jews again were prominently involved in the destruction of the Polish Home Army and the arrest and execution of Poles loyal to the Polish democratic government, then in exile in Even though in his earlier writings Gross had admitted Jewish complicity with Cast in the light of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, it should not be too surprising that some Poles may have sought out Jewish traitors and tried to kill them. It worked the other way too. Several hundred Poles, including women and children, were murdered by a Jewish-Soviet partisan unit in Koniuchy in 1944. One of the members of the unit was even honored by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in AS IS SO OFTEN THE CASE WITH SENSATIONALIST ACCOUNTS OF THE WAR, the author raises more questions than he answers. He bases his claims primarily on the allegations of Szmul Wasersztajn, who was not an eyewitness to the events at Jedwabne but was in hiding some distance away, and the testimonies elicited during the Lomza trials in 1949 and 1953, a period when Poles underwent the brutal Stalinization of their country. Regarding German documentation concerning Jedwabne, Gross claims he looked for it but "I was unable to find it." I am not entirely convinced Gross personally investigated German and, for that matter, former Soviet archives during his research on his book. He makes the quaint observation that he asked two scholars, both of whom allegedly familiar with German archives, about Jedwabne and neither of them heard of it. Does asking two colleagues about the subject replace the need to immerse oneself personally in critical documents, which are absolutely essential to prove one's allegations about what happened at Jedwabne? Even though Gross admits the presence of the Gestapo in Jedwabne and even acknowledges that without the Germans the massacre would not have occurred, he insists that the Germans confined themselves to the role of bystanders and clears them of responsibility. The fact that in other nearby towns in the Since the publication of Gross's controversial book, new documentary evidence has come to light which suggests that the Germans, not the Poles, were primarily responsible for the massacre. According to one report, the Polish role was limited to less than 50 people, who were forced to guard Jews in the town square prior to their execution. Even the number of murdered Jews has been called into question. One report pointed out that a scanning of the grave site uncovered German bullets (Poles would not have been allowed to possess guns and rifles) and that approximately 400, not 1600, Jews perished. Whether 400 or 1600 lost their lives is not the point. It was an atrocity that every decent person should deplore. But the fundamental question of who was primarily responsible for the massacre is still unanswered. Was it the Germans? Was it the Poles? If the Poles were involved, what was their precise role in the affair? GROSS'S CREDIBILITY IS SERIOUSLY COMPROMISED when he asserts his own bizarre idea of historical methodology. He asserts that the testimonies he read should be accepted as "fact" without first skeptically reviewing the material and seeking independent verification. That's quite a reversal of fundamental historical methodology! It is astonishing that all the Holocaust experts who have given their nihil obstat to this flawed volume completely ignored this strange approach to establishing historical truth. Gross seems more concerned about the alleged lack of Polish national grief over the Jews than about determining precisely and accurately what really happened in Jedwabne. The Washington Post quotes him, saying, "I deeply believe that getting to know what happened in Jedwabne will become a breakthrough in our historical myths and will help us clean our conscience." Obviously, he is more concerned about Polish than Jewish historical myths. Poles should honestly face the negative aspects of their behavior toward Jews. But what about Jews candidly facing their collaborationist past with IT IS TESTIMONY to the power of the "Holocaust Industry," to borrow Professor Norman Finkelstein's apt description, that an obscure event that occurred in eastern Poland sixty years ago should be dredged up in this slim volume that is long on sensationalism and short on acceptable historical evidence and receive the hysterical media acclaim that it has received. We are a long way from the quality control Holocaust historiography desperately requires. Now more than ever we need fair and balanced investigations of the Holocaust and the related genocides of eastern Europeans by the Nazis. The highly sensitive subject of Polish-Jewish relations can no longer be painted with the broad brush of anti-Semitism. The subject needs trained professional historians to present all the facts and who refuse to apply one standard of moral behavior to Jews and a more severe one to Poles. Let us hope that the research currently underway by the Polish National Institute of Memory will give us the answers to Jedwabne that Professor Gross failed to provide us. Dr. Richard Lukas is a retired professor of history. He taught at seven universities in To subscribe to Polish American Journal, see http://www.polamjournal.com under "subscriptions." Richard Lukas, , 0000-00-00 http://www.iyp.org/polish/history/jedwab |
| Ultimate
debunking of Gross prof. Tomasz Strzembosz |
Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz has published in today's "Rzeczpospolita" (31 March 2001 edition) an article called "A different picture of neighbors" (see the Polish original at http://www.rzeczpospolita.pl/gazeta/wydanie_010331/publicystyka/publicystyka_a_2.html Tomasz Strzembosz: A different image of Neighbours 1. Statement Since some journalists, such as Anna Bikont from "Gazeta Wyborcza", read my texts as it suits them, I hereby state that the article below is not an explanation of what happened in Jedwabne on the 10th of July 1941, but refers to the contents of specific source materials -- that is statements made to the investigating officers, prosecutors and the court, in Lomza in 1949 -- as well as to the way these source materials were read by Professor Jan T. Gross and subsequently presented in his book "Neighbours". Professor Gross talks about what seems to appear from these source materials, which - I state this clearly - are not sufficient bases for me to pronounce what happened then: about the course of events and their most significant circumstances. It is possible that we will never learn about these events, or that we will not learn everything. However, I agree with Professor Gross that these materials are an important source; and this is why the way in which they are read is not without influence on the laborious process of approaching the explanation: who, what and when - namely, getting to the truth. 2. History of the problem One cannot claim that for 50 years nothing has been written about the crime committed in the town of This situation continued until 1999, when Professor Jan T. Gross published his article "Summer of 1941 in Jedwabne. A contribution to research on the role of local communities in the extermination of the Jewish nation during the second World War" in a collective work "Nonprovincial Europe", edited by Professor Krzysztof Jasiewicz. This article contains a type of 'nucleus' and the basis for evaluation of what happened, which is an account by Szmul Wasersztajn; this account is in the Jewish History Institute in In his article, Professor Gross concludes: "But even without certainty regarding the details, it is absolutely clear for a historian, that in late June and early July of 1941 in Jedwabne a group of local people inhumanely ill-treated their fellow citizens of Jewish origin". Hence, on the basis of only one cited account, which is short and contains conflicting details in the two available versions (it is not certain which of these came first), a sociologist and a historian made a very grave accusation against a group of people. One year later, in the spring of 2000, a publishing house Pogranicze in the town of This book very quickly aroused an enormous response as it presents a thesis going much further than the conclusion of "Nonprovincial Europe". It can be formulated as follows: the Jedwabne Jews, who were Polish citizens, were murdered by the Polish community in Jedwabne, aided by the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. They murdered them by themselves, without the participation of the occupant - the Germans - who were merely passive observers or involved in filming the murders carried out solely by Polish hands. I have not known, in my fairly long life, a historical book that would come to such notice and create such a wave of statements in such a wide range of media. Perhaps it is no wonder. Yet, amongst the hundreds of articles and statements on the radio and television, there is a clear lack of statements about the facts themselves, statements that would take up the issue on the basis of the same or entirely new, significant sources. Nearly all of these reports deal with moral aspects of the murder, its consequences for the historic consciousness of Poles, or political and psychological consequences, or they undertake a critique of the methodology used in the work presented by Gross. However, practically nobody tries to question essentially the factuality of the previously mentioned statement that it was Polish "neighbours" who murdered their Jewish "neighbours", by themselves, burning them in a barn of Bronislaw Sleszynski, with the approval of the occupant authorities, but without participation of the Germans. Responding to the accusations of more than one historian (including the one writing these words), that the account of Wasersztajn is not sufficient, Professor Gross, on numerous occasions, both during discussions in the editorial offices of "Rzeczpospolita", and during a recent discussion in Bialystok, answered: "yes, the account of Wasersztajn is not enough, but in my work I also used other, completely elementary materials; Strzembosz has 5 accounts taken 60 years after the war, I have 36 accounts made as early as 1949 in a court room in Lomza and before other investigating officers". After such a statement the participants of the discussion had to fall silent. Why? Because Professor Gross obtained access to the files of the proceedings against Boleslaw Ramotowski and 21 others, at the time when the files of the former Main Commission of Investigating Crimes against the Polish nation (in a state of liquidation) were entirely inaccessible, even to the employees. It was these files to which he referred. He knew, he saw them, held them in his hands, he had access to "secret knowledge", we were left with what had been - in rare cases - revealed earlier, as well as what sometimes came out in a heated discussion which - by the very nature of such discussion - may have been distorted. Only recently, when the prosecutor Ignatiew no longer needed those files, the investigation records and the 1949 trial documents were made accessible to historians, thanks to the kindness of the IPN (National Memory Institute) authorities. More than that. I know they have been photocopied and a copy will be available to anyone really interested. They will finally be published. What are those documents? As the charges from March 31, 1949 state, the Jewish History Institute in Poland sent to the Ministry of Justice "evidence materials regarding the criminal activity of murdering individuals of Jewish nationality by the inhabitants of Jedwabne. According to the statement given by a witness Szmul Wasersztajn, who observed the extermination of Jews. The main perpetrators of this crime were (...)". Thus, the files of the trial contain the same account of Wasersztajn that is quoted by Professor Gross (the longer version); this account became the basis for the trial. As a consequence of this investigation, a trial in the One substantial volume thus contained several types of documents: - - - testimony of suspects and witnesses made before officials of the local Office of Public Safety in w Lomza, who were investigating officers; - - - statements of suspects and witnesses given before public prosecutors of the - - - testimony of the accused and witnesses made during the court trial; - - - charges and the verdict with justification, prepared by the judges of the - - - correspondence of the accused to various national authorities' offices; - - - files of the Appellate Court and the High Court in This is the source that is always called upon by Professor Gross. 3. Amazement I read it all. Even more: I copied by hand all the documents elementary to the case of the murder, maintaining accurately their style and writing, which were, one might add - very characteristic. I have to admit that the more I read the files, the more my amazement increased. These files, when treated in a serious and complex manner, say something entirely different from what Professor Gross claims; Professor Gross based his arguments mainly on these files, although these were not the only documents used. Professor Gross constantly stresses the fact that because he can rely on such a rich and credible source basis, he has the right to formulate authoritative claims that others can oppose with accounts only - and those accounts were given many years later. It is impossible to convey in a press article all that the study of these documents yielded. It is just as is impossible, on the basis of these accounts and only these, to present a credible version of events, which could in the end turn out to be different from the picture emerging from the statements of the accused and the witnesses; all of these parties were in a specific and very particular situation, so they said what they said - not necessarily the truth and only the full truth. I can however, pass on a few statements, which appear espressis verbis from the documents, considered by Professor Gross as so significant in the course of uncovering the truth. They will concern: - - The number of people accused of participation in the murder of Polish citizens of Jewish origin in the town of - - Participation of Germans in this murder, that is, the uniformed and armed officials of police formations. In this case, I will attempt to quote in the most extensive way possible, the relevant fragments of sources, so that I can not be accused of pronouncing claims that are not based on source materials. May the readers judge for themselves, whether they are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently convincing to talk about participation of Germans in the particular stages of the murder. The murder consisted of 3 stages: dragging the Polish citizens of Jewish origin out of their flats and driving them to the market place in Jedwabne; leading them, first through the town, then through a field to the barn of Bronislaw Sleszynski, and finally burning them in the barn. I haste to add here, that the first and the third stage are the least known to us: most of the suspects admitted to guarding the Jews in the market place, less to driving them here, but nearly no one admitted to being near the barn when it was being lit. Such an admission might have been an evidence of participation in the worst of crimes. So this is where there is most room for speculation. I would like to start with the role of the Germans and the role of the Poles in the events which took place in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Since the suspects and the witnesses gave testimony in turn: before investigators, public prosecutors and during the court trial - I will attempt to present their statements in exactly this order, in order to demonstrate if and to what extent they changed according to who the interrogators were. I will quote them in extenso, as they sounded, but merely those fragments that concerned the relations between Poles and Germans. Quoting the whole statements would produce a book, not an article. 4. Testimony I will only consider here statements of the suspects, out of whom in the end 22 were put to trial on May 16 and 17, 1949. The order has been maintained as it was during the trial, which was called a trial of "Boleslaw Ramotowski and 21 others". 1. 1. 1. Boleslaw Ramotowski - born in 1911, without a job, currently a janitor in a primary school, 1 part of primary school completed, wife and four kids (I give only the most significant data that characterise the suspect; the suspects were all Roman Catholics, and lived in Jedwabne). Before the investigating officer (I do not consider here the issue of who the investigating officers were [sometimes they were non-commissioned officers]; it is a separate and very interesting issue) he testifies (08.01.1949): "Yes, I took an active part in driving those Jews to the barn, who lit it - I did not see that, I only know, that we Polish drove nearly one and a half thousand Jews (this number occurs in a number of statements, it looks like a number suggested or written in by the investigator) and the men[tioned] Jews were burnt. Who set the fire, this I don't know. Question: Tell me, who else took an active part together with you, in driving those Jews, who were burnt in Jedwabne. Answer: They are the following people (...)" (I will write later about the number of suspects occurring in the statements, but I would like to signal that they are the people named by the investigating officer. In the case of Ramotowski it is as many as 41 people). Before the public prosecutor he states (15.01.1949): "Yes, I admit I am guilty that in 1941 in the summer in Jedwabne, to accommodate the authority of the German state under the orders of the mayor and the German gendarmerie I took an active part in guarding the Jewish population driven to the market. My task was only to make sure that none of the Jews got away. In guarding, the Jews participated also (...)" Before the court he states (16.05.1949): "I was at the market for around 2 hours, because I was forced by Germans to guard the Jews. When the Germans drove the Jews to the barn, I ran away home then. (...) The Court reads out the testimony of the accused made during the invest.[igation], k.74 The accused states further: During the interrogation I was forced to tell on other people, because I was beaten very much. (...)" 2. Stanislaw Zejer - born in 1893, 1 part of primary school completed, farmer, 4 ha of land, married. Before the investigating officer he states (11.01.1949): "I was detained because I took part, by the order of the town mayor Karolak, to drive Jews to the market place. (...) It was in 1941 in the month of July, the janitor came to me by an order of the town major and he said told me to go to drive Jews to the market and I went to drive them to the market. After we drove them there, the gendarmerie started terrible beatings together with the Poles.(...) To the Jews that were there, the Germans told to take the monument of Lenin and to walk with it into town singing. I wasn't there any more during that time, because I got an order from the town mayor to fetch clover. I was bringing that clover for an hour. When I got back, the barn with the Jews was already burning, and there were about 1000 Jews who had been chased into that barn." Before the public prosecutor he states (15.01.1949): "Yes, I admit to being guilty, that in 1941 in Jedwabne, to accommodate the authority of the German state (this is a consistently used formula associated with the fact that charges came from the so-called "August Decree" from August 1944), under the orders of the town mayor Karolak and the Gestapo, I drove to the appointed place in the market 2 people of Jewish nationality; after leading those two Jews to the market I saw a lot of Jews already there. From there I went straight home and I didn't see what happened after that, what the Germans did with the Jews. Whether the other inhabitants of Jedwabne took part in bringing Jews, I didn't see that. (...)" Before the court he testifies (16.05.1949): "Stanislaw Zejer does not admit to being guilty and explains: when I was in the Magistrate, the mayor told me to collect Jews but I didn't want to, when I went out in the street one from Gestapo told me to take 2 Jews, but I let them go when the Gestapo one went to the bakers.(...) The Court reads out the statement of the accused for k. 33 and 75 investigation. The accused testifies further: I saw Jerzy Laudanski when he walked with the Jews, when they drove them to the market, the Gestapo were walking behind Laudanski. I did not see any of the other accused. These Jews were lead by the Gestapo and they were beating them. I am illiterate. I didn't go myself, the Germans took me and they forced me". 3. Czeslaw Lipinski - born in 1920, farmer, 5 parts of primary school completed, bachelor, 3 ha of land and farm buildings. Before the investigating officer he testifies (11.01.1949): "Question: Did you take part in the murdering of Jews in 1941in the month of July? Answer: I did not take part in the murdering of Jews, only Kalinowski Eugeniusz, Laudanski Jurek and one German came to me and [I went] with them to the market; I brought one Jew and 2 little Jewesses [sic!] When we drove with the Germans the above mentioned Jews (...) we brought the above mentioned Jews to the market then the Germans put me on the Stary Rynek street [and] told me to look out so that the Jews would not run away from the market. I was sitting with this stick around 15 minutes, but I could not look any more how they were murdering them [,] I went home and on the way I threw this stick away (...)". Before the public prosecutor he testifies (15.01.1949): "I do not admit to being guilty, that in July 1941 I took part in the burning of Jews in Jedwabne and I explain, that on the critical day when I stood on my own courtyard a German came up to me, took me with him to the market, to guard the Jews, who had been driven to the market. As soon as the German walked away from me, I immediately ran away from the market. I only stood by the market for a short time, maybe 10-15 minutes and because I was terrified with what was happening, I don't remember anything about who from the civilian population took part in murdering the Jews. After getting home I hid in the hay (if he hid, it was from the Germans not the Poles) and I don't know what happened to the Jews". Before the court he testifies: "I didn't bring any Jews to the market". The court reads the statement of the accused made in the investigation k. 35 and 76: In the statement I talked about how they made me, because I was beaten very much. I wasn't in the market at all I don't know what went on there". (This statement questions all the previous ones. Which one is true? In any case, neither the investigator nor the public prosecutor seem to consider the statements about the role of Germans in driving Jews and manipulating Poles as something to question, they both accept this as obvious.) 4. Wladyslaw Dabrowski - born in 1890, cobbler, illiterate, married. Before the investigating officer he testifies (11.01.1949): "Question: Tell us if you took part in the murdering of Jews during the German occupation in 1941 in the month of July? Answer: I did not take part in the murdering of Jews, I took part only in the guarding at the market, where there were over fifteen hundred of those who had been driven there by the Polish community. (...) My task was to watch that not one Jew came out beyond a line, which I did, I got such an order from Karolak, Sobota and one German, and during my guarding I didn't see anyone beating Jews (...)". Before the public prosecutor he testifies: (15.01.1949): "I do not admit to being guilty and I explain: on the critical day when I was at home, gendarmerie came to my home with the mayor of Jedwabne Karolak and told me to go to the market and guard the Jews. Because I didn't want to go and tried to run away, the German hit me on the head with his gun (this was confirmed by the testimony of a number of witnesses) and he hit me in the face with his hand and knocked a tooth out. Then I stood there for around 2 hours. As soon as the German moved away from me I ran away home. (...)" Before the court he testifies: "(...) Does not admit to being guilty and explains: on the critical day I worked near the church and I didn't take any part. The court reads the testimony of the accused given in the invest.[igation] k. 38 and 78. The accused testifies further: I talked like that during the interrogation, because i was beaten and I was afraid of further beating. I didn't see any of the accused. I was beaten in a terrible way" (the statements during the interrogation and before the public prosecutor had to contain some truth, as the fact of the beating by the German was confirmed both by the family and by strangers). 5. Feliks Tarnacki - born in 1907, profession - locksmith, job - farmer, 4 parts of primary school completed, widower. Before the investigating officer he testifies (11.01.1949): "Question: Did you take part in the round-up on the Jewish population in the month of July 1949 and who else took part in it? Answer: On the day on which the round-up on the Jewish population took place, mayor Karolak Marian came to me and the secretary of the magistrate Wasilewski, whose first name I don't know, together with a Gestapo man, and they chased me out to the market, where there were a lot of people gathered [from] the town of Jedwabne and from other parts, whom I didn't know: (...) I stayed in the market for around 15 minutes and then having run away from it I took the bicycle from my house and left for the village of Kaimy in the district of Jedwabne, where I stayed with Przestrzelski Feliks for around 10 minutes and after drinking a glass of vodka I went in the direction of Lomza. (...) After that I returned home on foot, i.e. to Jedwabne and there was already smoke in town from the burnt barn. After getting home I hid. I remained in hiding for the whole night". Before the public prosecutor he testifies (15.01.1949): "I do not admit to being guilty that in July 1941 I took part in the murdering of Jews in Jedwabne and I explain that on the critical day I was at home. During that time the mayor of Jedwabne Marian Karolak came to my flat with a Gestapo man and they took me to the market, where Jews were being brought. When the Gestapo man walked away from me I ran away home and went by bike to Lomza (...)" Before the court he testifies: "(...) I was at the market maybe 10 - 15 minutes by the order of a Gestapo man, but I escaped right away. The court read out the testimony on k. 40 and 79 invest.[igation] The accused testifies further: I didn't see any of the accused. My brother is called Jerzy Tarnacki." 6. Józef Chrzanowski - born in 1889, farmer, home schooling, married, 3 ha of land with farm buildings. Before the investigating officer he testifies (11.01.1949): "(...) In 1941 when the occupant army entered Jedwabne the local population commenced with the murdering of the Jews, first they drove them to the market: when I was walking along Przylska street I was met by Wasilewski Józef and Sobota, inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne, and they told me to go to the market so I didn't oppose and went with them. When I got to the market they told me that I should give my barn for the burning of the Jews, so then I started to ask them not to burn my barn, so they agreed then to this and left my barn alone, only they told me to help them drive the Jews to the barn of Sleszynski Bronislaw, the Jews were rounded up in fours (although the testifying is not saying it directly, he means the Germans; similarly when he talks of setting the fire) and we Polish guarded on one side and on another so that the Jews would not run away, when we got to the barn, they told all the Jews to go into the barn and we had to look out that all the Jews went into the barn and they set fire to the barn and the Jews were burnt, then I went home then, I had no orders to drive the Jews from the Germans. (...)" Before the public prosecutor (15.01.1949) he repeats the statement about defending his own barn, does not admit to driving Jews to the barn of Sleszynski. Before the court he testifies: "Does not admit to being guilty, explains: I wasn't present at the driving of Jews, neither was I at the leading of them (leading them - to the barn - T.S.). The Court read the testimony of the accused on k. 42 and 80 of the invest.[igation]. The accused testifies: Wasilewski and Sobota turned to me, so that I would give my barn for the burning, but I didn't agree. Then the Gestapo came, they also demanded, that I would give the barn, I didn't want to agree, but being scared of them I ran away in the corn and stayed there until the evening. I didn't see any of the accused." (it is clear that either the court asked about the other accused, or else returned to the testimony given before the investigating officer of the Security Services). Before the prosecutor (Jan. 15th 1949) he repeats that he did not want his barn to be used for burning the Jews, he pleads he is not guilty of driving the Jews to the Sleszynski's barn. Before the Court he testifies: "I do not confess my guilt, he explains: I was not present at collecting the Jews or at driving them (to the barn - T.S.). The Court read out the defendant's testimonies on chart 42 and 80 of the investigation files. The defendant testifies: Wasilewski and Sobota wanted me to give my barn for burning, but I refused. Then the Gestapo men came and they also demanded that I give my barn, but I did not want to; as I was afraid of them I ran away and hid in the rye. I stayed there till the evening. I saw none of the accused". (the court probably asked him about the other accused persons or came back to his testimony before the UB investigating officer). 7. Roman Górski - born 1904, a farmer, he owns 3 ha of land, 2 classes of elementary school completed. Before the investigating officer he testifies (Jan. 10th 1949): "at 12 a.m. to my house came Karolak Marian, the mayor, and a German gendarme, who kicked me. They took me to the Market of Jedwabne, where they ordered me to guard the Jews together with several 16- 17-year-old boys from the village (...) I was at the Market from 12 a.m. to 3 p.m. and then I went back home, as my wife, who was lying in after childbirth, suddenly fell ill. I did not go out of the house any more that day. (...)" Before the prosecutor he testifies (Jan 15th 1949): "Yes, I confess I am guilty that in July 1941, accommodating with the German authorities and under the threat of the mayor and German gendarmes I was made to guard the Jews collected at the Jedwabne Market. The mayor, Karolak, and German gendarmes came to my house and took me to guard the Jews at the Market, so that they could not run away. I also saw that Sobota and Wasilewski selected about a dozen Jews present and ordered them to do funny physical exercises. I do not know what happened next to the Jews, as I went back home". Before the Court he testifies: "Gendarmes came to my house and ordered me to go with them. When I opposed, they beat me and forced me to go with them to the market, where I remained only for 15 minutes and escaped and came back home, because my wife, when she saw that the Germans were beating me, fell ill. The Court read out the defendant's testimony on chart 44 and 81 of the investigation files. The defendant testifies: I did not do anything, when I was at the market. I did not see Jerzy Laudanski. I was beaten very heavily during the investigation proceedings and told these things while being in pain." 8. Antoni Niebrzydowski - born 1901, a locksmith, secondary education, married, an owner of a house in Jedwabne. Before the investigating officer he testifies (Jan. 10th 1949): "In 1941 to my house came Karolak, a German mayor, and Bardon Karol and they ordered me to go to guard the Jews at the market, whom they were driving to the sugar market. I did not know what was going on and I went at the order of Karolak and Bardon. I was on the side of the He delivered kerosene to be poured on the barn to which "they rushed the Jews". He gave the kerosene at the order of Eugeniusz Kalinowski and Jerzy Niebrzydowski. Before the prosecutor he testifies (Jan. 15th 1941): "Yes, I confess I am guilty that in July 1941, accommodating the German authorities and under the threat of the mayor and Bardon (Bardon, who was an assistant gendarme, was the only Jedwabne citizen armed with a gun) I was made to guard the Jews collected at the Jedwabne market. I gave the kerosene from the storehouse to Bardon, Niebrzydowski Jerzy and Kalinowski Eugeniusz; I do not know for what purposes they needed the kerosene. After some time I went back home and I only saw the fire belching out of that barn (...)" Before the Court he repeats his version of events and adds: "Then people were saying that the kerosene I had given was used to burn the Szlesinski's barn" (it is an important completion - maybe, giving the kerosene to the town authorities, he did not know for what purposes it was going to be used). 9. Wladyslaw Miciura - born 1902, a carpenter, one class of elementary school completed, married, 6 children aged 6 - 15, ? ha of land. Before the investigating officer he testifies (Jan 10th 1949): "Three or four days before the raid I was made to do some carpenter work at the gendarmerie station. In July 1941, I do not remember the exact date, several cabs (at that time the villagers called by this name all the passenger cars) came with Gestapo men and they organised a raid on the Jews and they rushed them to the market square. The gendermes sent me home for breakfast and when I came back after an hour a policeman ordered me to go to the market to guard the Jews and prevent them from running away. I guarded the Jews from 12 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then I went back to the gendarmerie station, but they did not want me to work; they told me to go and drive the Jews to the barn, so I did this and I was there till the moment the barn full of Jews was set on fire. (...) Before the prosecutor he testifies (Jan. 15th 1949): "Yes, I confess I am guilty that in July 1941 in Jedwabne, accommodating with the German authorities and under the threat of German gendarmes and the Gestapo men I was made to guard the Jews collected at the Jedwabne market, I did not participate in driving the Jews to the Sleszynski's barn. (...)" Before the Court: he does not confess his guilt and explains: "I did not participate in driving the Jews". During the investigation proceedings he gave the names of the accused because he was beaten. He says: "I was not present at the market square at all. All day long I was working as a carpenter at the gendarmerie station" (This testimony is also characteristic for other defendants. Before the investigating officer he acknowledges having done everything; before the prosecutor he denies most of the controversial acts - participation in driving the Jews to the Sleszynski's barn; before the Court he says he has not taken part in the murder at all. Most of all testimonies against the neighbours [not cited here] are false and forced. The fact that before the Court he denies participating in the crime does not mean that he did not see the Gestapo cars and the actions of gendarmes.) 10. Józef Zyluk - born 1910, no profession, illiterate, performs odd jobs as a salesman, married, 5 children Before the investigating officer he testifies (Jan. 9th 1949): "I was detained by the militiamen in Jedwabne on 8th January 1948 and accused of delivering the Jews to the Gestapo men in 1941." In the later part of his testimony he says that, drawn away from mowing the hay, together with Karolak the mayor he took one Jew from the mill in Jedwabne, was taking him to the market, but let him go in Before the prosecutor he testifies (Jan 15th 1949): that "on the critical day, when I was mowing the hay, the mayor of Jedwabne came and told me to go with him to the town. As I did not want to go with him, he told me that if I do not go, I would be shot down. So I went with him." Then he repeats his testimonies from the investigation. (In his application to the Supreme Court dated 28th July 1949 he says that later he saved 8 Jews and that he can present witnesses to confirm this.) Before the Court he testifies: "(...) at the Karolak's order I was conducting one Jew, but only for about 15 steps, then I ran away and I know nothing". The Court read out the defendant's testimonies from chart 49 and 84. The defendant testifies: "the name of the Jew I was conducting was ZdroJewicz" (he really survived and testified in the court proceedings). I think that citing next ten testimonies would be enough to form a fairly reliable view on the role of the Germans in the liquidation of the Polish citizens of Jewish origin in Jedwabne on 10th July 1941. So - the Germans! How many of them were there? We do not know. Maybe it was true what Julia Sokolowska, the cook at the gendarmerie station in Jedwabne, said during the trial on 17 May: "On the critical day there were 68 Gestapo men, I was preparing dinner for them; and there were lots of gendarmes, as they came from various gendarmerie stations". Other Jedwabne citizens also clearly distinguish the Gestapo men from the gendarmes. Some base their opinion on the details of clothing they observed. For example Natalia Gasiorowska, giving her testimony before the prosecutor (in November 1950), said: "I am sure they were the Gestapo men, as they had skulls on their caps", and Marianna Supraska, giving her testimony on the very same day and before the same prosecutor, talking about the participation of Zygmunt Laudanski, said that he had been rushed by the Gestapo men who "had skulls on their sleeves". In any case the number of the Germans is not the most important matter. However, one of my reporters, Dr Stefan Boczkowski, wrote in the letter of November 2000, that Jedwabne was "green" with their uniforms. The most essential is the fact that all the time the Germans were the forcing element and the representatives of the occupying authorities who had been deciding about everything in the neighbourhood for the last three weeks. The testimonies show that the Germans forced the local men out of their houses and rushed them to the market square or made them "drive" the Jews. In other testimonies, not cited here, the witnesses tell about the Gestapo men and gendarmes "driving" the Jews along One question is left open - was Jedwabne on that day surrounded by the guards and who were the men guarding the town? One of the defendants says that he, armed with a stick, was left by the Germans on his farm located at the entrance to the town - he states, however, that he did not fulfil his task and let through the persons who were running away (namely ...). Other testimonies, however, both of the suspected and the witnesses, seem to deny that there was any tight cordon of the guardians around the town. Several suspects escape from the Jedwabne market square, hide themselves in the rye around the town and nobody prevents them from doing so; the other suspect rides out of the town on his bike in the direction of Lomza and only near Lomza meets the gendarmes who take the bike away from him. The full isolation of the town surrounded by gardens and with direct exits to the fields covered at that time with high crops would be possible only with the presence of a great number of military forces placed not only in the exit streets and roads. 5. The number of the Poles taking part in the murder In order to establish this number on the basis of the presented source materials it is necessary to analyse the following elements: ˇ ˇ the number of suspected (and then accused) persons testifying before the Provincial Court in Lomza, decreased by those acquitted of a charge on the spot on 17 January 1949 or later during the proceedings before the Appeal Court; ˇ ˇ persons defined as "hiding themselves", i.e. those who were not arrested and did not take part in the trial; ˇ ˇ persons who died before the beginning of 1949 and also defined as guilty; ˇ ˇ persons mentioned in the Szmul Wasersztajn's report, with the reservation that they also have to be "checked" during the testimonies given before the court. The separate problem is that of town citizens mentioned in testimonies given before the officers of the Security Service (UB). Most of the defendants during the court trial revoked their testimonies regarding this matter, saying that they were forced to give them by torture. It is worth noting that the UB investigating officers were not interested in the Germans - firstly because their presence in Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 was obvious for them (as well as for the prosecutors and the judges), and secondly because the Germans were not available and the Poles, not the Germans, were the subjects of the investigation. Moreover, there is a tendency, a visible tendency, to widen the circle of suspects both by the persons already in the hands of the Security Service (UB) and by the persons who had not yet been arrested. With the help of forced statements, evidence is being collected against the arrested and the non-arrested persons. Janek is to testify against Piotrek, Piotrek is to testify against Jurek, Jurek against Janek, etc., so that the accusation is based not on one but on many depositions. There occur paradoxical situations. Boleslaw Ramotowski mentions in his statements before the UB officers 41 "co-perpetrators", whom he saw at the Jedwabne market square. Later on he even defines who was holding a stick and who had a gun. It was impossible to notice so many persons in the chaos of events that were happening, especially as the witness - according to his own words - took an active part in the events. Thus, it is no wonder that during the court trial he revoked that part of his testimony, stating that he saw only one person at the market. Similarly Julia Sokolowska, the cook at the gendarmerie station located close to the market square, who, however, had to perform a definite task (cook the dinner), during the investigation proceedings stated that she saw at the market more than thirty Poles busy with collecting and guarding the Jews. The question arises: can we treat the persons mentioned during the investigation as persons really engaged in the preparation or realisation of the crime in Jedwabne? Let us now do the calculations: 1. The formal accusation mentioned 22 persons charged with participating in the crime, of which 10 were acquitted and released. (During the "Main Court Proceedings" of 16th and 17th of May 1949 the following were sentenced: Karol Bardon, to death [pardoned by Bierut, received 15 years in prison], Jerzy Laudanski, to 15 years in prison, Zygmunt Laudanski, Wladyslaw Miciura and Boleslaw Ramotowski, to 12 years in prison, Stanislaw Zejer and Czeslaw Lipinski, to 10 years in prison, Wladyslaw Dabrowski, Feliks Tarnacki, Roman Górski, Antoni Niebrzydowski and Józef Zyluk, to 8 years. The following were acquitted: Józef Chrzanowski, Marian Zyluk, Czeslaw Laudanski, Wincenty Goscicki, Roman Zawadzki, Jan Zawadzki, Aleksander LoJewski, Eugeniusz Sliwecki and Stanislaw Sielawa. Such sentences indicated a considerable level of independence of the court, which deemed some of the depositions for the Security Service (UB) as insufficient in view of the later testimonies by witnesses, especially if the suspects pleaded not guilty already during the inquiry.) Consequently, only 12 persons were declared guilty. However, the 2. The list of persons in hiding (this qualification does not mean that the persons mentioned in the list really remained in hiding, but that they did not live in Lomza province and were not available at the moment. Indeed, many inhabitants of Lomza province left after the war - for a variety of reasons - for the regained territories, in particular the Mazury region), and therefore not available, includes 8 persons suspected of the crime (these are: Jerzy Tarnacki [to whom Wasersztajn referred as Jurek Tarnoczek], Julian Schmidt, Marian Karolak, Józef Wasilewski, Jerzy Niebrzydowski, Michal Trzaska, Waclaw Borowski and Mieczyslaw Borowski), although 5 of them are also on Szmul Wasersztajn's list. This leaves only 3. 3. The list of persons suspected of the crime, but not alive in 1949 includes 9 persons (the list includes: Józef Sobota , Eugeniusz Kalinowski, Józef Kobrzeniecki, Stanislaw Sokolowski, Boleslaw Rogalski, Wladyslaw Modzelewski, Bronislaw Sleszynski, Jarmutowski and Aleksander Janowski), although three of them (Boleslaw Rogalski, Jarmutowski and Bronislaw Sleszynski) are also on Wasersztajn's list, which leaves 6. The list of six includes Józef Sobota , who was later found in a psychiatric hospital and released due to the state of his health. However, he was undoubtedly one of the most charged perpetrators of the massacre. 4. The list of persons whom Szmul Wasersztajn deemed particularly criminal includes 14 inhabitants of Jedwabne (these are: Bronislaw Sleszynski, Marian Karolak, Mieczyslaw Borowski, Waclaw Borowski, Jarmulowski (mentioned among the deceased as Jarmutowski), Boleslaw Ramotowski, Boleslaw Rogalski, Stanislaw Sielawa, Franciszek Sielawa, Eugeniusz Kozlowski, Trzaska, Jerzy Tarnoczek (Tarnawski), Jerzy Laudanski and Czeslaw Laciecz (sic!). Looking at this list one can have certain doubts. The list includes acquitted Stanislaw Sielawa, who was noted - as Wasersztajn writes - for cruelty, Bronislaw Sleszynski, who was confined to bed with dysentery, whose fault was that following orders from Karolak, supported by the presence of a gendarme; he handed them the keys to his barn; the list includes the Borowski brothers, who committed allegedly terrible deeds prior to July 10th. Those deeds were not confirmed by anyone. Moreover, it partly matches the other lists. Mentioned here are those listed as deceased: Bronislaw Sleszynski, Boleslaw Rogalski and Jarmulowski (or Jarmutowski), those who remained in hiding: Jerzy Tarnacki, Michal Trzaska, Marian Karolak, Waclaw Borowski and Mieczyslaw Borowski, those who were convicted: Boleslaw Ramotowski and Jerzy Laudanski, and finally, Stanislaw Sielawa, acquitted by the court, so he can not be considered here. This way, the list is reduced to 3 persons who were not listed elsewhere. If we sum up this information, we arrive at a conclusion that (assuming that all those in hiding and all of the deceased were guilty) 23 persons from the Polish community participated at some stage in the atrocious act of July 10th 1941. This is a rather probable number, since reports by witnesses (among others Stefan Boczkowski) mention similar numbers. We are dealing here not with the "community" of Jedwabne, but with a group of several dozen men, of whom Karol Bardon, perhaps the most guilty, can hardly be considered to represent the Polish element (born in Cieszyn Silesia, German soldier during World War I, trusted - since at the beginning of the occupation he served as a gendarme), and two others were a known brawling drunk and a notorious bandit. Among the participants of the events of July 10th the undoubted criminals were: Marian Karolak (the authorised mayor) and Karol Bardon, who many times act, together with the Germans as those who exerted force onto others. Several times the depositions mention some unidentified youths from neighbouring villages and some ordinary onlookers who were present during the events, probably unaware of how they will end. Similarly unaware (I believe) were most other Polish participants, apart from above mentioned Bardon and Karolak, and maybe a few more people from Jedwabne Town Hall. 6. Selection of Material Let us sum up: the decisive role of the Germans as those who inspired, organised and participated, plus the participation of several dozen Poles, including those who were forced to. Justifying the 1949 verdict, the court clearly emphasised that the accused acted under the influence of German terror. In addition, there was the attitude of others, who ran into cornfields, hid in their homes and finally, like Józef Zyluk, looked after his fellow citizens who survived the massacre. Józef Zyluk, forced to lead two Jews from the mill on the outskirts of Jedwabne onto the market square, let them go, saving their lives. One of them, named Zdrojewicz, survived the war. Similarly, Zofia Górska in her letter of March 2nd, 1949 to the Provincial Court in Lomza, concerning her arrested husband Roman, writes that after the mass murder in Jedwabne the couple were hiding two Jewish neighbours in their home, namely Partyjer Serwetarz and his brother (since I quoted only 10 depositions of the suspects, omitting several dozen other depositions, including testimonies of important witnesses, important information in this matter is missing here). As we know, of those doomed to extermination, far more survived than the seven hidden by the Polish family of Wyrzykowski in Janczewko. Many survived in Jedwabne itself until autumn 1942 and a few saved their lives and lived on in 1945. This picture is fundamentally different from that drawn by Professor Jan Gross in his "Neighbours". What is the reason for such difference? Jan Tomasz Gross left out several dozen testimonies of various persons - witnesses, defendants, etc., who talked about the role of Germans as the causative agents; he only quoted the testimonies which mentioned the participation of Poles. He relied, among others, on an initial testimony of cook Julia Sokolowska, which was later withdrawn, and the material written by Karol Bardon, a German gendarme who, being sentenced to death, tried to dilute his responsibility by blaming the inhabitants of the town. Professor Gross has never explained the reasons for such selection. He has never explained why he accepts some documents and rejects other ones. It is also worth noting that the account of Szmul Wasersztajn, who was not questioned by the court, and the testimonies of the prosecutor's witnesses Abram Boruszczak and Eljasz Gradowski, have actually been repudiated. It turned out in the light of the testimonies of the inhabitants of Jedwabne, and, in particular, the Polish citizen of Jewish descent, Józef Gradowski, that Abram Boruszczak had never lived in Jedwabne, and that Eljasz Gradowski, convicted for theft, had been imprisoned by the Soviet authorities and sent deep into the All three accusers were treated by the court as persons who had heard of things but had not been direct witnesses. In their final cessation appeal to the Supreme Court the defence lawyers indicated that Szmul Wasersztajn had never been interrogated or questioned by either Security Service (UB) officers, or by prosecutors or during court proceedings. Answering this, the Supreme Court stated that this had been a serious infringement but, as the court had not based the proceedings on the Wasersztajn account but on testimonies of direct witnesses, the infringement did not have significant impact. It is Szmul Wasersztajn who provides the most violent passages in Professor Gross's book. These facts which stimulate imagination so much have not been confirmed by any other sources. I leave any comments to the reader. Tomasz Strzembosz (born 1930), historian, Professor of the Catholic University of Lublin and the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). Author of publications on armed conspiracy in the Polish capital city: "Military Actions of Underground Warsaw 1939-1945", "Assault Forces of Conspiracy in Warsaw 1939-1945", "Rescuing and Freeing Prisoners in Warsaw 1939-1944". For nearly twenty years has been studying the history of Polish conspiracy on the north-eastern territories of the prof. Tomasz Strzembosz, Rzeczpospolita, 2001-03-31 http://www.iyp.org/polish/history/jedwab |
| Secrets
in the archives |
translated by: Emilia Wisniewska The special operational groups of Gestapo could have operated in Jedwabne, suppose the German historians. The Jews which asked for reparations to German authorities for the suffering caused by Nazis , has not mentioned about participation of Poles in the crime of the The authorities of GBR had conducted at least three investigations by the end of fifties, assuming that the crimes in the The first investigation was re-opened in 1958. Its bases were the indications found in the petitions by the citizens of There was not any suggestion about the participation of Polish civilians in the massacre, say the manager of the regional branch of the German Federal Achieves, Heinz-Ludger Borgert. The research undertaken by the agency in Ludvisburg proved, that in the Bialystok and Lomza regions, independently of the intervening units (Einsatzgruppen) there perhaps operated the special unit designated for the "special assignments", in which included was the Gestapo unit of the Eastern Prussia region. One other of such groups could have operated in the Lomza region, and have something to do with the massacre in Jedwabne - thinks In 1968 similarly, the second investigation against the commanders of SS and police, environmental police and the gandarmerie units, suspected of committing the crime in 9locations in the The Prosecutor took up the third investigation in this matter of In these testimonies there is talk about German responsibility for the crime in Jedwabne - asserts Borget. As a part of this investigation German prosecutor deposed also residing abroad Jewish witnesses. One of them, Cwi Baranowicz, mentions the attempt by Poles to burn Jewish population in the synagogue in Piatnica. According to witnesses, the burning did not occurred only thanks to the German intervention. The witness suggested that the Poles participated in the Jedwabne massacre. However, Baranowicz himself had not ever resided in Jedwabne. Borget admitted that in the German sources one could find the information that Germans considered the possibility of using anti- Semitic sentiments in the local community on the territory that has been taken by German army in June 1941, to ignite pogroms. - The word of caution was issued to make German initiative invisible - explains. Borgert excluded the possibility of existing the German film in Koblencja and in -It does not apply to Poles- said Professor Witold Kulesza . The witnesses deposed in the trials of the Jedwabne crime conducted in The prosecution in Part of the documents in Ludvisburg was sent to the by the Main Commission for Investigating Nazis Crimes. And even there is no mention about Poles. When Main Commission to Investigate Nazi Crimes were to address the German authorities to take up the investigation it would indicate the German preceptors. And that is why it did not rely to the German side for example the testimonies of the witnesses of the trial conducted in Why than to come back to the matters already known for a long time? We are coming back to these documents to find out what was established, thus far. However, we must admit that they do not bring a breakthrough in the investigation. Wojciech Kamiński, pap Wojciech Kamiński, pap, Zycie, 2001-03-24 back to the english home page |
| Jewish
crooks from Jedwabne by Prof. Jerzy Robert Nowak |
translated by: Mariusz Wesolowski by Jerzy Robert Nowak [...] Jewish crooks from Jedwabne In the June 2001 issue of the "Kulisy" magazine there appeared a shocking article "Discovering the secret" by Danuta and Aleksander Wroniszewski. This journalistic couple several years ago (in 1988, in the Lomza weekly "Kontakty"), for the first time in In the words of the "Kulisy" commentator, "(...) the Wroniszewskis discovered then some startling criminal-financial aspects of this case, which might have had an impact on the later testimonies of Jewish witnesses. We reveal them now for the first time". The new article by the Wroniszewskis brings forth facts compromising one of Gross's false witnesses, namely, Eliasz Gradowski - a petty thief during the war, who afterwards became a larger-scale crook appropriating possessions of the murdered Jews. In a subchapter called "Affairs with property", the Wroniszewskis write: "Different reasons certainly motivated Eliasz Gradowski who appeared as a prosecution witness during the 1949 trial. He named specific Poles participating in the pogrom and described their actions, he also described the resulting robbery of ex-Jewish possessions, although in the period of 1940-45 he had been away in We have run into this story in the course of our investigation of the colorful and controversial functionary of the District Security Office in Lomza, one Eliasz Trokenheim. In January 1949, when his colleagues were arresting Poles suspected of the participation in the mass burning of Jews at Jedwabne, Trokenheim was a defendant before the Prof. Jerzy Robert Nowak, Niedziela, 2001-06-24 http://www.iyp.org/polish/history/jedwab |
| The
Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of by J. Schatz (Review) |
Kevin MacDonald's review of a book by J. Schatz, "The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland" (1991) in Kevin MacDonald, THE CULTURE OF CRITIQUE: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Westport, Connecticut & London, 1998. Page numbers are in MacDonald's book. Comments by Peter Myers {thus}, May 7, 2001. { {p. 61} Communism and Jewish Identification in Poland Schatz's (1991) work on the group of Jewish communists who came to power in Poland after World War II (termed by Schatz "the generation") is important because it sheds light on the identificatory processes of an entire generation of communist Jews in Eastern Europe. Unlike the situation in the The great majority of this group were socialized in very traditional Jewish families "... whose inner life, customs and folklore, religious traditions, leisure time, contacts between generations, and ways of socializing were, despite variations, essentially permeated by traditional Jewish values and norms of conduct.... The core of cultural heritage was handed down to them through formal religious education and practice, through holiday celebrations, tales, and songs, through the stories told by parents and grandparents, through listening to discussions among their elders.... The result was a deep core of their identity, values, norms, and attitudes with which they entered the rebellious period of their youth and adulthood. This core was to be transformed in the processes of acculturation, secularization, and radicalization sometimes even to the point of explicit denial. However, it was through this deep layer that all later perceptions were filtered. " (Schatz 1991, 37-38) Note the implication that self-deceptive processes were at work here: Members of the generation denied the effects of a pervasive socialization experience that colored all of their subsequent perceptions, so that in a very real sense, they did not know how Jewish they were. Most of these individuals spoke Yiddish in their daily lives and had only a poor command of Polish even after joining the party (p. 54). They socialized entirely with other Jews whom they met in the Jewish world of work, neighborhood, and Jewish social and political organizations. After they became communists, they dated and married among themselves and their social gatherings were conducted in Yiddish (p. 116). As is the case for all of the Jewish intellectual and political movements discussed in this volume, their mentors and principle influences were other ethnic Jews, including especially Luxemburg and Trotsky (pp. 62, 89), and when they recalled personal heroes, they were mostly Jews whose exploits achieved semi-mythical proportions (p. 112). Jews who joined the communist movement did not first reject their ethnic identity, and there were many who "cherished Jewish culture . . . [and] dreamed of a society in which Jews would be equal as Jews" (p. 48). Indeed, it (p. 62) "... was common for individuals to combine a strong Jewish identity with Marxism as well as various combinations of Zionism and Bundism. Moreover, the attraction of Polish Jews to communism was greatly facilitated by their knowledge that Jews had attained high-level positions of power and influence in the (p. 60). "In both the Soviet Union and At one end of the spectrum of Jewish identification were communists who began their career in the Bund or in Zionist organizations, spoke Yiddish, and worked entirely within a Jewish milieu. Jewish and communist identities were completely sincere, without ambivalence or perceived conflict between these two sources of identity. At the other end of the spectrum of Jewish identification, some Jewish communists may have intended to establish a de-ethnicized state without Jewish group continuity, although the evidence for this is less than compelling. In the pre-war period even the most "de-ethnicized" Jews only outwardly assimilated by dressing like gentiles, taking gentile-sounding names (suggesting deception), and learning their languages. They attempted to recruit gentiles into the movement but did not assimilate or attempt to assimilate into Polish culture; they retained traditional Jewish "disdainful and supercilious attitudes" toward what, as Marxists, they viewed as a "retarded" Polish peasant culture (p. 119). Even the most highly assimilated Jewish communists working in urban areas with non-Jews were upset by the Soviet-German nonaggression pact but were relieved when the German-Soviet war finally broke out (p. 121) - a clear indication that Jewish personal identity remained quite close to the surface. The Communist Party of Poland (KPP) also retained a sense of promoting specifically Jewish interests rather than blind allegiance to the In SAID (Ch. 8) it was noted that identificatory ambivalence has been a consistent feature of Judaism since the Enlightenment. It is interesting that Polish Jewish activists showed a great deal of identificatory ambivalence stemming ultimately from the contradiction between "the belief in some kind of Jewish collective existence and, at the same time, a rejection of such an ethnic communion, as it was thought incompatible with class divisions and harmful to the general political struggle; striving to maintain a specific kind of (p. 63) " Jewish culture and, at the same time, a view of this as a mere ethnic form of the communist message, instrumental in incorporating Jews into the Polish Socialist community; and maintaining separate Jewish institutions while at the same time desiring to eliminate Jewish separateness as such" (p. 234). It will be apparent in the following that the Jews, including Jewish communists at the highest levels of the government, continued as a cohesive, identifiable group. However, although they themselves appear not to have noticed the Jewish collective nature of their experience (p. 240), it was observable to others - a clear example of self-deception also evident in the case of American Jewish leftists, as noted below. These Jewish communists were also engaged in elaborate rationalizations and self-deceptions related to the role of the communist movement in This combination of self-deceptive rationalization as well as considerable evidence of a Jewish identity can be seen in the comments of Jacub Berman, one of the most prominent leaders of the post war era. (Two communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, Berman and Hilary Minc, were Jews.) Regarding the purges and murders of thousands of communists, including many Jews, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Berman states: "I tried as best I could to explain what was happening; to clarify the background, the situations full of conflict and internal contradictions in which Stalin had probably found himself and which forced him to act as he did; and to exaggerate the mistakes of the opposition, which assumed grotesque proportions in the subsequent charges against them and were further blown up by Soviet propaganda. You had to have a great deal of endurance and dedication to the cause then in order to accept what was happening despite all the distortions, injuries and torments." (In Toranska 1987, 207) As to his Jewish identity, Berman responded as follows when asked about his plans after the war: "I didn't have any particular plans. But I was aware of the fact that as a Jew shouldn't or wouldn't be able to fill any of the highest posts. Besides, I don't mind not being in the front ranks: not because I'm particularly humble by nature, but because it's not at all the case that you have to project yourself into a position of prominence in order to wield real power. The important thing to me was to exert my influence, leave my stamp on the complicated government formation, which was being created, but without projecting myself. Naturally, this required a certain agility." (In Toranska 1987, 237) Clearly Berman identifies himself as a Jew and is well aware that others perceive him as a Jew and that therefore he must deceptively lower his public profile. Berman also notes that he was under suspicion as a Jew during the Soviet anti-"Cosmopolite" campaign beginning in the late 1940s. His brother, an activist in the Central Committee of Polish Jews (the organization for establishing a secular Jewish culture in communist While Jewish members saw the KPP as beneficial to Jewish interests, the party was perceived by gentile Poles even before the war as "pro-Soviet, antipatriotic, and ethnically 'not truly Polish' " (Schatz 1991, 82). This perception of lack of patriotism was the main source of popular hostility to the KPP (Schatz 1991, 91). On the one hand, for much of its existence the KPP had been at war not only with the On the other hand, in the eyes of the great majority of Poles, the KPP was a foreign, subversive agency of Moscow, bent on the destruction of The KPP backed the (p. 65) "Polish government-in-exile, to be defeated by the Germans resulting in 200,000 dead, thus wiping out "the cream of the anti- and non-communist activist elite" (Schatz 1991, 188). The Soviets also arrested surviving non-communist resistance leaders immediately after the war. Moreover, as was the case with the CPUSA, actual Jewish leadership and involvement in Polish Communism was much greater than surface appearances; ethnic Poles were recruited and promoted to high positions in order to lessen the perception that the KPP was a Jewish movement (Schatz 1991, 97). This attempt to deceptively lower the Jewish profile of the communist movement was also apparent in the ZPP. (The ZPP refers to the Union of Polish Patriots - an Orwellian-named communist front organization created by the Soviet Union to occupy When this group came to power after the war, they advanced Soviet political, economic, and cultural interests in The Jewish-dominated communist government actively sought to revive and perpetuate Jewish life in Moreover, the Jewish-dominated government regarded the Jewish population, many of whom had not previously been communists, as "a reservoir that could be trusted and enlisted in its efforts to rebuild the country. Although not old, 'tested' comrades, they were not rooted in the social networks of the anti-communist society, they were outsiders with regard to its historically shaped traditions, without connections to the Catholic Church, and hated by those who hated the regime. Thus they could be depended on and used to fill the required positions" (Schatz 1991, 212-213). Jewish ethnic background was particularly important in recruiting for the internal security service: The generation of Jewish communists realized that their power derived entirely from the Jewish members of the internal security force often appear to have been motivated by personal rage and a desire for revenge related to their Jewish identity: " Their families had been murdered and the anti-Communist underground was, in their perception, a continuation of essentially the same anti-Semitic and anti-Communist tradition. They hated those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who opposed the new order with almost the same intensity and knew that as Communists, or as both Communists and Jews, they were hated at least in the same way In their eyes, the enemy was essentially the same The old evil deeds had to be punished and new ones prevented and a merciless struggle was necessary before a better world could be built." (Schatz 1991, 226) As in the case of post World War II Hungary (see below), Poland became polarized between a predominantly Jewish ruling and administrative class supported by the rest of the Jewish population and by Soviet military power, arrayed against the great majority of the native gentile population. The situation was exactly analogous to the many instances in traditional societies where Jews formed a middle layer between an alien ruling elite, in this case the Soviets, and the gentile native population (see PTSDA, Ch. 5). However this intermediary role made the former outsiders into an elite group in Poland, and the former champions of social justice went to great lengths to protect their own personal prerogatives, including a great deal of rationalization and self-deception (p. 261). Indeed, when a defector's accounts of the elite's lavish lifestyle (e.g., Boleslaw Bierut had four villas and the use of five others [Toranska 1987, 28]), their corruption, as well as their role as Soviet agents became known in 1954, there were shock waves throughout the lower levels of the party (p. 266). Clearly, the sense of moral superiority and the altruistic motivations of this group were entirely in their own self-deceptions. Although attempts were made to place a Polish face on what was in reality a Jewish-dominated government, such attempts were limited by the lack of trustworthy Poles able to fill positions in the Communist Party, government administration, the military and the internal security forces. Jews who had severed formal ties with the Jewish community, or who had changed their names to Polish-sounding names, or who could pass as Poles because of their physical appearance or lack of a Jewish accent were favored in promotions (p. 214). Whatever the subjective personal identities of the individuals recruited into these government positions, the recruiters were clearly acting on the perceived ethnic background of the individual as a cue to dependability, and the result was that the situation resembled the many instances in traditional societies where Jews and crypto-Jews developed economic and political networks of coreligionists: "Besides a group of influential politicians, too small to be called a category, there were the soldiers; the apparatchiks and the administrators; the intellectuals and ideologists; the policemen; the diplomats; and finally, the activists in the Jewish sector. There also existed the mass of common people - clerks, craftsmen, and workers - whose common denominator with the others was a shared ideological vision, a past history, and the essentially similar mode of ethnic aspiration" (p. 226). It is revealing that when Jewish economic and political domination gradually decreased in the mid- to late-1950s, many of these individuals began working in the Jewish economic cooperatives, and Jews purged from the internal security service were aided by Jewish organizations funded ultimately by American Jews. There can be little doubt of their continuing Jewish identity and the continuation of Jewish economic and cultural separatism. Indeed, after the collapse of the communist regime in When the anti-Zionist-anti-Semitic movement in the Soviet Union filtered down to As with Jewish groups throughout the ages (see PTSDA, Ch. 3), the anti-Jewish purges did not result in their abandoning their group commitment even when it resulted in unjust persecutions. Instead, it resulted in increased commitment, "unswerving ideological discipline, and obedience to the point of self-deception.... They regarded the party as the collective personification of the progressive forces of history and, regarding themselves as its servants, expressed a specific kind of teleological-deductive dogmatism, revolutionary haughtiness, and moral ambiguity" (pp. 260 261). Indeed, there is some indication that group cohesiveness increased as the fortunes of the generation declined (p. 301). As their position was gradually eroded by a nascent anti-Semitic Polish nationalism, they became ever more conscious of their "groupness." After their final defeat they quickly lost any Polish identity they might have had and quickly assumed overtly Jewish identities, especially in In conclusion, Schatz's treatment shows that the generation of Jewish communists and their ethnically Jewish supporters must be considered as an historic Jewish group. The evidence indicates that this group pursued specifically Jewish interests, including especially their interest in securing Jewish group continuity in (p. 98) Jews thus achieved leading positions in these societies in the early stages. but in the long run, anti-Semitism in the The cases of Anti-Semitism increased dramatically toward the end of the 1960s. Jews were gradually downgraded in status and Jewish communists were blamed for The "earthquake" finally erupted in 1968 with an anti-Semitic campaign consequent to outpourings of joy among Jews over (p. 99) Extensive purges of Jews swept the country and secular Jewish life (e.g., Yiddish magazines and Jewish schools and day camps) was essentially dissolved. This hatred toward Jews clearly resulted from the role Jews played in post war The case of More from Kevin MacDonald's book: The Culture of Critique. To order Kevin MacDonald's The Culture of Critique from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ To order J. Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ Kevin MacDonald, , 0000-00-00 powrot |
| Judeo -
Communism, myth or truth? Written and collated from various sources by Krzysztof Janiewicz |
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Long before Hitler had emerged on the world stage, a young journalist who's name was Winston Churchill had written as follows in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, "There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a very great one. It probably outweighs all others. With the possible exception of Lenin, the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherine, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunachasski cannot be compared with the power ( So much from the contemporary assertion of W. Churchill. Of course, he himself could be wrong, his assertion of the situation in But there are many corroborating historical sources supporting his assertion. So did really so many Jews, or as some prefer to say, people of the Jewish origin or background, played a major role in the establishing of the Communist system, and served as Lenin's and Stalin's willing executioners? Did those people really compose such a disproportionate number of the new ruling elite as to earn for the whole system a term Judeo-Communism? State Department document 861.00/1757 sent May 2, 1918 by State Department document 861.00/2205 was sent from From the Headquarters of the American Expeditionary Forces, Siberia on March 1, 1919, comes this telegram from A second Schuyler telegram, dated June 9, 1919 from Even as recently as 1965, a study by the US Senate Judiciary Committee of anti-Jewish policies of the Soviet government at that time entitled "The Soviet Empire, A Study of Discrimination and Abuse of Power" revealed that before WW II a whopping 41.1% of the members of the entire Supreme Soviet had been Jews despite being a mere 2% of the population. "Whatever the racial antecedents of their top man, the first Soviet commissariats were largely staffed with Jews. The Jewish position in the Communist movement was well understood in "In the Bolshevik era, 52 percent of the membership of the Soviet communist party was Jewish, though Jews comprised only 1.8 percent of the total population." (Stuart Kahan (grandson of Lazar Kaganvich), The Wolf of the Kremlin, p. 81) Norman Cantor, professor of history at In another book, Cantor provides confirmation of Jewish prominence in other important areas of the communist government: " The founders of the Soviet secret police (later KGB), headquartered in Lubyanka prison in "During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that-as 1930s anti-Semites claimed-Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s. Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time, Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the "Even in absolute numbers, the Jews...made up the largest group in the leadership of the Stalinist Secret Police. The Russian myth of the "Jewish NKVD" thus had a factual basis. The Nazis, who knew precisely of these facts, used it for their propaganda purposes of the Jewish-Bolshevik terror regime that they felt obligated to destroy." ("Special Tasks" by Pavel and Anatoli Sudoplatov, 1995, Little, Brown and Co. N.K. Petrow and K.W. Skorkin (Title: "Who led the NKWD, 1934-1941?" Publisher: N.G. Ochotin, A.B. Roginskij, Verlag Swenja, Lets look at the situation from the beginning. Karl Marx: "on both paternal and maternal sides Karl Marx was descended from rabbinical families" (Univ. Jew. Encyc., Vol.VII, p. 289). The words of the leader of the Bolshevik revolution, W. U. I. Lenin: " The clever Russian is almost always a Jew or has Jewish blood in him ." (Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography, p. 112). ("Lenin's Lineage? 'Jewish,' Claims Lenin, whose maternal grandfather, Israel Blank, was Jewish, said that Jews made the best revolutionaries. Lenin was both clever and a revolutionary. He was surely referring to himself. Researcher Wayne McGuire of Harvard University writes: "Lenin was a Jew by the standards of Israel's Law of Return: he possessed a Jewish grandparent...It would seem that not only was Lenin a Jew, but that he was a Jewish racist and chauvinist, although he kept his ideas on this volatile subject far in the background, probably because they were in radical conflict with the supposed universalism of Marxism. ...Lenin was a Jewish racist who deliberately gave Jews especially, the most 'intellectually demanding tasks.' He admitted that 50% of the communist terrorist vanguard in the south and west of But was Lenin the only one who was "clever and revolutionary" and was a Jew "or has Jewish blood in him."? Nikolai Bukharin: Lenin's chief theorist. David Ryazanov: adviser to Lenin. Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) leader of the Russian Revolution, was an architect of the Red Army, and commissar of foreign affairs between 1917-1924. Lev Rosenfeld (Kamenev): member of the Central Committee. Maxim Litvinov (Wallach): foreign affairs commissar. Moses Uritsky head of the Commissary for the Constituent Assembly. Mikhail Gruzenberg (Borodin) commissar. Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and - as chairman of the Central Executive Committee - head of the Soviet government. As the first president of the Soviet Union, Sverdlov ordered the massacre of the Czar's family-women and children-in the town named after Catherine the Great, Yekaterinburg, (renamed Jacob Yurovsky: commander, Soviet Secret Police. Yurovsky led the death squad that carried out Sverdlov's order for the murder of the Czar's family, including the bayoneting to death of the Czar's daughters. The Ipatyev house, where, in the basement, the massacre had occurred, stood intact until 1977, when the local Communist party boss at that time, Boris Yeltsin, ordered it demolished, lest it become a shrine to anti-Jewish sentiment. Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading communist revolution in other countries. This top Communist Jewish official stated: "Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritzky, Zinoviev and Volodarsky, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeoisie – more blood! As much as possible!" (Krasnaya Gazeta, Sept. 1, 1918). Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich: chief mass murderer for Stalin, butcher of the Ukraine, implementing the holocaust on Russia's and the Ukraine's rural population he planned, ordered and supervised the deaths of app. 7 millions of the Ukrainians and the wholesale destruction of Christian monuments and churches, including the great Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Standing amid the rubble of the cathedral, Kaganovich proclaimed, "Mother Russia is cast down. We have ripped away her skirts." (N.Y. Times, Sept. 26,1995). When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent his henchman Lazar Kaganovich to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovich, the Soviet Eichmann(Jew), made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent of all Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovich and OGPU hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. Some parents even ate infant children. The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's custom-made famine and Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day. The KGB's archives, and recent work by Russian historians, show that at least seven million died. Ukrainian historians put the figure at nine million, or higher. Twenty-five percent of The predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders, and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted by Stalin's Cheka on Ukraine and the Baltic, led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both, communism and their suffering. KOMZET: commission for the settlement of Jewish Communists on the land seized from murdered Christians in Genrikh Yagoda*: chief of Soviet Secret Police, mass murderer extraordinaire. (Jewish poet Romain Rolland, winner of the Nobel Prize, wrote a hymn of praise to Yagoda). Sergei Eisenstein: director of communist propaganda films that depicted Christian peasants (kulaks) as hideous, money-grabbing parasites. The kulaks were subsequently massacred. (Cf. for example Eisenstein's "Bezhin Meadow"). Ilya Ehrenburg: Minister of Soviet Propaganda and disseminator of anti-German hate material dating from the 1930s. Ehrenburg instigated the Soviet Red Army rape and murder of German civilians. Referring to German women, Ehrenburg gloated to the advancing Red Army troops, "that blonde hag is in for a bad time." In a leaflet addressed to Soviet troops, Ehrenburg wrote: "...the Germans are not human beings...nothing gives us so much joy as German corpses." (Anatol Goldberg, Ilya Ehrenburg, p. 197). Goldberg concedes that Ehrenburg, "...had always disliked the Germans...now that there was a war on he turned his old prejudice into an asset." (Ibid., p. 193). Mikhail Kaganovich: deputy commissar of heavy industry, supervisor of slave labour, brother of Lazar. Rosa Kaganovich: Stalin's mistress; sister of Lazar. Paulina Zhemchuzina: member of the Central Committee and wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov. Olga Bronstein: officer, Soviet Cheka Secret Police, sister of Trotsky, wife of Kamenev. Matvei Berman and Naftaly Frenkel: founders of the Gulag death camp system. Lev Inzhir: commissar for Soviet death camp transit and administration. Boris Berman: executive officer of the Soviet Secret Police and brother of Matvei. K.V. Pauker: chief of operations, Soviet NKVD Secret Police. Firin, Rappoport, Kogan, Zhuk: commissars of death camps and slave labour supervised the mass deaths of the prisoners during the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. M.I. Gay: commander, Soviet Secret Police. Slutsky and Shpiegelglas: commanders, Soviet Secret Police. Theodore Dan, Julius Martov (Zederbaum), and M.I. Lieber (formerly of the Jewish Bund) led Menshevik’s fraction. And so on and on. Many more, every one of them had a blood of millions of the people on their hands. From Robert Wilton's, "The Last Days of the Romanovs" Published 1920: According to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of 556 important functionaries of the Bolshevik state, in 1918-19 there were 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35 Latvians, 15 Germans, one Hungarian, 10 Georgians, 3 Poles, 3 Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews. Out of 22 "Sovnarkom" members, The Extraordinary Commission of Moscow (Cheka), the Soviet secret police and predecessor of the GPU, the NKVD, and the KGB, was made up of the following: Out of 36 Cheka's top officials, one was a Pole, one a German, one an Armenian, two were Russians, eight were Latvians, and 23 were Jews. "Accordingly," Such was the situation in But after the WWII Poland and the Poles also experienced a very similar system. So, could the term Judeo-Communism (Zydokomuna) be justified in regard to the situation in In 1945 the Red Army "freed" But it didn't stop after 1945. "Only Soviet-trained intelligence agents were trusted by the Soviet government among Polish prewar Communists. Among those "the Jews ... were ... considered less susceptible to the lures of Polish nationalism, to which even impeccable Polish communists were not thought immune" (" Also, Stalin expected a fierce resistance from the Polish population (in fact he was right, because what can be termed a civil war lasted in Poland till at least 1950), so by placing Jews in the leading position in what was seen by the local population as an occupational force, he could get an extra propaganda benefit. During an armed confrontation, the Polish anti – communist resistance fighters, who were shooting in the direction of the Red Star, had a good chance that the bullets would hit a Jew who was carrying it. From there was only one-step to accuse Poles on the international forum of anti – Semitism, murdering the "poor holocaust survivors" or the "poor Jewish refugees" returning home. That way the political conflict could be turned in to the ethnic conflict in the eyes of the world. In the Polish collective memory of World War II, the Nazi occupation is organically tied to the Soviet occupation. Soviet hemocidal policies directed at The Soviets brought with them new political elites. Let’s see who they were. In "State Security in the Soviet-occupied "After 1945 came the Soviet occupation, the aforementioned Jakub Berman, the most dreaded man in Poland, on whose conscience lie the deaths of 30,000 Home Army soldiers murdered in prisons and torture chambers in Soviet-occupied Poland" (Teresa Toranska, Them, Harper & Row, 1987, 201-354). Jakub Berman was strategically placed in the second most powerful position in the government. (in the theory second to Bierut in the hierarchy, but in reality more powerful, in his office had a direct telephone line to Stalin, cordial relationship between Stalin and Berman is described in Teresa Toranska’s book "Them". Berman was a member of the Politburo, and State Security Services (U.B.) was under his direct control. He was perceived not only as communist but also as a Jew. In the interview he gave to Teresa Toranska he said: "I knew very well, that as a Jew I couldn’t or rather I shouldn’t take the highest position [in the government]. But I didn’t really care if I took a position in the first row. True power doesn’t flow from the personal exposure. I wanted to make my own mark on the new reality that was taking a shape then, but without personally exposing myself. It of course demanded a lot of cunning". And he made his own mark indeed, by the blood of the Polish patriots that he and his cohorts murdered by the thousands. We do remember till now and hopefully we will never forget. Him and the others, and their descendants, who now, in today’s Hilary Minc: third most powerful man in the government, member of the Politburo, in charge of Treasury Gen. Roman Romkowski (Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel): vice-minister of the State Security Ministry. As such, and as Berman’s confidant supervised departments of Training and Investigations. Gen. Juliusz Hibner (Dawid Schwartz): Commander of the Internal Security. In 1951-56 Chief Commander of the Army. Jozef Rozanski (Josek Goldberg): Director of Department of Investigations in State Security. Well known torturer. Charged with overusing his powers and the torture of the prisoners (!!!), sentenced in December 1955 to 5 years of imprisonment. (This gives a new meaning to the saying: Being kicked out from the KGB for cruelty) Leon Andrzejewski (Lajb Wof Ajzen): Chief of Staff of Minister's Office Luna Brystygier (Julia Brustiger): head of Political Department in the Bureau. Director of the V Department in the State Security. Known also as "Bloody Luna" Anatol Fejgin: Director of the X Department in the State Security. Czaplinski: Director of the III Department, in charge of the campaign against AK, nicknamed Akower, because he was famous from cruelty towards imprisoned soldiers of AK. Duliasz: Director of VI Department. Zabawski: Director of VIII Department, until year 1939 was resident-agent of NKVM for Gorecki vel Goldberg: Director of IX Department And the rest of Directors and vice-Directors of Bureau: Col.col.Rubinstein,Sajewski, Krupski, Sinekiewicz (Levi), Gangel, Burgin, Tyborski a former policeman in Ghetto, Jozef Swiatlo (Izaak Flieschfarb) Those are names of just highest brass of so called "Polish" Ministry of State Security. According to Jewish researcher John Sack, "In 1945 many Poles felt (and not without reason) that Jews ran the Office of State Security...the chief of the Office was Jacob Berman, a Jew, and all or almost all the department heads were Jews." Sack reports that 75% of the officers of the Communist Secret Police in Now from John Sack "An Eye for an Eye" conference that took place on HYPERLINK "http://www.compuserve.com/" Nizkor Project: "Now, the Office of State Security was a Polish government organization. The lower ranks were Polish Catholics but most of the leaders were Polish Jews. The chief of the Office in In the province where Lola was, Silesia, in Silesia the director of the Office of State Security was a Jew, I met him in Copenhagen, a little baldheaded man, the director of prisons was a Jew, I met his whole family in Tel Aviv, the secretary of state security was a Jew, I met him time and again at his home in New Jersey. And in One woman I talk to. She wasn't even German, she was Polish. In 1945 she was 20 years old, tall, blonde, beautiful, medical student. The guards at Lola's prison pulled off her clothes and told her, "Let's do it!" They beat her and beat her night after night until she was black and blue. One morning, she came back to her cell and fell on the floor [look at her], sobbing. Her cellmate asked her, "What, what is that blue thing you're wearing? Oh, oh, it's your skin." Alex/Sysop asks: You mentioned one man who wouldn't talk to you. Was it hard to get folks to open up about this story? Did many want to keep it "under the rug" as it were? John Sack: Alex, I'm writing a book now about the Chinese Mafia. I promise it's much, much easier to get a Chinese gangster to talk to you, even to tell you about the people he murdered that the police don't know of, than to get the Jews who ran the concentration camps for Germans in 1945 to talk about that. One man said he'd sue me. One man said he'd destroy me. One man said he'd kill me. I think he meant it. Michael S. Curtis asks: I can understand the revenge factor. Can you offer a trail of how many Jewish folks ended up controlling concentration camps after the war and where they were? Or is the concern more with revenge carried out by small groups who captured ex-concentration John Sack: Michael, there's no way of knowing how many Jews there were. That's because almost all of them changed their names to Polish Catholic ones, even on their application forms for the Polish secret police. (...)The Jews ran and worked for the Office of State Security, the Polish political police. They wore uniforms and called themselves lieutenants, captains, even generals. They certainly weren't working in small groups. Now to your next question.... Michael S. Curtis: It would seem that the sacking of John Sack: It did. But that's another matter. A lot has been written about what the secret police did to the Poles. I'm writing about what the secret police ("almost entirely Jewish-led," the In As Piotr S. Wandycz of As Simon Wisenthal said: "I am talking on this subject (Polish-Jews relation), I always say that I know what kind of role Jewish Communists played in Excerpts from The Sunday Telegraph "...In his office on Nowowieska street, not far from where Mrs Brus-Wolinska used to work, Gen Michalowski produces a list of several dozen similar investigations; into the activities of judges and prosecutors responsible for the deaths or imprisonment of famous Home Army officers, obscure Home Army soldiers, even participants in anti-communist riots in the l970s. Some of these investigations have resulted in prison sentences. Some have been called off due to the ill health or deaths of the accused. While his office cannot release all of the military prosecutor's evidence against Mrs Brus -- that must await the trial and extradition hearings -- Col Palus is happy to spell out some of the circumstances of Gen Fieldorf's arrest and execution. He says that Mrs Brus is not being accused of breaking the law retrospectively: he claims she violated laws which applied at the time, illegally extending Gen Fieldorf's arrest without charging him or producing any evidence. When I spoke to Mrs Brus, I asked her whether she got involved much in other cases. "What, do you think I sat there and drank coffee?" she laughed. "We were very busy in those days indeed". "She was a very important military prosecutor," says Col Palus. As for her declaration of innocence, "they all say that. All of them say they are innocent until they are confronted with their victims, and some of them keep saying it even then." In It is also true, however, that many Poles deeply resent Jews who use their Jewishness as an excuse when they are accused of other crimes. Maria Fieldorf Czarska, the General's daughter, says bitterly that she doubts Mrs Brus will ever come to trial: "She will say she is old, she will say she is ill, she will say we are anti-Semitic." More than one person points out a curious irony: Senator Bartoszewski, whom Mrs Brus arrested, is best known for having led the Home Army division which was responsible for rescuing Jews. He is also an Auschwitz survivor, and now an honorary citizen of This Polish view matters, because it is Polish justice, which is at stake. This isn't an Anglo-Saxon debate, any more than is the debate about the extradition of General Pinochet: the exploration of a totalitarian past isn't a British passion. One Polish government official formulates the problem like this: "Just because Jews were victims of crimes against humanity, does that mean they cannot be tried for crimes against humanity themselves?" That is not a British question, and few British people would ask it." There are many more like Brus-Wolinska that probably never will be brought to justice. Many more murderers from the communist era are hiding in the * GENRIKH YAGODA Alexander Solzhenitsyn is recognised as the "father of democracy" in Solzhenitsyn writes of the period in 1934 and 1935, when the Jewish commissar Genrikh Yagoda headed the Soviet secret police, and Yagoda's black vans went out every night in St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, to round up "class enemies": former members of the aristocracy, former civil servants, former businessmen, former teachers and professors and professional people, any Russian who had graduated from a university. A quarter of the population of the city was arrested and liquidated by Yagoda during this two-year period. And Solzhenitsyn laments that the citizens of cowardice and their selfishness the Russians deserved what the communists did to them. Krzysztof Janiewicz, , 0000-00-00 powrot
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