Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

In the Shadow of the Holocaust, by Yosef Grodzinsky. 2004

Lifting the Veil on Censorship: Unmasking the Censored Fact of Zionist Jew-on-Jew Violence in the DP Camps of Postwar Germany

Yosef Grodzinsky is (or was) Professor of Psychology at Tel Aviv University, and Professor and Canada Research Chair in Neurolinguistics at McGill University. His book has favorable mentions from Rabbi Michael Lerner, the Editor of TIKKUN MAGAZINE, and Avraham Burg, a member of the Knesset. (See back cover).

NO LAST-MINUTE NAZI ELIMINATION OF THE JEWS

The author covers the history of refugees and DPs after VE day. A significant fraction of the 180,000 (p. 25) individuals released from Nazi German concentration camps died within weeks of release. Grodzinsky estimates that, in the summer of 1945, some 100,000 of those released were still alive and, of these, several dozen thousands were Jews. (p. 26).

Obviously, with few exceptions, there had been no last-minute Nazi killings of captive Jews. So much for the Holocaust-uniqueness myth that the Nazis had sought the death of every single Jewish man, woman, and child. They obviously did not.

I now focus on three salient themes:

THE JUDENRAT: NOT BEYOND MORAL SCRUTINY

A certain amount of politics permeates this work. The reader learns, for example, that the Revisionist Party ran a 1947 leaflet in which it stated that, “We wish to rid the committees of the shameful legacy of the JUDENRAT.” (p. 154). Obviously, a significant number of Jews at the time believed that Jews, under the Nazis at the time of the Holocaust, were still, to some extent, morally responsible for their conduct. They did not share the now-common view that Jewish-Nazi collaboration could summarily be dismissed under the rubrics of “choiceless choices”, “right and wrong had ceased to exist”, and “All Jews were victims of the Nazis”.

AMAZING! ZIONISTS REPEAT ANTI-SEMITIC NAZI THEMES TO TRY TO SCARE JEWS OUT OF PERMANENTLY SETTLING IN POST-WWII GERMANY

Grodzinsky comments, (quote) Several thousand DPs naturalized in Germany, trying [tried] to build a future for themselves there, in many instances successfully. Of these, the Zionists did not approve. Chayim Hoffman (Yahil), who headed the Jewish Agency mission to Germany, and then became the first Israel Consul in Munich, would later mince no words upon reflecting on these: “The 20,000 DPs still in Germany today not only desecrate Israel’s honor, but also put the nation as a whole in danger. As long as a Jewish community exists in Germany, rootless and devoid of values, inherently parasitic and provocative in its practices, we are under the threat that savage anti-Semitism would once again become the main agent for a revival of a chauvinist Germany, whose venom would spread out from here throughout the Diaspora.” (unquote)(pp. 115-116).

VIOLENCE: NOT JUST SOMETHING THAT THE GOYIM DID TO THE JEWS

The standard narrative is this: Gentiles are prone to violence, while Jews are advanced ethically, and have an abhorrence to violence. Predictably, the violence of “those primitive Poles” against Jews is frequently featured, while Jew-on-Jew violence is almost always ignored. Grodzinsky is an exception to this trend. He discusses the “pogroms” of Zionists done on peaceful Jews in post-WWII Germany.

At the time that the State of Israel was being founded, Zionist agents often used violence against Jews, in the DP camps of Germany and Austria, who were unwilling to be drafted to fight in Palestine. Grodzinsky (p. 199) states that the archives are replete with hundreds of documents that illustrate this organized Jew-on-Jew violence.

The author adds, (quote) It was indeed “unbelievable”, as an editorial in the Paris-based Bundist organ UNSER SHTIME (Our Voice) read, “that Jews, the standard victims of Fascism and terrorism, would be capable of the kinds of violence Zionists in the camps exercise toward their Bundist and non-Zionist political rivals.” (unquote) (p. 207).

ISRAELI CENSORSHIP: ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS KNOWLEDGE OF THE ZIONIST JEW-ON-JEW VIOLENCE

Nowadays, Poles are often accused of not being willing to “face up to dark chapters of their history”, to “engage in moral reckoning”, or to “come to terms with the past” (regarding an assortment of Jewish accusations against Poles). Interestingly, the same charge can be turned around, and directed at prominent Israeli Jews. Yosef Grodzinsky comments, (quote) Israeli historians thus decided to be active participants in the nation-building endeavor, rather than commit to the standards and norms of their profession. This is not atypical: Controversial parts of national history receive a similar treatment in many countries. The consequence, at any rate, was that the DP affair I told here was expunged from the books, remaining unknown for long decades. Repeated allegations (mostly be Bund members) regarding violence in the DP camps in the context of the draft were denied by Zionist historians. (unquote). (p. 230).