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

Between Tumbling Walls, by Tuvia Borzykowski. 1976

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Steeped in Communism. Jews Loot Jews. Denouncers Include Jews. All-Ways Cruel Jokes

This book is unusual in several respects. It contains a diary of life in Warsaw–not in the Warsaw Ghetto before the Jewish Uprising, but covert life in Aryan Warsaw after this Uprising. (pp. 115-157).

Was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising an answer to “Jewish passivity?” In a way, Borzykowski thinks so: “In the four days of fighting we had made up for the shame of Jewish passivity in the first extermination action of July, 1942.” (pp. 29-30).

POLES WERE RIGHT: WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING (1943) HAD A HEAVY COMMUNIST PRESENCE (ZYDOKOMUNA)

Polish suspicions of the ZOB (Z.O.B.) being entangled with Communism find support in the author’s glowing portrayal of his memories of celebrating May Day: “…we had a short moment of elation coupled with nostalgia for the good old days. What street demonstrations there used to be on May 1, with thousands of workers marching, red flags waving the in the wind, bands blaring!” (p. 87).

NOT ONLY POLES LOOTED JEWS: JEWS ALSO LOOTED OTHER JEWS, INCLUDING A FORM OF GRAVE ROBBERY

The reader is reminded once again that plunder is a common feature of wartime–unlike Jan T. Gross and his obsession with Poles acquiring post-Jewish properties as a presumed result of (what else?) Polish anti-Semitism. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Jewish shabrovniks (looters) went to the bunkers destroyed by the Germans, and: “Not only food was the aim of the “shabrovniks”. In those days, when the most precious items had lost all value, the ghouls searched the pockets of the dead for jewels and currency. They removed rings and watches from the victims of the deadly gas, or even a good pair of shoes.” (p. 79).

DENOUNCERS: NOT ONLY POLES: ALSO GERMANS AND JEWS. OR GERMANS FOUND FUGITIVE JEWS WITHOUT ANY HELP AT ALL

After the Uprising, the author briefly hid in the nearby Lomianka Woods (Puszcza Kampinowska) before hiding among Poles in Warsaw. He alludes to the help provided by Zegota. (p. 123). Instead of focusing exclusively on Polish blackmailers and denouncers of Jews, he notes that Germans often identified fugitive Jews directly (p. 120), and that the blackmailers/denouncers (szmalcowniki) included Germans (p. 120) and Jews, including specifically-named ones. (pp. 143-145).

WHETHER IT IS FUGITIVE JEWS OR POLISH FIREARMS, GERMANS THEMSELVES FIND THEM

There is a bit of irony to Jan T. Gross and his portrayal of Poles willing to incur the German-imposed death penalty for possession of firearms but not for hiding Jews. Systematic German searches of Polish Warsaw apartments, done for the purpose of suppressing the Underground by uncovering hidden weaponry, also uncovered hidden Jews. (p. 136). Clearly, the Germans did not need denouncers in order to find fugitive Jews.

GALLOWS HUMOR, CRUEL JOKES: NOT ONLY POLES ABOUT JEWS. ALSO JEWS ABOUT JEWS (AND POLES ABOUT POLES)

Seldom-presented information is included. For instance, Borzykowski describes the mental state of the Jews after the first deportations to Treblinka: “It is almost impossible to describe the mood of the ghetto Jews in those days, shortly after the first extermination action. They were broken people, deprived of all human feelings. They accepted everything, did not even hesitate to step over dead bodies, and all eyes expressed the same self-evident truth: `We’ll all end up as soap’. Cynical jokes circulated in the ghetto. One could hear people jokingly calculating how much fat in somebody’s body would produce for the German war machine.” (p. 18). Now consider those accounts (not this one) which state that some Poles made “Jews are frying” remarks, etc., as the Ghetto burned. Could some of these accounts reflect Jew-on-Jew cynicism converted, by psychological displacement in Jewish writers’ minds, into Pole-on-Jew cynicism? In addition, remembering that Poles also were experiencing mass murder by the Germans, could the same psychological processes that created the cruel Jew-on-Jew jokes (among Jews) have also have created the cruel Pole-on-Jew jokes (among Poles)?

Indeed, Poles made similar cruel jokes about THEIR OWN victimhood–about their defenselessness in the face of German incendiary bombing and shelling during the Soviet-betrayed Warsaw Uprising of 1944. See the Peczkis review of A Jump for Life: A Survivor’s Journal from Nazi-Occupied Poland:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/rejoicing-at-jewish-deaths-a-myth-cyprys/