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

Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in PostCommunist Europe, by John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.) 2013

A Prejudicial Orwellian Title (How About “Bringing the Jewish Dark Past to Light?”) Holocaust Preeminence: A Near-Lament That Eastern Europeans Are Not Buying It!

The only value of this book is the comprehensiveness of its treatment of public reception to the Holocaust throughout Eastern Europe. Otherwise, the reader who is looking for something new, or particularly enlightening, can stop right here. It does not. It treats the Holocaust as self-evidently supreme over all other genocides, and never stops hammering this point into the heads of the many Eastern European peoples.

HOLOCAUST BULLYING: JEDWABNE WIELDED AS A CLUB AGAINST POLES–YET AGAIN

The editors, John-Paul Himka and Joanna B. Michlic, call on Eastern European nations to have their own “Jedwabne debates”. (p. 9). In addition, Michlic (p. 410), and Omer Bartov (p. 691) misrepresent Polish responsibility, for Jedwabne, as proven fact. It is not. For instance, see JEDWABNE MASSACRE, by Chodakiewicz:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jedwabne-how-jan-t-gross-manipulates-facts-chodakiewicz/

SOME HOLOCAUSTSPEAK: WHOSE DARK PAST?

The phrase–dark past—used in the title of this book, is used in a transparently tendentious, Orwellian manner in reference to Eastern Europeans. There is no mention of the dark past of Jewish conduct in Eastern Europe, except in backwards-bending attempts by the authors to evade it–in a manner that seems to border on intellectual dishonesty. In addition, the dark past of the Germans has all but disappeared.

A very thoughtful approach, to the “dark past” construct, is quoted, albeit dismissively, by Omer Bartov, as follows, “The Paris-based Romanian writer Paul Goma believes reconciliation is possible only if the Jews ‘come to the same table of mutual admission of responsibility, as every other ethnic community’.” (p. 669). Now THAT would be the day!

ARE JEWS SPECIAL? INESCAPABLY, YES. HOLOCAUSTIANITY

The reader may be astonished, as I was, about the number of nations throughout Eastern Europe that have already been subject to Holocaust supremacist thinking. In fact, much of this book is, quite frankly, a litany of complaints (and even laments) that Eastern Europeans are not generally buying into the notion that Jewish suffering is special and that their own genocides (at the hands of the Nazis and Communists) are secondary. This is notably said of Estonia (p. 202, 668), Latvia (p. 317), Lithuania (p. 327), Poland (pp. 439-440), Russia (p. 488), Slovenia (p. 687), Ukraine (p. 646), etc. On the other hand, specifically-named Eastern European individuals that are Judeocompliant are featured and praised. All this is standard practice.

WARMED-OVER POLONOPHOBIA

In her chapter on Poland, Joanna Beata Michlic dusts off all her mischaracterizations of basic facts, and of scholars not to her liking, that she had presented in her bigoted anti-Polish Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/polonophobic-memes-antisemitism-michlic/

GERMAN GUILT EVASION AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Author Bella Zisere quotes Latvian-American historian Andrew Ezergailis, who speaks of the German and Jewish approaches to the Holocaust as ones that involve, in his words, a Germanless Holocaust in which locals are blamed in place of the actual guilty party–the Germans. (p. 304). [I find this observation quite perceptive. In fact, in my reviews, I have been using the phrase “de-Germanization of the Nazis.”]

Ezergailis has developed the theme of the Germanless Holocaust. See my review:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/german-guilt-diffusion-a-germanless-holocaust-ezergailis/

RACIST JEWISH MONUMENT CHAUVINISM: ONLY JEWISH FEELINGS MATTER

Author John-Paul Himka discusses Babi Yar (Babyn Yar) in Ukraine. Some 100,000 locals, mostly Russians and Ukrainians, had been murdered there by the Germans. Among these 100,000 were 33,771 Jews. (p. 645). Recently, an American Jewish group had wanted to build a memorial to only the Jewish victims. In a manner reminiscent to that of Poles regarding Auschwitz, local Ukrainians objected to the privatization (Holocaust monopolization) of Babi Yar as a site memorializing only the Jewish victims. (p. 646). Bravo, Ukes!

For more on how the Jews have been trying to hijack the memory of Babyn Yar, see my reviews:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/victimhood-competition-ukes-beat-jews-young/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/german-guilt-diffusion-smoking-gun-hrynevych/

The foregoing are not isolated instances. Jews have also built a Jews-only monument at a site in Poland where both Jews and Poles were murdered, and where a monument jointly commemorating Poles and Jews had long existed:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/graffiti-poland-abundance-cultural-webber/

The message is loud and clear: Only Jewish suffering is of any lasting importance.