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

Surviving Treblinka, by Samuel Willenberg. 1989

Polish Underground Killing of Fugitive Jews Potentially Driven By Faulty Intelligence

Samuel Willenberg is one of the few Jews who escaped from the Treblinka death camp. He provides gruesome details of what took place there. About 870,000 Jews were gassed or shot. The bodies were buried, and eventually re-exhumed and burned, up to 18,000 at a time, in massive open-air pyres. The book includes a sketch map of the Treblinka death camp, and even a photograph of German earthmoving equipment used to unearth the earlier-buried bodies.

DO NOT BLAME THE POLES FOR “NOT DOING MORE” TO AID FUGITIVE JEWS

After the Jewish revolt and escape from Treblinka, the Germans’ hunt was so intense that two of the Poles who helped Willenberg had already experienced a German search of their domiciles (p. 144, 147). He noticed how Germans were checking all traffic on the roads (p. 145), and also encountered a poster that warned Poles against helping any of the “typhus-bearing Jewish bandits” (p. 149). Some Poles approached by Willenberg for help were obviously so frightened that they immediately departed from him (p. 25, 28, 144). But, in spite of the death penalty for the slightest Polish assistance to Jews, local Polish peasants helped Willenberg on no less than nine separate occasions in the first days after his escape (pp. 143-on).

WILLENBERG PRO-COMMUNIST. SOME POLISH JEW-KILLING CAUSED BY FAULTY INTELLIGENCE?

In time, Willenberg became a member of the Communist GL-AL bands, whose Communist nature he denied (p. 181) and, for awhile, the AK (ARMIA KRAJOWA). He took part in the Warsaw Uprising, repeated accusations of the NSZ killing fugitive Jews (p. 178), and then said the same thing about the AK.

Interestingly, Willenberg reports a discussion with an AK officer, who produced a list of Jewish Gestapo informers about to be liquidated, and with Willenberg on the list! The list had been found in possession of a Jew who was accused of being a Gestapo agent, (pp. 182-183). Taken literally, this suggests that at least some cases of the AK killing innocent fugitive Jews was due to faulty intelligence. (Of course, with regards to wartime espionage, underground organizations don’t have the luxury of conducting detailed investigations, and some innocent people got killed because of mistaken inferences).

THE MYTH OF THE ARMIA KRAJOWA CONDUCTING A “HOLOCAUST AFTER THE HOLOCAUST”

The very fact that Willenberg became an openly Jewish member of the AK and was allowed to survive a face-to-face accusation of an AK officer, alone should soundly refute the accusation of some (e. g., Yaffa Eliach, Oskar Pinkus) that the AK was implementing some sort of secret plan to kill all remaining Polish Jews! But the facts don’t matter, and the accusations continue.

IRONY ABOUT GERMANS SEEKING CONSENT, FROM THE CONQUERED AND DESPISED POLES, FOR CONSTRUCTING THE DEATH CAMPS

One particularly malicious Polonophobic Holocaust myth is the one about the Nazis’ choice of Poland as the site of the death camps because Poles welcomed them or at least wouldn’t object much to them. No doubt, this libelous canard is facilitated by the countless misleading accounts in the western press of “Polish death camps”. Ironically, not only didn’t the Germans seek any form of “permission” from the conquered and despised Polish untermenschen, but actually kept the death camps a jealously-guarded secret. So extreme was this secrecy that a German woman who had inadvertently been shipped to Treblinka was deliberately killed in order to protect the secret of extermination. (p. 30). And, to add plausibility to the fraud about Jews only being resettled for forced labor, and Treblinka being only a labor camp, the Nazis actually HAD built a nearby labor camp, Treblinka 1, to which they had been sending Poles and later some of the deported Jews (p. 9, 101, 202). Periodically, Treblinka 1 inmates were dispatched to the Treblinka death camp, but never the other way around!

POLES DID “NOT DO ENOUGH” TO WARN THE WORLD ABOUT THE UNFOLDING SHOAH: BASIC REASONS

Certain authors (e. g., Yisrael Gutman, David Engel) have accused the Polish government-in-exile of delaying, and then understating, its reporting on the numbers of murdered Polish Jews. In his introduction, Bartoszewski puts Willenberg’s experience in perspective, making it clear that only a trickle of substantive information ever escaped those extermination camps in which Polish Jews were being murdered by the Germans: “Together the four death camps exterminated over 2 million Jews; we know of only two survivors from Belzec, three from Chelmno, sixty-four from Sobibor, and around forty from Treblinka.” (p. 9). Even the indirect clue afforded by the odor of vast numbers of bodies being burned at Treblinka did not become reality until early 1943 (p. 17).

In stark contrast to the Jews, Germans usually murdered Poles publicly. So why invoke nefarious motives to explain the fact that the Polish government-in-exile knew much more about the extent of Polish deaths than Jewish ones, and did so much earlier?

POLISH NAZI COLLABORATION WAS MINIMAL: A LESSON FROM TREBLINKA

Another anti-Polish meme is the one about Germans choosing Poland as the site of the death camps so that they could conveniently recruit numerous Polish volunteers to assist in the extermination of Jews. In actuality, Willenberg doesn’t mention even ONE Polish collaborator serving the Germans at Treblinka! He elaborates on the work of Ukrainian collaborators numerous times, describing them as follows: “While they disliked Poles, White Russians, and Cossacks, they reserved a sizzling, boundless hatred for the Jews.” (p. 56).