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

Lvov Ghetto Diary, by David Kahane. 1990

Some Jewish Self-Criticism and Self-Examination. God’s Punishment of the Jews Entertained. Jewish-Nazi Collaboration Addressed

This work discusses the German entry into the Lwow (Lviv) area in 1941, the first wave of killings, the Janowska concentration camp, the local massacres, and the dispatching of Jews to the Belzec death camp. The author survived the Holocaust by being hidden by Ukrainian bishop Sheptytskyi (Szeptycki).

JEWISH COLLABORATION WITH THE NAZIS

The JUDENRAT was reckoned by the Germans as the executive branch of the Gestapo. (p. 14). It was the Germans (and not the Poles and Ukrainians) who took everything of value from the Jews. (pp. 14-15). The author has a mixed portrayal of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews themselves. For instance, some Jewish ghetto police risked their lives to save Jewish families from death, while others made what Kahane calls a “good living” by blackmailing fellow Jews. (p. 17).

There was an unwritten international law, honored even by barbarians, that warranted a condemned man to go free if the rope snapped during a hanging. When this happened to a Jew, the Germans just got stronger rope and repeated the hanging. (pp. 73-74).

SOME JEWISH SELF-CRITICISM

The author struggled to explain the locals’ hatred of Jews. “I cannot say that the Jews are completely blameless. Certainly, a peasant would have been angry with a Jewish land tenant who took a key to the church as a mortgage. More than once a Jewish innkeeper would get a peasant drunk and then swindle him and even steal his property. Nor were the weights and measures used by Jewish storekeepers always accurate. But how can one blame a whole people for the sins of individual land tenants or storekeepers?” (p. 11). [The informed reader will undoubtedly realize that Kahane seems to forget that collectivist reprisal is part of the human condition. For instance, when Jews sided with Communists to get back at Polish anti-Semites, they were also causing the deaths of Poles (including children) who had never done anything against Jews.]

For more Jewish self-criticism, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/like-jews-like-endeks-deutsch/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jewish-self-criticism-candor-kermish/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jewish-self-criticism-candor-korczak/

THE HOLOCAUST AS GOD’S JUDGEMENT

Not only some Christians, but also some Jews, tried to explain the Holocaust as God’s punishment of the Jews. Kahane himself entertained such notions, as he wrote, “Some endeavor to explain the horrors of the Holocaust as being a punishment inflicted upon European Jewry for the sin of assimilation they had committed.” (p. x).

Yet some Holocaust materials berate those Poles who suggested that the Holocaust was God’s punishment of the Jews. The standard double standard is in force.