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

I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance, by Adina Blady Szwajger. 1992

Not Only Fugitive Jews: Poles, Too, Were Subject to Robbery. Auschwitz Carmelite Convent Irony

The author’s work as a nurse gave way to that of a courier girl during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. She mentions Schremf, who was Director of the German-run Department of Health of Warsaw. He was sadistic and brutal, and hated both Poles and Jews. (p. 33). To him, at least, there was no dialectic of the prime victimhood of the Jews and the lesser victimhood of the Poles.

FUGITIVE JEWS WERE NOT THE ONLY ONES BLACKMAILED OR ROBBED. POLES WERE TOO

Poles nowadays get a lot of flak, in Holocaust materials, for sometimes betraying Jews, for stealing from Jews, and for sometimes participating in Nazi-sponsored auctions of recently-murdered Jews.

This is hardly a black and white issue. Szwajger puts the szmalcowniki (blackmailers) and thieves of Jews in the broader context of the overall criminality that had arisen in the Polish population (as a consequence of the brutality of the German occupation). She writes: “I told them honestly that I was afraid. Going home just before the curfew through the dark streets of Powisle wasn’t safe. What I normally carried with me was too valuable to risk its being stolen. You have to remember that that on the streets there roamed, apart from the gendarmes and the extortionists, bands of young men completely corrupted by the war, PREYING ON ANYBODY, NOT JUST US. The words ‘Get out of your coat, Miss’ were not uncommon, and you were rarely able to resist.” (p. 123; Emphasis added).

AN IRONY TO THE SLANTED MEDIA MESSAGES DURING THE AUSCHWITZ CARMELITE CONVENT CONTROVERSY

We heard all those pronouncements about the Cross being absolutely foreign, if not offensive, to Judaism, voiced during the Auschwitz Carmelite Convent controversy. In contrast, Szwajger joined the ranks of Jews who appropriated Christian-suffering themes, in this case in the context of her work as a nurse: “And that this hospital was a Golgotha where the little Jesus of the ghetto was falling under the weight of his cross–the Jewish child, thrice innocent, suffering a thousand tortures.” (p. 43).