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

Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (War and Genocide), by Jonathan Petropoulos (Ed). 2006

Holocaust Supremacism and the Holocaust Industry Feed Each Other. Paid Polish Rescuers of Jews Had Acted Properly

Because this anthology has many topics, I focus on a few that are particularly relevant to current events.

“PROPERTY RESTITUTION” GENERATES MUCH PUBLICITY FOR THE HOLOCAUST ITSELF

One might intuitively think that the primacy of the Jews’ Holocaust, over the genocides of all other peoples, is what had made the “property restitution” demands of the Holocaust Industry newsworthy, and ostensibly credible, in the eyes of the general public. In actuality, it was and is just as much the other way around. It is effectively a feedback process. Author and restitution-lawyer Michael J. Bazyler tacitly highlights this fact, as he writes, “To everyone’s surprise, even to the participants themselves, this campaign would become a major political issue not only in Europe but also in the United States. One illustration of the prominence of the Holocaust restitution movement was that more news articles were published about the Holocaust between 1995 and 2000 than during the fifty preceding years, and most of these articles focused on Holocaust restitution.” (p. 339).

Let us update this feedback process. Could it be that the current media push, for the Holocaust Industry to successfully extort “reparations” money from Poland, is as much about renewed publicity for the Holocaust itself as it is about shaking down Poland (herself a major victim of Nazi Germany) for a little or a lot of money?

DEBUNKING “POLISH GREED” FOR REQUIRING PAYMENT FROM JEWS AS A CONDITION FOR HELPING THEM. AN INADVERTENT LESSON FOR THE POLONOPHOBES

Neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross, and his followers in media and academia, have been going around saying that Poles must had been greedy and (what else?) anti-Semitic whenever they required fugitive Jews to pay them in return for being rescued from the Germans (Nazis). In what very rarely is seen of Jewish authors, Robert Melson goes beyond the usual Judeocentric memes of exclusive Jewish victimhood, and recognizes the difficulties and dangers faced by the Poles.

Melson’s mother, a fugitive Jew, had asked the Zamojski family for Aryan documents, which the Zamojski’s agreed to do for what she thought was an exorbitant sum of money. (pp. 100-101). So she instead engaged in what nowadays is called identity theft. She impersonated the Zamojskis and went to the parish priest, saying that her birth and marriage records had been confiscated by the Soviets. The ruse worked: She obtained a set of documents identifying her as one of the Zamojskis.

In showing atypical fairness to the facts and to the Poles, author Robert Melson comments, “What angered her and my father was that the Zamojskis seemed to put money before friendship. However, while the Zamojskis may not have been generous and noble, their reactions had been human and understandable. They themselves were in dire economic straits and it mortal danger, and they were not wrong to have imagined that my father–the son of the wealthy Julius Mendelsohn–might have had the money to buy the documents. As for my mother, her angry dismissal of the Zamojskis may have covered over a guilty conscience: in effect she had stolen their identities and had put them at risk as well, and her story might seem less admirable on closer examination.” (p. 101). Melson then defends his mother’s conduct, as she had faced a choiceless choice. However, the same consideration should always be given to paid Polish rescuers of Jews.

NAZIS SEXUALLY NON-TRADITIONAL: THE MYTH OF SEXUAL REPRESSION BY THE NAZIS

The Frankfurt School (the first cultural Marxists) had promoted the notion that sexual repression itself led to fascism and Nazism. For more on the Frankfurt School, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/polokaust-lebensborn-child-kidnapping-goggin/

More recently, leftists have tried to connect traditional sexual mores with Nazism in order to try to discredit them. However, Nazism was not sexually repressive. Scholar Dagmar Herzog quips, “Jews were strongly associated with an accepting, celebratory attitude toward pleasurable (and not inevitably reproductive) heterosexuality. While some Nazis did want a return to conservative values, the bigger drama involved the effort to detach emancipatory impulses from their association with ‘Marxism’ and ‘Jewishness’ and to redefine sexual liberation as a ‘Germanic,’ ‘Aryan’ prerogative.” (p. 150).

Herzog adds that, “Already a few years into the Third Reich, it was well known, both domestically and internationally that the Nazis encouraged premarital sex among teenagers.” (p. 151). This was notably true of the BDM (BUND DEUTSCHER MADEL). (p. 151).

With reference to Catholic priest Matthias Laros in 1936, Herzog writes, “Distancing himself from BOTH Nazis and Jews (even as he reinforced the association of Jews with un-Christian sexual values), Laros declared that ‘the church, unconcerned by all semitic or antisemitic fashions of the day, holds fast to the…Christian structure of marriage.'” (p. 153; Emphasis in original).