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

Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold, by Tim Cole. 2000

Politics of Memory: The Gradual Development of the Holocaust “Myth”. Jews Started Monopolizing Auschwitz: The Carmelite Convent Controversy

Author Tim Cole traces the development of popularization of the Holocaust in the US, Israel, and in other parts of the world. He uses the term “myth” not to question the fact of 6 million murdered Jews in any way, but to point out the gradual emergence of the Holocaust in much contemporary thinking. Cole (p. 6) quotes Yaffa Eliach on the fact that “there is no business like Shoah business.”

For more on how the promotion of the Holocaust resembles that of a product that is being sold, see this review:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/holocaust-supremacism-in-the-light-of-marketing-principles-ries/

AT FIRST, THE HOLOCAUST WAS NOTHING SPECIAL: IT WAS JUST ONE MORE GENOCIDE

In common with other writers (e. g., Novick, Finkelstein), Cole points out that there was little special attention paid to the WWII extermination of Jews, by either Jews or gentiles, in the first years after the war: “While the Holocaust was perpetrated in Europe during 1941-45, it was not really until the early 1960s that anything like widespread awareness of the ‘Holocaust’ began to emerge.”(p. 7).

The same took place in the State of Israel, “During the 1940s and 1950s, throughout Israeli society, there was an effective silence about the Holocaust.”(pp. 51-52). Finally, “After 1961 the Holocaust ceased to be a taboo, and instead assumed an increasingly central–if contested–position in Israeli society and politics.”(p. 63).

HOLOCAUSTIANITY: A NEW SUBSTITUTE RELIGION FOR JEWS

Cole concludes: “There is little question that in the 1970s and 1980s the ‘Holocaust’ assumed a critical role in self-definition as Jewish.” (p. 13). In fact, he also shows that the Holocaust had become a substitute for Jewish tradition, for self-identity as Jews, among many assimilated American Jews (pp. 118-119).

POLITICS OF MEMORY: HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY NOW REIGNS

By the 1990’s, the Holocaust had assumed nothing short of staggering dimensions on the American scene: “…in the United States there are more than one hundred Holocaust museums and research centres, suggesting that the ‘founding of Holocaust museums’ is ‘a particularly American phenomenon.'”(p. 147). And yet we have authors today that complain about central Europeans engaged in the politics of memory, when it was Jews that had invented the politics of memory!

THE JEWS GRADUALLY CAME TO MONOPOLIZE AUSCHWITZ

The Cole devotes a moderate amount of attention to the Auschwitz Carmelite convent controversy. It was a manufactured controversy. For a long time, Christian symbols in Jewish places of death had not aroused Jewish antagonism at all! (p. 103).

IRONICALLY, JEWS (AND NOT ONLY POLES) AT FIRST THOUGHT OF AUSCHWITZ AS A GENERIC PLACE OF MASS ATROCITY

Auschwitz itself had assumed a prominent place in Jewish Holocaust consciousness belatedly: “From being a site of Warsaw bloc memory of fascist atrocity, ‘Auschwitz’ became recognized not simply as a site of the mass gassing of Jews, but the site of Jewish memory of the ‘Holocaust. Yet alongside this ‘Jewish Holocaustisation’ of Auschwitz, a process of ‘Catholising’ Auschwitz started to take place, in particular centered on the Polish-Catholic martyr Father Maximilian Kolbe.”(pp. 102-103). Cole continues: “What was being contested during the controversy was less ownership and use of the physical fabric of the camp, and more ownership and use of the ‘brandname”Auschwitz’.”(p. 105).

Author Tim Cole (p. 108) then recounts Cardinal Glemp’s suggested compromise solution: Oswiecim-Auschwitz, where mostly Poles died, would be central to Poles and Christians, while Brzezinka-Birkenau, where mostly Jews died, would be central to Jews. However, most Jews rejected this compromise solution on the grounds that it would impinge upon the symbolic status of Auschwitz. What is unclear in all of this is how the fact that 90% of the victims of the entire Auschwitz complex were Jews is supposed to entitle them to dictate to everyone else how and how not the site of the Auschwitz complex is to be memorialized. It is easy to see that all the talk about the Jewish victims of Auschwitz being forgotten, or about Auschwitz becoming “Christianized”, are simply smokescreens. The real reason clearly is Jewish intolerance against the sufferings of non-Jews being associated, even indirectly, with the sufferings of Jews. This, frankly, is a form of Jewish racism.

HOLOCAUSTIANITY: A NEW SET OF TEN COMMANDMENTS

As further proof of this, note Cole’s citation of Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir on the latter’s statements concerning the Holocaust becoming a religion of sorts that supplants the Ten Commandments: “…Holocaust religion offers new commandments: ‘Thou shalt have no other Holocaust’, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or likeness”, Thou shalt not take the name in vain’. ..”(p. 143). No wonder that there was so much Jewish opposition to the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz! Its very presence dared juxtapose the Polish Holocaust with that the Jewish Holocaust, thereby violating the first and third of these new commandments!

HOLOCAUST EDUCATION

Cole describes Holocaust education in contemporary Israel as follows: “Not only do they have ‘Holocaust’ lessons at school–where ‘since the early 1980s, questions on the Holocaust have accounted for 20 per cent of the overall score in the high school diploma examination in history’–but as mentioned earlier they all visit Yad Vashem, and an increasing number visit the death camps in Europe.”(p. 141). In view of this intense education, the ignorance of Israeli students who visit Poland is unbelievable (unless, of course, it is intentional).

Consequences of Holocaustianity. Polokaust Slighted By Jews, and German Guilt Transfer to Poles–Admitted By Rabbi Sherwin