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

Sasha Pechersky: Holocaust Hero, Sobibor Resistance leader, and Hostage of History, by Selma Leydesdoff. 2017. Routledge, Oxfordshire

Gassing Poles at Sobibor: Not Only Jews Were Gassed: So Were Poles, Russians, and Gypsies

This book repeats many of the earlier works on Sobibor. It includes the dubious testimonies of Reuben Ainsztein. It features emphasis of the standard lament that eastern Europeans (in this case, Russians) remember Sasha Pechersky, and the Holocaust in general, as murdered Soviet citizens rather than as murdered Jews (whence the book title).

HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE: WHOSE SUFFERINGS ARE BEING MARGINALIZED?

Ironically, author Selma Leydesdorff comments, “The reaction was that survivors, and a new kind of memorial culture close to the survivors, emphasized the killing of Jews, and, ironically, the deaths of non-Jews faded away.” (p. 33x). It certainly did. We are now ruled by Holocaustianity.

GASSING POLES AT SOBIBOR: NO JEWISH MONOPOLY ON BEING SENT TO THE GAS CHAMBERS OF THE DEATH CAMPS

Part of the mystification of the Holocaust emphasizes the extermination centers, built by Nazi Germany for the purpose of destroying the Jews. Not quite. To begin with, note that a large fraction of the 6 million Jews, murdered in the Shoah, did not die from gassing in the death camps. They were shot (as in the Holocaust by Bullets.)

Besides this, non-Jews were also gassed in the extermination centers! Leydesdorff writes, “In the Minsk archives, where several historians have studied the deportation trains to Sobibor, the assumption is that non-Jews were also on the trains. Samuel Lerer stated in 1945 that ‘gypsies’ were killed at Sobibor. During hearings in Kiev regarding the lawsuit of 1962, Pechersky testified as an eyewitness: ‘It should be noted that not only Jews arrived at Sobibor. Several Russians arrived…with our car and they were exterminated in the gas chambers. Such cases happened in other troop trains, because in the work camp near Minsk we were kept together with the Russians. Lerer mentions that several Polish prisoners arrived blindfolded, and we can assume that they were partisans operating in the surroundings….I assume there were also non-Jews, but we don’t know how many.” (p. 33x).