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

Smoke Over Birkenau, by Seweryna Szmaglewska (Translated from the Polish by Jadwiga Rynas). 1947. Henry Holt and Company, New York

Auschwitz Classic Contradicts Modern Holocaust Narratives About the Absolute Suffering of Only Jews

The author of this early book on Auschwitz was a Polish writer who was incarcerated in the Nazi German camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau for three long years (1942-1945). (p. v). She subsequently became one of the few Poles who got to testify against the German criminals at the Nuremberg trials. Owing to the fact that this Auschwitz classic was written shortly after the war, it is free of later accretions, such as the presumed special-ness of the Jewish experience.

INDUSTRIAL GENOCIDE IRRELEVANT: DIE QUICKLY OR DIE SLOWLY AT AUSCHWITZ

Nowadays, Holocaust supremacists make much of the fact that millions of Jews experienced industrial genocide (while non-Jews did not), and that most Jews arriving at Auschwitz were immediately put to death, while most arriving Poles (and other non-Jews) were not. Actually, the speed of death (within hours or within months of arrival) and the method of death (gassing or starvation) are irrelevant. Death is death.

The Germans most certainly did not make any distinction between “ordinary concentration camps” and “death camps”. The author comments, “The impossibility of escape fills you with terror. Lack of strength to fight means annihilation. Only now the words of an SS man heard one day reach you consciousness: ‘HIER IST EIN VERNICHTUNGSLAGER.’ (This is an annihilation camp).” (p. 32).

For more on Auschwitz as a VERNICHTUNGSLAGER (for all arrivals), see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/03/10/gassing-poles-and-not-only-jews-at-auschwitz-nazi-concentration-camps-low-survivorship-siedlecki/

TRICKS NEEDED FOR LONG-TERM SURVIVAL IN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Let us take this further. Szmaglewska describes Krause, a new commander. She writes, “Krause is indignant. He looks straight into Perschel’s sick eyes and declares that a prisoner in a concentration camp should not live longer than six weeks. If he is not dead by that time, it means that he has learned too many tricks–and therefore should be exterminated.” (p. 369).

Long-term survival, in the Soviet gulags, also required knowledge of “tricks. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/03/07/communist-slaughter-ussr-communist-death-toll-62-million-absolute-minimum-24-million-gulags-soviet-archives-unreliable-1920-polish-soviet-war-unknowns-rummel/

NAZI ENMITY TO JEWS WAS NOT ABSOLUTE: GERMAN-SPEAKING JEWS WERE GIVEN ADVANTAGES OVER THE RUSSIANS AND THE POLES!

Jews were not below everyone else in the Nazi hierarchy in any kind of self-consistent manner. The author comments, “They [the Russians] are the dirtiest because they cannot afford to buy anything, and their dirty appearance in turn prevents them from getting better work. Besides, better jobs are not open to them, because, as a rule, they do not speak German, whereas the Jewish women can manage the language and are able to come to an understanding with the Germans. The Russian women, just as is the case with most of the Poles and Yugoslavs, must go to work in the fields.” (p. 247).

CYNICAL GERMAN POLICIES: POLES AND NOT ONLY JEWS FACED IMMEDIATE DEATH IF VISIBLY SICK

Sick Jewish inmates had no rights of hospitalization (p. 38), while sick Polish inmates did in theory. But this difference was nominal, and the product of German cynicism. Sick Poles, in practice, faced death just as did sick Jews.  Szmaglewska comments, “Because in the hospital each sick woman is examined by an SS doctor and when suspected of a contagious disease is exterminated, there is among the Polish women the determination to avoid the hospital at any cost. It is generally accepted that: better to lie in the rain and mud than go to the hospital where only death awaits you. As a result, when a woman faces the fact that she is really sick, she bravely decides to ‘carry on'”. (p. 32).

KAPOS, AT LEAST AT AUSCHWITZ, WERE NOT FORCED TO BECOME KAPOS OR TO REMAIN KAPOS

One common exculpation for Jews serving as kapos, and mistreating their fellow Jews, is the claim they were forced to do so. This is untrue. See, for example:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/judenrat-collaboration-exculpated-zertal/

Being a kapo was not itself a choiceless choice, and Szmaglewska brings up some Polish kapos that had quit their positions, doing this precisely so that they would not have to take part in the torture of their fellow inmates. She writes, “In one of the two groups two Polish women were evacuated who, as functionaries, had opposed themselves to Hitler’s volition that a slave should raise the whip against another slave: Felicj Iwanowska, ex-Capo of the Unturkunft, and Mrs. Wanda, ex-Capo of Rajsko.” (p. 319).