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

Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, by Shelly Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz. 2003. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis

Holocaust Dominance: Holocaust Subsumed Accusations. Dissembling on German Guilt. Polonophobe Claude Lanzmann

This book discusses pictorial representations of the Jews’ Holocaust. I focus on a few enduring issues.

THE HOLOCAUST SUBSUMED ACCUSATIONS: AN IRONY

Jews have constantly complained that Poland used to subsume the Holocaust within a broader narrative of Polish martyrdom. In other words, the Nazi German murders of Jews were specifically recognized, but “only” mentioned alongside the Nazi murders of Poles. Horror of horrors! Evidently, the Polish UNTERMENSCHEN are not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath as the Jews. Sensing this manifestation of Jewish racism, it is no wonder that some Poles had suggested that Jews scrape off the soil in Auschwitz, take it in barrels to Israel, and be done with Poland.

WHY JEWS MONOPOLIZE AUSCHWITZ

Ironic to the “subsuming” accusation, it is the other way around! Because of Holocaust supremacism, the genocides of non-Jews, when mentioned at all, are now subsumed within the narrative of the Jews’ Holocaust. Author Berel Lang makes this clear, “Auschwitz has become a metonym not only for all six of the death camps, but for the ten thousand other concentration camps as well, for the ‘Final Solution’ as a whole, and then for the act of genocide as such.” (p. 26. Emphasis added).

The foregoing statements are instructive. They help the reader understand why Auschwitz is monopolized by the Jews. This Jewish monopolization is being enforced even in Poland as part of Holocaust education. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/10/30/big-insidious-auschwitz-birkenau-jewish-monopoly/

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY REINFORCED BY HOLOCAUSTSPEAK

Editors Hornstein and Jacobowitz use familiar lingo as they comment, “To acknowledge that the Holocaust was an unprecedented catastrophe of inconceivable proportion suggests that it defies representation. (p. 3. Emphasis added). No one ever suggests that any other genocide was of “unprecedented catastrophe” or of “inconceivable proportion.” We get it. The Holocaust is above all other genocides.

SHIFTING THE BLAME FOR THE HOLOCAUST AWAY FROM GERMANY AND UNTO CHRISTIANITY–AGAIN

Andrea Liss discusses Jewish artist Arie A. Galles and his Fourteen Stations. It is a creative mockery of Christianity, wherein the 14 Stations of the Cross become 14 killing sites of Jews. Liss alludes to Galles’ anti-Christian bigotry as follows, “The project’s title, Fourteen Stations, makes ironic reference to Passion plays and Christ’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross, confronting the smooth flow of antisemitism within Christianity, hitting it hard with the shock of these disorienting and disquieting ghost drawings of photographs.” (p. 34).

Evidently, Galles, like so many other Jews, makes all antisemitism (no matter how trivial or long ago) to be folded into the Holocaust. This serves to lessen German guilt. Of course, there is nothing about how Jews are partly responsible for provoking antisemitism. Galles is oblivious to the fact that Nazism was a German-Austrian secular political movement that had nothing to do with Christianity. In addition, Galles drags-in religion into the narrative in a selective manner. He is deafeningly silent about the hateful anti-Christian teachings within Judaism, and about the parallels between Talmudic racism and Nazi German racism. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/talmudic-parallels-to-der-giftpilz-wasserman/

CLAUDE LANZMANN’S SHOAH

Florence Jacobowitz comments, “Shoah is not hesitant or diplomatic. Polish antisemitism is registered full-force in a contemporary setting.” (p. 11). Stick it to the Poles! Once again, “ordinary” Polish antisemitism, which was arguably partly justified, and the completely-different Nazi German exterminationist antisemitism, which could never be, are one and the same. In the Judeocentric imagination.

Jacobowitz also writes, “Lanzmann’s Jewish survivors are the film’s heroes just as the Germans and Poles, guilty of crimes from indifference to cruelty, are its antagonists.” (p. 14).

I just love the Judeocentric doublespeak. Germans and Poles are now on the same side. Lanzmann’s opined “Polish indifference” is now equivalent to the crime of “German cruelty”. And need we mention all the times when Jews were indifferent to Polish sufferings?

CONTROLLING MEMORIALS: CONTROLLING PUBLIC MEMORY AND CONTROLLING THE NARRATIVE

Author Tim Cole writes, “Constructing a memorial is a conscious act of choosing to remember certain people and events, and by implication choosing not to remember other people and events. And that conscious act is a ‘political’ one, ‘political’ in the sense that it is about power over memory, power over the past, and power over the present.” (p. 272). Definitely.

This has obvious implications for such things as the building of Holocaust museums and monuments. They exist for the elevation of the Holocaust above all other genocides. One can think of the USHMM right in Washington, D. C. No other genocide, of any other people, enjoys this privilege.

The foregoing also occurs in Poland, in a passive sense. Polish taxpayer funding is prioritized for the building of Jewish monuments and museums over funding for monuments and museums dealing with Polish patriotic themes.

Thought control is also demonstrated by leftists tearing down old monuments to historical figures (e. g, Columbus) in the USA under various bogus pretexts. It also occurs in Poland, such as by the attempt by lewaks (Polish leftists) to force the renaming of Roman Dmowski Street in Warsaw with the name “Women’s Rights Street”.

The process also works in reverse. A court in Poland has ruled that the Stalin-built PALAC KULTURY cannot be torn down. This legitimizes, as a valid Polish institution, the Soviet-imposed Communist puppet government that once ruled Poland. Once again, this is a left-wing control of public memory.

THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE AS A ONETIME TOOL FOR ENFORCING JEWISH TRIBALISM AND JEWISH SEPARATISM

Poles have been incessantly criticized for seeing Jews as the “other”, for not generally recognizing Poland’s Jews as Poles, and for not granting prewar Jews expansive special rights, through the so-called Minorities Treaty, which included the use of Yiddish-only in public life. Ironic to this, Daniel Libeskind writes from personal experience, “I remember how shocked I was, as a child in Israel in the late 1950s (after we emigrated from Poland), that when we spoke Yiddish on the streets of Tel Aviv somebody would say, ‘Shhh! We are Israelis, this is a new place, this is not Poland. You are in another place now.'” (p. 47). Clearly, Yiddish had been used to polarize Jews and Poles.