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

Vanished Without Trace: The Story of Seven Years in Soviet Russia, by Antoni Ekart. 1954. Max Parrish, London

Gulag System: Communist Concentrations Camps. High Mortality and Falsified Records

Author Antoni Ekart was a Polish Jew. (p. 108). He describes his experiences after the 1939 German-Soviet conquest of Poland, and his ensuing deportation into the interior of the USSR. When later attempting to join Anders Army, a Soviet official repeatedly insisted, “‘I tell you that you will not be accepted.'” (p. 108). This confirms the fact that it was the Soviets, and not Anders, that were hindering the Jews in joining Anders Army.

THE GULAGS, LIKE THE NAZI DEATH CAMPS, ARE “UNBELIEVABLE”

Ekart, making it obvious that he knew about the Holocaust, makes this sage observation, “I also said that although the attitude of Hitler to the Jews was well known, I did not think that the German people were capable of such barbarity. I knew Germany from before 1932 and I believed what I said, and gradually managed to persuade Dr. Berger that it was so. At the time it was difficult to believe all that was said about the German camps at Majdanek, Tremblin [Treblinka] and Oswiecim [Auschwitz]. It was hard to imagine that a highly cultured nation like Germany could slaughter ten million people, including four million Jews. Now, however, I understand it well. After all, when I returned to Poland many near and dear friends would not believe what I told them about Soviet camps, even though there were probably several thousand people like myself in Poland. There are many such truths which people refuse to accept unless they have themselves been eyewitnesses, simply because they are beyond the limits of the ordinary person’s imagination.” (p. 250. Emphasis added). This offers a clue to both Holocaust denial and the more common Gulag denial.

GULAG SYSTEM: FORCED LABOR AND STARVATION AS A MEANS OF MASS EXTERMINATION

Overwork was a constant presence, as noted by the author, “We Poles were enduring our hard conditions of life in the camp, and were working sixteen hours a day…” (p. 100).

The author discusses how the labor conditions in the Baku oil fields were temporarily given an improvement in the face of Soviet wartime needs. But when the demand for oil went down, the horrible working conditions returned. Ekart comments, “The improvement showed that the NKVD were well aware of the relationship between the degree of nourishment and the rate of industrial output. And also that the conditions in most of the camps were designed to exterminate certain classes of the population by extreme starvation.” (p. 243).

FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE OF THE GULAGS AND THE NAZI DEATH CAMPS

Ekart thus evaluates the Communist gulag system, “The nutriment given is much smaller than was is needed to replace the energy lost in work. This deliberate NKVD policy of undernourishment makes it difficult to regard the majority of the camps, especially those in the North and the so-called Penal Settlements, as being in any way different from the German concentration camps with their crematoria and gas chambers. The death rate is the same.” (pp. 60-61). Hear that, Holocaust supremacists?

GULAGS WITH 100% MORTALITY LIKE NAZI DEATH CAMPS

Proponents of Holocaust supremacy have specifically argued that there was no gulag equivalent to the Nazi German death camps, wherein admission was virtually synonymous with death. If so, then what? There is no historical or moral difference between a few camps with total mortality and many camps with partial mortality.

And, in fact, there were gulags in which just about everyone died. Antoni Ekart writes, “Conditions at Halmer Yu were still worse. This place was some 250 km. north of Vorkuta on the shore of the Polar Sea. In the local language the name meant ‘Death Valley’. A port is being built there, which is to become the main coal supply base for the Arctic Fleet of the USSR. The prisoners were mostly engaged in building a railway to Halmer Yu from Vorkuta; their expectation of life was three months, and it was only rarely that one of them managed to survive and to get back to the southern camps.” (p. 227).

Nor was the virtually total mortality limited to Soviet concentration camps in extremely cold climates. Ekart writes, “For this reason the mortality in the southern camps is higher, especially in the summer. Makhov knew of camps working cotton plantations where, of five or six hundred prisoners brought there two years ago, scarcely any remained alive.” (p. 85).

COMMUNIST JUSTICE WAS A SHAM FROM BEGINNING TO END

Ekart focuses on the Soviet use of forced labor to build up the USSR. He thus quotes a Communist official, “‘The enterprise is too tremendous for it to matter in the least whether one particular person is guilty or innocent. The Soviet penal law and executive apparatus are sufficiently elastic to eliminate all obstacles. The plan for the mobilization of labor among elements doomed to isolation has to be carried through at all costs. The question is too important to the economy of the Soviet Union as a whole to allow any sentimentality or any considerations of abstract justice. Execution of justice has a different purpose in Russia from the one it has in capitalist countries.'” (p. 287).

COMMUNISTS USED PSYCHOLOGICAL AS WELL AS PHYSICAL TORMENT

Ekart quotes a Communist official, “‘I will try to explain. The aim of the NKVD is the complete isolation of every human being under their control. They are determined to destroy the confidence which exists between one man and another…Under these conditions it is impossible to organize a conspiracy or even an opposition…A confederacy of even five men is completely impossible; the NKVD would know all about it within a day…'” (p. 70).

SOVIET ARCHIVES UNRELIABLE: FALSIFICATION OF FACTS

Some scholars believe Soviet archives as gospel truth. Ekart provides an example of how Soviet records can be deliberately distorted, “One of my duties was to register the cause of death. At one of the conferences the senior physician read us an order from the Health Department of Gulag, forbidding the use of the following terms: ‘Alimentary dystrophy, pellagra, or any other deficiency disease.’ From then onwards the cause of death usually given was ‘cardiac degeneration’.” (p. 204). What else has been falsified?