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

Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, by Tzvetan Todorov. 1991, 2000. Phoenix, London

Double Genocide (Nazis Equal Communists) Supported. Lanzmann’s Polonophobia: French Ignored

Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian-French writer. He displays some seldom-appreciated insights. For example:

LIKE HITLER LIKE STALIN

Todorov notes that, “In the totalitarian ethic, loyalty to the leader is a fundamental obligation. The cults of both Stalin and Hitler are notorious in this respect.” (p. 189).

The author recounts the two totalitarian systems, “Just as the Third Reich was not without its share of socialist ideas, so too was Stalin not without his Nietzschean inspirations. Indeed, the extent to which the two dictators emulated each other is striking. Before the war, Hitler both admired Stalin and imitated him on many points. He modeled the Gestapo after the NKVD; the Communist massacre at Katyn prefigures, down to its details, the butchering of the Einsatzkommandos, the mobile death squads that Hitler would operate behind the Russian front…The entente between the two heads of state, culminating in the infamous Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939-41, was a moment of truth, not a lapse of judgment.” (pp. 132-133).

BOTH COMMUNISM AND NAZISM NEEDED EXISTENTIAL ENEMIES

The Jews under Nazism were not the only existential enemies! Author Todorov gets right to the point, “Totalitarian doctrines always divide humanity into two groups of unequal worth…the inferior beings must be punished, even annihilated…In Nazi doctrine, that fact is obvious: the ‘inferior races’–Jews, Gypsies, and others–are all subhumans, parasites. But it is just as true of Soviet discourse (to say nothing of Soviet methods), which throughout the purges of the 1930s was identical to that of the Nazis; slogans such as ‘Dogs must die like dogs’ or “Crush the vermin’ were the order of the day…A class enemy in one case, a race enemy in the other; under both regimes, however, this much is the same: the enemy is necessarily an extreme enemy, against whom a war of extermination is justified.” (p. 127).

NAZI CAMPS VERY MUCH LIKE THE SOVIET CAMPS (GULAGS)

Author Tzvetan Todorov comments, “…far more attention has been paid to the Nazi camps than to the Communist gulags.” (p. 149). Yeah, no kidding!

He adds that, “From the inmate’s point of view, the Communist and Nazi camps were often identical, and so one can appreciate the quandary of someone like Buber-Neumann, who experienced both: ‘I ask myself, deep down, which is really worse’, she writes, ‘the lice-infested corncob-walled cabins in Birma [in Kazakhstan] or the nightmare-order of Ravensbruck.'” (p. 133). For more of her testimony, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/12/04/ravensbruck-direct-comparison-of-soviet-gulags-and-nazi-concentration-camps-gas-chambers-buber/

The author concludes, “The Soviet camps were perhaps less ‘advanced’, but they predated those of the Nazis and were larger, every bit as deadly, and just as full after the war as before.” (p. 237). The latter refers to the postwar re-use of the Nazi camps, under new management, by the Soviets, to imprison potential dissidents to Communism. The Soviets incarcerated approximately 120,000 people in the formerly Nazi camps. (p. 134).

IS IT BETTER TO DIE QUICKLY (NAZI DEATH CAMP) OR DIE AGONIZINGLY (GULAG)?

Author Todorov continues, “Or, as she [Margaret Buber-Neumann] says in her testimony at the David Rousset trial in 1950, ‘it is hard to decide which is the least humane–to gas people in five minutes or to strangle them slowly, over the course of three months, by hunger.'” (p. 133).

For another testimony–that of a Jewish inmate of both Soviet and Nazi camps–and one who preferred the quick death of a Nazi death camp to the agonizingly slow death in a Soviet gulag, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/gulags-like-nazi-death-camps-definitive-work-buca/

RESCUE OF JEWS: NO HAGIOGRAPHY OF THE DANES OR BULGARIANS

The author, of Bulgarian-French origins, contemplates the premise that Danes and Bulgarians are better than everybody else. Todorov concludes, “…recent persecutions of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria show that exclusionary and discriminatory sentiments are not altogether unknown among the Bulgarian majority. I believe instead that the Danish and Bulgarian experiences represent a fortunate confluence of circumstances.” (p. 250).

CLAUDE LANZMANN VILIFIED POLES WHILE TURNING A BLIND EYE TO THE FRENCH

Author Todorov unambiguously calls out Claude Lanzmann for his egregious Polonophobia. With the exception of Jan Karski (briefly), “…the Poles whom Lanzmann chooses to show are all anti-Semites. All of them remained indifferent to the suffering of the Jews, all use the same clichés in speaking about them, and in the end, all are pleased to be rid of them.” (p. 273). [The latter tripe also came up in the form of the “Goodbye Jews!” lie in the well-watched movie Schindler’s List.]

Moreover, Lanzmann, a French Jew, conveniently ignored all the malevolent acts of the French. Todorov quips, “According to Lanzmann, the French peasants would never have allowed death camps to be built on their soil.” (p. 274).  [Really…As if the German conquerors needed permission from the conquered! Laugh.] ”

THE FRENCH, AND NOT ONLY POLES, LOOTED THE DOOMED JEWS

One would never guess this by listening to Lanzmann (or his protégés Jan T. Gross and Jan Grabowski), as per the Treblinka-site looting, but the French were at least as guilty as the Poles. Tzvetan Todorov comments, “Lanzmann reproaches the Poles for having rushed to the death camps in the wake of the exterminations ‘to sift through the earth in search of coins, jewels, and gold crowns they knew were buried there.’ In France, when the Jews were imprisoned in the Loiret, the local peasantry came out, eager to help with the searches: some women actually tore off the inmates’ earrings ‘when things weren’t moving quickly enough.’ Others ‘distinguished themselves by raking through the contents of the latrines in search of rings, bracelets, and necklaces.'” (p. 274). The latter quote is from a French-language source.