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

Under Two Dictators, by Margarete Buber. 1947. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York

Ravensbruck. Do Not Trivialize Communist Crimes: Lessons From Personal Experience

The author, a German woman, suffered from both Stalin and Hitler. She was incarcerated in a Siberian penal colony at the Birma district of Karaganda in the 1930’s. Years later, Buber-Neumann was incarcerated at Ravensbruck during WWII.

SOVIET CAMPS WERE WORSE THAN NAZI CAMPS

Nowadays, and partly as a bow to Holocaust supremacism, the Nazi camps are memorialized (regarding Jews, that is) while the Soviet gulags are almost forgotten. We have Jews openly complaining whenever the gulags are compared to the Holocaust (e. g., the contrived horror of double genocide). The truth does not conform to Holocaust orthodoxy. The gulags were as bad, and sometimes worse, than the Nazi camps. Permit a few observations by the author, who had personally experienced both.

The Nazi German cell, in which Buber-Neumann had been imprisoned, had a window, whereas the cells in Soviet camps had none. Buber singled out the unexpected window as a “great luxury”. (p. 178).

The inmates of Nazi concentration camps sometimes got packages, but the Soviet gulag inmates never got them. (pp. 9-10). For a time, at least, the inmates at Ravensbruck got more food than did the inmates of the Birma gulag. (p. 190).

Later in the war, the bunk beds at Ravensbruck were pushed together. Only then did this onerous arrangement come to equal that which was true all along at Birma. (p. 297).

For another comparison of Nazi camps with Soviet camps, done by a former inmate of both, see:

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

THE SOVIET COMMUNIST NKVD WAS WORSE THAN THE NAZI GESTAPO

Buber sagely distinguishes the methods used by the two totalitarian police systems. She writes, “The G. P. U. [NKVD] examiners aimed from the beginning, not at finding out whether there was any factual basis for their suspicions against their prisoners, but at establishing their ‘guilt’ and securing sufficient ‘proof’ for a heavy sentence without all the preliminary bother of bringing them to trial. The Gestapo men, on the other hand, were still bound, if ever so loosely, to the judicial traditions of a civilized country, in which, in the ordinary way, an offender had to be formally charged and brought up for trial.” (pp. 183-184).

This standard Communist procedure, of assigning guilt in advance, lives on today as the pedagogika wstydu (pedagogy of shame) of cultural Marxism thinking.

GAS CHAMBERS WERE PRESENT IN “ORDINARY” NAZI GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Holocaust supremacists try to enforce a contrived dualism, in the public imagination, between Nazi death camps and Nazi concentration camps. This subterfuge is done for the purpose of keeping the Jewish experience exulted over the sufferings of all the other victims of the Nazis. In actuality, there was considerable overlap between the two sets of Nazi German camps. Their ends were the same: Both were instruments of suffering and death.

Nazi gas chambers have been mystified for their role against Jews. In actuality, the Nazis gassed non-Jews as well as Jews. Furthermore, gas chambers and crematoria were present in “ordinary” German camps as well as in the so-called death camps. For instance, eyewitness Buber reports that Ravensbruck had gas chambers (p. 182, 208, 211) as well as crematoria. (pp. 293-294, 304).

THE EXPERIENCES OF THE POLES

Although Buber-Neumann was a German, she sometimes singled out the experiences of the Poles. She found out, from the German nurses, that Polish women were subject to German experiments, including experimental transfers of bone and muscle. These gruesome experiments put their legs in plaster casts. (pp. 252-253).

Consistent with the Polish “heroic narrative” that is nowadays derided by some Jews and leftists, Buber quotes an inmate that had verbalized an admiration of what she called nationalist Poles. (p. 265). This admiration extended to the Poles dying as martyrs for their country.