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

Arrested Mourning: Memory of the Nazi Camps in Poland, 1944-1950, by Zofia Woycicka. 2013. Peter Lang, Frankfurt

Andrew Kornbluth Confronted: The Intuitively Unexpected Power of Jews (Domestic and International) Regarding Early Postwar Communist-Ruled Poland

In his award-winning book, The August Trials, Andrew Kornbluth has argued that the Communist government, eager to win over the Polish masses to Communism, was deliberately and conspicuously lenient on the Polish killers of Jews. Kornbluth presents not a shred of evidence to support his argument. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/04/21/andrew-kornbluth-impugning-the-courts-that-tried-polish-jew-killers-a-creatively-polonophobic-gross-grabowski-imitation-german-guilt-diffusion-and-dilution-polish-anti-defamation-law-falsehood-ko/

If anything, the actual evidence, elaborated below, points in the opposite direction.

ANDREW KORNBLUTH CONFRONTED: POLAND’S POSTWAR JEWS HAD TO BE LISTENED TO

One factor in Kornbluth’s accusatory reasoning is that the Jews of postwar Poland were very few and that they were voiceless, for which reason the Communist government could safely disregard them if it was so inclined. This is far from the truth.

Woycicka writes,

“One explanation for this is that until the end of the 1940s, Jewish Holocaust survivors constituted a small but statistically significant proportion of Polish society and could present their views in the wider debate on the war and occupation.” (p. 92).

She makes this consideration even stronger,

“The decisive factor seems to be that, until the end of the 1940s, there continued to exist in Poland a fairly sizeable Jewish minority (of between 210,000 and 240,000 people, according to various estimates), which enjoyed significant autonomy and which was represented by various political parties and social and cultural organizations. Through such institutions as the CKŻP, CŻKH, and the Jewish Religious Congregation, the Jewish community was able to lobby for its own interpretation of history.” (p. 73).

ANDREW KORNBLUTH CONFRONTED: POLAND’S POSTWAR GOVERNMENT FACED PRESSURE FROM INTERNATIONAL OPINION

Even in the 1940s, International pressure already favored fairness if not favoritism towards Jews. So, contrary to Kornbluth, the Communist government was, if anything, actually pressured to avoid “going easy” on Polish denouncers or killers of Jews. And, ironic to Kornbluth’s argument about the Communist government feeling some sort of a need to “win over” the ethnic Poles, it was the pro-Jewish international community that the Communists felt the need to “win over”. Woycicka comments,

“The Communists wanted international recognition, yet after the experiences of the Nazi era, policy towards the Jewish population was for the Western allies an important criterion when evaluating the new regimes of Central and Eastern Europe. The Polish authorities were also aware that the existence of relatively autonomous Jewish organizations was a condition of receiving foreign aid to help Holocaust survivors. Perhaps another factor that influenced the attitude of the new authorities to the Jewish minority in Poland was that those same authorities included activists of Jewish origin.” (pp. 73-74).

ANDREW KORNBLUTH CONFRONTED: MOSCOW DRIVES THE DIMINISHED  JUDEOCENTRIC HOLOCAUST MEMORIALIZATION

Woycicka discusses the relative decline in Polish attention to the Jews’ Holocaust that began in the early 1950s. She writes,

“One of the main reasons for this was the significant decline in Poland’s Jewish population in the years 1947-1951. Successive waves of emigration saw the number of Jews living in Poland fall to between 57,000 and 80,000. At the same time, as a result of top-down directives, all Jewish political organizations and virtually all social and cultural institutions were liquidated; the only exceptions were the Jewish Historical Institute, created in the autumn of 1947, and the Social and Cultural Association of Jews, established in 1950. However, these two organizations were completely subordinate to the policies of the PPR/PZPR. Consequently, the Jewish community and the institutions that represented it ceased to perform the role of a separate “memory group” in Poland. Although the closure of independent Jewish institutions was an element of the Stalinization of public life in general, it was also the outcome of a change in the Communist Party’s policy towards Poland’s Jewish minority. This process was inspired by Moscow and had parallels in other Eastern bloc countries. With the emergence of the Iron Curtain and the creation of the state of Israel (1948)–a country favorably disposed towards the United States–the policy of the Soviet Union towards the Zionist movement, and thus also towards its own Jewish population, changed significantly. In 1948/1949, an anti-Semitic campaign initiated by the central authorities under the banner of the struggle against cosmopolitanism and Zionism took hold in the Soviet Union.” (pp. 229-230).

This, of course, later culminated in the events of 1968. By then, the gentile Communists had grown powerful enough to drive out most of the Jewish Communists and to seize most of the privilege and power for themselves. Communism was always based upon duplicity. Now the Jewish Communist thief saw most of his booty stolen by the goyish Communist thief. What gets around comes around.

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JEWS THEMSELVES ONCE REJECTED ANY DICHOTOMY BETWEEN NAZI DEATH CAMPS AND “ORDINARY’ NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Nowadays, the Holocaust establishment makes a big fuss about its contrived distinction between extermination camps (where mostly Jews died) and other Nazi camps (where mostly non-Jews died). Ironically, this artificial dichotomy was initially not held, moreover not even among Holocaust-surviving Jews! Woycicka writes,

“In the first years after the war, there was also no single, accepted classification of the camps, while from the Jewish perspective the distinction between ghettos, labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps seemed fluid.” (p. 95).

“Blumental stressed that although the Nazis had created many categories of camps, in practice there was little to choose between them. De facto, all the camps, with the exception of prisoner-of-war camps for soldiers from Western countries, ‘had a single purpose: to destroy the people incarcerated within them’.” (p. 96). Exactly right. Death is death, regardless of how it occurs.

ANDREW KORNBLUTH CONFRONTED: LONG-TERM SUFFERING RESULTING FROM “ORDINARY” NAZI GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

The survivors of German concentration camps often went on to suffer long-term effects, even decades after the incarceration. Woycicka presents this seldom-mentioned information,

“Tests carried out in 1964-1965 by Czesław Kempisty on 360 former prisoners from Wrocław showed that 58 per cent of them suffered from cardiovascular diseases (the national average being 4 per cent), 35 per cent from anxiety and personality disorders (national average: 4 per cent), 29 per cent from gastrointestinal diseases (national average: 11 per cent), 29 per cent from bone disease and diseases of the motor organs (national average: 10 per cent), and 19 per cent from respiratory diseases (national average: 4 per cent).” (p. 35).

So we have Andrew Kornbluth confronted.