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

We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando From Auschwitz, Edited by Gideon Greif. 2005. Yale University Press, New Haven and London

Auschwitz Sonderkommando: Jews and Not Only Poles Profited Off Dead Jews

This book focuses on those Jews that were forced to observe the German gassing of their fellow Jews and then to cremate the masses of bodies. Not all of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando were Jews: Some were Poles. (p. 4, 238, 253, 357).

JEWISH “FEAR OF DEATH” A FALSE EXCULPATION FOR JEWISH COLLABORATION WITH THE NAZIS

The canned excuse for Jews, in the ghettos, serving the Nazis is always the same–that of Jews trying desperately to save their own lives. This will not do. Jews collaborated with the Nazis long before the Nazis began killing Jews on a sustained and large-scale basis. And, once the Holocaust commenced, Jews were slow in catching on.

Fact is, most Jewish arrivals at Birkenau, even at the very doorstep of the gas chambers, had no idea that they were about to be gassed. (p. 164, 324). Further proof of the fact that most Auschwitz-bound Jews had no conception of their impending death is provided by Sonderkommando Eliezer Eisenschmidt, who comments, “It’s rather strange that Jews brought magazines like that to the camp…They did it because they all thought they were going to a labor camp. Who among them had any idea that they weren’t going to work but to a gas chamber? That’s how the Germans tormented us. The Jews believed the Germans’ lies. You can tell how effectively the Germans managed to fool the Jews by all the things that the Jews, and not only the French Jews, brought to Auschwitz. Right now I remember how one French Jewish woman brought a little poodle.” (p. 246).

So, for most Jews, fear of imminent death cannot be an excuse for collaboration. One cannot fear what one does not know!

EVEN THE JEWISH SONDERKOMMANDO RETAINED SOME AGENCY IN HIS CONDUCT

Jewish collaboration with the Nazis should be examined objectively, and not be summarily dismissed. The fact that the Nazi Germans forced the Jewish Sonderkommando to cremate the bodies of their fellow Jews did not eliminate all of their agency. Now, the Sonderkommando probably did face more “choiceless choices” than just about any other Jew, but these pronounced “choiceless choices” did not encompass the totality of his conduct. Even the Sonderkommando had bona fide choices to make for which they should be held responsible.

Sonderkommando Eisenschmidt writes, “Once the Germans wanted to hang some Poles who’d mutinied against them. They told us to appoint two men for the task but none of them volunteered–except for Maurice and a Jew from Slovakia. They went because they knew they’d get good food and better conditions for doing so.” (p. 244).

This is a classic case of collaboration: Act freely against a fellow citizen at the behest of the enemy and in exchange for favors from the enemy. It also reminds us that, just as the Germans sometimes took advantage of Poles and used them against Jews, so also the Germans sometimes took advantage of Jews and used them against Poles.

THE GERMANS DID NOT REALLY TRY TO KILL ALL THE SONDERKOMMANDO

The Sonderkommando were Geheimnistrager (p. 4, 68, 86), that is, bearers of a secret. It is intuitively obvious that the Germans would want to kill them all, so that there would be no surviving eyewitnesses to the mass gassings and mass cremations. The Germans killed some, but not all. The Germans allowed some of the Sonderkommando to become anonymous by intermixing with the remaining Auschwitz population or even with the other evacuees from Auschwitz. (p. 117, 210, 281, 331, 362). Only belatedly did the Germans try (often or usually unsuccessfully) to single out the former Sonderkommando out of the general Auschwitz population. One can conclude that, either the Germans were grossly negligent, or else they were not really serious about killing all the eyewitnesses to their crimes.

Yet Holocaust orthodoxy tells us that the Germans pre-emptively killed all the Sonderkommando. Why does this Holocaust myth persist? Could it be because it serves the mystification of the Holocaust and the enhancement of the Holocaust in the public imagination at the expense of all other genocides?

JEWS AND NOT ONLY POLES TRAFFICKED IN POST-JEWISH PROPERTY

Nowadays, the Holocaust establishment, in serving the Holocaust Industry, tries to make a profound moral issue of the fact that Poles inherited the onetime property of the murdered Jews. This is despite the fact that, after every war, the property of the dead becomes the property of the living in accordance with pre-existing property-succession laws, and the Polish acquisition of post-Jewish property was completely normal and completely legal.

Jan T. Gross and the like have portrayed Poles as greedy and (what else?) anti-Semitic for acquiring post-Jewish property, as in the vicinity of Treblinka, and the general spin about Poland is that of a nation that “got rich” off the dead Jews. Can the Holocaust Industry be far behind?

We never hear about it, but the Jews also trafficked in, and made money off, the sales of the belongings of the murdered Jews. Sonderkommando Ya’akov Silberberg provides one such example in a question-and-answer format. He comments, “Do you remember people in the Sonderkommando trading the various items that they’d found in the undressing hall? They did business; they bartered with people on the outside. Whom do you mean? With Germans and prisoners outside of the Sonderkommando. The Jews brought the belongings and those who went to work outside the camp sold them to Poles who lived in the area. What was the most sought-after commodity in this barter trade? Schnapps.” (p. 327. Emphasis added).

So, if Poles were exploiters of dead Jews, then so were the surviving Jews themselves! Moreover, this exploitation involved the acquisition of non-essential items (alcohol), which is an aggravating circumstance.

AUSCHWITZ SONDERKOMMANDO: NAZI GERMANS BLAMED THE JEWS, AND NOW JEWS BLAME THE POLES

The editor specifies why the Germans made it a point to use Jews as part of the Jew-extermination program, “This aspect not only pertains to the Sonderkommando but also describes a wider strategy of the Nazis, who forced the Jews to participate in and even finance their own extermination. The intention behind this strategy was to blur the boundary between victim and perpetrator.” (p. 343).

Exactly right. And now the Jews use exactly the same strategy (the mythical “Polish complicity in the Holocaust”) to blur the boundary between German perpetrator and mostly compelled Polish so-called bystander. For shame.