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

Entangled in Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944-1947, by Marcin Zaremba. 2022. Indiana University Press, Bloomington

Marcin Zaremba. The Brutalization of the War and Imposition of Communism–in Near-Encyclopedic Detail

If you think that Poles just stood around and watched as Jews were persecuted, be prepared for a shock. Historian Zaremba, though following the customary Judeocentric mindset (see below), provides a wealth of seldom-mentioned data on the magnitude of privations and wrongs faced by Poles during the German occupation and the ensuing Soviet “liberation”.

ALL PEOPLE LIVING IN POLAND AT THE TIME WERE TRAUMATIZED, NOT JUST THE JEWS

Zaremba makes this sage comment, “This book is about the terror that descended on Poland…It is impossible to measure who felt most threatened–a Jew by a pogrom, a Pole by the secret police, or a Polish, Ukrainian, or German family by expulsion and drifting without a home.” (p. 7). But only Jewish suffering really matters.

Now consider alcoholism. The Germans did not just destroy Polish morals by selling Poles alcohol. The alcohol also alleviated the German-caused starvation, owing to its high caloric content, and eased the Poles’ pain and bitterness at being enslaved by the Germans. (p. 51).

The trauma of the Poles continued long after the Nazi German occupation finally ended. Zaremba comments, “The teachers interviewed in 1946 noticed behaviors in their pupils indicating a lack of respect for others’ property, an interest in weapons, lowered moral standards, drinking, and an inclination to brawl.” (p. 54).

The legacy of WWII, in a sense, continues to this day. Approximately 14 million land mines had been cleared by 1956, and approximately 5,000 postwar Poles were killed by land mines and unexploded ordinance as of 1994. (p. 236).

POSTWAR KILLINGS–NOT ONLY OF JEWS!

Nowadays, all Americans hear is that postwar Poles killed Jews. Poles are the designated bad guys and Jews are victims. Let us finally drop this Judeocentric contextual vacuum.

In 1945 and 1946, 8,411 and 7,146 murders took place in Poland, according to militia statistics, which are probably grossly underestimated. (p. 48, 62). Yet the Holocaust establishment blows the trumpet about perhaps 1,000 Jews killed during this same period!  Marcin Zaremba writes, “There is no doubt that all postwar violence–and not only anti-Jewish violence–had its roots in the war. People became more aggressive toward each other and grew indifferent to death. Both the German and Soviet occupying forces showed that anything could be inflicted on a human being–mistreatment, humiliation, death…Crime levels rose to the twentieth century’s highest, and the Jews were by no means its only victims.” (p. 305).

Now consider the “train pogroms”. Turns out that regime functionaries, and anyone who did not comply with bandits’ demands for belongings, could be thrown out of moving trains. It did not happen only to Jews! Red Army Troops also engaged in this sport. (p. 165).

Marcin Zaremba suggests that Polish bandits preferred to rob and kill Jews rather than Poles. (pp. 169-170). However, he presents only a small number of anecdotal cases, and speculative reasoning, to support his sweeping generalization.

POLES “GOT RICH OFF DEAD JEWS”? HARDLY!

In typical Holocaust materials, all we hear about is the blackmailing of fugitive Jews, the purchases of post-Jewish properties in German auctions, and of Poles generally “getting rich” off dead Jews, as by stealing from the remains of the murdered Jews. The Judeocentric contextual vacuum rules again. Zaremba provides much context.

It is not difficult to image what the Polish people were driven to, “Grueling living conditions, destitution, and hunger pushed people to seek extraordinary solutions, whether in looting or in banditry.” (p. 305).

In 1945 alone, there were 26,471 recorded robberies and 121,729 thefts. (p. 63).

Zaremba adds that, “In the summer of 1945, Poland lived by looting…Looting was a sort of folk reaction to crisis, to what at times seemed to be a permanent state of shortages and poverty.” (p. 135). He adds that, “Looting both grew out of wartime demoralization and worsened it…Looting became an element of the air, of the postwar lifestyle. Outside official debates among the intelligentsia, few thought of looting as something bad.” (p. 149).

Zaremba concludes, “Poland in 1944-47 was a country of beggars, vagrants, and various other ‘free particles’…” (p. 105).

The entering Red Army picked up right where the Germans left off, in terms of plundering the Poles. Zaremba comments, “Inhabitants of larger towns and cities…also learned to fear Soviet troops’ banditry.” (p. 77).

GRAVE ROBBERY–NOT ONLY OF JEWS

Jan T. Gross has propagandized the Poles’ looting of the Jewish cremains at Treblinka. This happened everywhere. Zaremba quips, “The cemetery hyenas searching for gold teeth and wedding bands also destroyed German graveyards in the Regained Territories.” (p. 149). The graves of ethnic Poles were also plundered by other Poles. (p. 148).

DIRECT AND INDIRECT SOVIET COMMUNIST TERROR

The dreaded Soviet NKVD was directly involved in the subjugation of Poland for at least two years after the entry of the Red Army. Zaremba comments, “The NKVD army units were still pacifying towns and villages as late as 1946.” (p. 187).

The Polish Communist Security Forces (U. B., or Bezpieka) also sowed terror. They arrested over 11,000 people in 1944, 45,000 in 1945, and 44,500 in 1946. (p. 188). But most arrested people were not recorded, and the actual number arrested for 1945 alone probably exceeded 200,000 people. (p. 197).

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THE LOWDOWN OF THIS BOOK

The author adheres to the standard Judaized narrative. Jews have no agency, and can only be the object of perceptions. They can only be victims. Jews never do anything wrong: Poles only imagine that Jews can do wrong. Jews cannot possibly do any harm to Poles (p. 15): Jews can only be scapegoats. Polish antisemitism (what else?) is freely invoked.

Incredibly, Zaremba insinuates that the Poles’ fear of Communism owed to their prejudices of Russians as Asiatics (p. 20). So Poles are the problem? It could not possibly stem from the fact that Communism was an evil and totalitarian system. It could not possibly stem from the long history of Russian aggression against Poland, eh?

Author Zaremba repeats the Jedwabne lie as fact. (p. 49, 306). He dusts-off the Jan T. Gross notion that the Poles’ belief in the blood libel was the prime cause of the postwar Polish pogroms, such as at Rzeszow and in Kielce. He overlooks the possibility that Communist agent provocateurs had been spreading the blood-libel rumors. He also ignores the fact that Jews also believed that children–Jewish children–are regularly kidnapped (by Gypsies). See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/ritual-murder-jews-believed-similar-mielnicki/

Zaremba also disregards the fact that Jews can also fabricate and spread hysterical tales–such as believable pogrom horrors involving Jewish “eyewitnesses” seeing Americans kill Jewish children in New York, creating a riot. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/10/12/bogus-pogroms-how-pogrom-horror-stories-originate-lurid-antigoyism-holocaust-survivor-testimony-unreliable-ribak/