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

Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, by Eliyana R. Adler. 2020. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London

Eliyana R. Adler on Polish Jews Deported to Siberia. Repeats Pole-Blaming Memes

The author is a historian and Professor of history and Jewish studies. She re-exhumes the hoary canard of the Polish Air Force largely destroyed on the ground in 1939. (p. 17). Her work repeats the usual Zydokomuna denialism as pertaining to 1939 Polish Jewry, and the attacks on Anders Army, but also contains some worthwhile information, which I focus on.

ORIGIN OF POLONOPHOBIC TALL TALES TOLD BY HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Here is more evidence that Holocaust survivors can graft-in into their memories certain events that they never personally experienced. (This means that they can repeat anti-Polish hearsay, on the authority of them being eyewitnesses, but which has no basis in fact.) Adler writes:

“Scholars of testimony have argued that certain elements of the Holocaust have become so emblematic that survivors feel a need to include them in their testimonies, as if not doing so will diminish the legitimacy of their recollections. In Zoe Waxman’s word, ‘collective memory obscures the diversity of Holocaust testimonies.’ Lawrence Langer highlights a recurring episode in which new arrivals at death camps are shown the smoke from the crematoria and cruelly told that it is their loved ones.'” (p. 48).

This has broad-based relevance. Nowadays, the anti-Polish accusations of Holocaust survivors are automatically believed just because they are Holocaust survivors (and because they fit the standard Pole-accusing Jewish narratives that are in circulation). In addition, postwar accusations against Poles (e. g, the August Trials), largely based on uncorroborated Jewish survivor testimony, are nowadays uncritically revived by those that attack Poles and Poland. It is clear that such accusations should at least be treated with a grain of salt.

ARCHIVES DO NOT TRUMP ALL OTHER INFORMATION

Some historians treat archives as if they were gospel truth. They are not. Adler realizes, “And while these accounts are certainly subjective, it is not necessarily true that archival material provides a more objective point of view. All documents contain bias, as do documentary repositories and their staffs. In Kate Brown’s rendering, ‘archivists and historians know that documents can be inaccurate, obscurantist, aspirational, and sometimes just plain false, written to deceive. Historians are discovering that archives are not inert depositories, but contain their own narratives that are active in framing the determining the past.'” (p. 6. Emphasis added).

SOVIET ARCHIVES ARE NOT RELIABLE

Eliyana R. Adler continues, “This may be even more true of Soviet sources, as Sonja Luehrmann explains: ‘In the case of Soviet documents, their relationship to what one might think of as social reality is further complicated by the fact that documentation of life in the USSR was never intended to be neutral or objective but to participate in transforming the reality it described.'” (p. 6).

However, Adler does not practice what she preaches. She uncritically believes Soviet archives and their claim of only 320,000 Polish deportees (1939-1941) instead of the 3-5X larger figure from other sources. (pp. 110-111).

THE ZYDOKOMUNA IS REAL AFTER ALL

Author Adler does her best to explain-away the 1939 Judeo-Bolshevism, as if it was all Polish imagination. (p. 54). Unfortunately for her, there are many candid Jewish testimonies of massive Jewish support for the invading Soviets. I suppose that this, too, is just Polish imagination, eh?

Now consider the well-worn argument that the Jews were glad to fall in Soviet as opposed to Nazi hands. According to Adler’s own figures, some 1,600 Jews voluntarily re-located from Soviet-occupied Polish territory to Nazi-German-occupied Polish territory. (p. 28). She does not explain how this squares with the “gratitude towards Soviets” canned exculpation. If the Jews were then so mortally afraid of the Nazis, such voluntary relocation would be unthinkable.

Jews were commonly Soviet commissars, and this was still true even 25 years after the Russian Revolution. Adler comments, “Jewish Communists were heavily represented among the political commissars, but Jews also served as officers, medical staff, and enlisted men and women.” (p. 179).

ONGOING JEWISH SEPARATISM

Many Polish Jews had no loyalty to Poland. [This makes the use of the Orwellian phrases, “Jewish Poles” and “non-Jewish Poles”, employed also by Adler, all the more farcical.] Consistent with the premise that Jews have no lasting loyalties to the nations in which they live, Jewish separatism occurred in various contexts, and not just relative to Anders Army. Adler writes, “The idea of a separate Jewish unit surfaced a number of different times in relation to various Allied armies.” (p. 180).

Jews kept taking advantage of Soviet plans against Poland. Adler writes, “Some Polish Jews volunteered to serve in the Red Army, especially after the break between the Poles and the Soviets in 1943 and the formation of a Polish division within the Red Army.” (p. 179).

Before that, Jews in Anders Army raised a big stink about imagined Polish antisemitism. That was their excuse for deserting. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2026/08/19/warsaw-uprising-heroic-narrative-affirmed/

THE JEWISH BLAME GAME, WITH POLES THE DESIGNATED WHIPPING BOY

Eliyana R. Adler dusts off the accusations of (what else?) antisemitism in Anders Army as fact, ignoring the fact that they had been disproven, and shown to be largely the products of Communist propaganda. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/04/10/poland-smeared-anti-polish-media-propaganda-behind-jews-desert-anders-army-davies-and-polonsky/

Jews regularly blame Poles for German crimes. That is old news. It turns out that Jews also blame Poles for Soviet crimes! Adler comments, “He [David Engel] also demonstrates that, despite complicated ongoing negotiations over Polish citizenship, and questionable behavior on both sides, ‘it was the Poles, not the Soviets, who emerged from the evacuation controversy as the villains in Jewish eyes.'” (p. 193). Exactly right. It’s the same old game.