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

Holocaust: Politics, Violence, Memory, edited by Jeffrey S. Kopstein, Jelena Subotic, and Susan Welch. 2023. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London

Jedwabne Not Holocaust. Little-Known Facts on Kristallnacht. Politics of Shame is Very Real

I focus on novel information. Here are some interesting facts.

JULY 1941: JEDWABNE NOT HOLOCAUST–EVEN IF THE POLES DID IT!

The Jedwabne accusation is the centerpiece of Jewish accusations against Poland, which is why Jews so strenuously resist the performance of a full forensic dig at Jedwabne. Nowadays, Jedwabne is automatically folded into the Holocaust, and Poles are cleverly blamed for “complicity in the Holocaust”. This, at minimum, enables Jews to use the moral prestige of the Holocaust as a political tool to use against Poles, based on the imputed Polish shame (pedagogika wstydu: see below) for the Jedwabne massacre that exists in the public imagination.

To begin with, this is not merely a falsification of history: It is reading history backwards! Author Jeffrey Kopstein admits that Jedwabne could not possibly be part of the Holocaust. He comments, “What are we to make of these pogroms? Are they even part of the Holocaust? The temptation to include them within the Holocaust, or to see them as a ‘prelude’ to it, is driven largely by our knowledge of the horrors that would come next. But such knowledge was unavailable to victims, perpetrators, and bystanders at the time. Nobody knew in the summer of 1941 that there would be a Holocaust…The Germans had not yet decided on whether or how all Jews would be killed (this would occur only at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942).” (p. 114. Emphasis added).

Moreover, the consistent German mass shootings of Jewish women and children, along with the men, did not even begin until a few weeks AFTER Jedwabne. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/03/28/endorsed-improvised-holocaust-helpless-poles-next-jedwabne-not-holocaust/

Yet countless textbooks regularly and fallaciously include Jedwabne in the German-made Holocaust! This is also part of an intentional strategy of putting part of the blame for the Holocaust on the Poles, and thereby diffusing the guilt away from the Germans.

Incidentally, recent research shows that the Germans, and not the Poles, did the Jedwabne massacre:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2021/07/01/jedwabne-update-definitive-work-jedwabne-a-german-disguised-crime-long-suppressed-information-now-available-2000-2003-poles-are-guilty-ipn-commission-refuted-sommer-chodakiewicz-stankiewicz/

But the Jews largely control the narrative on Jedwabne, so what does it matter?

THE PEDAGOGIKA WSTYDU (PEDAGOGY OF SHAME) IS VERY REAL

Some leftists and Jews scoff at the notion that the widespread publicity to the Holocaust is a tool for instilling shame, and for the sake of extracting political concessions. In contrast to this gaslighting, Charles King writes, “Being sorry for the Holocaust became one of the desiderata of Europeanness in the 1990s. Countries sometimes competed as being sorrier than their neighbors–at least in the form of public memorials, official expressions of regret, and the issuance of government reports that created official narratives in their territory…” (p. 28. Emphasis added).

Notice that all European nations are supposed to be sorry for the Holocaust, and not just Germans and Austrians! Moreover, this is all Judeocentric. No nation needs to feel any kind of moral or political sorrow for its wrongs to Poland.

SHIFTING THE BLAME FOR THE HOLOCAUST AWAY FROM THE GERMANS

There is nothing more for Jews to gain politically if Germany is rightfully blamed for the Holocaust. Jan Burzlaff confirms what Poles had long suspected. He comments, “Second, and unlike Kuehl, social scientists have now increasingly embraced the general shift by Holocaust historians, moving from a focus on National Socialism and perpetrators to interethnic violence and Jewish perspectives. For instance, the political scientists Jeffrey S. Kopstein and Jason Wittenberg positioned Jan T. Gross’s study of the Jedwabne pogrom within a comparative landscape of communal violence in the summer of 1941.” (p. 56).

“COMMUNAL VIOLENCE”–A RACIST AND COLONIALIST TERM

In other words, some kind of vague communal violence (including Jedwabne) is now supposed to be equivalent to the Nazi German murder of 6 million Jews. Poles have been made into the new Holocaust whipping boy.

What’s more, the term communal violence, apart from transferring part of the Holocaust blame from Germans to Poles, itself has racist and colonialist connotations. See:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/07/20/nazi-camps-german-concentration-camps-german-death-camps-killing-centers-little-practical-difference-germans-guilty-of-nazism-germans-not-victims-of-nazism-communism-worse-than-nazism-holocau/

DEMYSTIFYING THE KRISTALLNACHT POGROM

Author Daniel Solomon presents the astonishing fact that fully 1/3^rd of all synagogues in Nazi Germany were unharmed during Kristallnacht! (p. 69). I have read hundreds of books on the Holocaust and had never heard this before! Is this done to suppress information that reduces the perceived moral urgency of Jewish victimhood in the public imagination?

There is more. Solomon presents evidence that the burnings of synagogues were more likely to occur in places where there were larger Jewish populations, and where Jewish electoral support for the Communists, in the 1930 elections, had been higher. (pp. 69-70, p. 78).  This contradicts the popular notion that Jews were nothing more than victims of totalizing anti-Semitism, especially under Nazism. It also refutes the myth that Jewish conduct had absolutely nothing to do with how Jews were treated, even in the days of the Third Reich.

WHAT IS A POGROM IN THE FIRST PLACE?

The term pogrom normally refers exclusively to Jews. It is the victim card yet again. No other victims of ethnic riots have a special name for their victim experiences. Isn’t this yet another way to make Jews seem special?

Interestingly, Solomon deviates from this universal policy by taking the unusual step of broadening the definition of pogroms beyond Jews. For instance, he uses the term pogrom in reference to violence between Hindus and Muslims in India. (p. 70). Heresy!

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY PERSISTS

Any possibility that Holocaust supremacism is finally diminishing is blown away by Kopstein et al, who write, “We live in a culture profoundly influenced by the legacy of the Holocaust.” (p. 1). We certainly do. Needless to say, and as intended, no other genocide profoundly influences our culture.

Not to be outdone, Volha Charnysh calls the Holocaust “the protypical case of ‘radical evil'”. (p. 245). In other words, no other genocide can possibly be as “radical evil” as the Jews’ Holocaust. This is racist. It assigns different moral worth, to peoples that had experienced genocide, in accordance with their ethnicity.

HOLOCAUST GRANDSTANDING AGAIN: THE HOLOCAUST MORAL LENS

The expansive superlatives given to the Holocaust, and to no other genocide, go on and on. Kopstein at al. write, “More than seventy-five years later, the Nazi extermination effort against the world’s Jews continues to provide a moral lens through which we judge political action…The Holocaust therefore functions as a ‘shadow case’ of sorts, a yardstick against which to compare a broad range of contemporary social and political processes.” (p. 1). Funny how no other genocide gets to function as a “moral lens” or yardstick. It is a privilege given solely to Jews and their Holocaust. Are we supposed to believe that this is by accident?