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

Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis, by Isaiah Trunk. 1979. Stein and Day Publishers, New York

Counterpart to Jedwabne Lenin Statue. Collaboration Here Exposed: Insight on “When Germans Are Not Watching”. Early Jewish Faults

This book has many Jewish testimonies, most of which were recorded ten or so years after the war. I focus on items of lasting relevance.

LENIN STATUE MOCK FUNERAL AND TEARDOWN–BY GERMANS–SIMILAR TO JEDWABNE

Author Isaiah Trunk cites R. K. of Siemiatitch [Siemiatycze?], Bielsk Region, Bialystok Province, from June or July 1941, “Special squads of Germans from the ‘Todt Organization’ started arriving and they got the local townspeople to order the statue of Lenin standing in the Semiatitch marketplace demolished. They showed their hatred by dragging all the Jews out and forcing us to the market square, beating us the whole time without pity. They hurled one Jew live into the river and he drowned. They draped a talis over the director of the Jewish Folkshul, Yihude Kogut, put a toyre crown on his head and made him deliver a eulogy for Lenin in front of all the people. He had to yell, ‘Down with the USSR!’ The Jews were then ordered to smash off Lenin’s head but we wouldn’t do it…These killers obliterated the statue themselves and ordered the pieces taken down into the Jewish cemetery.” (p. 98).

Note that the details of the Nazi German creative mockery of the Jews are very similar to that of the mock funeral and teardown of Lenin’s statue at nearby Jedwabne, complete with the German putting of the blame on the Polish locals. The uncanny coincidence in details, between the two statue-destroying incidents, points to the Germans, and not the Poles, as the perpetrators of the Jedwabne massacre.

The fact that the Germans went out of their way to blame the Poles (“they got the local townspeople to order the statue of Lenin standing in the Semiatitch marketplace demolished”) reinforces the fact that the Germans had a consistent policy of blaming the locals (Poles) for German actions. Whenever today’s Jews blame the Poles for Jedwabne, they are reviving and repeating Nazi propaganda, and doing so hook, line, and sinker.

COLLABORATION HERE EXPOSED: THE JEWS’ TURN

How often have we heard the vague insinuation about “Polish complicity in the Holocaust”? This work confirms (p. 225) that Germans tortured captured fugitive Jews in order to force them to divulge the hiding places of other fugitive Jews. Consequently, the low overall fugitive Jew survival rate should not automatically be blamed on the Poles.

Collaboration here exposed: The following are some examples of Jewish-Nazi collaboration that very much look like self-serving Jews that took advantage of the Nazi occupation in order to benefit themselves at the expense of their fellow Jews, and nothing more.

EXAMPLE 1: David Graysdorf’s testimony (1947), on the situation facing Jews near Boryslaw and Drohobycz:

“These 1,200 people were held inside the camp until August 1944. Random executions and roundups went on regularly. The camp was run by SS men Tamaneck, Schwartz, Kempke, Lindenfeld, Semmer, Menzanger, Schembach. It’s impossible to describe their cruelty. They were joined in their sadistic acts by the Jewish head of the Ordnungsdienst [Jewish police], Wolek Eiznsztajn, and his second, Max Heinberg, who profited from what the Nazis left over.” (p. 80).

Collaboration here exposed, and more: The “profit” statement is ironic to Holocaust-Industry-related Jewish complaints about Poles profiting from post-Jewish property. Physician, heal thyself.

EXAMPLE 2: F. F.’s testimony (1954) from a camp at Blizyn, near Radom (1943-1944):

“We would have survived the work if the Germans hadn’t forced us to meet impossible slave quotas, and put the wild Kapos over us. The Kapos were Jewish. They beat us–but even worse, they reported bad workers to the Germans to the Germans and that was the beginning of real hell. Some of the Kapos were from Tomaszow and were quiet, ordinary people before the war. No one would have believed that they were capable of becoming collaborationists and traitors.” (p. 190).

Collaboration here exposed: Note that Jewish kapos beating other Jews is sometimes excused as “necessary in order to impress the Germans to avoid trouble”, ironically even when the Germans were not around to actually witness the beatings! Now Jan Grabowski, Barbara Engelking, etc., have alleged that the Poles and the Polish Blue Police (Policja Granatowa) apprehended and killed fugitive Jews “even when the Germans were not watching”. So, by the same exculpatory standard as used by the Jews, the Poles and Polish Blue Police can validly use the “necessary to impress the Germans to avoid trouble” argument. In other words, the Poles must denounce or kill Jews, even on their own, so that the Germans will be “impressed enough” that they don’t potentially punish the Poles for failure to obey them.

Collaboration here exposed: Jan Grabowski and his ilk have also alleged that most Polish szmalcowniki (extortionists of Jews) had been respectable people before the war, and not necessarily marginal members of society, as commonly thought. And what if? As the quote above indicates, the cruel Jewish kapos also had been respectable people before the war, but nobody (certainly not the Holocaust establishment) makes an issue of that. Need we ask why?

EXAMPLE 3: M. G.’s testimony (1954): A survivor of Auschwitz:

“We’re in Oswiecim. The Sonderkommando dragged us off the trains with clubs. The Jews of the Sonderkommando were especially hard on the ways they treated us. They screamed out orders: ‘Gespecke lassen!’ [Leave the bacon]. People asked, “Why?’ We were told to take them along!’ ‘You’re all going to heaven,’ they answered cruelly. Then the nightmare of the selektsye [selection] started.” (p. 232).

The foregoing contradicts other testimonies that speak of the Jewish Sonderkommando being warm and welcoming, and deceiving Jewish arrivals about the purpose of the “showers”. Collaboration here exposed: Does this mean that some Jewish Sonderkommando acted in solidarity with the Nazis by actually delighted in the impending deaths of the Jewish arrivals, and openly telling them so?

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CRUSADES-ERA PERSECUTION OF JEWS PARTLY THE JEWS’ FAULT: HERESY!

Let’s backtrack a bit. In an exotically-rare gesture, the Jewish author, Trunk, instead of blaming everything on the Christians, admits to Jewish wrongs in the distant past. He writes, “In Medieval Jewish chronicles and homilies, we discover justification of the calamity: as a punishment by the hand of God for committed sins–mipney khatoeynu. We also encounter in these accounts some sober explanations of the hatred towards Jews: lack of honesty in dealing with Christians, economic competition, and immodest behavior in public.” (p. 3).