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

Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, by David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky. 1947. Yale University Press, New Haven

Rehabilitation Under Communism? Hardly. Death Rates of 1939-1941 Polish Deportees

This book is full of interesting information. For example, we learn of Jan Czerski, a self-taught Polish geologist. He was exiled to Siberia in retaliation for his participation in the Poles’ January 1863 Insurrection. He then became one of the top explorers of Siberia, and a mountain range in Siberia is named after him. (p. 111).

NAZIS COPIED THE COMMUNISTS

Nazi German forced labor was in many ways modeled on the earlier Communist forced labor. The authors write, “German documents which fell into the hands of the Allies reveal with how great an interest the German Government observed and studied the Soviet system of forced labor.” (p. 86).

Some of the quoted Russian eyewitnesses report that the slave labor in the gulags was worse than that of the African slaves in the antebellum American South (pp. 86-87, 200). Tell that to people today that live under the delusions of “wokeism”!

REHABILITATION UNDER COMMUNISM? SOME GULAGS WERE WORSE THAN NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS

Ironically, claims that Communist concentration camps were “not that bad” fly in the fact of the facts. One eyewitness reported, “There were many cases of suicide. In September of 1940 in the barrack where I lived a Viennese Jew, Frischhof, hanged himself from his cot. The Germans had held him in Dachau for 11 months; he had endured that imprisonment but could not stand this one. Another case was that of a man who, driven to despair, threw himself into a well and was drowned.” (p. 38).

Holocaust supremacists have also argued that there was no gulag equivalent to the Nazi German death camp–a camp where admission absolutely guaranteed death. If true, so what? Death is death, whether it comes as an outcome of many camps with partial mortality, or comes as an outcome of a few camps with “total” mortality. Nor is it even true. Some gulag camps did have 100% mortality. Several thousand Poles sent to the lead mines of the Chukotsk Peninsula all died to a man. Note, furthermore, that these were military men, and not “soft” civilians! (p. 141).

REHABILITATION UNDER COMMUNISM? THINK AGAIN

In recent years, we have heard the curious argument that Communism was no big deal because, under Communism, a former “class enemy” could be rehabilitated. Holocaust supremacists have extended this premise and asserted that, whereas it was impossible for a Jew to be rehabilitated under Hitler, the status of “class enemies” under Communism could improve with time, and they could be rehabilitated. This alone is supposed to make Nazism more evil than Communism.

In actuality, Jews could in fact be “rehabilitated” under Nazism. Some Jews were made into quasi-permanent forced laborers, and others got re-defined as Mischlinge or as Honorary Aryans. Furthermore, the Third Reich even released some Jews for money or for German nationals. Please see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2022/07/12/jews-ransomed-all-jews-must-die-a-myth-actual-captive-jews-freed-by-the-nazis-dutch-and-german-jews-wasserstein/

The status of these Jews had definitely improved under Nazism. Their rehabilitation had been decisive. They had stopped being the existential enemies of the Reich that must be destroyed at any cost, as demanded by Nazi ideology, and became economic commodities that could legitimately be exchanged for money or for German nationals.

RE-EDUCATION AND REHABILITATION UNDER COMMUNISM WERE MOSTLY PROPAGANDA, NOT FACT

Authors Dallin and Nicolaevsky make the following revealing comments:

“‘Re-education’ of the prisoners was a far cry from the truth, since every responsible writer and speaker was well aware of the real state of affairs in the prison camps…Not moral regeneration but a new potential for criminality was the real consequence of the operation of this new institution.” (p. 232).

“It was only for the benefit of the credulous that the propaganda machine still insisted on the miraculous ‘regeneration of man’…’To reforge’ and ‘reforging’ became the most widely used terms for this hypocritical front of ‘re-education'” (p. 233).

“Liberation from labor camps upon the expiration of a sentence was not automatic by any means…The Central Administration in Moscow usually extends the terms of political prisoners when they are near expiration, whether these prisoners are held in prisons or in the corrective labor camps.” (p. 246).

“In the second half of the nineteen thirties the iron curtain fell upon forced labor and the labor camps. In contrast with the strenuous propaganda of the early ‘thirties, the press and the public spokesmen were now silent concerning Soviet penal policies. There was no more talk in public about the exemplary correction of criminals in the Soviet land, about humane treatment and the therapeutic effects of labor; no more invitation were extended to ‘workers delegations’ abroad to visit these peculiar Russian institutions. Complete secrecy prevailed.” (pp. 253-254).

For more on the farcical nature of rehabilitation under Communism, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/07/17/the-odd-official-gulag-statistics-falsified/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2024/06/24/ruthless-communism-not-exterminatory-pioneering-forced-labor-happened/

THE MORTALITY OF THE POLISH DEPORTEES OF 1939-1941

One Polish source cites 1,470,000 deportees, of which 990,000 were special migrants, 250,000 were prisoners in labor camps, and 230,000 were Polish POWs. According to another source, there were 1,080,000 deportees, of whom 880,000 were “ordinary” deportees, special laborers numbered 20,000, and POWs numbered 180,000. (pp. 263-264).

According to an estimate, after nearly two years of captivity, there were 270,000 deaths out of 1,080,000 (25%), while another source cites a 40% mortality rate (p. 264) for the 1939-1941 Polish deportees.

THE MYTH OF COMMUNIST “ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY”

Communists always claim that their system is more moral and just than capitalism. How so? Dallin and Nicolaevsky remark, “True, unemployment does not exist in Russia, and every citizen has a job. But so did the serf and the slave. Unemployment was virtually nonexistent in Hitler’s Germany.” (p. x).

In addition, Communist propaganda has always blamed the “injustices” of capitalism as a root cause of the existence of common criminality. Ironically, the Soviets had a huge problem with common criminality for ten or more years after the Russian Revolution. (pp. 158-159).