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

Lewinska, P. 1968. Twenty Months at Auschwitz. Lyle Stuart, Inc., New York

Auschwitz Inmates Scorn Jews? It Was a German-Caused All-Around Phenomenon. Typhus Not a “Jewish Disease” 

This book was written by a Polish woman who was sent to Auschwitz in January 1943. (p. 100). Her testimony centers upon the everyday experiences of the inmates.

AUSCHWITZ INMATES SCORN JEWS? EVERYBODY SCORNED EVERYBODY!

Holocaust supremacists sometimes assert that the non-Jewish inmates of Auschwitz did not give proper deference to the Jews and their allegedly special victim status, or even that they engaged in Nazi-like contempt for Jews. This mystification of the Holocaust fails. It turns out that the Germans had a strategy for dividing the inmates against each other, and not only of pitting non-Jews against Jews.

Author Pelagia Lewinska writes, “The Germans busied themselves with exploiting every possible difference among the inmates to awaken animosities, differences of a social nature, or an educational level, and the like. But the most terrible venom they used was that of racial and national chauvinism, knowingly provoked to aggravate our daily dose of misery.” (p. 121).

She elaborates, “Thus, the word ‘patriot’,” so filled with beauty and generosity in its true meaning, ended in the camp jargon as the description of an enraged female for whom insults like ‘dirty Jew’, ‘Ukrainian pig”, ‘filthy Polack’ became a way of discharging the bitterness of her aching heart…” (p. 121). Lewinska then describes how this became a tool against the Jews (and not only Jews). She comments, “The envious and stupid accused us of failing in patriotism when we came to the aid of a Ukrainian woman or a Jewess. We had to defend ourselves more and more frequently against such charges.” (p. 122).

JEWS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS–WAS IT A “FAVOR”?

Holocaust supremacists commonly insist that Jews dying in gas chambers was an extraordinarily horrible fate that marks out the Holocaust as unique or exceptional. Far from it. Death is death. If anything, it could be said that the quick death of a Jew in the gas chamber was better than the normal slow death of a Pole in Auschwitz. At least the Nazi Germans thought so.

The author writes, “The Germans considered death by gas a kinder form of killing. That is why an SS noncommissioned officer, wanting to express his gratitude to a Jewish woman doctor for the care she had given him, assured her that he would see it that when her time came she would be gassed.” (p. 142).

INFANTICIDE AT AUSCHWITZ

Lewinska writes, “Women gave birth to babies who immediately disappeared…Then an ordinance appeared forbidding sending any more infants to the crematory ovens. Instead, they abandoned each baby to its fate, leaving the umbilical cord untied until the infant choked in its final outcry. Believe me, the ovens were a blessing.” (p. 98).

TYPHUS A KILLER: GERMANS TREATED NON-JEWS, AND NOT ONLY JEWS, AS THE “BEARERS OF TYPHUS”

The author devotes atypical attention to diseases as a killer of inmates in Auschwitz. She comments, “Typhus was, in order of importance, the second-ranking means of exterminating people. I have already mentioned the great quantity of lice and the ideal conditions for their multiplying. Almost every woman, with rare exceptions, had typhus at one time or another, and cures were almost as exceptional.” (p. 92).

Ironically, the Germans had, at one time, a policy of targeting non-Jews over Jews. Lewinska writes, “The Germans did sometimes battle the epidemic. They finished that battle in one day in the men’s section at Auschwitz: all actual typhus cases and all those suspected of having the disease were sent to the gas chambers. About two thousand men perished thus in one single day. And they all had been Aryans.” (p. 92. Emphasis added).

Obviously, the Germans did not treat typhus as a Jewish disease, at least not consistently. And yet, ironically, Jews frequently complain of being reckoned the “bearers of typhus” by the Nazi Germans!

Auschwitz inmates scorn Jews? Hardly.