Part 1
THE HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE
"Instead of learning about the Holocaust
through the large lens of Jewish history, many Jews and non-Jews in
America now learn the whole of Jewish history through the lens of the
Holocaust."
James Young, p. 304
"The myth of the Holocaust teaches that throughout their history of
persecution the Jews have been blameless, their oppressors irrational."
Liebman and Cohen p. 33
"It isn't the truth [about Jews in the Holocaust era] that frightens me
but the suppression of free speech in order to protect communal myths
that are not lies but truths rendered so sacrosanct and undiscussed that
they start to smell fishy."
Carol Oppenheim, Jewish author, p.
39
"Many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the six million by the
Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots - or in the hope of not
being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a
Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot be doing what you
know he
is doing because he is a Jew."
James Baldwin, Black novelist, p.
34
"Related to the film's box-office success is the fact that precisely
because Schindler's List has been watched by large numbers of people who
had very little previous knowledge of the Holocaust, and cannot be
expected to gain much more knowledge in the future. This specific
version of the event may remain the only source of information about it
for many of its viewers."
Omer Bartov, p. 46
"It is doubtful that history is the genre for writers who are so
overwhelmed by the Holocaust and yet want to describe it. It seems that
some fictional form of expression may be more suitable than history for
those who want to respond emotionally rather than historically to that
great tragedy."
Richard Lucas, p. 222
"[Jewish] manufactured claims of uniqueness for their own people are,
after all, synonymous with dismissal and denial of the experience of
others... Narcissistic false claims of uniqueness are joined with
brutal, racist denials of the sufferings of others, becoming two sides
of the same coin."
David Stannard, p. 198
"I would be the last to minimize the atrocity of Auschwitz, where my
father and mother perished. But don't the tears of others count? " -
Maxime Rodinson, p. 9
"[The Holocaust had been] hardly talked about for the first twenty years
or so after World War II; then, from the 1970s on, [it became] ever more
central in American public discourse - particularly, of course, among
Jews, but also in the culture at large. What accounts for this unusual
chronology?"
Peter Novick, 1999, p. 2
"The actual historical subject [of the Holocaust] itself has become
almost unimportant compared with its contemporary political function in
the hands of some Jews."
John Fox, non-Jewish faculty
member in Jewish history and Holocaust studies at both University
College and Jews College, London, [3-19-2000, p. 47-48]
It is the profoundest of ironies that Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis may have saved worldwide Jewry from extinction.
(In the case of Jewish Hassids, Menachem
Friedman notes that "paradoxically, it was the destruction of Eastern
European Jewry in the twentieth century that created the conditions which
enabled the spread of ultra-orthodoxy.")
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 31]
At the very least, judging by common Jewish
commentary about their fate in Europe over fifty years ago, Hitler is
responsible for a dramatic Jewish revival. Before World War II many Jews
were on a slow but steady path of assimilation wherever they resided in
their diaspora, particularly in Western Europe, each generation inched
further away from the separatist myths of the Jewish past.
Religion of all kinds continued in retreat and
the rationale for being Jewish was - at least in some parts of the Jewish
community - steadily weakening. As the Nazi regime came to power, however,
many German Jews (if we take what they say at face value) had strayed from a
specifically Jewish connection in their lives and were forced to re-examine
their identities.
In 1935, for instance, the German literary
critic Jean Amery (Hans Mayer) supposedly discovered himself a Jew in a
Viennese cafe when reading a newspaper about new Nazi laws on the subject.
Likewise, in 1938, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein connected to his long
lost Jewish identity as a consequence of Nazi dictates. They were both
suddenly Jews because Hitler said so.
[TRAVERSO, p. 39]
Even Albert Einstein found his identity as a Jew
in the context of rising political anti-Semitism in Germany in 1914.
There had been nothing in Switzerland, he said,
"that called forth any Jewish sentiments in
me. When I moved to Berlin all that changed."
[CLARK, p. 377]
(He was helping to raise "funds for the
Zionist cause of a Hebrew university" by 1921.)
[RHODES, R., 1988, p. 173]
"The composer Arnold Schoenberg and many
other baptized Jews," notes Nachum Gidal, "now publicly declared their
return to Judaism."
[GIDAL, p. 425]
Sigmund Freud reflected, at least publicly, the
same experience:
"My language is German. My culture, my
attainments, are German. I could identify myself German intellectually,
until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and
German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew."
[GAY, MOMENT, p. 50]
In 1937, an American Jew, Alfred Siegel, wrote
in the American Israelite that,
"Hitler has been a life-giving stimulant for
me. In times when there is no Jewish flame left in me and I am feeling
very cold, I get warm again on account of Hitler... I know I shouldn't
say this, but... Hitler [is] helping me to fulfill my status as an
immortal man... What will become of me when there is no more Hitler and
there is no one to set flames under me to keep me warm? What if we come
at last to a world in which no anti-Semite is left and everybody loves
me? What of my poor Jewish bones which set so quickly cold without
stimulation? Who and what will keep me warm then?
May 27, 1937 [in GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]
For today's many Jewish "ideologists," wrote
Jacob Neusner, decades after Hitler,
"there is no real choice about 'being
Jewish' if born one. The Holocaust dictates that there is no escape from
it. Hitler knew you were one."
[NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978]
"The gas chambers at Auschwitz," notes
Jonathan Sacks, "made no distinction between [Jewish] assimilators and
traditionalists, believers and heretics, atheists and Jews of faith."
[SACKS, J., p.6]
Such comments are terribly true, but always left
unstated is the disturbing fact that the same all-encompassing view that
"born Jews" (whatever they choose to believe) are inescapably Jewish is a
concept intrinsic to classic Jewish identity itself. Hitler did not invent
the idea that being Jewish is a racial pedigree, often these days
euphemistically referred to as a "community of fate."
Was not Hitler following the same path as this
1970s observation by a Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz? :
"To be a Jew means to have a bond with every
other Jew - and somehow know how to find him."
[in SILBERMAN, C., p. 76]
Whatever the case, in attempting to racially
define and annihilate the Jewish people, Hitler rejuvenated them.
This is exemplified in the famous plea by the
Jewish theologian, Emil Fackenheim, who implored his fellow Jews to renew
with vigor their sense of Jewishness. To allow it to wane - post-Holocaust -
was now equated to be a posthumous victory for Hitler. (Even for Jews
married to non-Jews, distinctive Jewish progeny is often a burning issue.
A liberal feminist professor, Amy Sheldon, notes
that,
"although I had many mixed feelings towards
traditional Judaism, there was never any doubt in my mind that our
children would be raised as Jews. 'I can't finish what Hitler started,'
I told my [non-Jewish] husband before we were married."
[SHELDON, p. 82])
We see in Hitler's last breath in 1945 the birth
of Israel in 1948, and the conjoining of the Holocaust and the modern state
of Israel as the sacred pillars of a renewed Jewish identity rooted in
guilt, fear, resentment, hostility, and rage.
It was, however, not an identity that took
immediate shape after Hitler's persecution of Jewry. The martyr status of
concentration camp victims, the heroizing of survivors no matter what they
had to do to live, the stress upon exaggerated Jewish resistance to the
Nazis, a deeper embracement of Jewish tribalism, and the political
exploitation of the Holocaust for Jewish and Israeli myths and manipulations
came later.
What came to be known as "the Holocaust," says
Edward Lilenthal,
"was often indistinguishable, in the
immediate postwar years, from the millions of noncombatant casualties
due to terror bombings of civilian populations, epidemic illness, or
starvation. It was considered by most as simply part of the horror of
war."
[LILENTHAL, p. 5]
In Israel, in the early years after the
Holocaust, Jewish survivors were even scorned with contempt by Israeli Jews
as "soap" (i.e., feebly passive Jews who were passively turned into bars of
soap by Nazi tormentors, [GOREN, p.
159] the fulfillment of demeaning
stereotypes about fellow Jews.
"With what scorn," noted Georges Tamarin in
1973, "Israeli youth reacts to the alleged faint-heartedness of the six
million victims of Nazis!"
[TAMARIN, p. 115]
The Holocaust was an emblem of shame to Jewry,
little discussed, more often avoided.
"Even in their extraordinary death agony,"
notes Haim Breseeth, "the millions of European Jews had not attracted
sympathy [in Israel] - a minimum expectation from an important Jewish
community."
[BRESEETH, p. 196]
"In retrospect," says Arye Carmon," it
appears that a disturbing conjunction evolved between the
incomprehensible magnitude of evil of the Nazis and the victims who
conscientiously were presented as an ideological object to be
disassociated from. This conjunction may explain the duality of guilt
and shame that has portrayed mourning in Israel."
[CARMON, p. 76]
A daughter of Holocaust survivors who was raised
in Israel remarked at a conference there that,
"What I hated and dreaded most when I was a
child was summertime. It was a time when the [tattooed concentration
camp] numbers on my mother's arm would be there for all to see and
people would know that she was a survivor and was one of the despised
people. People like my parents were despised in Israel, and I was
ashamed of them."
[EMMETT, p. 147]
"In 1947 a Jewish concentration camp survivor, Primo Levy, could only
interest a small, obscure press to publish an account of his experiences
and the volume was little noticed.
[TRAVERSO, p. 104]
Even Eli Wiesel's ultimately influential
work about the Holocaust, Night, did not appear in English until 1960,
after twenty publishers had rejected it.
[WHITFIELD p. 74]
"We would look in vain in the 1950s," says
Jacob Neusner, "for what some call 'Holocaustomania.'"
[NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 84]
"Many Jews raised in the United States in the wake of the Holocaust,"
notes Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, "experienced it like a family secret -
hovering, controlling, but barely mentioned except in code or casual
reference."
[BRODKIN, K., p. 141]
In 1961 only two of 31 discussants in a major
Jewish magazine's symposium on "Jewishness and Younger Intellectuals" put
any emphasis on the Holocaust effecting their lives. In that same year,
another important Jewish magazine's theme of "My Jewish Affirmation"
overlooked the Holocaust almost completely.
[LINENTHAL, p. 8]
Even as late as 1966, when Commentary published
a forum on "Jewish belief" in its pages,
"the Holocaust," notes Nathan Glazer, "did
not figure in any of the questions, nor, it must be said, did it figure
in the answers."
[GLAZER, American, p. 172]
In a collection of 1960s-era interviews with
Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion "the word Holocaust never appears."
[STERNBERGER, I., 8-15-95]
The book that first attracted, and furthered, widespread interest in the
particularly Jewish experiences of World War II was the diary of Ann Frank
(The Diary of a Young Girl), a volume that a Jewish novelist, Meyer Levin,
almost single-handedly pushed to fame. Levin urged the diary's publication
in the American Jewish Congress Weekly; it was serialized in the Jewish
magazine, Commentary.
Doubleday eventually published it and Levin
himself heralded its importance on the front page of the New York Times Book
Review, his editors not informed about his own "vested interest" -
commercially and politically - in the story.
[BLAIR, p. 3]
The volume has since sold over sixty million
copies in fifty-one languages.
[WHITFIELD, p. 72] (There appeared
with such revelations a corresponding shame and guilt among diaspora Jews
and a rising need to atone for their own sin of doing so little to help
European Jewry during the Hitler era.
[RUBENSTEIN, p. 24])
The diary of Ann Frank is so well publicized
internationally that, note David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa,
"Ann Frank's Diary of a Young Girl has sold
over a four million copies in Japan, more than any other country except
the United States. So beloved is Ann Frank in Japan that the first
Japanese company to market sanitary napkins designed especially for
Japanese women called itself Anne Co., Ltd., and sold its product under
the brand name 'Anne's Day' (Anne no hi), which quickly became a
euphemism for menstruation in Japan."
[GOODMAN, p. 6]
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted continued
popular promotion of Anne Frank in 2001, half a century after her death:
"A four hour miniseries, following Anne's
life from her happy school days through her two years in hiding in
Amsterdam and to her final days in the
concentration camp, air nationally over ABC TV on May 20 and May 21.
The 20th Century Fox studio is developing a feature move based on 'The
Diary of Anne Frank.'
A new edition of the diary, including five previously unpublished pages
describing her parents' difficult marriage, was released in March.
The Helos Dance Theatre premiered 'About Anne: A Diary in Dance' in Los
Angeles last month.
An interactive CDROM titled 'Anne Frank House: A House with a Story' was
released earlier this year, offering a virtual tour of the building and
the 'secret annex' where the Frank family hid.
In Boise, Idaho, ground has been broken on a $1.6 million Anne Frank
Human Rights Memorial Park."
[TUGEND, T., 5-13-01]
In formal literature, "apart from the notable
exception of [Saul] Bellow's The Dangling Man," says Theodore Ziolkowski,
"it was not until the 60s with Edward
Wallant's The Pawnbroker, Norma Rosen's Touching Evil, Susan Schaeffer's
Anya, Arthur Cohen's In the Days of Simon Stern, and later works by
Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow - that the Holocaust became a genuine
theme."
[ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 599]
By 1998, however, Sheila Schimpf noted that
"For 10 years Barry Gross has asked Michigan
State University students in his English classes how many have read or
seen 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' Almost every hand goes up. 'It has
become almost the common text for this generation of students,' Gross
says."
[SCHIMPF, p. E1]
In 1967, with the multiple-nation Arab war
against Israel, worldwide Jewry snapped to a new kind of attention and
consciousness, one that has since accelerated to our own day into deeply
politicized Jewish obsessions with anti-Semitism, the hallowed specialness
of the Holocaust, and the absolute sanctity of Israel.
During the 1967 Arab war, Jews everywhere (as it
is told and retold in Jewish scholarship) imagined the prospect for another
Holocaust.
"It would be impossible to understand the
present Israeli stance toward the Arabs without taking full account of
the Holocaust," says Jay Gonen.
[GONEN, p. 151]
In the Arab armies Jews saw Nazi storm troopers.
In the PLO leadership of Yassar Arafat, they stamped the face of Hitler.
"Israel," says Melvin Urofsky, "made it
possible [for Jews worldwide] to endure the memory of Auschwitz. Were
Israel to be destroyed [by Arabs], then Hitler would be alive again, the
final victory would be his."
[UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 351]
The old Jewish self-identity of weakness and
victimization - based on the Jewish martyrological tradition of death,
destruction, and terror - became now a conviction of armor, militantly
wielded, shaped with the very shame and horror of the Holocaust.
The resultant Israeli victory over the Arabs
meant a symbolic return to physical power, along biblical lines even, for
many Jews, redemption. It also meant the springboard for a new
Holocaust-centeredness, aggressive in its character, hostile and embittered
to non-Jews everywhere around them. And it was adept in milking communal
guilt from comfortable Jews in America who experienced nothing of the risks
of 1967 Israel nor the European Holocaust years.
A victorious Israel rising up out of ashes of
the Holocaust became the cornerstone of Jewish self-conception. The
Holocaust was no longer shamefully harmful to the Jewish self-image. It was
now a much-heralded building block for the state of Israel and impassioned
Jewish vigor, everywhere discussed, everywhere publicized.
Jews who paid little attention to the Jewish annihilation during World War
II, and in the early years after, two decades later were increasingly
consumed with it.
"A profound sense of their status as
survivors seized world Jewry," notes Jacob Neusner.
[NEUSNER, Holo, p. 976]
"The question," adds Hanno Loewy, "which
constantly recurs is, 'Why did I of all people survive?' - a question
which pursues the survivor and to which there is no answer."
[LOWEY, p. 240]
"Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish
children," wrote well-known lawyer Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "at a family
event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah - I imagine SS guards lining
up these children for the gas chambers."
[DERSHOWITZ, p. 178]
"To some extent," says Jacob Petuchowski,
"this preoccupation [with the Holocaust] represents a repercussion of
the guilt-complex of the survivors (and perhaps more so of those who
survived at a safe trans-Atlantic distance than of the actual survivors
of the camp.)"
[PETUCHOWSKI, p. 6]
The Jew, says James Yaffe, "feels guilty
over the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler. What more could he
have done to help them? Perhaps nothing, but his guilt stems from his
sense that he might so easily have died instead of them."
[YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 59]
"The notion of survivor guilt and of
resurrecting the dead to greater power than they had in life," suggests
Samuel Heilman, "is of course an old one, most dramatically elaborated
in Freud's famous essay Totem and Taboo."
[HEILMAN, S, 1992, p. 370]
It is important for many Jews to diffuse
their own guilt by dumping much of it into the laps of others: "I am
burdened with collective guilt," said Hans Meyer, "I say; not they. The
world, which forgives and forgets, has sentenced me, not those who
murdered or allowed the murder to occur." Meyer, Ruth Wisse informs us,
"committed suicide, driven 'to the mind's limits' and beyond by the
dishonest postwar reimposition of normalcy."
[WISSE, p. 48]
"Ironically," says Leon Wieseltier, "for many Jews what remains [of
Jewish identity] most vivid and 'ethnically' alive is the Holocaust."
[BECHSTEL, p. 118]
Rabbi David Novak even argues that today's
Holocaust-based Jewish identity (i.e., the peculiar notion that modern
Jewish identity is fundamentally defined by its contradistinction from
real, and imagined, enemies) ironically owes much of its conception - in
the modern post-Holocaust context - to the existentialist non-Jew, Jean
Paul-Sartre, and his own book about anti-Semitism.
[NOVAK, p. El of Is, p. 20]
With the growing emphasis upon a Jewish identity
largely defined by the Holocaust, vacation tours were created for American
and other diaspora Jews to visit death camps in Europe as part of an
immersion in "the Jewish experience."
"At bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing
number of communities," notes Peter Novick, "the child is 'twinned' with
a young vicitm of the Holocaust who never lived to have the ceremony,
and by all reports the kids like it a lot. Adolescent Jews who go on
organized tours to Auschwitz and Treblinka have reported that they were
'never so proud to be a Jew' as when, at these sites, they vicariously
experienced the Holocaust.
Jewish college students oversubscribe
courses on the Holocaust, and rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels
on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance DAy). And it's not just the young.
Adult Jews flock to Holocaust events as to no others and give millions
unstintingly to build yet another Holocaust memorial."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8]
The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, one
of the greatest Holocaust centers, built a multi-million dollar high-tech
environment to "recreate the Holocaust experience" for Jews who missed it.
The director of a Jewish education committee
even proposed a high school course about the Holocaust so that all students
could be able to understand "what it means to be Jewish."
[LIPSTADT, p. 356]
By 1986, a quarter of all new books reviewed in
Judaica Book News had a Holocaust subject and more college students were
taking courses about the Holocaust than any other Jewish concern.
[SILVER, p. 460]
In 1985, 86% of American Jewry, as evidenced in
one survey, believed that
"there's no doubt that the Holocaust has
deeply affected the way I think and feel about being Jewish."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 33]
"For American Jews," notes David Schnall,
"Israel has become vitally important not as a living alternative [as a
place to live] but more so as a refuge, a final port in the storm of
humanity, should the unthinkable occur once more."
[SCHNALL, p. 124]
The horror of the Nazi's mass murder of Jews was
not just that so many millions of people were sadistically violated,
tortured, and murdered.
The human capacity for mass atrocity is as old
as humanity itself. History is full of Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, and
Crusaders of every type riding into pillaged villages by ruthless
exterminators, entire vistas laid waste in carnage. Tribe, clan, kingdom,
and nation have, over the millennia, taken turns in being victim and
victimizer.
The REAL horror of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe was that this atrocity
was elaborately construed and constructed in modern times by a supposedly
"civilized" state, Germany. It was not carried out by a band of head hunters
or Neanderthal brutes, but by people who drove cars, went to the grocery
store, paid taxes, and lived in familiar-looking homes and apartment
buildings.
Strangely, they were people quite like us, like
anybody, wrapped in nationalist institutions. That is what is most
frightening about it. All the Nazis needed was a national narcissism about
themselves, their past, and their destiny which was the precondition
necessary to entirely dehumanize, enslave, and exterminate others. Where
have we seen these preconditions before?
To the everlasting shame of our sad species, none of this is new. The
rudimentary foundation of the Nazi's "Master Race" self-perception and
glorification finds a fanatic precursor, among others, in the most ironic of
places: the origins of the Judaic faith itself in the Jewish self-conception
as the "Chosen People."
What is the essential ideological difference,
really, between those who envision themselves to have partnership in a
superior racial lineage (in the Nazi case, pure Aryans) and those who
traditionally understand themselves to be a likewise hereditary lineage of
human beings, in the Jewish case supposedly descended from a single man,
Abraham, especially graced and privileged by God (Jews)?
Both rely, traditionally and fundamentally - in
origin - upon racist criteria in their respective belief systems. For the
Nazis, it is essential to prove pure Germanic lineage to qualify in the
Aryan membership. By Nazi standards, if a grandparent was a Jew, a person
was considered racially tainted, and Jewish. For Jews, as legally
established in today's secular state of Israel, the racial lineage is
matrilineal: a Jew is defined as someone who has a Jewish natural mother.
If the father was Jewish and the mother not, the
child is tainted and is not, by Orthodox standards, Jewish.
Dr. Joseph Mengele, the horrible Nazi medical experimenter and "Angel
of Death" at Auschwitz, echoed this racial antithesis - at least as he saw
it - when he reputedly remarked,
"that the [Nazi's] Final Solution was the
ultimate struggle for the control of the world between the only two
peoples superior enough to vie for it, the Jews and the Germans.
[LESHEM, p. 63]
Or, as Hannah Arendt saw it,
"[The Nazi movements'] claim to chosenness
could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim... Leaders [of Nazism]
knew quite well that the Jews had divided the world, exactly as they
had, into two halves - themselves and all the others."
[ARENDT, p. 240]
In 1937, amidst the rise of German fascism,
Charles Clayton Morrison at the liberal Protestant journal, The Christian
Century, (which was a well-known crusader against Hitler and anti-Semitism)
wrote that,
"[it is] this obsession with the doctrine of
a covenant race that now menaces the whole world, and Jews themselves
are the chief sufferers from it. [The Jewish idea] of an integral race,
with its own exclusive culture, hallowed and kept unified by a racial
religion, is itself the prototype of nazism."
[MORRISON, p. 736]
"Nazi racism," notes Richard L. Rubenstein,
"was an attempt to reestablish a basis for community on shared archaic
roots. The exclusion of the alien was intrinsic to its very nature."
[RUBENSTEIN, p. 110]
This exclusionism, as we have repeatedly seen,
is also integral to traditional Judaism.
The Nazis were indeed conscious of themselves as a counter-Chosen People,
based upon their racially Aryan-centered ideology which was antithetical and
ultimately violent to the Jewish self-assertion of superiority. Adolf Hitler
appropriated for his Aryan Master Race the Jewish notion of being a Chosen
People, and then twisted it to his own megalomania, saying:
We [Aryans] are chosen... [and] whoever
proclaims his allegiance to me is, by this very proclamation and by the
manner in which it is made, one of the chosen.
[Emphasis in original; KATZ, p. 9]
Feminist Merlin Stone even speculates, from a
linguistic perspective, that Hitler and the Nazis may have known something
about the ancient Hittites and Hebrews, arguing that if her theories about
the "warlike Hebrews" are right,
"We must certainly view the... atrocities
enacted upon the Hebrew people of the twentieth century by the
self-styled Aryans of Nazi Germany not only as tragic but ironic. The
researches and excavations of the Hittites culture have been carried on
primarily by German archeologists throughout this century. It was
sometimes before and directly after the First World War that nasili was
slowly beginning to be accepted as the real name of the Hittite language
and Nesa, or Nasa, their first capital... One cannot help but wonder how
much Adolf Hitler was affected by reports of these finds... Strangely
enough one more connection between the Hittites and Hebrews is the
Hebrew use of the word nasi for prince."
[STONE, M., 1976, p. 127]
Hitler even had a pseudo religious view about
Jews as a satanic kind of nemesis. As Steven Katz puts it:
"[In the Nazi view] the struggle between
Aryan and Jew is not only necessary and inevitable but also a clash of
world-historical... significance. Though actualized through blood and
time, the depth of this homicidal encounter is rooted in eternity."
Yoel Taitelbaum, former leader of the
Ultra-Orthodox "Guardians of the City" movement, argued that a kind of
cosmic struggle inevitably existed between Jews and non-Jews; the Nazis were
one such - particularly brutal - Jewish nemesis.
In this view,
"hatred of Jews is inherent in the nations
of the world because the choice of God fell upon Israel."
[FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]
A more secular allusion to the Jewish Chosen
People/German Master Race parallel is reflected in the work of the popular
Israeli poet Uri Greenberg who wrote that Jews were "the race of Abraham,
which had started on its way to become master."
[FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]
And what of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a seminal
Zionist leader, who - imagining the modern Israeli nation - poeticized in
1920 that "with blood and sweat / a race will be born to us / proud,
magnanimous, and cruel." [FUNKENSTEIN,
p. 308]
The Nazi focus in scientifically proving their own racial superiority had
respective precedents even in the European Jewish community who were
receptive to such confirmation of their own superiority.
In the late nineteenth century, Jules Caravallo,
an official at the Alliance Israelite Universelle (one of the earliest
Jewish lobbying organizations) reported the results of a French study that,
"Jews constituted a distinct racial type;
[and] that the Jewish cranial dimensions were found 'without exception
to be superior to the dimensions of the corresponding Christian cranium;
and that it seemed to be reasonable to accept a superiority of the
Jewish heads over the Christian heads.'" The Jewish Alliance liked the
study so much that they awarded a gold medal to its French author and
widely distributed the results of the study. [PATAI] ("Leaders of the
Alliance Israelite Universelle,' says Albert Lindemann, "warned its
members against 'arrogance' yet still implicitly accepted, often in the
social-Darwinian language current at the time, the notion of Jewish
superiority.")
[LINDEMANN, p. 69]
Even in the late 1970's a respected Jewish
scholar saw fit to excerpt the following text of a German Nazi, Fritz Lenz,
to support his own argument.
The new context for this was a discussion by the
Jewish author, Raphael Patai, of the possible reasons - as he saw it
- for Jewish intellectual superiority over other people:
"Jews and Teutons [Germans] are alike
distinguished by great powers of understanding and by remarkable
strength of will. Jews and Teutons resemble each other in having a large
measure of self-confidence, an enterprising spirit, and a strong desire
to get their own way... [They each] are inclined to diffuse themselves
as a ruling caste over foreign populations. They, too, prefer whenever
they can to have the hard physical toil of life done for them by
others..."
[PATAI, p. 328]
"Lenz's attitude to the 'Jewish race,'" declares Patai, "was
unsympathetic but correct."
[PATAI, p. 327]
Incredibly, this kind of thinking continues to
have currency for some influential Jews in our own day.
In 1994 another Jewish American scholar, Norman
Cantor, in one breath discarded the Nazi scientism that claimed Aryan
superiority as a Master Race and replaced them with the innate, genetic
superiority of Jews:
"... the further we travel from the
monstrosity of Nazi misuses of the racial concept and the more genetic
applications are investigated, the more does a scientific sanction for
viewing the Jews as a distinct genetic group, and furthermore one
exhibiting an extraordinary creative behavior pattern, come within the
parameters of legitimate discourse."
[CANTOR, p.]
In the realms of Orthodox Judaism, (from which
claims of Jewish superiority over others stems), there are Jews today who
cite traditional Jewish religious texts to argue profoundly extremist, and
shocking, ideas. In the last decade three Hebrew "radical right-wing"
anthologies published in Israel, entitled Tzifiya, included recent Jewish
writings that were, by any standards, echoes of Nazi ideologues.
Charles Liebman remarks about a rabbi we have
heard from earlier:
"In the last issue [1988] a rabbi from
Merkaz Harav [David Bar Haim] writes on the differences between Jews and
non-Jews... After bringing proof texts he concludes that... 'non-Jews
are considered as animals... The status of non-Jews in Jewish law
resembles the status of animals and there is generally no distinction
between them.' A number of the articles in the anthology are overtly
racist, some are written by rabbis of some distinction. The most
depressing aspect is not that there are learned rabbis who hold such
views but that the religious establishment finds no cause to condemn
them."
[LIEBMAN, p. 318]
In 1988 Rabbi Binyamin Tzvielli, the former
Director of the Religious Department of Israel TV and Radio, attacked the
principle of democracy:
"The democratic psychosis... has taken
control of us for no substantial and visible reason... Democracy is part
of the culture of the West and together with this culture it goes down
and disappears before our eyes."
[SPRINZAK, p. 273]
In 1985, says Ehud Sprinzak,
"Relying on Maimonides and other
distinguished Halakhic sources [Rabbi Israel] Ariel maintained that the
famous commandment ["Thou Shalt Not Kill"] was never meant to be
universal, that only the killing of a Jew qualifies as murder and is
punished accordingly. Killing of a non-Jew is not punishable by
society."
[SPRINZAK, p. 270]
Rabbi Ariel even wrote that the Jewish Promised
Land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile and sooner or later a war would
have to be undertaken against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq,
"with the expressed purpose of their
elimination."
[SPRINZAK, p. 270]
"Although [Ariel] writes in a scholarly
manner and eschews policy recommendations," notes Ehud Sprinzak, "any
reader familiar with his very dogmatic fundamentalism is left with no
doubt: neither Muslims nor Christians qualify as alien residents [in
Israel]; both should be expelled from the Holy Land."
[SPRINZAK, p. 22]
In 1994, Israeli rabbi Yitzhak (Joseph) Ginsburg
produced a treatise "glorifying Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Muslims in a
Hebron mosque," selling 1,000 copies in its first two days of publication.
The author proclaimed that,
"the crowning glory of [Goldstein's] act is
the sanctification of God" and that "God looks more fondly on Jewish
blood and therefore it is redder and its life has priority."
A second edition of Ginsburg's publication was
printed in 1995.
Another volume, entitled "Baruch Hagever: A
Memorial Volume for the Holy Person Baruch Goldstein," was published by
Michael Ben-Horin, Netanel Uzari, Yoel Lerner, and Yosef Dayan. Another
rabbi, Ido Elba, faced Israeli charges of incitement to violence in his work
entitled, "Clarification of Religious Precepts on Killing Gentiles."
[ALON, G., HA'ARETZ]
Rabbi Elba faced Israeli court action for his dangerous views but, as Orit
Shochat noted in 1998 in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,
"Elba expounded on the halacha [Jewish
religious law], as many others do. True, he did so at a rather
inconvenient time shortly after the massacre of dozens of Palestinians
by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein but the halacha itself (which is,
after all, immune to charges of incitement) contains some racist and
sinister statements for which Rabbi Elba is not responsible. Why is
there no ban on Sefer Hinuch, which is given as a bar mitzvah gift to
Jewish boys throughout the country, although it also contains
interpretations of these matters, in the very spirit of Rabbi Ido Elba?"
[SHOCHAT]
It must be emphasized that all such commentators
as those above are not just aberrant Jews who drag up racist and
totalitarian dogma out of the blue: such people, often "learned rabbis," are
citing Jewish religious sources to today argue their theses.
The crucial questions here, of course, involve
how seminal Jewish religious texts can be used to sanction such monstrous
material, to what degree it always has been used in this way, and how others
- like the Nazis, reacting to Jewish fanaticism and racial claims - have
built and expanded upon it for their own purposes. And lastly, of course:
How widespread is Jewish interest in such religious sources now?
Charles Liebman even notes another disturbing
example in a more mainstream, and respectable, Orthodox Jewish journal in
Israel:
An article in Tkhumin, the most
distinguished annual [in Israel] dealing with matters of Jewish law and
public issues from an orthodox perspective, published a learned essay on
the status of Muslims, according to Jewish law. The author seems to
phrase himself carefully and there is no trace of polemic in the tone of
the article, a fact that makes the conclusions all the more striking.
According to the writer, under the ideal
conditions envisioned by Jewish law, non-Jews in the land of Israel
ought to live in servitude to Jews. In fact, their very right to live in
the Land of Israel is problematic. It is permitted though not required
to save their lives when they are endangered.
[LIEBMAN, p. 311]
Overtly racist and fascist-like dogma from
Jewish religious texts are finding new receptivity in modern Israel's
"religious Zionist" schools. Students are instructed that non-Jews have
"inferior biological characteristics."
Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen note that
students,
"learn that the first two [Jewish]
patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, each had two sons so that the Jewish son
might inherit pure genes whereas the corrupt, impure genes that Abraham
inherited from his idolatrous ancestors could be passed on to the
non-Jewish son. Only Jacob's son - those of the third generation -
inherited pure genes and were worthy of being Jewish... That there is no
outcry against [this] being made part of the religious Zionist high
school curriculum suggests the level that Jewish ethnocentrism has
reached in some quarters."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 60]
Which is to say, a level it has been for many
for most of Jewish history. (If such material is given credence in some
Jewish circles in our own day, what, one imagines, was the Jewish community
thinking in the medieval era?)
"There is a strain in Jewish thought,"
laments London rabbi Mark Solomon, "that says there is a special Godly
something or other that is passed down in a certain genetic line which
confers a special quality on people and Jewishness is a special quality.
I call that metaphysical racism."
[KLEIN, E., p. 58]
It is not difficult to find instances where
texts can be mined for religious justification of divinely-sanctioned Jewish
chauvinism, racism, and dominance over others. Some Jewish religious texts
centered on the Chosen People ethos underscore this attitude of Jewish
preeminence and control over non-Jews:
"Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will
lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people:
and they shall bring thy sons in their arms and thy daughters shall be
carried upon their shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers and
their queens thy nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their
face towards the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet."
ISAIAH, 49:22-23
"Kings shall come from you [Israelites] and shall rule wherever the foot
of the sons of man has trodden. I [God] shall give to your seed all the
earth which is under heaven, and they shall rule over all the nations
according to their desire; and afterward they shall draw the whole earth
to themselves, and shall inherit it forever."
Book of Jubilees 32:18-19
[MACDONALD]
This kind of thinking even has credibility in
some quarters of American Jewish academe.
In 1993, in a book published by SUNY (State
University of New York Press), David Novak examined various Jewish religious
perspectives, including the idea of Jewish domination over others, and finds
that such a notion is irrefutably part of Orthodox Judaism:
"If the Torah is only for the sake of
Israel's election, then it appears to be [in] the interest of her
nationalist self-interest... The practical implications of assuming that
the Torah is solely for the sake of affirming the election of Israel [by
God] is to see no transcendental standard governing Israel's
relationships with the nations [other people] of the world. The only
relationship possible, then, is one where Gentiles accept Jewish
sovereignty and dominance, be it political or only "religious" - in the
usual western sense of that distinction... Such a theology can all too
easily lend itself to such a practical program of dominance. Indeed, a
consistent proponent of it would have no theological arguments with
which to argue against such programs, however much he or she might be
morally offended by them."
[NOVAK, Elec of Is, p. 25-26]
With the military empowerment of modern Israel
and Jewish religious texts in mind, Shalom Carmy notes that,
"A decade before the Balfour declaration
[the 1917 British decree that helped to establish the modern state of
Israel]," Isaac Breuer had warned that the power conferred by halaka on
male Jews over women, slaves, and aliens, imposed an awesome
responsibility, and that only the most rigorous discipline would prevent
its abuse."
[CARMY, Rel Zio, p. 19]
With the assassination of Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin in 1996, most Jews were shocked that his killer, Yigal Amir,
was Jewish - a man who felt that the myths of historic Israel and Jewish
religious laws were being betrayed by Rabin's peace accords with Arabs.
Many were also disturbed to find out that Amir
was so deeply and passionately trained in traditional Jewish religious
doctrine. Earlier, Baruch Goldstein, another devout Orthodox Jew and a
doctor, had machine-gunned to death 29 Arabs as they prayed in a Hebron
mosque.
Meir Lockshin, a Canadian professor and himself
an Orthodox Jew, was so disturbed by the killings that he wrote,
"One just can't ignore the fact that Amir
and the other famous Orthodox murderer of the nineties, Baruch
Goldstein, attended the finest modern Orthodox schools and excelled in
their studies. They were not sociopaths. They were well-integrated and
respected members of their communities; it was impossible to tell them
apart from their colleagues and friends. As Rabbi Lichenstein said on
the day before the assassination, the nationalist Orthodox community in
Israel would have gladly shown off Yigal Amir as one of the great
successes of its educational system. It is absurd then for the Orthodox
community to say that he and Goldstein are not representative."
[LOCKSHIN]
Within a year of Rabin's death, his imprisoned
assassin had,
"attracted marriage proposals from dozens of
young women at home and abroad, including some from wealthy American
families."
[AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 8-18-97]
Baruch Goldstein's terrorist act against random
Arabs was not the first such attack in Israel.
In 1982 a Jewish American in Jerusalem, Alan
Harry Goodman, a veteran of the Israeli army,
"shot his way into the Dome of the Rock [the
third holiest shrine/mosque in worldwide Islam] with an M-16 rifle,
killing one man and seriously wounding three others."
"Since Goodman's trial in 1982," noted Amos
Elon nine years later, "more than twenty religious fanatics have been
caught in the act of preparing one or another violent outrage on the
Temple Mount. Many more suspects were charged but released for lack of
sufficient evidence."
[ELON, 1991, p. 100]
In 1984, 16 Jewish religiously-obsessed men were
arrested for their plans to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
A few months later, 28,
"young yeshiva students from mainstream
rabbinical colleges in Jerusalem were arrested one night at the foot of
the Temple Mount with ladders and ropes in their hands. Some were armed.
The presiding judge in their case allowed them all to go free."
Not long after this incident, yet another set of
28 religiously-driven criminals were apprehended,
"as they were plotting to blow up Moslem
shrines on the Temple Mount. Some members were caught in the act of
connecting explosives to Arab buses."
"Some of the plotters," notes Amos Elon,
"had distinguished service records in the army. A few were public
figures... All were devoutly Orthodox. Most were graduates of prominent
religious seminaries. They included ranking officers in the army and a
veteran air-force pilot."
[ELON, 1991, p. 100-102]
Funds for their legal defense came from
"hundreds of synagogues throughout the country," "nearly a million" Israeli
signed petitions requesting amnesty.
"Given the gravity of the charges against
them," notes Amos Elon, "most of the defendants came away with
relatively light sentences."
[ELON, 1991, p. 105]
Some of the convicted eventually had their
sentences dismissed by the president of Israel.
In view of such events, a troubled Israeli rabbi, Tzvi Marx, worries that,
"the unwillingness of the yeshiva [Orthodox
training] world to allow for moral criticism, on the simplistic
religious assumption of the [Jewish Orthodox] tradition's inherent
perfection, has spawned an exaggerated, unholy triumphalism as well as
racism which bore fruits in the violence of the Jewish Defense League,
the [Meir Kahane's] Kach movement, the [Jewish terrorist underground]
Machteret, and finally in Hebron."
[MARX, p. 95]
Such a dangerous Orthodox attitude has
counterparts in the United States, as evidenced by Brooklyn's Rabbi Abraham
Hecht's religious sanctioning of the Rabin assassination.
[GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 260]
(Rabin was purportedly murdered for
transgressions against Jewish religious law, particularly in his willingness
to relinquish conquered land back to Arabs).
In the first half of the twentieth century, a prominent American rabbi,
Mordecai Kaplan, found the implications of traditional Jewish views of
themselves as a Chosen People so ominous and out of sync with modern
universalistic, egalitarian, and democratic values that he founded an entire
movement, Reconstructionism, that rejected many of the tenets of Orthodox
Judaism. (Members of Orthodox Judaism in turn of course rejected his views;
some groups excommunicated him).
Kaplan had this to say about the Jews as the
Chosen People:
"We cannot fail to recognize in the claim of
Jewish superiority a kinship and resemblance to the similar claims of
other national and racial groups which have been used in defense of the
imperialist exploitation of the yellow and black man by the whites on
the grounds that they were the 'white man's burden.' They are the
grounds for the German persecution of Jewry, in accord with the Aryan
clause of the Third Reich's fundamental law. They were in the past the
grounds in which our own people rationalized their conquest and
expropriation of the Canaanites... All such claims to superiority of one
race, nation, or caste [are] detrimental to the interests of humanity,
and [are] essentially vicious."
[KAPLAN, p. 94-95]
As Jacob Wasserman, a German-Jewish novelist
wrote in 1929:
"It is clear to me that no people can
continue being chosen, nor unceasingly designate itself as such, without
upsetting in the eyes of other peoples the normal order of things. The
whole idea is plainly absurd and immoral."
[in BARON, J., 1956, p. 209]
This "immoral" and racist "viciousness" is
directed by traditional Jewish teachings at any non-Jew. In the particular
case of the people of African descent, Jewish racism is well evidenced in
the writings of the influential and revered medieval Jewish sage, Moses
Maimonides, whose work is so well regarded by orthodox Jews that some of it
has become part of Orthodox liturgy.
Maimonides said this about Africans:
"The Negroes found in the remote South, and
those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these
climes... the status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my
mind they have not the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank
lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes."
[GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED]
(While pious Jews are supposed to follow 613
commandments in the Torah, Maimonides even "spoke about forcing" Gentiles to
follow seven laws that the Talmud deems anyone must follow, if Jews have the
power to enforce them.) [NOVAK, p. 48,
E of I]
In recent years African-American scholars in particular have been
speculating on the origins of racism as it affected their ancestors and the
resultant moral climate that permitted the dehumanization of Africans for
exploitation in the New World slave trade. Many believe that the seminal
equation of Blacks and slavery is to be located in Jewish tradition, in the
so-called "Hamitic" myth. In the Old Testament Noah (of "Ark" fame) had
three sons, each brother the patriarch of different racial and social lines
of humanity.
One of them, Ham, had a son who was eventually
cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:25) to be a "servant of servants" (i.e., slave).
Jewish tradition links Africans as descendants of this grandson of Noah,
Canaan:
"[Canaan's] children shall be born ugly and
black!... Your grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks... they
shall go naked, and their male members shamefully elongated. Men of this
race are called Negroes; their father Canaan commanded them to love
theft and fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters
and never tell the truth."
[GRAVES, p. 121]
"The association of Ham with the African race," writes Tony Martin, an
African-American professor at Wellesley College, "made this myth a major
rationalization for the European enslavement of Africans... Christians
have customarily borne the brunt of blame for the Hamitic myth and they
certainly are not without sin in this regard. Yet, the Hamitic myth
(that is, the association of the African with the supposed curse of
Noah) was invented by Jewish talmudic scholars over a thousand years
before the transatlantic slave trade."
[MARTIN, p. 33]
"Since early times," notes Judah Rosenthal, "Noah's curse of Canaan was
utilized by the defenders of slavery.... [Jewish] legend was that some
Canaanite tribes left Canaan during Joshua's conquest and settled in
Africa... In the Talmud Africans are called Canaanites."
[ROSENTHAL, p. 74]
Some Jewish religious literature (the
Midrash) opines that all descendants of Ham were cursed to be slaves.
[ROSENTHAL, p. 76]
This version of the Ham tradition is noted in
the Jewish Encyclopedia:
"Ham is represented by the Talmudist as one
of the three who had intercourse with their wives in the Ark, being
punished therefore in that his descendants, the Ethiopians, are black...
Ham was punished by having his descendants led into captivity with their
buttocks uncovered."
[JEW ENCY, v. VI, p. 186]
The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion
notes:
"The Canaanites are believed to have been
descended from Canaan, youngest son of Ham... Noah cursed Canaan for the
depravity of Ham upon his father, destining him to be subjugated by Shem
- thereby foretelling the eventual displacement of the Canaanites by the
Israelites (descended from Shem), consistently justified by the Bible as
the inevitable outcome of the sexual licentiousness practiced by the
Canaanites."
[WERBLOWSKY, p. 149]
In modern history, few expressions of Jewish
racism towards Blacks were as boldly proclaimed as Norman Podhoretz's
infamous article in the 1960's in the American Jewish Congress' magazine
Commentary, of which he was editor.
Podhoretz, once self-described as a liberal,
readjusted Commentary down an increasingly neoconservative path:
"The hatred I feel for Negroes is the
hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most
hidden and most overloaded... It no longer... has any cause or
justification... I know it from insane rage that can stir me at the
thought of Negro anti-Semitism, I know it from the disgusting prurience
that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple."
[LINCOLN, p. 179]
Traditional Jewish racism, based on religious
principles, has taken new forms with newer secular Jewish ideologies.
Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, traces
traditional Chosen People attitudes into its newly secularized mode:
Zionism, through the "Revisionist" Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky.
Jabotinsky, says Evron,
"poeticized about 'hidden glory,' declaring
that every Jew is a potential 'prince' - in other words, that Jews are
noble by their very nature (just as the Germans imagined themselves to
be innately superior)... Indeed, this belief in innate superiority is
the basis of racism and of all the varieties of fascism, which is also a
reason for classifying revisionist Zionism within the general category
of fascist psychology."
[EVRON, p. 112]
Even in the years leading up to the Holocaust in
Germany, Daniel Niewyk recognizes some world-view parallels between German
fascism and the growing Zionist movement among German Jewry:
"At the heart of the Zionist critique of
liberal [Jewish] assimilation [into German society] lay the conviction
that Jews constituted a unique race ... That [Jewish marriage to
non-Jews] might become a serious problem for the Jews prompted Zionist
leaders in the Berlin Jewish community to authorize a report identifying
intermarriage as a threat to the 'racial purity of the stock.'"
[NIEWYK, p. 129]
Niewyk overlooks what he calls "this [Jewish]
racial arrogance" as having roots in the Chosen People ethos; he chooses to
frame it as a mirror-like reaction to German fascism:
"[it is] nothing other than the photographic
negative of anti-Semitism."
[NIEWYK, p. 131]
But the former head of the Israel Civil Rights
Association, Israel Shahak, does see the connection between traditional
Orthodox Jewish racism and its capacity nowadays to violently implement such
views in nationalist form, via the modern state of Israel.
"Many people," says Shahak, "do not realize
where Zionism... is tending: to a combination of all the old hates of
classical Judaism towards Gentiles."
[SHAHAK, p. 72]
"It is true," notes professor Georges
Tamarin, an immigrant to Israel, "that the Bible is one of the greatest
creations of human cultures. But it is equally true that it is full of
inhuman motives and that, as [Jewish author Arthur] Koestler (who surely
cannot be accused of being an anti-Semite) stated, all the bases of the
[Nazi discriminatory] Nuremberg Laws can be found in it... If the
segregatory laws of the Herrenrasse were barbarous, the segregatory laws
of the Chosen People are equally barbarous."
[TAMARIN, p. 24]
Even the German-Jewish philosopher, Martin
Buber, of "I-Thou" fame, beloved by many American Jews as a benevolent
proponent of Jewish mysticism, called Jews,
"a community of blood [Gemeinschaft seines
Blutes]... the deepest, most potent stratum of our being."
Many Jewish authors nowadays have busied
themselves with diffusing the most troubling implications of Buber's ideas.
"This language," remarks apologist Enzo
Traverso, "so surprising today, signifies for him an essentially
cultural strategy which... led inevitably to a reactionary or racist
political standpoint."
[TRAVERSO, p. 30]
"Of all the doctrines that Buber ever
enunciated," notes Maurice Friedman, "this one of the 'blood' is perhaps
the most problematic and the most difficult to comprehend... Buber would
have seen no contradiction here, however, for his call to inner decision
was a call to the realization of one's uniqueness through the uniqueness
of one's people."
[FRIEDMAN, M., 1981, p. 132]
Jewish identity, wrote Buber, is not,
"just the mere continuity with the past.
[It] has deposited something in us that can never leave us in any hour
of our life, that determines every tone and hue of our lives, whatever
we do and whatever befalls us - namely blood, the deepest, [most] potent
level of the soul."
[POPPEL, S., 1976, p. 129-130]
As Israel Shahak notes, during the rise of
Nazism Buber was,
"actually teaching doctrines about non-Jews
not unlike the Nazi doctrines about Jews."
[SHAHAK, p. 28]
Buber's (Jewish) friend and influence, Gustav
Landauer, had addressed the idea of the Jewish community of "blood" earlier:
"What man is by birth, what is his innermost
and most secret, his inviolable uniqueness, that is the great community
of the living in him, that is his blood and his community of blood.
Blood is thicker than water; the community which the individual
discovers himself to be is mightier and nobler and more ancient than the
thin influences of state and society. What is most individual in us is
what is most common in us."
[FRIEDMAN, M., 1981, p. 133]
A British Jew, Emma Klein, in a 1996 book about
Jewish identity, led a section called What Is It to Be Jewish? with answers
to the question by four young Jews who were grappling with the issue.
"It's two things," said Nichola, "It's a family thing and a thing that
has been imposed on me through blood. It's a genetic thing, if you
like."
"It's something that has been imposed on me," said Claire, "It's a blood
thing. I can't escape it."
"I feel Jewish," said Sophia, "out of history, my blood, and it's just
like a nationality.'
[A young man named Guy summed up the common theme more ominously]:
"Entertaining any idea about racial purity just stinks of Hitler but it
is an issue. I feel all sorts of people have some pride in their roots
and they feel racial mixing dilutes your heritage. I think I might feel
that. It frightens me."
[KLEIN, E., p. 191]
Even under Soviet communism and the emphatic
destruction of religious roots, this familiar Jewish identity endured.
Sylvia Rothchild notes the results of
American Jewish Committee interviews (1978-80) with Russian Jews now living
in America:
"Many émigrés spoke of their Jewishness as
'a matter of blood,' out of their control. They felt it as something
'mysterious... unfathomable," a wellspring of feelings that inundated
them from time to time. [Some] experience 'inexplicable' Jewish loyalty
in spite of the fact that they were not religious, knew no Yiddish and
had no Jewish education."
[ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 34]
When Jewish author Ann Roiphe read some
scientific evidence that suggested that,
"not much admixture has taken place between
the Ashkenazi Jews and their gentile neighbors [in Europe] during the
last 700 years," she was pleased. "It is actually comforting," she
wrote, "to think of the scientist looking through a powerful lens and
finding [Biblical heroines] Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and the unfortunate,
unwanted Leah sending their chemical matter into the future."
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 37]
In 1973 Rabbi A. Avidan provided the following
religious "guidance" for Israeli soldiers. It was published by the Central
Regional Command of the Israeli Army. No other rabbi ever challenged its
contents.
It was eventually taken out of circulation,
presumably because it could undermine military commanders' own orders:
"When our forces come across civilians
during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no
certainty that these civilians are incapable of harming our forces, then
according to the Halakhah [Jewish religious law] they may and even
should be killed... In a war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are
allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians,
that is, civilians who are ostensibly good."
[SHAHAK, p. 76]
For an outside observer to both groups,
traditional Judaism and German Nazism, the the original intention of the two
belief systems seems similar: each seeks to maintain group privilege and
exclusivity through racial lines of its own. (The likes of Patai, Cantor,
Kahane and others extend racist self-glory, one way or the other, to our own
day).
Each anticipates in-group domination over
others. And each ideology - in origin - aims to clear their respective land
claims of foreign elements. By any means necessary. The Nazi's idea of Aryan
supermen stems from a secular, pre-Judaeo-Christian pseudo-pagan revival,
tinged with nihilism; the Jews special grace is religiously sanctioned from
God, who was originally conceived as a brutal and vengeful Lord of a
Kingdom.
Each group envisions a special destiny, above
all other people.
"The fact remains," says Harold Cruse, "that
the European experience shows that when it comes to playing the role of
the Chosen People in history, the danger is that two can play this game
as well as one. When that happens, woe be to the side that is short on
numbers."
[CRUSE, p. 483]
For those who might decry with indignation a
comparison of oppressed and oppressor as being ridiculously unwarranted,
largely due to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust epoch, we need only turn to
history to confirm where the atrocious deeds of the Nazis and Jews, in both
action and attitude, merge:
When the Lord your God gives them [the
Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites,
the Hivites and the Jebusites - all contestant tribes against the Jews
for parts of the ancient land of Israel] to you and you defeat them;
then you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them
and show them no mercy...
[Deuteronomy 7:1-6]
This, of course, is from the Jewish Torah, known
in Christian tradition as the Old Testament.
This is not just ancient history, or legend
about ancient history, but part of the most sacred of Jewish religious
texts. It is the origin of Judaic belief per their claims to the land of
Israel. Many Jews to this day believe such material to be the infallibly
dictatorial Word of God, as do many Christians who accept the Old Testament
as part of their own religious foundation.
For anyone who takes the time to wade through the avalanche of esoteric
minutia in the Old Testament, examples of religiously sanctioned cruelty and
atrocity by the Israelites are found to be core to their dogma of "specialhood"
and land conquest.
The eminent and popular scholar Joseph Campbell
(who, of course, is vilified by some indignant Jews as just another in the
endless parade of anti-Semites; Jewish scholar Sander Gilman, for example,
calls Campbell's work "tainted with the rhetoric of anti-Semitism"
[GILMAN, Psycho and, p. 101] spent a
lifetime studying world myths and belief systems and calls the Torah
tradition "one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time."
[CAMPBELL, P. 181]
Slave labor, rape, and genocide are, for
example, encouraged in the following Old Testament passage:
When you draw near to a city to fight
against it, offer terms of peace to it. And if its answer to you is yes,
then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you
and shall serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war
against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives
it into your hand you shall put all its males to the sword, but the
women and the little ones, the cattle, and everything else in the city,
all its spoils, you shall take as booty for yourself.
[Deuteronomy 20:10-14]
When God reputedly gave the land of Israel to
the Jews, there were, of course, people already living there. And what,
according to the most sacred of Jewish texts, was deemed necessary to clear
the place of non-Jews?
The text from the Torah quoted above continues:
Thus you shall do to all the cities which
are very far from you, which are not cities here. But in the cities of
the people that the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you
shall save nothing alive that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy
them, the Hittites and Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the
Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has commanded.
[Deuteronomy 20:14-18]
Could Hitler and his henchmen improve much on
this?
The violent wresting of the Holy Land from others is led by Joshua and
begins with carnage at the city of Jericho:
"And they utterly destroyed all that was in
the city, both men and women, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass,
with the edge of the sword... "
[JOSHUA, 6-21]
The genocide continued:
"So Joshua smote all the country of the
hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all
their kings; he left none remaining but utterly destroyed all that
breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded."
[JOSHUA 10:40]
The parallel between the Israelites'
scapegoating of their archrivals, the Canaanites, as prelude to their
extermination, and the Nazis' contempt for, and mass murderer of, Jews is
striking.
"Canaan," says Eric Friedland, "is
transformed [by Jews] into a cipher for the worst elements of Israel's
social and religious life, a major contributing cause of its
degeneration and downfall. A finishing touch is furnished by Isiaiah
(23:8) and Zechariah (14:21) when they debase the term 'Canaanite' into
a synonym for a merchant or trafficker. Haven't we heard this canard
before?"
[FRIEDLAND, p. 79]
Modern Jewish reflection upon, and moral
reckoning for, their own genocide of the Canaanites, Friedland concludes,
has not been forthcoming:
"The... difficult task is to come to terms
from a religious perspective with that part of our past that, under a
less developed moral standard, was for a long time condoned but in the
present age raises serious ethical questions with profound
repercussions."
[FRIEDLAND, p. 81]
As Robert Carroll notes:
"Total war can make sense from a strategic
point of view, but it raises serious moral problems; and the genocidal
war against the Canaanites in the Bible has bothered sensitive readers
of a book often thought to express perfect, divinely ordained morality."
[CARROLL, R., 1989, p. 159]
"I remember," notes Joshua Cohen, "[in fifth grade] asking my [Jewish
religion] teacher how it was possible for Jews to have behaved like
Nazis, and being told that the attempted genocide in [Torah chapter] 1
Samuel was different in that the Israelites were carrying out a holy
command... [This] is itself an example of the appalling bigotry that can
subsist in canonized texts. The biblical paradigm, moreover, confirms
our fear that canonization of texts might confer a moral authority on
bigotry. For many Jews, the text of the Bible and particularly of the
Torah is sacred... My fifth-grade teacher is hardly alone in regarding
the Command to exterminate Amalek as the word of God."
[COHEN, J. p. 293]
Although Aryan Nazism was an expressly stated
anti-Christian creed, (restructuring German culture in terms of a
pre-Christian and pre-Judaic neo-pagan revival, i.e., erasing Jewish and
Christian world views), many Jews today ignore a myriad of other variables
and stretch medieval Christian antipathy for the "Jews who killed Christ”
into a psycho-social basis in the formation of the Third Reich.
In this view, a key to understanding Hitler's
hatred of Jews was Christianity. Richard Libowitz, for example, states that,
"the fact that the vast majority of
perpetrators of and bystanders to the Holocaust were baptized in good
standing of traditional churches, none of whom has ever been formally
rebuked by his or her particular denomination, suggests one of the
primary non-Jewish challenges of Holocaust study demanding evaluation.
Elie Wiesel has confronted the most disturbing facet of that realm with
his reminder that 'not every Christian was a killer, but every killer
was a Christian.'"
[LIBOWITZ, Asking, p. 65]
"It [The Holocaust] was Christians who
perpetrated it," declares David Wyman, "the Nazis who were the products
of western Christian civilization."
[WILSON, M., p. 30]
Richard L. Rubenstein proclaims that German
Nazi,
"National Socialism was an anti-clerical
movement. It was nevertheless dialectically related to Christianity. It
was the negation of Christianity as negation was understood by Hegel and
Freud. It could have as little existed without Christianity as the Black
Mass of medieval Satanism could have existed without the mass of Roman
Catholicism.
The classic villains of Christianity, the
Jews, became the primal object of extermination of the anti-Christian
Christians, the Nazis. Studying the classical utterances on Jews and
Judaism, and at the same time reviewing the terrible history of the Nazi
period, prompts one to ask whether there is something in the logic of
Christian theology that, when pushed to the extreme, justifies, if it
does not incite to, the murder of Jews.”
[RUBENSTEIN, p. 5]
Such a libel is profoundly short-sighted,
preposterously convoluted, and loaded with Orwellian doublethink.
It asserts that the Nazis’ emphatic break with
Christianity was really an affirmation of fundamental Christian religious
tenets and it ridiculously equates Satanism with the Catholic Church by
virtue of the devil cult’s very rejection of the latter. (Was Godless
communism, Aryan fascism’s opposite, an expression of Christianity too - at
the same time! - because it also took hold in a Christian milieu?)
Rubenstein’s logic, and so many others’ like
him, insist that the very assertion of negation is really its opposite, an
expression of affirmation. More profoundly, the insistence that Christianity
presumed murderous antipathy towards Jews (fulfilled in German Nazism) and
is somehow rooted in Christian universalistic teachings, completely
overlooks the origins of such institutionalized hatred in western religious
tradition.
By Rubenstein’s own logic (or by any more
reasoned analysis), even if we accept the scurrilous premise that the
Christian world view is somehow murderous, it did not evolve out of thin air
but was itself an outgrowth of Judaism. Even by Rubenstein’s own logic, it
must be underscored that the initial Christians were themselves Jews who
rejected (negated - by Hegel’s, Freud’s, or anybody’s definition) Judaism.
Then, following Rubenstein’s own argument,
Christianity’s negation of Judaism was really its affirmation, and the worst
of “Chosen People” Judaism was passed down from its ideological parent from
Jewry to Christianity to Nazism.
However one views this scenario, if we are going to seek out, in ancient
origins, the presumed roots of Nazism, it is obviously more viable to locate
examples of - and role models for - “nationalist” violent hate behavior even
back further in the religious past, not in Christian universalism that
invited others to join their fold, but in the “particularist,” exclusionist
beliefs and brutally merciless actions of the ancient Jews themselves.
Many today will steadfastly deny, and be
outraged by, such disturbing Nazi/Israelite parallels. How can one compare
the relatively “primitive” actions of a group of people thousands of years
ago to those of a supposedly “civilized” group in the 1940’s: the Nazis, the
consummate, scientific dehumanizers?
After all, times have changed; the Jews of the
late twentieth century understand their heritage to represent a “beacon of
light to the rest of humanity.”
“The origins of democracy are to be found in
the Mosaic code,” so it is claimed by so many Jewish apologists and
propagandists, and all the rest of it.
But the bottom line is this: If
Jewish-instigated genocide is routinely disregarded or trivialized from the
ancient past, then why should any of the Jewish myths of that era be taken
seriously?
To deny the genocidal origins of the Jewish
covenant with God as central to the faith is to deny the whole of the Old
Testament, the origins of Jewish identity itself, and their link to the land
of Israel. Ironically, for all the modern Jewish bitterness against
Christianity for its alleged endemic anti-Semitism, the fact that
Christianity also accepts the events of the Old Testament as the
incontestable “will of God” spares Jews regular inquiries into the moral and
ethical responsibility for the Nazi-like misdeeds of their ancient
ancestors, a religious foundation that has led in more than one direction to
the socio-political dogmas today.
Christianity is in fact largely protective of
Jewish tradition. To both Jew and Christian alike (and Muslims, for that
matter, who also accept the Old Testament) God sanctioned the Israelite’s
massacres and they are, hence, acceptable and morally unchallenged. The
Nazis never made claims that God was on their side. As such, they are
everyone’s monsters.
(Christianity is responsible for the attempted extinction of the Jewish
people? Some have argued the exactly opposite case. As Marcus Arkin notes
about the writings of Jewish British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli,
“[He] reminds the Jews that Jesus Christ has
done more for them than anybody else and that had the Church not
flourished and Christianity had not become widespread, Judaism may have
been forgotten completely.”
[ARKIN, 1989]
Because Jesus was a Jew, and based his teachings
on the Old Testament, Christianity is not free in categorically dismissing
the Jewish religion. Nor destroying it. As Jewish scholar Samuel Sandmel
once even argued, Jesus
“was... a Jewish loyalist... He was a martyr
to his Jewish patriotism.”)
[JACOB, W., 1974, p. 205]
In the case of yet another ancient Israelite
genocide (this one more successful) against the Amalekites, even one of the
foremost modern scholars on the Old Testament, Bernard Anderson, turns
apologist - in apparent deference to the all-pervasiveness of
Judeo-Christian thinking in Western culture - when he argues that the modern
viewer should suspend moral judgment about Jewish-inspired genocide in their
religio-historical origins:
“Through the [Israelite] prophet Samuel,
[King] Saul was given a divine command to utterly destroy [the
Amalekites] - man, woman, child, cattle, and goods... According to
modern ethical standards, this act of total extermination was a
barbarous thing (though it was scarcely less refined than modern
warfare!) But instead of making a value judgment from our standpoint,
let us try to understand the act within the religious perspective of
ancient Israel.”
[ANDERSON, p. 172]
As the Torah/Old Testament commands:
“Now go and smite Amalek, and exterminate
everything that is his. Don’t pity him, but kill man, woman, infant and
nursling, ox, sheep, camel and ass.”
[SAMUEL 15:2-3]
Saul in fact initially spared the King of the
Amalekites, Agag, and confiscated some prime livestock.
For Saul’s reluctance to blindly obey the word
of the Israelite God and exterminate every living thing, he was considered
to have “sinned” and was severely reprimanded by the prophet Samuel.
Eventually Saul attempted to make amends by personally hacking Agag “in
pieces.” [I SAMUEL 15. 1-33]
“So decisively did [Saul] defeat [the
Amalekites],” says scholar Bernhard Anderson, “that they vanished from
the historical scene shortly afterwards.”
[ANDERSON, p. 172]
“Heretics, false prophets, witches,
communities harboring apostates, and the six Amorite nations that
occupied Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest,” notes Joshua
Cohen, “are all sentenced to extermination in the book of Deuteronomy.
But the cherem [the sentence of “extermination”] on Amalek, is the most
renowned ban in all of Jewish tradition. It is pronounced twice: in
Exodus, Chapter 17, and again in Deuteronomy, Chapter 25.”
[COHEN, J. p. 290]
Even more troubling, the Old Testament asserts
that “the Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages.” [EXODUS
17:16]
“Amalekites,” notes the Oxford Dictionary of
the Jewish Religion, “were regarded as Israel’s inveterate foes, whose
annihilation became a sacred obligation... Only after the final
destruction of the Amalekites will God and his throne be complete.”
[WERBLOWSKY, R., p. 41]
The Old Testament commands Jews to literally
“blot out the memory of Amalek,” an order that, as part of continuous
religious review, ironically ensures that it can never be forgotten.
On the contrary, such a religious sanction
secures, notes Joshua Cohen,
“the enduring presence of bigotry in
[Jewish] sacred teachings.”
[COHEN, p. 299]
A disturbing modern perspective on the
Amalekites is their reinvention in some Orthodox and Zionist Jewish minds as
Arabs (and any other non-Jews, or even Jews, that are understood to want to
“destroy” Israel. Michael Asheri’s Amalek, for instance, is generic
Germans.) [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 340]
Rabbi Avraham Weiss (who we will meet again later in this chapter assaulting
a convent in Poland) explains that:
“The affirmative Torah commandment is to
destroy those who bear the seed of Amalek. Since the halakha has ruled
that Amalek does not exist today, the commandment cannot be carried out.
Rav [Rabbi] Haim Soloveitchik, however, maintained that there are two
forms of Amalek. There is the genetic Amalek, and there is the
figurative Amalek, which constitutes any nation willing to destroy
Israel. Basing themselves on this position, Kahanists [the followers of
Rabbi Meir Kahane] argue that Arabs are figurative Amalek.
Thus, when Arabs were indiscriminately
killed, the classic Kahanist response was,
“We were not involved, but we applaud
the action.”
Thus, after Ami Popper murdered seven Arabs,
Rabbi Kahane suggested that a street be named after him.
Thus, the Hevron massacre [Baruch
Goldstein’s murder of 29 Arabs at prayer in a mosque] has been defended
in some circles not on rounds of national warfare, but on the grounds of
fighting against Amalek. Rav Joseph B. Soloveitch [says that] every
individual who bears the genes of Amalek must be wiped out. With regard
to the figurative Amalek, on the other hand, one is mandated to engage
in warfare against any nation that attempts to destroy the Jewish
people.”
[WEISS, p. 50]
Who then, one must inevitably be drawn to
wonder, might be included as the (figurative) enemies of (figurative) Israel
who seeks to (figuratively) destroy it?
“The name Amalek,” observes Joshua Cohen,
“has taken on a symbolic meaning in Jewish tradition... To most Jews,
Amalek represents the malign genius of anti-Semitism.”
[COHEN, J., p. 291]
Amalek can hence be creatively interpreted to
mean virtually anybody.
“Anyone who acts to deliberately provoke
hatred of God or Torah-fearing Jews,” decried an ultra-Orthodox
newspaper in Israel, “can be considered ‘children of Amalek.’”
[JERUSALEM POST, 3-15-92]
“Amalek is also an ideology that denies
Israel’s unique mission in perfecting the world,” wrote Shlomo Riskin in
1996, “The spiritual heirs of Amalek include the Nazis, the Soviet
Communists and Moslem fundamentalists.”
[RISKIN, S., 3-1-96]
The immediate modern Amalek nearest at hand in
Israel was addressed by Rabbi Israel Hess in a 1980 issue of the campus
magazine at one of Israel’s pre-eminent colleges, Bar-Ilan University
(religiously Orthodox in orientation). Hess was formerly its campus rabbi.
The title of his piece was Genocide: A
Commandment of the Torah.
“Hess,” says professor Ehud Sprinzak,
“likened the Arabs to the biblical Amalekites, who were deservedly
annihilated. The Amalekites, according to Hess, were born socially and
militarily treacherous and cruel. Their relation to Jews was like the
relation of darkness to light - one of total contradiction. The Arabs,
who live today in the land of Israel and who are constantly waging a
treacherous terrorist war against the Jews, are direct descendants of
the Amalekites and the correct solution to the problem is
extermination.”
[SPRINZAK, p. 123]
Israeli Knesset member Amnon Rubenstein noted
this articles, saying,
“Rabbi Hess explains the commandment to blot
out the memory of Amalek and says that there is no mercy in this
commandment: the commandment is to kill and destroy even children and
infants. Amalek is whoever declares war against the people of God.”
[HARKABI, p. 150]
“Hess implies that those who have a quarrel
with the Jews instantly become Amalek and ought to be destroyed,” says
Yehoshafat Harkabi, “children and all... Amalek is not an ancient
extinct tribe but a generic enemy that each generation may identify for
itself.”
[HARKABI, p. 150]
“It’s not just a lunatic fringe,” says Rabbi
David Hartman, about this kind of thinking in the Jewish community, “It
is a diseased element that is capable of infiltrating into the Jewish
self-understanding.’
[DORFNER, p. 50]
In 1992 Moshe Kohn was mailed a pamphlet in
Israel. It’s message was, he says,
“Now that we Jews are again enjoying
national sovereignty in our homeland, we at long last again have the
opportunity - and the duty - to fulfill the Biblical commandment to
exterminate Amalek. Moreover, only after we have done so will God’s
Kingdom prevail over all creation. And who exactly is today’s Amalek?
According to our pamphleteer, it is ‘the Palestinians.’”
[KOHN, M., 3-27-92]
Jewish religious injunctions to mass slaughter
are even part of traditional yearly Purim commemorations, particularly on
Shabbat Zachor (“the Saturday of Remembrance”),
“the Sabbath on which Jews are commanded to
obliterate the enemy of Amalek, the arch enemy of the Jewish people.”
[FEILER, p. 14]
In the wake of the mass murder of Arabs at
prayer by Baruch Goldstein,
“some Jews,” noted the Jewish Bulletin, “say
Goldstein was inspired by Purim passages that condone wanton killing.”
[KATZ, p. 1]
Such passages from the biblical Book of Esther
celebrate how Jews rose up to kill thousands of Persians who plotted against
them, recited twice by observant Jews during Purim.
“The tone [of these passages] is not
self-defense,” complains Rivkah Walton, “but of slaughter, slaughter,
slaughter.”
[KATZ, p. 1]
“The concluding chapters of the Book of
Esther,” adds Peter Novick, “tell of the [Jewish] queen’s soliciting
permission to slaughter not just the Jews’ armed enemies but the
enemies’ wives and children - with a final death toll of seventy-five
thousand. These ‘memories’ provided gratifying revenge fantasies to the
Jews of medieval Europe.”
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 5]
In the 1960s the Israelis kidnapped former Nazi
official Adolph Eichmann from Argentina, and sentenced him to death in the
Jewish state. One staff member at the American Jewish Committee worried
that, because of the trial,
“gentiles might learn that ‘for over 2,000
years Jews have cheered joyously in the synagogues when the Megillah
readers annually told of the hanging of [Queen Esther’s arch-rival]
Haman and his ten sons with him.’”
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 1323]
“Objections to the Purim passages don’t stop there, however,” notes the
Jewish Bulletin, “some people oppose the way biblical citations in
Exodus (17:8-18) and Deuteronomy (25:17-19) are read on Shabbat Zachor
before Purim. These call for the annihilation of the descendants of
Amalek, the biblical enemy of the Israelites.”
[KATZ, p 1]
Another Jewish commentator, Ismar Elbogen, noted
the traditional emotional climate of such public Purim recitals:
“Often the reading of the scroll [of
Esther], was accompanied by customs intended to release the overwhelming
feelings of joy, and these not infrequently took on wild form... The
noisy disturbances have been eliminated in every civilized country.”
[ELBOGEN, p. 110]
In this Amalek context, what are we to make of
the words of Philip Graubart in a 1996 issue of the Jewish Exponent?:
“Baruch Goldstein examined the story of
Esther and the biblical passages regarding Amalek and discovered it was
permissible to murder 40 Muslims at prayer. And we all know in Judaism’s
vast corpus of sacred writings, there are a few other texts and ideas
that, in the wrong hands, could lead to further atrocities.... Only Jews
passionately committed to Jewish texts can fall victim to Judaism’s dark
side.
Only Jews who absolutely revere the Torah as
God’s word could accept the biblical injunction to slaughter Amalek as a
call to arms, or take God’s genocidal commandments to Joshua to be
currently relevant... [but] I’m not afraid of passion, I’m terrified of
the absence of passion in my own Jewish culture... On a day to day basis
I feel a lot more threatened by apathy than by zealotry. And so do most
rabbis.”
[GRAUBART, p. 5]
Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense
League, an elected member of the Israeli Knesset, and a man even many Jews
concede to have clearly fascist tendencies (Hebrew University professor Ehud
Sprinzak calls Kahane’s political party, Kach, “quasi-fascist,”
[SPRINZAK, p. 233]
Lesley Hazelton calls Kahane himself “openly
fascistic”) [HAZELETON, L., 1987, p.
19] quotes the following two Old
Testament citations to begin one of his books, Our Challenge:
“For thou art a holy people unto the Lord
they God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto
himself, above all people that are on the face of the earth.”
[DEUTERONOMY, 7:6]
“Every place wherever the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours:
from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates
even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall be no man
able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of
you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as
he hath said unto you.”
[DEUTERONOMY, 11:24:25]
Kahane then uses such religious ‘authentication’
to claim that,
“we [Jews] are not simply one more little
superfluous nation but the heart and the reason for the world.”
[KAHANE, p. 173]
As an Israeli Knesset member, he even submitted
a bill that sought to physically separate Israeli Jews from Gentiles; fellow
Knesset member Michael Eitan compared his proposals to “the Nazi’s racist
Nuremberg Laws.” [SPRINZAK, p. 239]
In 1987, a Van Leer Institute survey of
Israeli youth found that,
“42 percent said they supported Kahane.
Among religious youth, the support shot up to 60 percent.”
[HAZELETON, L., 1987, p. 132]
(Kahane was assassinated by an Arab in New York
City in 1990).
The problem of racism in Jewish tradition, says
professor Moshe Greenberg,
“has its roots in the policy of the Bible
and the [Talmudic] sages to separate Israel from the [other] nations; it
is full blown in the Kabbalistic denial that the Gentile is in the image
of God and reaches horrific proportions in the genocidal biblical
command to wipe out Amalek and the seven nations of Canaan.”
[GREENBERG, p. 24]
One (secular) Jewish apologetic strategy for
this is to argue that the genocides recorded in the Old Testament never
really happened. But, as Greenberg worries,
“A historical critique of the biblical texts
[about genocide] indicates... [that they] belong to the realm of theory
rather than to historical reality. This may salve our conscience, but
only aggravates the problem - that, under no pressure of facts, the
biblical authors found compatible with their faith a divine command to
commit genocide.”
[GREENBERG, p. 30]
So how should Jews of moral conscience teach
this key part of their religious tradition?
They should, says Greenberg, tip-toe around it.
“When we teach the [genocide] passages in
school (and given the pivotal nature of the book of Joshua we cannot
avoid teaching them) we must explicitly neutralize them (e.g., by
stressing the ancient context, their obsolete motivation, and the
annulling precedent set up by the sages)... It must be made clear to
pupils that our general regard for the Bible as a treasure of enduring
values does not extend to these passages.
The urgency of such a repudiation
corresponds to the evidence that the new empowerment of Israel stirs
atavistic longings to act out what existed throughout all of Jewish
history... only in the imagination.”
[GREENBERG, p. 31]
Meanwhile, the truth about Jewish history and
tradition is systematically ignored and distorted by popular Jewish folk
mythology about an idealized past and morality.
As parroted very typically by Mannie Sher, a Jew
and former Chairman of the British Association of Psychotherapists, modern
Jewish reification of their tradition of victimhood blames their alleged
noble, peaceful morals for anti-Jewish hostility throughout history.
Knowing the facts, this posturing reads like an
insidious fairy tale:
“The world to which the Jews introduced God
and their new ideals of universal morality, justice, peace, and
individual responsibility has never been appreciative. Jewish ideals,
like those of psychoanalysis, have generally been alien and threatening
to the prevailing order. Judaism gave a vision that ‘nation should not
lift sword against nation’ to a world in which war and warriors rather
than peace or prophets were glorified.
Like psychoanalysis, Judaism sees every
individual as both responsible for himself and answerable. It is little
wonder then why hatred of the Jew developed and ultimately became the
greatest hatred in human history.”
[SHER, p. 38]
There are others who admit a vast tradition of
“hatred” in Jewish religious sources, but seek to dismiss its gravity. David
Wolpe, for example, asks his readers in a popular Jewish newspaper:
“Is it good to hate?... Our tradition does
not teach us that all hatred is bad. The Bible is unambiguous on this
point: We are clearly intended tohate Amalek, whose memory we are
instructed to wipe out... The subject is raised each year in the middle
of the Passover seder... In fact there are few things that can be
healthier than merited hatred... Sitting in a comfortable home today, it
is easy to see barbarity in the words of the Haggadah. When we do, we
betray our history.”
[WOLPE, p. 8]
Of course all the above emphasis on ancient
Israelite savagery is not to assert that Jews and Nazis hold a monopoly on
atrocity or were locked in an inevitably trans-historical death embrace. Far
from it.
History is over-laden with atrocious crimes by
one people against another throughout the centuries, exercising respective
violent versions of what anthropologists today call ethnocentrism.
The idea that “We are the People and everyone
else is not” is endemic to world cultures and religions. But the extreme
“Kill every thing that breathes” injunction as moral (and religious) policy
is rare; after all, for even the most ruthless victor that which is taken
alive has at least some economic, pleasure or productive value to the
conqueror.
The spiteful vanquishing of everything and
everybody, repeatedly, in a holy book of all places, and one that is the
foundation of Judeo-Christian heritage, cannot be completely overlooked - as
it always is - in the development of future peoples, world views, and
civilizations that stemmed from it.
Arnold Toynbee, the well-known British historian, in arguing that religious
“fanaticism” in Judaism has been inevitably passed to Christianity (and its
notorious Crusades) and Islam (like its Holy Wars), had the audacity to
openly attribute the ultimate cause of discriminatory suffering experienced
by Jews throughout history upon their own heads.
“The first ‘bigots’ in history that I know
of,” said Toynbee, “are... the Maccabees [a group of rebellious Jews who
overthrew Greek rule], if ‘bigot’ means, as I believe it does, not just
any persecutor, but one who persecutes people of another religion on
account of his differences from them to religious practice and belief.
The Maccabees forcibly converted Idumea and Galilee to Judaism and they
brought it about that Herod and Jesus were Jews, not gentiles.”
[SYRKIN, Toynbee]
Old Testament scholar John Allegro also notes
the Maccabean era:
“In the conception of the New Israel, dreamt
of by the Jews of the Exile, propounded by their prophets, and hammered
out in Judea by administrators from Babylon Jewry, there existed a
fundamental conflict between the religious ideal of a world state
governed by Jews and freely accepted by all men, and the practical
reality that people are tenaciously conservative about their religions
and take unkindly to having their gods chosen for them. When this
removal of their freedom of worship is coupled with a particularly
uncompromising racialist domination and tight political control,
resistance to the alien regime stiffens even further, and will yield to
naught but the severest military pressures.
From the outset, then, the glorious New
Israel was only likely to be achieved by force of arms, and maintained
by brute force. The Maccabeans were at least realists, and played the
military and political games as shrewdly and ruthlessly as any other
tyrants of the ancient world. When it came to converting the gentile to
the faith, to fulfill the spiritual promise of the kingdom of God, they
simply offered the choice between circumcision and slavery.”
[ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 116-117]
Arnold Toynbee takes such history further,
leveling to modern Jewish eyes and ears the most profound of blasphemies:
“The irony of Jewish history surely is that
the Jews have been the chief sufferers from a spirit which they
themselves originally kindled.” [SYRKIN, p. 177] Elsewhere he argues
that, “[Hitler’s] main idea - the fanatical worship of a jealous tribal
god, at the bidding of a prophetic leader - is the original (though not
ultimate) Leitmotiv of the Old Testament.”
[GOULD, p. 454]
“Toynbee,” says Jacob Agus,
“regards the biblical notion of a people,
set apart from the rest of mankind, as the source of self-aggrandizement
of Christian nations in the modern world. Ultimately, this narcissistic
belief of the ancient Israelites took root in the minds of
anti-Christian Germans, emerging as the Nazi madness of our own
generation...
[AGUS, p. 385]
...Jews were accustomed to attacks from
demagogues, chauvinists, purveyors of ‘mystiques’ of one kind or
another. But, to be the target of criticism at the hands of a
superintellectual [Toynbee] and a champion of humanism - this was a
different matter all together...
[AGUS, p. 373]
... Largely because of a 1917 Toynbee article that was a major
contribution to shaping and propagating the pro-Zionist policy in
Britain...
[AGUS, p. 382]
.... his views were resented all the more
because he wrote as one who belonged to the traditional friends of
Israel.”
[AGUS, p. 373]
Needless to say, most Jewish readers - fixated
on their communal identity as victims, and victims only - typically react
with indignant outrage to Toynbee’s “anti-Semitic” suggestion.
“At the bar of history,” complains Marie
Syrkin, former editor at the Zionist-oriented magazine, Midstream,
“[Toynbee accuses that] the Jewish sufferer is not innocent.”
Her line of argument against him then notes
Toynbee’s only historical evidence for this accusation against the Maccabees
to be Flavius Josephus (a Jewish apostate to the Romans), who is a standard
source for much information about Jews in the Roman-ruled era.
Josephus is afforded a lot of credibility by
Jews on other subjects; he is in fact a major reference for some of today’s
Jewish polemical argument. His detailed accounts of the desert fortress of
Massada, for example, and the 900 Jews who committed suicide rather than
surrender to a Roman siege is considered to be a factual account and has
become a beacon of pride for many modern Jews.
The Massada story has become an important symbol
in Zionist nationalist folklore.
The Jewish historian, Hannah Arendt, sides with Toynbee and takes his thesis
of Jewish fanaticism even further:
“There is some truth in ‘enlightened’
assertions from Voltaire to Renan to Taine that the Jews concept of
chosenness, their identification of religion and nationality, their
claim to an absolute position in history and a singled-out relationship
with God, brought into Western civilization an otherwise unknown element
of fanaticism (inherited by Christianity with its claim to exclusive
possession of Truth) on one side, and on the other an element
of pride that was ‘dangerously close to its racial perversion.”
[ARENDT, p. 242]
The Chosen People tradition “so close to” that
of “racial perversion” in dehumanizing others has been consciously usurped
by others in recent centuries. As David Stannard notes:
“[In South Africa] the Afrikaner’s
self-identification with the ancient Hebrews - with their own Great Trek
regarded by them as a second Exodus, combines with their own explication
of the biblical story of Ham as meaning that black Africans were
divinely ordained to be their servants - formed the theologically
legitimizing core of the reprehensible doctrine of apartheid. Thus, the
covenantal belief of the Ulster-Scots in their self-defined status as
one of God’s predestined ‘elect’ peoples has served to justify their
occupation of the promised land of Northern Ireland along with their
historical persecutions of that land’s native Irish people. And thus, on
one occasion (among many) that the Puritan settlers of New England laid
waste an entire neighboring nation with barely a pretext of
provocation—shooting and stabbing to death every man, woman, and child
that they could find - they wrote in justification that ‘sometimes the
Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents,’
and notes that as Chosen People (alluding to Deuteronomy 20:16) the Lord
had given them the Indian’s “land for an inheritance.’”
[STANNARD, p. 194]
“Oliver Cromwell’s Joshua-like campaign against the Catholics of Ireland
in the seventeenth century,” adds Scottish scholar Robert Carroll,
“which led to bloody massacres of civilians, was inspired by the Bible.”
[CARROLL, R., 1989, p. 159]
“In the ancient world,” says Robert Pfeiffer, “the Jews alone claimed
theirs was the only true religion and that eventually it would conquer
the world... the Jewish claim to practice the only true religion, which
would be inherited by both Christians and Muslims and then turned
against the Jews themselves, was entirely opposed... to the current
attitudes of Greeks, Romans, and Eastern peoples. None of them would
condemn the others for worshipping... false and deceitful gods.”
[MORAIS, p. 46-47]
A typical Jewish reaction to the likes of
Toynbee and his criticism of Judaism’s fanaticism and the modern state of
Israel, and certainly the disturbing evidence cited herein, is reflected in
Oskar Rabinowicz’s entire volume against the British scholar, entitled
Arnold Toynbee on Judaism and Zionism: A Critique. The author’s defensive
tirade begins, from his very first sentence, with a justification of
Zionism, but the core of his argument originates in the ethnocentric and
exclusionist notion that it is absolutely forbidden for non-Jews to speak
critically about Jews:
“Judaism rejects racial discrimination,
exclusiveness, personal superiority claims, or earthly uniqueness... No
outsider [to Jewry] has the right to tell the Jews... what they do or do
not... believe in.”
[RABINOWICZ, p. 66]
*********************************
Modern Jewish American discourse about the Holocaust typically remains
myopic, self-obsessed, and one-sided.
It is what Jewish scholar Peter Novick calls
“collective memory” (i.e., a kind of legend).
“Collective memory...,” writes Novick, “is
not just historical knowledge shared by a group. Indeed, collective
memory is in crucial senses ahistorical, even anti-historical.
To understand something historically is to
be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from
multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral
ambiguities of protaganists’ motives and behaviors. Collective memory
simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective; is
impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic
archetypes.”
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 3-4]
Because so much of the Jewish disaster occurred
in Poland, this country is especially singled out for attack in Jewish
polemic. “Over the last thirty years,” notes Lawrence Weinbaum,
“much of world Jewry has displayed a keener
sense of hostility to Poland than to Germany itself. Poland, not
Germany, is often seen as the ultimate place of evil... Part of the
hostility to Poland is based on the entirely false impression that
Germans chose occupied Poland as the venue for the death camps because
they could court Polish cooperation in carrying out the Final Solution.
Although there is no historical evidence to support this contention, it
has gained very wide currency and credence... Careless references to
‘Polish extermination camps,’ rather than German or Nazi camps, also
played a part in fostering this perception...
Popular literature, not always based on
objective scholarship, has also played a leading role in shaping the
popular image of Poland. Novels (and subsequent film adaptations) by
popular writers such as Leon Uris (Exodus, Mila 18, QBVII), Gerald Green
(Holocaust), and others have done much to influence the way we think
about Poland, and the impression gained from these books has generally
been negative.
In such works Poles are often portrayed in a
worse light than the Germans and it sometimes seems that the burden of
guilt for the Holocaust has been shifted to the shoulders of the Poles.”
[WEINBAUM, p. 7]
In 1982, Jewish American author Laurence
Weschler noted that,
“over and over, prior to my Polish trip, I
encountered sheer hatred [by Jews] of the country and its people, cold
fury in reminiscences of the anti-Semitism that, it was claimed,
pervaded Polish society in the years before and during the war.”
[WESCHLER, p. 28]
Thus prepared, Weschler was stunned to find that
the Jews who actually live in Poland do not share Jewish-American
mythologies about the place.
As Weschler says, after a series of interviews
with Jews in Poland:
“Over and over, I hear the same assertion
from this man and his young Jewish friends, and they all give me
substantially the same reasons for making it. What follows is, in all
fairness, a simplification, but the basic premise is consistent: that
the Poles have never been anti-Semitic at heart. They have always been
highly nationalistic, a proud, suffering people deprived of and longing
for their state.
In the past, they were faced with a large Jewish population - a
population whose very size proves the prior openness of the Polish
people, and particularly of Polish nobility, to Jewish immigration. The
Jews tended to keep to themselves, in ghettos of their own choosing. It
is easy to understand how during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
the highly nationalistic Poles might have conceived of these
self-possessed Jews as aliens in their midst...
During the late nineteenth century, according to this view, capitalism,
a foreign import, came to Poland by way of the Germans and native Jews.
Many of the most visible and most brutal large-scale enterprises -
especially textile plants - were owned by Jews.
‘Polish resentment is understandable,’ I am told. During the twenties,
this explanation goes on, the Poles finally achieved their state, but
ten percent of the population was Jewish, and the Jews were still
largely concentrated in self-contained communities in urban centers.
Many people - both Poles and Jews - felt this presence to be troubling,
at once alien and too large. Zionists had their Polish supporters. Other
Jews, meanwhile, were active in the Communist Party and were devoted to
the Soviet example - this in a country and among a people who had only
recently thrown off Russian imperialist yoke.”
[WESCHLER, p. 31-32]
Richard L. Rubenstein also notes that the,
“Post-Holocaust awareness of the genocidal
potential of anti-Semitism has also effected historical investigations
often with distorting effect. Because of the objective innocence of the
victims, Holocaust studies have tended to emphasize what was done to the
Jews rather than those elements of conflict and competition between Jews
and non-Jews that could have contributed to the tragedy...
There has been a persistent tendency to
treat hatred of Jews and Judaism as a form of moral and psychological
pathology... Regrettably, the interactions, economic, political and
social between the two communities, as distinct from the actions against
Jews by Christians, are seldom dealt with in retrospective inquiries
into the evolution of anti-Jewish ideas and policies.”
[RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 87]
Many Jews, like prominent polemicist Alan
Dershowitz, completely overlook the suffering of the Polish people, their
own history, their own culture, and their own nationality to obnoxiously
proclaim that Poland (the site of most of the Nazi concentration camps),
“can only [my emphasis] be a Jewish cemetery
with no tombstone.”
[DERSHOWITZ]
What was the wider story of the sufferings in
Europe during World War II? What was the context of the Holocaust? We all
know what happened to the Jews; it is heralded everywhere. But what was
happening to other people?
In the first two years of the German invasion of Poland, the ill-treatment
of Poles was worse than Jews, so much that Poles would sometimes don the
Nazi-enforced “Yellow star” marker for Jews to blend in with them.
[LUCAS, p. 34-35]
On August 22, 1939, Hitler declared the
necessary killing,
“without pity or mercy all men, women, and
children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain
the living space we need.”
[GUMBOWSKI, p. 59]
Hitler also planned that,
“the destruction of Poland is our primary
task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation
of living forces... Be merciless! Be brutal!... The war is to be a war
of annihilation.”
[LUCAS, p. 4]
William Shirer writes that:
“Hitler... wanted... a Nazi-ruled Europe
whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose
people would be made slaves of the German master race and whose
‘undesirable’ elements’ - above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in
the East, especially the intelligentsia among them - would be
exterminated. .. The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen
- subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of
them, among the Slavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the
mines as slaves of their German masters. Not only were the great cities
of the East, Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw, to be permanently erased but
the culture of the Russians and Poles and other Slavs was to be stamped
out and formal education denied them... As early as September 18, 1941,
Hitler had specifically ordered that Leningrad was to be ‘wiped off the
face of the earth.’ After being surrounded it was to be ‘razed to the
ground’ by bombardment and bombing. Its population (three million) was
to be destroyed with it.
[SHIRER, p. 937]
As Charles Sydnor notes about the Nazi invasion
of Russia, beginning on June 22, 1941:
“A three mile-wide strip of territory
stretching the length of Eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea to the
Carpathian Mountains erupted in a torrent of fire and flying steel as
German aircraft, artillery, and armor blasted across the Soviet
frontier. In the violence of its initial collision, the immensity and
ferocity of its subsequent development, and the profligacy of its
destruction of human life and resources, the German-Russian conflict
transcended anything then in the human experience. To the men of the SS
Totenkopfdivision, who were to fight exclusively against the Russians
until the end of the war, the campaign became a grim crusade of
extermination.”
[SYDNOR, C., 1977, p. 138-139]
“The Poles,” concedes a rare Jewish author, Eva Hoffman,” in the Nazi
hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior
races - slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi
plans, for eventual extermination.”
[HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6]
“The Nazi leaders,” noted Jewish author
Raphael Lemkin (the inventor of the term genocide,”), “had stated very
bluntly their intent to wipe out the Poles, the Russians; to destroy
demographically and culturally the French element in Alsace-Lorraine,
The Slavonians in Carniola and Carinthia. They almost achieved their
goal in exterminating the Jews and gypsies in Europe.”
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 100]
And as Richard Lukas notes about conquered
Poland:
“The genocidal policies of the Nazis
resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish
Jews.... this [Polish Gentile] holocaust has been largely ignored
because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have
chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms - namely, the as
the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them,
the Holocaust was unique to Jews, and they therefore have had little or
nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million
Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever
known.”
[LUKAS, p. ix]
(In nearby Ukraine, notes Myron Kuropas, an
estimated 14.5 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 Jews were lost...
through deaths, deportations and evacuations. The war also destroyed
over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns and some 28,000 villages.”)
[KUROPAS, M., 1995]
Twenty million tablets of cyanide for the gas
chambers were discovered after the war in Nazi storehouses, many times the
numbers necessary to exterminate Jews only. At one gas chamber site -
Kulmhof (Chelmo) - a group of 5,000 gypsies were among the first to be
murdered.
Others exterminated there included convoys of
non-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia (“These children
were killed just as the Jews were”) and even a busload of nuns.
[GAS, p. 91-92]
At Buchenwald, 250 Gypsy children were the first
to be gassed. [HANCOCK, p.55]
Throughout the territory of German occupation, people of all nationalities,
and specifically invalids, the sick, and homosexuals, were subject to
institutionalized murder, by gas or otherwise. The last gas chamber murders
at the Mauthausen site were 181 Austrians who were against the Nazi regime.
Nazi Germany had clearly stated policies concerning surrounding European
countries and their inhabitants of Slavic descent:
“By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on
the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One
half of them were to be ‘assimilated,’ mostly by shipping them as slave
laborers to Germany. The other half, ‘particularly’ the intelligentsia,
were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject,
‘eliminated.’”
[SHIRER, p. 938]
Nazi mistreatment of prisoners of war,
particularly Russian Slavs, was notorious:
“Dr. Otto Brautigam, deputy leader of the
Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories wrote... It is no longer a
secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war
have died of hunger or cold in our camps...”
The conceptual dehumanization of the Slavic
people by the Nazis was not far behind the portrayal of Jews. Jews, however,
were believed to pose a greater immediate threat, an innately alien and
antagonistic element within German society, dimensionally international,
conceived to be far more powerful in influence than Poles.
Jews were to be exterminated first in a “Final
Solution,” the Slavs later, except those to be used as slaves.
“Martin Boorman, Hitler’s party secretary...
wrote a long letter to Rosenberg [another Nazi official]... ‘The Slavs
are to work for us. In so far as we don’t need them, they may die... The
fertility of the Slavs is undesirable.... Education is dangerous..."
[SHIRER, p. 939]
Chaim Kaplan, eventually murdered by the Nazis,
noted the conditions for his maid after the German invasion:
“When the Nazis confiscated our apartment,
they permitted our Christian maid to remain. She is exempt from the Nazi
Nuremberg laws, they raped her. After that they beat her so that she
would reveal where I hid my money.”
[KAPLAN, C., p. 46]
The Nazi occupation of Poland was intended to
de-Polonize the entire country and reconstruct it in a Germanic image.
Polish names of towns and places were torn down
and replaced by German ones (exactly as the Jews of Israel have done in
replacing Arabic geographical names with Hebrew ones).
“Property in Poland belonging not only to
Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation.”
[SHIRER, p. 944]
“The planned deportation [of Poles to the
Auschwitz concentration] camp,” says Franciszek Piper, head of the
Historical Research Department of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, “of
tens of thousands of men, women, and children from the Zamosc region -
foreseen as one of the first bridgeheads for Germanization in eastern
Poland - demonstrated the Nazis’ goal of exterminating the Poles, which
they only achieved to a small degree.”
[PIPER, F., Political, p. 15]
Hideously monstrous medical experiments on Jews
by sadistic Nazis is well known.
But,
“Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi
doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp
inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans... At the Ravensbrueck
concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates - the ‘rabbit
girls’ they were called - were given gas gangrene wounds while others
were subjected to ‘experiments’ in bone grafting. At Dachau and
Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner,
they could live on salt water.”
[SHIRER, p. 979]
Priests were also tortured and experimented upon
at Dachau. [GOLDBERG, M., H., 1979, p.
223]
There were grandiose medical visions for others who were not Jews:
“An S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote
Himmler... that... the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity
should be sterilized.”
[SHIRER, p. 979]
The suffering of millions of non-Jewish Poles,
Czechs, Russians, Gypsies and other nationals and ethnics during the
Holocaust era has been completely forgotten and overlooked in our own time.
(Between December 1939 and August 1941, the Nazis even murdered 50,000
Germans - defined as “mentally sick” - with carbon dioxide gas in chambers
disguised, like other mass murder sites, as showers.
[ARENDT, p. 108]
Among the murdered were even Germans who
protested against the Nazi treatment of Jews - people like clergyman like
Bernard Lichtenberg and philosopher Kurt Huber.
[RUBENSTEIN, p 188-189]
Even Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp
of Jewish Holocaust symbology, was instituted by sending to the gas chambers
300 Poles and 700 Russian prisoners of war.
[LUCAS, p. 38]
The numbers always cited for people murdered at Auschswitz (and the
Holocaust in general) are only guesses and estimates - citing this
fragmentary document or that, and then presuming from there - and they vary
widely. While Franciszek Piper claims 90% of those who died at Auschwitz
were Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ascribed 2.5 million Jewish and
l.5 million non-Jewish dead to the place.
Scholar Norman Davies echoes whatever he read
that one-quarter of the Auschwitz dead were non-Jews. Whatever the case,
Auschwitz has become the consummate symbol of Jewish suffering in the
Holocaust and Judeo-centric discourse has completely appropriated the human
misery of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, concentration camps in general, and the
neglected whole of World War II as an ethnocentric pillar of their own
specialized victimization.
As Polish/Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz notes,
“the meaning of the word Holocaust [has
undergone] gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to
the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were
not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other
nationalities.”
[LUKAS, p. ix]
Unlike other European nations, underscores
Milosz,
“there was no collaboration between Poles
and Nazis. There was no collaboration. This should be said clearly,
because there was no Polish pseudo-government under the Nazis. The
Polish population was treated by the Nazis as the next to be destroyed
and the Poles knew that.”
[MILOCZ, p. 37]
Although far fewer in numbers, the people most
directly parallel to the Jewish situation in World War II were the Gypsies (Sinti
and Romani). By any criteria, their own catastrophe alone under German
fascism ruins modern Jewish claims to “Holocaust uniqueness.”
There are numerous surviving documents attesting
to Nazi policy of complete annihilation of Gypsies, including a memo from
the Office of Racial Hygiene stating that,
“all Gypsies should be treated as
hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination.”
[HANCOCK, p. 43]
Ian Hancock, a University of Texas professor and
himself of Romani heritage, has struggled for years to call attention to the
disaster that befell his people.
“It is abundantly clear,” he says, “that
some historians see only what they want to see, that a very blind eye is
being turned in the direction of Gypsy history, and that when the Romani
genocide in Nazi Germany is acknowledged, it is kept, with few
exceptions, carefully separated from the Jewish experience.”
[HANCOCK, p. 40]
Hancock has discovered Jewish resistance to the
intrusion of the Gypsy story on Jewish sacred turf to be widespread.
Sometimes the undercurrent of Jewish exclusionism is revealed to be nakedly
racist:
“The director of one Holocaust center
referred to me as a troublemaker; another writer on the Holocaust
called my discussion of the Romani case in the Jewish context
‘loathsome.’ A representative of the United States Holocaust Memorial
Council, whom I have never met, told a researcher who called to find out
how to reach me that I was a ‘wild man.’ People have walked out when it
was my turn to speak at conferences about the Porrajmos [the Gypsy
“Holocaust”], and one former professor at the university where I teach
adamantly refused even to mention Roma and Sinti in his regular course
on the Holocaust.
There is an element of racism evident in the
Jewish response; after all, Gypsies are a ‘third world people of
color’... At one presentation I gave at a Hillel center, I was
interrupted by a woman who leaped to her feet and angrily demanded why I
was even comparing the Gypsy case to the Jewish case when Jews had given
so much to the world and Gypsies were merely parasites and thieves. On
another occasion a gentleman in the audience stood up and declared that
he would never buy a book on the Holocaust written by a Gypsy.”
[HANCOCK, p. 55-57]
(Adamant Jewish conviction of intrinsic
superiority - and elitist distinction - over Gypsies is reflected in famous
Jewish novelist Judith Krantz’s autobiography:
“’I admire old tribes,’ said [a German
baron],
‘I once traveled for weeks with Gyspies,
and I found them fascinating . You realize Gypsies have a tradition
as old as the Jews, don’t you?’
I confessed ignorance of Gypsy tradition,
but the next day, as the baron and I sat at the airport, I said
thoughtfully,
‘I’ve been thinking about the Gypsies
and the Jews, and it seems to me that for better or worse, the Jews
have given the world Einstein, Freud, Marx, and for that matter,
Jesus Christ himself - but I can’t think of many Gypsies who’ve
changed the world, can you?’
Even that bloody awful baron had to laugh
and say, ‘Touché.’”
[KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 306] )
Among those few Jews who publicly supported the
Gypsy’s struggles for attention to their own “Holocaust” history was famed
“Nazi-hunter” Simon Wiesenthal.
Wiesenthal once described the run-around he
experienced at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum in his efforts to get a
Gypsy on the museum thirty-member governing board.
“I felt the attitude of the Holocaust
Memorial Council to be unjust,” he said, “... I received a number of
copies of other letters in which all kinds of people had approached
[Council head Elie] Wiesel with the request that he should support the
claim of the gypsies.”
[WIESENTHAL, p. 222-223]
Only after Wiesel left as head of the group was
a Gypsy allowed to sit on the Council.
“The Nazis selected the Jews as their first
candidates for annihilation,” notes Israeli Boas Evron, “but the Gypsies
were extirpated with equal thoroughness and much larger and more
ambitious plans were afoot for the enslavement and piecemeal
extermination of the Slavs (Soviet losses during World War II are
estimated at twenty-five million people, only a minority of whom were
soldiers).”
[EVRON, p. 51]
In 1999, in Atlanta, Georgia, Jewish-dominated
Holocaust politics explicitly censored the Nazis’ mass murder of
homosexuals. As the Atlanta Jewish Times notes,
“The Georgia Holocaust Commission caused a
rift with the city’s gay community. The commission made repeated
headlines in January with the deletion of two paragraphs from a
Holocaust teacher’s guide about gay and lesbian persecution. The
incident triggered a confrontation between the gay community and the
commision... The drama peaked with the forcible removal of gay activist
Harry Knox from a commission meeting at [Jewish commission director
Sylvia] Wygoda’s order.”
[ATLANTA JEWISH TIMES, 6-18-99]
Jews commonly claim that 6 million of their
numbers were exterminated in the Holocaust.
“The ‘Six Million figure,’” notes Zev Garber
and Bruce Zuckerman, “often invoked in characterizations of ‘The
Holocaust,’ points out the problem of stressing [Jewish] uniqueness over
commonality. The truth is that eleven million people were killed in the
concentration camps. Nearly half of these are excluded in most
characterizations of ‘The Holocaust,’ and this seems to imply that
Gentile deaths are not as significant as Jewish deaths.”
[GARBER, p. 208]
Wladyslaw Krajewski, another Jewish commentator,
today still lives in Poland. He notes his own problems in dealing with
uninformed western Jewry who seek confirmation of Jewish myth, a conviction
of blanket Polish anti-Semitism, and not the truths of World War II:
“When my wife and I were in the United
States [for a visit], we also had to argue with those who ascribe
anti-Semitism to the Poles en bloc, to the [Polish] Home Army, and so
on... In general, there is a prevalent stereotype among [non-Polish
Jews] according to which they are always victims (as indeed they usually
are). Many people in Israel, and more so in the United States, think
that the terror was directed exclusively against the Jews during the
German occupation [of Poland] (as indeed it was primarily directed
against them).
They are unwilling to believe it when they
are told that large numbers of Poles also fell victim to German terror.
They say that such people may have fought in the resistance movement or
aided Jews, but that only the Jews (and perhaps the Gypsies) were
persecuted without reason. Such judgments result in large part from
ignorance (although no one admits to being ignorant). Such things are
not said by the few Jews living in Poland, who are better informed about
the German occupation of our country.”
[KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 103-104]
Some scholars have suggested between four and
five million Jewish deaths in the World War II years.
Jewish scholars Gerald Reitlinger and Raul
Hilberg, among others, estimate the number of Jewish dead to be between five
and six million. They are all guesses and estimates. No one knows anywhere
near with certainty an exact figure. No matter, all these sums are
unfathomably staggering and the suffering incomprehensible. But rarely heard
is the fact that the Nazis also exterminated up to 7 million Christians in
these same death camps.
For every two Jews executed there, suggests
Jewish author Max Dimont, three Christians were slain too. Slavs and
gypsies, Russian prisoners, the Polish clergy, the Polish resistance
movement and its intelligentsia were also decimated.
15 to 20 million people were killed in Europe.
[ENCY BRITT, p. 716] Three million
Polish Jews died as a consequence of Adolf Hitler, as did three million
Polish Christians. Three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war alone
perished in Nazi captivity. Throughout the world, the number of people who
died because of World War II is estimated to be a numbing 50-64 million
human beings! [ENCY BRITT, 18, p. 716]
Where are the monuments to them - humanity
at-large, devoid of clan and tribe allegiances - a museum that affirms that
every single life in that grisly pile was precious, sacred, and unique in
human history. There is no such museum. There is no such monument. We never
hear about them. There are only monuments to Jewish suffering.
Why?
However pained Jews are for their own horrible losses, by the end of the
twentieth century Jewish mourning had become a politic that is deaf to the
screams of others. To view the atrocities of the Third Reich in the larger
view as crimes against humanity do not serve the Zionist and nationalist
principles of the Jewish state of Israel nor even the general Jewish
religiously-inspired sense that they are somehow “different” than others:
“chosen.”
The fact remains that the Nazi Holocaust of the
Jews did not occur in a velvet box protecting others from hideous injury.
Violence and atrocity was everywhere, in every direction. It was war, a
World War, and profoundly maniacal people were struggling to annihilate
anyone not part of their racial and ideological clan.
But Zionists and other Jews remind us -
relentlessly and incessantly - only that the Nazis violated Jews on a
profound scale, and ignore the rest of the festering agony of it all.
The Holocaust gave modern Israel final legitimization to be born. For the
Zionists, Hitler conclusively proved that life in the Diaspora was
precarious and that gentiles could not, in the long term, be trusted. In
times of social upheaval, it was believed that Jews might again be
scapegoated. The Holocaust effectively united Jews throughout the world in a
way that race or religion couldn’t.
It remains important to Zionists that the
extermination of Jews in Europe be viewed myopically, distinct from all
other phenomena, distinct from the extermination of all other people. All
that mattered to Germany was Aryans. And all that matters to Israel - and
its many Diaspora supporters—is Jews.
In 1979 the head of a Jewish-American delegation to Warsaw, Eli Wiesel,
objected to the fact that Poles speak of World War II,
“victims in general... We speak of Jews.
They mention all of the victims of every nationality, of every religion,
and they refer to them en masse. We object... The Jews were murdered
because they were Jews, not because they were Poles... And so we told
our Polish hosts: ‘If you forget the Jews, you will eventually forget
the others. One always starts with the Jews.’”
[LINENTHAL, p. 31]
“It wasn’t enough to give [Poland] our
parents and grandparents, our brothers and sisters,” complained another
Jewish delegate, Lily Edelman, “... We also had to leave them a billion
dollar tourist industry.”
[LINENTHAL, p. 31]
Not only does Judeo-centric myopia and
self-obsession singularly recognize, memorialize, and even celebrate, Jewish
victimization in World War II. Not only are non-Jewish co-sufferers ignored;
they are, worse, subject to scorn and attack for not “saving the Jews.”
Many Jews even bitterly complain that the United
States should have “done something more” to save their brethren, as if
Jewish lives were more important, more innocent, than any of the millions of
others who died. It is hard to imagine what such critics have in mind, when
America was already engaged in the utmost act of aggression and violence
against Germany: war.
The people who are most subject by Jews to insult, complaint, abuse,
prejudicial stereotyping, and hatred - sometimes seemingly even more than
the German Nazis themselves - are the Poles.
Polish Christians are commonly accused by Jewish
writers to have “handed Polish Jews over to the Nazis” and/or turned their
backs from saving them.
“Poles were indifferent to, if not
supportive of, the ensuing Nazi massacre of the Jews,” charges Barry
Rubin, in a very, very common Jewish slander, routinely glossing over
the mutually desperate situations of Poland, Jews, and enormity of World
War II.
Jews, after all, had for centuries positioned
themselves as exploiters of the Polish peasantry, in league with the
oppressive aristocracy. There was little love for Jews by the Polish people
and Jewish reputations were terrible.
A pre-war Polish nationalist party, the National
Democratic Party, for instance, objected to Jewish influence in the country,
that the Jewish ten percent of the population,
“constituted an alien element detrimental to
national unity. It feared that the very high proportion of Jews in the
professions (estimated at thirty per cent of the lawyers, doctors,
architects, and so forth), the Jewish monopoly in retail trade and
finance, and the avoidance by the Jews of physical labor in mines,
factories, and on the land amounted to barring the way of poor Poles to
social advancement.”
[KORBANSKI, p. 18-19]
Polish feelings about Jews in Poland based upon
their historical relationship may be ascertained by some old Polish proverbs
about them:
-
The peasant gleans, the Lord squanders,
the Jew profits.
-
The Lord plots the ruin of the peasant
with the Jews.
-
One mountain will not meet another, but
the gentry will always meet the Jew.
[CALA]
With some exceptions among individuals, and with
the exception of self-aggrandizing commercial concerns, Jewish communities
largely functioned as insular, self-absorbed, elitist, and self-positioned
“strangers” in Polish society.
The gulf between Polish Christians and Jews was
enormous. (In pre-Holocaust Poland the intermarriage rate between Poles and
Jews was one per cent). [WISTRICH,
Intro, p. 4]
It was self-imposed by Jews from the earliest
times of their stay in Poland, and echoed by their Polish neighbors.
“Ethnocentrism,” notes Tadeusz Piotrowski,
“was a two way street.”
[PIOTROSKI, p. 38]
Most Jews chose not to assimilate into Polish
society whatsoever (many could not even speak Polish) and had few links of
good will to the surrounding non-Jewish people.
“In prewar [World War II] Poland,” notes
Wladyslaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew, “Of course, the majority of Jews did
not regard themselves as Poles. Growing up for the most part in Jewish
environments, they observed only the Jewish customs and religion, spoke
only Yiddish at home, and generally spoke Polish poorly.”
[KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 96-97]
Norman Salsitz notes growing up in a Jewish
community in a Polish town and discovering that “many” Jews didn’t even know
what the Polish flag exactly looked like.
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 73]
In 1936, Jewish voting patterns in Poland (in
their self-governing kehillah organizations) revealed a 38 percent vote for
the Bund party (a group emphasizing a Jewish, as opposed to Polish,
identity), 36 percent vote for Zionist lists (the return to Israel group),
and religious Orthodox (religiously anti-Gentile) and “middle-class” groups
at about 23 percent. [GITELMAN, Z.,
1997]
Whatever Jewish politics, Norman Salsitz notes
that, like many Jewish communities in Poland, the 2,000 Jews in his hometown
were “95 per cent... observant, pious people.”
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 140]
This, we may fairly presume, would include all the separatist and
anti-Gentile ideology that Orthodox Judaism entails.
As far as my district goes,” noted Israeli
professor Chone Shmeruk, in reflecting upon the Warsaw neighborhood where he
grew up,
“it was exclusively Jewish. The only
non-Jews there were the janitors who usually had small apartments near
the entrance. Most of the Jewish residents spoke Yiddish... As far as
Warsaw goes, a street like Karmelick, for instance, was exclusively
Jewish. There was a Bund elementary school there with all classes taught
in Yiddish. There was no Polish element there and contacts with Poles
were few or none. I did not visit Polish homes and they did not visit
mine. I did not really have any Polish friends.
My friends from school or the courtyard were
Jewish... When a Jew left the northern district, it was perhaps not like
going to another city, but rather going somewhere unknown... If you went
to a park it was to be a ‘Jewish park’... There was a chasm between the
Jewish and Polish districts in Warsaw.”
[SHMERUK, p.326-328]
Jewish self-segregation was the norm for most
Jews of Eastern Europe. Raphael Patai notes the vast gulf between his Jewish
grandparents in the Hungarian village of Pata (from about 1880 to 1920) and
the non-Jews around them:
“My attention was focused on the almost
complete separation that existed between the life forms of that Hasidic
Orthodox Jewish family and the other five equally religious Jewish
families of Pata, on the one hand, and those of the hundreds of
Christian Hungarian families of the village, on the other... I received
the distinct impression [from documents and interviews with relatives]
that the life of my grandfather and that of the Hungarian peasants of
Pata had practically nothing in common... The contact between my
grandparents and the peasants of the village was confined to the
occasions when the latter stopped by [my grandparents’] store to make
their small purchases. To this might be added the twice-daily trips my
grandmother had to take to the village well until about 1902 [until they
had a well dug on their property]... Apart from this, my grandfather
lived entirely in the world of Jewish tradition, primarily that of the
Talmud. He knew nothing of the cultural traditions of the Pata
peasants... One reaches the conclusion that this Hungarian Jew lived in
practically complete cultural isolation from his purely Hungarian
environment.”
[PATAI, R., 1971, p. 136-137]
Alan Levy notes famed Nazi-hunter Simon
Wiesenthal’s attitude towards his non-Jewish neighbors in Poland:
“Having lived among Poles from birth, grown
up with them, and attended their schools, Simon knew that ‘to them we
were always foreigners. Mutual understanding was out of the question.
And even now that the Poles, too, had been enslaved and were next on
Hitler’s list for extermination, nothing had changed: there were still
barriers between us.’ Sometimes, this estrangement grew so strong that
Simon ‘no longer even wanted to look at Poles. In spite of the
conditions and the risks inside the [concentration] camp, I would have
preferred to stay there. But I didn’t always have the choice.’
[LEVY, A., 1993, p. 42]
“Jewish separatism,” notes Jewish author Eva Hoffman about Poland, “was
also an active choice, and it also had its consequences. It means that
Jewish individuals and communities cultivated their own alienness, and
that although they were willing to engage in contractual relations with
the Poles, they did not wish to enter into a shared world with them.”
[HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 63]
The firm root of this Jewish separatism from
Poles endures today.
As Jewish American Victor Seidler noted in 2000:
“I know that my father had come from Warsaw
but in no sense did I think of myself as ‘Polish’.... When I gave my
lecture at the Polish Academy of Sciences, I was introduced as someone
with Polish ancestry and I had to clarify that my family was Jewish.”
[SEIDLER, V.J., 2000, p. 47]
Jewish revulsion for Christians in Poland, their
classical disdain—even hatred - for them, and the Jewish enforcement of the
huge gulf between Jews and Poles, is reflected in this account by the best
known Jewish polemicist about the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, here describing
his childhood in Poland:
“[Christian] rituals held no interest for
me; quite the contrary. I turned away from them. Whenever I met a priest
in I would avert my gaze and think of something else. Rather than walk
in front of a church with its pointed and threatening belfry, I would
cross the street. To see was as frightening as to be seen; I worried
that a visual, physical link might be created between us... All I knew
of Christians was its hate for my people [Jews]. Christians were more
present in my imagination than in my life. What did a Christian do when
he was alone? What were his dreams made of? How did he use his time when
he was not engaged in plotting against us?”
[WIESEL, A Jew, p. 4-5]
In a novel Wiesel wrote, called Dawn, Sylvia
Barack-Fishman notes a disturbing undercurrent, common - as we have seen -
in the traditional Jewish worldview:
“Wiesel’s protagonist comes to the startling
conclusion that Jews must learn ‘the art of hate’ in order to guarantee
their physical survival. ‘Otherwise,’ he argues, ‘our future will only
be an extension of the past.’”
[BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 281]
Jewish “hate,” as we have seen, casts a wide
net. Even a Roman Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe, canonized by the church
and heroized in Poland for voluntarily dying at Auschwitz that another man
might live, is dismissed by one Jewish magazine these days as the former
editor of “a mass-circulation anti-Semitic Franciscan weekly.”
[TOMASZEWSKI, p. 47]
Reflecting the tone of Jewish disdain for Christians, one of Jewish novelist
Max Shulman’s characters in Potatoes are Cheaper declared that,
“If [my mother] happened to see [a nun] on
the street, she made a circle three times, said Shma Yisrael and ran to
kill a chicken.”
[NOVAK/WALDOKS, 1981, p. 96]
That isn’t really fiction. Moshe Rozdial
reflects the usual Jewish polemic and apologetic about Jewish racism and
hatred of those around them:
“If I could be really honest, growing up
around holocaust survivors, especially grandparents who had been part of
village life in Poland, my clearest memory of anything that relates to
churches was the way my grandmother would spit three times, you know, tu!
tu! tu!, like in Fiddler on the Roof, to ward off evil spirits, every
time she would walk past a church steeple. The cross has really been
more a burden to Jews, than for Christians to bear.
For my Bubbe, my grandmother, it represented
the wrath of Satan, swooping down on a helpless people when they were
not vigilant to warding off the evil eye. She saw Nazism as just another
version of Christianity, hoardes of Aryan barbarians, swooping down with
their broken cross, to do the work that the church had laid the
foundation for, for a thousand years. I remember walking down the street
with my hand in hers, feeling that tug and knowing, almost instinctively
that if I look up I’d see a cross atop a roof, as she reflexively
crossed the street to avoid walking directly in front of the church.
Muttering, Nevelah! Nevelah!
Do you know what that means? The impurity of the dead. Any dead thing.
Any dead thing, that by Jewish law, could not be touched in any way, so
as not to be defiled by spiritual purity. That’s what Bubbe thought of
the crucifix and ultimately, the church... She’d spit three times, more
if she was in a dark mood, and walk out of her way to avoid the site.
The dead Jew on the cross was a Nevelah to her, a presence that has
always defiled her life, Jewish life. A symbol of death and human
corruptness, to to my people. I know it’s not politically correct to say
these things to you. We Jews are always watching our tongues, when it
comes to Christianity.”
[RODZIAL, M., WINTER 1999]
A yeshiva student, Rachmiel Frydeland, notes how
it was growing up Jewish in the pre-war town of Chelm:
“I had no contacts with Christianity at all.
On the way to school we passed a Roman Catholic church and a Russian
Orthodox church, and we spat, pronouncing the words found in Deuteronomy
7:26, ‘... though shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor
it; for it is a cursed thing... Why should we say such horrible words?
The [Christian] people looked so pious. They came from surrounding
villages to worship, and they never bothered us.”
[FRYDLAND, p. 55]
Abraham Sterzer grew up within a Jewish life in
Eastern Galicia.
“Our rabbi,” he says, “insisted that we
Jewish children spit on the ground and utter curses while passing near a
cross, or whenever we encountered a Christian priest or religious
procession. Our shopkeepers used to say that ‘it was a Mitzveh (blessed
deed) to cheat a Goy (gentile).’”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 39]
Anna Lanota recalled that her Jewish community
in Poland,
“had a somewhat unfavorable attitude toward
other nations - maybe even contemptuous. There prevailed the feeling
that we were the chosen people.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 39]
The first prime minister of modern Israel, David
Ben-Gurion, once recalled his childhood among non-Jewish children in Poland:
“Somebody would perhaps throw a stone, or
start an argument, and very often it was the Jews who started first. We
used to get the upper hand.”
[KURZMAN, D., 1983, p. 50]
Jewish commentator Elias Tcherikower notes the
nature of Jewish shtetl (Jewish community) culture in Eastern Europe:
“Jews were not regarded, nor did they regard
themselves, as Russians or Poles who differed in religion and
occupational concentrations from the majority population... Jews
constituted an autonomous, isolated, self-enclosed, and collectively
responsible social entity.
The goings-on in the outside world certainly
impinged upon the Jewish community, but were regarded as being as the
same order as natural events; most often, as natural catastrophes. There
was, relatively speaking, little social interaction that mattered
between Jew and non-Jew. What was of significance
was what went on in the Jewish world, in the world of the shtetl...
Above all, the shtetl was a community of
rigid religious orthodoxy... The shtetl’s frame of reference was the
Jewish community. Outside was the world of the goy, the alien... Loyalty
to this hostile, alien world was nonexistent.”
[NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 4-6]
As Jewish Holocaust survivor Nechama Tec notes
about traditional Jewish separatism, self-imposed estrangement from
non-Jews, and resistance to assimilate into Polish culture (which had
virtually insurmountable consequences when any Christian Pole sought, at
constant risk of his or her life, to hide Jews from the Nazis):
“In 1939, of all the European countries,
Poland had the highest concentration of Jews. They made up 10 per cent
of the country’s population. As the largest community of Jews in Europe,
Polish Jews were also the least assimilated. They looked, dressed, and
behaved differently from Polish Christians... In prewar Poland, more
than half the Jewish children attended special Jewish schools.
Enrollment in religious school, in turn, discouraged mastery of the
Polish language.
Thus, in answer to a 1931 census inquiry, the overwhelming majority of
Jews mentioned Yiddish as their native tongue (79 per cent) and only 12
percent gave Polish as their first language. The rest chose Hebrew. Jews
and Poles lived in separate and different worlds, and their diverse
experiences made for easy identification. It has been estimated that
more than 80 percent of the Polish Jews were easily recognizable, while
less than 10 percent could be considered assimilated.”
[TEC, N., 1986, p. 12]
Jewish anthropologist Samuel Heilman notes that
the Hasidic ultra-Orthodox literalist movement, founded in the eighteenth
century, became the dominant Jewish world view in Eastern Europe.
“In several generations,” he observes, “[the
Hasidic movement] absorbed huge numbers - perhaps a majority - of the
region’s Jews.” [Heilman refers here to the “region” of Eastern Europe,
including Podolia, Volhynia, Galicia, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine]
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 21]
In 1992 Heilman wrote a book about the Hasids in
Israel (whose ancestors were from Eastern Europe) and, even there, the
following is the profoundly separatist and ethnocentric world view he found
still reflected by 11- and 12-year olds in the Hasidic school system.
Showing a school class a map of Israel,
“I asked each boy if he could tell me what
lay to the east, the south, the north, and the west [of Israel], each
time pointing my pencil to the area in case they did not know the
bearings of the compass.
Again, no one knew... Next I asked each boy to tell me the names of the
surrounding countries, without necessarily specifying where they were in
relation to Israel. In response, one boy began to list cities in
Israel... Perhaps the most revealing answer came from one youngster who,
in reply to the question of what bordered on Israel, confidently
answered that Israel was surrounded by ‘chutz la’aretz.’ ‘Chutz la’aretz’
is the Hebrew expression that most Israelis use to refer to the rest of
the world. Literally, it means ‘outside of the Land (of Israel),’
abroad. In this boy’s mind the world was neatly divided.
Just as there were goyim and Jews, so similarly there was Israel and
chutz la’aretz... It struck me that in the world they inhabited, the
information I had asked them was simply not important. They had a
different map of the world... The large territories were not Russia,
Germany, or Poland. They were named after cities of importance to the
hasidim of Zvil: Apta, Lublin, Mezerich, Berdichev, Chernobyl.
Cities had become countries.”
[HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 233]
Stephen Bloom’s 2001 book about an
ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave (the Chabad Lubavitchers, founded in
Lithuania) in Postville, Iowa, give a clear example of what relations must
have been like between many Jews and Poles and Eastern Europe before the
rise of the Nazis.
Jews in the Iowa town
-
don’t want to touch Gentiles
[BLOOM, S., p. 96]
-
they resist eye contact with them as
they walk down the street
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 86]
-
they have no knowledge or interest in
Gentile life around them
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 114]
-
they appeared “obnoxious and imperial”
to local people, [BLOOM, S.,
2001, p. 161]
-
they cheat local merchants
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 323]
-
they use oil in their candelabras
because oil, which doesn’t mix with other liquid, symbolizes Jewish
separateness from all others.
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 182]
“Wherever we go,” one Chabad leader said,
“we don’t adapt to the place or the people. It’s always been like that
and always will be like that. It’s the place and the people who have to
adapt to us.”
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 209]
“Postville people, by and large, were
tolerant,” says Bloom, “... [But the Hasidic Jews] were downright rude.
They seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious, especially when it
came to business dealings... At first, the locals welcomed the Jews, but
even the simplest offer - a handshake, an invitation to afternoon tea -
was spurned. The locals quickly discovered that the Jews wouldn’t even
look at them. They refused to acknowledge even the presence of anyone
not Jewish.”
[BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 48, 51]
As Norman Salsitz notes about his Jewish youth
in Poland:
“Most Poles were devout Catholics, and we
Jews followed in the path of orthodox Judaism. Poles who were Catholics
were automatically Poles; Poles who were Jewish were never referred to
as anything but Jews. In look, in dress, in behavior, there was usually
no mistaking the Pole and the Jew. Then, too, Poles all spoke Polish,
Jews mostly Yiddish... Acquaintances among Poles and Jews were common,
indeed nearly inevitable in a town the [small] size of Kolbuszowa; but
close friendships were practically nonexistent.”
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 242]
Another Jew who a survived World War II as a
child in Poland, Yehuda Nir, notes that when the Nazis came it was in the
best interests of his affluent family to pretend that they were non-Jewish
Poles but,
“we kept delaying our move to the ‘Aryan
world.’ Our hesitation reflected a fear of the unknown, an inability to
project ourselves into the role of Christian Poles, Catholics. Although
we had known many Catholics quite well and have lived with the Nowickis
for almost a year [Nir doesn’t explain this: they lived in the same
apartment building? In the same house? Why?], they were always seen as
strangers, goyim, the people on the other side of the fence. We felt we
didn’t know enough to fully identify with them, that at best we could
only mimic them.”
[NIR, Y., 1989, p. 31]
“The Poles never thought of us as Poles,” says prominent Yiddish
novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, “and we didn’t either.”
[RUBIN, p. 192]
Nonetheless, before the war, when Poland was
still able to assert its nationalist will, on April 12, 1933, the German
Ambassador to Warsaw, Hans Moltke, reported to his superiors that,
“the Polish foreign minister warned him that
any retaliation against Polish Jews or any others of Polish extraction
living in Germany would be met with dangerous Polish countermeasures.”
[BLACK, p. 112]
Poland was invaded by the Nazi war machine in
1939 and totally overcome and decimated in a matter of weeks.
The Nazi blitzkrieg consisted of 1,800,000
soldiers, 2,500 tanks, over 2,000 aircraft and naval warships. Three million
Polish Christians died during World War II, a figure equal to that of Polish
Jews who perished. 40% of the national wealth was destroyed, 10% of the
non-Jewish population was killed.
[BART. p. 16]
How were Poles to save Jews when they had first
to struggle for their own lives and families?
In 1989 Stephan Korbanski, the,
“last surviving leader of the Polish
Underground State during German occupation,” wrote a book complaining
that “the charges leveled by the Jews against the Poles for allegedly
sharing responsibility for the Holocaust by not preventing the slaughter
of the Jews are groundless, unfair, and slanderous. An individual or
nation can be blamed for denying help which could be given, but not for
failing to do the impossible.”
[KORBANSKI, p. vii]
Korbanski notes that German ordinances declared
the death penalty for anyone (and often his or her family) caught helping
Jews and that, nonetheless, the Jewish Historic Institute in Warsaw has
documented by name 343 Polish Christians (and 101 others who cannot be
identified) who were murdered for helping Jews escape the Nazis.
The Association of Former Political Prisoners,
mostly inmates from Auschwitz, estimates the number of Poles murdered for
helping Jews at 2,500 (the Maximilian Kolbe Foundation has identified by
name 2,300 Poles). [KORBANSKI, p. 67]
Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal notes that
an,
“incomplete list of Poles executed for
sheltering Jews numbers 521 families.”
[WIESENTHAL, 1989, p. 216]
The Jewish-American author Jerzy Kosinski wrote:
“My parents and I were saved by Poles. I was
hidden and transferred from one place to another and that with my looks!
I look... like the stereotype of a Jew on a Nazi poster.”
[KORBANSKI]
Korbanski underscores the fact that all Polish
secondary schools and colleges were closed by Nazi invaders, the Polish
language was forbidden, libraries and book shops were burned, the Polish
language press was outlawed, Polish cemeteries were destroyed, and
everything Polish was renamed in German.
“Only one church was left in each county;
all others were burned or closed.”
[KORBANSKI, p. 23]
In the early days of the Nazi invasion, Polish
priests, political leaders, landowners, officials, teachers, lawyers, and
doctors were routinely executed. Many of those who escaped were sent to
Polish concentration camps to die. In the town of Bydogoszcz, over 20,000
inhabitants were liquidated for their defenders’ role against the initial
Nazi onslaught. 9,000 Poles were shot in the streets of Warsaw in one year
alone.
During Nazi occupation Poles were killed for,
“not getting off the sidewalk to make way
for a German approaching,” for “illicit fishing, for slaughtering a pig
for their own use, for stealing fruit from orchards, for riding a train
without a ticket.”
[KORBANSKI, p. 24]
Ethnic Germans, indigenous to parts of
multi-ethnic Poland, served as spies.
Even the Pole Jan Mosdorf, head of,
“a right wing organization of a nationalist
and anti-Semitic character,” who was imprisoned at Auschwitz risked his
life to help - and sometimes save the lives of - Jewish prisoners.
[SWIEBOCKI, p. 206]
Mosdorf, said one Jewish prisoner, Mojzesz
Maslanko,
“had a big heart and helped Jews. I
personally received a large amount of help from him, which perhaps
decided my survival.”
[SWIEBOCKI, p. 206]
Mosdorf was executed by the Nazis in 1943.
Meanwhile, while the Poles were invaded and occupied from the West by
Germany, communist Russia attacked from the East. Soviet occupation of
Eastern Poland resulted in the confiscation of everything from banks to
sawmills. Churches and other religious centers were closed or destroyed.
Over a million Poles were deported, mostly to Asiatic Russia. Among the
deportees, some 500,000 ended up in labor camps where many died.
[BART. p. 18]
Members of Poland’s religious and political
infrastructure were executed; Korbanski notes that up to 100,000 Polish
political prisoners were murdered by the Soviets by mid-1941.
Korbanski, as a leader of the Polish underground, and others began to report
to the outside world what was happening in Poland, including the situation
of the Jews. They even had a Jewish liaison in the Warsaw ghetto. Members of
the Polish “Home Army” even made a number of attempts to blow up the walls
and open the Jewish Warsaw ghetto, but were repelled by German defenses.
[KORBANSKI, p. 57]
In a review of Korbanski’s book by David Engel, a Jewish professor at New
York University, Korbanski’s first-hand account and perspective (and the
suffering of the Polish people) were summed up with these last sentences:
“Mr. Korbanski will never have to deal with
the problems raised by the book; he passed away shortly after it was
released. How sad that the final work of a man with so much to his
credit is a splenetic diatribe, falling at times far below acceptable
scholarly standards to the level of gutter literature.”
[ENGEL, A New Jewry p.]
This kind of arrogantly insulting attitude is
not unique to Mr. Engler, but reflects an important current in
post-Holocaust Jewish thinking. The “problems raised in the book” are not
with Korbanski’s defense of the Polish people against continuous and
relentless Jewish impugnment; it is with the likes of modern Judeo-centric
propagandists like Engler.
What especially grates Engler the wrong way is this kind of comment from
Korbanski:
“The [Jewish] consensus which emerged (in
the early periods of Nazi occupation) was the unanimous belief that only
total submission to all the Nazi orders and industrious work for the
Germans might offer chances of survival until the end of the war. The
[Jewish] watchword was: “This is not our war; it’s the war of the Poles
against the Germans.” All the Jewish problems were to be dealt with by
the Jewish Council (Judenrat), headed by former Polish senator Adam
Czerniakow and formed by Germany themselves. That doctrine of
submissiveness remained in force for two years, during which the Jews in
the ghetto did not ask the Poles for any help or weapons.”
[KORBANSKI, p. 44]
The well-known Jewish historian of the
Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, supports such a notion that,
“the reaction of the Jews [to the Nazis] is
characterized by almost complete lack of resistance... [Jews] had
learned (over 2,000 years) that they could avert danger and survive
destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies.”
[HILBERG, p. 662, 666]
Well-known Jewish psychologist Bruno Bettelheim
concurred:
“A certain kind of ghetto thinking has as
its purpose the avoidance of taking direct action. It is a type of
deadening of the senses and emotions... One can... degrade oneself so
that one will be permitted to survive.”
[HOROWITZ, p. 143]
A Nazi lieutenant and head of an execution squad
wrote that “the execution of the Jews is simpler than that of the Gypsies.
One must admit that the Jews go to their deaths very composedly; they remain
very calm. The Gypsies, however, scream and wail and move about incessantly
as soon as they get to the place of execution.” Desperate Gypsies were known
to even use stale bread as last resort weapons.
[HANCOCK, p. 48]
A Polish-Jewish historian in the Warsaw Ghetto, and eventual victim of the
Nazis, Emmanual Ringelblum, expressed bewilderment that Jews did nothing to
resist their fate.
“Jews,” he wrote in 1942, “were evacuated
under a guard of Jewish policemen. Not one of them escaped, although all
of them knew where and towards what they were going... One gendarme is
sufficient to slaughter a whole town.”
[BART., p. 19]
While Jews en masse simply acceded to their
horrible fate, engendering the contempt and disdain of Poles, about 350,000
Poles sustained a continuous fight against the Nazis in underground
resistance groups throughout Poland.
Another 100,000 were members of the Polish Armed
Forces in the West and by the end of the war the Poles constituted the
fourth largest Allied army. And, unlike other European countries under
German rule, there was never organizational Polish collaboration with the
Nazis. [BART, p. 16]
“The Jews did nothing [to resist the
Nazis],” says Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, “until they had nothing left to
lose, when they started an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19,
1943 and in Bialystok shorty afterwards.”
[BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 20]
The Warsaw Uprising is the cornerstone of modern
Jewish/Israeli mythology about Jewish “resistance” to the Nazis in World War
II.
The last surviving member of the uprising, a
doctor who never left Poland, Marek Edelman, has been visited by many Jewish
delegations over the years who sought insights and details of the last stand
of Warsaw’s besieged Jewry.
“On several occasions,” notes Norman Davies,
“[Edelman has recounted] his sense of dismay at numerous meetings with
people who only want him to confirm their preoccupations.... Edelman
[however] had made his terrible gaffe, ‘Do you really think it can be
called an uprising’”?
[DAVIES, p. 22]
Dow Marmur noted a visit by Edelman to Canada to
give a talk to the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation, and the clash between
Diaspora mythologies and those of first-hand experience in Poland. Edelman,
says Marmur, was,
“the last surviving member of the Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising and, in that capacity, he has earned an important place
in twentieth century Jewish history... He said relatively little about
anti-Semitism in Poland, although he answered all the questions put to
him. The reaction from Jews was often hostile. We wanted him to say
something else and when he did not, we were furious and let him know
it... I am pleading for a general effort to understand him and people
likehim; they are our fellow Jews, and his personal contribution to
Jewish history surpasses that of all his Canadian opponents put
together.”
[MARMUR, p. 49]
Stephan Korbanski was central to Polish
underground resistance activity and his perceptions are highly credible. As
critic Engler himself concedes from his professorial armchair:
“[Korbanski] transmitted a number of radio
messages to the West concerning the systematic murder of Polish Jewry...
including the operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Korbanski was
also responsible for arranging the trial and execution of collaborators,
including some of those who blackmailed Jews in hiding... In recognition
of these activities, in 1980 he was honored by Yad Vashem as a Righteous
Gentile...”
[ENGLER, p.]
But Engler just doesn’t like Korbanski’s
centrally located view of Polish affairs and that Poles have their own
perspective of history. Korbanski’s indictment of Jewish communists of the
secret police agencies in the post-war destruction of Poland is especially
galling.
Korbanski writes that,
“To realize his plan of seizing total
control of Poland, Stalin formed two teams: one to satisfy appearances
and the Western Allies, the other to actually rule Poland. The first was
headed by the Polish communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob
Berman, who knew Stalin well.
The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins, which
exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy of
Poland’s independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites, whose
loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their
residence...
[KORBANSKI, p. 73]
The principal instrument of Berman’s power
was his total control of the Ministry of State Security, which began -
under Stalin’s instructions - to liquidate all centers of Polish
opposition, often by simply murdering persons suspected of advocating
Poland’s independence.
[KORBANSKI, p. 74]
Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles
Szurek also,
“admit [that] the Jewish youth and
proletariat played an important (‘although not exclusive’) role in the
apparatus of oppression.”
[BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18]
One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the
earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of its
leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI,
W., p. 94]
With Jews representing about 10% of the Polish
population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in
communism,
“in the large cities the percentage of Jews
in the [Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller
cities, frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the]
statement that ‘in small cities like ours, almost all communists were
Jews’ does not appear to be a gross exaggeration."
[SCHATZ, p. 96]
In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist
membership was Jewish. In 1930,
“Jews constituted 51 percent of the
[Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19
percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians).”
[SCHATZ, p. 96]
In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the
International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries.
[SCHATZ, p. 97]
They were also 54 percent of the communist field
leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and “occupied most of the
seats” of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers’ Party and
Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist
activists were jailed.
Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that,
“in Polish court proceedings against
communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were
Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 36] [SCHATZ, p. 97]
Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the
Polish Communist Party included a “firm stand against anti-Semitism.”
[SCHATZ, p. 100]
Furthermore, the symbology of three very high level Jewish officers - Minc,
Berman, and Zambrowski - in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions,
“became a lasting part of anti-Semitic
vocabulary.”
[SCHATZ, p. 206]
“All three communist leaders who dominated
Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and
Hilary Minc, were Jews.”
[MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63]
As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal
Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now,
“due to the Jews who occupy leading
positions in Poland’s government and endeavor to introduce a
governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have.”
[SCHATZ, p. 207]
Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in 1939 the
Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty:
“Representatives of [the Nazis’] former
arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone
and have been received with royal honors. The head of the Soviet
delegation is a Jew, the Nazi’s ‘friend’ Litvinov. When it is time to
engage in politics, nobody cares about race.”
[KAPLAN, C., p. 84]
Stephan Korbanski also notes that the Soviet
Communist secret police,
“team assembled by Berman [whose brother
Adolf was chairman of the Jewish Committee in Poland till 1947, when he
immigrated to Israel] [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 85] at the beginning of
his rule were all Jewish - Vice Minister Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman
Romkowski) [who once interrogated Korbanski], and other high officials
like General Julius Hibner (David Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security
police chief Joseph Swiatlo, Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg), ‘Colonel
Czaplicki,’ and Zygmut Okret. These were not the only Jewish officials
who oppressed Poles in the name of communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a
member of the Communist Council of State, has stated that ‘it was
unfortunate that all the department directors in the Ministry of State
were Jews.’”
[KORBANSKI, p. 78]
“Jacek Rozanski,” notes Polish author Jacek Borkowicz, was “director of
the Investigative Department of the Polish State Security Ministry” and
was “sentenced in 1955 to five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957
sentenced him to fifteen years]” for “using inadmissible means of
persuasion during interrogations... Son of a prominent Warsaw
Yiddish-language journalist (on the pro-Zionist ‘Hajnt’), Rozanski was a
dedicated communist who .. maintained his Jewish identity until the
end.”
[BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344]
“All the detainees described [Rozanski] as
an exceptionally cynical and sadistic psychopath who liked to torture
prisoners needlessly,” notes Jewish author Michael Checinski, “...
Rozanski’s Jewish origin was then common knowledge, in spite of his
Polonized name.”
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 80]
The aforementioned Anatol Fejgin was head of
the,
“Tenth Department of the Polish State
Security Ministry - the special unit answerable to the Party First
Secretary and concerned with spying on the communist leadership [and he]
was sentenced at the same trial in 1957 to twelve years’ imprisonment.”
[BORKOWICZ, p. 344]
Jewish author Michael Checinski notes the
post-World War II case of Semyon Davidov who,
“held the relatively modest post of head of
Soviet advisers in Poland. But no serious operational decisions on any
question pertaining to political provocations or police terror could
ever be taken without Davidov’s consent. On the one hand, Davidov and
his personal network supervised the activities of the Soviet advisers in
all the mainstays of real power in Poland (the armed forces, security
service, party apparatus, state administration, and industry). But he
also was responsible for overseeing the entire Polish apparatus of
terror.”
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 51]
Abel Kainer (a pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski,
a Polish Jew) adds that,
“The archetype of the Jew during the first
ten years of the Polish People’s Republic was generally perceived as an
agent of the secret political police. It is true that under Bierut and
Gomulka (prior to 1948) the key positions in the Ministry of State
Security were held by Jews or persons of Jewish background. It is a fact
which cannot be overlooked, little known in the West and seldom
mentioned by the Jews of Poland. Both prefer to talk about Stalin’s
anti-Semitism....
The machinations of communist terror
functioned in Poland in a matter [sic] similar to that used in other
communist ruled countries in Europe. What requires explanation is why it
is operated by Jews. The reason was the political police, the base of
communist rule, required personnel of unquestionable loyalty to
communism. These were people who had joined the Party before the war and
in Poland they were predominately Jewish. “
[KORBANSKI, p. 79]
“The feeling that Jews are oppressors probably sounds absurd to many
westerners,” wrote Stanislaw Krajewski, under his own name. “The only
sense it has derives from the Jewish participation in the oppressive
rule in Poland, and in particular the fact that a lot of Jews looked
favorably at the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939.”
[KRAJEWSKI, p. 50]
Most Poles did not look favorably at such a
scenario. World War II was a struggle for them on two fronts - in the West
against the Nazi fascists, and in the East against the Russian communists.
Even a Jewish scholar/polemicist like Robert Wistrich, who expresses
astonishment that one-third of West Germany after World War II still felt
that anti-Semitism was primarily caused by “Jewish characteristics,”
concedes that,
“After the Polish communist seizure of power
in 1948 there were indeed a number of Jews like Jakob Berman, Hilary
Minc, and Roman Zambrowski, who did play key roles in the party, the
security services, and economic planning. No doubt they were considered
by Moscow as being less susceptible than the Catholic majority to Polish
nationalist feelings, though in the eyes of many Poles they were little
better than agents of a foreign, semi-colonial power... the
anti-communist underground was convinced that Jews were deliberately
betraying Poland.”
[WISTRICH, AIE, p. 271]
In another, related, example of the usual sharp
double standard of Jewish morality and responsibility, in an article
entitled, “Lithuania May Charge Jews for Crimes Against Humanity,” in
December 1997 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the Lithuanian response
to a Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United States Congressmen to the
president of Lithuania, insisting that he “put suspected [World War II]
criminals on trial.”
Kazys Pednycia, the prosecutor general of
Lithuania, “alarmed local Jewish leaders” by announcing that his office
“would not only study the massacres of Jews
committed by both Germans and Lithuanians during the war, but also
crimes committed by Jews against Lithuanians when the country was under
Soviet control.”
“Of course there were Jews who suffered from
Lithuanians,” said Pednycia, “But there were also just the opposite
cases, and we all know that.”
“The presence of Jews in the Soviet secret
police,” noted JTA reporter Lev Krichevsky, “has prompted many
Lithuanians to share the sentiments expressed by the prosecutor
general.”
The chairman of the Jewish community in
Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius, responded to the prosecutor’s comments
about Jews by declaring them “absolutely false,” “non-ethical,” and
“historically wrong.” [KRISCHEVSKY,
Lith, p. 16]
In 2000, Lithuanian requests for the extradition
of Nahman Dushanski and Simion Borkov from Israel, for the mass murder of
Lithuanians during World War II, were denied by the Jewish state.
[MELMAN, 2-10-2000]
Jewish pre-eminence in communist terrorist police organizations in the
Ukraine was the same. A Canadian of Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak,
notes a 1997 volume published in his homeland entitled “The Jewish Conquest
of the Slavs.”
It was produced by Security Service of the
Ukraine, today’s state police agency. In tabulating the nationalities of 183
biographies in the volume of leading officials in the terrorist Soviet
secret police agencies (the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak notes, on
average, about six out of ten such people were Jewish. This percentage
doesn’t include, of course, those who successfully hid their Jewish
identities, a practice common in Eastern Europe.
As Prytulak concludes,
“One possible reason that Jews incessantly
paint the false image of themselves as victims of Ukrainians is because
of the reality that Ukrainians have been among the foremost victims of
Jews... A more thoughtful examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism
reveals many reasons for viewing it - at least in some of its
manifestations - not as an irrational and unexplainable and gratuitous
hatred, but as a natural and understandable antipathy from an
acquaintance with Jewish misbehavior.”
[PRYTULAK]
Richard Rhodes notes the prominence of Bela Kun
and other Jewish communist elite in Hungary, and future (Jewish) nuclear
bomb scientist Edward Teller’s family there:
“The leaders of the Commune and many among
its officials were Jewish... Max Teller warned his son that
anti-Semitism was coming. Teller’s mother expressed her fears more
vividly. ‘I shiver at what my people are doing,’ she told her son’s
governess in the heyday of the Commune. ‘When this is over there will be
a terrible revenge.’”
[RHODES, R., 1986, p. 111-112]
Bela Kun, notes Louis Rapoport,
“a Jew, [was] the cruel tyrant of the 1919
Communist revolution in Hungary and later Stalin’s chief of terror in
the Crimea.”
[RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 56]
In Russia, the “home” of communism, the
preeminence of Jews in oppressive state departments, including the terrorist
secret police, and the enforced starving of millions, was the same. [See
details - Genrikh Yagoda, head of the secret police; Lazar Kaganovich, head
of the “Apparatus of Terror,” Jewish dominance of the Soviet concentration
camp system, et al - earlier]
As Richard Pipes notes:
“Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the
Nazis, every aspect which is known in sickening detail, even the general
course of the Communist holocaust of 1918-1920 remains concealed.”
[PIPES, R., 1990, p. 823]
The following observation is written by a Jewish
author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the normal Jewish framing of Russian
perception about the subject as irrationally anti-Semitic:
“There is a tendency in Russian intellectual
circles “to view the Bolshevik Revolution as an essentially non-Russian
phenomenon, which took place under the influence of the minority nations
in the Russian empire, chiefly the Jews. There are those who regard the
political terror as a phenomenon connected mainly with the Jews (this
element is to be found in, or inferred from [Nobel laureate] Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn, the [communist] oppositionist, and Valentin Kataev, the
official writer). Such an attitude is also behind militant
anti-Semitism, born in publicistic writings and in belles-lettres,
portraying the Jews as plotters who, since Peter the Great, have sought
to harm Russia and are now corrupting Soviet society. In this manner
anti-Jewish pogroms and measures in the past are presented as protests
against exploitations.”
[ETTINGER, p. 21]
In communist Poland, according to Pinek Maka (a
Jew), the Secretary of Security for Silesia, the number of Jewish officers
in the dreaded OSS (the secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much
as 75% of the total) - merely in his own jurisdiction.
[SACH, p. 175]
Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek Edelstein,
estimated that 90% of the Jews of Kattowitz disguised themselves with Polish
names. Josef Musial, the Vice Minister for Justice in Poland in 1990,
suggested that most officers in the OSS throughout Poland had been Jewish.
[SACK, p. 183]
In 1992, when Shlomo Morel, a Jew still living in Poland, was interrogated
by Polish authorities who were looking into his past as the commandant of a
post-World War II communist concentration camp for Germans and nationalist
Poles,
“Shlomo went home, wrote a cousin in Israel,
asked him for $490, and the next month, in January 1992, took the first
plane that he could to Tel Aviv,” leaving his Catholic wife behind. [SACH,
p. 166] In an interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised
him that he must not write about the story of Jewish dominance and
brutality in the OSS “because it would increase anti-Semitism.”
[SACH, p. 169]
Surviving prisoners under Morel’s rein had
testified that:
-
* “The commandant was Morel, a Hun in
human form.”
-
“The commandant was Morel, a
Schweinehund without equal.”
-
“The commandant, Morel, appeared. The
clubs and the dog whips rained down on us. My nose was broken, and
my ten nails were beaten blue. They later fell off.”
-
“The commandant, Morel, arrived. I saw
him with my own eyes kill many of my fellow prisoners.”
[SACK, p. 167]
After World War II, writes Richard Lucas,
“Jews in [Polish] cities and towns displayed
Red flags to welcome Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish soldiers,
and filled administrative positions in Soviet-occupied Poland. One
report estimated that seventy-five per cent of all the top
administrative posts in the cities of Lwow, Bialystok, and Luck were in
Jewish hands during Soviet occupation...
The entire character of the University of
Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war, the
percentage of students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent;
Ukrainians 15 per cent; Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the
percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12 per cent, and 85 per cent,
respectively.”
[LUCAS, p. 128]
“The evidence,“ observed Jewish commentator
Aleksander Smolar, “is overwhelming: large numbers of Jews welcomed the
Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory the image of Jewish crowds
greeting the invading Red Army as their liberator.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 50]
“Thousands of Polish survivors’ testimonies,
memoirs, and works of history,” notes Polish scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski,
“tell of Jewish celebrations, of Jewish harassment of Poles, of Jewish
collaboration (denunciations, manhunts, and roundups of Poles for
deportation), of Jewish brutality and cold-blooded executions, of Jewish
pro-Soviet citizens’ committees and militias, and of the high rates of
Jews in the Soviet organs of oppression after the Soviet invasion of
1939.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]
Testimony to the Jewish Polish response to the
Soviet invasion of Poland includes the following Jewish accounts, from the
archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust organization in Israel:
“When the Bolsheviks entered the Polish
territories they displayed a great distrust of the Polish people, but
with complete faith in the Jews... they filled all the administrative
offices with Jews and also entrusted them with top level positions.”
[from the town of Grodno]
“I must note that, from the very first, the majority of positions in the
Soviet agencies were taken by Jews.” [from the town of Lwow]
“The Russians rely mainly on the Jewish element in filling positions,
segregating, naturally, the bourgeois from the proletariat.” [from the
town of Zolkwia]
“A Jewish doctor recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed
themselves into a ‘komsomol,’ toured the countryside, smashing Catholic
shrines.” [near the town of Jaworow]
“Whenever a [pro-Soviet] political march, or protest meeting, or some
other sort of joyful event took place, the visual effect was always the
same - Jews.” [from the town of Lwow]
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 - As Piotrowski
notes, these comments have been edited out of an English translation of
the source volume, originally published in Polish]
“The victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and carried out by
his Jewish subordinates,” says Stephan Korbanski, “during the first ten
years of the war numbered tens of thousands.
Most of them were Poles who had fought against the Germans in the
resistance movement. The communists judged, quite correctly, that such
Poles were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet rule and were
therefore to be exterminated. The task was assigned to the Jews because
they were thought to be free of Polish patriotism, which was the real
enemy.”
[KORBANSKI, p. 79]
Korbanski then goes on to name and detail 29
more Jewish officials (beyond the ones earlier mentioned) of the communist
elite that held positions in suppressing Polish nationalism.
But political winds in the communist world
shifted drastically. Between 1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish communist
officials were purged from Kremlin ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link to
Israel’s 1967 military victory over the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs
and Jewish Russian loyalties - per Israel - were put into question.
[KORBANSKI, p. 85]
“In places like Gleibwitz,” writes John
Sack, “the Poles stood against the prison walls as Implementation tied
them to big iron rings, said, ‘Ready! Aim! Fire!,’ shot them, and told
the Polish guards, ‘Don’t talk about this.’ The guards, being Poles,
weren’t pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks, the office’s brass
[of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to Stalin, for they
thought of themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots...
Stalin... had hired all the Jews on
Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them into his Office of State Security,
his instrument in the People’s Republic of Poland. And now, 1945, the
Poles went to war with the Office, shooting at Jews in Intelligence,
Interrogation, and Imprisonment.”
[SACK, p. 139]
All this, of course, including the Poles own
struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the role of Jews in the brutal
communist oppression of Polish nationalism, traditional self-imposed Jewish
estrangement from Polish society, and Jewish docile acquiescence to Nazi
rule is part of the unscholarly “gutter literature” that the likes of David
Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.
In 1984, a Polish journalist, Teresa Toranska, had this interchange with
Jacob Berman, the despised Jewish former “Minister of State Security” in
post-war communist Poland:
Berman: “I was against too large a
concentration of Jews in certain institutions... it wasn’t the right
thing to do and it was a necessary evil that we’d been forced into when
we [communists] took power when the Polish intelligentsia was boycotting
us...
Q: In 1948-49 you arrested members of the [Polish] Home Army Council of
Aid to Jews, the ‘Zegata’... Mr. Berman!
The security services who were all or nearly all Jews arrested Poles
because they had saved Jews during the [Nazi] occupation, and you say
the Poles are anti-Semites. That’s not nice.
Berman:... It was wrong that that happened. Certainly it was wrong... It
was a small group, but very dedicated, and it took enormous risks to
look after Jews during the war.”
[TORANSKA, p. 321]
Toranska also talked to Roman Werbel, a
prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major Polish communist
journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality wrought by Jewish
security officers upon Poles in fomenting anti-Semitism:
“Beating causes degradation not only in the
person who is beaten, but in the person doing the beating as well. So
it’s better to shoot someone than to beat him... There are principals
you have to stick to in beating, however Johnny has to be beaten by
Johnny and not Moshe... I can see now that there were too many Jews in
the security services.”
[TORANSKA, p. 109]
Jewish apologist Michael Checinski (whose world
view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent anti-Semitism model, whereby even
in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews are themselves considered victims of
an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an anti-Semitic communist regime) argues
that,
“while by coincidence or evil design, Jewish
officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they
could easily be blamed for all the regime’s crimes...
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 62]
... Jews - and especially those with Jewish
names or striking Semitic features - could be placed in the most
controversial posts (for example, those dealing with Church affairs or
the campaign against the political underground) and thus deflect
antiregime feelings into anti-Semitism. This policy was implemented not
only in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe, where the new [communist]
governments, ruling only with the military support of the Soviet army,
were seen by their own peoples as puppets.”
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 63]
In 1999, the government of Poland was still
seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus (now living in England), who in
the post-World War II communist regime was Poland’s chief military
prosecutor.
Polish investigators, noted the Jerusalem
Report, say,
“that Brus... played a key role in the trial
and execution of a hero of the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf...
The anti-Communist Fieldorf, hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but
posthumously pardoned in 1989, was an intelligence officer in the
underground Polish Home Army in World War II.”
[WINNER, D., p. 37]
In 1994, the New York Times discussed the case
against Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a well-known German Jewish literary critic who
had emigrated from Poland.
“He was forced to admit his involvement with
the Polish secret police from 1944 to 1950,” says Carol Oppenheim,
“after his name turned up on the front page of a Warsaw newspaper
publishing excerpts from a secret Polish intelligence archive.”
[OPPENHEIM, p. 39]
“Hundreds of Jews,” writes Jewish author
John Sack, “were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered
Germany...
[SACK, p. 6]
... Many [officers of the OSS] were Jewish
boys but few used Jewish names...
[SACK, p. 39]
...The talk was in Yiddish, mostly... About
three out of four of the officers - two hundred rowdy boys - in the
Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland’s large industrial city]
were Jews... They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that
belonged to a [Polish prisoner].”
[SACH, p. 40]
There is a profoundly disturbing - and
continuously recurring - Jewish moral double standard behind Jewish efforts
nowadays to impugn the Poles, in order to shirk their own responsibility for
Polish “anti-Semitism” and the terrible Jewish situation under the Nazis.
Jewish propagandists/scholars regularly charge
that Poles were immorally complacent during the Nazi extermination of
European Jewry (as Poles themselves were being slaughtered). They are still
looking, a half century later, for scapegoats for the shame of their own
people. Few can face the extremely sensitive issue of Jewish complacency -
and even active participation - in their own liquidation.
Stanislaw Krajewski, Jewish and still living in Poland, notes that the
traditional separatist tenets of Judaism even engendered a willing
acceptance of their push by the Nazis into the doomed Jewish ghetto of
Warsaw:
“The self-separating orthodox circles have
been criticized for their cultivation of a ghetto mentality. How strong
this mentality was may be seen from the fact that when the ghetto was
established in German-occupied Warsaw in 1940 some Jews expressed
satisfaction: at least Jews would be separated from the goyim
[non-Jews].”
[KRAJEWSKI, p. 15, CJ REL, no. 3, 87, pp.
8-25]
Chaim Kaplan notes the many Jews who had the
chance to flee to Russia immediately after the Nazi invasion of Poland:
“The so-called leaders of Jewry fled for
their lives early and three million Jews have been left orphaned,
abandoned to the claws of a cruel beast that knows no pity. Unorganized
emigration to Soviet Russia has therefore increased... In tens of
thousands our youths flee to this ‘Russia’ from the inferno waiting them
under the rule of Nazism... Finally the Soviet government noticed them.
True Bolshevism cannot live side by side with financiers, middlemen,
black marketeers, exploiters, and extortionists. Didn’t Communism come
to uproot all such things from the world?”
[KAPLAN, C., p. 77]
The Israeli social critic Israel Shahak - who
spent his own childhood in a Nazi concentration camp - notes with cynical
irony the fact that so many Jews today express outrage that, as they see it,
“the whole world stood by” as the Jews sunk into the Holocaust.
Shahak severely points out that according to the
double standard moral dictates of Orthodox Judaism, Jews are, incredibly,
themselves forbidden from saving non-Jewish lives.
Citing talmudic references, current rabbinical
writings in modern Israel, and the great Jewish religious philosopher
Maimonides, Shahak writes that,
“the basic talmudic principle is that
(non-Jewish) lives must not be saved.”
[SHAHAK, p. 80]
“As for Gentiles,” wrote Maimonides, “with
whom we are not at war... their death must not be caused, but it is
forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; for example,
one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued.”
[SHAHAK, p. 80]
The profoundly divisive nightmare of
Jewish-Polish relations under Nazi rule - each people terrorized into the
basest struggle for self-survival - might be epitomized in the testimony of
Z. Maszudro, immediately upon his liberation from the Buchenwald
concentration camp:
“Then the gaze of the [Nazi] construction
officer fell upon two Jews whose strength had given out. He ordered a
Pole named Strzaka to bury the two men, who could hardly stand on their
feet. Strzaka froze with horror and refused. The construction officer
took the shovel and beat him with it. He ordered him, ‘Lie down in the
trench immediately!’ Thereupon he forced the two Jews to cover with dirt
the prisoner lying in the trench. The two men did it out of fear for
their lives, hoping to escape the same gruesome fate themselves.
When only Strzaka’s head still peered out,
the construction officer called, ‘Halt.’ and had him pulled out again.
Now the two Jews had to lie in the trench, and the construction officer
again gave Strzaka the order to cover the two with dirt. Slowly the
trench filled with dirt; one shovelful after another was dumped in. The
face of the Polish comrade was contorted with terror ... But the
construction officer stood next to him with the look of a wild animal
that hypnotizes its victims.”
[HACKETT, p. 195]
A few Jewish scholars have surfaced over the
years to lay the unpleasant story of the Jewish role in their own European
extermination on the table.
The Jewish historians Raul Hilberg and Hannah
Arendt - both widely maligned and vilified by the mainstream Jewish
community - were among the first to explore Jewish leaders and organizations
that were used by, and cooperated with, the Nazis to betray and exterminate
their own people.
Arendt notes that,
“The Jewish Council of Elders were informed
by Eichmann [a high-level Nazi administrator] or his men of how many
Jews were needed to fit each train, and they made out the list of
deportees. The Jews registered filled out the innumerable forms,
answered pages and pages of questionnaires regarding their property so
that it could be seized the more easily; they then assembled at the
collection points and boarded the trains. The few who tried to hide or
escape were rounded up by a special Jewish police force.”
[ARENDT, p. 102]
“The final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was... done entirely by a
Jewish police force.... To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the
destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of
the whole dark story...”
[ARENDT, p. 104]
“In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the
highly assimilated Jewish communities of the Central and Western Europe
and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East... Jewish officials could be
trusted to compile the lists of persons and their property, to secure
money from the deported to defray the expenses of their deportation and
extermination... They distributed the Yellow Star badges.... In the
Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestos that (Jewish leaders)
issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power.”
[ARENDT, p. 105]
“[Nazi official] Eichmann mentioned, “says Arendt, “and there is no
reason to not believe him, that there were Jews even among the ordinary
S.S. men, but the Jewish origin of [important Nazis like] Heydrich,
Milch, and others was a highly confidential matter.”
[ARENDT, p. 178]
Such commentary elicited a firestorm of outrage
from fellow Jews, including attacks from the Anti-Defamation League and the
World Jewish Congress.
“Arendt was accused of virtual treason
against her people,” says Jeffrey Isaac, “for effacing the line between
the gulf between the guilt of the Nazis and the innocense of the Jews.”
[ISAAC, p. 23]
Yet even as severe a critic of Arendt’s views as
Zionist author Marie Syrkin concedes that,
“in regard to the evil role of the Jewish
police there can be no dispute.”
[SYRKIN, p. 191]
And the Jewish leadership (the so-called
Judenrat, the administrative Jewish Council) at-large under the Nazis?
“Whatever the heavy sins of the Jewish
Councils,” continues Syrkin, “let those certain they would have first
chosen death for themselves and their families judge them.”
[SYRKIN, p. 192]
Fair enough. So why not accord this judgmental
leeway and same moral standard to the Poles too, whose complete family unit
was subject to instant execution for any individual caught helping a Jew?
“One of the most important historians of the
Warsaw ghetto,” says Haim Breseeth, “[was] Emmanuel Ringelbaum. Writing
about the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat, he criticized the co-opted leadership
with the seminal words: ‘We are going like lambs to the slaughter.”
[BRESEETH, p. 195]
Most Jewish leaders kept the horrible truth of
what was in store for their people hidden from them, either for
“humanitarian” reasons or fear of resultant panic and chaos. Arendt notes
that Leo Baeck, for instance, the head rabbi of Berlin, “believed Jewish
policemen would be ‘more gentle and helpful’ and would ‘make the ordeal
easier’ (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and corruptible,
since so much more was at stake for them.”)
[ARENDT, p.]
Which is to say, their own skins.
“Everywhere,” notes Anthony Heilbut,
“Amsterdam, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest - it was the same. Jewish leaders
compiled lists of persons and property, ‘secured money from the
deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and
extermination,’ and organized the efficient evacuation of whole
communities. On occasion the leaders even selected a few people to be
saved - and those tended to be ‘prominent Jews’ and functionaries.”
[HEILBUT, p. 421]
Earlier, complained Chaim Kaplan in 1939,
“the Joint’s [a Jewish help organization]
official representatives have all left us. The leaders of Polish Jewry
pushed themselves to the fore in peaceful days when a monthly salary of
1200 zloty, equivalent to that of a senator or a deputy, attracted them;
but in time of danger to us - and to them as well, if the truth be told
- they fled for their lives. Will their sin be remembered on the Day of
Reckoning? I doubt it.”
[KAPLAN, C. p. 96]
Kaplan later wrote about conditions under the
Nazis in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1942, as he knew and experienced them:
“To go from one matter to another on the
same subject - from the Judenrat to the Nazis; that is, from the actions
of one degenerate to those of another degenerate; they are both on the
same ethical plane... There are lists of ‘suspects,’ and for everyone on
the list the sentence is death... Sometimes the greedy Nazis conspire
with some worthless Jew. They share one pocket; both lie in wait for the
loot of innocents and for their blood; both fill their houses with the
wealth they have stolen and robbed...
But robbing doesn’t last forever, and when
the partnership breaks up it is not convenient for the thieving Nazi to
have a Jew know his secrets. The remedy for this is to get rid of him...
Thus Perlmutter, the president of the Judenrat of Mlawa, was killed by
his German overseer, whose hand had never left his while both of them
looted and robbed and grew rich. And so it was with the ‘Thirteen.’ [”A
group of Jewish Gestapo informers headed by Abraham Gancwajch”]...
They thought that they could live in the
shadow of the Gestapo, that it was a special privilege to be close to an
iniquitous, wicked regime. And behold - they have gotten their just
deserts. Thus may they be destroyed!”
[KAPLAN, C., p. 339-340]
Among the most notorious so-called “elders” of
the Jewish community, appointed by the Nazis, was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski,
who was a child molester at a Jewish orphanage before the war.
[LEITER, R., 7-20-2000, p. 27]
Despite his allegiance to Nazi directors, he too
met his end in a concentration camp. Some Jewish Council members, notes
Simon Wiesenthal,
“did the only thing they couild, under the
circumstances, by following Nazi regulations to the letter. Others were
corrupted. They accepted favours, juggled names, hoping against hope
that they might save their own skins. Other Jews collaborated with the
Nazis of bartered others’ lives for their own. Some Jews were
concentration camp trustees. Sometimes they helped their fellow inmates;
sometimes they didn’t.”
[LEVY, A., 1993, p. 85]
As long as such people in the Jewish leadership,
its sycophants, and Jewish prisoners were cooperative with the Nazis in
helping to exploit and kill other Jews, there was always hope - rarely
realized - that the betrayers might come out of it all alive.
But just on this count alone - that the Nazi
might kill anyone for as little as a sidewise glance, why should Poles - who
had been in competitive conflict with Jews for centuries (while Jews
maintained themselves as essentially a separate country in Poland), and who
were actively fighting the Nazis while the Jews did virtually nothing - be
held to a higher moral standard than Jews about Jews, when some Jews
themselves sold off their own people with little or no moral compulsion at
all, and despised Poles?!
And why on earth should Poles have been expected
to rescue Jews at every corner when their own life situations were also in
doubt, when Jews themselves were even turning in their own kind, in huge
numbers, primally straining for personal survival?
Jewish author Norman Salsitz noted three well-known Jewish betrayers to the
Nazis in his small hometown, Kolubuszowa (total population 4,000; half
Jewish), in Poland:
“Enemies there were among our own ranks -
not many, mind you, but with nearly everyone else against us betrayal by
fellow Jews was all the more devastating... When we saw [one] speaking
to German police and going in and out of military headquarters, we
understood that he enjoyed a privileged position...
When bribes had to be given to German
officials he served willingly as an intermediary, taking a portion of
the money as his ‘share.’ He warned of upcoming raids on our houses and
seizures of property and persons, but suggested how, for a sum of money,
all might be averted. We paid him, suspecting that most of the time no
such raids were planned, that such talk was merely a device to line his
own pockets. But who could be sure?...
Regarding a secondinformer in town, Shmul
Czolik, no one was likely to be surprised by his actions... Money put
into Czolik’s hand hands usually meant an end to that [Nazi] ‘threat’...
That he terrorized the town for a time is certainlyno understatement...
Then there was Pearlman, a thoroughlycontemptible creature who also
joined in the ranks of the informers in town... Though Jewish, he
identified his fortunes with the Germans.”
[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 261-264]
Upon liberation of the concentration camp at
Buchenwald, prisoner Jacob Rudinger told Allied interviewers of an incident
that shocked him deeply. Near the end of the war,
“Senior block inmates decided to destroy the
documents of all Jews since the SS [the elite Nazi killing corps] had
threatened to force all Jews out of the camp [to their extermination]
the next morning. The next morning the SS carried out roll call... They
ordered all Jews to move to the left wing of the block. I explained to
the two SS men that I had no documents to show who was a Jew and who was
not.
About 200 of the400 Jews moved to the left
wing... My room attendant and I were able to bring approximately 100 of
the 200 Jews into the block again. Then something happened I would not
have believed possible. A Jew approached an SS man and declared that
there were still many Jews in the block. The two SS men went back into
the block and brought out approximately twenty more Jews.”
[HACKETT, p. 325]
Jews could even betray their own over petty
arguments. As Dana I. Alvi noted:
“In November, 1944, one of the Jewish women
we saved argued with a group of Jews and brought the Germans who then
killed 18 people, including her nephew and her elderly sister. One man
survived... For us, and the Jews who passed through our home, the
greatest fear was that someone from the [Jewish] ghetto would betray
[us]. The names ofJewish traitors are a record in the history books
authored by Jews. The photos of Jews being pulled out of their hidings
in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto are testimonials to such betrayals. No
other people but their own Jewish acquaintances knew of those hidings.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 67]
“Two [of my] relatives,” adds Eva Hoffman, “died because of an act of
betrayal by a fellow Jew - a man who, in the hopes of insuring his own
survival, led the Germans to a hiding place.”
[HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6]
There were even predators like Stella Goldschlag,
also Jewish, who worked undercover for the Nazis searching for hiding Jews.
“Stella,” notes Peter Wyden, who knew her,
“had stalked fellow Jews throughout Berlin and betrayed them to the
Gestapo which deported them to die in concentration camps. She
functioned much like an executioner on behalf of the Fuhrer’s ‘final
solution’ of the ‘Jewish problem.’”
[WYDEN, p. 17]
Goldschlag survived the Nazi era and has been
living - unlike former Gentile Nazi collaborators hunted down by
international Jewry all over the world - an undisturbed life in Europe.
Even in the art world, the Jewish Wildenstein family (prominent European art
dealers) have come under fire in recent years for evidence that they had
undercover dealings with the Nazis. As the Jewish Week noted in 1999,
“The Wildensteins aren’t the first Jews to
be accused of profiteering off Nazi plunder... Such incidents weren’t
uncommon in the chaos of postwar Europe. Countless more cases have
surfaced of Jews who worked for the Nazis to save their own skins.”
[GOLDBERG, J. J., 6-18-99 p. 14]
Tadeusz Piotrowski notes the dimensions of the
Jewish Holocaust little heard about these days:
“There were Jewish szmalcowniki
(blackmailers). There was a Gestapo-sponsored Jewish militia (Zagiew-Zydowska
Gwardia Wolnoschi, or Jewish Guard of Liberty, led by Abraham Gancwajch)
and the Society of Free Jews (Towarzystwo Wolnych Zydow, under Captain
Lontski), whose members spied on the Jewish underground. There were the
Jewish Gestapo brigades and Jewish Sonderkommando units. There was
Jewish police force (Jupo).
There were camp ‘trusties.’ (Kapos),
retrievers (Abholder), raiders (Ordner), stool pigeons (Spitzel), scouts
(Fahnder), and catcher (Greifer) of Jewish descent... At his trial
[prominent Nazi official] Adolf Eichmann testified that the Nazis
regarded Jewishcollaboration as ‘the very cornerstone’ of their
anti-Semitic policy.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 66]
By the beginning of 1942, the Gestapo-directed
Zagiew alone had about 15,000 Jewish agents.
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 74]
“Former inmates of the Nazi concentration
camps,” adds Norman Finkelstein, “typically testify that the Kapos were,
in the words of Auschwitz survivor Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, ‘harder on the
prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS
men did.”
[FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 63-64]
(For what it’s worth, although of enormously
less gravity, this harsh treatment in some ways echoes that afforded fellow
Jews by Jewish overseers in an immigration barracks in America in 1882:
“The Father, or manager and taskmaster over
the immigrants, was an American Jew who looked down upon the earthly
beings, as the immigrants were called and not in a friendly tone. His
assistant, the Hungarian Jew, was a brazen scoundrel and treated the
immigrants like cattle. The other Russian Jews, who through flattery
managed to secure soft jobs, imitated them in behavior... [Leading to a
an eventual riot of Jewish immigrants that was quelled by 100
policemen], the Father’s assistant slapped a weak woman who had implored
him [to give her] several drops of a certain medicine. He also
threatened her lady friends with a revolver when they reprimanded him.
After breakfast, a delegation went to see the Father with complaints
agaisnt his assistant, but the latter gave them a rude reception.”)
[SHPALL, L., 1957, p. 103, 107, 108]
Emmanuel Ringelbaum wrote with disdain about the Jewish police who
suffocated his people under Nazi rule:
“Jewish policemen also distinguished
themselves with their fearful corruption and immorality. But they
reached the height of viciousness during the resettlement [transfer of
Jews to concentration camps]. They said not a single word of protest
against this revolting assignment to lead their own brothers to the
slaughter. The police were psychologically prepared for the dirty work
and executed it thoroughly.
And now people are wracking their brains to
understand how Jews, most of them men of culture, former lawyers (most
of the police officers were lawyers before the war), could have done
away with their brothers with their own hands... Very often, the cruelty
of the Jewish police exceeded that of the Germans, Ukrainians, and Letts...
Victims who succeeded in escaping the German eye were picked up by the
Jewish police...
Those who didn’t have the money to pay off
the police were dragged to the wagons... For the most part, the Jewish
police showed an incomprehensible brutality... Merciless and violent,
they beat those who tried to resist... Every Warsaw Jew, every woman and
child, can cite thousands of cases of the inhuman cruelty and violence
of the Jewish police. Those caseswill never be forgotten by the
survivors, and they must shall be paid for.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 68]
Israeli human rights activists, and Holocaust
survivor, Israel Shahak, notes that,
“My memories (and memories of all survivors
who are honestly‘talking among themselves’) tell me that at the time [of
the war] we Jews hated the Jewish policemen, or the Jewish spies for the
Nazis in the Ghetto, much more than we hated anybody else.”
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 75]
Holocaust survivor Marcus David Leuchter recalls
that,
“the brutality of the Jewish police force
was unexpected; in the number of people they caught, they even exceeded
the demands of the Germans.”
[LEUCHTER, M., 2000]
Of course, times have changed and things are
recontextualized. Such stories are a grotesque embarrassment to the myths of
the Holocaust, they are only rarely addressed in obscure academic corners,
and few people today are aware of them.
And while angry Jewish scholarship fingers
Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and other Nazi collaborators as moral beasts
to be hunted down still today throughout the world, parallel Jewish
criminals are never even mentioned. Popular Jewish convention demands
collective Jewish innocence and a correspondingly collective Gentile evil.
Period.
In this context, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski
addresses today’s chronic double standard held for Jews and Poles in the
World War II situation:
“While the Polish masses are criticized or
condemned for their reluctance to help the Jews... a double standard is
applied towards those members of the Jewish community who worked in
Jewish Councils... [They] are excused, on the grounds that they had
little choice, much more willingly than those Gentiles whose caution or
fear prevented them from offering help to Jews...
Most Poles particularly resent this
application of a double standard to those Jewish individuals who were
active in, and high-ranking members of the Communist Party, and
especially the security police... No one... can claim that he or (very
often) she had to be a member of the Stalinist political force or
judiciary and, for one reason or another, had no choice but to torture
and kill their innocent political opponents.”
[BARTO, Conv, p. 29]
Still another Jewish enforced double standard of
moral judgment is that going on today in today’s Czech Republic.
As Carol Oppenheim notes, there is,
“the struggle in the Czech Republic by Jews
and Sudenten Germans for legal restoration of homes that they were
pushed out of almost fifty years ago. Germans are challenging the
[Czech] government over a law that gives homes back to Jews making
claims but refuses to consider the claims of Sudenten Germans for houses
taken between 1945 and 1948, the very period when Jews figured
prominently in the [then ruling] communist administration.”
[OPPENHEIM, p. 39]
Despite all the historical conflicts between
Poles and Jews, some Poles did rescue Jews from the Nazis. Some Poles did
die for basic human principles. In fact, more than 2,500 Christian Poles
were executed for aiding Jews. [CERAMI]
Over 2,000 Polish Christian citizens are honored
as Righteous Gentiles at Israel’s Vad Yashem. (This does not include the
many that cannot be formally documented).
“Every Polish Jew who survived in occupied
Poland,” notes Eva Hoffman, “(rather than in the Soviet Union), did so
with the help of individual Poles and of organizations set up for the
purpose of aiding Jews. This was help offered at enormous risk, since
sheltering Jews carried with it the penalty of death.”
[HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 7]
But few Jews don’t want to hear about Christians
who saved Jewish lives. Rabbi Harold Schulweiss, who has lectured on the
subject to many Jewish audiences, notes that:
“By and large, in most audiences, I found a
resistance to my message. What was my obsession with ‘them’ [Poles] they
seemed to ask.” [CERAMI] (Even Liwa Gomulka, a Jew, and eventual wife of
post-World War II Polish communist head Wladyslaw Gomulka, “refused to
see an old Polish woman who had hidden her during the Nazi occupation
and had come to her for some small favor.”)
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 143]
So where were the Jews, before things got worse
for them, who saved a Polish life, in any way in those times? Where is just
one? As Norman Davies notes, “to ask why the Poles did little to help the
Jews is rather like asking why the Jews did nothing to assist the Poles.”
[DAVIES, Playground, p. 264] And it was not the Poles who, in the end, were
performing the absolutely unthinkable. If Poles and others are collectively
held responsible for what they did, or did not do, under Nazi occupation and
enforcement, what about the following?
As Hannah Arendt’s observes:
“The actual work of killing in the
extermination centers was usually in the hands of Jewish commandos...
They... worked in the gas chambers and the crematories... they pulled
the gold teeth and cut the hair of the corpses... they dug the graves
and, later, dug them up again to extinguish the traces of mass murder...
Jewish technicians had built the gas chambers at Theresienstadt, where
the Jewish “autonomy” had been carried so far that even the hangman was
a Jew.”
[ARENDT, p. 109]
Wolfgang Sofsky observes that this was part of
the Nazi process to dehumanize Jews:
“The SS deliberately had Jews burn Jews, as
though it wished to prove that the members of the subrace accepted any
degradation and even killed one another: as though it wished to shift
the guilt onto the victims themselves... Those prisoners were left alive
for a time in order to dispose of relatives, neighbors, and fellow Jews.
Their behavior cannot be judged by the conventional moral conceptions of
civil society.
The institution of the sonderkommando shows
to what point human beings can be brought by permanent threat of death
... The Kommandos were subordinated to Jewish Kapos, who had unlimited
power to mete out punishment.”
[SOFSKY, W., 1993,p. 267-268]
Jews are automatically excused from the
unspeakable horrors they were forced to do in their struggles for survival,
and who can morally condemn them? Who among us today can swear with absolute
certainty that we would not have done the same when trapped in Hell? But why
the double standard? Why are only Jews, among all other people trapped in
the Nazi net, afforded blanket forgiveness while everyone else stands
relentlessly, to this very day, accused?
Germany, says Richard Rubenstein,
“demonstrated that a modern state can
successfully organize an entire people for its own extermination.”
[ELLIS, M. 1990, p. 39]
“Over the whole way to their deaths,” says
Robert Pendorf, “the Polish Jews got to see hardly more than a handful
of Germans.”
[ARENDT, p. 117]
“Prisoners from a special work detail, the
so-called sonderkommando,” notes Franciszek Piper, “had to perform all
the auxiliary work: removing bodies from gas chambers, cutting the hair,
tearing out gold teeth, and burying corpses. The sonderkommando
consisted mainly of Jewish prisoners originating from the countries from
which the latest transports were arriving.”
[PIPER, The Mass, p. 169]
Literary agent Barbara Rogan recalls moving to
Israel and reading a manuscript submitted by a former Jewish sonderkommando,
who—among other things he did to survive - burned concentration camp bodies.
“What fixes the book in my mind,” says
Rogan, “... [was] his attempt to deal with overwhelming, abiding
guilt... someone ought to have published it, but as far as I know, no
one has.”
[ROGAN, p. 320]
At the peak of the Auschwitz murder process,
there were nearly 1,000 Jewish sonderkommandos - 450 from Hungary, 200 from
Poland, and 180 from Greece. They were overseen in the hierarchy by 19
Russian prisoners of war, five Poles, and a German kapo.
[SOFSKY, W., 1993, p. 268]
Wherever they were in the hierarchy of death,
all were subject to immediate execution if they refused to fulfill their
assigned role in mass murder under the Nazis. At the Treblinka concentration
camp, about a thousand Jewish sonderkommandos ran the daily routines.
[De Beavoir, S., 1967, p. 8]
The Totenjuden (“Jews of Death”) were,
“those who handled the bodies, those who
took them out of gas chambers, extracted their teeth, and carried them
to the ditches.”
The Platzjuden (“Jews of the Square”) were in
charge of,
“herding the Jews out of the cars,
collecting their baggage, and clearing the cars.”
Another group of Platzjuden’s task was to aid,
“these convoys undress and to carry their
clothing into the sorting square... The world of these two commandos
obviously had an indelicate side, since they participated directly in
the final process of liquidation.”
The Goldjuden sorted out valuables and
“subjected [new arrivals] to an intimate search.”
Hofjuden (“Court Jews”) were involved in the
“upkeep of the camp and the personal service of the Technicians [Nazi
overseers].” [STEINER, J., 1967, p.
92-95]
At Auschwitz, Nazi doctor Carl Clauberg performed experiments on Jewish
female prisoners.
“His medical and nursing staff,” notes Irene
Strzelecka, “consisted mainly of female Jewish prisoners.”
Beginning in late 1943, his head doctor was
“surgeon and gynecologist Alina Bialostocka,” a Polish Jew.
[STRZELECKA, p. 90]
Another Jewish doctor, Maximilian Samuels, was
among those who performed castration experiments on male prisoners
[STRZELECKA, p. 93]
and
“Jewish prisoners had to assist [Nazi
doctor] Mengele in his scientific research on twins.”
[STRZELECKA, p. 96]
Another Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, was one
of those,
“who would carry out autopsies [of those
murdered in Nazi experiments] and give their scientific appraisals.”
[STRZELECKA, p. 96]
“In the women’s camp at Birkenau,” notes Wolfgang Sofsky, “along with
the German Asoziale [asocials], for the most part prostitutes, the ranks
of the prominent prisoners included the small number of Jewish women
from Slovakia who had... survived a series of selections. In Monowitz
and the attached satellite camps, several hundred Jews from the first
transport were part of the [prisoner] aristocracy, along with German
prisoners.”
[SOFSKY, W., 1993, p. 147]
In 1987 a former Jewish kapo (a kind of foreman
for the Nazis among prisoners), Jacob Tannenbaum, faced deportation from the
United States for brutality in concentration camps.
He was accused by fellow Jewish concentration
camp survivors of ordering 300 Jews to their deaths in 1945, for raping
women, and torturing and killing male prisoners, including a rabbi.
“He was a nasty, nasty guy,” said a former
head of the Office of Special Investigations, Martin Mendelsohn, “There
were a lot of witnesses who remembered him and his bestiality.”
[MAGIDA, p. 4]
Yet, notes the Jewish Week,
“most [Jews] agreed, in the words of Elie
Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, that ‘the kapos
were victims. They were chosen by their enemies. It is true that some
were very, very cruel, but even those were acting as instruments of the
enemy.”
[BOROSON, 5-22-87, p. 17]
Tannenbaum was eventually stripped of U.S.
citizenship, but not deported.
“This is the best solution for all
concerned,” said Tannenbaum’s lawyer, Elihu Massel, “It will also avoid
a truly ghastly trial in which Jews would have had to testify against
Jews, none of whom really want to remember.”
[JW, 2-12-88, p. 34]
Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal notes the
case of an “ex-Gestapo agent named David Zimet - a Jew!”
Zimet was,
“the right hand of a very known Gestapo
sadist with the name of Grunov... In one truck of Jewish women [deported
by the Nazis] were the wife and the daughter of Zimet. And the hatred
against him was so great that the Jewish women in that truck taking them
all to die killed his wife and his daugthter then and there’... Years
later, Wiesenthal was looking over a confidential list of cases being
investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when he read: ‘ZIMET,
David. A policeman in ghetto in Tarnow. Witnesses have attested to his
brutality.’ ‘Zimet!’
Wiesenthal exclaimed. ‘This is my old case!’
He informed the Canadian authorities of his evidence against Zimet, but
they proved unwilling to prosecute a Jew for Nazi crimes. The Canadian
Jewish Committee intervened and Zimet agreed to submit to a council of
arbitration established by the committee. ‘Nothing ever came of it,’
says Wisesenthal, ‘because the Jewish community was reluctant to
publicize the case since Zimet was himself Jewish.’”
[LEVY, A., 1993, p, 83, 84]
(As Jewish scholar Peter Novak notes about
Jewish collaborators with the Nazis: “With only one exception known to
me - an article in Life in 1950 about a New York rabbinic court
proceeding against a surviving Jewish camp official accused of beating
another person to death - discussion of the phenomenon was confined to
Jews. Much of [Jewish scholar Hannah] Arendt’s offense [to fellow Jews]
was that she had written of these matters before a large gentile
audience.”)
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 140-141]
“The true lords and masters of the kommandos were the kapos,” notes
Wolfgang Slofsky, in his study of the Nazi death camps, “They were
always on hand... They kept the work sites under surveillance,
distributed work tasks, and were responsible for their groups being
complete... They were to blame for a great deal of excessive drudgery
and a great many of the killings...
[SOFSKY, p. 192]...
Kapos shouted louder than the guards and
were quicker to swing their clubs and strut around like petty
potentates, reading on their masters’ lips their every wish. At times, a
symbiotic relationship developed between masters and servants. The
supervisors hardly needed to take action themselves: they were able to
leave everything to their servile lackies...
Often there was no real need for a gesture
from the master - the servants took the initiative on their own... They
imitated the master because the latter would never punish what the
master did. They acted like their master in order to remain what they
were - privileged prisoners. They followed this model in order to
survive.”
[SOFSKY, 1993, p. 137]
The authors of articles that dare to discuss the
Jewish Councils that functioned as bureaucracies for Nazi overseers, notes
Polish scholar Piotr Wrobel,
“have been accused of slander, ignorance or
even anti-Semitism...”
[WROBEL, P., 1997, p. 225]
Wrobel’s own article in 1997 addressed the
profound double standard applied to Jews on the question of Jewish
responsibility during the Holocaust epoch. In Holland, for example, two
presidents of the Dutch Joodse Raad, Cohen and Asscher,
“were arrested by Dutch authorities. The
prosecuting attorney stated that ‘Cohen and Asscher, as Jews,
collaborated with the enemy, and shall not see the light of freedom.’
Eventually, the Dutch Miniser of Justice decided to drop the case,
adding that ‘this should not be construed as a rehabilitation of the
party in question.’”
[WROBEL, P., 1997, p. 227]
Under post-war Jewish “Courts of Honor,” which
tried Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, notes Wrobel,
“punishment tended to be lenient...
Altogether, between 1946 and 1950, there were about 160 trials of former
members of the Jewish Councils, their officers, Jewish policemen and
kapos... According to its governing statute, the Court could pass only
relatively mild sentences: exclusion from the Jewish community for a
period of time from one to three years, withholding someone’s electoral
rights in a Jewish community, and public reproach... It appears that
major Jewish collaborators, who managed to survive, left Poland very
soon after the war or changed their identitites and the People’s Court
tried only a small fraction of them.”
[WROBEL, P., 1997, p. 228-230]
And Wrobel’s perspectives about all this, as a
Pole, and the incessant Jewish condemnation of the Polish people for an
alleged reluctance to save Jews?
“How can non-Jewsh bystanders,” concludes
Wrobel, “be condemned for their passivity when Jewish Kapos, policemen,
and former Judenrate leaders were rehabilitated? Many similar questions
appear when we study the Holocaust and most of them have no satisfactory
answer yet. This aspect of the Holocaust is still far from settled.”
[WROBEL, P., 1997,232]
There are even more profound Holocaust-era facts
that the Jewish community vehemently strives to bury. While on the one hand
the Jewish community wields the “We Shall Never Forget” injunction about
their Holocaust, the facts of Jewish-created mass murder are forcibly
covered up.
In 1993, for instance, Jewish journalist John
Sack published the results of his interviews with 23 Jewish OSS (the
communist secret police in post-war Poland) officers and 55 family members
or friends of Jewish members of the dreaded OSS. The book, not surprisingly,
has been subject to a concerted and massive censorial effort [see later
chapter].
Sack was shocked with what he found in his seven
years of research on the subject: 60,000-80,000 Germans and Poles were
murdered in Jewish-run concentration camps,
“more than the number of [Jews] who died at
Belsen and Buchenwald.”
[SACH, p. 14]
“Jews,” says Sack, “were sometimes as cruel as their [Nazi] exemplars at
Auschwitz, and they even ran the organization that ran the prisons
and... the concentration camps for German civilians in Poland and
Poland-administered Germany... The Jews who committed [atrocities]
covered them up... I learned that in 1945 they killed a great number of
Germans: not Nazis, not Hitler trigger men, but German civilians, German
men, women, children, babies, whose ‘crime’ was just to be German... The
Germans lost more civilians [this way than]... the Jews themselves lost
in all of Poland’s pogroms. So I had learned, and I was aghast to learn
it.”
[SACK, p. x]
Sack notes Jewish torturers sticking toads down
peoples’ throats, whippings, and some buried alive in potato sacks. A
hundred non-Jews at the Myslowitz concentration camp, for instance, were
murdered each day. [SACK, p. 110]
The death rate in some Jewish-controlled
camps was 80%. [SACK, p. 206]
Simply the reporting of facts is, for many Jews,
a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Note this letter by a Polish Jew to a
Jewish magazine in 1998:
“Recently, [Polish] Panorama TV News showed
a report about Jaworzno camp, where members or suspected members of
independence fighters groups (many of them were Ukrainians), were
imprisoned with the statement that it is difficult today to find traces
of the camp, for the buildings which had housed the inmates had been
converted into regular housing, the barracks have been dismantled and
the former commander had left for Israel. My husband was outraged by
this conclusion, and he said that such a blatantly anti-Semitic
statement on a public new broadcast is sheer manipulation.”
[MAKOWIECKA, A., p. 3]
Among other unpleasant Holocaust stories is that
of a Jewish leader, Yisrael Kastner, a senior European Zionist official and
eventual immigrant to Israel, who collaborated with the Nazi SS in its mass
murder program.
He did so, two Israeli researchers wrote,
“in return for the freedom of a few hundred
relatives and friends.”
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 154]
“Kastner was eventually assassinated,” notes
Noah Lucas, “as though proof of the intolerable tension which the
probing of Holocaust history could engender.”
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 155]
After World War II too, bands of Jewish
assassins calling themselves Nokmim (Avengers),
“secretly sought out and summarily executed
several hundred SS and Gestapo men and other Nazi officials in Italy,
Austria, and Germany itself... They operated for about a year and a
half, identifying and locating Nazi war criminals and summarily
executing them.”
[BLACK/MORRIS, p. 189]
One such band of Jewish killers was called Din
(Judgment). Led by Joseph Harmatz and Abba Kovner, their,
“overall objective [was] the death of 6
million Germans as vengeance for Jews who died in the Holocaust.”
[DAVIS, D., 1998, p. 9]
Kovner visited Tel Aviv to garner support from
Israeli officials to carry out a mass scale extermination action against
post-war Germany. Reviewing at least part of the project, the President of
Israel, Chaim Weizmann, noted Harmatz,
“approved of our plans and recommended a
scientist who would make poison for us.”
[DAVIS, D. 1998]
Initial Din plans were to poison German food
supplies and the water supply of the entire city of Nuremberg. Returning
with Israeli-supplied poison to carry out the plan, Kovner was arrested on a
British ship by police who learned of the terrorist plot.
Nonetheless, members of Din managed to return to Germany and taint 3,000
loaves of bread with poison, intended for German prisoners. Harmatz
estimates that the bread successfully killed 300-400 people.
“The 300 or 400 we poisoned was nothing
compared with what we really wanted to do,” he said in later years.
[DAVIS, D., 1998, p. 9]
For Kovner’s part, he moved to Israel, and “gave
up dreams of vengeance, becoming one of the great poets of the new state.”
[DAVIS, D. 1998, p. 9]
Reviewing the moral crimes of the Jewish leadership under Nazi rule, Hannah
Arendt faces squarely the hideous, sordid mess of it all, points the finger
to those who look to blame others beyond the Nazis for an answer
(Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and others who were—to use Elie
Wiesel’s phrase of pardon for Jewish Nazi collaborators - also “chosen by
their enemies”), and poses the gnawing rhetorical question to the European
Jewish community itself:
“Why did you cooperate in the destruction of
your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?”
[ARENDT]
Such an accusation and such revelations in the
1960’s engendered a storm of outrage from the worldwide Jewish community,
anger that was less directed at the Jewish perpetrators of their own
victimization under the Nazis, but, rather, at harbingers of bad news like
Arendt (and a few others like Raul Hilberg) for daring to cite evidence that
profoundly threatened sacrosanct Jewish myths about the Holocaust years and
even earlier history, in most quarters myths that still hold popular
currency.
Vehement Jewish resistance to the writings of
these two Jewish scholars exists to this day. In recent years Hilberg
committed to text his bitterness to his community’s reaction to the facts:
“For thirty years... I was almost buried
under an avalanche of condemnations. [HILBERG, p. 137] It has taken me
some time to absorb what I should have always known, that in my whole
approach to the story of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting
myself against the main current of Jewish Thought, that I did not give
in, that in my research and writing I was pursuing not merely another
direction but one which was the exact opposite of a signal that pulsated
endlessly through the Jewish community.”
[HILBERG, p. 129]
Trying to get his seminal work, The Destruction
of the European Jews published in 1958, Hilberg faced the “first negative
reaction to my manuscript and these bullets were fired at me from
Jerusalem.” [HILBERG, p. 111]
Israel’s Vad Yashem, the memorial center created
to mythologize Jewish victims of Hitler as “martyrs,” rejected the
manuscript on the following grounds:
“1. Your book rests almost entirely on the
authority of German sources and does not utilize primary sources in the
language of the occupied states, or in Yiddish or Hebrew.
2. The Jewish historians here make reservations concerning the
historical conclusions you draw, both in respect of the comparison with
former periods and in respect of your appraisal of the Jewish resistance
(active and passive) during the Nazi occupation.”
[HILBERG, p. 110]
Hilberg quickly understood that the results of
his research into German archives went against the grain of Jewish
institutionalized dictate concerning the Holocaust.
“To discover the source of his [Dr. J.
Melkman, General Manager of Yad Vashem] argument about ‘resistance,’”
says Raul Hilberg, “I merely had to glance at Yad Vahem’s letterhead
which proclaimed the parity of the disaster and heroism.”
[HILBERG, p. 111]
In the 1980s, John Sack paid a visit to Yad
Vashem to search for information about the hundreds of Jews who ran the
murderous post-war concentration camps under the auspices of the Office for
State Security for Germans and anti-communist Poles. Virtually all former
Jewish OSS members have successfully hidden their past and many had moved to
America.
One such person has become the,
“vice-president of the United Synagogues of
America and a chairman of the United Jewish Appeal.”
[SACK, p. 151]
Yad Vashem’s repository, writes Sack,
“had fifty million pages, five, on the
average, per [Jewish] man, woman, and child, a mile-long tunnel of
pages, all indexed, all catalogued, so I was surprised it had nothing at
all on the Office of State Security [of Eastern Europe] or the Jews who
had run it.”
[SACK, p. 148]
The director of the Holocaust center told Sack
the facts he had thus far uncovered were “imaginary”:
“’Impossible!’ the Director said... [He
glowered] at me as though he would choke me, a man who might someday
write that the Jews sometimes killed the Germans [and Poles] when all
the fifty million pages said it was the other way around.”
[SACK, p. 148]
Sack’s investigation at Vad Yashem did turn up,
however, the intriguing fact that the vice-chairman of this vast Holocaust
propaganda post had himself served as an officer in the notorious OSS.
He had even been a torturer, a “heavy-handed
interrogator” at the Neisse concentration camp.
“I was terrible,” he told Sack. “But better
not to speak about this.”
[SACK, p. 148-149]
Note: famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wisenthal
once noted that even many Jewish administrators for German Nazis ended up as
officials in American Jewish organizations:
“[I] in many cases, such people after the
war found jobs with Jewish organizations. Maybe they were trying to
atone; maybe they thought this was the best place to hide. Once, I was
going special to Paris to see the director for Europe of the [Jewish]
Joint Distribution Committee, because working for him was a man - a Jew!
- who had been in a concentration camp the head of the transports to the
death camps. According to Wisenthal, the JDC director, an American,
responded, ‘So what? This was a time when everyone had to serve.’”
[LEVY, A., 1993, p. 85]
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