Compensation for Damages Suffered Under Nazi and Soviet Occupations

Compensation for Damages Suffered Under Nazi and Soviet Occupations


Iwo Cyprian PogonowskiComments on Jan Tomasz Gross'sGhastly Decade 1939The matters related to compensation for Poles and Jews for damages suffered under Nazi and Soviet occupation.
Reuters Agency reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina on Fri, 19 Apr 1996 (14:50:17 PDT) on The World Jewish Congress.
Israel Singer, General Secretary of the World Jewish Congress stated that "More than three million Jews died in Poland and the Polish people are not going to be the heirs of the Polish Jews. We are never going to allow this. (...) They're gonna hear from us until Poland freezes over again. If Poland does not satisfy Jewish claims it will be "publicly attacked and humiliated" in the international forum.
Today some Jews are estimating the value of Jewish assets lost in Poland and vicinity in the billions of dollars. Descendants of the Holocaust victims obviously could not hope to extract billions of dollars from descendants of the Polish gentile victims of war. Aware of these difficulties, some Jews have promoted a myth about Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Obviously it would be easier to extract money from descendants of the guilty rather than descendants of innocent co-victims whose property was also destroyed or eventually, in many cases, taken from them by the Soviet puppet government.
Jan Tomasz Gross wrote three essays in the spirit of this kind of myth. They were published in Krakw in 1998 by Universitas under the title of "Upiorna Dekada, 1939-1948. (Ghastly Decade 1939-1948)." On 118 small-size pages the author accuses the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust and in eviction of the Jews. This propaganda effort is surprising, coming from a writer of serious works.
A symbolic buzzard eating dead flesh is shown on the cover the Ghastly Decade 1939-1948. It resembles communist propaganda posters, especially the famous "spit-soiled dwarf of reaction of 1945." The decade "1939-1948" does not represent any distinct period in Polish history. It does, however, include the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany and the exodus of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe. It was forced by pogroms staged by the Soviets in all satellite states. The exodus was made possible by opening the Iron Curtain for hundreds of thousands of Jews. The notion that these people were not fit to live under communism is patently wrong. Millions of those "unfit to live under communism" perished in the "Gulag Archipelago." Only Jews had the privilege to emigrate en masse from the Soviet Bloc because Stalin had other plans for them. The Polish nation had no complicity in these events.
Stalin exploited the Zionist movement in order to abolish the British Mandate in Palestine. In the process he created a window of opportunity, to use the words of Paul Johnson, for establishing the State of Israel. Stalin's purpose was to embitter the conflict between Arabs and Jews and to blockade the supplies of Arab oil to the West. He also helped to inflame the hatred of the Muslim world against the United States. Stalin's strategy worked and deadly terrorism of Islamic fundamentalists is growing long after the Soviet dictator is gone.
Gross falsifies quotations in order to make his points. On page 56 he changes the meaning of a quote in the diary of dr. Zygmunt Klukowski (Dziennik z lat okupacji Zamojszczyzny - A diary of the years of occupation of Zamojszczyzna). Gross insinuates that in October 1942 Poles murdered some 2300 Jews while the Germans deported for execution 934 other victims. The deception is achieved by omission of quotation marks ("nasi"); this changed the meaning of a crucial statement of the original diary, in which reference was made to locally stationed German gendarmes.
Self defense and national identity under the occupation.
The ethnic Poles considered German and Soviet invaders as equally dangerous whereas many Jews were trying to find security on the Soviet side. The ethnic Poles were naturally preoccupied with saving their nation, which was exposed to massive executions starting two years before the Holocaust. From the beginning of the war, the Germans were committing mass murders on the Polish civilian population, especially throughout western Poland, newly annexed by Germany. They brought with them lists of victims prepared long before the invasion of Poland. The Soviet NKVD prepared a list of 21,857 people of the Polish leadership community all of whom were executed during the Spring of 1940. Mass execution of the Jews in German gas chambers began two years later.
The Polish resistance movement was the largest in occupied Europe. In order to break the Polish resistance Nazi-German terror apparatus (1939-1945) and the communist security forces (1939-1956) tortured more gentile Poles than any other European ethnic group.
Gross does not recognize the fact that helping Jews was a part of the resistance against the Nazis. Illogically he cites the fact that more Poles were engaged in the armed resistance than in saving of the Jews as a proof of Polish anti-Semitism.
In order the understand the desperate struggle of the Poles in the face of the greatest catastrophe in the Polish history and the general disinterest of the Polish Jews in the fate of the Polish state one can quote statements by the Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) in New York's Forverts of Sept. 17, 1944. Writing under the pen-name Iccok Warszawski under the title "Jews and Poles Lived Together For 800 Years But Were Not Integrated" he stated:
"Rarely did a Jew think it necessary to learn Polish, rarely was a Jew interested in Polish history or politics. (...) Even in the last few years it was still a rare occurrence that a Jew would speak Polish well. Out of three million Jews living in Poland, two and half million were not able to write a simple letter in Polish and they spoke [Polish] very poorly. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Poland to whom Polish was as unfamiliar as Turkish." In the same paper he wrote on March 20. 1964: "My mouth could not get accustomed to the soft consonants of [Polish] language. My forefathers have lived for centuries in Poland but in reality I was a foreigner, with separate language, ideas and religion. I sensed the oddness of this situation and often considered moving to Palestine." (The above quotations are from Chone Shmeruk's Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bruno Schultz published in the Polish Review Vol. XXXVI, 1991, pp.: 161-167.) Bashevis Singer suggests that Jews in Poland were a self-segregated ethnic or national group which could not pass as ethnic Poles.
Death penalty for helping Jews was unique to Poland.
The essence of the policies of the Nazi government at all times was the implementation of the doctrine of the Lebensraum, or German "living space." The aim of the Berlin government was to seize Slavic lands and replace the Slavic population with what they considered "racial Germans." Thus, Poland was to be colonized by Germans and the Polish nation eradicated. For this reason the Nazi-Germans used every opportunity to kill Poles. One of the examples of this policy was the death penalty and immediate execution of entire Polish families and neighborhoods for helping Jews. At the same time, for example, in Denmark, which the Germans did not intend to colonize, no one was executed for helping any of the few Jews who lived there.
Gross disregards these facts and on the page 41 he gives the following illogical title to a chapter:
On the fact that the prevailing Polish anti-Semitism also was the reason why the Poles who helped Jews were brutally and totally murdered by the Germans.
Then on page 60 Gross writes "how was it that the people who sheltered Jews during the war, did not like to admit it after the war. (...) It was believed that anyone helping Jews got rich" and therefore could be robbed or repressed for "breaking the local code of behavior." Gross does not mention the fact that it often was difficult to admit to one's neighbor that by sheltering a Jew one was risking one's neighbor's life without his knowledge - it was easier not to tell one's neighbor about the "time bomb" next door and therefore not to celebrate the fact that it did not explode.
One could consider how much more Polish gentiles could have done to avert the tragic fate of the Jews in a situation where Polish gentiles could not prevent the killing of millions of Polish Christians and when the Polish Nation itself faced genocide. It is difficult to find a Polish gentile family which did not experience the loss of close relatives under the German and Soviet occupations. In central Poland, which the Germans turned into killing fields called by them a General Protectorate, there were eleven million Polish gentiles and two million Polish Jews. They were separated by the cultural barrier described by Bashevis Singer. Thus, for each Polish family there was one Jew that desperately needed help. The presence of the prewar German minority and of "racial Germans," recruited locally by the Nazis, further complicated the struggle for survival of both Polish gentiles and Jews.
Also important was the Soviet policy to nominate Jews to very visible posts in the Communist terror apparatus in order to shift the blame to the Jews for Soviet crimes. This perfidious Soviet policy did not facilitate a postwar admission that one risked one's and others' lives while sheltering the very people who later became Soviet executioners in Poland. Widespread Jewish complicity in the Soviet terror apparatus installed in Poland speaks volumes about their lack of concern for the existence of a sovereign Polish nation.
Arab oil versus the pogrom in Kielce.
Stalin signed in Yalta a pledge to hold free elections in Poland. The Soviets broke this pledge and used various propaganda means to draw the Allies' attention away from this fact. They exploited the horrible Jewish tragedy, about which the world was beginning to learn the gruesome details. The Soviets used the accusation of Polish anti-Semitism to justify their protracted occupation of Poland, while at the same time the NKVD staged pogroms in all satellite states, in particular in Poland.
19th century ritual murder accusations of the Black Hundred and the Tsarist Okhrana were recycled by the Soviets. Of the many pogroms in 1945 and 1946 only the Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1945 was exploited worldwide by the Soviet propaganda. The pogroms in Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia, and eastern Galicia as well as the Kielce pogrom was conducted under close control of the NKVD in order to generate an exodus of Jews who otherwise would not emigrate.
The American Ambassador to Poland was convinced the date of the 4th of July was chosen for an efficient dissemination of news among the American Jewry on the anniversary of the American Independence, a day free of work (Arthus Bliss-Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed, New York, 1948). A month later a bloody pogrom was staged in Bratislava, Slovakia, where participants of a veterans' convention were ordered to march to Jewish quarters where they committed crimes similar to those in Kielce. Needless to say, Gross treats the Kielce events as a genuine proof of Polish anti-Semitism.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Kielce pogrom, the post-communists exerted much effort trying to whitewash the NKVD and UB which engineered and controlled the pogrom, while blaming it on Polish mob. It bears repeating, however, that innocent people were tortured and executed within a week after the pogrom, after a show trial which lasted a few days. The strength of the post-communist grip on Poland makes the correction of these mendacities difficult.
I have personally discussed the Kielce events with Israeli Judge Mrs. Sara Dotan. She was assigned to supervise in 1996 in Tel-Aviv the deposition of Israeli survivors of Kielce pogrom for a report prepared by post-communist investigators Zbigniew Mielecki and others. Judge Dotan stated that she was severely shocked to learn from the witnesses that the Kielce murders were committed by soldiers and Catholic priests.
I have tried to explain to her that apparently the witnesses mistook the military shirts equipped with white neck bands for the Roman collars (which were not worn by Polish priests in 1946). Apparently some of the uniformed men from the Soviet terror apparatus in Poland (such as soldiers from the Blocking Companies of the Second Infantry Division stationed in Kielce, soldiers from the Internal Corps as well as the uniformed riot police) were assigned to stage the pogrom. Apparently, they were given civilian coats and pants to feign a role of a Polish mob. By wearing the regular military shirts they appeared to the Israeli witnesses as having had the Roman collars now popular among the clergy visiting the Holy Land.
The tragic events known as the Pogrom of Kielce of 1946 were demonstrably a part of Soviet postwar global strategy. The Soviets ruthlessly exploited Jews for Soviet political purposes.
In New York on July 7, 1946 the Society For The Promotion Of Poland's Independence issued a Declaration On the Kielce Crime. The declaration was signed by prominent historians Henryk Askenazy, Oskar Halecki and others. It stated:
(...)The Warsaw regime receiving its orders from Moscow and acting strictly in obedience to them has (...) [pursued] policies planned methodically and aimed at compelling the Jews to leave Poland and to embarrass the British Government in matters pertaining to the Palestine problem, and, furthermore, to aggravate the political crisis in the Near East, to envenom Judeo-Arab antagonisms. It is indeed for that purpose that the Warsaw regime endeavors to squeeze in the remnants of Poland's Jewish population which has succeeded in escaping Hitler's massacre, into American and British zones of occupation of Germany."
Soviet attempts to destabilize the oil-rich Near East also included the opening of the Iron Curtain to allow hundreds of thousands of Jews, many of whom went to Palestine, to join the struggle for the independence of Israel. The emigrating Jews were armed with Czech weapons given to them by the Soviets. Bernard Lewis (Semites and Anti-Semites. New York: W.W. Norton 1986) states that the Soviet Bloc was the only source of weapons used by the Jews during the decisive struggles in Palestine. In the Spring of 1947 Andrei Gromyko was the first to propose in the UN the establishing of the State of Israel. Decisive moves by the USSR in the UN on the recognition of the State of Israel were a part of the strategy to make Islamic owners of the Near East oil fields dependent on Soviet weapons and political support. Soviet aim was to blockade the supply of Arab oil to the United States and its allies as well as to generate fanatical hatred of the Muslim world against the West.
Crime during catastrophic events
One can endlessly cite criminal acts and moral failures inside Ghetto walls and outside of them. The courts of the Polish Home Army (AK) associated with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London condemned to death and executed traitors and criminals. All over the world cataclysms offer an opportunity for people to act on their worst instincts.
In the United States it is a standard procedure to call on the national guard to protect the population against widespread looting and crime during catastrophic events. No one in America considers such crimes to be a national disgrace. Anti-Polish propaganda practiced by Gross and others like him demands that the Polish Nation accept the behavior of individual criminals to be sins of all Poles.
The Holocaust Museums
Gross quotes Jzef Lipi ski, the famous professor of economics, who wrote Two homelands ("Dwie Ojczyzny") "anti-Polonism is as bad as anti-Semitism or as anti-Ukrainism," and then goes on to criticize Poland for not copying American museums of the Holocaust. These museums practice anti-Polonism and spread the myth about Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Large exhibits of the 1946 Pogrom of Kielce are shown as the Polish phase of the genocide of the Jews.
There is nothing in the Holocaust Museums on the German megalomaniac interpretation of the theory of evolution which says that life is a mortal struggle for the survival of the fittest. The Germanic race was supposed to be the fittest, as opposed to Semitic and Slavic races. Marx strengthened the confusion when he came up with his theory of history according to which the law of the jungle was justified in the political struggle between nations or social classes.
The Holocaust Museums do not show how Marx and Darwin provided fertile ground for the development of anti-Semitism which percolated in German society throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, as German racism and the ideals of German superiority gained ground. At the same time Wagner's operas were strengthening German megalomania, Nietzsche's dream of supermanhood pleased the Germans. While Bismarck's regime toned down anti-Semitism, it directed its hatred towards Polish Catholics. Bismarck marked the Poles for destruction in order to assure Germany's rule over Prussian territory (Werner Richter, Bismarck, New York: Putnam Press, 1964. p. 101). While Bismarck's anti-Catholic campaign was being conducted in parts of Poland occupied by Germany, mixed Christian-Jewish marriages were occurring quite often among the Germans. The children of those marriages were thaught to say that they were totally and unconditionally German. But anti-Semitism kept growing, sustained among other reasons by a resentful realization that Jews played a prominent role in German society.
Forcing of Jews to be executioners both in ghettos and death camps.
The Holocaust Museums should show how the racist sentiments were at the root of the opinion that German defeat in 1918 was due to Jews and how anti-Semitism became the rallying force for politicians and demagogues in the Weimar Republic. In this atmosphere, the descendants of mixed Jewish-German marriages leaned over backward to prove that their loyalties lay with Germany rather than with Jewry. Therefore when Hitler came to power, many members of such families volunteered for the job of solving the Jewish question. Among such people were von Heydrich, Globocnik, Eichman, Knochenn, Dannecker and many others. These people represented a "pathological Jewish self-hatred," to use the words of a Jewish historian Gerald Reitlinger (SS-Alibi of a Nation 1922-1945, Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1951 & 1981). In particular, Reitlinger points out that when SS General Reinhard von Heydrich became responsible for the program of extermination of the Jews, he arranged it so that the Jews themselves were forced to be executioners of Jews both in ghettos and death camps.
As a result an average Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto dispatched over 2,200 persons to the gas chambers of Treblinka. At the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw, where Jews were loaded into trains going to Treblinka, Jewish policemen offered food in the railway carriages to entice hungry inhabitants of the ghetto to enter. The most horrible dimension of the Jewish tragedy in World War II was that German planners made the Jews themselves execute the Jewish genocide. The abominable activities of the extortionists (szmalcowniki), or gentiles who collaborated with the Nazis as "racial Germans" (the volksdeutsche) or other collaborators, were of marginal importance in the genocide of Polish Jews. The real destruction was done with active participation of Jewish Councils and Jewish Police. This aspect of the Jewish tragedy has been carefully hidden in the US Holocaust Museum, which instead prominently features such "Polish" elements as the Kielce pogrom.
Reconciliation versus tradition
Traditional Jewish animosity toward the Poles developed during the partitions of Poland. It was much more common than Jewish hatred of the Germans. This was mentioned by Polish Catholic writer Zofia Kossak-Szczucka during the Holocaust when she was appealing for sacrifices of Polish gentiles for the cause of saving Jews within the egota program financed by Polish Government-in-Exile in London.
Today the Jewish attitude toward Poles manifests itself in the use of generalizations when dealing with accusations. Jewish students are often thaught that the Holocaust would not have taken place if the Poles did not want it. To teach about the Holocaust an animal farm rendition of the genocide of the Jews is used showing Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as swine (Maus by Art Spiegelman). Some of the colleges in America include this new version of the animal farm as an obligatory reading. If ever this cartoon rendition of the Holocaust is translated into Polish and published in Poland it will offend many who remember how the Nazis referred to the Poles as swine.
In the conclusion of his Ghastly Decade Gross equates Polish anti-Semitism with Hitlerism in Germany, Stalinism in Russia, and legally- sanctioned slavery and racism in the United States. These comparisons are highly unfair. Anti-Semitism never was legally sanctioned in free Poland. When Poland was a Soviet satellite the Warsaw regime carried out Moscow's orders whether in Kielce, or in 1968, or at any other time during the entire history of Peoples' Poland.
Gross writes: The Poles - because of the Holocaust - must study the history of the persecution of the Jews in Poland. Otherwise they will not be able to live in harmony with their own identity. The insinuation included in this statement is in contrast with what Simon Wiesenthal wrote in Krystyna, a Tragedy of Polish Resistance: "In the Polish history, the relations between Poles and Jews never were simple." On his eightieth birthday Wiesenthal said: I know what kind of role Jewish communists played in Poland after the war. And just as I, as a Jew, do not want to shoulder responsibility for the Jewish communists, I cannot blame 36 million Poles for those thousands of [wartime] extortionists (szmalcownicy) [common criminals].
Conclusion
The separatist Polish Jews described by Bashevis Singer are no more. Today Jews in Poland are a part of the Polish Nation and they should follow the conciliatory advice of Simon Wiesenthal
During the Second World War Poland was devastated and plundered by the Germans and the Soviets. Jewish possessions in Warsaw were devastated, together with the possessions of all inhabitants of the Polish capital. After the war the capital was rebuilt from ruins with great effort and sacrifice of the Polish people. So it was in other Polish towns. The Polish population was systematically robbed by the Germans and the Soviets. Essentially by the end of 1948 there was hardly a person in Poland, Jew or Gentile, whose property was not destroyed or taken over either by the Nazis or the Communists. All claims for restitution for damages incurred in the years 1939-1989 should be settled without regard of creed or ethnic origin.
Unfortunately, Gross, despite his scientific credentials, is practicing propaganda in the spirit of the statements made by the Secretary General of the Jewish World Congress quoted at the beginning of this text. Gross's propaganda helps those who make demands for ransom to be paid by the Polish Government to compensate for crimes perpetrated in Poland by the Nazis, the Soviets, and by common criminals.