- (Note - It is very important to remember how the Soviets
succeeded for over 40 years in attributing the WWII Katyn Forest mass slaughter
of Polish Army officers to the Germans. In fact, the Russians carried out
that slaughter. The following stories reveal yet another crucial and important
correction of an alleged WWII 'Nazi' atrocity. Bringing history into accord
with the facts should be everybody's business. There are three separate
news stories below pertaining to this tragic admission
- by the Poles. - ed.)
-
-
- Long after he'd settled comfortably into Melbourne's
suburbs, Janek Bienstein remembered his neighbors in his home town of Jedwabne,
north-east of Warsaw, in Poland.
-
- He remembered, for instance, who among them had pushed
him, his family and almost all of the town's other Jews - some 1600 in
all - into a huge barn one evening before dousing it with petrol and setting
it on fire.
-
- He remembered whose barn it was, who stood by watching,
and who sang joyfully as the Jews packed inside burned to death.
-
- As one of the town's horse-and-cart men, he knew them
all - their names, their occupations, their attitudes towards Jews. And
he would never forget their roles in the events of July 10, 1941, a fortnight
after the Germans displaced the Soviets who had been there since 1939.
It was the worst single pogrom to take place in Poland during the war years.
-
- Bienstein named those he held responsible in a section
he contributed to Jedwabne History and Memorial (Yizkor) Book in 1980.
"No German took part in the actual murder day - the opposite,"
he wrote.
-
- "Two officers came to the death barn asking the
murderers to let live the following professionals: shoemakers, tailors,
carpenters and blacksmiths. But the Gentiles answered: 'We won't allow
a remnant of the Jews to be left alive. Professionals we'll supply from
the Christians'."
-
- It's a view of events that the Poles have until now done
their best to deny. A memorial on the site of the massacre lays the blame
firmly at the feet of the Gestapo.
-
- But Bienstein's story is just one among many in a book
released this past week in Poland, and excerpted as the cover story of
the March 12 edition of The New Yorker, and the world is taking note.
-
- The book, Sasiedzi (Neighbors), by American academic
and Polish Jew Jan T. Gross, is not due to be published in English until
next month. But it has already raised a commotion because, using documented
evidence, it lays almost all the blame for the massacre upon the Polish
villagers and peasants rather than the German forces.
-
- The Jedwabne pogrom began in the morning as the Poles,
of whom 92 are named in written accounts, sought out and killed small groups
of Jews hiding in buildings, in fields and in the streets. Some of the
Jews committed suicide rather than face their attackers.
-
- One young woman was decapitated and her head kicked around
like a football. A three-year-old girl was pitchforked into a fire. A pregnant
woman, almost at full term, was disembowelled. One man had a cross cut
into his chest.
-
- Through a long hot day, the Jews were rounded up by Poles
using clubs and whips on the orders of the mayor. They were herded into
the town square where, according to some reports, 75 people were made to
carry a heavy statue of Lenin before being executed.
-
- The Jews' religious leader, 90-year-old rabbi Avigdor
Bialystocky, was forced to march at the head of the crowd carrying a red
flag. The Jews were forced to chant "the war is because of us, the
war is for us".
-
- But as the Jews in the barn were saying their last prayers
before dying, Janek Bienstein (then known as Neumark) seized his chance.
-
- Immensely strong from his life's work with horses and
carts, he had been one of the last forced into the barn, which left him
near the door.
-
- As his widow Dora tells it, Janek's father, Reb Shimeon,
implored his son to save himself, even as his face was on fire and his
eye melting.
-
- "Outside the door stood a man with an axe,"
says Dora. "He knew him. It was a Pole. As a young boy, they were
playing and fighting. And when he sneezed, he recognised the sneeze from
inside, and pushed the door himself.
-
- He said: 'You so and so, you want to burn me alive?'
And the Pole said: 'Here, Janek, here is the axe. Save yourself. I don't
see anything.' And he turned away.
-
- "Janek grabbed his sister and her little girl, and
they ran across the road to the cemetery."
-
- It was the beginning of a flight that ended with Janek
spending three years as prisoner number 86879 in Nazi concentration camps
Auschwitz and Dachau.
-
- At those times when death seemed the easiest option it
was, as he wrote later, the thought of being "able to tell what has
happened, and what our Polish neighbors did to us" that kept him alive.
-
- When the war ended, he married Dora, originally from
Budapest, whom he met in Dachau. She suggested they should each pay one
last visit to their home towns before getting on with their new life.
-
- "No, I wouldn't last a day there," he told
her. "They would kill me straight away. I was a witness. I was there.
I was in it and I was burning."
-
- Fewer than a dozen Jews survived Jedwabne that day, including
seven who were hidden together in bunkers under a barn by a brave Polish
woman. One of them, the late Szmul Wasersztejn, went on to record a deposition
in 1945 that ultimately led Jan Gross to the truth.
-
- In Jedwabne, the massacre had been commemorated by a
rough stone in a field with an inscription that reads: "Scene of a
massacre of the Jewish population. The Gestapo and German police burned
1600 people alive."
-
- It was a lie, symptomatic of a long cover-up that is
only now being exposed and examined in a burgeoning debate opened up by
Professor Gross.
-
- He says his evidence challenges the Poles' notion of
themselves solely as victims during the war. Some three million Jews were
killed, and a similar number of non- Jews, in Poland.
-
- Last Thursday, authorities in the town removed the disputed
monument in the first concrete response to his contention that it was the
Polish townspeople and outlying villagers, rather than the occupying German
forces, who did the killing.
-
- A government body intends to reorganise the site in time
for the 60th anniversary commemoration of the massacre this year, and a
new investigation has begun into the evidence.
-
- Although some details of the massacre provided by Janek
Bienstein in 1980 figure in Sasiedzi, much of the book's information is
drawn from court documents relating to the little-known trials of 22 Poles
in May, 1949, for their participation in the massacre. Twelve of the 22
were convicted and sentenced to jail terms. One death sentence was commuted.
-
- Professor Gross says that although the information was
available before now, no one had pulled it together and made it part of
"what we know" about the Holocaust, which is why it is having
such an impact. Most mass killings of Jews have until now been attributed
to the Nazis' police battalions and killing squads.
-
- Poland's highest authorities - including the President,
Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish Catholic primate Cardinal Glemp, and
the Prime Minister, Jerzy Buzek - have accepted the essential veracity
of Professor Gross' work and have urged Poles to come to terms with the
truth.
-
- "The participation of Poles in the Jedwabne crime
is undeniable - no serious historian can deny it," Mr Buzek said.
-
- "If we have the right to be proud that some Poles
saved Jews from the threat of losing their lives, we must also recognise
the culpability of those who participated in their murder."
-
- But this has not convinced some Polish academics and
their followers, including the editor of Melbourne's Polish Weekly, Zdzislaw
Derwinski. Such critics remain sceptical, charging Professor Gross with
making his findings on insufficient evidence and the authorities with being
at least premature in accepting them.
-
- Polish Weekly, which serves Melbourne's 22,000 Poles,
has published four articles on the issue, each of them tending to undermine
or cast doubt on the Gross position.
-
- Speaking from Paris to The Sunday Age, Professor Gross
said some of the arguments put forward by Professor Tomasz Strzembosz in
the most significant of the articles, tried to paint Jews as having been
collaborators with the Soviets, which provided a cover for others' long-standing
anti-Semitic prejudices. There was absolutely no evidence of Jews' collaboration,
he said.
-
- Perhaps ironically, sections of Melbourne's Jewish community
have attempted to "soft-pedal" relations with local Poles, trying
to reassure them they are not "anti- Polonists" by focusing attention
on Poles who helped Jews during the war.
-
- Michael Nadworny, an influential Polish Jew, says the
Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust Centre and the Federation of Polish
Jews have decided to step up efforts to tour the exhibition Courage to
Care, which is currently in Perth. Depicting the stories of so- called
"righteous Gentiles", it will travel to Moe in May.
-
- After the war, Janek Bienstein became just another Jewish
gent in Melbourne's suburbs, living first in Moonee Ponds then in Caulfield.
He was a worker at Smorgons and GMH, a father of two and a grandfather,
too.
-
- Among his circle of friends, though, he was always highly
regarded for his heroic deeds in the concentration camps and even earlier.
As a boy of 14, he saved 60 people in Jedwabne from another pogrom in 1920
by riding to seek help from a sympathetic Catholic archbishop.
-
- Janek Bienstein died in August, 1997, aged 91. His widow,
Dora, 77, who lives in South Caulfield, trembles with inner satisfaction
that his quest for justice has been realised. "I just wish it would
have come out five years before," she says, "when he was alive."
_____
-
-
-
- Holocaust Marker Removed - Massacre Culprits
Were The Poles
- http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com
By Andrzej Stylinski
The Associated Press
3-17-1
-
- WARSAW, Poland - Polish authorities
yesterday removed a Holocaust monument that for decades falsely blamed
the Nazis for a 1941 massacre of Jews that was actually carried out by
Polish villagers.
-
- The small, weathered stone memorial in the town of Jedwabne
is to be replaced with a new monument by July 10, the 60th anniversary
of the massacre.
-
- New evidence that Polish neighbors herded the community's
1,600 Jews into a barn and set it on fire has torn into Poles' longheld
self-image as victims of Nazi occupation - and never as collaborators in
Hitler's plan to annihilate European Jewry.
-
- Poland lost 6.5 million citizens, including 3 million
Jews, under Nazi occupation. Poles have prided themselves on a resistance
movement that took great risks to shelter many Jews and get word of the
Holocaust to the outside world.
-
- A book by Jan Tomasz Gross, a Polish ÈmigrÈ
who teaches at New York University, uncovered facts that were kept secret
or ignored during 40 years of communist rule. Published last year in Polish,
an English version of "Neighbors" is due out next month in the
U.S.
-
- Gross writes that when Nazi commanders moved into the
eastern Polish village, they "easily reached agreement" with
town officials on what to do about the Jews. Hundreds, including women
and children, were brought to the square. They were beaten with clubs and
stones before being locked inside the barn.
-
- A communist-era court convicted 12 villagers in 1949
of collaborating with the Nazis and sentenced them to terms ranging from
eight to 15 years. One death sentence was later commuted.
-
- Poland's National Remembrance Institute has launched
an inquiry that could lead to a trial of any participants still alive.
-
- http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=
massacre16&date=20010316
-
- Poles And The Jews - How Deep The Guilt?
- By Adam Michnik From The New York Times
3-17-1
-
-
-
- A monument at Jedwabne, Poland, that blamed Nazi occupiers
for a massacre of local Jews. It was removed on Thursday after public acknowledgment
that Poles committed the murders.
-
- On July 10, 1941, 1,600 Jews, nearly the entire Jewish
population of the Polish village of Jedwabne, were murdered by their Polish
neighbors. Some were hunted down and killed with clubs, axes and knives;
most were herded into a barn and then burned alive. Although the slaughter
was not a secret, publicly the Nazi occupiers were blamed.
-
- A monument in Jedwabne (pronounced yed-VAHB-nay) declared:
"Place of martyrdom of the Jewish people. Hitler's Gestapo and gendarmerie
burned 1,600 people alive, July 10, 1941." But last May, Jan T. Gross,
a historian at New York University, published "Neighbors: The Destruction
of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne" in Poland. The book, which will
be issued in the United States in April, documents the massacre by Polish
villagers in gruesome detail.
-
- In a country whose people think of themselves as wartime
victims, not villains, it set off a storm of debate in corner shops, cafes
and classrooms, and among the country's political and church leaders. Some
Poles have continued to deny Polish responsibility; most have tried to
wrestle with the country's history of anti-Semitism and questions of collective
guilt. Jozef Cardinal Glemp, the Roman Catholic Primate, and President
Aleksander Kwasniewski have publicly asked for forgiveness, and on Thursday
the Jedwabne memorial was removed.
-
- Adam Michnik is a dissident and historian who spent six
years in prison under the postwar Communist regime, served as an adviser
to the Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and is now editor-in-chief of Gazeta
Wyborcza, Poland's largest daily newspaper. He wrote this article for The
New York Times, and it was translated from thePolish by Ewa Zadrzynska.
_____
-
- Mr. Michnik's article:
-
- Do Poles, along with Germans, bear guilt for the Holocaust?
It is hard to imagine a more absurd claim.
-
- Not a single Polish family was spared by Hitler and Stalin.
The two totalitarian dictatorships obliterated three million Poles and
three million Polish citizens classified as Jews by the Nazis.
-
- Poland was the first country to oppose Hitler's demands
and the first to stand against his aggression. Poland never had a Quisling.
No Polish regiment fought on behalf of the Third Reich. Betrayed by the
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, Poles fought alongside the anti-Nazi forces from
the first day until the last. And inside Poland armed resistance to the
German occupation was widespread.
-
- The British prime minister paid homage to the Poles for
their role in the Battle of Britain and the president of the United States
called Poles an "inspiration" to the world. Yet that didn't stop
them from delivering Poland into Stalin's clutches at Yalta. Heroes of
the Polish resistance ó enemies of Stalin's Communism ó ended
up in Soviet gulags and Polish Communist prisons.
-
- All of these truths contribute to Poland's image of itself
as an innocent and noble victim of foreign violence and intrigue. After
the war, while the West was able to reflect on what had happened, Stalinist
terror stymied public discussion in Poland about the war, the Holocaust
and anti-Semitism.
-
- At the same time, anti-Semitic traditions were deeply
rooted in Poland. In the 19th century, when the Polish state didn't exist,
the modern nation that was to emerge was shaped by ethnic and religious
ties and by opposing antagonistic neighbors often hostile to the dream
of Polish independence. Anti-Semitism was the ideological glue of great
political nationalistic formations. And yet it was also used at various
points as a tool by Russian occupiers in accordance with the principle
"divide et impera."
-
- In the 1920's and 30's, anti-Semitism took hold. It became
a fixture of radical right- wing nationalists and it could be detected
in the utterances of the hierarchy of the Catholic church. Though historically
Poland had been a relatively safe haven for them, Jews began to feel increasingly
discriminated against and unsafe ó and they were, with noisy anti-Semitic
groups, segregated seating at universities and calls for pogroms.
-
- During Hitler's occupation, the Polish nationalistic
and anti-Semitic right didn't collaborate with the Nazis, as the right
wing did elsewhere in Europe, but actively participated in the anti-Hitler
undergound. Polish anti-Semites fought against Hitler, and some of them
even rescued Jews, though this was punishable by death.
-
- Thus we have a singularly Polish paradox: on occupied
Polish soil, a person could be an anti-Semite, a hero of the resistance
and a savior of Jews.
-
- Fourteen years ago an essay recalled a well-known appeal
to save the Jews that was published by a famous Catholic writer, Zofia
Kossak-Szczucka, in August 1942. She wrote of hundreds of thousands of
Jews in the Warsaw ghetto awaiting death without hope of rescue and how
the entire world ó England, America, Jews overseas and Poles ó
was silent. "The dying Jews are surrounded by Pilates washing their
hands," she wrote. "This silence cannot be tolerated any longer.
No matter what the reasons for it, this silence is a disgrace."
-
- Speaking of Catholic Poles, she continued: "Our
feelings toward the Jews haven't changed. We still consider them the political,
economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Furthermore, we are aware that
they hate us even more than they hate the Germans, that they hold us responsible
for their misfortune. . . . The knowledge of these feelings doesn't relieve
us of the duty of condemning the crime. We don't want to be Pilates. We
have no chance to act against the German crimes, we can't help or save
anybody, but we protest from the depths of our hearts, filled with compassion,
indignation and awe. . . . The compulsory participation of the Polish nation
in this bloody show, which is taking place on Polish soil, can breed indifference
to the wrongs, the sadism and above all the sinister conviction that one
can kill one's neighbors and go unpunished."
-
- This extraordinary appeal, full of idealism and courage
while openly poisoned by anti-Semitic stereotypes, illustrates the paradox
of Polish attitudes toward the dying Jews. The anti-Semitic tradition compels
the Poles to perceive the Jews as aliens while the Polish heroic tradition
compels them to save them.
-
- The same Kossak-Szczucka, in a letter to a friend after
the war, described a wartime incident on a Warsaw bridge: "Another
time, on the Kierbedz bridge, a German saw a Pole giving alms to a starving
Jewish urchin. He pounced and ordered the Pole to throw the child into
the river or else he would be shot along with the young beggar. `There
is nothing you can to do help him. I will kill him anyway; he is not allowed
to be here. You can go free, if you drown him, or I will kill you, too.
Drown him or die. I will count . . . 1, 2 ó'
-
- "The Pole could not take it. He broke down and threw
the child over the rail into the river. The German gave him a pat on the
shoulder. `Braver Kerl.' They went their separate ways. Two days later,
the Pole hanged himself."
-
- The lives of those Poles who felt the guilt of being
helpless witnesses to atrocity were marked by a deep trauma, which surfaces
with each new debate about anti-Semitism, Polish-Jewish relations and the
Holocaust. After all, people in Poland know deep inside that they were
the ones who moved into the houses vacated by Jews herded into the ghetto.
And there were other reasons for guilt. There were some Poles who turned
Jews in and others who hid Jews for money.
-
- Polish public opinion is rarely united, but almost all
Poles react very sharply when confronted with the charge that Poles get
their anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk and with accusations of their
complicity in the Shoah. For the anti-Semites, who are plentiful on the
margins of Poland's political life, those attacks are proof of the international
anti-Polish Jewish conspiracy. To normal people who came of age in the
years of falsifications and silence about the Holocaust, these allegations
seem unjust.
-
- To these people, Jan Tomasz Gross's book "Neighbors,"
which revealed the story of the murder by Poles of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne,
was a terrible shock. It is difficult to describe the extent of this shock.
Mr. Gross's book has generated a heated response comparable to the Jewish
community's reaction to the publication of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann
in Jerusalem." Arendt wrote about the collaboration of some of the
Jewish communities with the Nazis: "The Jewish Councils of Elders
were informed by Eichmann or his men of how many Jews were needed to fill
each train, and they made out the list of deportees. The Jews registered,
filled out 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 to escape were rounded up by a special Jewish police
force. . . . We know how the Jewish officials felt when they became instruments
of murder ó like captains `whose ships were about to sink and who
succeeded in bringing them safe to port by casting overboard a great part
of their precious cargo.' " Soon afterward, her Jewish critics said
that Hannah Arendt claimed that Jews themselves implemented their Shoah.
-
- Some of the reactions to the book by Mr. Gross were as
emotional. An average Polish reader couldn't believe that something like
this could have happened. I must admit that I couldn't believe it either,
and I thought that my friend Jan Gross had fallen victim to a a falsification.
But the murder in Jedwabne, preceded by a bestial pogrom, did take place
and must weigh on the collective consciousness of the Poles ó and
on my individual consciousness.
-
- The Polish debate about Jedwabne has been going on for
several months. It is a serious debate, full of sadness and sometimes terror
ó as if the whole society was suddenly forced to carry the weight
of this terrible 60-year-old crime; as if all Poles were made to admit
their guilt collectively and ask for forgiveness.
-
- I don't believe in collective guilt or collective responsibility
or any other responsibility except the moral one. And therefore I ponder
what exactly is my individual responsibility and my own guilt. Certainly
I cannot be responsible for that crowd of murderers who set the barn in
Jedwabne on fire. Similarly, today's citizens of Jedwabne cannot be blamed
for that crime. When I hear a call to admit my Polish guilt, I feel hurt
the same way the citizens of today's Jedwabne feel when they are interrogated
by reporters from around the world.
-
- But when I hear that Mr. Gross's book, which revealed
the truth about the crime, is a lie that was concocted by the international
Jewish conspiracy against Poland, that is when I feel guilty. Because these
false excuses are in fact nothing else but a rationalization of that crime.
-
- As I write this text, I am weighing words carefully and
repeating Montesquieu: "I am a man thanks to nature, I am a Frenchman
thanks to coincidence." By coincidence I am a Pole with Jewish roots.
Almost my whole family was devoured by the Holocaust. My relatives could
have perished in Jebwabne. Some of them were Communists or relatives of
Communists, some were craftsmen, some merchants, perhaps some rabbis. But
all were Jews, according to the Nuremberg laws of the Third Reich. All
of them could have been herded into that barn, which was set on fire by
Polish criminals.
-
- I do not feel guilty for those murdered, but I do feel
responsible. Not that they were murdered ó I could not have stopped
that. I feel guilty that after they died they were murdered again, denied
a decent burial, denied tears, denied truth about this hideous crime, and
that for decades a lie was repeated.
-
- This is my fault. For lack of imagination or time, for
convenience and spiritual laziness, I did not ask myself certain questions
and did not look for answers. Why? After all, I was among those who actively
pushed to reveal the truth about the Katyn massacre of Polish soldiers,
I worked to tell the truth about the Stalinist trials in Poland, about
the victims of the Communist repression. Why then did I not look for the
truth about the murdered Jews of Jedwabne? Perhaps because I subconsciously
feared the cruel truth about the Jewish fate during that time. After all,
the bestial mob in Jedwabne was not unique. In all of the countries conquered
by the Soviets after 1939, there were horrible acts of terror against the
Jews in the summer and in the autumn of 1941. They died at the hands of
their Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Russian and Belarussian
neighbors. I think that the time has come to reveal the truth about these
hideous acts. I will try to contribute to this.
-
- Writing these words, I feel a specific schizophrenia:
I am a Pole, and my shame about the Jedwabne's murder is a Polish shame.
At the same time, I know that if I had been there in Jedwabne, I would
have been killed as a Jew.
-
- Who then am I, as I write these words? Thanks to nature,
I am a man, and I am responsible to other people for what I do and what
I do not do. Thanks to my choice, I am a Pole, and I am responsible to
the world for the evil inflicted by my countrymen. I do so out of my free
will, by my own choice, and by the deep urging of my conscience.
-
- But I am also a Jew who feels a deep brotherhood with
those who were murdered as Jews. From this perspective, I assert that whoever
tries to remove the crime in Jedwabne from the context of its epoch, whoever
uses this example to generalize that this is how only the Poles and all
the Poles behaved, is lying. And this lie is as repulsive as the lie that
was told for many years about the crime in Jedwabne.
-
- A Polish neighbor might have saved one of my relatives
from the hands of the executioners who pushed him into the barn. And indeed,
there were many such Polish neighbors ó the forest of Polish trees
in the Avenue of the Righteous in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in
Jerusalem, is dense.
-
- For these people who lost their lives saving Jews, I
feel responsible, too. I feel guilty when I read so often in Polish and
foreign newspapers about the murderers who killed Jews, and note the deep
silence about those who rescued Jews. Do the murderers deserve more recognition
than the righteous?
-
- The Polish primate, the Polish president and the Rabbi
of Warsaw said almost in one voice that a tribute to the Jedwabne victims
should serve the cause of reconciling Poles and Jews in the truth. I desire
nothing more. If it doesn't happen, it will be also my fault.
-
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