May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

.

596 Nathan Jeffay, “Religious Zionists Challenge March of the Living’s Value,” Forward, May 8, 2009.

597 Kobi Nahshoni, “Rabbi Melamed Urges Students Not to Visit Poland,” April 21, 2009, Internet: .

598 Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995), 117.

599 Matthew Wagner, “Poland Gets 1^st Orthodox Rabbis Since WWII,” Jerusalem Post, June 30, 2008.

600 Esther Farbstein, The Forgotten Memoirs: Moving Personal Accounts from Rabbis Who Survived the Holocaust (Brooklyn, New Yor: Shaar Press), 458. Rabbi Weinberg was in Pawiak for all of two weeks; afterwards, as a Soviet citizen, he was interned with Soviet prisoners-of-war.

601 Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals, Part 1 Brooklyn, New York: Naturei Karta of U.S.A., 1977), 13, 16.

602 Joseph J. Preil, ed., Holocaust Testimonies: European Survivors and American Liberators in New Jersey (New Brunnswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 128.

603 Hoffman, Shtetl, 245.

604 Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1918–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 22.

605 Art Spiegelman’s highly popular Holocaust comic books Maus and Maus II depict Poles as bad-tempered, unfeeling pigs who go around saluting in Nazi fashion and greeting each other with “Heil Hitler.” Contrary to all evidence, the kapo function is Auschwitz is assigned exclusively to Polish pigs, who excel in cruelty and especially in tormeting Jews. Not surprisingly, GradeSaver, a popular online student study guide provider, states: “A ‘kapo’ is a Polish supervisor at a concentration camp.” See Internet: . Although touted as an educational tool, the style of Maus is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda rag Der Stürmer: Poles are invariably brutal bigots, blackmailers and murderers. The use of pigs as symbols of Poles is a lesson that cannot be lost upon the youngest of readers, the very word “pig” being universally used as a term of derision. For Jews, a pig is unclean animal. According to the Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center (Internet: <http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2376474/jewish/Pigs-Judaism.htm>), “There is probably no animal as disgusting to Jewish sensitivities as the pig. It’s not just because it may not be eaten: there are plenty of other animals that aren’t kosher either, but none of them arouse as much disgust as the pig. Colloquially, the pig is the ultimate symbol of loathing; when you say that someone ‘acted like a chazir [pig],’ it suggests that he or she did something unusually abominable.” An Israeli court found a Jewish woman guilty of racism for putting up posters depicting Islam’s Prophet Mohammad as a pig. Pork-eating immigrants from Russia have also been the focus of volatile demonstrations in Israel. After one such demonstration, David Benziri, a leading Sephardi rabbi and brother of an Israeli cabinet minister, said: “There is nothing so anti-Jewish as pig.” At these rallies Christian Russian immigrants are called the “abomination of Satan,” accused of “flooding the land with pork, prostitution, impurity and filth,” and there are calls for their segregation by Orthodox Jews. See Alan Philps, “Pork-eating Gentiles stir outrage in Israel,” National Post [Toronto], November 24, 1999. It is most unlikely that this point would have been lost on Art Spiegelman when he chose to portray Poles as pigs. In the biographical introduction to the excerpt from Maus that appears in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, editors Jerome Klinkowitz and Patricia B. Wallace comment that Spiegelman’s representation of Poles as pigs is ”a dietary contrast with Jews, but also a calculated insult” (7th edition, Volume E, p. 3091). A similar point was made by Harvey Pekar, who describes himself as a Jew with a background similar to Spiegelman’s: “When he [Spiegelman] shows them [Poles] doing something admirable and still portrays them as pigs, he’s sending a mixed message.” See The Comics Journal, no. 113, December 1986. In MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (New York: Pantheon, 2011), Spiegelman divulged his actual reasons for portraying Poles as pigs: It is to bash Poles. With reference to his father’s attitude towards Poles, he quips, “So my metaphor [mice to be killed outright, and pigs to be exploited and eaten] was somehow able to hold that particular vantage point while still somehow acknowledging my father’s dubious opinion of Poles as a group.” (P. 122.) He adds that, “‘And considering the bad relations between Poles and Jews for the last hundred years in Poland, it seemed right to use a non-Kosher animal.’” (P. 125.) For an in-depth discussion of the treatment of Poles in Maus see “The Problems wirh Spiegelman’s Maus: Why Maus Should Not Be Taught in High Schools or Elementary Schools,” Internet: and the companion Q&A, “Poles as Pigs in Spiegelman’s Maus: Distorting Holocaust History,” Internet: .

Elie Wiesel and Alan M. Dershowitz are other prominent exponents of a style of writing about Poles that must surely be placed in that broad category of what French-Jewish intellectual Pierre Vidal-Naquet refers to as “the sort of primitive anti-Polish sentiments that too often characterize those whom I shall call ‘professional Jews’.” See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 182. As Columbia University historian István Deák has noted, “No issue in Holocaust literature is more burdened by misunderstanding, mendacity, and sheer racial prejudice than that of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II.” See István Deák, “Memories of Hell,” The New York Review of Books, June 26, 1997.

606 Erin Einhorn, The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2008), 48–49, 53. Einhorn first visted Poland in 1990, at age seventeen, as part of the March of the Living organized for Jewish high school students. The students visited Nazi concentration camps, but their hatred was directed at and reserved for the Poles. She recalls he own reaction: “I wasn’t shocked by the ovens or piles of hair, which I’d expected. It was the houses. Out there in the field. Houses that looked as though they’d seen what there was to see. Damn Poles! I cursed them. They’d rather stew in the stench of death than to do something to stop it.” Ibid., 50. When Einhorn produced a radio piece, in September 2002, on her new-found perspective to the resentment that lingered between Jews and Poles, her relatives were dismayed by her portrayal of Poland, as were many Jewish listners. Ibid., 263.

607 Wiszniewicz, And Yet I Still Have Dreams, 117–18.

608 Alexander J. Groth, Holocaust Voices: An Attitudinal Survey of Survivors (Amherst, New York: Humanity Books/Prometheus Books, 2003), 35–36, 154, 157.

609 Groth, Holocaust Voices, 158–59, 164. The author, Alexander J. Groth, himself a survivor from Poland, also succumbs to the most primitive biases about Polish conduct during the war and the Poles’ alleged support for the Final Solution. Ibid., 162–63. Yet, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, the author of the famous appeal “The Protest” issued during the mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto in summer of 1942, has been accused of anti-Semitism for taking note of the fact that many Jews “hate us more than they hate the Germans, and … make us responsible for their misfortune.”

610 Baron, History and Jewish Historians, 88.

611 “Pope begins pilgrimage in Egypt,” National Post (Toronto), February 25, 2000.

612 See, for example, Elie Wiesel, “The Killing After the Killing,” Washington Post, June 25, 2006, and Thane Rosenbaum, “A Lethal Homecoming,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2006.

613 “Izraelczycy zaatakowali siostry Radwańskie: Poleciały wyzwiska?”, Dziennik.pl, February 12, 2013; “Ojciec sióstr Radwańskich potwierdza, że w Izraelu wyzywano jego córki,” Dziennik.pl, February 25, 2013; “Tennis: Radwanska Still Seethes Over Israel Fed Cup Row,” Agence France-Presse, February 13, 2013.

614 Marshall Sklare, Observing America’s Jews (Hanover: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1993), 32–33.

615 Feffer, My Shtetl Drobin, 22.

616 Z. Tzurnamal, ed., Lask: Sefer zikaron [Memorial Book of Łask] (Tel Aviv: Association of Former Residents of Lask in Israel, 1968), 124–25.

617 Cyprys, A Jump For Life, 220–21.

618 Steve Paiken, “Poland Striving to Shake Off an Anti-Semitic Past”, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 29, 1992.

619 See, for example, Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski, Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland (Montreal: Price-Patterson, 1994), 159, and the second revised edition: Żegota: The Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942–1945 (Montreal: Price-Patterson, 1999), 147; Hoffman, Shtetl, 247; Piotr Szczepański (Zbigniew Romaniuk), “Pogromy, mordy i pogromiki,” Kurier Poranny, April 12, 1996 (edition AB).

620 In total, several thousand Christian Poles—men, women and children, entire families and even whole communities—were tortured to death, summarily executed, or burned alive for rendering assistance to Jews. Hundreds of cases of Poles being put to death for helping Jews have been documented though the list is still far from complete (the author is aware of scores of additional cases). See the following publications on this topic: Philip Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 184–85; Wacław Zajączkowski, Martyrs of Charity: Christian and Jewish Response to the Holocaust, Part One (Washington, D.C.: St. Maximilian Kolbe Foundation, 1987), Part One; Wacław Bielawski, Zbrodnie na Polakach dokonane przez hitlerowców za pomoc udzielaną Żydom (Warsaw: Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce–Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 1987); The Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation–The Institute of National Memory and The Polish Society For the Righteous Among Nations, Those Who Helped: Polish Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, Part One (Warsaw, 1993), Part Two (Warsaw, 1996), and Part Three (Warsaw, 1997). A portion of the last of these publications is reproduced in Appendix B in Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944, Second revised edition (New York: Hippocrene, 1997), and an extensive list of Polish victims also appears in Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947 (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 1998), 119–23. Some Holocaust historians who deprecate Polish rescue efforts, such as Lucy S. Dawidowicz, have attempted to argue that essentially there was no difference in the penalty that the Poles and Western Europeans such as the Dutch faced for helping Jews. See Lucy C. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), 166. However, the sources on which Dawidowicz relies belie this claim. Raul Hilberg clarifies the situation that prevailed in Holland as follows: “If caught, they did not have to fear an automatic death penalty. Thousands were arrested for hiding Jews or Jewish belongings, but it was German policy to detain such people only for a relatively short time in a camp within the country, and in serious cases to confiscate their property.” See Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books/Harper Collins, 1992), 210–11. Although the death penalty was also found on the books in other jurisdictions such as Norway and the Czech Protectorate, there too it was rarely used. See Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) 215–16; Zajączkowski, Martyrs of Charity, Part One, 111–18, 284–86, 294, 295. Such laxity was virtually unheard of in occupied Poland, where the death penalty was meted out with utmost rigour. Several Norwegian resistance fighters were executed for helping Jews to escape to Sweden, and a number of others imprisoned. See Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (Hoboken, New Jersey: KTAV Publishing House; New York: The Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers, 1993), 366. Several dozen individuals in the Czech Protectorate were charged by Nazi special courts and sentenced to death. See Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 218–27, 303–304. Rescuers were also put to death in other occupied countries such as Lithuania. See Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003), 326–27.

621 Małgorzata Niezabitowska, Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland (New York: Friendly Press, 1986), 249.

622 Marek Arczyński and Wiesław Balcerak, Kryptonim “Żegota”: Z dziejów pomocy Żydom w Polsce 1939–1945, 2nd revised and expanded edition (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1983), 264.

623 Hanna Wehr, Ze wspomnień (Montreal: Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, 2001).

624 Cited in Marc Hillel, Le massacre des survivants: En Pologne après l’holocauste (1945–1947) (Paris: Plon, 1985), 99.

625 Hoffman, Shtetl, 247.

626 Mark Smith, “Escape from Treblinka,” The Herald (Scotland), May 31, 2010.

627 Paul Gottfried, “Polonophobia,” Chronicles, January 1997, 12–14.