Compensation for Damages Suffered Under Nazi and Soviet Occupations

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
Comments on Jan Tomasz Gross's
Ghastly Decade 1939-1948

Copyright @ 1998 by Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski
All rights reserved.

The 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.