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Post by Bonobo on Nov 15, 2009 22:09:49 GMT 1
Film about anti-Semitism in Poland sparks uproar
JACOB KANTER
THE JERUSALEM POST
Nov. 3, 2009
A film about the rise of anti-Semitic movements in Poland has recently been met with censure by members of the country's parliament and public.
Hitler's Daughter, directed by Aro Korol and produced by Korol's London-based Awesome Industry, focuses on right-wing radio station Radio Maryja, as well as its founder, Tadeusz Rydzyk, a Roman Catholic priest.
"Father Rydzyk sees no contradiction between wearing a collar and spreading his politics via satellite," Korol wrote on the film's Web site, hitlersdaughtermovi e.com. "One of Radio Maryja's many anti-Semitic commentaries suggested that Jews were sabotaging the struggle of democracy in Ukraine and Belarus. The station also made very nasty, anti-Semitic remarks accusing Jews of making a business of Holocaust reparation payments."
Hitler's Daughter has caused a media frenzy in Poland, and Korol has received death threats.
Marek Jurek, a former speaker in the Polish parliament now representing the Right of the Republic party, called on Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski to intervene, saying that "[such a film] should not only be met with severe political reaction, but also legal steps, to prevent insults addressed at Polish institutions to an international audience."
Jurek's comments were based on a four-minute clip of Hitler's Daughter available on the Internet. The film will be officially released in the fall of 2010.
"I find it deeply worrying that Polish politicians have taken such measures against me and that my film has been subject to such harsh judgment," Korol said in a statement. "I consider it essential to expose the anti-Semitic machinations of organizations in a country where racial and religious tolerance should be universal and unchallenged. My hope is that I can now produce and finalize this film within the next 10 months."==============================================
Europe must focus on Baltic hate
We must continue to push the issue of Polish, Latvian and Lithuanian antisemitism
By John Mann MP
Jewish Chronicle
October 29, 2009
Now that the party conference pantomime season is out of the way, there needs to be a calm, collected and detailed look at what is happening with antisemitism and, in particular, Holocaust revisionism, in political parties in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.
When I visited these countries in my capacity as chair of the All-Party Group against Antisemitism, I found evidence of widespread antisemitism. In Latvia in particular, the Jewish community and, not least, Jewish schools told me that they feel themselves under sustained attack. This definitive perspective was rather missing from the political shenanigans over the summer and is where our attentions need be focused.
I outlined my concerns for the Latvian Jewish community in an antisemitism debate in Parliament. Latvia's best-selling book of Christmas 2007 was an overtly antisemitic diatribe by Andris Grutups, the co-founder of, and lawyer for, the ruling party of Latvia. His book could be summarised as "the Jews had it coming because they were all Communists".
Whilst William Hague and David Miliband crossed swords over the question of offence caused by Latvian Nationalists commemorating their country's legionnaires whom, clothed in Waffen-SS uniforms, went to battle the Red Army in the Baltic in 1944, the Latvians' official response was to point to "Soviet Propaganda" as the culprit of such rumours. As one report to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees explained, there are continuing concerns about the attitudes of Latvia and the other Baltic states towards the role of the Germans in the Second World War and the part they played in fighting the Soviet Union.
Exploring this theme last week, Jonathan Freedland noted that there has been a 20-year resurgence of ultra-nationalism in former Soviet states resulting in a new narrative of Stalinism as the greater evil of the Second World War. He pointed to the Vilnius Museum of Genocide Victims which commemorates 74,500 Lithuanians persecuted under Moscow rule while ignoring the 200,000 Jews killed by Lithuanians. This revisionist angle, where Lithuanians, Latvians and Poles were solely victims rather than also being perpetrators, hinders efforts to move forward as a civilization.
Professor Dovid Katz has done extensive work in the Baltics and believes that time to act is running out. Writing in this newspaper, he highlighted the Prague Declaration, currently circulating through email accounts at the European Parliament. A sinister document, it uses the smokescreen of legitimate concerns about the evils of Communist regimes to insist that Soviet Communism and Nazi Fascism be declared equal. Its recommendations include the re-writing of textbooks to "correct" this history. Its authors draw parallels between Nazi and Soviet crimes for Western European audiences.
According to the Simon Weisenthal Centre, bogus accounts of overwhelming Jewish complicity in Soviet rule is widespread, including the glossing over of local participation in the killings, and sustained efforts to tarnish the reputation of Holocaust victims, survivors and resistance fighters with antisemitic stereotypes of "Jewish Bolshevik conspiracies" . In Lithuania, three Holocaust survivors are now part of a "pre-trial" investigation by state lawyers for alleged "war crimes". Lithuania, meanwhile, has an appalling record of failing to prosecute Nazi war criminals.
This attempt to rewrite history is being imported. As the CST exposed this September, Lee John Barnes, the legal officer for the BNP, is following a similar line. His blog depicts the Holocaust as a defensive action against "Jewish Bolsheviks". Meanwhile, only last week, Orlando Figes of Birkbeck University conducted a debate on contemporary attitudes to the Holocaust in Somerset House. The blurb for the event contained the sentence "There is no Spielberg for the Soviet holocaust".
As a result of our All-Party inquiry into Antisemitism, the Foreign Office has been pursuing an active programme of agenda-raising using the relevant European organisations and instruments, and has been hailed as a model of best practice. I will be raising this matter at the cross-departmental working group on Antisemitism and with the Foreign Secretary. It is our intention to send a further fact-finding mission to both Latvia and Poland in order to evidence more comprehensively attitudes and activities. Should these missions have implications for political parties in those countries then I think that discrete but robust pressure will be in order.
We must continue to monitor and combat this evolving form of antisemitism and should expect the highest standards of both British and European officials in combating racism in all its forms.============================================================
Death haunts the Polish town that killed its Jews
John Nathan visits Michal Kaminski's former constituency, the site of a notorious wartime massacre
By John Nathan
The Jewish Chronicle
October 28, 2009
The then Polish President Aleksander Kwasmiewski lays a wreath in 2001 at the monument in Jedwabne marking the massacre of the town's Jews by Poles. Jedwabne's ex-MP Michal Kaminski, whose alliance with the Tories has caused controversy in the UK, opposed the idea of a formal apology by the then President.
The then Polish President Aleksander Kwasmiewski lays a wreath in 2001 at the monument in Jedwabne marking the massacre of the town's Jews by Poles. Jedwabne's ex-MP Michal Kaminski, whose alliance with the Tories has caused controversy in the UK, opposed the idea of a formal apology by the then President
Any visitor to the remote town of Jedwabne, in north-east Poland, is going to know something about its horrifying past.
On the outskirts there is a memorial that marks the site where hundreds of Jedwabne's Jews were burned alive in a barn in July 1941. It is the only reason to visit this colourless place.
Today, the memorial no longer attributes the massacre to the Nazis. It was changed in 2000 after it was revealed that it was not the occupying Germans who wiped out the Jewish half of the town, but the Jewish victims' gentile neighbours.
It is the silence that first strikes you when entering Jedwabne. This is the silence for which many Polish towns in the region are known and which is romanticised in many folk songs about the area. "Not just songs," says Roman Pawlowski, a journalist who writes for the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, " but post-war poetry and literature as well."
With a population of about 2,000, Jedwabne is not what you might call a destination. Nor is it on the way to one. Few people pass through. Lying between two rivers, the surrounding flat, forested landscape is saturated with swamps.
The nearest city is Bialystok, which, after Warsaw, is the only Polish city whose Jewish ghetto mounted an uprising against the Nazis. It did not last long.
Sometimes it is hard to know whether your impression of a town like Jedwabne — in this part of Poland, there are many — is informed by a knowledge of its history or by your experience of the place.
The grey little two-storey houses that border the town's main square; the double-spired church that overlooks it; the lined faces of old men who sit on benches, apparently with nothing to talk about — everything, every blade of grass and every cobblestone seems to be informed by the massacre.
This might be because it was in this very square where Jedwabne's long-established Jewish population were beaten and made to dig out weeds from between cobblestones. Or perhaps it is because Jedwabne's grand church, like many others in the region, was funded largely by money extorted from Jews, whose yearly choice was to pay up or suffer a pogrom.
Jedwabne's Jewish history is similar to many other Polish towns. Its wooden synagogue was built in 1770, though destroyed in a fire in 1916.
In the 1930s records show that Jedwabne was home to 144 craftsmen, including 36 tailors and 24 cobblers, most of them Jews. By the time the Second World War broke out, its population was 2,500, of whom over half were Jewish. On market day, the square would have been crammed with the stalls of Jewish tradesmen.
On the day I visited in early September there was just one dreary second-hand clothes shop in evidence. Its sign optimistically promised "western fashion", but there is not much passing trade on these near-deserted streets. It had closed before I left.
"The Jewish shtetls used to be noisy, crowded places before the war," says Pawlowski who comes from nearby Tykocin, a town whose Jews were buried alive a month after Jedwabne's were burned. "Now they are silent. It is the silence of a cemetery."
On that hot summer day in July 1941, the people of Jedwabne ripped out the heart of their own town, and the place has been dying ever since.
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Post by Bonobo on Nov 22, 2009 16:26:40 GMT 1
Interview: Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael SchudrichBy Martin Bright
Jewish Chronicle
November 5, 2009
The rabbi at the centre of the row over the Conservative Party's alliance with the controversial Polish MEP Michal Kaminski has issued a fierce condemnation of the MEP's refusal to support an official apology for Polish involvement in the notorious wartime Jedwabne massacre of Jews.
However, Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, confirmed that Mr Kaminski had been a staunch supporter of Israel in recent years and had spoken out against antisemitism in the Polish parliament.
In 2001, Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski apologised for the massacre of as many as 400 Jews at Jedwabne in north eastern Poland. But Mr Kaminski has consistently argued that the atrocity is not something for which the whole Polish people should be held responsible.
"Mr Kaminski did not deny what happened at Jedwabne," said Rabbi Schudrich. "He was opposing the apology that was made by President Kwasniewski. It is a position that I completely disagree with. I find his opposition distasteful and wrong."
He added: "In recent years it is the case that he has been a strong supporter of Israel. His reception by Israeli diplomats in Britain and his reception when he was in Israel a short while ago [demonstrates this]. And I also know from friends in the Polish parliament that Mr Kaminski has spoken out against antisemitism in recent years."
In his first British newspaper interview on the matter, Chief Rabbi Schudrich said he could not say if Mr Kaminski was antisemitic. "I can't judge what is in a person's heart. All I can do is look at what Mr Kaminski said on this or that occasion. People can make their own judgment."
He said it was not possible to dismiss the past political history of the Polish MEP, who leads the new European Conservatives and Reformists bloc in the European Parliament. His membership of the extremist party National Revival of Poland (NOP) could not easily be shrugged aside.
"Is it true that Mr Kaminski joined the NOP, which is clearly a nasty, fascist-leaning, antisemitic party, when he was a teenager? Yes. From what I have read he quit the party when he was 17 or 18 years old. It's something we need to remember. But we shouldn't define a man who is 37 years old by only what he did 20 years ago."
The American-born rabbi has worked in Poland for 17 of the last 19 years. He said he had been surprised suddenly to find himself at the centre of a political storm in Britain. Both Conservative and Labour politicians have used Rabbi Schudrich's comments to back their side of the argument. He said he was grateful for the opportunity to clarify his comments to the JC.
"I really know very little about British politics and I have no desire to know any more," he said. "As a rabbi, I have an obligation to stay out of politics. My responsibility is to represent my community to the government of my country and to other Jewish communities around the world."
He was concerned that the Kaminski affair perpetuated the idea that Poland was an antisemitic country. He said that since the fall of Communism, thousands of Poles had rediscovered their Jewish roots, something their parents and grandparents had hidden from them during the Communist years.
"That is the story of Polish Jews today. When Jews around the world discuss Poland, they have an obligation not only to remember the past, but also the work being done to bring as many Jews here in Poland back to the Jewish people. This is our real challenge."
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To: Editor, Am-Pol Eagle, Cheektowaga/ Buffalo, NY
Re: Biased journalism the norm in Polonia
Dear Editor, In his "Polish News Bytes" column (Am-Pol Eagle, 11/05/09), right-wing "Warsaw Correspondent, " Rob Strybel, writes that "Liberals and leftists regularly vilify (Father Tadeusz) Rydzyk who is not afraid to criticize Jewish attempts to extort restitution payments from Poland."
Strybel's use of the word, "extort," is but another example of his extremely biased attitude towards Jews. Poland is one of the last nations yet to enact restitution legislation for private property seized by the Nazis and Soviets, whether owned by Jews or non-Jews. Poland is under tremendous international pressure to pass such a law and it will most assuredly do so in the near future despite the protests of Rydzyk and Strybel.
Strybel continues in his column with a brief report on "Hitler's Daughter," a documentary- in-progress, which focuses on the anti-Semitic character of Rydzyk and Radio Maryja. Strybel states that "someone using the name of Aro Korol" is producing the documentary to "attack" Rydzyk and the radio station.
Strybel's description of the documentary' s producer as "someone using the name of Aro Korol," is a disambiguous attempt at slander. Is Strybel inferring Arol Karol is not the real name of the producer? This is sensationalistic, yellow-journalism at its worst.
Strybel continues by saying that while the film blames Rydzek "for an increase in anti-Semitism in Poland" in "actuality, anti-Semitic feelings have dropped significantly over the 18 years the station has been in existence."
What? This statement, an attempt to create some kind of correlation in the reader's mind between the drop in anti-Semitism in Poland and Radio Maryja, is ridiculous beyond description. How could a responsible editor consciously make a decision to print such a ludicrous statement? Anti-Semitism has thankfully declined in Poland in spite of the broadcasts of Radio Maryja, a sounding board for Polish ultra-nationalism and conservative Catholicism.
Thankfully, the majority of the Polish people do not support Tadeusz Rydzyk. Polish Primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, a conservative himself, has come out in opposition to to the controversial priest. 700 Polish Catholic clergy and intellectuals have signed a petition condemning Rydzyk. Even the Vatican has gotten involved and voiced serious concerns about Radio Maryja.
The decision by Polonia's editors to continue to circulate Strybel's biased and irresponsible remarks is a sad commentary on the overwhelmingly conservative mindset of American Polonia.
Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski' s statement regarding old-line, Polish American Congress ex-President, Edward Moskol, also fits Father Rydzyk, Robert Strybel, and Polonia's editors perfectly, "I expect that Edward Moskal and his collaborators stop making statements which strengthen the world-wide worst stereotype of Poland and Poles."
Sincerely,
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Post by valpomike on Nov 28, 2009 3:17:37 GMT 1
This is a good thing, I think, is it not?
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 9, 2009 19:14:10 GMT 1
Israel didn't want sick, handicapped Poles
09.12.2009 16:19
Israeli authorities tried to prevent handicapped and sick Polish Jews from immigrating to Israel, the Haaretz daily reports.
The Israeli newspaper quotes a letter sent in 1958 by the then-foreign minister of Israel Golda Meir to Israel’s ambassador to Poland Katriel Katz: "A proposal was raised in the coordination committee to inform the Polish government that we want to institute selection in aliyah, because we cannot continue accepting sick and handicapped people. Please give your opinion as to whether this can be explained to the Poles without hurting immigration,” reads a document published in Haaretz.
The letter was written during the second wave of Jewish immigration from Poland to Israel from 1956 to 1958, which comprised 40,000 Jews, mainly survivors of the Holocaust. During the first wave of immigration in 1950, Poland did not allow Jewish professionals, such as engineers or doctors to immigrate, claiming that their presence was essential to Polish economy and society.
“After 1956, immigration restrictions in Poland were abolished, and Poland certainly did not intentionally send handicapped and aged people to Israel,” Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, a Polish historian from the University of Warsaw who uncovered the letter, told the Israeli newspaper.
Prof. Rudnicki said that the letter revealing Israel’s plan to impose a selection process on Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, leaving Poland came as a surprise to scholars. Prof. Rudnicki, quoted in the daily, called the document “cynical” and, in his opinion, it shows that Golda Meir was a brutal politicians who cared more about interests than people.
No official Polish response to Meir’s request about selection has ever been found.
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 9, 2009 19:17:35 GMT 1
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Post by tufta on Dec 11, 2009 11:39:53 GMT 1
Poles did not turn on Jews
Today, we know many events denying the myth we, in the West believed for so many years - that szmalcowniks gave away the Jews and the rest of Polish society was indifferent -says the British historian of Jewsih origin, David Cesarini.
the whole interview is unfortunately just for the Polish language reading part of our community... - www.rp.pl/artykul/403210_Cesarani__Polacy_nie_odwrocili_sie_od_Zydow.html My comment - Cesarini is right about the stereotype, but he is wrong about one thing. The stereotype was repeated not just in the West. It was so deeply imbedded, and repeated by part of Jewish diaspora, mostly former communists helping the Soviets to enslave Poland who fled to the West, that it permeated even to Poland. As a result even some bright Poles started to believe it.
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 11, 2009 23:42:17 GMT 1
My comment - Cesarini is right about the stereotype, but he is wrong about one thing. The stereotype was repeated not just in the West. It was so deeply imbedded, and repeated by part of Jewish diaspora, mostly former communists helping the Soviets to enslave Poland who fled to the West, that it permeated even to Poland. As a result even some bright Poles started to believe it. I can detect an allusion here. ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D I read the article. Cesarani is really mild on us, Poles. He seems to be fascinated with the Polishness like another British writer - Norman Davis, that is why he defends Poles. Has Cesarini heard about Davis` popularity in Poland and, coveting it, desires to achieve a similar status? Of a British historian acclaimed in Poland? I am afraid it is the matter in this case. Tufta, I am too bright and too well-read to believe him. ;D ;D ;D ;D What is more, I am a Pole who knows my compatriots so well...... unfortunately......  Just look at the photo of a Jewish cemetery above. |
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Post by tufta on Dec 12, 2009 11:16:25 GMT 1
You detect an allusion becasue you are bright ;D [ Tufta, I am too bright and too well-read to believe him. ;D ;D ;D ;D Well, I am glad to be not so bright and well-read ;D To me he just confirmes what is and was already well-known. But, if yooy hypothesis that speaking the truth about Poland and Poles is a good way to intenationalization of scientific carieree, than we would at least agree on one --- it's great! ;D |
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Post by Bonobo on Jan 26, 2010 13:40:30 GMT 1
Bonobo, I heard that the Jewish community is growing since some Polish Catholics found out that they are jews since their parents hid their identity during communism for their own safety. They pretended to be Roman Catholics, even raising their kids that way! Pieter
Polish woman's Jewish "shock"
Next week, John Demjanjuk will stand trial in Germany accused of helping to murder more than 27,000 Jews at the Sobibor death camp, built by the Nazis in Poland. The BBC's Steve Rosenberg travelled to Poland to meet a woman who only recently discovered she, herself, was Jewish and that her family had been killed in one such camp.
BBC News
11/26/09
Bogomila always suspected that her mother had a secret.
"She always looked frightened," Bogomila tells me. "My husband used to say, "Your mother is afraid of her own shadow."
This summer, her 67-year-old mother Barbara finally revealed her secret. She is a Jewish child of the Holocaust. Suddenly, at the age of 37, Bogomila realised she was Jewish, too.
I'm sitting with Barbara and Bogomila in the Jewish community centre in Lublin. Before World War II, more than 40,000 Jews lived in this city. The Holocaust changed everything.
"My whole family was killed by the Nazis," Barbara says.
"I survived because a Polish family agreed to hide me. When I was growing up I realised the Polish 'mother' couldn't be my real mother, she was too old. When I was 12 she told me the truth."
I ask Barbara why she had waited so many years before telling Bogomila and her other two daughters of their Jewish heritage.
"My husband is Catholic," Barbara says, "He didn't want the girls to know. His own family didn't like Jews. He didn't want the girls to have problems. I'd had problems when I was small. In school the other children used to make fun of me. They used to pull my curly hair to try to make it straight. I was made to feel different."
Today Jews in Poland continue to suffer abuse.
I wouldn't call it anti-semitism, " says the President of the Union of Jewish communities of Poland Piotr Kadlcik. "It's more a broad dislike of Jews. What's worrying is a certain level of leniency of the prosecutor's office in relation to hate crimes, Nazi salutes and the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries."
"Very happy"
Barbara admits that she never planned to reveal her secret. It was Bogomila's persistent questioning about the past that forced her to change her mind.
Her daughter had been bombarding her with questions about her ancestors, desperate to discover more about her family.
After the initial shock of discovering she was Jewish, Bogomila says she is "very happy" with her new identity. She has even signed up for a course of Jewish studies in Lublin.
She attends the small Sabbath meal here in the community centre. And she recently visited the Nazi death camp Sobibor, where a quarter of a million Jews were murdered in the gas chambers.
I ask Bogomila if she has told her own children the news.
"I would like to tell them," she says, "but they are so small. Agatha is 10, Christopher is six and Julia is five."
"Are they really too young to be told?" I ask
"If I tell them, then my oldest child, Agatha, will probably go and tell her other grandmother - my mother-in-law, " Bogomila explains.
"And my mother-in-law doesn't like Jews. As for my husband's grandmother, she hates Jews."
==============================================
WWII survivor seeing Polish rescuer after 65 years
ULA ILNYTZKY
The Associated Press
11/25/09
NEW YORK - A Holocaust survivor and the Polish Christian who risked his life to save him are especially grateful this Thanksgiving season: The two men will be reunited for the first time in 65 years.
Joseph Bonder, 81, was going to John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday afternoon to welcome Bronislaw Firuta, 83, from Wroclaw, Poland.
The two men haven't seen each other since the Soviet Army liberated Ostra Mogila, Poland, in 1944, although they have been in touch by phone and letters since the 1950s.
Firuta was 15 when he and his family helped hide 13-year-old Bonder and his 18-year-old sister, Joan, for three years as the Nazis searched for Jews in the town. The two families knew each through Joan, a teacher who had Firuta as a student.
"I'm very excited to see him after all these years," Bonder said in a telephone interview from his home in Monroe Township, N.J., hours before Firuta arrived.
In late summer of 1941, the Bonder family was living in a Jewish ghetto when Bonder's father sent the two children to stay with the Firutas, who lived about 1 1/2 hours away. Bonder's parents did not survive World War II.
The Firutas harbored the two teenagers in a barn loft and hay shed attic and later, when it became too dangerous, in woods behind their home.
"They would come about once a day to bring us food. They would put it in a bucket as if they were feeding the animals," in case authorities arrived, Bonder said.
If they were found out, Bonder said, the Firutas could use the excuse that the barn was an open structure that anyone could enter.
It wasn't easy hiding, Bonder said. The teenagers had no games or books and spent much of their time lying around.
There were two close calls when local police came searching, but the teenagers were never caught.
"Someone would come and tell us and we would run," he said. "Everything was luck. Not everybody hits the lottery. So we were lucky."
That first winter, the two teens stayed with different Christian families, but never more than a day or two so as not to jeopardize their safety.
In the spring and for the next year and a half, they sought shelter during the day deep in the woods behind the Firutas' home and at night in their barn or shed.
"We had no radio, so we came at night to stay with them to get the news of the world," Bonder said.
During the summer, they stayed in tents in the woods with a small group of other Jews. In the winter, they lived in underground bunkers that they dug.
But there were no luxuries, not even blankets. "If you had a few burlap bags, you were lucky," Bonder said.
Bonder and Firuta led busy lives and money concerns have kept them from meeting before now. Joan Bonder died 11 years ago.
Joseph Bonder hopes the reunion will make up for the long absence. Firuta will be a guest in Bonder's home for two weeks, and he hopes to show him tourist sites in New York City.
Firuta lost his wife about two months ago, and a fire damaged his house a few weeks after that.
"I'll try to entertain him as much as possible, but I don't think he's feeling so good. We'll do as much as he can do," Bonder said.
The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, which finds and honors non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews, paid for their reunion.
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Post by Bonobo on Feb 2, 2010 22:34:51 GMT 1
Polish bishop apologizes for Holocaust interview
02.02.2010 13:29
Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek has apologized to the Italian Catholic web site Pontifex.com for having accused it of misquoting him saying that the Holocaust was a “Jewish invention”.
“I was wrong to suggest that the interview which I gave to Mr. Bruno Volpe for Pontifex.com [published on 25 January] was misquoted by him," wrote one of Poland’s most prominent religious figures. Bishop Pieronek explained that he accused the Italian journalist of having manipulated his remarks before actually checking the interview on Pontifex.com.
The Polish bishop admitted that in the interview for the Italian web site - which caused outrage among some in Israel and the wider Jewish community - he did say that the “Shoah was a Jewish invention,”and that his choice of words was very unfortunate. But they doe not represent his views on Holocaust, he said.
“What I meant was that the word “Shoah" was a Jewish invention used by a renowned American-Jewish writer and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel. Holocaust, a horrendous genocide, was, in fact, invented and carried out by the Nazi Germany," wrote the bishop.
Pieronek also apologized to Pontifex.com. “I apologize to Mr. Volpe and everyone who felt offended by my unintentionally misfortunate statement. I had no intention to falsify history or accuse anyone of ill will.”
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I was misquoted, says bishop
26.01.2010 11:42
As many as three newspapers carry interviews with Polish Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek after remarks he made in an interview with an Italian Catholic web site which said that the suffering of the Holocaust had been monopolized by Jews and was be4ing used for propaganda purposes by Israel in its conflict with Palestinians.
In an interview with RZECZPOSPOLITA, Bishop Pieronek reiterates what he said to TVP television yesterday that he was misquoted as saying that the Holocaust was a Jewish invention, but he stresses that talking of the Shoah in the context of the murder of Jews alone is historical manipulation. He also told RZECZPOSPOLITA that the Holocaust has become an idea whose aim is to unite Jewish communities around the world. “It is a Jewish weapon.. They have the right to use it. But we have the right to talk about it,” Bishop Pieronek said.
Pieronek said that he had not been contacted by the web site for his quotes to be authorized, perhaps believing that Italy had a “Press law” equivilant to Poland’s, where Article 14 says that, if so wished, the journalist must OK quotes with the interviewee before publication.
In its editorial comment, GAZETA WYBORCZA writes that contrary to what the bishop claims nobody denies that Poles were among the victims of Auschwitz. “It has to be remembered, however, that the crematoria there were invented to annihilate the Jewish nation’, the daily says. According to the paper, the accumulation of so many controversial views has created a false picture of a bishop using anti-Semitic stereotypes.
.DZIENNIK looks with much concern at the results of the latest Eurobarometer public opinion survey which says that as many as 69 percent of Poles think that Poland is less successful in coping with the global economic crisis than the other EU countries. In a situation in which Poland is the only EU state which avoided recession last year this is a highly surprising result. According to DZIENNIK, social sentiments are crucial for the country’s return on the path of brisk economic growth. The mood of pessimism among consumers is bound to translate into a drop in investments and spending, and a reluctance to take credits.
The daily also stresses that only 13 percent of Poles hope that the present government is able to offer a successful economic programme. A prominent analyst interviewed by DZIENNIK says that it is natural that the Polish man-in-the-street does not care about a fall in living standards in Germany or France. What he is interested in is his own situation and the still existing huge gap between Poland and Western Europe, with the average wage in Germany being twice as high as in Poland.
Comments:
# 26.01.2010 17:44 An anti-Semitic bishop spreads his vitriole, then like a cockroach out of the woodwork comes a holocaust denier too cowardly to use his real name ...Kafka could have written this short story... Sandy
# Rob 26.01.2010 19:30 The bishop said what everyone knows but is afraid to say. Rob
# Martin Kimel 26.01.2010 19:33 Yes, it's sad to still see such anti-Semitism in the Polish church.
As for the Holocaust deniers, where do they think the millions of Jews in preWar Poland went? Or do they think that that too was a Jewish invention? It's not worth time or effort debating such morons. Martin Kimel
# John 26.01.2010 21:43 5,8 millions Polish citizens died during the Holocaust. Of them: 3,0 million Jews (10% of the total population before the war or 3,3 millions), 2,4 million ethnic Poles (before the war counting some 30 millions or 85% of the total population), 400.000 people of other ethnicities, mostly Ukrainains and Belorussians (I don't find any reliable source counting their pre-war population).
Total 6 million Jews were murdered systematically by Nazis, 3 mil Polish and/or Soviet Jews, and 3 mil other Jews of different nationalities such as Hungarian, German, Czech, Austrian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian, French, Yugoslavian etc.
So denying that the holocaust was not aimed systematically against Jews is a very harsh falsification of the truth. If we want to live in a human society based of mutal respect and to try to acknowlegde the dark past in order to make a butter future for the global community and at least try to learn something from this all, this misconception from the behalf of Father Tadeusz Pioronek, is not a good example how to do it. However, it is not the worth the debate to listen to person like this, and the media should give this man attention, because it seems that he is not making things better. John
# Rob 26.01.2010 22:00 Nowhere is the bishop denying the holocaust. On the contrary, he points out the denial of the great holocaust suffered also by the Polish nation. That the gallant fight of his nation against totalitarianism, and their unspeakable sufferings under the German and Soviet occupations are being constantly and purposefully undervalued, belittled, ridiculed and denied. The true history of Poland between 1939 and 1989 is being greatly obscured, twisted and manipulated. Many crimes and genocide against the ethnic Poles remain conveniently hidden, unrecognized and unpunished. This seems to be the bishop’s real message, and in this he is correct. Rob
# Leszek 26.01.2010 23:17 Interestingly, Santomauro is correct about no documents signed by Hitler for the Final Solution. Then again, the way Hitler ran his group was to allow them to come up with ideas. This made people try to up the extremity of action to get noticed by Hitler. It was an exceptionally divisive way of leading, causing cliques within the ruling group. It also allowed Hitler to stop opposition to his policies. He often left the signing of plans/documents etc to others. Then again, seeing that he slept much of the day and had intimate dinners much of the night didn't leave much time for such mundane things as running a country.
We don't have the documents. Simple. That doesn't mean the documents never existed nor that there was no plan. Logical error, Mr Santomauro. You'll have to do better than that. Leszek
# Aaron 26.01.2010 23:19 Rob, I'm still waiting for one of you anti-Semitic germs to explain to me why a CATHOLIC WEB PORTAL would misquote this bishop. What exactly would their motive be, genius? Come on, dazzle us with some logic :-) Aaron
# Aaron 26.01.2010 23:21 Leszek, you couldn't be more correct. There is no single Nazi document that expressly enumerates a "master plan" for the annihilation of European Jewry. Holocaust-denial propagandists misrepresent this fact as an exposure of the Holocaust "hoax"; in doing so, they reveal a fundamentally misleading approach to the history of the era. That there was no single document does not mean there was no plan. The "Final Solution" was, as the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust observes, "the culmination of a long evolution of Nazi Jewish policy." The destruction process was shaped gradually and borne of many thousands of directives. Aaron
# Aaron 26.01.2010 23:22 PS. Rob, I'm not being condescending to you, I'm smarter than you. There's a difference. Aaron
# Rob 27.01.2010 00:35 Aaron, but why is talking about the enormous suffering of the Poles anti-Semitic? Are their lifes of a lesser value to you? Did they not oppose Hitler on practically all fronts of Europe? Did tens of thousands of them not die trying to save the Jews, while in peril themselves? Or is this truth now forbidden?
Finally, try refrain from name calling if you can.
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Post by Bonobo on Mar 14, 2010 10:14:33 GMT 1
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Post by valpomike on Mar 14, 2010 21:49:01 GMT 1
Are these the youth of Poland today? Catch them and make them do the clean up work, all around the cities.
Parents need teach there children better. I know the schools are doing the best job they can, but teachers can't be parents to all students.
Mike
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Post by valpomike on Mar 18, 2010 17:36:41 GMT 1
Someone, please share you input on this, with us all.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 11, 2010 21:50:56 GMT 1
Catch them and make them do the clean up work, all around the cities. Yes, it is a good idea. Parents prefer to put the burden of rearing their kids on schools. After all, they work hard and don`t have time to look after children. Teachers should and can do it because they are paid for it from parents` taxes. |
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Post by valpomike on Apr 12, 2010 3:39:27 GMT 1
But without the help of good parents, as roil models at home, it makes the teachers job much harder. The parents are to have the most input into their lives. It they can't be a good parent, they should not have children.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 12, 2010 21:21:32 GMT 1
It they can't be a good parent, they should not have children. Mike Parents should pass an exam and psychological tests. But this is science fiction now. Polish s-f writer, Lem, suggested it in his Return from the Stars. |
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Post by valpomike on Apr 14, 2010 14:41:14 GMT 1
If parents can not, or will not lead there own children correct, some one must step in, and if need be, take away the children, and their welfare checks. Make the parents do they job, or loss their income.
Mike
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Post by valpomike on Apr 21, 2010 0:43:13 GMT 1
Those were very bad times for the Jewish of Poland, and we must all remember them, for what they went through.
Mike
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Post by Bonobo on May 26, 2010 19:36:04 GMT 1
US Congress committee calls for more action on property restitution
26.05.2010 11:56
The head of the Helsinki Commission at the United States Congress, Senator Ben Cardin, has criticized Poland for delaying the process of dealing with the restitution of Jewish property confiscated during and after WW II.
Representative of the Obama administration, Stuart Eizenstat also expressed hope that the problem will be solved soon.
Speaking during the session of the Helsinki Commission in Washington, Senator Ben Cardin indicated Poland and Lithuania as the two countries which have done least to solve the problem.
“Successive Polish governments promised that the issue of compensation will be dealt with. None has done anything about it,” he said.
In March 2001, the Polish parliament approved a law for the restitution of private property, though the right to file a claim was limited to those with Polish citizenship as of December 31, 1999. The law was subsequently vetoed by the President of Poland. The Terezin Declaration, a nonbinding set of guiding principles aimed at faster, more open and transparent restitution of art, private and communal property taken by force or under duress during the Holocaust, was approved at the Prague Holocaust Era Assets Conference in June last year. Poland was a signature to the non-binding agreement.
Senator Cardin added he was aware that due to the relocation of borders and massive resettlements of people following the war, property restitution in Poland is a complicated issue. “Solving of the problem is difficult but not impossible” he added.
Former US Ambassador to the EU Stuart Eizenstat, the country’s delegate to the Prague Conference on the return of assets looted during World War Two also addressed the Commission, Tuesday. He said that the reprivatization law currently being prepared in Poland is defective as it does not include the restitution of properties located in Warsaw.
Poles themselves were the victims of Nazism and communism so the restitution issue is difficult, he remarked, at the same time expressing hope that the legislative work will be corrected. Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced back in 2008 that legislation which aimed to tackle the issue had been prepared but the global finance crisis meant that plans had to be shelved due to increasing public debt.
“The escalation of demands does not help in the creation of a political climate needed to pass an anti-discrimination, re-privatisation law,” declared Poland’s Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, commenting last year on the appeal from Jewish organizations for the return property confiscated under Nazi occupation in Poland from heirless victims during the Holocaust.www.thenews.pl/international/artykul132334_us-congress-committee-calls-for-more-action-on-property-restitution.html
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Post by pjotr on Sept 25, 2010 23:47:41 GMT 1
On December 6th , 1942 in the village of Stary Ciepielów in the South-Eastern part of Mazovia, a family of seven has been burned alive in their wooden house. Their name was Kowalski - father, mother and five children. One of the daughters managed to get out to the yard. She was shot and her corpse was pulled by the plaits back into the burning building. The fate of Kowalski family was as typical for Poles caught helping the Jews in Poland under German occupation 1939-1945, as their name is. In the neighbouring village of Rekówka 6-person family of Obuchowicz, 14 persons of family Kosior, married couple Skoczylas were killed on this day for same reason – helping their Jewish compatriots. In all occupied Poland there are over 1000 well documented murders, actual deaths number much higher. On the 66th anniversary of this tragic events Institute of National Memory introduces an educational project for teachers of all schools in Poland. The project is entitled 'Poles saving Jews during World War II' The project includes edition of a folder package for familiarization of the pupils, including means enabling fact-finding, innovatory lesson scenarios, old photos, realtions of the witness and other source materials. The pupils will learn about the best known histories of Irena Sendler or Henryk Sławik as well as about other Poles involved in an honoured for helping the compatriots of Jewish faith. They will study the motives and ways of operation in the situation when Germans introduced the punishment of death for helping the Jews. It is estimated that over 1 million of Poles were directly involved in the system of assistance. Internet portal www.zyciezazycie.pl. is an element of the project, which also includes billboards, posters, documentary films and TV spots. . But it didn`t excuse Poles who preferred to stay aside. If there were millions of helpers, the Nazi wouldn`t be able to kill all. Bonobo, I don't agree with you. Although there was a lot of collaboration with the Nazi's in the Netherlands, like in Poland many religious and non-religious people (secular liberals and socialists) helped the jews too. People who helped to hide jews in their house or by giving them food and false identity papers, were arrested by the Gestapo or SD, and interrogated, tortured and often executed. A lot of them were send to concentration camps in Germany, Austria, Poland and in the Netherlands. A lot of Dutch resistance fighters and Catholics and Protestants who helped hide jews and British pilots died in the Nazi concentration camps, in the Dunes of Scheveningen where they were executed or from tortures in their prison cells. High Jewish death tollOf the 140,000 Jews that had lived in the Netherlands prior to 1940, only 30,000 survived the war. This high death toll had a number of reasons. One was the excellent state of Dutch civil records: the Dutch state, prior to the war, had recorded substantial information on every Dutch national. This allowed the Nazi regime to easily determine who was Jewish (whether fully or partly of Jewish ancestry) simply by accessing the data. Another factor was the disbelief of both the Dutch public as a whole and the Dutch Jews themselves. Most could not believe that the Jews would be subjected to genocide and sent to death camps. This meant the Jews needed to hide in others’ homes, but that was difficult especially in urban areas. It was also punishable by death. Despite the risks, many Dutch people helped Jews. One-third of the people who hid Jews did not survive the war. German occupation of the NetherlandsGleichschaltungFollowing the refusal of the Dutch government to return, the Netherlands was controlled by a German civilian governor—unlike France and Denmark, which had their own governments, or Belgium, which was placed under German military control. The civil government was headed by the Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart. The German occupiers implemented a policy of Gleichschaltung (“enforced conformity”), which was characterized by the systematic elimination of non-Nazi organizations. In 1940, the German regime more or less immediately outlawed all socialist and communist parties; in 1941, it forbade all parties, except for the National Socialist NSB. This second step was an enormous shock to the religious parts of the Dutch society because of decades of pillarisation, which meant that nearly every religious group (for example Catholics and Protestants) had its own institutions. The Roman Catholic Church fiercely opposed the second step and in 1941 all Roman Catholics were urged by Dutch bishops to leave associations that had been Nazified. Position of the Dutch within the Nazi ideologyAnother aim of the German occupiers was to dissolve the Dutch nation and make it part of a greater Germanic, or Aryan, one. The German officials, including those of the SS, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Adolf Hitler himself regarded the Dutch as part of the Aryan Herrenvolk. Persecution of JewsShortly after it was established, the military regime began to persecute the Jews of the Netherlands. In 1940, there were no deportations and only small measures were taken against the Jews. In February 1941, the Nazis deported a small group of Dutch Jews to the concentration camp Mauthausen. The Dutch reacted with the February strike as a nationwide protest against the deportations, unique in the history of Nazi-occupied Europe. Although the strike did not accomplish much—its leaders were executed—it was a major setback for Seyss-Inquart as he had planned to both deport the Jews and to win the Dutch over to the Nazi cause. As a reaction to the February strike, the Nazis installed that same month a Jewish Council: a board of Jews, headed by Professor David Cohen and Abraham Asscher, who served as an instrument for organising the identification and deportation of Jews more efficiently, while the Jews on the council were told and convinced they were helping the Jews. In May 1942, the Nazi leaders ordered Dutch Jews to wear the Star of David. Around the same time the Roman Catholic Church of the Netherlands publicly condemned the government’s action in a letter read at all Sunday parish services. Thereafter, the Nazi government treated the Dutch more harshly: notable socialists were imprisoned, and, later in the war, Roman Catholic priests, including Titus Brandsma, were deported to concentration camps. In 1942, a transit camp was built near Westerbork by converting an existing internment camp for immigrants; at Vught and Amersfoort the Germans built concentration camps as well. Dutch Nazi's, WA men from the Dutch Nazi party NSB insult, humiliated and terrorize the Jewish neighbourhoud. And that causes the grief and anger of the Jews who live their and their non-Jewish Dutch compatriots. Often Socialist and Communist Amsterdam workers. In 1941 Jews and non-jewish leftist workers who tried to protect the Jewish corner clashed with the Dutch SA, the WA, which lead to the death of W.A.-man A. Koot, and that was cause of the first large Nazi progrom against the Jews of Amsterdam. The anti-fascist sing an insulting anti-Nazi song. The owner of the Ice shop is a melancholic German jew from Berlin who escaped to Holland. The Dutch Nazi guy calls the Germans that the WA had been attacked by armed jews with pistols - he lies ofcourse -. These cowardly vicious traitors were hated by the Dutch. And after the war someone who has a bad reputation or is unreliable and mean could be called a NSB person.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_strikeThe ceremony in Amsterdam to commemorate the Februari strikeAbout the Roman Catholic priest Titus Brandsmaen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_BrandsmaBonobo, What I do think however is that the Nazi's behaved themselves more badly and brutal against the Poles then the Dutch, because the Dutch were seen as Aryan brethern who were considered to be very close to the Germans while the Poles were seen as the Germans as Slav ' Untermenschen', people who had to disappear after the Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians and other undesirables would be eliminated. The Dutch would be resettled to Poland and Ukraine after the elimination of the Poles, Ukranians and Russians. The Germans then would settle in Holland what would then be part of Germany. They probably wanted to do the same with the Danes. When the Germans entered Poland they immediately commited war crimes towards both the Poles and the jews in Poland. They started to eliminate the Polish elite Bonobo. People like you, teachers, professors, intellectuals, artists, writers, journalists and academics. That was the differance with the Netherlands. In the Netherlands in the first half of the war the elite was left alone. Only later the Germans arrested the top of the Dutch elite and emprisoned them to use them as scape goats in the case the Dutch resistance murdered German Nazi officials like SS-leaders, Gestapo or SD men, Wehrmacht solidiers or officers or the Dutch Nazi henchmen of the Germans. Later in the war the Germans got disappointed in the Dutch, because the Germans had thought that we (Dutch) as fellow Western-Germanic ' Aryans' would support the Nazi cause en masse. Unfortunately for them only a small minority really supported them actively, and the Dutch slowed down their war Industry. From the other side a lot of Dutch Industrialists, companies and profiteers profited from the war, because their lucrative assignments and jobs for the occupiers. The Dutch Hitler Jugende, The Jeugd Storm (Youth Storm) Para militairy party militia of the Dutch Nazi party NSBWA men joyn the German Nazi's at the Eastern frontWaffen SS Dutch Volunteers( P.S.- I don't agree with the comments of the Dutch guys texts in the video.
I think he is a Pro Dutch-Nazi person.) |
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Post by pjotr on Sept 27, 2010 17:40:56 GMT 1
A lot of Dutch and German jews have Polish roots. Also a lot of Israeli, American and South-African
jews have Polish (Jewish) roots.
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Post by Bonobo on Dec 30, 2010 10:16:49 GMT 1
A new discussion on Polish complicity in Holocaust is going to start very soon because Jan Gross is publishing his new book next year. It is called Golded Harvest and describes how Poles looked for Jewish gold in the former death camp in Treblinka.
Description
It seems at first commonplace: a photograph of peasants at harvest time, after work well done, resting contentedly with their tools, behind the fruits of their labor. But when one finally notices that what seemed innocent on first view becomes horrific: the crops scattered in front of the group are skulls and bones. Where are we? Who are the people in the photograph, and what are they doing?
The starting point of Jan Gross's A Golden Harvest , this haunting photograph in fact depicts a group of peasants--"diggers" atop a mountain of ashes at Treblinka, where some 800,000 Jews were gassed and cremated. The diggers are hoping to find gold and precious stones that Nazi executioners may have overlooked. The story captured in this grainy black-and-white photograph symbolizes the vast, continent-wide plunder of Jewish wealth.
The seizure of Jewish assets during World War II occasionally generates widespread attention when Swiss banks are challenged to produce lists of dormant accounts, or national museums are forced to return stolen paintings. The theft of this wealth was not limited to conquering armies, leading banks, and museums, but to local populations such as those pictured in the photograph. Based upon a simple group shot, this moving book evokes the depth and range, as well as the intimacy, of the final solution.  holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.com/2008/03/gold-rush-in-treblinka.htmlNearly 2 years ago I made this post which, among others, contains a description of the robbery of Jewish property by Polish peasants. Those things have been known to historians and specialists: some Poles took part in robbing or in another way acquired the property which belonged to murdered Jews. One of the most sickening reports about Polish participation in Holocaust that I found comes from the diary of doctor Klukowski, born to a landlord`s family with strong Polish traditions (don`t be misled by his appearance - he wasn`t Jewish) ![]() m.onet.pl/_m/e2680ce306c9c00aa66a2af0e5b126d7,5,8.jpg klukowski.webpark.pl/foto/z_klukowski.jpgklukowski.webpark.pl/foto/z_klukowski02.jpgklukowski.webpark.pl/foto/zdjecie_0003.jpgDuring the war he was a director of the local hospital in Szczebrzeszyn in eastern Poland, a member of the underground Home Army, a doctor of partisan units from the area (he treated partisans in his hospital). After the war he testified at Nurenberg trials. Later he was persecuted by communists, spent a few years in prison. His son was arrested, tried and sentenced to death for underground activity against the new system. A man of great merits. He witnessed the Holocaust in his town and described it in his diary. www.geocities.com/shebreshin/extermination.html"Diary from the Years of Occupation 1939-1944" Excerpts October 22, 1942 The action against Jews continues. The only difference is that the SS has moved out and the job is now in the hands of our own local gendarmes and the "blue police". They received orders to kill all the Jews, and they are obeying them.
In town some Jewish houses were sealed by the gendarmes, but others were left completly open, so robberies took place. It is a shame to say it but some Polish people took part in that crime. Some people even helped the gendarmes look for hidden Jews.
October 23, 1942
................. While I was gone, the gestapo, local gendarmes, "blue police", and some street people in Szczebrzeszyn again started the hunt for Jews. Particulary active was Matysiak, a policeman from Sulow, and Skorzak, a city janitor. Skorzak had no gun, only an ax, and with the ax he killed several Jews. The whole day people hunted and killed Jews, while others brought corps to the cemetery for burial.
October 24, 1942
In Szczebrzeszyn the hunt for Jews is still on. Additional gestapo agents came from Bilgoraj. With the help of gendarmes, "blue police", and some citizens they looked everywhere for Jews. All cellars, attics, and barns were searched. Most Jews were killed on the spot, but some were taken to the Jewish cemetery for public execution.
I witnessed a group of Jews being forced to march to the cemetery. On both sides of the prisoners marched gendarmes, "blue police", and so-called Polish guards dressed in black uniforms. To speed things up Jews were beaten on their heads and backs with wooden sticks. This was a terrible picture.
Among the bandits (partisans) are many Jews. The peasants, for fear of repressive measures, catch Jews in the villages and bring them into town, or sometimes simply kill them on the spot. Generally, a strange brutalization his taken place regarding the Jews. People have fallen into a kind of psychosis: following the German example, they often do not see in the Jew a human being but instead consider him a kind of obnoxious animal that must be annihilated with every possible means like rabid dogs, rats, etc.
I witnessed how Jews were removed from a hiding place in the rope maker Dym's house. I counted approximately fifty Jews as they were taken to the jail. A crowd looked on, laughing and even beating the Jews; others searched homes for more victims. (...) What happened to dr Bolotny I do not know. Dentist Bronsztajnowa, along with her two young daughters was transported to Belzec. Dr Sztrejcherowa was shot in her own house.
I feel it is correct to give some names of the German gendarmes and members of the "blue police" who were very active in the killing of the Jews. Commandant Frymer, gendarmes Pryczing and Schultz, Polish-speaking gendarmes Mendykowski, Bot, Prestlaw and Syring. "Blue police" - Muranowski, Tatulinski, Hajduczak and Jan Gall. The cruelest of all is Gall, who is even teaching his teenage son how to kill Jews.
All the local scum turned out in the streets of town. Many horse-driven carts from the countryside arrived, and they all waited almost the whole day long for the moment when they could start plundering. News about some Poles behaving shamefully and looting abandoned Jewish flats was heard from different sources. Our locality will not lag behind in this respectPolish press released a few articles about Treblinka diggers. The first one in 1957, the last one in 2008: wyborcza.pl/1,76842,4811664.html?as=2&startsz=x At some point the golden harvest turned into industry and people went to regular work in the fields. Peasants built excellent houses etc with the Jewish gold. |
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Post by Bonobo on Jan 4, 2011 20:39:43 GMT 1
Gross defends ‘Polish gold diggers’ book
04.01.2011 12:04
Controversial historian Jan T. Gross and his wife have defended their latest book which includes a section on ‘Polish gold-diggers’ at the Treblinka Nazi death camp after WW II, in an interview on Polish public TV.
The Princeton-based academic, whose books about Polish-Jewish relations have sparked both acclaim and disdain, spoke in the wake of a press release about his forthcoming book, Golden Harvest.
The historian’s latest volume, which will be in bookshops in Poland early this year and internationally in August, focuses on how Poles profited from Jewish property as a result of the Holocaust. The book begins, say press reports, with a description of how locals from the area around the Treblinka Nazi death camp dug up the bones of dead Jews looking for valuables.
“There are immense matters regarding questions of society and the Jews which are still not known,” Gross told TVP television.
The professor was joined in the TV link-up by his wife and longtime academic partner Irena Grudzinska Gross, herself an associate researcher at Princeton.
During the discussion and after being accused of souring relations between Poles and Jews, Grudzinska-Gross said that prior to the publication of her husband’s first works, “the negative opinion of certain Jewish circles about Poles was a great deal more pronounced than it is now.”
She continued that “Poland is the one country” where open discussion takes place from the sphere of formerly occupied countries where Jews were murdered, adding that “Jewish circles value this.”
Jan Gross noted that Polish historians themselves had done “phenomenal work in this field.”
Historical mist
It has been reflected that Gross’s books caused waves in Poland owing to the fact that during the communist era there was no culture of open historical debate. The regime lumped Jewish victims of the Holocaust as part of the country’s 6 million war dead, with no special emphasis on the fate of the Jewish population.
The communist regime’s reluctance to promote Poland’s Jewish heritage was strengthened in 1968 when the government launched an anti-Zionist campaign in the wake of student riots. Thousands of reformers and those of Jewish decent were compelled to emigrate. Jan Gross, a half-Jewish student, was among them.
Gross’s book Neighbours (2001) focused on the previously little known wartime pogrom of the Jewish inhabitants of the village of Jedwabne in eastern Poland. Gross examined the role of Polish villagers in the mass murders, sparking a heated debate in the country and a formal apology by the then president, Aleksander Kwasniewski..
His next book, Fear (2006), drew back the curtain on the murder of approximately 1000 Jews in Polish localities in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Whilst some academics and newspapers have praised Gross for his unflinching work, others have claimed that his books are sensationalistic and one-sided.
Professor Aleksander Skotnicki, winner of the Karski Nirenska Prize for his work on Polish-Jewish heritage, noted in a recent interview with the Krakow Post that the revelations in Fear, Gross’s last book were “true”, but that his handling of the material did not present “ the whole picture of the situation.
“And if [the book} is the only source of information for a reader about Poland and Jews, then of course, people will say: ‘Ah, everybody was eating Jews for breakfast, lunch and dinner’."
Poland is fighting an ongoing campaign to stop international journalists from referring to “Polish Concentration Camps”, arguing that camps in Nazi-occupied Poland were created by the German regime and invariably housed Polish Catholic inmates alongside Jews, Soviet prisoners-of-war and other victims.
However, Professor Gross argues that the degrees of pre-war and post-war Polish anti-Semitism must not be downplayed with regards to Poland’s legacy as a victim of history.
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Post by tufta on Jan 5, 2011 9:01:28 GMT 1
others have claimed that his books are sensationalistic and one-sided. That's exactly what they are. That is why they raise so many controversies - which is the author's aim to do. Btw. You have placed the story in the wrong thread, it more suits the Polish Jewish good neighbourhood. |
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Post by Bonobo on Jan 5, 2011 22:48:48 GMT 1
others have claimed that his books are sensationalistic and one-sided. That's exactly what they are. That is why they raise so many controversies - which is the author's aim to do. Yes, because only a sensational publication will attract readers, reviewers and media today. They are bitter, indeed, but still talk about true things which have been never or very rarely discussed in Poland. After sensationalist Gross, it will be time to publish serious works. He is paving the way, sort of. Why is that? Do you mean this one sentence? She continued that “Poland is the one country” where open discussion takes place from the sphere of formerly occupied countries where Jews were murdered, adding that “Jewish circles value this.”Sorry, it is not enough. Besides, I have always wanted to tell you that you needn`t have started another thread because my title Polish Jewish troubled neighbourhood comprises both good and bad aspects of the problem. Neighbourhood is positive to me, while troubled is negative. But now it is too late.....  |
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Post by tufta on Jan 6, 2011 13:23:24 GMT 1
After sensationalist Gross, it will be time to publish serious works. He is paving the way, sort of. On the opposite - he is making a sensation out of a well-known facts. You have provided proofs there is nothing new, no new 'historian work' there. And there are more proofs - books, publications by Polish historians. The whole issue is much better researched than for instance American Jews lack of any help to their European kin while Holocaust was still happening. So Gross is making a sensation, and even worse he does it in an unhonest way. |
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Post by Bonobo on Mar 12, 2011 20:45:36 GMT 1
Golden Harvest, a new book by Jan Tomasz Gross, was released in bookstores across Poland today. The event did not go unnoticed, however, and critics are divided on whether it is a positive addition to historical debate or a slander against the Polish nation.
In this audio report, Polish Radio reporter John Beauchamp met with people who either exclaim the book as necessary to provoke debate on Polish history, or who believe it is flawed.
Pawel Lisicki, editor-in-chief of the quality Rzeczpospolita daily, raises questions as to how the book was prepared and what it represents. Lisicki strongly criticises Gross’s methods, going so far as to say that Gross “is trying to change Polish history.”
On the other hand, Dr Edyta Gawron, head of the Department of Jewish Studies at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University believes that Gross’s books, including Golden Harvest, are there to bring the subject out into the open and provoke debate on the subject, which remained taboo in Poland for decades after World War II.
Following on that thought, Piotr Pazinski from the Polish-Jewish Midrasz monthly magazine based in Warsaw told us that “Gross writes about things that everybody knows, almost everybody knows in Poland - at least among the older generation - and almost nobody wants to speak about.”
Golden Harvest was released today, 10 March in Poland, and is expected to be published by Oxford University Press in the USA either at the end of this year or at the beginning of 2012.www.thenews.pl/international/artykul150940_golden-harvest-divides-critics.html
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Post by Bonobo on Mar 28, 2011 0:30:37 GMT 1
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Post by Bonobo on Apr 18, 2011 21:01:13 GMT 1
Weekly accused over “anti-semitic” cover
18.04.2011 14:23
A Polish-language weekly sold in several countries has been accused of anti-semitism after a cover depicted two Orthodox Jews surveying Warsaw, accompanied by the provocative speech bubble: “Son, one day all of this will be yours.”
The article, entitled “What more do we have to give back to the Jews?”, was published in the Angora weekly to tie in with the re-emergence of the debate about compensation to families – of all religious denominations – that lost property under the Nazi and Communist regimes.
Noted human rights group The Association of the Open Republic, which counts former minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski on its board, has lodged an official complaint in the prosecutor's office in Lodz, central Poland, declaring that the publication incites racial hatred.
“It is an outrageous cover,” says Stefan Ciesla, a member of the board of the association, who adds that “it recalls the lowest stereotypes applied by Germany's Nazi Party during the early stages of its existence.”
However, Angora itself is retaining a calm front. Editor-in-chief Pawel Woldan insists that the cover is a “satirical sketch” and is thus “governed by its own rules.”
“I do not understand where this hyper-sensitivity comes from,” he says. “It’s an absurdity.”
“Everyone is accusing us of anti-semitism now,” Woldan continues, “but no one has commented that we have published material in defence of Jews on several occasions.”
However, Pauline Babinski, a noted US lawyer of Polish descent, believes that Angora is not seeing the full picture. “Showing something like this in a country like Poland, where millions of people were killed by Hitler’s men during the Second World War, is simply unbelievable,” she says. 
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Post by Bonobo on May 25, 2011 21:45:00 GMT 1
Israeli legislator lashes out at Holocaust trips25.05.2011
A top Israeli official has submitted a scathing review of the customary school trips to Poland, which he labels as “inadequate” and a form of Holocaust “pornography.”
Micha Lindenstrauss, Israel's State Comptroller, the lynch-pin of the country's legislative governing body (Knesset) also asks - why the school trips to Jewish landmarks and sites of the Holocaust only focus on Poland, and not Germany?
“It was not Poland, the country or its people, who perpetrated the Holocaust, but rather Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Nazi military,” he says in his review.
“Sometimes we miss the target by focusing on Poland."
Likewise, the report questions the wisdom of focusing so rigorously on the death camps, like Auschwitz, themselves.
“Aside from the pornography of evil, they have no educational value. In contrast, survivors' testimonies, thousand-year old Jewish culture... these do have educational value, but no one teaches them.”
According to the report, Israel's educational ministry has ignored complaints from parents and teachers, dismissing notions of forays into Germany, Ukraine or the Czech Republic.
The report also bashes the ministry for not reviewing the results of the trips.
“Since the trips began, the Education Ministry has never bothered to check matters such as their effect on participants, their added value, the extent to which they achieve their goals, whether they alter teens' stances, or the reasons many teens abstain from them."
About 25,000 Israeli schoolchildren take part in the trips each year. Research shows that the participants mainly hail from the more affluent families, creating a further level of exclusion. A trip costs about 4800 zloty (1700 dollars). (nh/pg)
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