Peasants Desecrate Graves For Gold

Gold earrings found in a grave. Source - New York Times. Full Description, below.

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Grave Robbing and Other Stories of Poles’ Complicity is the headline of a Jewish Daily Forward article about Jan Tomasz Gross' new book, "Golden Harvest." Gross is quoted as saying, "The Poles participated in the murder of Jews, and this was done all over the country." The problem with the quote is, of course, the use of "The Poles" rather than "Poles." The quote, as written, implies that Poles, as a group – rather than criminal individuals – are guilty. That Polish identity, not human nature, is the problem.

Not just Poles qua Poles are guilty. Peasants qua peasants are guilty, too – thus the National-Geographic-style photo, above, so often linked with the book. Babushka-wearing, hand-implement-wielding, dirt-encrusted farm laborers may soon be the sartorial and ethnographic other we can blame for the Holocaust. Forget those SS officers, forget their squeaky leather boots, artfully carved daggers, and Hugo-Boss-designed epaulets. Well-educated, modern, Nazis – people just like us – were just innocent bystanders who let the primitive peasants have their way. Certainly, as chapter seven of "Bieganski" describes, that's what the SS officers themselves said, to escape any sense of guilt for the Final Solution.

Since when is dressing well a crime against humanity? Source

Gross hammers the point home: "the crops in front of [the peasants] are not beets or potatoes but skulls and bones." There you have it: Eastern European peasants' staple foods. Beets and potatoes. That's what the orchestrators of the most notorious crime of the Twentieth Century ate. Not steak, not champagne, or even soda pop. Those who carried out the Holocaust were nothing like us. They were primitive, backward, religious. We are modern, clean, educated, secular. People like us could never do anything like this.

As chapter two of "Bieganski" demonstrates, after two of Gross' previous books, "Neighbors" and "Fear" were published, the American mainstream press identified Polish identity as the problem. Poles as Poles were guilty for the Holocaust in a way that no other ethnic group – including Germans – was. The same may happen with "Golden Harvest." Because, after all, no one but Poles could commit crimes so heinous as those Gross describes. It's all about being Polish, being a Polish peasant. It's all about the babushkas, and the potatoes, and the beets.

Is there any other way of looking at Polish peasants who desecrated Jewish graves? A way that helps us to better understand humanity – not just the Poles', but the whole human condition, including our own?

A New York Times article may provide clues. "Ghosts Wail as Cambodians Plunder Killing Field Graves."

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Here the peasants are Buddhist, not Catholic. They are consoled by monks in saffron robes, not priests in earth-toned cassocks. They work, harvest, and eat rice, not potatoes. Interestingly, the article never attributes the desecration of graves in Cambodia to an ethnic or religious Cambodian essence. They didn't desecrate these graves because they are Cambodian Buddhists. They desecrated these graves because their country had endured a devastating war, a war that was the result of complex international forces over which they, peasants, had zero control. They were hungry and desperate and left out of world prosperity. They did what any human being would have done in similar circumstances. We look at them; we see ourselves, had our lives and our country's history gone differently.

Funny how that is all clear when the grave robbers are Cambodians, not Poles, Buddhists, not Catholics, eaters of rice, not eaters of beets and potatoes, wearers of sarongs, not babushkas. We feel compassion for these Cambodians – the article's author speaks of trauma and healing – not of superiority and condemnation. We wish them recovery; we wish them well. We do not damn them and condemn them in perpetuity, as we condemn Polish, Catholic, peasants. Simply, it makes us feel good to feel superior to Polish, Catholic, peasants. Cambodian, Buddhist peasants make nice folk art. We can't demonize Cambodians. That would be Politically Incorrect.

Cambodian weaving. Source

Perhaps most importantly, the New York Times is willing to acknowledge that Cambodia and Cambodians underwent severe trauma. No such allowance is given to Poles. Poles merely "imagine" that they suffered during World War II. In fact, they "profited." That's the new narrative. 

There is a picture, above, of a hand holding two gold earrings found in a grave. That photo is not from Poland. It is from Cambodia. How do you feel about the hand, the human hand, holding those earrings now, knowing that it was not a Polish peasant who holds the earrings?

Excerpts from the New York Times article:

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By the time the researchers arrived in early May, some 200 graves had been dug up and the bones scattered through the woods by hundreds of people hunting for jewelry.

''Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too,'' said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized this poor and isolated village. ''If they can dig for gold, why can't I?''

It was the first such raid the researchers had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the country. Altogether 1.7 million people died from 1975 to 1979 from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.

''People said, 'This goose has no owner,' '' said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. Few valuables were in the graves, but villagers took whatever they could find.

''I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer,'' he said, speaking of the pain of the past. ''There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone.''

For younger Cambodians, who know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, ''It's just a dead person.''

Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small children, said she could not sleep for three nights after digging two small gold earrings out of a grave.

''I'm afraid that the owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings and now I have taken them,'' Srey Noeun said. ''She'll say, 'Please give them back. They are all I had.'''

Ms. Srey Noeun said she sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things that she really needed: four pounds of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for oil lamps, salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.

''We never have enough rice,'' she said. ''Normally we can't afford to buy pork.''

The buried treasure seemed paltry after nearly a week of digging: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings. But it was dazzling to people who live without electricity or running water, far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.