72 Polish Catholic Women Tortured in Ravensbruck. Their Story: Lilac Girls

"Carolina Ferriday, far right, arranged for 35 of the tortured women to come to the States for physical and mental rehabilitation. She celebrated Christmas with some of them in her Connecticut home in 1958." Source

"German doctor Herta Oberhauser, who was desperate to be a surgeon and performed many of the brutal experiments. She was eventually sentenced to 20 years in the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, but only served five." Source

Available at Amazon here

From the New York Post:

"The Polish woman had returned to Ravensbrück, 70 years after she had last seen the place. This time, she was in a wheelchair, strolled around by an attentive volunteer who called her his “auntie” and wore a Polish flag scarf with her concentration camp number emblazoned on it. They would stop periodically to take selfies with some of the young people who had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

Stanislawa “Stasha” Sledziejowska-Osiczko was one of the lucky ones. She had made it home.

Stasha was a member of the Ravensbrück rabbits, 72 Polish Catholic female prisoners who were subjected to a series of inhumane medical experiments by Nazi doctors at World War II’s only all-female concentration camp. The group’s name came from their treatment as medical lab rabbits — and also, because the cruel experiments often left them with injuries and deformities that meant hopping was the only way they could get around.

Their story has never been widely told, but now, a new novel called “Lilac Girls” by Martha Hall Kelly, describes their incredible journey, which spanned from the concentration camp to the United States, where a well-known philanthropist and socialite named Caroline Ferriday would help them recover from their horrific injuries. Her circumstances could not have been more different than that of the Ravensbrück prisoners — and yet she became one of their biggest defenders during a time when the reality of concentration camps seemed very distant to most Americans …"

Read more at the New York Post

Bieganski Lives in Rabbi Zev Friedman's Protest at the Polish Consulate

"Some 200 demonstrators outside the Polish consulate in New York protested what they termed 'attempts to deny Polish war crimes during the Holocaust.'"

The rally was organized by Rabbi Zev Friedman, the dean of a suburban New York high school, in response to the interrogation last month of a Polish Jewish scholar, Jan Gross, by prosecutors concerning statements he made implicating Poles in the persecution of the country’s Jews during and after World War II..."

Source

And of course Polish Americans are SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED that someone is saying something bad and untrue about Poland!!! Who would do that? Why? What can we do?

And then they pull the covers over their heads and fall asleep until the next incident. 

Read Bieganski. Discover what this stereotype is and why it exists. 

Then read The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision. And discover what you can do to change things. 

Poland Warns about the Holocaust. Another Heartbreaking Historical Document.

General Władysław Eugeniusz Sikorski and Winston Churchill
Migration Museum Project

Michal Karski writes:

"The Polish wartime government in exile has recently come in for the kind of attack which was common currency in the days when Stalin was doing his utmost to discredit the Poles, in other words, it is being described as essentially a clique of reactionaries and anti-Semites. A British historian who shall remain nameless - (I don’t particularly want to publicize the book he is promoting for him) - has chosen to paint General Sikorski and co in the most negative colours in a few British publications.

"Critics might like to note that this same Polish government was responsible for trying to bring to the attention of the world the plight of Polish Jews and others from all parts of Europe. A booklet was issued and publicized in which Nazi atrocities taking place on Polish soil were described. The date of publication is notable since the information was made public far earlier than is commonly supposed in the Western World: December 1942. Why was so little done in response?  Perhaps the historians who are so quick to criticise the Polish government might like to offer some explanations of their own."

Michal is too courteous to name the offending publication that is slandering General Sikorski, but it is The Scotsman. Its slanders, AFAIK, have not made an impression outside of the UK; if I am wrong, please correct me.

If you want to read The Scotsman's slanders, or if you want to read attempts to correct them, you can read more here and here.

And of course you should read "Bieganski," here.

Below please find the historical document Michal refers to, above. This is just one of many attempts by Poles to alert the Allies to what was transpiring in Poland.

Click on the image for a larger version, or view the document on the web here. Thanks to Otto for help with this blog.

Anti-Semitic Mural in Muslim Neighborhood in London

This is old news -- from 2012 -- but given how much anti-Semitism is in the news in England, I mention it now. 

A Muslim neighborhood in London was home to an anti-Semitic mural right out of the Nazi playbook. 

You can read  more about his hideous mural here. 

You can read more about the anti-Semitism scandal in England any number of places; it is all over the news right now. Just one article is here. 

A Facebook friend shared this attempt to address the situation with humor.

The Word "Jew" Is an Insult in English, Says Susan Sommercamp in the Washington Post

Why does the word for a person of my religion sound like a slur? asks Susan Sommercamp in the Washington Post. 

"Polak" of course is the word for my ethnicity and it *is* a slur. 

"Jesus Christ" is the name of my teacher and savior and it is a curse word. 

Funny how these things work. 

FTA: 

My first boss right out of college was terrific — ambitious, warm and open to friendly lunches outside the office.

Then one day in December, the topic turned to her plans for Christmas.

She asked where I would be celebrating the holiday, and I said, “Oh, I don’t celebrate Christmas. I’m a Jew.” She gaped.

I wasn’t expecting her response: “Why would you say something so derogatory about yourself?”

“What?”

She whispered, “You called yourself a Jew. That’s an awful word to use. It’s like saying n—–.”

“No, it’s not. I’m just saying that I’m Jewish.”


“They’re not the same. ‘Jewish’ is fine. ‘Jew’ is not. Really, I’m surprised you just said it out loud at work.”

Read more here: 

Selling Nazism Was Hard Work. Julius Streicher Nazi Editor of Der Sturmer: A Review

Peter Sean Bradley is a Catholic lawyer who reviews many Nazi-related books on Amazon.

He has noticed how treatment of Nazism has changed.

"When I compare texts from the 1930s, I read about everything that is going on, the oppression of socialists and Catholics and Protestants and Jews. But when I read modern accounts, all that disappears and the only thing I read is about the persecution of the Jews. Naturally, with that kind of focus, one concludes that the Germans must have been brimming with one hatred and one hatred only, namely anti-Semitic.

Likewise, you find in the texts of the time, more concern about economic conditions and the fact that German territory was occupied than anti-Semitism. All of the other stuff disappears today, however, and what is taught is that the Nazis were merely anti-Semites. Then we say, well, we are not anti-Semites, so we are OK."

Bradley recently reviewed Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-semitic Newspaper Der Sturmer

His review talks about how hard it was for Nazis to sell Nazism, and about how much propaganda effort and manipulation of the public went into this effort. The review also talks about similarities between social media and Nazi propaganda, and whether or not it is ethical to hang a man for what he has said. This is no mere academic question -- in 2003, Rwandan radio journalists were jailed for genocide. They were jailed for broadcasts, rather than for actually killing anyone. 

***

I started this book with low expectations. How interesting could a book be about the most “unpleasant” of the Nazis? How much of value could there be in reading the biography of a person who retailed the worst, most banal, most ridiculous of Jew-baiting libels to incite hatred among the gullible and stupid? I knew that Julius Streicher was the most notorious Jew-baiter in Nazi Germany through his newspaper, Der Sturmer, and that he was executed at Nuremberg, which was enough information to make me want to keep a wide berth from reading about him.

The nice thing about low expectations is that it is so easy to be surprised. This book is positively first-rate. It provides a perspective on the society of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s that is invaluable, and it runs counter to a lot of the canards about a hopelessly anti-semitic culture that was, we are told by modern historians, naturally trending toward hateful bigotry. What I took away from this book was the amount of effort it took to create the culture of Nazi antisemitism. It didn’t happen naturally. The preconditions were there, but it took huge amounts of propaganda and social conditioning to teach Germans that they had to stop caring for their Jewish friends and neighbors.

The author is Randall Bytwerk. One of the interesting discoveries I made is that Bytwerk is responsible for the “German Propaganda Archive at calvin.edu. I’ve used that source on numerous occasions as a resource for German propaganda but I did not make the connection. It makes sense, though, that a professor with an interest in propaganda would also be an expert on this loathsome character who played such a role in propaganda. Bytwerk observes that “the Internet also makes it possible to provide a virtual appendix to this book. In 1996 I established the German Propaganda Archive a large collection of translations of Nazi and East German propaganda. My goal is to make available, in English, the original materials of the two German dictatorships of the twentieth century. The site includes translations from the Stürmer and other products of Streicher’s publishing house.”

Welcome to the 21st century.

Bytwerk has no sympathy for Streicher. He constantly describes Streicher as unpleasant and rather stupid and boring in his obsession. Apparently, even Hitler could tire of Streicher’s one-note conversations topic; Der Furher would sneak into Nuremberg, where Streicher was Gauleiter, in order to avoid having to have dinner with Streicher. Nonetheless, Hitler was a Streicher supporter and Streicher was a significant supporter of Hitler and the Nazis from an early time when his newspaper, Der Sturmer, was a major source of revenues for the Nazi movement.

Streicher came out of the right wing movement. He seems to have moved gradually into the Volkisch movement as a result of his unpleasant personality and his inability to cooperate with party members in less radical parties. Streicher was from Nuremberg. Nuremberg was a Protestant enclave in Catholic Bavaria, but Streicher was a Catholic citizen of mostly Protestant Nuremberg. Bytwerk does not discuss Streicher’s religious history – for example, Bytwerk does not mention Streicher’s public apostasy in the 1930s, but he does mention, in passing, that a party that Streicher belonged to prior to the Nazis lost Catholic members when Streicher published an article attacking the Jesuits. Bytwerk also notes:

“As a teacher Streicher was expected to attend to the spiritual as well as to the intellectual development of his pupils. Particularly in the small towns in which he taught, the local priest often had supervisory authority over the schoolmaster. Now, Streicher was never to be a man who easily accepted interference in his affairs, and his childhood had not left him a loyal Catholic. In July 1904 he decided to change the time at which the Sunday school (for which the schoolmaster was also responsible) met, against the wishes of the parish priest.”

Streicher was a schoolteacher during the time that he was developing Der Sturmer and becoming a Nazi bigshot. One of the more nauseating outgrowths of Streicher’s career as a school teacher was his interest in poisoning the minds of German children with books that taught antisemitism to children. Likewise, Der Sturmer would run stories of children telling their parents not to shop at Jewish stores, much in the same way that children today might tell their parents to recycle or not smoke because their teachers had told them to.

The biggest impact that this book had on me was providing a sense of how important a role Der Sturmer played in the life of Nazi Germany. Der Sturmer was “social media” long before the concept was invented. Sturmer display cases were set up all over Germany. At this kiosks the pages of the Sturmer newspaper would be displayed so that passer-bys could get their fill of anti-Semitic propaganda. The Sturmer was a slim newspaper, fourteen pages or so, which allowed the complete paper to be read this way. The Sturmer display cases were maintained by fans of the Sturmer. These fans would write into the Sturmer to report on neighbors who were friendly to Jews. The sense I got was that this fan base might represent what we see on the websites of, say, Richard Dawkins or other internet celebrities, for whom the interaction through the comments is a major feature of their social life.

The contents of the Sturmer is described by Bytwerk as constantly changing information based on a constant theme – sounding again like an internet blog maintained by a celebrity. The theme was, of course, how awful Jews are, but Streicher had a gift for gossip and raking up new scandal in order to provide new material for his readers to be scandalized about.

In addition the Sturmer had a regular feature consisting of denunciations of Germans who were friendly to Jews or continued to patronize Jewish business. This resembles what we see today among “social justice warriors” who level secondary boycotts against businesses who support legislation they find reprehensible, or who, not so long ago, arranged to have a CEO fired from a corporation because he had made a donation in favor of traditional marriage. With that comparison, we may begin to realize the organized social sanction that the ordinary German was under – act like a decent human being and you might get your name featured in the Sturmer, after which you would be the one subject to isolation and retaliation.

Streicher used inventions and fabrications as part of his propaganda. For example, he spread blood libel stories that had been discredited centuries before. He also used the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a propaganda source. Streicher’s propaganda technique also included hammering the Jews with true stories about misconduct and crimes by Jews. Thus, any time a Jew was accused of being a rapist, this story was put into the Sturmer, which eventually led Germans to believe that there must be something to this “the Jews are rapists” meme. The technique involves conflating “facts” with “representative facts.” We see the same thing today with Catholic priests accused of child abuse. The facts are that Catholic priests are accused of child abuse at no higher rate than any other group, and that the priests accused are not representative of Catholic priests, but given the constant repetition of the theme of “pedophile priest,” most people believe that Catholic priests are somehow a threat in a special and unique way, much like Germans believed that Jews were criminals and/or rapists. Bytwerk explains:

“Moreover, many facts are not necessarily representative facts. A careful selection of information can lead an audience to a quite mistaken conclusion, even though none of the information is false. One can simply omit inconvenient facts, of course, but leaving that aside, it is easy to draw improper conclusions in other ways. For example, people greatly overestimate the incidence of disasters, murders, and diseases like cancer, and underestimate the occurrence of home accidents or diabetes. A plane crash or an earthquake gets front-page coverage and full play on the evening news, and cancer is the great evil of the day. Such vivid happenings are remembered, overshadowing less dramatic facts.

Julius Streicher’s ability to provide a profusion of facts suggesting that Jews were committing crimes on a startling scale was well suited for the modern media. His standards of evidence were, as we have seen, unimpressive, but some of what he accused Jews of doing was true. It did not matter to him and his readers that infractions committed by Jews were certainly not more numerous or even proportionally higher than crimes committed by “Aryans.” During the Weimar era his targets sometimes were convicted. And after 1933 convictions became almost predictable, for reasons perhaps not entirely evident to the average citizen. His material was not representative, but its vividness was farmore persuasive than a mere statistic.

On a lower level, given complete knowledge of the behavior and thoughts of any individual, one could construct a highly unflattering portrait, relying entirely on those facts that suggested the individual’s depravity. The ability to select is the ability to persuade. Streicher could present cases of Jewish evil with reasonable assurance that his readers would make the desired inductive leap from the given case to the general. If a large number of Jews seemed to be criminal, then all Jews probably were. Of course, the well-known human tendency to perceive selectively is also at work. One who expects to see Jews about evil deeds will find just that, overlooking consciously or not the more impressive evidence to the contrary. The anti-Semite who, in reading the Talmud, was struck only by the small number of passages he perceived as supporting his prejudices, was only following to a greater degree a mental and emotional process that everyone commonly practices.”

So, it would appear that a virtue of this book is to get us thinking about modern culture, where we can realize that we are not so special, or, perhaps, that the Germans of the 1930s resemble us in disturbing ways.

Bytwerk weighs into the claim raised by Daniel Goldhagen that the “ordinary German” was characterized by “eliminationist anti-Semitism” that would have led them to kill Jews had they had the opportunity.” Based on the data of the Sturmer, Bytwerk disagrees. Thus, Bytwerk points out that the Sturmer denunciations of Germans who were friendly to Jews increased through 1938, which suggests that many, many ordinary Germans were not anti-Semites, even in the face of great pressure to conform. Bytwerk explains:

“Surprisingly, the Stürmer sometimes carried the responses of such people. Some of the accused claimed that Jews provided better quality at lower prices. A farmer who took Jewish children for a cart ride asserted, “The government does not ask me where the money came from when I pay my taxes.” 7 To Stürmer readers, such comments emphasized stubborn refusal to relinquish contact with Jews. The criticized behavior sometimes displayed clear opposition to Nazi anti-Semitic policies, at other times only the person’s economic self-interest. Those denounced in the Stürmer might still have harbored anti-Semitic attitudes.

Still, the behavior is clearly not what one would expect of those holding eliminationist anti-Semitic views. This was particularly true by 1937, when Hitler had been in power for more than four years. Those who had thought that the Nazis were anti-Semites of the traditional variety had had sufficient time to learn otherwise. To shop at a Jewish store or to trade with a Jewish livestock dealer by 1937 took a conscious decision to ignore the considerable pressures of the state and society.”

And:

“Some correspondents reported being insulted when they attempted to encourage people to avoid Jews. A 1938 letter gave the response of a woman in Silesia who, when reproached for buying in a Jewish shop, replied, “You’re drunk, aren’t you?” 11 A farmer criticized in 1939 for dealing with Jews responded bluntly, “Hang me from the church steeple if you want, but I’m not going to stop dealing with the Jews.” 12 Many letters noted that well-meaning attempts to dissuade citizens from dealing with Jews were simply ignored. Often they wrote, in apparent astonishment, that someone had conversed with a Jew “in broad daylight” or “in the fifth year of National Socialism” or visited a Jewish shop “on November 10, [1938]!”

There was clearly a great deal of anti-Semitism in German society, but there was a great deal of prejudice against every minority group in most countries of the period. Streicher was quite willing to engage in Catholic-baiting when the opportunity arose, but while this low-level bigotry provided the tinder, by itself, without the stoking of men like Streicher, it was not itself “eliminationist.” Bytwerk writes:

“When Goldhagen argues that most Germans were eliminationist anti-Semites, he overstates the case. Some Stürmer readers met his definition, but even most of them disliked Jews without giving evidence of wanting to kill them. Increasing numbers of villages announced themselves “free of Jews,” but readers who reported that fact did not seem concerned that their former Jewish neighbors, though relocated, were still alive. Those very readers provided evidence in their letters that they were not typical of the German population as a whole. In denouncing their decent and compassionate fellow citizens, they felt themselves members of a crusade that lacked universal support and predicted it would take a long time before they could win the struggle to remake all Germans to their anti-Semitic image. Hitler found his willing executioners— a number ample enough to slaughter millions— but he did not have the whole citizenry of Germany from which to choose.”

Streicher was kicked out of Nazi leadership by the mid to late 1930s, due to his own inability to get along with other Nazis and his own corruption. He did continue to publish the Sturmer, although as Jews either emigrated or deported, there was less material for his paper. In addition, during the war, the Sturmer operated under paper restrictions. The Sturmer’s heyday was over by the time the war started and its circulation was in substantial decline.

Because of his own incompetence, Streicher was never given the opportunity to directly participate in the Holocaust or in war crimes like the other old Nazis. Nonetheless, Streicher was hanged with them, refusing to apologize for his involvement and braying out his loyalty to Hitler in his last breath. I will shed no tears for this waste of human life, but I am not certain that Streicher should have been hanged. He was a miserable human being and he poisoned the minds of Germans, and he made the Holocaust possible with his propaganda, but, ultimately, weren’t his crimes a matter of speech and argument? Do we hang people for political ideas? If so, shouldn’t we be throwing Communists and racists in jail before they get political power?

This is a surprising, good book. Because of its focus on someone who turned out to be a minor actor, it was able to get deeper into the background of the period. I recommend it highly to those who are interested in political science or the dark arts of propaganda.

Massacres and Double Standards; Jews, Christians, Muslims and "Who Hit Whom First"

Vladimir Kush Pros and Cons

Massacres and Double Standards; Jews, Christians, Muslims and "Who Hit Whom First"

On April 26, 2016, FrontPage magazine published my review of Dario Fernandez-Morera's book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain here.

The book is superb, a must-read.

A reader posting under the rather anonymous internet handle of "R Steinberg" used the review to slander me as an anti-Semite.

In the comments section under the article, R Steinberg wrote, "Goshka [sic], as far as I am concerned, is a soft anti-semite. Goshka fails to mention that the massacre of Christians in 614 was a reaction to decades of Byzantine Christian persecution of Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land; Jews understandably allied themselves with the Sassanid Persians in the latter's attempt to wrest Jerusalem from the Jews' Christian persecutors."

A subsequent post questioned whether this Jewish massacre of Christians even occurred. "Is there any positive historical proof of the 614 Jewish massacre of Christians in Yerushalem -- outside of Byzantine accounts?

R Steinberg responded, "I am only aware of Byzantine accounts, particularly that of the monk Antiochus Strategos, who, judging from his language, probably loathed Jews even before the massacre occurred."

In a further subsequent post, R Steinberg wrote "Her context-lacking reference to a massacre of Christians by Jew in the year 614, for example, seems gratuitous, as it occurred in Jerusalem (at the Mamilla pool or reservoir), not in the Iberian Peninsula, and a century before there were any Muslims in Spain."

According to historians, in 614, during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628, Jews massacred Christians at the Mamilla Pool. It is mentioned in the book I was reviewing. I mentioned it in my review for a very specific reason, that I stated quite clearly in my review, and that R Steinberg declined to respect.

Fernandez-Morera's book argues that elites today market a false image of Muslim Spain as a land of happy coexistence. In fact, Fernandez-Morera demonstrates, there was much strife in Muslim Spain, much of it based on conflicts between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

I mentioned that there is one aspect of this myth that Fernandez-Morera did not dwell on. The world today is not the world of the eighth century. Today Christianity is the world's largest faith. America, a largely Christian nation, was the first to have nuclear weapons. European languages dominate five of the world's continents and a large percentage of the remaining continents. Up to the mid part of the twentieth century, Europeans, often Christians, colonized much of the globe.

We are, of course, in the post-Holocaust era, and we are used to thinking of Jews as completely powerless minorities, unable to forfend the murder of six million Jews.

None of this was true in the eighth century. Christians were killed just for being Christian in the eighth century, not just by Muslims, but by Pagans, as well. If you were a Pagan Slav in the eighth century, you didn't think of Jews as powerless, friendless victims of genocide. You thought of Jews as slave traders. Slavs were among the most typically enslaved people in Muslim Spain. Their enslavement included mass castration of males. These are neutral, historical facts. To know them is not an anti-Semitic hate crime. It's simply true.

When we think of Muslim Spain, we need to think, not of Christians as unquestionably powerful and dominant. They were not. Christians were often victims.

It's very hard for some people to think of Christians as victims. It's so hard it is almost taboo.

FrontPage magazine recently drew my attention to Paul Kivel, a man who makes his living demonizing Christianity as the source of "everything bad." You can read about him here and here. His website, "Challenging Christian Hegemony," is here.

Responsible voices have called the status of Christians in the Middle East today a "genocide." The world's response to this genocide is most often silence. One reason for that silence is that we have been brainwashed never to think of Christians as victims. We have been brainwashed to think of Christians as all-powerful victimizers.

The Leonard Lopate Show is a talk show on the NPR affiliate, WNYC, in New York.

Lopate is a very intelligent, well-informed man. He knows the world.

He recently interviewed Klaus Wivel about his book "The Last Supper: the Plight of Christians in Arab Lands."

I was stunned by this broadcast. Lopate began by asking, paraphrase, "Aren't you stirring up Islamophobia?" Lopate went on to suggest that Christians in the Middle East don't belong there – that they are all Crusaders who invaded. Of course Christianity originated in the Middle East and Christians there today are most often not descendants of Crusaders, but rather of early Christians. Even if they were descendants of Crusaders, they have been there longer than Lopate's ancestors, or mine, have been in the US. We don't deserve to be the targets of genocide, and neither do Christians in the Middle East.

Lopate implied that Christians brought their problems on themselves through their behavior – maybe they were too close to, or too distant from, the right center of power.

It was very hard to listen to. I didn't hear, from Lopate, the kind of concern that victims of genocide usually receive.

We should know about the Mamilla Pool massacre. We should know that Christians, too, have a history of being killed for who they are. Christians, too, have reason to be cautious when interacting with members of other faiths. Christians, too, have a history of pain and victimization that deserves respect. Christian lives matter.

As for who hit whom first. R Steinberg compared Christian behavior toward Jews with Jihadi behavior toward Christians, that is, "continuous predation and conquest." I don't think that this comparison is justifiable. I don't think that seventh-century Christians mounted a jihad against Jews that involved "continuous predation and conquest" comparable to the Muslim Conquest.

If you'd like to read about Jews' status in the Byzantine Empire, one place to start is the Wikipedia page dedicated to that topic, here.

In any case, R Steinberg's insistence that Christians' bad behavior toward Jews be mentioned in any mention of the Mamilla Pool massacre reminded me, of course, of Polish-Jewish relations.

On July 10, 1941, Polish Catholics massacred Jews in the small town of Jedwabne, Poland. The Jews were first terrorized and humiliated. Then they were burned to death in a barn. This is a horrific event.

A huge debate surrounds how people talk about this event.

I have seen accounts that tightly focus on Polish Catholics fiendishly torturing and murdering Jews. Period. End of story. Nothing else is mentioned. In these accounts, one explanation is offered: Polish Catholics are essentially sick, twisted, hateful people. There is something wrong with being Polish. There is something wrong with being Catholic. Catholicism must change. Polish people must be forever demonized and shunned. I detail such accounts in my book Bieganski.

There are other ways of telling the Jedwabne story, though.

Pull the camera back.

Pull the camera back a few feet, and you will see that this massacre occurred during the Nazi occupation of Poland. You will see Nazi soldiers surrounding the Poles.

Pull the camera back even further, and you will see more. Here is a cut and paste of the Wikipedia page addressing the history.

"As soon as the Soviets entered Jedwabne, the local Polish government was dismantled. At first, many Polish Jews were relieved to learn that the Soviets, rather than the Nazis, were to occupy their town, and unlike gentile Poles, publicly welcomed the Red Army as their protectors …

Administrative jobs were offered to Jews who declared Soviet allegiance. Some Jews joined a Soviet militia overseeing deportations of ethnic Poles organized by the NKVD.

At least one witness testimony says that during round-ups, armed Jewish militiamen were seen to be guarding those being prepared for deportation to Siberia. A total of 22,353 Poles (entire families) were deported from the vicinity. Red Army troops requisitioned food and other goods, undercutting nearly everyone's material needs … Waves of arrests, expulsions and prison executions continued until June 21, 1941."

The bottom line: Before the Nazis invaded, the Soviets invaded. The Soviets murdered, tortured, and deported Polish Catholics. Some-not-all Jews celebrated the arrival of the Soviets and the end of a very short lived Polish sovereignty. Poland, previous to WW I, had been a colonized, occupied country since the late eighteenth century. Poland's 1939 loss of sovereignty to Germany and Russia, its deadly enemies, that had struggled to erase it for over a hundred years, was a catastrophe for Poles. Some-not-all Jews participated in rounding up Polish Catholics for deportation to Siberia.

None of that backstory makes the Jedwabne massacre excusable. None of it exculpates the perpetrators. None of that comforts the victims.

Here's the point – understanding the Jedwabne massacre as an expression of an essentially hateful Polish essence – which many elite voices chose to do – is canon. That version of history appeared in major American publications and on campuses.

In my review of Fernandez-Morera's excellent book, I did not present the Mamilla Pool massacre as an expression of a Jewish essence. I made no attempt to present the full backstory of that massacre as that backstory is utterly extraneous to the key point – that Christians over a thousand years ago were not the Christians of today in America. They were just one religion in a mix of religions. They were vulnerable. They were sometimes killed for their faith, both individually and en masse. That vulnerability deserves our awareness.

There is, of course, a double standard at work. The Jedwabne massacre has a backstory. The Jedwabne massacre was not representational of any Polish essence. It was rather, an expression of hideous local and contemporary circumstances – occupation, terror, and the decapitation of society by both the Nazis and the Soviets, who made it their business immediately upon arrival to liquidate teachers, priests, and anyone else who might lead the people.

Anyone who mentions the Jedwabne massacre's backstory risks being called a bigot or an apologist who wants to avoid ethical consequences and the need to be mindful of antisemitism.

In the case of Jedwabne, mentioning the backstory has been condemned.

In the case of the Mamilla Pool massacre, one must mention the backstory. One must not put an emphasis on being sensitive to eighth century Christians awareness of their own vulnerability.

I reject this double standard.

If someone were to say to me, "Jews feel vulnerable because of events like Jedwabne," I want to hear and respect that message. I don't need to immediately adduce the entire backstory.

If someone says to me that Christians, too, have a history of being killed, individually or en masse solely because of their faith, I want to hear and respect that. And not need to vitiate the message.