Sexy Nazis and Brute Polaks: Having Our Ethical Cake and Eating It, Too

"Black Book." source

Power is attractive.

Nazis were powerful.

Nazis are attractive.

This is all very pertinent to "Bieganski," the brute Polak stereotype.

Several recent big-budget, high-profile, critically-acclaimed and financially successful films and television productions share two remarkable features. They include full-frontal nudity in graphic sex scenes. The lovers are highly attractive, very sympathetic Nazis.

These films are doing hard cultural work. Sexy Nazis reassure viewers that we can have our cake and eat it, too. We can enjoy our attraction to squeaky leather boots, riding crops, engraved daggers and masterful warriors. Enjoying all the paraphernalia of power need not compromise us ethically. We are shocked, shocked at the Holocaust. We don't much like those dirty, primitive, Catholic, Polaks.

Christoph Waltz as SS Col Hans Landa, "The Jew Catcher," 

widely esteemed by fans as a Sexy Nazi source

"Bieganski" shows how a deep-rooted stereotype of Poles and other Eastern European, peasant- and Christian-descent populations is currently deployed in scholarly, journalistic, and popular prose devoted to the Holocaust, and, by extension, to all hate.

Not only are Polish Catholic peasants the world's worst anti-Semites, essentially and ineradicably responsible for the Holocaust in a way that Germans are not seen to be. Indeed, Sexy Nazi films are just the popular culture extension of trends taking place in the Ivory Tower. Nowadays, Bieganski, or the brute Polak, is humanity's representational hater.

In Willard Gaylin's 2004 book "Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence," Gaylin attempts to illustrate human hatred for his reader. Gaylin does not turn to Al Qaeda terrorists, who had attacked the US just a few short years before, committing one of the most visually spectacular displays of hatred humanity had ever seen, and inaugurating the War on Terror. He doesn't turn to German Nazis as the epitome of hate. Rather, to illustrate pure hatred for his reader, to, as Gaylin puts it, engage in the courageous task of "confronting evil head-on," Gaylin turns to Poles, specifically Polish, Catholic peasants. They hold the key to understanding evil.

At the same time that an inescapably tainted Polish essence is positioned as responsible for the Holocaust, and hate itself, Germans, including German Nazis, are inched away from guilt. In a recent scholarly book that uses a fictional short story to depict Polish rescuers as sex deviants who help Jews in order to exploit them sexually, one can read a Jewish survivor state, "Not one German ever laid a finger on me … What I do hate is Ukrainians and Poles."

It's easier to hate Poles, "Bieganski" shows, exactly because of the distance between the stereotypical image of the dirty, laboring peasant, excessively religious, clinging, as Andrei Codrescu put it on NPR, to his "smoke darkened icons" and his "stink," and the modern, educated, secular person. It's difficult to accept that people who are human in the exact same way that we are human commit atrocities. It's difficult to confront the fact that we humans are attracted to power, and that Nazis, if nothing else, were very powerful. The Brute Polak image solves this problem for the contemporary Holocaust audience.

It's easier to locate evil in someone seen as utterly different from oneself, and utterly different from that which naturally attracts us. That is the reason that every ethical person, not just Poles, should care about the Bieganski stereotype. Indeed, prominent Polish Jews, including Adam Michnik, exactly on this ground of ethics and the manipulation of guilt by power groups, have spoken out against the stereotyping of Poles in the West.

Some Sexy Nazi Movies:

"The Reader." You really can't get a grip on the Holocaust until you've had a gynecologist's eye view of Kate Winslet's privates.

"Black Book." If you like seeing beautiful young women completely naked, and posed in compromising and perverse scenarios, then "Black Book" is for you.

Carice van Houten as Rachel, a Jew who falls in love with a Gestapo chief, is fully exposed on screen, and things are done to her body that I've not only not seen in movies before, I didn't think I'd ever see.

"Inglorious Basterds." As "Bieganski" records, female fans of this film decided that Christoph Waltz, as SS Colonel Hans Landa, aka "The Jew Hunter," was the sexiest thing they'd ever seen.

"Island at War." The youtube romantic tribute videos to Baron von Rheingarten, this series' sexy Nazi, are something to see. Being a mass murderer is no impediment to being a sex symbol to the discriminating BBC or PBS viewer!

"Lust Caution" "Lust Caution" has chosen a monster for its lead. In bed, though, this torturer is one of the world's great lovers. His masterful feats of lovemaking are so acrobatic you'll not be sure if you're viewing a page from the Kama Sutra or a metaphor invoking ramen noodles.

Power is attractive.

Nazis were powerful.

Nazis are attractive.

This is all very pertinent to "Bieganski."

Open Letter to Clair Willcox, University of Missouri Press Editor-in-Chief

Mr. Clair Willcox

Editor-in-Chief

University of Missouri Press

2910 LeMone Blvd.

Columbia, MO 65201

Dear Mr. Clair Willcox, Editor-in-Chief, University of Missouri Press:

We, the undersigned, write to express our concern about the 2009 University of Missouri Press publication, "They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust." This book distorts history in order to perpetuate a highly destructive and dangerous stereotype of Poles. In this stereotype, Poles are brutes, and are less evolved than modern, secular people. This very stereotype was strategically deployed by the Nazis themselves to justify their atrocities.

Sadly, too many Western elites initially accepted the Nazi claim of merely bringing "discipline" to Slavic "savages." The stereotype was first honed in the US by Scientific Racists to deny Poles entry into the US through the quota acts of the 1920s. American Scientific Racism inspired the Nazis.

The stereotype is used today to rewrite the history of World War Two. For these reasons, every decent person should be concerned about this stereotype. Indeed, it has been named and condemned by important Holocaust scholars and scholars on Polish-Jewish relations, including prominent Jewish scholars and activists on both sides of the Atlantic, for example, Eva Hoffman, Gunnar S. Paulsson, and Adam Michnik.

Further, we are concerned because Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn, a co-author of the book, after viewing an Amazon review that critiqued the book, sent an unsolicited e-mail to the author of that Amazon review, an e-mail accusing her of being a pogromist and an expeller of Jews. Antony Polonsky, the world's most important scholar of Polish-Jewish relations, and himself of Polish-Jewish descent, has publicly condemned Rabbi Cukierkorn's racist e-mail.

We request that the University of Missouri Press withdraw the current edition of "They Were Just People" and prepare a revised version. We also request that the University of Missouri Press, in future, exercise more careful and evenhanded oversight of its publications, and that it provide evidence that it has taken steps to insure this.

We note, with sorrow, that those who endorse "They Were Just People" are not prominent scholars in Polish-Jewish relations. One is a past president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. This status does not qualify the speaker to assess a book on Polish-Jewish relations. None of the endorsers is Polish or is a scholar of Polish history or culture. This is not reflective of due application of the rigorous peer review process that honors and safeguards truth.

One of the great gifts, and challenges, of the Information Age is the flood of data in which each citizen swims. One can find books and webpages making any number of outlandish, even destructive, claims. In this new age, university presses and the peer review process have the unique charge to serve truth. We implore the University of Missouri Press not to squander or tarnish this sacred, essential duty: truth.

We ask you to review, carefully, the facts below, that demonstrate beyond question that "They Were Just People" should never have received a university press imprimatur.

"They Were Just People," contrary to its subtitle, does not create vivid impressions of or deep insights into Poles, Poland, or Polish rescuers. Poles are two-dimensional. Given that most American readers will come to this book knowing little or nothing of Poland, and given that the authors say as little about Poland as possible, the overwhelming impression readers will be left with is of a country, Poland, that was worse than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

An example of this last: "life under Soviet domination was an improvement. For twelve-year-old Felix, it felt as if he had never been so free because he experienced no more attacks from Catholic children" (161). The book profoundly distorts history, here, and makes a mockery of the millions – including Poles and Jews – imprisoned, tortured, dispossessed and murdered by Stalin.

The book is happy to report that on January 17, 1945 "Soviet forces liberate Warsaw" (197). In fact, a new war had begun for Poland. No scholar knowledgeable of Poland would have let that utterly false line pass peer review.

"They Were Just People" creates the impression that, out of no reason other than perverse sinfulness or degradation, Poles and Poland nurtured a deadly hatred of Jews. Example: "the [Polish] population in general was very antagonistic toward the Jewish population, or they didn't care, or they were simply collaborating with the Germans. Many of them ended up with property that belonged to Jewish people" (114). Jews "were more afraid of the Poles than the Germans" (131).

Those who might be perceived as heroes in the US, Polish anti-Nazi resisters, were, in fact, interesting in nothing but killing Jews. "Partisans look for Jews to kill" (133).

Poles are probably so anti-Semitic because they are devoutly Catholic. "the history of anti-Judaism in Christian history" (sic) is to blame (211). "They Were Just People" never mentions the genocide of Catholic Poles that preceded the genocide of the Jews (see historian Michael Phayer on this) or the Scientific Racism that, for decades, first in America, and then in Germany, had identified both Catholic Poles and Jews as life unworthy of life.

The audience is invited to discharge the overwhelming trauma that the Holocaust narrative generates by hating Poles and blaming Christianity, when in fact the ultimate Nazi goal was to eliminate Christianity, and Polish priests were targeted for destruction.

The most memorable Poles in "They Were Just People" are very much not rescuers. The most memorable Poles in "They Were Just People" include, rather, a twisted sadist who tormented a starving Jewish boy by carefully laying out, in front of him, rows of apples that he forbade the Jew to touch (58). Why did the Polish sadist do this? We never learn – he is not interviewed, not even to corroborate this harrowing anecdote.

The single most memorable narrative in "They Were Just People" describes a Pole feeding the disinterred, decaying corpses of Jews, ordered murdered by the Nazis, to his pigs.

Did this really happen?

"They Were Just People" provides no evidence that it did. The book reports it as an FOAF – a friend of a friend tale. The teller heard it from someone else who reported hearing it from someone else. Scholars of narrative identify FOAFs as notoriously unreliable and non-veridical. This notorious unreliability did not hinder a university press from publishing the story as if it were unquestionably true – and not just true, but diagnostic and representational of all Poles and Polish culture (94).

"They Were Just People" informs its readers that the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, was an anti-Semitic organization bent on killing Jews (206, 133). "The Polish underground in general and the AK in particular, displayed little interest in the Jews and certainly took no action to defend them … the AK was imbued with anti-Semitism" (206). This comment does not reflect current scholarly assessment of the Home Army. It would not have passed peer review of a competent reader.

Though, in Poland alone, Nazis mandated death for entire families if one member so much as offered a Jew a glass of water, Poles helped, the book tells us, because they were peasants too greedy or stupid to understand the risk (44, 111, 144). Example: "If German authorities came to that farm and found Jews, she said, 'then he has the same execution that we would have. But the famer was not smart enough to think of this. He was thinking of the big chunk of money he would get.'" The speaker is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who acknowledges that she survived "Because of a Polish army officer." Even so, "my generation will never forgive" Poles.

Polish-Jewish scholar and author, Eva Hoffman, daughter of two Holocaust survivors, tells a very similar anecdote in her book "Shtetl." Hoffman goes on to question why Jews who survived thanks to Poles often hated Poles. Hoffman shows the insight to probe the power of stereotypes. Hoffman took this step in 1997. "They Were Just People" reveals no awareness of this previous scholarship, or ethical leadership.

Another Polish rescuer, Jan Goral, acted because "the idea of owning sixty more acres intrigued him enough to put the lives of his whole family on the line."

Was callous, reckless, selfish greed really Jan Goral's motivation for building a large bunker and saving eleven Jews? The reader will never know. "They Were Just People"'s authors don't interview Jan Goral. They just accept the venal motivation a Jewish storyteller applies to him as fact.

Of an entire family of rescuers, the book states, "The Switzky family did this more for the money than for any altruistic reason" (144). The Switzkys are also quite stupid; they do not know that the people they are rescuing are Jews. If the Switzkys had known, the Jews "would not have survived" (144). In any case, the Switzkys are verbally abusive of the Jews they are unknowingly, greedily, saving (145). But the Switzkys lose their patience, and decide to hand the Jews over to the Nazis for a reward of sugar.

Were the Switzkys really greedy, stupid, and abusive? The reader will assume so. The authors of the book never verify any of these assessments of the Switzkys. A final note: a more likely spelling of this name is "Switzki," not "Switzky." Even accurately reproducing Polish orthography is not on the authors' agenda.

Poles should never be forgiven (42); most Poles, including priests, collaborated with Nazis (114, 167) or were worse than Nazis (131, 189) and worse than Soviets (161). Leaving Poland for France constitutes "escape" where one can "breathe clean air for the first time" (172). France, of course, in the Vichy regime, significantly collaborated with the Nazis in a way that Poland did not.

The focus is on Jewish survivors. Polish rescuers are not fleshed out. Many lack full names. They are just "Jan," or "a farmer." Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's far superior "The Samaritans" and Block and Drucker's "Rescuers" convey rescuers' hardship, terror, sacrifice and ingenuity. How to: dispose of human waste; acquire food when Nazis kept Poles on starvation rations and monitored every transaction; hide footprints in snow? "Rescuers" tells of Irene Gut Opdyke surrendering her body to save Jews and Stefania Podgorska heeding spectral voices. Polish heroes struggled alone: the Allies repeatedly abandoned and betrayed Poland's Jews and non-Jews.

"Just People" erases all this vital information, and more: the unique demographic, economic, educational, and political realities of interwar, wartime, and postwar Poland that can never excuse Polish anti-Semitism, but that certainly reveal as specious Tammeus and Cukierkorn's insistence that Poles be understood no differently than twenty-first century, suburban Americans. Their "readers' guide" presumes to present ethical questions, without ever probing the genuine ethical realities Poles faced. The authors reveal a damning degree of ignorance, if not hostility, when they condemn Poles for using the terms "Poles" and "Jews" (186) when there are very good reasons for these terms that are used universally by scholars invested in the topic.

"Just People" never mentions that Auschwitz was built and used for Polish prisoners during its first 18 months, that the Einsatzgruppen targeted Polish elites, that Polish convents were remarkable in their rescue of Jewish children. Polish Zegota was the only government-sponsored underground agency in Nazi-occupied Europe devoted to aiding Jews. The authors never mention this. The authors mention Ponary, never that 20,000 Poles were killed there. The number of Polish non-Jews murdered, exiled, tortured, and enslaved reaches into the millions. Poles rescued even as they lived in Hell.

"They Were Just People" is part of a trend, analyzed in detail by Ben Gurion University scholar Dr. Jackie Feldman in his 2002 Israel Studies article, "Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective Through the Poland 'Experience.'" As Dr. Feldman demonstrates, some have decided, for ideological reasons, to rewrite Holocaust history and cast Polish Catholics in the role that German Nazis properly play. One tactic in this revisionism is to denigrate Polish Catholic rescuers. "They Were Just People" serves this ideological end of Holocaust revisionism.

Mr. Willcox, we, the undersigned, look forward to your communication with us on these important matters. Everyone faces a moment when conscience should function above politics, profit, or ease. We hope that the University of Missouri Press will exhibit the qualities necessary to meet and master this moment.

Thank you.

William Adasiewicz, Grandson of Polish Immigrants, Member Polish Cultural Center of the Pacific and Polish Arts and Cultural Foundation. Redwood City, CA.

Stuart Balcomb, artist, composer, editor, TheScreamOnline.

Mary C. Bielski President of Marie Sklodowska Curie Professional Women's Association, New York.

Phil Boiarski

Antoinette Cooney

Nancy Forrest, Executive Director, Eugene Springfield Solidarity Network/Jobs with Justice

Danusha V. Goska, PhD, WPUNJ, (author, "Bieganski").

John Guzlowski, PhD, Son of Buchenwald Survivor (author, "Lightning and Ashes").

Vincent Knapczyk, President of the Polish Army Veterans Association Of America

Stefan Komar, NY Police Pulaski Association, Son of Witold Komar, Member of Polish Home Army Battalion "Zoska", acknowledged by Yad Vashem for saving 350 Jews during the Warsaw Uprising.

Mary Krane Derr, Poet and Writer of Polish Descent.

Leonard Kress, Professor of Communications and Humanities, Owens Community College; translator of Polish literature, including Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz. (author, "Sappho's Apples").

Witold J. Lawrynowicz

Krystyna Mew, Daughter of Polish-Jewish Gulag Prisoner (publisher of her father's memoir, "Lost Between Worlds" by Edward Herzbaum).

Krzysztof Nowak of The Katyn Forest Massacre Memorial Committee, Inc.

Christopher Olechowski, Adjutant General, Polish Army Veterans Association of America

Christina Pacosz, poet, author "A Great Deal of Doing: The Missouri Leadbelt Riot of 1917."

Peter Rechniewski Litt. B MA, grandson of Dr. Stanislaw Rechtszaft, murdered in 1943 by SS at Umschlagplatz, buried in Warsaw's Jewish Cemetery.

William H. Szych, Grandson of Polish Immigrants.

Małgorzata Tarchała, Polish Catholic, brought up to respect history, other nations, and all religions, living in Heidelberg, Germany.

Szymon Tolak

Caria Tomczykowska, President, The Polish Arts and Culture Foundation.

Michał Tyrpa, President, Paradis Judaeorum Foundation; founder of "Przypomnijmy o Rotmistrzu" worldwide civic initiative to commemorate Witold Pilecki.

Margaret Wacker

Why Stereotype Poles? Why Distort WW II History? Here's Why.

Photo by Maurese Polizio 

"Poland can serve as an ideal stage for Israeli Jews playing out the drama of their identity, as it provides so many good props and so few competing live actors" Prof. Jackie Feldman

***

Chapters Five and Nine of "Bieganski" cite Jewish scholars – significantly Peter Novick, Tom Segev, and Jack Kugelmass – whose work offers insight into the process of supporting Jewish identity through the stereotyping of Poles.

Non-Jews also use the Brute Polak stereotype to support their sense of their own identity. As Alan Dundes explained, putting down "white trash" "dumb Polaks," gained popularity among politically correct elites in America after the Civil Rights movement made it problematic for elites automatically to establish their superiority vis-à-vis African Americans.

***

Ben Gurion University's Prof. Jackie Feldman also offers insight into the stereotyping of Poles for instrumental ends.

Prof. Feldman's excellent and recommended article, "Marking the Boundaries of the Enclave: Defining the Israeli Collective Through the Poland 'Experience'" appeared in Israel Studies, volume 7, issue 2, 2002.

Prof. Feldman's article supports in its every detail and observation the conclusions of Chapters Five and Nine of "Bieganski."

***

Prof. Feldman describes the Holocaust-oriented trips young Jews take to Poland. Feldman quotes Limor Livnat, Israel's Minister of Education, saying that young Jews "gravitate toward Auschwitz." They "want their feet to tread that cursed earth" (84). Indeed, trips to Poland are a "central rite" in "Israel's civil religion" (90).

Feldman applies anthropologist Dame Mary Douglas' model of an enclave society to these trips.

Mary Douglas (1921-2007) was a prominent British anthropologist. In her model of an enclave society, members "build a strong boundary" around themselves. Enclave members erect "a wall of virtue between themselves and the outside world, a world they never cease to revile" (Douglas, quoted in Feldman, 91).

Feldman argues that Holocaust-oriented trips to Poland are used by organizers to erect and maintain the wall an enclave society requires and desires. Each aspect of the trip is manipulated by organizers to increase the "wall of virtue." Outside the wall is the world enclave society members "never cease to revile."

Poles and Poland cannot be seen in any manner approaching the objective. They exist to serve the enclave, and their image must be manipulated, perceived, and interpreted in a way that serves the enclave. "Modern-day Poland is of no interest. National identity … is all that matters" (93).

As Ferdinand de Saussure observed, we define through opposites. The other, the opposite, against whom young Jews traveling to Poland are encouraged to define themselves, is Poland and its Poles. Because the trips teach young Jews that they are virtuous victims, Poles must be their opposites. Poles must be guilty, hateful, victimizers. These trips offer no opportunity for Poles to be anything else; in fact, the trips are carefully choreographed in such a way as to create and perpetuate Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype.

Trips are designed to bypass cognitive mechanisms and arouse emotion. Holocaust tourists, Feldman argues, are not encouraged to think complex thoughts so much as to feel overwhelming feelings. Those overwhelming feelings are channeled into a particular version of Jewish identity that cannot allow for the universality of human experience.

Participants are programmed to "experience non-Jews as anti-Semites." "A picture of the world is created in which impermeable boundaries separate 'us' from 'them'" (90). The trips communicate to young Jews that the Holocaust never ended; absent the IDF, "they would be on their way to the gas chambers" (84).

Feldman argues that "Visits to Poland by Ministry of Education groups are designed to inscribe upon Israeli youth the sense of belonging to an egalitarian collective with well-defined, but constantly threatened boundaries" (91).

These trips emphasize "the division of the world into Israel and Poland, 'us' and 'them,' life and death" (92).

The trips to Poland began when observers began to fear that forces, including globalization and the passage of time from WW II, were eroding Jewish identity. At the same time, differences between Jews – Sephardic and Ashkenazi, orthodox and secular, doves and hawks – threatened a sense of Jewish unity. The trips to Poland were seen as necessary to buttress Jewish identity and unity.

"Common bases for national identity were seen as weakened … Youth became the prime carriers of globalization [through] TV, fashion, music, MTV, video, the internet … Poland visits have been promoted … as a bulwark against global forces and a means of shoring up loyalty to the national collective."

Trips to Poland, one founder put it, "Made us one nation – the nation that was murdered!" (92)

Mary Douglas said that enclaves maintain their boundaries by associating contact with outsiders with contact with unclean bodily excretions. "An enclave uses defilement for reinforcing its antipathy towards the outsider" (Douglas quoted in Feldman 93).

Feldman points out that Israeli youth visiting Poland equated Poland with uncleanness and unclean bodily excretions and the violation of bodily orifices. Trip graduates communicated that sense of Polish uncleanness to subsequent young people making the trip. They told other young people that Polish food "stinks" and is "disgusting," Polish water is "brown," and "not fit for humans." Even McDonald's in Poland is "grungy." Polish toilet paper is unacceptable. "Pee whenever you get the chance." "Hotels are flooded with drunks and whores." One guide, Feldman reports, "took ten days of food with him from Israel, refusing to eat anything that grew on 'impure Polish soil'" (93-4).

Feldman argues that there is a sharp boundary drawn between how young Jewish visitors to Poland behave when in their own group and what they understand as their own space, and how they behave when Poles are present, and when they feel themselves to be in Poland. Feldman says that these behavior differences "becomes a prototype of imagined historic Polish-Jewish and Gentile-Jewish relations" (95). Outside of their "bubble" of contact with fellow Jews, the world around them, that is, Poland, is "a place of hostile, strange surroundings, wandering, and the inevitable end" (95).

"The Israeli guard accompanying each bus" is "the guardian of gateways to and from Poland." "Security measures … eliminate any possibility for casual contact with Poles." Feldman quoted a group leader implying to young Jewish visitors to Poland that they must be rushed from Holocaust site to Holocaust site because if they linger, they will be in danger from Poles who might do them bodily harm (95).

Clothing, too, is used to maintain a boundary between Jews and surrounding Poles. Sweatshirts are "emblazoned with a large barbed wire star of David surrounding the letters 'ISRAEL'" (96).

In the handbook for participants, youth are told, "We remind the Poles of this dark chapter in our history and theirs … the Poles are forced to confront their past anew, and their role in the tragedy of the Jewish people." Feldman quotes Mary Douglas, "To vilify the outsider is a way of justifying" the enclave's disdain for the outsider. "The lines between 'us' and 'them' reflect widely held Israeli positions (e.g. that Poles are anti-Semites)." Any event that suggests otherwise – that suggests that maybe, just maybe, some Poles are NOT anti-Semites, is "neutralized through scheduling and rhetorical devices" (96).

What do enclave members do when they encounter realities that do not agree with their narrative? In concrete terms, what happens when a young Jew on such a trip meets a nice Polish person?

Mary Douglas outlines five strategies. Feldman applies Douglas' strategies to Jewish youth visiting Poland (96-7).

Source: Maciomhair Gallery

Feldman mentions that a great stumbling block to the enclave is the beauty of Poland, or the attractiveness of individual Poles. To maintain the enclave, this attractiveness must be overcome. "Israeli students expect Poland to look like a Holocaust movie" with "mud, ugly, gray people … they are sometimes disappointed to find that [Polish] scenery, weather, men or women can be quite beautiful." Soon, though, under their guides' tutelage, visitors learn to "simply ignore" any attractions Poland offers (97).

Guides encourage visitors "not to give the Poles a penny more than necessary." On one occasion, visitors admitted to shoplifting in Poland. Their Orthodox group leader "dismissed it as a sin that results from a good deed (averah haba'ah b'mitzvah) – in other words, depriving Poles of income" (98).

Polish students "are considered the enemy." Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriah wrote that "it is a sacred obligation to remember the deeds of the Polish people who are imbued with a venomous hatred towards all Jews…these are the very people who helped carry out mass murder, and whose children also slaughtered many … Remember our murdered and remember our murderers" (98).

Feldman cites a commentator who notes the de-emphasizing of universal standards of morality by "many rabbinical leaders." Hostility to Poles is justified by the Talmudic proverb, "Esau hates Jacob." Poles are Esau; Jews are Jacob. Since, in this formulation, all Poles hate all Jews, it is appropriate for Jews to hate Poles in return (99). In Genesis, Esau is the rough, outdoorsy, impetuous, less favored brother. Jacob is the patriarch who takes the name "Israel." Assigning Poles the Esau identity has a long tradition.

Feldman comments on how even the presence of a "righteous Gentile," that is a Pole who saved Jews, is handled in such a manner as to reinforce the "us v. them" paradigm. Audiences are encouraged to conclude that "righteous Gentiles" are not like other Poles, are, rather, completely unconnected to their Polish milieu (100). In fact Feldman says, through the use of a poem, Poland is equated with Sodom. The atypical Pole who helped Jews did so because he is the one righteous man in Sodom.

Because living Jews in Poland do not mesh with the dominant paradigm of "Poland = Death," young visitors have been kept from interacting with living Polish Jews. In fact, in their prayer ceremonies, contrary to Jewish custom that advises that Jews worship according to local custom, young Jewish visitors worship in Sephardic, not Ashkenazi, style.

Jews who lived in Poland before the Holocaust are depicted as Orthodox, rather than assimilated to Polish culture. This emphasizes the "us v. them" paradigm. Pre-war Polish Jews are "alien in the Kingdom of Amalek." Amalek, of course, is the condemned nation against whom Old Testament Jews conducted a genocidal war. One can see that the Bible is used to define Poland as utterly cursed and other: as Esau, as Sodom, as Amalek (100).

Jews living in Poland today "post a potential threat" to the us v. them paradigm because these Jews choose to live in Poland. For this reason, Holocaust tours have avoided contact with living Polish Jews (101).

Ceremonies in Poland, Feldman argues, are designed in such a way as to reinforce the "with me" v. "against me" paradigm. Differences between Jews disappear. It doesn't matter if they disagree politically or socially; no differences between Jews matter at all, any more. The important differentiation is between Jews and outsiders, who are, in Poland, of course, Polish Catholics (105).

Feldman closes with recommendations for restructuring young Jews' visits to Poland in a way that will inculcate universal values, rather than hostile chauvinism. Jews must redefine their experience in Poland, rather than continue to depict it as "a long, dark period of suffering and persecution … of fragile existence imbued with fear and humiliation" (106).

***

Political mastermind Karl Rove said, "Attack an opponent's strength. Make it a weakness."

It is widely known that there are more trees planted at Yad Vashem in honor of Polish rescuers than rescuers from any other nation. The number is too small. Conditions in Poland were magnitudes worse than in any other Nazi occupied country. Many rescuers can never be honored.

One would think that Poles' status as rescuers would serve to counter the Brute Polak stereotype.

Interestingly, in recent years, university presses have published books that depict Polish rescuers as sex deviants, profiteers, reckless fools, and sadists.

"They Were Just People," a University of Missouri press book, depicts Polish rescuers acting out of greed or stupidity. Of one, the book says, "If German authorities came to that farm and found Jews, she said, 'then he has the same execution that we would have. But the famer was not smart enough to think of this. He was thinking of the big chunk of money he would get.'" The speaker is a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who acknowledges that she survived "Because of a Polish army officer." Even so, "my generation will never forgive" Poles.

Another Polish rescuer, Jan Goral, acted because "the idea of owning sixty more acres intrigued him enough to put the lives of his whole family on the line." (Nazis killed entire families of Poles if anyone in that family aided a Jew in any way.)

Was callous, reckless, selfish greed really Jan Goral's motivation for building a large bunker and saving 11 Jews? We don't know. "They Were Just People"'s authors don't interview Jan Goral. They just accept this venal motivation as fact.

The most memorable narrative in "They Were Just People" describes a Pole feeding the disinterred, decaying corpses of Jews, ordered murdered by the Nazis, to his pigs.

Did this really happen?

"They Were Just People" provides no evidence that it did. The book reports it as an foaf – a friend of a friend tale. The teller heard it from someone else who reported hearing it from someone else. FOAFs are notoriously unreliable. This notorious unreliability did not hinder a university press from publishing the story as if it were unquestionably true.

The "Polish peasant disinters Jewish corpses and feeds them to his pigs" narrative neatly meets the requirements for the Holocaust-trip strategy Jackie Feldman describes, above. Feldman argues that Holocaust trips position the Polish rescuers young Jews are allowed to encounter in such a way as to define these Poles as the one good man in Sodom. That's exactly the purpose of the pig story in "They Were Just People." The teller says as much: "that was the kind of people who lived there [in Poland]." Other than the one family that helped this Holocaust survivor, Poles are the kind of people who would disinter Jewish corpses and feed those corpses to their pigs.

The location of this nauseating, horrifying tale in a book purportedly about Polish rescuers, along with statements from survivors like "We will never forgive the Poles," serves effectively to satisfy Karl Rove's strategy of attacking one's opponent on his strength.

Ha, this book says. You think Polish rescuers deserve respect? You naïve fool.

"Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women," published by Brandeis University Press, includes few lengthy, contextualized accounts of sexual violence. The lengthiest account in the book involves no German Nazis. Rather, in this account, it is a Catholic Pole who sexually assaults a Jewish girl. The Catholic Pole does not hand a Jewish girl over to the Nazis. In exchange, he demands a sexual encounter with her. An additional remarkable feature: the account is fiction. A university press publishes a self-identified "groundbreaking" book addressing sexual violence against Jewish women during the Holocaust, and devotes its longest account, not to assaults by German Nazis, but to an assault by a Pole, and not a nonfiction account, but a fictional one.

As is often the case in work that locates Holocaust guilt in Catholic Poles, Germans are exculpated at least once in "Sexual Violence." Contributor Eva Fogelman, a psychologist, quotes one Jewish Holocaust survivor as reporting, "I was never raped by a German. Not one German ever laid a finger on me." The Germans, Fogelman reports, "liked her looks, but treated her like a Fraulein, giving her food and milk." "By contrast with her praise of the Germans, she said, 'What I do hate is Ukrainians and Poles. I shiver when I see them in the streets'" (269). In case the reader misses the point, Fogelman, lists "Germans, Poles, Ukrainians" as "persecutors" (272).

***

Polonia has not responded to the Bieganski image with effective strategy. Polonian organizations, like the Kosciuszko Foundation, have not, as far as I know, even acknowledged the existence of the Brute Polak stereotype.

There are piecemeal efforts, like a petition to get press organs to stop identifying German, Nazi concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland as "Polish concentration camps," but these efforts merely put a band-aid on cancer. The Brute Polak stereotype must be recognized for what it is, and addressed head-on.

Till that day, Polonia does not have the microphone. Polonia is not controlling the discourse.

That being the case, every time Poles or Polonians cite Polish rescuers, audiences hear "Polish Rescuers … those people who helped Jews out of greed or stupidity or sadism or lust."

That's what audiences hear because the Brute Polak image has been made dominant through journalism, media, and academia. Audiences, no less than young Jews on Holocaust tours of Poland, have been conditioned to hear selectively.

***

It goes without saying that Holocaust tours in Poland are not the definitive expression of Jewish culture today. There are many Jews who love and value Poland. There are also many Jews who have never heard of, never mind taken, a Holocaust tour of Poland, and who would find much about these tours unappealing. As stated above, Jewish scholars have lead the way in offering critiques of the chauvinism and anti-Polonism of these tours. In fact, a rabbinical student allowed me to post his own critique of these tours here.

In other words, though this material is disturbing, we cannot allow it – or anything – to tempt us to fall into hatred's traps. And we must not blame all Jews for what some Jews are doing. We must remain mindful that many Jews have been allies to Poles in combating generalizations, and many non-Jews have trafficked in stereotypes of Poles. We must regretfully admit the chauvinists and distorters of history among Polish Catholics.

Rather, what we must do is confront this material in a clearheaded way. People of good faith, who want a better tomorrow, must act on this material to discourage stereotyping and encourage the kind of universal values promoted by heroes Irena Sendler and Janusz Korczak.

Black and White Beach. Source.

Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn Levels "Pogromist" Allegation

I received an e-mail this morning from Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn alleging that I am a pogromist, or participant in pogroms, that is, government-incited, or at least tolerated, anti-Jewish riots. Pogroms are particularly heinous events, often involving not just murder, but public humiliation, rape, and torture.

Rabbi Cukierkorn leveled this accusation at me because I posted a critical Amazon review of a book he co-authored, "They Were Just People." I will include the full text of my review, below, and a link.

I also mentioned "They Were Just People" in a recent blog post about a 1917 anti-Polish riot that resulted in the terrorizing and expulsion of Polish immigrants from the lead mining region of Missouri.

Rabbi Cukierkorn's allegation that I am a pogromist is troubling to me for several reasons:

Rabbi Cukierkorn is a man of God.

Rabbi Cukierkorn is a religious leader.

Rabbi Cukierkorn's opinions of Poles have been given the imprimatur of the University of Missouri Press. Rabbi Cukierkorn knows nothing about me except this: I am Polish-American, and I object to stereotyping of Poles. That is enough for Rabbi Cukierkorn to accuse me of being a pogromist. It is troubling to me that a book by a man who holds that worldview has been granted sanction by the University of Missouri Press.

I must ask the University of Missouri Press: If a Polish Catholic priest did not like a Jewish reader's Amazon review, and sent that reader an email accusing the Jewish reader of being a "Shylock," would the University of Missouri publish that priest's assessments of Jews?

I hope, and assume, that the answer to the previous question is "No."

Responding to any criticism of racist stereotyping of Poles with a charge that the person who criticized anti-Polish stereotyping is a pogromist is a rhetorical strategy. This strategy cripples and distorts discourse about Poles and Jews, about the Holocaust, and about World War Two. Too many good people are, simply, afraid to speak up when Poles are stereotyped and scapegoated, and when history is rewritten to serve stereotyping rather than truth.

***

I welcome input from Bill Tammeus, Rabbi Cukierkorn, or the University of Missouri Press. I welcome input that addresses the key points in my Amazon review and subsequent comments, and that does not stoop to ad hominem invective and stereotyping.

The Brute Polak stereotype gained power in America, as chapter three of "Bieganski" shows, when peasant immigrants arrived in America from Eastern Europe. Scientific racists like Madison Grant put a veneer of respectability, even ethics, on elite Americans' instinctive recoil from dirty, alien, peasants from Eastern Europe.

Madison Grant and other scientific racists assured elite America that it was not only natural to be disgusted by Bohunk peasants; it was also virtuous to feel that disgust. Bohunks were no only disgusting, they were very, very bad.

Chapter Seven of "Bieganski," which was previously published in Polin, and well reviewed in Shofar and American Jewish History, shows how Nazis defined themselves as "decent" while condemning Eastern European peasants as dirty and undisciplined.

Anti-Bohunk images that were communicated and sanctioned by scientific racists in the US, and by Nazis, are alive today. They are used strategically. As the American Jewish History reviewer of "Bieganski" said, "'The necessity of Bieganski,' Goska finally argues, lies also on an even higher platform: it gives illusion of absolving those who failed in their own test of humanity [during the Holocaust], by placing blame on easily identifiable others."

Elites today use a timeworn image – The Brute Polak – to justify their own hate of ethnic others. One hundred years ago, elites despised Polish, Catholic peasants, and justified that hatred, even as they exiled Poles from living in Missouri's lead mining region, and passed the notorious Quota Acts that defined Poles and other Eastern and Southern European immigrants as racially inferior, and denying them entry to the US.

Today, as in the past, elites continue to despise Polish, Catholic peasants, and, as in the past, they continue to justify that hatred – even to identify it as virtuous. Elites no longer drive Poles out with riots. Now they exile and lynch Poles with language.

Today, the timeworn image of the unsavory peasant, Catholic Pole is exploited thus. Elites locate the horrible crime of anti-Semitism exclusively, diagnostically, and essentially in peasant, Catholic Poles. "Anti-Semitism equals Poles equals Polish Catholic peasants equals Poland": this formula absolves elites of ever being suspected of, or feeling guilt for, anti-Semitism or any other ethnic hate. "We are not Polish, Catholic peasants; therefore, we are above reproach."

***

Here is a link to my Amazon review of "They Were Just People," the book co-authored by Rabbi Cukierkorn, who accused me of being a pogromist because I critiqued his book.

Here is the full text of my Amazon review of "They Were Just People":

"They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland during the Holocaust" appears wholesome and high-minded. The proverbial one candle – "It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness" – illuminates the black cover. The title is clever – Polish rescuers identified the Jews they saved as "just people," meaning, "simply people." These rescuers can be identified as "just people," as in "righteous people." Co-author Tammeus is a Presbyterian elder whose surname suggests German ancestry; Cukierkorn is descended from Polish Rabbis. Maggie Finefrock, my old Peace Corps buddy, sent me the book. What could be wrong with this picture?

"They Were Just People" systematically erases important facts in distortion so careful it's hard to believe it occurred by chance. A book that purports to be about tolerance is in fact a book that may contribute to the cultivation of ignorant arrogance and even hate. Neither the University of Missouri nor any other American university press would publish a Holocaust-related book that so carefully presented an equally skewed depiction of Jews. That a university press gave this book the green light says much, none of it good, about double standards in academia.

Writing about Polish-Jewish relations during World War Two is one of the hardest tasks any author might ever undertake. Strides have been made by authors like Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Eva Hoffman, Gunnar S. Paulsson, Antony Polonsky, Michael C. Steinlauf, Nechama Tec, and Leon Weliczker Wells. Tammeus and Cukierkorn appear either to be unaware of these authors' efforts at fairness or so dismissive of them that they need not incorporate their ethical heritage. Rather, Tammeus and Cukierkorn revert to a completely false simplification designed to use Poles as primitive villains in order to flatter American readers.

"They Were Just People," contrary to its subtitle, does not create vivid impressions of or deep insights into Poles, Poland, or Polish rescuers. Poles, here, are two-dimensional. Given that most American readers will come to this book knowing little or nothing of Poland, and given that the authors say as little about Poland as possible, the overwhelming impression readers will be left with is of a country, Poland, that was worse than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and that, out of no reason other than perverse sinfulness or degradation, nurtured a deadly hatred of Jews. The audience is invited to discharge the overwhelming trauma that the Holocaust narrative generates by hating Poles.

The most memorable Poles are very much not rescuers. The most memorable Poles in "They Were Just People" include, rather, a twisted sadist who tormented a starving Jewish boy by carefully laying out, in front of him, rows of apples that he forbade the Jew to touch (58). Why did the Polish sadist do this? We never learn – he is not interviewed, not even to corroborate this harrowing anecdote. Another Pole feeds Jews to his pigs (94).

The Home Army was an anti-Semitic organization bent on killing Jews (206, 133) this comment does not reflect current scholarly assessment of the Home Army. Though, in Poland alone, Nazis mandated death for entire families if one member so much as offered a Jew a glass of water, Poles helped, the book tells us, because they were peasants too greedy or stupid to understand the risk (44, 111, 144); Poles should never be forgiven (42); most Poles, including priests, collaborated with Nazis (114, 167) or were worse than Nazis (131, 189) and worse than Soviets (161). Leaving Poland for France constitutes "escape" where one can "breathe clean air for the first time" (172) and perhaps enjoy some refreshing Vichy water.

The focus is on Jewish survivors. Polish rescuers are not fleshed out. Many lack full names. They are just "Jan," or "a farmer." Wladyslaw Bartoszewski's far superior "The Samaritans" and Block and Drucker's "Rescuers" convey rescuers' hardship, terror, sacrifice and ingenuity. How to: dispose of human waste; acquire food when Nazis kept Poles on starvation rations and monitored every transaction; hide footprints in snow? "Rescuers" tells of Irene Gut Opdyke surrendering her body to save Jews and Stefania Podgorska heeding spectral voices. Polish heroes struggled alone: the Allies repeatedly abandoned and betrayed Poland's Jews AND non-Jews.

"Just People" erases all this vital information, and more: the unique demographic, economic, educational, and political realities of interwar, wartime, and postwar Poland that can never excuse Polish anti-Semitism, but that certainly reveal as specious Tammeus and Cukierkorn's insistence that Poles be understood no differently than twenty-first century, suburban Americans. Their "readers' guide" presumes to present ethical questions, without ever probing the genuine ethical realities Poles faced. The authors reveal a damning degree of ignorance, if not hostility, when they condemn Poles for using the terms "Poles" and "Jews" (186) when there are very good reasons for these terms that are used universally by scholars invested in the topic.

"Just People" never mentions that Auschwitz was built and used for Polish prisoners during its first 18 months, that the Einsatzgruppen targeted Polish elites, that Polish convents were remarkable in their rescue of Jewish children. Polish Zegota was the only government-sponsored underground agency devoted to aiding Jews. The authors never mention this. The authors mention Ponary, never that 20,000 Poles were killed there. The number of Polish non-Jews murdered, exiled, tortured, and enslaved reaches into the millions. Poles rescued even as they lived in Hell.

On the plus side: The anecdotes here support important realities discussed in better books: Jews who were integrated into Polish culture had a better chance of survival; the survival of one Jew depended on the participation of many Poles who can never be named, never mind honored. Jews received food, shelter, documents, housing, supportive testimonials, and guidance from Poles they'd never met, and would never see again. When asked why they helped, many Poles cited their Christian faith as inspiration.

[At the end of the review, I included the links, below, to better books on the same topic.]

The Samaritans: Heroes of the Holocaust.
Zegota: The rescue of Jews in wartime Poland
Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939-1945
Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust

***

Here is a link to the blog post relating anti-Polish hate in Missouri, old and new.

***

Here is the full text of my e-mail to Bill Tammeus, which he forwarded to Rabbi Cukierkorn:

"Hello, I mention you in a blog post: http://bieganski-the-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/christina-pacosz-on-missouri-leadbelt.html"

Here is the full text, phone number deleted, of Rabbi Cukierkorn's email to me:

"As a Proud descendant of Polish Jews, I am flabbergasted by your gratuitous hate and disparagement of my co-author.  The world would be a much better place if people knew what they are talking about before acting in hurtful ways.

I will be delighted to talk with you and share my views that are committed to my understanding of the truth in the land that welcomed us when we were expelled from Spain.  Chances are you will not call me, showing that had you had the chance you would be among those doing the expelling or taking part in the pogrom...

Regards,

Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn"

Christina Pacosz on the Missouri Leadbelt Riot of 1917

Striking Workers, Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Source

Christina Pacosz, poet. Source.

In 1897, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, striking Bohunk and German coal miners were killed in what has become known as the Lattimer Massacre.

In 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado, coal miners, many immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, were massacred.

In 1927 striking coal miners were attacked with machine guns in Columbine, Colorado. Flaming Mika, a Croatian teenager, was a strike leader.

It's interesting to read web-based commemorations of these events, and others like them. Many such webpages are maintained by leftists.

I salute leftists for working to keep alive history that is otherwise buried and ignored. I ask, semester after semester, if any of my students are aware of this history. They are not. When I tell them that American troops fired on American workers, their jaws drop and their eyes get large.

Unfortunately, though, the leftists who commemorate these events often work hard to obscure the ethnic identity of the striking workers. Those who struck, who lead the strikes, who were shot, who were wounded and killed, are all "workers."

In fact, though, those who struck, who lead the strikes, and who were shot and killed were disproportionately immigrants or children of immigrants, and largely Bohunk. Those who shot and killed them knew this.

Leftists, for their own ideological reasons, often work to obscure this historical reality: "white" Bohunks were identified by contemporary science as racially inferior. (In the same way, the Soviet Union, when it had control of Auschwitz, identified the bulk of its victims, not as Jews, but as "enemies of fascism." You'd never know, from many Soviet treatments of the Holocaust, that the Nazis had an agenda of scientific racism. In its heyday, scientific racism was embraced by the left as well as the right.)

The scientific racism, widely accepted one hundred years ago, that identified Bohunks as racial inferiors, certainly informed those who abused them in the workplace, and shot, and killed them when they asked for better work conditions.

During the 1915-16 Bayonne, New Jersey, refinery strikes, Standard Oil's manager announced, "I want to march up East 22^nd street through the guts of Polaks." He didn't just want to march through the guts of workers. He wanted to march through the guts of *Polak* workers.

In describing the murderous suppression Andrew Carnegie and his fellow industrialist, Henry Clay Frick, visited on strikers, Carnegie's biographer wrote, "Frick had ... been unfortunate in the type of workmen with whom he had previously dealt. The Hungarians, Slavs, and Southern Europeans of Connellsville were a savage and undisciplined horde, with whom strong-arm methods seemed at times indispensable."

Most Polish Americans have no idea that their grandparents and great-grandparents were identified by the New York Times, the canonical anthropological publications, the Museum of Natural History, and the US Congress as racially inferior. Most Polish Americans have never heard of the Lattimer Massacre.

Me? I'd never heard of the Lead Belt Riot until poet Christina Pacosz introduced me to it. And I study this stuff. Amazing how busy and effective those who erase history can be.

***

In her essay, "A Great Deal of Doing: The Missouri Leadbelt Riot of 1917," poet Christina Pacosz describes the riot that drove her Polish father, and others like him, out of the lead-mining region of Missouri.

Poles and other Bohunks arrived in Missouri to mine lead. Lead was needed for World War I. The locals did not like the "noisy and aggressive Hunkie," as Missouri's state historian described them. And, so, the locals rose up and drove the Bohunks out, including Pacosz's father, who

"vividly remembered mattresses stuffed into windows, all the children huddling in a dark, stuffy room. The emotional trauma of a small, scared boy is what my father recounted on those muggy, mosquito-filled summer nights we rocked together on our front porch in Detroit's Polish ghetto."

Pacosz's recounting of this forgotten history is priceless. Her Beat-inspired prose is grittily beautiful and yet highly detailed. This is poetry, and this is history.

Pacosz is not just a poet, not just an historian. She is also, unavoidably, a moralist. Given the skill of her pen, Pacosz is potentially a hanging judge – at least metaphorically. Should the modern-day descendents of those who terrorized, dispossessed and exiled her Polish immigrant father and grandfather be condemned? "I wonder if these people had any relatives who wore white sheets and terrorized my father?" she asks.

Pacosz's generosity is as abundant as her talent. Her rich heart and insight into the multifarious causes of ethnic violence that pits one worker against another inspire her to conclude, "There is no one here I can be angry with."

Lewis Hine. Breaker Boys. My father could have been in this photo.

Source. 

Me? I am angry.

My angry words here are all mine, and they are not related to Ms. Pacosz's generous essay.

I'm angry at modern day, politically correct Missourians who piously adopt the same lies that their racist ancestors adopted to lynch my people. Nowadays their ropes are words.

My old Peace Corps buddy, Missourian Maggie Finefrock, from Kansas City, sent me a book that her colleague, Bill Tammeus, also located in Kansas City, had written.

In that book, published by the very politically correct University of Missouri Press, very politically correct Bill Tammeus distorts history, invests in stereotypes, and ultimately tempts readers to hate Poles.

Poles were brutes to the Missourians of the Lead Belt Riot who drove us out with violence and hate. Poles deserved to be violently driven out of their homes, driven out with "guns, knives, and hatchets," because they were "noisy and aggressive."

That racism, over one hundred years old, is not dead.

To the elite, Poles are still brutes, and they still deserve to be blamed and scapegoated and treated as inferior. Books like Tammeus' lynch with words.

Again, the anger here is all mine, and is not related to Christina Pacosz's essay.

***

Please acquire and read Christina Pacosz's essay. Nothing else I've read about Poles in America could take its place.

"A Great Deal of Doing: The Missouri Leadbelt Riot of 1917."

By Christina Pacosz

John Brown Press
PO Box 5224
Kansas City, Kansas 66119

Here is poet John Guzlowski's blog post on Christina Pacosz's book "This Is Not a Place to Sing."

Here is an Amazon review of Ms. Pacosz's book, "This Is Not a Place to Sing."

On Non-Jews Using the Word "Holocaust."

Hieronymous Bosch. Detail from "The Garden of Earthly Delights."

May non-Jews use the word "Holocaust"?

Polish-American poet John Guzlowski, whose family members were victimized by the Nazis, considers the question. He writes:

"My mother wasn't an educated woman. She had no college, no high school even. She couldn't read the books that argue about who was and who was not in the Holocaust.

When I was growing up, she never said she was in the Holocaust. She wasn’t a talker, but she talked a little about what happened to her family. Her mother and sister and the sister's baby were killed by German Soldiers and Ukrainian neighbors. She had two aunts who died in Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands. My mother spent a couple years in a slave labor camp in Germany. There were Jews and non-Jews in her camp; people suffered and died there. She didn’t talk about any of this much, and when she did she didn’t use the word 'Holocaust.'

This changed as she got older. Toward the end of the 1990s, she started talking about how she was in the Holocaust..."

Read all of Guzlowski's essay here.

Czeslaw Milosz was apparently concerned that reserving the word "Holocaust" for Jews might mean a diminution of the suffering of non-Jews. In his Nobel Prize lecture, the Polish poet warned,

"For the poet of the 'other Europe' the events embraced by the name of the Holocaust are a reality, so close in time that he cannot hope to liberate himself from their remembrance unless, perhaps, by translating the Psalms of David. He feels anxiety, though, when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and prisoners of other nationalities. He feels anxiety, for he senses in this a foreboding of a not distant future when history will be reduced to what appears on television, while the truth, as it is too complicated, will be buried in the archives, if not totally annihilated. Other facts as well, facts for him quite close but distant for the West, add in his mind to the credibility of H. G. Wells' vision in The Time Machine: the Earth inhabited by a tribe of children of the day, carefree, deprived of memory and, by the same token, of history, without defense when confronted with dwellers of subterranean caves, cannibalistic children of the night."

Read all of Milosz' lecture here.



A reader just sent me this link to a new book "The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi Dominated Europe." "Divide and conquer" is the theme. Review here.

Polish Mama on the Prairie: My Feet in Two Worlds

Poland. Photographer: Maciej Duczynski. Source

Polish Mama on the Prairie tells a story that doesn't fit. She's Polish, but she's not. She's American, but she's not. She grew up poor and facing discrimination and bigotry, but she's – white – one of those people who is supposed to enjoy "white privilege." She loves America, but everything isn't perfect. When she says that everything isn't perfect, people tell her to "Get the f--- out of this country."

Her life is pretty good, except for the persistence aches of displacement:

"And on Earth, I feel like I don't belong 100% in either culture. I don't speak perfect Polish, I don't have a Polish accent, I dress like an American, I get told that living in Poland would probably not work well for me, and why don't my children speak better Polish? I also get told that I have a funny name, I 'look Polish or foreign,' I don't dress like an American, I should accept the fact that I am not Polish anymore and that I am American and not speak Polish or about Poland ever, and if I mention anything I wrote about earlier in this article, I am unpatriotic and un-American.

Several years ago, I started to shake loose from a gradual depression that I couldn't talk to anyone about because nobody could relate to how I felt. I didn't want my parents blaming themselves like they caused this feeling in me of being a ship without a harbor."

She didn't even realize how hurt she was until she started writing.

"The funny thing is, until I started writing this, I didn't realize how hurt I was growing up. And when I started writing today, it all came back in a painful, drowning wave. I had a couple of moments when I had to walk away from this just to cry. But I'm glad I did. I feel stronger."

My story is somewhat similar to Polish Mama's story. You can read my story here.

Read Polish Mama's story here.