[Excerpt
from the Holocaust chapter (18) about Jewish communist
leaders in Poland]:
World
War II Polish anti-Nazi leader Stephan
Korbanski writes that
two teams: one to satisfy
appearances and the Western Allies, the
other to actually rule Poland. The
first was headed by the Polish
communist Warda Wasilewska and the
other by Jacob Berman, who
knew Stalin well.
The choice of Berman was connected
with his Jewish origins, which
exonerated him from suspicion of
Polish patriotism and advocacy of
Poland's independence. Stalin
regarded the Jews as cosmopolites,
whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country
of their
residence ... [KORBANSKI, p. 73]
The principal instrument of Berman's
power was his total control of
the Ministry of State Security,
which began -- under Stalin's
instructions -- to liquidate all
centers of Polish opposition, often by
simply murdering persons suspected
of advocating Poland's
independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]
Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles
Szurek also "admit [that] the Jewish youth and proletariat played an
important ('although not exclusive') role in the apparatus of oppression."
[BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18] One Jewish
veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party
(KPP), estimated that half of its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI,
W., p. 94] With Jews representing about
10% of the Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little
interest in communism, "in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the
[Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities,
frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the] statement that 'in
small cities like ours, almost all communists were Jews' does not appear to be
a gross exaggeration. [SCHATZ, p. 96]
In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the
Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51 percent of
the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent.
(The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [SCHATZ, p. 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the
International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97] They were also 54 percent of the communist
field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most of
the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and
Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists
were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that "in Polish
court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those
accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [PIOTROWSKI, p.
36] [SCHATZ, p. 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions of
the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism."
[SCHATZ, p. 100]
Furthermore, the symbology of three very
high level Jewish officers -- Minc, Berman, and Zambrowski -- in the post-war
oppressive Communist institutions,
"became a lasting part of anti-Semitic vocabulary." [SCHATZ,
p. 206] "All three communist
leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw
Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63] As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond,
noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now "due to the
Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland's government and endeavor to
introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to
have." [SCHATZ, p. 207]
Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in
1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty:
"Representatives of [the Nazis'] former arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish
government, are now guests in this zone and have been received with royal
honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi's 'friend'
Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about race."
[KAPLAN, C., p. 84]
Stephan Korbanski also notes that the
Soviet Communist secret police
"team assembled by Berman [whose
brother Adolf was chairman of
the Jewish Committee in Poland till
1947, when he immigrated to Israel]
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 85] at the
beginning of his rule were all
Jewish -- Vice Minister Natan
Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman
Romkowski) [who once interrogated
Korbanski], and other high officials
like General Julius Hibner (David
Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security
police chief Joseph Swiatlo, Joseph
Rozanski (Goldberg), 'Colonel
Czaplicki,' and Zygmut Okret. These were
not the only Jewish officials
who oppressed Poles in the name of
communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a
member of the Communist Council of
State, has stated that 'it was
unfortunate that all the department
directors in the Ministry of State
were Jews.'" [KORBANSKI, p. 78]
"Jacek Rozanski," notes Polish
author Jacek Borkowicz, was "director of the Investigative Department of
the Polish State Security Ministry" and was "sentenced in 1955 to
five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957 sentenced him to fifteen
years]" for "using inadmissible means of persuasion during
interrogations ... Son of a prominent Warsaw Yiddish-language journalist (on
the pro-Zionist 'Hajnt'), Rozanski was a dedicated communist who .. maintained
his Jewish identity until the end." [BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344] "All the
detainees described [Rozanski] as an exceptionally cynical and sadistic
psychopath who liked to torture prisoners needlessly," notes Jewish author
Michael Checinski, "... Rozanski's Jewish origin was then common
knowledge, in spite of his Polonized name." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 80]
The aforementioned Anatol Fejgin was head
of the "Tenth Department of the Polish State Security Ministry -- the
special unit answerable to the Party First Secretary and concerned with spying
on the communist leadership [and he] was sentenced at the same trial in 1957 to
twelve years' imprisonment." [BORKOWICZ, p. 344]
Jewish author Michael Checinski notes
the post-World War II case of Semyon Davidov who
"held the relatively modest post of
head of Soviet advisers in Poland.
But no serious operational decisions on
any question pertaining to
political provocations or police terror
could ever be taken without
Davidov's consent. On the one hand, Davidov
and his personal
network supervised the activities of the
Soviet advisers in all the
mainstays of real power in Poland (the
armed forces, security
service, party apparatus, state
administration, and industry). But
he also was responsible for overseeing
the entire Polish apparatus
of terror." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982,
p. 51]
Abel Kainer (a pseudonym of Stanislaw
Krajewski, a Polish Jew) adds that
"The archetype of the Jew during
the first ten years of the Polish
People's Republic was generally
perceived as an agent of the secret
political police. It is true that
under Bierut and Gomulka (prior to 1948)
the key positions in the Ministry of
State Security were held by Jews or
persons of Jewish background. It is a fact which cannot be
overlooked, little known in the West
and seldom mentioned by the
Jews of Poland. Both prefer to talk
about Stalin's anti-Semitism ....
The machinations of communist terror
functioned in Poland in a matter
[sic] similar to that used in other
communist ruled countries in Europe.
What requires explanation is why it
is operated by Jews. The reason
was the political police, the base of
communist rule, required personnel
of unquestionable loyalty to
communism. These were people who had
joined the Party before the war and
in Poland they were predominately
Jewish. " [KORBANSKI, p. 79]
"The feeling that Jews are oppressors
probably sounds absurd to many westerners," wrote Stanislaw Krajewski,
under his own name. "The only sense it has derives from the Jewish
participation in the oppressive rule in Poland, and in particular the fact that
a lot of Jews looked favorably at the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in
1939." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 50] Most Poles did not look favorably at such a
scenario. World War II was a struggle for them on two fronts -- in the West
against the Nazi fascists, and in the East against the Russian communists.
Even a Jewish scholar/polemicist like
Robert Wistrich, who expresses astonishment that one-third of West Germany
after World War II still felt that anti-Semitism was primarily caused by
"Jewish characteristics," concedes that
"After the Polish communist seizure of power in 1948 there
were
indeed a number of Jews like Jakob
Berman, Hilary Minc, and
Roman Zambrowski, who did play key
roles in the party, the
security services, and economic
planning. No doubt they were
considered by Moscow as being less
susceptible than the Catholic
majority to Polish nationalist
feelings, though in the eyes of many
Poles they were little better than
agents of a foreign, semi-colonial
power ... the anti-communist
underground was convinced that
Jews were deliberately betraying
Poland." [WISTRICH, AIE, p. 271]
In another, related, example of the
usual sharp double standard of Jewish morality and responsibility, in an
article entitled, "Lithuania May Charge Jews for Crimes Against
Humanity," in December 1997 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported
the Lithuanian response to a Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United States
Congressmen to the president of Lithuania, insisting that he "put
suspected [World War II] criminals on trial." Kazys Pednycia, the
prosecutor general of Lithuania, "alarmed local Jewish leaders" by
announcing that his office "would not only study the massacres of Jews
committed by both Germans and Lithuanians during the war, but also crimes
committed by Jews against Lithuanians when the country was under Soviet
control." "Of course there
were Jews who suffered from Lithuanians," said Pednycia, "But there
were also just the opposite cases, and we all know that." "The
presence of Jews in the Soviet secret police," noted JTA reporter
Lev Krichevsky, "has prompted many Lithuanians to share the sentiments
expressed by the prosecutor general."
The chairman of the Jewish community in Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius,
responded to the prosecutor's comments about Jews by declaring them
"absolutely false," "non-ethical," and "historically
wrong." [KRISCHEVSKY, Lith, p. 16]
Jewish pre-eminence in communist
terrorist police organizations in the Ukraine was the same. A Canadian of
Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, notes a 1997 volume published in his
homeland entitled "The Jewish Conquest of the Slavs." It was produced
by Security Service of the Ukraine, today's state police agency. In tabulating the
nationalities of 183 biographies in the volume of leading officials in the
terrorist Soviet secret police agencies (the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak
notes, on average, about six out of ten such people were Jewish. This
percentage doesn't include, of course, those who successfully hid their Jewish
identities, a practice common in Eastern Europe. As Prytulak concludes,
"One possible reason that Jews
incessantly paint the false image of
themselves as victims of Ukrainians is
because of the reality that
Ukrainians have been among the foremost
victims of Jews ... A
more thoughtful examination of the
phenomenon of anti-Semitism
reveals many reasons for viewing it -- at
least in some of its
manifestations -- not as an irrational
and unexplainable and
gratuitous hatred, but as a natural and
understandable antipathy
from an acquaintance with Jewish
misbehavior." [PRYTULAK]
Richard Rhodes notes the prominence of
Bela Kun and other Jewish communist elite in Hungary, and future (Jewish)
nuclear bomb scientist Edward Teller's family there:
"The leaders of the Commune and many
among its officials were
Jewish ... Max Teller warned his son that
anti-Semitism was coming.
Teller's mother expressed her fears more
vividly. 'I shiver at what my
people are doing,' she told her son's
governess in the heyday of the
Commune. 'When this is over there will be
a terrible revenge.'"
[RHODES, R., 1986, p. 111-112]
Bela Kun, notes Louis Rapoport,
"a Jew, [was] the cruel tyrant of
the 1919 Communist revolution in
Hungary and later Stalin's chief of
terror in the Crimea." [RAPOPORT,
L., 1990, p. 56]
In Russia, the "home" of
communism, the preeminence of Jews in oppressive state departments, including
the terrorist secret police, and the enforced starving of millions, was the
same. [See details -- Genrikh Yagoda, head of the secret police; Lazar
Kaganovich, head of the "Apparatus of Terror," Jewish dominance of the
Soviet concentration camp system, et al -- earlier] As Richard Pipes notes:
"Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect which is known
in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of
1918-1920 remains concealed." [PIPES, R., 1990, p. 823]
The following observation is written by a
Jewish author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the normal Jewish framing of Russian
perception about the subject as irrationally anti-Semitic:
"There is a tendency in Russian
intellectual circles "to view the
Bolshevik Revolution as an essentially
non-Russian phenomenon,
which took place under the influence of
the minority nations in the
Russian empire, chiefly the Jews. There
are those who regard the
political terror as a phenomenon
connected mainly with the Jews
(this element is to be found in, or
inferred from [Nobel laureate]
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the [communist]
oppositionist, and
Valentin Kataev, the official writer).
Such an attitude is also
behind militant anti-Semitism, born in publicistic writings and
in belles-lettres, portraying the Jews as
plotters who, since Peter
the Great, have sought to harm Russia and
are now corrupting
Soviet society. In this manner
anti-Jewish pogroms and measures
in the past are presented as protests
against exploitations." [ETTINGER,
p. 21]
In communist Poland, according to Pinek
Maka (a Jew), the Secretary of Security for Silesia, the number of Jewish officers in the dreaded OSS (the
secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much as 75% of the total) --
merely in his own jurisdiction. [SACH, p. 175]
Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek Edelstein, estimated that 90% of the
Jews of Kattowitz disguised themselves with Polish names. Josef Musial, the
Vice Minister for Justice in Poland in 1990, suggested that most officers in
the OSS throughout Poland had been Jewish. [SACK, p. 183]
In 1992, when Shlomo Morel, a Jew still
living in Poland, was interrogated by Polish authorities who were looking into
his past as the commandant of a post-World War II communist concentration camp
for Germans and nationalist Poles, "Shlomo went home, wrote a cousin in
Israel, asked him for $490, and the next month, in January 1992, took the first
plane that he could to Tel Aviv," leaving his Catholic wife behind. [SACH,
p. 166] In an interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised him
that he must not write about the story of Jewish dominance and brutality in the
OSS "because it would increase anti-Semitism." [SACH, p. 169]
Surviving prisoners under Morel's rein
had testified that:
* "The commandant was Morel, a Hun
in human form."
* "The commandant was Morel, a
Schweinehund without equal."
* "The commandant, Morel, appeared.
The clubs and the dog whips
rained down on us. My nose was
broken, and my ten nails were
beaten blue. They later fell
off."
* "The commandant, Morel, arrived.
I saw him with my own eyes kill
many of my fellow prisoners."
[SACK, p. 167]
After World War II, writes Richard
Lucas, "Jews in [Polish] cities and towns displayed Red flags to welcome
Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish soldiers, and filled administrative
positions in Soviet-occupied Poland. One report estimated that seventy-five per
cent of all the top administrative posts in the cities of Lwow, Bialystok, and
Luck were in Jewish hands during Soviet occupation ... The entire character of the University of
Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war, the percentage of
students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent; Ukrainians 15 per cent;
Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12
per cent, and 85 per cent, respectively." [LUCAS, p. 128]
"The evidence, "observed Jewish
commentator Aleksander Smolar, "is overwhelming: large numbers of Jews
welcomed the Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory the image of Jewish
crowds greeting the invading Red Army as their liberator." [PIOTROWSKI, p.
50] "Thousands of Polish survivors' testimonies, memoirs, and works of
history," notes Polish scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski, "tell of Jewish
celebrations, of Jewish harassment of Poles, of Jewish collaboration
(denunciations, manhunts, and roundups of Poles for deportation), of Jewish
brutality and cold-blooded executions, of Jewish pro-Soviet citizens'
committees and militias, and of the high rates of Jews in the Soviet organs of
oppression after the Soviet invasion of 1939." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]
Testimony to the Jewish Polish response
to the Soviet invasion of Poland includes the following Jewish accounts, from
the archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust organization in Israel:
"When the Bolsheviks entered the
Polish territories they displayed a great
distrust of the Polish people, but with
complete faith in the Jews ... they
filled all the administrative offices
with Jews and also entrusted them with
top level positions." [from the town
of Grodno]
"I must note that, from the very
first, the majority of positions in the
Soviet agencies were taken by
Jews." [from the town of Lwow]
"The Russians rely mainly on the
Jewish element in filling positions,
segregating, naturally, the bourgeois
from the proletariat." [from the
town of Zolkwia]
"A Jewish doctor recalled how local
Jewish youths, having formed
themselves into a 'komsomol,' toured the countryside, smashing
Catholic shrines." [near the town of
Jaworow]
"Whenever a [pro-Soviet] political
march, or protest meeting, or some
other sort of joyful event took place,
the visual effect was always the
same -- Jews." [from the town of Lwow]
[PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 - As Piotrowski
notes, these comments have
been edited out of an English translation of the source volume,
originally published in Polish]
"The victims of the reign of terror
imposed by Stalin and carried out by his Jewish subordinates," says
Stephan Korbanski,
"during the first ten years of the
war numbered tens of thousands.
Most of them were Poles who had fought
against the Germans in
the resistance movement. The communists
judged, quite correctly,
that such Poles were the people most
likely to oppose the Soviet
rule and were therefore to be
exterminated. The task was assigned
to the Jews because they were thought to
be free of Polish patriotism,
which was the real enemy."
[KORBANSKI, p. 79]
Korbanski then goes on to name and detail
29 more Jewish officials (beyond the ones earlier mentioned) of the communist
elite that held positions in suppressing Polish nationalism. But political
winds in the communist world shifted drastically. Between 1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish communist officials were
purged from Kremlin ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link to Israel's 1967
military victory over the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs and Jewish Russian
loyalties -- per Israel -- were put into question. [KORBANSKI, p. 85]
"In places like Gleibwitz,"
writes John Sack, "the Poles stood against the prison walls as
Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, 'Ready! Aim! Fire!,' shot
them, and told the Polish guards, 'Don't talk about this.' The guards, being
Poles, weren't pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks, the office's brass
[of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to Stalin, for they thought of
themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots ... Stalin ... had hired all the
Jews on Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them into his Office of State Security,
his instrument in the People's Republic of Poland. And now, 1945, the Poles
went to war with the Office, shooting at Jews in Intelligence, Interrogation,
and Imprisonment." [SACK, p. 139]
All this, of course, including the Poles
own struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the role of Jews in the brutal
communist oppression of Polish nationalism, traditional self-imposed Jewish
estrangement from Polish society, and Jewish docile acquiescence to Nazi rule
is part of the unscholarly "gutter literature" that the likes of
David Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.
In 1984, a Polish journalist, Teresa
Toranska, had this interchange with Jacob Berman, the despised Jewish former
"Minister of State Security" in post-war communist Poland:
Berman: "I was against too large
a concentration of Jews in certain
institutions ... it
wasn't the right thing to do and it was a
necessary evil that
we'd been forced into when we
[communists] took power when the Polish
intelligentsia
was boycotting us...
Q: In 1948-49 you arrested members of the [Polish] Home
Army Council of Aid to
Jews, the 'Zegata' ... Mr. Berman!
The security services
who were all or nearly all Jews arrested
Poles because they had
saved Jews during the [Nazi]
occupation, and you say
the Poles are anti-Semites. That's
not nice.
Berman: ... It was wrong that that happened. Certainly it was wrong ...
It was a small group,
but very dedicated, and it took
enormous risks to look
after Jews during the war."
[TORANSKA, p. 321]
Toranska also talked to Roman Werbel, a
prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major Polish communist
journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality wrought by Jewish security
officers upon Poles in fomenting anti-Semitism:
"Beating causes
degradation not only in the person who is beaten,
but in the person doing the
beating as well. So it's better to shoot
someone than to beat him ...
There are principals you have to
stick to in beating, however
Johnny has to be beaten by Johnny
and not Moshe ... I can see
now that there were too many Jews in
the security services."
[TORANSKA, p. 109]
Jewish apologist Michael Checinski (whose
world view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent anti-Semitism model, whereby
even in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews are themselves considered victims
of an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an anti-Semitic communist regime) argues
that
"while by coincidence or evil
design, Jewish officials were often placed
in the most conspicuous posts; hence they
could easily be blamed for
all the regime's crimes ...[CHECINSKI,
M., 1982, p. 62] ... Jews -- and
especially those with Jewish names or
striking Semitic features -- could
be placed in the most controversial posts
(for example, those dealing
with Church affairs or the campaign
against the political underground)
and thus deflect antiregime feelings into anti-Semitism. This
policy was
implemented not only in Poland, but
throughout Eastern Europe, where
the new [communist] governments, ruling
only with the military support
of the Soviet army, were seen by their
own peoples as puppets."
[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 63]
In 1999, the government of Poland was
still seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus (now living in England), who
in the post-World War II communist regime was Poland's chief military
prosecutor. Polish investigators, noted the Jerusalem Report, say
"that Brus ... played a key role in the trial and execution of a hero of
the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf ... The anti-Communist Fieldorf,
hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but posthumously pardoned in 1989, was an
intelligence officer in the underground Polish Home Army in World War II."
[WINNER, D., p. 37]
In 1994, the New York Times
discussed the case against Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a well-known German Jewish literary
critic who had emigrated from Poland. "He was forced to admit his
involvement with the Polish secret police from 1944 to 1950," says Carol
Oppenheim, "after his name turned up on the front page of a Warsaw
newspaper publishing excerpts from a secret Polish intelligence archive."
[OPPENHEIM, p. 39]
"Hundreds of Jews," writes Jewish author John Sack, "were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered Germany ... [SACK, p. 6] ... Many [officers of the OSS] were Jewish boys but few used Jewish names ... [SACK, p. 39] ... The talk was in Yiddish, mostly ... About three out of four of the officers -- two hundred rowdy boys -- in the Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland's large industrial city] were Jews ... They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that belonged to a [Polish prisoner]." [SACH, p. 40]
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