Face-To-Face : Holocaust Enabler and Holocaust Survivor

Irmgard Furchner (pictured in white), a typist who has been dubbed the 'secretary of evil', heard from the first Holocaust survivor (Josef Salomonovic, shown left) to testify at the trial in Itzehoe, northern Germany

 

"Maybe she has trouble sleeping at night. I know I do."

"It is not easy to go over all this again. It's a moral duty. It's not pleasant." 

"I was classified as a parasite. Everyone who couldn't work was a parasite."

"The worst was the hunger and the cold."

Josef Salomonovic, Holocaust survivor

In this file photo taken on July 21, 2020 a woman is seen next to a gas chamber at the museum of the former Nazi Death Camp Stutthof, in Sztutowo, July 21, 2020. (Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

 

The 83-year-old was given the opportunity to cast his mind back a lifetime at the trial of a 96-year-old German woman being prosecuted as guilty, however indirectly of atrocities perpetrated at a Nazi concentration camp where she was employed at age 18, as a typist. The court in Itzehoe, near Hamburg, heard the testimony of a man who at age 6, was interned in one camp after another. Too young to be of use as a slave labourer, he nonetheless managed to survive his years of death-camp deprivation.

Speaking to the court while facing Irmgard Furchner who had attempted to flee to avoid appearing at trial, Josef Salomonovic detailed his memory of his father kissing him goodbye for the final time and then he was no more, his life taken with a lethal injection to the heart in Stutthof concentration camp, Poland. The six-year-old boy within the 83-year-old man, deprived of his father, acutely recalls the event and his subsequent aching loss.

There will be others to testify at the trial. Others prepared to give their accounts, condemning the woman accused of being an accessory to the murder of 11,412 people between 1943 and 1945 at Stutthof, one of a myriad of slave labour, concentration, and death camps operated by Nazi Germany in its campaign-within-a-campaign; prosecuting a world war while tending to the business of exterminating Europe's Jewish population.

Irmgard Furchner (in 1944) was just 18

Ms.Furchner was 18 years of age when she began her work as a typist and stenographer for the camp commandant working in an office outside the main camp. Her defence is that she claims to have been completely unaware of the systematic slaughter that occurred within the camp. A claim that the testifying witness scorned dismissively. She was indirectly guilty, the defence of knowing nothing somehow not squaring with her stamping of his father's death certificate.

With him was a picture of his father which he held up to the former stenographer while testifying. As a child, he informed the court, he had witnessed his mother forced to strip off her clothing, setting aside her possessions. The Nazi attendants shaved her head, and he failed to recognize her as his mother. He had  himself been assigned to eight concentration camps, Auschwitz among them, but in his experience, Stutthof had been the direst.

It was in Stutthof that he was deprived of his father, separated from him, and sent on to Auschwitz, the death camp, in view of his youth identifying him as a body too immature to be put to hard physical labour. In the end, miraculously, through the agony and the uncertainty, pain, fear and hope, he survived. And he discovered that his mother and an older brother had also survived, after liberation. Originally from the Czech Republic, they were slated as Jews, to perish.

He described to the court how he would crouch between his mother's legs in hopes of being warmed. Toward the end of the war he was sent to work in a munitions factory in Dresden, and he thought at that time  he was about to die. "But then there was the bombing in Dresden, and that's why I'm still alive", he explained.

The 96-year-old defendant Irmgard F. sits in an ambulance chair behind a plexiglass screen in a courtroom in Itzehoe, Germany, Oct. 19, 2021 (Christian Charisius/DPA via AP, Pool)

Germany's Extermination Laboratory

Nazi parade in Amsterdam, early in Germany’s occupation of the Netherlands. ‘The Beehive’ department store, Jewish-owned before the occupation, is seen in the background. (public domain)

"The Dutch armed forces surrendered on May 14, 1940, the fifth day of the German invasion. The Netherlands securely in the hands of the German army, the Nazi regime appointed Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reich Commissar for the country. His most important subordinate and rival was Hanns Albin Rauter, the General Commissar for Security, a Higher SS and Police Leader dispatched by Heinrich Himmler. These two Austrians, both executed as war criminals after the Third Reich’s defeat, could rely on the National Socialist Movement, an indigenous fascist party led by Anton Mussert, for enthusiastic support."

"The 140,000 Jews residing in the Netherlands thus had good reason to be afraid. Among them were 25,000 foreign, mostly German Jews, who had sought refuge there, including Anne Frank and her family. Over the next several months, the expected anti-Semitic measures came. Seyss-Inquart and Rauter passed legislation barring Jews from holding public office. In October, all Dutch civil servants had to complete forms—one specifically designed for Jews, the other for Aryans. At the same time, Jewish businesses were also forced to register with the government. The process of removing Jews from the civil service then ensued in early November. In January 1941, the Nazis demanded registration of all Jews, as well as people of mixed ancestry. This insidious process, gradually and methodically implemented, of identifying and separating Jews from everyone else, relegated them to pariah status in their own country."

"Following this wave of reactionary legislation, two incidents in February 1941 demonstrated that the Jewish population in Amsterdam would not hesitate to protect themselves. Feeling emboldened, the Defense Division, the paramilitary arm of Mussert’s organization, openly attacked Jews in Amsterdam. Young Jewish men fought back fiercely and, in one confrontation, killed a Dutch National Socialist." "On February 19, German police entered a popular ice cream parlor in South Amsterdam owned by Erich Cahn, a German Jew and refugee. Mistaken for Dutch Nazis, this patrol was sprayed by ammonium gas from an improvised device in the parlor. In retaliation, the Germans arrested, tortured, and sentenced Cahn to death by firing squad."

"Ever mindful to send a message, Seyss-Inquart’s government additionally seized 425 Jews, literally grabbing them from Amsterdam’s streets, and deported them to Buchenwald.  Of them, 389 were sent from there to Mauthausen. Only a few survived. The brutality displayed in these roundups not only shocked people but stirred them to act."

Opposition took shape around the radical Left. The Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), banned by the German authorities, gave voice and organization to these stirrings. A meeting organized by the Communists and attended by trade-union representatives happened on the 24th. Two CPN militants, Piet Nak and Willem Kraan, called for a general strike. Leaflets were distributed, emblazoned with the words: 'Strike! Strike! Strike! Shut down all of Amsterdam for a day'!" 

Dr. Jason Dawsey, research H\historian, The Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, The National WWII Museum, New Orleans

‘February Strike’ in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1941 (public domain)

 "We always thought the first deportation train departed in July 1942. These razziamen were already deported on 27 February 1941, so that's much earlier."

"It was a kind of laboratory [for the Nazis] to improve their knowledge of everything that we see at Auschwitz on a much, much bigger scale."

"[Those in command at Mauthausen, where the Dutch Jewish men were temporarily incarcerated could select whether to gas people] during the bus ride, halfway to the castle -- and then at Hartheim, there was a kind of place where no one could see what was going on."

Historian Wally de Lang

Dutch Jews board the train that is to take them to Auschwitz. Photograph from 1942 or 1943. Photographer: Rudolf Breslauer. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Rechten: Public domain

Hundreds of Dutch Jews wee rounded up in a razzia in early 1941, taken off the streets of Amsterdam, marking the first Nazi raids on Jews in Western Europe. This was the beginning of an operation and transport to a killing site that became a training camp for German military personnel who would specialize in the exacting necessity of exterminating European Jews. The fine points of gassing people to death in large numbers on an experimental basis to fine-tune and expedite the process needed a living laboratory for success, and the Netherlands was chosen as the initial round-up site.

This roundup (razzia) was occasioned in particular by the death of a Dutch Nazi collaborator who had been killed in a violent confrontation between Dutch fascists in alliance with the German military which had entered the Netherlands the spring before, and young Jewish Dutchmen who had determined to defend themselves. Aboard a deportation train on 27 February 1941 the men disembarked at the site of a 17th century castle-cum-'hospital' in upper Austria, Hartheim Castle.

The castle had, a year earlier, been transformed into a killing centre with the installation of a gas chamber retrofitted in a room especially adapted for the purpose. According to writer-historian Wally de Lang in her newly published book, the castle was destined to become a training camp preparatory to large-scale gas chamber operations to handle an anticipated expulsion of Jews from all points in German-occupied Europe to the Final Solution death camps.

 

In Amsterdam's Jodenbuurt, Jewish men are rounded up and arrested by German soldiers in February 1941. (Public domain)

These experimental test chambers for gassing prisoners of war at Hartheim pre-dated the creation of the Final Solutio,n in January 1942. Of the group of 340 Jews who had been transported from Amsterdam, 108 were murdered at Hartheim in a three-day period in August 1941. Efficiency was a German byword. The families of these men were sent notices of death, attributed to fictional causes. This, at a time when the full agenda of the extermination of Europe's Jews was not yet openly being carried out.

 

The castle was not meant to be the venue of such a ignominiously horrendous rehearsal for genocide. It had been donated by heirs to the local welfare society decades earlier, to be dedicated to the care of mentally and physically afflicted people, but by 1940, 30,000 of those individuals became afflicted in a eugenics network of annihilation courtesy of the Third Reich, to rid the world of the mentally unstable and physically disabled.

 

German pogrom on Amsterdam’s Jewish Quarter in February 1941 (public domain)

And although the Nazi Eugenics program came to a halt when the public became aware of the situation and reacted with outrage in 1940, the castle went on to lend its premises to the deaths of 12,000 prisoners of war from 1941 to 1944, in accordance with Action 14f13, an ordinance to eliminate concentration camp prisoners no longer capable of performing slave labour. Poles and Spaniards were among the national and ethnic groups that were targeted for elimination by gassing, though Jews remained the primary target.

Mauthausen, Dachau and Gusen concentration camps, all associated with Hartheim, saw their staff handle logistics and administration. Mauthausen qualified as one of the most brutal of Nazi concentration camps, its complex including some 100 sub-camps spaced throughout Austria, holding a total of 85,000 people by 1945. When researching her book The Raids of 22 and 23 February 1941 in Amsterdam, Ms.De Lang discovered that the Dutch Jews were taken frist from Amsterdam to Camp Schoorl, a prison camp in the Dutch dunes.

Of the 525 men originally seized 388 were dispatched to Buchenwald where many died, and 350 were sent on from there to Mauthausen where many others perished. Three months on, 108 of the original group were gassed at Hartheim. As a percentage of their Jewish population that died in the Holocaust, the Netherlands had a higher rate than other Western European countries, partially attributed to the aid given the Nazi occupiers (which was by no means unique to the Netherlands) by fascist Netherlanders.

Organizing the ‘February Strike’ in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1941 (public domain)

Reframing, Readjusting Historical Accuracy

"This is a fairly unprecedented verdict which strikes at the heart of what I as a historian do. This verdict, if upheld on our appeal, which will follow, means an end to independent research of the history of the Holocaust and, I would argue, of many other parts of Polish history which run contrary to the official myths and legends espoused by the Polish state today."

"I became sort of a face to hate. There are bad people out there, with vast support from different states, who want to write themselves a new history."

"The damage probably has already been done.The authorities in Poland have already won."

"Their goal was not actually to talk about history, it was to frighten people."

Professor Jan Grabowski, Holocaust Historian, University of Ottawa

The "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate at the former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz.   Credit: Kacper Pempel/ REUTERS

"Anyone suggesting that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust could face fines or even imprisonment of up to three years under a controversial new law approved by president Andrzej Duda. The law makes it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of having taken part in the atrocities and the systematic mass murder of the Jews committed by the Germans during World War II."

"A milestone was reached when scholars felt able to move away from simplified categories of German perpetrators and Jewish victims. They shone light on the complicity of non-German citizens in German occupied territories. Scholars such as Jan Tomasz Gross and Jan Grabowski played a key role in studying Poland. With the help of testimonies from Holocaust survivors, Gross revealed in 2000 that Polish citizens took part in a 1941 massacre in the small town of Jedwabne, helping German occupiers to murder their Jewish neighbours."

"The Polish law gives the government the right to restrict different interpretations of the past. It aims to rewrite that history according to nationalist political aspirations. It will question academic achievements in the field of Holocaust studies and represents a danger to academic freedom, openness and critical reflection."

"The law is an insult to Holocaust survivors and the recognition of their suffering – which was, and still is, a painful process on the individual as well as on the collective level. It could allow powerful political institutions to anchor their narratives on the past and silence those who were not given a voice during the Holocaust."

"Allowing politically motivated, whitewashed versions of history to take hold is the first step in legitimising Holocaust denial. Only by confronting the difficult and painful aspects of the past can we understand how to prevent events like the Holocaust happening in the future."

The Conversation, February 16, 2018

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and museum director Piotr Cywinski at Auschwitz, December 6, 2019. Credit: KACPER PEMPEL/Reuters

"Of course, anti-Semitism was not some foreign ideology imported to Poland by the Nazis in 1939. Many individual Poles participated in pogroms, assisted in turning Jews over to the Nazi authorities, and profited from blackmail and the plunder of Jewish property, while some Polish agencies were used in the management of ghettos and concentration camps."

"On the other hand, thousands of Poles are recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, as “righteous among nations” for their efforts to resist the Nazi occupation and rescue Jews from the Holocaust."

Jonah Shepp, Foreign Affairs, Intelligencer

When the new law criminalizing linking Poland and its citizens to aiding and abetting Nazis in the Second World War round-up of Jews for annihilation during the Holocaust was signed into law, it was feared then, several years ago, that the law's threat would have a stultifying effect on future historians writing of the reality of Jewish existence in Poland, the fragility of living among neighbours long accustomed to slandering Jews who on occasion launched themselves into deadly pogroms to let off steam. The law was a blatant device to disassociate Poland and Poles from accusations of complicity in the death of Jews.

It has never been a secret that Polish society has always been anti-Semitic. Which also does not seek to deny that not all Poles subscribed to the demonization of Jews as set out in the Elders of the Protocols of Zion, a masterwork of racist slander out of Russia at the turn of the 20th Century. It became part of the German school curriculum, and was widely published and distributed, aided by some like Henry Ford who himself subscribed to its anti-Semitic fictional claims. Among Poles and Jews, who lived together mostly in small towns and villages for a thousand years, there was some amity as well as enmity.

During the Holocaust years Poles suffered under German occupation, targeted themselves for exile from Poland and mass murder at the hands of the Third Reich which considered them, like Jews, to be sub-human. They were far from the German Nordic ideal. Many Poles betrayed their Jewish neighbours for a variety of reasons; simply to see them dead, to be able to loot Jewish property, take over their abandoned hovels, to cleanse Polish villages from a Jewish presence.

 

Survivors walk in Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, in 2017.Agencja Gazeta / Reuters

Renowned Holocaust scholar Professor Jan Grabowski in professional tandem with a Polish scholar Barbara Engelking, co-edited a lengthy tome whose contents they had researched with the assistance of nine researchers to produce 1,700 pages for a book titled Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland. The book, which took years of work, was released in Poland the very year the new law came into effect, raising the heated outrage of Polish nationalists among whom the name of Grabowski became a battlecry.

A Polish court recently ordered the pair of scholars to issue an apology to the niece of a Polish man who was mayor of a small town who had been accused of betraying the presence of 22 Jews hiding in a nearby forest, who were then killed. A trial had taken place in 1950 when the mayor had been accused of complicity in the death of the fugitives, with a Jewish woman attesting to his innocence. He was acquitted. When the woman was years later interviewed for the book she admitted having been beholden to the mayor and as a result giving false testimony. Telling her interviewer that the mayor had indeed betrayed the Jews and was complicit in their deaths.

It was that passage in the lengthy book that caught the eye of the mayor's niece who launched a lawsuit against the two co-authors. "The results of this research (for the book) have been greeted warmly by academia, and they were greeted with absolute fury by the nationalists governing in Poland right now and of course their electorate", Professor Grabowski stated, who himself had been born and raised in Poland, and whose father was a Holocaust survivor.

In the lawsuit, the woman claimed that her uncle had been defamed, demanding financial compensation and an apology. She had the support of a nationalist group (funded by the Polish government) formed to defend Poland against any such accusations of aiding the German occupation and most specifically, collaborating with the Germans in their hugely successful bid to rid Europe of the presence of Jews. A week ago the judge ordered a written apology be made for "providing inaccurate information" and "violating his honour". She deliberately failed to order financial compensation as being inappropriate.

 

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at Auschwitz, December 6, 2019. Credit: Krystian Maj / KPRM

"[Dr.Jan T.] Gross told me he didn’t think the law would have many practical consequences for established historians, although he worried that it might prevent younger ones from studying the Holocaust. Above all, he was concerned about the teaching of history in Polish schools."

“'No one will dare to teach the Holocaust,” he said. “The ignorance in Polish society about the Holocaust is extraordinary. There were surveys made and the majority of the people who were asked the question ‘Who suffered more during World War II under German occupation, Poles or Jews?’—the majority of the people responded ‘Poles.’ How ignorant do you have to be?”

Rachel Donadio, The Atlantic, February 8, 2018

The Third Reich Rail Component Enabling the Holocaust

"I blame the railway company for knowingly transporting Jews to the concentration camps and for killing those Jews there in a terrible way."

"I cannot give up because this hurts me every day. Every day I have to think about this and it hurts me. And I want the pain to finally pass."

"I want recognition from them and recognition always comes with an allowance."

Salo Muller, 84, surviving child of Dutch-Jewish Holocaust victims

"The Dutch Jews transported by the Deutsche Reichsbahm have simply been forgotten."

"The state is a hundred percent shareholders in the railways. Germany's moral responsibility always remains."

Axel Hagedorn, Muller lawyer

Snow-covered personal effects of those deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp litter the train tracks leading to the camp's entrance, in an image from around 1945

The German rail system during the Holocaust years of the Second World War ran over a hundred 'Final Solution' trains from the Netherlands to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor. As indeed they did from every country of Nazi-occupied Europe, in a massive drive to exterminate European Jews from their countries of origin to satisfy the vision of a 'Judenrein' world. Henrich Himmler, Nazi SS chief in 1943 pleaded for more trains to enable the rapid transport of Jews to slave labour and death camps.

The sole Nazi representing the German train network to be charged was then-rail boss Albert Ganzenmuller, in 1973. On his first court day he suffered a heart attack, adjudged then medically unfit to stand trial. He lived until 1996 with no legal consequences for his role in transporting millions of Jews to their death. Lawyer Hagedorn, on behalf of his client, Salo Muller, has written to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to remind her that history records but does not forgive.

Jews deported from Warsaw Ghetto    US Holocaust Memorial Museum

The heirs of German wartime railways, he wrote, have a moral and clear legal obligation to recognize their predecessors' role in the slaughter of millions of Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters, among others. The Nederlandse Spoorwegen Dutch railway company apologized for its part in the conveyance of Dutch Jews to death camps last year, after Mr. Muller successfully sued them. They paid 50 million euros in compensation, divided among survivors and their families.

Clearly, the German railway company that did the bidding of the Third Reich in its campaign to annihilate European Jewry has an obligation to acknowledge its role in the signal crime of the 20th Century. Salo Muller's parents wee transported by train from Amsterdam to Auschwitz when he was a child. He has lived with that reality all his life, tormented by visions of how his parents suffered and how they perished, all the while knowing that their fate had been shared by millions of other Jews.

Jews loading onto trains at the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw  Wikipedia  

Hie success in holding the Netherlands rail company accountable for their complicity with the Nazi occupation has spurred him to go on to demand that the German rail company admit its own responsibility in uncountable Jewish lives being forfeited to the Final Solution that produced the Holocaust. There are close to 500 Dutch survivors and approximately 5,500 next of kin, all of whom await recognition, admission of responsibility on the part of the German rail company, and accompanying reparations.

The Deutsche Reichbahn operated German railways during the Second World War, transporting about 107,000 Dutch Jews to concentration camps. The company profited to the amount of 15 million euros (in today's approximate currency accounts). During that fearful time in Jewish history, the victims themselves were charged to fund their own travel costs, which took them to their death.

Mr. Muller had been a physiotherapist with the Ajax Dutch soccer club before he embarked on this campaign.

From Polish Death Camps to Denials of Restitution

"[The Polish government now has to move beyond] declarations of non-acceptance for the claims of Jewish communities from the United States or Israel to specific legal solutions that will protect us against such demands [wartime reparations to Jewish-Polish victims] in the future."
Tomasz Rzymkowski, MP, right-wing nationalist Kukiz ’15 bloc

"[This is] the war which the Jews are waging against the Polish nation."
"The Jews started this war centuries ago. In fact they have always conducted it against the Poles and against the whole Christian world."
Grzegorz Braun, Polish weekly Najwyzszy Czas 

"The issue of restitution has served as a pretext for the Polish far-right to whip up an antisemitic hysteria. It became a big theme in the European Parliament election campaign, which has been tainted by xenophobia and hate speech, especially through propaganda channels on YouTube."
"[Opposition to restitution was] also a fruit of the wave of antisemitism in Polish media and politics  during the controversy around the 2018 Institute of National Remembrance Act [which effectively criminalized public discussion of Polish collusion with the Nazis]."
"Unfortunately, we are still witnessing the repercussions of that [when Poland backed down in the face of diplomatic protests by Israel and the United States]."
Rafal Pankowski, director, “Never Again” Association, Poland’s leading anti-racist group 

"Jewish claims are a real danger for all of us."
"The Polish government is facing the historical test of responsibility for the nation amid demands that have only an ethical but not legal basis."
"We want ruling politicians to defend our properties."
Robert Bakiewicz, National March group, Poland

A marcher in Warsaw carries an antisemitic sign at a protest against the restitution of property stolen from Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation. Photo: Agencja Gazeta / Maciej Jazwiecki via Reuters

The 'our properties' Mr. Bakiewicz speaks of represent properties belonging to Jewish Polish citizens who perished during the Holocaust. Their properties quickly claimed by Poles. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who returned to their villages in the expectation that they could reclaim their homes were quickly disabused of that naive trust when Polish villagers, their neighbours for hundreds of years, turned on them violently leaving the survivors no option but to leave their village and their property for a second time.

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Saturday made the public vow that Poland is prepared to reject compensation demands. Its citizens, he pointed out again -- the predictable mantra of the government of Poland in all such matters concerning Jews who are exempted post-history of ever having been citizens -- were victims of atrocities from German occupation and noble Poland "cannot bear any responsibility".

Nazi Germany constructed more death camps on Polish soil than anywhere else, knowing there would be no protest from Poland over the fate the Third Reich had in store for Europe's Jews. In all of Europe, Poland had the largest Jewish population; 3.3 million, a population that had lived there for eight hundred years, through constant government- and church-sanctioned pogroms, and it was in Poland that more Jewish lives were annihilated than anywhere else in Europe; 380 thousand Polish Jews survived.

Lodz, Poland, Deportation from the ghetto in the summer of 1944   Yad Vashem

As the only member state of the European Union not to have passed restitution legislation in recognition of Holocaust victims' properties and passing it on to survivors and their descendants, Poland in effect is contradicting its own assertion that the six infamous death camps -- Chelmo, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau, at which collectively three-and-a- third million Jews were murdered -- were not 'Polish death camps' but German death camps situated in Poland.

Poland was determined to pass a law to be recognized internationally to that effect, making it unlawful to reference those camps as 'Polish' rather than German. A plan that ran afoul of international opinion. An estimated ten to twenty thousand Polish nationalists on Saturday marched through Warsaw with loud demands that no compensation be paid to Jews whose properties were confiscated by Germans and Poles during the Second World War, and which later came into Communist hands.

As the sole ex-Communist country lacking comprehensive legislation addressing property claims that had been nationalized, that in itself speaks volumes about a Poland which dismisses ethical responsibility with the shrug that no law exists, internationally or otherwise, that mandates them to do so. The U.S. Congress joined the World Jewish Restitution Organization which has called repeatedly on Poland to address itself to property claims by U.S. citizen Holocaust survivors and their families.

"No to claims", chanted the protesters. "Here is Poland not Polin", referring to the Hebrew word for Poland. Signs were prominent in display with messages such as "unconstitutional robbery plunder", and they did not refer to the looting by Poles of Jewish property. Copies of the infamous anti-Semitic Czar-era slander, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were being distributed. Right-wing extremist Poles demonstrating their anti-Semitic bona fides.

Poland's refusal to consider restitution for Jews hasn't stopped it from demanding that Germany pay attention to Poland's demands for restitution, however. Poland is demanding 800 billion euros in restitution from Germany. Six million Poles, including three million Polish Jews, were killed during WWII. Arkadiusz Mularczyk, head of the Polish parliamentary committee on reparations, said "It’s time for a decision from the Polish Sejm (lower house of Parliament)" to pursue reparations from Germany.

Poland Should Study Remorse and Humility

"During World War II, due to the demoralizing circumstances and German actions, it is true that vile-acting individuals could be found among Poles and Jews alike."
"Yet, we should remember that the objective of the Germans was also to 'eradicate the Polish nation' and 'completely destroy Poland'."
"In his numerous publications and public statements, he [Grabowski] falsifies the history of Poland, proclaiming the thesis that Poles are complicit in the extermination of Jews."
"The attempts to ascribe part of the responsibility for the crimes of the World War II and the Holocaust to the Poles are evidently actions damaging Poland and are based on Jan Grabowski’s unconfirmed estimated figures."
Polish League Against Defamation statement

Jews are loaded onto trucks in the Lodz Ghetto, to be sent to an extermination camp in 1942.

"What is important, from my point of view, is that the militant nationalists who nowadays hold sway in Poland be warned that they will be held to account, that they are wrong if they think that their outrageous statements and slanders will go unnoticed."
"The more I studied these issues, I saw a level of complicity of parts of Polish society in the destruction of Polish Jews."
"From among the approximately 250,000 Polish Jews who had escaped liquidations of the ghettos and who had fled, about 40,000 survived. We have thus more than 200,000 Jews who fled the liquidations and who did not survive until liberation. My findings show that in the overwhelming majority of cases, their Polish co-citizens were – directly through murder, or indirectly by denunciation – at the root of their deaths."
"Whether they lived or died depended to a large extent on the attitude of the Poles. [While some Poles did save Jews], Polish society demonstrated various behaviours, some of which were horrifying."
Jan Grabowski, Holocaust researcher, professor, University of Ottawa

Jews are liquidated from the Krakow Ghetto in 1943.

"[The Polish League Against Defamation] has attempted to silence Prof. Grabowski by criticizing both his academic credibility and his personal integrity. Most recently, the league circulated a letter to universities in Europe and North America – including the University of Ottawa – that questions Prof. Grabowski’s widely acclaimed scholarship and accuses him of defaming the Polish nation."
"The HRREC affirms our confidence in the highly respected scholarship of Prof. Grabowski and we underline his academic freedom to pursue and publish his research without fear of attacks on his person or reputation."
"The HRREC strongly denounces the attacks on Prof. Grabowski as well as any endeavour to interfere with independent research."
Human Rights Research and Education Centre (HRREC), University of Ottawa

After the Second World War, Jewish refugees who settled in Canada among the already long-settled Jewish immigrants from Europe, became aware that it was entirely conceivable that they might come across a former guard from any of the extermination or forced-labour camps operating in Eastern Europe walking the streets of Canadian cities. East Europeans, post-war, made application to leave their countries of origin and settle in Canada. They took steps to conceal their past during the war and succeeded in their applications for settlement in Canada.

Among them a good number of Ukrainian and Polish nationals who had collaborated with the Nazis taking up prison work with relish, work that made them complicit in the deaths of millions of Europe's Jews. When the Canadian Jewish Congress applied to the various governments of Canada over the years to establish a commission that would root out former war criminals living in Canada who took part in Nazi Germany's genocide against the Jewish population of Europe, nationalist Canadian-Ukrainian did everything they could to circumvent any such actions, denying that Ukrainians had ever been part of Germany's extermination plans.

For the past few years Poland has been strenuously applying itself to teaching the world that it is morally incorrect to refer to 'Polish' concentration camps, though so many were located in Poland. The Nazis knew that in establishing death camps in Ukraine and Poland they could anticipate local complicity. Even in occupied France French police and authorities were swift to make common cause with the Nazis, helping to round up Jews to be dispatched to concentration camps from which they would never return. Poland prefers the descriptive of 'Nazi' concentration camps, never 'Polish' concentration camps.

Dr. Grabowski, a highly internationally respected Holocaust researcher, has been the victim of a campaign of defamation by the Polish League Against Defamation, allied with the conservative ruling party of Poland which claims that his research uses wholly fictional accounts in a deliberate effort to slander Poland. History speaks for itself. There is more than ample documentation, from meticulously-maintained German archives, much less personal testimony of Holocaust survivors to attest to Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities. Ukraine's defence is Poland's as well. Most Eastern European countries lent themselves under Nazi occupation, to the hunt for Jews.

Poland's Law and Justice party attempted to make it a criminal offence to label the concentration camps in that country where millions were exterminated 'Polish' installations. International indignation convinced it to back down. Professor Grabowski wrote an historical accounting of Poland's complicity during the Holocaust years titled Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, to document the involvement of Poles finding and killing Jews who managed to escape from ghettoes attempting to survive by installing themselves surreptitiously among non-Jews.

With its publication, heated debate ensued even as the book was recognized in 2014 for an award by the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. That award was not the only recognition given Dr. Grabowski for his research and writing; he received numerous death threats. A German newspaper review of the book recognized its quality of revelations and that favourable review saw a response from a far-right Polish website which chose to publish an article alongside a photograph of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister.

"Sieg Heil, Herr Grabowski, Three times Sieg Heil" ran the headline of the article. Leading to a successful libel suit. Now, with this latest besmirching of the professor's scholarship and literary and moral  integrity, the Polish organization is being sued for libel by him, in recognition of its public campaign accusing him of slandering Poland by writing of Polish violence against Jews. Should justice prevail, he will win this lawsuit as well.

Poland does itself no favours by their disingenuous efforts to exonerate their wartime record. Far better to be resigned to the reality of history, to express regret and shame and the intention to cultivate a more humane and responsible admission of wrongs done and deplored. What has passed is past; what is required is to ensure that there can be no repeats of the past. This offensive defensiveness does the country no credit whatever, other than bringing more shame upon it for denying its part in the horrors of genocide.

An inscription 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sits above the main gate at the Auscwitz-Birkenau concentration camp museum in Auscwitz-Birkenau, Poland, February 28, 2018.   Bloomberg

Polish Revisions of Inconvenient Holocaust History

"What kind of order will Uncle Sam’s army install, and what are the crimes attributed to us by ‘the older brothers in faith’ — the Jews?"
"It’s simple. It’s about the post-Jewish property worth billions of dollars left behind by the Holocaust victims, the Jews who left no heirs … The Poles have to give them billions for the heirless property left by Jews. Thus they need to be softened and accused of Nazism. Thus the talk of ‘Polish death camps’ and the tales about Polish crimes against Jews."
Janusz Sanocki, Polish parliamentarian

"The Jews welcomed them [the Soviet Red Army] with flowers."
"I’m asking, where were the Jews when 500,000 Poles were murdered in front of their eyes, and two million Poles were put on the trains of death to Siberia. I’m asking if there was even a single Pole saved by Jews in a situation like that."
"Perhaps we should only allow Poles to guide the tours in Auschwitz. There is little about the Polish people there."
Marek Jakubiak, Polish parliamentarian

"[Any discussion of Polish collusion with the Nazis amounted to a] moral, ethical Holocaust against the Poles.""My mother helped Jews in Warsaw, she told me about it. I have many Jewish friends. And I would not call the communist system ‘Jewish,’ despite the fact all the senior personnel in the security service, the NKVD, the judiciary were people with [Jewish] names like Szechter, Michnik, Morel, Swiatlo, Rozanski, Goldberg."
Pawel Kukiz —  2015 candidate, Polish presidency

Polish neo-fascists gathering for an Independence Day march, Nov. 12, 2017. 
Photo: Reuters / Agencja Gazeta / Adam Stepien.

"Of course Poles took part. Tens of thousands of 'szmalcowniks' — [Poles who informed on Jews or extorted their property]." 
"We are all obliged to remember these heroic people [Poles who helped save Jewish lives], but we must not allow their heroism to cover the crimes and wickedness of a much larger group of Poles. Antisemitism was and remains endemic in our country."
"Now (Polish PM Jarosław) Kaczyński has caused that phrase ['Polish death camps] to reach thousands of recipients. [The decision of President Andrzej Duda, to sign the IPN Act, as the Holocaust legislation is known, into law earlier this week proved to] everyone in the world, not only Israel [that the new law] is not a random manifestation of parliamentary madness."
Włodzimierz Cimoszewicz, (former) Polish premier

"I know the Jewish people and acknowledge that there were Polish criminals who murdered Jews during the Holocaust. But they were not the majority, and Poland definitely isn’t responsible for the murder of millions of Jews. We are victims of the Holocaust too, and saying that death camps or concentration camps were ‘Polish’ is a crime."
"This may sound provocative, but I think you [Jews] couldn’t have survived on this land without the help of a Polish family. If 150,000 Jews survived World War II, most of them, if not all, survived thanks to the Polish population. My aunt lives in Herzliya, and she perfectly understands this narrative."
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

A Polish police officer checks a Jewish man's documents at the Kraków Ghetto, 1941. The Polish national archive, from 'Hunt for the Jews.'

Poland had the greatest number of European Jews living in the country pre-World War II, a figure put at three million Polish Jews who had lived in Poland for over a thousand years in the great dispersal of Jews (diaspora) all over the world. Jews lived in the capital Warsaw, as merchants and in the rural districts of the country, in small towns called shtetels (Yiddish). In many of those shtetels Jewish population numbers equalled their Polish neighbours or represented the majority. For the most part they lived amicably together.

Yet anti-Semitism was so deeply ingrained in Poland that ongoing pogroms terrorized Jews from time to time when Polish rage turned against the 'foreigners' in their midst to smash property and injure and murder their Jewish neighbours. The Orthodox Church often incited parishioners to wreak their frustration on the Jews, leaving Polish Jews in a constant state of vigilance and morbid anticipation of new pogroms being unleashed on them.

When the war was over, and the death camps liberated of whatever remained of their human cargo of slave labourers and those who survived the inhumane conditions leading to starvation, privation, disease and madness sought to return to their homes, they were reviled and attacked by their former neighbours most of whom were installed on properties formerly owned by Jews. Fully 90 percent of Poland's pre-war Jewish population of three million was exterminated after 1939, the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Tens of thousands of Polish Jews were betrayed by their fellow Poles to the Nazi Gestapo. On the other hand, six thousand Poles have been honoured as "Righteous Among the Nations" in recognition of their stalwart courage in helping to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust years.  Nazi Germany was well aware, however, when it blueprinted plans to establish camps for slave labour and death camps where in Europe it would be least likely for the population to react against the targeting of Jews among them.

In countries like Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Hungary and Lithuania, among many other nations that hosted concentration camps, locals were complicit with the rounding up of Jews, and eager to find work in the camps. Infamously, France too, occupied by the Third Reich, had no ethical problem in aiding their German overseers in rounding up French Jews and aiding the Germans in their transport to death camps. It was, however, in Poland where the most and the most deadly camps were established in the knowledge that where anti-Semitism flourished there would be little backlash.

Watch towers and barbed wire fence of the former Nazi death camp Majdanek, outside Lublin, Poland. AP

Poland has become very sensitive to the phrase "Polish death camp" when referring to dread places of incarceration and annihilation like Auschwitz, quick to correct the phrase as "Nazi death camps" established by an occupying power that also persecuted Poles. Now, Polish President Andrzej Duda has ratified a law to make it illegal in Poland to accuse Poland for their part in the Nazi institutionalized mass murder of millions of Jews throughout the Second World War. The bill was signed as Polish 'activists' chanted anti-Semitic slogans at a rally that took place in front of the presidential palace in Warsaw.

One of the banners read: "Take off your yarmulke and sign the bill". The ruling Law & Justice party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski a few days earlier had urged the Polish president to sign the legislation, in the face of mounting criticism from the international community. Israel has repeatedly asked Poland to rethink the Holocaust bill for its curbing of free speech and impediment of history as it occurred. Relations between Israel and Poland which had been improving in the last decade, are now at a declining standstill.

The United States administration has urged Poland as well to reconsider passage of the legislation as a historical re-write unworthy of a nation that has still not come fully to grips with its complicity with the Nazi occupiers. A diary left behind, retrieved from the camp garbage heap where teacher Stanislaw Zeminski from the town of Lukow in eastern Poland was held until his death in the Majdanek death camp in 1943, documented the atrocities he witnessed.

The situation was tragic, Zeminski wrote, because the orgy of murders represented not only the work of the Germans, and their Ukrainian and Latvian helpers. "It was clear that our [i.e., Polish] policemen would take part in the slaughter (one knows that they are like animals), but it turned out that normal Poles, accidental volunteers, took part as well."

He provided testimony by Polish peasants who surrounded a nearby village and launched a hunt for Jews, as Zeminski puts it. They did it, he wrote, to obtain prizes offered by the German occupiers: vodka, sugar, potatoes, oil – along with personal items taken from the victims.

"Locals were actively involved in pulling Jews from the bunkers in the ghetto", Zeminski wrote in his diary. "They pulled Jews out of their houses; they caught them in the fields, in the meadows. The shots are still ringing, but our hyenas already set their sights on the Jewish riches. The [Jewish] bodies are still warm, but people already start to write letters, asking for Jewish houses, Jewish stores, workshops or parcels of land." People, he noted. volunteered for this hunt willingly, without any coercion.

Polish-born historian Jan Grabowski won a lawsuit against a Polish website last year. About 18 months earlier, the site had launched a savage attack on him under the headline, Sieg Heil, Mr. Grabowski, following the publication of a favorable report in a German newspaper, a review on his book Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland. The book describes the Polish populations involvement in turning in and murdering Jews who asked for their help during the Holocaust.

The Will Was There, The Way Was Found

"It's a small tunnel, 70 by 60 centimetres. But the story behind it, the will to survive, the resiliency, the courage, the drive to live and to fight back -- this tunnel brings to light, almost 75 years after it was built, the knowledge of what happened in Lithuania. The longer I was there and the more I thought about the escape the more powerful it all became to me."
Paul Bauman, Calgary geophysicist

Ezra Wolfinger, Israel Antiquities Authority, via AP  -- Prisoners dug the tunnel in a pit they were kept in

What happened in Lithuania happened also elsewhere, like Latvia. Estonia. This was fertile ground for Jew-hatred of such an intensity that the Nazis knew full well the plan they were still in the process of fully formulating, to destroy European Jewry, would never be opposed. But, as in occupied France, the fervency of the proffered assistance to the Nazi plan of extermination by the police and military of the occupied nations in Europe surprised even the Germans.

It was crude and time-consuming, the first attempts at genocide. To have the victims themselves dig the pits deep enough to accommodate the number of bodies the SS troops figured they would be dealing with. To march into the villages in eastern Europe where Jews had lived among their non-Jewish neighbours for a thousand years, to round up and assemble the Jewish men, women and children, sometimes herding them into synagogues which would then be set on fire.

Alternately, to march them into nearby forests where the pits had been dug, to order them to line themselves up in neat orderly rows, because it was more efficient that way and the Germans were above all, efficiency experts. And then to shoot them so the bodies would tumble into the pits, one after another, ten at a time, it was tiring, gruelling work, and so irritating to hear the piteous cries and moans from the still-living.

Ezra Wolfinger/Nova -- Ground scanning was used to pinpoint the tunnel

Lithuania appeared to the Nazis to be ideal for initiating this laborious extermination attempt pre-dating the death camps, the far more efficient gas chambers and the ovens. Still in the experimental stage the idea of mass pits seemed appealing. Recently a site in a Lithuanian forest where five such huge pits existed, was found to be the site of a narrow tunnel. It is estimated than over 100,000 people were killed at the Ponar forest site.

A group of Jewish prisoners was set aside for a special task assigned to them. They were to burn the bodies that were piled into the pits. In the process of doing that, some of the 80 recognized their own family members among the slain. That discovery reduced their own will to live, but for the imperative to live and inform the outside world of what had taken place, in the quaint belief that the outside world really wanted to know.

But knowing what they knew, and knowing that everyone they loved and cared for was dead, removed the emotion of personal fear from the minds of the special prisoners. They began to collectively dig a tunnel, using any implement, however small, at hand for the purpose. It took them 75 days to tunnel 35 metres and on the last day of Passover, 1944 symbolically signifying !freedom! the escape occurred.

When the Nazis became aware of the break-out they responded. The escapees came up against another barbed wire fence that slowed them down, and then a minefield. Some were shot, some were blown up in exploding mines and others were chased down by dogs. The escapees placed no trust in the thought that villagers would give them aid, and they weren't disappointed.

Those who survived wandered for days, and the dozen who succeeded in their escape to a precarious freedom and managed to survive the effort, joined Jewish partisans in the forest to fight the Nazis and their Lithuanian helpers guerilla-style, until war's end.

Those 80 prisoners were named the "Burning Brigade", confined to Pit Six. The other five pits are full of human remains. All of them situated in a beautiful forested setting of mixed maple and oak trees, with moss growing in the damp atmosphere, and a heavy green canopy emitting very little sunlight, but the area bursting with birds and birdsong.

Adjacent the area of the pits in the forest is a train track, since of course the strategy couldn't succeed without a continual infusion of Jews packed into cattle cars, arriving full, leaving empty.

Fading Memories

"The world cannot forget Treblinka."
"I live two lives, one is here and now and the other is what happened there. It never leaves me. It stays in my head. It goes with me always."
Samuel Willenberg, 93, Holocaust survivor

Samuel Willenberg  Photo credit: Courtesy

For 70 years, Samuel Willenberg lived his two separate lives. His living memory of the monstrous years he suffered, living as a young man given the job of working as a death camp inmate engaged in custodian duties. Witnessing the deaths of hundreds of thousands innocent children, women and men of all ages because they were Jewish, has haunted his other life, that of a man with an obligation to live as normal a life as possible under such impossible circumstances.

He has finally been released from those two lives. Death that destroyed the lives of those he loved when he was young, waited patiently for him. His life of living memories has now departed, along with his life of experiencing what it is to live as an ordinary individual with an extraordinary past. He was 20 years old when he became an inmate of Treblinka, where Jews were assembled on transports and railcars to a one-way destination meant to be final. Treblinka was a death camp, not a concentration camp, not a dual-purpose human-slavery-and-death-camp.

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Like Auschwitz, Sobibor, Theresienstadt and Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belson, Treblinka was merely one of the more recognizable death camp names, but there were 15,000 camps altogether established by Nazi Germany in occupied Europe. Those venues were carefully selected; not too many in Germany itself, since the Germans represented, after all, a dignified, civil and cultured nation, where cultivation of the arts, love of nature and of animals came naturally to such people, who would take offence at the presence of such places in their near proximity.

One needed, after all, more than the mere prevalence of anti-Semitism to be assured that no inconvenient protests might take place at the presence of sprawling, guarded camps crowded with starving, disease-ridden people whose gassed bodies were shovelled into giant furnaces sending their reeking ashes all over the atmosphere. And there were countries deemed appropriate to the task at hand, like Austria, Belgium Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, France, Holland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia -- and oh yes, Germany as well.

In 1943, Mr. Willenberg was among a group of several hundred young Jewish men who got possession of some weapons and ran for nearby woods, after trying to set fire to the camp. While hundreds fled for the safety of the woods, most were shot and killed by the Nazi guards. Many others were caught by Polish villagers who responding to the charity and purity of heart that their Catholic faith inspired in them, brought the captured Jews whom they despised, back to the kindly custody of the Nazis.

Two Israeli soldiers help Samuel Willenberg, the only living survivor of an August 1943 prisoner rebellion at Treblinka, to light a candle in a memorial ceremony at the camp on October 2, 2013. AFP

Mr. Willenberg recalled being shot in the leg, climbing over bodies that were piled high at the barbed wire fence. Despite that wound he managed to leap over the fence and run, even as he recognized the faces of many of those lying on the ground, their destinies to greet death at that fateful juncture of their lives. Mr. Willenberg did make good his escape. His appearance belied his Jewish ancestry, his facial features and blue eyes not typical of European Jews in the opinion of non-Jews. When he eventually arrived in Warsaw he joined the Polish underground.

After the war he served a few years in the Polish army, then left for Israel. There he took up the profession of a surveyor. Then he also began sculpting, his bronze pieces focusing on Jews during the war when the Third Reich was determined to exterminate Europe's Jews and succeeded to an astonishing degree, despite which no joint action took place by the Allies to disrupt that effort. When Germany surrendered, the liberation of the remaining camps, those not destroyed by the retreating Germans, finally took place.  

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