Friday, November 26, 2021

Happy Unthanksgiving and Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Unthanksgiving and Happy Thanksgiving 

You’ve heard this before, and you’ll probably hear it another hundred times this Thanksgiving Holiday. It’s the one thing people tell you about Thanksgiving besides how much they like turkey. What you’ve heard is that Thanksgiving traditionally is a time when we all talk about the things we’re most thankful for.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to talk about the stuff that makes me Thankful or happy or sad or excited or bored. I keep that sort of stuff pretty much to myself. Maybe it’s just a guy thing. Guys, in my experience, like to play it pretty close to the vest.

This year, however, I’m going to give into the question about what makes me thankful and tell you what makes me thankful.

Before I tell you that, however, I want to tell you something else about myself, something related to my thankfulness. I’m going to tell you what doesn’t make me thankful. Don’t worry. I’ll try to keep this part short.

I’m not thankful for how divided America seems right now. Growing up as a Polish refugee here, I always admired how Americans seemed to work together through crises. That seems gone. I’m also not thankful for the pandemic. I want COVID to just leave, disappear. I’ve had enough of living in the pandemic with its endless spikes in COVID cases and its arguments about vaccinations and masks. I’m also not thankful for climate change. I read this morning that penguins are disappearing because the Antarctic is warming up. I don’t want penguins or elephants or pandas or people to disappear because of climate change. I want my 12-year old granddaughter to be able to tell her kids and grandkids about how much she loves those animals and how they should love them too!

Okay, I’m done talking about what I’m not thankful for. There’s probably a lot more, but I don’t have a lot of space here to yak on and on about it.

So here’s what I’m thankful for.

I’m thankful for my wife Linda whose love has kept me happy and focused for the last 46 years. When I met her I was an alcoholic, drug-taking hippie trying to escape from a life that was completely screwed up. She pointed me in the right direction and helped me become the guy I am. She also gave me a great daughter Lillian and a great granddaughter Lucy. We all live together, and it’s a life that is fun and loving and creative.

What else am I thankful for?

I’m thankful for my writing, my breathing, the trees in my backyard, the way the deer slowly wander through those trees. I’m thankful too for crunchy granola cereal in the morning, wine in the evening, and a granddaughter who loves to practice her ballet everywhere.

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy 

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Saturday, November 6, 2021

A Visit to the ER

A Visit to the Emergency Room

Stabbing pains in my right hip woke me up that Monday morning. I couldn’t stand or walk. I’ve had some pain there before caused by my autoimmune problems and some weird condition called undifferentiated spondyloarthropathy. But the pain I had this morning was 100 times worse. I knew I had to go to the emergency room.

My wife Linda helped me up and got my shoes on. It was too painful to change out of my pajamas, so I left them on, and then she helped me to our car. Every step was painful. At one point, I thought I would pass out from the pain.

I’ve been to ERs before, but this one was the worst. As they wheeled me in in a wheelchair, I saw a woman at the counter weeping. She was saying she had waited too long, that she was in too much pain, that she couldn’t wait any longer for a doctor. The receptionist tried to quiet her, but she couldn’t stop pleading and weeping. Finally, a security guard came and took her away.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Across the aisle from us, a boy sat shaking and groaning. A few feet from him, a woman kept vomiting into a pink dishpan.

Linda and I sat there for 3 hours. Finally we got moved inside, out of the waiting area. Inside, it was worse.

Because the emergency area is so small, we sat in a narrow hallway for another hour. We heard nurses and doctors talking to people about their heart attacks, their drug overdoses, their insurance policies and why they wouldn’t cover anything. In the room across from us, a little girl screamed over and over.

Finally, I saw a doctor. He ordered blood tests and CT scans for me. He hoped they would explain the stabbing pain in my hip. They didn’t. After 5 hours of waiting for the results, we were told I didn’t have cancer, broken bones, or a kidney failure, but the tests didn’t explain my stabbing pain.

I said to the doctor, “What can I do?” He told me to make an appointment to see my doctor. When I said it would take weeks, he shrugged. I asked him if he could give me something for the pain, and he suggested oxycodone. I said I’ve had it before, and it didn’t work for my pain. He nodded and said it didn’t work for his pain either. He said he’d write a prescription for something else that might help.

When I left the ER, I understood why the woman was screaming when I first came in. I wanted to start screaming too. After 8 hours in the ER, I was going home. The stabbing pain was less stabbing. Sitting around for those 8 hours must have helped.

Watching TV shows about doctors, you start believing they can fix all the medical problems in the world. But the reality is different. Sometimes doctors can fix problems, and sometimes they can’t. The last thing the ER doctor said to me was that about 40% of the patients he sees come because of some kind of terrible pain. And of that 40%, only about a fourth find their problems solved.

This column recently appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/wizyta-na-szpitalnym-oddziale-ratunkowym/

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Tuesday, November 2, 2021

All Souls’ Day

When I was a kid in the 50s growing up in Chicago, All Souls Day – the day set aside to commemorate the faithful who’ve died — wasn’t a big deal. 

I went to St. Fidelis, a Catholic parish near Humboldt Park, and even though the parish was pretty much made up of Poles and Polish Americans, All Souls Day didn’t seem like it was anything special. A mass was said that day that all the school kids had to go to, but we had to go to mass every school day. Sure, the priest would mention the dead at the service on All Souls Day, but beyond that there wasn’t anything different. Not that I could see.

But in Poland it was apparently different.  At least that’s what my parents used to say.  They would tell me stories about what it was like All Souls Day in Poland when they were kids.

People, my mother would tell me, would first have a really special dinner. There would be kasza and other ceremonial foods, and there would even be special plates set aside for the family members who had died. Then, the family would walk to the cemetery where their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers, were buried. Candles would be lit there by the graves. I asked my mom once why they did that. She told me the people who lit the candles hoped the light from them would lead the souls of the departed back to their families and homes here among the living. Sometimes at night, there would be so many candles burning on and near the graves that you could see the light shining above the cemeteries as you walked back home, even if your home was far away.

But we didn’t do that in America. We were immigrants, Displaced Persons and refugees, and all our dead were buried far away in Poland and the parts of Poland that are now the Ukraine. My mother didn’t even know where her mother and her sister and her sister’s baby were buried. The men who killed them put my mother on a boxcar and sent her to the slave labor camps in Germany before she could bury her family. When my mom returned to her hometown west of Lwow 40 years after the war, no one could even tell her where her mom and her sister and the baby were buried.

Growing up, I didn’t hear much about my mom’s dead or my dad’s dead. We didn’t commemorate them. Maybe the past and those who died in it was just filled with too much sorrow for my parents to try to commemorate.

A little while ago, the Polish poet Oriana Ivy now living in California — author of the books April Snow and From the New World — sent me a poem about the fog in Warsaw and how she imagines it’s the war dead coming back. She writes, “Warsaw has a lot of fog, especially in autumn — which is very ‘atmospheric,’ as we used to say — lyrical, poetic — and of course all those plaques marking the places of mass executions — you could say that it’s a haunted city.”

Here’s the poem:

All Souls 

Sometimes I think Warsaw fog

is the dead, coming back

to seek their old homes –

wanting to touch even the walls.

But they cannot find those walls,

so they embrace the trees instead,

lindens and enduring chestnuts.

They embrace the whole city, lay

their arms around the bridges

and the droplet-beaded street lamps;

they pray in the Square of Three Crosses,

kneel among the candles and flowers

under bronze plaques that say

On this spot, 100 people were shot –

they bow, they kiss

even the railroad tracks –

they do not complain, only hold

what they can, in unraveling white.

This article originally appeared in the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.  


http://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/guzlowski/wszystkich-swietych/

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Sunday, October 31, 2021

Pandemic Halloween

Pandemic Halloween 

We had 3 kids stop by our house for tricks or treats last year.  There was a pirate, a witch, and a little kid who didn’t know what she was dressed as.

The pirate kid was proud of his costume even though he didn’t have a hat or wig. He left them in the car his mom was using to drive him from one house to another. He said, “It’s just too hot for a wig. That’s why I’m not wearing one!” We gave him a mini package of Twix and a great big smile.

This pirate boy stopped by at about 7 pm. 

After that, it was quiet.

At about 730, I went outside and stood on the front porch for a while to see if there was anyone else coming. There was no moon yet, and all the houses on both sides of the street were lit up.  I think my neighbors, like us, were waiting for the trick or treaters. A car drove past going south toward the supermarket on Boonsboro Road. Other than that driver, I didn’t see anyone.

I looked across the street then at the house where 3 young girls live. It’s a big old house just like ours. Every year we’ve been in this town, the girls have made it over–even when the youngest was 1. She wore a pink and gold princess costume that year, and she had her big white cat with her. The cat didn’t wear a costume.

This year the three girls didn’t make it.

Their house had its lights on too.  I imagined that the 3 girls and their mom and dad were probably also in their home waiting and hoping just like us for kids to come to their door trick or treating.

It was the pandemic last year that kept the kids away.  Before COVID showed up, we’d have about 40-50 kids come by the house trick or treating.  They’d start coming around about 5 pm, just before we sat down to dinner, and the last kid would be ringing our doorbell around 9 pm, sometimes even later, just before we started getting ready for bed.  It wasn’t like that last year.  

I hope it will be different this year.  We all like Halloween, seeing the kids excited and rushing from house to house collecting candy.

People talk about how the pandemic is finally winding down, and that the numbers of vaccinated people are going up and the numbers of people sick from COVID are going down faster and faster.  I hope it’s true.  I’d like to see more kids come by this year for Halloween.

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My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, thr oldest Polish newspaper in America! 

https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/halloween-w-pandemii-pandemic-halloween/

Saturday, October 2, 2021

Summer Heat

Summer Heat

It’s been mostly in the mid 90s during the day and the low 70s at night for the last month here where I live in Lynchburg, Virginia.  It’s so hot that I spend most of the time inside our house with our great air conditioning.  

When I look outside, I see grass turning brown, dry leaves dying and falling from the trees around the house.  I dream of fall and cold weather and snow, and I know they won’t be here soon enough, but I’m happy that we have air conditioning at least.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. In the 1960s when I was a kid living with my parents in Chicago, we had no air conditioning, neither central air nor window units. In fact, none of my friends had it either.  If we wanted to cool off, we’d sit outside in the shadow of a tree, or if we had a quarter we’d go to one of the upscale movie theaters in the area that had air conditioning. 

I remember when I used to work in factories during summer vacation when I was a college student.  One job was particularly tough.  I loaded TV sets into trucks.  I’d spend all day every day in hot trucks. One time we took the temperature in one of the trucks, and it was 110 degrees.  The factory had no air conditioning, so the bosses who ran the place would have a big jar of salt pills on a desk on the loading dock, and we would be popping the pills all day long like they were some kind of crazy candy.  

I would come home from that job and turn on the desk fan and just sit in front of the TV watching baseball, and I didn’t even like baseball. Just sitting and not moving at all helped to push back some of that heat.

Some nights it got so hot in the house that the whole family would go downstairs to the basement and sleep on rugs on the cement floor down there. That cement floor was so cool that sometimes we had to bring blankets to the basement to wrap ourselves up in. And other times it was so hot that even the basement wasn’t cool enough. There were nights when it was so hot that we’d take our blankets and walk over to Humboldt Park and sleep in a field with our neighbors. 

I can’t imagine it getting hotter in the years to come, but that’s what people are saying.  The earth’s climate is changing.  The world is getting hotter.  I’m not looking forward to the day when even air conditioning won’t be enough.  

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy 

Sunday, September 26, 2021

The Gift from the Sea

 Gift from the Sea 

I was at the beach with my wife Linda and daughter Lillian and granddaughter Lulu.

We rented a condo near the water, and for a week every moment of our lives was touched by the sea.  We walked along its shore in the morning and the evening, we listened to the soft rush of the waves washing up on the beach over and over again, we watched seagulls flying softly above our heads, we smiled at the excitement of the small children running along the water and into it, and we entered the water ourselves to swim and to stand and to feel the ocean’s deep breath.

Standing there in the water at one point, I remembered a book I had read a long long time ago.  It was called A Gift from the Sea.  It was by an American author, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the wife of the famous pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh who flew the first plane across the Atlantic Ocean.  Her book talked about a vacation she and her husband took on the Florida coast decades ago and the gift that the sea gave her.

I hadn’t thought of her book in 40 years, not since I first read it, but there I was in the water suddenly thinking of it again, thinking of it and the gift that the sea gives us.

And what is that gift?  For me it was a sudden sense that all of my memories of water and shore and sand were still with me, still fresh in my eyes and my ears and in my heart.  

Standing there on the beach, I remembered standing as a three-year old on the deck of the troop ship that brought us from the DP camps in Germany to America in 1951.  I remembered watching the black and roiling ocean waves, and I remembered asking my mother what our life would be like in America.  I remembered being five years old and afraid of walking into the water at North Avenue Beach until my father took my hand in his and told me that he would stay with me in the water no matter what.  I remember years later sitting in the sand with my wife and our 5-year old daughter on a different beach and building a sand castle with her, and hearing her excitement at how beautiful it all was.  

All of these memories and so many others came to me as I stood on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean last week and thought of the gift that the sea gives us.

— This was my recent column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest newspaper in America.  https://dziennikzwiazkowy.com/felietony2/guzlowski/dar-od-morza/


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Tuesday, August 31, 2021

The 82nd Anniversary of the Start of World War II


The 82nd Anniversary of the Start of World War II 

My mother didn’t like to talk about the war. When I was a kid, I would ask her, and she would just wave me away. If I kept asking, she would only say, “If they give you bread, eat it. If they beat you, run away.” 

She would say this, and then she would walk away. It wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that she started to share her experiences in the war with me.

One of the first stories she told me was about the day German soldiers came to her village in eastern Poland in the fall of 1942. The story was brutal, and my mother told it staring into my eyes and talking slowly as if she wanted to make sure I understood every word she said. 

She told me of the day the soldiers came to my grandmother’s house. They shot my grandmother in the face, and then they kicked my mother’s sister’s baby to death. When they saw my mother, they didn’t care that she was just a teenager. They raped her so she couldn’t stand up, couldn’t talk. They broke her teeth when they shoved her dress into her mouth to stop her crying. 

When they were done, they dragged my mother into a boxcar that was filled with other young people from her village that were being taken to Germany to be slave laborers. The trip to Germany took a week. 

My mother cried all that week, first in the boxcars then in the camps. Her friends said, “Tekla, don’t cry, the Germans will shoot you and leave you in the field,” but my mother couldn’t stop. Even when she had no more tears, she cried, cried the way a dog will gulp for air when it’s choking on a stick or some bone it’s dug up in a garden and swallowed. 

 My mother finally stopped crying when the woman guard in charge gave her a cold look and knocked my mother down with her fist, and then told her if she didn’t stop crying she would shoot her. 

 My mother never thought she’d survive that first winter in the slave labor camp. She had no coat, no hat, no gloves, just what she was wearing when the Germans came to her house and killed my grandmother and took my mom to the camps. A soldier saved her life there. He saw her struggling to dig beets in the frozen earth with her hands, and he asked her if she could milk a cow. She nodded, “Yes,” and he took her to the barn where the cows were kept and raped her. Later, the cows kept her from freezing and gave her milk to drink.

Two and a half years later, the war ended, but it didn’t really end, not for her. The war was always with her. For my mother, like for so many of the Poles who survived, the war never ended. It was always with them.

Sunday, August 22, 2021

My Father Was An Alcoholic

My dad didn’t drink during World War II.  He was a Polish slave laborer in Buchenwald Concentration Camp for four years, and in the camps there wasn’t much drinking or even eating.  Right after the camps were liberated, however, he searched for something to drink and found it.  Later in the refugee camps that he and my mom spent six years in, he ran a still and made booze as soon as he could set one up.

He drank for the next 30 years.  He didn’t drink on weekdays.  Weekdays were for working and making the money that the family needed to live in America.  He was absolutely sober those days.  He wouldn’t touch a drop.  


Weekends, however, were different. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why he drank, but now I do.  My dad drank because he was trying to push back the memory of all the terrible things he had seen in the war.  He hoped that the drinking would cut him off from his memories and from the outside world.  He wanted to isolate himself in that piece of himself that hadn't seen men castrated, women bayoneted in the breast, babies thrown in the air and shot.  He never found that peaceful place.  


So he drank.  Fridays when he came home from the factory where he worked, he would go to the kitchen and take out a bottle of vodka and fill a glass and sit down at the table and drink.  If anyone was in the kitchen with him, he would smile at them and say “to your health.”  He would finish that glass and then take another and another.  He would drink until he passed out.  Saturday, he would begin with beer in the morning and switch to vodka in the afternoon.  Sundays, after church, he’d go to the bar on the corner for his Sunday drink, a free glass of booze that would lead to another and another.  


The peace that he sought never came.  No matter how much he drank, the memories of the war still haunted him.  Sometimes, when he would pass out from the drinking, we could hear him in his sleep weeping or screaming from those memories.  


When he was 56 he realized that the drinking wasn’t helping him, and he sought out a psychiatrist.  He gave him Librium, a medication that’s supposed to relieve anxiety.  It didn't help my dad.  He went back to drinking, and the drinking got so bad that the psychiatrist talked about the possibility that my dad would have to be committed to an asylum of some kind.  


What finally saved him from drinking was my mom telling him she would leave him if he continued to drink.  He couldn't stand that thought.  Her leaving would have been his end, his suicide.  


She was his church.

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Dr. Danusha Goska’s Review of The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland

 The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland

Andrew Kornbluth 

Published March, 2021

Harvard University Press 

 

The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland was published in March, 2021 by Harvard University Press. The book addresses post-war trials of World-War-II-era Polish collaborators with the Nazis. Author Andrew Kornbluth focuses on trials of Poles who caught, handed over to German Nazis, or murdered Jews seeking refuge. Kornbluth estimates that Poles killed 'tens of thousands' of Jews. Iaddition, in the post-war era, Poles killed 'anywhere from 600 to 3,000 Jews.' The August Trials cites previous work by Polish-Canadian scholar Jan Grabowski, author of Hunt for the Jews, Polish scholars Dariusz Libionka, Alina Skibinska, and Barbara Engelking, and Polish-American scholar Jan Tomasz Gross. Kornbluth is a Research Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is a former fellow of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. 

 

The August Trials has received laudatory reviews. Mark Glanville, writing in the Jewish Chronicle, reports that 'As a result of actions taken by Germans and Poles … 90 per cent of Poland’s 3.5 million Jewish population was exterminated.' The reader will note 'Germans and Poles.' Glanville and Kornbluth's goal is to locate Poles, Poland, and Polish culture and Catholicism in the same historical dock occupied by German Nazis, Nazi Germanyand NazismThe crime of which both sets of perpetrators stand accused, and, in the author's belief, convicted, is genocide. Kornbluth refers to Poles killing Jews as 'the conveyer belt of genocide.' Polish blue police and village leaders constituted 'genocidal infrastructure.' Konstanty Gebert, writing in Moment, reports that Kornbluth describes a Soviet-era process that 'strengthened the legend of Polish innocence.' Ronald Grigor writes that 'Polish Communists asserted the wartime innocence of all Poles.' Communists, Kornbluth argues, thereby earned the support of the Polish populace. 

 

'Innocence' is a concept that appears repeatedly. Kornbluth dedicates his book 'To the innocent.' Kornbluth's first chapter title invokes the Biblical Cain. Cain introduced murder into the human experience, and was forever afterward stigmatized. 'Cain' is eponymous with 'guilt.' Poles are Cain; Poles cannot escape stigma for the murder of Jews. The transcendent power of myth, in the authority of Genesismust be invoked to establish the quality of Polish guilt. 

 

Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939. The USSR invaded from the east later that same month. After World War II, The USSR again invaded and took control of Poland. Post-war Poland occupied a different geographic territory than the Poland of 1939. Poland lost eastern territory and moved west, into formerly German territory. Soviet domination ended in 1989. The years 1939-1989 were not Poland's only experience of foreign domination. Poland had been a large and wealthy country in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Beginning in 1772, Poland was partitioned and colonized by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poland regained political status as a nation after World War I, in 1918. Kornbluth does not dwell on this history; I mention it that readers might better understand subsequent summaries of Kornbluth's points. 

 

In the immediate post-World-War-II period, a reconstituted, USSR-dominated Poland conducted more than 32,000 'August trials.The term 'August trials' is a reference to the August 31, 1944 decree that established them. These trials were of Poles who had collaborated with the Nazis. Over the course of twelve years, judges handed down20,000 guilty verdicts and 1,835 death sentences. Kornbluth's study focuses on 'over 400 trials conducted between 1944 and 1952 for crimes committed against Jews by Poles' in the Generalgouvernement (General Government). The Generalgouvernement was name German Nazis gave to the center and southeast of Poland.

 

The bulk of Kornbluth's book consists of one-or-two-paragraph summations of crimes, and summaries of how the accused pleaded, and also of how judges and attorneys handled cases. Kornbluth's introduction telegraphs his intention. The introduction's title is 'A Country without a Quisling?' Those outside the fevered realms of Polish-Jewish relations will not recognize the import of that title. Poland was exceptional among European countries occupied by Germany. Occupation was longer and much harsher in Poland. Depending on what calculations are used, Poland is often assessed as having lost a greater percentage of its prewar population than any other country. Poland produced the Home Army, one of the largest resistance forces in occupied Europe. Nazi Generalplan Ost called for the elimination of Poles and Poland. Kornbluth does not mention these facts; I mention them in order that the reader of this review can better understand the meaning of the introduction's title. 

 

In spite of the uniquely horrific conditions of occupation in Poland, Poland, as a state, did not collaborate with the Nazis. In Norway, Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling was the nominal head of state during Nazi occupation. Poland's government was in exile, in London. Poles fought against the Nazis in an organized way from the first day of the war to the final Nazi presence. Polish patriots are proud to say that, under the hell-on-earth that the Nazis instituted in Poland, Poland was a state without a Quisling. With his introduction's title, Kornbluth announces that one of the goals of his book is to disprove that statement, and to remove Poland's source of pride. 

 

Kornbluth is a skilled writer. The book is well organized and never succumbs to academic jargon. Throughout, Kornbluth's writing is economical. He never uses more words than necessary; thus, accounts are clipped in style. For the most part, his writing is dry. Anger does seep through, especially in the book's conclusion and in a couple of spots where trial proceedings are assessed as 'galling.' Kornbluth uses anachronistic phrases like 'outsourcing genocide' and 'it takes a village.' Kornbluth also protests against resistance in today's Poland to gay rights. Contemporary phrases applied to past events reflect Kornbluth's intention to use past events to reinforce his position in contemporary debates, for example, the debate over Jewish claims for financial restitution from Poland.

 

Though Kornbluth's accounts of Poles' crimes against Jews are skeletally brief, Kornbluth manages to include repugnant details. Assailants are spectacularly stupid, crude, and sadistic. If they revealed any decent human characteristics at all, none of those characteristics are included in Kornbluth's summaries. One criminal takes pleasure in shooting Jews in their genitals. Another leads a captured teenage Jew by a rope around his neck. Others murder Jews that they had previously agreed to rescue. Nazis most notoriously murdered their victims with modern machinery and chemicals.With Jewish Sonderkommandos handling the dirty work, Nazis could keep their Hugo Boss uniforms clean. Polish peasant villagers killed their victims with fists, axes, and shovels. More than one victim was buried while still breathing. Parents had to watch their children being killed. Poles picked over the possessions of dead Jews, laying claim, inter alia, to blood-spattered linens. This is a grand guignol inhabited by ghouls. 

 

In spite of the brevity of these accounts, the sensitive reader will live these atrocitiesthrough the eyes, hearts, and final breaths of the victimized Jews. One can imagine being Jewish during Poland's interwar period, 1918-1939. Poland was reborn, a cause for celebration and hope, but in that reborn Poland, in a reflection of wider world trends, anti-Semitism was rising. Thugs beat Jews in the streetsuniversity seats were limited, and anti-Semites called for Jews' expulsion. Polish Jews watched Hitler's rise in Germany, and, finally, Nazi Germany's invasion. They watched Einsatzgruppen massacre Jews and Catholic Poles and ghetto walls arise. Finally, in desperation, they begged Polish neighbors for help. These neighbors toyed with them, promising help, but responded with the back of a shovel against a head. Former neighbors rifled through the pockets of the dead for 'Jewish gold.' The reader wishes that her hands could reach through time itself and pull victims back from shallow graves, wishes that her fingers could rewrite history. The reader has no such power, and must soldier on, and read the next account. 

 

What propels this reading of account after accountof multiple sets of foreign names that she will soon forget and struggles to pronounce, even when reading silently, is the conviction that at least to read is to witness, is to relieve, retroactively, the victim's anonymity and isolation at that intimate, sacred moment of confused, horrifying, and unjust death. May the pain of these deaths, may the outrage the reader feels, inform future action with compassion, understanding, and an unbending commitment to justiceand against hate

 

Poland's thousands of rescuers appear in The August Trials only to reinforce the author's point. The rarely mentioned rescuers here are too afraid to let others know that they have rescued Jews, because they will be punished by their fellow Poles for that rescue. Readers familiar with World War II in Poland will have read, or have heard from survivor friends, of entire villages that conspired to keep one Jew safe in a hayloft or behind a false wall. Kornbluth never attempts to reconcile the disconnect between accounts of villages that sheltered Jews and other villages where many united to persecute Jews and profit from their elimination. Roman Solecki, a Jewish Pole who served in the Home Army, was my friend. I don't know how to reconcile his accounts with this book's accounts of Home Army units killing Jews. Perhaps a future volume will systemize what differentiates not just individuals who rescue from individuals that persecute, but the village collectives that made the same choices. 

 

Those interested in Polish-Jewish relations should and will read The August Trials. We want to know about these victims. We want their pain to inform our involvement in Polish-Jewish dialogue. I want to say that Hersz Flechtman, who was bashed in the head by the nephew of the Polish man who was hiding him, that three-year-old Mojzesz Kwint, drowned by a Polish woman who didn't receive enough money to keep him, the unnamed Jewish woman who was repeatedly raped by a szmalcownik, or blackmailer, were seen, known, heard and mourned by me. 

 

Kornbluth reports on the various rationalizations for their crimes offered by Polish perpetrators, their defense attorneys, or judges. Poles killed Jews or handed them over to Nazis because the Nazis threatened to kill any Poles who didn't do so. Poles wanted Nazi rewards, for example food. Poles wanted Jewish people's possessions. Poles were overwhelmed by the brutality of the occupation and had sunk into lawlessness. Poles suspected Jews of 'banditry,' that is theft of limited food and other resources. Poles suspected Jews of collaboration with Soviet communists. Inevitably, blame-the-victim excuses are offered. A given Jew didn't do enough to save himself, so his killers had no choice. 

 

Kornbluth argues convincingly that there were important differences between crimesPoles committed against other Poles and crimes Poles committed against Jews. Crimes committed against Jews were more public, communal, deadly, and sadistic than crimes committed against Poles. Poles who otherwise served honorably in anti-Nazi resistance also committed crimes against Jews; thus, one cannot write off anti-Semitic violence as the signature of social deviance. To be a Polish hero in the war against Nazism was not mutually exclusive with being a sadistic anti-Semitic killer. 

 

As mentioned, the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 and then again, during andafter the war. The USSR dominated Poland until the fall of communism in 1989. Post-war Soviet crimes against Poles interfered with Poland's ability to address Polish criminals who collaborated with the Nazis. In the post-World-War-II era, heroic Poles who had fought honorably against Nazism were variously defamed, arrested, tortured, paraded in show trials, killed, buried in unmarked graves, and all but erased from history. Their persecutors were Soviet-allied communists. Most of these communists were Poles. A disproportionate number of communists were Jews, including Maria Gurowska, the judge who sentenced anti-Nazi hero August Emil Fieldorf to death, and Helena Wolinska-Brus, who prosecuted FieldorfUnder Jakub Berman, at least 200,000 Poles were arrested for alleged political crimes and at least 6,000 were executed. Kornbluth writes, 'Of roughly 400 "leading" positions in the Ministry of Public Security between 1944 and 1954, it has been calculated that 37 percent were occupied by ethnic Jews.' Note the word 'ethnic.' Kornbluth differentiates between those descending from Jewish ancestry and those who actually practice the religion. Space is created between Jewishness and crimes committed by Jews. Equity would require the same treatment accorded to Catholics. 

 

Witold Pilecki, who volunteered to be smuggled into Auschwitz in order to help the resistance against Nazism, was also killed. Other notable victims include those persecuted in the Trial of the Sixteen, that is, Home Army leaders who were tortured in Moscow and falsely accused of fascism and Nazi collaboration. The last of these 'cursed soldiers,' Jozef Franczak, was not killed until 1963. Post-war communist propaganda denigrated heroic Home Army, anti-Nazi soldiers as 'spittle-flecked dwarves of reaction.' Further, many Poles believe that the post-war Soviet occupier exploited the Kielce pogrom to discredit Poles as hopelessly primitive and violent anti-Semites incapable of self-government, and to boost Western acceptance of Soviet hegemony. In other words, Poles know that enemies of Poland weaponized the criminal behavior of anti-Semitic Poles to defame and disempower all Poles. In any case, the West had aligned itself with the Soviet Union in order to defeat Nazi Germany, and any Soviet propaganda against Poland may have been merely gratuitous. Roosevelt and Churchill both knew about the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, for example, and Roosevelt and Churchill both lied about the event, attributing it, falsely, to German Nazis. The West never protested the Trial of the Sixteen. 

 

For the above-mentioned reasons, many Poles reflexively dismiss post-war trials in Soviet-dominated Poland as illegitimate. Kornbluth argues that the August Trials, though, were carried out by dedicated, respectable judges and attorneys and that they cannot be dismissed as Soviet-influenced propaganda. At the same time that he asks for respect for the trials, however, Kornbluth argues that the trials were not really legitimate, because the communist state and Polish society came to a cozy agreement to erase Polish crimes against Jews from memory, and rewrite World War II history in Poland as one of complete Polish innocence and heroism. This reader accepts Kornbluth's argument that the trials record real crimes that deserve attention. This reader was not convinced of Kornbluth's latter point. 

 

Andrew Kornbluth deserves recognition for his research into material that would cause many to shrink back in horror, and for his presentation of that material to the public. Readers should be aware of the brute Polak stereotype and its uses when reading Kornbluth. 

 

Normal people do not drown defenseless children. What makes it possible for a human being to defy normal behavior? Kornbluth attributes these crimes to 'racial hatred and greed,' plus Polish Catholicism and nationalism. 

 

Kornbluth describes Roman Dmowski, an interwar politician, diplomat, and author, as the 'father of modern Polish nationalism' and leader of interwar Poland's 'single strongest political grouping.' Polish nationalism existed long before Dmowski, and its various incarnations include an expansive understanding of Polishness that includes Jews. 

 

Dmowski was a Social Darwinist. Social Darwinism was a significantly anti-Christian innovation from Western Europe and the United States. Social Darwinist ideas were very popular on American campuses and in American culture in the early twentieth century. A co-founder of the Bronx Zoo; the president of the Museum of Natural History, whose tenure lasted twenty-five years; the inventor of what became the SAT; and the founder of Planned Parenthood were all invested in Social Darwinism. American Social Darwinists declared Poles, Italians, and other Eastern and Southern Europeans to be a lesser subspecies of humanity, and impeded their entry to the US as immigrants on those grounds in 1924. The Catholic Church actively opposed Social Darwinism. Kornbluth does not so much as allude to these facts

 

Kornbluth quotes Dmowski praising Germans. In fact Dmowski, wrote, 'Every Pole will be an enemy of every German he meets.' Thirty-three percent of Germans were Catholic; their Catholicism earned these Germans no acceptance from Dmowski. Dmowski's anti-Semitism was not informed by his devout Catholicism – he wasn't a devout Catholic. 

 

Kornbluth describes Dmowski as the leader of interwar Poland's 'single strongest political grouping.' Interwar leader Jozef Pilsudski supported a traditional concept of Polish nationalism that included Jews. Pilsudski is revered by Poles, both in Poland and abroad, in a way that Dmowski has never been. In fact Pilsudski's nickname is 'dziadek,' grandfather.  

 

Kornbluth makes brief references to Cardinal August Hlond and Archbishop AdamSapieha. For example, of Sapieha, Kornbluth says, 'Sapieha declined to protest the Holocaust.' Kornbluth cites Dariusz Libionka. Indeed, as of this writing (6/1/21) Wikipedia includes Kornbluth and Libionka's accusation against Sapieha in its page dedicated to Sapieha. Sapieha criticized Jews; Sapieha did not inform the Nazis that genocide was a bad idea; Catholicism is responsible for the Holocaust. 

 

This review cannot fully address this charge or this logic, but this reader was not convinced by Kornbluth's reasoning. One cannot help but mention, though, that Sapieha was responsible for the priestly formation and ordination of Karol Wojtyla. Indeed, Sapieha saved Wojtyla from a Nazi roundup of 8,000 Polish men and boys. Wojtyla, as John Paul II, would later be praised as the most pro-Jewish pope in history.

 

Hlond and Sapieha both did make critical comments about Jews, comments that should never have been made. Neither made genocidal comments. Both were persecuted by Nazis and participated in anti-Nazi resistance, including resistance against Nazi persecution of Jews. Both condemned violence against Jews. 

 

Regarding the practice of selecting unattractive quotes and using those quotes to prove a religion's complicity in genocide. Perform an internet search of the word 'Talmud' and immediately encounter pages that select unattractive passages from the Talmud and go on to argue that these passages prove that Jews are complicit in communist genocides and world domination. This is not an intellectually respectable exercise. 

 

To return to the question of how a Polish woman could drown a Jewish child she volunteered to safeguard. There is scholarship that addresses such atrocities, scholarship Kornbluth does not citeReading The August Trials reminded this reader ofother works, including accounts of Ukrainian genocidal activity against Poles that also took place under Nazi occupationDeath toll estimates of Poles killed by Ukrainians range between fifty and one hundred thousand. These killings were public, communal, and sadisticUkrainians sawed Poles in half, including Father Karol Baran, crucified Poles, gang-raped Polish women, and cut off their breasts. I would not see the logic of conflating these crimes with Nazism and identifying Ukrainians as German Nazis' co-equals. Nazism, not Ukrainian nationalism, was the author of Poland's devastation. Saying that does not exculpate Ukrainian killers of Poles. It merely acknowledges what Nazism was and what its intent was in relation to Poland, and Nazi Germany's horrifically awesome ability to realize those intentions, no matter what Ukrainians decided to do. I have read accounts of Ukrainians' crimes against Poles, and not feltanimus against Ukrainians per se, or come to understand these crimes as expressions of any Ukrainian essence. Historians like Timothy Snyder have worked to explain the tensions between Ukrainians and Poles, and the pressures of occupation, that contributed to anti-Polonism among Ukrainians. 

 

Reading The August Trials reminded me also of first-person accounts of the Rwandan genocide. Neighbor turned on neighbor, not just to kill, but to torture. One method was to rape Tutsi women with spiked plants. One thinks, too, of the 1846 Szela jacquerie. Polish peasants killed and in many cases decapitated an estimated 1,000 nobles and destroyed 500 homes. Again, in reading these accounts, authors worked to make me, the reader, understand why a human like myself would commit hideous crimes against a neighbor. 

 

While reading The August Trials I also confronted vexing events in my own countryand on the streets of my own city. A Jewish family, mother, father, and infant, were all stabbed in broad daylight in Manhattan on March 31. An 84-year-old Thai grandfather was murdered on the street in San Francisco on January 28, 2021. In May, 2021, a 67 year old Asian woman was raped in an otherwise quiet and safe neighborhood. Her assailant broke her bones. On March 23, 2021, Mohammad Anwar, an Uber Eats driver and recent immigrant from Pakistan, was killed by a thirteen-year-old girl and a fifteen-year-old girl, just three miles from the White HouseAll of these attacks took place in broad daylight. Video of these attacks are visible on the internet. On December 10, 2019, five people were killed in an attack on a kosher grocer in Jersey City. The attackers had bombs and planned much greater carnage. On December 28, 2019, five Jews were stabbed inside a private home by an intruder. One died. Hate crimes against Asians have increased in the US by 164%. Hate crimes against Jews have increased by 63%. 

 

In the attacks mentioned above, the attackers are African AmericansAfrican Americans are disproportionately represented among the committers of hate crimes. Influential African American leaders have made anti-Semitic statements, including Patrisse Cullors, the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and James Baldwin. My state's poet laureate, Amiri Baraka, accused Jews of complicity in the 9/11 terror attacks. His son is the mayor of New Jersey's largest city. After the Jersey City terror attack against Jews, a black school board member, Joan Terrel-Paige, accused 'Jewish brutes' of 'threatening, intimidating, and harassing' black people by 'waving bags of money.'Terrell-Paige is still a Jersey City school board member. 

 

Open discussion of black anti-Semitism and anti-Asian racism are all but taboo in America. Ross Douthat, a columnist at the New York Times, states that media is afraid fully to cover these attacks because of the demographics. For thorny reasons too complicated to plumb here, it would be far easier to cover attacks by white supremacists against Jews and Asians. Covering African American attacks on Jews and Asians violates too many taboos, so the attacks are under-covered, little understood, and ongoing. On May 21, 2021, Aaron Keyak, who led Jewish engagement for the Biden-Harris campaign, advised American Jews to remove kippah and stars of David for their own safety. 

 

There is an unstated premise in The August Trials. Poles got it wrong, and they got it wrong because of flaws in Polish character, flaws rooted in nationalism and Catholicism.We, the readers and authors of books like The August Trials, are not Polish, not Catholic, and not nationalist. We do not share Polish flaws, and, therefore, we are in a position to correct Poles. We have figured out and transcended ethnic strife. We have mastered free speech. The contrast between our superiority and Poles' inferiority emphasizes how badly Poles are handling things, and how flawed is their nature. 

 

These premises are wrong. America has never known, perhaps no other country has ever known, the extreme conditions Poles suffered during World War II. And yet America faces the same problems Poland faces in addressing ethnic strife. 'Polish Catholicism' or 'Polish nationalism' are inadequate tools to understand anti-Semitic crimes or any suppression of discussion of anti-Semitic crimes. America is rapidly secularizing, and yet, America is playing, in a more subdued way, the same games that Poles who would cover-up Polish crimes play. Secular Americans do not hold the same things sacred as Polish Catholic nationalists, but secular Americans also have taboos and sacred cows that Americans protect against the harsh glare of truth. A jacket blurb calls The August Trials courageous. It doesn't take courage to condemn anti-Semitism in Poland. It would take great courage to speak plainly about the American hate crimes mentioned above. 

 

No one would argue that the current epidemic of black attacks on Jews and Asians renders black pride invalid. No one would argue that black attacks on Jews and Asians means that blacks have never been victimized by white supremacy. No one would argue that, because some blacks were free and did own slaves, that black slaves were not 'innocent' and did not deserve to be enslaved. And yet the hideous crimes of a minority of Poles during World War II invalidate Polish celebration of Polish heroes, and erase Nazi and Soviet aggression. Particularly disturbing is the use of the word 'innocent.' Poles are not innocent, these commenters insist, including in quotes above. If Poles are not 'innocent,' the implication is that Poles deserved what they suffered under the Nazis.

 

One reads account after account of Polish peasant villagers behaving like monsters. One watches video after video of blacks violently assaulting innocents in broad daylight. The easiest thing to do, the conclusion our Darwinian lizard brain, hardwired to us-and-them dichotomies wants us to reach, is to write the behavior off as the sole possession of the hated ethnic other. Ron Slate, writing in On the Seawall, illustrates his review of The August Trials with a photo of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, who sheltered 2,000 Jews in his monastery, and gave his life for another in Auschwitz. Even the good Poles are bad, this juxtaposition informs the viewer. Slate begins his review of The August Trials with an anecdote about 'rabidly anti-Semitic' illiterate Polish janitors. For Slate, even the heroic Poles are stupid, have low-class jobs, and are infested with a disease associated with dogs: rabiesThe August Trials, he appears to believe, licenses him to perpetuate ethnic stereotyping and hate. 

 

Anyone arguing that Poles committed atrocities against Jews because they are Catholic and nationalist rewrites important Holocaust history and human psychologyIn the same way that we ask how Poles could commit the atrocities Kornbluth records, we ask how rescuers could save Jews. Rescuing a Jew in Poland was a life-threatening, all but impossible task, and yet Yad Vashem tallies 7,112 Polish rescuers, an incomplete number. To make that impossible task possible required a mythology more powerful than just being a nice person. Many rescuers cited their Catholicism and their Polish nationalism as their very reasons for rescuing Jews. Myths of Polish heroes and Polish saints were powerful enough to inspire humans to transcend a manmade hell. The entire Ulma family was murdered by Nazis for helping Jews. Their devout Catholicism inspired their sacrifice. Just like the monsters in The August Trials, the Ulmas were Polish, Catholic, peasant villagers. Liron Rubin, an Israeli and my friend, is married to a man whose mother was rescued by Sister Teresa Janina Kierocinska, a Polish nun and daughter of a nationalist Polish family. As Yad Vashem puts it, 'The survivors of the Sosnowiec convent later remembered Mother Teresa-Janina as someone of exceptional humanity whose love of mankind was rooted in her deep religious faith.' Liron's mother-in-law remained a Jew, but in honor of the nun who saved her life, she took the name Teresa. 

 

Scholars have struggled to understand what, other than psychosis, would predispose an otherwise normal person to commit heinous crimes. Edna Bonacich, Amy Chua, and Thomas Sowell have worked on what they variously call middleman minorities and market dominant minorities. Polish anti-Semitism reached its peak in the interwar period. Why? The middleman minority theory helps to explain why. How to understand atrocities? Thomas Sowell describes Sinhalese in Sri Lanka clapping and dancing as they burned a random Tamil woman alive. Sinhalese are largely Buddhist. No serious scholar would attempt to write off Sinhalese violence against Hindu Tamils, against mosques, and against Christians as prompted by Buddhism. 

 

Kornbluth tells his reader that Poles killed Jews because Poles saw Jews as implicated in 'Christ-killing.' But Kornbluth quotes Polish anti-Semites mouthing typical grievances voiced in middleman minority economies. Kornbluth quotes one such Pole saying that Poles interpret Nazi removal of Jews as liberating them from 'their former state of slavery to the Jews' 'a nightmare never to be repeated.' Without an understanding of Poland's caste-like socioeconomic structure, readers could never understand such a comment. Early in the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington, a former slave, traveled to Poland in search of 'the man farthest down' and found that man in Polish peasants, whom he felt to be comparable to the descendants of former slaves in the US. Numbers support Washington's assessment. In 1913, the Negro Almanac published a comparison between freed slaves and their descendants and descendants of Russian serfs, a population that included Poles. Hard numbers showed that African Americans had made greater economic progress than former serfs. 'Wherever in Poland money changes hands, a Jew is always there to take charge of it,' Washington wrote. This is the middleman minority pattern, and it has been applied in analyses of atrocity not just in Poland, but in Southeast Asia, regarding vicious Indonesian pogroms against Chinese, and in reference to African American conflict with Korean shopkeepers in Los Angeles. 

 

Any attempt to understand Polish peasants' sadistic and criminal behavior towards Jews during World War II is not complete unless it addresses middleman minority theory, and how populations around the world have behaved in these economies. Scholars James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, in their 2020 bestseller Cynical Theories, describe how modern leftwing scholarship often rejects class-based analyses in favor of identity-based analyses. Polish Catholicism and nationalism make for convenient and currently trendy targets, but their use as explanatory tools is limited. 

 

When discussing the support that some Jews offered the Soviet invasion of Poland in September, 1939, and later Soviet hegemony over Poland, it is customary for responsible authors to argue against any association of support for communism with Jewish identity. Poles collaborated with Nazis, we are too often told, because Poles are Catholic and nationalist. No responsible historian would argue that Jews collaborated with communists because of Jewish theology or pride in Jewish identity

 

In The August Trials, Poles collaborated with Nazis because they were Poles, but Jews collaborated with communists because they faced temporary, changing, and unique historical circumstances that militated for their collaborationGiven anti-Semitic hostility, Kornbluth writes, 'it was unsurprising' that some Jews 'embraced a utopian ideology … that espoused colorblindness.

 

That 'utopian ideology,Soviet communism, was genocidal in its persecution of Poles. As early as 1921, in its anti-religion campaign, communists in Russia began killing tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns. The Holodomor, the wartime ethnic cleansing of Poles from eastern Poland, and the Katyn Massacre announced in neon that the communist road to a 'colorblind' 'utopia' was paved with the bodies of Slavic Christians. Anyone, of any ethnicity, who supported communists in 1945 had every reason to know that. Communists should not be robbed of their agency retroactively, any more than Nazi collaborators should.  

 

It is logical and ethically necessary to point out that those Jews who did support or collaborate with invading Soviets did not do so out of any treacherous or power-hungry Jewish essence, biological or theological, but, rather, because of changing and changeable historical circumstances peculiar to a given time and place. Any person, no matter his ethnicity, might make the same decisions under the same circumstances. It is important to point out the universality of human decision-making because Jews are subject to stereotyping and ethical people do not want to fuel that stereotyping. 

 

No scholar unfamiliar with stereotyping of Jews could be relied on to produce scholarship about crimes committed by Jews under the aegis of communism. We must apply the same approach to Polish Catholics. Any scholar writing about crimes committed by Poles should be familiar with, and should resist, stereotyping. 

 

Besides contemplating what causes ugly ethnic violence, readers of The August Trials will wonder how justice could have been achieved in Poland's post-war circumstances. Warsaw, the capital, was flattened. The population was decimated, and in flux, as borders changed. Poles were returning from battlefields, concentration camps, and guerilla warfare with Soviets. Given these conditions, it is remarkable that any attempt at justice took place at all. 

 

Criminal Poles were accused by other Poles who witnessed their crimes. The accusers express outrage, horror, and pity, and they repeatedly cry, just as we, the readers, do. Apparently not all Polish peasants were monsters. But village life is inescapably communal. How do you continue to exist in a tiny village after accusing your neighbor of hideous murder? A comparison of how post-war Poland handled this question with how it was handled in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa might offer insights. 

 

Kornbluth and others, as mentioned in the reviews quoted above, insist that Poland crafted a self-image as a blameless nation of heroic victims. 'Unflattering stories' of collaboration 'disappeared from view' until white knight Jan Tomasz Gross rode to the rescue in 2000. In this Promethean scenario, Gross must be depicted as outside Polish identity. Poles are too intellectually stunted and morally venal to confront their own flaws. Thus, Kornbluth, Gross, Grabowski, et al, provide the conscience that Poles, given their debased nature, lack.

 

I do not recognize my own admittedly limited experience of Poles or Poland in this assessment. During my first visit to Eastern Europe, that is to Slovakia in 1974, my relatives told me stories about a local man who had done labor for the Nazis. One of my aunts, I was told, physically assaulted him. He protested that he was doing it only for food. He was hungry. People volunteered such stories of Nazi collaborators. I first visited Poland in 1978. In a university classroom, I was introduced to Tadeusz Rozewicz's poem 'Saved' ('Ocalony'). 'I saw,' Rozewicz writes, 'A human that was at once / Vicious and virtuous.' Subsequent discussions touched on the ambiguities of the war. Poles taught me the word 'szmalcownik' – 'blackmailer.' A Polish woman volunteered to me that she suspected that her brother-in-law had collaborated, and that was why her family kept their distance from his family. Conversations like this were every bit as troubling as reading The August Trials. 

 

Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Pozegnanie z Maria), published in 1946, hardly reflects the charge that Poles saw themselves as uncomplicated heroes. Borowski clearly presents the difference between the fate of most Jews sent to Auschwitz and most Poles, and he acknowledges that the despoiling of murdered Jews is what feeds him during his imprisonment thereIn films like Ashes and Diamonds I encountered a far more ambiguous treatment of the cinematic World War II hero than I ever saw in any American movie. Though made in 1958, the film still spurs discussion. Czechoslovakia produced The Shop on Main Street in 1965 and Agnieszka Holland directed Angry Harvest in 1985; both films treat material goods stolen from murdered Jews.

 

Many Poles, for the past eight decades, have struggled to come to terms with every aspect of World War II in Poland, including Polish anti-Semitism and Nazi collaboration. One need only mention Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, Czeslaw Milosz, Jan Blonski, Alina Cala, and Father John T. Pawlikowski. Marcel Lozinski, a child of Jewish parents, made a devastating documentary about the Kielce pogrom in 1987, the same year that the Kosciuszko Foundation ran a summer session at the Jagiellonian University in Polish-Jewish relations. I participated and I can report that no one shrank from the topic's darkest aspects. From the early days of the internet, Polish and Jewish participantshave been having frank conversations in online groups. In 1946, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Auschwitz survivor and cofounder of Zegota, cofounded the All-Polish Anti-Racist League in response to the anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland. Bartoszewski would later write, 

 

'Both in the Polish press and on the radio at that time there was no lack of voices to oppose these tragic incidents, and the recent suffering and extermination of Jewish society in Poland were also mentioned. Articles, memoirs, and references to the subject can be found … [Former members of Zygota] were unanimous in recognizing the importance of using their own authority and enlisting the public support of others of importance in the struggle against the degrading chauvinism in Poland, against manifestations of national, religious, and racial hatred, and, above all, against all unsympathetic or hostile attitudes towards Jews who had survived … An initiative was taken during the first weeks of 1946 by former members of the Council for Aid to the Jews. This was to establish a loosely structured, all-Polish society to discuss the problem for the moral and political danger for Poland and the Poles of actions dictated by anti-Semitic views and anti-Jewish prejudices, whatever their causes.'

 

More recently, Polish diplomat Agnieszka Magdziak-Miszewska said, 'If I want to have a moral right to justified pride in [Polish] rescuers, then I must admit to a sense of shame over [Polish] killers.' She speaks for me and millions of others. 

 

Nor have I ever encountered a culture that has done a better job of assessing its past than Poland. I don't say that as a compliment to Poland. I remember the look on the faces of Chinese-born students when a Japanese-born student gave a speech in my English language class about how peace-loving Japanese people are. Turks still refuse to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. An sui generis giant of American culture, Gone with the Wind – both as a novel and as a film – distorts slavery, the Civil War, and the KKK. 

 

Processing the Holocaust, crafting the narrative, revising it and telling it again, has taken decades in the United States at large, among American Jews, and among Israelis. See the 2001 This American Life broadcast "Before It Had a Name," Peter Novick's book The Holocaust in American Life, the documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, Lucy Dawidowicz's articles "Indicting American Jews" and "American Jews and the Holocaust," and Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the HolocaustAmericans, never-occupied, enjoying free speech, a stable government and domestic peace and security still stumbled for decades, struggling to tell the story of the Holocaust accurately. American anti-Semitism, American Jews' survival guilt, and a fear of offending Germany, and cutting off important markets, impeded that struggle over narrativeTo attribute Poland's missteps to rotten Polish nationalism and Catholicism is to fall into stereotyping and to create a chimeric ethnic other scapegoat we sacrifice for our own sins. 

 

Indeed, the scholars that Kornbluth relies on, like Grabowski, Gross, Libionka, Engelking, and Skibinska are themselves products of Poland, Polish educations, Polish ethics, and Polish conversations

 

Years ago in Poland, at dinner one night, a friend took a call from her grandfather. Afterward, I absentmindedly asked, 'Did you talk to your grandmother, too?' My friend, whom I had known for months and who had never mentioned this previously, replied coolly, 'No, she died in Auschwitz.' She never mentioned this death again. I knew peoplewho never disclosed their wartime heroism, or their wartime suffering. Later I learned from others what they had done, or what they had gone through. In contrast, in my own country, America, it is normal to believe that Americans single-handedly defeated the Axis powers. In America people are encouraged to dwell on their suffering and to use that suffering to obtain scholarships, jobs, or government apologies. The concept of 'microaggression' is taught to students and employees to encourage sensitivity to every imaginable slight. No American, or indeed anyone in the Woke West, is in any position to tell Poles that they think or talk too much about their suffering. 

 

The very first sentence of Kornbluth's book establishes Poland as economically well off and militarily secure, 'prosperous and stable.' Kornbluth is discussing 2018 Poland, but this sentence's initial position is powerful, and Kornbluth does little to revise the impression it creates. No extreme circumstances help to render comprehensible the depths to which Polish society sank. No invitation is extended to Kornbluth's reader to ask, 'If overwhelming forces took over your country, and put a price on the head of a subset of your fellow citizens, what would happen?' 

 

In The August Trials, German Nazis and Soviet Russians are remote presences who don't do much to interfere with Polish life. Occupying German Nazis, rather, were fearful of Poles. Germans 'lived under the threat of partisan attack.' No one reading this book, without previous knowledge, would have any idea of the realities of Nazi or Soviet occupation, or the predecessors, the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian culturally genocidal, colonial presence. This depiction of Polish villages as peaceful places during World War II is contradicted by Norman Davies, who writes, 'The well-known fate of the one Bohemian hamlet of Lidice, whose 143 men were killed in retaliation for the assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich, was repeated in hundreds of Polish villages. An incomplete post-war count put their number at 299.' Kornbluth refers to a Polish 'SS volunteer.' I contacted Herbert F. Ziegler, an historian of the SS. He confirmed that the SS would not accept Polish volunteers because of their racial inferiority. As for the Soviet occupation, as Jan Tomasz Gross has written, 'Very conservative estimates show that [between 1939 and 1941] the Soviets killed or drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the Nazis from a population half the size of that under German jurisdiction.' 

 

In the West, acknowledged victims gain platforms, respect, and remuneration for having suffered. Poles cannot be allowed these commodities. That Poles were themselves victims, and that, even in the midst of their victimization, they victimized others, is an uncomfortable reality with equally uncomfortable repercussions for those Jews who, under the worst imaginable coercion, worked for Nazis. No, there is no moral equivalence between a Polish woman who drowns a defenseless Jewish child she had agreed to shelter and the Sonderkommandos. But crafters of master narratives resist ambiguity. They have to – large audiences respond poorly to ambiguity. Jews must be victims and victims must be pure. Poles must not be victims and must not be innocent. Innocence itself, as Shelby Steele has pointed out in the American context, is a coveted commodity. 

 

Reading about atrocity isn't easy. When reading such material, one can sense that one is in the hands of an author who is not much different from a computer search engine. That is, the author is cold, has no agenda, and is merely coughing up facts in response to the reader's query. One can sense that the author is a mensch, that is, someone who is as tormented by the material as the reader is. This author has reached some higher state, and is writing about this material as part of an effort, however quixotic, to make the world a better place, to expand understanding of what humans are capable of, and to commission the reader to take part in an effort of tikkun olam, or the repairing of the world. One can sense that the author has an agenda, one of score-settlingenemy-creating, othering, or one-ups-man-ship. This kind of writing, rather than trying to untie the knot of human hate, pulls the ends tighter and makes the knot more intractable to unraveling. While reading this book, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I might be in the hands of the final kind of author. 

 

Danusha V. Goska 

 

I thank Karen A. Wyle for reading this review and offering very helpful comments.


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Danusha V. Goska, PhD has lived and worked in Africa, Asia, Europe, and on both coasts, and in the heartland, of America. Her work has received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant, a Stephen King Haven Award, and others. Her essay "Political Paralysis" appears in the book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While." Her memoir "Save Send Delete" tells the true story of her debate about God, and love affair, with a prominent atheist. Julie Davis named "Save Send Delete" one of the ten best books of the year. Her latest book is "God through Binoculars," available now through Amazon and Shanti Arts Press

 

Goska's book "Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype" won the PAHA Halecki Award. The Shofar Journal of Jewish Studies called it "Groundbreaking." American Jewish History said that Bieganski points out that the Brute Polak stereotype "gives the illusion of absolving those who failed in their own test of humanity" during the Holocaust. The book has been the subject of cover stories in the highly respected "Tygodnik Powszechny" and the "Polish American Journal."

 

Goska has been an invited speaker at Brandeis, Georgetown, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at Krakow's Galicia Jewish Museum as part of the world famous Jewish Culture Festival, and in American synagogues, churches, libraries and universities. She has appeared on WABC's longest-running talk show, "Religion on the Line," hosted by Rabbi Joseph Potasnik and Deacon Kevin McCormack.


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