Zdewastowano kolejny pomnik katyński
Halina Młuńczak - Członek Rodziny Katyńskiej (2008-04-08)
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Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Zdewastowano kolejny pomnik katyński sluchaj mp3
Zdewastowano kolejny pomnik katyński sluchaj mp3
Zdewastowano kolejny pomnik katyński
Halina Młuńczak - Członek Rodziny Katyńskiej (2008-04-08)
Aktualności dnia
słuchajzapisz
Zdewastowano kolejny pomnik katyński
Halina Młuńczak - Członek Rodziny Katyńskiej (2008-04-08)
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Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Polish catholic woman Sendler Irena Mother of the Holocaust Children
Polish catholic woman Sendler Irena Mother of the Holocaust Children
Polish Woman Sendler Irena Mother of the Holocaust Children
Irena Sendler: WWII Rescuer and Hero
by Peter K. Gessner
Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler was born in 1910. Her father was a socialist and a doctor in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. Most of his patients were Jewish.
In October 1942, when in German-occupied Poland the Council for Aid to Jews - codename "Zegota" - was organized by the Polish Underground, Sendler was one of its first recruits. Thirty-two years old, she was at the time a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Welfare Department. She had already been very involved in helping Jews before the Germans set up the Jewish Ghetto. She became the director of the Children’s Section of Zegota using the codename: Jolanta.
Sendler had already been helping Jews well before becoming the founding of Zegota. Her Welfare Department operated canteens for orphans, poor people and the destitute in every district of the city. Jews, whose bank accounts, real estate and property had been quickly confiscated by the Germans, found themselves among the ranks of the poor, yet by German edict were denied all forms of assistance. Sendler, having recruited at least one co-worker, or more correctly, co-conspirator from each of the ten centers of the Welfare Department, strove to find ways to circumvent the German edicts. Jewish families were registered under fictitious Christian names, were registered for short periods a tenants and to prevent inspections, their families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis. When the Ghetto was sealed, however, 90% of the 3000 Jews that were being helped through her efforts, ended up behind its walls.
Irena Sendler receiving the In the Service of Health medal from Poland's Minister of Health. Warsaw, October 1958
To be able to enter the Ghetto, she managed to obtain for herself and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, official passes from doctors in Warsaw’s Epidemic Control Department that allowed them to legally entre the Ghetto. They visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought themselves or arrange for others to bring to the Ghetto food, medicines, money and clothing. However, given the terrible conditions in the Ghetto, where 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease, the two decided to help people, particularly children, to get out of the Ghetto. This was no easy task. Moreover it got more difficult as time went on and the Germans sealed the various avenues - underground passages, holes in the Ghetto wall, etc. - that were used in the process. Some guards could be bribed, and children could and sometimes were thrown over the Ghetto wall.
For Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families on the Christian - so called Aryan side - willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk being executed if the Germans ever found out, was also not easy. As a rule, the children were first placed in a temporary shelter, then to a foster home after they had somewhat recovered from their period of destitution. There was also a need to wait for them to receive from the Polish Underground false identity papers that were good enough to pass German muster. Each child had to be provided with a factitious birth and baptismal certificate and a family history of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. which the children, if old enough, had to commit to memory. Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the children’s original names and their new identities and buried the information in glass jars in a garden so that at some point in the future they could be returned to their parents, or at least know who they had been. In all Sendler, her jars contained the names of 2,500 children.
On October 20, 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. Although subjected to beatings and torture during which both of her feet and legs were broken, but not her spirit: she revealed nothing. Never again would she be able to walk without crutches. Sentenced to death, she was rescued by Zegota which, fearful that she would break down and reveal the location of the children, managed to bribe a guard to check off her name on a list of those already executed. As a result, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those on whom a sentence of death had been carried out.
Rescued, she had to assume a completely new identity and liver an entirely new life. She could not visit her dying mother, nor attend her funeral. But she did again become deeply involved in the work of Zegota and after the war was able to give the children’s who’s who identify information to the Central Committee of Polish Jews.
In the post-war period she again immersed herself in the area of Social Welfare, working in the Ministry of Health. Having been in the Polish Underground was not looked upon with favor by Poland’s communist masters. Though she was never arrested by the Communist authorities, she was threatened that her children was not be allowed to have access to higher education.
In 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Interviewed in 1995 on camera in a 40-minute French documentary by Polish-born writer and film-maker Marek Halter, Sendler, her squinty, blue eyes awash with tears, recounted how she smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto in an ambulance. In the front seat, a dog barked loudly to drown out the cries of her small passengers. Still visited by some of Jews she saved, ``I could have done more,'' she said. ``This regret will follow me to my death.''
Now 91 years old and confined to a wheelchair she continues to live in Warsaw where in May, 2001 she was visited by a group of four high school students from a rural school in Uniontown, Kansas. The students, accompanied by their parents and history teacher, came to meet the person whose life story inspired then to create a prize-winning dramatic presentation "Life in a Jar." The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS has brought Sendlers story of great courage and dedication to a wider public.
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On August 22, 1939, a week before his attack on Poland, Hitler exhorted his nation: "Kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." As many as 200,000 Polish children, deemed to have "Germanic" (Aryan) features, were forcibly taken to Germany to be raised as Germans, and had their birth records falsified. Very few of these children were reunited with their families after the war.
More than 500 towns and villages were burned, over 16 thousand persons, mostly Polish Christians, were killed in 714 mass executions, of which 60% were carried out by the Wehrmacht (German army) and 40% by the SS and Gestapo. In Bydgoszcz the first victims were boy scouts from 12 to 16 years old, shot in the marketplace. All this happened in the first eight weeks of the war. See Richard C. Lucas, The Forgotten Holocaust; The Poles under German Occupation. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky [c1986].
In the East, the Russians, collaborating with the Germans (Hitler-Stalin Pact of Aug. 23, 1939) attacked Poland on September 17, 1939, and occupied the eastern part of Poland until June 1941. Massive killings followed, among them 21,857 officers, mostly reserve members of the army, police and frontier guards, whose bodies were found later in Katyn, Miednoye, Kharkov and Tver. Other bodies from these massacres have never been found. About two million Poles, mostly members of the intelligentsia, were deported to Siberia or to Kazakhstan in North and Central Asia. More than half never returned; thousands were killed in the fighting and over 452,000 became POWs in Soviet Russia. Poland disappeared from the European map, divided between Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Out of its pre-war population of 36 million, Poland lost 22%, the highest percentage than any other country in Europe. The heaviest losses were sustained by educated classes, youth and democratic forces that could challenge totalitarianism later on. See I. C. Pogonowski, Poland: A Historical Atlas. New York, Hippocrene Books, 1987.
According to the German AB Plan, Poles were to become a people without education, slaves for the German overlords. Secondary schools were closed; studying, keeping radios, or weapon of any kind, or practicing any kind of trade were prohibited under the threat of death.
In 1988, the public prosecutor, Waclaw Bielawski, from the Main Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, issued a list of 1,181 names of Poles who had been killed for helping Jews during World War II. In 1997, the Main Commission – The Institute of National Memory and The Polish Society for The Righteous Among the Nations in Warsaw, published Part III in the series Those Who Helped: Polish Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. It reduced the list of 1,181 names to only 704, by accepting only those whose accounts could be independently corroborated and verified fifty years later. The publication also included the names of more than 5,400 Poles, who have been recognized by the Israeli Yad Vashem Institute – The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, as “Righteous Among the Nations.” About 17,000 people of 34 nationalities were similarly honored. In Western Europe the automatic death sentence for help rendered to Jews did not exist, and applying it to a whole family or neighbors was unthinkable. The reign of terror that was organized in Poland was completely unique, and unimaginable in the West.
Those who were executed are not usually recognized as “Righteous”. They were generally murdered with the Jews they harbored, so there were no Jewish witnesses, while the Polish witnesses were not taken into consideration. Only in very rare cases (25 that were known in 1999), when a Jew managed to escape death and lived long enough to make the proper deposition in an Israeli consulate or at Yad Vashem (the State Tribunal of Israel) in Jerusalem, could the rescuers be recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Saving Jews was very difficult, as about 85% of Poland’s Jews either did not speak Polish or spoke a dialect. In many cases, Jews were easily distinguished by their appearance.
Poland, under the Soviet-imposed communist regime that lasted from 1948 until 1989, was cut from the West. Poles lost contact with the Jewish persons they saved, most of whom left the country. Many Polish Jews changed their names, either under the occupation or after settling abroad. Furthermore, it was dangerous to maintain correspondence with the West. Many of the rescuers also changed their addresses, due to the massive migration from the eastern part of the country, incorporated into the Soviet Union, to the western territories that were taken from Germany after the war.
The stories of the rescuers are a shining example of the most selfless sacrifice, surpassing in its heroism that of all the soldiers on the battlefield, whom we commemorate each November. In fact the soldier must fight; he cannot refuse. He is supported by the entire military organization and his efforts are mostly limited to battles that have a clear beginning and an end. He is paid and given the food, supplies and weapons that he needs.
Rescuers of Jews in Poland – on the other hand – were completely alone, often deprived of their pre-war means of livelihood, expelled from their farms, factories, businesses, offices and even homes, most of them living in dire poverty. For ome of them it was virtually impossible to earn a living. They were under no legal obligation to risk their own lives and, even more, the lives of their families and neighbors. Their help most often lasted days and nights, weeks, months, even years, always in secret, and always in the risk of discovery.
And what about the Polish woman, 95-year-old Irena Sendlerowa, who is credited with saving the lives of 2,500 Jews? Sendlerowa led about 20 helpers who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety between 1940 and 1943, placing them in Polish families, convents or orphanages.
She wrote the children's names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor's yard as a record that could help locate their parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused - despite repeated torture - to reveal their names.
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being instantaneously shot, along with family members.
Even now, more than half a century after the end of the war, questions are still being asked: What was the Polish nation's response to the unfolding Jewish Tragedy? Did the Poles try to help the Jews? How much help could have been actually offered in view of the rigours imposed by German Occupation? Such questions call for a well-considered response based on historical facts.
Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where - throughout the duration of the war - a secret organisation existed whose express purpose was to help the Jews and find, at least for some of them, a place of safety. Initially coordinated by several committees, in December 1942 this action culminated in the creation of the Relief Council for Jews in Poland, code name 'Zegota'.
'Zegota' (1) organised financial aid and medical care for the Jews hiding on the 'Aryan side', and procured for them forged identity documents. 'Zegota' was successful in providing accommodation for many. This presented an extremely difficult problem as discovery of a person of Jewish origin on the premises resulted in an immediate execution of all the occupants.
E. Ringelblum (2) describes hundreds of such cases.
Some 2500 Jewish children from Warsaw were saved by 'Zegota' by placing them either with catholic Polish foster-families or in orphanages run by convents or local councils. Also, help in the form of money, food and medicines was organised by 'Zegota' for the Jews in several forced-labour camps in Poland.
As soon as the Jewish Tragedy became apparent, the Polish Government-in-Exile, the Underground State and Polish diplomacy embarked on a massive campaign, informing the free world of the plight of the Jews. Efforts were made to obtain help for them from the Allied Governments, the Vatican and from various organisations in the Allied countries. There were countless broadcasts, articles in the press, organised meetings, approaches to Allied leaders and governments in which the Free Polish leaders, ministers, politicians and diplomats over and over again informed that a crime of genocide was being committed by the Germans against the Jews. (3). The full story of the Jewish Tragedy was brought to the Allied countries by special couriers from the Polish Resistance, one of them gaining access to the inside of the Warsaw Ghetto and to a death camp. The couriers tried to persuade the Allies and the Jewish organisations that there was a real danger and urgency to help the Jews. Unfortunately the efforts of the Poles were in vain. The Allies were too busy with the on-going war to consider the plight of the Jews in Poland. The Jewish organisations in the free world could not bring themselves to believe the Polish reports - they thought it was all an exaggeration.
So, where were the rich and influential Jews from New York and London? What did they do to help their folks? And so, one more time the same question appears: HOW DARE Mrs. Pilar Rahola and El Pais atack Polish people and Poland?
The military wing of the Polish Underground State, the Home Army, tried to involve the Jewish organisations in Poland in resistance activities. At first, there was much reluctance on their part to participate. However, in 1942 the Jewish resistance movement began. The Home Army helped by providing military intelligence, communication with the Allies and eventually by providing some weapons, explosives and military expertise for the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (4).
It is worth noting here that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance Authority, has recently expressed both thanks and appreciation to the special unit of the 'Zoska' Battalion of the Polish Home Army, which in August 1944 captured the Warsaw Concentration Camp, the so-called 'Gesiowka', liberating 348 prisoners, Polish and European Jews.
Now, what about the ordinary Polish people - were they prepared to offer help to the Jews? At the early stage of Poland's occupation the Jews were selected for special treatment by the Occupant. This meant gradual isolation, degradation, starvation and eventual denial of the right to life for all Polish Jews.
Poland was the only country in all of Nazi-occupied Europe with death penalty for sheltering Jews. Germans knew how sympathetic Poles were to Polish Jews and in that way they could get rid of them both. Entire families, sometimes whole towns were murdered for sheltering Jews. Besides, 75% of the Jewish popiulation spoke only Yiddish, which later became a problem for those who wanted to be saved and pretend to be Poles.
The harsh reality of life for the rest of Poland's population was that everybody was preoccupied with the constant struggle for survival. To find work, to obtain enough food and other necessities of life - all these were of utmost importance to very many. Furthermore, there was the constant fear of being arrested and sent to a concentration camp, to forced labour in Germany, or to be taken as a hostage for public execution by a firing squad or hanging.
Three million Poles and three million Polish Jews perished as a result of the German occupation. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where giving any kind of help to the Jews resulted in a collective execution of the helper and his or her family. Under such circumstances it would require a person of a special kind of courage and love of humanity to offer help to a Jew. How many saints would one find in any given community? How many such people would we find in Western Europe in the times of war? And yet there were Polish people who did help. It has always been difficult to establish the exact number of helpers, but some idea of that number can be gleaned from the Yad Vashem list of the 'Righteous among the Nations' (1). The list, as of 1st January 1997, gives the names of 14,706 persons from 34 nationalities who helped the Jews. 4,954 of them are Polish helpers. Among them are listed 11 catholic clergymen and 18 nuns. Only three organisations are honoured by Yad Vashem, one being the Polish organisation 'Zegota'. It is likely that - as research into the role of the Polish people in the Holocaust continues - the list of Polish names will grow.
Those listed are the helpers who survived and their heroism was verified by those whom they helped. But there were many who paid the ultimate price. In most cases those whom they were trying to help perished with them. The publication 'Those who helped' (1) lists 704 Poles who were killed because they helped the Jews. Places and dates are also given of mass executions by the Germans (the so-called pacifications of villages) of a further 143 Poles who rendered help to the Jews. To obtain and verify the names of those helpers who perished presents an even more difficult problem. Inevitably there will remain a large number of unknown heroes.
One can finally ask: Was the help given to the Jews of some significance? Stewart Steven, who in his book 'The Poles' (5), gives an extensive account of Polish-Jewish relations, offers the following conclusion: 'Maybe Poland could have done more for its Jewish population, but then so could every country of occupied Europe. The record shows that the Poles did more than most'.
So, what can we say about Poles, mostly Roman Catholic, who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland? But it is fair to say that rescuers came from every religious background: Protestant and Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim.
What about the fact that - despite the overwhelming and deadly idea of antisemitism in the Third Reich - there were a large number of individuals and organizations (such as Zygota in Poland) that risked (and sometimes lost) their lives in the effort to save Jews? They saved thousands of Jewish children from the Nazi, smuggled them out of the Warsaw Getto and hid with Polish families?
What about Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government-in-exile, who alerted British and American politicians to Nazi plans to murder the Jews? After an unsuccessful attempt in Great Britain, he went to the United States to give all the proof of the Holocaust to the US President and the US Congress.
Finally, what about the Jewish collaborators with the communist regime under Stalin in eastern part of Poland after the 1939 Russia aggression?
Where is your journalistic code of ethics and – at least – common sence? Such articles as the one by Mrs. Pilar Rahola contribute even more to the ever-present anti-Polonism in the American and European media. Besides, it is too difficult to understand when the reader is not provided with wider information and truthful publications.
The double standards are evident by calling an event, such as the one in Jedwabne, an act of anti-Semitism, while burning a synagogue in Worcester, Mass in the United States was called "an act of vandalism", and a shooting in the Jewish Children Center in California - "an act of a mad man". If such acts took place in Poland, surely they would have been called anti-Semitic. American patriotism applied to Poles changes into nationalism.
For 1000 years, Poland had been the spiritual and religious center of Jewish Diaspora and produced one of the greatest world centers of Talmudic studies. 300 papers in Hebrew were published in Warsaw alone. Jews, unlike Blacks in America, were not forced to settle in Poland; they prospered, attended colleges and universities, owned factories, etc.
As early as in 1264, King Boleslav of Poland issued a charter inviting the Jews there. The charter was an amazing document, granting Jews unprecedented rights and privileges. For example, it stated that::
"The testimony of a Christian alone may not be admitted in a matter which concerns the money or property of a Jew. In every such incidence there must be the testimony of both a Christian and a Jew. If a Christian injures a Jew in any which way, the accused shall pay a fine to the royal treasury."
"If a Christian desecrates or defiles a Jewish cemetery in any which way, it is our wish that he be punished severely as demanded by law."
"If a Christian should attack a Jew, the Christian shall be punished as required by the laws of this land. We absolutely forbid anyone to accuse the Jews in our domain of using the blood of human beings."
"We affirm that if any Jew cry out in the night as a result of violence done to him, and if his Christian neighbors fail to respond to his cries and do not bring the necessary help, they shall be fined."
"We also affirm that Jews are free to buy and sell all manner of things just as Christians, and if anyone hampers them, he shall pay a fine."
Polish King Kazimierz was favorably disposed towards Jews. On October 9, 1334, he confirmed the privileges granted to Jewish Poles in 1264 by Boleslav V. Under penalty of death, he prohibited the kidnapping of Jewish children for the purpose of enforced Christian baptism. He inflicted heavy punishment for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. And although Jews had lived in Poland since before the reign of King Kazimierz, he allowed them to settle in Poland in great numbers and protected them as people of the king.
Another Polish king, Sigmund II Augustus, issued another invitation. Here is an excerpt from his edict, granting the Jews permission to open a yeshiva at Lublin, dated August 23, 1567:
"As a result of the efforts of our advisors and in keeping with the request of the Jews of Lublin we do hereby grant permission to erect a yeshiva and to outfit said yeshiva with all that is required to advance learning. All the learned men and rabbis of Lublin shall come together for among their number they shall choose one to serve as the head of the yeshiva. Let their choice be a man who will magnify Torah and bring it glory."
GOLDEN AGE OF POLISH JEWRY
In Poland, the Jews were allowed to have their own governing body called the Va'ad Arba Artzot, which was composed of various rabbis who oversaw the affairs of the Jews in eastern Europe. The Poles did not interfere with Jewish life and Jewish scholarship flourished.
Some important personalities of this period, which every student of Jewish history should remember, were:
Rabbi Moshe Isserles (1525-1572), from Krakow, also known as the Rema. After the Sephardi rabbi Joseph Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish Law, Rabbi Isserles annotated it to fill in the rabbinic decisions from Eastern Europe. His commentary was, and continues to be, critically important in everyday Jewish life.
Rabbi Ya'akov Pollack (1455-1530), from Krakow. He opened the first yeshivah in Poland and was later named the chief rabbi of Poland. He developed a method of learning Talmud called pilpul, meaning "fine distinctions." This was a type of dialectical reasoning that became very popular, whereby contradictory facts or ideas were systematically weighed with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions.
Rabbi Yehudah Loewe, (1526-1609), not from Poland but important to Eastern European Jewry. He was known as the Maharal of Prague and was one of the great mystical scholars of his time. He has been credited with having created the golem, a Frankenstein figure, a living being without a soul.
Along with the growth in Torah scholarship came population growth. In 1500 there were about 50,000 Jews living in Poland. By 1650 there were 500,000 Jews. This means that by the mid 17th century about majority of the Jewish population of the world was living in Poland!
Where did these Jews settle within Poland?
Jews were generally urban people as they were historically not allowed to own land in most of the places they lived. However, they also created their own farm communities called shtetls. Although we tend to think of the shtetl today as a poor farming village (like in Fiddler on the Roof), during the Golden Age of Polish Jewry many of these communities were actually quite prosperous. And there were thousands of them.
The Jews in these independent communities spoke their own language called Yiddish. Original Yiddish was written in Hebrew letters and was a mixture of Hebrew, Slavic, and German. (Note that Yiddish underwent constant development and "modern" Yiddish is not like the "old" Yiddish which first appeared in the 13th century, nor "middle" Yiddish of this period of time.) Overall, the Jews did well, working alongside Polish and Ukrainian Christians
How many African Americans till the 20th century were able to do so?
Jews came to Poland on their own will, to the country of great opportunity. They found shelter from the hostilities of Western Europe, stayed in and prospered, had representatives in the Polish parliament, and had the freedom of expressing their religion and customs. In some towns of Eastern Poland, Jews accounted for more than 50% of the occupants. They were respected citizens. So, how could this be possible if the country was anti-Semitic, as it is widely presented in the book by Jan Tomasz Gross?
Polish Jews enjoyed equal rights and full protection of the law under the Polish government. The laws changed under the rule of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. But we need to keep in mind that it also affected Poles as well. Their situation improved again after WWI when the Polish government was reestablished.
Why, between the wars, was the Jewish population growing 6 times faster than the Christian population, if the alleged anti-Semitism took place?
The only prejudice that you can accuse Polish people of is to be anti-Communist. Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who still lives in Poland, said: "It is not a Jew who is the enemy, it is an enemy who is Jewish." I'm sorry to destroy the beautiful image of the peaceful and innocent Jewish people but at the time of the massacre it was well known that there were "informers," "observers," "advisors," or in plain English "Soviet collaborators" among Jews then and through the war and after.
Those did not see the wrong they were doing, the comfort came from accepting a different way of thinking. They considered themselves Poles or Polish Jews before the war, now comfortably became only Jews, so there were no ties of loyalty to Poland or to the Polish people. Collaborators gave away Poles and Jews as well (Jakub Berman as an example).
But this would be too difficult to understand for us who - for decades - were fed on anti-Polish propaganda. The same propaganda that the Nazis and later the Soviets used and which is now being repeated with a nauseating consistency by the American press.
It is the backwardness of American Jews to prefer that stereotype. I was hoping that with the raising of the Iron Curtain, the flow of information about Poland would be available to the average American reader and TV viewer. Unfortunately, that did not happen. We rather prefer to publish such articles as the one in El Pais. Also, hiding Polish accomplishments from the public only adds to the image of the Poles as some primitive tribe. The fact that Poland's economy is one of fastest growing in Europe is a thorn in the eye for some. The anti-Polish sentiment spreads to minimize their success. We already forgot who first faced the Soviet power and fought Communism. And last, but not least, the public does not know that presently Poland and Israel have a very good relationship.
We must not forget that Poland was not only a victim during WWII but only recently freed herself from under Soviet occupation. We should remember that Communism in Poland was FORCED upon its people, that Soviets placed Jews on high positions, which triggered atrocities. There is no perfect nation in the world – there are always honorable citizens and there is scum in all of them. But it seems that we only find the bad in Poles and all the good in Jews. For[AB1] a well-balanced story, the authors should mention what Soviet Jews did to Poles (Koniuchy massacre) and the fact that – out of 34 countries altogether – the Poles are those who have the biggest number of trees at Yad Vashem.
I guess American Jews don't rush to reveal some other information to the American public like: what were the Judenrat and the Jewish Police doing in the ghettos? Who took over the houses of Polish officers and their families in the east of pre-war Poland when they were taken to Siberia?
Do we inform that Poland's government was the only one in Nazi-occupied Europe to sponsor the organization to help Jews escaping the ghettos?
What did American Jews do to help their dying brothers?
In the American consciousness the Holocaust has become synonymous with Jewish history. Historical literature of the Holocaust has focused on the six million Jewish victims with the exclusion of the sixteen to twenty million Gentile (non-Jewish) victims.
We allow speculation on almost every aspect of Polish-Jewish relationship, never asking: "Why don't we speculate how many Jews would save Poles if the roles were reversed?"
For me, to have a different opinion is to risk being called an anti-Semite. An intelligent but objective Jewish person is called a "self-hating Jew". A "bystander" is someone who chose not to give his and his family's life for a strange, Jewish person.
Good things are happening in Poland .We don't rush to tell about the annual Jewish Festival in Krakow or about the opening of yet another Jewish school in Warsaw. Or even about the commemorating of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We don't rush to tell about "Fiddler on the Roof" in Yiddish at the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw. Instead, we publish misleading stories about a music concert in Auschwitz (!?) and killings in Jedwabne. Why is that? American historians should stop wasting their ink only writing about alleged Polish anti-Semitism. Any atrocities toward Jews either occurred during Nazi or Soviet occupation or were triggered by revenge and greed, not to be mistaken with anti-Semitism. Also, to suggest that all Polish Jews are long gone is wrong, many prospered and became famous: actors (Holoubek, Zapasiewicz, Himilsbach, Rudzki), movie critics (Waldorf), writers (Tuwim), philosophers and editors (Michnik), politicians (Mazowiecki, Suchocka), musicians (Szpilman, Zimmerman), heart surgeons (Marek Edelman), athletes (Kirszenstein a.k.a. Szewinska), singers (Szmeterling a.k.a. Jantar). Some Polish Jews just recently became interested in their religion; Jewish schools are reopening, while the synagogues, museums, and Jewish cultural institutes have always been present in Poland's cultural life. Positive Jewish characters are in every Polish classic; there are streets named after Jewish heroes; monuments accommodate their heroism and their tragedy. All this does not seem like an anti-Semitic country, does it? But it will stay in the American media, as long as we allow it to.
Polish Woman Sendler Irena Mother of the Holocaust Children
Irena Sendler: WWII Rescuer and Hero
by Peter K. Gessner
Irena Sendler
Irena Sendler was born in 1910. Her father was a socialist and a doctor in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. Most of his patients were Jewish.
In October 1942, when in German-occupied Poland the Council for Aid to Jews - codename "Zegota" - was organized by the Polish Underground, Sendler was one of its first recruits. Thirty-two years old, she was at the time a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Welfare Department. She had already been very involved in helping Jews before the Germans set up the Jewish Ghetto. She became the director of the Children’s Section of Zegota using the codename: Jolanta.
Sendler had already been helping Jews well before becoming the founding of Zegota. Her Welfare Department operated canteens for orphans, poor people and the destitute in every district of the city. Jews, whose bank accounts, real estate and property had been quickly confiscated by the Germans, found themselves among the ranks of the poor, yet by German edict were denied all forms of assistance. Sendler, having recruited at least one co-worker, or more correctly, co-conspirator from each of the ten centers of the Welfare Department, strove to find ways to circumvent the German edicts. Jewish families were registered under fictitious Christian names, were registered for short periods a tenants and to prevent inspections, their families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis. When the Ghetto was sealed, however, 90% of the 3000 Jews that were being helped through her efforts, ended up behind its walls.
Irena Sendler receiving the In the Service of Health medal from Poland's Minister of Health. Warsaw, October 1958
To be able to enter the Ghetto, she managed to obtain for herself and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, official passes from doctors in Warsaw’s Epidemic Control Department that allowed them to legally entre the Ghetto. They visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought themselves or arrange for others to bring to the Ghetto food, medicines, money and clothing. However, given the terrible conditions in the Ghetto, where 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease, the two decided to help people, particularly children, to get out of the Ghetto. This was no easy task. Moreover it got more difficult as time went on and the Germans sealed the various avenues - underground passages, holes in the Ghetto wall, etc. - that were used in the process. Some guards could be bribed, and children could and sometimes were thrown over the Ghetto wall.
For Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families on the Christian - so called Aryan side - willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk being executed if the Germans ever found out, was also not easy. As a rule, the children were first placed in a temporary shelter, then to a foster home after they had somewhat recovered from their period of destitution. There was also a need to wait for them to receive from the Polish Underground false identity papers that were good enough to pass German muster. Each child had to be provided with a factitious birth and baptismal certificate and a family history of parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. which the children, if old enough, had to commit to memory. Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the children’s original names and their new identities and buried the information in glass jars in a garden so that at some point in the future they could be returned to their parents, or at least know who they had been. In all Sendler, her jars contained the names of 2,500 children.
On October 20, 1943 Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo. Although subjected to beatings and torture during which both of her feet and legs were broken, but not her spirit: she revealed nothing. Never again would she be able to walk without crutches. Sentenced to death, she was rescued by Zegota which, fearful that she would break down and reveal the location of the children, managed to bribe a guard to check off her name on a list of those already executed. As a result, she was listed on public bulletin boards as among those on whom a sentence of death had been carried out.
Rescued, she had to assume a completely new identity and liver an entirely new life. She could not visit her dying mother, nor attend her funeral. But she did again become deeply involved in the work of Zegota and after the war was able to give the children’s who’s who identify information to the Central Committee of Polish Jews.
In the post-war period she again immersed herself in the area of Social Welfare, working in the Ministry of Health. Having been in the Polish Underground was not looked upon with favor by Poland’s communist masters. Though she was never arrested by the Communist authorities, she was threatened that her children was not be allowed to have access to higher education.
In 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel. Interviewed in 1995 on camera in a 40-minute French documentary by Polish-born writer and film-maker Marek Halter, Sendler, her squinty, blue eyes awash with tears, recounted how she smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto in an ambulance. In the front seat, a dog barked loudly to drown out the cries of her small passengers. Still visited by some of Jews she saved, ``I could have done more,'' she said. ``This regret will follow me to my death.''
Now 91 years old and confined to a wheelchair she continues to live in Warsaw where in May, 2001 she was visited by a group of four high school students from a rural school in Uniontown, Kansas. The students, accompanied by their parents and history teacher, came to meet the person whose life story inspired then to create a prize-winning dramatic presentation "Life in a Jar." The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS has brought Sendlers story of great courage and dedication to a wider public.
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On August 22, 1939, a week before his attack on Poland, Hitler exhorted his nation: "Kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." As many as 200,000 Polish children, deemed to have "Germanic" (Aryan) features, were forcibly taken to Germany to be raised as Germans, and had their birth records falsified. Very few of these children were reunited with their families after the war.
More than 500 towns and villages were burned, over 16 thousand persons, mostly Polish Christians, were killed in 714 mass executions, of which 60% were carried out by the Wehrmacht (German army) and 40% by the SS and Gestapo. In Bydgoszcz the first victims were boy scouts from 12 to 16 years old, shot in the marketplace. All this happened in the first eight weeks of the war. See Richard C. Lucas, The Forgotten Holocaust; The Poles under German Occupation. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky [c1986].
In the East, the Russians, collaborating with the Germans (Hitler-Stalin Pact of Aug. 23, 1939) attacked Poland on September 17, 1939, and occupied the eastern part of Poland until June 1941. Massive killings followed, among them 21,857 officers, mostly reserve members of the army, police and frontier guards, whose bodies were found later in Katyn, Miednoye, Kharkov and Tver. Other bodies from these massacres have never been found. About two million Poles, mostly members of the intelligentsia, were deported to Siberia or to Kazakhstan in North and Central Asia. More than half never returned; thousands were killed in the fighting and over 452,000 became POWs in Soviet Russia. Poland disappeared from the European map, divided between Third Reich and the Soviet Union.
Out of its pre-war population of 36 million, Poland lost 22%, the highest percentage than any other country in Europe. The heaviest losses were sustained by educated classes, youth and democratic forces that could challenge totalitarianism later on. See I. C. Pogonowski, Poland: A Historical Atlas. New York, Hippocrene Books, 1987.
According to the German AB Plan, Poles were to become a people without education, slaves for the German overlords. Secondary schools were closed; studying, keeping radios, or weapon of any kind, or practicing any kind of trade were prohibited under the threat of death.
In 1988, the public prosecutor, Waclaw Bielawski, from the Main Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, issued a list of 1,181 names of Poles who had been killed for helping Jews during World War II. In 1997, the Main Commission – The Institute of National Memory and The Polish Society for The Righteous Among the Nations in Warsaw, published Part III in the series Those Who Helped: Polish Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. It reduced the list of 1,181 names to only 704, by accepting only those whose accounts could be independently corroborated and verified fifty years later. The publication also included the names of more than 5,400 Poles, who have been recognized by the Israeli Yad Vashem Institute – The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, as “Righteous Among the Nations.” About 17,000 people of 34 nationalities were similarly honored. In Western Europe the automatic death sentence for help rendered to Jews did not exist, and applying it to a whole family or neighbors was unthinkable. The reign of terror that was organized in Poland was completely unique, and unimaginable in the West.
Those who were executed are not usually recognized as “Righteous”. They were generally murdered with the Jews they harbored, so there were no Jewish witnesses, while the Polish witnesses were not taken into consideration. Only in very rare cases (25 that were known in 1999), when a Jew managed to escape death and lived long enough to make the proper deposition in an Israeli consulate or at Yad Vashem (the State Tribunal of Israel) in Jerusalem, could the rescuers be recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
Saving Jews was very difficult, as about 85% of Poland’s Jews either did not speak Polish or spoke a dialect. In many cases, Jews were easily distinguished by their appearance.
Poland, under the Soviet-imposed communist regime that lasted from 1948 until 1989, was cut from the West. Poles lost contact with the Jewish persons they saved, most of whom left the country. Many Polish Jews changed their names, either under the occupation or after settling abroad. Furthermore, it was dangerous to maintain correspondence with the West. Many of the rescuers also changed their addresses, due to the massive migration from the eastern part of the country, incorporated into the Soviet Union, to the western territories that were taken from Germany after the war.
The stories of the rescuers are a shining example of the most selfless sacrifice, surpassing in its heroism that of all the soldiers on the battlefield, whom we commemorate each November. In fact the soldier must fight; he cannot refuse. He is supported by the entire military organization and his efforts are mostly limited to battles that have a clear beginning and an end. He is paid and given the food, supplies and weapons that he needs.
Rescuers of Jews in Poland – on the other hand – were completely alone, often deprived of their pre-war means of livelihood, expelled from their farms, factories, businesses, offices and even homes, most of them living in dire poverty. For ome of them it was virtually impossible to earn a living. They were under no legal obligation to risk their own lives and, even more, the lives of their families and neighbors. Their help most often lasted days and nights, weeks, months, even years, always in secret, and always in the risk of discovery.
And what about the Polish woman, 95-year-old Irena Sendlerowa, who is credited with saving the lives of 2,500 Jews? Sendlerowa led about 20 helpers who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety between 1940 and 1943, placing them in Polish families, convents or orphanages.
She wrote the children's names on slips of paper and buried them in jars in a neighbor's yard as a record that could help locate their parents after the war. The Nazis arrested her in 1943, but she refused - despite repeated torture - to reveal their names.
Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being instantaneously shot, along with family members.
Even now, more than half a century after the end of the war, questions are still being asked: What was the Polish nation's response to the unfolding Jewish Tragedy? Did the Poles try to help the Jews? How much help could have been actually offered in view of the rigours imposed by German Occupation? Such questions call for a well-considered response based on historical facts.
Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where - throughout the duration of the war - a secret organisation existed whose express purpose was to help the Jews and find, at least for some of them, a place of safety. Initially coordinated by several committees, in December 1942 this action culminated in the creation of the Relief Council for Jews in Poland, code name 'Zegota'.
'Zegota' (1) organised financial aid and medical care for the Jews hiding on the 'Aryan side', and procured for them forged identity documents. 'Zegota' was successful in providing accommodation for many. This presented an extremely difficult problem as discovery of a person of Jewish origin on the premises resulted in an immediate execution of all the occupants.
E. Ringelblum (2) describes hundreds of such cases.
Some 2500 Jewish children from Warsaw were saved by 'Zegota' by placing them either with catholic Polish foster-families or in orphanages run by convents or local councils. Also, help in the form of money, food and medicines was organised by 'Zegota' for the Jews in several forced-labour camps in Poland.
As soon as the Jewish Tragedy became apparent, the Polish Government-in-Exile, the Underground State and Polish diplomacy embarked on a massive campaign, informing the free world of the plight of the Jews. Efforts were made to obtain help for them from the Allied Governments, the Vatican and from various organisations in the Allied countries. There were countless broadcasts, articles in the press, organised meetings, approaches to Allied leaders and governments in which the Free Polish leaders, ministers, politicians and diplomats over and over again informed that a crime of genocide was being committed by the Germans against the Jews. (3). The full story of the Jewish Tragedy was brought to the Allied countries by special couriers from the Polish Resistance, one of them gaining access to the inside of the Warsaw Ghetto and to a death camp. The couriers tried to persuade the Allies and the Jewish organisations that there was a real danger and urgency to help the Jews. Unfortunately the efforts of the Poles were in vain. The Allies were too busy with the on-going war to consider the plight of the Jews in Poland. The Jewish organisations in the free world could not bring themselves to believe the Polish reports - they thought it was all an exaggeration.
So, where were the rich and influential Jews from New York and London? What did they do to help their folks? And so, one more time the same question appears: HOW DARE Mrs. Pilar Rahola and El Pais atack Polish people and Poland?
The military wing of the Polish Underground State, the Home Army, tried to involve the Jewish organisations in Poland in resistance activities. At first, there was much reluctance on their part to participate. However, in 1942 the Jewish resistance movement began. The Home Army helped by providing military intelligence, communication with the Allies and eventually by providing some weapons, explosives and military expertise for the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (4).
It is worth noting here that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance Authority, has recently expressed both thanks and appreciation to the special unit of the 'Zoska' Battalion of the Polish Home Army, which in August 1944 captured the Warsaw Concentration Camp, the so-called 'Gesiowka', liberating 348 prisoners, Polish and European Jews.
Now, what about the ordinary Polish people - were they prepared to offer help to the Jews? At the early stage of Poland's occupation the Jews were selected for special treatment by the Occupant. This meant gradual isolation, degradation, starvation and eventual denial of the right to life for all Polish Jews.
Poland was the only country in all of Nazi-occupied Europe with death penalty for sheltering Jews. Germans knew how sympathetic Poles were to Polish Jews and in that way they could get rid of them both. Entire families, sometimes whole towns were murdered for sheltering Jews. Besides, 75% of the Jewish popiulation spoke only Yiddish, which later became a problem for those who wanted to be saved and pretend to be Poles.
The harsh reality of life for the rest of Poland's population was that everybody was preoccupied with the constant struggle for survival. To find work, to obtain enough food and other necessities of life - all these were of utmost importance to very many. Furthermore, there was the constant fear of being arrested and sent to a concentration camp, to forced labour in Germany, or to be taken as a hostage for public execution by a firing squad or hanging.
Three million Poles and three million Polish Jews perished as a result of the German occupation. Poland was the only country in occupied Europe where giving any kind of help to the Jews resulted in a collective execution of the helper and his or her family. Under such circumstances it would require a person of a special kind of courage and love of humanity to offer help to a Jew. How many saints would one find in any given community? How many such people would we find in Western Europe in the times of war? And yet there were Polish people who did help. It has always been difficult to establish the exact number of helpers, but some idea of that number can be gleaned from the Yad Vashem list of the 'Righteous among the Nations' (1). The list, as of 1st January 1997, gives the names of 14,706 persons from 34 nationalities who helped the Jews. 4,954 of them are Polish helpers. Among them are listed 11 catholic clergymen and 18 nuns. Only three organisations are honoured by Yad Vashem, one being the Polish organisation 'Zegota'. It is likely that - as research into the role of the Polish people in the Holocaust continues - the list of Polish names will grow.
Those listed are the helpers who survived and their heroism was verified by those whom they helped. But there were many who paid the ultimate price. In most cases those whom they were trying to help perished with them. The publication 'Those who helped' (1) lists 704 Poles who were killed because they helped the Jews. Places and dates are also given of mass executions by the Germans (the so-called pacifications of villages) of a further 143 Poles who rendered help to the Jews. To obtain and verify the names of those helpers who perished presents an even more difficult problem. Inevitably there will remain a large number of unknown heroes.
One can finally ask: Was the help given to the Jews of some significance? Stewart Steven, who in his book 'The Poles' (5), gives an extensive account of Polish-Jewish relations, offers the following conclusion: 'Maybe Poland could have done more for its Jewish population, but then so could every country of occupied Europe. The record shows that the Poles did more than most'.
So, what can we say about Poles, mostly Roman Catholic, who risked their own lives to save Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland? But it is fair to say that rescuers came from every religious background: Protestant and Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Muslim.
What about the fact that - despite the overwhelming and deadly idea of antisemitism in the Third Reich - there were a large number of individuals and organizations (such as Zygota in Poland) that risked (and sometimes lost) their lives in the effort to save Jews? They saved thousands of Jewish children from the Nazi, smuggled them out of the Warsaw Getto and hid with Polish families?
What about Jan Karski, a courier for the Polish government-in-exile, who alerted British and American politicians to Nazi plans to murder the Jews? After an unsuccessful attempt in Great Britain, he went to the United States to give all the proof of the Holocaust to the US President and the US Congress.
Finally, what about the Jewish collaborators with the communist regime under Stalin in eastern part of Poland after the 1939 Russia aggression?
Where is your journalistic code of ethics and – at least – common sence? Such articles as the one by Mrs. Pilar Rahola contribute even more to the ever-present anti-Polonism in the American and European media. Besides, it is too difficult to understand when the reader is not provided with wider information and truthful publications.
The double standards are evident by calling an event, such as the one in Jedwabne, an act of anti-Semitism, while burning a synagogue in Worcester, Mass in the United States was called "an act of vandalism", and a shooting in the Jewish Children Center in California - "an act of a mad man". If such acts took place in Poland, surely they would have been called anti-Semitic. American patriotism applied to Poles changes into nationalism.
For 1000 years, Poland had been the spiritual and religious center of Jewish Diaspora and produced one of the greatest world centers of Talmudic studies. 300 papers in Hebrew were published in Warsaw alone. Jews, unlike Blacks in America, were not forced to settle in Poland; they prospered, attended colleges and universities, owned factories, etc.
As early as in 1264, King Boleslav of Poland issued a charter inviting the Jews there. The charter was an amazing document, granting Jews unprecedented rights and privileges. For example, it stated that::
"The testimony of a Christian alone may not be admitted in a matter which concerns the money or property of a Jew. In every such incidence there must be the testimony of both a Christian and a Jew. If a Christian injures a Jew in any which way, the accused shall pay a fine to the royal treasury."
"If a Christian desecrates or defiles a Jewish cemetery in any which way, it is our wish that he be punished severely as demanded by law."
"If a Christian should attack a Jew, the Christian shall be punished as required by the laws of this land. We absolutely forbid anyone to accuse the Jews in our domain of using the blood of human beings."
"We affirm that if any Jew cry out in the night as a result of violence done to him, and if his Christian neighbors fail to respond to his cries and do not bring the necessary help, they shall be fined."
"We also affirm that Jews are free to buy and sell all manner of things just as Christians, and if anyone hampers them, he shall pay a fine."
Polish King Kazimierz was favorably disposed towards Jews. On October 9, 1334, he confirmed the privileges granted to Jewish Poles in 1264 by Boleslav V. Under penalty of death, he prohibited the kidnapping of Jewish children for the purpose of enforced Christian baptism. He inflicted heavy punishment for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. And although Jews had lived in Poland since before the reign of King Kazimierz, he allowed them to settle in Poland in great numbers and protected them as people of the king.
Another Polish king, Sigmund II Augustus, issued another invitation. Here is an excerpt from his edict, granting the Jews permission to open a yeshiva at Lublin, dated August 23, 1567:
"As a result of the efforts of our advisors and in keeping with the request of the Jews of Lublin we do hereby grant permission to erect a yeshiva and to outfit said yeshiva with all that is required to advance learning. All the learned men and rabbis of Lublin shall come together for among their number they shall choose one to serve as the head of the yeshiva. Let their choice be a man who will magnify Torah and bring it glory."
GOLDEN AGE OF POLISH JEWRY
In Poland, the Jews were allowed to have their own governing body called the Va'ad Arba Artzot, which was composed of various rabbis who oversaw the affairs of the Jews in eastern Europe. The Poles did not interfere with Jewish life and Jewish scholarship flourished.
Some important personalities of this period, which every student of Jewish history should remember, were:
Rabbi Moshe Isserles (1525-1572), from Krakow, also known as the Rema. After the Sephardi rabbi Joseph Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish Law, Rabbi Isserles annotated it to fill in the rabbinic decisions from Eastern Europe. His commentary was, and continues to be, critically important in everyday Jewish life.
Rabbi Ya'akov Pollack (1455-1530), from Krakow. He opened the first yeshivah in Poland and was later named the chief rabbi of Poland. He developed a method of learning Talmud called pilpul, meaning "fine distinctions." This was a type of dialectical reasoning that became very popular, whereby contradictory facts or ideas were systematically weighed with a view to the resolution of their real or apparent contradictions.
Rabbi Yehudah Loewe, (1526-1609), not from Poland but important to Eastern European Jewry. He was known as the Maharal of Prague and was one of the great mystical scholars of his time. He has been credited with having created the golem, a Frankenstein figure, a living being without a soul.
Along with the growth in Torah scholarship came population growth. In 1500 there were about 50,000 Jews living in Poland. By 1650 there were 500,000 Jews. This means that by the mid 17th century about majority of the Jewish population of the world was living in Poland!
Where did these Jews settle within Poland?
Jews were generally urban people as they were historically not allowed to own land in most of the places they lived. However, they also created their own farm communities called shtetls. Although we tend to think of the shtetl today as a poor farming village (like in Fiddler on the Roof), during the Golden Age of Polish Jewry many of these communities were actually quite prosperous. And there were thousands of them.
The Jews in these independent communities spoke their own language called Yiddish. Original Yiddish was written in Hebrew letters and was a mixture of Hebrew, Slavic, and German. (Note that Yiddish underwent constant development and "modern" Yiddish is not like the "old" Yiddish which first appeared in the 13th century, nor "middle" Yiddish of this period of time.) Overall, the Jews did well, working alongside Polish and Ukrainian Christians
How many African Americans till the 20th century were able to do so?
Jews came to Poland on their own will, to the country of great opportunity. They found shelter from the hostilities of Western Europe, stayed in and prospered, had representatives in the Polish parliament, and had the freedom of expressing their religion and customs. In some towns of Eastern Poland, Jews accounted for more than 50% of the occupants. They were respected citizens. So, how could this be possible if the country was anti-Semitic, as it is widely presented in the book by Jan Tomasz Gross?
Polish Jews enjoyed equal rights and full protection of the law under the Polish government. The laws changed under the rule of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. But we need to keep in mind that it also affected Poles as well. Their situation improved again after WWI when the Polish government was reestablished.
Why, between the wars, was the Jewish population growing 6 times faster than the Christian population, if the alleged anti-Semitism took place?
The only prejudice that you can accuse Polish people of is to be anti-Communist. Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who still lives in Poland, said: "It is not a Jew who is the enemy, it is an enemy who is Jewish." I'm sorry to destroy the beautiful image of the peaceful and innocent Jewish people but at the time of the massacre it was well known that there were "informers," "observers," "advisors," or in plain English "Soviet collaborators" among Jews then and through the war and after.
Those did not see the wrong they were doing, the comfort came from accepting a different way of thinking. They considered themselves Poles or Polish Jews before the war, now comfortably became only Jews, so there were no ties of loyalty to Poland or to the Polish people. Collaborators gave away Poles and Jews as well (Jakub Berman as an example).
But this would be too difficult to understand for us who - for decades - were fed on anti-Polish propaganda. The same propaganda that the Nazis and later the Soviets used and which is now being repeated with a nauseating consistency by the American press.
It is the backwardness of American Jews to prefer that stereotype. I was hoping that with the raising of the Iron Curtain, the flow of information about Poland would be available to the average American reader and TV viewer. Unfortunately, that did not happen. We rather prefer to publish such articles as the one in El Pais. Also, hiding Polish accomplishments from the public only adds to the image of the Poles as some primitive tribe. The fact that Poland's economy is one of fastest growing in Europe is a thorn in the eye for some. The anti-Polish sentiment spreads to minimize their success. We already forgot who first faced the Soviet power and fought Communism. And last, but not least, the public does not know that presently Poland and Israel have a very good relationship.
We must not forget that Poland was not only a victim during WWII but only recently freed herself from under Soviet occupation. We should remember that Communism in Poland was FORCED upon its people, that Soviets placed Jews on high positions, which triggered atrocities. There is no perfect nation in the world – there are always honorable citizens and there is scum in all of them. But it seems that we only find the bad in Poles and all the good in Jews. For[AB1] a well-balanced story, the authors should mention what Soviet Jews did to Poles (Koniuchy massacre) and the fact that – out of 34 countries altogether – the Poles are those who have the biggest number of trees at Yad Vashem.
I guess American Jews don't rush to reveal some other information to the American public like: what were the Judenrat and the Jewish Police doing in the ghettos? Who took over the houses of Polish officers and their families in the east of pre-war Poland when they were taken to Siberia?
Do we inform that Poland's government was the only one in Nazi-occupied Europe to sponsor the organization to help Jews escaping the ghettos?
What did American Jews do to help their dying brothers?
In the American consciousness the Holocaust has become synonymous with Jewish history. Historical literature of the Holocaust has focused on the six million Jewish victims with the exclusion of the sixteen to twenty million Gentile (non-Jewish) victims.
We allow speculation on almost every aspect of Polish-Jewish relationship, never asking: "Why don't we speculate how many Jews would save Poles if the roles were reversed?"
For me, to have a different opinion is to risk being called an anti-Semite. An intelligent but objective Jewish person is called a "self-hating Jew". A "bystander" is someone who chose not to give his and his family's life for a strange, Jewish person.
Good things are happening in Poland .We don't rush to tell about the annual Jewish Festival in Krakow or about the opening of yet another Jewish school in Warsaw. Or even about the commemorating of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We don't rush to tell about "Fiddler on the Roof" in Yiddish at the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw. Instead, we publish misleading stories about a music concert in Auschwitz (!?) and killings in Jedwabne. Why is that? American historians should stop wasting their ink only writing about alleged Polish anti-Semitism. Any atrocities toward Jews either occurred during Nazi or Soviet occupation or were triggered by revenge and greed, not to be mistaken with anti-Semitism. Also, to suggest that all Polish Jews are long gone is wrong, many prospered and became famous: actors (Holoubek, Zapasiewicz, Himilsbach, Rudzki), movie critics (Waldorf), writers (Tuwim), philosophers and editors (Michnik), politicians (Mazowiecki, Suchocka), musicians (Szpilman, Zimmerman), heart surgeons (Marek Edelman), athletes (Kirszenstein a.k.a. Szewinska), singers (Szmeterling a.k.a. Jantar). Some Polish Jews just recently became interested in their religion; Jewish schools are reopening, while the synagogues, museums, and Jewish cultural institutes have always been present in Poland's cultural life. Positive Jewish characters are in every Polish classic; there are streets named after Jewish heroes; monuments accommodate their heroism and their tragedy. All this does not seem like an anti-Semitic country, does it? But it will stay in the American media, as long as we allow it to.
Monday, April 7, 2008
It's Time to wake up George Galloway & JFK "I'm speechless!"
It's Time to wake up George Galloway & JFK "I'm speechless!"
Friday, April 4, 2008
Generał Polskich Nadziei - Władysław Anders
Generał Polskich Nadziei - Władysław Anders
Generał Polskich Nadziei - Władysław Anders - cz। 1; dokument fabularyzowany kraj
http://www.tvpolonia.com/player/index.php?path=58&mov=498149367.wmv&play=1
Generał Polskich Nadziei - Władysław Anders - cz। 1; dokument fabularyzowany kraj
http://www.tvpolonia.com/player/index.php?path=58&mov=498149367.wmv&play=1
Generał Polskich Nadziei - Władysław Anders - cz। 2; dokument fabularyzowany kraj
http://www.tvpolonia.com/player/index.php?path=58&mov=963344982.wmv&play=1
Monday, March 24, 2008
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
Polska Gazeta ^ | March 2, 2008 | Herbert Romerstein
COVER UP FOR THOSE WHO CARRIED OUT MASS MURDER
By Herbert Romerstein
When the Nazis announced on April 12, 1943 that they had found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets in Katyn forest, most Americans did not believe them. The Nazis were known to commit mass murder and the extensive propaganda campaign in the United States in support of the Soviet Union had affected the thinking of most Americans.
But the Poles knew the truth. They had been asking the Soviets about the missing men for almost two years. And some Americans knew the truth because they understood the Soviet Union and its history. But, it took some time before these voices of truth could be heard.
The Soviets broke relations with the Polish Government in exile in London because the Poles had asked for an International Red Cross investigation. The Soviets claimed to have been insulted. And they used that as an excuse for recognizing a puppet Polish government that the Soviets set up in Lublin.
The American communists joined in the Soviet propaganda campaign. Corliss Lamont, a millionaire communist propagandist, wrote "Soviet Russia's severance of relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile, over the Nazi-inspired charge that the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish army officers, shows clearly the danger to the United Nations of the splitting tactics engineered by Hitler and definitely helped along by the general campaign of anti-Soviet propaganda carried on during recent months in Britain and America. According to the London Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, 'It is a safe assumption that the Poles would not have taken so tough an attitude toward the Soviet Government if it had not been for the widespread support Americans have been giving them in the cases of Henry Ehrlich and Victor Alter.'"
The reference was to the widespread protests by Jewish and trade union organizations when the Soviets admitted that they had executed Ehrlich and Alter who were leaders of the "Bund", the Jewish trade union organization. According to the communist Lamont, "The shameful anti-Soviet agitation around the Alter-Ehrlich case was followed by the collaboration with Goebbels' propaganda around the German mass murders of Poles." The Polish government had protested to the Soviets about Ehrlich and Alter.
Lamont also quoted from "Professor Lange at the University of Chicago" in support of the communist line. We now know that Oscar Lange had been recruited as an agent of the NKVD by Boleslaw Gebert.
Gebert himself wrote communist propaganda in support of the Soviet Union's false story. In one of his pamphlets, he attacked the commander of the Polish forces fighting in Italy against the Nazis, General Marjan Kukiel. According to Gebert, who was sitting safely in the United States, General Kukiel, who was leading troops in combat against the Nazis, was "Siding with the Germans in their accusations that the Soviet Union was responsible for slaughtering Polish officers and soldiers in the forest of Katyn. The world knew that this unspeakable crime was the work of the Germans…." His pamphlet was published by the communist front "Polonia Society of the International Workers Order". He was the head of that organization, which, of course, did not speak for the majority of Polish-Americans.
Not only did communists and NKVD agents carry out the propaganda campaign but, unfortunately, the United States government helped them. The Office of War Information (OWI) tried to intimidate the Polish-American radio stations and newspapers when they told the truth about the Soviet atrocity against the Poles.
Alan Cranston was head of the Foreign Language Division of the OWI and later a U.S. Senator from California. He called a meeting of OWI officials because the Polish-American radio stations "had taken a rather antagonistic attitude toward Russia" on the Katyn forest issue. Cranston felt that this "was inimical to the war effort and should be straightened out". The radio stations and newspapers were contacted and threatened with being closed down if they continued to tell the truth about the Soviet Union.
In 1952 the U.S. Congress held hearings on Katyn. More Americans learned the truth. When the Soviets recaptured the Smolensk area, they organized their own tribunal to "investigate" the murder of the Polish officers. The American press in Moscow was invited to observe. The American ambassador, Averell Harriman, sent his young daughter to represent the American Embassy. Years later she was asked by the Congressional committee investigating Katyn why her father had sent her instead of someone who was older or was a medical authority. She answered that the Soviets might not have allowed someone more experienced but it would be difficult for them to refuse her. She had believed the Soviet propaganda line; but by 1952 when she testified before the committee, she knew that the Soviets had committed the crime. She testified that she had thought that the Germans did it because the bodies were laid out in methodical manner. Apparently, she thought that the Russians could not do anything in an orderly way.
At the time of the German announcement of Katyn the American ambassador was William Standley. He understood the Soviet Union and did not trust them. He made the mistake of speaking openly to the American correspondents in Moscow. One of them represented the "Daily Worker", the Communist Party USA newspaper. She was called Janet Weaver. She was actually Janet West Ross, the wife of the American Communist Party representative to the Comintern. She regularly reported Ambassador Standley's comments and other information gleaned from conversations with American officials to Dimitrov, head of the Comintern. He passed them on to Molotov. We found a collection of her reports in the Comintern Archives in Moscow. On March 8, 1943, she reported to Dimitrov that Ambassador Standley had revealed to the American journalists that the Soviets were concealing from the Russian people the truth about the massive amount of American war materials supplied. Two days after her report, Harry Hopkins pressed President Roosevelt to remove Ambassador Standley. Hopkins succeeded, and Standley was replaced by the naïve Averill Harriman, who was much more acceptable to the Soviets. It was only in the 1980s that we learned of the evidence that Hopkins was an NKVD agent.
President Roosevelt had heard from Winston Churchill the truth about Katyn. Churchill shared with Roosevelt the information he had received on the Soviet responsibility for the murders. However, when Roosevelt heard from his own representative, George Earle, former governor of Pennsylvania, that he had information that the Soviets had committed the crime, he refused to listen. Earle had been sent by the President to Turkey and Bulgaria under diplomatic cover to report directly to the President, about the Balkans. Before seeing the President, Earle spoke to his friend Joe Levy, of the "New York Times". Levy warned him that "Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the President and the whole atmosphere over there is 'pink'." He advised Earle to be careful when he told the President the truth about Russia. Later, Earle told the President that he wanted to go public about Katyn, Roosevelt wrote to him "I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about an ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy."
Lt. Col. John Van Vliet, Jr. was an American prisoner of war in Germany. He was one of the Allied officers brought by the Germans to Katyn in 1943. When he returned to the United States in 1945, he wrote a report for the United States government revealing his knowledge of the Soviet responsibility for the murders. His report was marked "Top Secret".
The Polish-American community continued to speak out on the truth about Katyn. After the war, they got two valuable allies. One was Arthur Bliss Lane, the U.S. ambassador to Poland 1944-1947. His book "I Saw Poland Betrayed", published in 1948, was the first time many Americans heard the truth about Katyn. The other was Julius Epstein. He was an Austrian born Jew who had escaped from the Nazis. He was now an American citizen and a prominent journalist. Epstein opposed both the Nazis and the Communists. During the war, he had worked for the Office of War Information and was horrified by the pro-Soviet propaganda he saw that agency promoting.
In 1949, Epstein joined Ambassador Lane in forming the "American Committee for the Investigation of the Katyn Massacre". The Committee in coordination with the Polish-American community published pamphlets and articles telling the American people the truth about Katyn.
The Voice of America, the official voice of the American government, briefly mentioned the formation of the Committee, but refused to broadcast former Ambassador Lane's speech. When Epstein visited officials of Voice of America in New York and Washington, he demanded to know why they were not telling the truth about Katyn. They answered "We are playing down Katyn, because it would create too much hatred against Stalin among the Poles." When Epstein asked whether they wanted to create love for Stalin among the Poles at the American taxpayer expenses, he got no answer.
Count Joseph Czapski, a Polish officer had been imprisoned by the Soviets with the other Polish officers. He was released when the Soviets thought that he would be valuable for their propaganda to the West. Instead he represented General Anders in investigating the whereabouts of the missing Polish officers. He was the source of much of the information about the Soviet attempt to cover up before the bodies were found. When Count Czapski visited the United States, the Voice of America asked him to make a broadcast. He submitted the text in advance. Voice of America officials crossed out any reference to the Soviet crime. He could not even mention the word Katyn.
When Julius Epstein learned of the existence of the Van Vliet report, he and Ambassador Lane asked Congress to obtain the report. Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan began a campaign to get the Army to release the report. After many excuses, it became apparent that the report was missing. Finally the Army revealed that immediately after Col. Van Vliet submitted his report, it was sent to the State Department. There were no carbon copies kept by the Army. The State Department claimed to know nothing about it. It is interesting to note that the report went to that part of the State Department headed by Alger Hiss. We now know that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. So we can understand the disappearance of the document.
It was only in May 1951 that the Voice of America would allow some discussion of the subject. But even after that, the cover up of the Soviet crime continued, with only occasional mention of the Soviet crimes.
In 1978 at a writer's conference in Poland, the prominent writer and poet Andrzej Braun spoke out against the censorship of the truth about Katyn. The Voice of America Warsaw correspondent, Ron Pemstein, sent a report on Braun's speech to Washington. Pemstein reported that the poet cited as an example of censorship the refusal to tell the truth about "the murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at Katyn forest in 1940". A half an hour after the story reached Washington, the Voice of America had edited out the words "by the Soviet Union" and the date "1940". The story simply said "Braun cited the murder of Polish officers in World War II." Eleven Polish-Americans working at Voice of America sent a protest to the head of the Voice's European Division. He called a meeting and scolded them for complaining. Remember, this happened during the Jimmy Carter Administration in 1978. When this story appeared in the press, Voice of America director Peter Straus said that the censorship was a "error in judgment by the news editor." But more and more Americans were learning the truth. By the 1980s during the Reagan Administration most American knew the truth about Katyn.
In the years between 1945 and 1991, the KGB carried on numerous disinformation campaigns to conceal the guilt of the Soviet Union for the murders. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more and more information became available about Katyn. We now even know that Stalin himself, together with Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan, signed the report from Beria ordering the murders of the Poles at Katyn.
Herbert Romerstein is director of the Center for Security Research at the Education and Research Institute and author of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors.
New evidence on Katyn forest massacre cover-up
Polska Gazeta ^ | March 2, 2008 | Herbert Romerstein
COVER UP FOR THOSE WHO CARRIED OUT MASS MURDER
By Herbert Romerstein
When the Nazis announced on April 12, 1943 that they had found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been murdered by the Soviets in Katyn forest, most Americans did not believe them. The Nazis were known to commit mass murder and the extensive propaganda campaign in the United States in support of the Soviet Union had affected the thinking of most Americans.
But the Poles knew the truth. They had been asking the Soviets about the missing men for almost two years. And some Americans knew the truth because they understood the Soviet Union and its history. But, it took some time before these voices of truth could be heard.
The Soviets broke relations with the Polish Government in exile in London because the Poles had asked for an International Red Cross investigation. The Soviets claimed to have been insulted. And they used that as an excuse for recognizing a puppet Polish government that the Soviets set up in Lublin.
The American communists joined in the Soviet propaganda campaign. Corliss Lamont, a millionaire communist propagandist, wrote "Soviet Russia's severance of relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile, over the Nazi-inspired charge that the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish army officers, shows clearly the danger to the United Nations of the splitting tactics engineered by Hitler and definitely helped along by the general campaign of anti-Soviet propaganda carried on during recent months in Britain and America. According to the London Bureau of the New York Herald Tribune, 'It is a safe assumption that the Poles would not have taken so tough an attitude toward the Soviet Government if it had not been for the widespread support Americans have been giving them in the cases of Henry Ehrlich and Victor Alter.'"
The reference was to the widespread protests by Jewish and trade union organizations when the Soviets admitted that they had executed Ehrlich and Alter who were leaders of the "Bund", the Jewish trade union organization. According to the communist Lamont, "The shameful anti-Soviet agitation around the Alter-Ehrlich case was followed by the collaboration with Goebbels' propaganda around the German mass murders of Poles." The Polish government had protested to the Soviets about Ehrlich and Alter.
Lamont also quoted from "Professor Lange at the University of Chicago" in support of the communist line. We now know that Oscar Lange had been recruited as an agent of the NKVD by Boleslaw Gebert.
Gebert himself wrote communist propaganda in support of the Soviet Union's false story. In one of his pamphlets, he attacked the commander of the Polish forces fighting in Italy against the Nazis, General Marjan Kukiel. According to Gebert, who was sitting safely in the United States, General Kukiel, who was leading troops in combat against the Nazis, was "Siding with the Germans in their accusations that the Soviet Union was responsible for slaughtering Polish officers and soldiers in the forest of Katyn. The world knew that this unspeakable crime was the work of the Germans…." His pamphlet was published by the communist front "Polonia Society of the International Workers Order". He was the head of that organization, which, of course, did not speak for the majority of Polish-Americans.
Not only did communists and NKVD agents carry out the propaganda campaign but, unfortunately, the United States government helped them. The Office of War Information (OWI) tried to intimidate the Polish-American radio stations and newspapers when they told the truth about the Soviet atrocity against the Poles.
Alan Cranston was head of the Foreign Language Division of the OWI and later a U.S. Senator from California. He called a meeting of OWI officials because the Polish-American radio stations "had taken a rather antagonistic attitude toward Russia" on the Katyn forest issue. Cranston felt that this "was inimical to the war effort and should be straightened out". The radio stations and newspapers were contacted and threatened with being closed down if they continued to tell the truth about the Soviet Union.
In 1952 the U.S. Congress held hearings on Katyn. More Americans learned the truth. When the Soviets recaptured the Smolensk area, they organized their own tribunal to "investigate" the murder of the Polish officers. The American press in Moscow was invited to observe. The American ambassador, Averell Harriman, sent his young daughter to represent the American Embassy. Years later she was asked by the Congressional committee investigating Katyn why her father had sent her instead of someone who was older or was a medical authority. She answered that the Soviets might not have allowed someone more experienced but it would be difficult for them to refuse her. She had believed the Soviet propaganda line; but by 1952 when she testified before the committee, she knew that the Soviets had committed the crime. She testified that she had thought that the Germans did it because the bodies were laid out in methodical manner. Apparently, she thought that the Russians could not do anything in an orderly way.
At the time of the German announcement of Katyn the American ambassador was William Standley. He understood the Soviet Union and did not trust them. He made the mistake of speaking openly to the American correspondents in Moscow. One of them represented the "Daily Worker", the Communist Party USA newspaper. She was called Janet Weaver. She was actually Janet West Ross, the wife of the American Communist Party representative to the Comintern. She regularly reported Ambassador Standley's comments and other information gleaned from conversations with American officials to Dimitrov, head of the Comintern. He passed them on to Molotov. We found a collection of her reports in the Comintern Archives in Moscow. On March 8, 1943, she reported to Dimitrov that Ambassador Standley had revealed to the American journalists that the Soviets were concealing from the Russian people the truth about the massive amount of American war materials supplied. Two days after her report, Harry Hopkins pressed President Roosevelt to remove Ambassador Standley. Hopkins succeeded, and Standley was replaced by the naïve Averill Harriman, who was much more acceptable to the Soviets. It was only in the 1980s that we learned of the evidence that Hopkins was an NKVD agent.
President Roosevelt had heard from Winston Churchill the truth about Katyn. Churchill shared with Roosevelt the information he had received on the Soviet responsibility for the murders. However, when Roosevelt heard from his own representative, George Earle, former governor of Pennsylvania, that he had information that the Soviets had committed the crime, he refused to listen. Earle had been sent by the President to Turkey and Bulgaria under diplomatic cover to report directly to the President, about the Balkans. Before seeing the President, Earle spoke to his friend Joe Levy, of the "New York Times". Levy warned him that "Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the President and the whole atmosphere over there is 'pink'." He advised Earle to be careful when he told the President the truth about Russia. Later, Earle told the President that he wanted to go public about Katyn, Roosevelt wrote to him "I specifically forbid you to publish any information or opinion about an ally that you may have acquired while in office or in the service of the United States Navy."
Lt. Col. John Van Vliet, Jr. was an American prisoner of war in Germany. He was one of the Allied officers brought by the Germans to Katyn in 1943. When he returned to the United States in 1945, he wrote a report for the United States government revealing his knowledge of the Soviet responsibility for the murders. His report was marked "Top Secret".
The Polish-American community continued to speak out on the truth about Katyn. After the war, they got two valuable allies. One was Arthur Bliss Lane, the U.S. ambassador to Poland 1944-1947. His book "I Saw Poland Betrayed", published in 1948, was the first time many Americans heard the truth about Katyn. The other was Julius Epstein. He was an Austrian born Jew who had escaped from the Nazis. He was now an American citizen and a prominent journalist. Epstein opposed both the Nazis and the Communists. During the war, he had worked for the Office of War Information and was horrified by the pro-Soviet propaganda he saw that agency promoting.
In 1949, Epstein joined Ambassador Lane in forming the "American Committee for the Investigation of the Katyn Massacre". The Committee in coordination with the Polish-American community published pamphlets and articles telling the American people the truth about Katyn.
The Voice of America, the official voice of the American government, briefly mentioned the formation of the Committee, but refused to broadcast former Ambassador Lane's speech. When Epstein visited officials of Voice of America in New York and Washington, he demanded to know why they were not telling the truth about Katyn. They answered "We are playing down Katyn, because it would create too much hatred against Stalin among the Poles." When Epstein asked whether they wanted to create love for Stalin among the Poles at the American taxpayer expenses, he got no answer.
Count Joseph Czapski, a Polish officer had been imprisoned by the Soviets with the other Polish officers. He was released when the Soviets thought that he would be valuable for their propaganda to the West. Instead he represented General Anders in investigating the whereabouts of the missing Polish officers. He was the source of much of the information about the Soviet attempt to cover up before the bodies were found. When Count Czapski visited the United States, the Voice of America asked him to make a broadcast. He submitted the text in advance. Voice of America officials crossed out any reference to the Soviet crime. He could not even mention the word Katyn.
When Julius Epstein learned of the existence of the Van Vliet report, he and Ambassador Lane asked Congress to obtain the report. Representative George A. Dondero of Michigan began a campaign to get the Army to release the report. After many excuses, it became apparent that the report was missing. Finally the Army revealed that immediately after Col. Van Vliet submitted his report, it was sent to the State Department. There were no carbon copies kept by the Army. The State Department claimed to know nothing about it. It is interesting to note that the report went to that part of the State Department headed by Alger Hiss. We now know that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. So we can understand the disappearance of the document.
It was only in May 1951 that the Voice of America would allow some discussion of the subject. But even after that, the cover up of the Soviet crime continued, with only occasional mention of the Soviet crimes.
In 1978 at a writer's conference in Poland, the prominent writer and poet Andrzej Braun spoke out against the censorship of the truth about Katyn. The Voice of America Warsaw correspondent, Ron Pemstein, sent a report on Braun's speech to Washington. Pemstein reported that the poet cited as an example of censorship the refusal to tell the truth about "the murder of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at Katyn forest in 1940". A half an hour after the story reached Washington, the Voice of America had edited out the words "by the Soviet Union" and the date "1940". The story simply said "Braun cited the murder of Polish officers in World War II." Eleven Polish-Americans working at Voice of America sent a protest to the head of the Voice's European Division. He called a meeting and scolded them for complaining. Remember, this happened during the Jimmy Carter Administration in 1978. When this story appeared in the press, Voice of America director Peter Straus said that the censorship was a "error in judgment by the news editor." But more and more Americans were learning the truth. By the 1980s during the Reagan Administration most American knew the truth about Katyn.
In the years between 1945 and 1991, the KGB carried on numerous disinformation campaigns to conceal the guilt of the Soviet Union for the murders. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more and more information became available about Katyn. We now even know that Stalin himself, together with Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan, signed the report from Beria ordering the murders of the Poles at Katyn.
Herbert Romerstein is director of the Center for Security Research at the Education and Research Institute and author of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors.
Discovery of carcinogenic material in an Israeli F-16I. Poland Israel Greece.
Discovery of carcinogenic material in an Israeli F-16I. Poland Israel Greece.
As pilots began undergoing tests for cancer on Sunday, a team of technical personnel from the Israel Air Force flew to Fort Worth, Texas, for consultations with their American counterparts and Lockheed Martin concerning the recent discovery of carcinogenic material in an Israeli F-16I.
The discovery of the material prompted OC IAF Maj.-Gen. Elazar Shkedy to ground all F-16I training flights until the investigation is concluded. Shkedy decided to suspend training flights - the plane will continue to be used in necessary operations - after a number of pilots complained of a bad smell coming from the cockpit of one of the planes.
The IDF Medical Branch conducted tests and discovered that the smell was caused by a type of formaldehyde known to be carcinogenic in high concentration. As a result, the IAF on Sunday began taking blood samples from F-16I pilots to test them for cancer.
Although traces of the material were found in only one plane, Shkedy's decision to stop training flights was indicative of the severity of the problem, defense officials said. In addition, since deciding to suspend F-16I training flights, the IAF has been in touch with other militaries to discuss the discovery.
"If it was just one plane and was a maintenance issue, then there wouldn't have been a need to suspend all training flights," one official said. "The fear is that the problem is much more extensive."
Lockheed Martin said it was cooperating with the investigation completely and raised the possibility that it was an isolated incident - the carcinogenic material has thus far been found in one plane - and was connected to the maintenance of the aircraft.
The Israeli F-16I is part of a batch of planes manufactured at Fort Worth and supplied not just to the IAF but also to Poland, Greece and the US Air Force. None of these countries have reported discovering formaldehyde in their aircraft.
As pilots began undergoing tests for cancer on Sunday, a team of technical personnel from the Israel Air Force flew to Fort Worth, Texas, for consultations with their American counterparts and Lockheed Martin concerning the recent discovery of carcinogenic material in an Israeli F-16I.
The discovery of the material prompted OC IAF Maj.-Gen. Elazar Shkedy to ground all F-16I training flights until the investigation is concluded. Shkedy decided to suspend training flights - the plane will continue to be used in necessary operations - after a number of pilots complained of a bad smell coming from the cockpit of one of the planes.
The IDF Medical Branch conducted tests and discovered that the smell was caused by a type of formaldehyde known to be carcinogenic in high concentration. As a result, the IAF on Sunday began taking blood samples from F-16I pilots to test them for cancer.
Although traces of the material were found in only one plane, Shkedy's decision to stop training flights was indicative of the severity of the problem, defense officials said. In addition, since deciding to suspend F-16I training flights, the IAF has been in touch with other militaries to discuss the discovery.
"If it was just one plane and was a maintenance issue, then there wouldn't have been a need to suspend all training flights," one official said. "The fear is that the problem is much more extensive."
Lockheed Martin said it was cooperating with the investigation completely and raised the possibility that it was an isolated incident - the carcinogenic material has thus far been found in one plane - and was connected to the maintenance of the aircraft.
The Israeli F-16I is part of a batch of planes manufactured at Fort Worth and supplied not just to the IAF but also to Poland, Greece and the US Air Force. None of these countries have reported discovering formaldehyde in their aircraft.
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