Grotesque calls about Jews who have Polish ancestors

Echo opinion by Seth Greenland published in the Los Angeles Times:  Have we learned nothing? The protester’s taunt, ‘Go back to Poland,’ is grotesque😟

When it was reported that a demonstrator near Columbia University in New York had loudly suggested that Jews should go back to Poland, I was already there.

The White Eagle (Polish: Orzeł Biały) is the national coat of arms of Poland. It is a stylized white eagle with a golden beak and talons, and wearing a golden crown, in a red shield

My wife, son and daughter and I were visiting Holocaust sites in Eastern Europe. My father’s family is from Poland and Ukraine, and many of our relatives perished in the Holocaust.

April 12, 1945 - Dwight D. Eisenhower views the gallows at Ohrdruf concentration camp. On April 4, 1945, the US 4th Armored Division and 89th Infantry Division of the Third US Army came face to face with the horrors of Nazi brutality. The men discovered Ohrdruf, a Nazi labor camp and a subcamp of the Buchenwald system.

I don’t know if any of my ancestors were Zionists although I suspect some of them must have been. The definition of “Zionist” that I’ve always used is a person who believes the Jews deserve a state where they can be safe. That is something I believe. I also believe the Palestinians deserve a state where they can be safe, the Israeli occupation has been a disaster and Benjamin Netanyahu needs to be replaced.

As for the suggestion that Jews, or more precisely Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis — those of European heritage — should book a one-way ticket to Warsaw, I realize it’s not a point of view representative of the whole of the protesters on U.S. campuses.

Yet it is undeniably a reflection of the “settler colonialist” position on Israel, a narrative that has gained traction despite more than half of Israeli Jews being Mizrahi — that is, from the Middle East. Palestinians and Israelis are two Indigenous peoples occupying the land that is being fought over.

And what about Poland? Almost 3 million Jews lived in Poland before World War II.

Now the population that self-identifies as Jewish is less than 5,000. It’s instructive to remember that most of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, perhaps 300,000 , were taken to Treblinka where they were murdered alongside another 500,000 or so Jews.

Treblinka is now a vast field covered with a massive memorial consisting of hundreds of stones laid side by side, pointing heavenward. I wandered among them and thought about the catastrophe that led to this place and what was now unfolding at universities across America — the anti-Israel chants, Jewish students’ fear of being on campus, the protests and counterprotests creating a climate of menace.

The same day my family visited Treblinka, another Columbia student, described as a leader of the protests there, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” He apologized, and I don’t want to compare him to Nazis. He and his compatriots are young and with youth comes the right to let your heart dominate your brain. His words, however, wore a swastika.

Of course, what happened to the Palestinian people since 1948, has been its own catastrophe, of which the war in Gaza is the latest iteration. The number of civilian deaths is appalling, the suffering of the families profound and seemingly endless. It is not hard to understand the anger and heartbreak animating pro-Palestinian encampments, although one wishes more protesters would acknowledge that the Israeli onslaught did not occur in a vacuum, and that Hamas itself has an affinity for dead Palestinians.

“Go back to Poland” taunts are grotesque and willfully misinformed. To read about them while in Poland, where a ghost country of murder victims exists alongside the current population, is deeply disorienting. Where a synagogue used to be is now a delicatessen; a ritual bathhouse is a police station; a cemetery a derelict patch of ground or a verdant grove in the woods bereft of gravestones because they were stolen to be used to pave roads. So many Jews died in Poland that you could say that the entire country is a Jewish cemetery. 

In Poland, Jews are like the Native Americans in America. They are celebrated, sometimes sincerely, but mostly they are erased.

We visited a town that was nearly 100% Jewish before the war; now not one Jew lives there and there is virtually no indication that Jews ever made it their home. 

Sadly, I am by inclination sympathetic to the protesters. I am even inclined to forgive their ahistorical point of view, although it is ironic given that so many of them are being educated at elite institutions. But they must know: Jewish collective trauma, like that of the Palestinians, is undeniable. One shouldn’t have to go to places like Treblinka to be reminded of this. Have we learned nothing?

Treblinka extermination camp in Poland:Concrete blocks marking the path of the former railway spur at Treblinka

That the protesters are not all antisemitic is a given. Some will happily take a break from chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” to inform you that they count Jews among their number. And yet, from their encampments in privileged Los Angeles and Manhattan, they envision a progressive paradise where everyone’s wounds are salved and racism a dim memory, but there is no place for Zionists, which for many (once again: not all!) is simply a dog whistle meaning Jews.

Go back to Poland? It is impossible. And the maximalist daydreams of American protesters will not help Palestinians.

Seth Greenland is the Los Angeles-based author of six novels and a memoir. His most recent book, “Plan Américain,” was published in France last year.

Holocaust resistance in the Nazi concentration camps

Defying the Holocaust didn’t just mean uprising and revolt: Remembering the Jews’ everyday resistance- an echo report published in The Conversation by Chad Gibbs, professor of Jewish studies College of Charleston. Published under a Creative Commons License, as per The Conversation- Our mission is to share knowledge and inform decisions.

Richard Glazar insisted that no one survived the Holocaust without help. To this Prague-born Jewish survivor, who endured Nazi imprisonment at Treblinka and Theresienstadt, plus years in hiding, it was impossible to persevere without others’ support. Glazar conceded that some of his fellow Treblinka survivors were “loners,” but he nevertheless believed that they “survived because they were carried by someone, someone who cared for them as much, or almost as much as for themselves.”

Carrying someone else took many forms. For fellow Treblinka* prisoner Samuel Goldberg, a Polish Jew born in a small town called Bagatelle, it was the moment the women of his work detail stood up to a guard to save Goldberg’s life. For those around Glazar, it was the times he brought them more to eat because his position as a fence builder gave him chances to buy food outside the camp. 

Still more prisoners benefited from a friend willing to literally hold them up during roll call so no guard would notice they were sick – a near-certain death sentence.

In a place meant to destroy all Jewish life, the smallest acts of support and comfort were resistance.

On Aug. 2, 1943, the Treblinka II extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was the site of one of the most dramatic acts of armed rebellion throughout the Shoah, as the Holocaust is called in Hebrew. 

Several hundred prisoners managed to escape, though most were recaptured and killed. Nonetheless, at least 70 people survived to recount what happened there. Without their actions, the camp might have continued to operate, and we would likely know next to nothing of its history.

In years of research on this extermination camp, I’ve come to place as much importance on the long trail of smaller acts as on the famous day itself. Long before the revolt, resistance was commonplace at Treblinka. It had to be. Here and elsewhere, prisoner revolt would have been impossible without those everyday acts of support that laid foundations for more.

Defiance and dignity

Between July 1942, and November 1943, Nazi Germany killed as many as 925,000 people at Treblinka II. The vast majority of these victims were Jews, though the regime also murdered several thousand Romani people there.

This terrible place was unlike most other Nazi camps in that its sole purpose was the destruction of life. There were no slave labor industries or construction projects. The Jews responsible for the revolt were among the several hundred men and women kept alive to maintain facilities, sort the belongings of the dead, and dispose of the bodies. As the historian Michael Berenbaum put it, Treblinka was “a factory whose end product was dead Jews.”

In such a hell, life itself is resistance, but those held at Treblinka pushed back against Nazi designs for their destruction in every way possible. Early organized efforts took the form of escapes to warn other Jews. Abraham Krzepicki, for example, escaped Treblinka and went back to the Warsaw Ghetto to tell of what the camp really was – and later died there, fighting in the ghetto’s 1943 uprising.

These messengers of truth helped expose Nazi lies and give others the chance to try to go into hiding, fight or jump from trains.

Still, most people targeted by the Third Reich could not avoid transport to Treblinka or other camps even if they knew what awaited them there. For some, resistance was the way they carried themselves on the way to a certain death, such as saying prayers like the Shema Yisrael. Condemned for being Jewish, they steadfastly remained so to the end.

Samuel Willenberg, who was the last survivor of the Treblinka revolt when he died in 2016, remembered how a young woman named Ruth Dorfmann asked only if the gas would hurt, and calmly acted with such unshakable dignity that he felt compelled many years later to sculpt her final moments.
‘Choiceless choices’

Court testimonies, oral histories, survivors’ memoirs and other sources show that over months of concerted planning, Treblinka prisoners’ “Organizing Committee” laid the groundwork for the August rebellion by building a network of trusted men and women. Organizers found ways to place them in jobs that gave prisoner planners complete access to the camp.

That process was a winding and perilous road. Three earlier plans failed, and Nazi guards killed many Jews they suspected of resistance. It took at least eight months of concerted effort to finally pull off the revolt.

Though resistance at Treblinka eventually meant armed revolt, it could not have achieved that end without the countless little rebellions that came before. The same was true in Warsaw and throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. At its core, resistance is the way a person or a people chooses to stand against the challenges thrown at them. That holds true even if those options are what Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer called “choiceless choices” between one terrible outcome and another.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were crammed into inhumane conditions, residents held each other up by establishing soup kitchens and clandestine schools, organizing the removal of waste to prevent disease, and setting up everyday events to help people feel normal, even for one moment.

Warsaw Jews worked to archive what they endured and documented the medical effects of the starvation they faced. Both acts demonstrated hope for a future that would remember their suffering and use its lessons to ease the pain of others.

Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance for the Holocaust established by the Israeli government, occurs on the 27th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar: the start of major fighting during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Thousands died in the Germans’ brutal retaliation.
A more complete picture

The full name of Yom HaShoah is “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day” – which, along with its tie to the Warsaw Ghetto, links remembrance with resistance in no uncertain terms. This pairing held great importance for Israel’s identity as a new state and for a people so deeply wounded by years of terror.

Whenever we remember the Holocaust, we should remember the small rebellions, the individual stands, and the little acts of caring that Glazar found so important. Only in seeing that wider picture of everyday struggles can we understand the true variety and scope of resistance.

*The Treblinka killing center opened in July 1942, and was dismantled in September 1943. An estimated 925,000 Jews, as well as an unknown number of Poles, Roma, and Soviet POWs, were murdered there.

Proof about the Holocaust from first person documentations preserved in Weiner Museum exhibit

MaineWriter- In my opinion, there was a time when I couldn't fathom how anyone would deny the reality of the Holocaust. The horror is a historical fact that was witnessed by all of Europe and the World War II American camp liberators. Beyond belief, but the Holocaust deniers are intent on erasing the horror of the 6 million who were murdered by Nazis in concentration camps. For that reason, the work of those who protect this tortuous history is more important than ever. Humanity must be protected from the risk of a repeat of the Holocaust.

A new exhibition at the Weiner Museum traces the stories and the legacies of the individuals and institutions who worked during and immediately after the Holocaust to record and collect information of atrocities and bring perpetrators to justice.

The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide

29 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DP Tel: +44 (0) 20 7636 7247

The first edition of "Oyf di Felder fun Treblinke" ("In the Fields of Treblinka") by Rachel Auerbach, 1947 (Wiener Library Collections )

By Brigit Katz in Smithsonian.com

During the Holocaust, in camps and in ghettos, the incarcerated documented the facts and gathered evidence. After the war, in a variety of countries and organisations, this work continued, and attention turned towards prosecution of perpetrators and towards prevention of future genocides. The collection of evidence and research was also an important aspect of the huge post-war task of tracing the missing after the Holocaust, and has been a feature of the work of commemorative institutions ever since.

In November of 1954, a researcher named Eva Reichmann issued an impassioned appeal to Holocaust survivors who had started their lives anew in Great Britain: come to her with their wartime stories, letters, diaries, photos, documents—anything related to the horrors they had suffered under the Nazi regime—so their experiences could be recorded, cataloged and safe-guarded.

“Under no circumstances must this material, written or unwritten, get lost,” she wrote in her call-to-action, published by the Association of Jewish Refugees in Great Britain. “[I]t has to be preserved for the future historian.”

At this early stage after the war, Reichmann, a Jewish historian and sociologist who fled from Germany to Britain in 1939, was already anticipating a day when eyewitnesses to Holocaust history would be gone—a timeline that is fast approaching today. And so she embarked on an ambitious project to collect the testimonies of refugees and survivors across Europe.

She conducted her work in her capacity as research director for the Wiener Library in London, which was founded in 1933 with the goal of collecting information about Nazi persecution. 

Today, the institution has become one of the world’s largest Holocaust archives. For a new exhibition launched by the library this week, it is shining new light on the efforts of Reichmann and other early Holocaust researchers—pioneers who set out to create a reliable record of one of history’s darkest chapters.

Crimes Uncovered: The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers tells the stories of a diverse group of men and women who, in many cases, had experienced the Nazi persecution they set out to document. Alfred Wiener, the library’s founder and namesake, was a German Jew forced to flee to Amsterdam, and subsequently to England, in the face of mounting anti-Semitism. 

Early on, Wiener had sensed the dangers of Germany’s rising fascist movement and had started amassing an archive of information about the Nazis, which he brought with him to the U.K. Among the artifacts on display at the exhibition is a 1919 pamphlet in which Wiener warns fellow Jews about the possibility of an orchestrated attack against their community.

Curator Barbara Warnock tells Smithsonian.com that the exhibition was a natural project to take on, given the library’s roots in the field of early Holocaust research. 

Drawing on the institution's vast collection of more than 1 million objects, the show highlights the prescience, determination and sheer bravery of the earliest documentarians of the Holocaust—some of whom gathered evidence in ghettos and concentration camps, endangering their own lives in the process.

Filip Müller, for instance, secretly collected information about Auschwitz-Birkenau while he was a member of the sonderkommandos, the Jewish prisoners forced to work in gas chambers and the crematoria. 

Müller gathered lists of Auschwitz SS commanders, and even peeled off a label from a can of Zyklon B—a cyanide-based pesticide used in gas chambers to murder people—and passed them on to two prisoners who were ultimately able to escape the camp with the evidence. 

Müller knew he was risking his life spiriting away such information; he had seen first-hand how insubordination was punished. In a 1957 document featured in the exhibition, he testifies that an overseer of a crematorium, whom he identifies only as “Kaminsky,” had been executed for “deliberately protect[ing] the illegal resistance activities.”

The exhibition also includes the posthumously published English edition of Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, an account by the activist and historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who orchestrated a clandestine archival project within the ghetto’s walls. 

Operating under the name Oneg Shabbat, the contributors wrote about their personal experiences of daily life in the ghetto, conducted interviews with their neighbors and amassed a huge trove of documents—everything from photographs, to candy wrappers, to posters calling for resistance. When hundreds of thousands of Jews were being deported from the ghetto to the Treblinka death camp, the secret archivists crammed their materials into milk cans and metal boxes and buried them, hoping that they would someday be discovered.

Ringelblum was ultimately shot to death in a prison in Poland. A Galician woman named Rachel Auerbach, who escaped the ghetto and went into hiding, was among the few members of Oneg Shabbat who survived the Holocaust. She helped retrieve parts of the archive after the war's end and, following a visit to Treblinka in 1945, wrote a comprehensive book about the extermination camp. An original first edition, Yiddish-language copy of that text, In the Fields of Treblinka, is also on display in the show.

Once the fighting had drawn to a close, and survivors of the genocide had been liberated, the movement to collect evidence was propelled by other urgent needs. War crimes trials were underway, and researchers like Auerbach assisted in Allied efforts to prepare prosecutions against prominent Nazis. Then there was, of course, the matter of tracking down the millions of displaced and dead.

“It was a very chaotic situation,” says Warnock. “[There was] a huge effort to centralize and gather together all documents collected by occupying armies: any death camp records, any transportation records and other Nazi documentation that fell into the Allies’ hands.”

But for researchers like Eva Reichmann, the main impetus for collecting evidence was to piece together a “great narrative” of the Holocaust, one that would endure for generations to come. In her 1954 call-to-action, which is on display at the exhibition, she wrote that bringing war criminals to justice was “by far the weakest motive prompting our call for the preservation of our collective experience.” More important, she explained, was the “perennial wish that the memory of our dead should be enshrined in a dignified account.”

Vital to Reichmann’s mission was gathering testimonies of the Holocaust from the perspectives of a wide range of people who were affected by it. A coversheet of one of the accounts she collected is on view at the exhibition; the document features a Nazi soldier describing his experience on the frontlines—and how he learned of the horrors that were taking place in Auschwitz while he was at battle.

Other early chroniclers of the Holocaust were similarly interested in piecing together a comprehensive record based on eyewitness accounts. In doing so, says Warnock, they set themselves apart from the earliest academic historians of the Second World War, who treated the Holocaust as a chapter within the broader narrative of the Nazi regime, rather than a subject in its own right. She estimates that it took until the late 1960s at the earliest, and perhaps even onto the 1980s, for a larger shift in the framing of the Holocaust to occur in academia. “Until more recent years, early testimonies were kind of forgotten about, and it wasn't a major focus of the work of historians,” she says.

Scholars today, by contrast, are intensely interested in the testimonies of individual witnesses and victims of the Holocaust. And thanks to the foresight of the researchers profiled in the exhibition, contemporary historians have access to a wealth of such precious early firsthand accounts of the attrocities, painstakingly assembled all those years ago.

“We all bear witness,” Reichmann wrote in her appeal to survivors to share their stories with the Wiener Library. Understanding the vast importance such work would hold for future generations, she added, “We all have a duty to fulfill towards our past.”