Jewish Studies and Holocaust Education in Poland: Essays on Past and Current Practice by Lynn W. Zimmerman (McFarland)

Although this book is free of the strident Polonophobic formulations of many Jewish authors, it consistently repeats the well-worn standard narrative of the innocent victim Jew and the villainous Catholic Pole. It therefore has little to offer beyond an overview of Jewish events in today’s Poland. I have provided a list of books, in the comments section, as corrective for the biases of this book, for the interested reader.

INTRODUCTION

Author Lynn W. Zimmerman, to her credit, repudiates the “Polish death camps” canard as she comments that, “Poles did not plan and carry out the Holocaust.” (p. 23). She mentions a Jew from Chmielnik who was shot by the Polish Underground for collaborating with the Nazis. (p. 172). These are about the only manifestations of objectivity in this book.

Otherwise, all the reader gets is the standard blame-everything-on-Poles and blame-everything-on-Christianity approach (e. g, p. 18). He or she gets no idea that it was Jews that, first and foremost, had thought of themselves as “the Other”, and had perfected it to a fine art, at least to very recent times. The reader gets no inkling of the fact that, until recent times, Jews themselves accepted responsibility (took credit for) the Crucifixion of Christ (as a false messiah), that Jewish-Christian religious hostilities had always been fully reciprocal, and that there was (and sometimes still is) a pronounced streak of racism in the Jewish religion.

REWRITING POLISH HISTORY AND POLISH CULTURE IN JEWISH TERMS

There are the standard attempts to Judaize Polish history: To horn in on Polish self-understanding, to instill in Poles some kind of mythical duty to remember and reverence their past and present Jews, to get Poles to pay obeisance to the Holocaust above the Poles’ own genocide at the hands of the Germans (Nazis), to instill in Poles a perpetual shame for not doing “enough” for Jews during the SHOAH and to get Poles to feel guilty [the classic PEGAGOGIKA WSTYDU] for the rare, completely-normal wartime Polish-nonspecific acts of collaboration with the Nazis. This manifestation of PEDAGOGIKA WSTYDU includes the rather silly, but commonly-repeated, implied equation of the conduct of Vichy France with that of the individual traumatized Poles under the brutal German occupation. (p. 122).

The reader quickly learns that unwelcome opinions are not tolerated in this book. There is the defamation of RADIO MARYJA (p. 63), which is quite common among the LEWACTWO (leftists) and Jews, all because its message is not always compatible with the standard LEWAK (leftist) or Jewish narratives.

Everything in this book is one-sided. There is a survey (Jolanta Abrosewicz-Jacobs, p. 126) about how concerned and ashamed Poles are about anti-Jewish graffiti in Poland. Needless to say, there are no surveys about how concerned and ashamed Jews [if any] are of the many calumnies that Jewish authors have long been writing about Poland.

Predictably, Polish responsibility for Jedwabne is presented as established fact. It most certainly is not. (See comments). As always, Jewish acts against Poland are airbrushed out of history in an Orwellian fashion. There is not a word about the Jewish mass-murder of Poles at Koniuchy. Click on, and see my review, of Intermarium: The Land Between the Black and Baltic Seas.

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY AND THE MYSTIFICATION OF THE HOLOCAUST

Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs writes of the Holocaust, in her own rather grandiose words, as “the most traumatic event in world history”. (p. 122). Says who? There have been scores of genocides, of many different peoples, in just the 20th century. Isn’t it just a bit racist to seriously think of the genocide of one’s own people as “the most traumatic” of all genocides?

We hear once again that, until recent times, Poles just ignored Jewish deaths or just mixed them up with the Nazi German murders of Poles. (p. 35, 86, 95). This canned complaint is manifestly untrue (see comments).

There is also the well-worn lament that Poles generally are not falling in line with the uniqueness of the Holocaust (pp. 97-98; 108-109). And why should they? For what rational reason do they need to bow before the dictates of Holocaust Supremacism? The Holocaust was not unique (see comments). No genocide is above any other genocide.