The Warriors: My Life as a Jewish Soviet Partisan by Harold Zissman
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This Jewish Source Affirms the Germans, and Not the Poles, as the Main Killers of Jedwabne’s Jews

The author writes, “Later on, some Jews who had fled Jedwabno [Jedwabne] for Derechin told us when the Germans first entered their town, they had herded all the Jews into a barn and set it ablaze. Anyone who tried to get out was cut down by machine-gun fire. Now, standing in lines in the church courtyard, we heard a German tell us in perfect Russian that anyone trying to escape would be shot.” (p. 42).

For another Jewish source that affirms the Germans, and not the Poles, as the main killers of Jedwabne’s Jews, see DELIVERANCE, by Michael Maik.

Jan Peczkis

• Source: GoodReads.com , July 18, 2018

Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America 
by Alan L. Mintz

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Origins of Holocaust Preeminence in the USA, and the Intimidating Effect It May Have Towards Potential Dissenters

Origins of Holocaust Preeminence in the USA, and the Intimidating Effect It May Have Towards Potential Dissenters

The author identifies himself as Jewish—the grandson of Jews from Lithuania in the 1880s. (p. 168). He largely focuses on the impact of Holocaust movies, but also touches on deeper issues, which I now discuss.

Mintz writes, “How the Holocaust succeeded in penetrating layers of American isolationism is not a simple matter. The key to this question, I believe, lies in the power of cultural texts and their diffusion in the form of books, stage plays, movies, and television.” (p. 16). In other words, it was the media.

HOLOCAUST DOMINANCE, BY ITS VERY NATURE, TENDS TO CHILL DISSENT

Some Jews think that American Holocaust consciousness has caused an overshadowing of other aspects of being Jewish. In addition, non-Jews may feel intimidated against criticizing the preeminence of the Holocaust. Mintz comments, “It is ‘within the family’ of the Jewish community that critical reservations about Holocaust-centeredness have been most freely expressed. Such reservations, or even resistance, may abound in general, non-Jewish circles in American culture; yet the powerful moral prestige of the Holocaust, I suspect, often prevents these thoughts from being aired.” (p. 161).

Jan Peczkis

The Living And The Dead: The Rise And Fall Of The Cult Of World War II In Russia by Nina Tumarkin

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Not Only By Poles and Not Only From the Jewish Dead: Systematic Grave Robbery in the USSR. Also: Katyn Was Genocide

A travelling display of a MATSEVA (macewa: Jewish tombstone) commonly insinuates the repurposing of MATSEVOT (e. g, as paving stones) as some king of unusual, barbaric Polish act aimed specifically at Jews. In addition, media attention, as from Jan T. Gross and his GOLDEN HARVEST, has focused on Poles robbing the cremains of Jews after the war and sometimes long afterwards. The Polish Catholic villain is alive and well.

In actuality, grave robbery and the repurposing of cemeteries is as old as human history! These ghoulish practices neither began nor ended with Polish perpetrators or the Jewish dead. As this book shows in considerable detail, it happened in the Soviet Union, and not only to Holocaust-murdered Jews, and at least as recently as the 1980s!

GRAVE ROBBERY IS CONDUCTED BY PEOPLE OF ALL NATIONALITIES AND ALL SOCIAL CLASSES, AND NOT ONLY UNDER DESPERATE OR WARTIME CIRCUMSTANCES

Author Nina Tumarkin, who identifies herself as a Soviet Jew (p. 49), describes the situation near the Crimean city of Simferopol, where the Germans (Nazis) had shot 12,000 Soviet citizens, mostly Jews, in 1941. (p. 158). The Germans did not have time to confiscate the valuables from the victims. So now the area, as recently as at least the 1980s, is frequented by grave looters.

Apropos to this, Tumarkin comments, “The robbers included a physician who had graduated from a Moscow institute affiliated with the prestigious Academy of Sciences. They ranged in age from twenty-eight to fifty. Their nationalities were Russian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, and Armenian.” (pp. 159-160).

WHY THE GRAVE ROBBERY?

Since the victims were not all Jews, the robbers must have realized that they may be robbing one of their own ancestors. Tumarkin rejects anti-Semitism as a primary explanation, and instead suggests that, “More likely, the robbers simply saw an opportunity to get money, a scam they saw as no worse than the countless scams that made up the notorious ‘second economy’ in the Soviet Union. Only in this case they were not stealing from the state. They were simply digging for gold.” (p. 161).

NOT ONLY THE JEWISH DEAD ARE ROBBED: SO ARE THE MOSTLY-SLAVIC RED ARMY DEAD NEAR MURMANSK

Author Nina Tumarkin discusses the Valley of Glory near Murmansk, “And to the Valley of Glory, where for many years people had in fact been stealing the stars off the tombstones and digging up graves and stealing military medals.” (p. 162).

NOT ONLY THE JEWISH DEAD ARE ROBBED: SO ARE THE MOSTLY-SLAVIC RED ARMY DEAD NEAR NOVGOROD

Kazan filmmaker Vladimir Yerkhov had made a television movie that depicted the finding and burial of the WWII Soviet dead. Let Tumarkin tell of his ghoulish experiences, “Yerkhov’s first narration describes a terrible sight he had witnessed in October 1989 in the environs of Novgorod. He had arrived with a search group at a locus of wartime fighting, only to find that marauders had gotten their first. Forty-seven human skulls and a thick layer of bones had been dug up and strewn about in search for valuables. Any teeth with metal that looked like gold or silver had been pulled out of the skulls that then had been tossed onto the ground.” (p. 163).

Obviously, it was not only the Jewish dead that had experienced a “golden harvest” (following Jan T. Gross) at their expense!

CONCLUSION ON GRAVE ROBBERY

We have seen enough of the MATSEVA on public display. It is high time that the MATZEVOT-related anti-Polish memes, in Holocaust circles, be laid to rest (pardon the pun).

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THE KATYN MASSACRE WAS A FORM OF GENOCIDE

Nina Tumarkin realizes the fact that the Katyn Massacre was not motivated solely by practical considerations. She writes, “The thousands of victims represented the cream of the Polish officer corps and the potential germ of a vigorous postwar administration. Stalin had his own designs on postwar Poland that did not include anything like independent governance. There is every reason to believe that the slayings had been a PROPHYLACTIC GENOCIDE.” (p. 176; Emphasis added).

Jan Peczkis

The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin by  Adam Hochschild

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The Especial Horrors of the Gulag in Kolyma. And Not Only the Remains of Jewish Dead Are Disrespected!

Nowadays, in common Holocaust materials, Poles are blamed for looting the cremains of Jews and of insufficiently respecting the sites of Jewish dead in Poland. However, grave robbery is as old as human history, and disrespect to the dead is likewise.

For example, author Hochschild describes how the remains of Soviet dead can be treated. He writes, „There are so many bones still lying about, said one account I read, that today in the summer Kolyma children use human skulls to gather blueberries.(p. xxv). We never hear about THAT.

KOLYMA: MUCH LIKE A NAZI GERMAN DEATH CAMP–ONLY SLOWER DEATHS

The gold-mining camps in Kolyma had an annual death rate of 20%. (pp. xxiv). Historians’ estimates, of the total death toll at Kolyma alone range from 250,000 to over 1,000,000. (p. 237).

Some parts of Kolyma rivalled the death rate of the Nazi German death camps. Hochschild compared the fate of prisoners, depending exactly upon where they were sent, to the decisions made by Mengele at Auschwitz. He asks, „Or to a place like Camp Expeditsiony, near the Arctic Circle, where from one group of six hundred prisoners sent there in 1939, one hundred survived the first winter, and only one was still alive six years later?”

Jan Peczkis