Bad Pole Holocaust Survivor Testimony Unreliable Sereny

Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience, by Gitta Sereny. 1983

Holocaust Survivor Testimony Unreliable. Polokaust to Follow Holocaust. Ukrainians Searched the Countryside for Fugitive Jews, So Don’t Automatically Blame Betrayals on the Poles

Consider some interesting information:

UNRELIABILITY OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR TESTIMONY—AND THAT OF OTHERS IN WWII

Sereny interviews Franz Stangl and other Nazis such as Franz Suchomel, Jewish escapees from Treblinka, and a member of the Polish Underground. There are many contradictions between different accounts, which she explains as follows: “This is less the result of failing memories or deliberate manipulation, than because most people now represent these events and their part in them with a view to seeming–to themselves even more than to others–what they would have liked to have been, rather than what they were. And this applies to Germans as well as Poles, Christians as well as Jews, West as well as East Europeans.” (p. 171).

All of this is in striking contrast to the musings of the likes of Jan T. Gross, Jan Grabowski vel Abrahamer, and Barbara Engelking, all of whom would have us accept that Holocaust survivor testimonies must automatically be believed because, after all, they are the “voice of victims”!

THE OTHERIZATION AND SELF-OTHERIZATION OF THE JEW

Polish authors have commonly been criticized for not portraying Polish Jews as Poles. But the shoe is also on the other foot. Sereny comments: “Polish Jews always refer to non-Jewish Poles as ‘Poles’ and to themselves as ‘we’ or ‘Jews’.” (p. 121; see also p. 199).

NO POLISH DEATH CAMPS

To her credit, Sereny recognizes the fact that Poles had nothing to do with the German death camps built on their soil (p. 100), and that Poles faced the death penalty for the slightest form of aid to Jews (p. 117).

POLES MONITOR THE UNFOLDING GERMAN-MADE HOLOCAUST

There is a fascinating interview (pp. 149-156) with Franciszek Zabecki, a member of the Polish Underground who was also the traffic superintendent at the Treblinka railroad station. He points out that there was limited Underground communication between different regions of German-occupied Poland (p. 151). Consequently, the events unfolding at Treblinka were not immediately related to those at Belzec and Sobibor. (This may address David Engel’s accusation of the Polish Government in exile’s “tardy” report on Jewish deaths). Zabecki kept a tally of all the trains arriving at Treblinka along with the numbers written on each train. From this, he arrived at a death toll of 1.2 million (p. 250) which, if correct, would cause Treblinka to surpass Auschwitz-Birkenau as the world’s largest Jewish cemetery. [The currently-accepted Treblinka death toll is closer to 800,000.]

COLLABORATION—INCLUDING JEWISH NAZI COLLABORATION

Ukrainian collaborators played a central role in the operation of Sobibor (p. 122, 124) and Treblinka (e. g., p. 148, 166; see especially p. 224). Lithuanians (p. 155) and Russians (p. 164) were also involved. So were Jewish Kapos (p. 123, 158-159)–the depravity of some of whom rivaled that of the Germans and Ukrainians (p. 188).

DO NOT ASSUME THAT DENUNCIATIONS AND KILLINGS OF FUGITIVE JEWS WERE NECESSARILY DONE BY POLES

Treblinka-escapee Berek Rojzman commented: “We got to know from people around that the Germans were sending Ukrainians who pretended to be partisans, into the woods to look for Jews.” (p. 243). How often was the JUDENJAGD, attributed to Poles, actually the work of Polish-speaking Ukrainian collaborators (not only around Treblinka, but also elsewhere—even in otherwise Ukrainian-free regions of Poland)?

THE NAZI AUTHORITIES DELIBERATELY SPARED SOME GERMAN JEWS
Franz Stangl rebuts Holocaust-uniqueness arguments (that posit that ALL Jews were targeted for extermination) when he alludes to certain deliberately-protected Mischlinge and full-blooded German Jews: “That racial business,” said Stangl, “was just secondary. Otherwise, how could they have had all those ‘honorary Aryans’? They used to say that General Milch was a Jew, you know.” (p. 232).
THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH

Had the Vatican had been “silent” on Jews? If so, it had also been “ineffectual” in its occasional statements on murdered Poles (pp. 278-279).
After Nazi Germany’s defeat, German war criminals tried to evade justice. Against the blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church, Sereny shows that aid to fleeing Nazis was given almost exclusively by German and Austrian clergy (pp. 285-286).

NOT JUST THE HOLOCAUST. THE IMPENDING POLOKAUST

Not content with maintaining an exclusively Judeocentric focus, Sereny examines the planned extermination of Slavs: “Historical records in the public domain prove beyond any doubt that the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and concurrently of large numbers of Gypsies, was intended as only the first step in a gigantic programme of genocide of all so-called `inferior races’ of Europe. A beginning was made both in Russia…and in Poland…” (p. 93).

Treblinka-escapee Richard Glazer adds: “This is something, you know, the world has never understood; how perfect the machine was. It was only lack of transport because of the Germans’ war requirements that prevented them from dealing with far vaster numbers than they did; Treblinka alone could have dealt with the 6,000,000 Jews and more besides. Given adequate rail transport, the German extermination camps in Poland could have killed all the Poles, Russians, and other East Europeans the Nazis planned eventually to kill.” (p. 214).

ODESSA WAS A MYTH–WELL, ALMOST

Finally, Sereny discusses Stangl’s flight to Brazil. She contends that few Nazis escaping from postwar Europe benefited from the aid of conspiratorial organizations such as Odessa, whose effectiveness had been greatly exaggerated to begin with (p. 276).