Jewish Collaboration Even Profiteering Sierakowiak

The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto, by Dawid Sierakowiak, Alan Adelson (Editor), Kamil Turowski (Translator). 1998

Jewish Complicity in the 1939 Poland-Destroying Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Jewish-Nazi Collaboration and Profiteering in the Lodz Ghetto: “Save One’s Life” Exculpation Fails

This Holocaust diary touches on quite a few interesting subjects. For example:

SOVIET JEWISH COMMUNIST LEADERS CONSORTED WITH THE NAZIS IN THE FOURTH PARTITION OF POLAND

Nowadays, we hear so much about the so-called Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Ironically, even earlier, there was a high-level Jewish complicity in the 1939 destruction of Poland. We never hear about that.

Polish Jew David Sierakowiak, apparently exhibiting a rarely-seen moral reckoning, thus comments in his diary entry of September 29, 1939, “The pact has been signed in Moscow. The division of Poland between Germany and Russia has been settled. Lozovski and Kaganovich attended the banquet given by Ribbentrop. Well, well, what an insult!” (p. 45).

Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (1893-1991) is well known. Here is how editor Alan Adelson describes Lozovski: “A. Lozovski (1878-1952) was the pseudonym of Solomon Abramovich Dridzo, the son of a poor rural Hebrew teacher who was the Soviet deputy minister of foreign affairs from 1939 to 1946. A staunch defender of Joseph Stalin, Lozovski survived every one of Stalin’s purges but the last. He was executed at the age of seventy-four.” (p. 45). Nowadays, we hear a lot about Stalin’s anti-Semitism. Evidently, serving Stalin was just fine–until he turned against the Jews.

BEYOND JEWISH-NAZI COLLABORATION: PROFITEERING AT THE EXPENSE OF THE POOR GHETTOIZED JEWS

The standard, canned exculpation for Jews serving the Nazis is that of people desperately trying anything to save their own lives. Now, individual and group Lodz Jews had episodically been murdered by the Germans (as at Chemno/Kulm), just as countless individual and group Poles had been murdered throughout German-occupied Poland. However, an across-the-board collective Jewish fear of imminent death could not possibly hold for the events described in the next paragraph, as the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto were not systematically to be sent to their deaths (at Auschwitz) for another two years (mid-1944)!

In describing the situation, in the Lodz Ghetto, on June 22, 1942 (the first anniversary of the start of Operation Barbarossa), Sierakowiak writes, “Meanwhile, an absolutely reactionary period has begun in the ghetto. [Judenrat Chairman Chaim] Rumkowski, without a thought about adding something to eat for the starving population of the ghetto, has set up the so-called BEIRAT 2. It is an additional cooperative for the police, instructors, and all kinds of higher-level clerks, who, together with those belonging to the “B I” and “L” (doctors), receive special allocations of food on a regular basis. SO MUCH FOR THE OFFICIAL VERSION. Unofficially, the stealing of food and filling of pockets by people working for food is becoming more and more outrageous. The big shots eat, so to speak, in advance. THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THE GHETTO WHO HAVE ALREADY SET ASIDE LITTLE FORTUNES FOR AFTER THE WAR, PARTICULARLY THE JEWISH KRIPO AGENTS. Our authorities are also feeding themselves all right. All this ROBBERY is being conducted with increasing indulgence and greed while the starvation increases around them.” (p. 188; Emphasis added).

Obviously, those Jews serving the Nazis in the KRIMINALPOLIZEI (KRIPO) were not desperately trying to save their lives. They clearly anticipated surviving WWII. And not only that, but also of living off the proceeds of the Nazi-murdered Jews!

THE MYTH OF POLES “GLAD THAT HITLER DID THE DIRTY WORK FOR THEM”

Even before the Germans began the systematic extermination of the Jews in what has become known as the Shoah, Poles commonly showed sympathy to the Nazi-persecuted Jews. Diarist David Sierakowiak adds to many such examples as he comments (November 18, 1939), “The Poles cast their eyes at the sight of the Jews with their armbands; friends assure is that ‘it won’t be for long.’” (p. 64).