Looting Jews Rob Poles Berg

The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto, by Mary Berg, Norbert Guterman (Translator), Susan Lee Pentlin (Introduction), S.L. Shneiderman (Editor), Sylvia Glass (Translator). 2007

Looting a Common Wartime Event, Not Something That “Poles Did to Jews”. Holocaust Uniqueness Argument (Universal Targeting of Jews) Clearly Invalid

In recent years, certain authors (e. g., Michael Steinlauf, Jan T. Gross) have attempted to make some kind of deep moral issue out of the fact that Poles looted Jews and acquired post-Jewish properties. But such acts were common in wartime, and certainly not limited to any nationality. When Mary Berg and her fellow Jews were on the move during the German-Soviet conquest of Poland, they came across a bullet-ridden house containing a dead Polish peasant. They looted him, as she describes (October 10, 1939): “The kettle which we `inherited’ from this murdered peasant became our faithful companion on the long road to Warsaw.” (p. 14)

A LEFTIST AUTHOR

Those readers familiar with chroniclers of the Warsaw ghetto (notably Ringelblum and Czerniakow) may find Berg’s entries rather brief. She seems to have a left-wing bias, judging by her frequent positive references to “Polish revolutionaries”, etc. (p. 146, 210, 229), to the virtual exclusion of non-leftist Poles who helped Jews. One exception is the following: “Only the nuns who are in this group protect them and condemn the anti-Semitic remarks of certain women. The nuns take care of the children without discriminating between the Jews and the Gentiles. They display true sisterly love and Christian charity; everyone respects them.” (p. 196)

DO NOT CONFUSE THE OCCASIONAL CHRISTIAN-BUILT GHETTOS WITH THE LATER NAZI GERMAN ONES

One aspect of the anti-Christian spirit among certain modern academics has been the implicit equation of the Nazi-built ghettos for Jews with earlier Christian ones. In his preface, Holocaust-survivor Shneiderman soundly repudiates any such insinuation: “The term `ghetto’ itself is a Nazi lie, for there can be no comparison between the Warsaw ghetto and others created by the Nazis in Poland, and the medieval ghettos, whose walls occasionally served as protection to the Jews who lived within them. From the beginning, the modern ghettos served the enemy as deathtraps.” (p. 7)

NOT ONLY JEWS SUFFERED: POLES DID TOO

In several entries in her diary, Berg mentions the sufferings of Poles (e. g., p. 198, pp. 210-211) at the hands of the Germans. And, in common with many Polish authors, Berg refers to those Poles who would harm or betray Jews as hoodlums (p. 25), and hooligans (p. 111, 235). As for their Jewish counterparts, she contrasts Jewish criminals with those Jews who became informers as a result of being broken by Gestapo tortures: “However, there are a few underworld characters who are really dangerous because they take their services for the Gestapo seriously, just as they used to commit crimes in dead earnest.” (p. 111).

THE POLICJA GRANATOWA

Berg touches on the actions of the Polish Blue police (Policja Granatowa). During a German-sponsored execution of Jews, members of the Polish police refused to obey the order to shoot the Jews, and several of them wept (p. 154). Berg met a Polish prison guard who had tears in his eyes when he described the manner in which the Jews were being herded to the death trains (pp. 170-171).

COMPLICITY IN THE HOLOCAUST: NAZI COLLABORATORS ON POLISH SOIL, OTHER THAN JEWS, WERE USUALLY NOT ETHNIC POLES

The deportations of Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka, starting late July 1942, took place as follows, without the participation of the Polish Blue police: “The Lithuanians and Ukrainians displayed great zeal in their murderous work. They are tall young beasts of seventeen to twenty who were especially trained for their job by German instructors.” (p. 169).

Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators were used by the Germans against Jews in many other contexts throughout German-occupied Poland (p. 175, 183-184, 228, 230, 233). If Poles were half the eager Jew-killers that they are made out to be by Polonophobes, this would have made no sense.

NO HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS: SOME JEWS WERE DELIBERATELY SPARED JUST AS OTHER PEOPLES FACING GENOCIDE HAD SOME OF THEIR MEMBERS SPARED

As part of the standard but arbitrary meritocracy of genocides, we hear the endlessly-repeated claim that the Jews were the only people fated for complete extermination, and that this is supposed to make the Jews’ Holocaust more significant than the genocides of all other peoples and therefore worthy of the most attention. Endless repetition of the all-Jews-must-die message does not make it so, either in significance or in fact.

Mary Berg was the daughter of an American citizen. She and other non-European Jews were not killed by the Germans. They were released by the Nazis, finally arriving in Spain in March 1944 (p. 251). It is obvious that, contrary to Holocaust-uniqueness arguments, the Nazis were not determined, as either a matter of obsession or a matter of policy, to kill every single possible Jew within their grasp.