Tax Cheating By Jews Shatyn

A Private War: Surviving in Poland on False Papers, 1941-1945, by Bruno Shatyn. 1985

Cheating on Taxes. Jewish Betrayers as Well as Polish Betrayers

Bruno Shatyn (Szatyn, Schatten) was an atypical Polish Jew who, speaking fluent Polish and lacking Semitic features, survived the Nazi occupation in the open. His entire work is remarkably free of Polonophobia, and at no time does he become so Judeocentric as to ignore Polish martyrdom. For instance, he gives an eyewitness account of the slaughter of defenseless Polish civilian refugees by strafing German planes in 1939 (p. 116).

JEWISH SEPARATISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

In his preface, Oscar E. Swan describes prewar Polish Jewry without the usual anti-Polish bias: “In the United States, with its tradition of rapid cultural assimilation, it may be difficult for the reader to imagine the tremendous gulf separating Polish and Jewish society in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s…there were the `Litvak” Jews, recently arrived from the east and speaking little or no Polish, and the Orthodox Jews, who had kept their own dress, language, customs, religion, and schools, resisting even a modicum of accommodation to the prevailing culture. Despite the inevitable sharp social tensions created by such a situation in this fiercely Catholic country during the economic hard times of the 1930s, and despite anti-Jewish sentiment, demonstrations, and clashes at the universities, in labor unions, and in other areas of public life–often enough fomented by the Nationalist element among Polish politicians–most urban Jews in Poland before the war lived in peace and relative prosperity.” (pp. xxi-xxii). Swan forgets that it was the Yiddishists who, most of all, fomented discord between Jews and Poles.

POLES AND JEWS: RECIPROCITY OF PREJUDICES

In the Foreword, British historian Norman Davies adds: “In the era of Nationalism, there were Poles of the National Democratic persuasion who treated all Poland’s ethnic minorities, including the Jews, with undisguised hostility, just as there were growing numbers of Jews of the Zionist persuasion who treated Poland as a country fit only to turn their backs on…it would also be inaccurate to suggest that Poland ever experienced the same level of pathological racism which has reigned at various times in neighboring Germany or Russia.” (p. viii).

ORGANIZED CHEATING ON TAXES

Shatyn describes the prewar Litvaks [Litwaks], some of whom had migrated westward to his native Krakow (Cracow), as follows: “…for the most part they were wholesalers, supplying goods either to local stores or to shops in the many small towns in the countryside. They engaged trained bookkeepers to keep their books for tax purposes, but in addition they all carried in their pockets little notebooks in which their actual accounts were kept, accounts different from those found in the bookkeepers’ neat ledgers. The information in those little books was entered in a Hebrew script, legible only to them. They were excellent tradesmen, and, universal opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, they never cheated or swindled, though they drove a hard bargain.” (pp. 101-102). The reader can understand how the Poles, even if not openly exploited, naturally resented being the generation-after-generation recipients of these hard bargains.

BTW, isn’t tax evasion a form of swindle, and isn’t defrauding the Polish government also a defrauding of the Polish nation?

STANDARD, CANNED ZYDOKOMUNA EXCULPATION FAILS

Shatyn points out that most Polish Jews scoffed at the notion that the conquering Germans would exterminate them (p. 133, 163). This further undermines the fear-of-Nazi-extermination justification for the extensive 1939 Jewish-Soviet collaboration.

LINGERING JEWISH GERMANOPHILIA

The Jewish pro-German mental inertia persisted well after the beginning of what has become known as the Shoah: “Who could believe that these proper, upright, hard-working people would commit mass murder? Even now, when we know that it is true, we still can’t get used to the idea.” (p. 194).

JEWISH DENOUNCERS AS WELL AS POLISH DENOUNCERS

For security reasons, Shatyn tried to avoid those who knew him. Realizing that his Polish friends wouldn’t betray him, he feared that they may divulge his Jewishness through some indiscretion or under Gestapo torture (p. 186). As for the szmalcowniki (blackmailers), he recognized the fact that these extortionists were marginal members of Polish society and that their acts were criminal rather than anti-Semitic in nature: “…the scum of society, the sort of person who, discovering that someone was a Jew, blackmailed the victim to his last penny and then, when he was penniless, denounced the unfortunate to the police, in full confidence that he would be eliminated and, with him, all evidence of the informer’s crime.” (p. 186). Shatyn also feared the Gestapo-serving Jewish informers, who made the rounds looking for fugitive Jews (pp. 186-187, 195).

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

This Polonophobic meme is reinforced by the likes of the well-watched movie SCHINDLER’S LIST, in which a Polish girl gives a sarcastic farewell to the Jews about to be sent to their deaths. The truth was quite different.

On two different occasions, when the Germans were parading and/or humiliating the Jews before killing them, Shatyn wrote: “The Poles lined the sidewalks, looking on in absolute silence, as though frozen in place.” (p. 42). Also: “Poles gathered on the sidewalks, incredulous, some crossing themselves at this monstrous sight.” (p. 121). These accounts further contradict the selectively-chosen ones, by Jan Tomasz Gross, of Poles rejoicing at Jewish suffering. And, unlike Gross, Shatyn recognized the efficacy of the German-imposed death penalty in the deterrence of Polish aid to Jews (p. 48, 178, 186).

AN IRONY TO THE POLISH DEATH CAMPS FALSEHOOD

Shatyn provides intriguing details about his monitoring of German trains and skillfully deductions of their cargo and its implications (p. 223). Some rather imaginative Polonophobes have maliciously asserted that the Nazis built their extermination camps on Polish soil because the Poles would tolerate, if not welcome, them. The very notion that the German HERRENVOLK would consult the defeated and despised Polish UNTERMENSCHEN is preposterous on its face! As a further irony, the Germans attempted to keep the camps secret from Poles. Shatyn reports that Polish conductors were removed from the death trains as they neared the camps, to be replaced by the SS and their Ukrainian and Baltic collaborators (p. 21). During their journeys, the train windows were barred, and no one was permitted near them (p. 224), although the weak moans of the victims could be heard in the fields.

POLES WERE ALSO SCAPEGOATS

Finally, Jews weren’t the only scapegoats. The Germans also adopted a blame-the-victim mentality against Poles for Germany’s misfortunes, notably after Stalingrad: “They claimed that everything was the fault of the verfluchte Polen–had it not been for their resistance to the German invasion in September 1939, this war which was now threatening to destroy the Reich would never have started.” (p. 227).