Jewish Collaboration Ghetto Police Exculpations Wanting Drix

Witness to Annihilation: Surviving the Holocaust, by Samuel Drix. 2003

Jewish Ghetto Police Collaboration: Exculpations Rejected. Insights on Polish Rescuers Killing Their Jews

The author was a Jewish doctor, and Holocaust survivor, from Lwow (Lviv). This book touches on the author’s experiences in pre-WWII Poland, the 1939 Communist-Nazi conquest of Poland, the Soviet occupation (1939-1941), the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust (1941-1944), the renewed Soviet occupation (1944-on), the author’s flight to the West, and his new life in the USA. Author Samuel Drix survived the Holocaust by fleeing from a Nazi work camp and hiding among Poles.

In common with countless Holocaust survivors, Drix testifies that Jews were prepared for Nazi persecution, but no Jews had expected the Germans to commit genocide. (p. 14).

THE JEWISH GHETTO POLICE: EXCULPATIONS REJECTED

Nowadays, the Nazi-collaborating conduct of the JUDENRAT and the Jewish ghetto police is often understood solely in terms of these Jews facing choiceless choices, or the desperation of people doing anything to try to save their own lives. However, Jewish-Nazi collaboration cannot be so easily dismissed.

The Jewish collaborators went far beyond the minimum to save their own lives, and their fellow Jews, who knew exactly what it meant to try to survive the Nazis, did not find their conduct excusable. Drix describes what happened when four Jewish policemen tried to hide among the other Jews of the work camp, (quote) News about it spread like lightening and soon a crowd gathered, hostile to those four. Jewish policemen from the ghetto, in the period 1942 to 1943, had a very bad reputation. They had actively helped the Gestapo in all the actions, and were very eager, even too eager and brutal. They had filled their pockets with money and valuable objects from their victims or from those whom they had blackmailed. It was therefore understandable that this crowd of inmates granted no mercy to them and offered them no refuge…These traitors and Judases had earned their punishment at the hands of their own brothers, and their masters’ prize for their faithful service. (unquote). (pp. 171-172).

HOW POLES WERE PUT IN A KILL-OR-DIE CHOICELESS CHOICE RELATIVE TO THE JEWS THEY HAD BEEN HELPING

Unlike those (e. g, Jan T. Gross) who belittle the German-imposed death penalty for the slightest Polish assistance to Jews, Drix, who actually went through the Holocaust, does not. He is quite explicit about the magnitude of the terror faced by Polish rescuers of Jews. (p. 69, 204, 207).
The author realizes that the Zawers, the Polish family that had earlier hid them, became very much afraid that, were he to be caught, the Germans would force him to divulge who had helped him. (p. 204). [This, of course, would cause the death of the Polish family. This helps explain why Polish rescuers sometimes killed the Jews they had been housing—a fact seldom mentioned in discussions surrounding the media-acclaimed Jan Grabowski vel Abrahamer and his JUDENJAGD.]

BLACKMAILING JEWS: POLISH, UKRAINIANS AND (YES) JEWISH PERPETRATORS WORK AS A TEAM

This kind of behavior was an all-around problem, and not limited to any one nationality. Drix comments, (quote) Later on, a new manner of tormenting and blackmailing Jews developed. Ukrainians and Poles working in KRIPO (that is, the criminal police) paid Jewish informers to tell them which Jews in the ghetto were wealthy. (unquote). (p. 38). According to this extortion “game”, these wealthy Jews were arrested, and, upon paying a bribe, were released.

UNPREDICTABLE CHARACTER OF EXTORTIONISTS: JEWISH AS WELL AS POLISH

Certain authors, notably neo-Stalinist ones such as Jan T. Gross and Jan Grabowski vel Abrahamer, have tried to make much of the fact that Polish blackmailers of Jews were not only marginal members of society, but also some upright ones. However, exactly the same was true of Jewish blackmailers. Drix writes, (quote) I would like to add that in the almost eleven months of my stay at Janowska camp and OT camp, I observed how people behaved at such a time of distress and struggle for life, often in a manner quite hard to predict from their education and social status. They showed themselves as they really were, beneath this veneer. There were some from good homes and privileged backgrounds who behaved like animals, not just stealing to survive but blackmailing and profiting through others’ miseries so they could have a more comfortable life. Fortunately, such people were few, but they were influential. On the other hand, there were people from very simple backgrounds, poor and uneducated, who did all they could to help others at great personal sacrifice and risk. (unquote). (p. 169).

POLISH ANTI-SEMITISM IN PERSPECTIVE. COMMUNISM NOT BETTER

In discussing the locals’ attitudes towards Jews during the 1918 Polish-Ukrainian war, Drix comments, (quote) Anti-Semitism among the Poles, however, was not nearly as widespread and virulent as among the Ukrainians. (unquote). (p. 27).

In 1930, Drix was one of only 11 Jews admitted (by quota), out of 600 Jewish applicants, to the prestigious Lwow medical school (at Jan Kazimierz University). (p. 10). [How does this compare to the highly-competitive admission rates to medical schools in general?] In addition, the reader is not told of the overabundance of Jewish physicians in Poland, which necessitated this NUMERUS CLAUSUS.

Some Jewish authors have tried to excuse the WWII and post-WWII Jewish-Soviet collaboration (sometimes called the Zydokomuna) by the claim that Jews had it better under the Soviets than under the Poles. Drix parts ways with this exculpatory thinking, (quote) However, it must be said that even at its worst, Polish anti-Semitism never compared to what the Jews later experienced at the hands of the Germans and Ukrainians. By that comparison, life in prewar Poland seemed a paradise. What’s more, it was still better to be a Jew in democratic Poland than to live under the Soviets in equal fear with everyone else. (unquote). (p. 11).