Jewish Collaboration Not All Choiceless Choices Kulkielko

Escape From The Pit, by Renya Kulkielko. 2015

1939 German Terror Bombing. Jewish Nazi Collaboration Went Far Beyond Choiceless Choices. Jewish Banditry

Renya Kulkielko was a Polish Jew who masqueraded as a gentile on Aryan papers, frequented the Kielce area (including Bendzin), and traveled at times to Warsaw. Her testimony is unusual in that she didn’t survive the German-made Holocaust by hiding and waiting its end. Instead, she managed to cross into Slovakia and Hungary, in 1944, before emigrating to Palestine.

1939 GERMAN TERROR BOMBING: GRAPHIC DETAILS

Kulkielko was an eyewitness to the indiscriminate Luftwaffe terror bombing and strafing of defenseless Polish civilians during the 1939 war. She wrote: “”On the highways we stumble over the bodies of men and cattle killed by bombs…Again, a plane approaches. It flies low; spraying machine-gun bullets…Rows of running people have fallen. One notes various oddities: mothers holding their babies in their arms have been killed, while the little children remain alive and cry out with heaven-rending voices; little children are killed while the mothers protecting them are only wounded. The sun shines. Along the road the stench of dead men and cattle is suffocating, unbearable.” (p. 2).

VOLKSDEUTSCHE

As for the German occupation, she does credit Poles for helping Jews (e. g., 19, 28, 30, 172). Most of the time, however, Kulkielko makes negative references to presumed Polish conduct towards Jews without any evident attempt to distinguish Volksdeutsche from Poles, or clearly demarcating her direct experiences from hearsay and storytelling. Sometimes, though, she realizes the significance of Polish-speaking Germans (Volksdeutsche)(p. 4, 7, 153, 159). For instance, she writes: “From the first the Germans carefully weighed the matter of liquidating the Jews. ‘Annihilation Squads” were set up for this purpose. They consisted of Ukrainians turned savage, of Poles turned Volksdeutsch and of young, healthy Germans to whom a human being meant no more than a fly.” (p. 25).

Kulkielko’s remark about “Poles turned Volksdeutsch” is Orwellian. Those Poles didn’t turn German. They had been partially or total German all along! And that is why the Nazi German occupants of Poland recognized them as Volksdeutsche, and, following their racial hierarchy, granted them many of the privileges of the Reichsdeutsche German.

JEWISH NAZI COLLABORATION–FAR BEYOND MERE SURVIVAL, AND MUCH BEYOND
CHOICELESS CHOICES

The conduct of the Jewish Ghetto police is often excused by the presumed desperation of people facing certain doom. In actuality, this police behaved the way it did long BEFORE the Nazi exterminatory actions. (p. 10). (That resettlement equals extermination was not widely believed, at least by the Jews of Warsaw, until much later–about mid-1942.) (p. 28). Referring to a much earlier period of time, Kulkielko wrote: “Only men of the meanest sort obtained employment in the [Jewish] militia, for who else could undertake to help beat, murder, and make sport of their own town-folk? There were very few men in the militia who had any humanity in them. Most behaved like beasts of prey, some even worse than the Germans. They wore boots and white hats, and were armed with rubber truncheons.” (p. 10). Later in the book, members of the Jewish militia are described as ones who demanded bribes upon the discovery of concealed goods, and who imposed fines, which they pocketed, for the most trivial acts. (p. 81).

JEWISH BANDITRY AND THE DENUNCIATION OF FUGITIVE JEWS

Bands of armed Jews are said to have resisted the Nazis at Czestochowa, and to have subsequently raided Polish villages for food. (p. 116). The author fails to mention that Jewish banditry was a major factor in Poles betraying or killing fugitive Jews.

DENUNCIATIONS OF FUGITIVE JEWS WERE NOT A BLACK-AND-WHITE THING

Author Kulkielko realizes that the Germans often raided private homes in search for fugitive Jews (p. 119), and that denunciation was not just a Pole-on-Jew thing. Non-Jews (presumably Poles) were also denounced to the Germans by other non-Jews (presumably Poles or Volksdeutsche)(p. 137, 140).