FACES AND PLACES: An eye for an eye: a story of redemption (01/10/99)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

An eye for an eye: a story of redemption

During a dinner attended by Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Teheran in 1943, the Soviet leader suggested that the Allies randomly shoot 50,000 German officers at war's end. Mr. Churchill was outraged. "I would rather be taken out in the garden here and now to be shot myself than sully my own and my country's honor by such infamy," he retorted.

Playing up to Stalin, President Roosevelt fatuously suggested a compromise 49,000 be targeted for execution. His son, Elliott Roosevelt, then a U.S. Army brigadier general, however, responded with a toast to the deaths of "not only those 50,000 ... but many hundreds of thousands more Nazis as well." Stalin, of course, was delighted.

Dwight D. Eisenhower shared President Roosevelt's loathing for the enemy. In a letter to his wife in 1944, America's future president wrote that "the German is a beast." He later suggested the liquidation of all leaders of the Nazi party, from mayors on up, plus all members of the Gestapo, a total of some 100,000 people.

The extermination of German POWs at the hands of the Allies after the war was documented by James Bacque in the 1989 publication "Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans After World War II." Douglas Botting who authored "From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany, 1945-1949," and Alfred-Maurice de Zayas who penned "The German Expellees: Victims in War and Peace" authenticated the slaughter of Sudeten Germans by the Czechs, expulsion of East Prussian Germans from Silesia by the Poles, anti-German terror of the Russians, resurrection of Nazi concentration camps by American masters and the disappearance of millions of dollars of gold bullion.

For me, however, the most riveting account of post-war retribution was a Soviet-inspired genocide documented in a 1993 book titled "An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945" by John Sack. Soon after occupying Poland and East Germany, the Soviets established the Office of State Security and deliberately recruited Holocaust survivors, primarily Jews, to de-Nazify some 10 million Germans residing in the area. Office personnel rounded up German men, women and children, 99 percent of whom were innocent non-combatants, and trucked them to cellars, prisons and 1,255 concentration camps where between 60,000 and 80,000 perished as a result of torture, starvation and typhus. Tragically, the West was aware of these atrocities - they were referenced in the Congressional Record of August 2, 1945, and Mr. Churchill condemned them in the House of Commons on August 16 - but nothing was done. At the time, few people really cared what happened to Germans who, after all, had started World War II.

John Sacks spent seven years of research in Poland, Germany and Israel to write his 252-page book, which contains 65 pages of notes. He focused on the most brutal of the Jews, referring to them by their given names, Lola, Pinek, Shlomo, Moshe, etc. Most of them immigrated to America, Canada and Israel, where they prospered in various occupations. In 1993, for example, Lola was a California CEO of a large company worth millions. Moshe was in the construction business in Linden, N.J. All were interviewed extensively by Mr. Sacks.

Not surprisingly, the book was condemned by Jewish scholars who called it "an audacious lie," "vile docudrama" and "anti-Semitic fodder." In a 5,000-word onslaught that appeared in the New Republic, Daniel Goldhagen described the work as "widely out of focus," "not beneath resorting to outright fictionalization" and the result of "sheer inventions." In his controversial book "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," Mr. Goldhagen later explained the Holocaust as the result of a "long-incubating, pervasive, virulent, racist, eliminationist, anti-Semitic German culture." National groups who aided the Germans in slaughtering Jews - primarily Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians - Mr. Goldhagen continued, also "came from cultures that were profoundly anti-Semitic." Genocide against Jews, according to the new disputed "Goldhagen thesis," is the result of a long-nurtured ethno-national predisposition.

Following the uproar, Piper Verlag, a German publisher, abruptly canceled distribution of Mr. Sack's book and promised to recycle the 6,000 copies already printed in Germany because it could be "cause for some misunderstanding." Unbowed by the attacks, Mr. Sacks believes he "had a moral duty" to write what he did; the book, he says, is "the story of Jewish redemption."

A significant figure in Mr. Sack's book is Shlomo Morel, who ran an internment camp for German civilians in the Polish community of Schwientochlowitz. He lost his father, mother, brothers, uncles, aunts and all but one cousin during the Holocaust. He joined the Soviet-supported Jewish partisans and once the Soviets drove the Germans out of Poland, he became, at the age of 26, commandant of the camp. John Sacks describes the horrors experienced by the Germans at Shlomo's camp: "The guards put the Germans into a doghouse, beating them if they didn't say 'bow-wow.' They got the Germans to beat each other; to jump on each other's spines and to punch each other's spines and to punch each other's noses, and hit the Germans so hard that they once knocked a German's glass eye out. The guards raped the German women ... and trained their dogs to bite off the German men's genitals at the command of 'Sic.' And still 3,000 remained, and Shlomo hated them more ... hated them for not dying compliantly ... In time, three-fourths of the Germans at Shlomo's camp were dead ... and Shlomo still wasn't satisfied with his Schwientochlowitz score."

Today, Shlomo Morel leads a comfortable life in Israel. In December, the Polish prosecutor's office in Katowice charged Shlomo with crimes against humanity and demanded that Israel extradite him to Poland. Israeli authorities refused, informing the Polish Ministry of Justice that his alleged crimes are not perceived as genocide in Israel and are therefore subject to the statute of limitations. Apparently, according to Israeli reasoning, killing innocent Jews for no reason is genocide. Killing innocent Germans for no reason is not.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, research director of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has condemned Israel's double standard. "How can organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, or B'Nai Brith, or the World Jewish Congress, who have together orchestrated such a concerted demand for bringing alleged Nazi war criminals to justice, now allow such rank hypocrisy in Israel to go unchallenged?" he asks. It's not a rhetorical question.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

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