“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late.”
Jonathan Swift
Poles have long been described as dumb, dirty, perverted, thuggish and antisemitic Catholics. The history of depicting the Polish people as Untermenschen by Western and Jewish media, literature, and Hollywood as opposed to über people (self-appointed elites) did not begin in Nazi Germany. In America, it started in the late 19th – century when big waves of Eastern/Central European immigrants reached her shores. They were no longer Polish nobility like Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Casimir Pulaski who came to America a century earlier and became heroes of the Revolutionary War. The 19th – century immigrants were illiterate, poor peasants escaping abject poverty under the ruthless rule of Prussian, Russian and Austrian occupiers who partitioned Poland and erased it from the map of Europe for well over 100 years. When the BLM and Antifa rioters defaced the Kosciuszko Monument in Washington, DC in early June 2020, they probably had no idea whose monument they targeted. Sadly, U.S. reporters did not care to take the opportunity to remind America at large that Thaddeus Kosciuszko was not only a Revolutionary hero but also a man who opposed slavery and left money in his will to free slaves and pay for their education. When he returned to America in 1797, throngs of Philadelphians carried him on their shoulders while bands were playing and cannons were firing fusillades of homage. A century later, America was a different place, and Polish arrivals were no longer seen as worthy of positive treatment. Being Polish in America became synonymous with being dumb, dirty, dangerously nationalistic, primitively Catholic and antisemitic. During WW II and afterward, Hollywood cast Poles as stupid, vulgar, violent, nationalistic, and Catholic antisemites, which was driven by a political agenda to provide a smokescreen for stabbing Poland in the back by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Yalta (M.B.B. Biskupski). In the last 30 years, stereotyping Poles as primitive Catholic antisemites has grown in scope, viciousness, and power. Once again, it is not a coincidence but a well-orchestrated, belligerent campaign. And increasingly so, it poses a threat to Poland’s political and financial existence.
The study of a stereotyped Pole
To learn about stereotyping Poles, the underlying sources and hidden agendas, its ubiquitous presence, and how it affects Polish-Jewish relations and Poland’s image in the world, it’s helpful to reach for Danusha Goska’s scholarly work, “Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture.” Based on her wide research in history, popular culture and folklore, and interviews with Poles and Jews in America, Dr. Goska demonstrates that “in the Bieganski stereotype, Poles are depicted as physically strong, violent, fecund, anarchic, dumb, primitively nationalistic, and thuggish. The special hatefulness of Bieganski is epitomized by his Polish antisemitism.” Hence when non-Polish people commit antisemitic acts, their behavior is explained away by applying identity politics, PC – approved systemic oppression, or unique personal struggles. In the media and artistic expressions of the Bieganski stereotype, no mitigating factors are admissible. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s vicious libel stating, “Poles imbibe anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk” was not only condoned but repeated by other public figures with equal impunity. Habitually antisemitic expressions by Louis Farrakhan are excused or ignored by the media. “Poland,” says Goska, “is shorthand for antisemitism in international journalism.” In a 2008 London Times piece, Giles Coren, a food critic, known for his anti-Polonism, wrote that “Polack” immigrants, who amuse themselves at Easter by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it,” […] “should clear off out of England.” Since Poles do not enjoy any of the PC protection that other ethnic and religious groups do, Coren felt safe besmirching Poles as murderous antisemites. Several years later, The Independent alleged that Coren created a Polish twitter account to send antisemitic tweets. His blatant anti-Polonism made no dent in his career. Polonophobic stereotypes are commonly held and liberally expressed by Jews and Westerners alike. With impunity. Not only the media but also university professors make light of antisemitism demonstrated outside of Poland and deny or ignore Jewish pogroms in England (and elsewhere) on the grounds that none of that is ever as bad as Polish antisemitism. Pole, Poland, and Polish culture equals antisemitism, and is a prototypical world view of many people, Danusha Goska asserts. To them, Polish ethnicity, Catholicism, and nationalism breed vile antisemitism. To analyze the Bieganski stereotype employed in literature and film, Dr. Goska presents various examples, among them “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Monster’s Ball,” and “Sophie’s Choice.” Strangely enough, thuggish Southern characters were made Polish though in reality, few Poles lived in the American South, where most whites were WASPs. Several scholars “made mincemeat of Styron’s historically absurd equation of Poland with the American South in ‘Sophie’s Choice,’” writes Goska. However, as the scholars observed, “far fewer people will ever read their scholarship than will read the bestselling novel.” In Borat, the most talked-about 2006 film, the Bieganski stereotype is on display. Though Borat identifies himself as being from Kazakhstan, he speaks Polish catchphrases. A chauvinistic nationalist, he is vile in every way, and his worst trait is his Eastern-European antisemitism. International movie critics, from the London Times to the New York Times, made connections between Borat and Poles, the unreformed Eastern European “peasants who deserve to be mocked as people who bathe in toilet bowls. They are responsible for the Holocaust.” Dr. Goska asserts that “Borat typifies Bieganski in popular culture, but he also inhabits high culture, and the academy as well.” She reminds the reader that contemptuous characterizations of Poles in Jewish literature were common before the Holocaust. Few are aware today that “Jews felt contempt for Poles and Slavs at the genesis of their encounter. Poles and other Slavs were the merchandise for Jewish slave traders” (Joseph Adler).
Jerzy Kosinski and his literary career in post-war America
The list of Poland-slanderers is long. It includes Jews saved by ethnic Poles risking their own lives for them, only to be accused of antisemitism after the war. Perhaps none was worse than the author of The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosinski, whose real name was Levinkopf. Not only did he betray his rescuers, but he also maligned them around the world. Born in the city of Lodz (the Polish Manchester) in 1933 and saved by Poles during the war, Jerzy Kosinski left Poland in 1957. What was unavailable for ethnic Poles in the terrible times of Soviet-imposed terror, he was able to obtain. He got his passport from the communist authorities and left for America to enjoy a scholarship in the free world. Having married a much older widow, he subsequently established himself in New York and became famous in literary and entertainment circles. Before The Painted Bird was published in 1965, several US publishers rejected it. It was rumored that German money was instrumental in the book’s eventual publishing, as were other anti-Polish materials. The Painted Bird became a must-read on US campuses and a bestseller in Europe, translated into many languages. The stage for Kosinski’s book was set between Nazis and Soviets in the Polish-Soviet borderlands during WW II. It is a story of a 6-year old Jewish boy who had to be sent away by his parents from their city to a remote village for shelter. The book chronicles his wanderings in the borderlands, where he is compelled to live amidst backward, illiterate Catholic peasants with the inclination for incest, sodomy and sadism. Kosinski writes about the most cruel and vile experiences of the boy, who eventually loses his ability to speak. It happened after angry peasants threw him into a manure pit to punish him for inadvertently dropping a missal while helping to serve Mass. The boy regained his power to speak when he was 15. Having been separated from his parents, he was found in an orphanage after the war. Many people saw the book as an autobiographical account. Kosinski maintained that impression when asked by literary critics, media interviewers, and friends. At the same time, he avoided giving any specifics as to where exactly he spent the war. It was only in 1982 that the truthfulness of Kosinski’s account was seriously challenged in The Village Voice, when two reporters accused him of secretly using several editors to do the actual writing, and of having plagiarized Being There from other sources. It was his other widely acclaimed book, later made into a hit movie. It was subsequently discovered that he plagiarized a Polish writer by the name of Dolega-Mostowicz, author of The Career of Nikodem Dyzma, a Polish bestseller about a con artist.
The unmasking of Jerzy Kosinski and his real-life in WW II Poland
The Painted Bird, considered a masterpiece of Holocaust literature, was in fact the first post-war attack on Poland via literature. The book was not known in Poland until 1989, the year considered to mark the end of communism. Its translation and publication in Polish caused sensation and indignation in Kosinski’s country of origin. Many people were incredulous wondering if the boy could have indeed been abused in such a terrible way. Joanna Siedlecka, a Polish reporter and writer, decided to retrace the steps of the Kosinski family during the war. Her quest proved to be very fruitful and resulted in publishing a collection of her findings and reflections entitled The Ugly Black Bird in 1994. It is based on the accounts of witnesses still alive in those days, who described to her the true wartime history of The Kosinskis.
In various biographies published in America, Kosinski’s book was referred to as his own life-story. Yet, Joanna Siedlecka discovered that the wartime childhood of Kosinski was entirely different from what he purported it to be in The Painted Bird. The truth was that The Kosinskis survived the occupation well, thanks to simple Polish people in the south-eastern part of the country. From the town of Sandomierz to the small village of Dąbrowa Rzeczycka, the Kosinskis did not have to hide. They had Aryan papers and lived in fairly good conditions; quite unusual, considering the fact that it was the brutal time of the German occupation when most everybody struggled daily to survive, and food was scarce. They rented a two-room apartment in the village, bought expensive food, and even had a maid. Mrs. Kosinska, a Lithuanian Jew, doted on her only son. Both she and her husband did not display any deep religious roots. Unlike the impoverished locals, she always looked elegant and designed her dresses and had them made to measure. To the astonishment of the local peasants, she wore red nail polish and was even able to get cocoa! Such luxuries were unthinkable and unavailable to the local Poles. Moses Kosinski, a Russian Jew, who unlike his wife and son in appearance, could pass for a Pole, worked in the state purchasing center, gave lessons in exchange for food, and made secret connections with the local communist partisans. Neither Jerzy Kosinski nor his parents experienced cruelty. On the contrary, they were offered help and kindness. Naturally, the peasants knew that they were Jews, but – despite the well-known consequences imposed by the German occupiers on Poles, i.e., the death penalty for helping a Jew – it never occurred to the Polish peasants to denounce them to the Germans stationed nearby. The village was poor and illiterate, but decent and Catholic. The simple peasants understood that The Kosinskis were also human beings and, like themselves, wanted to survive the war. In the spring of 1945, The Kosinskis left the village and severed all contact with the locals, never even sent a word to them. When Jerzy Kosinski returned to Poland in 1989 as an acclaimed American writer and celebrity, his old acquaintances went to Warsaw to see him. Shockingly, he received them coldly during a book signing ceremony in a long line; quickly got rid of them by promising to write and visit them and disappeared. He never did see them again or write to them. They wondered if he may have forgotten the name of the village…but when they read The Painted Bird, they were insulted. In it, they found Dąbrowa Rzeczycka, their village, the same places and names…. Everything was easily recognizable except for the cruelties and sexual deviancy.
Kosinski ‘s friend defends him in America
Two years after Joanna Siedlecka wrote The Ugly Black Bird, an extensive biography of Jerzy Kosinski written by James P. Sloan, Kosinski’s friend, was published in America. James Sloan was inspired by Siedlecka’s book to travel to Poland for his research. He wrote a detailed presentation and analysis of Kosinski as a person, a writer, and a survivor of WW II. While Siedlecka sheds a bright light on the true story of Kosinski’s life in Poland and his subsequent defamation of his rescuers and his home country, Sloan makes many efforts to rationalize and justify Kosinski’s mystification and his allegedly trauma-induced post-war behavior. Joe Sobran famously wrote, “the Holocaust has become a device for exempting Jews from normal human obligations. (…) even if six million Jews were murdered during World War II, the survivors are not entitled to commit the slightest injustice. If your father was stabbed in the street, that’s a pity, but it’s not an excuse for picking someone else’s pocket.” (Essay For Fear of The Jews)
To American scholar James Sloan, Siedlecka’ s revealing book is designed to bleach out Poland’s antisemitism because in his mind Poland obviously was so. This is a weak point, given what she wrote. Curiously, many Western authors, including Sloan, when writing about the plight of Jews in Poland during the war, emphasize the catholicity of Poles, often as a thinly veiled weapon against them, whom they readily accuse of being antisemitic. One reads about poor Jews vs. Catholic Poles as if it were right to compare apples and oranges. One reads about Polish shmaltzovniks, but Jewish shmaltzovniks are hidden from public scrutiny thanks to the collusion of silence between pro-Jewish historians and the media.
The discredited Painted Bird made into a movie by a Czech director
Years after the shocking Kosinski facts became known in America and Europe, Vaclav Marhoul – a Czech movie director and producer- decided to bring the vile book back to life by making it into a feature film. An article for the Czech Film Magazine in spring 2018 reported that Vaclav Marhoul wanted to make a film about “the timeless message of the lonely journey and suffering of a small Jewish boy during World War II.” But he rejected the notion that his film based on The Painted Bird was about the Holocaust or WW II. Yet, the film includes a sequence in which Jews leaping off a moving train are mowed down by Nazis. And it is not the only scene with German and Soviet invaders. Marhoul believes that his film is relevant today because “the recent events in Europe – the migration crisis, the spread of xenophobic prejudices and hatred without any knowledge of the facts… all this made his message even more urgent.” His call, “Look at the populists who are running so many European countries at the moment like Hungary, Poland, Russia (sic!), in the Czech Republic, too, and of course the US,” sounds like a clarion call by a leftist social justice warrior. According to Vaclav Marhoul, The Painted Bird is a warning of what can happen when Europe turns inward as it is doing now, drawing a parallel between the attitudes to migrant children fleeing wars in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan and the rejection and abuse his hero suffers.” But his hero’s “suffering” is all manufactured by a perverted mind and heart. If Marhoul cares about children suffering because of wars, why not a real story? Perhaps about poor Jewish girls sexually abused by Chaim Rumkowski in the Lodz ghetto during the war? Why not a film about the double tragedy of poor Jews betrayed by their own elites in the ghettos? Why not a movie about Polish priests murdered for protecting Jews? How about a story about Catholic convents, monasteries, and churches in occupied Poland hiding Jews during WW II?
The Czech director’s attack on Catholic Poland
In various interviews, Marhoul makes general statements about Kosinski’s book being “controversial,” using a convenient euphemism to gloss over the uncomfortable facts about Kosinski’s lies and plagiarism. However, when it comes to Marhoul’s opinion about Poland, he does not mince words accusing Poland’s government of totalitarian behavior because in Poland – unlike in the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Slovakia – “the project did not receive national film grants.” His explanation as to why it happened is self-serving, and his opinion malicious. “Ever since Law and Justice — a party of orthodox, aggressive Catholics — won the elections in Poland, Kosinski and his book have been public enemy number one (sic!) Even though the Polish Film Institute is independent, it was obvious that people in Poland are afraid.” It would be interesting to find out how Marhoul gathered his “facts” about Poland. He does not bother to substantiate his slanderous opinions. His attack on Catholic Poland for failure to grant him Polish taxpayers’ hard-earned money for his project is narcissistic and defamatory. Curiously, he does not slander other countries, only Poland. By his admission, finding co-producers wasn’t easy. “Many people, producers, were afraid of our project. To them it was controversial. In the end, everything is about money, and if the producer thinks a project won’t make money, they won’t get on board. I approached exactly thirty French producers, and not a single one was interested. In Germany, I approached fifteen producers, and not a single one was interested.” Apparently, Poland is not allowed to consider controversies or solid business practices when determining whether to sponsor a film or not. France and Germany are. No totalitarian or aggressive Catholics there!
How the Czech director ignores the Kosinski facts and contributes to gratuitous brutality and sick sexual pornography via his film
According to Marhoul, the story isn’t about the Poles. How so? Well, Kosinski says in the book that “the story plays out someplace in Eastern Europe.” It stretches credulity to believe Marhoul is not aware why almost every article in Israeli and Western media about The Painted Bird says it’s a Holocaust story of a 6 -year old Jewish boy, in Eastern Europe…in Poland. It was Kosinski himself who avoided dispelling the misconceptions and even confirmed them as factual. From now on, Marhouls’ film based on the discredited Kosinski book will strengthen the misconceptions and defame the already maligned Poland even more. It’s no coincidence that not one opinion piece about Kosinski’s book ever assumed it had happened in the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Russia. Not one of them talked about Catholic Slovaks, Czech Hussites, or Orthodox Ukrainians who committed the alleged atrocities. No wonder. Kosinski never denied the common assumption that his book was autobiographical. Marhoul’s opinions sound like thinly veiled excuses to justify his making an ill-conceived movie. He chose to make it 17 years after Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide in New York. By then, it had long been no secret in literary and artistic circles in America and Europe, and beyond, that The Painted Bird was a made-up, ghost-written story, and that Being There was plagiarized. Many suspected Kosinski of being a CIA snitch. It was no secret, either, that he used to visit sex clubs known for sadomasochistic kicks, and some called him an “international fornicator.” Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide in a way that shocked many. Just as his life. These are well-known facts, but they did not matter to the Czech director. He became obsessed with the Kosinski story and spent 11 years trying to achieve his ill-conceived goal. He maintains that his film is about universal values. How about slander and lying for one’s gratification? Or betraying those who saved your life? Why does Marhoul prefer made-up obsessive cruelties and sick sexual depravities to real-life stories of human drama? Why make a film about fabricated torture, rape, gouging out a man’s eyes with a spoon, bestiality, incest, and other scenes of sexual violence that almost every human being could never even imagine let alone depict to “send a message to today’s world?” What message is there in made-up gratuitous brutality and pornographic depravity?
In the opinion of the more insightful movie reviewers, there’s no spiritual catharsis in Marhoul’s film. It is a story from hell, from one perverted horror to the next. It shows the East European peasants as the scum of the earth and Catholic at that! No better than the Nazis and the Soviets. It is also very telling that the rare episodes of positive human behavior in The Painted Bird come from a German soldier and a Soviet sniper. ALLES IST GUT.
A German TV miniseries made to normalize the Nazis and malign the Polish underground
It is reminiscent of Our Mothers, Our Fathers ( Generation War ), Germany’s WW II TV miniseries designed to normalize the Nazis. The film portrays a world of a few elegant young Germans in which WW II begins in 1941, ignoring Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the horrors they perpetrated there. “The non-German participants in the story, from the antisemitic Poles to the Ukrainian thugs to the cigar-chomping American, are mostly cast in a negative light. Apart from the Russian Jewish woman and one or two Poles, the foreigners are thugs. The Polish partisans look like a filthy ragtag bunch (…), loutish antisemites, even as the German soldiers still manage to look rather dashing in the icy ruins of a battlefront. The feeling one gets, then, is that no matter how awful the crimes of Hitler’s Germany may have been, one would rather spend time with our nice German heroes than with those disreputable foreigners. (…) There is no hint in the movie that this absolves Germany of its historical sins. But we are made to like some of the men and women who committed them.” (The New York Book Review, February 2014)
The German Public TV miniseries was wildly popular in Germany and Austria. Small wonder. It was quite popular in America, too, with many movie critics giving it pretty high marks. Too few noticed the serious problems with the latest German take on WW II. Perception is the reality not only in politics but even more so in film. The German miniseries was met with official protests from Poland for a revision of history. The Polish critics had a point. The most serious issue with the German picture was that of balance. It also spread the guilt around, mostly laying it on Polish shoulders. German Public TV sold Our Mothers and Our Fathers to many countries for distribution. Soon afterward, the film poisoned millions of unsuspecting viewers around the world with slick-packaged WW II propaganda made in Germany. Mission accomplished. Mark Twain famously observed that it’s easier to fool a person than to convince him that he’s been fooled.
The reception of Marhoul’s Painted Bird by international audiences and film critics
When The Painted Bird debuted at The Venice Film Festival in September 2019, its graphic depictions of violence, from rape to pedophilia to gruesome disfiguration, prompted mass audience walkouts. When it arrived in Toronto soon afterward, the result was the same. The film also screened at the 63rd BFI London Film Festival and in Warsaw, winning no awards again. Yet the film has earned raving reviews for its “faithful depiction of the many horrors that occur in Kosinski’s source material” and it holds an approval rating of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Few critics have taken a more profound view. One reviewer (www.screendaily) observed that it’s very troubling that “a tragedy of humanity is used simply as a board on which to pin one man’s banal, pornographic, Hieronymus-Bosch-for-Dummies vision of what goes down when our basest instincts take over.” Another critic writing for “Ioncinema” called Marhoul “a mercenary who believes that torture can be poetic. The Painted Bird in its attempt to denounce the horrors of the world simply ends up becoming an extension of them. To call the film sadistic would be to give it intellectual dignity that it lacks.”
The Painted Bird has failed to achieve festival awards, which encourages distributors to invest in films. However, its star-speckled international cast boosts its worldwide cinematic prospects. Harvey Keitel, Stellan Skarsgard, Udo Kier, and Barry Pepper are among the names. Then, there is the high international profile of Kosinski’s source novel. No coincidence here. What’s more, the film’s screening at the Venice and Toronto Festivals to widely reported emotional reactions of walkouts and raves may have helped cement its reputation as a safe box-office bet. The more buzz the better. In September 2019, IFC Films – an American film production and distribution company, issued an official statement which praised The Painted Bird is “a brilliant cinematic achievement with a fiercely accomplished cast to match.” The statement went on to say, “We are incredibly proud to bring such a monumental film to audiences across the country.” The Painted Bird was the Czech Republic’s official Oscar submission in 2020 in the Best International Feature Film but missed out on a nomination. The premiere of the film in the U.S. was set for July, 2020.
When all is said and done, countless unsuspecting viewers around the world will have had their minds and hearts contaminated by this made-up depravity, as water is contaminated by sewage. Vaclav Marhoul had obsessed for years about dredging up the vile Kosinski book out of the swamp of oblivion where it belongs.
The Painted Bird has long had a pernicious effect on the minds and attitudes of countless people towards Poland. It can be illustrated by reflexive anti-Polonism in the media, academia, and average people. One of Dr. Goska’s sources for her book reported that what he knew about Poland was that it had “a history of antisemitism.” He cited The Painted Bird as an important source of his knowledge about the Holocaust and used it to understand how people “could be the way they were.” He had no clue Kosinski’s book was fiction.
The double standard in treating Poles and Jews
Historians, politicians and the media have long treated Jews and Poles differently. It is generally believed that a Pole was always obligated to rescue a Jew while a Jew is not even asked if he ever tried helping a Pole. What is ignored or willfully omitted is the fact that both the Poles and the Jews were persecuted and killed at random by the German invaders. “Poles were indifferent to, if not supportive of, the ensuing Nazi massacre of the Jews” is a common Jewish slander, and the holier-than-thou accusers habitually pass over the mutually desperate situations of Poles and Jews, and the tragic scope of the Second World War. Edward Reed observed that the modern narrative about Poland during WW II is based on a sweeping assumption that “people in Poland (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe) are bad people and that they owe the Jews. It is equally based on the mirror-image narrative: Jews in Eastern Europe were innocent victims and never did anything wrong.” But the truth is different. Despite what Mark Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, said about what constituted Jewish identity, solidarity was not it. Dr. Goska cites the opinion of Edelman from a press interview in which he “identified non-Jewish Polish Solidarity activists, then in hiding from the communist authorities who wanted them dead, as Jewish, because – as Mark Edelman stated – ‘A Jew always has a sense of community with the very weakest.’” ( Across Frontiers 33). Contrary to Edelman’s conviction, there were traitors among the Jewish elites, and some Jewish prisoners were cooperative with the Germans in helping to exploit and kill other Jews, hoping that by doing so they might save themselves and perhaps some others. Curiously, Poles are habitually held to a higher moral standard about Jews than Jews are about other Jews! A Pole is readily condemned for not helping a Jew during WW II despite the German-imposed death penalty for doing so while a Jew is excused for selling off his own people! The Poles were actively fighting the Germans while the vast majority of Jews were passive; a difference in attitude that has long been a taboo protected by pro-Jewish authors and Hollywood. No exceptions, not even for the onetime powerhouse Harvey Weinstein.
Historical records contradict the official image of WW II Jews as mere innocent victims
According to Jerzy R. Nowak, an eminent expert on Polish-Jewish history, there are many historical records which show that in times of misery for the majority of Warsaw ghetto residents, “other Jews, mainly Gestapo agents, Judenrat officials, members of the Jewish police, and wealthy merchants were doing business with Germans, while smugglers had fun in the most expensive restaurants.” This shocking lack of national solidarity between the rich and the poor Jews in times of war was recorded by various Polish Jews, including Wladyslaw Szpilman, a pianist and composer of Jewish origin in Poland. Roman Polanski memorialized him in The Pianist. His personal records “leave no doubt as to the indifference of the wealthy Jewish elites to the fate of the countrymen dying next to them in the ghetto.” Szpilman wrote, “The bribed guards lost their sight at a certain time, and then just before their eyes and under their silent supervision, whole columns of carts filled with food, expensive drinks, luxury delicacies, tobacco straight from Greece passed through the ghetto gate. French clothing and cosmetics. I could admire the exhibition of this commodity every day in “Nowoczesna” (café). Those who came were rich, wearing gold, and shiny diamonds, and there were also bright-eyed “ladies” with their delicious sweets. The tables, in the rhythm of firing-off champagne corks, offered their services to war speculators. There, I lost two illusions: one – about the prevailing solidarity and the other – about the musicality of the Jews. In front of “Nowoczesna” beggars were banned. Stout porters were chasing them away with their clubs. In the rickshaws passing by, refined men and women were riding, in the winter dressed in expensive wool, and in the summer wearing expensive hats and French silks. To reach the space protected by the doorman’s batons, they had to pave their way through the band of beggars with an expression of indignation on their distorted faces. They never gave alms.”.(W. Szpilman, “The Pianist,” Cracow, 2001, pp. 62-63). Unfortunately, the collusion of silence between Jewish and Western media and Hollywood continues to protect the ugly truth from being made public. The few who dare to speak up are attacked, ostracized, and punished.
Media protection and selective outrage
Seventy-five years after WW II, covert media protection is also granted to countries whose authorities helped organize Jewish deportations to death camps in German-occupied Poland. France, Norway, and Slovakia are some of them. Poland never had a collaborationist government and no Polish political group ever recognized the occupation or cooperated with Nazi Germany. Yet, it is precisely Poland that continues to be subjected to waves of accusations of inbred antisemitism, slander, charges of alleged indifference towards the fate of Jews, or even of helping Hitler exterminate Jews. Ukraine with the horrors of Babi Yar and Russia seem to enjoy media protection, too, despite their terrible record re the Holocaust.
The hidden goal of the international campaign against Poland, incl. literature and film
And last but not least, a few dots must be connected for the non-Polish readers who are not students of Polish /Jewish/German history. The war on Poland is ultimately about money. It started about 30 years ago and has been waged in history departments, chambers of power, the media, and entertainment. Its goal was to recast Poland into the mold of a Jew-hating and murdering country during WW II and afterward. For Germany, it’s about spreading the guilt around, primarily onto Polish shoulders, and for Israel and Jewish Holocaust organizations in America and Europe, it’s about protecting the Judeo-centric version of WW II. But there’s more.
The final stage of this 30-year-long war was opened in 2017 with the passing of The Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today (JUST) Act 447 by the US Senate and in 2018, by the House. A succinct explanation of what it is really about can be found at www.stopacthr1226.org
From it, one can learn how and why the dangerous and unjust legislation was passed so quickly. “Paul Ryan, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, suspended the normally applicable procedure and allowed the vote, under suspension of the rules, not on its own Act H.R.1226, but on the Senate Act S.447. The highly controversial bill S. 447 passed the House by ‘voice voting,’ which is normally reserved for noncontroversial acts. Two weeks later it was signed by the US President. (…) What looks like JUST at first glance, after thorough consideration constitutes a profoundly UNJUST legal framework. The premise behind the bills S. 447 and H.R.1226 was not the implementation of existing law, but the creation of a completely new legal authority and establishment of a political enforcement mechanism in the USA to achieve the goals specified in the already publicized compensation schemes, for instance, those exposed in the study published by the European Shoah Legacy Institute in 2017. Such demands are at present – from the point of view of the American, international and Polish law – nothing but illegitimate extortion attempts. Their proponents, unable to show that their compensation demands are legitimate and meet the necessary legal qualifications present under the existing set of laws have turned to the Congress of the United States trying to change the existing legal standard, which they do not like. Acts S.447 and H.R. 1226 were designed to elevate their extralegal scheme to the appearance of a respectable and enforceable legal concept.”
S.447 is a political two-by-four for the Holocaust Industry with which to hit Poland between the eyes and make her pay billions of dollars to Jewish organizations as moral compensation for “heirless” property “stolen” by Poland after the war. In less elegant words, S.447 is a brazenly masterminded shake-down masquerading as a just law.
The latest dollar figure floated behind the scenes is…. three hundred billion! If successfully excised from Poland, it would spell the economic (and political) end of the country.
What Jewish historian Tim Cole wrote in “Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought,” is right after all. “At the end of the twentieth century, the Holocaust is being bought and sold…In short, ‘Shoah business’ is big business.”
Lucynda Kondrat
