| To: Glen Beck Program on Fox News. Dear Mr Beck. My name is Felix Molski, I am an Australian of Polish heritage and I believe in individual responsibility and accountability and find the concept of collective salvation and collective accountability repugnant. I was viewing your program of 2nd June, 2011 with great interest as it was reinforcing this view, but I was greatly disappointed when Kristine Chiger Keren who survived through the help of a Polish sewer worker, Socha, answered your question: "Where was everyone else? ….. If New Hampshire all of a sudden started killing people in mass, I would say what happened? Or if I went up to New Hampshire and they were trying to kill people like me I would say well what happened to the people of America?
She replied: "You have to remember that we lived in Poland and Poland it was very anti-Semitic and it was very difficult to find somebody who will help you even among the friends. My parents they have a friend non-Jews but nobody came to give a hand to help. By coincidence we found Socha."
Her statement condemns virtually all Poles as being anti-Semitic. Did she live in every city, town and village in Poland to know? Was she mature enough to be able to accurately differentiate between actual racism and legitimately held disagreements about ideas, politics, beliefs that commonly occur between people? It seems that only as an afterthought, when she remembered she had just testified that she was saved by a Pole, that Ms Keren implied that her family were just lucky to come across one of the only Poles who was not anti-Semitic.
If Ms Keren took some time to reflect on what she said I think that she would conclude that her statement was itself a racist remark, and she would rephrase it. In this exchange it may also be possible to incorrectly infer that it was the Poles who were putting Jews in death camps and killing them. However I do not believe Ms Keren was making this inference, but other people might. It may seem a long bow, however, you may not be aware that Polish people throughout the world have for decades now been fighting against the wording of the phrase ‘Polish Death Camps’ for this very reason, since they were not Polish at all, they were Nazi Death Camps on land occupied by Germany.
No doubt, there were and are individual Poles with racist attitudes, just as there were and are many Australians, Americans, Irish, English and Jews who hold racist attitudes. For example in Eastern Poland, including Lwow, where Ms Keren said she lived, when the Russians invaded Poland on the 17th of September 1939, some Jewish individuals sided with the invaders and informed on the Poles, whom they judged as being bourgeois.
These Poles were either shot on the spot, or deported to Siberia in cattle vans together with about one and half million others, the majority of whom perished. Many of those who survived up to the time when Germany invaded Russia were released shortly after. If the Russians found out that the individual informed on was an officer, or had ever been an officer in the military, they were sent to one of three officer Prisoner of War camps controlled by the NKVD where officers captured in the war were being held. Nearly all who were in these camps were executed between March and May of 1940 in what is generically known as Katyn.
It is wrong for any individual to hate people that can be grouped in some way. I have spoken up against it all my life, whether it is a Pole bad mouthing a Jew, an Australian an aboriginal, an American an African-American or the other way around.
As a balance I would like to make a few points. Firstly, the reason why so many people of Jewish heritage lived in Poland is that Jewish people found a refuge in Poland when the governments of the other nations of Europe were harshly enforcing anti-Semitic laws. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was in those days what America became later. It provided refuge to the downtrodden and gave religious tolerance to all.
Secondly, if you check the ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ you will notice that in its annals there are more people of Polish nationality than any other, even though Poland in World War 2 was the only occupied nation where the official punishment for helping or harbouring Jews was death to the perpetrator, his or her family and any associates involved. That was the law in German occupied Poland. As far as I know this was not the case in any other Nazi occupied nation, where the official punishment was instead the threat of being arrested and being sent to a concentration camp.
In Poland harbouring a Jew or Jewish family was like having a time bomb in your house, unaware of the time remaining before detonation. It was safer to have concealed weapons because you do not have to feed and clothe weapons and they do not arouse any suspicions in their looks or behaviour. Or weapons would not be questioned and you would not risk the possibility of a wrong answer. For example, a Jewish child being given refuge as being a sibling of a Polish family, if under suspicion for some reason may be asked to recite some commonly said prayers.
Furthermore, I would like to bring to your attention, ‘Zegota’ as the only government sponsored agency (Polish Government in exile in London) established to rescue Jews in German occupied Europe. It provided hiding places and false identity documents for Jewish men, women and children who with this help were able to escape from Nazi control. The Polish Government in exile sent Jan Karski, at great personal danger, into the Ghetto and into a death camp to witness what was being done by the Nazis to the Jews. He reported what he saw it to the West, to Jewish leaders, to Churchill and to Roosevelt to no avail. His name is on the list of the Righteous. Witold Pilecki did the same, though I don’t think his name is on the list of the righteous, however his life symbolises heroism in standing up for individual liberty to an even greater extent.
One of the most inspiring stories from Zegota is that of Irena Sendler. Sendler is much less well known than Oscar Schindler, even though she and the people she organised saved around 2500 Jewish children from death, which is more than Oscar Schindler saved, and at much greater personal cost at the time of her actions and for decades after. She was tortured and maimed but refused to disclose the names of her helpers or of any Jews. She was sentenced to death on suspicion. Thankfully she was rescued by Zegota just before the sentence was to be carried out. Her name is listed in ‘The Righteous Among Nations’. If you are interested and have time check out how the Irena Sendler story came to prominence in the last few years through a history project completed by students from a small rural High School in Kansas.
The students from this school to this day perform ‘Life in a Jar’ to teach the golden rule of treating others as you would have them treat you. There is also a documentary ‘Irena Sendler: In the Name of Their Mothers and a film ‘The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler that testifies to her righteousness.
‘The Righteous Among the Nations’ recognises the efforts of people like Karski, Sendler and Schindler, but it must be remembered that this is only a small part of people who stood up to do the right thing. What of people such as my uncle (my mother’s brother) who was shot on the spot by a firing squad for throwing food over the ghetto wall to help the Jews there from starving. He had gotten away unharmed on previous occasions but no documentary proof exists of his gestures.
Unfortunately, the Glenn Beck program will end on the 30th June and I doubt you will have time to highlight the deeds of Irena Sendler on a relevant segment of your show. However it is inspiring to know that people like her exist.
Yours sincerely
Felix Molski
PS. It also may be instructive to contrast two German individuals, the notorious Herman Goering with his half-brother, Albert. Throughout WW2 Albert Goering saved many Jews from death. At the end of the war he became an Allied prisoner and he was only released from prison after an American officer looked more deeply into his case when he saw the name of one of his relative’s on the list of Jewish people Albert Goering claimed to have assisted. He provided the list to back up his claim that he was being unjustly imprisoned simply due to his surname being Goering. What better way to reinforce the concept of individual responsibility when you can see the injustice of discriminating against someone in as small a group as a single family!
For more details about some of the above here are Wiki links :
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_areas_annexed_by_the_Soviet_Union
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_Massacre
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BBegota
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Karski
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Pilecki
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendler
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_in_a_Jar
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_G%C3%B6ring
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