Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz
Traumatized author’s anti-Polonism and ignorance of relevant history is openly displayed in his comic book novel that recounts relatives who survived the Holocaust and his frustrating visit to Auschwitz.
Ari Richter, a professor of fine arts at the City University of New York, describes in his 256-page comic book the experiences of four generations of his family, from World War I to the present day, and how their perspectives have influenced his own views as a Jewish American and admitted Polonophobe.
As part of his research, Richter and his wife, Irin, travel to Germany and Poland. In Alsenz, Germany, he suffers a minor panic attack, complaining that “This place creeps me out. I can feel everyone’s eyes on us, like they know we don’t belong here.”
Their subsequent visit to Poland is described in a chapter cynically titled “Pole-ish”, which visibly conveys Richter’s biased view of Poles. In Poland, he and his wife struggle with suspicion and distrust, “feeling less easy than in Germany – more leery glances like we were strangers out of place.” Directly under this statement, Richter has drawn two fair-haired Poles, a young man and woman, both with angrily contorted faces, at whom Richter and his wife exchange the following dialogue: Richter: ‘They’ve been glowering at us this whole time. Is it really so obvious that we’re Jewish? Irin: “No, I think it’s just their faces.”
At the bottom of the page, Richter writes “And both Grandpa and Grandma Ruth’s families were from places that later became Poland, which they would tease each other about.” In the panel under it, we see the following dialogue: Grandpa Karl: “Go on Ari, tell your grandmother what it’s like to be Polish.” Grandma Ruth: “Ari, please tell you grandfather that it takes on to know one. Richter: “Heh heh.” As if to absolve himself from personal responsibility, Richter claims his anti-Polish bias was inherited from his grandparents.
On the next page, we witness his Jewish superiority complex and more irrational Polonophia. He writes “Irin and I live in a neighborhood with a lot of recent Polish immigrants. We’re often subject to their wary looks … especially as young creative professionals who are driving up rents and home prices.” In the panel under it, we see the following dialogue: Irin: “I say hello to these guys every time I pass, and they never once acknowledged me.” Richter: “Don’t take it personally. Us bougie, gentrifying Jews must feel like a reverse pogrom to them!” (Bolded text in original).
As the two drive toward Auschwitz, Richter writes “So I tried to keep my inherited biases in check, and to keep an open mind for the rest of our trip in Poland.” As will be seen in the next chapter, titled “Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz”, he predictably fails.
In this chapter, he relates his impressions of his three-and-a-half-hour guided tour of Auschwitz and further reveals a profound ignorance of World War II and Polish history. He is surprised to learn that Poles were the first prisoners at Auschwitz I and that up to 75,000 died there. Richter is also unaware that Jews weren’t murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau for nearly two years after Poles arrived at Auschwitz I.
He also parrots another tired canard maintained in Jewish circles by writing “True, the Germans were responsible for Auschwitz [apparently meaning Auschwitz-Birkenau], but before they showed up, Poles had inflicted centuries of pogroms against their Jewish neighbors, some even after the war.” (Bolded text in original). Richter is unaware that Poland was partitioned by Russia, Germany, and Austria, and did not exist between 1795 and 1918. During that time, the pogroms were committed by the ruling Russians. As for pogroms after the war, he cites as examples the killings at Jedwabne in 1941 and Kielce in 1945.
Had Richter researched these two events, he would have found that Jedwabne was staged by the Germans, who also staged identical incidents at Rutki, Zambrow, Piatnica, Wasosz, and Wizna. In each of these towns, the Germans used the same terrifying method. Polish Jews were rounded up, marched to the town square, and herded into a building, which was then set on fire and anyone who escaped was shot. The source for the Jedwabne lie is Jan T. Gross’s 2001 book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. His book has been decisively discredited by historians Alexander B. Rossino, Christopher Browning, Ewa Kurek, and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz.
Kielce, by contrast, was Soviet-staged. Michael Checinski, in his book Poland: Communism-Nationalism-Anti-semitism, wrote about the role played by Mihail Aleksandrowicz Diomin, a Soviet intelligence officer. Checinski, a Polish Jew and former officer of the Polish Army who was linked with the Communist Secret Police, wrote that Diomin specialized in Jewish matters and traveled to Poland at that time. Former US Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane was chosen to report on the incident and did so in his book I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to The American People. Lane stated that “But almost all sources agreed that the militia had been responsible to a great extent for the massacre, not only in failing to keep order but in the actual killing of the victims, for many had been shot or bayoneted to death…” Note that the militia in postwar Poland was fully controlled by the Soviet occupiers.
Richter dismisses the Righteous, Poles who rescued Polish Jews under threat of death, as inconsequential. He writes “We learned of the Righteous, many who left food on the road for starving prisoners and adopted orphaned [Jewish] children after liberation.” (Bolded text in original).
Had he researched the Polish Righteous, he would have found that only in Poland did the Germans have a standing order that anyone aiding a Jew in any way would be executed together with immediate family. Despite this death penalty, Poles comprise the largest number by far of any country honored as Righteous Among the Nations, many of whom were killed for aiding Jews. While these are known to Yad Vashem, thousands more are known only to God. Estimates of Poles who aided Jews range from 300,000 to 1 million and estimates of those killed for doing so approach 50,000.
In addition, German death squads carried out mass executions of entire villages that aided Jews and some of the annihilated villages became extinct. Richter should ask himself if he would risk his life and the lives of his family to save one or more persons in similar circumstances. Many Poles did so because they believed it was the Christian thing to do. Also, two Polish institutions were critically instrumental in rescuing Jews. The first, Zegota, was the only government organization in the German-occupied countries established to rescue Jews. Estimates of Jews saved by Zegota range from 30,000 to 60, 000. The second was the Catholic Church, which rescued Jewish children on a massive scale by hiding them in convents, orphanages, and rectories. No German-occupied country had such an organizational infrastructure that aided tens of thousands of Jews.
Richter complains further, stating “Obsessed with Yad Vashem’s “Righteous among the Nations” honor, but frustrated by its exacting standards, affiliates of Poland’s right-wing Law & Justice party created their own award, to give out as they please.”
With respect to Polish awards for saving Jews, Richter naively believes Yad Vashem is the ultimate authority in deciding who should be recognized. This is nonsense. During the years 1945 to 1989, the heroism of Poles who saved Jews was vigorously repressed by the Communist authorities. Following Poland’s overthrow of Communism, Polish officials were able to research and publicly honor Poles who died saving Jews but were not recognized by Yad Vashem.
The nearly 7,200 Poles awarded by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations” is far from the true number of Poles who provided aid. Richter is obviously ignorant of the limitations of Yad Vashem’s “righteous” criteria. First, various Polish rescuers are not honored because the rescued Jews, for whatever reasons, chose not to identify or confirm the names of their Polish rescuers. Testimonies from others who had knowledge of a rescue but were not themselves rescued are not accepted. Second, Yad Vashem does not honor the many Poles who were murdered by the Germans in reprisal for aiding Jews. In order for a Pole to be honored, each death has to be verified by 3 to 4 sources, which is difficult to do decades after the event. In still other cases, both the hidden Jews and Polish benefactors were murdered. Third, Yad Vashem does not honor Poles who took money for the upkeep of fugitive Jews. This is entirely irrational as no payment could ever suffice for risking one’s own life. Polish rescuers who took money to help Jews are not honored because they are deemed to not have acted from altruistic motives. The fact that Poles lived at near-starvation levels under German occupation and had grave difficulties feeding Jews without payment, to say nothing about risking their lives for the aiding them, makes this criterion all the more absurd. Historian Richard Lukas, in his book Forgotten Holocaust writes: “Poles from all social groups helped persecuted Jews; food, shelter, and false papers were among its most common forms. Taking into account the extreme barbarism of the German governments in Poland and the constant persecution of Poles, it is a fact worth emphasizing that so many Poles were involved in this work. The surprising thing is not how few, but how many Jews were saved in Poland during these years.”
Further into his visit at Auschwitz, Richter writes “What stung me most about the tour’s messaging was the repeated distinction made between Polish and Jewish victims, when so many were both.” Richter asks “Why is he [the tour guide] not calling Polish Jews “Poles”? The fact is that the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews refused to assimilate, did not speak Polish, and self-identified as Jews rather than Poles. Professor Yacov Talmon, who hailed from the Russian partition of Poland, acknowledged: “… many important factors infused in the Jews a spirit of contempt and hatred towards the Poles. In contrast to the organizational activity and capacity of the Germans, the Jews saw the Poles as failures.” Historian Bernard Weinryb makes the point that the negative images Jews held of Christians were based on ideas “about the superiority of [their own] community, the chosenness of the Jews in comparison with the idolatry (paganism) of the others.”
Richter accuses the post-Communist government led by Lech Walesa of “quietly adjusting the numbers” of Auschwitz’s “non-Jewish deaths”, so that Poles are presented as the primary victims. This is false and Richter is clearly confused. It is factually correct that Poles were the primary victims of Auschwitz I and it has never been claimed that Poles were the primary victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nevertheless, to support his bogus accusation, he shows Walesa stating “The new consensus among Holocaust scholars is that over 1 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz, as were 70-75 thousand Poles,20 thousand Roma, 15 thousand Soviet POWs, and 10-15 thousand other nationalities.” This statement is factually correct.
Richter continues with fictitious assertions from his anti-Polish crowd by stating “But enough contemporary Poles, still seeing themselves as the primary victims, elected a right-wing government that enacted those sentiments into law.” According to our liberal, progressivist comic book author, any conservative government is “right-wing” and Polish President Duda’s Administration is no exception. He depicts President Duda in a panel announcing “This bill makes it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust, or any other Nazi German atrocities.” This statement is not only false, President Duda never said it. Like so many other Polonophobes who have made this accusation, Richter uses the nebulous word “complicity” in an attempt to convince readers that the Polish government was a willing accomplice in helping Hitler commit genocide against Polish and other European Jews.
The law Richter refers to was enacted in 2018 and criminalized anyone who publicly attributed to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich. Stated simply, it criminalized public falsification of historical fact, the same as Holocaust denial laws in Poland and Israel. It was further intended to protect Poland’s reputation and prevent the use of the fallacious phrase “Polish death camps”. The law later removed the criminal penalty and made violation a civil offense.
Ignorant of the actual text of the law, he cynically depicts President Duda saying “And no more calling them “Polish Death Camps,” Dammit!!!” (Bolded text in original). Further displaying his ignorance, Richter writes “They’ve [the Polish government] even taken issue publicly with a documentary that labels a wartime map of the camps as being in Poland.” In a conspicuous display of shallowness, our uneducated comic book artist is unable to grasp that the factually correct phrase is “in German-occupied Poland”.
Richter lists “Additional Things that Gave Me Pause” and labels a statement made by the tourist guide as a “hot take”, i.e., an opinion that is likely to cause controversy. The guide is depicted saying “Gaining new territories was Germany’s primary aim in the war.” Richter views this as the guide’s opinion and disagrees by writing “Not the wholesale murder of Europe’s Jews”.
A quick read of the history confirms that Hitler used Nazism’s ideology of Lebensraum, meaning Living Space, to justify his attack on Poland, which required the taking of Slavic lands for colonization by the German Master Race. Nazism’s Racial Purity ideology further declared that Slavs, Jews, and Roma were inferior races and, if they intermixed with the German Master race, they would contaminate it to the point of extinction. The German people therefore had the duty to exterminate and enslave the inferior races. Richter wrongly believes his opinion that Hitler started World War II to murder all of Europe’s Jews, can only be historical fact.
As is evident, Richter, like most Americans, has unwittingly accepted as gospel truth a wide array of fallacies and misconceptions about Poland and the Poles that are conscientiously maintained by anti-Polish, Holocaust supremacist groups. Richter’s ignorance of the relevant history, combined with his visceral “inherited” anti-Polonism, is convincingly displayed throughout the two cited chapters of his comic book. While his paranoia of Poles and Polish Americans might conceivably be mitigated through intensive psychotherapy, resolving Richter’s virulent anti-Polish bigotry and profound illiteracy of the applicable history is sadly hopeless.
