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Click here: http://click.topica.com/aaaauYbz8SnrbAjwjxa/Discovery_Travel ------------------------------------------------------------ __________________________________________________________________________ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Tuesday, 11 July 2000 Vol. 4, Number 57 (#440) __________________________________________________________________________ Web Sites of Interest: Labor For Mumia Book Reviews: We Were In Auschwitz Grant McCool (Reuters), "New Translation Tells of Nazi Depravation," 6 Jul 00 Comment and Analysis From Readers Lenni Brenner "[On Lileikis Prosecution]," 9 July 00 Joe Biernacki (Canadian Polish Congress), "Responding to the Jew Hater and Holocaust Revisionist and coward" Rightwing Quote of the Week: Exchange on tactics between Vincent Bertollini and Alex Curtis -------------------------------------------------------------------------- WEB SITES OF INTEREST: Labor For Mumia Friends, Labor for Mumia, the new Campaign among working people demanding Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal, has just launched a new WebSite. We've made it easy for you to get involved. You can get the latest information on the campaign, research labor support for Mumia and interact with us as you begin to bring this campaign into your union. Check it out and sign-up today. Double-click on: <http://www.aspenlinx.com/labor> In Solidarity, -- Randy Christensen Labor for Mumia - Coordinator -------------------------------------------------------------------------- BOOK REVIEWS: We Were In Auschwitz New Translation Tells of Nazi Depravation Grant McCool (Reuters) 6 Jul 00 NEW YORK -- Concentration camp prisoners fought one another for a bowl of soup or a piece of bread, betrayed their own kin and abandoned all ideological principles in the degradation wrought by their Nazi captors. This is the story told in "We Were in Auschwitz," a collection written and published by four non-Jewish camp survivors immediately after the Second World War and newly translated into English from the original Polish. "It was an absolutely different approach," said co-author Krystyn Olszewski, 79, describing the difference between the book and other Holocaust literature. "There were other very interesting stories about martyrdom, helping each other and underground activities ... there were many, many truths about the camps, but we selected this one approach." The book was one of the first published accounts of what happened in the camps where the Germans tortured, starved and gassed to death millions of people from all walks of life and from many nations of Europe. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews and an estimated 5 million non-Jews, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. After years of obscurity, a rare edition of the book came to light again in 1998 when a Boston-area literature professor, Alicia Nitecki, unpacked a box of Polish books her husband had inherited. Nitecki, who teaches at Bentley College, said the work predates Primo Levi's more famous "Survival in Auschwitz," which also addressed the way prisoners mistreated each other. "When I started looking at it I realized it had been written as early as it was," she told Reuters in an interview in New York, where her translation was issued by Welcome Rain Publishers this month. "I'd never heard of it, it had never been translated and it had disappeared." Book Bound In Prison Stripes The book in her hands was bound in the striped material of the uniforms worn by concentration camp prisoners and embossed with the letter "P" for Polish and "6643" -- the number allotted in the camp to co-author Janusz Nel Siedlecki. It was dedicated to the "VII American Army," which liberated them from the Dachau-Allach camp. The authors and the publisher were swept up in a Nazi purge of the Polish underground and spent time in different camps, including Auschwitz. "We did not fight for the concept of nation in the camp, nor for the inner restructuring of man; we fought for a bowl of soup, for a place to sleep, for women, for gold and watches from the transports," publisher Anatol Girs wrote in one preface. Another preface was written by co-author Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish poet. The stories were written in the first person singular but they were not individually signed. The writing style is journalistic and unsentimental about what the authors themselves suffered. In one story, "Homo Sapiens And Animal," two dying prisoners are lying on the ground: "...from time to time one of them lunges at the other and strikes him with the bowl he holds in his hand. Between them, a couple of spoonfuls of spilled soup. They are fighting only about licking the valuable drops that were spilled during a brawl." In another story, from Borowski's separately published "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen," a mother trying to avoid being put on a truck to the gas chamber hysterically denies knowing her child, who loudly wails, "Mama, Mama don't leave me!" A Russian sailor grabs the mother and heaves her onto the truck, then throws the child at her feet. Degradation Of The Human Spirit Nitecki, deported to a labor camp in Germany from Poland as a 2-year-old along with her family in 1944, said the book showed "this in a way was the worst of the German crimes -- this is what happens to the human spirit when they are placed in a situation of such total depravation and degradation." "I would like to see people looking at the Holocaust experience in terms of what it teaches us about ourselves as a species," said Nitecki, whose great uncle was gassed to death in Auschwitz. "This is what Primo Levi was after and why these people wrote the book and I think that has been reduced in the popular discussion of the Holocaust." She said the book was written partly in reaction to what the three authors and publisher Anatol Girs were hearing at a displaced persons camp in Munich in 1945 and 1946 -- "everybody was the hero of their own tale." The book was "a memoir and an elegy for the dead," she added. Girs published 10,000 copies, some of them bound in striped material from camp uniforms and at least one in leather from a Nazi SS jacket, with strips of barbed wire attached to the front and back covers and a death mask on the spine. The book was republished in the late 1950s in Polish only. Borowski committed suicide in 1951. Siedlecki and Olszewski live in Warsaw. Girs went to the United States, at first working as a janitor and a babysitter, but was forced to destroy 9,000 copies of the book because he could not afford to store them. He died in 1990 at the age of 84, but his daughter Barbara Girs of Brattleboro, Vermont, still has the first leather-bound edition in Polish. Although she grew up with it in her home, she did not know Polish and read the book for the first time after Nitecki trached her down and it was translated into English. "They didn't always survive by being nice, but they were forced to be the way they were and also that it wasn't a heroic life that you led there," she said in an interview in New York. "You survived by finding a way to take care of yourself and your friends." -------------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT AND ANALYSIS FROM READERS "[On Lileikis Prosecution]" Lenni Brenner 9 July 00 Brother Paul, Recently The New York Times ran squibs on Aleksandras Lileikis, 93, stripped of his US citizenship and deported to Lithuania, where he is held for trial for turning over Jews to the Hitlerites. Such a trial does nothing for his dead victims, or present day victims of ethnic carnage. Karl von Clausewitz, the author of the classic Vom Krieg (On War), insisted that an advantage that the defensive has, is that the public identifies with those who it feels are the victims of aggression. He, being 93, ill, harmless, helpless, automatically becomes, if not Mr Nice Guy, a great-grandfatherly ex-baddy. Reunions of SS men, and present day Nazi-skin groups, must always be both legally outlawed and fought in the streets. But Lincolnesque mercy to ancient villains must be granted. When a 93-year-old stands trial, folks' focus shifts away from what produced Nazism, and what lessons from that catastrophe still apply, in our age of international communal carnage. -- Lenni Brenner - - - - - Responding to the Jew Hater and Holocaust Revisionist and coward Joe Biernacki (Canadian Polish Congress) [EMAIL PROTECTED] In 1995, Shalom International was the only Jewish organization to go to each of the 50th Anniversary of the Liberation of the death camps in Poland, Germany, Austria. We were there with our 20ft. banner that said: "Purge, Extradite, Prosecute All Nazi Murderers". We were at Auschwitz/Birkenau; 10 camps in Germany, plus the Budenstag in Bonn, and the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and Mauthausen Death Camp in Austria. I remember at Buchenwald in Germany near Weimar, in seeing survivors at each of these ceremonies, but specifically the tension between Polish and Jewish survivors still. We wanted to know why Germany had let the murderers to go free. The Germans cared less and were arguing who liberated this death camp first, the survivors or the Americans. But what struck me was the massive divide between Poles and Jews even at these ceremonies and it was consistant. The Jews were repelled by the Poles who had done everything possible to see that the Jews were wiped out, and no 'forgiveness' here and of course both amazed me and was a major bit of education. For it is systematic of how the Poles treated the Jews during the Holocaust, and after the Holocaust. On the one hand you charge that I don't know 20th century Polish history, when Poland has 1000 years of' Jew hating' and Jew-killing, as its legacy. Who can forget or forgive the insanity of Poles charging that Jews drank the blood of a 'Christian child' during the Passover, to justify the mass pogroms and killings as part of this Catholic 'blood libel' treachery. And while a few Poles were religious enough to save some Jews, the overwhelming Polish population were more than happy to aid and abet all German policies towards Jews. Poles tied to their Catholic scapegoating of Jews and supporting a Catholic Hitler, were delighted to participate in the grand theft of Jewish property, and this year the Polish government refused restitution of $27Billions in property stolen from 170,000 Jewish and non-Jewish survivors. However, what was stolen from the 3 1/2 million Jews with only a few hundred thousand survivors in the Holocaust, is minor, to the mass extermination of these people and 600 Jewish communities wiped out in the process. To trivialize, and commercialize these sacred grounds and world's largest Jewish cemeteries, which are the 'death camps', is no different that pushing the Jews into the gas chambers and Krematoria themselves. I'd expect nothing less from a Polish low-life like yourself telling me about Auschwitz being Polish because it's on Polish soil. Hitler built 7 extermination camps in Poland for a reason, knowing the Jew- hating and Jew-killing support he'd get from the Poles for this mass murder campaign. Meanwhile, Auschwitz/Birkenau and Belzec, Sobibor, Majdenek, Chelmno, Treblinka, belong to the Jews from 34 countries brought to be exterminated because they were Jews. It is international territory and our sacred grounds, and the more Poland desecrates our cemeteries, the more the world knows what Poland is really all about, and who would have anything to do with Poland on any level with this type of 'politics' and hatred that permeates the Polish being. Selling burgers and fries, to make money at a 'death camp' is typical of how the Poles even honor their own dead, let alone dishonor ours. Why would we expect anything less from the Poles? The Polish line is that the Soviets who dominated the Poles after WWII were all Jews who oppressed and murdered the Poles (who collaborated with the Nazis and they are today), and therefore the Holocaust is justified. You attack Jews for what the Poles excel in, in ripping off their own country, let alone the hypocracy of a Catholic Church that for 2000 years has attacked Jews, which attacks Christ the Jew, as well. Then you tell us in your propaganda that 'gruesome torture' was 'rare' in German camps. Mindboggling bull and so revealing as to your stupidity as well as your revisionism. With 1600 'death camps' and over 10,000 'concentration camps', the pure 'Aryan' pleasure was their sadistic torture and experimentation and mass murder of nearly 7 million Jews, including 1 1/2 million children. Another 5 million non-Jews were also murdered in the camps. To the Poles who helped Jews and even died doing this, all the honor and respect. Sadly, too few of them. As to Jewish partisans saving Poles, I don't know the figures, but unlike Poles, we do care about each other and our allies and murder isn't our thing, and why the world hates us for being their 'conscience', besides their 'scapegoat'. Meanwhile, get your crosses out of Auschwitz and the other death camps and stop revising history. The Vatican openly and financially supported Hitler and enjoyed the killings of millions of Jews. Pius XII was Hitler's Pope and John Paul II is Hamas' Pope still wanting to finish what Hitler started. If you weren't such a coward, you'd admit to Jew hating and Jew killing and be proud of it instead of denying it. Commercializing a 'death camp' is no class at all, and we urge any self-respecting Jew and non-Jew to boycott Poland and everything Polish ,till these sacred grounds are returned to the Jewish community for proper respect for all victims of Nazism and their Polish collaborators. You lie about Jews and then get upset if we tell the world the truth about Nazis and Polish Nazis as well. Too bad. It's only the beginning. You're upset because we honor and 'remember' our victims, and then say you should do the same for Poles. Well do it. You tell your lies and we'll tell the world the truth and then let them decide who to morally support. Crosses and commercialism and trivializing the Holocaust, crosses the line of any decency and only paints the Poles as the lowest of the low. You has lost this issue on all but the pro-Nazi fronts. The more Jew hatred and synogague bombing in Warsaw in 1997; desecration of Jewish graves and sites in 1998, only goes back to when after the Holocaust in Kilce, Poland, another 67 Jews were slaughtered by the Poles, because Jew hating and Jew killing is in your mother's milk and that is the reality you will never change. To the Poles who aren't part of your cowardess and nastiness and wish to make the difference in doing what is morally right, we are more than happy to make an alliance. To trash like yourself, nothing but contempt in exposing this 'Polish poison' to the Planet at large. Poland is a nation soaked with Jewish blood, then trying to make a buck off of it, by lying about what really happened and is happening. And Poland is paying the price globally for this crime against the Jewish people and humanity. When I was in Auschwitz in 1991 and again in 1995, the air over the camp, smells of 'death'. Poland is a 'dead' country. And no amount of money can change this bankruptcy in morals to desecrate a death camp. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- RIGHTWING QUOTE OF THE WEEK: For those who believe that fascism is only a thing of the past Exchange on tactics between Vincent Bertollini and Alex Curtis: To: Alex Curtis Subject: Aryan Nations Congress and Meetings in General As you probably know, Aryan Nations is have their annual Congress July 14,15,16. I am speaking on the 15th to what will probably be a group of 100 or so visitors. I know from your many writings that you do not condone groups or organizations or gatherings of any kind. I know that there will be infiltrators there and some who would like to build dossiers with even more info. I don't really care. It would be a pleasure for us if you could find a way to show up. After all, you are out, as it were and no one would be particularly surprised if you showed. There may even be a possibility for you to speak along with Louis, others and myself. Just a thought. Warmest -- Vincent Bertollini The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger - - - - - Response to Bertollini by Curtis [I'd look like one hell of a hypocrite. It is not that I don't condone them. As a matter of fact, I openly advertise their taking place. I do advise against attending them because meetings and rallies should not be taking place in 2000 for propaganda purposes. This week, my web statistics show that my Real Audio broadcast was downloaded by 243 people. Dozens more will call the same speech via telephone at 619-286-6709. 490 read the text of my speech on the Net. Hundreds more read it on my E-zine. All this without stepping outside my city, spending hundreds of dollars and days of time to get to another state, and finally not having personal contact with a single informant, agent provacateur or well-meaning person who later undertakes action that pulls me in. Every significant group that has agents or meetings is presently being sued for millions, except for the rarely- meeting National Alliance, which will fall prey too. The Number One factor that always makes the case for the plaintiff, the U.S. Attorney or Morris Sleeze is personal contact of some kind. If we are to mature into an effective resistance against JOG tyranny, we must break away from the mind set of right-wing ideas of organizations and meetings.] * * * * * In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. __________________________________________________________________________ FASCISM: We have no ethical right to forgive, no historical right to forget. 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