The British-made satirical film, The Death of Stalin, released last year, made fun of the absurdity of Soviet “justice” in the years when the dictator ruled his empire like an Oriental satrap. Accusations against people could come out of thin air. Trials, preceded by torture to extract confessions, took minutes. A bullet in the head […]
Category: Jewish Affairs
Cynically portrayed by Nazi Germany as a “reeducation center,” the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was a synonym for unbridled state-sponsored terror. Although it was not an extermination camp, like Treblinka, it consumed the lives of about 50,000 people from 1936 to 1945. Now a memorial and museum, Sachsenhausen was not the first concentration camp built on […]
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A Victim of Antisemitism
Mireille Knoll survived Germany’s brutal occupation of France as 73,000 of her fellow Jews were uprooted from their homes by German forces in collaboration with the Vichy regime and deported to Nazi extermination camps in Poland. But on March 23, in what French President Emmanuel Macron later denounced as an “appalling” crime, she was murdered […]
Irena Grudzinska-Gross was one of the leaders of the Polish student protest movement that ignited one of the most shameful episodes in Poland’s postwar history. Speaking in Toronto on March 26, she claimed that the state-sponsored antisemitic campaign in Poland from 1967 to 1968 cannot be separated from the mass murder of three million Polish […]
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Poland Struggles With Its Demons
Polish President Andrzej Duda recently delivered a candid speech to mark the 50th anniversary of the antisemitic campaign launched by the then Communist regime under the guise of anti-Zionism. As a result of the calumnies levelled against Polish Jewish citizens, the vast majority of whom were highly assimilated, 13,000 or more Jews fled into exile, […]
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Message In A Bottle
The horrible things my eyes have seen are indescribable,” Marcel Nadjari, an Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner, wrote in 1944. Nadjari, a Greek Jew, was a member of the Sonderkommando, a squad of inmates charged with the grisly, inhumane task of herding newly-arrived Jews into the gas chamber, extracting valuables from their corpses, removing their bodies and placing them […]
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Nasty Backlash In Poland
Sad to say, Poland has been deluged by an outpouring of nasty rhetoric with antisemitic overtones. It has surfaced since the passage this month of controversial legislation which criminalizes the accusation that the “Polish nation” was complicit in the Holocaust and which outlaws the erroneous phrase “Polish death camp.” These malicious expressions were swiftly and […]
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The New Antisemitism
A new kind of insidious antisemitism, far different than the familiar variety of old, has emerged as hopes for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict have been dashed by realities on the ground. Responding to President Donald Trump’s recent decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, pro-Palestinian youths went on a rampage in three European cities, erasing […]
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More Light Shed On The Holocaust
The Holocaust unfolded in a succession of Nazi-occupied countries ranging from Poland and the Soviet Union to France and Hungary, and although much is known about this catastrophe 72 years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp by the Red Army, a whole lot of new material is still turning up and enlarging our […]
Regrettably, Poland continues to drag its feet concerning a problem that should have been resolved years ago. To this day, Poland is still the only major European country that has not passed comprehensive legislation for the restitution of property seized by the Nazis during the German occupation and nationalized by the Communist regime after 1945, according […]