By Richard H. Curtiss
Published:
1997-09-01
Richard
H. Curtiss is executive editor of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (PO Box
53062, Washington, DC 20009). This report is reprinted from the June-July 1997
issue. When he retired from the US foreign service, Curtiss was chief inspector
of the US Information Agency. He is also the author of A Changing Image: American Perspectives of the
Arab-Israeli Dispute and Stealth
PACs: Lobbying Congress for Control of US Middle East Policy.
„The Holocaust museum is doing wonderful work. But I'd
hate to think that the one thing the Holocaust Museum doesn't talk about is
genocide when it's done by Jews.“-John Sack, author of An Eye for an Eye, Feb. 13, 1997.
Listening to American magazine writer John Sack speak
is like reading the Thousand
and One Nights. Each improbable adventure seems to lead to another
even more astonishing tale. But the Arabian
Nights is a work of fiction, set in the Baghdad of the Abbasid
Caliphate. John Sack's tales are true, and they take place in such varied
settings as California, Poland, Germany and Israel over the past half century.
And while editions of the Arabian Nights are available through any bookstore,
John Sack's book, An Eye
for an Eye, published in 1993, is out of print less than four years
after it was issued.
The
66-year-old author, who is Jewish and who presently lives in Idaho, was invited
by Michael Berenbaum, until recently director of the research institute of the
Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, to tell an invitational audience his story
of how some 60,000 to 80,000 German prisoners died at the hands of a largely
Jewish guard force in the aftermath of the European Holocaust in World War II.
Just before the talk was to be held, however, it was canceled by the museum's
new director, Dr. Walter Reich. When Sack ascertained that he had been
deliberately „disinvited“ by the new head of the Holocaust Museum, he spent
$300 to rent a room to deliver the same talk February 13, 1997, to journalists
at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
Sack's
misadventure with censorship by the publicly funded US Holocaust Museum began
in California in April 1976 when he met the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust
survivor named Lola Potak. The daughter told him how in Nazi concentration
camps her mother had lost her mother and her sister, and had had a brother
hanged by the Nazis in January 1945.
Subsequently
Lola Potak, whose weight was down to 65 pounds, escaped when prisoners were
being marched from one camp to another to avoid the oncoming Allied armies in
the winter of 1944-1945. After the area in which she was hiding was overrun by
the Russian army, she volunteered to serve the Polish secret police against her
German oppressors. She ended up as the commander of a camp for German prisoners
operated at Gliwice [Gleiwitz], Poland. It was one of 1,255 such camps
established as Soviet forces swept across Europe, Sack learned. He spent the
next two-and-a-half years interviewing Lola and other former guards to whom she
introduced him about their experiences at Russian and Polish-operated camps.
[See: „Book Detailing Jewish Crimes Against Germans Banned,“ Jan.-Feb. 1995 Journal, p. 28.]
Destructive Hate
The
result was an article in California
magazine entitled „Lola's Revenge and Lola's Redemption.“ In it Sack wrote
about how Lola, who at first could think of nothing but revenge, one day found
herself challenging a guard under her command who was beating a German
prisoner. „If you despise them, why do you want to be like them?“ she asked.
From then on she told the guards to treat the German prisoners like human
beings. „Maybe people will learn that to hate your neighbors may not destroy
them, but it will surely destroy you,“ Lola said.
Sack's
article won an award as the best magazine article of the year. As a result, he
signed up Lola to collaborate with him on a book about the camps for German
prisoners operated by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. After he approached a
number of publishing firms, the idea was accepted by Henry Holt publishers.
To
Sack's chagrin, however, Lola Potak and other former guards she had introduced
him to then refused permission to use their stories. When he pointed out that
they had a contract, they threatened „to sue me, to kill me, and to call the
Israeli mafia,“ Sack said.
So
Sack, who speaks and reads fluent German, gave up the idea of working with his
original collaborators, but not of writing the book. In April 1989 he visited
the German Federal Archives in a castle above the Rhine River. There he found
five statements by Germans who were incarcerated in Lola's prison. He looked up
the five former prisoners, found three other guards who had served under Lola,
and visited the prison.
From
there his research took him to various countries where he talked to other
witnesses and read thousands of documents. His researches confirmed that Lola
had been the camp commandant, and that she had stopped the violence against the
prisoners.
„So
Lola was telling the truth, but she wasn't telling the whole truth,“ Sack told
his Press Club audience. He explained that he learned that „among the prisoners
in Lola's camp were 20 captured German soldiers. But there also were 1,000
civilians.
„They
were tortured. One was a 14-year-old boy arrested for wearing a Boy Scout uniform.
They poured gasoline on the Boy Scout's hair and set it on fire. He went
insane. The Germans who died in the camp were buried in a mass grave at a
Catholic cemetery.
„The
truth was that the Germans in Lola's prison were worse off than Lola had been
at Auschwitz.“ Sack continued. „For example, the guards at Auschwitz were not
allowed to rape the prisoners. In Lola's prison they did.“
Sack
said the prisons were operated by the Polish Office of State Security. The
Germans called it the „Polish Gestapo.“ Of the security office directors, „almost
all were Jews, and three-quarters of the officers were Jews and one-quarter
were Catholics,“ Sack said. Sack then went looking for the camp officers,
finding some in Israel, and one in New Jersey.
He
confirmed that between 60,000 and 80,000 Germans died in the camps. Of 50
babies in one camp, 48 died. „From Gliwice we moved westward to Breslau and
from there to Prague,“ another former guard told him, describing how Germans
were interned behind advancing Allied forces. „More Germans died in the camps
than Germany lost in the bombing of Dresden, or than Japan lost at Hiroshima,“
Sack said. „Although the numbers of Germans who died in the camps were only one
percent of those who died in the Holocaust, one German survivor said that, for
the victims, it was another Holocaust.“
Sack
also heard about Solomon Morel, supposedly Lola Potak's boyfriend and the
commander of another internment camp in Poland. Morel, while drunk, assembled a
group of German prisoners and threatened to kill them if they did not sing the
Nazi „Horst Wessel Song.“ Then, while forcing them to continue to sing, he
began beating the prisoners to death with a wooden chair.
The
author prepared the story of Morel for publication as a separate article. „GQ paid $15,000 and
then didn't publish it,“ Sack said. „Mother
Jones didn't call back. The
New Yorker refused to look at it.“ In 1993, however, The Village Voice
published the story of Solomon Morel and in the same year Basic Books published
Sack's long-delayed book, An
Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945.
In fact, the book was rushed into publication to accompany a segment on CBS's „60
Minutes“ featuring Morel's story.
Getting
his book published didn't end John Sack's troubles, however. Some of the
reviewers challenged the book's authenticity. One headline read „The Big Lie,
Continued.“ Another reviewer called it „false witness“ and still another
speculated that „none of this ever happened.“ Although the Morel story was carried
in newspapers in Tel Aviv, „in the United States, except for '60 Minutes,' only
The New York Times
carried it,“ Sack said.
The
American writer insists there are lessons to be learned from his research. „How
can we say to other people, the Germans, the Serbs, the Hutus, 'what you're
doing is wrong' when we ourselves do it and then cover it up?“ he asks.
„How
could the Germans do it? Until we find out why, these holocausts will continue.
If we hate and we act on that hate, then we have even more hate later on. You
don't have to be a German to become like that. We all have it in us to become
like Nazis. Hate is like a muscle. The more we exercise it, the bigger it gets,“
Sack says. His belief in his mission is expressed most succinctly in his book's
dedication: „For all who died and for all who, because of this story, might
live.“
As
for the book's commercial reception, the New
Republic carried one advertisement for it but wouldn't carry a
second one. Instead, according to a recent article in The Washington Post, New Republic literary
editor Leon Wieseltier said shortly after the book came out that it was „one of
the stupidest books I've ever read and I frankly resolved to do as much damage
as I could.“ At the time of the book's publication, neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times
reviewed it. This unwillingness even to acknowledge the book's existence led New York magazine to
publish an article in May 1994 headlined „The Book They Dare Not Review.“ That
article reported that two leading scholars, Istvan Deak and Arno Mayer, had
verified that the kinds of crimes Sack reported in his book did indeed take
place.
Eventually
The Nation, a
liberal journal, printed an article on the book by historian Jon Wiener.
However, it contained statements by both Deak and Mayer that seemed to recant
or disavow their quotations in New
York magazine. Wiener's own conclusion was that Sack „distorts and
sensationalizes history.“ Wiener added that although Sack „deserves credit for
finding and doing the work on an important story ... his lack of skill as an
historian is crippling.“
Writing
in the extreme Zionist New
Republic, Harvard University's Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of
the heavily publicized book, Hitler's
Willing Executioners, attacked Sack personally, accusing him of „outright
omission or virtual concealment of relevant numbers ... fictionalization [and]
insouciance about hard evidence.“ The Harvard
Crimson then accepted an ad in which Sack challenged Harvard's
Goldhagen to a debate, a challenge that was not accepted.
Sack's
interest in speaking at the Holocaust Museum resulted from an invitation to
Goldhagen to speak there in April 1996. Goldhagen's thesis is that most of the
German people were willing participants in the Holocaust, and that their crimes
were rooted in German history and culture.
„I'm
basically saying the exact opposite of Goldhagen – that you don't have to be
German to do this,“ Sack said. „When I see all this publicity going to someone
who's absolutely 100 percent dead wrong, I want to speak out.“
In
his National Press Club talk Sack acknowledged, in answer to a question, that
Basic Books printed 17,000 copies of his book, but that it no longer is
obtainable from the publisher. Sack refuses to attribute this to censorship,
but instead blames the vagaries of the book trade.
Nevertheless,
he admitted that he now is trying to buy back the rights from Basic Books. If
he concludes that the publisher is deliberately trying to keep the book off the
market, Sack vows to have the last word. „If I can't get the rights back, I'll
put it on the Internet for free,“ he told his audience.
„Thus, as we do nothing but enact history, we say
little but recite it: nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual
life is built thereon. For, strictly considered, what is all knowledge too but
recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning
and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials?“
-Thomas Carlyle
-Thomas Carlyle
Journal Scholarship
„ ... There are serious scholars, or people you would
find serious in the sense that they unearth new information, who publish in,
for example, the Journal of the Institute for Historical Review, which
dedicates itself to proving, for example, that the gas – there were no gas
chambers at Nazi death camps. There has been scholarship, Christopher, in those
journals. Let there be no doubt about it. They have uncovered train records
that many of us who study this field didn't know existed.
They go to the actual archives ... „
-Eric Breindel, New York
Post editor and columnist, on the „Charlie Rose Show,“
broadcast nationwide May 8, 1996, on the PBS network. He was speaking with Vanity
Fair writer Christopher Hitchens. Breindel, who is Jewish,
is a staunch defender of Israel and Zionist interests, and a harsh critic of
Holocaust.
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