John Sack : an Eye for an Eye
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John Sack : An Eye for An Eye JOHN SACK AN EYE FOR AN EYE The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge For the Holocaust Revised, Updated and Illustrated First published : 1993 Internet AAARGH 2007 — 2 — John Sack : An Eye for An Eye ISBN 0o-9675691-0-9 Fourth Edition Some of this book first appeared, in much different form, in California and The Village Voice. First edition, 1993, published by BasicBooks, a division of HarperCollins. Second edition, 1995, (additional preface) published by BasicBooks. Third edition, 1997, (electronic : revised and updated) published by CompuServe. This edition do not seem to be online. Fourth edition (revised, updated, illustrated — The present edition), 2000, published by John Sack. In other words, no publishing company was willing to publish this book. Since the author’s death in 2004, it seems the book has not been available for sale, anymore. ISBN 0-9675691-0-9 AAARGH The website was founded in 1996 by an international team http://vho.org/aaargh http://aaargh.com.mx The Quarterlies of AAARGH http://revurevi.net Conseils de révision Gaette du Golfe et des banlieues The Revisionist Clarion Il resto del siclo El Paso del Ebro Das kausale Nexusblatt O revisionismo em lengua português Arménichantage Books (290) published by AAARGH on Internet http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres/livres.html http://aaargh.com.mx/fran/livres/livres.html Documents, compilations, AAARGH Reprints http://aaargh.com.mx/fran/livres/reprints.html http://vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres/reprints.html Free subscribe: (e-mail) [email protected] [email protected] Mail: [email protected] We claim to be protected by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights; http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html AAARGH, TO AVOID DYING STUPID. — 3 — John Sack : An Eye for An Eye OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN SACK The Butcher From Here to Shimbashi Report from Practically Nowhere M Lieutenant Calley The Man-Eating Machine Fingerprint Company C for all who died and for all who because of this story might live — 4 — John Sack : An Eye for An Eye Contents An Eyefor an Eye 1-143 Update: The Flight of Shlomo Morel 159 Update: The Book An Eye for an Eye 173 Notes.179 Sources 239 Acknowlegments 257 Query 261 Index 263 [ix] Preface My mother's mother was from Cracow, thirty miles from Auschwitz, and I must assume that if she (and my other grandparents) hadn't left in the i890s and sailed to America, that I’d have been sent to Auschwitz in the 1940s. I'd have been about twelve years old. Like other boys then, I’d have been wearing a drab gray suit and a flat gray "golfer" cap, and I'd have stepped from the train with my mother, father, and freckle-cheeked sister nine years old, and onto the concrete platform inside of the Auschwitz wires. As it happened, I didn't go to Auschwitz until ten years ago, when I was almost sixty and it was safe to do so. I stood on the wide concrete platform and stared at the tracks where the train would have been, but I couldn’t picture myself getting off it. I tried, but the "when, where and what” of Auschwitz were so remote from my own remembered world that I felt I was trying to see myself as I or my atoms were just before the Big Bang. I'd read about Auschwitz, and I knew that Mengele would have been on this platform that day, and I went to where he'd have stood. I knew he'd have told my mother and father, "Go right," and my sister and me, "Go left,” but I still couldn't picture it. I went to the ruins of the dressing room—the undressing room—then of the cyanide chamber, which now had no roof and was full of old roof- components, of dirt, grass and dandelions, and (as I looked closely) of tiny white chips of bone that, in the 1940s, had fallen there from the sky. Again, I tried to picture my sister and me in this cyanide chamber, undressed, our two bodies touching and one thousand people around us, all screaming, the gas coming down upon us, and I simply couldn't see it, my mind had no hook that could hold it, I might as well have been groping for "Why does the universe exist? What if it didn’t?" I left without taking notes, but I remember that I felt some sympathy for the men and women who say that the Holocaust didn’t happen. The people who say it are fools, maybe worse, but I can commiserate with them. The thought the Holocaust did, indeed, happen is too enormous for one little volleball [x] brain. I'd come to Auschwitz and this part of Poland to research this book. I had heard of a Jewish girl, Lola, who, after onc-and-one-half years at Auschwitz, had turned the Holocaust upside-down by becoming the commandant of the big prison for Germans at Gleiwitz, thirty miles away, and in some ways by imitating the SS women at Auschwitz, and I wanted to write about her. Lola wasn’t in Poland anymore, but as I spoke to Jews, Poles and Germans about her and as I studied documents in a cobwebbed cellar in Poland and a concrete castle over the Rhine, I slowly became aware that the truth was much, much larger than Lola. I learned that hundreds of Jews and probably thousands of Jews — 5 — John Sack : An Eye for An Eye who'd been on the platform at Auschwitz (or the numerous places like it) in the early 1940s could picture things that I couldn't and, in fact, could do things that in the 1930s they couldn’t even have pictured. When the Holocaust ended, I learned, a lot of Jews became commandants like Lola. I understood why, but the Jews were sometimes as cruel as their exemplars at Auschwitz, and they even ran the organization that ran the prisons and—as I learned—the concentration camps for German civilians in Poland and Poland-administered Germany. Once again, I felt that I was confronting something too big for one little three-pound brain, for I was learning that, yes, the Holocaust happened, the Germans killed Jews, but that a second atrocity happened that the Jews who committed it covered up: one where the Jews killed Germans. God knows the Jews were provoked, but I learned that in 1945 they killed a great number of Germans: not Nazis, not Hider's trigger men, but German civilians, German men, women, children, babies, whose "crime" was just to be Germans. Through the wrath of Jews, however understandable, the Germans lost more civilians than at Dresden, more than, or just as many as, the Japanese at Hiroshima, the Americans at Pearl Harbor, the British in the Battle of Britain, or the Jews themselves in Poland's occasional pogroms: so I now learned, and I was aghast to learn it. This was no Holocaust of the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, but I knew that if I reported it, I’d be exhibiting, well, call it chutzpah, for I could guess what the world would say, but I felt I’d be doing the righteous thing both as a reporter and as a man who's a Jew. I'm not a Biblical scholar, but I went to Saturday school (I was voted the “most religious") and I knew that the Torah tells us to bear honest witness, tells us, indeed, that if someone sins and we know it and don’t report it, then we're guilty too. The men (and the woman, a scholar says) who wrote the Torah didn’t cover up Jewish misdeeds. Even when Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, sinned— -God told him to go to Israel, but he went to Egypt instead—the Torah reported it. It reported that Judah, whose name is the source of "Jew," made love to a harlot, and it reported that Moses, even Moses, trespassed against the Lord, who then didn't let him into the Promised [xi] Land. The people who wrote the Torah (or according to Orthodox Jews, the God who wrote it) believed that we Jews couldn’t proclaim, "Thou shalt not cover," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not kill," if we ourselves did it and covered it up, and I, as a Jew doing research in Europe, felt that I must report what the Jewish commandants did if Jews were to keep any moral authority. I suspected that some Jews would ask me, "How could a Jew write this book?" and I knew that my answer must be "No, how could a Jew not write it?" When I came back from Europe, and when I started writing, I still chose to concentrate on the intimate story of Lola and Lola’s circle. To write a whole formal history such as the Germans wrote, from the German viewpoint, omitting all mention of Jews, in a three-volume work in the 196os, would demand a battalion of historians who, even then, probably wouldn’t turn up the truth of a secret organization from 1945. For myself, I didn’t want to write something like "The Jews did this," "The Jews did that," "Well, weren’t the Jews just awful," just as I hadn't written like that in my three books about the American soldiers in Vietnam and as I hope I wouldn't write if I ever wrote about the German SS.