Judgment of former communists shouldn't have blinders
Maria Fieldorf-Czarska, daughter of the Polish Home Army leader, General August Emil Fieldorf who was executed in 1953, is such a woman. Like many Poles of her generation, the sprightly 73-year-old living in Gdansk doesn't like Jews much.
"All the people connected with the arrest and prosecution of my father were Jews, most of them went to Israel. Nobody apologizes to us, but these days we have to say sorry to Jews all the time. Our government said sorry for the Jews who were murdered by the Germans, now Israel should apologize to us," she told me, over tea and sandwiches.
"The sad truth is that our secret services in the 1950s were dominated by Jews. They were disposed to communism, maybe it is genetic. They were persecuted by the czar and by Hitler, by everybody. There were always some Jews leading the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), denouncing the people from the Home Army."
Snacks were served after she asked my interpreter if I was Jewish. He told her, truthfully, that he didn't know.
In the normal run of things, Fieldorf-Czarska's views, commonplace in Poland, could be dismissed as the standard, if unpleasant, ravings of another elderly Central European xenophobe.
But these are not normal times in Poland. The cry for justice, for those who committed crimes of murder and torture under communism, fills the air.
The case of Fieldorf-Czarska's father has become an international cause celebre. Polish officials want to put on trial the woman who issued the general's arrest warrant, former military prosecutor, Helena Brus, now an elderly British pensioner married to an Oxford don.
Ironically, Brus, known as Wolinska when she stalked the corridors of the Ministry of Justice during the 1950s oiling the wheels of Stalin's terror, was forced from Poland during the anti-Jewish campaign of 1968.
The Ministry of Justice has also requested the extradition from Israel of Salomon Morel, a former commander of the Soviet-run detention camp at the Swietochlowice camp in southern Poland in 1945. More than 3,000 prisoners, mainly Germans, were held at the camp during 1945. More than half died, according to the Polish news agency PAP. Israel has refused the request.
Like Brus, Salomon Morel appears to be heavily implicated in the systematic persecutions of anyone deemed anti-Soviet in post-war Poland. Like Brus, Salomon Morel, needless to say, is Jewish.
By anyone's standards, the early 1950s in the Soviet bloc were times of terror, when a nod or a wink from a communist official was enough to insure incarceration, exile or execution.
That plenty of Jewish communists, all true believers in the marxist utopia, also perished in the Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak show trials of the 1950s is just another black twist in 20th century Jewish history.
For those who support the continuing trials of elderly Nazis, there are no moral or logical grounds for demanding the cessation of due legal process against those on the left who also committed judicial murder.
Polish Jewish intellectuals, such as Konstanty Gebert, a former Solidarity activist and now editor of the Warsaw-based Jewish magazine Midrasz, said that if there is a case against former Stalinist officials such as Brus and Morel, then they should be brought to trial, just as any other alleged criminal should be.
The question, Gebert asks, is why zoom in on these two elderly Jews? Stalin's willing executioners, jailers and secret policemen numbered tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.
However bloody and brutal the regime at the Swietochlowice camp, it was but one in a chain of such places across the country. Only a small minority of those working such camps, in communist prisons and their basement torture chambers, were Jewish.
Most were Poles, Ukrainians or Belarussians. A study commissioned by Stanislaw Radkiewicz, secret police chief in 1945, reported that of 25,600 employees, 438 were Jewish.
"The evidence against Salomon Morel is very damaging, but why, of all the commanders of the dozens of camps run by the Soviets, pick on him? The Morel case is very worrying," says Gebert.
There are other cases pending in Poland against former communist officials. But considering how many tens of thousands of former NKVD and KGB officers helped run Stalin's terror machine, one would expect that there would be at least dozens of extradition requests to Russia, Ukraine and Belarussia, demanding that former secret policemen and women be sent back for trial.
So I asked the Ministry of Justice how many extradition requests had been submitted to these three countries in the last two years. The answer was none. It seems Poland has one law for elderly Jewish communists, but another for their former gentile comrades.
Adam LeBor is a freelance journalist based in Budapest. His book, "Hitler's Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide," is published in an updated edition this month by Simon and Schuster.
"All the people connected with the arrest and prosecution of my father were Jews, most of them went to Israel. Nobody apologizes to us, but these days we have to say sorry to Jews all the time. Our government said sorry for the Jews who were murdered by the Germans, now Israel should apologize to us," she told me, over tea and sandwiches.
"The sad truth is that our secret services in the 1950s were dominated by Jews. They were disposed to communism, maybe it is genetic. They were persecuted by the czar and by Hitler, by everybody. There were always some Jews leading the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), denouncing the people from the Home Army."
Snacks were served after she asked my interpreter if I was Jewish. He told her, truthfully, that he didn't know.
In the normal run of things, Fieldorf-Czarska's views, commonplace in Poland, could be dismissed as the standard, if unpleasant, ravings of another elderly Central European xenophobe.
But these are not normal times in Poland. The cry for justice, for those who committed crimes of murder and torture under communism, fills the air.
The case of Fieldorf-Czarska's father has become an international cause celebre. Polish officials want to put on trial the woman who issued the general's arrest warrant, former military prosecutor, Helena Brus, now an elderly British pensioner married to an Oxford don.
Ironically, Brus, known as Wolinska when she stalked the corridors of the Ministry of Justice during the 1950s oiling the wheels of Stalin's terror, was forced from Poland during the anti-Jewish campaign of 1968.
The Ministry of Justice has also requested the extradition from Israel of Salomon Morel, a former commander of the Soviet-run detention camp at the Swietochlowice camp in southern Poland in 1945. More than 3,000 prisoners, mainly Germans, were held at the camp during 1945. More than half died, according to the Polish news agency PAP. Israel has refused the request.
Like Brus, Salomon Morel appears to be heavily implicated in the systematic persecutions of anyone deemed anti-Soviet in post-war Poland. Like Brus, Salomon Morel, needless to say, is Jewish.
By anyone's standards, the early 1950s in the Soviet bloc were times of terror, when a nod or a wink from a communist official was enough to insure incarceration, exile or execution.
That plenty of Jewish communists, all true believers in the marxist utopia, also perished in the Polish, Hungarian and Czechoslovak show trials of the 1950s is just another black twist in 20th century Jewish history.
For those who support the continuing trials of elderly Nazis, there are no moral or logical grounds for demanding the cessation of due legal process against those on the left who also committed judicial murder.
Polish Jewish intellectuals, such as Konstanty Gebert, a former Solidarity activist and now editor of the Warsaw-based Jewish magazine Midrasz, said that if there is a case against former Stalinist officials such as Brus and Morel, then they should be brought to trial, just as any other alleged criminal should be.
The question, Gebert asks, is why zoom in on these two elderly Jews? Stalin's willing executioners, jailers and secret policemen numbered tens, if not hundreds, of thousands.
However bloody and brutal the regime at the Swietochlowice camp, it was but one in a chain of such places across the country. Only a small minority of those working such camps, in communist prisons and their basement torture chambers, were Jewish.
Most were Poles, Ukrainians or Belarussians. A study commissioned by Stanislaw Radkiewicz, secret police chief in 1945, reported that of 25,600 employees, 438 were Jewish.
"The evidence against Salomon Morel is very damaging, but why, of all the commanders of the dozens of camps run by the Soviets, pick on him? The Morel case is very worrying," says Gebert.
There are other cases pending in Poland against former communist officials. But considering how many tens of thousands of former NKVD and KGB officers helped run Stalin's terror machine, one would expect that there would be at least dozens of extradition requests to Russia, Ukraine and Belarussia, demanding that former secret policemen and women be sent back for trial.
So I asked the Ministry of Justice how many extradition requests had been submitted to these three countries in the last two years. The answer was none. It seems Poland has one law for elderly Jewish communists, but another for their former gentile comrades.
Adam LeBor is a freelance journalist based in Budapest. His book, "Hitler's Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide," is published in an updated edition this month by Simon and Schuster.
