Warsaw – At first glance, it seems like an ordinary, innocent photograph: a group of Polish peasants holding shovels in a field on a sunny day. But look closer and you see the skulls and bones scattered at their feet.
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According to some historians, the photo was taken at the site of the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland shortly after World War II and shows the peasants digging up Jewish remains in search of gold or other valuables. When it ran alongside a 2008 newspaper feature about Poland’s postwar era, most readers didn’t take much notice. But when historian Jan Tomasz Gross saw the photo, he was moved to write Golden Harvest, a controversial new book in which he argues that many Poles enriched themselves during the war by exploiting Jews, from plundering mass graves to ferreting out Jews in hiding for reward. In the book’s introduction, Gross recalls how the photo made a big impression on him. “I could not understand why it passed without echo among the [newspaper’s] readers,” he writes.
While the photo did not create much of a stir, the book — which was published in Poland on March 10 — has. Co-written by Gross’s wife Irena Grudzinska Gross, Golden Harvest charges that some Poles searched mass graves to retrieve golden teeth from the skulls of Jews murdered by the Nazis, traded glasses of water for golden coins from emaciated Jews being transported to death camps and pointed out hiding Jews to the Nazis in order to get ahold of their belongings. “Plundering Jewish property was an important element of the circulation of goods, an element of economic life, and thus a social fact, not an incidental behavior of demoralized individuals,” writes Gross about the villagers living near the death camps in Poland.
I have always heard that the pre-war Jewish population of Poland was 3.3 million. If we take the average family size to be 6 people, we get 550,000 families. Some of those families owned one property, some owned zero property, and some owned many properties. It is fair to assume that the number of Jewish-owned properties was at least 500,000. I recall that the pogrom in 1946 Kielce was due to the resentment by the locals of returning Jews who had survived the German murderers.
Those formerly Jewish-owned parcels of land exist today and they bear silent witness to the billions of dollars of Polish wealth due directly to the murder of Jews. The Poles can claim that the Germans took all the Jewish gold, jewelry, assets, etc. However, the real property is still right where the murdered Jews left it. Surely the vast majority of the property has never been paid for.
It’s a reasonably fair article pointing out to the fact that the issues are being debated and there is still a lot to research. There were Poles who committed crimes or behaved shamefully, but it’s the extent of the phenomenon and the motives (anti-Semitism vs. opportunistic greed*) that is the crux of the controversy. Note the difference between what is known about Nazi crimes (where details about specific massacres, camps are known.) and crimes committed by Poles (where, with few exceptions, it’s more of a guesstimate).
So what else is new? I’ve read of Poles and other Eastern Europeans doing this years after WW2 (excavating mass graves).
If greed were a motive, the proof would be in the number of Polish Christian graves that were robbed. The Nazis killed 3 million Polish Christians. I would assume that a disproportionate number of those killed came from the upper classes, as Hitler was trying to wipe them out. Polish Christian graves would have yielded just as much in the way of dental gold as Jewish graves. So, how many Polish Christian graves were robbed? If the number was comparable to the Jewish graves robbed, then I concede that greed was the prime motive. If not, then anti-Semitism was.
Fair point, we should compare. All I say here is conjectures. Though some Jews might have brought more valuables because they were told they were being “resettled”. And ethnic Poles’ graves would have been more dispersed. Treblinka was huge and relatively isolated. It’s easier to do such “work” in the woods than in Warsaw.
An educated Pole whom I told about Gross’ book immediately mentioned a novel by Zeromski (I think) that described how Polish peasants robbed corpses of Polish insurgents (usually nobles) in 1863. Granted, it was a while ago. But some things didn’t change by 1940s. A newspaper recently reported that a gang of grave-robbers was caught in Poland. They didn’t dig up corpses but stole metal and gold elements from several hundred graves. I don’t like to say it, but many Poles believe there are always some scoundrels in Poland that jump on every occasion to loot and rob (e.g. flood). Could it be the only cause? Maybe not, but I don’t think anti-Semitism was – those criminals were looking for gain. Whether they would have behaved the same if those were the graves of 1 million Christian Poles, I don’t know. Maybe anti-Semitism is what allowed them to stoop lower.