Warsaw – A Polish online bookstore Thursday jacked up prices on a controversial book on Poles’ treatment of Jews, hoping the 4,499-zloty price (1,580 dollars) would deter sales after customers complained and threatened to boycott the retailer.
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The retailer, Selkar.pl, said it could not withdraw the book from circulation, but said the price hike should make it too expensive for customers to purchase. The book was being sold by other online retailers for about 25 zloty.
Golden Harvest, by Jan Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross, describes how some Poles living near death camps like Treblinka dug through the mass graves of Jews after the war in search of gold and other valuables that the Nazis might have missed, (as was reported here by VIN News).
The book touched a nerve in Poland, a nation that prides itself for having aided Jews during the Nazi occupation.
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They cannot simply ban the book since it would violate their version of the first amendment. Even in the U.S., they don’t “ban books”. We should let anyone read what they want but make clear what the facts really were.
My father, of blessed memory, told me about Polish neighbors cheering and clapping as his family and other Jewish families were led away to be slaughtered in Lodz, Poland. He told me that when he returned from Auschwitz (one of the few) to see his family’s house and possibly find missing relatives, he was chased off the property and subjected to anti semitic acts and rants. HIS property. His family’s property. He always said the Poles exhibited incredible cruelty. Read “”Maus” by Art Spiegelman to get an original and vivid account of how many Poles acted during this shameful period in history.
Zecher Amalek.
There was a poem by uri zvi greenburg called something like goel hadam which if you can find it should be read
Raising the price by this online bookstore to such a degree will only bring more attention to the book. It will still be available via regular bookstores, which still exist in Poland, not to mention thru the publisher and author’s online sites. Exactly what good this all will do is uncertain. The Yidden know what occured there, and so do the Poles who profited from the grisly plunder 60 years ago.
Of course, there were quite a few righteous Poles, but the phrase “Poland, a nation that prides itself for having aided Jews during the Nazi occupation” is a deliberate attempt at distorting history, no less.