On Not Mentioning the Jews in Nazi/Polish/Holocaust Literature: "Spring Held No Hope", 1942

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 902

Maria Mikorska’s Spring Held No Hope, published in London in June 1941 is a difficult, hard, emotional read, even in the genre of Holocaust literature.  It quickly paints a documentary history of bestial behavior of the Nazis in Poland.  I wonder though what happened to the mentioning of the Jewish issue in all of this reportage of inhuman transportation and treatment of humans, as the reference almost never occurs.  

Reading though this 52-page pamphlet of terror and horror, I wondered what exactly happened to the missing reportage of the hunting and killing of the Jews as a group.. The period of 1939-1941 saw the beginning of the Endlösung der Judenfrage¹ (“The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem”) in which 90+% of the 3.5 million Polish Jews alive in the Polish Second Republic were killed and exterminated, the primary victims of the Nazi Holocaust.  At this point in the war the Nazis were removing Jews from their cities and establishing regional ghettoes.  Once the Jews were collected in this manner it was easier for the administration of their extermination.

Getting back to Spring Held No Hope and the lack of identification of the Jews as a persecuted group I turn to pp 24 and 25 (illustrated below and clickable).  

The examples of inhuman transport and the direct extermination of men, women and children by starvation and hypothermia mention the cities Jarocin, Gdynia, Siedlice, Skierniewice, Lublin and Otwock:  all of which had large centers of Jewish populations that were removed by the Germans directly after the invasion and removed to ghettoes though this fact is not mentioned in this pamphlet. Ostensibly the collection of Jews was not in an effort to seize property (as the majority of the Jews in Poland at this time had little wealth) but rather to supply labor (being a group with the potential for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of humans capable of performing slave labor).  The Jews in Gdynia (for example) were sent to Siedlice to establish a larger Ghetto immediately after the invasion; by 1942 the tens of thousands of occupants were either shot and killed or sent to Treblinka; 2,000 or so remained after this, though most of them were also soon sent to Treblinka; those remaining were all executed when the ghetto was completely liquidated on 14 April 1943. 

I am in no way saying that it the murder of Poles during the Nazi occupation was limited to Jews—the 3.5 million Polish Jews represented 10% of the Polish population; of the remaining 90%, or 32 million or so Gentile Poles, some 3 million were killed by the Nazis, or about 10% of that population.

These are horrible stories told by Mikorska—but I’m bothered by the lack of the recognition of the Jews as the major, featured target in all of this and wonder if the author suffered an enormous sin of omission. This is far from being  a singular event--even the important and highly significant Eisenhower report on the concentration camps of May 1945 does not signify the Jewish people as anything out of the ordinary--and may well be indicative of the general practice of dealing with the Jewish aspect of the Nazi exterminations.

Notes

1. The name and practiced of the Final Solution was infamously adopted at the Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942, liquidating the ghettoes and sending the occupants to the six major concentration camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

I've written elsewhere in this blog on the Holocaust; for more, search "Holocaust" in the Google blogsearch in the left column.