Holocaust profiteering by literary hoax is widespread. "Holocaust profiteers" is the term originally coined on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. The anatomy of "Holocaust profiteering" was made clear by the Reuters Agency when it reported from Buenos Aires, Argentina on Friday, 19, April 1996 (14:50:17 PDT) on a meeting of the World Jewish Congres Rabbi Israel Singer, General Secretary of the World Jewish Congress stated that "More than three million Jews died in Poland and the Polish people are not going to be the heirs of the Polish Jews. We are never going to allow this. (...) They're gonna hear from us until Poland freezes over again. If Poland does not satisfy Jewish claims it will be "publicly attacked and humiliated" in the international forum.
The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, February 5, 2002, p. A16, "Bookshelf" published a review accurately entitled "Real Horrors, Phony Claims" It was a review of "A Life In Pieces," by Blacke Eskin, ( Norton, 251pages $25.95) written by Tom Gross, no relation to J.T. Gross. The title "Real Horrors, Phony Claims" summarizes the essence of Holocaust profiteering by literary hoax which has been practiced by J. T. Gross in his last four books.
On Friday January 5, 2011 J. Tomasz Gross together with his wife took part in a discussion which took place before television cameras of the TVP station in Poland. Tomasz Lis conducting the interview did not hide his distaste and asked penetrating questions of the Grosses. Lis made clear his disapproval of Gross’s recent literary activities, especially his new book “Golden Harvest.” According to Lis the book is full of ugly and false accusations against the Polish nation. This includes alleged massive crimes committed such as mass killing of Jews and stealing their property during and after World War Two.
During the televised conference the Grosses acted as joint authors of the “Golden Harvest.” They agreed to a very significant reduction of the number of Polish perpetrators to “probably a few thousands.” J. T. Gross was stuttering and had a hard time finding proper words for his cynical Holocaust support for Jewish claims movement. At times he repeated the same nonsense, which he had used in his last four books starting with his “Ghastly Decade.”
It appears that Gross, the New York sociologist turned historian, frustrated by his obscurity, became a full-fledged Holocaust profiteer. In the process Gross demonstrated an extraordinary hatred for the Polish people and his own greed to finally make money using the formula of Rabbi Singer quoted above from the Reuters Agency. Gross documented his hatred and greed in four propaganda books: "Upiorna Dekada - The Ghastly Decade" (Universitas, Kraków 1994) and "Sasiedzi - Neighbors" (Princeton University Press, 2001), “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz” (Random House, New York, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8129-3) and now “Golden Harvest,” which according to Google the book published by Znak met with mounting rage of informed readers. Jan Tomas Gross describes dubious examples such as finding jewelry on the grounds of the cemetery in Treblinka.
As a former political prisoner for five years in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp near Berlin I witnessed of many transactions in the macabre trade with golden teeth by the Jews who were assigned to work in the cremation of dead prisoners. I do not think that those Jews behaved in any other way than would people of any other national group had they been inspecting the dead bodies for golden teeth and using pliers to break out the gold teeth. Others likely would also have been trading with the guards and with the German criminals mafia composed of he “beruf Verbrecher” in English professional criminals marked with small green triangles on the left side of their chest and on the right side of their pants.
I found out details of these from my friend a German Jew Paul Kaufman, as I remember his last name. Paul was personally acquainted with some Jews from the Crematorium Commando, who helped him with food. Paul was a victim of a medical experiment, which resulted in a drop foot and lame walk. He had to report periodically for examination and was in Sachsenchausen when most of the Jews were ominously shipped east. The fact that prisoner’s numbers were not tattooed on hands of the inmates, the way it was done in Auschwitz, allowed me to offer to Paul prisoner’s number of a Pole so that he could get rid of the star of David on is clothes and survive. Paul did not speak Polish and did not take advantage of my offer because he was afraid that if found out he would be tortured.
In late April 1945 the “Death March of Brandenburg” took place. Of some 38,000 prisoners from Sachsenhausen of these about 6,000 had been shot dead by May 3 and when the march ended and the guards ran away after shooting several hundred prisoners in last few moments. I did not see a single Jew marked with the Star of David among the marchers. Nevertheless the “Death March of Brandenburg” is now included as a part of the Jewish Holocaust.
It appears that Gross, the New York sociologist now historian, frustrated by his obscurity, became a full-fledged Holocaust profiteer. In the process Gross demonstrated an extraordinary hatred for the Polish people and greed to succeed financially as an author.
From the beginning his well edited books were full of lies. Thus for example already on the page 41 of the “Ghastly Decade” or in Polish "Upiorna Dekada” Gross gives the following illogical title to one of his chapters: "On the fact that the prevailing Polish anti-Semitism also was the reason why the Poles who helped Jews were brutally and totally murdered by the Germans." Then on page 60 Gross writes "how was it that the people who sheltered Jews during the war, did not like to admit it after the war. (...) It was believed that anyone helping Jews got rich" and therefore could presumably be "robbed or repressed" for "breaking the local code of behavior." I know of no such "local code."
Gross does not mention the fact, that often it was difficult to admit to one's neighbor, that by sheltering a Jew, one was risking one's neighbor's life, without his knowledge; therefore, it was easier not to tell one's neighbor about the risk. For this reason many people did not celebrate the fact and the happy occasion when their hidden Jews have survived to the end of the war. The neighbors, who did not know about the presence of these Jews near them, would immediately have realized that their life had been put at risk by the decision of their neighbor without their knowledge and consent.
The fact is that in Poland Poles and Jews were separated by a cultural barrier is well described by Bashevis Singer, the Nobel Price winner for his writings in Yiddish.. Generally, it is true that at every turn most of the Jews could have been noticed because of their faulty use of the Polish language. The tragic truth is that for each Jew in the midst horrors who was saved, at least several Poles risked their own lives. Most Polish gentiles could not save Jews any more than they could save their own people. They could not prevent the killing of millions of Polish Christians and the Polish Nation itself faced genocide from the Nazi government planning the “1000 Yr. Reich” of ethnically pure German population from the River Rhine to the River Dnepr. It is difficult to find a Polish gentile family, which did not lose several family members and close relatives under the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
In his four books Gross ignores the fact that the death penalty for helping Jews was unique to wartime Poland and that the essence of the policies of the Nazi government at all times was the implementation of the doctrine of the Lebensraum, or German "living space." The aim of the Nazis was to seize Slavic lands and replace the Slavic population with what they considered "racial Germans." Thus, Poland was to be colonized by Germans and the Polish nation eradicated. For this reason the Nazis used every opportunity to kill Poles. One of the examples of this policy was the death penalty and summary execution of entire Polish families and immediate neighborhoods for helping and hiding Jews. At the same time, for example, in Denmark, which the Nazis did not intend to colonize, no one was executed for helping any of the few Jews, who lived there.
Gross falsifies quotations in order to make his points. On page 56 of "Upiorna Dekada" he changes the meaning of a quote in the diary of dr. Zygmunt Klukowski (Dziennik z lat okupacji Zamojszczyzny - A diary of the years of occupation of Zamojszczyzna). Gross insinuates that in October 1942 Poles murdered some 2300 Jews while the Nazis deported for execution 934 other victims from the same locality. His deception is achieved by omission of quotation marks ("nasi"); this changed the meaning of a crucial statement of the original diary, in which reference was made to locally stationed German gendarmes.
Gross hides the fact that the ethnic Poles considered German and Soviet invaders as equally dangerous, whereas many Jews were trying to find security on the side of the Soviets. The ethnic Poles were naturally preoccupied with saving their nation, which was exposed to massive executions starting two years before the genocide of the Jews begun.
From the beginning of the war, the Nazis were committing mass murders on the Polish civilian population, especially throughout western Poland, newly annexed by Germany. Nazis brought with them lists prepared long before the invasion of Poland of people to be executed. The Soviet NKVD prepared a list of 22,000 people of the Polish leadership community all of whom were executed during the Spring of 1940. Mass execution of the Jews in Nazi gas chambers began two years later.
The Polish resistance movement was the largest in occupied Europe. In order to break the Polish resistance Nazi terror apparatus (1939-1945) and the communist security forces (1939- 1956) tortured more gentile Poles than any other European ethnic group. Jewish tragedy consisted of mass executions but did not involve massive hunt and tortures related to resistance activities, as was the case with Polish Catholic population.
Gross does not recognize the fact that helping Jews was also a part of the resistance against the Nazis. Illogically he makes an accusation out of the fact that more Poles were engaged in the armed resistance against occupation than in saving of individual Jews. Gross cites this fact as a proof of Polish anti-Semitism.
Under the Soviet occupation there was a policy to nominate Jews to the most visible posts in the Communist terror apparatus. It happened on one hand because plenty of Jews volunteered for these positions and on the other because the Soviet government was shifting the blame to the Jews for Soviet crimes. The Soviet deliberately aggravated the intra-ethnic relations by their policy of "divide and rule."
This perfidious Soviet policy did not facilitate a postwar admission that one risked one's and others' lives while sheltering the Jews who after the war became Soviet executioners in Poland. The widespread complicity of the Jews in the Soviet terror apparatus installed in Poland was considered to be a proof of Jewish lack of concern for the existence of a sovereign Polish nation.
The collaboration between the "Jewish committees" and the NKVD in the Soviet occupied Poland is well documented. Then, the last memory of Poland of many a Polish citizens before the door was slammed shut on a boxcar bound for Siberia was that of a Jewish militiaman slamming the door. (There was no similar collaboration between Polish Catholics and the Nazis for example.) However, the problem of Jewish collaboration with enemies is more complicated. Let us remember the fact that the last experience of Jewish victims in Poland, packed into boxcars bound for the gas chambers, was that of a Jewish ghetto policeman slamming shut the death car door. The film "Pianist" made recently by Polanski vividly shows these horrible scenes. It is a matter of record that an average Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto sent to gas chambers about twenty two hundred victims.
Jan Moor Jankowski MD, for 30 years a professor of forensic medicine of the New York University School of Medicine, stunned Gross on Feb. 6, 2003 with an attack on the credibility of "Neighbors." Professor Jankowski made a striking comparison of Gross's book with another Holocaust bestseller reviewed only a day before in the Wall Street Journal. The reviewed book, "Fragments" was written by Benjamin Wilkomirski who was an imposter. He claimed to be a Jewish "Holocaust survivor" when, in fact, he was not. The Wall Street Journal reviewer called the book a "coldly planned fraud" or a work of "a deranged man who actually believes the myths he has constructed for himself."
Dr. Moor Jankowski said that he has "the same opinion of Dr. Gross and his books. It was obvious that since J. T. Gross does not seem deranged "therefore each of his last four books is a fraud." Gross did not even attempt to rebut Dr. Moor Jankowski's statement in Gross's presence during a lecture and discussion at New York University. (It should be noted that Dr. Moor Jankowski was hailed in American and Polish media for helping Jews during WWII in Poland. He was decorated by the President of France for his Resistance activities and also received a medal from Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for helping to organize the teaching of medicine in Israel. He is the only American member of the French Academy of Medicine.)
Like Gross's "documentary" bestseller, the book entitled "Fragments" (of Recovered Memories) by a Jewish orphan using the name of "Benjamin Wilkomirski" turned out to be fraudulent. For a time it was a widely acclaimed book. It was written by a Swiss Protestant, Bruno Doessekker, who pretended to be a Jewish orphan abused by Christians. Doessekker took advantage of the then fashionable in the United States court claims based on (mostly fraudulent) "recovered memories." However, the most important characteristic of the "documentaries" written by Gross, Doessekker, and Kosinski is their cynical and fraudulent exploitation of human suffering during WWII, including the genocide of the Jews.
As mentioned before The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, February 5, 2002, p. A16, "Bookshelf" published a review properly entitled "Real Horrors, Phony Claims" It was a review of "A Life In Pieces," by Blacke Eskin, Norton, 251pages $25.95) written by Tom Gross, no relation to J.T. Gross.
The story of the man who called himself Binjamin Wilkomirski is as extraordinary as it is outrageous. It began with his memoir called "Fragments," in which he claimed to be a Jewish Holocust survivor who had suffered Dr. Josef Mengele's horrendous medical experiments as a child. Wilkomirski also described his terrible experiences at Majdanek, a concentration camp in German occupied Poland, and at Auschwitz, where he saw his father beaten to death.
"Fragments," published in Switzerland in 1995, was acclaimed a masterpiece, and soon became an international bestseller. Wilkomirski won the National Jewish Book Award for auto- biography, the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in Britain. He also was given a cash award from the American Orthopsychiatric Association. His fame grew, and Wilkomirski received standing ovations throughout America, at public lectures organized by the U.S. Holocaust Museum. He was cited in newspapers as an authority on the Holocaust. Some compared him to Primo Levi. Professors of history assigned "Fragments" as obligatory reading to their students.
Suddenly he was exposed. The harrowing Holocaust memoir turned out to be written by an impostor - a gentile who had spent the war in a comfortable Protestant home in Switzerland.
Blake Eskin's "A Life in Pieces" is a thorough account of the "Fragments" swindle. By analyzing the story in detail, Mr. Eskin has given us a chance to revisit this episode of Holocaust profiteering and to understand how and why it happened not that the stories are easily understandable or pleasant any more than those in “Gross’s Golden Harvest.”
The public doubts about "Fragments" (of March 1998) came from a reader who posted his review on Amazon.com. He is Michael Mills, a junior Australian government bureaucrat living in Canberra. He found dates in "Fragments" to be wrong and realized that some of Wilkomirski's "memories" of Majdanek appeared very similar to a fake testimony already published by child "survivor" of Buchenwald.
Daniel Ganzfried, an Israeli born Swiss writer, whose own father was in Auschwitz, looked into Wilkomirski's past, his school records, and even found his family photographs of the "Holocaust survivor" from as far back as 1946, taken in Switzerland, when Wilkomirski's "Fragments" placed him in Poland.
Wilkomirski wasn't his name at all: He was Bruno Grosjean, born to a single mother, a Christian, and adopted by his wealthy new family, the Doessekkers, near Zurich. Bruno Doessekker or "Wilkomirski" before he published "Fragments," was a clarinet player from Zurich, born on Feb. 12, 1941 (not in 1939), in Biel, Switzerland. Doessekker was aware of his real childhood and fought for and won a share of his birth mother's estate in 1981.
"Wilkomirski" dismissed Mr. Ganzfried's accusations and presented himself as a victim of an "anti Semitic plot" involving Swiss government officials. But other evidence of the fraud surfaced. Mr. Doessekker now faces criminal charges in Switzerland.
Mr. Doessekker's motives were similar to those of J. T. Gross. Was he guilty of a "coldly planned fraud," or more charitably, is he simply a deranged man who actually believes his own myths? Why those who believed him came to be so easily fooled or were some of them also members of what Norman Finkelstein called the "Holocaust Industry." Were they "Holocaust profiteers" to use the term coined on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal? Thus, Holocaust historian Daniel Goldhagen, highly praised the book and the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum made "Wilkomirski" a guest of honor at a $150 per plate luncheon at New York's Carlyle Hotel.
The demand to debase the Polish people and to prepare them for a shake down by the Jewish restitution movement goes on because, besides of the Holocaust profiteers, honest people suspecting a fraud are afraid to speak up for fear of being accused of anti-Semitism.
Long forgotten are the large Polish contributions and sacrifices for the Allieds' victory, Poland was betrayed by Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran and Jalta; it was handed over to become a Soviet satellite state, after ruthless pacification of Poland by communist terror apparatus disproportionally staffed with Jews.
During half a century of Soviet occupation the puppet communist regime made mockery of historical truth and justice, while following Moscow's order to enslave and degrade the Polish people. Now the Polish people are told to forget the communist crimes and honor Holocaust profiteers as was done with J.T. Gross in connection with his “Neighbors” by the Polish authorities and state controlled media staffed largely by former communist officials, the people who long ago developed instincts and habits of knowing "whom to lick and whom to kick.”
Disgusting lies in Grosses “Fear" contain accusations that Polsh Catholics took part in killing Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The book “Golden Harvest” (“Złote Żniwa”) written by a Polish-Jewish couple is exploiting economic relations in post-war Poland and is accusing Poles of regularly enriching themselves by taking over post-Jewish properties. Now many Poles are realizing that the literary hoax produced by the Holocaust profiteering by using a literary hoax by Gross and his likes who change the image of Poland from a heroic and tragic victim of war of aggression into a vicious partner of the Nazis.
Gross’ and Wilkomirski’s literary hoax resembles the story of
Misha Defonseca (born 1937), born as Monique de Wael, who is a Belgian writer and the author of “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” which was first published in 1997 and at that time professed to be a memoir. It became an instant success in Europe and was translated into 18 languages. The French version of the book was a derivative work based on the original with the title “Survivre avec les loups” that was published in 1997 by the Éditions Robert Laffont; this second version was adapted into the French film “Survivre avec les loups” (Surviving With Wolves).
The author as well as her lawyers admitted that the bestselling book was a hoax, originally presented as autobiographical. The confession of February 29, 2008, finally set the record straight.
Actually Defonseca was born in 1937 in Etterbeek, a suburb of Brussels, Belgium, to Robert De Wael and Josephine Donvil. Her family similarly to the family of “Wilkomirski” was not Jewish, as her professed autobiography clearly states on the other hand Grosses family is 50% Jewush.
Defonesca’s parents were resistance fighters arrested by the Germans. Her father subsequently collaborated with the Gestapo and was released to live in Germany, where he dyed from natural causes later during the war. Defonseca and her husband, Maurice, moved to the United States from Paris in 1988 and bought a house in Millis, Massachusetts. He was unemployed by the mid-1990s. “Misha” began to recount a vivid story about her childhood; wandering across Europe at the age of six after her parents were deported in 1941, being sheltered by friendly packs of wolves, supposedly killing a German soldier in self defense, sneaking into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto and finally finding her way home at the end of the war. Jane Daniel, a local book publisher believed the fake story and convinced Defonseca to write a memoir about her alleged past after she heard the writer tell the story in a Massachusetts synagogue. Daniel published Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years in 1997 through her "one woman operation", Mt. Ivy Press.
Before to the uncovering of the hoax, the book had resultes in a multi-million dollar legal battle between Defonseca and the book's ghostwriter, Vera Lee, against Daniel and her small publishing company, Mt. Ivy Press. Daniel and Defonseca quarreled over profits received from the best-selling book and Daniel sued. In 2005, a Boston court ordered Daniel to pay Defonseca and Lee $22.5 million. According to Defonseca's lawyers Daniel has not yet paid the court-ordered sum.
Besides followers, the book also had many critics who pointed to passages that were logically or historically implausible. The first person who publicly doubted the authenticity of the story was Henryk M. Broder, who wrote a biography about Defonseca in 1996 for the German newspaper “der Spiegel.” In late February 2008, a baptismal certificate from a Brussels church for a Monique De Wael and a register from an elementary school near the De Waels' home that shows Monique enrolled there in September 1943—two years after Misha claimed to have left Brussels, were posted by Jane Daniel on her blog. Belgian national newspaper Le Soir soon reported on these findings.
Finally on February 29, 2008, Defonseca admitted to “Le Soir” that she had fabricated the tale, after having been presented with what the paper described as "irrefutable" evidence that her story was false. "The book is a story, it's my story", was the writer’s lame excuse in a statement issued under her real name. She said "It's not the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world." Defonseca told “Le Soir” that she had always wanted to forget her real name because of her father’ collaboration with Gestapo people had called her "the traitor's daughter".
Forensic genealogists Sharon Sergeant\ and Colleen Fitzpatrick led the team which, was instrumental in uncovering the hoax of Defonesca’s fake story in many ways similar to the Wilkomirski’s hoax.
Another literary hoax this time by a Jew is described in a play about Jerzy Kosinski was written by Davey Holmes, its title is: "More Lies About Jerzy," It was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Kosinski wrote "The Painted Bird," a harrowing novel about his Jewish boy's childhood in Nazi occupied Poland the book was introduced to the American public as an autobiography. In reality it was not his childhood, as it turned out. The play was staged in the Vineyard Theatre in New York in 2001 about ten years after Kosinski's suicide. In the play he is the swaggering antihero. Kosinski was a famous, "oh so macho" Polish-Jewish emigre whose memoir about the Holocaust was exposed as a fiction. "More Lies About Jerzy" seems to be a cartoon image as compared to the devious, deeply mysterious man who inspired the play. Jerzy Kosinski makes a spectacle of himself over and over again in "More Lies About Jerzy ," evoking his torments in the Holocaust in order to seduce women and silence his critics, fondly recalling his trips to sex clubs even striding about the stage dressed in nothing but a pair of colorful, skimpy briefs," the review tell us.
A lot was written about Jerzy Kosinski: Polish researcher Joanna Siedlecka, "Bed Black Bird" ("Czarny Ptasior," Marabut, CIS, Gdansk, Warsaw 1994.), The New York Times, Book Review of April 21, 1996 by Louis Begley and October 1996 and a review by D. G. Myers (entitled "A Life Beyond Repair," Books in Review) deal with "Jerzy Kosinski, A Biography" by James Park Sloan, (illustrated, 505 pp. New York: Dutton,1996). Myers starts by saying: "Since his suicide in 1991, the literary reputation of Jerzy Kosinski has continued to sink."
Kosinski's "Steps" won the 1969 National Book Award. The author fitted well into American sexual revolution with his "grisly violence and a sexuality bordering on the sadomasochistic." He confined to Dorothy Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, that his manuscript of the "Painted Bird" was "based on his experiences."
Summaries of BBC documentary "Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski" were shown on CBC in Canada on Jan. 14, 1996 and reviewed in "The Globe and Mail" of Toronto and in "The Toronto Star" under the title: "The Passionate Eye: Sex, Lies and Jerzy Kosinski." The "Alert of Los Angeles" published in February 1995 an article entitled "Jerzy Kosinski - Liar and Ingrate."
After his suicide in 1991 a number of documentaries, articles and stage performances dealt with the person of Kosinski and his best- selling novels such as "The Painted Bird" and "Being There." Over thirty years earlier in the late 1950's, Jerzy Kosinski, as a recent immigrant started working in Manhattan as a parking lot attendant at "Kinney Rent a Car." Soon, however, he became a part of the literary scene in New York City and a frequent guest on late night talk shows of Johny Carlson. He played the role of Leon Trotsky, in Warren Beatty's "Reds."
Kosinski visited prominent Poles in Washington and tried to get them to give him useful blurbs for his first two books ("Future is Ours, Camarade" 1960, and "NoThird Path," 1962), which he wrote under the pen name of Joseph Nowak. He thought that his stories depicting the misery of life in Moscow and in the USSR in general would sell well in the USA entangled in the cold war against the Soviets. He was disappointed. His anti-Soviet books did not get any serious reviews and did not sell well. Kosinski's experience was a forerunner of the similar difficulties of another author, a sociologist, named Jan Tomasz Gross, whose literary activities are discussed below.
Kosinski's book "The Painted Bird" became a bestseller thanks to its pornographic content and revelations of sexual abuse of a Jewish Holocaust victim in occupied Poland. He presented the book to the publisher at the time when sexual revolution was promoted in America as a part of the culture war against the Catholic Church and its Legion of Decency. This culture war was also fought by the Hollywood moguls, who's purpose was to include pornography in their films.
"An Empire Of Their Own, How The Jews Invented Hollywood" by Neal Gabler (Doubleday, New York, 1988) was called "a pioneering work" by "The New Republic." In it Jews not only invented Hollywood but also controlled it ever since. The sexual revolution was supported by radical Jews, who like Herbert Marcuse, the father of the sex revolution in America, realized its power as a political weapon and a source of huge profits from the pornographic content in films and publications.
Pornography is a well proven weapon to disorient young people and break their ties with the older generations. The Bolsheviks used it extensively during their revolution. Radical Jews used it in the past to weaken morally and politically the majority in the countries of their residence. Before the war, for example, Cardinal Hlond fought against the spreading of pornography by Jews in Poland.
Kosinski realized that the acceptance of his new book would be strengthened by his assumption of a double identity. He was to be a victim of horrible sexual child abuse and also a victim of the Holocaust in Poland. "The Painted Bird" became a basic Holocaust text. "It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into numerous languages, and required reading in high school and college classes" according to Norman G. Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry" Verso, New York, 2000). Ellie Wiesel, the inventor of the use of the word "holocaust" was a great admirer of Kosinski. Wiesel used his new word to described the Nazi genocide of the Jews on the basis of Nazi attempt to kill all Jews within the territory occupied by them. As it happened the Hitlerites killed two thirds of the Jews of Europe and one third of world Jewry. To describe this tragic event Wiesel used the Greek word "holo kaustos" meaning "burnt whole" as a description of the Jewish tragedy. Miriam Webster's Dictionary covers with this term the mass slaughter of some twenty five to thirty millions of the unarmed European civilians during World War II. That is not, however, what the Jewish cult of the Holocaust needs. The radical Jews do not want to count gentile lost lives together with Jews and they refuse to recognize any non-Jews as "Holocaust survivors."
Jewish professional Holocaust survivor, Ellie Wiesel said that the Kosinski's "Painted Bird" changed his life. "It is as a chronicle that 'Painted Bird'...achieves its unusual power." Both authors had a lot in common. While Kosinski "analysed the new language", Wiesel wanted "to forge a new language" of the Holocaust.
Norman Finkelstein calls their endeavor "ruminations...of a charlatan" or an empty debate for which he quoted the Polish proverb: "From empty to vacuum." He compared Kosinski's book to a more recent fraud contained in Bejamin Wilkomirski's "Fragments."
One could identify many more recent additions to this literary genre. For example, J. T. Gross's books "Upiorna Dekada" or - "The Ghastly Decade" (Universitas, Kraków 1994) and "Sasiedzi" or - "Neighbors" (Princeton University Press, 2001). In "Neighbors" the author claims that the Christian half of the town of Jedwabne, Poland, murdered the Jewish half, while Nazis tried unsuccessfully to save some of the Jewish victims. Gross's books "Ghastly Decade," "Neighbors," “Fear” and “Golden Harvest” belong to the same literary type of Holocaust profiteering
In the "Painted Bird," Kosinski claims that his parents worried about his welfare in wartime Poland in 1939, sent him to friends in Eastern Poland, while they remained in Lodz, hidden by Poles. After the war they found him in an orphanage unable to speak for three years. He describes in detail sexual abuse suffered by him and other Jewish children. He describes the disappearance of Lilka, a Jewish girl beaten and raped by a Polish farmer. He claims that Poles were putting out the eyes of Jews, drowning them, sexually abusing, and torturing them. Kosinski claims, by advertizing the book as his own autobiography, that he shared in the horrible experiences described by him.
Jerzy Lewinkopf Kosinski was six when the war started and twelve when it ended. Joanna Rostropowicz-Clark described Kosinski in her article "The Antihero of Our Time" (Przeglad Polski, New York, May 9, 1996;) she included, courtesy Jeane Kibourne, Kosinski's pictures at six and twelve. Both photos show a very happy and well nurished child, without any signs of maltreatment.
Josek Jerzy Nikodem Lewinkopf Kosinski was born in Lodz in 1933. His father Mojzesz Lewinkopf was born in Zamosc in 1891 and was a buyer. His mother Elzbieta was born in Lodz in 1899. The Lewinkopfs changed their name to Kosinski and in 1940, moved with Jerzy to Sandomierz.
The notion that it was dangerous to be Jewish during the war caused Jerzy to feel self hatred and become so antisemitic that he did not want to play with Jewish children. He learned to recite Catholic prayers in Polish. The Lewinkopf Kosinski family changed address several times, but never entered the ghetto. At first they lived with other Jews in a Polish Catholic home; later they moved alone into another Polish home. They did not wear the Star of David on their clothes. After two years they moved to Dabrowa Rzeczycka (DR) near Radomysl, where lived Father Okon, Polish priest who helped many Jews.
In DR Jerzy was baptized and received Holy Communion in May 1943. Both, Mrs. Lewinkopf Kosinski and Jerzy had strikingly Semitic appearance. Despite of this fact Jerzy volunteered to serve as an altar boy and learned the Latin liturgy. He read Polish classical literature and started to study English, while his father worked as a middleman for the local farmers and had enough money to hire a maid. Kosinskis hanged in their rooms pictures of Jesus, the Holy Family,and Our Lady. Each time Jerzy received Holy Communion with other children his mother gave them a party and served cakes and cocoa, which was a rarity during the war.
Mrs Lewinkopf Kosinski was always well dressed, made up, and manicured. She lived comfortably and did not need to cook and clean her house during the war. Kosinskis' life style contrasted with other Jews who had to hide in potato cellars, barns, etc.
Joanna Siedlecka describes the questionable character of Mojzesz Lewinkopf Kosinski. He dealt with German police and survived a number of meetings with Germans and had contact with local farmers and with members of the resistance movement Armia Krajowa (The Home Army, which fought for a free Poland). He also dealt with the communists underground.
People wandered what did Mojzesz give Nazis in exchange for his life that other local Jews, who perished, did not give. Mojzesz also claimed that he played chess with Soviet sponsored communists guerillas and did not spy for them, as the local Poles had suspected. When the Soviets occupied DR, on 28th of July, 1944, he openly worked for them, joined the communist party and paraded his small nephew Henio in a Soviet uniform. Mojzesz was often seen with officers of the NKVD. Soon his landlord was arrested, with all local soldiers of the clandestine Polish Home Army (AK); each of these men was known to Jerzy's father and each was denounced by him. Mojzesz Lewinkopf Kosinski managed to survive an attempt on his life by anti-communists, because he was away from home, traveling to Lodz.
When Kosinski's "Painted Bird" was translated into Polish, it was read by the people with whom the Lewinkopf family lived during the war. They were scandalized by the tales of abuse that never happened. They recognized names of Jewish children sheltered by them during the war - children who survived thanks to them, now painted as victims of their abuse. They were bitter and offended by Jerzy's ingratitude and obsession to slander them. Jewish girl Lilka was never mistreated by them and she never disappeared, as Kosinski claimed.
Kosinski's benefactors wrote letters to Polish papers exposing JerzyKosinski for the liar and ingrate he was. They did not realize just how much literary success and money Jerzy earned in America by claiming that he was a Holocaust survivor victimized by them. In reality he became a Holocaust profiteer, who profited by defaming the very people who saved his life.
Kosinski's book "Being There" was at first very successful. It was turned into a movie of the same name. However, eventually it contributed to his downfall, when his ghost writers rebelled against him. It became known that the whole concept and structure of "Being There" was copied from a Polish book written by Tadeusz Dolega Mostowicz (1898-1939), entitled "Kariera Nikodema Dyzmy" ("The Carrier of Nikodem Dyzma" 1932). Ironically, Dolega Mostowicz lost his life during the September 1939 campaign betrayed by Jews near the Polish-Romanian border. Professor Jerzy Robert Nowak established that Dolega Mostowicz was a quarter master and a reserve officer in the Polish army mobilized in 1939. Mostowicz realized upon crossing the border into Romania, that he could not get any supplies there. He returned across the border, and bought the necessary provisions for his men at a nearby market. When he was heading back towards Romania, local Jews pointed him out to a Soviet tank crew, which chased Mostowicz's truck, assumed a good shooting position, and killed Tadeusz Dolega Mostowicz and his driver with a shot of a tank cannon.
Jan Tomasz Gross acted much like Jerzy Kosinski. Gross, who's previous books were ignored by critics in the United States, now is basking in the limelights of publicity thanks to wild accusations against Poles under Soviet and German occupation.
Some years ago Professor Jan Tomasz Gross wrote a fairly well- documented book entitled "Revolution from abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia." In this work, published by Princeton University Press, Gross gave substantial evidence of the complicity of some Polish Jews in the murder of thousands of Polish Catholics by the Soviet forces, who occupied much of Poland in September of 1939, during the joint Soviet-Nazi invasion of that country. His extensively footnoted book was received with stony silence by the journals, which might have been expected to review it, from the professional quarterly Slavic Review to the New York Times. Indeed, Gross was essentially put in a state of hostile isolation by many persons in the literary and professional Slavic community.
Apparently Gross has now worked his passage back into "politically correct society" with his recent book "Neighbors," also published by Princeton University Press. Relying principally on recollections of a Polish-Jewish Communist official (Szmul Wasersztajn aka "Calka"), Gross has produced a thin argument to the effect that in 1941 Polish civilians from the village of Jedwabne drove 1600 Jews into a barn and burned them to death. The geometrical improbability of the dismal spectacle aside (the farmer who owned the barn owned only four acres and the barn was small), one wonders how such a scantily researched book can receive the instant cachets of the same journals which had simply ignored "Revolution from Abroad."
It appears that Gross, the New York sociologist, frustrated by his obscurity, became a full-fledged Holocaust profiteer. In the process Gross demonstrated an extraordinary hatred for the Polish people. He documented his hatred in four propaganda books: "Upiorna Dekada - The Ghastly Decade" (Universitas, Kraków 1994), "Sasiedzi - Neighbors" (Princeton University Press, 2001), “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz” (Random House, New York, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8129-3) and now “Golden Harvest,” which according to Google the book published by “Znak” associated with “TygodnikPowszechny” which is subsidized by “Batory Fundation” financed by George Soros. J.T. Gross serves on the board of the Batory Foundation.”
www.pogonowski.com
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