Terrible Secret

This is a quite provocative and immensely fascinating investigation into the long-standing controversy over the degree to which the Polish people were complicit in the holocaust. This an issue that has been hotly debated for decades, in fact since it was first raised as a possibility ion the late 1940s. Given the degree to which millions of otherwise persecuted Jews had fled to the more tolerant attitudes of the Poles during the decades before the war, it was somewhat surprising that the accusations arose in the first place. Yet the way in which the Holocaust first began to flourish and spread throughout the small villages and hamlets of rural Poland made many observers suspicious of the degree of involvement by local peasants, who did in fact benefit from the dislocation of Jewish farmers by taking over their property and possessions. The investigation described in this new and updated version of this book is hardly a dispassionate or disinterested effort; the author is a Polish patriot who has long denied such accusations, and who turned his considerable investigative efforts toward disproving this claim. What he discovered substantiates his argument that far from being the active participants in the Holocaust others have claimed, many Poles were among the first to raise alarm over the suspicious activities of the Wehrmacht and the Special Forces to begin preparations for what became the "Final Solution" to the so-called `Jewish Question". In fact, Laqueur argues, many Germans, as well as international Jewish organizations, and top government officials in the western democracies first learned of the atrocities being perpetrated on the indigenous Polish Jews from other concerned Poles. What he reveals in doing so paints a devastating picture of apathy, disregard, and callousness on the part of the watching world.In what has since been described as a conspiracy of silence, much of the so-called civilized world stood by passively as the Holocaust gathered momentum and became a widespread and well organized mechanism for murdering millions of Jews, communists, gypsies, and other malcontents by the Nazi forces of occupation. This murderous campaign was conducted under the veil of a screen of lies, euphemisms, and political evasions, one in which the political expediencies for the western democracies became more important than dealing with the systematic annihilation of millions of human beings. The author's point is well taken. Responsibility for what happened in the death camps must be widely shared, and by a cast that includes not only the Nazi perpetrators but also the relatively disinterested and dispassionate indifference with which the rest of the political world dealt with the evolving situation. This deals quite passionately with what has become almost a cottage industry in the realm of books dealing with the social, economic, and political background that allowed the holocaust to be possible, to be probable, and then to occur. It is, along

Walter Laqueur, a French Jew, discusses how the Polish underground and the Polish government in exile reacted to the unfolding extermination of the Jews by the Germans during World War 2. Owing to the fact that Jews had lived in relative tolerance for centuries in Poland, a large fraction of the world's Jews had made Poland their home. It was therefore logical for most of the death camps built and operated by the Germans to be erected in German-occupied Poland. Insinuations are periodically hurled against the Polish underground, accusing it of silence about what the Germans were doing to the Jews. The implication is that Poles did not care about, or even secretly approved of, the extermination of Polish Jews by the Germans. Laqueur debunks all of these Polonophobic myths. He shows in detail that the Polish government promptly relayed information about the mass murder of Jews by Germans to the British government. There was not the slightest hesitancy or delay, on the part of Poles, in revealing this terrible secret to anyone who would listen.