by Richard H. Curtiss
„The
Holocaust museum is doing wonderful work. But I’d hate to think that the one
thing the Holocaust Museum doesn’t talk about is genocide when it’s done by
Jews.“—John Sack, author of An Eye for an Eye, Feb. 13, 1997.
Listening
to American magazine writer John Sack speak is like reading the Thousand and One Nights. Each improbable adventure seems to
lead to another even more astonishing tale. But the Arabian Nights is a work of fiction, set in the
Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphate. John Sack’s tales are true, and they take
place in such varied settings as California, Poland, Germany and Israel over
the past half century. And while editions of the Arabian Nights are available
through any bookstore, John Sack’s book, An Eye for an Eye, published in 1993, is out of print less than
four years after it was issued.
The 66-year-old author, who is
Jewish and who presently lives in Idaho, was invited by Michael Berenbaum,
until recently director of the research institute of the Holocaust Museum in
Washington, DC, to tell an invitational audience his story of how some 60,000
to 80,000 German prisoners died at the hands of a largely Jewish guard force in
the aftermath of the European Holocaust in World War II. Just before the talk
was to be held, however, it was canceled by the museum’s new director, Dr.
Walter Reich. When Sack ascertained that he had been deliberately „disinvited“
by the new head of the Holocaust Museum, he spent $300 to rent a room to
deliver the same talk February 13, 1997, to journalists at the National Press
Club in Washington, DC.
Sack’s misadventure with censorship
by the publicly funded US Holocaust Museum began in California in April 1976
when he met the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Lola Potak. The
daughter told him how in Nazi concentration camps her mother had lost her
mother and her sister, and had had a brother hanged by the Nazis in January
1945.
Subsequently Lola Potak, whose
weight was down to 65 pounds, escaped when prisoners were being marched from
one camp to another to avoid the oncoming Allied armies in the winter of
1944-1945. After the area in which she was hiding was overrun by the Russian
army, she volunteered to serve the Polish secret police against her German
oppressors. She ended up as the commander of a camp for German prisoners
operated at Gliwice [Gleiwitz], Poland. It was one of 1,255 such camps
established as Soviet forces swept across Europe, Sack learned. He spent the
next two-and-a-half years interviewing Lola and other former guards to whom she
introduced him about their experiences at Russian and Polish-operated camps. [See:
„Book Detailing Jewish Crimes Against Germans Banned,“ Jan.-Feb. 1995 Journal, p. 28.]
Destructive Hate
The result was an article in California magazine entitled „Lola’s Revenge and Lola’s Redemption.“ In it Sack wrote about how Lola, who at first could think of nothing but revenge, one day found herself challenging a guard under her command who was beating a German prisoner. „If you despise them, why do you want to be like them?“ she asked. From then on she told the guards to treat the German prisoners like human beings. „Maybe people will learn that to hate your neighbors may not destroy them, but it will surely destroy you,“ Lola said.
Sack’s article won an award as the
best magazine article of the year. As a result, he signed up Lola to
collaborate with him on a book about the camps for German prisoners operated by
Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. After he approached a number of publishing
firms, the idea was accepted by Henry Holt publishers.
To Sack’s chagrin, however, Lola
Potak and other former guards she had introduced him to then refused permission
to use their stories. When he pointed out that they had a contract, they
threatened „to sue me, to kill me, and to call the Israeli mafia,“ Sack said.
So Sack, who speaks and reads fluent
German, gave up the idea of working with his original collaborators, but not of
writing the book. In April 1989 he visited the German Federal Archives in a
castle above the Rhine River. There he found five statements by Germans who
were incarcerated in Lola’s prison. He looked up the five former prisoners,
found three other guards who had served under Lola, and visited the prison.
From there his research took him to
various countries where he talked to other witnesses and read thousands of
documents. His researches confirmed that Lola had been the camp commandant, and
that she had stopped the violence against the prisoners.
„So Lola was telling the truth, but
she wasn’t telling the whole truth,“ Sack told his Press Club audience. He
explained that he learned that „among the prisoners in Lola’s camp were 20
captured German soldiers. But there also were 1,000 civilians.
„They were tortured. One was a
14-year-old boy arrested for wearing a Boy Scout uniform. They poured gasoline
on the Boy Scout’s hair and set it on fire. He went insane. The Germans who
died in the camp were buried in a mass grave at a Catholic cemetery.
„The truth was that the Germans in
Lola’s prison were worse off than Lola had been at Auschwitz.“ Sack continued. „For
example, the guards at Auschwitz were not allowed to rape the prisoners. In
Lola’s prison they did.“
Sack said the prisons were operated
by the Polish Office of State Security. The Germans called it the „Polish
Gestapo.“ Of the security office directors, „almost all were Jews, and
three-quarters of the officers were Jews and one-quarter were Catholics,“ Sack
said. Sack then went looking for the camp officers, finding some in Israel, and
one in New Jersey.
He confirmed that between 60,000 and
80,000 Germans died in the camps. Of 50 babies in one camp, 48 died. „From
Gliwice we moved westward to Breslau and from there to Prague,“ another former
guard told him, describing how Germans were interned behind advancing Allied
forces. „More Germans died in the camps than Germany lost in the bombing of
Dresden, or than Japan lost at Hiroshima,“ Sack said. „Although the numbers of
Germans who died in the camps were only one percent of those who died in the
Holocaust, one German survivor said that, for the victims, it was another
Holocaust.“
Sack also heard about Solomon Morel,
supposedly Lola Potak’s boyfriend and the commander of another internment camp
in Poland. Morel, while drunk, assembled a group of German prisoners and
threatened to kill them if they did not sing the Nazi „Horst Wessel Song.“
Then, while forcing them to continue to sing, he began beating the prisoners to
death with a wooden chair.
The author prepared the story of
Morel for publication as a separate article. „GQ paid $15,000 and then didn’t publish it,“ Sack said. „Mother Jones didn’t call back. The New Yorker refused to look at it.“ In 1993,
however, The Village Voice published the story of Solomon
Morel and in the same year Basic Books published Sack’s long-delayed book, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of
Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945. In fact, the book was rushed into publication
to accompany a segment on CBS’s „60 Minutes“ featuring Morel’s story.
Getting his book published didn’t
end John Sack’s troubles, however. Some of the reviewers challenged the book’s
authenticity. One headline read „The Big Lie, Continued.“ Another reviewer
called it „false witness“ and still another speculated that „none of this ever
happened.“ Although the Morel story was carried in newspapers in Tel Aviv, „in
the United States, except for ‘60 Minutes,’ only The New York Times carried it,“ Sack said.
The American writer insists there
are lessons to be learned from his research. „How can we say to other people,
the Germans, the Serbs, the Hutus, ‘what you’re doing is wrong’ when we
ourselves do it and then cover it up?“ he asks.
„How could the Germans do it? Until
we find out why, these holocausts will continue. If we hate and we act on that
hate, then we have even more hate later on. You don’t have to be a German to
become like that. We all have it in us to become like Nazis. Hate is like a
muscle. The more we exercise it, the bigger it gets,“ Sack says. His belief in
his mission is expressed most succinctly in his book’s dedication: „For all who
died and for all who, because of this story, might live.“
As for the book’s commercial
reception, the New Republic carried one advertisement for it
but wouldn’t carry a second one. Instead, according to a recent article in The Washington Post, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier said shortly
after the book came out that it was „one of the stupidest books I’ve ever read
and I frankly resolved to do as much damage as I could.“ At the time of the book’s
publication, neither The
Washington Post
nor The New York
Times reviewed it.
This unwillingness even to acknowledge the book’s existence led New York magazine to publish an article in May 1994
headlined „The Book They Dare Not Review.“ That article reported that two
leading scholars, Istvan Deak and Arno Mayer, had verified that the kinds of
crimes Sack reported in his book did indeed take place.
Eventually The Nation, a liberal journal, printed an article on the
book by historian Jon Wiener. However, it contained statements by both Deak and
Mayer that seemed to recant or disavow their quotations in New York magazine. Wiener’s own conclusion was that
Sack „distorts and sensationalizes history.“ Wiener added that although Sack „deserves
credit for finding and doing the work on an important story ... his lack of
skill as an historian is crippling.“
Writing in the extreme Zionist New Republic, Harvard University’s Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen, author of the heavily publicized book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, attacked Sack personally, accusing
him of „outright omission or virtual concealment of relevant numbers ...
fictionalization [and] insouciance about hard evidence.“ The Harvard Crimson then accepted an ad in which Sack
challenged Harvard’s Goldhagen to a debate, a challenge that was not accepted.
Sack’s interest in speaking at the
Holocaust Museum resulted from an invitation to Goldhagen to speak there in
April 1996. Goldhagen’s thesis is that most of the German people were willing
participants in the Holocaust, and that their crimes were rooted in German
history and culture.
„I’m basically saying the exact
opposite of Goldhagen – that you don’t have to be German to do this,“ Sack
said. „When I see all this publicity going to someone who’s absolutely 100
percent dead wrong, I want to speak out.“
In his National Press Club talk Sack
acknowledged, in answer to a question, that Basic Books printed 17,000 copies
of his book, but that it no longer is obtainable from the publisher. Sack
refuses to attribute this to censorship, but instead blames the vagaries of the
book trade.
Nevertheless, he admitted that he
now is trying to buy back the rights from Basic Books. If he concludes that the
publisher is deliberately trying to keep the book off the market, Sack vows to
have the last word. „If I can’t get the rights back, I’ll put it on the
Internet for free,“ he told his audience.
„Thus, as we do nothing but enact history, we
say little but recite it: nay, rather, in that widest sense, our whole spiritual
life is built thereon. For, strictly considered, what is all knowledge too but
recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning
and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials?“
- Thomas Carlyle
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