<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: The Hole Has No Floor - We Keep On Falling !
Review: I have this book in German where Amazon still sells it. I am also reading "The 79th Survivor" by Artur Rubinstein's brother-in-law, Bronislaw Mlynarski who is mentioned in Slowes' book and who was one of 79 to survive the Starobielsk Camp - where ironically the Soviets were hoarding Ukrainian grain being shipped by trainloads to Hitler in 1939-40.Publishers' Weekly review seemed to think Slowes was not the genuine article because he was not face down in some mass-grave with a Walther PK bullet in the back of his head.......no he is a living witness ! The USSR invaded Poland on 17th September 1939 in coordination with the Nazis; they seized the 300.000 Polish troops preparing a last stand in the SE of their country against the Wehrmacht when the Red Army fell in their rear and carted them off to slave camps in Magadan and throughout the Gulags. The Officers were siphoned off to special camps - where these reservists, doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists could be denigrated, humiliated, robbed, starved, and experience life as prisoners of the NKVD not the Red Army. Was it in April 1940 that Beria and Stalin decided to do away with them ? Was this when the Nazis began construction of a new camp at Oswiecem known outside as Auschwitz ? Is this where Polish intellectuals and civic leaders were to be taken for liquidation (Jews did not arrive until late 1941) ? Is it true that the NKVD and SS ran a joint centre in Zakopane to coordinate the destruction of Poland's intelligentsia and independent leaders ? These are mentioned in the foreword to Slowes' book. The real value of Slowes' book is that he was a Jew in the Polish Officer Corps; and whereas many of the executioners of Stalin's NKVD who did the deed - not just at Katyn - were also Jewish - there has been a failure in many works to note that 15.000 officers is a huge under-estimate; and as Slowes points out there were at least 1000 Jews among those Polish Officers including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army - they too 'disappeared'. We should recall that Katyn was an old Cheka killing-zone; and that the only reason we heard of it was because the German advance exposed it; but Britain and USA continued the Soviet line of it being a German atrocity (and I believe Germans did hang at Nuremberg for this Soviet crime).........The story that Stalin told Sikorski about these officers having gone missing -when the Second Polish Corps was created in 1940 and allowed to leave for Iran (before fighting at Monte Cassino)- when they had 200.000 soldiers (incl. Menachem Begin) and very few officers - Stalin said he had no idea where the officers were - can be seen as the cause of the split between Poland and the Allies as their interests became subordinated to Realpolitik. In 1991 this book mentions they found other mass graves with soldiers from Starobielsk I believe. The Russians are slowly providing information to the Poles - mainly Yeltsin - Gorbachev was too much the Party Man to own up to this. In addition to these officers murdered by NKVD executioners to deprive Poland of any hope of becoming a sovereign state again; we should remember the thousands of families deported from the Soviet occupation of half Poland's territory (still today) and deportation of families of these officers to slave camps in Siberia, or Kazakhstan; or simply their death by starvation or being drowned in barges in the White Sea. Is there anything to choose between SS and NKVD ? Not really, except that the Bolsheviks had a 20 year head-start on the Nazis: imagine over 1.000 Jews actually fled the Soviet Occupied Zone to get into the German General-Government Area !!!! I think this is a very interesting book about a subject people in Western Europe know very little, and which goes to the very heart of Poland's social and economic weakness even today, when one of the Great Evils of the 20th Century; Soviet Communism sought to decapitate a nation and destroy any hope of independence.......and in so doing killed around 25.000 Polish Officers who could have led those 200.000 soldiers of the 2nd Corps under General Anders (who had spent 2 years under NKVD interrogation in Moscow)........these were the men that fought and took Monte Cassino.......having discovered from Radio Berlin months earlier what really happened to their officers.....and their Allies recite the words taught them by Stalin blaming the Nazis for NKVD war crimes
<< 1 >>
| 
