Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

Another Fable from Spieberg.

In the spirit of the lies and the liars and Holohoax rally guy, Spielberg's movie 'The Last Days' another Fable from Spieberg is in the works.

Steven Spielberg’s “The Diary of Schindler’s Pianist” has won the Academy Award for best picture of 2011 even before its release, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today.

“It would be insulting to make a film of this stature wait almost a year to be honored,” said Reynolds Pompton, academy president. “Besides, there would be no suspense factor at the ceremony anyway.”

The blockbuster film will not only be directed by but also will star Mr. Spielberg, who stepped into the key role of Hektor Schindler, the brother of the famed Oskar Schindler of “Schindler’s List,” when Aston Kutcher proved unavailable, officials of Dreamworks Studios said.

The script, originally written by Darren Aronofsky and Aaron Sorkin and now undergoing a rewrite by Quentin Tarantino, tells the story of a 13-year-old Jewish girl who is rescued from Auschwitz by Schindler, a private in a Slovenian resistance unit, who can never forget the piano recital he once saw the brilliant prodigy give in the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow. The two are pursued through Eastern Europe by a vengeful SS man to be played by Christoph Waltz but are saved by an elite American infantry squad under the command of Tom Hanks one day before the war ends.

Based on a made-up story that loosely resembles an apocryphal legend, the tragic yet uplifting saga will be narrated by Natalie Portman in a poignant voiceover based on the girl’s own diary entries as soon as they are created by the screenwriting team.

http://www.thefinaledition.com/article/new-spielberg-holocaust-epic-awarded-pre-oscar.html

 

[Clayton Moore]

Dachau + Spielberg + Band of Brothers = Holohoax Lies

In an episode of Steven Spielberg’s miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) American soldiers, the men of Easy Company, stumble upon a German concentration camp, a satellite of Dachau, where to their horror they discover hundreds of emaciated Jews, along with about an equal number of Jewish corpses. It is the spring of 1945 and we are — or so Spielberg would have us believe — in the midst of an extermination facility, one part of the vast industrialized machinery of mass murder designed to effect the nazi Final Solution, the physical extermination of the Jewish people. All of the inmates in the camp are thus Jews, identified by the yellow stars stitched into their striped camp uniforms, and they identify themselves as Jews to the startled liberators.

That was Spielberg’s first inaccuracy, which we shall call Falsehood #1. Most of the inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald, about eighty percent, were non-Jews. When we look at photographs of liberated German concentration camps, we now think that all of the “survivors” we see are Jews. But that, as a matter of uncontested fact, is untrue. In 1945 American media coverage of the liberation of the camps on German soil rarely spoke of Jews, for the simple reason that Jews were a minority among their various inmates. The Americans who liberated the camps did not “confront the (Jewish) Holocaust,” as Spielberg’s Band of Brothers wants us to assume. They instead discovered, as a contemporary British documentary put it, “men of every European nationality, including … Germans.”

Falsehood #1 — the ejection of Gentiles from Dachau and their replacement with Jews — generates a problem for Spielberg. If all of the inmates in the concentration camp presented in Band of Brothers are Jews, and if Hitler wanted to exterminate all Jews, then why are the inmates still alive? That is also, of course, the monumental problem that the Jewish Holocaust has always faced. Why did the Germans fail to kill all the Jews under their control? Why did they bother to evacuate Jewish internees from the East? Why is Elie Wiesel, evacuated in 1945 from Auschwitz in Poland to Buchenwald in Germany, still alive? Why was Anne Frank not gassed at Auschwitz? Why was she instead relocated to Bergen-Belsen, where she tragically succumbed to typhus?

By falsely making all of his camp’s inmates Jews, Spielberg faces the same problem, and he invents a solution—Falsehood #2. The camp guards, a Jewish survivor tells Spielberg’s American liberators, desperately shot as many of the inmates as they could, knowing that the imminent arrival of Allied liberators would end their genocidal mission. Then they ran out of ammunition. So they fled, no doubt disappointed at their failure to implement fully their part of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. They had killed as many Jews as they were able to kill, but not as many Jews as they had wanted to kill (i.e. all of them, every single person in the camp). The emaciated Jews we see on the screen are still alive because the nazi killers fortuitously ran out of bullets.

Liberation of Dachau, 29 April 1945: In photographs of concentration camps we now see Jews, but in fact the men above are Poles.

http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/07/spielberg-and-the-eleven-million/

 

[erwinl]

In the spirit of the lies and the liars and Holohoax rally guy, Spielberg's movie 'The Last Days' another Fable from Spieberg is in the works.



http://www.thefinaledition.com/article/new-spielberg-holocaust-epic-awarded-pre-oscar.html

Very nice,

But what is the point with this story?

 

[A'isha]

Apparently whoever wrote that bit of idiocy that Clayton Moore cut and pasted didn't actually bother watching Band of Brothers. In the ninth episode, "Why We Fight", when Easy Company discovers the camp, Liebgott says, explicitly, that the people in the camp are not just Jews, but also "Poles and Gypsies".

 

[LemmyCaution]

Ok, after the comic interlude courtesy Clayton Moore, back to Dogzilla and LGR, who have dodged so many issues trying to defend Saggy's hapless "degenerate liars" proposition, spun up so many distractions, and left so many loose ends that I fear we will lose focus unless we deal with things in order.

So to advance the discussion I want to return to and highlight just two questions for Dogzilla and one for LGR. Of course there's more, like why LGR and Dogzilla imagine Schloss never existed or the "Klooga" detour. But all I ask is that we hold other matters - think of LGR's bizarre introduction of the "Kovno action," which occurred subsequent to the events we're discussing - and that we don't rush past the unanswered challenges to the claims made by Dogzilla and LGR.

We really need more than handwaving and doubt on these significant issues to make progress.

For Dogzilla:

1) Dogzilla now handwaves away the matter of the fate of Vilna's Jews. It is quite an admission of intellectual bankruptcy and irresponsibility that he doesn't understand that deniers need to explain the reduction of a city's Jewish population by more than 3/4 within a year or two. Yet he did try an explanation of sorts for the removal of Jews from Vilna, even while saying the question gets us nowhere: He asks if Vilna's missing Jews might not have been arrested and taken to labor camps in the USSR as Paulina Kruk was. So Paulina Kruk was arrested by Soviets in 1939 crossing Soviet held territory, probably without good papers, whilst Vilna's Jews disappeared from German occupied and administered territory in 1941, removed from the city they lived in by the German occupiers. The onus is on Dogzilla to explain how the one explains the other, with sources, not with his usual handwaving that it doesn't matter after his explanation comes up wanting.

2) Dogzilla says that the matter of sources other than Pesye Schloss's testimony is moot regarding her credibility and what went down at Ponar. Since other sources are the most important way to substantiate and cast doubt on testomony, we need Dogzilla at this point finally to accept his responsibility and to take a position on these "other" sources, explaining them in the light of Schloss's testimony recorded by Kruk. His continued refusal to state a position on the other witnesses - those mentioned by Kruk as well as witnesses independent of Kruk and sources like Jaeger - only reinforces his know-nothing methodology.

I realize that both issues above were introduced by LGR and are different to Dogzilla's original basis for doubt, which was so flimsy that he dropped it and is now chasing LGR's leavings. So be it: Dogzilla took this stuff up, let him state clearly and specifically why.

As for LGR:

1) We have still not heard details, and how LGR knows them, regarding the alleged problems with Kruk's manuscript and its supposed contamination. We need to know who did it, how, when, exactly what - and the evidence for the process of contamination. In this context LGR needs to deal with evidence (such as Kruk's own writing, which LGR already misstated, as well as witnesses) for the case I've made, that the manuscript covering 1941 was in Vilna, never in Klooga or Lagedi.

Failing this, LGR could always let Nick Terry and me know how his case against OSR 24 and all the OSRs is coming along.

 

[TSR]

In the spirit of the lies and the liars and Holohoax rally guy, Spielberg's movie 'The Last Days' another Fable from Spieberg is in the works.

.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parody

Or in your case, a rather poor self parody.
.

 

[Dogzilla]

In the spirit of the lies and the liars and Holohoax rally guy, Spielberg's movie 'The Last Days' another Fable from Spieberg is in the works.



http://www.thefinaledition.com/article/new-spielberg-holocaust-epic-awarded-pre-oscar.html

I think somebody is making fun Hollywood's holomania here. It's too absurd to be real but joking about the holocaust is something some people find 'offensive.' Maybe because sensitive Mexicans will be offended as well as Jews it's OK?

 

[little grey rabbit]

So to advance the discussion I want to return to and highlight just two questions for Dogzilla and one for LGR. Of course there's more, like why LGR and Dogzilla imagine Schloss never existed or the "Klooga" detour.

There is no independent evidence of Schloss's existence. We don't even know what town she was from.

But all I ask is that we hold other matters - think of LGR's bizarre introduction of the "Kovno action,"

I didn't introduce the Kovno action. I introduced someone who claimed to have bicycled to Ponary in April 1942 and was told he was the first person to survive Ponary. I simply quoted his words and pointed out it was part of a larger pattern of numerous people claiming to have survived Ponary, not been believed and yet seem blissfully unaware of all the other testimonies.

As for LGR:

1) We have still not heard details, and how LGR knows them, regarding the alleged problems with Kruk's manuscript and its supposed contamination. We need to know who did it, how, when, exactly what - and the evidence for the process of contamination. In this context LGR needs to deal with evidence (such as Kruk's own writing, which LGR already misstated, as well as witnesses) for the case I've made, that the manuscript covering 1941 was in Vilna, never in Klooga or Lagedi.

Well obviously the authenticity of the diary is undermined by the miraculous survival of the various sections in remote locations. I personally don't have an issue with the fact Kruk wrote the diary, since we don't have any good evidence that he was not liberated at Klooga. But I don't have an opinion either way in that regard.

But we know his diary is not a genuine record - for significant actors it includes people who we have no independent evidence existed. The two supposed witnesses of Ponary for one, and a policewoman who supposedly participated in a New Year's eve orgy. Even if you weakly suggest perhaps the two alleged survivors were deported and their existence was not captured in any other document or page of testimony, the idea that sexually-crazed Jewish policewoman would not appear in the May 1942 census stretches credibility beyond breaking point.
Further it includes events we know are fictional - eg the Ponary action of September 1 and excludes events we know happened - the shooting of 300 Jews in response to attack on a barracks building in early July - a reprisal action that resulted in placards being pasted across Wilna.

Good news, Mr Caution, there appears to be yet another first survivor of Ponary

Witness Kovner: If you will allow me, I shall describe the thing which is engraved in my memory most of all.

Q. What was engraved in your memory most of all?

A. This is the story of a woman named Sara Menkes, who was rescued from the pit, and she told me of the execution of a group of women, in October 1941. She told me about this several weeks later. In this group there was, amongst others, one who you could say was a pupil of mine. For several months I had taught her in the gymnasium, the daughter of Epstein, a teacher at the gymnasium in Vilna. Her name was Tsherna Morgenstern.

I shall describe it briefly: they were taken to Ponar. After they had waited at some point, a group of them was taken and lined up in a row. They were told to undress. They undressed down to their shirts. A line of men of the Einsatzgruppen stood facing them. An officer came out in front of them, looked at the row of women, and his glance fell on this Tsherna Morgenstern. She had wonderful eyes, a tall, upstanding girl with long plaits. He looked at her for a long time, smiled and said: "Take one step forward."

She was terrified, as all of them were. At that moment nobody spoke, nobody asked anything. She remained where she was, evidently panicstricken, and did not step forward. He ordered her, asking: "Hey - don't you want to live - you are so beautiful - I say to you: 'Take one step forward'." Then she took a step forward. He said to her: "It would be a pity to bury such beauty in the ground. Walk, but don't look backwards. There is a path here, you know this path, walk along it."

For a moment she hesitated and then she began walking. The rest of us - Sara Menkes told me - gazed at her with a look in our eyes, I don't know whether it was only of fear and also of envy. She walked forward weakly. And then he, the officer, drew his revolver and shot her, as the first, in her back. Why should I tell more?

And yet Mr Kovner failed to testify at this trial that he had also interviewed one of the children that appear in Kruk's diary.

There is no record in Kruk's diary that reflects a realistic way news of Ponary would slowly infilitrate a community. It is not impossible that the first witness might be disbelieved, but subsequent witnesses would each cause additional sensation.

But this growing sense of shock and sensation doesn't appear in Kruk's diary. He talks about two witnesses that no one else mentions and then that's it. The instrumental purpose of Ponary has been served by this one entry and the author doesn't add anything additional. In short its a poor exercise in fiction by a rather unimaginative writer, not a genuine representation of how a community would react in situation.

 

[little grey rabbit]

Sara Menkes seems to be performing the same function as the teacher "T Kacs".

Since we aren't dealing with reality but a myth-history - can we combine this into one person and say that one is a pseudonym of the other? Or should we seek safety in numbers and stick with the position they were different people?

 

[little grey rabbit]

Of course the Wilno Ghetto did inspire some of the greatest Holocaust art

who could forget Frozen Jews?

Frozen Jews
Did you ever see in fields of snow
Frozen Jews, in row upon row?

Breathless they lie, marbled and blue.
Of death in their bodies, no hint and no clue.

Somewhere their spirit is frozen and saved
Like a golden fish in a frozen wave.

Not speaking. Not silent. Just thinking bright.
The sun too lies frozen in snow at night.



On a rosy lip, in the freeze, still glows
A smile—will not move, not budge since it froze.

Near his mother, a baby starving, at rest.
How strange: she cannot give him her breast.

The fist of a naked old man in surprise:
He cannot release his force from the ice.

So far, I have tasted all kinds of death,
None will surprise me, will catch my breath.

But now, overcome in the mid-July heat
By a frost, like madness, right in the street:

They come toward me, blue bones in a row—
Frozen Jews over plains of snow.

My skin is covered with a marble veil.
My words slow down, my light that is frail.

My motions freeze, like the old man's surprise,
Who cannot release his force from the ice.



Moscow, July 10, 1944


Haunting

 

[Wroclaw]

I hate you.

 

[Dogzilla]

Ok, after the comic interlude courtesy Clayton Moore, back to Dogzilla and LGR, who have dodged so many issues trying to defend Saggy's hapless "degenerate liars" proposition, spun up so many distractions, and left so many loose ends that I fear we will lose focus unless we deal with things in order.

I am not defending Saggy's "degenerate liars" proposition. Saggy asked for one credible Jewish eyewitness to the holocaust. If Saggy is going to take the fact that Pesye Schloss' credibility is less than stellar and conclude that all eyewitnesses are degenerate liars, it is he who will make that leap. I won't. But, working backwards, not being able to conclude that all holocaust eyewitnesses are degenerate liars doesn't mean that Pesye Schloss is credible.

So to advance the discussion I want to return to and highlight just two questions for Dogzilla and one for LGR. Of course there's more, like why LGR and Dogzilla imagine Schloss never existed or the "Klooga" detour. But all I ask is that we hold other matters - think of LGR's bizarre introduction of the "Kovno action," which occurred subsequent to the events we're discussing - and that we don't rush past the unanswered challenges to the claims made by Dogzilla and LGR.

We really need more than handwaving and doubt on these significant issues to make progress.

For Dogzilla:

1) Dogzilla now handwaves away the matter of the fate of Vilna's Jews. It is quite an admission of intellectual bankruptcy and irresponsibility that he doesn't understand that deniers need to explain the reduction of a city's Jewish population by more than 3/4 within a year or two. Yet he did try an explanation of sorts for the removal of Jews from Vilna, even while saying the question gets us nowhere: He asks if Vilna's missing Jews might not have been arrested and taken to labor camps in the USSR as Paulina Kruk was. So Paulina Kruk was arrested by Soviets in 1939 crossing Soviet held territory, probably without good papers, whilst Vilna's Jews disappeared from German occupied and administered territory in 1941, removed from the city they lived in by the German occupiers. The onus is on Dogzilla to explain how the one explains the other, with sources, not with his usual handwaving that it doesn't matter after his explanation comes up wanting.

The where did they go gambit doesn't go anywhere. Are the only two things that could happpen to Jews is 1) survive or 2) be murdered by the Germans as part of a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe?

2) Dogzilla says that the matter of sources other than Pesye Schloss's testimony is moot regarding her credibility and what went down at Ponar. Since other sources are the most important way to substantiate and cast doubt on testomony, we need Dogzilla at this point finally to accept his responsibility and to take a position on these "other" sources, explaining them in the light of Schloss's testimony recorded by Kruk. His continued refusal to state a position on the other witnesses - those mentioned by Kruk as well as witnesses independent of Kruk and sources like Jaeger - only reinforces his know-nothing methodology.

We're not talking about other witnesses as much as you would like to think we are. We're talking about Pesye Schloss' nomination as a credible eyewitness to the holocaust--a witness who is at best a second hand witness. At worse, a person who never existed.

I trust you're happy now.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I simply quoted his words and pointed out it was part of a larger pattern of numerous people claiming to have survived Ponary, not been believed and yet seem blissfully unaware of all the other testimonies.

I see that you still refuse to give direct answers to direct questions: names, details, and how you know them, etc. People survived the shootings, they told others, they were in shock.

There is no independent evidence of Schloss's existence. We don't even know what town she was from.

So what? A reliable chronicler spoke to her and recorded what she said. It meshes with what other witnesses saw or experienced, with recollections after the fact, and with German documents.

Well obviously the authenticity of the diary is undermined by the miraculous survival of the various sections in remote locations.

Miraculous? To type multiple copies of an important document one considers extremely important, as Kruk did the early portions of his manuscript, and then to hide these where you live, burying one copy for safekeeping with other important documents and place two copies with trusted people for safekeeping, and later to bury the final parts at Lagedi, having told trusted people where they could be rescued from? This is miraculous? It comes across as reasonable meticulous care of something important which a person doesn’t want to see get lost.

By the way, you write so vaguely, I wonder, are you still maintaining that the early, Vilna portions of Kruk’s diary were not hidden in Vilna but were in Klooga? Will you explain to us simply and clearly the chain of custody of the Vilna portion of the diary and why it causes suspicion of contamination, and by whom - rather than continuing to toss around vague insinuations like “miraculous survival”? You keep avoiding doing this.

I personally don't have an issue with the fact Kruk wrote the diary, since we don't have any good evidence that he was not liberated at Klooga.

Of course Kruk wrote the diary. We even know about his method of writing. Also, we have good evidence that about 80 prisoners survived the massacre at Klooga. Kruk has never been named, by the survivors or those who’ve studied the massacre, as a survivor. We have witnesses testifying to the murders of the vast majority of the prisoners in the camp. What is your evidence that Kruk was among those who survived?

But we know his diary is not a genuine record –

No, we don’t. You make the case that it isn’t – but “we” do not know it, and in fact "we" know of no one else who doubts it is a genuine record. Your resorting to these sweeping claims as though they are common knowledge is a silly, transparent tactic - and doesn't excuse you from needing to offer evidence for your claims.

for significant actors it includes people who we have no independent evidence existed. The two supposed witnesses of Ponary for one,

If you mean the three Ponar survivors whose account Kruk recorded – Yudis Trojak, Pesye Schloss, and Tema Katz – you are mistaken. Clearly, we have independent evidence regarding Tema Katz, and you even posted some of it. About Schloss, there is nothing I have found on the Internet independent of Kruk. As to Yudis Trojak, according to Dina Porat, Kovner jotted the following in his pocket diary for 4 September 1941: “first greeting from Ponar: Trojak.” Porat says that the note was written in Yiddish.

and a policewoman who supposedly participated in a New Year's eve orgy. Even if you weakly suggest perhaps the two alleged survivors were deported and their existence was not captured in any other document or page of testimony, the idea that sexually-crazed Jewish policewoman would not appear in the May 1942 census stretches credibility beyond breaking point.

I can’t read your mind and would rather not try to.

Further it includes events we know are fictional - eg the Ponary action of September 1 and excludes events we know happened - the shooting of 300 Jews in response to attack on a barracks building in early July - a reprisal action that resulted in placards being pasted across Wilna.

Hunh? July? You mean the incident that used to be dated early September but was also not dated at all? The July shooting, to which Kruk alludes, that you once tried placing in September? That reprisal shooting? The one about which you wrote so optimistically “It was dated early September. but it wasn't written by Filbert but by an officer with the 403 Division. Filbert was just talking generally after the war about a zero being added”? Before revising the timing to “Because it is not dated at all”?

Is this the shooting you're referencing now?

And how supposedly do “we know” that the shootings at Ponar which began on 2 September 1941 were “fictional”? Do we "know" this from Sakowicz? From Jaeger? From whom and how exactly?

Earlier this year you declared the shootings at Ponar that week fictional because, you said, they involved only 300 victims, not over 3,000, based on your misdating and tomfoolery with the 13 July shooting, which you alleged took place in early September and was trumped up into a larger action. And you declared OSR 24, which dated the July shooting to July, another contaminated document. The scenario you suggested earlier this year was that when the OSRs were found and compiled by what you called the "War Crimes" a problem was seen with the Great Provocation, and they just moved the incident to avoid problems with the Soviet version. But now you declare the Great Provocation shootings fictional . . . just because . . . and you try impeaching Kruk for not mentioning the 13 July shooting which you previously put in September, whereas earlier this year his not mentioning the 13 July shooting would have been proof of its having occurred in September.

My head is spinning, except to say once again that Kruk did mention the 13 July shooting. Just not in the manner you want, in the third person omniscient as it were.

Nor do we know placards were posted “across Vilna.” We know that posters were put up. In July Finis.

You have certainly shown that you will say anything, without any regard for the sources or honesty, to put your denial across. When was the 13 July shooting - and what is your case against OSR 24?

Good news, Mr Caution, there appears to be yet another first survivor of Ponary

You find this formulation cute for some reason. It isn’t. It reeks of desperation.

And yet Mr Kovner failed to testify at this trial that he had also interviewed one of the children that appear in Kruk's diary.

Kovner heard a lot. He didn’t testify forever and so, unsurprisingly, mentioned some things but not others. There was nothing that stood out in particular about the testimony of Trojak and Schloss other than that they were included in Kruk’s diary. They do not occupy a privileged place but form part of the reinforcing web of testimonies and sources.

But we cannot say for sure that Kovner did not testify about Trojak. In addition to the hearsay which Kovner related regarding the October shooting, he also was examined as follows:

Q: Did you take evidence from a boy Miller, aged 11, who reached Vilna?
Witness Kovner: A little girl.
Q. A girl, aged 11, who arrived in Vilna and described what was happening in the Ponar forest?
A. We recorded more than one testimony.
Q. Was this one of the pieces of evidence that you collected in your own handwriting?
A. Not in my handwriting. Some other comrade, a woman whom I don't remember, wrote this down.

Kovner also explained that “The question of what was happening in Ponar worried us. And we sought...we looked for people who had been saved and there were those who had been saved - both wounded and not wounded - I remember that we took evidence from them. Here there are two shocking, lengthy pieces of evidence” and mentioned other testimonies.

There is no record in Kruk's diary that reflects a realistic way news of Ponary would slowly infilitrate a community.

You say. I don’t see what is unrealistic about how Kruk explained his learning about the first wave of Great Provocation shootings: “The persons I’m talking about are related to our entry of September 4 – the first information from Ponar. Through our friends and efforts, I gained access to a few of the six who came from Ponar.” p90 And, “It is hard to find out how many were shot. We have to wait for that. . . . How can you write about all this? How can you collect your thoughts?” pp92-93 Later he described how he sat in his house midday, after hearing this devastating news, but it seemed "pitch black," quiet, lonely, filled with “horror upon horror, dread upon dread!” Citing confusing orders about property registration and confiscations also made that week, Kruk acknowledged that “one contradiction supersedes another,” giving vent to his inability to comprehend all the was happening. (p94)

The context for all this was two months of snatchings of Jews from streets and homes by Lithuanian partisans and SS, their disappearance without a trace, and vague rumors about horrible occurrences at Ponar, shootings to be exact.

Kruk was well connected, eager to keep a record of the war and German occupation, and constantly seeking out information and committing it to his journal. All this seems not simply plausible but vividly so.

It is not impossible that the first witness might be disbelieved, but subsequent witnesses would each cause additional sensation. But this growing sense of shock and sensation doesn't appear in Kruk's diary.

Your point is a bit of an oversimplification and ignores the diary: different people absorbed and dealt with staggering news in different ways, as people do. Kruk himself progressed from July to September as he learned more and more and began putting together the pieces of the puzzle. In July Kruk was already wondering how to save himself from the snatchers and making a spotty record in his diary of what he was hearing about disappearances as well as many other aspects of German rule. But also this: “On the tenth of this month, a rumor came to the Judenrat that people were shot in Ponar. . . . Five days later, reports came to the Judenrat from var[ious] people who secretly repeated the rumor. . . .” Kruk, with good enough connections to learn of these confidential reports to the Judenrat, waited at that time until 5 days after the event – “all the Jews were shot” – to write about it.

Kruk’s diary is generally factual – almost matter of fact, but his passage on Trojak and Schloss ends with comments like “If heaven is heaven, it should start pouring down lava; let all that is still alive be washed away once and for all.” The man was clearly tortured by what was learning. p93 Your inability to recognize these emotions speaks to both your bias and your reading comprehension problems.

He talks about two witnesses that no one else mentions and then that's it.

We have already seen that you are not correct in this statement: Kruk wrote about a number of witnesses to shootings that week, describing at some length what 3 of them had to say - and Abba Kovner mentioned 2 of those 3. When will you stop being dishonest?

The instrumental purpose of Ponary has been served by this one entry and the author doesn't add anything additional. In short its a poor exercise in fiction by a rather unimaginative writer, not a genuine representation of how a community would react in situation.

Kruk's account was not an exercise of imagination or propaganda or myth making, but an entry in a chronicle containing a record of what the writer heard and experienced. At one point, Kruk misplaced a part of his journal - he found it later - and wrote this about the apparent loss: "A piece of the chronicle that can't be reconstructed. . . . In my heart there remains a rip, a rip after a lost closeness, a piece of a dreadful time." p324 He also described his writing in these words, "I shall have a picture of how the Germans make a city like Vilna Fascist. The Jews will go through a hard time - I will watch it, experience it, and leave a record of it!" p310

Your avoidance is glaring at this point. You faffing about with insinuations and empty claims and suppositions presented as must-be's. Give us the details – not more fuzzy mysteries and what-i'fs but specifics about the diary and who contaminated it, how, when.

 

[LemmyCaution]

I am not defending Saggy's "degenerate liars" proposition. Saggy asked for one credible Jewish eyewitness to the holocaust. If Saggy is going to take the fact that Pesye Schloss' credibility is less than stellar and conclude that all eyewitnesses are degenerate liars, it is he who will make that leap. I won't. But, working backwards, not being able to conclude that all holocaust eyewitnesses are degenerate liars doesn't mean that Pesye Schloss is credible.

Well, good for you. You have yet to show why Pesye Schloss's testimony isn't credible.

The where did they go gambit doesn't go anywhere. Are the only two things that could happpen to Jews is 1) survive or 2) be murdered by the Germans as part of a plan to exterminate all the Jews in Europe?

Of course, it is not a gambit. It is a direct and simple question. You can't answer it. The Jewish population of Vilna was ~15,000 in December 1941 - down from 70,000 in 1939. Let's say the "missing" ~55,000 mostly survived. Where did they go? How do you know where they went?

The question, in fact, gets us very far. Here, for example, one small point emerges: your unwillingness to engage on the question helps you leap to a conclusion - that Pesye Schloss didn't exist on account of her absence from a census list compiled after she was more than likely no longer in Vilna. By Jaeger's account. We know that she was probably not in Vilna, and thus not on the census list, partly because Jaeger told us about the reduction of the number of Jews living in Vilna during summer and fall 1941. Now, Jaeger claims that the missing Jews were murdered. Do you disagree? On what grounds?

We're not talking about other witnesses as much as you would like to think we are.

You aren't talking about other witnesses and sources at all. Frankly, I find it amazing that you persist in this bizarre stance, so at odds with how history is done. Apparently, you do so because, despite your demurral, you really are on the same level as Saggy with his "one witness" mantra.

We're talking about Pesye Schloss' nomination as a credible eyewitness to the holocaust--a witness who is at best a second hand witness.

It is difficult to talk about Pesye Schloss or any other witness without making comparisons to other witnesses, documents, reports, records, etc. This is elementary. If we had discussed Yudis Trojak - who, to remind you, I offered along with Schloss (http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7571462&postcount=5853) - I would be asking you about Schloss - and, of course, Sakowicz, Jaeger, Balberyszki, Kovner, Dworzecki, and other points of comparison. Your inability to grasp this is astonishing.

Leaving aside your continued confusion about what makes a person an eyewitness, the reason I raised Pesye Schloss and the reason I consider her reliable is that her recorded testimony meshes with other sources, as I've explained over and over. I am sorry, but your dodging these other witnesses is making you look foolish and cowardly. There is - for the umpteenth time - no gold-star witness; there are sources and witnesses which we can compare to one another. Your refusal to compare testimonies and sources betrays that you don't know how to do or understand history. It's embarrassing.

At worse, a person who never existed

.And you know this how? We have a reliable chronicler writing up her testimony. Again, you need to tackle Kruk to dismiss Schloss. You keep avoiding doing so.

I trust you're happy now.

You and LGR are making me laugh at your antics, if that's what you mean, although I am pretty much with Wroclaw on this.

 

[Dogzilla]

UOT

Well, good for you. You have yet to show why Pesye Schloss's testimony isn't credible.

We don't have any evidence of Pesye Schloss existing outside of her hearsay evidence recorded by Kruk.

Of course, it is not a gambit. It is a direct and simple question. You can't answer it. The Jewish population of Vilna was ~15,000 in December 1941 - down from 70,000 in 1939. Let's say the "missing" ~55,000 mostly survived. Where did they go? How do you know where they went?

It is a direct and simple question that assumes two possible fates for the Jewish population of Vilna--1) survival or 2) murdered as part of a Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews. You haven't provided any reason to believe that is true.

The question, in fact, gets us very far. Here, for example, one small point emerges: your unwillingness to engage on the question helps you leap to a conclusion - that Pesye Schloss didn't exist on account of her absence from a census list compiled after she was more than likely no longer in Vilna. By Jaeger's account. We know that she was probably not in Vilna, and thus not on the census list, partly because Jaeger told us about the reduction of the number of Jews living in Vilna during summer and fall 1941. Now, Jaeger claims that the missing Jews were murdered. Do you disagree? On what grounds?

Historians look at the evidence and see where the evidence leads them. You can speculate about why Pesye Schloss doesn't show up on the census but all that is important is that she does not. She does not appear on any Jaeger list of dead Jews either, does she? There is no other record of her outside of Kruk's diary. As such, her testimony is hearsay from a witness who doesn't exist outside of her testimony.

You aren't talking about other witnesses and sources at all. Frankly, I find it amazing that you persist in this bizarre stance, so at odds with how history is done. Apparently, you do so because, despite your demurral, you really are on the same level as Saggy with his "one witness" mantra. It is difficult to talk about Pesye Schloss or any other witness without making comparisons to other witnesses, documents, reports, records, etc. This is elementary. If we had discussed Yudis Trojak - who, to remind you, I offered along with Schloss (http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7571462&postcount=5853) - I would be asking you about Schloss - and, of course, Sakowicz, Jaeger, Balberyszki, Kovner, Dworzecki, and other points of comparison. Your inability to grasp this is astonishing.

I'm sorry but it was you who chose Schloss as a "credible eyewitness." A person's testimony must be considered along with all other types of evidence but there are certain aspects of testimony that can be considered in a vacuum. Is it a first hand account or is it hearsay? Can it be verified that the witness really existed? These are two aspects of a Pesye's testimony that fail these tests.

Look at somebody like Elie Wiesel. The guy is a buffoon with no credibility as an eyewitness to the holocaust. But, unlike his contemporary Pesye Schloss, we can be reasonably certain that he is real. And he can give us a first hand account of his version of the holocaust.

Leaving aside your continued confusion about what makes a person an eyewitness, the reason I raised Pesye Schloss and the reason I consider her reliable is that her recorded testimony meshes with other sources, as I've explained over and over. I am sorry, but your dodging these other witnesses is making you look foolish and cowardly. There is - for the umpteenth time - no gold-star witness; there are sources and witnesses which we can compare to one another. Your refusal to compare testimonies and sources betrays that you don't know how to do or understand history. It's embarrassing. .And you know this how? We have a reliable chronicler writing up her testimony. Again, you need to tackle Kruk to dismiss Schloss. You keep avoiding doing so.
You and LGR are making me laugh at your antics, if that's what you mean, although I am pretty much with Wroclaw on this.

You have it backwards. We don't need to tackle Kruk to dismiss Schloss. If Schloss is shown to be a fraud, Kruk is demolished. The fact that Pesye Schloss's testimony meshes with other testimony is no more surprising than the fact that Tania Head's story meshes so well with other 9/11 survivors. Or that there is a similarity among UFO eyewitness testimony. The best argument you have in favor of Pesye Schloss is that it fits with all the other testimony--which it would if it were fake or real. It proves nothing.

 

[Wroclaw]

We don't have any evidence of Pesye Schloss existing outside of her hearsay evidence recorded by Kruk.

Yeah, nor do we for, you know, Jesus. Hearsay evidence entirely. Dude never wrote anything down apparently.

It is a direct and simple question that assumes two possible fates for the Jewish population of Vilna--1) survival or 2) murdered as part of a Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews. You haven't provided any reason to believe that is true.

On the contrary, we have plenty of documents among the Nazis, not the least of which is the Jäger Report, plus multiple eyewitness testimonies. Your refusal to accept the evidence is not equivalent to there not being any.

Historians look at the evidence and see where the evidence leads them. You can speculate about why Pesye Schloss doesn't show up on the census but all that is important is that she does not. She does not appear on any Jaeger list of dead Jews either, does she?

Jäger's list doesn't give specific names, though why you would even bother to mention Jäger at all is a big problem for you, not us. Jäger writes of tens of thousands of Jews being shot to death. In fact, along with other reports, we have, in the end, written records of more than half of the Jews in Vilna being shot. Ergo, we may properly assume that any person whose fate we cannot otherwise determine was shot, as the odds favor it.

And yes, that is what historians would do in such a case.

There is no other record of her outside of Kruk's diary. As such, her testimony is hearsay from a witness who doesn't exist outside of her testimony.

That you know of. Yet.

I'm sorry but it was you who chose Schloss as a "credible eyewitness." A person's testimony must be considered along with all other types of evidence but there are certain aspects of testimony that can be considered in a vacuum. Is it a first hand account or is it hearsay? Can it be verified that the witness really existed? These are two aspects of a Pesye's testimony that fail these tests.

Even if it did (and it doesn't), that doesn't disprove dozens of other testimonies about Ponary, or the written records.

Look at somebody like Elie Wiesel. The guy is a buffoon with no credibility as an eyewitness to the holocaust. But, unlike his contemporary Pesye Schloss, we can be reasonably certain that he is real. And he can give us a first hand account of his version of the holocaust.

Are you alleging that were Pesye Schloss a witness to any other event in history, you'd toss her aside? Because I don't believe you would.

You have it backwards. We don't need to tackle Kruk to dismiss Schloss. If Schloss is shown to be a fraud, Kruk is demolished.

Wrong again. (Remarkable!) It would only prove that part of it to be "demolished"; no more, no less.

The fact that Pesye Schloss's testimony meshes with other testimony is no more surprising than the fact that Tania Head's story meshes so well with other 9/11 survivors.

I.e., because she read other testimonies. Except that Herman Kruk didn't have any testimonies to read when he wrote his account. Ergo, your comparison is false.

Or that there is a similarity among UFO eyewitness testimony.

Except that no alien abductor has ever testified. Not the case with Einsatzgruppen or Lithuanian collaborators. Sorry.

The best argument you have in favor of Pesye Schloss is that it fits with all the other testimony--which it would if it were fake or real. It proves nothing.

You're correct. Technically her testimony alone, in isolation, proves nothing.

But it isn't in isolation, so don't pretend it is.

 

[LemmyCaution]

We don't have any evidence of Pesye Schloss existing outside of her hearsay evidence recorded by Kruk.

No, we have Kruk's saying he met her, we have his record of her testimony of what she survived, which makes her an eyewitness, so, to challenge her, you need to show some problem in Kruk - or show that you have been through all the archives, digital and non-digital, Polish census data, etc. You continue to misrepresent or obstinately misunderstand the difference between hearsay and eyewitness testimony. Your stupidity is so boring and repetitious, I'll just let it pass from now on.

Historians look at the evidence and see where the evidence leads them. You can speculate about why Pesye Schloss doesn't show up on the census but all that is important is that she does not.

Why? Why is it important if we should not expect her to?

She does not appear on any Jaeger list of dead Jews either, does she?

Jaeger doesn't list the names of Jews killed by the Germans in his area of operation in Lithuania. You would know this if you would spend some time reading instead of echoing LGR's comedy act. Stop being silly.

And by the way, if you agree that historians look at, follow, and compare the evidence, why do you keep refusing to do so?

I'm sorry but it was you who chose Schloss as a "credible eyewitness."

Which she is: her testimony, as recorded by a reliable chronicler, whose credibility you haven't so much as challenged, meshes with other testimony, which you play dumb about.

A person's testimony must be considered along with all other types of evidence but there are certain aspects of testimony that can be considered in a vacuum. Is it a first hand account or is it hearsay? Can it be verified that the witness really existed? These are two aspects of a Pesye's testimony that fail these tests.

So why do you have nothing to say about Sakowicz, Trojak, and Katz? Because there is no record of them outside . . . what? Schloss's appearing in a journal kept by someone trying to make an accurate record of Vilna under occupation - and her appearing alongside Trojak and Katz - and her testimony meshing with the observations of Sakowicz in his journal - well, yes, testimony must be considered in many ways . . . it's you who safeguard your biases and beliefs by refusing to do so.

Look at somebody like Elie Wiesel. The guy is a buffoon with no credibility as an eyewitness to the holocaust. But, unlike his contemporary Pesye Schloss, we can be reasonably certain that he is real. And he can give us a first hand account of his version of the holocaust.

Yawn.

You have it backwards. We don't need to tackle Kruk to dismiss Schloss. If Schloss is shown to be a fraud, Kruk is demolished.

Which she hasn't been. All that has been shown is that she doesn't appear in the 1942 census or in other records that are online and available through search engines. How do you plan to show she's a fraud? If Kruk made an error or false claim here, then he is wrong here - unless you can show a pattern of his falsifying things. Which you haven't, you haven't shown that he is error prone - and you haven't demolished anything except any hope anyone had you'd approach this intelligently.

What we have is a reliable, honest, and thoughtful witness, Kruk, essentially testifying to her existence - and claims from LGR and you that you are sure she didn't exist because you haven't found a digital record of her. In this case, as so often, your bias is clear in how you leap to conclusions.

The fact that Pesye Schloss's testimony meshes with other testimony is no more surprising than the fact that Tania Head's story meshes so well with other 9/11 survivors. Or that there is a similarity among UFO eyewitness testimony.

Except that the other testimony I've cited was given independently and at about the same time.

The best argument you have in favor of Pesye Schloss is that it fits with all the other testimony--which it would if it were fake or real. It proves nothing.

No, the best argument for her existence is that a reliable chronicler recorded her testimony. That he recorded it alongside other testimony, which you continue to ignore, simply reinforces the point. That her testimony meshes with the other testimony is what makes it credible. It is Kruk you need to tackle if you want to convince yourself that Schloss didn't exist. And you have to explain how Kruk is dishonest elsewhere to make this case against him convincing, you have to explain why he threw in a make-believe witness with others whose existence can be verified in other documents - and whose testimony meshed with Schloss's. Beyond that, you need to show that you have made a reasonable, convincing search to find Schloss, such as searching in pre-'40s Polish census and other demographic data. Have you?

 

[Pacal]

Just checking up on things here. And what do I find? Well the deniers have once again plunged to even greater depths of mendacity, distortion and uttering fantasy.

I'm becoming more and more certain that these guys are nothing but repulsive trolls.

 

[Dogzilla]

Quick question for the peanut gallery: When was Kruk's diary first published? Where was it before it was published?

 

[LemmyCaution]

Quick question for the peanut gallery: When was Kruk's diary first published? Where was it before it was published?

a. It was first published in Yiddish, in 1961, by YIVO. But not the Klooga materials and, I believe, not some of the 1939-1940 materials. b. According to Barbara Harshav, out of an original 757 pages, 380 pages were at YIVO in NYC, 130 pages at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and 101 pages at the Moreshet archives in Israel (an outline of topics in the diary, written in long hand and kept separately from the rest of the diary). The Klooga manuscripts were with other materials from the former Jewish Museum in Vilna, closed in 1947, the holdings then re-located to a church on Szniadecki Street, where the director of the new archive for Lithuanian documents, Dr Antanas Ulpis, stashed the Jewish materials in the basement and where they remained until through the 1980s.

Earlier in this thread I explained where the Vilna portions of the diary were stored when Kruk was taken to Estonia in 1943 and where they were found after the liberation of Vilna. I also gave more details on the Klooga sections earlier in the thread and that they came to Vilna from Klooga after the liberation.

It should be noted that here
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7760987&postcount=7476
I wrote

And, speaking of Dogzilla and double standards, please don't neglect to name the Soviets who took the diary (I mean the individuals and how you know their names) and worked it over - as I have named the German who directed the cleanup at Ponar after the "Kovno action" and as you know I can name the Germans who directed the actions in the Great Provocation. And as you know I can point to the sources for the likelihood of the involvement of these named individuals.

So let's see the evidence - at the same level of specificity that we have given for some of the Ponar killings - that you have for the problems you've charged Kruk's diary with.

Speaking of double standards, I have yet to get a response to this request.

I would also remind you that LGR previously tried to pass off Kruk as being in Kovno and rewriting his diary after the war:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7756599&postcount=7425