Freedland Justified the Rewriting of History in order that the Holocaust could be Exploited by Zionism to Justify Genocide & Ethnic Cleansing
The Vrba Wetzler Report
My
Review of Freedland’s book has just been published
by the Electronic Intifada. Below is a slightly amended version.
Freedland is an integral part of Britain’s Foreign Policy Establishment. He is a patron of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs where our rulers discuss British foreign policy whilst taking a vow of silence about what they discuss outside its hallowed portals.
There
is no doubt that Freedland has strong Mossad/MI5 connections. He has ensured,
with the Guardian's Editor, Katherine Viner, that the Guardian has become a lapdog of the
British state, refusing as it did to support Julian Assange.
Freedland played the 'Jews as an ethnic minority' card to undermine Corbyn
Freedland is a ‘liberal’ Zionist which means that he uses multi-culturalism, positing British Jews as an ethnic minority, in order to defend the far-right Israeli state and its government.
For Freedland, Jews are equally oppressed as Muslims and because most Jews define being Jewish in terms of Israel, we must not criticise the current genocide or Israel's Jewish Supremacist i.e. Zionist ideology.
The job of liberal Zionism is to do what right-wing Zionism
cannot do abroad which is to pretend that Israel is the embodiment of Jewish, democratic values..
I confess I was somewhat surprised when 2 years
ago Freedland brought out a biography on Rudolf Vrba, the man who, with his friend
Alfred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz.
The book has had rave reviews in the right-wing press by those who know
next to nothing about the holocaust except how to best exploit it for Israel’s
genocidal purposes.
Today it is clear that you cannot be an
anti-racist if you are a Zionist. When I grew up this wasn’t so clear but today
it should be clear to all except the politically blind that a Jewish ethno-nationalist
state cannot be anything other than a racist apartheid state. Just as the Christian
nationalist states of Eastern Europe were the most enthusiastic about participating in the holocaust so it is with Israel, which today identifies with Nazi values.
When neo-Nazis and the far-right wax
lyrical about Israel’s ethno-religious nationalism only the dishonest and
stupid can have any illusions about where Israel is heading. It is the job of
the Freedlands of this world to paint Israel in rosy colours and hide the fact
that it has been a key supporter of fascism and repression the world over. What’s
happening in Gaza happened many times over in Guatemala in the 1980s where Israel supplied
the arms and training to the genocidal regime there.
Read and enjoy!
Tony Greenstein
Jonathan Freedland is a senior journalist at The Guardian as well as a columnist for the Jewish Chronicle. He is
the latter’s figleaf liberal Zionist. It was therefore a surprise that
Freedland should choose to write about Rudolf Vrba, an anti-Zionist Jewish hero
of the Holocaust.
Freedland’s problem was that the Zionist
movement, because of its collaboration with the Nazis, in its desire to use their rise
to power to build a ‘Jewish’ state, has virtually no Jewish anti-Nazi
resistance heroes to its credit.
On 10 April 1944, alongside Alfred Wetzler, Vrba
escaped from Auschwitz with the aim of warning Hungarian Jewry of the Nazis’
plans to exterminate the last major surviving Jewish community in Europe.
Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist
historian described how,
As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive
opportunity for Zionism ... Ben-Gurion above all others sensed the tremendous
possibilities inherent in the dynamic of the chaos and carnage in Europe … In conditions of
peace, it was clear, Zionism could not move
the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror
must therefore be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism ... By the end of 1942
… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement."
Those few Zionists who did fight in the
Resistance, like Chajka Klinger were extremely critical of the role that the Zionist movement played.
My first criticism of The Escape Artist is its title. It gives the impression that Vrba
was a circus act, another Houdini. Indeed Freedland makes just such a
comparison. Freedland manages, in one short phrase, to both demean and
trivialize Vrba’s bravery and heroism. Vrba was no escape artist or magician.
He was someone whose survival was a combination of extreme bravery, good
judgment and pure luck.
Vrba had very good reasons to hate the Zionist
movement but Freedland is careful not to allow them space in his biography.
Born Walter Rosenberg, Vrba lived in Slovakia, a puppet Nazi state which had
been separated off from Czechoslovakia when Hitler invaded and dismembered it
in 1939. It was ruled by the Hlinka or Slovak People’s Party. The president was
a Catholic priest Father Tiso.
Freedland describes how as a 17-year-old, in
February 1942, Vrba received a summons to report for deportation. Slovakia was
the first country to deport its Jews. From March to October 1942 some 57,000
out of 88,000 Jews were deported.
Vrba’s reaction, in March 1942, was to flee to
Hungary where he made contact with the socialist underground in Budapest. What
Freedland doesn’t mention is that after staying with the underground Vrba
visited Hungary’s Zionists. In Vrba’s autobiography, I Cannot Forgive, he describes what happened:
That afternoon I went to OMZsA House, headquarters of the Zionist
organization in Budapest. There I told my story in detail to a stern-faced man
in his middle thirties.
He pondered a while before he said: “You
are in Budapest illegally. Is that what you are trying to say?
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know you’re breaking the law.”
I nodded, wondering how a man with such a thick skull could hold down
what seemed like a responsible position.
“And you expect to get work here without
documents?”
“With false documents.”
Had I torn up the Talmud and jumped on it, I do not think I could have
shocked him more. His mouth opened once or twice and then he roared: “Don’t you realize it’s my duty to hand you
over to the police?”
Now it was my turn to gape. A Zionist handing over a Jew to Fascist
police. I thought I must be going mad.
“Get out of here! Get out as fast as a bad
wind!”
I left utterly bewildered. It was nearly three years before I realized
just what OMZsA House and the men inside it represented.
When his contacts in the Underground warned him
that the Zionist official might report him to the police Vrba decided to leave
Budapest for Slovakia. Naturally not a word of this appeared in Freedland’s
book.
Freedland had access to the personal papers of
Vrba from his first wife Gerta Vrbova and his second wife, Robin, as well as
other relatives. There is therefore a lot of useful and interesting information
that he acquired on the personal life of Vrba but the use to which he put this
is questionable, in particular the judgements he made about Vrba’s relationship
with Vrbova.
Gerta Vrbova
Freedland never interviewed or met Vrba. He only
talked to a bitter ex-wife, Gerta Vrbova, who blamed her ex-husband for the
marital breakdown. So what did Freedland think he was doing making an assertion
that "their lovemaking lacked the
tenderness, the gentleness, she craved. Instead she felt it carried a trace of
violence."
This is more than just prurience. It is an
attempt to sow the seeds of doubt as to Vrba's character. Jane Bennett, Vrba's
step-daughter, had memories of a "lovely,
modest man." Freedland comments that "It was Rudi’s side of the acrimonious family story they heard."
Well yes, but the same is true of Freedland! [pp. 318, 319]
Because the hardback preceded the paperback by a
year, Bennett was able to come forward with another side to the story.
According to her Rudi experienced "distress
that, when he sent gifts to his two daughters, his presents would be returned,
unopened." It would seem that Gerta, who had taken Freedland into her
confidence, had a vengeful side to her. Not something she would admit to the
credulous Freedland.
This biography is not a disinterested account of
Vrba’s life. From the start Freedland had a hidden political agenda, prime
amongst which was whitewashing the record of the Zionist movement during the
Holocaust. Vrba was prime amongst the critics of the Zionist movement in
Hungary in enabling the extermination of Hungarian Jewry.
When Vrba and Wetzler escaped from Auschwitz and
reached the Jewish Council offices in Zilina, Slovakia they immediately set
down their accounts of what was happening in Auschwitz, the only functioning
Nazi extermination camp by then.
The report they compiled, the Vrba-Wetzler
Report [VWR] (also known as the Auschwitz Protocols) revealed for the first
time that Auschwitz was not, as was widely believed, a concentration and labor
camp but an extermination camp.
Vrba and Wetzler were desperate to reveal the
deadly preparations being made in Auschwitz to receive the 800,000 strong
Hungarian Jewish community.
Rudolf Kasztner
The VWR, which was completed by 26 April by the
Slovakian Judenrat [Jewish Council], was handed to the leader of Hungarian Zionism, Rudolf Kasztner by 29 April. Instead of distributing it and
using it to inform Hungarian Jews of what would happen if they boarded the
deportation trains, Kasztner covered its existence up and then used it as part of his
negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, whose task it was to implement the Final
Solution, in order to secure a train out of Hungary for the Zionist and Jewish
elite.
On June 30 1944, 1,684 ‘Prominent’ Jews left
Hungary, first for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then for
Switzerland. They comprised Kasztner’s extended family along with Jewish and
Zionist leaders. Meanwhile, from 15 May to 7 July when Admiral Horthy, the
ruler of Hungary called a halt to the deportations, some 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, the vast
majority of whom were led straight to the gas chambers.
Freedland obscures the reasons why Kasztner did
not distribute the VWR and omits his role in not only keeping the truth of
Auschwitz from its victims but in actually misinforming them.
In Israel some years later, Kasztner was accused by a fellow Hungarian Jew, Malchiel Gruenwald,
of collaborating with the Nazis. Because by then he had become a senior
government official, Kasztner was forced by the state to sue for libel. However
the trial of Gruenwald rapidly became effectively a trial of Kasztner.
Kasztner’s undoing came when he denied giving
testimony at Nuremberg in favor of Kurt Becher, a Nazi leader and Heinrich
Himmler’s personal emissary in Germany. Gruenwald's attorney Shmuel Tamir (who later became a Kahanist) then
produced Kasztner’s affidavit in support of Becher. Later it transpired he had
given favorable testimony to a host of other Nazi war criminals including two
of Eichmann’s closest butchers, Dieter Wisliceny and Hermann Krumey.
Freedland’s explanation for Kasztner testifying
in favor of mass murderers was that "perhaps
Kasztner’s motivation was less compassion for Nazis in need than a blackmailed
man’s fear of exposure."
This "explanation" is a novel one.
Nazi war criminals on trial for their lives in Nuremberg were unlikely to be in
a position to blackmail anyone. Kasztner’s efforts were not only on his behalf
but that of the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress.
Kurt Becher
Freedland’s suggestion that Kasztner’s appeal
was upheld by the Supreme Court (by which time he was dead, assassinated by agents of Shin Bet in
1957),
because
they accepted that Kasztner had in good faith
believed that he was engaged in an effort to save the many, rather than the few
Haim Cohen
is the precise opposite of what happened. The Supreme Court found no such thing. Haim Cohen, Israel’s attorney-general, conducted the appeal. He argued that:
If in Kasztner’s opinion, rightly or
wrongly, he believed that one million Jews were hopelessly doomed, he was
allowed not to inform them of their fate; and to concentrate on the saving of
the few. He was entitled to make a deal with the Nazis for the saving of a few
hundred and entitled not to warn the millions ... that was his duty… It has
always been our Zionist tradition to select the few out of many in arranging
the immigration to Palestine ... Are we to be called traitors?
Judge Cheshin summed up the viewpoint of the
majority of the Supreme Court when he ruled that:
A person sees that an entire community is doomed, is he allowed to make
efforts to save the minority, although some of the efforts consist in hiding
the truth from the majority or must he reveal the truth to all.
The decision of Israel’s Supreme Court was
primarily political not legal. Cheshin voiced the fears of Israel’s Zionist
Establishment that:
if we rule that Kasztner collaborated with the enemy because
he failed to inform those who boarded the trains in [Kasztner's hometown]
Kluj that they were heading for extermination, then it is necessary to bring to
court today …. many other leaders and half-leaders
who also kept silent in times of crisis, who didn’t inform others about what
they knew.
Being a modest man, Freedland begins the book
with "Praise for The Escape Artist"
and there are 39 examples which demonstrate not so much the brilliance of his
book as the ignorance of his admirers.
Adjectives such as "riveting,"
"thrilling" and "fascinating" abound. To Jamie Susskind
Freedland’s book is "not just one of
the best books I’ve read about the Holocaust, it is one of the most important
books I’ve ever read."
To Zionist historian Simon Schama, the book is
"immersive, shattering and
ultimately redemptive." To Tom Holland The Escape Artist ranks alongside Anne Frank’s Diary and Primo Levy.
All I can say to these "experts" is
that they should read Vrba’s book I
Cannot Forgive. There is nothing of importance in The Escape Artist that isn’t in Vrba’s book. It is Vrba’s book, not
Freedland’s cheap imitation thriller that ranks alongside Anne Frank’s Diary and Is
This a Man.
According to the Financial Times, "Vrba
died almost forgotten." Melissa Fay Green told how "I didn’t know Vrba’s name previously."
For C.J. Carey it was a "little-known
story."
The real question is why Vrba was unknown.
The Holocaust has produced thousands of books and articles. Why then was it
that the names of the first Jewish escapees from Auschwitz (leaving aside Siegfried Lederer who was taken out by an SS man) were almost entirely missing from the
history of the Holocaust and Auschwitz?
The simple answer is that a conscious decision
was taken by the Zionist Holocaust historians, led by Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael
Gutman, to erase all mention of Vrba and Wetzler. Freedland justifies this and
Zionism’s distortion of history because of the need to preserve Zionism’s
monopoly when it comes to Holocaust history.
Freedland writes that “even in Israel … Vrba and Wetzler were barely recalled at all"
and that it was only because of Ruth Linn’s "tireless campaign" that his memoir was eventually translated
into Hebrew in 1998.
Even at Yad Vashem, the country's official Holocaust archive, museum and
memorial in Jerusalem, the Auschwitz Report was filed away without the names of
its authors."
Argentina's Jewish Mothers of the Disappeared Demonstrated Against Israel's Support for a Junta that Murdered Thousands of Jews
Freedland notes that the escapee’s two names had
been anonymised yet he found this acceptable "because he was not an easy sell in Israel or in the mainstream Jewish
diaspora." But Vrba’s memoirs were published in the diaspora. They
were not however published in Israel, despite it being the nation that "stops once a year" to remember a
Zionist version of the Holocaust. A sanitized Holocaust which justifies the
very racism that European Jews experienced during the Nazi era.
Freedland claimed, in a dishonest rendition of
the historical record, that what made Vrba "a
more awkward witness still was his tendency to refer to the Jews whom he blamed
as 'Zionists." This is untrue. Vrba was careful to distinguish between
Zionists and Jews. It is Freedland himself who is guilty of this crime.
Freedland’s book is part of the process of
manipulating and changing the historical record to accord with a false
narrative of Zionist heroism. Freedland pretends that Vrba was a supporter of
Israel "and rooted for it"
believing that its existence "was a
good thing for Jews."
The idea that Vrba was some kind of Zionist
is absurd. Freedland provides no evidence for his assertion. On the contrary
when he first met Ruth Linn, a Haifa University professor of education, he told her that he had no interest in “your state of the Judenrats and Kastners."
After the war Vrba was employed as a researcher
in biochemistry in Czechoslovakia. But as time went on he became dissatisfied
with Stalinist Czechoslovakia and decided to escape to the West.
Thus it was that Vrba escaped to Israel where he
could claim citizenship under the Law of Return. But as Freedland concedes
"this was no journey of Zionist
homecoming." Israel was a gateway to the West.
(Vrba)did not take to Israel … nor was he much moved by the romance of a perennially persecuted nation … But there was something more painful. He looked around this new state and, often in high places, he saw the very individuals he believed had failed the historic test that had confronted them all less than fifteen years earlier.
Freedland describes how Vrba
could not contain his anger against those Zionists who he felt had
betrayed the Jewish people, starting with Kasztner and, in his view the early
Israeli leaders.
Freedland takes issue with Vrba’s attitude to
the Zionists citing a few who had not collaborated such as Moshe Krausz, the
head of the Palestine Office in Budapest.
This is true. In my book Zionism During the Holocaust I explain the background to the establishment of the United State's War Refugee Board in January 1944, which was responsible for saving
200,000 Jews. It had been undertaken by the dissident revisionist Zionists ShmuelMerlin and Peter Bergson. But this was in the teeth of opposition by America’s
Zionist leaders, Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann.
Freedland spoke of "a hinted suggestion that Zionism was prepared to sacrifice the mass of
European Jewry in order to establish" the Israeli state. It was more
than a hinted suggestion. The Zionist leaders repeatedly made it clear that
saving Jews was secondary to building a "Jewish" state. For example Ben-Gurion
argued
that:
“It is the job of Zionism not to save the remnant of Israel in Europe,
but rather to save the land of Israel for the Jewish people and the Yishuv.”
As Marek Edelman, the last Commander of the Warsaw Ghetto
Resistance said:
“[During the war] it never even entered any of our minds that the Zionists were deliberately remaining passive in regard to the physical destruction of the Jews in order to additionally justify the founding of the State of Israel…
Instead of attacking the resulting distortion of
Holocaust history Freedland justifies Vrba’s silencing because "handing a platform to Rudolf Vrba may have
come to seem like a risk." A risk to whom or what? The truth or the
Zionist rewriting of Holocaust history?
Freedland, despite his exploitation of Vrba’s
memory, deplores the fact that Vrba was not minded to "soften his message to make it more palatable."
Why should Vrba have softened his message? Is that what historians should do:
adjust to the political climate of the day? Or is telling the truth more
important?
Even worse Vrba speculated that Zionists such as
Kasztner "like Hitler believed in a
‘master race.'" But such a belief is integral to Zionism as we can see
today in Gaza.
Freedland justifies Bauer’s attempt to erase
Vrba from history because of what the Zionist historian claimed was his "deep hatred for the Jewish leadership,
Zionism. etc." Bauer is one of the main defenders of Kasztner, arguing
that even if the Auschwitz Protocols and the secret of Auschwitz had been
known, Hungarian Jews would not have believed it.
This is not the place to analyze this bogus
argument -- knowing yet not knowing. The fact is that Kasztner had no right to
make a decision on behalf of Hungary’s Jews to keep the secret of Auschwitz
from them after the sacrifice made by Vrba and Wetzler.
As Israel's attorney-general Haim Cohen said at
Kasztner’s appeal:
Eichmann, the chief exterminator, knew that the Jews would be
peaceful and not resist if he allowed the prominents to be
saved, that the "Train of the Prominents" was organized on Eichmann’s
orders to facilitate the extermination of the whole people … if all the Jews of
Hungary are to be sent to their death he is entitled to organize a rescue train
for 600 people. He is not only entitled to it but is also bound to act
accordingly.
Moshe Silberg
Moshe Silberg, the sole dissenting
Supreme Court Judge, savaged this argument that even if de facto Kasztner
facilitated the extermination of the Jews he was not guilty of collaboration:
"I must say that I cannot accept this argument. Is this
‘innocence’? Is there ‘representation’ of despair? Can a single individual,
even jointly with some friends, despair on behalf – and without the knowledge –
of 800,000 people? … The burning question of ‘By what authority’ and ‘quo
warranto’ is an adequate answer to such a claim of Bona Fide.
Freedland tells how Vrba "refused to conform to what the world expects
of a Holocaust survivor." Instead of praising Vrba’s determination to
tell the truth Freedland sides with those who tried to silence him.
It was the leadership
of the Zionist movement -- whether it was
in Hungary, Palestine or the United States -- who collaborated with the
anti-Semites and obstructed rescue.
Stephen Wise and Nahum Goldmann tried to get
Zionist dissidents Bergson and Merlin deported from the United States. In
Israel after the war, Budapest Zionist functionary Moshe Krausz complained to the
Jewish Agency about Kasztner only to find himself sacked.
Ruth Linn wrote a book describing how Vrba and
the Auschwitz Protocols had remained unknown, not by accident but because of
the deliberate decision of Bauer and the Zionist historians of Yad Vashem to
erase him from history.
Freedland cites Linn’s book Escaping Auschwitz – A Culture of Forgetting in his bibliography
but chose not to quote from it. In many ways Freedland’s biography of Vrba is
really a response to Ruth Linn’s description of the process of erasure. Linn
wrote that:
Whereas the two escapees accurately predicted the fate of the Hungarian
Jews, what they could not have foreseen was that their postwar memoirs and
documented report would be kept from the Israeli Hebrew-reading public …
Although I am a native Israeli who graduated from a prestigious private
high school, I had never heard about the escape from Auschwitz at the numerous
Holocaust ceremonies I attended. Nor had I ever read about it in any detail in
any of the Hebrew Holocaust textbooks at school.
Linn told how "no [Israeli] publishing house, including Yad Vashem, would show any
interest at all." Linn therefore set out to
trace the use the family of Israeli historians have made of misnaming,
misreporting, miscrediting and misrepresenting in the secretive tale of the
escape from Auschwitz.
Linn gives as an example the decision of Bauer
in his best-known Hebrew textbook The
Holocaust: Some Historical Aspects to devote just one sentence to the
escape from Auschwitz and to render the two Jewish escapees anonymous. Both
Bauer and fellow Yad Vashem historian Yisrael Gutman mention the escape at
length in their 1994 English publications, yet it is absent in the Hebrew
versions.
In 1999, a year after Vrba’s memoirs had been published
in Hebrew, "an account of the escape
from Auschwitz was finally included in Gutman’s Hebrew writings for high-school
students." As Linn remarks:
Could a narrative of an individualistic escape, by a non-Zionist Jew
critical of his Jewish leaders, ever be made to harmonize with the ‘collective
aura’ that dominated the state of Israel?"
Netanyahu and Hungary's anti-Semitic Prime Minister - Viktor Orban
Zionism has always found its friends
among the anti-Semites. Its founder, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his diaries that
the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the
anti-Semitic countries our allies.
Netanyahu’s friendship with
Hungary’s Victor Orban is but one example.
Sanitized biography
Freedland had access to the personal
papers of Vrba. Now that Vrba and his first wife Vrbova are dead, he has an
obligation to place these papers in an academic archive and let others decide
for themselves whether Freedland’s interpretation of them is skewed or not.
Freedland used his Guardian column to repeatedly attack Corbyn for 'antisemitism'
Freedland was a leading protagonist in the false anti-Semitism campaign in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019. His choice of an anti-Zionist Jewish Holocaust hero as the subject of a book is therefore curious to say the least. It appears that one of Freedland’s motives in writing the biography was in order to both justify Vrba’s silencing by Zionism’s Holocaust historians and to obscure his message that Zionism was a quisling Jewish movement during the Holocaust.
What didn’t see the light of day in
Freedland’s book was Vrba’s response of 22 September 1963 in The Observer to a letter the previous week by Jacob Talmon, who had
complained bitterly when Hannah Arendt's reports of the Eichmann trial were
published earlier
that month.
Jacob Talmon, a professor at the
Hebrew University, criticized Arendt for raising the question of the Judenrate (Jewish
councils) and their collaboration with the Nazis in the implementation of the
Final Solution. Vrba asked:
Did the Judenrat (or the Judenverrat) in Hungary tell their Jews what
was awaiting them? No, they remained silent and for this silence some of their
leaders -- for example, Kasztner -- bartered their own lives and the lives of
1,684 other 'prominent' Jews directly from Eichmann.
Nor did Freedland refer to Vrba’s
memoirs in the Daily Herald of
February 1961 when he wrote:
I am a Jew. In spite of that, indeed because of that, I accuse certain
Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war. This small group of
quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler's gas chambers
and bought their own lives with the price of silence … I was able to give
Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks’ notice that Eichmann planned to send a
million of their Jews to his gas chambers … Kasztner went to Eichmann and told
him, 'I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep
quiet.
This is the story that Freedland
chose not to tell in his sanitized biography of Vrba.
Tony Greenstein is the author of Zionism During the Holocaust
