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Most people, when they are grown up, stop readying books. They only watch TV. There are others who read only fiction - Mills and Boon (romanc) or Sidney Sheldon (crime-thriller) but nothing else. Sometimes, reading habits are driven by media frenzy. Trash fiction such as Harry Potter and Da Vinci Code* manage to top bestseller lists because of multi-pronged efforts through the media to push these books in to people's hands. People earn for third-party validation and succumb to peer pressure. Even extremely successful people have this weakness. They will act like fools to just to win the acclaim of others.
When I was in school, I read a lot of fiction. From Asterix to Hard Boys to James Hadley Chase to Jim Corbett, I have read them all. One day, just out of curiousity, I read Gandhi's autobiography. I was captivated by how close one could get to history by reading biographies. I then read biographies of seveal others and soon graduated to non-fiction. Non-fiction helped me grow by leaps and bounds. I knew I was several cuts above the general population because of all the information I gathered from those books. I strongly believe your swath of knowledge grows exponentially with number of non-fiction books you read. With fiction, it sees no change. On this page, I am recommending a few books to you. I hope they are useful to you.
By Joseph Frederick Scott. This is a very old book and is used as a standard reference by the Encyclopedia Britannica. The author seems pretty annoyed to find that ancient Indians had invented of the decimal system and the Algebra, thereby laying the foundation for modern mathematics. So, the author veers off into genetics to bring out a novel explanation - hybrid vigor. Crossbreeding between "Aryans" from the West and "indigenous" people of India created a vastly superior race, who were capable of inventions that could last for millennia. He goes on to say that the hybrid vigor lasted only a few generations, which curtailed further development of science and mathematics in India.
By James Cameron. Mark Twain said that the opinion of natives of their own country did not matter much. The opinion of foreigners on how the country "struck" them was more interesting. This work falls into that category.
By Hugh Thomas. An extremely well-documented book on the origins of the bleeding-without-fighting war. In one place however Thomas goes off track and pulls a conspiracy theory on the reader. The author claims the early MIG aircraft engines were based on original Rolls Royce designs. In the references section, this bull is filed as "private information." The author is also unable to come to terms with the fact that leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill had sought Stalin's help to defeat Hitler. Like a typical Western historian, Thomas quotes some racist views Churchill had about Slavic people in a vain attempt to exorcise historical fact.
Chitra Subramaniam is credited with breaking the Bofors story in the press. She was based in Stockholm when Swedish radio broadcast that large bribes were paid to get the Indian howitzer deal. Ms. Subramanian managed to get hold of some original documents that threw light on the scandal. Despite threats to her life, she continued to make more revelations in her articles in The Hindu. For her courage and determination, she won several awards, one of which she shared with her editor N. Ram. However, after some time, the editor stopped publishing her articles, claiming that her work was "too controversial." Chitra may have been asked to rest and settle for a job with the WHO, which is a front of the Rockefellers.
When Tariq Ali wrote this book, Pakistan had for the most part the leading banana republic in the world. Even now, the situation in Pakistan has not changed much.
By Ambrose Bierce. Don't miss this one. You can download my PDF e-book version of The Devil's Dictionary for free.
By Anne Frank. This book may be a work of fiction, if you believe the claims of some skeptics who call themselves "Historical Revisionists." I found it to be a good read though. It was purportedly written by a young Jewish girl when she along with her family were hiding from the Nazis. Her family claimed that she died in the concentration camps. Historical revisionists who went to her hiding place, which is now restored as a museum, say that is impossible for such a large family to hide in such a cramped space, among other things claimed in the diary.
Written by Shahid Hamid, personal secretary of the last C-in-C of British India. He later became DGMO (Director-General of Military Operations) of Pakistan's Army. The author provides a first-person account of the partition. It is an important book for every student of Indian History. It is well known and least admitted that the British cultivated Jinnah by proxy; this book provides the evidence. Lord Mountbatten knew well that Hamid was a lackey of Jinnah. One day, the Viceroy tells Hamid that he believed that the creation of Pakistan was inevitable. Hamid admits that he went and told Jinnah about this. Jinnah grew more confident after this.
Another interesting bit of information I found was about Nehru. Many people are aware of Gandhi's statement that Nehru even thought and dreamt in English. What many do not know is that Soviets were so impressed with Nehru's writing in English that they paid him for his books in dollars, contrary to their practice of paying only in roubles.
After the British government realized that Congress was an existential threat, it sought to deny Congress' claim to be the sole representative of India. When Wavell was Viceroy, his government went to great lengths to rally Muslims against the Congress. A delegation of the Muslim League went to London to bring back Jinnah to India. The plan was to project Jinnah and the Muslim League as the representative of Indian Muslims. This plan grew over time and resulted in the partition of the country. The British used Ambedkar to deny the Congress support of harijans. After the failure of the Round Table Conference, Ambedkar was invited and showered with praise by Tory leaders in London. The British also cultivated the RSS or the Hindu Mahasabha, which showed its true colors in the weeks following the partition, when it lead the massacre of millions of Muslims. Have no doubt, the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS, and later VHP and BJP attracted a lot of patriots and devout Hindus. It is quite likely that the Saffron Brigade remains an instrument of destabilization in the hands of London-based anti-Indian forces (i.e., Rothschilds). In this respect, I feel that the RSS-BJP-VHP combine a much bigger threat to Indian existence than Islamic terrorists, as the later is at least openly anti-Indian. The Saffron Brigade uses nationalistic and religious appeal to attract our support and sell us into slavery.
This is the biography of Sheik Abdullah translated in English. One of the interesting tidbits in the book are that Kashmiri Brahmins (Pandits) eat meat and that Nehru used to sleep with Chanakya's Arthrashastra under his pillow. The second bit is probably not true.
William L. Shirer mentions how Gandhi slept with naked women to test his control. Shirer asked why he was putting these women in such danger for his experiements. I do not remember what Gandhi said but since then I have stopped calling him the Mahatma. From other accounts, it seems that Gandhi was also a fetishist of a worst kind. Yet, unlike a lot of other people, I have come to realise that everything else Gandhi preached was right - from ahimsa to village economy to letting Jinnah get lost with Pakistan.
Compiled by Alex Ayres. I have I had my own copy of this book. I read it from a library. Check my collection of jokes titled Humour for some of his quotations.
The authors Dharmpal & S. N. Prasad are government historians and this book provides the official version of the events in the 1947 war with Pakistan. It sets the record straight on several controversies. For example, they have showed how Stanley Wolpert was wrong in quoting M.C. Mahajan. However, they provide an unsatisfactory explanation for Nehru's decision to halt the advance of the Indian Army into present-day POK.
Swami Chidbhavananda compares the bible and its "brutal verses" with Indian scriptures. Published by Sri Ramakrishna Tapovanam, Tiruparaitturai, Tiruchirapalli District, Tamil Nadu. PIN Code: 639115.
Stanley Wolpert reads like a yearbook. He speculates that the Muslim League delegation that went to bring Jinnah to India may have used sex to persuade win him over. Wolpert rides on controversy to sells his books.
Steven Hoffman's critique on the Indian political establishment during and after the 1962 invasion by China.
By Jeanne Boydston, Nick Cullather, Jan Lewis, Michael McGerr, James Oakes
When the British discovered the The East Indian Company employed Max Mueller to provide a fake translation of the Vedas. The idea was to discredit the Hindu civilization. Brahm Dutt Bharti's book exposes the lifelong masquerade.
Why read a book about a vain fellow? For history. For history.
By P. D. Stracey. It is no wonder that Nagaland was a nightmare. Many Indians think Nagas are from China. For their part, seccionist Nagas say they are related to their cousins to faraway Taiwan! Seccionist's literature revolves around the point that Nagas are a nation and not part of India. Stracey, who is an Anglo-Indian, tells us the facts. Nagaland was never a nation. Nagaland was a collection of isolated villages that fought with each other. Head-hunting was widely practiced. Nagas were converted to Christianity by American missionaries, who also told them they were not distinct from Indians. It was again Americans who left behind a huge cache of firearms after they fought the Japanese in Burma. Today, Nagas are armed to the teeth. They hunt with firearms, not bows or arrows. They worship Jesus Christ. They have Christian names. There is a special Naga council, which runs a parallel government and collect taxes. It was never in existence before the Americans went there. Only a few tribes have survived these onslaughts and retained their original Naga traditions and culture.
Arthur Swinson tells us that nobody in history has ever held Afghanistan for long. That is perhaps why George "I am a moron" Bush and St. Obama of Hope and Change have sent the U.S. military there. You see endless war means a permanent stream of money for the elite that arms the U.S. military. You see the war - World, Cold, Vietnam, Korean, etc., serve only one purpose - increase the coffers of the arms merchants.
If you want the official view that the Rockefeller's CFR wants you to have, then this is the book. Written by F. Gregory Gause III.
This book is made up of fiction. Relax. I recommend it because this book made me see Pakistanis for the first as my brothers, not as enemies. Every Indian should read this book.
Sonia Gandhi may not have a Cambridge degree but she knows how to publish a book. Yes, this is her book. Full of photographs though.
Eugene Irschick covers the attempts by Dravidian movements at Tamil revival in the pre-Independence era. (Available at the Connemara Public Library, Egmore, Madras.) I wrote to Irschik to ask about his book. His daughter replied and referred me to some other material. I started putting real effort in research material on the old Moral Volcano blog after that.
A classic expose on the CIA, written by an ex-agent Viktor Marchetti. His book was heavily redacted. However, there were some passages about how the CIA helped the Nagas. CIA also ran some private airlines in Laos fetching American prostitutes and drugs. It was my first introduction into the murky world of Western intelligence agencies. I was surprised to learn for the first time that a government agency in a democracy would be involved in drugs smuggling. Apparently, most of the drugs run under the protection of the CIA ends up in North America and Europe.
Edited by Charles Neider
My time in the American Center library was not entirely wasted.
Asghar Khan was Air Force chief in Pakistan at that time. His description of the drunken antics of the Pakistani military reader will make you buckle with laughter.
Christopher Hibbert chronicles the 1957 Indian revolt (dubbed "sepoy mutiny") against East India Company's government with first-person accounts of European survivors.
Barbara Tuchman spans across eons to show how nation after nation has gone to war only to end with failure because they all followed a policy that essentially defeated its purpose.
Paul Kennedy says that before Industrial Revolution, India was biggest manufacturing nation in the world. Import of cheap factory-made textiles from Britain laid waste to large parts of the Indian economy and millions died from poverty and famine.
William L. Shirer was allowed by the Nazis to chronicle their regime from close quarters.
This book by Booker T. Washington was the second biography that I read after Gandhi's autobiography.
If I had to sum up my world view in one sentence, the title of the book by Art Buchwald would do. In Mein Kampf (I have a copy), Hitler says that people will not believe if you tell them small lies but that they will definitely fall for a big lie. If you want a recent example, take Barack Obama.
* - With the Harry Potter series and Da Vinci Code, there was a subtle attempt to undermine Christianity. The Western media along with Hollywood, in the hands of Jewish people, seem to have greatly helped things along. Jews are extremely wary of Christianity. They see it as a threat to their existence. Hence, anything that loosens the hold of Christianity on the Western population is considered as "good for the Jewish people." For example, they would never show the same interest in the life of Christ. That is because The New Testament portrays Jews as the murderer of Christ. Actor-director Mel Gibson broke several taboos when he went ahead and created a trashy version of the life of Christ into a movie. It was panned by Jewish-owned media. He became a marked man since then. He was arrested for drunken driving and his wife divorced him with a payout of over half a billion dollars. Another example, is John Sack, an American journalist and a Jewish guy by the way. He wrote a book about concentration camps run by Jews for captured Germans. (You read this right. After the Nazis were defeated in World War II, Jews from Allied countries took charge of Germany and set out to punish her citizens. Thousands of Germans were put in concentration camps and murdered. No investigation was ever carried out. John Sack went ahead and exposed them in his book. Several publishers offerred to publish it but one by one they rejected it.
Writing Lola's Story
Now, this story I liked. If it was true, this was a story worth telling. I had this dream: maybe the Serbs and Croats will read it, the Irish Catholics and Protestants will read it, the Hutus and Tutsis, the Israelis and Palestinians ... Maybe they'll read it, and maybe they'll learn, as Lola did, that to hate your neighbors may or may not destroy them, but it does destroy yourself. And maybe these people will stop their revenge, stop their genocide.
We Jews always say of the Holocaust, "Never again. Never again will people hurt us simply because we are Jews." But Lola was apparently saying, "Yes, and never again will I hurt a German simply because he's a German." Fifty years ago, Lola was apparently saying, "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." This story I wanted very much to write. So ...
I start interviewing Lola. At the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Los Angeles. At a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey. On the Champs Elysés in Paris. I interview Lola on and off for two-and-a-half years. Her memories just pour out, and she also introduces me to a dozen other people, all Jews: people who knew her in Gleiwitz, prison guards in Gleiwitz, even the man who appointed her the commandant in Gleiwitz.
I write a twenty-page article on Lola's revenge and Lola's redemption. Lola reads it and likes it. The story runs in California magazine. Lola, at her own expense, comes to Washington to promote it on National Public Radio. The story is sold internationally, and it's reprinted in Best Magazine Articles, 1988. We have movie offers. Bette Midler and Suzanne Somers want to play the Lola part.
And then I write a book proposal. I write, "It's Lola's redemption, not Lola's revenge, that this book's about." I'll go to Germany. I'll find some prisoners maybe. I'll go to Poland. I'll find some more guards, maybe. I'll write a book. The title will be Lola. And in August 1988, the publisher Henry Holt in New York City says, "Okay! We want it!" Good news, and I phone it to Lola.
And Lola on the telephone says, "Listen, John, I don't want you to write it." I say, "Lola? Lola, this is the first time you've told that to me." I say, "Lola, we signed a contract." We had signed one. Lola had written, "I grant you the exclusive right to write and to publish a book about my life."
That night I go to Lola's apartment in Hollywood. Anyone here ever been in an encounter group? Remember your first night? Everyone shouting and screaming. You're just sitting there stupefied. You're thinking, "What is going on?" Well, I'm in Lola's condo. Lola is saying, "Lookit, John. I don't like the way you write. You write like a reporter. If you start writing this book, I will stop you. I will stop you!"
Lola's daughter is there. She's saying, "John, give it up. I'm begging you to give it up. John! Give it up!" Another daughter of Lola's is there. She's a lawyer, and she says, "John! You're going to have instantaneous and very expensive litigation!" Lola's saying, "I'll go to court." The daughter's saying, "John, I want you to sign this release. John! Sign the release!" The other daughter's saying, "John! Just leave us! Just go!" Lola's saying, "John! Get out of our lives!"
I leave. I telephone Lola but she doesn't answer. I write her, but she sends the letters back, unopened, inscribed "refused."
And not just Lola. Lola's second-in-command at the prison in Gleiwitz was Moshe, also a Jew. He won't talk to me. His wife on the telephone says, "We don't give you the permission to write this." I say, "I ... You ..." That's what I say, "I ... You ... One doesn't need permission!" I have permission, from the Constitution of the United States. Moshe's wife hangs up.
And then there is Jadzia, also a Jew, she was one of Lola's guards in Gleiwitz. Jadzia says on the telephone, "I was never in Gleiwitz!" Then she says, "Yes, I was in Gleiwitz, but I'll never talk about it!" And then she talks for an hour saying, "I don't know nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing! Nothing!"
People won't talk to me. People tell other people, "Don't talk to John Sack." People talk to me, and they lie to me. People say they'll sue me, they'll destroy me, they'll kill me. One man takes my driver's license, writes down my address, and says, "If you write about me, I will call the Israeli Mafia."
Here's some advice. Never tell a reporter, "You'd better not write this." I have a contract with Henry Holt. I've made a promise to Henry Holt. I keep my promises.
In April 1989, I fly to Germany. I go to this castle, this concrete castle, high on a hill above the Rhine. It's the German Federal Archives, and they've got forty thousand statements there by Germans who lived in what now is Poland during World War II. The statements of course are in German, in German script, and I find five statements from Germans who were in Lola's prison.
I go to another place in Germany: a great medieval hall, with banners on the stone walls. It's a reunion of a thousand people from Gleiwitz. They're drinking beer. They're eating sausages and sauerkraut. They're laughing and singing, "Ein prosit, ein prosit ..." And I'm like a little flower girl. You know, the girl who goes from table to table selling roses? I'm going around asking, "Uh, excuse me. Anyone here who was in prison in Gleiwitz?" Yeah, I am a party pooper. I admit it. But eventually I find five of Lola's prisoners.
I take the train to Gleiwitz. Now it's Gliwice, Poland. And going through Communist East Berlin, I'm arrested, taken off the train, and locked up in a little room because with me I have a copy of the book Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevìkerung aus den Gebieten ótlich der Oder-Neisse ["The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse," published in the 1950s by the Bonn government]. Hours later I'm let out and I get to Gleiwitz/ Gliwice at four in the morning. It's a city of two hundred thousand people, almost none of whom speak English. I don't speak Polish, but I find three of Lola's guards. They remember her well.
It's 1989, Poland is still Communist, but I get into Lola's prison, into the prisoners' cells. I tell them, "Djien dobre. Good morning." I see the prison records. Remember when, according to Lola, she went to the Polish government and said, "I want revenge"? Well, I find her application, in her own handwriting. She wrote, "I want to cooperate against our German oppressors." I find the official document appointing her commandant in Gleiwitz.
After that, I go to Germany eleven more times, to Poland three more times, to France, Austria, Israel, Canada, and all around the United States. Through interpreters I talk to two hundred people in Polish and Russian, Danish and Swedish, German and Dutch, French and Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I left out English. I get three hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews, and I see thousands of documents.
And what do I learn? Well: Lola was telling the truth. She was the commandant in Gleiwitz. And she was taking revenge. She slapped the Germans around. And just as she said, she stopped. I remember one day in 1989, I'm having lunch with one of her guards at the Hotel Leszny. We're eating wienerschnitzel. And out of the blue the man says, "You know, Lola stopped. She told us, 'Stop!' She said, 'We're going to show the Germans we're not like them.'"
So Lola was telling the truth. But, she wasn't telling the whole truth. Lola had told me the people in her prison were German soldiers. And yes, twenty of them were German soldiers, men who worked as painters, carpenters, and such. But there were a thousand other prisoners there, and they were German civilians: German men, German women, German children.
One prisoner was a fourteen-year-old boy. He had been out in Gleiwitz wearing his boy scout pants. A man cried out, "You're wearing black pants! You're a fascist!," and he chased the boy and tackled him at the Church of Saint Peter and Paul, and then took him to Lola's prison. Now, the boy was completely innocent. So were most of the people in Lola's prison. They weren't Gestapo. They weren't SS. They weren't even Nazis. Out of a thousand prisoners, just twenty were ever even accused of it.
But the Germans in Lola's prison were slapped and whipped. And I'm so sorry to have to say it, but they were also tortured. The boy scout: the guards poured gasoline on his curly black hair and set it on fire. The boy went insane. The men: they were beaten with a Totschläger, a "beater-to-death." It's a long steel spring with a big lead ball at the end. You use it like a racketball racket. Your arm, your wrist, the spring: they deliver a triple hit to a German's f ace.
Lola didn't tell me, but the Germans in her prison were dying. I found their death certificates in Gleiwitz city hall. One of Lola's guards told me, "Yeah, the Germans would die." He told me, "I'd put the bodies in a horse-drawn cart. I'd cover them with potato peels so no one would see. I'd ride to the outskirts and, after I threw the potato peels out, I'd take the Germans to the Catholic cemetery. To the mass grave."
We all know about Auschwitz. But I have to tell you, the Germans in Lola's prison were worse off than Lola had been at Auschwitz. Lola at Auschwitz wasn't locked in a room night and day. She wasn't tortured night after night. She herself told me: "Thank God, nobody tried to rape us. The Germans weren't allowed to." But all of that happened to German girls at Lola's prison in Gleiwitz.
One woman I talked with wasn't even German. She was Polish. In 1945 she was twenty years old: a tall, blonde, beautiful medical student. The guards at Lola's prison pulled off her clothes and told her, "Let's do it!" They beat her and beat her, night after night, until she was black and blue. One morning, she came back to her cell and fell on the floor, sobbing. Her cellmate asked her, "What, what is that blue thing you're wearing? Oh, oh, it's your skin."
And ten feet away was Lola's office. Lola in her brass, braid, and stars. I once asked her, "Lola, where did you get that uniform?," and Lola said, "Well, the Russians must've given it to me." That wasn't the whole truth either.
Lola was in the Polish secret police. Its name was the Office of State Security, in Polish the Urzad Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego. The Germans called it the Polish Gestapo. One of its missions was to round up Nazi suspects. But for all practical purposes, if you were a German, you were a Nazi suspect. So the mission was to round up Germans, imprison them, interrogate them, and if they confess, prosecute them.
In the Office of State Security, the lower ranks were Polish Catholics, but most of the leaders were Polish Jews. The chief of the Office in Warsaw was a Jew. (When I was in Poland he wasn't alive, but I met some of his family.) The department directors, all or almost all of them, were Jews.
In Silesia, the province where Lola was commandant, the director of the Office of State Security was a Jew. I met him in Copenhagen, a little bald-headed man. The director of prisons was also a Jew. I met his whole family in Tel Aviv. The secretary of state security was a Jew. I met him time and again at his home in New Jersey. And in the Office of State Security in Silesia in February 1945, of the officers - not the enlisted men, not the guards, but the lieutenants, captains and such - one-fourth were Catholics, and three-fourths were Jews.
I interviewed twenty-four of them. And I learned that the Office of State Security ran 227 prisons for German civilians like Lola's. It also ran 1,255 concentration camps, and I interviewed four of the commandants. They were also Jews. One was Lola's boy friend, a man who'd lost in the Holocaust his mother, his father, all his brothers (he had no sisters), all his uncles and aunts, and all but one of his cousins. I hope that, like me, you can all have compassion for Solomon Morel.
But one night in February, 1945, Solomon went to his concentration camp in the city of Swietochlowice. He went into the Germans' barracks, and said, "My name is Captain Morel. I am a Jew. I was at Auschwitz. I swore I would take revenge on you Nazis." They weren't Nazis, but Solomon said, "Now! Everyone! Sing the Horst Wessel song!" That was a Nazi anthem. No one wanted to sing it. One boy, fourteen years old, didn't even know it.
Solomon had a club. He said, "Sing it!" Some people began, "Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen ..." "Sing it! Sing it, I say!" They started singing, "Clear the streets for the brown battalions. Clear the street for the Storm Section men." Solomon had all this hate inside him, and he released it. He picked up a wooden stool and he started beating the Germans to death. For this one camp, I found the death certificates for 1,583 Germans.
In other camps and other prisons, thousands of German civilians died. German men, women, children, babies. At one camp there was a barracks for fifty babies. They were in cribs, but the camp doctor, Dr. Cedrowski - he was a Jew who had been in Auschwitz -- he didn't heat the barracks, and he didn't give the babies milk. He gave them only some soup, and forty-eight of the fifty babies died.
All in all, sixty to eighty thousand Germans died. Some were killed by Jews, some by Catholics, and many by typhus, dysentery, and starvation, but sixty to eighty thousand died in the custody of the Office of State Security. Now, someone, a German, once told me that this was another holocaust. Well, I'm sure it seemed like a holocaust to the Germans.
But let's not forget: sixty thousand is one percent of the number of Jews who died in the capital-H Holocaust. Jews didn't do what the Germans did. We didn't plot to exterminate the German people. We didn't mobilize all the Jews and the Jewish state. (There was no Jewish state.) We didn't send the Germans systematically to cyanide chambers.
But let's also remember that sixty to eighty thousand civilians is more than the Germans lost at Dresden, and more than, or just as many as, the Japanese lost at Hiroshima, the Americans at Pearl Harbor, the British in the Battle of Britain, or the Jews at Belsen or Buchenwald.
All this was covered up for nearly fifty years. Jews who were involved didn't talk about it. For example, the chief of police in occupied Breslau, Germany, in 1945, who was Jewish, later wrote a book about the Holocaust. And in telling about his time as chief of police in Breslau, all he says is, "We moved westward to Breslau and ... from there ... to Prague." That's it. And Jewish reporters who knew didn't write about it. There's a working reporter right now in New York City who was in Poland right after World War II. He told me, "Whatever, whatever the Germans tell you, believe me, it's true." But he himself, he never wrote about it.
The truth was covered up, and was still being covered up. In 1989, I went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel's central Holocaust center. As you may know, they have fifty million documents there about the Holocaust. I ask them, "Well, what do you have on the Office of State Security?" They have nothing. I ask them, "What do you have on the Jews in the Office of State Security?" Nothing. I say, "Well, there were Jewish commandants, Jewish directors, Jewish ..." The chairman of Yad Vashem responds, "It sounds rather imaginary," and the director of archives says to me, "Imm-possible! Impossible!"
Denial, denial. I know that denial is a very human thing. But historically I don't think it's a Jewish thing. When Abraham, Isaac and Jacob committed sins, we Jews didn't deny it. Yes, Abraham, the father of our people, sinned. God told him to go to Israel, instead he went to Egypt, and we admitted it in the Book of Genesis. Judah (the word "Jew" comes from Judah) made love to a prostitute. We admitted it in Genesis. Moses, even Moses sinned, and God didn't let him into the Promised Land. We admitted that in Deuteronomy. Solomon -- good, wise, old King Solomon -- did evil. He "worshipped idols." We didn't cover it up. We admitted it in the Book of Kings.
It seems to me that that's the Jewish tradition. How can we say to other people -- to Germans, to Serbs, to Hutus -- "What you're doing is wrong," if we ourselves do it and cover it up? I wish it were someone else who was here today. Abraham Foxman. Elie Wiesel. I wish he or she would simply say yes, some Jews, some Jews, did evil in 1945. But when the Jewish establishment didn't say it, then I had to say it.
I'm a reporter. That's what reporters do. Someone kills sixty thousand people, we report it. If we don't report it, it might become common, or more common, than it already is. But also I'm a Jew, and the Torah says (Leviticus 5:1), that if someone does evil, and if I know it and don't report it, then I am guilty too.
So I start writing this book. The title now won't be Lola. It'll be An Eye for an Eye. And on the third page I write, "I hope that An Eye for an Eye is something more than the story of Jewish revenge: that it's the story of Jewish redemption." I write about Jews taking revenge, yes. But that is one tenth of An Eye for an Eye. Mostly I write ...
I write about Zlata, Moshe, Mania, and Pola. They were Jews who refused to look at, much less work at Lola's prison. I write about Ada, who visited the prison once, just once, and then fled to Israel. I write about Shlomo, who was in the Office of State Security and, at the risk of his life, told people in it, "You must stop doing this."
I write about Lola. I write that in Gleiwitz she finally remembered how a Jew should act and, at the risk of her life, she got bread, her own bread from her own home, and smuggled it to the German prisoners. Now this isn't something that Lola told me. No, the prison guards told me. They said that if Lola had been caught, she'd have gone to prison herself.
And I write that at Yom Kippur, 1945, Lola -- again at the risk of her life -- escaped from Gleiwitz, just as she had escaped some months earlier from Auschwitz, and came to the United States. Almost all the Jews in the Office of State Security escaped, at the risk of their lives, in September, October, and November 1945. And I write that too. They crept through the woods into Germany, or climbed the pass into Italy. They did what the SS never did: they deserted, they defected.
I was crying while I was writing this. My advance from Henry Holt was $25,000, and for three years I was writing An Eye for an Eye. In September 1991 I finally finished it, wrapped it up, and mailed it to Henry Holt in New York. And I told myself: "Okay. I've done it. That's the end of the cover-up."
No. Because then the people at Henry Holt say, "We don't want it." They don't say it's wrong. They know it's right. They just say, "We don't want to publish it. Keep the twenty-five thousand." Okay. My agent and I send the manuscript to other publishers: to Harper's, to Scribner's - you name it, we sent it - to two dozen other publishers.
And let me tell you. The letters we get from these people, they're practically blurbs. The publishers say: "well-written," "extremely well-written," "chilling," "compelling," "disturbing," "dismaying," "shocking," "startling," "astonishing," "mesmerizing," "extraordinary," "I was riveted," "I was bowled over," "I love it!" And the publishers all reject it. The letter from St. Martin's Press says, "I am always moved by Holocaust books, but I'd have trouble distinguishing this book ... from other books ... in this vast area of literature."
Okay. My agent and I agree that if we can't sell a book, we'll try magazines. One of the chapters is on Solomon Morel. Remember? The man who lost his mother, father, all his siblings, uncles, and aunts in the Holocaust. The man who had so much hate for the Germans, he had to disgorge it, who commanded a concentration camp at Swietochlowice, and beat Germans to death.
Solomon is still alive. He's wanted by Interpol for crimes against humanity. Interpol has an international warrant out for his arrest. But he's fled to Israel. He's taking refuge in Tel Aviv, and no one in America -- no newspaper, magazine or television network -- has ever reported it.
So we send the chapter on Solomon Morel to Esquire magazine. I've been a contributing editor there, a war correspondent in Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia. Esquire says, "No." We send it to GQ magazine. GQ says, "Yes!" The editor says it's the most important story in GQ's history. He even tells that to an editor of Esquire at a bar in Greenwich Village. He tells him, "Ha, ha! You don't have it! We do!"
For six weeks GQ is fact-checking. They don't find a single error. They send me the galley proofs, the page proofs, and on Wednesday the presses will roll. And then the telephone rings at my home in the Rocky Mountains. The editor of GQ says, "John, this isn't a happy phone call. We aren't going to run it." He tells me to keep the $15,000 and to sell the story somewhere else.
So once again my agent and I are making calls, sending faxes, passing out the GQ page proofs. Harper's magazine says no. Rolling Stone says no and "I'm sure you'll understand." Mother Jones, that great exposé magazine ("Extra! Extra! Cigarettes are bad for you!") doesn't even call back. The New Yorker (which has published ten pieces by me) refuses even to look at it.
But finally, finally, in March 1993, the story of Solomon Morel is published in the Village Voice. And in November, An Eye for an Eye is published by Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins. So, thank God, now it's all over. I can relax now. Not.
Because one day later there's a telephone call to Basic Books. It's from the executive director of the World Jewish Congress. He says he wants an immediate retraction, and if he doesn't get it he'll call a major press conference tomorrow. He says he'll denounce me, Basic Books, and HarperCollins, and say, "They are all anti-Semites." Well, we don't retract, and the World Jewish Congress doesn't denounce. But …
Then the reviews come out. And the reviewers say that An Eye for an Eye isn't true, that what I wrote there never happened at all.
Please! Much of An Eye for an Eye had been fact-checked by California magazine, fact-checked by GQ, and, for the Village Voice, fact-checked by a woman who is the Fact-Checker from Hell. She and I checked every single word, even if we had to call up Poland. And when, after two weeks of this, night and day, we were finally done, the editor of the Voice gave an interview saying, "This may be the most accurate story in the history of American journalism."
Much of An Eye for an Eye was corroborated by 60 Minutes, which found eight eyewitnesses I hadn't found. It was corroborated by the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Historians hired by major newspapers in Germany went to the German Federal Archives and wrote, "The facts are true," "The facts are right," "The facts are iron-bound."
But in the United States, one review was entitled "False Witness." Another was headed "The Big Lie, Continued."
The Jewish paper Forward said, "Sack is transparently writing docudrama," and told readers that Lola Potok was not the commandant of the prison in Gleiwitz. Well, Lola herself had told me, "I was the commandant," and thirty-five other people, including the current commandant, including the current director of prisons, said yes, Lola was the commandant. I have the document that says, "We appoint Citizen Lola Potok Commandant," and I have a document signed by Lola Potok, Commandant. But still the Forward said, "The unlikelihood is overwhelming but Sack ... seems ... oblivious." As I read this, I felt I was being lectured by Chico Marx. Remember? "Who you gonna believe? Your own two eyes or me?" I wrote a letter to the Forward. Over the last seven years, I've had to write, at last count, about 1,500 letters about An Eye for an Eye. And all those letters, added up, are twice as long as the book is.
---o0O0o---
This article was first published in July 2005.
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Moral Volcano is the work of an Indian, thinker, astrologer, software programmer, GNU/Linux user, web designer, technical writer, lexicographer, hacker, gamer, pioneer IE Blocker, amateur photographer, and somewhat podcast transcriptionist. named V. Subhash (Me). I have written a fake American Policy for Dummies book. My e-book How To Invest In Stocks PDF eBook is free but not fake. So, I my PDF eBook version of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, which was created using the all-text original provided by the Guttenberg project and a free software HTMLDoc.
I do not have any time for social notworking sites such as Facebook. They cause a huge loss of productivity in offices where employees have access to Internet. I had a Johnny Bravo fan site but that was gone when Yahoo closed Geocities. Sites such as Facebook, Linked-In, MySpace, Orkut, and Twitter thrive only because spies and marketers feel there is a great need for easy access to demographic and personal information. "Free" pretends to be free for a reason. Otherwise, everything comes with a price tag.
Finally, this website blocks Internet Explorer - all versions, not just IE6. This is the first website on the Internet to do so. If you have a website, I welcome you to do so.
