Contaminated evidence of The August Trials

Letter to Editor of the Jewish Chronicle (but not published)

Dear Sirs,

With regard to Mark Glanville’s harsh assessment of Poland’s treatment of Jews in his review of “The August Trials” by Andrew Kornbluth (TheJC 19^th March 2021), we again have that sad case of two narratives, one Polish and one Jewish, running in a parallel universe that finds difficulty in coming together into one objective channel of history. Glanville’s opening sentence about a series of trials of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators beginning in August 1944 is, in itself, jarring to Poles, to whom August 1944 means only one thing, the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising against the Germans which led to the betrayal by the Red Army, the death of over 250,000 Polish citizens and the wholesale destruction of Poland’s capital city. The trials lasted more than 6 years, but the very name August Trials was originally part of the Communists’ propaganda to downplay the searing significance of August as the month in which to commemorate the Uprising each year.

While this does not take away from the courage and sense of civic duty with which some individual judges and prosecutors took up their task of investigating wartime collaboration, this does not apply to all of their zealous Communist colleagues seeking to take revenge on Poland’s pre-war elites. It also left them open to being considered by many of their countrymen as collaborators with the new oppressors. However useful the detailed information and accusations about Nazi collaboration and murder supplied in those courts, they will remain suspect to historians as evidence because of the toxic atmosphere of Red terror in which post-war justice was conducted.

I must take issue too with the suggestion that “butchery” of Jews had been taking place in the countryside since 1935. There was undoubted deep-seated antagonism towards the Jewish population in many rural areas, partly because of primitive religious beliefs, and partly because of distrust of an alternative culture that rarely spoke Polish and had little sense of loyalty to the newly emergent Polish state. But without Hitler’s invasion in 1939 and subsequent brutal occupation of Poland, there would have been no holocaust, and no wartime battle for survival by two nations in one country but at different levels of humiliation and extermination.

Obviously I have not read Andrew Kornbluth’s book as it has not yet been published, but I hope that in its detailed examination of the trails of accused collaborators more will emerge to help understand the complexities and the tragedy of Polish-Jewish relations during and after the Second World War.

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

author of "Hello I'm Your Polish Neighbour"