The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 15

THE PALM BEACH POST SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1996 15A Post-Holocaust pogroms really happened; I was there i mnrdprers who killed more than Anil iim 77T7 A f- 36 -r. vhf if i "I WA I The Polish government and some Polish-American groups are reluctant to acknowledge the murders of Jews. By YAFFA ELIACH The truth never has many friends, and unpleasant truths are especially friendless. I was reminded of this recently when several fringe Polish-American groups, following in the footsteps of Holocaust revisionists, set out to deny the truth about the murder of Zipporah and Hayyim Sonenson, my mother and baby brother, by a band of uniformed oles on Oct. 20, 1944.

They were killed in the formerly Polish town of Ejszyszki Eishyshok in Yiddish now part of Lithuania and called Eisiskes. The Eishyshok pogrom occurred not during the Holocaust but months after the Nazis were driv- jen from the town on July 13, 1944. The participants were 150 Poles, 80 of whom were members of the nationalist Polish Home Army. Before the Holocaust, 3,500 Jews lived in our town. After the liberation, the 30 or so Jews who had survived returned.

Most of us in two houses, my father's family home and that of the Ka- I "bacznik family. I was 7 years old. On the night of Oct. 19, the attackers stopped near the Ka- hacznik home. There, according to 2,000 Jews after the liberation? Recently, there have been some indications of a positive change in the Polish government's attitude regarding the acknowledgment of anti-Semitism in the post-Holocaust years.

Polish officials participated in the commemorations of the Kielce pogrom of 1946, in which 42 Jews were murdered by Poles, and there was an official government apology. During his recent visit to the United States, President Alek-sander Kwasniewski of Poland met with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He was asked about the inquiry into the murder of my mother and brother and the Polish government's request to interview me. The president directed the questioners to the Polish Embassy's expert on Jewish affairs. As yet the responses from the embassy as well as from Warsaw and the government's war crimes institute in Lodz have been conflicting and inaccurate.

It is painful and outrageous that it is still difficult for some Poles to accept the facts about the terrible fate of Poland's Jews. It was such a refusal to treat Jews with decency and honesty that contributed to the catastrophe. As our world shrinks and its diverse nations become more entangled with one another, it is of the utmost importance to understand that the "dislike of the unlike" is what leads to the gas chambers and the killing fields. When the truth about Eishyshok is denied, more Eishyshoks are likely. Yaffa Eliach, a professor of history and literature at Brooklyn College, is the author of There Once Was a World: A Nine-Century Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok.

He wrote this article for The New York Times. hand and pulled me out of bed. As we were running toward the staircase leading to our parents' room, a grenade came through our window and exploded in my bed. As the sound of shooting filled the air, the people upstairs began fleeing for their lives, jumping from the second-floor windows and running toward the apple grove. My father, Moshe Sonenson, pleaded with my mother to follow the others through the window.

But she feared leaving the baby behind. So the family rushed to a hiding place in a small attic-like closet off a second-floor room. Miraculously, the baby slept peacefully. Sometime after midnight we heard footsteps, then voices, on the stairs. My parents recognized many of the voices as belonging to people they knew.

One of the men must have noticed the scratch on the floor, where my father had dragged a large wooden chest to cover the door. As the men moved the chest and opened the door, my mother walked out with the baby in her arms. My mother knew her murderers, among them Anton Sharavei, Wladyslaw Duszinski and our 17-year-old neighbor and his 22-year-old brother. Addressing Sharavei by name, she asked that she be killed first, so she would not have to witness her son's death. Nine shots answered her plea, killing my baby brother in her arms.

Then 15 more bullets, fired from an automatic weapon, killed my mother, and she fell back on top of me and my brother. With a fusillade of bullets, which flew around the attic gleaming like little red fireflies, the soldiers left. In the darkness and confusion, they hadn't seen the others inside the little attic. My mother, with the baby in her arms, was buried in the Jewish cemetery that my father's ancestors had inaugurated in the 12th BUNDESARCHIVFILE PHOTO Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust: Hundreds of Jews who survived the Nazis were killed by Poles. the Atlantic.

The Polish Embassy in Washington told Richard Z. Chesnoff, a correspondent for U.S. News World Report, that groups of Holocaust deniers enlisted the Ministry of Justice in Warsaw to help discredit me. Rather than contact me directly, the ministry asked the United States Justice Department to interview me. When I met with American officials in February, I asked for a copy of the official request from Poland.

It was couched in Orwellian language, saying that Poland wanted to bring to justice my mother's and brother's killers, so the ministry was looking into the matter. But the Soviets tried and punished these men 50 years ago. Why aren't the ministry officials looking for the other Polish can groups of Holocaust deniers have distorted and denied every aspect of what happened that night. They ignore my account, those of all the other witnesses who were in town during the attack, as well as official documents. The vice president of the Polish Historical Society in Stamford, has said that I suffer from "Holocaust survivors' syndrome," a mental condition that he says renders my testimony worthless.

A member of the Polish American Public Relations Committee in Santa Monica, said that Holocaust survivors tend to be "revisionist, wanting to satisfy their egos, defame others and financially profit." It is painful to experience a Big Lie in the United States, but this Big Lie was imported from across century. They were the last Jews to be buried there. Eventually, a group from the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, arrived in the town to investigate. The Russians arrested most of the participants in the October pogrom, and they were brought to trial in Vilnius before an NKVD military tribunal, sentenced to prison terms and exiled to Siberia. Every aspect of the events of that night, as well as the other murderous activities of the Polish Home Army in Eishyshok and its vicinity, has been thoroughly documented by scholars, based on interviews with the Jewish survivors and other local Poles, official documents, court records, death certificates and diaries.

All the documentation notwithstanding, some Polish-Ameri Vm survivors, the commander gave re orders to murder all the Jews. He concluded his orders with a slogan popular in the Polish Home "Poland Without Jews." The attack on our house began inland ii y.m. wiui crashing through the window in the downstairs bedroom wnere my 13-year-old brother Yitzhak and I slept. He grabbed me by the With Huffingtons, the voters nearly got what they deserved Court becomes religious melting pot i jr By JOAN BISKUPIC 1 It was an event that passed almost unnoticed bv the Dress, barely re marked on by Supreme Court watch 'A- 'I ers. But when Justice Llarence as recently disclosed that he had joined Arianna Huffington, writes Ed Rollins, "was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in 30 years in national politics not to mention that she sometimes seemed truly pathological." And that's the nice part! Mrs.

Huffington wife of the defeated California senatorial candidate Michael is already issuing denials and threatening a lawsuit against Mr. Rollins, the former GOP political consultant, whose burn-every-bridge memoir, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, was published Wednesday. the Catholic Church, he was prorouna-ly affecting American history: For the first time in the Supreme Court's 207-year existence, it would no longer be dominated by a Protestant majority. The transformation mav be mostly symbolic, but it is nonetheless remark able a country so snapea, ana in many ways still influenced, by a strong Protestant ethos. Indeed, of the 108 justices ever to have served on the high court, only 16 have not been Protestants and five of those are on the court now.

"In terms of the long run of history," said University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock, "the Protestant dominance has been overwhelming. Here is a very elite institution where for the first time Protestants are a minority. This serves as a marking point as we look to a future with a more pluralistic society." Today, the United States is more religiously diverse and generally more tolerant of people with different faiths. Presidents no longer calculate religion into their judicial aDDointments; seri- late 1980s, the notion that three Catholic justices would sit together evoked little public notice and no complaint largely because none of the three was defined by his religion; their, ideological differences were overriding. Louis D.

Brandeis, nominated in 1916, became the first Jewish justice and initiated what for years would be called the "Jewish seat." This special seat lapsed in 1969, when Justice Abe Fortas resigned and President Richard Nixon appointed Harry A. Blackmun, a Methodist, to succeed him. For the next 24 years, no Jewish person was on the court. When President Clinton was considering his first nomination in 1993, Jewish leaders urged him to nominate a Jew. He did.

But neither Justice Ginsburg nor Justice Breyer, who was appointed the following year, was publicly defined by religious background. America's changing religious face has meant subtle differences at the court. In an important 1892 case, the majority declared that the country was a "Christian nation," a phrase that was repeated in a 1931 ruling. But by 1984, Justice Brennan was referring to the statement as "arrogantly" made. Besides, non-Protestants were not voting as a bloc to change the outcomes of cases.

When Justices Brennan and Scalia served together, they disagreed on virtually every social-policy issue, including how separate church and state should be. Besides differing on that and on prayer in public schools, Catholic justices have taken positions that conflict with the teachings of their church: Justices Brennan and Kennedy voted for abortion rights; Justices Scalia and Thomas have voted to uphold the death penalty. Last year, both Justices Ginsburg and Breyer voted (in dissent) to allow the University of Virginia to refuse student-activity money to a Christian journal. Their votes were perceived as arising more out of liberal tendencies in general than their Jewish beliefs. Joan Biskupic covers the Supreme Court for The Washington Post.

Mrs. Huffington Mr. Rollins campaign manager who still considers Mrs. Huffington a friend, vouches for the book's accuracy, firmly adding, "I was there." But the major reason for the near-success of the Huffington campaign was, in any event, an indisputable matter of public record: nasty TV attack ads. A steady barrage backed by an all-time record budget for a Senate campaign ($29 million) drove the once-popular Sen.

Feinstein's negative rating over 50 percent. Mr. Huffington's subsequent narrow defeat hasn't discredited either the candidate or Mr. Rollins' strategy. The empty suit is already making noises about running for governor in '98.

His wife has risen to be a Newt Gingrich confidante and a B-list Beltway media star. Such is the America we live in, where fame is the main currency, no matter how notoriously earned, especially if backed by gold. When I asked Mr. Rollins if he was surprised at the resilience of the Huffingtons and Mr. Perot, no matter how fraudulent their public poses turn out to be, he said, "You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising budget is big enough." As if to prove his point, Mrs.

Huffington this week has written a straight-faced syndicated column decrying negative campaign ads apparently secure in her knowledge that short-attention-span Americans won't remember her role in a campaign built on smear ads only one election ago. "There are plenty more Huffingtons out there, salivating to be senators, governors, and even president," Mr. Rollins writes. There's nothing in his book or in the political arena he leaves behind to allay the fear that one of them will triumph soon. Frank Rich is a columnist for The New York Times.

ous reference to the "Catholic seat" or Frank Rich Mr. Rollins' book, full of tales out of school about his clients and candid assessments of his own whoppers (on the Christine Whitman campaign, most famously), keeps you laughing. Or does until you remember how close to victory some of his most malevolent candidates came. For all the spice of Mr. Rollins' inside poop about bold-faced GOP names, his tale is implicitly far harsher in its judgment of a public (and a sometimes compliant press) that falls for zillionaire lunatics and the artificial campaign images that consultants like him invent to sell them.

Ross Perot, "an extremely dangerous demagogue" in Mr. Rollins' less-than-unique view, polled as high as 39 percent in '92 and still drew 19 percent of the vote after he self-destructed. But "at least Perot believed in something," he writes. The Huffingtons, who "believed in nothing except the pursuit of raw power," came even closer to winning losing the Senate race to the incumbent Dianne Feinstein by only 160,000 votes out of about 8 million cast. This near-victory occurred, according to Mr.

Rollins, despite the fact that Michael Huffington hated meeting constituents, hated being a congressman and was so bereft of convictions that he "gave empty suits a bad name." Yet driven by his own bottomless checkbook and a wife who was "obsessed with making her husband president some day," he was taken seriously by everyone from pundits like George Will to voters, who would have elected him had he not been caught at the last minute in a nanny scandal. Jamie Moore, the day-to-day Huffington the "Jewish seat ended decades ago. If it ever was true, it certainly is true no more that justices can be defined by their religion. One of the more liberal justices of this decade, William J. Brennan and one of the more conservative, Antonin Scalia, are both Roman Catholics.

The end of Protestant dominance on the court probably was inevitable, given the broader range of religious beliefs taking hold nationwide. For decades, Protestants have been declin-. ing as a percentage of the population. Mr. Laycock, an expert in law and religion, said that while the Constitu- tion's framers may have trusted only mainline Protestants, over time the nation's leaders realized that "to achieve religious liberty, people had to concede that someone could be a good citizen and good officeholder without sharing their religion." Two of President Ronald Reagans three appointments, Justices Scalia and Anthony M.

Kennedy, are Catholic, and President Clinton's two appointees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, are both Jewish. Justice Thomas, who was named by President George Bush in 1991 and who had been attending Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, announced in June that he had returned to the Roman Catholic church after a two-decade absence. That made the first-ever majority of non-Protestants. Both Justice Scalia and Justice Kennedy were appointed while Justice Brennan was still serving, but by the Berry's World Dole is a capital fellow (especially when it comes to taxes) .11 nA r-rAlir- wins and Democrats are poor.

We all know that. I Andy Rooney secretly hoping Mr. Dole reduces their capital gains tax like he says he will. I've been trying to think of some other things Mr. Dole might do to improve his chances.

Do they still give Green Stamps? He could offer people Green Stamps if they voted for him. All the telephone companies are offering free time if you sign up with them. Bob Dole could say, if he's elected, each person who voted for him would get three free phone calls a month to the White House. I'm neither a Republican or a Democrat, but I make enough money so Bob Dole's tax cut on capital gains doesn't make me mad. Maybe I'll vote for him in the next poll, even if I don't vote for him in the election.

Presidential candidate Bob Dole has obviously been paying attention to the polls. He realized he had to make some dramatic -'announcement, so he unveiled a plan to cut personal taxes by 15 percent and reduce the Capital gains tax from 28 percent to 14 'percent. Voters always like to hear politicians 'claim they're going to reduce taxes if elect-'ed. But if Mr. Dole thinks these tax reduc- tions are such a good idea, you wonder why he waited until he was so far behind in the polls to announce them.

It's the sort of thing could make a voter suspicious. If President Clinton is going to maintain the lead in his race for reelection, he may have to answer Mr. Dole's tax cut with a tax -hi. nf his own. Mavbe he'll sav he's going to personally like rich Republicans Dener man poor ones.

So does Bob Dole, because the rich ones contribute to his campaign. That may account for why he suddenly decided the capital gains tax was too high by twice. Poor Republicans are usually dumb as well as broke. They don't understand, and it's better not to argue with them. There were plenty of blue-collar Republicans who voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and they don't care beans about the capital gains tax because they wouldn't know a capital gains from a Chevrolet Caprice.

Just as certainly as not all Republicans are rich, not all Democrats are poor. I feel the opposite about Democrats from how I feel about Republicans. I prefer poor Democrats to rich ones. There's something two-faced about a rich Democrat. I'll bet a lot of them with Clinton bumper' stickers are to call him what he calls himself) to call Mr.

Clinton and raise him by promising tax cuts of 17 percent and a reduction to 12 percent on capital gains. What's the difference? After all, what a candidate promises and what an elected official does are two different things. If you are one of the handful of people in the United States making less than a million dollars, that capital gains reduction might not mean anything to you. But to people with an average, everyday Republican income of a few million dollars, it may sound good enough to induce them to contribute to Mr. Dole's campaign.

If there's one thing he needs more than votes, it's money. Not all Republicans are rich, and not all 'Your only problem is you were born too soon when "character" Andy Rooney is a nationally syndicated essayist and television commentator. reduce taxes by 16 percent and reduce the capital gains tax to, 13 percent. This might even cause Bob Dole (I like.