Walter Spitzer and his own Holocaust

Salve,
this post is not about the horses or riders.
It is about a book I finished reading yesterday.

Walter Spitzer (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum has a page about him, and Buchenwald Museum  too) is a painter and sculptor living in France who wrote a book about his life  between the early 1930s through the summer of 1945.
The book I devoured like a hungry wolf.
It is titled Sauve par le dessin ( Saved by the  drawing - I read the Polish edition, Uratowany rysunkami, to my knowledge there is not English edition) and it is not a simple memoir.
For Walter is a Holocaust survivor who spent his best boyhood  years in various Nazi German controlled places - starting with this ancestral home in Cieszyn, Poland, through a shtetl & ghetto in Gross (German added post 1939) Strzemieszyce, then Auschwitz III, then the 12 day death-march, then Gross Rossen, then the death-train, then Buchenwald and then the escape into the woods(amidst fighting between the American forces and German defenders) from anther forced march to the final liberty brought to him and his friend Coco by the American Army.

I am not a novice to the genre of Holocaust memoirs and recollections, but it has been some time since I read one of those - nota bene it was Byłam sekretarką Rumkowskiego: dzienniki Etki Daum edited by Elzbieta Cherezinska(2008 ed), about the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] ghetto daily live by the secretary to Chaim M. Rumkowski, the infamous (not only in my opinion) commander-in-chief of the ghetto.
So when I read the cover description and skimmed some first pages into the book, including Eli Wiesel recommendation-introduction, I thought that this was  one rather late memoir, after all  this author was 77 years old in 2004, sort of another late bloomer to the now revered Jewish past but with much established Holocaust industry, but when started reading the book I could not put it down.

And it is mostly because it is about this Polish-Jewish boy success, about the spectacular survival against all odds and about tons of Good Fortune in the world gone German Nazi pitiless, and to the core. Not a small part was played by the fact that Walter had been educating himself all that horrible days, months, and years, not only in the art of survival but also in art history and various aspects of fine art - drawing, photography, sculpture, painting etc

So if you think you have it bad and are in need of motivational or inspiration, do read this book.

Walter does his storytelling with such an ease and poise  as with a stroke of a pen, pencil or brush - one might say: after all his trade has been fine arts.
He does not stop and writes about intimate aspects of his own life and lives of others, so the memoirs is much more personal and very coming of age at the same time.
 They (museums, galleries etc) write about him that the Communists at the Buchenwald KL saved him, but he had had to come to them first, and to do so he crossed, at the peril of immediate death, the gate between the death and political camps there, putting all his life and the lie of his friend Coco in the hands of good Fortune. It apparently worked. He made good his promise to record the Hell by his pencil etc - eg this one.
There are very personalized pictures as well - some etching and drawings by Walter, his own family and boyhood pictures, there is one of smiling beautiful Pola (you need to read the book to find out what role this photo played), then the American soldiers and unpublished photos from Buchenwald KL. 

nota bene good reader tell US Holocaust Museum to get some money to translate this book into English pronto.

There is a video about Walter, where he talks in his own English about this life and art, and there is also his Facebook page. So you can explore away about this little Polish boy from Cieszyn who made it alive and kicking from the German death machinery.

There are few horses that appear in his book too - one is a picture of their defunct stable with dusty horse tack at his home ground floor before the World War II, then 1938 and  the Polish army cavalry and officer marching into Czechoslovakia to take Zaolzie; then 5 years later during the infamous death-march from Blachhammer to Gross-Rossen  Walter drew a big cart horse (in his estimation it was a loot from some French or Belgian farm) in some snowed-in German village farm, the sketch  he did for the German farmer in exchange for some bread and margarine given to him upon inspection and final approval by the farmer.
Finally there is a wild joyride within the American-occupied zone, when he was lent a saddled cavalry horse to ride across the woods and mountains. The horse was Hungarian like its owner, they are being part of the Hungarian Cavalry division awaiting return to Hungary after the Nazi Germany capitulation.  Walter did not knw how to ride but he did it anyway. Sweet ignorance and dexterity displayed by many a boy then, albeit this boy was special, he just survived the Hell and came back.
I strongly recommend this book, oh, I do!

Anne Applebaum versus post-Nazi tricksters

Salve,
I happily blog about horses and their riders in history and art, mostly about my corner of the woods, the pre-XX century Central Europe and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in particular.

However, from time to time I will add something about the current events or ideas, naturally dear to me, like the fate of the American wild horse aka mustang, or Polish modern history, or the Holocaust and German 'new history.'

So, when I read an article by not a small player in world's law enforcement and thus someone perceived possessing higher education  and rather high ethical and moral standards (including absence of lying and falsehoods), namely FBI director James Comey, at the Washington Post page, I was flabbergasted and insulted.
This top-official of Obama administration said in his text:
''In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do. That’s what people do. And that should truly frighten us''[ Washington Post ]
President Obama himself is not a stranger to this calumny - as evidenced in his speech in 2012.

Diplomatic intervention was needed and US ambassador was summoned in Warsaw responding with apology to Comey's mishmash of lies, but nothing beats a piece written by brave Anne Applebaum who had stepped in and had her short piece published responding to the Nazi-invented myth of Germany and her mythical Polish and Hungarian accomplices - a fragment:
  There are a number of problems with that pair of weak sentences, starting with the vast difference between Germany and the rest. During the war, Germany had a state policy of exterminating the Jews. This policy involved not “accomplices” but hundreds of bureaucrats, tens of thousands of soldiers, train schedules and plans. Germany also encouraged the creation of collaborationist governments in other countries – Vichy France, for example – some of which used their own police officers to send their Jewish citizens into the German death camps.
Germany also occupied Poland, but there was no Polish “Vichy.” During the war, there was no Polish state at all. Indeed, it was the absence of the Polish state that enabled the Germans to create a lawless, violent world, one in which anyone could be arbitrarily murdered, any Jew could be deported — and any Pole who helped a Jew could be shot instantly, along with his entire family. Many were. Millions of others died too – Polish intellectuals, priests and politicians were all Nazi targets.
In the course of the war, most of Poland’s infrastructure, industry and architecture were destroyed. In that atmosphere, many people were frightened by or indifferent to the fate of the Jews, and some murdered in order to avoid being murdered. But that doesn’t mean that “in their minds” they “didn’t do something evil.[...]
If the FBI director wants to take some lessons from Washington’s excellent Holocaust museum, that’s very admirable. But first he should make sure he’s understood what he’s seen”

Why I say Nazi-invented, well Reinhard Gehlen, German Nazi intelligence officer who after the Germany's defeat was taken prisoner and was working for the Americans leading the so called Gehlen Organization, and then since 1956 had been the director of the German Federal Intelligence Service,  i.e., a true spy-master,  employed former Nazis as his staff and as agents eg Klaus Barbie, Konrad Fiebig and Walter Kurreck etc. Amongst other tasks, these semi-secret agencies were working hard to dispel the negative image of post-Nazi Germany in Europe and the rest of the world. (good Polish article on the subject) .
One of these German intelligence officers and also a former Nazi Alfred Benzinger, accidentally :)  a chief  of Agency 114, is credited with the invention (probably with his good officers) of the term 'Polish Concentration Camps.'
The rest is history and our, Polish people (wherever we might reside), continuous nightmare... especially in the US, eg in the past I wrote to and called NY dailies like NY Times, NY Post and NY Daily News protesting their use of the term Polish Death Camps etc.

Therefore I am happy that Ms. Applebaum wrote her piece...

By the way let us not forget that between 1939 (August)-1941(June 22) Nazi Germany and Soviet Union were close allies, amongst other 'deeds' invading Poland, dividing the country and her peoples, and thus setting the stage for the Holocaust...

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