A case for discrepancy: Jankiel Wiernik and Hotel Polski

[Pauvre France]

In the account of his alleged experience in Treblinka, Jankiel Wiernik wrote that he witnessed one transport of people supposedly lured into the Hotel Polski scheme.

According to the legend, around 3,000 Jews gave themselves up voluntarily in the Hotel Polski trap set by the Germans to offer foreign papers in the summer of 1943. Those who stepped forward were supposedly going to be exchanged for German prisoners abroad, but instead they were sent to transit camps at Bergen-Belsen, Vittel (France) and Tittmoning, from where most of them went to Auschwitz. Others were sent to Auschwitz directly, or were shot in the Pawiak prison.

So the holocaustic orthodoxy tells of no transport from Hotel Polski to Treblinka. Yet, just before the revolt, Wiernik has spoken of these people whom allegedly showed up in Treblinka to be driven to the gas chambers and to be eventually gassed in the standard procedure amidst shouts, blows, dogs, powerful kicks, Ukrainians drunkards, carousing Germans, etc...

The 1944 version published in America shows:

There were, at that time, no transports whatsoever and the only executions were those carried out on individual Jews, for our executioners simply could not remain idle. Then the Germans were all in a good mood once again, and there was a chance to resume their murderous activities because new martyrs had arrived: a transport from Warsaw which was supposed to proceed abroad. All the people in that transport were well-to-do and looked prosperous. They numbered about 1,000 men, women and children. We guessed that it was a transport of people who had paid plenty of money to be conveyed to a place of safety. As I subsequently learned, they were first housed in the Hotel Polski, a first-class establishment on Dluga Street in Warsaw and then brought to Treblinka to be killed. We found out who these people were when sorting their belongings after their murders.

A Year in Treblinka - AMERICAN REPRESENTATION of the GENERAL JEWISH WORKERS' UNION of POLAND (p.41)

And so does the 1944 version published in Warsaw:

Pewnego dnia znów wszyscy w dobrym nastroju. Powrócą do swojej zbójeckiej pracy. Mają męczenników. Przybył transport z Warszawy. który miał rzekomo wyjechać zagranicę. Byli to ludzie debrze usytuowani. Poznać po nich było ich dobrobyt. Było ich około 1000 osób. Mężczyźni, kobiety i dzieci. Zrozumieliśmy, że jest to transport ludzi, którzy zapłacili grube pieniądze, za to by ich zawieźć w bezpieczne miejsce. Zabrano im wszystko. Trzymano ich Wwie, jak się później dowiedziałem, w pierwszorzędnym hotelu Polskim na Długiej i wykończono w Treblince. Poznaliśmy kim są po dowodach, gdy pracowaliśmy przy sortowaniu rzeczy. Zginęli jak wszyscy.

Rok w Treblince - NAKŁADEM KOMISJI KOORDYNACYJNEJ WARSZAWA (p.21)



My hypothesis is thus: Is the Hotel Polski story just one mendacity within the whole lie? It would mean that the episode has just passed from Treblinka to Auschwitz in the beginning of 1945 when the storytellers have tought Treblinka was not enough as a death combine, and that they forgot to update the transfer of that fabrication for 60 years. Therefore it would help to denounce Jankiel Wiernik as a patent fraud.

Has anybody more information on Hotel Polski and the alleged fate of the "survivors"?

The official historiography on this subject is made of two books.
- Yad Vashem Studies 1, 1957.
- Abraham Shulman, The Case of Hotel Polski. (Holocaust Library, 1982).

[Carto's Cutlass Supreme]

Interesting, but I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying. What do you mean by

and that they forgot to update the transfer of that fabrication for 60 years.

Also, are you saying that according to the story they didn't go to Treblinka, they went other places and thus there is a contradiction in Wiernik's testimony with the Hotel Polski story?

[Hannover]

I believe that Pauvre France is showing that the alleged Jews in this Hotel Polski story were supposedly sent to Bergen Belsen & Auschwitz in one version of the story, but in another version they were supposedly sent to Treblinka.

IOW, the Hotel Polski lie has gone astray.

Not keeping lies straight is a classic feature of the so called 'holocaust'.

- Hannover

[Pauvre France]

I suspect that:

a) They never went to Treblinka.
b) The Germans honored most of their promise.
c) These people went for the most to South America.
d) The storytellers used that opportunity in Spring 1944 to make them disappear at Treblinka in Rok w Treblince, this publication of the "Konrad Żegota" organization.
e) When the storytellers saw that some of these people were sent to France and then back to Poland, and others to Bergen-Belsen, they made them disappeared at Auschwitz because it is a more acceptable place to set up a giant lie than a small field in the middle of nowhere. Of course, many could have really died in the deadly withdrawal from Auschwitz during the German demise. These infortunate people became a bonus for the liars.
f)They forgot for 60 years the Jankiel Wiernik's "testimony" which saw them supposedly killed at Treblinka.

[The Merovingian]

I got a documentation which is even better than I thought.

The source is the article The Rescue of Jews with the Aid of Passports and Citizenship Papers of Latin American States from Yad Vashem Studies - Volume I (1957).

I expected to find no reference to Treblinka, but there is one at page 143. And what a strange one indeed!

On a day in October 1943 1,800 of the detainees were ordered to pack as they were to be transported to another camp, at Bergau near Dresden. Their luggage and possessions they were instructed to leave behind at Bergen-Belsen. These would follow them without delay. (Sometime later the inmates who had remained in the Bergen-Belsen Camp, discovered that the luggage had not been sent but had been stored in one of the huts.) All members of this group held "promesas".

Only a few days earlier a transport comprising seventy persons, who had been included in the lists drafted in Hotel Polski but whose departure to the Camp had been delayed for some reason, arrived. They were immediately attached to the trannport "leaving for Bergau". The destination of the transport was Auschwitz (note 28 ).

This was followed shortly afterwards by a second and a third transport, the latter comprising the remaining holders of "promesas" and passports. Only some hundreds of detainees remained in the camp, the majority of them belonging to the Palestine List, the others holders of documents which the Germans for some reason chose to regard as authentic.

We must add that Jews who had in their possession documents, still remained in Hotel Polski waiting to be sent in the wake of their predecessors. But no new lists for Bergen-Belsen were drawn up. These Jews were transported direct to Treblinki, where they were exterminated. (note 29)

According to the official legend, the Treblinka "death camp" was closed for good on November 17, 1943. So I guess that the transport of Jews from Hotel Polski in October or November was quite a burden for the Germans who were supposedly in the final stage of the camp, and who were busy at cleaning the terrific mess they did.

But what is absolutely extraordinary is that those Jews arrived in Treblinka at least three months AFTER the revolt of August 2, 1943, which helped Jankiel Wiernik to escape, yet nonetheless he saw them there.

[The Merovingian]

The second "seminal" work on that alleged trap set up by the Germans is The Case of Hotel Polski - An account of one of the most enigmatic episodes of World War II by Abraham Shulman, edited in 1982 by Holocaust Library - New York, and distributed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.



In the version of the story concocted by Abraham Shulman, none of the supposed victims went to Treblinka. He claims that they were killed either in Bergen-Belsen, or in the Pawiak Prison in Warsaw, or in Auschwitz as the table of contents summarizes it (p.5):



To draw up his book, Abraham Shulman puts together different testimonies whose origins are interesting (p.236) :

Most of the materials in this book are based on documents, diaries and witnesses' reports in the archives of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and in the Kibbutz of Ghetto Fighters in Israel, as well as from direct interviews with survivors of the Hotel.

In other words, we have to content ourselves with inaccessible writings (most in Yiddish) buried in the coffers of Yad Vashem and other testimonies from the Ghetto Fighters' Museum, the same museum that hosts Yankel Wiernik's model of camp Treblinka II . And we have not German documents of any sort to give us a glimpse of the existence of those victims or the purpose of Hotel Polski, if it ever had any for the Germans.

Abraham Shulman himself is bewildered (p.214-215). One may guess that he did not know the "Holocaust" was a fable:

The more questions we ask, the more illusory the answers become. As in the Japanese motion picture, Rashomon, we see different individuals live through the same experience but unable to agree on the facts. For instance, was it sufficient to come to the hotel and state, "I'm Jewish," for the gate to swing open immediately, or was the entrance closely guarded by men in police uniforms? Was the show the work of a few individuals, or was it a systematic operation by an organized gang?
There are glaring discrepancies in facts and figures. How many Jews were victimized at the Hotel? How many were sent to Pawiak Prison - four hundred, five hundred or six hundred? How many transports went to Vittel? To Bergen-Belsen? How many people were in each transport, and on what dates did they set out on their journey? No official lists are extant, so our only sources of information are accounts written much later by the survivors themselves, who are naturally in no position to deal objectively with statistics.

Yet that intelligent reflection does not prevent Abraham Shulman to conclude (p.221):

The Hotel Polski affair was but a tiny episode in that German-created "absolute reign of evil." The hotel had been built a number of years before the war. It was razed by the Germans, along with thousands of other buildings in Warsaw, methodically and cold-bloodedly. Only a short time before a detonation bomb turned the building into rubble did the Hotel Polski rise for a brief moment from it anonymity, to become the scene of the hoax described in this book.

Hoax indeed! How comes that the allegedly destroyed building of Hotel Polski on Dluga Street is nevertheless still up and standing in Warsaw, as show these two pictures:


(from the ARC Death Camps web site: http://www.deathcamps.org/occupation/pic/biggun06.jpg )


(from the web site of a tourist who went in Warsaw: www.webfeats.com/ Poland/p100499/index.html )

After his conclusion, Abraham Shulman discusses at length the article of Nathan Eck from Yad Vashem Studies I (p. 222-235). But he carefully avoids to quote Nathan Eck's statement that contends that a transport has gone to Treblinka after October 1943. It would have not fit well at all with the story of the camp developed after 1957 in the holocaustic historiography.




So to sum up, according to Jankiel Wienirk a transport of Jews was gassed at Treblinka before August 2, 1943. According to Nathan Eck, those Jews were gassed in October or November 1943, months after the supposed revolt in the camp. And according to Abraham Shulman, the Hotel Polski Jews did not go at all to Treblinka. None of these versions corroborates any of the others, so I have to give Hannover the last word: "they can't keep the lie straight."

For us, the account on Hotel Polski by Jankiel Wiernik, the great witness of Treblinka, is one more detail that can help to destroy his testimony, which is nothing but a sheer trick that all the other "eyewitnesses" have used as a pattern for all the subsequent lies.

[PLAYWRIGHT]

In the account of his alleged experience in Treblinka, Jankiel Wiernik wrote that he witnessed one transport of people supposedly lured into the Hotel Polski scheme.

According to the legend, around 3,000 Jews gave themselves up voluntarily in the Hotel Polski trap set by the Germans to offer foreign papers in the summer of 1943. Those who stepped forward were supposedly going to be exchanged for German prisoners abroad, but instead they were sent to transit camps at Bergen-Belsen, Vittel (France) and Tittmoning, from where most of them went to Auschwitz. Others were sent to Auschwitz directly, or were shot in the Pawiak prison.

Actually, it sounds like it might have been a legitimate prisoner swap plan. In 1943, Bergen-Belsen was not a concentration camp, it was an internment camp. Many of the people there WERE holders of foreign passports, being held for exchange. It wasn't until mid-1944 that Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp.

I haven't heard of Vittel or Tittmoning, but from what I've read of Bergen-Belsen up until about November, 1944, it was not a bad place to be at all.