“I survived because I did not look very much like a Jew,” says Polanski. “Particularly when I was a kid, I definitely looked like a lot of kids in Poland.” Even though at this point he lived no more than 30 miles from Auschwitz, Polanski says this rural area was quiet and free from violence; he knew “nothing about what was happening on the other side of the wires. … I only learned about all the atrocities right after the war.”...
Days before the war ended, Polanski recalls picking berries in the forest near Krakow when he heard a sound like the thrum of insects, only louder. “And then I realized it was coming from the sky,” he recalls. “I looked up, and these were the American bombers coming, hundreds of them. It was one of the most joyful moments of my young life. I laid down on the ground, and I was watching those planes.”
December 16, 2015
"In 1943, Polanski escaped the Krakow Ghetto and assumed the name Romek Wilk and lived in the countryside..."
"... aided by a family that had known his father, pretending to be a Christian boy."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
31 comments:
Did you purposely pair this story with the pedophile cop story?
It was one of the most joyful moments of my young life.
I wonder how it compares to the anal rape of a young girl. You know, just as a point of reference.
From Holocaust survivor to pedophile rapist.
Lovely.
Fuck Polanski.
Where's the fawning article about Samantha Geimer?
You mean, escaped pedophile, probable rapist, and fugitive from justice Roman Polanski? That's the one you wrote a long article about his childhood?
The family has a similar collective memory of the first US air raid on Manila Bay, September 1944.
That more than anything made it clear that victory was near.
One story has it that one of the ships hit was carrying a large store of occupation currency, "Mickey Mouse Money", which was blown into the sky and fluttered down over Manila.
drugged and anally raped a young girl. convicted of rape, he skipped out. what a dog.
Sounds like a good memory of the mighty Eighth Airforce doing it's job killing the Nazis on sight.
I have no idea why American bombers would be flying over Krakow towards the end of the war. It was firmly in Soviet hands by then, and there was nothing to bomb in southern Poland at that late date.
Unlike today where we use bombers to take out snipers, back then, the bombers were used to carpet bomb German-run cities into rubble.
A lot of these stories from famous people are just bullshit, and quoted when they are trying to achieve something, or make an excuse for some personal tick.
Aiding and abetting.
I need disinfectant.
Jerzy Kosinski got a pretty good novel from his similar experience. Does pretending to be Christian during wartime make men perverts?
His early life was marked by lots of grotesquely evil occurrences. Can you prepay karma?
Yeah, thanks for paying us back for the rescue by skeeving on our young people.
What does a Jew look like?
What does a rapist look like?
@coupe
That was my first thought too.I call bullshit.
I have no idea why American bombers would be flying over Krakow towards the end of the war. It was firmly in Soviet hands by then, and there was nothing to bomb in southern Poland at that late date.
Ha! Good catch. Something seemed off about that account and that is exactly right. The 8th Air Force timeline says nothing in Poland "days before the war ended." Likely it was Soviet bombers, which is ironic considering the resulting fate of Poland.
WWII and Nazi atrocities are still great examples of the difference between totalitarian socialism and our constitutional republic, but there were more people killed under communist socialist totalitarians than by the Nazis.
I read the Gulag Archipelago. I worked in companies with refugees from the Soviets. I have family friends who were rescued from Chinese communism by my church. I eat in restaurants run by the families of Vietnamese boat people.
Remember the Nazis, yes, and hate them.
Remember, too, that communist totalitarians still rule large parts of the world and should be just as reviled as the Nazis.
"I laid down on the ground, and I was watching those planes” in proper English would read,
"I lay on the ground, and I was watching those planes."
I'm surprised that a Pole would speak English as poorly as Amerikans do.
Jesus was a Jew who didn't pretend to be Christian.
St. Paul, like Roman Polansaki, was a Jew who did.
I should point out that passing as a Christian in Poland did not make one safe.
6 million Poles were murdered in the National Socialist death camps, including Auschwitz. Only half of those were Jewish. 3mm were Christian.
I'd also agree with the comment about fuck Polanski. He is a pedophile who anally raped a 13(?) year old girl. He is trying for sympathy. He should get none whatsoever.
Mikee,
You mentioned Gulag Archipeligo and the horrors of the International Socialist (Soviet) death camps. I'd add Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.
For a more recent, and perhaps even more horrifying, take on the Soviet Gulag, Read Anne Applebaum's book on them. 4-5 years old.
And to tie that to Polanski, her husband is the Polish Ambassador (Consul?) and a big mover and shaker behind the effort to rehabilitate Polanski.
John HEnry
There were a number of U.S. raids on the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau complex with the earliest of them on August 20, 1944. The last of them was on January 19th, 1945, right after the Nazis evacuated the camp (by putting the inmates on a murderous forced march, which Elie Wiesel describes in his book "Night."
The liberation of the camp by the Red Army happened just a week later, on the 27th of January.
So maybe if you're a 10 year old in Poland, the Nazis leaving town is the 'end of the war,' because the eventual surrender of the German armed forces in May doesn't affect you directly.
Timeline for the bombings here: http://www.wollheim-memorial.de/en/luftangriffe_en
Not saying that Roman Polanski isn't a rapist shit. Just that it is quite plausible that he did hear the American bombers overhead in the closing days of the war as he experienced it.
Monkeyboy,
I dont see it in the logs ether, but near the end of the war, I thought the Russians allowed some shuttle bombing of Prussian targets.
"Remember, too, that communist totalitarians still rule large parts of the world and should be more reviled than the Nazis."
FIFY
Did Polanski see Obama's uncle on the way to Auschwitz, too?
Coupe wrote: I have no idea why American bombers would be flying over Krakow towards the end of the war.
Polanski's memory is probably faulty. The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. I can think of no wild berries that would be even evident, let alone ripe in May. In Poland and elsewhere in temperate Europe wild berries begin to ripen in August.
I suggest Polanski is remembering the attack of September 13, 1944 . Flown by 96 B-24 Liberator bombers of the 8th Air Force the raid heavily damaged the I.G. Auschwitz chemical plant facility (operated by I.G. Farben under an SS contract) within the Auschwitz-Birkenau II camp complex. In this airstrike, an estimated total of 300 people, including SS men, were injured and killed. A further air raid on December 18, 1944, heavily damaged the pump and compressor stations of I.G. Auschwitz. As an Allied assessment report mentions, five barracks of the concentration camp also suffered damage in the strike. The fourth airstrike on I.G. Auschwitz, on December 26, 1944, was rated a success by Allied aerial reconnaisance because of the serious damage done to the plant. The last attack by the U.S. Air Force took place on January 19, 1945, one day after the start of the evacuation of the camp complex, when the SS forced the prisoners to begin a westward death march.
Just last night I read the 128 page transcript of an oral history by Rosa Goldberg Katz of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. At age 15 she was forced into the Lodz Ghetto by the Nazis. Her mother was deported from the Ghetto in 1942. They never heard from her or of her again. In August 1944 she, her father, her brother and a sister in law were sent to Auschwitz. Within moments of arrival the women were separated from the men and she never saw her father or brother again.
In the early years in the Ghetto, her brother, who had blond hair and blue eyes, had regularly snuck out to purchase or steal food. He got away with it for a while because of how he looked but eventually the Nazis cracked down on this ploy. They were always hungry, and she says that it seemed impossible they could survive on so little.
By a strange mistake she became part of a group of (mostly) women sent from Auschwitz to Berlin to work in a Krupp bomb assembly factory. They got better food and she gained strength and survived the Nazis, the American bombings and the Russian invasion. She was liberated by Russians but ended up with the Swedish Red Cross, which resettled her in Sweden. There she met her husband, also a survivor, and they moved to North Carolina in 1948. Her husband found work with a Polish Jew Abraham Rochlin who had fled early enough to make it to America in 1939. Rochlin was in the plywood business and prospering. In 1953 they moved to Oshkosh where her husband worked in a plant Rochlin's company had established there.
Who knows whether her brother's blue eyed blondness provided just enough for them to survive a bit longer, but it was no salvation for him once the killing machine got into full swing.
Rosa lived out her life in Oshkosh. She had nothing but good to say about Swedes and Americans, who she describes as generous and kind. It's an amazing narrative, part of a larger collection of interviews with holocaust survivors living in Wisconsin that the historical society did some time ago. Her recollections were vivid and disturbing but somehow in her life she found a way to root herself in the present and future not the past.
A genuine victim of grotesque racist evil who decided that her victimization was not going to be her defining characteristic.
All the defenses of Polanksi don't explain why he was picking berries "at the end of the war" when the last US bomber raid in Poland was in January.
Anyway, I'm less interested in what happened to Polanski when he was 10 years old, and more interested in the little girl he raped and how he skipped the USA to avoid going to jail.
@mikee
I'm with you, Bro. In my experience with Poles, Lithuanians and some Vietnamese from Orange County, it appears to me that the victims of Communist aggression worldwide is a far greater number than what the Nazis did in WWII. It's amazing that the Left still views McCarthy as a terror going after false bogeymen, when you have so many actual communities that were murdered by actual Communists. (See, long march, China)
Polanski? Hollywood sleazebag. Unimportant.
>>All the defenses of Polanksi don't explain why he was picking berries "at the end of the war" when the last US bomber raid in Poland was in January.
Whoopi says he wasn't "picking picking"...
Curious, this new attempt to rehabilitate Polanski. If ever we forget how vile and disgusting our star-fucking media is, just lie back and think of Roman.
Fritz, correction accepted.
Post a Comment