In their online article, "Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos," Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel (referred to henceforth as L and U), discuss the German photographic record of the events of 'Bloody Wednesday.' They imply that the photos possess outstanding importance as a record of the Germans' mistreatment of the Jews. "This is one of the few cases in which we possess documentation both of police actions and of the aberrations committed during them," they state. L and U examine four of the photos - the four which, we can be sure, they deemed the most incriminating. They number them photos 12-15. (We don't know how many photos were taken at Olkusz altogether, but I have seen at least another four.) Anyway, let's see the photos, starting with Photo 12:
According to L and U's caption, this is a picture of 'German policemen and SD men conduct[ing] a search during an arrest of Jews.’ Well, whatever this is a picture of, it's not very unsettling. It just seems to be a picture of two people - it's not even obvious that they are Jews - with their hands up. Whether or not anyone is being searched, I see nothing troubling about anything the Germans can be seen doing in this photo. Presumably, the other three photos are more disturbing. Let's move along to Photo 13:
According to L and U, Photo 13 is a photo of Rabbi Moshe Isaac Hangerman, 'barefoot and wearing desecrated tefillin (phylacteries), [being] forced to pray for the amusement of the police as the townsmen lay on the ground.' If if he IS praying - and there could be other interpretations of what he is doing - how do we know the Germans made him do so for their amusement? How do we know he did not ask to be allowed to pray? In any event, the two Germans smiling in the picture are not smiling because they are taking sadistic pleasure in the rabbi's predicament - they're smiling simply because their picture is being taken. You can tell because they are both looking directly towards the photographer. Those indifferent to the presence of the photographer are not smiling, which they would be, if in fact the rabbi was a source of amusement.
Perhaps Photo 14 is a little more 'aberrational'? A little 'bloodier'? Here it is:
L and U describe this picture as 'police and SD men are standing and smiling around a group of kneeling Jews.' In Holocaust discourse, the observation that the Jews are 'kneeling' is meant to imply that the Germans made the Jews kneel in order to humiliate them. However, as one can easily see, the Jews are NOT all kneeling. At least a third of them, in fact, are standing up, and they take up the centre of the picture. The kneeling Jews are therefore not kneeling because the Germans are trying to humiliate them, but simply because they are trying to squeeze into the picture. Although it is true that nearly all the Germans are smiling, and only one Jew is, we have what seems to be just a group photo, not an exercise in anti-semitism.Last, photo 15.
Once again, L and U try their best to make this photo seem offensive. They introduce it thus: 'Photos of this type are well known and sometimes populated by German soldiers, in contexts in which the nature of their relationship with the Jewish population should not have moved them to engage in abuse.' Unfortunately for their purposes, the photo furnishes no evidence of abuse whatsoever. The boy in the centre of the photo, who would seem to be its subject, may or may not be a Jew. Whether he is Jewish or not, he does not appear in the least bit concerned about anything. In fact, he seems to be amused himself. Even the Jews watching the scene from the sidelines are amused. Unfortunately, it's not possible to see what the subject of the picture actually is or what prompted the smiles all round. Whatever it may be, it's not 'abuse' and there is nothing the least bit offensive about this picture. I am starting to think that L and U chose to use the word 'aberrations' simply because aberration was the most they could ask anyone to try to see in any of these pictures. And, as it happens, the 'aberrations' all turn out to be in the minds of L and U and not in the photos, which contain nary a hint of 'aberration' or 'abuse.' The German photos lend no support whatsoever to the view that at Olkusz 'Jews were especially humiliated and maltreated because they were identified as Jews.' They merely support the claim that the Germans forced the townsmen 'to spend the day prostrate and face-down' on the ground, which punishment, being non-violent in the Gandhian sense, can hardly be considered a draconian response to the murder of a German gendarme.
By the way, L and U state that only one Jew was killed on 'Bloody Wednesday,' which is bad enough but many fewer than the word 'bloody' usually brings to mind. Admittedly, the term 'Bloody Wednesday' is due to the claim that 'Throughout the day, the German policemen kicked the men and beat them with their rifle butts.' However, the photos do not affirm that anybody - Jews or anyone else - was kicked or beaten at all. All extant photos show Jews perfectly unharmed. Somehow I don't think U2 should ditch their anthem 'Bloody Sunday,' the song which commemorates the British killing of 13 unarmed civil rights protestors in Ulster in the early 70s, anytime soon. By British standards, whatever happened at Olkusz, it was pretty much a picnic.
FURTHER COMMENTS
According to Yad Vashem and other Holohoax websites, the total number of people killed by the Germans at Olkusz on July 31, 1941, was three - two Poles and one Jew. I am unable to account for the claim on the official Olkusz town website, which states that 'On July, 31, 1940, on the day, which later would be called Bloody Wednesday, Germans shot 20 citizens and tortured hundreds of others.' It seems to me that you can just invent these figures out of thin air, while, just as easily, you can describe lying on the ground as 'torture.' This kind of boundless rhetorical inflation is precisely the sort that alerted many students - such as myself - to the absence of verifiable fact from Holocaust discourse.
We should also not take seriously the claim that the men were forced to lie face down on the ground all day. In a memoir written by one of the men, Jacob Schwarzfitter, it is stated that the townsmen (males 15 to 60) were forced to remain lying down from early in the morning until twelve o'clock, that is to say, noon. So clearly we are talking about much less than a day, only about six or seven hours.
Last, this operation did not only target Jews, and therefore cannot reasonably be represented as an anti-semitic operation. As the Yad Vashem website admits, both Jews and Poles were forced to lie down: ' ... a German police unit arrived in Olkusz on July 31, 1940, and gathered all male residents over 14 years old, including all the Jewish men in the main square. There the non-Jews and the Jews were forced to lie on the ground ... "'
LINKS
Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, "Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos."
http://yad-vashem.org.il/about_holocaust/studies/ordinary/levein_uziel_full.html
http://yad-vashem.org.il/exhibitions/from_our_photo_archive/data/olkusz.html
http://www.umig.olkusz.pl/pages/eng/historia_eng.htm
http://library5.gl.iit.edu/summaries/schwa_s.html
OTHER 'BLOODY WEDNESDAY' PHOTOS
http://www.zchor.org/olkusz/olkusz3.jpg
http://www.zchor.org/olkusz/olkusz_files/image004.jpg
http://igaal.azran.free.fr/Jew/Yad/Galerie3/images/olkusz2_jpg.jpg
http://igaal.azran.free.fr/Jew/Yad/Galerie3/images/olkusz3_jpg.jpg
http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/shoah/akcja_b.jpg
