The Audie Murphy of the Holocaust
turned out to be little better than the
Grand Calumniator of Poland
Holocaust Witness Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski was once to Poland what Simon Wiesenthal is today to Ukraine. Jerzy Kosinski was the grand calumniator of Poland;
Simon Wiesenthal is the grand calumniator of Ukraine. The Poles have been successful in discrediting their grand calumniator; the Ukrainians
are too timid to attempt to discredit Simon Wiesenthal. The present web page is dedicated to understanding Jerzy Kosinski, to
congratulating the Poles, and to giving courage to Ukrainians.
Who was Jerzy Kosinski? Jerzy Kosinski was born Jerzy Lewinkopf to Mojzesz (Moses) Lewinkopf and Elzbieta Lewinkopf (maiden name
Elzbieta Wanda Weinreich). Six significant dates in Jerzy Kosinski's life were:
1933 born in Lodz, Poland
1959 entered USA on a student visa
1960 published The Future is Ours, Comrade, under pseudonym Joseph Novak
1968 won the National Book Award for The Painted Bird
1982 veracity challenged in Village Voice article, "Jerzy Kosinski's Tainted Words"
1991 committed suicide
Biographer James Park Sloan
I quote from two sources by the same author. I quote below from two sources, both written by James Park Sloan: (1) the magazine
article, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994; and (2) the book, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996. The
first source provides the first two excerpts below, in blue, which by themselves present the chief features of the Kosinski story. The reader
interested only in a broad outline need not read beyond these first two quotations. The second source provides a number of further
excerpts shown in green, which serve to flesh in a fuller picture. The analogy to Audie Murphy in the above title was taken from p. 227 of
this second source. Audie Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in WW II who went on to become a movie star, and played
himself in the autobiographical war film, To Hell and Back.
Who is James Park Sloan? The dust jacket of the Sloan book informs us of the following:
JAMES PARK SLOAN is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a prize-winning
novelist, and a widely published short story writer and critic. He knew Jerzy Kosinski for over twenty years
before Kosinski's death.
A Personal Experience
I recollect, by the way, many years ago talking to a New York Jewish lawyer about Kosinski's book The Painted Bird, partly on the basis of
which this lawyer held the deep conviction that Poles were pretty close to sub-human. When he told me about Kosinski's description of
eyeballs being torn out as an incident that would not be clearly out of place in a Polish household, I replied - to his discomfort - that such
a scene would be about as typical in a Polish household as it would be in an American one. When I added that the only Poles that I had ever
known were intelligent, civilized, and cultured he did not reply, but his manner suggested that I had told him something that was a patent
impossibility.
What's the Relevance?
Why is so much attention given to Jerzy Kosinski below, even to the point of touching on his sexual deviance and other character defects?
As already mentioned above, Kosinski provides a precedent of a calumniator of a Slavic peoples who has been successfully and thoroughly
discredited, and whose example thus may give Ukrainians courage to similarly discredit their many calumniators, chief among whom is Simon
Wiesenthal. Beyond that, however, the Kosinski biography provides unusually detailed information which brings to the fore several
generalizations which may assist in the understanding of the phenomenon of anti-Ukrainian calumny.
The Gang of Ten
Let us begin. Heading the list of anti-Ukrainian calumniators are the following nine: Yitzhak Arad, Dov Ben-Meir, Yaakov Bleich, Alan
Dershowitz, Sol Littman, Morley Safer, Neal Sher, Elie Wiesel, and Simon Wiesenthal. If we expand this list to include prominent calumniators
of Slavs, Jerzy Kosinski makes it a list of ten. In order to express my disapproval of these individuals, and in order to encourage in Slavs in
general, and in Ukrainians in particular, an attitude of bold intolerance toward their misdeeds, I propose that they be called "the gang of ten,"
as I myself do below.
Incidentally, the link to Sol Littman above will take the reader to the very section in "The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes" that deals with Littman,
but only when using a Netscape browser - readers relying on other browsers will have to use CTRL+F to get down to the section titled "Sol
Littman's Mengele Scare."
Examining the gang of ten, it is possible to arrive at several generalizations, the chief of which may be the following:
(1) The gang of ten is Jewish. One notices immediately that all ten of these calumniators of the Slavs are Jewish. This
observation reminds us that in examining those who were responsible for the 23Oct94 60 Minutes story, The Ugly Face of Freedom, seven
