John Sack Obit

f Free Speech Friday, February 20, 2004 David Irving comments: In Memory of John Sack He passed away

on March 27, 2004. For more details call 415-482-8576 and ask for Rebecca. http://www.johnsack.com About the author: John Sack WILL ALWAYS BE one of America’s most eminent literary journalists. His reporting over more than half a century, from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, has appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He has been a war correspondent in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Yugoslavia, as well as CBS News bureau chief in Spain.

He is the author of nine non-fiction books, including M, Lieutenant Calley: His Story, and Company C, as well as An Eye for an Eye (available from the IHR.org). The founding editor of Esquire magazine has compared his writing to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernst Hemingway. For more about Sack and his career, see his Web site: http://www.johnsack.com This essay, slightly edited, was presented

on May 29, 2000, at the 13th IHR conference. For more about his travails with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, see “Suppressing the Story of Genocide Against Germans,” in the Sept.-Oct. 1997 Journal. “Inside the Bunker,” a lengthy article by Sack based on his participation at the 13th IHR Conference, appeared in the February 2001 issue of Esquire. John Sack: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v20/v20n1p-9_Sack.html Three years ago I was scheduled to speak at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The speech was announced in this brochure and also on the Internet. But then the Museum canceled it. For the next forty-five minutes, I’ll say here what I’d planned to say at the Holocaust Museum, and then, just as I’d have done at the Museum, I’ll stay here as long as you’d like, answering questions. The audience at the Museum would have been historians, mostly, and I’d have said something like Thank you. Thank you for inviting me, thank you for listening to me.

What I’m going to talk about happened fifty years ago. And for fifty years, no one, no historian, no one at all has spoken about it in public anywhere in the world. Not until now. Now myself, I’m not an historian, I’m a reporter. And what I write is the raw material of history, something that historians will — I hope — someday make some sense of. I go places. I watch events. I listen to people. And then I tell stories. And I’ll start by telling one now. A true story about a teenage girl.

Lola Blonde hair, brown eyes, very pretty. In high school she’s doing the flying rings, trapeze, acting in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She’s one of the title characters. She comes home. She’s skipping through the streets singing, “On the Good Ship Lollipop” Not exactly. She’s really singing [in accented English], “On the Good Ship Lollipop” Because she’s a Polish girl, and she’s in Bedzin, Poland, in the 1930s. Her name is Lola Potok. And when she’s 18 years old, the Nazis invade.

Lola is put on a train to the town of Oswiecim — we know it as Auschwitz. Her baby, one year old, is ripped from her arms; she never sees the baby again. She isn’t sent to the cyanide chamber, but her mother is. Her mother is killed, her brother and sister, nieces and nephews are killed. Fourteen people. (You know, I wasn’t going to say this at the Holocaust Museum, but in this particular room I know there are people who don’t believe there were cyanide chambers at Auschwitz.

I believe, and Lola believes, there were cyanide chambers at Auschwitz.) Her mother was killed. Her brother and sister, nieces and nephews were killed. Fourteen people. The one brother at Auschwitz who’s still alive stands on the gallows and says in Yiddish, “Nem nekumah! Take revenge!” Then he’s hanged. Revenge In January 1945, Lola escapes. She weighs sixty-six pounds. Her eyes are hollow. Her hair is this short. Her back has been broken. Her hand is mangled. She’s wearing two left shoes.

All the people she loves are dead, or she thinks so, and she is just bursting with hate. She wants to release that hate, to spew it onto the Germans. One of her childhood friends is in the Polish government, and Lola goes to him and tells him, “I want revenge.” And two months later the war is still going on, and Lola is now in Germany, the part occupied by the Russians and administered by the Poles. Lola’s in an olive-colored uniform. On her jacket are brass buttons.

On her collar, what the GIs call scrambled eggs. On her shoulders are stars. On her hip is a Luger. Lola is working for the Polish government, she is the commandant of a prison for Germans, and she is attempting to take revenge for the Holocaust. Now, Lola is a Jewish girl. She’s studied the Torah, and the Torah says, “You shall not take revenge.” Lola knows that. She’s disobeying that. But is there any of us here who’d condemn her? Any of us who can’t understand her?

I can understand her, and I can have rachmanis, compassion, for her. I met Lola Potok. It was in April 1986. I’m living in Hollywood. I’m a writer, and I have a meeting at Paramount. And the secretary there, she’s reading something I wrote about the Billionaire Boys Club. She tells me, “I like it. It reminds me of my family.” I say, “The Billionaire Boys Club? ?” Secretary says, “Yes, all those murders. My mother, Lola, was at Auschwitz.” I say, “Oh.”

Secretary says, “And after that, my mother commanded a prison full of Nazis.” I say, “What? She commanded” I say, “Do you know there’s a movie there?” I say, “You should tell Lynda,” Lynda is the producer, the secretary’s boss, but the secretary tells me, “I know there’s a movie. I won’t tell Lynda. I want to produce it myself!” There’s a saying in Hollywood: a producer is someone, anyone, who knows a writer. I’m a writer, the secretary knows me, and therefore she’s a producer.

We’re in business together. The deal is, I’ll write a magazine article on Lola, her mother, and the secretary will make a movie from it. Cut. A few days later. Hollywood, the Moustache Cafe. I’m having spinach crepe. I’m having dinner with Lola. An elegant woman. Coral lipstick, black eyeliner, like on a femme fatale. Speaks five languages fluently. She’s sixty-six years old. And Lola starts telling me her story.

Gleiwitz At the end of World War II, she tells me, she commanded a prison in Gleiwitz, Germany. She says the inmates were German soldiers. But she says some were Nazis, even SS, pretending to be German soldiers, and Lola was looking for them. Looking for Höss and Hössler, the commandants at Auschwitz. Looking for Mengele, the man who once said to her mother, “Go left, you die”; who said to Lola, “Go right, you live.” And if Lola ever found him, she didn’t know what she’d do. But she’d do it.

And Lola tells me: One day in her prison she found a Gestapo man. Fat, forty years old. Under his arm was a tattoo. It said A or B. It was his blood type. Everyone in the Gestapo had it. Lola freaked out. She started screaming, “Du schmutziges Schwein! Du verfluchtes Schwein! Du How many Jews did you kill?” She slapped him. The man was down on the floor. He was hugging her boots, saying, “Gnade! Gnade!

Have mercy on me!,” and Lola was kicking him and kicking This story of Lola’s: Is there anyone here who likes it? I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to write it. I thought it was ugly. Lola didn’t like it. She told me her mother, if she were alive, wouldn’t like it. Her mother used to read to her from the Torah and tell her, “You mustn’t hate. It only hurts you. It corrodes your soul.” And Lola said that after some months in Gleiwitz, she remembered this. She was in the prison one day.

And there was a Jewish guard there. His face was red. His teeth were bare. There was spit on his teeth. Ugly, ugly. The man had a whip. He was screaming in Polish, “You son of a whore.” He was whipping a German prisoner. Lola said, “Stop.” Lola said, “Why are you whipping him?” The man said, “Well, the Germans did it to me!” Lola said, “And now you hate them?” The man said, “I despise them!” Lola said, “Well, if you despise them, why do you want to be like them?”

Because to Lola, to Lola, this man, this Jew, he looked, talked, acted just like the Nazis she’d known at Auschwitz. At that time, Lola didn’t care about the Germans, the German prisoners. They could have dropped dead for all she cared. But she told me she cared about the Jewish guard. For years the Nazis had called him a pig, a dog, and if now he’d truly become a beast, then who had won, the Jew or the Nazis?

So according to Lola, she called all the guards to her office and said to them that from now on, we’ll treat the Germans like human beings. And from then on, Lola told me, that’s what she did. Writing Lola’s Story Now, this story I liked. If it was true, this was a story worth telling.

I had this dream: maybe the Serbs and Croats will read it, the Irish Catholics and Protestants will read it, the Hutus and Tutsis, the Israelis and Palestinians Maybe they’ll read it, and maybe they’ll learn, as Lola did, that to hate your neighbors may or may not destroy them, but it does destroy yourself. And maybe these people will stop their revenge, stop their genocide. We Jews always say of the Holocaust, “Never again. Never again will people hurt us simply because we are Jews.”

But Lola was apparently saying, “Yes, and never again will I hurt a German simply because he’s a German.” Fifty years ago, Lola was apparently saying, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” This story I wanted very much to write. So I start interviewing Lola. At the Inn of the Seventh Ray in Los Angeles. At a Jewish cemetery in New Jersey. On the Champs Elysées in Paris. I interview Lola on and off for two-and-a-half years.

Her memories just pour out, and she also introduces me to a dozen other people, all Jews: people who knew her in Gleiwitz, prison guards in Gleiwitz, even the man who appointed her the commandant in Gleiwitz. I write a twenty-page article on Lola’s revenge and Lola’s redemption. Lola reads it and likes it. The story runs in California magazine. Lola, at her own expense, comes to Washington to promote it on National Public Radio.

The story is sold internationally, and it’s reprinted in Best Magazine Articles, 1988. We have movie offers. Bette Midler and Suzanne Somers want to play the Lola part. And then I write a book proposal. I write, “It’s Lola’s redemption, not Lola’s revenge, that this book’s about.” I’ll go to Germany. I’ll find some prisoners maybe. I’ll go to Poland. I’ll find some more guards, maybe. I’ll write a book. The title will be Lola.

And in August 1988, the publisher Henry Holt in New York City says, “Okay! We want it!” Good news, and I phone it to Lola. And Lola on the telephone says, “Listen, John, I don’t want you to write it.” I say, “Lola? Lola, this is the first time you’ve told that to me.” I say, “Lola, we signed a contract.” We had signed one. Lola had written, “I grant you the exclusive right to write and to publish a book about my life.” Threats That night I go to Lola’s apartment in Hollywood.

Anyone here ever been in an encounter group? Remember your first night? Everyone shouting and screaming. You’re just sitting there stupefied. You’re thinking, “What is going on?” Well, I’m in Lola’s condo. Lola is saying, “Lookit, John. I don’t like the way you write. You write like a reporter. If you start writing this book, I will stop you. I will stop you!” Lola’s daughter is there. She’s saying, “John, give it up. I’m begging you to give it up. John! Give it up!”

Another daughter of Lola’s is there. She’s a lawyer, and she says, “John! You’re going to have instantaneous and very expensive litigation!” Lola’s saying, “I’ll go to court.” The daughter’s saying, “John, I want you to sign this release. John! Sign the release!” The other daughter’s saying, “John! Just leave us! Just go!” Lola’s saying, “John! Get out of our lives!” I leave. I telephone Lola but she doesn’t answer. I write her, but she sends the letters back, unopened, inscribed “refused.”

And not just Lola. Lola’s second-in-command at the prison in Gleiwitz was Moshe, also a Jew. He won’t talk to me. His wife on the telephone says, “We don’t give you the permission to write this.” I say, “I You” That’s what I say, “I You One doesn’t need permission!” I have permission, from the Constitution of the United States. Moshe’s wife hangs up. And then there is Jadzia, also a Jew, she was one of Lola’s guards in Gleiwitz. Jadzia says on the telephone, “I was never in Gleiwitz!”

Then she says, “Yes, I was in Gleiwitz, but I’ll never talk about it!” And then she talks for an hour saying, “I don’t know nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing! Nothing!” People won’t talk to me. People tell other people, “Don’t talk to John Sack.” People talk to me, and they lie to me. People say they’ll sue me, they’ll destroy me, they’ll kill me. One man takes my driver’s license, writes down my address, and says, “If you write about me, I will call the Israeli Mafia.”

Here’s some advice. Never tell a reporter, “You’d better not write this.” I have a contract with Henry Holt. I’ve made a promise to Henry Holt. I keep my promises. Doing the Research In April 1989, I fly to Germany. I go to this castle, this concrete castle, high on a hill above the Rhine. It’s the German Federal Archives, and they’ve got forty thousand statements there by Germans who lived in what now is Poland during World War II.

The statements of course are in German, in German script, and I find five statements from Germans who were in Lola’s prison. I go to another place in Germany: a great medieval hall, with banners on the stone walls. It’s a reunion of a thousand people from Gleiwitz. They’re drinking beer. They’re eating sausages and sauerkraut. They’re laughing and singing, “Ein prosit, ein prosit” And I’m like a little flower girl. You know, the girl who goes from table to table selling roses?

I’m going around asking, “Uh, excuse me. Anyone here who was in prison in Gleiwitz?” Yeah, I am a party pooper. I admit it. But eventually I find five of Lola’s prisoners. I take the train to Gleiwitz. Now it’s Gliwice, Poland.

And going through Communist East Berlin, I’m arrested, taken off the train, and locked up in a little room because with me I have a copy of the book Die Vertreibung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus den Gebieten östlich der Oder-Neisse [“The Expulsion of the German Population from the Territories East of the Oder-Neisse,” published in the 1950s by the Bonn government]. Hours later I’m let out and I get to Gleiwitz/ Gliwice at four in the morning.

It’s a city of two hundred thousand people, almost none of whom speak English. I don’t speak Polish, but I find three of Lola’s guards. They remember her well. It’s 1989, Poland is still Communist, but I get into Lola’s prison, into the prisoners’ cells. I tell them, “Djien dobre. Good morning.” I see the prison records. Remember when, according to Lola, she went to the Polish government and said, “I want revenge”? Well, I find her application, in her own handwriting.

She wrote, “I want to cooperate against our German oppressors.” I find the official document appointing her commandant in Gleiwitz. After that, I go to Germany eleven more times, to Poland three more times, to France, Austria, Israel, Canada, and all around the United States. Through interpreters I talk to two hundred people in Polish and Russian, Danish and Swedish, German and Dutch, French and Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew. I left out English.

I get three hundred hours of tape-recorded interviews, and I see thousands of documents. And what do I learn? Well: Lola was telling the truth. She was the commandant in Gleiwitz. And she was taking revenge. She slapped the Germans around. And just as she said, she stopped. I remember one day in 1989, I’m having lunch with one of her guards at the Hotel Leszny. We’re eating wienerschnitzel. And out of the blue the man says, “You know, Lola stopped. She told us, ‘Stop!’

She said, ‘We’re going to show the Germans we’re not like them.'” The Facts Come Out So Lola was telling the truth. But, she wasn’t telling the whole truth. Lola had told me the people in her prison were German soldiers. And yes, twenty of them were German soldiers, men who worked as painters, carpenters, and such. But there were a thousand other prisoners there, and they were German civilians: German men, German women, German children. One prisoner was a fourteen-year-old boy.

He had been out in Gleiwitz wearing his boy scout pants. A man cried out, “You’re wearing black pants! You’re a fascist!,” and he chased the boy and tackled him at the Church of Saint Peter and Paul, and then took him to Lola’s prison. Now, the boy was completely innocent. So were most of the people in Lola’s prison. They weren’t Gestapo. They weren’t SS. They weren’t even Nazis. Out of a thousand prisoners, just twenty were ever even accused of it.

But the Germans in Lola’s prison were slapped and whipped. And I’m so sorry to have to say it, but they were also tortured. The boy scout: the guards poured gasoline on his curly black hair and set it on fire. The boy went insane. The men: they were beaten with a Totschläger, a “beater-to-death.” It’s a long steel spring with a big lead ball at the end. You use it like a racketball racket. Your arm, your wrist, the spring: they deliver a triple hit to a German’s face.

Lola didn’t tell me, but the Germans in her prison were dying. I found their death certificates in Gleiwitz city hall. One of Lola’s guards told me, “Yeah, the Germans would die.” He told me, “I’d put the bodies in a horse-drawn cart. I’d cover them with potato peels so no one would see. I’d ride to the outskirts and, after I threw the potato peels out, I’d take the Germans to the Catholic cemetery. To the mass grave.” We all know about Auschwitz.

But I have to tell you, the Germans in Lola’s prison were worse off than Lola had been at Auschwitz. Lola at Auschwitz wasn’t locked in a room night and day. She wasn’t tortured night after night. She herself told me: “Thank God, nobody tried to rape us. The Germans weren’t allowed to.” But all of that happened to German girls at Lola’s prison in Gleiwitz. One woman I talked with wasn’t even German. She was Polish. In 1945 she was twenty years old: a tall, blonde, beautiful medical student.

The guards at Lola’s prison pulled off her clothes and told her, “Let’s do it!” They beat her and beat her, night after night, until she was black and blue. One morning, she came