An Eye For An Eye.

• Author: Oppenheim, Carolyn Toll

My late Uncle Meyer, an idealistic Polish Jewish Communist, saved his family from the Nazi death camps by fleeing to Russia. At the end of the war, they were sent back to Poland to settle in Wroclaw (the former German city of Breslau), in Polish-occupied Silesia, in a house occupied by Germans during the war. They couldn't return to the familyowned house in Kalush in eastern Poland, because Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had redrawn the boundaries and given Kalush to the Ukraine.

It has always puzzled me that the existence of a thriving postwar Polish Jewish community surprises people. My cousins grew up under communism in the 1950s and 1960s, with Jewish schools, Jewish youth groups, and Jewish summer camps.

My cousins--who now live in Canada--told me about their life in those early postwar years as I was struggling through An Eye for an Eye, by veteran journalist John Sack. His book, with its appalling title--also billed on its jacket as THE UNTOLD STORY OF JEWISH REVENGE AGAINST GERMANS IN 1945--describes postwar atrocities committed in Poland against civilian Germans--women, men, and children--in concentration camps run by Jews recruited by the Polish Communist Office of State Security. Sack cites archival evidence for 1,255 camps set up partly to create a reign of terror so the Germans would flee Polish-occupied Silesian Germany and, officially, to find and punish former Nazis and collaborators among the German population.

As I read An Eye for an Eye, my cousins and I had some of the frankest conversations we've ever had about Jews, anti-Semitism, Poland, and our family's history. Initially, I dreaded asking them what they knew of events such as those described in Sack's book. How dare I interrogate people who lost family and survived the hell of the Holocaust only to be banished from Poland in 1969 during another anti-Semitic crackdown?

But instead of angrily denouncing my chutzpah, they did not shrink from speculation: It was possible, they said, but they--as children--wouldn't have been told about such things.

They did suspect their father had found something distasteful in the Party because he resigned his membership shortly after their return to Poland--but he never told them why. They were forced to give up the lovely German home the Party had given them. Although she was only a little girl at the time, my cousin Sonia, now forty-nine, still remembers the "pretty German furniture, dishes, table linens, and curtains" with some longing. "Of course, we wondered if those Germans had taken it from some other Jewish family," she said.

An Eye for an Eye is based on wrenching interviews with three Jews who admitted commanding concentration camps in Silesia in 1945. Sack, a regular contributor to Esquire and other magazines, including Harper's, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, spent seven years digging into Polish and German government archives. He found evidence that 60,000 to 80,000 German civilians died in such camps. One Jew tells a grisly story of camps with sadistic beatings, torture, little food, rampant disease, and a high death rate.

The central story is of Lola Potok, who lost ten siblings and a year-and-a-half-old daughter in Auschwitz and then sought her revenge as director of a camp for suspected German collaborators in Gleiwitz. The book, written novelistically, recounts Lola's experiences in Auschwitz and makes her rage--and her cruel administration of the camp--understandable. As her violent rage diminishes, she goes through a moral crisis, insists on humane treatment of the prisoners, and leaves her post--and Poland--after half a year.

Lola's childhood friend Pinek Maka, the second key Jewish subject, admits he was head of State Security for all of Silesia, but he denies knowledge of the atrocities. He says 60 to 70 per cent of the officers in Silesia were Jews, but most of them left in the last months of 1945. There are nearly seventy pages of notes identifying sources at the end of the book.

When John Sack went on 60 Minutes last November to discuss the investigation of his third Jewish interviewee, Solomon (Shlomo) Morel, the book became the subject of a major brouhaha among scholars, magazine journalists, book reviewers, and officials in American Jewish organizations. Morel had been subpoenaed by the Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation for interrogation concerning his role as commandant of a camp at Swietochlowice, but he refuses to return from Israel.

Morel admitted to Sack that he ran the camp, and archives verified that he did. So did lurid descriptions of cruelty Sack obtained in interviews with non-Jewish guards. And he got partial verification from one Jew, Pinek Maka's brother, Moshe. The staff at 60 Minutes went further: they found 1,580 death certificates for camp prisoners, many of them signed by Morel.

At that point, the story looked as if it might take off, and it sent shock waves through the Jewish community. Indeed, there was a danger that this book might distort the role of Jews in the postwar treatment of Germans by not supplying the larger context.

I questioned the book's failure to blast the Polish Communists for doubly victimizing Jews by using them cynically to...