In the years immediately following WW2, the NKVD-controlled Polish Secret Police operated 227 separate prisons and 1,255 concentration camps in which up to 80,000 Germans, predominately civilians—many of them just children, died. One of these prisons was the Gliwice prison (which is the building in the photographs) which, between May and November of 1945, was commanded by a former prisoner of Auschwitz, Lola Potok, a 24-year-old Polish Jewess who took the job out of a desire for revenge against the Germans, and whose motto was: 'We do to them what they did to us at Auschwitz,' although, in reality, the mistreatment of Germans in her prisoner far exceeded what she'd had to physically endure at Auschwitz.
Potok features prominently in John Sack's renown book An Eye for an Eye: The Story of Jews Who Sought Revenge for the Holocaust. Sacks told the IHR conference in May 2000 about how his highly original and immensely well researched study had evolved; how he suddenly lost all support from Lola Potok and her well-connected daughters; how no publisher wanted to touch his completed book, and how Deborah Lipstadt judged him as being worse than a Holocaust denier.
Sacks had originally learnt of Potok through one of her daughters who had the ambition of self-producing her mother's story into a Hollywood film, but required a writer to first tell the story in a magazine article. Sacks agreed to write-up Potok's version of events, and it is this first Sacks' piece on Jewish revenge in that features in this blog post:
