An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 (ISBN 978-0465042142) is a book by John Sack, which states that some Jews in Eastern Europe took revenge on their former captors while overseeing over 1,000 concentration camps in Poland for German civilians. The book provides details of the imprisonment of 200,000 Germans "many of them starved, beaten and tortured" and estimates that "more than 60,000 died at the hands of a largely Jewish-run security organisation." A professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University, Antony Polonsky, said that his "research appears to be sound", but he and other reviewers have questioned the "extent of Jewish persecution of Germans", in Sack's book.
According to Holocaust writer Daniel Goldhagen's review of the book in The New Republic, most of the people working in these camps were not Jewish and Goldhagen argued Sack did his best to conceal this. Goldhagen cited a November 1945 report that only 1.7% of the members of the Office of State Security were Jews as refutation of Sack's figure of 75%. Sack responded that he had stated his figure for officers in Kattowitz in February, not all members in November, and that he had also written that hundreds of Jews left OSS during the year. Sack said that he attempted to publish a response in a letter to the editor of The New Republic but the magazine refused it. Sack said that The New Republic agreed to publish his reply as an advertisement, but later reversed its position.
Sack has responded to American critics of the book who say that it is "sensational and its charges inadequately attributed to source" by replying that his extensive research left little doubt that Jews ran the Swietochlowice camp "from the bottom to the top". He added "It pains me as a Jew to report this".
Sack expressed surprise at criticisms denying the accuracy of his claims, asserting that the main points have been repeatedly confirmed by others, the TV programme 60 Minutes and the New York Times among them.
In 1995, the German publisher Piper Verlag pulled the book after printing it, apparently in response to a review by Eike Geisel that called it "antisemitic fodder". According to Sack, Geisel claimed to quote a passage that doesn't exist in the book. It was published by another German publisher instead.
Famous quotes containing the words eye, untold, story, jewish, revenge and/or germans:
“Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth sapped day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to gray
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“One of the necessary qualifications of an efficient business man in these days of industrial literature seems to be the ability to write, in clear and idiomatic English, a 1,000-word story on how efficient he is and how he got that way.... It seems that the entire business world were devoting its working hours to the creation of a school of introspective literature.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.... Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him. If I am not I, who will be?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)