Fake Holocaust Survivors: Moshe Baran
Returning to another fan favourite we have another ‘Holocaust Survivor’ story to break down. This time it is the turn of Moshe Baran whose claims were published in the ‘Pittsburgh Post Gazette’ in 2024 as a form of obituary.
The narrative begins as follows:
‘When the Germans invaded his tiny town of Horodok, Poland, Moshe Baran (Dec. 10, 1920 - Feb. 3, 2024) was tracking flax purchases from farmers for the Soviet Union. The job was “Kafka-esque,” he said — he wrote reports all day every day that no one read.
Before the Germans, the Soviets had come in 1939 and upended every aspect of life in the town of about 150 Jewish families, which now lies in modern Belarus about 37 miles northwest of Minsk. The Soviets closed businesses and the synagogue; banned religious observance, Zionist meetings and non-Party newspapers; and confiscated all privately owned radios. People began reporting each other to the authorities.’ (1)
Alright so immediately we are faced with the fact that Baran was willingly working as a local bureaucrat for the Soviet Union ‘tracking flax purchases from farmers’ and despite Baran’s attempt to obscure the fact by pointlessly referencing that Judaism was ‘banned’ – it wasn’t but couldn’t be done in a synagogue – and that Zionist meetings and newspapers were banned – which is true but so were anti-Semitic and/or nationalist ones for example – the truth is that Baran was very likely a member of the communist party; (2) although likely a new one given his status as a local government bureaucrat would have meant that he was a significant figure in Horodok not just some politically neutral functionary ‘forced’ to do the job as Baran tries to imply.
Baran’s status as a local communist party functionary - and a jewish one at that - put him at obvious and significant risk when the Third Reich launched Operation Barbarossa on 22nd June 1941 which Baran narrates as follows:
‘On June 22, 1941, the Nazis launched a surprise invasion. Baran joined crowds fleeing the area, making his way toward Minsk.
But suddenly, his appendix ruptured. In tremendous pain, he managed to walk home. His family was eventually able to get him to a hospital via horse and buggy, and find some anesthesia at another hospital so doctors could remove the appendix before it killed him. For the next year, Baran would wear the same clothes every day, having few belongings left.
Nazi rule proved terrifying. Violence, robbery and humiliations became commonplace. Baran saw German soldiers shoot his uncle dead in his yard. Forced labor began, and Baran had to cut wood in the forest with other young men.
His health rebelled again. While he was bedridden with kidney stones, the Nazis made all the Jewish men pull grass and weeds from between the street cobblestones. In a rare act of mercy, a German soldier opened Baran’s bedroom door, took one look at him and went away.’ (3)
The first thing to note here is the fact that Baran immediately fled which would be odd if he was just a meaningless functionary because the Germans while known to not to be friends of the jews were also not known to be going around mass murdering jews for no reason at this point according to the official narrative anyway.
The only way Baran’s actions make sense is if Baran was actually a member of the communist party and also a significant local Soviet functionary – as I’ve pointed out he probably was above – and thus had good reason to suspect that the residents of Horodok would point him out to the German troops and/or would come for him to enact revenge for his actions in support of the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941.
Secondly we have Baran’s magically rupturing appendix during his flight from Horodok towards Minsk so he immediately ‘walks back home’ which is a rather odd and contradictory thing to do if you are fleeing towards Minsk and also almost certainly untrue as the level of pain a ruptured appendix causes is notoriously excruciating; so are we to believe Baran fled for Minsk then his appendix ruptured and he ‘fled’ right back to Horodok.
It makes little to no sense.
There are two ways to resolve this problem which are firstly that Baran’s intended to flee to Minsk, but his appendix ruptured, and he was unable to do so which fits with Baran’s hospital visit given that Horodok had just acquired a hospital for the first time under Soviet rule. (4) This then makes sense of Baran’s getting promptly caught by the Germans.
Secondly, we could resolve this by stating that Baran never had an appendix rupture and instead used this as a later manufactured excuse to explain his failure to escape the German forces or his belief in a Soviet victory – which was common among Soviet officialdom in the early days of the war – because the former would peg him as an incompetent and the latter would imply he was a jewish communist rather than the Zionist he implies he was at the time.
We are then treated to Baran’s next extraordinary claim that when he was called to do forced labour by the German authorities; he promptly had attack of kidney stones and was writhing around in so much pain in his bed that a German soldier took pity on him and left him alone.
This would be extraordinarily fortunate if true, but the fact is that it likely isn’t since that would mean on two occasions in circa a year when Baran had to deal with a situation that he didn’t like he suddenly had major health crises. The reality is that one or both of these ‘health crises’ are made up and that Baran simply faked being in extreme pain to get out of doing forced labour which would be extremely ironic if he was the jewish communist he appears to have been at the time.
Next Baran relates how:
‘In the spring of 1942, the Nazis forced all the Jews from the town — about 1,000 people — into 15 to 20 houses in a makeshift ghetto. Baran and some other young people were sent to nearby Krasne as slave laborers. His brother and about 50 others were sent to a smaller labor camp in a neighboring town.
Baran remembered walking a half-hour to work each way, working 12-hour days laying track and subsisting on a starvation diet. He remembered camp inmates “swollen from hunger.” Inmates could be killed for petty or imagined offenses, like the three people shot dead because their Jewish stars weren’t “well-attached” to their clothes. The Jewish population in the Krasne ghetto swelled as survivors of Nazi massacres were sent there.’ (5)
Next, we are told by Baran that ‘all the jews’ in Horodok were rounded up into a makeshift ghetto, but the problem is that we know there were circa 5,000 jews in Horodok at the time not the 1,000 Baran claims there were. (6)
He then claims that he and circa 50 other jews were sent to the smaller Krasne ghetto in 1942 which is odd although quite plausible because the Krasne ghetto’s inhabitants were used by the German authorities for forced labour which Baran describes albeit in extreme and unlikely terms. (7)
Baran’s anecdotal claim that three jews were shot because their jewish stars ‘weren’t well-attached’ to their clothes is probably untrue (as it is a ludicrous reason that relies on the post-war ‘Holocaust’ atrocity narrative to explain the ‘why’), but could be reasonably explained if Baran is conflating the reason of the jewish stars not being ‘well-attached’ to their clothes as that rather than the more likely explanation that jews in the Krasne ghetto are known to have snuck out of the ghetto – which was open and not walled off although seemingly surrounded by barbed wire – to engage in illicit and illegal trading with local non-jews and/or Soviet partisans (8) which would have been a serious offence that could have potentially carried the death penalty.
Next, we are treated to a highly anecdotal account about the ‘destruction of Horodok’ based apparently on Baran’s grandson Boaz Munro’s ‘research’ which reads as follows:
‘On June 11, 1942, the Nazis destroyed what remained of Horodok. According to a family history compiled by Baran’s grandson Boaz Munro, the Nazis and Belarussian police separated the healthy men from everyone else and marched them away. As the men were marching, they saw trucks with the rest of the village — women, children, the sick and the elderly — turn off the road and go into the woods.
At that moment, the men realized that the people on the trucks were headed to their murders. These roughly 700 people were forced off the trucks into a wooden barn, which the Nazis splashed with gasoline and set on fire. Anyone who escaped the barn was shot with automatic weapons.
Baran’s parents and sisters had been in hiding and weren’t part of the massacre. They and his brother made their way to the Krasne ghetto, where the family was reunited after about seven months apart.
Baran and his friends saw that staying in Krasne spelled certain death.
“We were isolated and we lost our identity as people, which meant whatever the Germans wanted, we had to deliver,” Baran said in a video for the Eva Fleischer Oral History Project. “I realized things are not going to get any better.”
They wanted to join partisans in the woods. But the partisans were highly suspicious of strangers. They had even killed a different group of Krasne escapees.
Escaping carried other risks. If caught, the would-be escapees would be killed. If they weren’t caught, the Nazis often killed other Jews in the ghetto in retaliation.
Still, Baran and two friends planned to smuggle guns out of the ghetto to offer to the partisans in hopes they would then be allowed to join forces. The two friends would secretly move Soviet gun parts out of the warehouse where they worked, wrap the parts in rags to hide them, then leave them in a junkyard.
Each day after work, Baran would ask a guard for permission to get some of his things from the junkyard. This particular guard, who never yelled at the prisoners and didn’t seem to like oppressing them, would allow it. Baran would then retrieve the gun parts, sometimes hiding them in his pants. In the ghetto, he and his friends rebuilt the guns.
Baran met a woman in the ghetto who said she would lead them to the partisans if they, in turn, helped her and her two small children escape. One night, the group found a place next to a building where the barbed wire ended. Hidden in the dark, they dug under the wire. Several nights later, while clouds hid the moon, they slid under the barbed wire and fled into the forest.
They walked deep in the woods all night until they came to some dozens or hundreds of Jews who had dug bunkers in the ground. These people helped Baran and his friends smoke the lice out of their clothes. The woman who led them there left with her children, and Baran never saw her again.
Now that he was relatively safe, Baran wanted to get the rest of his family out of the ghetto. He was able to pay a Polish farmer in various goods to smuggle out his brother, a sister and the weapons.
But Baran’s other sister was too ill to leave, and his father seemed hopeless and resigned. His mother didn’t want to abandon them. Baran was furious, according to the family history. He and his brother begged their mother to leave and after a time, she did. Baran believed his was the only mother from his hometown to survive the war.
Two days after her escape, the Nazis rounded up everyone in the ghetto, including Baran’s father and sister, and took them inside a nearby barn. They made their victims strip to their underwear and shot everyone to death, which took all day. Then they burned down the barn.’ (9)
Now Boaz Munro’s ‘research’ is actually just the largely uncritical restatement of the claimed account of what happened in Horodok by Yosef Lifshitz in the 1957 ‘Memorial Book of David-Horodok’ not his own work. (10)
Munro appears to also have invented central pieces of his narrative since he claims that:
‘At that moment, the men realized that the people on the trucks were headed to their murders. These roughly 700 people were forced off the trucks into a wooden barn, which the Nazis splashed with gasoline and set on fire. Anyone who escaped the barn was shot with automatic weapons.’ (11)
Yet the use of gasoline and the barn do not appear in Lifshitz’s account at which is far more prosaic:
‘All those gathered at the marketplace were led away on foot by a strongly armed SS detachment, accompanied by hundreds of Horodtchukas to Chinovsk, a village seven kilometers from David-Horodok. There, the graves had already been prepared.
Surrounded on all sides by artillery and machine guns, every single man was shot to death. The cries and the screams of the unfortunate victims carried through the air and reached as far as David-Horodok.
The gathered Horodtchukas had fulfilled a triple mission: they made sure that no one fled from the field; they removed the gold rings, watches, clothing, shoes, and boots and even tore out gold teeth. Finally, they carried out the job of throwing the victims into the graves, not looking to see if they were really dead or still half alive.’ (12)
While Pitciha Hochberg’s post-war testimony – ‘Griding’ is an alternative name for ‘Horodok’ - differs from Lifshitz’s account as well as Munro’s claims:
‘The Germans entered the town at the end of June, 1941 (although they first came in 1939, on the eve of Rosh Ha'Shana. They left, and the Russians took their place. They stayed until 1941, when the war between Russian and Germany broke out. Then, the Germans returned to Griding.) Upon entry, they allowed local criminals to murder Jews and take away their possessions. Peasants started arriving from throughout the district, in order to murder and steal. Jews were killed and thrown in the lake.’ (13)
Munro claims the jews of Horodok were corralled into a barn and set on fire with gasoline, Lifshitz claims they were simply shot in pre-prepared graves while Hochberg claims they were shot by the local Poles and Ukrainians then dumped in a nearby lake.
No one seems to know quite how the jews of Horodok were allegedly murdered by the Germans and Ukrainians!
What is apparent is that Baran’s family somehow avoided the alleged massacre and that Baran was who allegedly working at a factory using Soviet gun parts at this point – which seems extremely unlikely I might add – ‘heard’ of the alleged massacre and he and his brother resolved to get his family out of Horodok and to join the Soviet partisans.
This is quite possible given that Soviet partisans were frequently raiding Horodok at this point (14) and through corruption of a local guard – which is quite possible – Baran and his brother escaped with his family out of both Krasne and Horodok to join the Soviet partisans except for one of Baran’s sisters who was ‘too ill to leave’ but once again we have to note the miraculous timing by Baran in that he and his family escaped Krasne and Horodok two days before the remaining jews population was again herded into another barn – albeit naked this time – and the barn burned down (possibly with gasoline) once again.
Once again Lipshitz disagrees and claims that the jewish inhabitants of Horodek were merely driven out and forced to wander around for weeks/months while the local Polish and Ukrainian peasants ‘beat and raped them’ and any jewish men disguised as women were ‘thrown from a bridge into the river’ by the Ukrainians. (15)
Hochberg again disagrees with both Baran and Lifshitz and has the jewish population of Horodok being carted off in three waves not two with the last two being to so-called unnamed ‘death camps’ (possibly Belzec and Janowska). (16)
The problem of course is that the other jewish testimony appears to contradict Baran’s narrative – as well as Munro’s – with Baran placing the destruction of Horodok’s jewish population in November 1942 while Hochberg puts it in February 1943. (17)
This goes to show how utterly unreliable Baran’s ‘Holocaust’ narrative is but the fact that he then fought in the Red Army – which he then (somewhat hilariously) got out of front line service for by claiming to be an ‘accountant’ – (18) and expropriated Polish and Ukrainian farmers on behalf of Stalin goes to suggest that Baran’s narrative is less that of a ‘jewish victim’ and more of a jewish communist persecuting non-jews who then gets his comeuppance.
Since as Baran writes:
‘Partisans took the weapons that Baran and his friends had assembled and sneaked out of the ghetto. Baran was able through contacts to join a group of Russian soldiers left behind enemy lines after their 1941 invasion.
With this group, Baran collected supplies dropped behind enemy lines by Soviet planes. He also fired guns at Nazi garrisons to provide cover for other partisans whose job was to kill the German soldiers. Sometimes he stood guard while partisans planted mines on railroads.
More routinely, he and the partisans took food and supplies from local farmers. If the farmers refused, the partisans told them they would “pay a price for that.” “This is how we got our food,” Baran said in the video.
As the German military began retreating near the war’s end, the partisans got stuck between two German lines. For about 10 days, they wandered through swamps, drinking muddy water, eating dried bread and sleeping by hugging trees.
Baran eventually rediscovered his family in the woods. They then lived under Soviet occupation again and Baran again was enlisted for bookkeeping. This time, he nearly faced death when a local official forced him into the Soviet army with the war still in force.’ (19)
In other words: Baran was a cowardly communist jew who voluntarily persecuted non-jews on behalf of Stalin’s Soviet government between 1939 and 1941 and again between 1942/43 and 1945 not a ‘meek pro-Zionist jew forced to work for the Soviet government and then persecuted by the Nazis’ as he implies.
References
(1) https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/pittsburgh-holocaust-survivors/baran.php
(2) Cf. W. W. Kulski, 1953, ‘Class Stratifications in the Soviet Union’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 1, pp.145-153
(3) https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/pittsburgh-holocaust-survivors/baran.php
(4) Yosef Lifshitz, 1957, ‘The History of David-Horodok’, p. 395 in Y. Idan (Ed.), 1957, ‘Memorial Book of David-Horodok’, 1st Edition, Former Residents of David-Horodok in Israel: Tel Aviv
(5) https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/pittsburgh-holocaust-survivors/baran.php
(6) https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Gorodok/index.html
(7) https://en.vilna.co.il/history/vilna-sites/%D7%A8%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%AA-%D7%A2%D7%99%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%97%D7%95%D7%96-%D7%95%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%A0%D7%94/%D7%A7%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%A1%D7%A0%D7%94/
(8) Ibid.
(9) https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/pittsburgh-holocaust-survivors/baran.php
(10) See Lifshitz, Op. Cit., pp. 398-400
(11) https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/pittsburgh-holocaust-survivors/baran.php
(12) Lifshitz, Op. Cit., p. 399
(13) Pitciha Hochberg, 1957, ‘Testimony of Pitciha Hochberg regarding crimes against the Jews of Griding during World War II’, p. 67 in Idan, Op. Cit.
(14) Lifshitz, Op. Cit., p. 400
(15) Ibid., p. 399
(16) Hochberg, Op. Cit., p. 67
(17) Ibid.
(18) https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/pittsburgh-holocaust-survivors/baran.php
(19) Ibid.
