THE JEDWABNE AFFAIR

 

Robert S. Wistrich*

 

 

A specter has been haunting Poland since the turn of the millennium – that of Jedwabne, a town of just over 2,000 inhabitants in the province of Mazowsze, about 100 kilometers northeast of Bialystok. On a hot summer day, 10 July 1941, a massacre of Jews was perpetrated in this remote region of northeast Poland. Within a few hours virtually all of Jedwabne’s 1,600 Jews – men, women and small children – were wiped out, in broad daylight, by their Polish neighbors. This last fact – that the actual perpetrators were not German Nazis but “ordinary Poles” – stunned many in Poland with the publication there of Jan Gross’s book Neighbors in May 2000. For as this slim volume makes clear, the invading Germans played at best a secondary role in Jedwabne – though without their presence, encouragement or approval it is difficult to imagine such events taking place. Nevertheless, it was the local inhabitants (all members of the Polish ethnic community) who voluntarily carried out the killings, under the direction of Mayor Marian Karolak, and with the active participation of the entire town council.

Jan Gross identified no fewer than 92 Jedwabne residents who actively took part in the murders (some of whom he interviewed), and he claims that everyone in the town “either participated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne.” Hence, he regards these events as a mass murder in a dual sense, “on account of both the number of victims and the number of perpetrators.” By revealing that the killers were Poles he challenged not only the earlier Polish investigations into what had happened at Jedwabne (the commemorative inscription erected by the Communist regime blames the Gestapo and “Nazi and gendarmerie”) but also Poland’s self-image concerning the wartime years and the Holocaust.¹

Although it took sixty years to uncover the stark truth about Jedwabne, many details had already come to light much earlier. For example, here is part of the testimony of an eye-witness (Szmul Wasersztajn) recorded in April 1945 and deposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw:

 

… local hooligans armed themselves with axes, special clubs studded with nails, and other instruments of torture and destruction and chased all the Jews into the street. As the first victims of their devilish instincts they selected seventy-five of the youngest and healthiest Jews, whom they ordered to pick up a huge monument of Lenin that the Russians had erected in the center of town. It was impossibly heavy, but under a rain of horrible blows the Jews had to do it. While carrying the monument, they also had to sing until they brought it to the designated place. They were ordered to dig a hole and throw the monument in. Then the Jews were butchered to death and thrown into the same hole.²

 

This was only a part of the almost indescribable ordeal that the Jews of Jedwabne were forced to endure on that burning hot summer’s day just six decades ago.

 

Beards of old Jews were burned, newborn babies were killed at their mothers’ breasts, people were beaten murderously and forced to sing and dance. In the end they proceeded to the main action – the burning. The entire town was surrounded by guards so that nobody could escape; then Jews were ordered to line up in a column, four in a row, and the ninety year old rabbi and the shochet were put in front. They were given a red banner and all were ordered to sing and chased into the barn .... Then the barn was doused with kerosene and lit, and the bandits went around to search Jewish homes, to look for the remaining sick and children.³

 

These and other surviving accounts tell a story of mayhem, mutilation and murder. Some Jews were knifed and left to bleed to death, others had their bodies pierced with sharp instruments; babies were thrown to the ground and trampled to death; men had their eyes or tongues cut out – many had their throats slashed. Groups of Jews were forced to undress and perform ridiculous exercises to the jeers and applause of the watching crowd, which included women and children. The Jews gathered in the market square of Jedwabne and already reeling from savage blows and the effects of scorching thirst, were made to chant: “The war is because of us, the war is for us.”

This was the grim prelude to their being burned alive in local farmer Edward Slezynski’s barn – their screams of agony drowned out by the sounds of music. Neither the smell of burning flesh nor the dark smoke billowing over the small town appears to have dampened the enthusiasm of the onlookers who witnessed this gruesome spectacle.

At the original trial held in Lomza in May 1949 (there was a sequel in 1953), the Polish Communist authorities did indict twenty residents of Jedwabne for “aiding and abetting the German occupiers.” Ten were acquitted altogether but other defendants received sentences ranging from eight to fifteen years, though most were released without serving their full time. There was only one death sentence, which was subsequently commuted.⁴

Gross has used the trial records extensively, relying on the perpetrators’ own accounts as well as the testimony of the few Jewish survivors. Subsequently, on visiting Jedwabne, he learned that the whole story was very well documented, that witnesses were still alive, and that the memory of the crime had been preserved in Jedwabne through the generations. The evidence was there but there was unwillingness to integrate it into Polish national memory.⁵ A breakthrough occurred when some Jedwabne residents agreed to be interviewed by filmmaker Agnieszka Arnold in 1998 for her documentary Dzie jest moj brat Kain? (Where is my brother, Cain?) which was aired on the main channel of Polish State Television in April 2000. The interviews essentially confirmed Gross’s findings, as did two serious articles (to which he pays tribute in his book) by investigative reporter Andrzej Kaczynski, which appeared in Rzeczpospolita (5 and 19 May 2000). Kaczynski’s first piece, entitled “Calopalenie” (Holocaust or “Burning Alive”), was devoted exclusively to the Jedwabne massacre, which the journalist cautiously described as instigated by Germans but executed “by Polish hands.” The reporter confessed that he had encountered much xenophobia and antisemitism in the course of his enquiries; but one essential point was made abundantly clear. “Not only old people, but even young people who knew the truth from family sources…told me that Jews were put to a cruel death first of all by the Poles. I was also told that some of the murderers are still alive.”

Jedwabne was not the only small town in Poland where Jews were taunted, beaten, stabbed and then burned alive in a barn. Something similar had happened in neighboring Radzilow on 7 July 1941 where 800 Jews were killed, three days before the horrifying events in Jedwabne. Gross devotes a chapter to this precedent. Other massacres apparently took place in the same period in Wasosz and Stawiski in the same region as Jedwabne. The Germans themselves had provided the model by burning Jews alive in a synagogue in Bialystok on 27 June 1941 (an incident which Gross does not mention) just five days after the attack on the Soviet Union. This raises questions that some of Gross’s critics pointedly asked. Did he not underplay the role of the Germans in organizing so-called self-cleansing actions by embittered and antisemitic Poles? How many Germans were in fact present in Radzilow and Jedwabne on the crucial days? What did they do or say? Did they order Poles to kill Jews, give them a green light to do so, or simply stand by and let them get on with what they ardently wished to do anyway? German archives apparently do indicate the presence in the region of an Einsatzgruppe led by Hermann Schaper who (according to government historian Pawel Machcewicz) was in Radzilow on 7 July – the day of the massacre. That may be significant. However, even if some direct German involvement were proven, it would not exonerate the Poles. As one resident of Radzilow, Mariusz Gryczkowski, put it: “I feel sorry and sad about all this. It makes me not want to be a Pole…When the Russians were here the Jews had contacts with them and denounced some people, and people were deported. When the Germans were here Jews were in a bad situation. And when the Russians were here Poles were in a bad situation. That’s the bottom line of the story. But it shouldn’t have happened.”⁶

However, the mayor of neighboring Radzilow, Kazimierz Gwiazdowski, a 38-year-old farmer, seems unrepentant, skeptical and even dismissive of Gross’s account: “I don’t think a book should be written based on one story. I can invent any story right now.”⁷ For the present, Radzilow’s memorial still stands, with its misleading Communist-era plaque that states: “In August 1941 fascists murdered 800 people of Jewish nationality, and among those, 500 were burned alive in a barn.” Many of its residents seem reluctant to face the more painful truth of Polish involvement.

The Polish Catholic Church has also found it difficult to speak with one voice in the face of the recent revelations. Not for the first time, different and even opposing trends within its ranks have emerged. For example, Bishop Stanislaw Stefanek of Łomża declared that the people of this destitute region of northeast Poland were essentially innocent and has described the media interest as an American conspiracy to defame Poles. Such comments were echoed by the notoriously antisemitic Reverend Henryk Jankowski (former confessor to Lech Walesa) who even created a model of the Jedwabne barn in his own church to symbolize attempts to blame Poles for the atrocity. On the other hand, the Catholic monthly Wiez (Bond) published an impressive collection of articles on the current debate entitled “Thou Shalt Not Kill. Poles on Jedwabne.” In his introduction to the volume, now translated into English, the former chief historian of Yad Vashem, Israel Gutman, writes:

These people knew each other’s names and faces, they knew their neighbors’ parents and children, had worked together in order to survive the difficult times .... This massacre – committed only because the victims were Jews – is an unheard of, incomprehensible atrocity.”⁸

The Polish perpetrators, he observes, were neither uniformed ruffians nor “collaborators” of the Germans. There were no local conflicts or specific events with inflammatory consequences that might provide an “explanation” for the orgy of destruction that took place. Gutman suggests that while the lawless savagery and disregard for human life imposed by Nazi rule was the trigger for the tragedy, it could not have happened without the widespread hostility to Jews in pre-war Poland, which stigmatized them as an existential threat that had to be eliminated.⁹

There has been considerable soul-searching among more enlightened Poles since the publication of Gross’s book. It has not been easy for a nation accustomed to think of itself as a victim of history to suddenly see itself as directly implicated in the mass murder of Jews. Poles pride themselves on having had the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. They point out that their country had been brutally occupied, both by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and by the Red Army in September 1939. They believe that they fought Nazism with all their might until the last day of the war and certainly they suffered terrible casualties in the process. Nearly three million ethnic Poles (ten percent of the overall Polish population) and about three million Polish Jews were killed during the war (ninety per cent of the pre-war Jewish population). If we include the Jews, then Poland lost six million people or twenty percent of its former inhabitants in six years of uninterrupted horror.

Poles also take pride in the fact that they did not produce Quislings or collaborators on anything like the scale that existed across Europe between 1939 and 1945. Until the revelations concerning Jedwabne, Radzilow, and a few other small towns in the Bialystok region, it was widely believed that Polish hands were relatively clean of mass killing of Jews. The fact remains that Poles did not engage, on the whole, in the savage murders carried out against Jews, as did the Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Hungarians, Croats and other collaborators of the Germans during the war years.¹⁰ They did not send regiments to the Eastern Front to fight with the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS; and there were relatively few Poles who served as guards in the concentration or death camps. Moreover, there are more Polish names in the Avenue of Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem than those of any other nationality.

But all too often in the past these valid arguments (and other less legitimate ones) have been used selectively and tendentiously to deny any kind of Polish responsibility for the Shoah. This was already apparent in an earlier Polish controversy about the Holocaust sparked by the literary critic Professor Jan Blonski, who was highly critical of his countrymen’s distorted and apologetic stance towards the annihilation of the Jewish people.¹¹ The debate, carried on initially in the important Catholic publication Tygodnik Powszechny, focused on a different (though related) set of issues, such as the Polish failure to do more to rescue Jews and the blight of antisemitism in Polish political life before the war, during the Holocaust itself, and in its aftermath. Even highly sensitive subjects such as the heinous deeds of the szmalcownicy (Poles who turned Jews over to the Germans in return for money), the transfer during wartime of Jewish property to Polish as well as German hands and the collaboration of the Polish “blue police” (granatowej policji) with the Nazis, were discussed in this internal debate of the late 1980s.

There were those who pointed out that the flattering self-image of Poles as ardent patriots, underground fighters and knights in shining armor was somewhat misleading when it came to Jews. True, reproaches often heard in the outside world that all Poles were endemically antisemitic might be unjust, but (as the critics noted) Polish silence, denial and opportunism during and after the Shoah had contributed to this image. Polish historiography had timidly avoided subjects such as the three thousand or so Jews murdered by Polish antisemitic gangs and by members of the underground Polish Home Army during the Holocaust and after the war. Under the Communists, a veil of silence still hung thickly over most Polish historical writing on these subjects, leaving only self-serving nationalist assertions about Polish heroism and the “generous help” allegedly given the Jews.¹² Self-criticism, where it existed, generally came from dissidents, particularly among Catholic intellectuals in Krakow.

Jan Gross – professor of politics and European studies at New York University –came from a very different background to Blonski. Born into a thoroughly assimilated mixed family (his father was a prominent lawyer and his paternal grandfather served as a liberal Jewish deputy for Krakow in the Imperial Austrian parliament), he left the country as a young man after the Polish student unrest of 1968 and brief imprisonment, to settle in the United States. Though his half-Jewish origins have not passed unnoticed by his more antisemitic critics, there is no reference to this personal background in his book. He was very clearly writing as a Pole addressing his compatriots over a matter of common national concern. His aim was not simply to reveal the identity of the perpetrators of the Jedwabne atrocity but to shake the conscience of his readers so that “the new generation, raised in Poland with freedom of speech and political liberties, is ready to confront the unvarnished history of Polish-Jewish relations during the war.”¹³

From a methodological viewpoint, Gross sharply rejected the idea of “two separate wartime histories – one pertaining to the Jews and the other to all of the other citizens of a given European country subjected to Nazi rule.” In his view, it was self-evident that “when the Polish half of a town’s population murders its Jewish half, we have on our hands an event patently invalidating the view that these two ethnic groups’ histories are disengaged.”¹⁴

Gross resolutely opposes the classic Polish apologetic argument which “explains” the Jedwabne massacre as revenge for alleged Soviet-Jewish “collaboration” before the German invasion. According to this theory – still very popular in Poland – when the Red Army entered the eastern half of the country in mid-September 1939, it had been enthusiastically welcomed by the Jewish population. Not only Catholic nationalists, ultra-rightists and open antisemites espouse this myth but also prominent historians such as Professor Tomasz Strzembosc, of the Catholic University of Lublin. According to Strzembosc, an expert on the eastern region of Poland, Jews took part en masse in enforcing the new Soviet order. Not only did they replace ethnic Poles in local offices but, so he claimed in Rzeczpospolita, they helped deport Poles to Siberia and northern Kazakhstan. “This was collaboration with arms in hand, taking the side of the enemy, treason in days of defeat.”¹⁵

By evoking this allegedly “treacherous” collaboration, Professor Strzembosc and others appear to be trying to create an artificial symmetry and even a spurious moral equivalent to the Holocaust. Even if it were proven that Jews collaborated with the NKVD (Soviet secret police) in significantly higher numbers than Poles, Ukrainians or Belorussians – could this possibly justify Polish citizens clubbing, drowning, gutting and burning their Jewish neighbors to death in Jedwabne? Moreover, did Jews under the Soviet occupation actually kill or murder any Polish soldiers or civilians? I know of no single documented case of any Jew executing or burning Poles alive under Soviet rule. Gross himself, who is an expert also on the “sovietization” of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, points out in Neighbors (and in earlier works) that more Poles than Jews actually collaborated with the Russians – including in the Jedwabne region.¹⁶ Furthermore, one-third of all Polish citizens deported eastwards to the interior of the Soviet Union, many ending up in Stalinist labor camps, were in fact Jews, and they included my parents who were deported from Lviv in eastern Poland in June 1940, after fleeing there from Krakow.

My own family history is as good a refutation of the Polish myth of “Soviet-Jewish collaboration” and Zydo-Komuna (Judeo-communism) as any pseudo-scientific argument disseminated by Gross’s critics.¹⁷ Both of my parents sympathized before 1939 with the Polish democratic left as a result of the increasingly rampant antisemitism in Polish society. Like many Jews, they had little reason to admire the Polish Republic, after having lived for two decades under its discriminatory practices. In the Soviet Union, they naïvely believed, Jews were not second-class citizens but enjoyed genuine equality. However, shortly after encountering the Soviet system in Lviv in 1940 my parents were rapidly disillusioned by its mendacity, corruption and ruthlessness. My father discovered that his “bourgeois” class origins made him suspect in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, as did the social background of many Jewish merchants, traders and professional people in eastern Poland.

My mother was more fortunate since the Soviets put her in charge of a horticulture institute in Lviv, which made a pleasant change after being denied employment as a “Jewess” in pre-war Poland. But like other inhabitants of the region, she learned that Soviet rule meant rapid “proletarianization” of all living standards and exposure to completely arbitrary decrees. Subsequently, my parents were deported eastwards, experiencing conditions identical to those of Poles in the Soviet Gulag. They arrived in Kazakhstan in 1942, where my father was twice imprisoned by the NKVD – the second time on fabricated charges of “anti-Soviet” propaganda. I mention this in order to illustrate the misleading character of the Polish myth of Judeo-communism whose extraordinary tenacity was once more revealed in the Jedwabne affair. Out of the 3.2 million Jews living in pre-war Poland, no more than several thousand were members of the outlawed Communist Party. Moreover, after 1945 even those who loyally served in the Party and its security apparatus did so as Communists not as Jews. They did not serve any “Jewish” interest. Yet the antisemitic stereotype has survived the war and continues to flourish, revived by historians such as Strzemboscz, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and the head of the National Remembrance Institute Board Dr. Slavomir Radon, who openly wondered to what degree the motive for the murders at Jedwabne was revenge for the Jewish population’s “collaboration” with the Soviet authorities.”¹⁸

Another familiar bogey resurfaced in the Jedwabne debate – that of “anti-Polonism,” this time in the guise of an organized conspiracy to lay responsibility for the Holocaust at Poland’s door. Jerzy Robert Nowak writing in Nasz Dziennik (May 2000) crudely dismissed Gross’s book as “the usual propaganda to get out of the Polish government money for the crimes committed in Poland by Germans, Soviets and criminals [Kryminalistow].”¹⁹ This was echoed by Leszek Czajkowki in Nasza Polski and by others writing in the right-wing, Catholic-nationalist and antisemitic press, which reaches hundreds of thousands of readers.²⁰

The American Jewish radical Norman G. Finkelstein, in an unbridled and slanderous attack on Gross’s book, which appeared in an abridged form in Rzeczpospolita (20 June 2001), added his own inflammatory gloss to the Polish debate. He claimed that Gross was merely a pale caricature of Daniel Goldhagen, and that his writing bore “the unmistakable imprint of the Holocaust industry” – supposedly out to exploit the Jewish genocide for political and financial gain. What particularly aroused Finkelstein’s onslaught was the chapter on stolen Jewish property which Gross linked to Polish antisemitism and the Holocaust. Gross’s suggestion that Poles must deal with the moral and material consequences of the past was (according to Finkelstein) especially offensive and cynical, since he had no right to lecture Poland from the comfort of New York City. “What sacrifices will he [Gross] suffer if the Holocaust industry bankrupts Poland?” – Finkelstein rhetorically asked his Polish readers. According to Finkelstein himself, no American professor who was silent about US crimes and no Israeli who failed to denounce Zionist “crimes against peace” had the right to confront the Poles with their past.

Were it not for this pitiful level of argument, the spectacle of Norman Finkelstein echoing the most reactionary Polish antisemites in his diatribes against the “Holocaust industry,” might almost be amusing. But for xenophobic chauvinist Poles, such a critique confirmed their fury at the “malicious” propaganda campaign (its center in Manhattan) to have Poles, rather than Germans, identified as Holocaust perpetrators. For the radical right, the “lying Jewish enemy” of Poland (supported by treacherous Polish lackeys) can never change his spots – driven as he is by relentless greed, hatred of Poles and willingness to employ blackmail to squeeze reparations from its “innocent” prey.²¹

More typical, however, of the scholarly critics has been the charge that Neighbors is a sensationalist work. Allegedly, it does not meet accepted scholarly standards and contains “one-sided testimonies” and “premature” conclusions. Marek Chodakiewicz, for instance, accused Gross of treating facts nonchalantly, of dilettantism, irresponsibility, and employing an unduly emotional style (the tone of the book is in fact remarkably sober).²² Such charges could, however, have been better applied to Chodakiewicz himself since he provided little evidence for his assumption that those murdered in Jedwabne must have been accomplices of the NKVD. Others cast doubt on the reliability of any Jewish eye-witnesses to the atrocity, claiming that they lacked the necessary detachment to be “calm and objective observers.”²³ The Polish historian Thomas Szarota also spoke for many “skeptics” when he suggested that the Poles must have been egged on by German troops or the SS. No conclusions, he insisted, could be drawn until a full investigation of all German archives had been completed.²⁴ Thus far, at any rate, these archives have not contradicted anything which Gross wrote.

Despite the various “scientific” reproaches voiced, it is important to note that none of the historians (or more serious critics) actually denied the facts per se. There was a general consensus that Gross’s book did puncture the Polish self-image.²⁵ One could not longer claim that Poles had kept their hands clean in a just war, totally innocent of Hitler’s crimes. For Gross’s supporters, this demystification has been liberating. Writing in Gazeta Wyborcza (2–3 Dec. 2000), the anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir reproached Polish historians for being “over-cautious” and “non-controversial” in their desire to be taken seriously [powazny].” Why, for example, did they only begin to address taboo subjects such as Jedwabne after Gross had completed his investigation? Why had Polish historians waited until the last eye-witnesses were on the verge of disappearing before seriously dealing with the Holocaust? Was it not time to investigate why at the end of the war in 1946 Poles were still killing Jews in their own country and pushing survivors to leave Poland forever? How was such antisemitism possible at all after everything that had happened during the Shoah?²⁶ These and many other questions are now on being asked.

The editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik, frankly acknowledged that he felt a certain “schizophrenia” and even guilt as a Pole “responsible to the world for the evil inflicted by my countrymen” and as a Jew who would certainly have been killed had he been there. In a revealing article, he wrote of the “deep trauma which surfaces with each new debate about antisemitism, Polish-Jewish relations and the Holocaust”; the feeling of guilt among Poles at having been helpless witnesses to atrocity, at profiting in many cases from the Jewish tragedy and at the many falsifications of history to which the Holocaust had been subjected in postwar Poland. The murders in Jedwabne, he concluded, had been further aggravated by the denial of the truth about them for so many decades and he reproached himself for not seeking it out more energetically; perhaps, Michnik speculated, he had “subconsciously feared the cruel truth about the Jewish fate during that time.”²⁷

Even bolder in his approach was the current president of Poland, Alexander Kwasniewski, himself a former communist, who in the spring of 2001 spoke publicly of “the black stains” in Polish history, which “we will no longer be able to ignore ... with all the pain, they must be exposed and not plastered over.” He insisted that “whatever the background may be to this horrible deed, one thing must not be forgotten: it was a mass murder of Jews by Poles … There must be heard from our mouths, the mouths of the Poles, a request for forgiveness and pardon from the Jews.”²⁸

Poland’s National Remembrance Institute opened its own investigation, exhuming the mass graves and interviewing witnesses. The institute’s chairman, Leon Kieres, frankly declared on Polish radio: “As a Pole, I can’t shake off the blame for what has happened.” Repeatedly, in interviews with the press, he emphasized that “the most important thing is the truth.”²⁹

Even a few residents of Jedwabne, such as Stanislaw Michalowski, read Neighbors and seem to have been strongly affected. He told reporters that he was no longer the same man. “We were raised in the conviction that we Poles were clean during the war, that atrocities had nothing to do with us. It’s morally crushing to realize what happened.”³⁰ But there have been other voices too, and most of Jedwabne’s present population feel little connection with the past or a sense of responsibility for the July 1941 massacre. The current mayor, Krzysztof Kodlewski, a 45-year-old schoolteacher, received many threatening phone calls as a result of his own praiseworthy efforts at honesty, frankness and reconciliation. He openly voiced the fear that his own children could become antisemites “when they are accused of being the children of murderers.”³¹

Some elderly Jedwabne residents still repeat the old canard that during the war Poles were sent to Siberia “because of the Jews.” The local Catholic priest, Edward Orlowski, even claimed that “what happened in Jedwabne was a battle against communists and not the Jews.” For good measure he added that “we cannot apologize for what happened until the Jews apologize first for turning their Polish neighbors over to the Soviets before the German occupation.” According to Orlowski, the truth was simple. The Germans alone were to blame and Poles only helped when they were forced to.³²

Christian nationalists, such as the right-wing parliamentarian from the Jedwabne region Michal Kaminski, echoed such arguments. They disputed the testimonies in Gross’s book as being biased and incomplete. Like the Krakow-based Organization of Veterans and Independence Fighters, Kaminsiki was upset by the apology made by the Polish president.³³ At his suggestion, some Jedwabne residents formed a committee to defend the sullied reputation of their town. Clearly, for some Poles, coming to terms with the dark shadows of Jedwabne’s past threatened their deepest patriotic and traditional Catholic beliefs.³⁴

The primate of Poland himself, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, did not help matters either. Initially, he seemed to question whether Poles were indeed responsible for the massacre in Jedwabne, downplaying its significance by calling it “a local tragedy.”³⁵ Glemp subsequently backtracked (following a protest letter from the rabbi of Warsaw, Michael Schudrich), conceding that “the burning of Jews, forced by Poles into a barn, is indisputable.”³⁶ In a subsequent address Glemp compared the murders in Jedwabne to Katyn (where Polish officers were killed on Stalin’s orders), Dachau, Rwanda, the Balkans and Palestine – all of them symbols which “elicit our pain as members of the human species.” Not surprisingly, the Warsaw rabbi found such comparisons “demeaning to the memory of the martyrs of Jedwabne” and the amorphous analogy with recent events in Israel to be highly inappropriate. Cardinal Glemp’s official statement also expressed concern about the current publication of Gross’s book in English. “Today, the release of its English-language version is being awaited with anxiety, because the truth thereby revealed to Americans is expected to unleash Jewry’s sharp attacks on Poles.”³⁷

Glemp made it clear that unlike Kwasniewski, he had no intention of visiting Jedwabne for the 60th anniversary commemoration (July 2001) and saw no cause for Polish national remorse or a feeling of collective guilt. He emphasized that “the only source of the Jews’ systematic extermination had been Hitlerite totalitarianism and local animosities sometimes succumbed to that current and were used instrumentally.” Glemp rejected any suggestion that “the blindness provoked in the people of Jedwabne and vicinity be extended to the entire Polish nation,’ and opposed government proposals that “on such and such a day the Catholic Church should conduct major prayers in Jedwabne, repent for its sins and ask forgiveness for the genocide.”³⁸ Instead he favored a joint Christian-Jewish religious ceremony in Warsaw that would be apolitical and would ask for “God’s forgiveness for the sins that have been committed.” Though Glemp evoked Rabbi Schudrich as the author of this suggestion, the Warsaw rabbi replied that a ceremony in Jedwabne was essential, observing: “Our tradition says that it is most appropriate to remember and mourn the loss that we have suffered in the place where it happened.” Eventually a mass was held on 27 May 2001 at the All Saints’ Church in Warsaw which passed off in a dignified manner. But Glemp subsequently managed to dampen the effect by suggesting that Jews also owed Poles an apology for their wartime collaboration with the Soviets!

Polish defensiveness over the Jedwabne massacre is apparent not only in Glemp’s ambivalent remarks but in the seemingly never-ending quest for “motives” and viable explanations that might somehow mitigate its impact. But there are no silver linings in this story. Even the Wyrzkowski family who heroically saved seven Jedwabne Jews at considerable risk to their lives were obliged to hide this fact from their neighbors and were later forced to flee the region. As Gross puts it, they were seen as embarrassing witnesses to the crimes that had been committed by their fellow Poles.³⁹

The Jedwabne affair certainly tarnished Poland’s self-image about its exemplary heroism during the war and its romantic Messianic myth of Poland as the “Christ of the Nations.” However, this does not turn Poles into co-perpetrators of the Holocaust or diminish in any way the primary German responsibility for the “Final Solution.” What Jedwabne showed is that Poles (like other nations) could be both victims and perpetrators at the same time. There were “ordinary Poles” as well as “ordinary Germans” who could obey evil impulses and become “willing executioners,” of their own free will. These facts, long repressed, signal the end of Polish innocence about their role in the Shoah. To their credit it should be said that many Poles have avoided the temptation to whitewash this difficult truth and have conducted their soul-searching in a dignified spirit of contrition and self-critical reflection.

Jan Gross’s dispassionate, low-key, but compelling account of the atrocity at Jedwabne has performed an important service in provoking this national catharsis and encouraging a thorough cleansing of the Polish conscience. On 10 July 2001, at a solemn memorial ceremony in Jedwabne, President Kwasniewski, speaking with dignity and simplicity, recalled the horrors that had taken place sixty years earlier:

For this crime we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness: this is why today, as a citizen and as President of the Republic of Poland, I beg their pardon – in my own name, and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime.⁴⁰

 

NOTES

 

* Robert Wistrich is professor of European history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and chairman of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism.

 

 1. Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (New York, 1997) provides a good account of how this self-image evolved after 1945.

 2. Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton/Oxford, 2000), p. 19.

 3. Ibid.

 4. For details of the 1949 trial, see ibid., pp. 27–32.

 5. See Antony Polonsky, “Beyond Condemnation, Apologetics and Apologies: On the Complexity of Polish Behavior toward the Jews during the Second World War,” Studies in Contemporary Jewish, XIII (1997), pp. 190–224.

 6. Quoted by Steven Erlanger, “Soul-Searching at Another Polish Massacre Site,” New York Times, 19 April 2001.

 7. Ibid.

 8. See Poles on Jedwabne (Warsaw, 2001) containing a selection of articles from the Polish press and the introduction by Israel Gutman, pp. 9–16.

 9. This point is amplified at greater length by Abraham Brumberg, “Murder Most Foul. Polish Responsibility for the Massacres at Jedwabne,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 March 2001.

10. See Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust (London, 2001), pp. 155–89.

11. See Jan Blonski, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in A. Polonsky, ed., My Brother’s Keeper? Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London, 1989), pp. 34–52.

12. Joanna Michlic, “The Troubling Past: Polish Collective Memory of the Holocaust. An Overview, East European Jewish Studies 1 (1999), pp. 79–85.

13. These are the closing words of Neighbors, p. 173.

14. Ibid., p. 9.

15. Tomasz Strzembosc, “Przemilczana kolabtoracja,” Rzeczpospolita 27–28 Jan. 2001, pp. 5–6.

16. See Jan Gross, Upiorna dekada (Krakow, 1998), which deals with stereotypes of Jews, Poles, Germans and communists between 1939 and 1948.

17. On the historical background to this myth, see André Gerrits, “Antisemitism and Anti-Communism: They Myth of ‘Judeo-Communist’ in Eastern Europe,” East European Jewish Affairs 1 (1995), pp. 49–72.

18. M.J. Chodakiewicz, “Kłopoty z kuracją szokową,” Rzeczpospolita, 5 Jan. 2001; for Slavomir Radon’s comments, see Slawomir Majman, “Jedwabne,” The Warsaw Voice, 4 March 2001.

19. J.R. Nowak, “Kto falszuje historie,” Nasz Dziennik, 13–14 May 2000.

20. Leszek Czajkowski, “Jedwabny interes,” Nasza Polska, 16 Jan. 2001

21. Leon Kalewski, “Prostujemy Klamstwa o pogromie w Jedwabne,” Nasze Polska, 10 May 2000.

22. Chodakiewicz, “Kłopoty z kuracją szokową.”

23. Zdisław Krasnodębski, “Z prawdą naz ty,” Zycie, 11 Dec. 2000.

24. Tomasz Szarota, “Czy na pewno juz wszystko wiemy?” Gazeta Wyborcza 2–3 (Dec. 2000). This article was reproduced in Poles on Jedwabne, pp. 105–11.

25. See Jaczek Zakowski, “Kazdy sąsiad ma inię,” Gazeta Wyborcza 18–19 Nov. 2000.

26. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “Obsesja niewinnosci,” Gazeta Wyborcza, 2–3 Dec. 2000.

27. Adam Michnik, “Poles and the Jews: How Deep the Guilt?” New York Times, 17 March 2001.

28. On 10 July 2001, Kwasniewski’s speech was broadcast live on Polish television and his apology was very explicit. See Andrzej Stylinski, Associated Press report, “Jedwabne,” 10 July 2001, and “Poland’s Reckoning,” Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2001.

29. See Jerusalem Post, 16 May 2001.

30. Quoted by Beata Pasek, “Poles Face Truth of Jedwabne,” Associated Press report, 11 March 2001.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. R. Bender, “Trzy pytania do prof. Ryszarda Bender,” Gtos, 25 Nov. 2000, provides an intellectual justification for this Christian nationalist backlash against Gross and his advocates.

35. Eric J. Greenberg, “Polish Church Leader Roils Jews Again,” Jewish Week, 9 March 2001.

36. Ibid.

37. Statement by Jozef Cardinal Glemp, The Roman Catholic Primate of Poland, Warsaw, 4 March 2001. Official Translation.

38. Ibid.

39. Gross, Neighbors, pp. 129–31.

40. “Poland Apologizes for World War II Pogrom,” Jerusalem Post, 11 July 2001. The new inscription on the monument at Jedwabne now reads: “In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and surrounding areas, men, women and children, fellow-dwellers of this land, murdered and burned alive at this site on July 10, 1941. As a warning to future generations not to allow the sin of hatred spawned by German Nazism to ever again set the residents of this land against each other.” It was devised before the government-led investigation officially confirmed that Poles had played a “decisive” part in the Jedwabne massacre. Polish public prosecutor Radoslaw Ignatiew finally presented the findings of his year-long investigation in July 2002. He noted that German special forces had probably incited the killings but did not actively participate in them. “We have to conclude that the role of the local population was decisive in the perpetration of this criminal act,” Jerusalem Post, 10 July 2002.