Professor Engel Introduction to "The Neighbours"

Attached is a rough translation (without footnotes) of the Hebrew introduction to Sasiedzi.

In a certain sense Jan Tomasz Gross can be called the leading figure among Poland's "new historians." Like his Israeli colleagues who bear the same title, Gross too confronts his people's collective memory and subjects it to the test of academic inquiry. Like them he too strives to hear the voices of individuals and groups whose memories are routinely relegated to the margins of public consciousness and to allow those voices to be heard by all. And like the writings of the new historians in Israel, his research also arouses sharp public disagreements, for the memories and historical episodes they uncover present a picture of the past in radical conflict with the one that most are accustomed to regard as indisputable truth.

The Polish edition of this book was published in mid-2000. It painted a heartrending picture of a horrific event: on 10 July 1941, in the town of Jedwabne in the district of Łomża, a Polish mob brought together virtually all of the local Jews, shoved them forcefully into a barn, poured kerosene on the building, and set it afire. 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children, about half of the town's population, were burned alive. But for Gross the most shocking feature of the episode was that "it was not the Nazis who murdered those Jews, nor the NKVD, nor the security services of the communist regime in Poland, but the [local Polish] community," the victims' neighbors. Gross himself appears to have recoiled from the magnitude of the shock: as he testifies in the book, four years passed between the time he first came upon traces of the event until he understood that in light of what had happened at Jedwabne one could no longer conceive the relations between Poles and Jews in the terms that Polish historiography has employed to date. Once he came to such an understanding, however, he has been adamant: "We must throw away the sleeping pills that the historians, publicists, and journalists have been shoving down our throats for the past fifty years, [which were supposed to make us believe] that only the Germans killed the Jews.... Framing the question of Polish-Jewish relations in this [new] spirit obliges us to confront anew the enormous problems of Polish wartime and postwar history."

Reactions were not immediate, but once they came (following extensive coverage in the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, edited by the former Solidarity activist Adam Michnik), it became clear that the book touched a raw nerve. Prof. Ryszard Bender of the Catholic University of Lublin, one of the country's leading historians, rejected the book out of hand: in an interview with the Catholic-nationalist weekly Głos he thundered against "the one-sided testimonies, filled with anti-Polish falsehoods," cited in the book, challenging its "sensationalistic" style and "superficial" research, which, he claimed, were aimed at creating "an emotionalized and tendentious description of events." Another nationalist weekly also wondered about Gross's intentions in giving publicity to "horror stories" with no basis in fact: after all, the newspaper claimed, "the world is already convinced that the Poles are guilty of everything." But not only ardent defenders of the traditional national narrative were alarmed; more moderate voices, seemingly open to a critical examination of the Polish past, also expressed reservations about the book's findings and conclusions. In Gazeta Wyborcza itself, journalist Jacek Żakowski expressed doubt whether it is possible "indisputably to confirm many details after sixty years." It might be, he warned, that the murder in Jedwabne-which he termed "a monstrous crime..., shocking, nauseating, and shameful," knowledge of which had caused him "to look differently at our neighbors and even at ourselves"-was not carried out in accordance with the desires of the town's entire Polish population and that at least some of the responsibility for it is borne by the "Hitlerites that were sent" there as part of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began two weeks earlier. Prof. Tomasz Szarota of Warsaw University, one of the leading scholars of the Nazi occupation of Poland, expressed similar thoughts: on one hand he welcomed the books publication as "a sign of our independence, normalization, and liberation from our complexes," but on the other hand he insisted that only after all possible documentary stones had been turned could the transfer of responsibility for the murder from the Germans to the Poles be justified.

The question of the German role in the episode is not a trivial one, if only because it is known that during the initial weeks following the invasion of the USSR German forces perpetrated murderous acts against Jews precisely in the area in question. Gross, however, is well aware of this fact, as well as of testimonies attributing to the Germans some sort of role in the events at Jedwabne. In fact, he discusses the significance of those testimonies at length in the chapter entitled "The Preparations." One can disagree with his conclusions, to be sure, but in light of his methodical analysis of the problem of sources, the complaints of his critics about lack of exhaustive research and an insufficiently critical approach to the interpretation of evidence seem groundless. In the event, it is not scientific precision that appears to be hanging in the balance in the stormy argument that the book has aroused, but the very image of the Polish people, both in its own and in the world's eyes. Ever since the Polish state was erased from the European political map at the end of the eighteenth century, Poles have cultivated a self-image that presents their nation as an eternal innocent victim of the rapacity of their neighbors from east and west. Against the lustful belligerence that characterized the foreign occupiers throughout the generations, the Polish nation, according to its national myth, inscribed on its banner the loftiest of all human values-liberty, democracy, and brotherhood. Polish children learn from their earliest years that the Second World War represented the supreme expression of this tradition: the Polish nation refused as one to collaborate with the Nazis in any form, establishing instead an exemplary military and civilian underground movement whose contribution to the victory of the forces of goodness and light was substantial. Moreover, Poland's stubborn resistance to German pressure immediately before and during the war is regarded as proof of the nation's constant readiness to offer itself as a sacrifice upon the altar of righteousness for the sake of the freedom of all mankind. Such readiness is actually regarded as an essential part of the Polish nation's historic mission to redeem the world.

Unfortunately, the systematic murder of Polish Jewry during the years 1941-44, though planned by the German occupier, was executed in the presence of the Polish community, most of which turned it back upon the cry of the victims. For this reason the story of the Holocaust is liable to subvert the national self-image. In 1996, two Polish sociologists, Ireneusz Krzemiński and Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, considered the psychosocical implications of this damage:

"The problem with the Holocaust" stemms among other things from the fact that its impressions clashes with the strongly-rooted image of "Polishness." The events of the Second World War did not confirm the myth of the Polish nation as a chosen people. Although the Poles themselves experienced the cruelty of the occupiers, they were witnesses to the crime, unprecedented in human history, that the Nazi Germans perpetrated upon the Jews. At the same time, the apathetic reaction often displayed toward what was happening to the Jews contradicted the universally accepted ideal of struggle "for our freedom and yours." The fact that historians agree that the Polish community could not have stopped the crime was nonetheless liable to arouse subconsciousness guilt feelings.

But now, after the findings of Jan Tomasz Gross's study of the incident at Jedwabne have been published, it has become evident that not all historians agree that the Poles were unable directly to affect the fate of entire Jewish communities. On the contrary, a scholar like Gross, of international reputation, who was himself a victim of the Communist regime, upon whom the free Polish government bestowed a medal for distinguished service, presents the Polish community, at least in one town, not as a powerless bystander but as an willing murderer, active and cruel. No wonder that one of his critics called his book "an atomic bomb with a delayed fuse."

Yet not all of the reactions have been defensive. Columnist Jacek Kurczewski has criticized Gross's critics for "not getting it into their heads that Poles were capable of doing something like this." "Polish intellectuals, like all intellectuals, love myths that portray their nation as exceptional," he warned, "but in truth we are not exceptional." And in response to what he took as *akowski's attempt to avoid coming to grips with the meaning of the Jedwabne episode, the journalist Konstanty Gebert, who gained fame during the early 1990s for his reporting about interethnic conflicts in postcommunist Europe, wrote that "books like [Gross's]... are vital for Poland no less than those that document crimes in which the Poles were victimized, for [only through them] will we know where we were treated unjustly and where we did injustice [to others]. Only if we know this, he continued, "will we be able to forgive in the first instance and to ask forgiveness in the second, and in this way finally to achieve a moral order in which it will be impossible to condemn a person for crimes committed half a century ago just because he is a Pole (or a Russian, or a German, or a Ukrainian, etc.)." Calls are going forth with ever-increasing force for an extensive and uncompromising public discussion both of the facts of the Jedwabne episode and of their practical and moral implications.

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Readers of the Hebrew edition will no doubt welcome the prospect that Gross's book will encourage a national Polish effort at soul-searching over Polish treatment of Jews in general and during the Holocaust in particular. In stark contrast to the Polish self-image, Jewish historical consciousness has conjured over the years an image of Poles as a nation consumed by Jew-hatred, whose children "imbibe antisemitism with their mothers' milk." Gross even states explicitly that the story he tells about Jedwabne contains "a partial answer to the question that vexes Polish public opinion: Why do the Jews have such a longstanding brief for the Poles, one more deeply rooted even than the one they carry for the Germans...?" But if the appearance of the book in Israel will be greeted sympathetically for this reason, it is difficult to imagine that it Israel will cause even the slightest public uproar. On the contrary, many readers are liable to find in it only confirmation of the traditional image and to wonder what there is in it that requires explanation.

In this context it is important to keep two facts in mind. First, the present state of historical research does not allow for an unambiguous determination of the extent to which the events in Jedwabne were typical or extraordinary. Gross has uncovered traces of similar occurrences in two nearby towns, Radziłów and Wšsosz, and there is evidence of murderous violence against Jews by aroused Polish mobs in other locations around Łomża, such as Stawiski and Szczuczyn. However, such behavior does not appear to have been a general phenomenon, even in the specific region under discussion. It is true that we know of not a few cases in which individual Jews were murdered by Poles, but for the most part these cases involved Jews who were living in hiding outside of the ghettos. Scholars of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War have not yet looked into the phenomenon of the destruction of entire Jewish settlements along the lines of Jedwabne and have not tried to estimate its extent. For this reason there are at present no scholarly grounds for viewing the Jedwabne incident as indicative of a general pattern. It can be assumed that, following Gross's lead, other scholars will devote attention to this matter, but in doing so they will automatically put not only Polish but also Jewish historical memory under critical scrutiny. At the present moment it is impossible to predict the outcome of either test.

Moreover, Gross's study does not point unequivocally to a longstanding tradition of Jew-hatred as the principal cause of the murder. Until the Germans came along, no signs of any special tension between Poles and Jews in Jedwabne were apparent; on the contrary, it appears that between the two world wars the relations between the two groups were more or less calm. To be sure, Gross raises the issue of the influence of the blood accusation on the town's Polish inhabitants, but in his words, "an evil spirit had to come along in order to wake the sleeping monster inside the people and to move it to action." He finds the source of that evil spirit in personal and local factors-partly in the greed of the local Polish population, who saw an opportunity to take over all of the Jews' property in one fell swoop, and partly in the conformist nature of the leading perpetrators, who assumed the conqueror's brutal behavioral norms, seeking to ingratiate themselves by doing what they presumed to be the occupiers' will before being told to do so. Thus in the final analysis Gross rejects any all-encompassing explanation of the murder, so that anyone hoping to find in the book scientific validation for the idea that the Polish people is distinguished by an inborn cultural propensity to harm Jews will be sorely disappointed.

On the other hand, a reader prepared to approach the book without prejudice will find in it much food for thought. The author wants to know not only what the particular historical incident under examination teaches about the collective character of the Polish people but also whether and to what extent it is possible to speak about any people's collective character or to derive conclusions about that character from history. He appears to walk a fine line in discussing these matters. In principle he rejects collective responsibility: "Only the murderer is responsible for the murder." But at the same time he acknowledges the existence of cultural collectivities, constructed out a sense of participation in a common past, whose existence extends over a period of many generations. According to Gross, it is customary for such communities to take pride in the glorious accomplishments of earlier generations, as if the good deeds of the parents are a favorable omen for the children. But if so, he asks, why should they not also assume part of the stain that attaches from their forebears' crimes and moral failures?

Standing at the center of the book is thus a question of universal significance, especially in an age when intergroup relations are coming to be based more and more upon the liquidation of collective accounts by means of apologies for past sins: Where does one draw the line between a legitimate demand to redress those who have suffered historical injury as a way to national atonement and catharsis and an unfair visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the second, third, and fourth generations? Today, as the Jewish population in Israel also wrestles with various aspects of this problem, the appearance of Jan Tomasz Gross's book in Hebrew translation appears most timely.