What happened one day in Jedwabne

"Sasiedzi: Historia Zaglady Zydowskiego Miasteczka" ("Neighbors: The History of the Destruction of a Jewish Village") by Jan Tomasz Gross, Pogranicze, 157 pages

Arecent news item in the Polish press reported that the Polish Institute for National Memory, established to document the crimes of the Nazis in occupied Poland, plans to launch an investigation into the murder in July 1941 of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne, a village in northeastern Poland. If it is proven that the massacre was in fact carried out by the villagers, and the murderers are still alive, they will be brought to trial and may spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

The Jedwabne affair came to light this summer, following the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross's book charging that nearly all the Jewish residents of this village were murdered by their neighbors. Gross's book is more than a historiographic "bombshell". It motivates us to re-examine the problematic and painful wartime relations between Poles and Jews which continue to affect the relationship even today.

Jan Tomasz Gross, born in 1947, was a student of physics and sociology at the University of Warsaw in the 1960s. Arrested for participating in the "events of March 1968", he was expelled from the university and thrown into jail. Upon his release, he emigrated to the United States and earned a doctorate in sociology from Yale University. Today he is a political science lecturer at New York University. His previous studies dealt with Poland under German occupation, Soviet-occupied regions in eastern Poland and the Soviet expulsion of Polish citizens. Only in the last few years has he taken an interest in Jewish affairs. Two years ago, Gross published a book on Jewish, Polish and Communist stereotyping in 1939-1948. His new book describes the events taking place in a certain Polish village over the span of a few days - events which may have an important and far-reaching impact on historiography and the public debate.

Jedwabne, approximately 100 kilometers west of Bialystok, was annexed to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1939 in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Of its 2,500 residents, about 60 percent were Jewish. The German army occupied the village towards the end of June 1941. Some of the Jews were murdered by Polish villagers as soon as the Germans arrived, but the real pogrom began on July 10, 1941. For several days, the Germans allowed the locals to do as they liked to their Jewish neighbors, a kind of unspoken collaboration between the new occupying force and the villagers.

Rumors that Jewish blood and Jewish property were up for grabs spread like wildfire. Inhabitants of the neighboring villages began to arrive in wagons. The first victims were beaten to death with sticks and metal implements. The rest were herded into a large barn at the edge of town and burned to death. Gross describes it as mass murder in a double sense: in terms of both the number of victims and the number of murderers. With the help of a simple statistical analysis and the names mentioned in his sources, Gross proves that half the Polish males in Jedwabne took part in the killing, from craftsmen to office clerks and young hotheads.

Shmuel Wasserstein, born in Jedwabne and one of the few survivors, testified before the Jewish Historical Commission in Bialystok in the spring of 1945. "The Germans arrived on Monday, June 23", he said. "By June 25, the murderers had begun their work. The Borowski brothers played the accordian and the clarinet to drown out the cries of the Jewish women and children. With my own eyes, I saw them kill Haiche Wasserstein, Jacob Katz and Eljasz Krawiecki. Jacob Katz was battered with knives, gouged out his eyes and cut off his tongue. The man lay in agony for 12 hours until he died." One of the Polish witnesses testified that "Sobota and Wasilewski picked out 12 Jews and forced them to do exercises as they stood by and jeered." Another group of Jewish men were taken to the cemetery and ordered to dig a hole, after which they were attacked and murdered with metal bars, knives and sticks.

Gross relies primarily on the testimony of the few Jewish survivors which was preserved by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, along with newly released legal documents from a number of trials conducted in 1949-1953. These trials did not receive much publicity at the time, the Soviets basically ignoring or downplaying anything connected with the extermination of the Jews, and imposing the same policy on communist Poland.

Gross' book about the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne reopens the discussion of the Polish attitude toward Jews during and after the war. An argument often cited in the literature and in public debate is that Polish hostility toward the Jews was aroused by Jewish support of Soviet occupation. In the Polish collective memory, Soviet occupation of the eastern frontier of Poland in 1939 and German occupation in 1941 were conjoined. Many Poles saw the German occupation as a kind of liberation from the Soviets. Gross finds no concrete evidence of Jewish "collaborators" working for the Soviet authorities in the district in question.

Indeed, such allegations were based more on conventions and stereotypes than actual fact. For the Poles, Soviet occupation was a trauma and a tragedy. They desperately needed an emotional outlet for their frustration. Venting their anger directly at the Soviets was not sufficient. This was also true, perhaps even more so, for the Ukrainian population in Soviet-annexed regions. A whole series of pogroms against the Jews took place in towns and villages across Eastern Galicia in the early days of German occupation. I believe Gross' book is the first documented account of a pogrom at this time.

Reading this book arouses fundamental questions about the participation of local populations in the persecution and massacre of Jews. To what extent was this incident an active and conscious contribution to the Final Solution? To what extent was it a spontaneous outburst of rage and a desire for material gain at the expense of defenseless Jews? A serious, in-depth study of the plunder of Jews by their neighbors has yet to be written. Murder and looting of the kind that went on in Jedwabne, however enraging and monstrous, was only part of a much broader and systematic apparatus set in motion by the Nazis. The brutality and terror brought to these provinces by Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia stimulated and brought out the worst in man.

Another question raised by Gross is whether a victim can also be a murderer. When all is said and done, the Poles, as a people and a society, were Hitler's victims, too. The answer is yes, definitely. There was a kind of illogical asymmetry here. Both Jews and poles were victims of Nazism, but this did not make them "brothers in affliction".

No less important is the matter of "quantity". Was the massacre in Jedwabne unusually barbaric, or par for the course in occupied Poland? Will the discovery of this incident lead to continued research and investigation in this direction? If Jedwabne does turn out to be an exceptional case, one can only hope that this model will not be applied indiscriminately to all Poles.

In his concluding remarks, Gross expresses the hope that his findings will help historiography and Polish society confront the past with greater courage and sincerity. To a great extent, nationalist sentiment and decades of communist rule have made this difficult. Gross believes that it is now possible in the new Poland of today.

An interesting question, and equally important, is whether Gross's book will affect Jewish attitudes to Poles and Poland. Will his study be perceived as further evidence that "all Poles are anti-Semitic"? Will the atrocities in Jedwabne be held up as a "symbolic precedent" of the Kielce pogrom? This important study, which undoubtedly contributes to our historical understanding of the Holocaust and World War II, must not be turned into a crude battering ram between Jews and Poles.

Simon Redlich

Prof. Shimon Redlich, head of Ben-Gurion University's Raab Center for Holocaust Studies, has recently completed the manuscript of "Together and Apart: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians in Brzezany, 1919-1945".