Ghosts of a Massacre

For years, the stone tablet stood on the outskirts of Jedwabne, a memorial to the former Jewish residents of the small Polish town who were killed by the Nazis in World War II. But the memorial was a lie. On a July day in 1941, 1,600 Jews were murdered in Jedwabne in a swift, brutal and barbaric pogrom. Some were clubbed to death, others drowned; the head of one young Jewish girl was cut off and kicked. Mothers were beaten to death with their babies in their arms. As darkness fell, 1,500 Jews were forced into a barn, which was then doused with gasoline and set ablaze.

But the Jews were not murdered by the Nazis. As Jan T. Gross details in his book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton University Press; 261 pages), "We now know beyond a reasonable doubt, and as Jedwabne citizens knew all along, it was their neighbors who killed them."

That single claim — that ordinary Poles participated in the extermination of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust — has proved the most shattering revelation to confront Polish society since the fall of communism. Neighbors, which has just been published in English, first appeared in Poland last spring and began to grab attention at the end of 2000; since then it has become a source of incessant, and painful, public debate. In March alone, the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza ran 70 articles on the subject. Poland's President, Prime Minister and Roman Catholic Primate have all admitted the crime was committed by Poles. Jedwabne's memorial to the slain Jews was removed in March; on July 10, the 60th anniversary of the massacre, a new one will be erected in a ceremony at which President Aleksander Kwasniewski will apologize for the atrocity.

Gross, a Polish émigré and a professor of politics at New York University, says he has been startled by the country's "open willingness to take on this revelation, which runs counter to the traditional Polish narrative of the war and totally undermines the conception that there was no victimization of Jews on the part of the Poles."

And yet the book has also stung some Poles, who believe it condemns the entire nation as anti-Semitic while ignoring Poland's resistance to the Nazis and the deaths of 3 million ethnic Poles during the war. In Jedwabne, locals now refuse to discuss what took place in their town. "The people to whom one should apologize are all dead," one woman said last week. "And we did nothing to them." The town's mayor, Krzysztof Godlewski, says that "we should behave in a way to scar up wounds. Jews don't expect any apologies from us. They simply want us to recognize that this little town was also shaped by the Jews."

How did the story of Jedwabne go untold for so long? Censorship is one reason. The British historian Norman Davies says that under communism "the entire wartime saga was reduced to a simple story of good and bad — all the evil was done by fascists and the victims were never properly identified." But plenty of people knew the truth: a memorial book of the massacre was published in 1980 and Gross draws from testimony from the 1949 trial of 22 Poles charged with the killing. "An entire Jewish population gets wiped out in one day," Gross says, "and yet somehow it never sank in, perhaps because the reality was so outrageous to contemplate."

Gross's book has been praised by most Western historians of Poland, who say it forces Polish society to acknowledge the virulence of its anti-Semitism during the period. But Neighbors has also been criticized for not corroborating accounts taken from the trial testimony with official documents, and for diminishing the role of the German occupiers, which Gross writes was limited to "taking pictures."

Tomasz Strzembosz, a historian at Warsaw's Catholic Lublin University, says the number of Polish townspeople involved in the massacre was only "several dozen" (Gross contends that at least 90 — half Jedwabne's adult male Polish population — took part); and that German gendarmes organized and inspired the whole thing. Gross acknowledges that "nothing could have happened in this territory without German consent" but while the Nazis may have offered encouragement, "they were not doing it themselves."

Some of the disputes may be resolved by investigators from Poland's National Remembrance Institute, which plans to report on the evidence later this year. But Neighbors may only be the beginning. Gross writes that Jedwabne was closely preceded by similar liquidations in two nearby towns. Norman Naimark, an authority on East European history at Stanford University, says Neighbors will spawn further research into wartime crimes against Jews by their Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian neighbors. Says he: "The book shows, once again, that man's inhumanity toward man is unending." In that sense, Poles are not the only inheritors of the legacy of Jedwabne.