Jacek Żakowski: All the readers of Jan Tomasz Gross's "Neighbors" that I have spoken to are walking around in pain. The book is too cruel and too emotional, and the weight of its accusations too great for anyone to be able to read it and go on living as before. Although doing so will not be easy, we must therefore absorb Jedwabne into our image of ourselves. First, however, we must understand it. In order to understand, we need to know exactly what happened there. The more spotty our knowledge, the harder it will be to understand, and the easier to be emotional-and there is too much emotion in Polish-Jewish relations in any case. After reading this book I feel distinctly unsatisfied and uncertain about what happened in Jedwabne. Gross deliberately provokes these feelings-in the first place, through his emotional, journalistic style, and in the second, through his uncritical attitude to arbitrarily chosen sources. He proclaims this attitude himself. In rejecting the principles of the historian's and even the reporter's craft, he writes that "we must take literally all fragments of information at our disposal, fully aware that what actually happened to the Jewish community during the Holocaust can only be more tragic than the existing representation of events based on surviving evidence." As a journalist, I know that the truth can differ in many important particulars from what is suggested by "fragments of information". As a historian, can you help me build up a true image of what happened in Jedwabne?
Tomasz Szarota: I, too, am in less than total agreement with Jan Tomasz Gross's
assessments of accounts by miraculously rescued Holocaust
victims. Gross is surely right when he states that rescued victims could not lie in 1945.
They could, however, be mistaken as to details, and surely they made mistakes on more than
one occasion. Every lawyer, psychologist, and historian understands perfectly well that
witnesses - who are often convinced that they are telling the truth-are unable for many
various reasons to recount the truth. The more emotional the event that they are telling
about, the greater the risk of error. That is why I think that, in spite of the existence
of a considerable number of accounts, no one will be able to completely reconstruct that
image today, for no one has seriously researched the Jedwabne affair.
- Why not?
- I think that there were simply too few of us who knew about it. I myself only learned about the crime in Jedwabne from Szmul Wasersztajn's account, which Gross quoted in the article that he contributed to Europa nieprowincjonalna [Non-provincial Europe], the festschrift for Professor Tomasz Strzembosz (published in 2000; Gross's article was titled "Lato 1941 w Jedwabnem. Przyczynek do badania udziału społeczności lokalnych w eksterminacji narodu żydowskiego w latach II wojny światowej" [The Summer of 1941 in Jedwabne: A Contribution to Research into the Role of Local Society in the Extermination of the Jewish People during the Second World War]). Reading that article was just as much of a shock to me as reading Neighbors was for you. Only afterwards did I begin to work on the Jedwabne affair, so I have been at it for only a few months. Yet I have been working hard, and have perhaps managed to acquaint myself with everything that has been published on the subject of Jedwabne.
- And so things have been published?
- Szymon Datner published a lengthy article in Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego [The Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute ] in 1966. There have been publications by Waldemar Monkiewicz, the public prosecutor who in 1949 represented the prosecution in the trial of those involved in the pogrom, and who later worked for many years in the Białystok branch of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes. There was also a very important article by Danuta and Aleksander Wroniszewski in Kontakty of Łomża.
- So in all your years of working on recent history, you never came across even a mention of the pogrom in Jedwabne?
- In general, I knew little about what happened in the Łomża region in 1941. After all-as I am now beginning to realize-Jedwabne was no exception. In his 1966 article, Datner described the large-scale extermination campaign that the Germans carried out against the Jews in the Białystok region between June and August 1941. We know that the scenario in Radziłów was similar to that in Jedwabne. Three days earlier, 1,500 Jews were also burned alive in a barn there. There too, the perpetrators were local Poles. In the dozen or more other cases that Datner described, as far as is known, the Germans themselves committed the murder. They shot 1,800 people in nearby Stawiska, 2,000 in Kolno, 2,100 in Tykocin, 3,500 in Łomża, and 1,900 in Szczuczyn. On June 27, the German 309th police battalion locked several hundred Jews in the synagogue in Białystok and burned them alive.
- For the time being, however, let us attempt to reconstruct what happened in Jedwabne.
- The basic facts seem indisputable. In July 1941, a large group of Poles living in
Jedwabne took part in the brutal murder of almost all the local Jews, who in fact made up
the clear majority of the inhabitants of the town. At first, they murdered them
individually, using clubs and stones, torturing them, cutting off their heads, profaning
their corpses. Later, on July 10, the almost 1,500 Jedwabne Jews who remained alive were
forced into a barn and burned alive there. Gross describes this massacre on the basis of
the extant accounts. He uses documents from the collection of the Jewish Historical Institute
-primarily the account by Szmul Wasersztajn-and memoirs by other people, including those
known from Yedwabne: History and Memorial Book, which was published in the United
States in 1980, and the testimony of the defendants from the 1949 trial.
These unquestionable facts are so shattering that they force even me, a historian who has
read much and written a good deal about various instances of disgraceful behavior by Poles
under German occupation, to come to completely new conclusions. We already knew about the szmalcownicye and
about the fact that relatively few Poles dared to shelter Jews in their homes. We knew
that there had been anti-Semitic outbursts after the arrival of the Germans in Warsaw in
1939, and that Jews were assaulted, robbed, and beaten by young Polish hoodlums. Yet we
did not realize that Poles were also perpetrators of the Holocaust. In Jedwabne, they
were-and these were not some isolated deviants, who are found in every society, but a
crowd with the town authorities at its head. Through his publications, Gross has forced us
to change our views on the subject of the attitudes of the Poles during the Second World
War, and that is an unquestionable service. Like you, however, I have the impression that
he wrote Neighbors too hurriedly and examined the Jedwabne affair too superficially
for us to be able to understand what really happened there.
- What does this mean?
- He did not, for instance, explain the matter of the presence of Germans in Jedwabne and their role in organizing and carrying out the pogrom. Gross assumes that there were practically no Germans in Jedwabne, aside from a small group of 11 gendarmes in the local police post and perhaps a few Gestapo functionaries. In a 1983 article, however, the prosecutor Monkiewicz states that the so-called Kommando Bialystok, led by Wolfgang Birkner from the Warsaw Gestapo, was involved in the Jedwabne pogrom. This unit was made up of functionaries from two German police Battalions, the 309th and the 316th. According to Monkiewicz, 232 Germans under the command of Birkner went to Jedwabne in trucks on July 10, 1941.
- In Neighbors, Gross rejected similar information provided by a cook who worked in the German gendarmerie post.
- I do not know if he was right to do so. I am not yet able, as a historian, to confirm the information provided by Monkiewicz. But Gross did not deal at all with Monkiewicz's texts, and I doubt that the prosecutor made up those 232 Germans, the trucks, and the figure of Birkner out of whole cloth. One way or another, there is something wrong when the name of Birkner does not even appear in Gross's book. After all-and this is something I have confirmed-such an officer did indeed work in the Warsaw Gestapo, he held the SS rank of Hauptsturmführer, and he probably died in Poznań in 1945. Following this lead, someone might try to find documents on the German presence in Jedwabne and German involvement in the pogrom. Gross did not do so.
- Should he have done so?
- Every solid historian would surely do so before publishing a book. As a sociologist and writer, Gross might have felt that doing so was not necessary to explain the matter.
- Yet is it necessary when we already know that Poles murdered Jews in Jedwabne?
- There is no denying the fact that Poles committed murder. To understand this event properly, however, it is necessary to become familiar with the circumstances of the crime in detail. What Gross has written in Neighbors is enough to rattle our consciences. But it is necessary to know the details to understand the whole situation. Every historian knows that a multiplicity of details can often be the devil's workshop. After all, it is not a matter of indifference for understanding the whole Jedwabne affair whether the massacre was carried out spontaneously by the town's residents taking advantage of permission from the local gendarmes, or whether the German, who sent a police battalion to Jedwabne, incited a group of the dregs of society to "purge" the town of Jews.
- This would also explain why the Jewish majority did not try to defend themselves against a pogrom carried out by part of the Polish minority, and why one of the Polish witnesses quoted by Gross told a Jew who was being murdered, "I cannot help you."
- Yes. Obviously, not all the Poles took part in the massacre. However, as far as we know, no one interfered with the criminals.
- Over the previous days, when what was still a small group of the dregs of society was tormenting and killing individual Jews in their homes and on the streets, no one interfered either-not Poles, and not even Jews. There are no accounts of any opposition aside from the priest mentioned by Wasersztajn who told them to "stop the pogrom, and that the German authorities would take care of things by themselves."
- Perhaps the town was terrorized. Or perhaps a part of the population felt that these murderers were settling accounts from the time of the Soviet occupation. In his book, Gross quotes Tomasz Strzembosz's article "Uroczysko Kobielno" [The Kobielno Forest Range]. This is the story of an act of betrayal in the anti-Soviet resistance movement, which led to the breaking up of a partisans camp and the arrest by the NKVD of a large group of Poles, including some from Jedwabne. One of the victims of this betrayal was Jadwiga Laudańska, who was murdered by the Soviets. Gross does not tell how she was connected with the Laudański brothers, who are often mentioned in Neighbors as the most active and brutal participants in the pogrom and the preceding individual murders. It is quite probable that the death of Jadwiga Laudańska at the Kobielno forest range influenced the behavior of the Laudańskis in July 1941, because it was then felt in Jedwabne that one of the local Jews had informed to the NKVD about where the partisans were. This went on top of the stereotype of the "Jewish communist" and the universal conviction at the time that the NKVD were Jewish. Finally, as Gross does not mention either, a group of former underground anti-Soviet soldiers returned to Jedwabne before the pogrom. They had been freed from the NKVD prison in Łomża by the German invasion. Returning after long months of interrogation and Soviet imprisonment, they must, of course, have been baying for bloody revenge. Not only the perpetrators, but also the witnesses, both Jewish and Polish, might have assumed that a settling of accounts was taking place. Today, thanks to research by Tomasz Strzembosz, we know that the informant was probably Polish, but what people knew at the time is more important to understanding the situation.
- Firmly grounded in an anti-Semitic stereotype.
- Of course, traditional anti-Semitism was the basis for what happened. But not only.
In the article by the Wroniszewskis, one of the witnesses describes the cooperation of a
group of Jews with the NKVD at the time of the Soviet deportations. Of course, Gross is
correct when he writes that Jews were also victims of the deportations and of the Soviet
system, for the Soviet authorities also confiscated their property and prevented them from
taking part in religious services. However, the outbreak of hatred of the Jews that
occurred after the arrival of the Germans also had its sources in generalized observations
of the behavior of some Jews under Soviet occupation. And again, Gross is right when he
writes that all generalizations are unjust. Yet they functioned and were
"covered" by personal experiences.
It is impossible for us to conceive today of the scale of hatred of the Jews there. Not
only among Poles, but also among Lithuanians. In my recently published book U progu
zagłady [On the Threshold of Destruction], I describe, among other incidents, the
pogrom in Kaunas. And Kaunas was not a small town perhaps gone mad with pain, like
Jedwabne for example, but rather a large, modern city, and the capital of independent
Lithuania. Yet things just as terrifying, which would have been unthinkable before the
war, happened there. Soviet totalitarianism not only brought about new wrongs to be
settled, but in its cruelty it also deprived people of a feeling of moral sensitivity. The
deportation and NKVD crimes taught the local
people that there is no longer anything that is absolutely impermissible. Not everyone
succumbed, but many did.
- To the extent that someone like the carpenter Śleszyński could urge the Gestapo to permit the burning of all the Jews, without sparing the master craftsmen whom the Germans supposedly wanted to leave alive?
- Unfortunately, knowing the economic aspects of prewar anti-Semitism and the sort of criminal emotions that sprang up under Soviet occupation, it is quite easy for me to imagine such a situation. An occasion simply sprang up suddenly to liquidate the Jewish competition once and for all, and a person completely devoid of inhibitions could feel that full advantage should be taken of the situation. Various accounts of Jedwabne indicate that an Aryan shop could not survive there before the war. All retail commerce was in the hands of Jewish merchants. The economic competition, including that among craftsmen, could arouse powerful emotions. Unfortunately, even such a statement fits in with the reality and criminal madness of the times. That's one thing. The second thing is the question of whether those words, among the most shocking in the book, were actually said.
- Gross summons them up on the basis of the account by Szmul Wasersztajn, who could not have heard them. For Wasersztajn, they were hearsay.
- If Gross had tracked down the German documents on Jedwabne, he might have found confirmation of Śleszyński's request. But he might have found information there that contradicted it. For instance, he might have found an earlier German order to kill all the local Jews-or perhaps even to burn them in the barn. Again, that would not cancel out the monstrous eloquence of the facts. It would, however, modify it in an important way.
- Perhaps those documents would also make it easier for us to arrive at a view on the question of how many people took part in the crime out of their own free will, and how many were terrorized by a group of criminals (whom Wasersztajn calls "hooligans"), and who were thus following orders in forcing their victims into the town square, and later into the barn. Gross quotes the testimony of Jerzy Laudański, one of those involved in the crime, who says that, on July 10, after discussions with the Germans, "Marian Karolak told us Poles to call Polish citizens to the town hall. After calling in the Polish population, he ordered them to round up the Jews to the square, presumably to work, and this was done."
- In order to understand Jedwabne, it would be necessary to know what proportion of the figure, given by Gross, of 92 persons involved in the crime did so out of criminal motivations, and how many were there and helped out of cowardice, out of fear of the dregs of society and Gestapo functionaries who controlled the town, backed up by the gendarmes present in Jedwabne and a battalion of German police.
- On orders, or under protection and with permission?
- Today, we cannot say. However, perhaps we are pointed in a certain direction by the information that the German authorities rebuilt the barn belonging to Bronisław Śleszyński, in which the Jews were burned.
- So who is guilty in your opinion: the Germans, the dregs of local society, members of the anti-Soviet underground out for revenge, or the anti-Semitic society of Jedwabne? I have the impression that Gross accepts too easily the view that the crime was the work of the whole town when he writes that "the 1,600 Jedwabne Jews. . . were murdered by . . . society" [thus reads the Polish edition - trans.].
- Such a conclusion may be justified by emotions, pain, and anger. This is understandable, but it is not justified by the documented facts. The accounts published by the Wroniszewskis would rather indicate that a relatively small group supported by the Germans terrorized the rest of the inhabitants and committed the massacre that later covered all of Jedwabne with shame. Today, that shame weighs on the whole Polish community of Jedwabne. But just think how much courage would have been needed under those circumstances to stand up to them.
- It is, of course, very difficult to imagine. However, a good deal of food for thought about the intensity of the terror and fear can be found in the fact that in the first days, before the Gestapo arrived, it was not only Poles who were passively watching the crimes being committed against the Jews. Other Jews were watching, too.
- I shall not attempt to explain this. It is possible, of course, to summon up negative
stereotypes. According to one stereotype, Poles are anti-Semites by nature and even those
who did not murder Jews observed the crimes approvingly. According to a second stereotype,
Jews are victims by nature, and do not attempt to defend themselves even when they are in
the majority. However, stereotypes never explain history, although they often falsify it.
One way or another, it is hard to understand-and Gross does not attempt to explain in his
book-how 1,500 healthy, able-bodied people could be led to their death by fewer than a
hundred criminals armed only with clubs, without attempting to defend themselves or even
to flee.
This does not in any way diminish the guilt of their murderers, yet there is some sort of
tragic mystery here-even if 232 German police were waiting somewhere nearby. A situation
described in Gross's book may shed a bit of light on this mystery. This is the story of
Michał Kuropatwa, a Jewish drayman, who sheltered a Polish officer in his home during the
Soviet times. At the door of the barn, someone pulled him out of the crowd in order to
save his life. Kuropatwa refused. He chose death with the other Jews. Gross compares
Kuropatwa's decision with the attitude of Janusz Korczak deportations
but, unfortunately, he does not quote the words that, according to eyewitness accounts,
Kuropatwa then uttered: "Where the Rabbi goes, I will follow." It would also be
worth understanding these words if we want to comprehend the phenomenon of Jedwabne.
- Didn't Gross know about those words?
- He knew about them, but did not quote them. However, there are facts about which Gross might not know, such as the fact that the wife of mayor Karolak, who was the main organizer of the pogrom, was murdered after the war. This, of course, has nothing to do with the circumstances of the pogrom, but it might shed some light on the repercussions that the events of July 10, 1941, had on the people of Jedwabne after the war.
- Was that revenge?
- I am convinced that it was, especially because she was not the last victim. Bronisław Śleszyński, in whose barn the massacre was carried out, was also beaten to death after the war. Gross does not mention this, either. I do not know whether he had an obligation to write about this in his book. However, these devilish details are very important to anyone who wants to understand Jedwabne. They are lacking in Neighbors.
- Why aren't they there?
- Because the author did not know about them. At a certain moment, he felt that he had enough material to write the book. In his position, I would have had a different opinion. I would have thought that I needed to keep on searching.
- Do you think that documents that will help us to understand Jedwabne will still be found?
- It's likely. I would not even rule out finding the film of the event, which the Germans shot according to many accounts. In the same way, German film shot in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 was found in the Stasi archives. Accounts could be found in the records of one of the war crimes trials held in Germany. We might find the personnel records of one of the Gestapo functionaries who was present at Jedwabne. There might be German documents on the pogrom in various archival collections. No one has yet carried out a serious search for them. That is why Gross's book leaves so many question marks. From a historian's point of view, the subject has not been exhausted.
In a sense, however, Gross's thinking was correct. He must have felt, accurately, that the time had come when it was possible, and also when there was a need to examine seriously the dark side of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War. Polish historians have not taken this up over the last half-century. Not even the accounts gathered in the Jewish Historical Institute have been adequately introduced into scholarly circulation, not to mention the popular Polish mind. Now we can no longer avoid a serious approach to this material. For that, despite all my reservations, I am grateful to Jan Tomasz Gross.