Jan Tomasz Gross writes [in the Polish edition of his book - trans.] that "the 1,600 Jedwabne Jews were killed neither by the Nazis, nor by the NKVD, nor by the UB, but by society." On this basis, he explains the enduring resentment that the Jews have towards the Poles. The Jews who continue to feel such "enduring resentment" towards the Poles are unconsciously upholding the logic of that crime. Every one of us is responsible for himself. None of us has the right to rebuke anyone else for his countrymen or forebears.
This book is an atomic bomb with a time-delay fuse. Jan Tomasz Gross planned and wrote it that way. He does not conceal the fact that his intention is to place the emotional charge of Neighbors in the Polish conscience and detonate it. This would be the end of Polish self-satisfaction, the end of false pride in being the righteous ones of wartime Europe, the end of the myth about being the only ones who had nothing to do with Hitler's crimes.
To a large degree, Gross has succeeded at this. To such a large degree that it is hard to recover your equilibrium after reading Neighbors. If anyone wanted to broadcast a work of comparable emotional power and comparable cruelty on Polish television, they would have to put a "for mature audiences" warning in the corner of the screen. And yet I am afraid that even those Jews and Poles who do not have nerves of steel and who will never read Neighbors are now going to be living not only in the light of newly discovered truths, but also in the dark shadow of this book.
The good Lord scatters the words that people write, and it is obviously too early to say who will understand what in Neighbors, and what conclusions they will come to as a result. We cannot say how much truth will be added to the public awareness and how much hostility, how much light and how much threatening gloom. We do not yet know the balance. We do not know how many consciences will be awakened or how many dangerous emotions stirred up, how many historical ghosts Gross will finally impale on his aspen spike or how many he will awaken to life.
Yet I would be lying if I said that this book does not fill me with fear.
This fear has three sources. First, there are the facts: the monstrous crime committed in Jedwabne - terrifying, repulsive, and shameful, regardless of the details over which the historians will long argue, for it may prove impossible to definitively verify certain details after 60 years.
Terrifying, repulsive and shameful regardless of exactly how many victims there were and how many people were involved in the crime, of how many bloodthirsty onlookers there were and of how many Poles-terrified by the madness of their neighbors-shut themselves up in their houses so that there were so few people courageous enough to offer aid to those who were being persecuted, regardless also of how many Nazis were sent to Jedwabne and what proportion of the guilt is borne by Polish, and what part by German criminals. It is simply hard for me to believe that people could do such a thing so recently and so near-less than 60 years ago and less than 200 kilometers from the place where I live. Ordinary, simple people. Europeans, perhaps our neighbors.
And it is terrifying to think that whatever it was that impelled them to that crime may
still lie somewhere deep within them (within us? within me?). Now that we know about it,
we are beginning to look differently into the eyes of our neighbors, and also into our own
eyes. Would the man across the way know how to bludgeon a little girl with a plow handle?
Would he and his brother-in-law play with her lovely sawed-off head afterwards, as if it
were a soccer ball? Would he smash her father's skull with a stone? Would the lady on the
first floor rush to loot the apartment on the eighth floor while the man from the fourth
floor was burning its tenants in a barn? Where would any of us be at the time? .Who would
be sitting terrified, locked in their apartment, while their neighbors were being
murdered?. Who would be running around town, like Laudański, in a raging lust for murder?
Who would be watching in curiosity? And since, as the poet assures us, "We know as
much about ourselves as we have been put to the test," where would I be? What would
happen to my neighbors and to me if we lived through the war and two years of Soviet
occupation in Jedwabne? Would we yield to the moral breakdown that supposedly prevailed
there at the time?
It is hard to ward off such questions when reading Neighbors.
It is true that Gross may perhaps not tell us much that is new about human nature. After Bosnia and Rwanda, it is hard for us to be shocked by human cruelty. Nor, alas, does Gross say much that is new about Polish culture, because it is already well known that neighbors of various ethnic groups, including the Poles, did monstrous things to each other in eastern Małopolska during the war. I even have the impression that he adds little to the litany of guilt towards the Elder Brothers, because it was possible long before this to read about what armed Polish groups sometimes did during the war to Jews hiding in the forests.
After the Holocaust, however, mass murder carried out with Polish involvement against their Jewish neighbors, whom they had known by name for generations, has an additional eloquence, no matter how much controversy there may be around it, and especially when it was committed in some sort of connivance with the Gestapo. Although every life has the same value, there is among the generations that lived in the proximate shadow of the chimneys of Majdanek and Auschwitz it is a natural reaction to feel a heightened sensitivity to the particularly terrible fate of the Jews. (In 1941, Karolak and Laudański could not have had the slightest inkling about either Majdanek or Auschwitz. Would the experience of the Holocaust have restrained them from their crime?)
In this sense, I too am grateful to Jan Tomasz Gross for the fact that his book attempts to maintain, or rather to awaken this awareness. Yet the way in which he does so also fills me with fear. I do not know if this kind of discourse is permissible, especially in the shadow of Auschwitz and the shadow of Jedwabne. I am not saying that it is not permissible. But is it, indeed? Is it prudent to talk in this way? Proper? Just? Is it responsible?
Responsibility is the key issue in this book-even more so than truth, towards which
Gross has an attitude (judging by his approach to the sources) that is
"postmodern" and "subjectivist." He is more concerned with guilt. Who
is guilty of this crime? Who did the killing?
Gross answers: "Society did
the killing." His exact words [in the Polish editon - trans.] are: "the
1,600 Jedwabne Jews were killed neither by the Nazis, nor by the NKVD, nor by the UB, but by society."
He means the Polish society [or, in the American version, "their neighbors" -
trans.] in the town of Jedwabne. This thesis, based on the factual material that Professor
Tomasz Szarota analyzes, was posed by a reputable sociologist, a Yale graduate, a
professor at a serious university in New York City. He posed it in a book that will soon
be published in the United States, and afterwards, surely, in Germany and a few other
countries. This thesis is not something that Gross tosses off in passing, just for the
sake of posing a thesis. This thesis is needed to exemplify another thesis that stating
that, in occupied Poland, "the so-called local population involved in the killings
of Jews did so of its own free will." - (p. 133). And this thesis, in turn, leads
to what would seem to be the crucial journalistic argument of Neighbors:
"Might there
not lie concealed here an important part of the answer to a question that haunts Polish
public opinion: Why do the Jews have such an ingrained resentment towards the Poles,
seemingly even more deeply rooted than their resentment towards the Germans themselves
who, after all, were the inventors, initiators, and principal perpetrators of the
Holocaust? [there is no equivalent to this sentence in the American edition - trans.]
And if, in collective Jewish memory, their Polish neighbors in numerous localities
murdered them of their own free will-not on orders or as part of an organized, uniformed
formation (and therefore, at least on the level of appearances, acting under
compulsion)-then are the Poles not somehow, in the perceptions of the victims,
particularly responsible for those acts? After all, a man in uniform who kills us is at
least to a degree a state functionary; a civilian in that role is nothing more than a
murderer."
When I come to that paragraph, I feel that I must somehow resist-because, in appealing to
the language of ethnic quantifiers, Gross runs the risk of causing or contributing to
further misfortunes.
Previously, the thesis that "Jews blame the Poles more than the Germans for the Holocaust" was something that I came across mainly in anti-Semitic hate literature. That was enough to negate it. Now I see it asserted, with a supporting rationale, by an accomplished fifty-year-old American professor of Polish-Jewish background, a participant in the March events, a prisoner in 1968, an emigrant in 1969, who is surely no anti-Semite.
What is a Pole to do? The first temptation that some of us will face is to follow the path trodden by that hate literature. "The Jews have always felt contempt for what is Polish and hated the Poles, which is why they joined the UB and murdered Polish patriots there, and now they are making us repulsive in the eyes of the world...." "The Jews were always fascinated by German culture and German power, and are still fascinated, and that is why they can forgive the Germans everything...." "American Jews could never believe that the cultured Germans were capable of such monstrousness. It was more comfortable for them that way, since they did not lift a finger at the time of the Holocaust...." "The Jews need good relations with the powerful Germans. The Holocaust is an impediment to them in this, and so they must find a different guilty party. We are the easiest prey. That is why international Jewry puts the blame on the Poles."
I cannot rely on such argumentation. Nor can I take such argumentation into consideration (by evoking, for instance, Reich-Ranicki, who chose Germany, or Edelman, who chose Poland) or even carry out a polemic against it, because I reject the language in which such views can be expressed. This is not a legitimate language for any sort of discussion. It is the language of misfortune, of many terrible misfortunes. It is the language of Marian Karolak and the Laudański brothers. It is the language of ethnic war, of genocide. If "the Jew was treacherous (and in the original, there would be no capitalization), then the Jew should be punished." Then it is not important to the user of such language which particular Jew they batter with stones. In certain circumstances, surely, "better if it's all of them" ("not excepting the skilled craftsmen").
Gross clearly pushes us in the direction of such language when he decides to resort to
it himself. For the Jewish users of such language (whose relatives or countrymen were
murdered by Laudański), with "ingrained resentment towards the Poles"
[Żakowski follows the Polish edition here and in the foregoing - trans.] it must not be
particularly important whether or not the Poles (here, too, there would often be no
capitalization) who feel the existence of that "ingrained resentment"
were in fact involved in the catastrophe of the Holocaust. For in such language,
totalitarian language ("the individual is a zero, the individual is nonsense"),
there is no place for individual wrongs or for justice.
It sounds obvious.
I had the impression that we in Poland had learned to a considerable degree how to avoid
that language-not only in writing and in speech, but also in emotions and in thinking
about the world. And not only in Poland. I think that, in Europe, we were reminded of the
danger of such quantifiers when we saw what happened in Bosnia. Perhaps not all of us.
Perhaps not completely. Yet, in general, we reject that language. And we tremble when we
observe its strange renaissance in nearby Austria, in Germany, in France, or in Polish
stadiums. Still, we are wary. We know what the threat is.
Perhaps Nietzsche's admonition that "it is wrong to love or to hate nations," and therefore also to judge them, came too late, after all. Love and hatred (as well as "ingrained resentment" and "gratitude") can properly only be felt towards a specific person. After the catastrophes of the twentieth century, more and more of us seem at last to understand that, in the world of emotions, large-scale quantification is, in the first place, false, and that, in the second place, it leads sooner or later to crimes.
I will agree that this language is natural. For thousands of years, we recognized our
enemies and our friends by their dress and language, just as animals recognize their
enemies by their smell and their coloration. In nature, it is safer that way. In Europe
over the last half century, however, we have undertaken a great many efforts to suppress
this nature, to expunge hostility (mistrust, dislike, fear) and all generalizations about
others from the catalogue of reflexes, to suppress ethnic emotions with reason, to use
culture to de-claw dangerous nature. I think that we have had considerable success in that
suppression, especially since the suppression of ethnic emotions fits in well with the
evolution of culture, which emphasizes the value of the person (the individual, the
citizen, the consumer, the human being) in various fields (from economy through theology).
These successes, however, are fresh and surely impermanent. It is doubtful in the end
whether ethnic emotions can ever be removed totally, for culture has never yet conquered
nature completely. Even if we succeeded in doing this in some sort of future, we have
spent too little time learning to speak (to think, to feel) the language of
"persons" to make it impossible for the language of "tribes" to ever
burst forth in us again. That language, indeed, can still be heard. It has quieted down in
Poland of late, but in many other countries it resounds more clearly than it did a few
years ago. Sometimes, it sounds threatening. I am all the more astonished at Jan Gross-who
himself once heard that language in Poland-for now being ready to call it forth again and
to run the risk of nourishing ghosts that are on their way to extinction. This is neither
an accident nor an oversight. It is, as I understand it, a risk taken consciously as part
of an intellectual design in which the acknowledgement that "when reflecting about
this epoch, we must not assign collective responsibility" nevertheless permits
Jan Tomasz Gross to formulate the question of whether, in thinking "about the
national pride and sense of identity rooted in the historical experience of many
generations, we are not equally responsible for the shameful deeds of our forebears and
countrymen?" [from the Polish edition - trans.].
It sounds apparently logical. But something that is logical, that might be correct to a
large degree in terms of values, something that is in agreement with nature and even
psychologically authentic in some way, may nevertheless be too dangerous for us to accept
it insouciantly. Our world is too threatening, human nature too incalculable, the evil of
this world too real and (as we go on convincing ourselves) too lightly covered by a thin
layer of culture ("those cultured Germans") for intellectuals to pose this sort
of question incautiously and with impunity. This does not mean that I would like to see
anyone punished for the views they express. Yet I know that history sometimes presents
people with macabre bills to be paid for incautious thinking and for the overly bold
speculations of outstanding minds-even if they are solidly rooted, from the standpoint of
values in, for example, the ideal of equality.
Words and ideas can murder indeed. That is why I would like to call in no uncertain terms for self-restraint, in the name of our common safety.
In itself, the placing of collective pride and collective responsibility on the same level strikes me as being artificial, a product of the ivory tower (although collective responsibility has been invoked by intellectuals of the caliber of Hannah Arendt or Jerzy Jedlicki). It is no accident that merits and responsibility are measured by different principles in the world we live in. Meting out justice to a common criminal requires a burdensome court trial subject to the rigors of refined procedures. Yet no one in their right mind would demand comparable procedures before a prize is awarded. Similarly, it would be difficult today to accept the imposition of collective punishment (for those involved in a riot, for instance), while a collective prize (for the police who restore order, for instance) tends not to evoke objections.
Now, in order to bring this thread to a close, I shall refer to a thought from Father Tischner's book Jak żyć (How to Live). "A person's responsibility," Tischner writes, "does not extend beyond the limits of the possibility of effective action" (Tischner's master, Roman Ingarden, wrote something similar in his famous essay on responsibility). Period. The rest is unreasoning and dangerous. Behind the Tischnerian barrier, we are safe. There is no place for tribal hatred, because tribal responsibility does not exist. The one who did evil or who did not prevent evil although he could have done so is the one who will be called to account. Any further claims are groundless.
There is no responsibility for grandfathers and great-grandfathers (and furthermore there is no law to make anyone bear such responsibility), because those not yet born had no way of restraining them. Nor is there any responsibility for contemporary countrymen or non-countrymen if we can have no influence on their actions. Jan Tomasz Gross is responsible for himself, and I am responsible for myself. Neither of us has the right to complain to the other about his countrymen or forebears.
I am ready to surrender even my pride in Tischner or Copernicus, and in Plato as well, for the sake of such a consensus, for it raises the hope of avoiding misfortunes and offers a greater chance of biological survival. And yet when I read in Gross's book about the crime in Jedwabne and about the lie on the monument that has been standing there for half a century, I feel it far more sharply than when I read in Kapu¶ciński or Jagielski about crimes in Africa. This is not only because I am irritated by the language of large-scale quantifiers, which attempts to implicate me in culpability for a crime committed half a century ago only because I am a Pole. Nor is it because it has to do with another monstrous episode in the exceptional Jewish fate. It is because, in spite of everything, the affair has something to do with an important fragment of my personal responsibility. Here is the third source of my unease as a reader of Neighbors. In a certain sense, I agree with Jan Tomasz Gross that "such a mass murder affects all in a community across time." What is more, it plays a part in creating a map of collective responsibility in which I admit that I, too, have a place-but not in the sense that I am, or feel myself to be, responsible for a crime that Laudański or Karolak-with the help of some number of other residents of the town of Jedwabne-committed more than half a century ago, before I was born, no matter how monstrous the things that were done there. I have a place there rather in the sense that all of us share the responsibility for whether or not such things ever happen again. According to the Tischnerian thought that I subscribe to, it is impossible to accept the concept of collective, a priori responsibility for the past on the basis of being a member of any given nation. Yet, according to this same thought, there is no questioning the principle of collective responsibility-including national, but not a priori responsibility-for the future. There was nothing that I could do to save the Bromsztajns, Hurewiczes, or Piekarzes. But to some degree it is up to me whether others will share their fate someday. No one can shirk such responsibility. It is only here, in accordance with the directives of Tischner and Ingarden-whether we like it or not-that the principle of shared responsibility connects us with the communities to which we belong-local, ethnic, denominational, cultural, and political-for these communities mark our "limits of possible effective action." It is not ties of blood or language, or place of residence, or even cultural heritage, which I experience and draw on in perhaps a different way than the Laudański brothers, but rather the Tischnerian "limits of possible effective action" (Ingarden would add that additionally, this is always a matter of action that is "one's own" and "conscious") that decide about participation in responsibility. These borders are obviously different for each of us, so that each of us has a different dimension (Ingarden would say "degree") of responsibility. Ingarden was an eyewitness to wholesale Nazi crimes. He devotes a great part of the subtle considerations in Ksi±żeczka o człowieku [The Little Book about Man] to the gradation of responsibility. By the nature of things, each person is more responsible for what happens and will happen close at hand than for what is farther away. All of us are more responsible for the attitudes of others with whom we share a language and a culture, for this is where we usually have more "possibilities of effective action." Those who have more possibilities are more responsible than those who have fewer. Those who know more and understand better bear more responsibility than those who are unable to learn or to arrive at a correct assessment. This increases my unease. I have the impression that, as a community, we have not fully come to terms with our responsibility and have not yet faced up to the challenge posed to us by the experience of Jedwabne. This impression is accompanied by the onerous feeling that the people whom fate has endowed with privileged positions in terms of access to knowledge and the opportunity for communicating with others (intellectuals, politicians, the clergy, teachers and journalists-and thus I, too) have failed in a particular way-and go on failing. We remain unable to rise to this challenge.
Now I must ask an unpleasant question. Why is it that the traces found, for instance,
in Szymon Datner's 30-year-old article were never followed up and checked, never entered
into public circulation, and never became the subject of debate in Poland?
Out of unconcern? It would be colossal unconcern. Out of forgetfulness? Or perhaps by
oversight? I myself missed the trail. I was lacking in knowledge and, perhaps, intuition.
Yet there were people who read Datner's article. Someone also read the articles in Kontakty.
Someone listened to and read the report by the prosecutor, Monkiewicz. Why, then, did the
falsehood inscribed on the monument at Jedwabne, where it is written that the
"Gestapo and Nazi gendarmerie" alone committed the crime, endure until
2000? Why is there not even a mention of places like Jedwabne in the history textbooks?
Could those who knew have regarded it as insufficiently significant? Were they falsely
ashamed? This cannot be excluded, for the natural feeling of collective responsibility
still lives in us. Could they have feared the questions that this knowledge raises? Or
perhaps Gross is right: it is easier to convince oneself that one is a victim than to
acknowledge responsibility for a crime that has been committed. When one is in fact a
victim (of war, occupation, or a political system imposed from the outside) and is
fighting to survive and maintain one's own identity, then perhaps it is difficult also to
see oneself as a victim. Or perhaps we were simply not allowed to write about such things?
Still, the censor cannot be blamed for everything. If the censor had made trouble, then
Datner and his readers of the time could have published the results of further
investigations in Kultura (Paris). Could
it have therefore been the case that they were afraid of touching the subject out of a
fear of stirring up those vexed Polish-Jewish emotions? Could a partial reason that the
truth about Jedwabne did not come out for so many years have been the fact that the
emotions and prejudices that motivated Karolak and Laudański had still not disappeared
from Polish culture? Such an answer is disquieting. Yet is it not true in part? If there
is a grain of truth in such a suspicion, it would mean that some of us could someday once
again become dangerous to our neighbors only because they are Jews, or Roma, or
Vietnamese. It is therefore worth wondering long and hard whether we might not fail today
by some chance, just as our forebears and the contemporaries of Mayor Karolak failed. Do
we have the will and courage to stand up to symptoms of hatred that could signal a
readiness to commit such crimes? Are we sure that, if they saw the shadow of a pogrom
approaching, our bishops would now have the courage to leave their palaces, stand in the
pulpit of the Jedwabne church, and restrain the maddened crowd before they murdered their
neighbors? Would enough of the righteous be found in today's Jedwabne (or Warsaw or Radom)
to restrain the murderers? Is there no town left in Poland today where a Karolak could
become mayor? Do we have the systematic courage and insight to demand proofs when we hear
hasty generalizations and accusations based on assumptions? In the year 2000, are we
capable of finding an appropriate response to a politician who reacts to skinheads
chanting "Jude raus!" on the streets by calling them "young people
blowing off steam"? Do we have the will to stop the racists before they feel that
"their moment has come"? This is the domain of our responsibility. We must do
something about it.
I share with many other people a fear of opening up Polish-Jewish wounds. Justifiable
emotions, as well as unjustified and completely irrational ones, are still too fresh for
an unimpassioned, rational, public debate to be possible. This much we know about
ourselves. There is no use pretending that this is a history like every other one-for it
is not. The element of the irrational is incomparably greater here than anywhere else.
However, this does not mean that history can be built with impunity on silence and lies. I
know of no better antidote to irrational emotion than solid knowledge, just as I know no
better way of avoiding misfortune than cultivating the memory of past misfortunes. This
means that it is our duty to reveal and tell about the truth. The history of Neighbors
teaches us that we must constantly engraft and attempt to understand the truth. Yet this
must be the truth told forthrightly, without fear and without favor, but also without
emotion, undue haste, unnecessary simplifications, stereotypes, injurious generalizations,
and large-scale quantifiers. Therefore I am very much opposed to the idea of inscribing on
the monument in Jedwabne, under the influence of Jan Tomasz Gross's book, a declaration
that the 1,600 Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by "society."
That would be a lie that not only reinforced dangerous emotions and threatening
stereotypes, but that also obscured the responsibility of those who committed murder and
wronged those who took no part in the crime. A more powerful argument might be the fact
that the memory of the victims demands from us today that we inscribe on the monument the
names of the murderers, since their hate-filled faces, and not some formless
"society," were the last thing that the victims saw.
I would very much like to see Jan Tomasz Gross draw the attention of the Jewish readers of
the American edition of his shocking book to the fact that, despite all the guilt and
omissions of our grandfathers and fathers, and also of ourselves, those Jews who have an
"ingrained resentment" towards Poles preserve the logic of that crime, which is
still dangerous today. They do so unconsciously, and perhaps unwillingly. In the name of
the memory of the victims and responsibility for the future, we cannot permit ourselves to
lie about the past. Even more so, we cannot repeat its mistakes.