As the author of the book about the tragic murder of the Jews who were annihilated by
their neighbors in the little town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, which was the point of
reference for Jacek Żakowski's interview with Professor Tomasz Szarota and for
Żakowski's essay "Every Neighbor Has a Name," I feel obliged to provide a few
words of explanation. On the one hand, I should show restraint, since I have already had
my say on the Jedwabne massacre in my book Neighbors. On the other hand, Gazeta
Wyborcza has almost a million readers, while only 2,000 copies of the book were
published. The majority of the public can therefore learn about its contents only from
what is written in Gazeta Wyborcza.
I will begin with a reminder about what happened in Jedwabne. In order to make it clear
that my reviewers agree with the diagnosis that follows, I will use their own words.
Szarota says: "The basic facts seem indisputable. We already knew about szmalcownicy... 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... 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... 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."
Żakowski writes: "It is simply hard for me to believe that people could do such
things 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."
What a shame it is that, while they accept the obviousness of the Jedwabne crime,
Żakowski and Szarota quickly distance themselves from the heart of the matter either by
misreading parts of the book or by appealing to unreliable sources. After all, in view of
Szarota's qualifications as a historian and Żakowski's reputation as a journalist, the
readers of Gazeta Wyborcza could take their reading of Neighbors as an
accurate commentary on what was actually written in the book.
* * *
The most misleading thing is Szarota's reference in his discussion with Żakowski to
the findings of the prosecutor Waldemar Monkiewicz. He states that the guilt for the
murder of the Jews in Jedwabne rests on a 232-strong unit of the German gendarmerie,
commanded by someone called Birkner, who came to the town in trucks for that purpose.
These theses have appeared twice so far in the press discussion on Jedwabne, in Andrzej
Kaczyński's first article (Rzeczpospolita, May 5, 2000) where they are immediately
undercut by statements by the residents of Jedwabne, and in Nasz Dziennik (May
13-14, 2000), where Jerzy Robert Nowak uses them in an assault on Kaczyński's article and
my scholarly reputation. In the light of several excellent articles and, I suppose, the
arguments developed in my book, no one else mentioned Monkiewicz again until Professor
Szarota brought him up. I cannot understand why Szarota is "not yet able, as a
historian, to confirm the information provided by Monkiewicz." All the more so, since
Szarota met Monkiewicz personally. On May 19, 2000, Professor Jerzy Holzer, director of
the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Science, organized a meeting
of a group of historians, staff members from the Main Commission for the
Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, and interested persons from the
Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the
circumstances surrounding the murder of the Jews on July 10, 1941. Prosecutor Monkiewicz
made opening remarks reviewing the matter from the point of view of a Commission staff
member who was researching war crimes in the Białystok region. Professor Szarota and I
were both at that meeting.
Szarota erroneously identifies Monkiewicz as the prosecutor at the 1949 Łomża trial. On
that occasion, as is written on the first page of the court records, charges were brought
against Ramotowski and his accomplices by "prosecutor C. Jagusiński." We
therefore do not know exactly which case Monkiewicz handled. In a time line on the
Jedwabne crime in Gazeta Wyborcza (Nov. 18-19, 2000), Jan Tomasz Lipski states that
Monkiewicz was in charge of an investigation in the Białystok region in the 1960s.
The records of the interrogations that Monkiewicz carried out must surely still be extant
in the archives of the Main Commission. Those records could tell us whom Monkiewicz
questioned, when he questioned them, what he questioned them about, and what answers he
got. This is significant because when residents of Jedwabne, Radziłów, and the vicinity
were interrogated years later about crimes committed during the occupation, they were
induced by the head investigators to give false testimony. Here is what a reporter from Rzeczpospolita
wrote (July 10, 2000) about an account of such an interrogation, as provided by an
informant from Radziłów: "After the war, people from Radziłów were summoned to be
interrogated in Białystok. My informant was not able to tell me who questioned them or
when. He was one of those summoned. He testified that the massacre was committed by Poles.
The interrogator violently denied this. 'Why did you call me here if you know better?' my
informant asked. Then the interrogator allowed my informant to recount his own version.
Afterwards, [the interrogator] advised him to keep it to himself. The trial took place in
Ełk. 'I did not testify truthfully in court,' [the informant] admitted."
I do not know if Monkiewicz was one of the officials carrying out the investigation, but
he too states that it was the Germans who committed the crime. I hope that, as part of the
effort to reach the truth about the genocide in Jedwabne, the Institute of National Remembrance
will identify the persons responsible for this equivocation and call them to
responsibility before the law.
In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs palace on Foksal street [in Warsaw - trans.] where we
met on May 19, Monkiewicz began his explanation by stating that Poles did not murder Jews
in the Białystok region in 1941. Of course, he did know about a case in which a group of
Poles was made to assist in forcing Jews to the place where they died. Monkiewicz said
that the Poles did this by linking their hands together to form a human chain that
prevented the Jews from escaping. After this declaration it would already have been
possible to thank him for any further explanations, since we know full well that the
Polish crowd beat Jews mercilessly that day in Jedwabne, and that the reason that we are
pondering the whole affair today is not that people linked their hands together there!
Nevertheless, prosecutor Monkiewicz continued his statement and revealed to us further
reasons why the murderers of the Jews in Jedwabne could not have been Poles. He stated
that gasoline was not freely offered for sale during the war, and so Polish civilians
could not on their own have poured gasoline onto the barn for the purposes of burning it
down. In this context in Monkiewicz's analysis, trucks appeared in Jedwabne. Gendarmes
from these trucks simply poured gasoline on the barn and set it on fire.
Given the vastness of the lack of knowledge on the subject of this crime-a lack of
knowledge that we are now trying to make up for-there is one detail that has been noted.
The kerosene poured on the barn was distributed from storage by Antoni Niebrzydowski to
Eugeniusz Kalinowski and his brother Jerzy: "They brought the eight liters of
kerosene that I had issued to them, eight liters, and doused the barn filled with Jews,
and lit it up; and what happened next, I do not know."
However, Szarota should already have been aware that Monkiewicz had nothing to say about
what happened in Jedwabne, and was only presenting his own deductions. From the facts that
Jedwabne lies in the Białystok region, and that Jews were murdered in the Białystok
region, and that the Germans were also in the Białystok region and murdered Jews, he
concludes that Germans murdered the Jews in Jedwabne. It is a likely scenario, but flawed
reasoning, and the conclusion is false. Szarota should also have asked himself: Is it
possible that three dozen eyewitnesses (including people involved in the crime) who
mentioned in their testimony the arrival of several Gestapo men from Łomża in a
"taxi" would have said not a word about some ten army trucks carrying 232
functionaries from "the two German police battalions, no. 309 and no. 316" that
would have had to arrive in the little town that day?
Tomasz Szarota concludes that "there is something wrong when the name of Birkner
[introduced into the "Jedwabne issue" by Monkiewicz-J.T.G.] is not even
mentioned in Gross's book. . . . 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. . . . Every solid historian would surely do so before publishing a book."
However, I remain skeptical as to the results of any possible following of the trail of
Birkner, in the conviction that matching historical forthrightness with Monkiewicz is an
oxymoron. It is unfortunate that Szarota used his authority as a historian to corroborate
a delusive version of the Jedwabne tragedy.
* * *
Szarota says that I wrote the book "too hurriedly." He is surely correct. I
did not come upon Monkiewicz's texts before writing Neighbors-not that I regret
this. Nor did I come upon Szymon Datner's article [on the extermination of the Jews in the
Białystok region, published in the Bulletin of the Jewish Historical Institute
in 1966 - ed.]. Even though it contains only confirmation of the theses of my book, I
regret very much not having noted it in my references. It would have been possible to
research the Jedwabne affair more thoroughly, and to write the book more painstakingly.
But I do not know whether my reviewer's suggestions would have been helpful in such an
effort because he, in turn, read Neighbors too hurriedly. Otherwise, when speaking
of facts "about which Gross might not know," would he have mentioned "[the
fact] that the wife of mayor Karolak, who was the main organizer of the pogrom, was
murdered after the war"? After all, I write about this on page 60 of Neighbors.
Szarota is a slipshod reader not only in regard to this detail. It is impossible to say
why he repeats several times in his discussion with Żakowski that I give "the figure
. . . of 92 persons involved in the crime" in the book. In fact, I wrote something
quite differently on pages 62 and 63 of Neighbors [the page numbers refer to the
Polish edition - trans.]:
"Sources at our disposal cite, by my count, ninety-two names (and, often home
addresses to boot) of people who participated in the murder of Jedwabne Jews. Perhaps not
all of them should be labeled murderers-after all, nine of the accused in the Łomża
trials were found not guilty. Various people who guarded the Jews in the square may
perhaps have just been there, uninvolved in acts of brutality. On the other hand we also
know that people mentioned by name are only a fraction of those who were there at the
time. 'Near the assembled Jews,' states Władysław Miciura, another defendant in
Ramotowski's trial, 'there was a mass of people not only from Jedwabne, but also from the
environs.' 'A lot of people were there, whose names I do not remember now,' we are told by
Laudański pere, who with his two sons was among the busiest on this day, 'I'll
tell them as soon as I recall.'
"The crowd of perpetrators swelled somehow as Jews were being herded toward the barn
where they were incinerated. As Bolesław Ramotowski put it, 'when we were chasing them to
the barn, I couldn't see, because it was very crowded.'
"The accused, who all resided in Jedwabne during the war, could not identify many
participants, because a large number of these were peasants who flocked into town from
neighboring hamlets. 'There were many peasants from hamlets whom I didn't know,' explains
Miciura. 'These were for the most part young men who enjoyed this catching of the Jews,
and they tortured them.' In other words, a lot of people took an active part in the
massacre. It was a mass murder in a double sense-on account of both the number of victims
and the number of perpetrators."
So much for what I wrote in the text of Neighbors. On the basis of this,
Szarota formulates an entirely unhistorical problem: "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 crime approvingly. According
to a second stereotype, Jews are victims by nature and do not try to defend themselves
even when they are in the majority. 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 less than a hundred criminals armed only with clubs, without attempting
to defend themselves or even to flee."
I am not going to ruminate over whether or not these 1,500 people (including the elderly,
women, and children) were "healthy [and] able-bodied" after being subjected to a
whole day full of murder and torture in the hot July sun, without water, crowded since
morning into the town square, surrounded and tormented by a crowd armed with stakes, axes,
plow handles, rubber truncheons, and God knows what else. It is clear that Szarota read my
book "too hurriedly," if he can permit himself such assertions. All the more so
since he gives voice to his methodological consciousness when he explains to Żakowski
that "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."
Yet where did this spokesman for history come up with the details that he shares with the
readers of Gazeta Wyborcza? Those "fewer than a hundred" perpetrators,
armed, for good measure, "only with clubs"? Certainly not from a reading of Neighbors.
Otherwise, he would have to explain how, let us say, Kobrzyniecki "knifed to death
eighteen jews [lower case in the original - trans.]" that day, not to mention many
other gory details that fill the accounts, which I quote, by the Polish witnesses and the
perpetrators of the crime.
I will not make things even more uncomfortable for my reviewer by quoting fragments from
the articles on Jedwabne in Rzeczpospolita (May 19 and July 10, 2000) or Gazeta
Pomorska (August 5) which poke holes in Szarota's astounding thesis about "1,500
healthy, able-bodied people led to their death by fewer than a hundred criminals armed
only with clubs." However, I recommend these articles to readers of Gazeta
Wyborcza who are interested in the pogrom committed against the Jedwabne Jews. And let
us remember: the Jews who were led to their death were no more "healthy" and
"able-bodied" than their murderers were armed "only with clubs."
* * *
Szarota's next oversight appears in his unawareness that Jews escaped from that hell
all day long, and that they defended themselves. There are many places in Neighbors where
one can read about this. Two of the people with whom I spoke escaped from Jedwabne twice
that day. In the first pages of the book, in the relation by Wasersztajn that I cite at
the beginning, we learn that "some tried to defend themselves, but they were
defenseless." That is one of the most moving sentences written there about the fate
of the Jews of Jedwabne.
Of course, Szarota did not deliberately distort my book. So what? It would be hard indeed
for a historian who poses some questions that are based on false premises (Why did the
Jews not "defend themselves or even flee" that day?), and others that are
profoundly unhistorical, to excuse himself through absent-mindedness. After all, in 1941
and in territory just conquered by the German army, how was the Jewish community supposed
to defend itself from a criminal attack by the local civilians? The Jews could flee or
hide to avoid aggression, and they did so. But what else could they do? In what further
way could they stand up to an attack by criminals, even if those criminals were armed
"only with clubs"? By engaging them in a free-for-all? And then what? Would they
be left standing victorious on the battleground?
In this cavalier aggravation of the problems surrounding the Jedwabne massacre, I discern
echoes of the boyhood reading of a historian from Warsaw-titles like "Chłopcy z
Placu Broni" [ The Boys from Arms Square].
Otherwise, I would have to suppose that he is referring by implication to the negative
stereotype according to which "Jews are victims by nature and do not try to defend
themselves, even when they are in the majority." In a more common variant, this
anti-Semitic cliché proclaims that the Jews "went like sheep to the slaughter"
during the war. Yet Szarota knows full well-I am quoting him-"that stereotypes never
explain history, although they often falsify it."
I am hardly splitting hairs. The response to Jedwabne is an issue of immeasurable
significance for the self-image of Polish society in the twenty-first century. Żakowski
and Szarota are prominent intellectuals and each of them, in his own way, has a real
influence on that self-image. How could it come to pass, for instance, that-having read Neighbors
and the distinguished articles about Jedwabne published in Polish newspapers since May-an
accomplished journalist who is aware of the power of words could express his thoughts by
asking (I am quoting from one of Jacek Żakowski's questions): "why the Jewish
majority did not try to defend themselves against a pogrom carried out by part of the
Polish minority?"
Let us imagine that a family of five, consisting of a grandmother, an able-bodied mother
and father, and two small children, is attacked by three teenage hooligans who begin
striking them with baseball bats. One might obviously describe this situation as a
confrontation in which the "family majority" fails to attempt to defend itself
against the "teenage minority," but we feel that such a formulation would not be
the most accurate way of grasping the essence of the event.
* * *
And one more objection. In his first question to Szarota, Żakowski says: "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.'"
I have inexpressible appreciation for Jacek Żakowski's journalistic abilities. But the
conclusion he quotes from the chapter in Neighbors titled "New Approach to
Sources" is preceded by a line of explanation that I follow in order to enable
readers to decide for themselves whether or not I in fact suggest an "uncritical
attitude" to sources by rejecting the principles of the historian's craft. And
perhaps it would be worthwhile for Żakowski to explain what he means when he says that
the sources I rely on are "arbitrarily chosen"-because he lightly tosses off
that remark without providing any justification for it.
I wrote in Neighbors that "The mass murder of Jedwabne Jews in the summer
of 1941 opens up historiography of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War . .
. To begin with, I suggest that we should modify our approach to sources for this period.
When considering survivors' testimonies, we would be well advised to change the starting
premise in appraisal of their evidentiary contribution from a priori critical to in
principle affirmative. By accepting what we read in a particular account as fact until we
find persuasive arguments to the contrary, we would avoid more mistakes than we are likely
to commit by adopting the opposite approach.
"I make the point, to some extent, on the basis of my own experience. It took me four
years, as I stated at the beginning of this volume, to understand what Wasersztajn was
communicating in his deposition. But the same conclusion. suggests itself as we consider
the general absence in Polish historiography of any studies about the involvement of the
ethnically Polish population in the destruction of Polish Jewry. It is a subject of
fundamental importance that has been extremely well documented. In the Jewish Historical Institute
in Warsaw alone one can find over seven thousand depositions collected from the survivors
of the Holocaust immediately after the war.But, in the last analysis, it is not our
professional inadequacy (as a community of historians of this period) that calls most
compellingly for revision in the approach to sources. This methodological imperative
follows from the very immanent character of all evidence about the destruction of Polish
Jewry that we are ever likely to come across. All that we know about the Holocaust-by
virtue of the very fact that it has been told-is not a representative sample of the Jewish
fate suffered under Nazi rule. It is all skewed evidence, biased in one direction: these
are all stories with a happy ending. They have all been produced by a few who were lucky
enough to survive. Even statements from witnesses who have not survived-statements that
have been interrupted by the sudden death of their authors, who therefore left only
fragments of what they wanted to say-belong to this category. For what has reached us was
written only while the authors were still alive. About the "heart of darkness"
that was also the very essence of their experience, about their last betrayal, about the
Calvary of 90 percent of the prewar Polish Jewry-we will never know."
Then comes the part that Żakowski quotes. As to whether or not what I said here is
arbitrary and uncritical, I will leave it to the readers to decide for themselves.
* * *
And finally a brief clarification in connection with an article by the same Jacek
Żakowski, "Every Neighbor Has a Name". Żakowski is outraged after reading Neighbors,
and gives vent to his feelings: "This book is an atomic bomb with a time-delay fuse.
. . . It is hard to recover your equilibrium after reading Neighbors."
Żakowski notes that "all the readers of Jan Tomasz Gross's Neighbors that I
have spoken to are walking around in pain." In the face of the Jedwabne crime as
evoked by Neighbors, Żakowski feels strangely defenseless-I am even thinking of
the unusual form of his text, which is probably more than a mere stylistic device. Never
before have I read a long article by a seasoned journalist that is made up mostly of
questions.
Nevertheless, I have the impression that the starting point for this series of undoubtedly
important questions is an erroneous reading by Żakowski of the last paragraph of Neighbors.
He writes: "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 are:
'the 1,600 Jedwabne Jews were killed neither by the Nazis, nor by NKVD, nor by the UB, but by society.' He
means the Polish society in the town of Jedwabne" [see the notes to the translation
of this passage in Żakowski's article - trans.].
In fact, it sounds somewhat different. I shall quote the entire last paragraph of the
book, a particularly important passage, of which Żakowski quotes the final sentence. I
lead up to that paragraph by writing that Poland is no exception in Europe: "And
like several other nations, in order to reclaim its own past, Poland will have to tell its
past to itself anew." After this assertion that the truth about our history in
the period of the Second World War still remains to be written, comes the paragraph that
reads thus:
"An
appropriate memento is, of course, to be found in Jedwabne, where there are two monuments
with inscriptions carved into the stone that will have to be chipped away in order to
liberate the historical truth in them. One says simply that the Germans killed the Jews:
'THE PLACE OF THE SUFFERING OF THE JEWISH POPULATION. THE GESTAPO AND THE NAZI GENDARMERIE
BURNED 1600 PEOPLE ALIVE JULY 10, 1941.' The other one, erected in a Poland that was
already free, either implies that there were no Jews at all in Jedwabne-or else it bears
witness, in spite of itself, to the crime that was committed: "TO THE MEMORY OF
APPROXIMATELY 180 PERSONS INCLUDING TWO PRIESTS MURDERED IN THE TERRITORY OF JEDWABNE
DISTRICT IN THE YEARS 1939-1956 BY THE NKVD, THE NAZIS, AND THE UB [signed:] SOCIETY' For,
in fact, the 1,600 Jedwabne Jews who are omitted here (even though they were 'murdered in
the community of Jedwabne in the years 1939-1956') were not murdered by any Nazis or NKVD
or UB, but rather by society" [translation of the Polish edition - trans.].
In other words, my point is that it is necessary to write the truth, because the truth
will always out.
Yet I make haste to explain that my attitude to truth is not "postmodern," as
Żakowski supposes, but only Aristotelian. In other words, I regard it as impossible for
the statements "A" and "not A" to be simultaneously true. On
reflection, I nevertheless feel that the final word in the book [in its Polish edition -
trans.], "society," should be put in quotation marks, to make it immediately
plain that it unconsciously reveals the truth hidden in the lies inscribed on the Jedwabne
monuments.
Permit me to conclude by posing two questions to my readers.
Let us say that a German police battalion was, indeed, in Jedwabne that day, and that
Poles, acting under pressure (from the dregs of the local community? the local government?
public opinion? the German gendarmerie?) and embittered by the certainty that Jews
had collaborated with the NKVD under Soviet occupation
(even though all we know for certain in the case of Jedwabne is that two of the defendants
in the Łomża trial, Laudański and Bardoń, had previously cooperated with the NKVD),
murdered their Jewish neighbors-women, children, old people, and everyone they came across
that day. Are there any parameters of pressure or embitterment that would make the
Jedwabne murder carried out by the Poles against the Jews "comprehensible"? Can
we imagine a sequence of events leading up to the murder in Jedwabne that would permit us
to say in conclusion something like, "Aha, I understand," or, "That was a
monstrous crime, and yet.," or "It's terrible, it's unforgivable, but
nevertheless."?
And the second question: What inscription should be placed on the monument commemorating
the tragic death of the Jedwabne Jews?