The Soviet authorities elevated Jedwabne to the rank of regional [raion]
capital. On January 15, 1940 the Jedwabne region, officially known as raion jedwabinsky,
in the Białystok district, was proclaimed. Its area encompassed 550 square kilometers;
from the north to the south it stretched for 40 km, from the west to the east for 25 km.
There, at the forks of the rivers Narew and Biebrza close to the Ławki marshes, a tragic
murder of Jews by Poles took place on July 10, 1941, right after the German invasion. For
a long time yet there will certainly be extensive controversy over this dramatic incident,
which professor Jan T. Gross describes in his book Neighbors.
A shocking event, it raises various emotions, some of which are dangerous. As a
sociologist, Gross must have taken this into consideration. All the more so should we
expect reliable and comprehensive documentation covering a wide range of sources. Many of
these sources would have strengthened the argument of his book. However, as he admits
himself, Gross moved too hastily into print. He decided not to research the source
materials. His "new approach to sources" (the title of a chapter in Neighbors)
doesn't always advance the cause.
It should be noted that the roots of the Jedwabne pogrom exist in various epochs,
including the 1939-1941 Soviet occupation.
Soviet documents regarding the northwest territories of Poland that were incorporated into
the part of the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic known as "Western
Belorussia" and including the Białystok area and therefore Jedwabne, can be found in
thousands of files in more than a dozen archives. It is surprising that professor Gross
completely passed over this Soviet material, even though he knew that it was already
accessible, at least from the work of Michał Gnatowski W radzieckich okowach 1939-1941
[In Soviet Chains] (Łomża, 1997), which Gross cites in Neighbors.
Eight years before the outbreak of the war, there were 1,263,300 people in the
Białystok Province [of Poland - ed.], including 153,500 Jews who made up 12.1% of the
population (38.3% in towns). Gross quotes these very facts from the general census of
1931. In the Soviet records, however - which also took into account so called bezhency, that is escapees from the German
occupied zone - there were 1,507,617 inhabitants in April 1940, with Jews representing
11.8 percent in the Białystok district (smaller than the pre-war province). Subsequent
[Soviet - ed.] statistics from February 1941 put the Białystok district population as
1,309,440, with 9.7 % of them being Jewish-the Jewish share in the population was
declining.
The Jedwabne region population statistics from the NKVD materials are more detailed. The head of the
regional division of the NKVD, State Security Lt. Kostrow, noted in a secret report titled
"Information on the political-economic position of the Jedwabne region in the
Białystok district on September 16, 1940" that the region's population was 38,885-by
ethnic background, 37,300 Poles, 1,400 Jews, and 185 Belorussians.
We may assume that the decided majority of these Jews lived in the town of Jedwabne. In my
opinion, confirmed by research on areas lying immediately east of the Białystok district,
there seem to have been many more Jews departing from than arriving in this small town in
the nine months from September 1940 to June 1941 (and thus up to the eve of the
German-Soviet war).
After May 1940, the border between the General Government and Soviet-occupied Poland was
very secure, with little hope of illegally crossing the border. The number of arrests had
been rising by the month since the beginning of Soviet occupation. Arrest depended first
of all on an individual's being a "danger to society" or, in the vocabulary of
the NKVD/KGB, a "sotsyalnoopastniy element", as covered by Article. 74 of
the [Soviet - ed.] criminal code. According to the Soviets, the "socially dangerous
element" could be an artisan, someone engaged in commerce, or owner of a house or
shop-in short, practically anyone. Many Jews were arrested in this category. They were
also among those who allowed themselves to be recruited for voluntary work in the depths
of Russia. The raion jedwabinsky was one of the most economically backward parts of
the Białystok district.
Several questions beg for answers. How is the count of 1,400 Jews recorded in Soviet
documents from September 1940 to be reconciled with that of 1,600 in Jedwabne who were
chased into the barn and burnt alive by Poles in July of the following year? Is it
possible that the author of Neighbors inflated the number of victims? Is it really
possible that Gross failed to notice the appendix in Gnatowski's book containing NKVD Lt.
Kostrov's report? Why did he ignore such a document?
In the reports of regional NKVD division heads, we are informed that there is
anti-Semitism in the Białystok district. For these functionaries, anti-Soviet attitudes
are often identical with anti-Semitic ones. The following are some examples connected with
the elections.
Thus in the Lubeszczyńskie village, Bielski region, in the ballot box for delegates to
the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union and Soviet Belorussia (March 1940), a note was
found with the following text: "Long Live Poland! Jan Turlejski [one of the
candidates] is a bandit. Get out! Otherwise we'll hang you on the first tree we find - may
you rot and die, whore, Jew-face [.]. Down with communists!" In Białystok, the NKVD made note of a flyer distributed during the
elections for local government (December 1940): "To all Jews! By grace of God may you
not make it to election day, may you all rot. You came to Poland dirty as swine and you'll
leave just the same [.] Hey, you wives of Tatars and dirty Jew-faces, we are all going to
vote because we're forced to. [.] Remember, Jew, you're in Poland, your wanderer's fate
brought you here but your face will not disappear from my memory, it'll smash your hook
nose." Col. Misiuriew, chief of the district NKVD, refrained from quoting further
from the flyer because of its "offensive language." Another flyer proclaims:
"We want the true Christian faith, not cant and lies imposed by Jews and
Stalin."
In the opinion of the NKVD, the regions of Jedwabne, Zambrów and Czyżew were
anti-Semitic. In the latter of these in 1939, during the two-week Nazi occupation, Poles
and Germans looted Jewish property.
Lt. Kostrov, NKVD chief in Jedwabne, in assessing the "economic-political situation
of the region," writes of a bitter Polish-Jewish conflict. He refers to pogroms in
1934-35 and notes that, in the township of Radziłów not far away, four people died in a
related matter.
In this regard, it is striking that the Jedwabne region, as reported in other Soviet
documents, had the lowest percentage of Jews in the Białystok district, some 3.6%.
Considerably more Jews lived in the following regions: Kolno (15%), Czyżew (12.7%),
Zambrów (10.5%), Ciechanowiec (9.5%) and Białystok city (37.7%).
Why did the murder in the barn occur there, where there were the fewest Jewish neighbors?
This is one detail from a historical point of view, but a reliable researcher ought to
know the facts and at least try to explain them. Why did the greatest repressive measures
before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war affect this particular region? It is known
that on the night of June 19, 1941, close to 12,000 people in the Białystok district were
arrested and deported, which is four times more than in neighboring regions. It transpires
from NKVD documents found in Minsk that, in the area around Jedwabne, the Polish
underground numbered 1,500 people (representing 4% of Poles in the region, not counting
their families). Did this have any connection with the drama in the barn at Jedwabne? Did
the hatred for the Soviet system, whose symbol were the Jews, express a specifically
interpretation of the patriotic mindset?
We do not find out from Gross's book.
The author of Neighbors demonstrates a reluctance not only for Soviet sources.
He also steps around Polish ones, despite knowing them well. This concerns accounts by
people who joined Anders's army. The Documents Office of the Second
Corps collected these with care and they are stored, along with the entire Second Corps
collection, in the archives of the Hoover Institution in California.
These accounts speak volumes about the Soviet occupation of the eastern marches of Poland in 1939-41. In almost all
these accounts, it is possible to learn about the participation of Jews in anti-Polish
activities. Jews are in the groups welcoming the Red Army, in ad hoc revolutionary
committees and quasi-militias. We see them at "meetings" both among the audience
and on the speakers' platforms, among members of the election committees, and among the
commissars, apparatchiks and various imported Soviet activists that arrived there. In
these accounts, Jews denounce others and are disloyal to their Polish neighbors and the
Polish state. The Jews reduce the eastern marches to poverty and economic death throes.
They play the part of sledovatneli and NKVD officers; they torture people
in the prisons and deport Polish civilians to Siberia.
I have looked through thousands of accounts (amongst others, those of the Eastern Archives
in Warsaw and the Sikorski Institute in London, as well as copies of the Hoover Archives).
There are also (with similar frequency, at times as background, like the Jewish problem)
notes on the drunks and dregs of society, criminals, thieves, and farmhands-often
Belorussians-who, in the first weeks of the occupation, took to robbery, murder, rape,
denunciation and organized raids on country estates and smaller units of the Polish army.
Besides, numerous Soviet documents attest to the anti-Polish attitude of part of the
Belorussian population.
A reading of this literature leaves the impression that the Jews who collaborate with
Soviet authorities are responsible for the entire misfortune of the Poles in the eastern
borders. The strength of this conviction surely indicates the state of public opinion at
the time, as well as the anti-Semitism ingrained in Polish tradition.
It is odd, therefore, that professor Gross does not include such accounts in his account
of the anti-Semitic nature of the events in Jedwabne, as part of the threshold of the
Holocaust. On the other hand, if we were to accept Gross's "new approach to
sources" (which relies on the change from "a priori critical to in
principle affirmative" in the appraisal of relation to "all fragments of
information at our disposal," then it would also be necessary to consider whether the
accounts of those survivors of the camps and prisons of the "Gulag Archipelago"
should be treated in a similar manner.
One important matter is that the Soviet documents do not confirm the suppositions of
massive Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation authorities.
In the mid 1930s, of course, Jews made up over 38 percent of the central NKVD staff (data from July 1934, published in
Moscow a year ago). After the great purge in the central apparatus, however, Jews
accounted for not quite four percent, with ethnic Russians dominating (over 66 percent).
This remained so until the outbreak of war with Germany. Yet the myth of the ubiquitous
"Jewish communist" persisted.
Over 30,000 Soviet personnel, known as the Vostochniks arrived in occupied
northeast Poland between 1939 and 41. Most of them came from Soviet Belorussia. An
analysis of Soviet administrative apparatus personnel questionnaires allows us to maintain
that the entire Soviet activist cadre was made up of outsiders, from party secretaries
down through the subordinate party, police, administrative and economic apparatus. In
these ranks, Belorussians clearly dominate. There are many ethnic Russians (most in NKVD structures) and there are also Jews (between
10 and 20 percent).
Out of 403 people in management positions (Secretaries and Directors of departments) in
the Białystok district in January 1941, there are 298 Belorussians (74%), 37 ethnic
Russians, 56 Jews (13.9%), eight Poles, two Ukrainians and one Lithuanian and one German.
In the upper party echelons in the district, the participation of Jews is greater (18.4
%).
Nor was there any "Jewish invasion" in the Jedwabne region. In October 1940, a
mere 13 Jews sent from the Soviet Union worked in the region. We know the personal data of
the party leadership in Jedwabne. All matters in the region were under its jurisdiction.
The first secretary of the Regional Committee of the Belorussian Communist Party
(Bolshevik) was Mark Rydachenko, born 1901, a Belorussian, member of the BCP(b) since 1926, educated in secondary and higher
party schools, a member of the apparatus since 1934. The second secretary was Dmitriy
Ustilovskiy, also a Belorussian, born 1904, BCP(b) member since 1926, incomplete
elementary and secondary party-school education, in the apparatus since 1939. The third
secretary for personnel is a Russian, Pietr Bystrov, born 1898, BCP(b) member since 1919,
incomplete elementary and incomplete elementary party-school education, in the apparatus
since 1938.
In the ranks of the party, ethnic Poles are few and far between; all of them came from the
USSR. In party documents, there are constant laments that so few locals have been
recruited.
According to Lt. Kostrov's report in September 1940, the NKVD had 130 informers and agents
in Jedwabne. Their nationality is unknown, but through January 1941, it is recorded that
25 informers were recruited among a hundred Polish partisans who gave up the underground
struggle.
In the fall of 1940, nearly 5,500 people were openly collaborating with the Soviet
authorities in façade organizations in the Białystok region. The largest number of
careerist collaborators, 2,773, is found among ethnic Poles - that is, 51 percent! Next
come 1,425 Belorussians (26%) and 1,050 Jews (19%).
In the Jedwabne region however, there are 126 Poles (70%), 45 Jews (25%), four
Belorussians, three Russians, and three "others" among 181 careerist
collaborators. Upwardly mobile individuals from working-class backgrounds dominate, with
the remainder being mainly farmhands and provincial intelligentsia.
In the region, 3.2% of the Jews are careerist collaborators, as contrasted with only 0.34%
of the Poles, a proportion that is ten times lower. The statistics, as we see, show there
were clearly more Polish collaborators. However, the Jews must have stood out more and
caused more resentment.
This false perception of reality by the Jedwabne neighbors, however, is not reflected in
Gross's book.
Gross's first text about Jedwabne appeared at the beginning of the year in Europa
nieprowincjonalna [Non-provincial Europe]. As research editor of that volume, I
thought that the press would take up the theme of Jedwabne. Andrzej Kaczyński from the
newspaper Rzeczpospolita did so. The magazine Myśl Polska did so as well, in its June
2000 issue: "Nor is there any lack [in Europa nieprowincjonalna] of controversial
historians, such as Grzegorz Motyka, Jan Tomasz Gross or Jerzy Holzer, whose tendencies
for national self-castigation provoke numerous protests ... Amongst some it is possible,
unfortunately, to sense hidden anti-Polish complexes, to find stereotypes that are
injurious to us".
Neither self-castigation nor complexes is the issue. The issue is that of truth, an
appalling truth, which the historian must honestly and comprehensively examine, and which
the public must find out about. Even if this truth hurts and outrages us. Even if we refer
to this act of genocide in Jedwabne as an instance of the Holocaust.