The Polish Republic may be guilty of disbanding whole ethnically Ukrainian and Belorussian villages, and even Polish ones, but its conscience is free of mass slaughter and the organizing of pogroms or extermination camps.
1. "Wi¶niewski pointed to a massacred cadaver of a young man of Mosaic persuasion, about twenty-two years old, whose name was Lewin, and said to me, Look, mister, we killed this SOB with stones... They took healthier men and chased them to the cemetery and ordered them to dig a pit, and after it was dug out, Jews were killed every which way, one with iron, another with a knife, still another with a club... Władysław... drowned two Jewish blacksmiths... Gitele Nadolny (Nadolnik), the youngest daughter of the melamed... had her head cut off, and the murderers, we are told, later kicked it around... Szelawa took away one Jew. His tongue was cut off... I started pleading to spare my barn, to which they agreed and left my barn in peace, only told me to help them chase the Jews to Bronisław ¦leszyński's barn... When Jews broke the statue [of Lenin], they were told to put its various pieces on some boards and carry it around, and the rabbi was told to walk in front with his hat on a stick, and all had to sing, 'The war is because of us, the war is for us.' While carrying the statue all the Jews were chased toward the barn, and the barn was doused with gasoline and lit, and in this manner fifteen hundred Jewish people perished."
2. Those were the Poles of Neighbors - a book by Jan T. Gross describing mass
carnage committed in the Podlasie region of Poland. This was previously a Soviet-occupied
zone. But in the short interim after the Soviets fled before the approaching German army,
the local Polish-ethnic group carried out ethnic cleansing. The polemics over the book
which recently unfolded in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza have proved how
difficult it is for Poles to recognize this fact out of their past. Professor Szarota has
charged Professor Gross with writing "the sociology" and not "the
history" of the event. Meanwhile, the author has scored a number of unquestionable
successes in research on the history of that eastern part of Poland under Soviet
occupation. So long as he wrote about Soviet terror he remained an historian, but has he
now ceased to be one? Reaching for the work of Hannah Arendt and Jerzy Jedlicki to support
his claim, Żakowski has confessed that it never occurred to him that Poles were capable
of doing what they did. Both quote the Jews' sympathy for the Soviet authorities, as if
that alone would constitute a justification for the actions of the mob and the reaction of
the parish priest, who call-only once-for calm and for leaving things up to the Germans.
The Polish intelligentsia - as with every elite of this sort - nurtures the myth of their
own nation's uniqueness. In fact, a unique nation we are not. When I was a student at the
university, I had to persuade my excellent teacher Witek Jedlicki that there was
anti-Semitism in Poland simply because there always has been. People still living in the
Podlasie region kept telling me that the best times had been the Nazi times, and when a
colleague of mine, Klaudiusz, joined our research team in the villages and learnt from the
locals what they could do to a Jew, he took the first boat to New York, where, eating
Polish ham, he prefers to keep as far away from Poland as possible. Jedlicki (Witold)
emigrated to Israel; another of my teachers, Benek Tejkowski, still lives in the country,
but has now acquired a new name Bolesław and such anti-Jewish phobia that he puts the
Polish Primate, Cardinal Glemp - and myself, too, of course, on his list of anti-Polish
Jews.
3. People here used to say that Polish anti-Semitism was of the traditional variety.
But what does that mean? Superstition cultivated by the Polish Catholic Church that
reminds people over and over again about the story of the blood-sucking Jewish innkeeper
who refused to sell vodka on credit, and who had been brought in by the Polish Catholic
landlord to collect money because he was a member of the tribe of Christ's enemies (i.e.
the Jews)? Urban mobs held pogroms from time to time, but Jewish religious communities
could avoid them by paying an additional special "tax." On July 10, 1941, the
Germans let the Poles of Jedwabne take their revenge in an act of traditional
anti-Semitism that rivalled the massacres committed by the Cossacks-and the Germans filmed
it. The Poles themselves burnt their Jews alive. The survivors who were placed under
protection when the Germans restored order in the village were then sent for orderly
extermination - with the application of modern methods - in the appropriate death camps.
The temptation is to say that it was a primitive village mob that carried out the
massacre. However, urban residents were not free of anti-Semitism where Polish Poles and
Polish Jews lived side by side. The development of democratic practices and of the
national consciousness exacerbated mutual relations - something like the Palestine of
today. Further, the contagion infected the intelligentsia as well-which is something else
that we remain silent about. If we searched the History Museum of Warsaw University, we
could read about the Respublica student fraternity, which refused entry to students of
Jewish origin "regardless of their creed" (ah, those little racists, I wonder
how many of them died later from bullets fired by Adolf's soldiers?). We would also find
there a picture of one Professor Czarnowski who strongly opposed anti-Semitism. However,
we would find nothing about the racist orders issued by the University authorities or
about the infamous stamping of students' identity booklets with the letter "Ż"
[standing for the word Żyd - Jew]. Should our compatriots from Jedwabne then cause
us any consternation? They were no different from the others, except that they killed
their Jews as a scapegoat for all their real and imaginary sufferings. It was ritual
murder.
4. One party remains innocent of that horrible tragedy, namely the Polish state. Had
Poland accepted the conditions of Hitler's ultimatum, Polish losses would have been much,
much smaller. Who knows, perhaps it would have been possible to conquer the Soviet Union.
The West would not have been dragged into the war against Germany, and the attack [by
Germany against the Soviet Union in 1941- ed.] would have been conducted not from the
countryside near the town of Łomża, but from the outskirts of Minsk [and thus, starting
closer to Moscow, would presumably have had a greater chance of success - ed.]. The
resistance put up by Poland saved the Soviet Union. Therefore, all the more ignominy falls
upon Stalin and Molotov for treacherously stabbing Poland in the back. Polish resistance
saved the lives of those Jews who survived, even if they survived in Siberia.
Thus the honor of Poland was also saved, since the Polish state never had to cooperate
with Hitler in ethnic cleansing, as did Pétain's France or Tiso's Slovakia. Some say: the
state did not co-operate because it did not exist. But the sequence of events is quite the
opposite: the Polish state ceased to exist because it refused to go along with Hitler. The
Polish Republic may be guilty of disbanding whole ethnically Ukrainian and Belorussian
villages, and even Polish ones, but its conscience is free of mass slaughter and the
organizing of pogroms or extermination camps.
5. Professor Gross asks what inscription should be put on the monument in Jedwabne. For me
it is obvious: FROM THE POLISH STATE IN REMEMBRANCE OF ITS JEWISH CITIZENS MURDERED BY
THEIR NEIGHBORS IN FRATRICIDAL RAGE.