There is no doubt that Jan T. Gross' book and the discussion it has aroused is one of
the most important events in recent years in the Polish debate about the past. Neighbors
and Gross's Upiorna dekada [The Ghastly Decade; Cracow, 1998], published two
years ago (and virtually unnoticed), concern the most important issues for Poles, issues
which shape our image of ourselves on such important topics as the German and Soviet
occupation, Polish attitudes towards the Germans and Jews, and the attitudes of Poles
towards the Holocaust.
No wonder these issues still cause white-hot emotions despite the passage of several
decades. This could be seen at a recent meeting of the Historical Institute of the Polish
Academy of Sciences, devoted to Gross' book and attended by several dozen people. This was
an exceptional meeting mainly because of the high temperature of the debate, towards the
end of which the participants were either shouting at each other or weeping.
Therefore, is there an opportunity to talk calmly about Gross's books and consider
arguments other than one's own?
Let us try to reconstruct the most important facts and questions to which there are no
answers yet.
On July 10, 1941, the entire Jewish population of the small town of Jedwabne, with almost
3,000 inhabitants, located a few kilometers from Łomża, was murdered. The number of
victims fluctuates between 900 and some 1,500 to 1,600 people; Gross assumes the highest
possible figure. The Jews were killed by their neighbors, the Poles. Not by all the Poles,
of course. On the basis of investigative and court records from 1949, the author
identifies several dozen of the most zealous murderers.
These facts are questioned by virtually no one, but there are doubts as to the role of the
Germans. The event was certainly not spontaneous. It was recorded by a German film crew
who appeared in Jedwabne that morning. The records contain information on conversations
between the Germans and the town's leaders over the preceding few days. In order to
understand the context of the Jedwabne incident, one should also bear in mind the fact
that, several days earlier, two German police battalions had murdered 2,000 Jews in
Białystok, burning many of them in the synagogue.
There is a striking similarity between the methods used at both locations, because in
Jedwabne at least several hundred Jews were burned in a barn. Gross does not pay too much
attention to these issues (or to other versions of the story according to which somewhere
between several dozen and more than two hundred German functionaries were there). He
considers the Germans to be of no crucial significance in establishing a picture of what
happened on that 10th of July.
Historians also point to other circumstances which Jan T. Gross either ignores
altogether or does not consider to a sufficient degree. A key question is the motives that
led to almost the entire Jewish community of a small town being massacred by its Polish
neighbors in a single day. One of the motives was certainly anti-Semitism (that part of
Poland was the only one where the National-Radical Camp had strong rural influence),
or it could have been simple greed - a desire to grab the victims' possessions. But that
is probably not all.
According to descriptions of what happened on that day, an important motive might have
been a desire to wreak vengeance on the Jews for their (factual or alleged - we are not
yet able to determine this) collaboration with the Soviet occupation forces between
September 1939 and June 1941. Gross claims there is no reason to believe that the Jews of
Jedwabne collaborated with the NKVD to a greater extent than the Poles did, or
that the Jews helped hunt down and eliminate a partisan unit in the neighborhood. Yet we
know that, before they died, young Jews were forced to remove the statute of Lenin which
the Soviet occupants had placed in the town, and that on their way to their deaths they
were forced to sing "The war is because of us, the war is for us."
Professor Tomasz Szarota has pointed out that some of the chief murderers, the Laudański
brothers, had previously lost a sister, who was arrested and murdered by the NKVD. Another
important piece of information (absent in Neighbors) is that, a few days before the
pogrom, a group of prisoners, former members of the anti-Soviet resistance who had been
released by the advancing Germans, arrived in Jedwabne.
The above details provide no ready replies, but they suggest that collective opinions
about the co-responsibility of Jews for Soviet atrocities, even if far from the truth,
might be to blame for the massacre.
Of course this does not change the moral assessment of what happened in Jedwabne, nor does
it excuse the murderers. Whether or not the atrocity was inspired by the Germans or
fuelled by a desire to wreak vengeance on the Jews for their alleged collaboration with
the Soviets, the fact remains that the Jews died at the hands of their Polish neighbors.
The same thing happened in Kielce on July 4, 1946: even if the Kielce pogrom
was the result of provocation by the UB (there are reasons to suppose it was), there
were Poles who were quite prepared to take up knives and crow-bars and march to 7, Planty
Street in order to kill Jews. A historian, however, cannot stop at a moral assessment, but
has a duty to sift through even trivial circumstances if these can help in understanding
the meaning of events.
That is why it is worth listening to Gross' critics, who accuse him of playing down facts
and presenting interpretations that do not comply with the ideas contained in Neighbors.
These accusations are not caused by a desire to play down Polish responsibility for the
atrocity (this opinion was to be heard during the above mentioned debate at the Historical
Institute), but by a desire to get as close to the truth as possible, and by a certain
humility towards historical matter which seems to be more confused and less certain than
the author of Neighbors cares to admit.
The debate on the integrity with which Jan T. Gross reconstructs the background to and
sequence of events in Jedwabne covers up the most important and controversial aspects of Neighbors
(as well as The Ghastly Decade). Out of a study devoted
to a single town, the author makes very sweeping statements about Polish-Jewish relations,
Polish co-responsibility for the Holocaust, and collaboration with the Germans.
The leitmotif is that "Jedwabne-though perhaps one of the most excessive...
of all murderous assaults by Poles against the Jews-was not an isolated incident,"
and that "in collective Jewish memory this phenomenon is ingrained-that local
Polish people killed the Jews because they wanted to, not because they had to."
In The Ghastly Decade, Gross claims that "in the overwhelming majority of
cases, the Poles neither offered help nor accorded sympathy to their murdered fellow
citizens, and all too often took part in the Holocaust." He also argues that it
would have been possible to rescue far more Jews: "...no police force is capable
of enforcing rules that are universally broken. If one Pole in five or one in ten -
instead of one in a hundred or two hundred - had helped a Jew, the Gestapo would have been
powerless. Brutal repression is applied most easily on a small community of people that is
isolated within its own society."
These are exceedingly strong words, and one should ask to what extent they are
justified. Let us begin by agreeing with Gross that numerous reports and memoirs confirm
the indifference of Poles towards the fate of Jews; even worse, they confirm cases in
which szmalcownicy blackmailed Jews or - in rural
areas - cases where Polish peasants captured Jews who were in hiding (of course it is
impossible to venture at making a precise determination of the scale of these phenomena).
But considering Germany's policy of extermination vis-a-vis the Poles, the very
idea that widespread help for the Jews would have kept the hands of the Gestapo tied and
would have protected the Jews against repression seems to be a piece of historical science
fiction. Such an idea is more in keeping with Gandhi's struggle by means of civil
disobedience against British rule in India than with the historical reality in the General Government. In any case, harboring Jews put
the entire Polish family under threat of death, and the most that can be expected of
people is a sense of decency, but not heroism.
However, the most important thing is that, at present, we have abundant information on
only one event - the massacre by Poles of the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne. There
is reason to believe that a similar episode occurred in the neighboring town of
Radziłów. Perhaps other cases we know nothing about will come to light, but for now
Gross's categorical statements have no justification. Anyone engaged in research into such
a sensitive issue is obliged to formulate his ideas with precision, and to be responsible
for every word. These elements are often lacking in Gross's books.
Let us cite yet another issue concerning collaboration with the Germans by Poles and Jews.
If Gross rejects the idea of Jewish collaboration with the invading Russians in 1939, he
has a totally opposite view of Polish attitudes towards the Germans after the outbreak of
the German-Soviet war. He writes in Neighbors: "To put it simply, enthusiastic
Jewish response to entering Red Army units was not a widespread phenomenon at all, and it
is impossible to identify some innate, unique characteristics of Jewish collaboration with
the Soviets during the period 1939-1941. On the other hand, it is manifest that the local
non-Jewish population enthusiastically greeted entering Wehrmacht units in 1941 and
broadly engaged in collaboration with the Germans, up to and including participation in
the exterminatory war against the Jews."
How else can one describe these views than the replacement of one stereotype - "Jewish communist" sympathizers with another
stereotype, this time about Polish attitudes in support of the occupation?
Gross' book is very much needed. It stirs our consciences, striking at the heroic image
of the German occupation, in which there was generally no room for szmalcownicy, peasants baiting Jews escaped
from the ghettos, and Polish participants in pogroms directed against the Jews. Let us
hope that this will spark off a debate on the most painful topics of our past. Most of
all, however, we need academic research in the true sense of the term, which will verify
the views set forth in The Ghastly Decade and Neighbors.
Such research (based, among other things, on the underground press and the records of
postwar trials of szmalcownicy and collaborators) is due to be undertaken-eleven
years too late - by the Institute of National Remembrance. The failure of
historians to engage in research that could have been, and should have been, undertaken
after 1989 is going to cause irreparable harm. Jan T. Gross's book will appear in the
United States and Germany in a few months' time, and it is this book - not source-based
scholarly works which have not been written yet - that will shape the views of a major
part of world opinion on Polish-Jewish relations during World War II.
I pay my respect to Jan T. Gross for his courage in tackling such a difficult subject, but
at the same time I have a serious suspicion that his numerous oversimplifications and very
risky generalizations will make Polish-Jewish dialogue and a readiness by Poles to confess
their own guilt more difficult, rather than easier.