Not being a historian, I can add nothing to the facts presented by Jan T. Gross; nor can I confirm them or question them. This noteworthy book, which recounts events so dreadful they seem unbelievable, goes beyond what happened in early July of 1941 in the small town of Jedwabne, situated in the vicinity of Łomża. Its message is much broader and-at the same time-immeasurably important. This must be seen as the reason for the reverberations that the book has caused, as well as for the debates that it has stirred up.
I would rather not go into a debate on whether the murder of Jedwabne's Jews was an old-fashioned pogrom or one of the crimes that go to make up the Holocaust. Most pogroms were not staged by outsiders. Rather, they were perpetrated by neighbors and acquaintances, even if the initiative came from the outside. And to be murdered by the people one knows, people who in more peaceful times walked the same streets, people whom one saw regularly or perhaps shared a classroom bench with, is a far cry from being killed by invaders with whom one has nothing in common. I do not know whether the distinction between familiars and outsiders can be applied here in the strict sense. Still, I believe that the Jedwabne criminals who murdered the Jedwabne Jews fit into a different category, for their victims, than the Gestapo-if for no other reason than the fact that the killers were not anonymous. The victims died at the hands of a Stasiek or a Jurek they had known since childhood.
There is no question that being murdered by one's neighbors is a particular situation. Gross shows us the terrifying extent of these events and how they explain, at least indirectly, the resentment felt by a certain number of Jewish Holocaust survivors toward Polish society. After all, we see here the questioning of the most elementary expectations one has of the people with whom one has so far coexisted, or with whom one has at least not been in a state of war. This, too, is a significant message contained in this important book.
Another component is the question of how it was possible, of what factors made the Polish inhabitants of this small town run amok set about the merciless slaughter of their Jewish neighbors. I would say that this is a matter of the etiology of a crime. It is not explained by the simplest of motives, such as greed or revenge (for some offense that, as Gross shows, was not committed on the scale of the town's community). The scale was surely tipped by irrational considerations, such as the conviction that the person to be destroyed belonged to an inferior species, unworthy of walking the earth. Or to put it differently: the conviction that the life of a Jew, in contrast to the life of any other person, had ceased to have any worth and that the only reasonable thing to do was to bring it to the quickest possible conclusion.
The primitive residents of Jedwabne and the vicinity certainly did not engage in any such deliberations. They knew what they knew; after all, they had all heard about "Jewish communism" and the murder of children in order to obtain the Christian blood necessary for baking matzo. The hatred that pushed them into crime was not some sudden plunge or murderous epiphany; it had its roots and it was fixed. These people not only lived in hate, they were brought up to hate. Here, it seems to me, we arrive at one of the most important questions in Gross' book, one that defines its message: did the inhabitants of Jedwabne succumb to such a powerful influence of Nazi ideology that they no longer felt any qualms about murdering their neighbors-or was it something that happened earlier that decided their actions?
Gross writes that the crime would never have happened had Hitler never invaded Poland, which makes Hitler responsible for Jedwabne, too. Of course, there is no denying the truth of this statement, but it does not exhaust the matter. Nor does it provide an excuse. The fact that the Jedwabne massacre was perpetrated almost immediately after the German invasion (Jedwabne had been within the Soviet occupied zone) makes such an explanation all the less exhaustive. Nor can it offer any sort of solace to anyone's self-regard, to even a minimal degree. It must be said that even if the organizers of the pogrom were acting under the influence of incitement and sudden emotions, they had been well prepared for what they did, and they had been taught to hate. They had not been taught in the first weeks of German rule but, in fact, all their lives. Even before the Germans arrived, the organizers of the pogrom had been taught about various Jewish iniquities, including their objective of ruling over the world. The organizers had already been taught that a Jew was no different from the devil and, in fact, was the devil.
The Jedwabne tragedy must also be viewed from another perspective. It was, to a greater or lesser degree, a result of what happened in the period between the First and Second World Wars, a consequence of intensified propaganda, and a result of what a simple man, deprived of scruples and inhibitions in a time of madness, could hear from the pulpit and from nationalist extremists. The patterns at work were perhaps the mob psychology skillfully described by Gustave Le Bon in the late nineteenth century. The Jedwabne mob was not only equipped with pitchforks and axes (baseball bats were still unknown); not only did it lose control of its emotions-it also had an ideology. This same ideology was familiar to those who, while not participating in the crime, did nothing to stop it. Since Jews were communists-Gross quotes the opinion of a local clergyman-there was no reason to defend them.
This book is about the Jedwabne crime, but its message-let me repeat-is broader. Its main element is a largely implicit polemic against silence, or in fact with a particular way of thinking and presenting one's own history that is concealed by that silence. It is a universally acknowledged truth that no community enjoys being reminded of shameful acts committed by its members, even if the figures in question were as primitive, uneducated, and even savage as the actors behind horrifying events in the obscure backwater town called Jedwabne. They do not like such things, even when there is no possibility of any talk about collective responsibility. Gross's book is an appeal for a multi-faceted concept of history that is in accord with the facts, and therefore not only for an end to the silence, but also for a renunciation of the self-satisfaction that results from the conviction that all the right, including the moral right, is on our side. The residents of Jedwabne were unquestionably members of the Polish people, and yet they participated in the Nazi system of crime. The question of how this was possible is not the only question that organizes the book's narrative. Another question appears, even though it is never directly formulated. Its sense is best captured in the words of Mickiewicz: "Why is it that you do not wish to write about this, gentlemen?"
Gross' book is, after all, a contribution to a debate about what history should be and how it should be written in order to avoid silences, stereotypes, and simplified differentiating dichotomies: the history of Polish-Jewish relations, the occupation years, and the postwar period, as well. I would say that the distinctive rhetoric of the book and its style of argumentation are a more or less concealed polemic with the dominant mode of writing history, a mode that has general roots but that is also connected with the practices that were obligatory in communist Poland. From at least the mid-1960s onward, the falsification of history, in fact, did not consist only in passing over in silence whatever failed to agree with a suggested or imposed view of the world, or only in directly following the ideological line, but also in attempting in some way to cater to commonly held convictions and opinions so as to create, in consequence, a smoothed-over (and falsified) version of history. This tendency was hardly a specialty of the communist period in Poland; it has its adherents and practitioners to this day. And even if their purpose is not simply to raise public morale, they do not want to be depressing, to pose vexing questions, to sow anxiety or self-critical reflections. Jan Tomasz Gross's shocking book is a protest against this mode of historical writing.
The book should be seen from both Jewish and Polish perspectives. I think that, for Jewish readers, it will become one more document of the destruction, one more tale of misfortune, and perhaps also-unfortunately-a confirmation of opinions that are widespread in certain circles, but are none the less idiotic, about inherent Polish anti-Semitism. It is truly important, however, for Polish readers, and it is to them that it is addressed. It is important because it insists on fundamental questions about the behavior of Polish society in a terrible time. It insists on a questioning of the stereotypes that prettify historical truth. It insists on self-critical reflection. It insists on the renunciation of the self-satisfaction that lulls moral vigilance.