The discussion around Jan Tomasz Gross's book Neighbors goes on. The book, after 60 years, threw a shaft of light and recovered from oblivion the bestial murder during the war of the Jews of the small village of Jedwabne. Unfortunately, the debate is beginning to move in the wrong direction.
It is not easy for any nation to acknowledge things that cover it with shame. It is human nature that we are inclined to remember the wrongs done to us, and that we do not want to remember the wrongs what we have unto others. Instinctive self-defense compels us to call into question even indisputably proven facts, to seek mitigating circumstances, to clear our own conscience while blaming others.
The question is not whether 1,500 or 900 Jews were murdered in Jedwabne. The most essential thing is not whether the motive for the murderers was greed or revenge for the collaboration of Jews with the Soviet occupation regime. And whether Professor Jan T. Gross skipped over an important source, omitted a sentence in a document he cited, or failed to consider the testimony of a particular witness are not the most important issues.
In the light of not one or two, but several testimonies and accounts, not only of witnesses and victims, but also of the perpetrators, it is an undeniable fact that old people and children, men and women, were murdered in Jedwabne in an unbelievably brutal manner at the hands of Poles. Attempts to undermine this fundamental assertion are, in the light of the evidence presented, nothing but a denial of the truth. From the documentation presented by the author, it is clear that the Germans were the instigators of the pogrom. In the introduction itself we find out from Gross that on that fatal day German cameras and film crews were waiting and that there was a meeting of the Gestapo with the village authorities. The pogrom was therefore not spontaneous.
It is also clear from Gross that, without German encouragement, permission, and support, the massacre would not have been possible. This does not in the least change the fact that, acting of their own free, unforced will, Poles tortured and killed their victims. None of the Polish murderers was in uniform and no one can hide behind the argument that he had to obey orders or perish himself. Nor is it possible to explain the mass murder as revenge for the collaboration of Jews with the Soviet occupation regime and for their participation in the persecution of Poles. Gross cites the written accounts of the ringleaders of the massacre who, before communist Polish judicial authorities, pled their cooperation with the NKVD during the Soviet occupation as a mitigating circumstance.
Even were it true that not a single Pole embraced the protective red banner during the Soviet occupation and that all Jews without exception collaborated with the Soviets, nothing can justify the killing of people like animals - the stoning, the butchering with knives, the decapitation, the stabbing with sharpened stakes, the wholesale murder of women and men, of the old and the young herded to the Jewish cemetery, the burying alive of still-breathing victims, the drowning of women with their children in the pond, and, at the end, the forcing of the remaining victims into the barn where they were burned alive.
Since we share national pride in our victories, in our laudable actions and in the contributions made by Polish artists to the common treasury of human values, then we must also bring ourselves to feel national shame for shameful actions. As a nation nearly entirely Christian, we must beat our breasts, acknowledging the sins and transgressions of each Polish Cain who violated the commandment "Thou shalt not kill!" If we expect from others redress for crimes committed against Poland and against Poles, we must also demonstrate the will to redress the evil committed by us to our neighbors.
No one ever performed a greater service for the Germans than Chancellor Willy Brandt when, before the eyes of the entire world, he fell to his knees before the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto. This was a symbolic act of atonement for the German crime of genocide, and it was performed by a person who had nothing to do with that genocide. The strong sense of collective guilt shown until today by the majority of Germans has caused the world, not excluding Poland, to more easily pardon them their terrible crimes, and to place the onus on "the Nazis," rather than the German people.
For many years, we protested against the mendacity of the Russian inscription in the Katyn forest, an inscription stating German fascists murdered Polish prisoners of war there in 1941. In Jedwabne, similar falsehoods are inscribed on two monuments. On the one erected during the Polish communist period, the inscription speaking about the execution of Jewish people burned by the German Gestapo and gendarmerie. Not a word about the Poles. The other monument was erected recently, after 1989, "to honor the memory of 180 persons, including two priests, who were murdered in the territory of the Jedwabne district.. by the NKVD, the Nazis, and the UB." This marker is signed, "society". Not a word about the Jews. As I write these words, both monuments are still standing.
The effacement of this shameful blot demands at least a symbolic act acknowledging guilt and atonement. This could be the fulfillment of the imploring request by a Rabbi from Jedwabne, Jacob Baker. Invoking John Paul II's request to Jews for forgiveness for the suffering that Jews endured at the hands of Christians, Rabbi Baker asks for the dignified burial of the bones of the murdered, their interment in a Jewish cemetery, and the commemoration of the place where the synagogue stood.
A ceremonial remembrance of the victims of the bloody pogrom at Jedwabne, with the motto "Thou shalt not kill," and with the participation of the primate of Poland, bishops, and representatives of the highest state and civil authorities and of Jewish organizations, could be the symbolic act of atonement that is so necessary.
Only in this way can we cure the nation of the ethnic or class hatred that led in the past to the most terrible crimes in human history. Kosovo is a contemporary example.
The six centuries of the presence of the Jews in Poland is today a closed book. To close the book with dignity, a mutual and straightforward accounting is necessary. Not everything in the mutual relations between Poles and Jews was bad. In the centuries before the rebirth of Israel, Poland was a refuge for Jews persecuted and expelled from both the East and the West. A dignified, final accord would be the realization of an idea raised in the press, the publication of a great book by Polish and Jewish historians. It would consist of two parts. The first would present what was good in the life they shared. The second would be a straightforward accounting of the wrongs committed.
This mutual and shared examination of conscience would certainly be rejected with fury by the extremist elements on both sides, but it would have great significance for all those who feel an attachment to the common values based on the Ten Commandments and the Gospels.
The question of the mass murder in Jedwabne has not only a moral dimension that is an internal Polish affair. It could also strike a fatal blow to the good name of the Poland that belongs to the civilized world. Jan Gross's book will be published in English in New York on April 1. Simultaneously, the influential New York Times will publish excerpts in its book review section, which is widely read by the western intellectual elite. Since we demanded that the Russians acknowledge the Katyn atrocities and reveal the instigators and the circumstances of the murder of unarmed Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn forest and elsewhere, we cannot feel resentful to the author of Neighbors because, sixty years later, he revealed and documented the mass murder committed by Poles in Jedwabne, a murder that we would prefer not to know about and not to remember.
Historians have the right to carefully verify the documents and accounts provided by Gross. Some of his conclusions are polemical in character and also stirred my reservations. However, we do not have time to wait for the moment when each item has been placed under the researcher's microscope, tested, corrected or filled in. Fundamental Polish interests demand the initiation of immediate preventive action to limit the damage caused to Poland by the world reaction to the news of the massacre in Jedwabne.
Within the Jewish Diaspora, especially in America, there are-just as in Polish society-extremist, chauvinistic elements as well as others who believe that the cultivation of hatred and demands for revenge can be a dangerous boomerang. On the basis of my own personal experience, I am convinced that we have both friends and relentless enemies among the American Jews. The oldest and most influential Jewish organization in the United States, the American Jewish Committee headed by David Harris, supported the efforts to bring Poland into NATO in the most effective of ways.
At the other extreme, there are Jewish counterparts of belligerent Polish anti-Semites. They see Poles, all Poles, as the most anti-Semitic nation in the world. They seem not to perceive the symptoms of this social disease in Russia, Germany and other countries of our region. The danger exists that Gross's book will be exploited in ways not intended by the author, to promote the thesis that "every Pole sucked anti-Semitism with his mother's milk." I took these words of Shamir as an insult to the memory of my mother, who was deeply religious and who taught her sons from childhood that displaying contempt to another person because of his origin, religion, or race is a mortal sin that violates the injunction to love one's neighbor. Those Poles who have fought racial prejudices their entire life must also take Shamir's words the same way.
Accusing the Polish nation of collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the Holocaust is the same type of slander as the "Auschwitz lie" that denies the existence of extermination camps and gas chambers.
I spent the war in Poland, and I wandered all over the country. In the first year of the occupation, it was not only my Jewish friends and schoolmates whom I met. Supporting myself as a salesman, I often visited the small town of Konstantynów in Podlasie, which was populated in the majority by Hasidic Jews. They lived in deathly fear of the Germans, but did not fear the Poles. In the first year of the occupation, commercial relations with the Polish population enabled Jews to avoid hunger and to survive. Only later did szmalcownicy become a terror for Jews who were trying to conceal their origins. From documents in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, it appears that the pogrom in Jedwabne was not an isolated incident. There were others. It is worth noting, however, that they occurred in Lithuania, in the Białystok region, and in Eastern Galicia immediately after the flight of the Soviet occupier. Jedwabne was not a common phenomenon throughout Poland.
To conclude from the 1941 pogroms that the Holocaust was the common work of Poles and Germans is a libel. All who feel themselves to be Polish have the responsibility to defend themselves against such slander. The majority of Polish society might be charged with having an attitude of indifference to the extermination of the Jews - if not for the fact that the entire civilized world reacted to the fact of genocide with indifference and passivity. The difference is that Poles were eyewitnesses, defenseless witnesses living in constant fear for their lives and the lives of their families.
Adam Michnik correctly, and in my presence, warned Jews gathered at a New York synagogue that the defamation of Poland could provoke a secondary wave of anti-Semitism among people who had spent their entire lives fighting racial prejudices.
It is worth adding that any eruption of neo-anti-Semitism in Poland would cause terrible harm not to Jews-there are barely a few thousand of them in Poland-but to the position and the good name of Poland in the world. Certainly this was not Gross's intention when he revealed the crimes committed by the Jedwabne Poles. In order to avert this secondary anti-Semitism, it is necessary to place the tragedy of the Jews on the agenda of the PolishJewish dialogue, especially in the United States, now. Jan T. Gross ought to be involved on the Polish side, for a great deal depends on how he himself presents Neighbors to western readers.