It is difficult today to pinpoint with entire certainty when this all began. Perhaps it
was when the Jedwabne Jews published Yedwabne: History and Memorial Book,
containing a description of the tragedy of their hometown, or perhaps it was when Prof.
Jan T. Gross received a grant to study the 1939-1941 Bolshevik occupation of Poland's eastern marches and was given
access to materials kept at the Hoover Institution.
For Gross himself, the important date was 1998, when Agnieszka Arnold, at work on a
documentary film, showed him footage from Jedwabne. Prof. Andrzej Paczkowski also played
an essential role, by giving Gross access to documents from the Main Commission for the
Investigation of Crimes against the Polish Nation , although they were off-limits to
other researchers at the time, for which Gross especially thanks him.
It is certain, however, that the beginning was not the court case of 1949, when 15 men
indicted for the murder of the Jedwabne Jews (seven other suspects could not be located).
The basis of the trial was the account (or rather the accounts) by Szmul Wasersztajn.
Twelve Poles were sentenced in a pseudo-trial that lasted barely a day (there are obvious
parallels with the procedure followed in Kielce in 1946), but it did
not occur to anyone back then to accuse the Polish nation of playing a part in the
Holocaust. This comes as little surprise considering that Wasersztajn's account clearly
stated that the slaughter was carried out on orders issued by the German Gestapo on July
10, 1941, and under German supervision. The indictment also confirms this: "at the
behest of the German state authorities, they took part in the apprehension of about 1,200
people of Jewish nationality, who were then burned to death en masse by the Germans."
It would be difficult to assume that the authorities of the UB and the Stalinist courts
consciously aimed to clear the Poles and to falsely cast responsibility onto the Germans.
Anti-Semitism was rather being sniffed out everywhere at the time and used eagerly as a
pretext for repression. In this case, however, the evidence pointed primarily in the
direction of the Germans. Gross initially treated Wasersztajn's report similarly. It was
only later, as he writes, that he "watched raw footage for [a documentary film by
Agnieszka Arnold and] . . . realized that Wasersztajn has to be taken literally."
That was in 1998.
Two years later, Jewish and liberal circles were swept by a hysterical urge to prove that
the Poles were responsible for the crime of genocide committed against the Jews by the
Germans, for the Holocaust. This campaign was accompanied by lies that would have been
difficult to imagine just a short time ago, such as the following statement of Gross's:
"nobody was forced to kill the Jews . . . the so-called local population involved
in killings of Jews did so of its own free will," or that "it was in no
one's interest in Stalinist Poland to underscore Jewish wartime suffering at the hands of
the Poles," or that strikes in Łódź in 1946 after the "Kielce
pogrom" are "perfectly understandable as a sign of frustration that
one could no longer properly defend innocent Polish children threatened by the murderous
designs of the Jews." Poles who harbored Jews "continued to hide this
fact from their neighbors-all of them were not hated or feared as crypto-communists but
rather as embarrassing witnesses to crimes . . . [and] to the illicit benefits that many
continued to enjoy . . . ." Gross is thus undertaking a hate campaign directed
at Poles and Poland, declaring a journalistic and propaganda war on us. Why?
Perhaps a better reference point for understanding Gross's book is the political
mechanism connected with the Kielce affair. For years, the so-called "Kielce
pogrom" and later the "Kielce provocation" served as a key argument against
Poland and Poles. In recent years it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the
so-called "Kielce pogrom" was in essence a crime against Poles, committed by the
NKVD and the UB. An
essential, but still incompletely explained role was played by Jewish communists,
especially Luna Bristigerowa, who was then in charge of a UB department and was the
superior of the UB officer, Sobczyński, who supervised the unfolding of the
"pogrom". Jewish refugees suffered then, and their deaths served as a pretext to
persecute Poles fighting for independence and to unleash hysteria that induced Jews to
emigrate to Palestine. These goals were achieved, but in the 1990s knowledge about this
crime, committed by the Bolshevik occupation authorities, began to penetrate to public
awareness, despite the resistance of the Commission for the Investigation
of Crimes against the Polish Nation and of judicial bodies that cancelled legal
proceedings in the matter, calculating that the truth would never surface.
Hence when the myth of Polish anti-Semitism-previously fueled by stories about the
"Kielce pogrom"-ceased to be useful, it was decided to find a replacement. Is
the tragedy of the Jedwabne Jews to become such a tool? Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne
intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of
Poland? The creation of the Institute of National Remembrance
and access to previously unknown sources could soon reveal the horrifying scale of
anti-Polish activities. Perhaps, then, this is all about blocking that process or giving
it an "ideologically correct" form. And perhaps the goals are even more
prosaic-perhaps it is simply a matter of creating prerequisites for the recovery of the
property that belonged to the Jewish community murdered by the Germans on Polish soil?
The first publication on this subject appeared in the newspaper Rzeczpospolita
in May 2000, when, on the basis of the Memorial Book and the Wasersztajn account,
Andrzej Kaczyński lay the responsibility for the murder of nearly 1,500 Jews at the feet
of the Jedwabne Poles, accusing them of participation in the Holocaust. Protests from
right-wing Catholic quarters were of no avail, the community of professional historians
remained silent, and so the hate campaign spread even further. The position of the Polish
government is not clear to this day. In any case, several historians met on May 19, 2000,
at the initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the ministry's palace on Foksal
street in Warsaw. Their task was to formulate an official position on this issue. As the
newspaper Nasz Dziennik wrote,
"from the statements that were quoted in the press after that meeting, one could
arrive at the conclusion that the worst possible reaction on the part of the Polish
authorities and public opinion in this matter would be any possible attempt to
fundamentally undermine the credibility of the accounts presented in Gross's book or to
steer the discussion toward a search for the alleged instigators and beneficiaries of an
'anti-Polish campaign.'"
There was not long to wait for the results of such a position. First Jewish circles, and
then liberal ones, began calling loudly for the punishment of the Polish nation for its
crimes against the Jews. Stanisław Krajewski demands on behalf of the Jewish community in
Poland that the president, prime minister and Roman Catholic primate publicly admit the
"truth" about responsibility for the slaughter in Jedwabne. Jan
Nowak-Jeziorański advanced a similar view on the pages of Rzeczpospolita,
demanding an act of repentance from the Episcopate, the primate, and the prime minister in
the name of the entire nation, just as Chancellor Brandt did before the Ghetto monument in
Warsaw in the name of the German nation. Nowak equated the responsibility of Poles for
Jedwabne to the responsibility of the Russians for Katyń , thus adding
identification with the Bolshevik NKVD to the identification of the Poles with the Nazis.
This wasn't anything particularly new, because Jan Tomasz Gross, the author of the
anti-Polish accusation himself, closed his book with a hypothesis that the true origin of
communism in Poland should be sought in the activities of Polish anti-Semites, who
collectively supported the Soviet occupation after 1945!
Such a profusion of libelous accusations and absurdities would seem impossible in a
country that regained independence after 50 years of occupation directed by communists of
Jewish origin supporting Russian Bolshevism. It turns out not only that it is possible,
but even that these libelous accusations and absurdities are being propagated by most of
the media and, at a minimum, tolerated by the country's authorities. The only exception
turned out to be Professor Radoń, head of the Administrative Body of the Institute of National Remembrance,
who voiced a shy reminder that Professor Gross's book is more of a political newspaper
column than a historical work, if only because Gross disavowed in advance any search for
sources that could undermine his thesis about the principal responsibility of the Poles.
Hence Gross relies exclusively on reports of the Jedwabne Jews who were saved from the
Holocaust (thanks to Poles, after all) while omitting or downplaying any information about
the presence and decisive role of German military units. He performs similar contortions
in trying to convince his readers that the Jewish population in eastern Poland was not
involved in any particular way in support for the Soviet occupation authorities in
1939-41.
The third fundamental instance of Gross's dishonesty as a researcher is his thesis that
the origins of communism on Polish soil after 1944 should be sought in the anti-Semitism
of the Poles. It is obvious to any historian that Professor Gross's book does not hold up
to criticism in terms of methodology. Even Professor Tomasz Szarota alluded to this in Gazeta
Wyborcza, but that has not hindered these circles in the continuation of their
anti-Polish campaign.
In order to prop up his accusation, Gross proposes a true revolution in the historical
sciences. Up until now, historians were bound by strict critical rules in regard to their
sources. Thus there was an obligation to take a critical approach to each account, to
mutually corroborate the information obtained, and, first and foremost, there was an
obligation to take all known sources into account. This means that an author cannot freely
pick and choose from among existing reports those that suit his thesis better, but rather
has the obligation to take into consideration all the information whose existence is known
at a given time. Failing to exhaust the accessible sources disqualifies a study as a work
of history, and demotes it to the rank of historical or political journalism. That is
precisely the case here. Gross may not be aware of this, since he is a physicist and
sociologist by training and took up history thanks to the grants he received from the
Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. Just to be on the safe side, Gross announces in
his book the need for a "new approach to sources": "the starting premise in
appraisal of [survivors'] evidentiary contribution [should change]," he writes,
"from a priori critical to in principle affirmative." In short, when
studying the history of the Holocaust, the point of departure in analysis of reports by
surviving witnesses should be to trust their accounts, and not to seek to corroborate
their description of events. Given such a premise, in fact, the entire existing historical
oeuvre becomes useless and the events of the recent past can be written anew. And then it
won't be hard to prove the theses that Gross's book forwards: the Poles are responsible
for the Holocaust; the operation of the Nazi genocidal machine was underpinned by
traditional, Polish, backward, atavistic anti-Semitism; the Jews were in no special way
helpful to the Soviet occupation either in 1939 or in 1945 and, quite the contrary, were
its main victims; and the Soviet army and communist regime were supported by peasant and
small-town anti-Semitic masses who collaborated with every occupying authority - with the
Germans, the Russians, the communists-in short, THE POLES ARE GUILTY.
Despite appearances, Gross is not the originator either of this "methodology" or
of these theses. They have long been spread on a large scale by political commentaries in Gazeta
Wyborcza and the circle of historians connected with the paper. Among these historians
we must name Andrzej Paczkowski, thanks to whose kindness Gross had access to materials
revealing, for example, the names of communist agents, many of them still alive to this
day. Paczkowski has long spread precisely such a vision of communism: "Not
everything, rather very little can be explained by statements about 'outsiders,' 'the
Jews,' ' NKVD agents,' 'mercenaries'
or 'traitors.' Poles appeared in the role of victim and persecutor. . . . And it is truly
difficult today to say with full certainty on which side there were more of them."
Krystyna Kersten and Jerzy Holzer write similar articles. This is precisely what the
"Polish historical school" looks like today. Part of it willingly erects the
edifice of anti-Polish "historiosophy" while the rest remain timorously silent.
Only recently, on the pages of Rzeczpospolita, did there appear a lengthy article by Professor Tomasz Strzembosz, a distinguished researcher of recent Polish history and especially the period 1939-54. Strzembosz's article demonstrates the actual role of the Jewish population in eastern Poland in the years of the first Soviet occupation . The discussion to date, declares Strzembosz, "overlooks the most important fact: what happened in Jedwabne after the German army entered the area, i.e. who, when and in what circumstances carried out the mass murder of the Jewish population of Jedwabne." Strzembosz analyzes in depth the behavior of the Polish and Jewish populations in the years 1939-41, especially the initial and final periods of the first Soviet occupation. "The Jewish population," writes Strzembosz, "especially the young and the urban poor, participated en masse in greeting the entering [Soviet] army and in introducing the new order, even with guns in their hands. There are also thousands of testimonies to this: Polish, Jewish and Soviet, there are the reports of the Armed Combat Union commander-in-chief, Gen. Stefan Grot-Rowiecki, there is the report of courier Jan Karski ,there are accounts recorded during the war and in the postwar years. What is more, the "guards" and "militias" springing up like mushrooms right after the Soviet attack were in large part made up of Jews. Nor is this all. Jews committed acts of revolt against the Polish state, taking over towns and setting up revolutionary committees there, arresting and shooting representatives of the Polish state authorities, attacking smaller or even fairly large units of the Polish Army (as in Grodno). . It was armed collaboration, taking the side of the enemy, betrayal in the days of defeat."
So it was in the first period, when the Polish state was still defending itself, when
our army units were fighting and it seemed that not all was lost. The Jews then played the
role of a "fifth column." Later, things became much worse. Strzembosz cites the
conclusions of Dr. Marek Wierzbicki as to who implemented the Bolshevik terror - of course
the NKVD and, before that, the
Red Army, but the miscellaneous guard formations and militias played a decisive role on an
everyday basis. And their ranks were primarily filled with Jews. "Polish Jews in
civilian clothes, with red bands on their arms and armed with guns also play large part in
arrests and deportations. That was the most drastic thing, but for the Polish community
another glaring fact was the large number of Jews in all the Soviet agencies and
institutions. . in the period September-December 1939, numerous arrests took place of
those representatives of the Polish population who before the war filled high functions in
the administration and political structures of the Polish state or who were very involved
in community work. The local Jews, members of the temporary administration or militia,
provided extensive assistance to the Soviet authorities in tracking down and arresting
them."
Why did this happen? What were the roots of this terrible hatred toward Poland and the
cruel revenge on Poles? "It is true," writes Strzembosz, "things were not
going very well for the Jews in Poland. but still, Jews were not being deported to
Siberia, shot, sent to concentration camps, or killed by hunger and slave labor. If they
did not consider Poland to be their homeland, they still did not have to treat it as an
invader and join its mortal enemy in killing Polish soldiers and murdering Polish
civilians fleeing to the east. Nor did they have to take part in designating their
neighbors for deportation."
Strzembosz proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that events took precisely the same course
in Jedwabne itself. Here is one account from a resident of Jedwabne, Józef Rybicki,
summing up what happened in the town after it fell to the Soviets: "Jews who had put
up an archway greeted the Red Army. They changed the old town government and proposed a
new one drawn from the local population (Jews and communists). They arrested the police,
the teachers . . . They led the NKVD to apartments and houses and denounced Polish
patriots."
The description of the tortures inflicted upon Polish conspirators by the NKVD in Jedwabne
is shocking. The following is an account by Corporal Antoni B., a member of the
anti-Soviet underground who was turned in to the NKVD by Jews:
"they took me for interrogation, the investigating judge and the NKVD commander
and one torturer came, and they sat me on a stool next to a brick wall, then I look over
and one in civilian clothes took a stick from behind the stove like the kind in the walls
of our tents, that long and thick, and suddenly they threw me on the floor and stuffed my
cap in my mouth and started to beat me, I couldn't cry out because the judge sat on my
legs and the second one held me by the head and held the cap in my mouth, and I fought
back until I tore the cap to bits, and the third torturer beat me the whole time, I got
that stick more or less 30 times, and they stopped beating me and sat me on the stool by
the wall. I had long hair, and the senior lieutenant grabbed me by the hair and started to
beat my head against the wall, I thought that nothing would be left of my head, he tore
the whole clump of hair from my head . they threw me on the ground and started to beat me
with a hazel stick, they turned me from side to side and beat me, and in addition two of
them were still sitting on me and suffocating me and said that they would finish me off.
They kept beating me until they probably knew that I couldn't take anymore, so at last
they let me go. They beat me like a cat in a sack, and at the end they sat me on the stool
and beat me with the stick on the arms." (from W czterdziestym nas matko na
Sybir zesłali [In 1940, Mother, They Sent Us to Siberia], published by the
Solidarity Interfactory Structure, p. 82).
I took this text from a collection of accounts prepared years ago for print by Professor
Jan T. Gross. When writing his book about Jedwabne, Gross skips over the description of
Antoni B.'s arrest and torture, although he quotes other fragments of this account. Why?
The facts leave no room for doubt: the Jedwabne Jews, as in the entire territory occupied
by the Soviets, constituted the nuts and bolts of the machinery of repression. Up to the
last moment, they were delivering Polish patriots into the hands of the NKVD and preparing the next
deportation transports to Siberia.
Does this mean that Poles burned 1,500 Jedwabne Jews in the barn as revenge? Certain
accounts by surviving Jews indicate precisely this. At the same time, however, we know
that the German Einsatzgruppe B was
active in this area, carrying out murderous raids on Jews in the surrounding towns. We
also know that some sort of formation, called "the Gestapo" by Wasersztajn, was
in Jedwabne that fateful day, that the Germans had at their disposal the kerosene used to
set the barn ablaze, that German sentries were on duty around the town the whole time,
and, to top it off, that a German newsreel team was brought in to document the crime and
that the German gendarmerie supervised the burial of the corpses. There even exists a
description of the course of events, which Gross arbitrarily deems it false: "on the
critical day the German gendarmerie went with the Mayor and Secretary Wasilewski at their
head around the houses, driving the men out to guard the Jews, who had already been herded
onto the town square. They also came into my house and found my husband and, with strict
orders and threats, gun in hand, they drove my husband out onto the square."
The estimates of the numbers of Germans vary. Gross speaks of a dozen or so gendarmes and
a few dozen members of the Gestapo. The cook from a gendarmerie post, Ms.
Sokołowska, testifying at the trial recalled "On the critical day there were sixty
gestapo men, because I cooked dinner for them, and there were a lot of gendarmes because
they came from other outposts." It was probably on the basis of this account that
Prosecutor Monkiewicz ascertained that the slaughter was supervised by 232 German
gendarmerie who came to Jedwabne in a column of trucks.
Nevertheless, there has never been a serious inquiry to identify the Germans who planned
the atrocity, gave the orders, supervised their execution, and filmed it. The involvement
of Poles, although shocking, is definitely not equivalent to the involvement of Jewish
police who murdered their fellow Jews in the ghettos, delivered them into the hands of
their executioners, and drove them onto the Umschlagplatz . Those
who, instead of establishing facts, join in the campaign against the Polish nation by
trying to shoulder Poles with blame for the Holocaust under German occupation while
"forgetting" that the real perpetrators were the Germans, bring shame upon the
profession of historian. Prof. Strzembosz's article restores honor to Polish historians,
who previously maintained a cowardly silence in the face of the campaign against Poland
and the Poles. I would like to believe that there are also Righteous Ones among the Jews,
who have not succumbed to the pressure of the pervasive hatred toward Poland.