Since May of last year I have been following with great attention the discussion
on the "Jedwabne issue." I have voiced my opinion on it a few times myself. The
issue is being discussed not only in the Polish media. Articles on the events at Jedwabne
started appearing in foreign newspapers before foreign editions of Jan T. Gross's book
called Neighbors have been published.
The historians' input to this discussion is visible, but it is not dominant. A certain
Polish German-studies specialist is misleading the German public, informing the readers of
the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that we are dealing here with einem
polnischen Historikerstreit [a Polish historians' controversy]. In reality, a public
debate is being held in Poland-stirred up by Gross's text and successive opinions
expressed by partakers in the discussion-and who knows, perhaps it even deserves to be
labeled as national debate. Scientists, journalists, publicists, writers, politicians, and
clergymen are participating in this discussion, as well as ordinary people who send
letters to editors with their own comments and thoughts. When I speak of a national
debate, I also mean that the events at Jedwabne have become the subject of heated debates
among members of Polish families, among friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
When reading some newspaper articles written by some participants in the discussion on
Jedwabne, I feel sometimes not only that we-the historians-are redundant, but also that
our work, the objective of which is to determine all the circumstances and events
preceding the extermination of Jedwabne Jews on 10th July 1941, is starting to
be treated as an embarrassing attempt to lessen the crime committed by the Polish
inhabitants of this town against their Jewish neighbors.
One of my polemicists implies that in my discussion on Gross's book I point at
"missing details which . . . should be taken into account". The following
assertion follows: "It seems that all these details are part of the sphere of
'wishful thinking.'" Another partaker in the discussion expresses a similar opinion:
"We may, of course, continue to sidestep the issue. We may say it is too early, that
reports are unclear, that there is no exact count of the murderers or the victims, that
one set of archives or another still needs to be investigated. Investigation is always
worthwhile; it should have been done many years ago, but they will not change a thing. The
truth will not become any more pleasant than it is now, and sooner or later we are going
to have to deal with it".
Here is my answer: many, a great many details which Gross did not include or which it was
possible to ascertain after his book was published, are historical facts and not part of
any "wishful thinking" mandated by any "obsession of innocence" among
Polish researchers. Criticizing source materials or querying archives, placing events at
Jedwabne in the broader context of the extermination of the Jewish population in
territories occupied by Germans after June 22, 1941, as well as taking antecedents into
account, i.e. the thirties and the period of Soviet occupation-this is not evasion!
When I read that "they will not change a thing," I wonder if there is any sense
at all in my continuing to work as a historian. On that same principle, one can also
question the justification of the all-new investigation of the subject being carried out
by the Institute of National Remembrance.
Jan Tomasz Gross writes in his book that: "At the time the overall undisputed
bosses over life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans," and elsewhere he adds:
"What we would like to know, however, with as much precision as possible, is this:
What specific role did the Germans play in the implementation of the massacre?"
Unfortunately, despite these declarations, we learn little from this book about the
Germans who were present in Jedwabne.
As I write this text, I still have no access to full documentation concerning the
realization of the first stage of Endlösung in the
Province of Bia³ystok in the summer of 1941. We know that police battalions No. 309, 316,
322, special operational groups of the Sipo and SD, and probably some Wehrmacht
squads participated in these criminal acts, along with, unfortunately, local
civilians. I suppose, although I am not able to verify it yet, that the events which took
place in W±sosz (July 5), Radzi³ów (July 7), and Jedwabne (July 10) are connected to
the activities of Einsatzkommando 8
(EK8), commanded by SS-Sturmbannführer Bradfisch, which was a part of Einsatzgruppe B,
commanded by SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, and which arrived in Bia³ystok on
July 1, or with the special Kommando Bialystok, of which we still know very little,
which was commanded by SS-Hauptsturmführer Wolfgang Birkner from the Warsaw
Gestapo. This latter formation was established as a result of an agreement between the
Sipo and SD chief Reinhard Heydrich and his representative in the General Government, SS-Brigadeführer
Eberhard Schöngarth. Birkner's squad left Warsaw on July 3, 1941.
One of the tasks of Einsatzgruppen was to organize the so-called Selbstreinigungsaktionen
[self-cleansing actions], after June 22. This mainly involved "initiating"
pogroms against the Jewish population, which were supposed to create an impression
"that it was the local population which out of its own initiative took the first
steps as a natural reaction to decades of Jewish oppression and to the communist
terror." In a report dated October 15, 1941 by the commander of Einsatzgruppe A,
stationed in Lithuania, we read: "It was quite significant to create certain facts
that would be possible to be proved in the future which would demonstrate that the
liberated populace resorted to the most abrupt measures against Bolshevik and Jewish
opponents, whereas orders given by the Germans would not be identifiable"
[emphasis added - T.S.].
With regards to using Poles in these "self-cleansing" operations, the idea came
from the commander of the 17th German Army operating in the vicinity of Lwów at the end
of June 1941 (his name was General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, from February 1942 Militärbefehlshaber
in France, then member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy, hanged in Plötzensee prison on
August 30, 1944). The proposal reached Reinhard Heydrich, who, on July 1, 1941 ordered
commanders of four Einsatzgruppen to do the following:
"Poles residing in the newly-occupied Polish territories may be expected, on the
basis of their experiences, to be anti-communist and also anti-Jewish. It is obvious that
the cleansing activities have to extend first of all to the Bolsheviks and the Jews. As
for the Polish intelligentsia and others, decisions can be taken later, unless there is a
special reason for taking action in individual cases considered to be dangerous. It is
therefore obvious that such Poles need not be included in the cleansing action, especially
as they are of great importance as elements to initiate pogroms and for obtaining
information. (This depends, of course, on local conditions)."
We may also assume that this order, through official channels, reached the above-mentioned
commanders of EK8 and Sonderkommando Bialystok, whose names are not
mentioned in Gross's book. If Wolfgang Birkner, like the commander of EK3 operating
in Lithuania, Karl Jäger, had survived the war and were able to be interrogated, then we
would know a lot more about the events of the first ten days of July 1941 in the Province
of Bia³ystok. Birkner was killed in the Pomorze Province on March 24, 1945 and-if I am
not mistaken-it has not been possible to obtain statements from any of his subordinates. I
know, however, that Bradfisch was tried before a court in the Federal Republic of Germany.
In the weekly magazine Kontakty of £om¿a, in 1988-twelve years before Gross's
book appeared-a report on Jedwabne, written by Danuta and Aleksander Wroniszewski, was
published. It describes the crime committed there by the Poles. Here, for the first time,
voluminous fragments of Szmul Wasersztajn's 1945 testimonies were published. It is
surprising that this report did not reverberate throughout the nation, and that Jan Tomasz
Gross did not get hold of it (in the USA, almost no one took notice of the 1980
publication of Yedwabne: History and Memorial Book). One of the interlocutors of
the Wroniszewskis, a witness to the events, Jan S., quotes the words said to him on the
morning of July 10, 1941 by mayor Marian Karolak, the central figure in the pogrom soon to
be commenced: "You know, today they are going to either burn them or shoot
them". There is not a shadow of a doubt that he was referring to the Germans and
their Jewish victims.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the Poles did the "dirty work" for the
Germans. Their participation in the extermination of the Jews was condemned by the
clandestine press-one of the fundamental media channels at the disposal of the Polish Underground State. In
the publication Prawda [The Truth], an organ of the secret Catholic organization
called the Front for the Rebirth of Poland (the current Polish Minister of Foreign
Affairs, W³adys³aw Bartoszewski, was one of those involved), in the May 1942 issue, (the
second issue), we read: "We must take all possible steps to prevent a similar
disgrace recurring. We must make people aware that they are becoming Herod's myrmidons, we
must condemn it in the secret press, we must appeal to the people to boycott the butchers,
we must threaten and foresee severe legal actions against the murderers by the courts of
the free Republic of Poland. So far no one is taking up this issue; the press is
timorously stifled, and the evil is spreading like an epidemic, crime is turning into a
habit. Under no circumstances can we allow for the plague of sadism, which turns people
into animals, to spread to us." Unfortunately this could not be prevented.
As a historian, I express the view that, in order to explain certain events, it is
always good to say what happened before. Of course, one may ask how far back it is
necessary to go. I found out recently that many "stiletto wielders" were
recruited in Jedwabne for the [Polish - ed.] national organization in the January Uprising
of 1863, and their names later appeared on lists of Siberian exiles. In the period between
the First and Second World Wars, the marshes of the Biebrza-where it was possible to hide
out of the reach of the police-favored the proliferation of crime in the area. At the same
time, the Province of £om¿a was an area of significant influence of the National Democracy movement
and the very radical youth wings allied with it.
When we think about the late thirties in Poland, there are associations with the
increasing wave of anti-Semitism, "ghetto benches" at educational institutions,
and anti-Jewish excesses. Reflections that the Second Polish Republic was a
nation of laws, actively opposed to the activities of the extreme right wing, are much
less prominent. In the effort to ensure order, there was an effort to suppress anti-Jewish
incidents, and to bring agitators who exacerbated nationalistic tensions, including
Catholic priests, to justice. In the Bereza Kartuska camp, members of the far-right
opposition were imprisoned alongside those from the left.
We surely forget too often that the Sanacja governments in
Poland were considered by nationalist groups to be centers of Jewish and Masonic influence
and obstacles to the process of creating a Catholic Polish "national state." In
the view of the nationalists, these were not governments capable of carrying out the
slogan "Jews to Madagascar." It was the German occupation regime that suddenly
created an opportunity to eliminate the "foreign element."
In areas that were under Soviet control from 1939 to 1941, Polish-Jewish conflicts
intensified greatly. In Neighbors, Gross cites the following message sent from
Lwów to London on December 8, 1939: "Jews are so horribly persecuting the Poles
and everything that is connected to Poland under the Soviet occupation . . . that at the
first opportunity all the Poles, from old men to women and children, will take such a
horrible revenge on them as no anti-Semite has ever imagined possible" [printed
in a footnote in the American edition of Neighbors - trans.]. Jan T. Gross comments
on this passage: "As a description of reality this text was wrong, but as a
forecast of things to come it was prescient."
In my opinion, unfortunately, the "description of reality" truly reflected the
prevailing atmosphere. The same atmosphere in the territory occupied by the Soviets was
documented by Jan Karski, who wrote in his
January 1940 report that "In principle all Poles are embittered and disappointed with
the Jews-the majority (mostly young people of course) is literally waiting for an
opportunity to wreak 'bloody vengeance.'"
From the point of view of a researcher of national stereotypes, one can wonder how the
"issue of Jedwabne" will influence the historical consciousness of the Polish
populace and the Poles' own image of themselves, as well as how information about a crime
committed 60 years ago will influence today's image of Poland and Poles as seen from
abroad.
It is undisputable that, between 1945 and the time when Poland regained full sovereignty
in 1989, the portrait of our times, and particularly the most tragic period, World War II
as an age of heroes and martyrs served-as the tales of Sienkiewicz once did-"to
strengthen hearts". Everything that called to mind our sins, shameful or disgraceful
deeds, clashed with that idealized picture of the past. The censorship in effect in Poland
at that time did not allow, indeed, for the "blank spaces" to be filled in. That
is, it did not permit writing about injustice done to us by our neighbors from the East (I
also would like to point out that, after the [communist - ed.] German Democratic Republic
was formed, it was forbidden to write or speak of the German occupation and German crimes,
but only to use the corresponding terms "Nazi occupation" and "Nazi
crimes"), but the same censorship did not allow Poles to "foul their own
nest".
In 1990, censorship disappeared and the Poles have slowly been getting rid of their
complexes and are becoming a normal nation, in the history of which, as in the history of
any nation, there are events to be proud of and events to be ashamed of. Signs of the
courage to talk about the evil and painful pages in our history and of a willingness to
discover the truth about it now are books that are appearing in Poland, such as a
two-volume (so far) edition of sources Niemcy w Polsce 1945-1950 [Germans in Poland
1945-1950], Zemsta ofiar [Revenge of the Victims] by Helga Hirsch, or Neighbors
by Jan T. Gross.
Confessing to the sins that were committed, and even the crimes committed by Polish hands,
modern Poles have a right to be proud of having been the first ones to say no to Hitler in
1939, of phenomena such as the Polish Underground State and
its armed forces-the Home Army, as well as two
uprisings (since the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto was the work of Polish Jews), are
something to be proud of, along with the fact that, of the approximately 16,600 people
awarded the Righteous among the Nations of the World medal, almost one in three is a
compatriot of ours.
At the same time, the world should remember that, although without a doubt the Jews
suffered the most, the Poles also suffered. Almost every Polish family lost someone close
in World War Two as a victim of one of the two totalitarian systems. Poland emerged from
the wartime conflagration as a country of ruins and devastation, a country betrayed
by its Western Allies and given over to foreign rule.
Just recently, I had the opportunity to take a look at results of opinion polls carried
out in the last two years in a few European countries, commissioned by the Polish
Institute for Public Affairs. In connection with our efforts to become a member of the
European Union, the polls were supposed to show how Poles and Poland are perceived in
Austria, Spain, Sweden, France, and Germany. The results are not promising.
It turns out that the world not only does not remember our heroism and martyrdom during
World War Two, but has also forgotten-so quickly-the contribution of Poland's Solidarno¶æ
movement to overthrowing the communist regimes not just in Poland but in the entire Soviet
bloc. Instead of obvious Polish successes in the field of political and economic
transformation, our country and our people are associated with backwardness and
anti-Semitism. Let's not have any illusions: information about crimes committed by Poles
60 years ago will only strengthen long-established stereotypes, and will worsen our
not-very-positive image in the world.
I am not saying that this was the intention of the author of Neighbors. However,
I am convinced that such intentions are fodder for foreign journalists and publicists, for
whom the "Jedwabne affair" provides an opportunity to show Poland and Poles in
the worst possible light. How else can you explain the behavior of the Frenchwoman who put
the following title on an article published on December 1, 2000 in the Libération:
"55 ans après, et toujours le refus d'affronter son passé. Jedwabno (sic!), le
trou de mémoire polonais" [55 Years Later and Still Refusing to Confront the
Past: Jedwabno, a Gap in Poland's Memory].
Neither the title nor the content of the article, which takes up two columns, upsets me
much. The thing that I consider most perfidious is the placing in the text a map of our
country sent by an envoyée spéciale from Warsaw, showing the outline of our
country with only three cities on it: the capital, Jedwabne and Kielce. And consider that, in
the most recent public opinion poll, dated October 2000, the French placed second when
Poles were asked which nations they had the warmest feelings towards.
Yet what is to be done about our poor anti-Semitism, which still exists and still makes
itself felt? What to do with a phenomenon that feeds on human stupidity, but is also
nourished by those who use it to attain their political goals? What to do so that those
distasteful and disgraceful slogans and graffiti disappear from our streets? How to
achieve a state in which each anti-Semitic statement made in Poland is immediately
condemned by listeners and readers? How to achieve a state in which each Polish
anti-Semite finally understands that he is committing a sin by violating the moral norms
that apply to a member of a Catholic community? If Neighbors leads to a
spiritual shock in Poland, then it will do us a great favor.
I remember that many years ago, during a televised discussion, my Ph.D. adviser, the late
Prof. Franciszek Ryszka, was asked how to eliminate anti-Semitism in Poland. He answered
succinctly: "Stop being an anti-Semite!"