*** From [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Konrad M Lepecki)
The New York Times
April 8, 2001, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 7; Page 17; Column 1; Book Review Desk
HEADLINE: Hitler's Willing Executioners
BYLINE: By Steven Erlanger; Steven Erlanger is Prague bureau chief for The
Times.
Neighbors
The Destruction of the Jewish Community
in Jedwabne, Poland.
By Jan T. Gross.
Illustrated. 261 pp. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press. $19.95.
This small book is an important contribution to the literature of human
bestiality unleashed by war. "Neighbors" tells a story that has long been known
in Poland but one that has shocked the rest of the world and even, it seems,
the Poles themselves. In great but austere detail, Jan T. Gross, a Polish-born
historian who teaches at New York University, describes how "one day, in July
1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other
half."
On that day residents of Jedwabne, a little village about 85 miles northeast
of Warsaw, beat, bludgeoned and knifed 1,600 of their neighbors, Jews with whom
until then they had peacefully managed to share their poor existence. The ones
who weren't already dead they locked in a barn and burned. Only a handful of
the town's Jews escaped the slaughter. This was not a crazed and spontaneous
outbreak of rage. As Gross notes, the local people "knew what was coming ahead
of time," and some of them tried to warn Jewish friends. While the Germans who
had occupied Jedwabne encouraged and agreed to the slaughter, it was planned by
Polish officials, among them the mayor and the town council, and carried out by
Poles who knew what they intended to do. Still, even the town's butcher
couldn't watch.
The man who volunteered his barn for the burning, Bronislaw Sleszynski, was
rewarded later by the Germans for his good deed. They built him a new barn.
Once the Communists took over again after the war, the new barn was dismantled
by the local cooperative, and the lumber was used to renovate a mill -- once
owned by one of the village's murdered Jews.
A plaque in Jedwabne blamed the Gestapo and the Nazi occupation police for
the massacre, and the people of the town walked by it for decades, knowing that
it was a lie. Only recently, after this book was published in Poland, where it
caused an uproar of self-examination, soul-searching and resentment, has the
plaque been removed -- another family secret no longer tenable.
In fact, the story of the slaughter at Jedwabne was available in the
testimony given four years later by one of the survivors, Szmul Wasersztajn,
and in the records of a 1949 trial of 22 of Jedwabne's citizens for the murder
of the Jews. The story was told again in 1980, in a memorial book compiled by
the few other survivors, seven of whom were hidden by a local family. Gross,
almost reticent, cites long excerpts from these accounts, which are deeply
wrenching.
For many Poles, the story of Jedwabne has come as a revelation. They knew
they were victims of the Soviets and the Nazis, but they managed to believe,
like many Austrians, that they were only victims and never perpetrators. It
should be no great revelation to the rest of the world. There is manifold
evidence that the Germans, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and many others were
complicitous in the destruction of their Jewish neighbors. It is no secret that
many people participated in the destruction of their fellow human beings, and
it is surely no surprise that many of those who did not participate did nothing
to stop the slaughter, either because they could not or dared not.
But how widespread was this ultimate collaboration? In one of the book's
odder and more chilling notes, Gross cites testimony about other massacres of
Jews by Poles that took place in the five days before the Jedwabne killings, in
the nearby villages of Radzilow and Wasosz. In those two places, he suggests,
as many Jews were killed as in Jedwabne.
Gross has written more an essay than a history, a thoughtful, sometimes
oblique meditation on the Jedwabne affair. From time to time, he stretches for
meaning, but in general he is cautious and fair to the facts. He is
particularly concerned with Jedwabne's meaning for Poland and the already rich
history of the Holocaust. He dismisses the notion that somehow the history of
the Jews and their fate in Poland can be separated from the larger history of
the nation. Citing the important role Jews played in prewar Poland, he asks,
"How can the wiping out of one-third of its urban population be anything other
than a central issue of Poland's modern history?" He calls for "a new
historiography" in Poland that will acknowledge how "anti-Semitism polluted
whole patches of 20th-century Polish history and turned them into forbidden
subjects."
Gross also ponders the nature of village life, the generally correct if
distant prewar relationship between Jedwabne's Catholics and Jews, and the
mitigating circumstances of this strange war, when Poles were first subjected
to the Soviets and then the Nazis and then the Soviets again. A fascinating
aspect of the book, once its main and obvious theme has been absorbed, is the
instances of collaboration as armies advanced and retreated and peasants tried
to stay alive.
One of the main charges against Jedwabne's Jews was that they had
collaborated with the Soviets during their 20 months of rule before the Nazis
seized the region. While Gross shows that few in fact did so, the accusation of
collaboration became mixed with traditional anti-Semitism and German
encouragement to create the fever that led to the massacre. Where Gross may
stretch too far, given his evidence, is when he suggests that the Poles who
collaborated with the Germans were prime material for collaborating later with
the Communists, and consequently that anti-Semites, not Jews, were the ones
"instrumental in establishing the Communist regime in Poland after the war."
That is a Polish debate about responsibility that goes beyond this little book.
Gross also proposes that those very "communities where Jews had been
murdered by local inhabitants during the war were especially vulnerable to
Sovietization." Perhaps. But it would be more useful first, given the theme of
"Neighbors," to know how many communities there were in Poland where Jews were
murdered by local inhabitants during the war. If Polish responsibility during
the Holocaust is the issue, then surely that is the question, and this fine,
careful book about the awful massacre in Jedwabne is only the beginning of an
answer.
--
Konrad M. Lepecki
+ + + + + + + + + + + +
http://members.tripod.com/~tytus/Welcome.html
===============================================================
Lista 'Forum Zagraniczne' Administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archiwum: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
