*** From [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Konrad M Lepecki)
The New Republic
APRIL 9, 2001 / APRIL 16, 2001
SECTION: Pg. 36
HEADLINE: The Murder of Memory
BYLINE: Jaroslaw Anders
Neighbors: The Destruction of the
Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
by Jan T. Gross
(Princeton University Press, 261 pp., $19.95)
Jaroslaw Anders is a Polish writer living in Washington, D.C. He writes
frequently on Eastern European subjects.
I.
Poles of my generation, born around 1950, usually remember the moment when
they learned of the existence useful for their purposes.
On July 10, 1941, the Germans called a meeting with the Jedwabne
authorities. The Poles apparently agreed to help the Germans round up Jews, and
to guard them in the town's marketplace. It seems that the locals who reported
for the job did so willingly. There were also volunteers from neighboring
villages, who came to town in their horse-drawn carts. Then things got out of
hand. During the round-up Jews were beaten and humiliated, then savagely
tortured, and finally killed with knives, stakes, iron pipes, and stones. (The
Germans refused to supply the Poles with firearms.) Those who tried to escape
were chased on horseback and dragged back. Some victims were mutilated and
dismembered, or buried alive. There was at least one reported rape. A witness
testified that a group of men played ball with the severed head of a girl. A
rabbi was ordered to march around with a red flag. At some point during the
pandemonium, a musical ensemble was rustled up to drown out the screams of the
victims. Finally those who were still able to walk were marched through the
town, packed into a barn, and burned alive.
Who did all this? The answer, writes Gross, is that "half of the population
of a small East European town murdered the other half--some 1,600 men, women,
and children." In various sources ninety-two participants were identified by
name, and according to Gross's calculations, they constituted roughly 50
percent of the adult male Polish population of Jedwabne. Most of them must have
been average citizens of this poor, deeply provincial part of Poland:
In Jedwabne ordinary Poles slaughtered the Jews, very much as ordinary
Germans from the Ordnungspolizei Battalion no. 101 did in Jozefow, as
documented in Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. They were men of all ages
and of different professions; entire families on occasion, fathers and sons
acting in concert; good citizens, one is tempted to say (if sarcasm were not
out of place, given the hideousness of their deeds), who heeded the call of
municipal authorities. And what the Jews saw, to their horror and, I dare say,
incomprehension, were familiar faces. Not anonymous men in uniform, cogs in a
war machine, agents carrying out orders, but their own neighbors, who chose to
kill and were engaged in a bloody pogrom--willing executioners.
Germans were present, too, but as amused witnesses, not as active
participants. They mixed with the crowd, or stood on the sidelines taking
photographs and shooting films. Nobody has discovered those obscene materials,
but Gross believes that they may still exist, and so one day we may view the
horror with our own eyes.
But there is no dearth of other documentation, and much of it must have been
known of for years. The story of Jedwabne was told immediately after the war by
Szmul Wasersztajn, one of several Jews saved by Antonina Wyrzykowska, a Polish
woman who was one of the very few "righteous gentiles" from this area.
Wasersztajn's testimony was deposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in
Wanist regime. He proposes that "communities where Jews had been murdered by
local inhabitants during the war were especially vulnerable to sovietization."
For totalitarianism always needs a degree of social atomization, the breakdown
of basic human bonds of solidarity and trust. Towns and villages where
anti-Semitism was rampant, and where some people had blood on their hands, were
already in a state of moral disintegration. Members of such communities were
easily blackmailed, controlled, set against their kin. Should this hypothesis
be correct, Gross says, one could posit that, contrary to Polish conventional
wisdom, "anti-Semites rather than Jews were instrumental in establishing the
Communist regime in Poland after the war."
Such truths are especially difficult to accept for a nation in transition
such as Poland today, struggling to achieve the status of equal partner in the
global community. Perhaps that is why so many people, even those who accepted
not only Gross's historical account of events but also its moral meaning,
expressed regret that Neighbors is being published in the West, where it could
irreparably damage Poland's image. It could even provoke an anti-Polish
campaign, they warned, or a new brand of historical revisionism, in which Poles
would be presented together with Germans as jointly responsible for the
Holocaust. This camp included Jan Nowak-Jeziora*nski, former director of the
Polish service of Radio Free Europe and one of the most respected leaders of
the Polish community in America. While stating that Poles should face the
horror of Jedwabne squarely and should resist the temptation to look for moral
loopholes, Nowak-Jeziora*nski warned nevertheless that there exist among
Western Jews, especially American Jews, " extreme chauvinists and sworn enemies
of Poland, who equal in their rancor Polish militant anti-Semites." Such Jews,
Nowak-Jeziora*nski and many others argued, may use Gross's book as proof that
Poles are even more anti-Semitic than Germans or Russians.
So even the apologies and the public gestures of contrition that surfaced in
Polish society were mixed with old stereotypes of hate-filled Jews waiting for
the opportunity to exonerate the Germans and to blame the Holocaust on the
Poles. But this endless obsession about "image" disguises the true problem that
Gross's book poses for Poles. What really matters is not how others view them,
but how they must view themselves. Gross is right to suggest that the whole
sphere of PolishJewish relations simply did not fit into the established Polish
narrative of innocent, heroic suffering. "The memory, indeed the symbolism, of
collective, national martyrology during the Second World War," he writes, "is
paramount for the self-understanding of Polish society in the twentieth
century." Poles want to regard their experience during the war as a direct
continuation of a centuries-old pattern of noble resistance to foreign
oppression--as the romantic epic of a noble nation struggling against barbarian
hordes.
It is a rather simple narrative, with the roles of villains and heroes
neatly defined and quickly recognizable. Conflicts are easily divided into "
us" and "them," the forces of good and the forces of evil. And there are no
third parties or other complicating factors: whatever is not "us" and not "
them" is incidental, a footnote at best. But the narrative proved too simple to
flourish unchallenged by reality. While re-living this mythic drama during
World War II and the German occupation, the Poles encountered something both
unexpected and deeply disorienting--something that certainly did not fit the
pattern. Simultaneous with their own immense suffering, they beheld the
annihilation of another people.
It is as if two wars were taking place in the same geographical area: a war
against the Poles and a war against the Jews. They were separate wars, and yet
they became entangled in an uncanny tapestry of human fates. And to complicate
things even further, the "other" victims were a people about whom the Poles had
always had ambiguous feelings. Indeed, they were a people whose
disappearance--though certainly not in such a brutal and horrifying way--many
Poles openly desired.
We do not know, of course, how this complication imprinted itself on the
minds of average Poles. From what we do know, it is possible to conclude that
between the heroism of some and the wickedness of others there stretched a vast
sea of moral and emotional opacity, of dim and contradictory feelings, of
callousness, contempt, compassion, denial, guilt; of actions and inactions
whose motives were equally obscure and unnamable. Testimonies of Jewish
survivors in Poland--and those who survived in Poland owed their survival to
the assistance of Poles--often mention the hesitation with which they
approached even those Poles whom they considered their friends before the war,
and the strange misgivings that they felt about those who risked their lives
for them. Poles sometimes call it a lack of gratitude, or "Jewish over-
sensitivity"; but in those days everything must have looked twisted, clouded,
unintelligible. Perhaps even Poles saw themselves as strange, mysterious,
unknowable--not at all like the bright and simple nation that they knew from
their prayer books and their national legends.
The old narrative was broken; and this should have marked the end of
innocence, and the beginning of maturity. But the romantic legend of Poland was
revived after the war. After all, Poland was once again in bondage, and once
again there was a demand for myths about a nation that, by the strength of its
own purity, would triumph at last. We can never know this with any certainty,
but it is at least possible that the zone of silence about Poles and Jews and
all that had happened and was happening between them was conceived and
constructed as a dam against the dimension of Polish experience that could
undermine the cherished and protective myth.
But now the time of maturity has truly come. We are three generations away
from the war, and the Polish nation really has survived. Political freedom
begets the moral obligation of intellectual freedom. Today's Poles have no need
to feel that they are guilty of the sins of their grandfathers. And collective
apologies, which some have suggested, seem rather meaningless. We know that
Polish history was not only about anti-Semitism, and that even the history of
Polish-Jewish cohabitation in Poland cannot be reduced to a one- dimensional
chronicle of unhappiness. But the obstacle has to be surmounted, somehow.
Gross's book has proved, among other things, that the existence of the
silent zone is more troubling to Poles than to anyone else. It is a constant
moral and social irritant, a cause of pointless recriminations and irrational
fears. As Gross writes at the end of his book, the history of a nation is a
biography in which everything connects with everything else:
And if at some point in this collective biography a big lie is situated,
then everything that comes afterward will be devoid of authenticity and laced
with fear of discovery. And instead of living their own lives, members of such
a community will be suspiciously glancing over their shoulders, trying to guess
what others think about what they are doing. They will keep diverting attention
from shameful episodes buried in the past and go on " defending Poland's good
name," no matter what. They will take all setbacks and difficulties to be a
consequence of deliberate enemy conspiracies. Poland is not an exception in
this respect among European countries. And like several other nations, in order
to reclaim its own past, Poland will have to tell its past to itself anew.
With the appearance of this extraordinary book, the telling has finally
begun.
--
Konrad M. Lepecki
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