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(More customer reviews)Jan Tomasz Gross' book "Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne" was first published in Poland in early 2000 (under the Polish title `Sasiedzi: Historia Zaglady Zydowskiego Miasteczka'), and appeared in 2001 in both American (English-language) and German editions. `Neighbors' describes how a massacre of a number believed to be 1,600 Jews on July 10, 1941, in the village of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland, which had hitherto been generally believed to be carried out by the German military, was actually carried out with Polish participation - according to Gross' account, it was organized and carried out by Poles, with German acquiescence.
`Neighbors' was spectacularly successful in provoking an intensive two-year debate in Poland on the subject of Polish-Jewish relations. An excellent collection of papers from that debate, in English translation, has now been published in the US under the title `The Neighbors Respond' edited by Joanna Michlic and Professor Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University. `The Neighbors Respond' (henceforth referred to as `NR') is not a rebuttal to `Neighbors', but examines the subject from many viewpoints - including a biting dissection of anti-Semitism in its Polish form by a Polish sociologist, Hanna Swida-Ziemba (NR, pages 103 - 113). Those who want to better understand the subject, including what anti-Semitism was, and was not, in Poland, will learn far more - and in far greater depth - from `The Neighbors Respond' than from reading `Neighbors' alone.
`The Neighbors Respond' does not attempt to summarize all that is now known about the Jedwabne massacre. Readers who want to understand the debate better may find the following useful.
The accusation that Poles were responsible for the Jedwabne massacre had an enormous impact on Polish public opinion. A Polish governmental commission, the Institute of National Memory (Instytut Pamieci Narodowej, IPN) was charged with conducting a detailed investigation. IPN's report was made public on July 9th, 2002. IPN's findings were detailed in a 1500 page two-volume study entitled `Wokol Jedwabnego' which unfortunately is presently available only in Polish. The number of American academics who read Polish is negligible, except for those of Polish descent, and the majority of Americans who refer to `the Polish report' have not read any of it.
An ACCURATE English-language version of IPN's principal findings, about 3 pages long, can be found on the Internet by going to `The Jedwabne Tragedy' at Buffalo University's `info-Poland' website, and then to `Jedwabne, July 10th, 1941: an interview with Prof. Pawel Machcewicz.' This also provides links to a host of discussion papers and informative articles. Unfortunately, the most extensive information is available only in Polish, but a large amount is in English. Notably, the Polish Catholic magazine `Wiez', offers on the Web a selection of articles by both Polish and Jewish authors, all in English, under the title `Thou Shalt Not Kill: Poles on Jedwabne.'
One American commentator has described IPN's findings as follows: "a (Polish) government commission determined that not only did Gross get the story right, but...."This is not accurate. IPN, after interviewing 98 persons of whom about one-third were first-hand witnesses of at least some part of the events, concluded that "approximately at least forty men" were Polish perpetrators in the murder (but not "one half of the town" as stated on the fly-leaf of `Neighbors', which would have required over one thousand participants; Gross himself, in `Neighbors,' claims to have ninety-two names of Polish participants). Whether ninety-two according to Gross or "at least forty" in IPN's findings, the number of Polish participants in the Jedwabne massacre was not one-half of the village, but closer to one-twentieth.
IPN's findings do not lessen the guilt of those Poles who willingly participated in the massacre. But IPN's findings imply that Gross' presentation of the Germans as a moderating influence who tried to hold back the Poles, together with Gross' discussions of supposedly wider implications, is a complete distortion.
IPN's investigation did not corroborate Gross' account in several important respects. I will summarize only two of the more significant:
(1) "Jedwabne's 1,600 Jews" were murdered (this statement in Gross' `Neighbors' has been repeated many times). In fact, Jedwabne in 1941 did not have 1,600 Jews. An IPN historian, Jan Jerzy Milewski, historian of the Bialystok Division of the Institute of National Memory, found a 1940 Soviet NKVD document in the archive in Grodno showing that at that time in Jedwabne there were 562 Jews. Thus a year before the massacre, a Soviet census found the Jewish population of Jedwabne to be approximately one-third the number given by Jan T. Gross in `Neighbors'.
IPN's exhumation of the Jedwabne victims was interrupted at the request of the invited supervising Jewish rabbi that the remains of the victims not be further disturbed. The best estimate of IPN's chief forensic investigator, Prof. Andrzej Kola, was that there were between 300 and 400 victims. IPN concluded: `The figure of 1,600 victims or so seems highly unlikely, and it was not confirmed in the course of the investigation.'
(2) `The Germans' direct participation in the mass murder.....was limited, pretty much, to their taking pictures' (Jan T. Gross, `Neighbors'). This is false. In reality, IPN found, the day began "with the herding of Poles to the town square, which was done, according to witnesses, jointly by the German gendarmes, i.e. policemen and the people from the collaborating administration. In the testimonials there is mention of the fact that German policemen hit some of the Jedwabne Poles in the face with rifle butts or their hands, which is evidence that some of them did not want to go to the town square." The Germans then distributed bats and clubs to the Poles, for use as weapons against the Jews. When Jews were brought to the town square and ordered to destroy the statue of Lenin, according to IPN it was the Germans who were in charge.
The Germans were not in Jedwabne just as photographers, as Gross would have readers believe. The Germans were in Jedwabne as organizers.
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