Reflections on the Jedwabne Debate
by Professor Israel Gutman

Page of Testimony from Jedwabne

For several decades following WWII, the subject of the treatment of the Poles towards the Jews during the Holocaust was cloaked in a conspiracy of silence.

It was not until 1987, with the publication of Jan Bloński's groundbreaking essay "Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto," in Tygodnik Powszechny, that the taboo was lifted and the subject entered the public arena.

Bloński wrote about the shared guilt of the countries and peoples of Europe for the Holocaust, stressing that this guilt should be expressed with particular force in Poland, a country in which so many Jews lived for so many centuries. He touched upon this painful reality without hesitation, but he also expressed relief that the worst evil had passed Poland by: "When one reads what people wrote about the Jews before the war, how much hatred there was in Polish society, one often wonders how it is that words were never followed by deeds. Well, they were not (or were seldom) followed by deeds."

That is what Bloński thought, and that is also what many friends of Poland thought until recently. In light of the 2001 publication of Polish historian, Professor Jan Thomasz Gross's Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, which exposed the 10 July 1941 massacre of Jews in the northeastern Polish town of Jedwabne at the hands of their Polish neighbors (and not as previously thought at the hand of the Nazis), one can no longer claim that genocide was alien to the Poles during the Holocaust.

According to Gross's account, which was assembled from survivor testimonies, postwar trial transcripts, and a memorial book, the 1,600 Jewish inhabitants of the 200-year-old market town of 2,500 people were ordered to the town square by the town's mayor, Marian Karolak, for the ostensible purpose of cleaning up the grounds. Once assembled, the Polish townspeople began to chase their Jewish neighbors throughout the streets, butchering them to death with, among other implements, stones, clubs, whips, and knives. The majority of Jews were then taken to a nearby barn were they were forced inside and burned alive.

Page of Testimony from Jedwabne

The massacre at Jedwabne clearly exceeds the pattern of universal indifference or marginal deviation. This is the murder of over 60 percent of the inhabitants of an impoverished town by their compatriots and neighbors with whom the victims had lived for generations. This massacre¾committed only because the victims were Jews¾is an unheard of, incomprehensible atrocity. The tools and the methods by which mass murder was committed against defenseless people, completely at the mercy of their tormentors, illustrate an incredible breakdown of humanity.

So how was this atrocity possible, and what was the origin of so much pent-up fury and bloodlust?  And finally: How is it that the murder of some 1,600 people in the heart of a town has stunned us 60 years after the event, like an unexpected archeological discovery?

Knowledge of the mass murder committed in Jedwabne is an enormous shock to Poles, one that clashes with their national myth about the war years. The continuing series of articles in the press, the public debates and discussions, have concentrated not solely on Jedwabne, but also on a wide range of issues such as antisemitism in Poland, Polish-Jewish relations at the time of the profound changes that occurred during and after the turbulent war years, and the question and dimensions of the responsibility for Jedwabne.

Generally speaking, the wide-ranging debate has been concluded in a mood of contemplation. The majority of Poland's 100 Catholic bishops recently held an unprecedented ceremony in Warsaw to publicly apologize for the Jedwabne massacre and for the suffering of other Jews at the hands of Catholics during WWII. In a public 10 July ceremony marking the 60^th anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre, President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, asked for forgiveness on behalf of his country for crimes committed by the Polish people against the Jews during the Holocaust.

The Polish people's readiness to recognize the fact that Polish history is not a glorious account of heroism and justice, but contains episodes of brutality against weak and innocent people, does not have to signify a spiritual collapse, but can instead result in the act of self-reflection.

The Polish nation has experienced a long history of bondage and martyrdom. The well-worn self-portrait of Poland has always portrayed the country as a victim fighting for its  right to existence.  Now is the time—and not only because of the shadow of Jedwabne¾to accept the fact that the inter-war history of independent Poland, followed by successive chapters of its history, are stained with crimes against its own citizens who looked to their country for aid and understanding.

Are the Poles, therefore, a nation of incorrigible antisemites? Such a sweeping statement is in itself unjust and bears something of the plague of antisemitism. It is true that antisemitism has embedded itself deeply in the Polish consciousness over the past few generations, that it existed during the war and occupation, and that it made itself sharply felt after the war. It was expressed in the wave of killings in the 1940s, in the Kielce pogrom of 1946, and in the expulsion of Jews in 1968-1969, the result of squabbling between Communist party factions.

At the same time, a relatively large number of Poles occupy an honorable place among the Righteous Among the Nations for helping hunted Jews at the risk, and sometimes with the loss, of their lives and the lives of their families. They did so selflessly, and with ceaseless effort, for people whom they did not know, and consequently lived in constant fear, for as is generally acknowledged, the task of rescuing Jews was especially difficult and dangerous in Poland.

Nor are the institutions representing the Polish people during the occupation—the government in exile in London and the underground Home Army in Poland responsible for the Jedwabne atrocity, even if they did little to alleviate Jewish misery and fate.

So is no one responsible for the massacre in Jedwabne? A lot has been said about individual responsibility or limited local responsibility, and various aspects of responsibility and guilt have been examined in detail. It has also been said that the entire nation and its future generations should not be held responsible for the sins of a small, remote town.

Such a manner of gauging responsibility is mistaken. There is such a thing as the personal responsibility of the perpetrators, but that is only one side of the coin. There is no denying that the evil force of what happened in Jedwabne was nourished by a widespread dislike of Jews. This hostility, which reached its peak in Poland in the 1930s required the Jews, who had lived in Poland for centuries, to be seen as a threat to the state, and a threat that ought to be eliminated. This antisemitism was not just imported from outside, but grew on Polish soil, on Polish home ground.

The regime of lawlessness and disregard for human life imposed by the Germans provoked the massacre in Jedwabne, a tragedy which is but a small part of the enormous devastation of the Holocaust—yet it is a tragedy for the Jews and a chapter in the history of the Poles.

The author is a Scientific Advisor at the International Institute for Holocaust Research