The Slaughter of Jedwabne’s Jews

After 60 years of silence, a new book has broken through the wall of lies and disinformation surrounding the annihilation by Polish townspeople of the Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland during the Second World War. Sasiedzi: Historia Zaglady Zydowskiego Miasteczka by Jan Tomasz Gross, was published in Poland last year, horrifying the Polish public by the magnitude and bestiality of an atrocity hitherto attributed to everyone except the Poles of Jedwabne. I have been following the discussions, reviews, and reports in the Polish and Polish-American press about the book’s implications. In April, when Princeton University Press publishes the English-language version (Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne), the discussion will certainly acquire global dimensions.
The central points of the discussion, as reported in the Polish and Polish-American press, are what I want to highlight in this article. Neighbors documents and describes the butchery of some 1600 Jews—Jedwabne’s entire Jewish population—at the hands of their Polish neighbors. Jedwabne is located in the Bialystock region of northeastern Poland.
At the time of the slaughter, it was very near the border between Nazi-occupied Poland and the Polish territories then occupied by the Soviet Union, which German forces had invaded on June 22, 1941. But, contrary to the fabrication that the mass murder was carried out by the occupying German forces, Gross’s research provides evidence that it was Polish townspeople—peasants, craftsmen, laborers, and local authorities— who were responsible for the genocide on July 10, 1941.
To speak of brutality is to understate the facts. According to the author, during the course of an entire day, the town of Jedwabne became a slaughterhouse, as its Jews were dragged from their homes and savagely butchered. The Poles had no firearms. Their weapons were stones, axes, knives, pitchforks, clubs, and bare hands. The Jews of Jedwabne were stoned, mutilated, decapitated, drowned and, in some cases, buried alive. Those who somehow escaped this butchery were rounded up, locked in a barn, and burned alive.
It is likely that the mass murder of Jews in Jedwabne was not spontaneous. Gross notes that on that fatal day, a Nazi film crew was on the scene even before the brutalities began; and that Gestapo officials had met with Polish civilian authorities just hours earlier. But incited or not, aberration or not, it was Poles, and not Germans, who used every means at hand to carry out the barbaric and frenzied slaughter.
Up to now, disinformation has been the policy of both Communist and post-Communist Polish governments regarding Jedwabne. Poland has always acknowledged the fact that some Polish individuals collaborated with Nazis, denounced Jews, or committed war crimes. But as a nation, Poles see themselves as witnesses and victims of Nazi atrocities. Neighbors shatters this assumption, forcing Poles to face a new dimension of their wartime experience. Just as they were witnesses and victims, they were also perpetrators of crimes.
A trial held in 1949 resulted in just one person being convicted and sentenced to death for the crimes committed in Jedwabne. Several other townspeople were sentenced to prison terms. The most poignant example of the policy of lies and disinformation, doggedly embraced by both Communist and post-Communist Polish governments, however, can be read on two monuments in Jedwabne. The first, erected after the war in Communist Poland, makes reference to the Jewish population of the town being burned alive by Gestapo and German police. There is not one word about the involvement of Poles. The second, erected after 1989 in post-Communist Poland, commemorates the death of 180 people, including two priests, who were killed in the region around Jedwabne by the NKVD (Soviet secret police), the Nazis, and the Polish UB (Communist security force). This monument, presented in the name of the Polish nation, omits any reference to the fate of the Jews of Jedwabne. In the midst of the stormy fallout from the book, the two monuments are still standing.
Neighbors throws open the doors for a comprehensive look at the role of Polish people during World War II. Many Poles who have read the book are of the opinion that a full disclosure of the events surrounding the massacre, and an openness in the investigation of war crimes in general, are essential to the ongoing Polish-Jewish dialogue. In this regard, it is significant that after 10 years of failed attempts, an Institute of National Remembrance has finally been created in Poland. Its purpose is to gather existing archives that relate to all criminal acts perpetrated in Poland from the Second World War up to 1989. Personal files, as well as documents, photographs, and other records previously held by such agencies as the secret police and the Ministry of the Interior, are being deposited there and will be made available for scholarly research. The head of the Institute, Professor Jan Kieresa, was in the United States recently to sign an agreement with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for an exchange of archival information. He also met with representatives of several Jewish organizations to discuss issues raised by the book. Poland’s President, Aleksander Kwasniewski, has officially acknowledged the tragedy at Jedwabne. On March 2, he told Israeli reporters from the newspaper Jedlot Achronot that he will make a formal apology and ask forgiveness at Jedwabne on July 10, 2001, the 60th anniversary of the bloody massacre of 1600 innocent Jews.

John Lescott-Leszczynski

John Lescott-Leszczynski’s aunt, Maria Leszczynska-Eckhardt, has been honored as a “Righteous Gentile” by Yad Vashem for saving a Jewish girl in Tarnopol, Poland, during W.W. II.

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