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Abstract
In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002
References
1 The investigation was opened in September 2000 and should be concluded sometime in 2002.
2 “Bezpośrednimi sprawcami byli Polacy,” Rzeapospolita, 20 December 2001.
3 I invite interested readers to consult Bogdan Musial's “The Pogrom in Jedwabne: Critical Remarks about Jan Gross's Neighbors,” and my “Critical Remarks Indeed,” in the fordicoming issue of Polin: Studies in Polish Jeurry.
4 The episodic references to looting and killing that Gradowski and Boruszczak provide are used as examples, alongside other testimonies. Tales about the wartime Jedwabne families that enriched themselves through the acquisition of Jewish property are still part of local folklore today (“why does so and so have such a big house … “ ) . Scores of witnesses attested to the fact that Jews were murdered in an unspeakably cruel manner. As I explain in the book, several testimonies from the trial report what the witnesses knew about the goings-on from others, not about what they saw themselves. Such facts as what were the most drastic episodes of murderous assaults, who killed an especially large number of Jews on which day, and who were the main looters of Jewish property were generally known and freely discussed in town. Gradowski's testimony is thus entirely reliable and congruent with the general state of knowledge about the crime. Manyjews who were in Jedwabne on lOJuly had fled there to seek shelter from neighboring towns and hamlets, where killings had earlier taken place. That Boruszczak was not a resident of Jedwabne (Roszkowski made a mistake here—my critics claim that Boruszczak never lived in Jedwabne, not that he had never been in Jedwabne) is therefore meaningless.
5 Andrzej Rzepliński, IPN expert and investigator, analyzed evidence produced during the 1949 Lomza trial and found it to be a reliable source of information about the July 1941 killing. He also analyzed a review of the case in 1950, a 1953 trial, and an investigation carried out in 1967 that also delved into the circumstances of the Jedwabne murder. The trial, in his assessment, offers “ahistory of neglect and non-action, indicating that the judicial authorities were uninterested in shedding light on the circumstances of the crime. Some of the defendants testified during the trial that they were forced to give false depositions during the investigation. Professor Rzepliriski did not exclude that the defendants were beaten [during investigation], but if so the aim was not to extract their confessions. In other uials of this period defendants who had been tortured also made selfincriminating statements in the courtroom. Courts [judging the Jedwabne murder cases] were not interested in finding out who was injured, by whom, and for what reason. Sentences were not unjust for the accused; indeed some of the perpetrators were found not guilty as a result of the court's sloppiness. The court reconstructed only the course of events on the market square and came up with an absurd image of a dance macabre where one German would guard one Pole so that he guards one Jew, but only until the German would turn around” ﹛Rzeczpospolita, 20 December 2001).
6 I protested against this decision in an article published by Gaxeta Wyboraa on 6 June 2001. At the time, Rabbi Baker, formerly from Jedwabne and now from Brooklyn, suggested to me that it would be a mitsvot to move the remains of “the Jedwabne martyrs” to a burial ground in Israel. A well-known Jewish scholar, Rabbi Joseph Polak, chairman of the Boston Beth Din's Halacha Committee, published in the latest issue of Tradition (“the Cadillac of halakchic studies,” as he told me) a learned treatise demonstrating that, according to Jewish law, the remains of the Jews in Jedwabne should have been moved to a proper burial ground.
7 “Ślubne obraczki i nóż rzezaka,” Rzeczpospolita, lO July 2001.
8 Nobody claims anything else. And for good reason, I think, because, if it had, the Landsmanschaft of the Jedwabne Jews would certainly know about it, since this organization predates the war, published the memorial book, still exists today, and occupies itself exclusively with inquiring into the fate of relatives and fellow Jedwabnites.
9 I published a statement in Rzeczpospolita on 23 June 2001 admitting to the mistake and explaining how it was made, and clarifying that it was inadvertent. Somehow I confused the first names of the three Laudański defendants in the case. On page 86 (of the English-language edition of Neighbors) I attributed to Czeslaw Laudański a sentence from the deposition of his son Zygmunt, and on page 991 again attributed to Czeslaw Laudański a sentence from the deposition of his son Jerzy.
10 During a program broadcast on 26 June 2001, on Radio Maryja, an obscurantist Catholic radio station with a devoted audience of several million, Jerzy Robert Nowak laughingly reported that he “could have enumerated three hundred [errors].“