Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

“The centerpiece of the story I am about to present in this little volume falls, to my mind, utterly out of scale: one day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children.”

The author emphasizes how incredulous the Jedwabne massacre seems, though it was a true historical occurrence. It is a simple story, thus presented in a “little volume,” but one that reveals the complexity of Polish-Jewish relations. The stark division between Polish Gentiles and Jews is not one between warring factions but one created by long-held animosity, scapegoating, and dehumanization.

“First and foremost I consider this volume a challenge to standard historiography of the Second World War, which posits that there are two separate wartime histories—one pertaining to the Jews and the other to all the other citizens of a given European country subjected to Nazi rule.”

Gross seeks to dispel the traditional villain-victim dichotomy that has allowed Poland and other nations to overlook their roles in the Holocaust. He also makes it clear that the Jewish experience of World War II isn’t distinct from experiences of other populations but is instead intertwined with them.

“The Holocaust thus stands at a point of departure rather than a point of arrival in humankind’s ceaseless efforts to draw lessons from its own experience. And while we will never ‘understand’ why it happened, we must clearly understand the implications of its having taken place. In this sense it becomes a foundational event of modern sensibility, forever afterward to be an essential consideration in reflections about the human condition.”

Gross incites the reader to regard the Holocaust as a revolutionary event in the development of our collective understanding of history. It was a catastrophic event that baffled and stunned even those who were complicit in it, triggering a need to understand our motivations as much as our behavior.

“But the climate of fear among Jedwabne Jews was intensifying by the day, primarily because of rumors about horrible pogroms and killings already carried out in the immediate vicinity.”

The Jewish residents of Jedwabne lived with the palpable fear of being next among those murdered. Their reliance on rumor to remain informed reveals the absence of any infrastructure dedicated to disseminating the news.

“Even though we were all persuaded that the Germans would be defeated, one could see that the war would last a long time. Who would be able to survive this? Jews were like a defenseless lamb in the midst of a pack of wolves. One could feel, it was in the air, that the Polish population was getting ready for a pogrom.”

This quote comes from Menachem Finkelsztajn’s testimony, currently kept at the Jewish Historical Institute. Finkelsztajn, a Jew from Radzilów, witnessed a pogrom in his hometown. The simile comparing Jews to lambs and the Poles to wolves illustrates the carnivorous aspect to the murders. It also inadvertently casts the Jews and the Gentiles as separate species, in a manner of speaking, within a circle of life that would inevitably place Jews as prey.

“[P]ropaganda started coming out from the upper echelons of Polish society which influenced the mob, stating that it was time to settle scores with those who had crucified Jesus Christ, with those who take Christian blood for matzoh and are a source of all evil in the world—the Jews. Let’s stop playing around with the Jews. It is time to cleanse Poland of these pests and bloodsuckers. The seed of hatred fell on well-nourished soil, which had been prepared for many years by the clergy.”

Antisemitism was not just prevalent among the uneducated peasant class; it was a problem that permeated all Polish society. Worse, the Christian clergy spread the poison, likely as part of an effort to reduce the perceived ideological threat of Judaism in Poland.

“At the time the overall undisputed bosses over life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans. No sustained organized activity could take place there without their consent. They were the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews. It was within their power also to stop the murderous pogrom at any time. And they did not choose to intervene.”

There was a hierarchy in Nazi-occupied Poland, and the Germans were at its pinnacle. The Germans, however, neither performed violent acts nor even instigated them. Instead, they simply created a permissive atmosphere for organized violence.

“And the accused had families and friends in the vicinity who knew each other, and could easily realize (they also shared defense attorneys) that they had for the most part incriminated themselves and each other. Finally, they also had plenty of time to activate on their own behalf assorted instruments of informal pressure potent in a small-town community.”

The community’s close-knit nature made it easier to control the flow of information. It also allowed the community to create a singular narrative about the pogrom. Those who deviated from the official story could face social opprobrium or worse.

“From the inside of the barn we are told two stories. One concerns Michal Kuropatwa, a coachman, who some time earlier had helped a Polish army officer hide from his Soviet pursuers. When the self-styled leaders of the pogrom noticed him in the Jewish crowd, he was taken out and told that because he had helped a Polish officer earlier, he might now go home. But he refused, choosing to share the fate of his people.”

Kuropatwa’s story is unique due to his steadfast commitment to the Jewish community. Gross subtly contrasts his personal sacrifice with the “self-styled leaders of the pogrom,” who were instruments of Nazi rule as well as products of racist indoctrination.

“Given our growing awareness of the importance of material expropriation as a motivating factor in the persecution of the Jews all over Europe, I would think it very probable that the desire and unexpected opportunity to rob the Jews once and for all—rather than, or alongside with, atavistic antisemitism—was the real motivating force that drove Karolak and his cohort to organize the killing.”

As was the case in other genocides throughout history, the potential for material gain was as much a factor as the benefit of establishing social homogeneity. Gross explains that there were palpable gains to the expression of antisemitism and that some had no personal animosity toward Jews at all but were merely interested in what they could acquire by espousing antisemitic values.

“Apparently, he tried to anticipate what each successive carnivorous regime of this epoch might most desire of its subjects, and went to extremes in his zeal to please—first by becoming a secret NKVD collaborator, then by doing the Nazis’ dirty work in killing the Jews, and finally by joining the Communist Party, the PPR.”

Gross uses the example of Zygmunt Laudanski, a Jedwabne inhabitant whose politics depended on his will to survive. To avoid being victimized by each succeeding totalitarian regime, Laudanski performed its dirty work—that is, he committed murder. It’s unclear how “evil” Laudanski was, given that he operated at the will of the state.

“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.”

This quote explains Gross’s choice to entitle this volume Neighbors. He upends the prevailing belief that the Poles were, like the Jews, victims of a distant power.

“We must remember that in the background of anti-Jewish violence there always lurked a suspicion of ritual murder, a conviction that Jews use for the preparation of Passover matzoh the fresh blood of innocent Christian children. It was a deeply ingrained belief among many Polish Catholics, and not simply among residents of the boondocks. After all, rumors that Jews were engaging in these practices drew incensed crowds into the streets of Polish cities at a moment’s notice even after the Second World War. This was the mechanism that triggered the most infamous postwar pogroms, in Cracow in 1945 and in Kielce in 1946.”

Gross uses the examples of pogroms in Krakow and Kielce to show that antisemitic violence was not only the purview of uneducated peasants from the villages. The prejudice was widespread, even among the educated, and useful in ensuring the Catholic Church’s influence on the country as well as the maintenance of wealth and power among the non-Jewish population.

“It is clear, from what happened in Jedwabne, that we must approach the Holocaust as a heterogeneous phenomenon […] we have to be able to account for it as a system, which functioned according to a preconceived (though, constantly evolving) plan […] we must also be able to see it as a mosaic composed of discrete episodes, improvised by local decision-makers, and hinging on unforced behavior, rooted in God-knows-what motivations […]”

The Jedwabne massacre differs starkly from traditional narratives of the Holocaust, which cause us to recall ovens, slow starvation, and other systemic methods of torture and murder. Outside of the concentration camps, murder took on many forms. The Holocaust teaches us that humans can be disturbingly creative in their cruelty.

“Who could imagine that in this village, on a Saturday, our Sabbath, sixty-two souls, most of them women and children, would fall prey to pitchforks and kitchen knives, and I, because I was in a back room, would manage to escape to the cornfields and hide?”

Aharon Appelfeld recalls how he escaped a pogrom. His rhetorical question helps the reader understand the randomness to the murders. Survival didn’t necessarily depend on anything that anyone did but on being in the right place at the right time.

“Can we arbitrarily select from a national heritage what we like, and proclaim it as patrimony to the exclusion of everything else? Or just the opposite: if people are indeed bonded together by authentic spiritual affinity—I have in mind a kind of national pride rooted in common historical experiences of many generations—are they not somehow responsible also for horrible deeds perpetrated by members of such an ‘imagined community’? Can a young German reflecting today on the meaning of his identity as a German simply ignore twelve years (1933-1945) of his country’s and his ancestors’ history?”

Gross poses these rhetorical questions to prompt the reader to consider both the importance of remembering these painful aspects of one’s history and the danger of forgetting. His prompts are useful for any nation that must confront a shameful past. Thus, they would be applicable to most nations. Gross rejects the argument that things that happened long ago are irrelevant to our present day, given that we live with the consequences and benefits of our shared histories.

“And even though it is only Fryderyk, a Jan, or a Mikolaj who has actually performed such deeds, as constitutive components of the canon they also belong to the collective ‘us.’ Hence Polish music, most deservedly, is proud of ‘our’ Chopin; Polish science of ‘our’ Copernicus; and Poland thinks of itself as a ‘bastion’ of Christianity’ in no small part because King Jan Sobieski defeated the Turks in an important battle near Vienna. For this reason we are entitled to ask whether deeds committed by the likes of Laudanskii and Karolak—since they were so striking and unusual—engage Polish collective identity as well.”

Gross furthers the argument that Poland cannot be selective about its history. The “hooligans” who rounded up and murdered 1,600 Jews are as much a part of Poland’s cultural heritage as those figures who advanced the country and its global reputation.

“And that is why we must take literally all fragments of information at our disposal, fully aware that what actually happened to the Jewish community during the Holocaust can only be more tragic than the existing representation of events based on surviving evidence.”

Gross promotes a new historiography and values all existing evidence, including that which is fragmentary and that which comes from the perpetrators of crimes. Though criminals are inclined to obfuscate and even lie, Gross contends that there is still value in their testimony—even if it is limited only to what it teaches us about human character.

“War is a myth-creating experience in the life of every society. But in Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe it is continuously a source of vivid, only too often lethal, legitimization narratives. The memory, indeed the symbolism, of collective, national martyrology [sic] during the Second World War is paramount for the self-understanding of Polish society in the twentieth century.”

Poland, like Germany, has used its memory of hardships—both those experienced between the wars and after World War II—to characterize itself as having suffered during the war. Though Poland did suffer, non-Jewish Poles also created suffering. They avoided contending with these past crimes by casting themselves as unwitting victims.

“It was apparently easy for the Germans to take on a sense of victimization since it alleviated, in a manner of speaking, the burden of responsibility for the war and suffering inflicted on countless victims.”

The Germans regarded themselves as victims in the aftermath of World War I, having suffered blame for the war and the economic effects of inflation, as well as World War II, which resulted in the dissection of Germany.

“Their existence was a reproach, calling forth pangs of conscience, as well as a potential threat.”

Gross refers to those Poles who assisted the Jews during the Jedwabne pogrom. This small group earned the antipathy of their neighbors who participated in the slaughter—not so much because they didn’t share the larger community’s antisemitism but because they witnessed behavior that, in hindsight, was a source of shame. This anxiety about the Poles who abstained from murder reveals the self-consciousness of those who participated, which had less to do with their actual sense of wrongdoing than their worry about being regarded as bad people.

“Aren’t people compromised by collaboration with a repressive regime predestined […] to become collaborators of the next repressive regime that gains power over the same area? Such individuals would be inclined to demonstrate enthusiasm for new rulers and their policies right from the beginning, in order to accumulate sufficient credit in advance, to balance their liabilities in case their roles under a previous regime become known.”

Gross reveals the opportunistic nature of collaboration. Citizens, he suggests, do not necessarily collaborate with repressive regimes because they share the party’s politics but because they seek to remain safe under totalitarian rule. Thus, collaboration is a survival tactic that is mutually beneficial to both the citizenry and the ruling party—the former addresses its fear while the latter secures the participation needed to remain in power.

“Nazism […] is a regime that taps into the evil instincts of human beings—not only because it elevates ‘rabble’ into positions of power, but also because of ‘the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but who then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere and the society is no longer holding together.’”

Authoritarian regimes, like that of Nazi Germany, allow the powerless and the misfits to usurp positions of influence that they would not otherwise have. The “simple man” contrasts with members of the intellectual class in that he is unlikely to worry about revocations of civil liberties and the plights of minorities as long as he retains a job and some semblance of moral order in his country. Unlike members of the upper class, he feels directly compromised, perhaps even affronted, by any social change that impacts his understanding of the world.