THE DAY WE BURNED OUR NEIGHBORS ALIVE ‘The Crime and the Silence’ The Jedwabne massacre

[Jerry B]

“I can’t sleep at night. I see it as if it were yesterday. … That terrifying scream that probably didn’t last for more than two minutes, it’s still inside me.” The woman speaking these words was 10 years old on July 10, 1941, when she saw her fellow Poles driving their Jewish neighbors into the barn. Schoolboys jeered at their Jewish classmates, hounding them toward death. Mothers wrapped their babies tight as they tried to shield them against the blows. Within minutes nearly all the town’s Jews—hundreds of them, from infants to old people—would be burned alive. The 10-year-old girl at the window watched the townspeople of Jedwabne pour gasoline at the barn’s four corners and set it alight. Then came the scream.


The Day We Burned Our Neighbors Alive

This account comes from Anna Bikont’s book The Crime and the Silence, which appeared in 2004 in Polish and six years later in French (it won the European Book Prize in 2011) but has just now been translated into English by Alissa Valles. In her work as a reporter for the Gazeta Wyborcza, the liberal Polish newspaper, Bikont has done obsessive, heroic work, interviewing witnesses, perpetrators, and survivors of the Jedwabne massacre and similar mass killings of Jews in the nearby towns of Radzilow and Wasosz. She has discovered a bizarre psychological phenomenon: The townspeople of Jedwabne still insist that they are the victims of Jewish slander. The massacre, they say, was perpetrated either by a few thugs, probably people from out of town, or by the Germans.

Bikont uses the townspeople’s own words to demolish their claim to innocence. She shows that virtually all of Jedwabne knows who the leading murderers were, who stayed home that day in July 1941 and who joined the bloodthirsty mob. These truths were passed down for decades in hints and whispers at kitchen tables and over rounds of vodka. What happened in 1941 was, as Polish President Krasniewski bravely called it, not a pogrom but a genocide, Jedwabne’s wholehearted effort to shatter every trace of Jewish life. Minutes after the killings the town went on a massive looting spree, robbing Jewish homes of silverware, furs, and furniture. These were their neighbors, people they had known for years.

How could an atrocity like Jedwabne happen? Looking for an answer, Bikont confronts the troubled depths of the unequal relationship between Poles and Jews. The trouble stems from Poland’s sense of itself as a perpetual victim nation, crushed over and over by greater powers like Russia and Germany. Until the news about Jedwabne spread, 60 years after the killings happened, it was hard for Poles to think of themselves as the doers, rather than the sufferers, of historical evil.

The Jedwabne massacre first invaded Poland’s public consciousness in 1999, when the filmmaker Agnieszka Arnold released a documentary based on her interviews with local residents. Historian Jan T. Gross used the transcript of Arnold’s film as the basis for his book Neighbors, published one year later, which described the long-repressed mass murder in chilling and carefully footnoted detail. Yet many Poles reacted with disbelief. Gross, whose father is Jewish and who teaches at Princeton, wasn’t a real Pole, they said; much of the evidence he cited came from interrogations conducted after the war by the Stalinist secret police, who used physical torture to extract confessions that were later recanted. The Jews, predictably, were digging up falsehoods and lies in order to make money by blackening Poland’s reputation.

Within a year, nearly everyone in Poland knew about the Jedwabne controversy. In Neighbors and its sequel, Fear, about the pogroms that Poles committed against Jews shortly after the war’s end, Gross laid open the dark side of Polish-Jewish relations, which had been covered up for the past 60 years.

On March 15, 2001, workers removed an inscription from the monument in Jedwabne’s town square: The inscription said that the Germans had killed the town’s Jews. That summer, on the 60-year anniversary of the burning, a ceremony was held at the site of the killings. President Kwasniewski told Der Spiegel that the visit to Jedwabne was the “greatest challenge of [his] presidency.” Yet Jedwabne itself boycotted the ceremony; only four or five townspeople came to it. On the road to the site of the long-ago crime, young men shouted about “Yids,” made obscene gestures, and blared loud music to drown out the speeches.

***

In the Nazi years, which were catastrophic for Poles as well as Jews, Poles often exploited their power over Jewish life and death and even laughed about it. Bikont quotes historian Jerzy Jedlicki, who says that “the destruction of the Jews was watched with amusement by a significant part of the Polish population. That amusement, the laughter that accompanied the holocaust—I remember it, because at that time I was on the other, Aryan side of the wall.” Before Gross’ Neighbors, Jedlicki continued, Poles, “and I include myself in this,” had run from the facts about Polish treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

Gross’ books changed everything. In the first decade of the 21st century Poles began to confront the fact that some of their parents and grandparents had ransacked Jewish homes during the war, had turned in Jews to the Germans to make money, and in the worst cases, had murdered Jews themselves. As happened in Germany in the 1970s, the country’s sense of guilt has led to renewed appreciation of the Jewish presence that was crucial to its national identity. Young Poles are now studying the lost culture of their Jewish neighbors with a hunger never seen before.

Marek Edelman, the only one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising who chose to stay in Poland after the war, said that he was beaten far more by Poles in the 1930s than he was under the Germans. His case was not unusual. Bikont points out that the anti-Semitic agitation of the 1930s was particularly strong in the Lomza area, where Jedwabne is located. The region had supported the right-wing Polish National Party for over 100 years. In the ’30s the National Party threw itself full force into the battle against the Jews. Lomza’s priests were at the forefront of the anti-Semitic campaigns. The Jews had killed Christ: Virtually every sermon dwelt on this theme. Anti-Semitism was rampant in Polish classrooms in the ’30s, and not just in Lomza. Jews often had to sit at the back of the room and endure the insults of their teachers and fellow students. Poles regularly beat Jews in the streets and smashed the windows of Jewish homes. Most Catholic newspapers proclaimed that Poland needed to get rid of its Jews.

“No Pole was ever harassed by Germans for not burning Jews,” one of the Jedwabne townspeople told Bikont. Like most of the handful of people in Jedwabne who are willing to speak the truth about the massacre, the man refused to give his name, knowing his neighbors will hound him for denying their sham version of history. Jedwabne has stuck to its official story: Germans forced Poles to commit murder. The town’s priest goes even further, saying to Bikont that perhaps the Germans, who were known to be clever, dressed as Poles when they herded the Jews to the barn.

Bikont hears over and over from the people of Jedwabne, young and old, that “the Jews” had sent Poles to Siberia under the Soviets, and so it was only inevitable that Poles would take their revenge (though, of course, it was really the Germans who were responsible for the killing). Historian Tomasz Strzembosz, the darling of the Polish right, claims that in 1939 Polish Jews first welcomed the invading Soviet army and then eagerly sent Poles to labor camps. But many Poles embraced the Russians as well. The number of Polish Jews who joined the NKVD was far less than the number of Poles. The Soviets deported Jews just as they deported Poles and confiscated their property equally.

Yet these simple facts, Bikont shows, are even now resisted by a substantial portion of the Polish nation. The story of Polish suffering under the Soviets is still bound up with the strange myth that the Jews joined the Communist enemy en masse in 1939 and that, in effect, the Jews and the Russians ruled Poland together. Was it any wonder that Poland, crushed by Jewish commissars, lashed out against Jews when the Nazis replaced the Soviets a few years later?

“The Church is the black hole,” said Bikont when I talked to her on the phone a few weeks ago. She told me that the Polish Church is “still anti-Semitic, and those who disagree with its anti-Semitism are ostracized.” In her book Bikont highlights the courageous exceptions. She quotes Catholic priests and bishops who speak honestly about Jedwabne and similar massacres and who pray for the Jews murdered in the land of their ancestors by Poles. Father Stanislaw Musial says about the Jedwabne killings, “It’s hard to find a more despicable or cruel crime in human history,” and he marvels at the fact that the Polish Church busies itself trying to find extenuating circumstances for the massacre. But men and women like Musial go against the Church’s message. It’s the Jewish Communists who are guilty, the Church insists; and the leaders of Chicago’s Polish community repeat the same anti-Jewish charges, according to Bikont. Such are the distortions that extreme nationalism requires, all the more disturbing when they don the cloak of religion.

The Crime and the Silence necessarily meditates on the fraught status of Jewishness in contemporary Poland. A friend at the Institute of National Remembrance in Bialystok, without being prompted, swears to Bikont that she will never reveal that Bikont is Jewish (a fact Bikont herself only discovered in her thirties). The friend has implied that Jewishness will be taken as a stain, a sign that one’s words cannot be trusted when it comes to Polish history.

***

While Bikont told me in our interview that Poland’s stance toward its Jewish past has “changed for the good in the last 10 years,” and that the new museum of Jewish History in Warsaw is a sign of healthy new interest in the country’s Jewish heritage, it is also true that old suspicions linger. After the war Poland became a mono-ethnic and mono-religious nation, and the current right-wing government, refusing to accept Muslim refugees, insists that it must stay this way. Seeing Poland as a land solely of and for Polish Catholics means slighting the Jews’ 800-year presence in that land.

Bikont does not forget to give us the inspiring side of the Jedwabne story, the steadfast heroism of those who resisted then and now the evil around them. She tells us about Stanislaw and Marianna Ramotowski, he a Christian Pole who saved the Jewish Marianna (born Rachela Finkelsztejn), and then married her; when Bikont interviewed them, they remained in Jedwabne, living next to the murderers and those who side with them. Among the later heroes are the town’s mayor, Krzysztof Godlewski, and the few others who saw it as their duty to confront the truth about Jedwabne’s past. Nearly all eventually leave, hounded by late-night phone calls and insulting shouts in the street. Bikont traces their stories with care: Leszek Dziedzic, who ends up in America with his family; and, in an affecting episode, Jan Skrodzki, who with great determination searches for the facts about his father, who turns out to have been a murderer of Jews. Bikont memorably narrates the tales of several Jewish survivors, among them Awigdor Kochaw, who was on the market square that day in 1941, ran and hid in a field of grain, and heard the doomed reciting the Shema; he survived the war by passing as a gentile.

The most moving section of Bikont’s book concerns a Christian Pole, Antonina Wyrzykowska, who saved seven Jews during the war; they lived on her farm, under the pigsty and the chicken house. Wyrzykowska sprinkled gas around the pigsty, so that when the Germans came with their dogs to sniff out Jews, the gas made the dogs lose their sense of smell. Wearing a yellow badge that said Jude, she brought flour and bread to the Lomza ghetto. Just after the war ended, men from the Polish Home Army knocked on her door, entered, and brutally beat her because she had sheltered Jews from the Nazis. (Before Gross’ book, the Polish Home Army’s atrocities against Jews had been another near-forbidden topic in Poland.) In the eyes of Jedwabne, Wyrzykowska’s wartime actions discredited her six decades later. It was a shameful fact that she had rescued seven human beings at the risk of her own life, because those human beings were Jews, and therefore not worth saving.

On July 10, 2001, Antonina Wyrzykowska was too frightened to come to the ceremony for the murdered Jews of Jedwabne: Three of the men who had beaten her up in 1945 were still living nearby.

[FALLSCHIRMJAGER]

Thank you Jerry for taking the time to bring this account forward. A very distressing episode of the mass murder of Jews in Poland, and one that certainly appears to have been systematically shrouded in lies. It never ceases to amaze me how the "ordinary" people of this world can turn into monsters at the flick of a switch. I know that there are written history's of Jewish mass murder in Britain during the 15th and 16th centuries, so we are not excused from events such as this either!
The Churches anti-semitic attitudes over the course of history is a controversial one, as there has been a certain truth in that statement. For myself as a practising Christian, whenever asked by our Jewish brothers as to why I love the Jewish nation, my reply is simply "because you gave me my Messiah".
May all those murdered and affected by evil actions, be they Jewish/Pole/Russian or one of the multitude of Nations concerned, find peace and rest. Leon.

[Jerry B]

Leon, i am not a practicing religious person, I think of myself as an agnostic having moved from my earlier position as an atheist, though I was brought up loosely as Church of Wales and I can only say that let those of us without sin cast the first stones as none of us, meaning our forebears are without guilt in some way but hopefully we are better than this and can treat all others as we would like to be treated, a position that is common to many religions and even has resonance with the likes of me.

[Larboard]

Heavy reading, sometimes you just can't take anymore... I hate to bring about a morbid subject here, but this can have a profoundly depressing affect on collectors over time. Years ago I stopped collecting (has anyone else done this?) And I sold all my reference books to a fairly big time local collector. The whole lot was $300, and now just one of these books can sell for $300... how times change.

He was part of a duo of local collectors, one of whom I ran into a couple years ago, inquired about the other (they always did the shows together), to find out that he had committed suicide some time back. That was a bit of a shock...

A few years earlier I'd heard that another local collector who I was heavily involved with (we set up tables together at a show one time) had also committed suicide. I had quit collecting and had lost touch with him years prior, but still... disturbing to hear.

Most of our local collections came from an elderly gent in the area, he and his brother were both WWII US Navy vets. The one I knew was the nicest guy, I miss him. He had a house full of the neatest antiques ever, lots of German regalia, from both world wars. His brother, I never met, had been shot down in over Germany, captured, treated pretty badly and eventually liberated. He started collecting the day the war was over, spent much time in Germany picking up stuff, sending it and bringing it back. He was a pretty severe alcoholic, and "blew his brains out with a P38" on the couch in the living room one night, according to his brother.

But over time, it leaves me wondering how affected you can be by delving into so much horror?


Weird thing about this massacre is that of course most of us know about Oradour, which has gone down in history as one of WWII's most horrific massacre of civilians, albeit at the hands of troops. and this one I've never heard of until today, and because it was perpetrated by civilians, "their own neighbors", is maybe an even uglier crime...

[Jerry B]

Each of us learn new things on a regular basis which is part of life and this hobby of ours, but let us not forget the history that often accompanies these objects we posses. Strange to read of such an event and then discover that it was apparently not committed by any of the big 3 of WWII baddies, them being The Nazi's, the Soviets or the Japanese whose atrocities are better known, but in this case acts committed by one of the good nations. More well known is some of the acts committed by some of the other smaller Eastern European nations who collaborated sometimes far too enthusiastically, but this event comes as a shock to me as much as to any others here. Mans inhumanity to man seems to be an oft repeated tragedy, lets not forget Rwanda or the Balkans in the 80's, these events are not unique, but hopefully one day they will become only a thing read about in history books.

[Gunny Hartmann]

Thank you for sharing this Jerry, this massacre is a part of history i was unaware of. Unfortunately i have witnessed open anti-semitism in Poland even today!...

[Krakow1]

This thread is perfect for the old adage:

Just because it is written it does not mean its true.

[Jerry B]

This thread is perfect for the old adage:

Just because it is written it does not mean its true.

Denying such events does not make them go away and is against forum rules

[Krakow1]

I am not denying events. I am not denying that Jedwabne happened.

It is just how it happened and how Jan Gross and Anna Bikont are portraying it is what I and several Polish known historians have a problem with.

[Krakow1]

Here are 5 books by Noted Polish Historians disputing what Jan Gross and Bikont has written. By the way, one of your sources Jan Gross is now being investigated by Polish Authorities to see if he commited a libel against Poland. Punishable for up to 5 years in Prison.
Here are five books by noted Polish Historians addressing these issues.
One problem: these books are not translated into foreign languages, because ....... who wants to believe that Poland was not the culprit behind all this ??
Jan Gross stated in his latest " article' that Poles killed more Jews than germans.....