The Question of the Germans in Jedwabne and Neighbors.
In Holocaust studies, historians look at painful and difficult events to give a voice to those who are gone. Jan Gross in his book Neighbors[1], did just that. The book, published in Polish in 2000 (and later English in 2001) started a national and then international discussion surrounding his claims against the Polish population during war and the use of his limited sources to support his claims. Using trial records from 1949 and 1953, Gross pieced together a story which undermined previously assumed Polish understanding of self-identity based off their national martyr-driven history and was the catalyst to a national self-reflection. The argument which ignited such a discussion was his assertion that the massacre which occurred in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10 1941 was the result of the Polish population freely, and willingly, murdering the Jewish population in a violent and chaotic pogrom. However, many critics such as Dariuz Stola and myself, have stated Gross’ claims regarding the Jedwabne massacre severely underplayed the role of the Nazi Regime in the event because he misread key sources and overlooked known historical narratives. It will be my argument that Gross in his book Neighbours intentionally “misread” and overlooked known historical contexts to illustrate a larger, less explicit argument – the need to question one’s National identity and past actions.
In the book, Gross starts the narrative before the Second World War illustrating the “normalness” of Jedwabne and the nearby village of Radziłów with their Polish and Jewish populations living a relative peaceful co-existence. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet occupied Poland in June 1941, violent assaults began against the Jews such as the multi-day pogrom in Radziłów from which many survivors fled to Jedwabne. In Jedwabne, the new mayor, a Polish man, Marian Karolak and some members of the Gestapo met and came to the conclusion to murder all of Jedwabne’s Jews (45). On July 10 1941 the Jews were ordered to the town square and then forced into a barn that was set on fire, killing everyone inside. The murderers were all “ordinary men” (71) from Jedwabne or nearby, with no “uniformed individual” in sight (52), making them “willing executioners” (78).
Gross’ narrative of Jedwabne acknowledges the Gestapo’s presence either the day before or the day of the massacre but designates their role to nothing more than “taking photos” (47). While there are a lot of unanswered (and unanswerable) questions about the events of July 10, there is a lot of information which can be inferred from general histories of the Second World War and from the survivors’ testimonies. Both of which point to larger Nazi German agency in Jedwabne.
As Timothy Snyder states, the Einsatzgruppen were used as a “tool of persecution” during their invasion and occupation of Poland during June 1941[2]. The Wehrmacht, because of the Nazi regime’s strong anti-Semitic (and anti-communism) policies and attitudes already in place in Germany, saw the Eastern Jews they encountered in Poland to be caricatures of Jewish stereotypes[3]. Under orders to eliminate partisan threats, the Einsatzgruppen killed two thirds of the total number of Jews lost in the Holocaust before 1942, leading the summer of 1941 to be known to modern scholars as the Holocaust of Bullets[4].
After the Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen swept through the newly occupied territory, the Gestapo remained to continue the establishment of local “councils”. These councils, such as Karolak’s, are implied to have been authoritative and representative by Gross. However, these councils appeared suddenly and took orders from the Gestapo and had no authority to create them[5]. Gross states that the two “quickly agreed on the matter” (44) but the meeting between the Gestapo and Karolak prior to the massacre was not as much as an agreement and compromise, but more likely an order which if refused, would have seen Karolak’s council out of office.
The idea that the Polish men of Jedwabne spontaneously conducted a “cacophony of violence” (59) to the scale and efficiency in which they did is also questionable and points to more involvement from Germany. Not to say that Poles did not harbor anti-Semitic attitudes prior to, or even during, the War, but the Polish vision of the ‘final solution’ was mass emigration, not genocide[6]. This community as Gross outlines in his first chapter, was relatively peaceful without much ill intent towards each other. The level of violence displayed on July 10 mirrors that of other German led assaults against towns and villages[7]. The Polish men carried out their attack on Jedwabne with an efficient and methodical approach, one that such a mob would not have been able to organically create[8].
Gross’ exclusion of the very real possibility of Nazi intervention in the carrying out of the massacre was entirely intentional for two reasons. First, Gross based his narrative within and on the first hand accounts so he is creating the story without inserting probability. Second, by removing the default “evil” in Holocaust literature, it makes it easier to question morality and National remembrance.
A major criticism of many against Neighbors is that Gross did not consult all the possible archives and documents, especially German ones, giving him a narrow view into the events[9]. However, only the information inferred is what is known to exist, because as Stola claims, there are no German documents that Gross could have consulted[10]. Instead, Gross focused his attention to the primary sources left by survivors and allowed them to tell the story without Gross’ ideas of what he may have thought they meant added in. By doing this Gross allows the survivors to tell their story, the way they remembered it (or wanted to remember it). The testimonies included in the book highlight with detail the individuals the witness knew, giving full names or even home addresses, but those the witness did not recognize, such as the peasants that travelled to Jedwabne for the massacre, are nameless, faceless and grouped together as one (53). If Germans had been mentioned in their accounts, they would have been overshadowed by their acquaintances and friends who they knew personally.
In addition, due to the manner in which some of the testimonies were extracted (given under duress by Communist courts), the Polish men of the town stood at the foreground of the statements as the guilty party. These testimonies have the agency focused on the Polish actors for fear of admitting to collaboration(/treason) with the Nazis and as Gross states the reader needs to be aware that the accused “minimize […] the extent of their own involvement” (14) to their crime of “act[ing] in a manner that fostered the interests of the German state” (12). By attempting to blame the Germans, the accused would have admitted to collaboration. From their knowledge of Soviet rule and prisons from Poland’s 1939 to 1941 occupation and mass arrests and deportations, denouncing your neighbors was a better option than what was to come in Soviet detention.
By keeping the narrative focused on the (presumed) Polish agency and reiterating the Polish “normalness” both of the town and of the men accused, it allows Gross and the reader to explore and reflect on two things: the national identity of Poland and the morality of humanity and its limits or abilities. The assertion by Gross that it was Poles, and Poles alone, who committed the massacre of July 10 1941, began a modern Polish reflection of their national identity[11]. Was Poland still the nation of martyrdom they idealized? The victim in a long tradition of occupation, exploitation and loss, or did the history of Poland also contain atrocities? The book also raises questions about the self – what are individuals capable of? Those in Jedwabne were ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ men who had families at home but were also capable of brutally humiliating and then burning their neighbors. These questions all become apparent when the Nazis are seemingly ignored. Gross’ removal of the Nazis as an answer no longer allows the blame to be placed onto the “obvious evil” of war time Europe.
Gross’ “oversight” of not including the Nazis as characters in his narration of the events of July 10 1941 in the small town of Jedwabne Poland serves a larger purpose to his argument in Neighbors. His book has two arguments (or explorations), the first is that Polish men murdered the Jedwabne Jewish men, women and children. Although this event probably relied on German interaction more than Gross cares to admit, but whether or not Germany had any influence on the day’s events, it still does not change the fact that the Jews of Jedwabne did not live to see the sunset. The second is an argument was aimed to question the identity that Poland has created for itself. To cause such an introspective discussion, Gross had to ignore the obvious scapegoat to make the argument explicit to the reader that the narrative of Polish martyrdom was flawed and is a romanticized telling of their past. Neighbors ignited a Polish and international discussion about what humanity and ‘normal men’ are capable of committing to their fellow neighbors.
Bibliography:
Deák, István “Heroes and Victims,” in The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy Over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland edited by Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Gross, Jan. Neighbors. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler. New York: Basic Books.
——-. “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 56, no. 12 (16 July 2009). [paginated according to .PDF on UBCConnect]
Stola, Dariusz. “Jedwabne: Revisiting the Evidence and Nature of the Crime.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 17 no. 1 (2003): 139-152.
[1] Gross, Jan. Neighbors. New York: Penguin, 2001. All citations to the book are in parenthesis after the quote in-text.
[2] Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 126.
[3] Snyder, Bloodlands, 122.
[4] Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 56, no. 12 (16 July 2009), 2.
[5] Dariusz Stola, “Jedwabne: Revisiting the Evidence and Nature of the Crime,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 17 no. 1 (2003): 144.
[6] Stola, “Jedwabne,” 145.
[7] Ibid., 141.
[8] Ibid., 145.
[9] István Deák, “Heroes and Victims,” in Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy Over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004), 427.
[10] Stola, “Jedwabne,” 141.
[11] Deák, “Heroes and Victims,” 423.