Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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.
1 Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community injedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Thou Shalt Not Kill: Poles onjedwabne (Warsaw, 2001).
3 Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, “The Massacre at Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, and After.” I wish to thank the author for sharing this unpublished work with me.
4 Bogdan Musial, “Tezy dotyczace pogromu wjedwabnem” (Theses referring to the Jedwabne pogrom), DziejeNajnotosze, 2001, no. 3.
5 Alexander B. Rossino, “Oskarzenia o slabych podstawach” (Accusation with a weak foundation), Rzeczpospotita, 26 September 2001, forthcoming in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 14 (2003).
6 Gross, Jan T., Upiorna dekada: Trzy eseje o stereotypach na temat Żydów, Polaków, Niemców i komunistów (Ghastly decade: Essays on stereotypes of Jews, Poles, Germans, and Communists) (Kraków, 2001), 51 Google Scholar.
7 Ibid, 20.
8 For example, Gross, Jan T. and Grudzińska-Gross, Irena, W czterdziestym nas Matko na Sybir zestali (They sent us to Siberia in 1940, Mother) (London, 1983)Google Scholar.
9 Maciej Rybiński drew attention to this preface in: Maciej Rybinski, “Przeciw winie kolektywnej” (Against collective guilt), Rzeczpospolita, 26 September 2001.
10 New York Times, 19 April 2001.
11 Gross, Neighbors, 7.
12 See, for example, István Deák, “Heroes and Victims,” New York Revieiu of Books, 31 May 2001.
13 Many American commentators have adopted this thesis as dogma. Cf. George F. Will, ‘July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne,” Newsweek, 9 July 2001. Abraham Brumberg has labeled any attempt to correct these figures “Operation Whitewash.” Cf. Abraham Brumberg, “Operation Whitewash,” Los Angeles Times, 13 June 2001; Abraham Brumberg, “Murder Most Foul,” Times Literary Supplement, 2 March 2001.
14 Cf. e.g., Ryszard Bender, “Trzy pytania do prof. Grossa” (Three questions to Professor Gross), Głos, 25 November 2000; Jan Engelgard, ‘Jedwabne a sprawa polska“ (Jedwabne and the Polish question), Myśl Polska, December 2000; Antoni Macierewicz, “Rewolucja nihilizmu” (Revolution of nihilism), Gbs, 3 February 2001; Jerzy Robert Nowak, “Kto falszuje historie” (Who falsifies history), Nasz Dziennik, 13-14 May 2001.
15 Tomasz Strzembosz, “Inny obraz sąsiadów” (A different image of the neighbors), I&eczpospotita, 31 March-1 April 2001; Tomasz Szarota, “Do We Know Everything for Certain?“ and “The National Debate on Jedwabne,” in Thou Shalt Not Kill, 105-10, 281-90; Pawel Machcewicz, “In the Shadow of Jedwabne,” in Thou Shalt Not Kill, 145-50; and Krzysztof Jasiewicz, “Research Still Needed on These Neighbors,” in Thou Shalt Not Kill, 123-30; Chodakiewicz, “Massacre at Jedwabne.“
16 This is a different topic, but, in addition to Jewish victims of communism, there were Jews in the Soviet power apparatus, and most Poles perceived the Soviet Union to be an enemy power. Today these people are usually presented as communists rather than Jews, but if they were killed by the Poles, they turn out to have been Jews. Cf. Eliach, Yaffa, There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred-Years Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eyshyshok (Boston, 1998)Google Scholar. Gross adopted this same logic in Upiorna dekada.
17 Shamir, Icchak, as quoted in Władysław Bartoszewski, The Convent of Auschwitz (London, 1990), 121 Google Scholar.
18 Gross, Upiorna dekada, 80.