Jedwabne pogrom (1941)

The Jedwabne pogrom refers to a massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland on July 10, 1941 during the Holocaust. As many as 1,600 are estimated to have been killed, ranging from women and children to elderly, many of whom were burned alive. 40+ ethnic Poles joined the pogrom, aided by Nazi military police (Feldgendarmerie).[1][2]

Background

Neighbors (2000) by Jan T. Gross

Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka ("Neighbors: The Story of the Annihilation of a Jewish Town"), a book written by American historian Jan T. Gross[a] caused a "moral earthquake" when it was published in Poland in May 2000, according to Piotr Wróbel.[4][b] It appeared in English, German and Hebrew within the year. In English, it was published in April 2001 by Princeton University Press as Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.[5]

Content

Writing that "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", Gross concluded that the Jedwabne Jews had been rounded up and killed by a mob of their own Polish neighbors ‒ different from Poland's official account that they had been killed by Germans.[6] Political scientist Michael Shafir wrote that the pogrom had been "subjected to confinement in the Communist 'black hole of history'".[7]

While Gross recognized that no "sustained organizing activity" could have happened without the Germans' consent,[8] he concluded that the massacre had been committed entirely by Poles, and that the Germans had not coerced them.[8]

Sources

Gross's sources were Szmuel Wasersztajn's 1945 witness statement from the Jewish Historical Institute; witness statements and other trial records from the 1949–1950 trials; the Yedwabne: History and Memorial Book (1980), written by Jedwabne residents who had moved to the United States;[9] and interviews from the 1990s conducted by Gross and a filmmaker.[4]

Reception

While several Polish historians praised Gross for having drawn attention to the pogrom, nationalists accused him of over-reliance on witness testimonies, which they called "unreliable" simply because the witnesses did not defend the Poles.[4][10][11] English historian Dan Stone once said:[12]

“ Some historians sought to dispute the fundamentals of Gross's findings by massive attention to minute details, burying the wider picture under a pile of supposed inaccuracies. ”

Ewa Wolentarska-Ochman, an expert in East European studies, said that the Neighbors "[left] young generations ... unable to comprehend how such a crime could be generally unknown and never spoken about in the last 50 years."[13]

Aftermath

The pogrom was not widely known until the film Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland was released in 2001.[1] The Institute of National Remembrance[c], Poland's state research agency that prosecutes Nazi and Soviet war crimes, conducted a forensic investigation in 2000–2003, confirming that the perpetrators were ethnic Poles, shocking the nation and the world.[2][14]

Legacy

Further information: Historical revisionism

The pogrom was reportedly conducted with exceptional brutality. Not only was a whole village burned alive, but also women were raped before being killed; men and children were stabbed to death with knives, pitchforks, axes, hatchets. No compassion was seen by witnesses who later testified in war crimes trials.[15] Historians found that some Poles had been motivated by grievances towards the Soviet occupation, which were projected onto Jews, as some Poles believed the Żydokomuna ("Jewish Communism") stereotype and sought revenge on Jews they mistook for being responsible for it.[1]

Denial

Despite abundant evidence, many in Polish society refuse to acknowledge the pogrom.[16][17] Some scholars said that such denial was going mainstream[18] amid the rise of nationalism across Europe,[19][20] where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".[20][21]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Jan T. Gross is an emeritus professor of history at Princeton University.[3]
  2. ↑ In December 1966, Szymon Datner wrote an article for the Bulletin of Jewish Historical Institute concluding that the Germans had moved through the area causing popular outbursts against the Jews without taking part in the killing themselves.
  3. ↑ Polish: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (IPN)

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2
    • Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved January 20, 2025. A rich body of scholarship emerged in the 2000s among Polish academics [...] came on the heels of the publication of Jan Gross's seminal book, Neighbors (published in Polish in 2000) about the gruesome murder of the Jews of Jedwabne in the summer of 1941 by their Polish neighbors [. ...] has been a sore point for Polish nationalists ever since the publication [...] It is true that we shall probably never know the precise number of Jewish victims but that has no impact whatsoever on our understanding of the event. What is known, is that on July 10, 1941, the Polish inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne murdered all the Jewish neighbors they managed to locate.
    • "The anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre". Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Warsaw, Poland. Retrieved October 21, 2024.
    • "This week in Jewish history". World Jewish Congress. July 10, 2022. Retrieved October 21, 2024.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1
  3. ↑ "Jan Tomasz Gross | Department of History". Princeton University. Retrieved May 29, 2025.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Wróbel, Piotr (2006a). "Polish-Jewish Relations and Neighbors by Jan T. Gross: Politics, Public Opinion and Historical Methodology". In Hayes, Peter; Herzog, Dagmar (eds.). Lessons and Legacies: The Holocaust in International Perspective, Volume VII. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. pp. 387–399. ISBN 0-8101-2370-3.
  5. ↑ Stola, Dariusz (2003). "Jedwabne: Revisiting the Evidence and Nature of the Crime". Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 17 (1): 139–152. doi:10.1093/hgs/17.1.139. SSRN 2831412.
  6. ↑ Kauffmann, Sylvie (December 19, 2002). "Poland faces up to the horror of its own role in the Holocaust". The Guardian.
  7. ↑ Shafir, Michael (2012). "Denying the Shoah in Post-Communist Eastern Europe". In Wistrich, Robert (ed.). Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy. Berlin, Boston and Jerusalem: Walter de Gruyter and Hebrew University Magnes Press. pp. 27–66. ISBN 978-3-11-028814-8.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Gross, Jan T. (2001). Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. pp. 77, 86‒87, 133. ISBN 978-0-14-200240-7.
  9. ↑ Holc, Janine P. (2002). "Working through Jan Gross's Neighbors". Slavic Review. 61 (3): 453–459. doi:10.2307/3090294. ISSN 0037-6779. JSTOR 3090294. S2CID 163923238.
  10. ↑ Musial, Bogdan; Polonsky, Antony; Michlic, Joanna (2003). The Pogrom in Jedwabne: Critical Remarks about Jan T. Gross's Neighbors. pp. 304–343.
  11. ↑ Rossino, Alexander B. (2003). "Polish 'Neighbors' and German Invaders: Contextualizing Anti-Jewish Violence in the Białystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa". In Steinlauf, Michael; Polonsky, Antony (eds.). Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. Vol. 16. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. pp. 450–471. ISBN 978-1874774747. OCLC 936831526.
  12. ↑ Stone, Dan (2010). Histories of the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-956679-2.
  13. ↑ Wolentarska-Ochman, Ewa (2006). "Collective Remembrance in Jedwabne: Unsettled Memory of World War II in Postcommunist Poland". History and Memory. 18 (1): 152–178. doi:10.2979/his.2006.18.1.152. JSTOR 10.2979/his.2006.18.1.152. S2CID 24138353.
  14. ↑ Adam Michnik, In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe, Chapter 10: "The Shock of Jedwabne", p.204-, University of California Press (2011)
  15. ↑ Żbikowski, Andrzej. "Mass murder of Jewish citizens in Jedwabne, Radziłów and other locations in the eastern Mazovia region in the summer of 1941". Jewish Historical Institute. Retrieved October 21, 2024.
  16. ↑
    • Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
    • Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
    • "Polish appeals court dismisses claims against Holocaust book historians". Euractiv. August 17, 2021. Retrieved January 4, 2025. An appeals court ruled that two historians accused of tarnishing the memory of a Polish villager in a book about the Holocaust need not apologise, overturning a lower court ruling that raised fears about freedom of academic research.
  17. ↑
    • Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
    • Grabowski, Jan (2024). "Whitewash: Poland and the Jews". The Jewish Quarterly. London, United Kingdom. Retrieved May 25, 2025. In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
  18. ↑
  19. ↑ Petrović, Zorica (2018). "The Roman Catholic Church and Clergy in the Nazi-Fascist Era on Slovenian Soil" (PDF). Athens Journal of History. 4 (3): 227‒252. doi:10.30958/ajhis.4-3-4. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Becker, Matthias J.; Troschke, Hagen; Bolton, Matthew; Chapelan, Alexis (October 16, 2024). "Holocaust Denial and Distortion". Decoding Antisemitism. pp. 237–260. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  21. ↑ Klein, Shira (June 14, 2023). "The shocking truth about Wikipedia's Holocaust disinformation". The Forward. Retrieved October 24, 2024. Why Wikipedia cannot be trusted: It repeatedly allows rogue editors to rewrite Holocaust history and make Jews out to be the bad guys [...].
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