Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland by Jan T. s> Gross (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 58I Gross, Jan T. Neighbors.TheDestruction of theJewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 200I. XX + 26I pp. Map. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $19.95: 712.95. A QUICK visitto the internetwill reveal that thousandsof articles,printed and electronic, have been generated by this smallbook, which was publishedin a Polish edition in 2000. To be sure, its revelations are shocking: on i0 July 1941, part of the Catholic Polish population of Jedwabne, a small town of approximately3,000 personsin Lomza county in the Podlasieregion of northeastern Poland, attacked, tortured and murdered most of the town's Polish Jewish population, perhaps i,6oo in all. The culmination of the day-long killingspreecame when all the survivingJews were driveninto a barn, locked in, and burned to death. There is a lingering dispute about German involvement in the instigation of the atrocity, but there can be no question that the murdererswere Poles. The book has strucka nerve among Poles andJews because Grossdoes not shy away fromthe implicationsof thisevent. His researchaddsto the growing literature about the 'ordinary men,' to use Christopher Browning's phrase, who servedas the foot-soldierswho enabled the ideological fanaticsof Nazism to carryout the massmurderof EuropeanJewry. In thiscase, thevictimswere neighbours who had lived for decades side by side with their murderers in apparentpeace and amity. Even more unsettling although Grossdoes not dwell on this point the Jedwabne massacrewas not an isolated event, but partof a seriesof massmurdersin the region. Some of thevictimsinJedwabne wereJewish refugeesfleeingsimilarattacksin nearbytownslikeRadzilow and W,sosz. Although he does not comment in detail on this phenomenon, Gross includes a map of the '"Bermuda Triangle" of July I94I massacresof Jews by theirneighbors'(p. 203). Self-justifyingeffortshave been made in the past to explain both occasional acts of Polish collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitism, and the more common phenomenon of popular apathy toward the Final Solution. In particular, alleged Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation and sovietization of eastern Poland in the period I939-4I iS often used to explain, if not excuse, such actions and attitudes. Gross demonstrates that, despite retrospective claims, Jedwabne Jews could not in any way be linked to the stereotypical 'zydokommuna'.Grosslocated the impetusin the basestof human motives:it was 'thedesireand unexpected opportunityto robtheJews once and for all ratherthan, or alongsidewith, atavisticAntisemitism'(p. I Io). The heated response to Gross'sbook in Poland has served to demonstrate another point made by the author, the extreme difficultyfor Poles to cede the role of 'victim' to others. As Gross provocatively asks in one chapter, 'Is it Possible to Be Simultaneously a Victim and a Victimizer'. The answer is, of course, 'yes'. This has made the realities of Polish-Jewishrelations before, during and after the Second World War so difficult even for conscientious scholarsto address,to saynothing of the broaderpublic. Grossarguesthat the construction of a usable past that can serve as a foundation for a modern Polish identity must include a recognition of the 'dark past' as well as the episodes of martyrdom and glory. At least some segments of contemporary Polishsociety have ralliedto Gross'scall. 582 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 Lost in the heat of theJedwabne controversyis a hypothesisthat arisesout of Gross' research, dealing not with the Holocaust, but with the subsequent Communist takeover in post-war Poland. Besides the dedicated ideologues who moved this process forward,he notes, was manpower of a differentsort. 'Amongtheir most valuable operativesand confidantsthere were also people devoid of all principles'. These were precisely the types of people who had been compromised during the German occupation. In other words, those willing to kill their neighbours for their cows or clothing, were also willing to benefit from serving the Stalinist system. His contention that 'communities whereJews had been murderedbylocal inhabitantswereespeciallyvulnerable to sovietization'(p. i66) is a hypothesisworthtestingby scholars. Gross's book is significantnot just for the light it sheds on Poland's 'dark past',but forthe many unansweredquestionsthat it raises. Department ofHebrew andJewishStudies J.D. KLIER University College London Jones, Derek (ed.). Censorship. A WorldEncyclopedia. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers , London and Chicago, IL, 200I. lXii + 289 I pp. (in four volumes). Illustrations.Bibliographicalreferences.Index. ?265.oo. THEfirstand most importantpoint to make about thisencyclopaedia is that it is a magnificentachievement. Covering...