On 10 July 1941, the non-Jewish inhabitants of the small Polish town of Jedwabne murdered most of their Jewish neighbours. The killers were Poles, not Germans. The victims were the Jewish residents of the town, around 340 of them by the most careful modern estimate, perhaps as many as 1,600 by older Polish accounts. Most were rounded up by their Polish neighbours, beaten in the town square, and then driven into a barn that was then set on fire. The barn burned with the people inside it.
The Jedwabne massacre was, until the end of the twentieth century, almost entirely absent from the official Polish narrative of the war. The Polish state had treated all Polish wartime suffering as the work of the Germans. The publication in 2000 of Jan T. Gross’s book Neighbours, which set out the Polish role in the Jedwabne massacre in detail, produced one of the most painful national arguments in modern Polish history. The argument is still going on.
The town and its Jews
Jedwabne is a small market town in the Białystok region of north-eastern Poland. Before the war it had a population of around 2,500, of whom a little over half, around 1,400, were Jewish. The Jewish community had been there since the eighteenth century. Jews ran most of the town’s shops and small workshops. Polish and Jewish neighbours had lived alongside each other for generations. Relations had been correct rather than warm; antisemitism was a feature of inter-war Polish politics and Jedwabne had not been an exception. There had been no organised pogroms before 1941.
The Soviet occupation
Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, eastern Poland including Jedwabne came under Soviet occupation from September 1939 to June 1941. The Soviet authorities deported tens of thousands of Polish citizens to the Gulag, including a number of Jedwabne Poles. The local Jewish population was not subject to the same deportations. Some Jews, particularly young ones, took up minor administrative posts under the Soviet regime, as Jews did across the Soviet-occupied territories. After the German invasion of June 1941, when the Soviet authorities fled and the local Polish population took control of their town for a few days before the Germans arrived, the accounts that had built up under the Soviet occupation were settled. The Jedwabne massacre is one of those settlings.
The day
On the morning of 10 July 1941, the Polish mayor of Jedwabne, Marian Karolak, and a group of local Polish men gathered the town’s Jewish population in the market square. There may or may not have been a small German police presence in the town that day. The historical record is unclear, and the Polish defence has long rested on the claim that the Germans ordered or organised the killing. The careful modern reconstructions, particularly the 2002 Polish state Institute of National Remembrance investigation, have concluded that the Germans were either absent or in such small numbers that they could not have organised what happened.
The Jews were beaten in the square through the day. Some were murdered there. The rabbi was made to lead the others through the streets carrying a portrait of Lenin. Late in the afternoon, the survivors were driven into a wooden barn at the edge of the town. The barn was locked. Petrol that the Germans had left in the town was poured over the walls. The barn was set on fire. The screams from inside lasted for some time. Around 340 people died in the barn that afternoon, almost all of them inhabitants of the town.
The historical reckoning
The killings at Jedwabne were not unique. Similar local pogroms by Polish neighbours took place in Wąsosz, Radziłów and several other towns in the same region in the same weeks. They have come to be called collectively the pogroms of summer 1941. They are part of the wider pattern of local civilian killing that followed the German invasion of Soviet-occupied territory across Eastern Europe.
What made Jedwabne different was Gross’s book. He had used the testimony of Szmul Wasersztejn, a Jewish survivor who had hidden in the woods that day and who recorded what he had seen in 1945. Wasersztejn’s testimony, combined with Polish witness accounts and the partial physical evidence at the site, produced a picture of the day that the Polish state had not been prepared to acknowledge. The book caused furious controversy. The Polish President at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, formally apologised at Jedwabne on the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre in 2001. Many Poles believed he should not have. The argument over what is sometimes called the Polonisation of Holocaust guilt continues in Polish political life today.
What it tells us
Jedwabne is not the story of the Holocaust in Poland. The Holocaust in Poland was overwhelmingly a German crime, conducted in Polish territory because that is where the major Jewish population lived and where the death camps were built. Polish Jews were murdered by the German state at a scale no Polish neighbours could have approached. But Jedwabne is part of the Holocaust in Poland, because the Holocaust would have been smaller if it had not had local participation in the territories it reached. The Polish state and the Polish public are still negotiating with that fact.
Sources
- Jan T. Gross, Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, Princeton University Press, 2001
- Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic (eds), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, Princeton University Press, 2003
- Institute of National Remembrance, Wokol Jedwabnego, Warsaw, 2002
- USHMM: Jedwabne