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Jedwabne - crime, debate, symbol

"In 2000, the book was published by Jan Tomasz Gross "Sasiedzi. Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka" (Neighbours. The story of the extermination of a Jewish town)". The author described the mass murder of Jews in Jedwabne in the Łomża district, carried out by local Poles with the encouragement and consent of the German Security Police. On July 10, 1941, the perpetrators brought several hundred Jews from Jedwabne to the town square, where they abused them for several hours and finally burned them alive in a barn. It was accompanied by individual assaults and murders as well as looting of Jewish houses. After the war, twenty-three suspects involved in the crime stood trial, ten of whom were sentenced to prison terms. Afterwards, there was silence on the subject, and a memorial erected in the 1960s attributed the sole perpetration of the murder to the Germans.

The publication of Neighbours had the power of an explosion that shattered the foundations of Poles' historical awareness, triggering a vast, emotional public debate. It involved not only historians, journalists and intellectuals. During the ceremony of unveiling the new monument in Jedwabne in 2001, the highest state authorities spoke out, and President Aleksander Kwaśniewski expressed his apology "on behalf of himself and those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime".

The revelation of the Polish involvement in the Jedwabne crime caused a cognitive shock. It undermined Poles' self-image of themselves as exclusively innocent victims of World War II. At the same time, the publication of Neighbours opened a new era of research on the attitudes of local people towards the Jews during the Holocaust. It quickly turned out that the slaughter in Jedwabne belonged to the wave of pogroms against the Jews, which swept through the eastern front after the German invasion of the USSR. Poles were the perpetrators in over twenty localities in eastern Mazowsze and Podlasie.

Historians' interest in hitherto unexplored sources (court case files and accounts of Jewish survivors just after the war) contributed, in turn, to the development of research on the course of the Holocaust at the local level. The dark side of the newly uncovered picture of the occupation reality turned out to be individual crimes, and rendition and murder of the hiding Jews, which were the order of the day after the German ghetto liquidation action.

Over the years, the name Jedwabne has acquired the dimension of a symbol with a double meaning. Among the supporters of critical history, it functions as a slogan evoking various forms of Poles' contribution to the extermination of the Jews. For a part of the public opinion that takes a defensive or even a denialist stance, it symbolises blaming Poles for not having done anything.

Krzysztof Persak

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