Analysis Of The Book Neighbors: The Destruction Of The Jewish Community In Jedwabne, Poland By Jan T. Gross

On July 10, 1941, a village in occupied Poland, Jedwabne, 190 km from Warsaw, there was one of the most cruel and incredible events recorded in World War II. During some hours of that summer day, a town of 3000 inhabitants was the scene where a collective murder took place. That day 1,500 people killed or saw another 1600 killed, the latter of Jewish origin, and in the extermination there was no distinction between men, women, children and the elderly. Only seven people survived being saved by a Polish family (the Wyrzykowski marriage) that, precisely, for that act of solidarity was persecuted for years. The story, as chilling as it was atrocious, was denied for decades until the Jewish Polish historian Jan T. Gross published the book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland in 2001, a publication that became a bestseller in the United States and it sparked an unprecedented national debate in Poland.

The book was built gathering the testimony of the only seven people who survived the massacre, and in the archives of two trials held by the communist authorities in 1949 and 1953. One of the particularities of this massacre is that in Poland occupied by the Nazis, the Germans did not order the killing or participate in it, they just limited themselves to authorizing the development of events and act as an instigating force. It was a collective crime carried out by a community of neighbors, of "common" individuals, where most of the men participated actively, and the rest observed in a passive but complicit way.

The sequence was devastating. With blows and various tortures, all the Jews were dragged into a barn, locked there, and then set on fire. Subjected to all kinds of humiliations, the Jews were forced to perform a whole series of humiliations before being killed by their neighbors.

This was followed by the confiscation of the "abandoned" goods, the generalized silence, and a systematic and collective oblivion of what happened. The people were annihilated, but their intact properties were appropriated by their executors. Gross points out that it was a mass murder in a double sense, because of the number of victims and the number of executioners. They killed them in a frenetic, barbaric way, and in many ways, some with metal tools, others with stab wounds, others with stakes.

One of the most disturbing elements of this story is that it breaks the “monster” archetype that commits inhuman acts. As the text of Gross points out, in Jedwabne the executioners were ordinary Poles. They were men and women of all ages, and of the most diverse professions. They were “good citizens” and what the Jews saw, to the greatest horror and bewilderment, were only familiar faces. They saw their own neighbors turned into volunteer killers. An example where the horde, the fury of a resentful mass that for different reasons is contaminated with the ideas of difference and superiority, eliminates the limits and individual responsibilities. Various reports state that the Jedwabne people of the postwar period knew perfectly well that the Jews of the village had been murdered by their neighbors during the war, and not by the Nazis.

The story of Jedwabne represents a witness event of how far a group of ordinary people, of friendly and familiar faces, can go before certain circumstances of contagion of the most visceral hatred, and where there is no room for reflection and empathy. The publication of Neighbors caused a deep shock in Polish society and, although more research has been published on the subject and even the 2012 production of the film Aftermath, there remains a truth that is hard to come to light. The film, Aftermath, is made to convey feelings and this film achieves it fully. This film lets us see the dark past in Polish history when the traces of a massacre during the Second World War are discovered. It is the hidden face of genocide despite being fictitious, it is inspired by the Jedwabne massacre, in which a group of Poles killed a whole community of Jews from northwestern Poland in 1941, although local history attributed this massacre to Nazis. In this film, we can relive the harsh sequel to the war, the complicity and hatred that generated the Nazi propaganda and extermination also identified with the name of holocaust or catastrophe.

Frequently we ask ourselves why there has been so much evil and why does it continue to exist? What we must do to improve the world and cultivate the best example, so that future generations inherit a reconstructed planet and life is more balanced, pleasant and comprehensive, making the greatest effort to eradicate injustice, racism, exclusion and all that type of evils that slow down and delay society. All those questions and reflections are the reaction that arises when watching the film, Aftermath. Now, was this process always this way or is it more complex? Gross reveals the importance of not fitting in topics and simplifications, in returning to the sources, even if they are oral, to discover the interlinings of History. As incited the author, none of this would have been possible without totalitarianism, without the arbitrary use of power and cruelty that seemed to breathe into those seeking to impose the myth of the ideal society in which only had room willful and self-denying citizens. But totalitarianisms are not an abstraction, but the people themselves make up the picture of this story. A legend after the events told that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered by the Germans, as in so many other places, in a wild and arbitrary manner. And a monument would rise in his memory. But in 1949 a process would begin, already in the communist era, after the war, in which several neighbors were going to be accused of having helped the German state in its dominating purposes. That is how the historian Gross managed to discover the testimonies of a rare process in which several neighbors were accused of having participated in the Jedwabne pogrom. His crime was to have helped the Germans, not to have murdered Jews. But that made it possible to discover the truth.

Little by little, pulling that fine thread, since the documentation was scarce, revealed what happened. What happened, really, in Jedwabne? On July 10, 1941, the mayor and other neighbors spontaneously, driven by German anti-Semitic politics decided to gather the Jews of the town and kill them. Not within any calculated extermination program but savagely and with excessive brutality, many of them were beaten to death and another hundred burned alive inside a warehouse. Gross carefully analyzes the few existing sources to understand such a cruel act that was driven, in part, by old prejudices and quarrels, they were accused of being communists, of selfish attitudes (to seize their property) or of pure racial hatred. Only 6 Jews survived opportunely hidden by a local family. Jedwabne represents not only the fact that the Poles themselves murdered their neighbors, apart from the Nazi authorities, but the active role they had in other places when using Nazi policies to seize their assets without worrying about the luck of the Jews. Even after the war, in 1946 and 1948, there were two anti-Semitic pogroms. The Holocaust today so well known, then, was only a rumor among the peoples affected by the war. But, in spite of everything, still, as Gross points out, there has not been a step forward in Polish historiography when studying this context of relations between Gentiles and Jews. It is a taboo subject, in which the Poles are proud of their Catholicism and observe that past with cold distance, except for those exploits carried out by the Polish resistance during the war.

However, it is disturbing to see how people who had been living for decades and who had known each other for a long time were able to act so wildly. Not all, of course. There were Poles who hid Jews at the risk of their lives, of being denounced by other neighbors knowing that this put them in danger of death. There were also families who, knowing that they were hiding Jews, were despised and even threatened by them, were stigmatized. The crimes of the Nazis were huge, but they were never alone in their endeavors. The perverse and false myth that the Jews were communists or that they made human sacrifices, typical of a medieval mentality, it was deeply rooted in a population that brought out its rage not against the true inducers of that humanitarian catastrophe but against the most affected. Neighbors is more than a true story of terror of the twentieth century, it is a key element that leads us to think about this new century, knowing that mass society can be trapped by counterproductive messages and that we have not been free from fanaticism or Totalitarianism, unfortunately. Jedwabne reveals that not all the victims of the past were recognized or that all societies have made a real catharsis of conscience.