One person was sentenced to death, though in Gross's view his culpability was less than certain. Testimonies of the accused and of witnesses, which mostly corroborated Wasersztajn's version, were preserved in legal archives. In 1980, a Jedwabne memorial volume was published in Israel and the United States, and it is today available on the Internet. Several Polish historians who took part in the passionate and often vitriolic debate that surrounded the publication of Gross's book in Poland displayed a surprising familiarity with the details of the crime. And yet for all those years, not only under communism but also after its fall, an event of this magnitude was never considered worthy of scholarly inquiry.
Pogroms belong to the threatening, cruel domain of the East, to Russia and Ukraine and Belarus.
Even the notion of anti-Semitism occupies a curious blind spot in the Poles' otherwise sharp historical vision. The very mention of the term still provokes indignant denials, and charges that one is trafficking in accusations of collective guilt. Gross seems aware of how volatile and sensitive his compatriots' feelings on this subject can be. He stresses that probably none of what happened in Jedwabne would have taken place without the German presence in the town. Throughout the massacre, the Germans remained firmly in control.