page_title: Jedwabne pogrom
section_title: Sąsiedzi by Jan T. Gross (2000)
hierarchical_section_title: Jedwabne pogrom / Later inquiries / Sąsiedzi by Jan T. Gross (2000)
caption_attribution_description: English: Jan Tomasz Gross, a Polish-American historian speaking at the Collège de France, February 21, 2019 –&#160;Conference&#160;: La nouvelle école polonaise d’histoire de la Shoah / New Polish School of the History of the Holocaust
context_page_description: The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust.
  At least 340 men, women and children were murdered, some 300 of whom were locked in a barn which was then set on fire. About 40 non-Jewish Poles were implicated as being perpetrators of the massacre. German military police were present in the town at the time.
  The massacre occurred among many others in the Podlasie region with the arrival of German troops shortly after their 21 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, which had until then occupied Jedwabne in an 20-month reign of terror since the Hitler-Stalin Pact divided Poland in 1939. The killers at Jedwabne used the negative stereotype of "Jewish Communism" against their victims. Prior to the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, Jedwabne had been located in an area which favored the National Party, an anti-Semitic bloc opposed to the prewar Polish government, which outlawed its radical violent wing in 1934.
context_section_description: Jan T. Gross's book Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka ("Neighbors: The Story of the Annihilation of a Jewish Town") caused a "moral earthquake" when it was published in Poland in May 2000, according to Piotr Wróbel. It appeared in English, German and Hebrew within the year. In English it was published in April 2001 by Princeton University Press as Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland.
  Writing that "one day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women and children", Gross concluded that the Jedwabne Jews had been rounded up and killed by a mob of their own Polish neighbors. This ran contrary to Poland's official account that they had been killed by Germans. Political scientist Michael Shafir writes that the pogrom had been "subjected to confinement in the Communist 'black hole of history'". While Gross recognized that no "sustained organizing activity" could have taken place without the Germans' consent, he concluded that the massacre had been carried out entirely by Poles from Jedwabne and the surrounding area, and that the Germans had not coerced them.
  Gross's sources were Szmul Wasersztajn's 1945 witness statement from the Jewish Historical Institute; witness statements and other trial records from the 1949–1950 trials; the Yedwabne: History and Memorial Book (1980), written by Jedwabne residents who had moved to the United States; and interviews from the 1990s conducted by Gross and a filmmaker. While several Polish historians praised Gross for having drawn attention to the pogrom, others criticized him for relying too heavily on witness accounts, which they argued were not reliable, and—where conflicting accounts existed—for choosing those that showed the Poles in the worst possible light. He was also criticized for having failed to examine the pogrom within the context of German actions during the early stages of the Holocaust. According to Dan Stone, "some historians sought to dispute the fundamentals of Gross's findings by massive attention to minute details, burying the wider picture under a pile of supposed inaccuracies".
caption: Jan T. Gross, 2019
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