Jedwabne pogrom (1941)

During the Jedwabne pogrom, Jews in Jedwabne, Poland were massacred by their neighbors and the Nazi military police.** This happened on July 10, 1941, during the Holocaust. 

Up to 1,600 Jews were killed in this pogrom, according to estimates. The victims included women, children, and elderly people. Many of the victims were burned alive. 

At least 40 ethnic Poles joined the pogrom, aided by Nazi military police (Feldgendarmerie).

Background

Neighbors (2000) by Jan T. Gross


In May 2000, American historian Jan T. Gross released a book titled Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka ("Neighbors: The Story of the Annihilation of a Jewish Town").

The book 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.

Content

Gross wrote: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. He concluded that the Jedwabne Jews had been rounded up and killed by a mob of their own Polish neighbors. This is different from Poland's official account that they had been killed by Germans. Political scientist Michael Shafir wrote that the pogrom had been "subjected to confinement in the Communist 'black hole of history'". 

Gross recognized that no "sustained organizing activity" could have happened without the Germans' consent. Still, he concluded that the massacre had been committed entirely by Poles, and that the Germans had not coerced them.

Sources

Gross's sources were Szmuel 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. 

Reception

While several Polish historians praised Gross for having drawn attention to the pogrom, nationalists accused him of over-reliance on witness testimonies, which they called "unreliable" simply because the witnesses did not defend the Poles. English historian Dan Stone once said:

Ewa Wolentarska-Ochman, an expert in East European studies, said that the Neighbors "[left] young generations ... unable to comprehend how such a crime could be generally unknown and never spoken about in the last 50 years."

Aftermath


The pogrom was not widely known until the film Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland was released in 2001. The Institute of National Remembrance, Poland's state research agency which prosecutes Nazi and Soviet war crimes, conducted a forensic investigation in 2000–2003, confirming that the perpetrators were ethnic Poles, shocking the nation and the world.Adam Michnik, In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe, Chapter 10: "The Shock of Jedwabne", p.204-, University of California Press (2011)

Legacy


The pogrom was reportedly conducted with exceptional brutality. Not only was a whole village burned alive, but women were also raped before being killed; men and children were stabbed to death with knives, pitchforks, axes, hatchets. Witnesses who survived and later testified in war crimes trials stated that they saw no compassion in their killers.

Historians found that some Poles had been motivated by grievances towards the Soviet occupation, which were projected onto Jews. Some Poles believed the Żydokomuna ("Jewish Communism") stereotype and sought revenge on Jews who they thought were responsible for it.

Denial

Despite abundant evidence, many in Polish society refuse to acknowledge the pogrom. Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
 Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
  Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
  Some scholars said that such denial was going mainstream 

  amid the rise of nationalism across Europe, where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".

Related pages

 Iași pogrom
 Lviv pogroms
 Szczuczyn pogrom

Footnotes

References

Category:Pogroms
Category:Massacres
Category:The Holocaust
Category:1940s in Poland
Category:Antisemitism in Europe