The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After [Hardcover]

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0880335548 | ISBN-13: 978-0880335546 | Publication Date: December 21, 2005

On July 10, 1941, the Jewish inhabitants in the small Polish town of Jedwabne were massacred by German policemen and some Polish townsmen and peasants. Chodakiewicz provides us with a detailed study of the conditions that led to the heinous slaughter of Jedwabne's Jewish population. A dominant interpretation of this event depicts the Germans as the perpetrators of the crime while the Poles looked on. An alternative version suggests that the Germans plotted the crime, while the Poles executed the slaughter. Chodakiewicz argues that these two competing theses are not supported by the available evidence. He emphasizes a comprehensive methodology using all available documents, testimonies, oral recollections, and forensic and other physical evidence to reconstruct the history. In addition, Chodakiewicz provides an alternative interpretation to the dominant paradigms concerning Jewish-Polish relations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[This volume is] coherently structured and well edited.

(Philip Ther Slavic Review )

About the Author

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is research professor of history at the Institute of World Politics.

(Spring 2008)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: East European Monographs (December 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880335548
• ISBN-13: 978-0880335546
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,489,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Jedwabne Massacre of Jews: Germans, Not Poles, to Blame, August 18, 2006

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Hardcover)

In recent years, Jan Thomas Gross' two books, NEIGHBORS and FEAR, have been widely publicized despite their very shoddy character. In fact, the media didn't rush to judgment on Poland; it stampeded. To top it all off, the media has actually spun the results of a recent investigative Polish commission as a confirmation of Gross--when it is almost the exact opposite!

This long-overdue book is a painstaking analysis of the Jedwabne tragedy, and it exposes the falsehood of the thesis that Poles murdered defenseless local Jews while the Germans only observed and photographed the act. Ironically, Gross' thesis had already been considered and discarded by Jewish and Polish scholars decades ago (p. 7, 124)! Also: "Aware neither of most available primary sources nor the work of Datner or any other scholars, Gross considered a very limited pool of evidence through the prism of a single survivor testimony." (p. 9).

Chodakiewicz begins by focusing on the good relations between the Poles and Jews before the war. He shows that, after the Soviet invasion, Jewish-Communist collaboration against Poles was very real and substantive. Later on, it is interesting that Germans referred to Poles as "superfluous" (p. 91), something supposed to be said only of the Jews. There are surprising details about various Polish guerilla actions, including reprisal raids against German villages in East Prussia (p. 93), as well as continued resistance for years after the imposition of the Soviet puppet state.

The Jedwabne massacre bears all the hallmarks of known German atrocities elsewhere. As a start, the torching of a building into which victims had been herded is a German, not Slavic, technique of mass murder. Forensic evidence alone practically refutes solitary Polish guilt in the massacre. The killing had clearly been preplanned and organized, occurring in two stages. This is utterly foreign to spontaneous pogroms, as are the facts that there were virtually no broken bones in the victims and their personal valuables had not been stolen. There were around 300 Jewish victims, not 1,600.

In contrast to Jan Thomas Gross, Chodakiewicz has studied all known witnesses. The available testimonies do NOT reduce to a Poles'-word vs. Jews'-word situation. To the contrary, and to summarize: "As we have seen, some Jewish accounts square with the majority of the Polish recollections which blame the Germans. A few testimonies blame the Poles alone for the massacre. Most suggest that the Germans carried out the crime with some Polish assistance."(p. 138).

Aside from some Volksdeutsche (Polish-speaking Germans) and known prewar Polish criminals, it is unclear to what extent Poles "freely" collaborated with the Germans. It has been argued that the Polish participation must have been voluntary because there was no cordon of German troops around the village. How naïve! Chodakiewicz (pp. 78-81) presents repeated examples of how easy it was for the Germans to terrorize both Poles and Jews into submission through the use of purely verbal threats and through remote supervision. Finally, the Germans were not looking for volunteers. They forced the Poles out of their homes and enforced obedience by threatening them and by employing kicks and whips (pp. 134-135). Right then and there (p. 135), and many times elsewhere, the Germans threatened Poles with death for the slightest assistance to Jews.

The number of Poles involved with the Germans at Jedwabne was several tens (not hundreds; nowhere near "half the town"), and that during the initial roundup of Jews in the market place (where Jews were humiliated through the mock funeral of Lenin's bust, but without any indication of impending death). How many Poles, if any, remained involved, "consensually" or not, in the later torching of the Jew-filled barn, is not indicated by credible evidence (p. 164, 169).

Chodakiewicz evaluates ALL Polish conduct. After the massacre, and in the German apprehensions of Jews for extermination in later years, the Poles very commonly aided fugitive Jews, but also sometimes betrayed them. While not elaborated by Chodakiewicz, the fact of near-starvation conditions in the countryside (p. 90), caused by the draconian German requisitions of feedstuffs, helps the reader understand why some Poles, fearing Jewish thefts of food, went as far as betraying them.

The ease by which Jan Thomas Gross dismisses evidence not to his liking is positively breathtaking. He disregards testimonies (demonstrating widespread Jewish-Communist collaboration) from the Hoover Institution archives on the basis of Gross' presumption that they are "anti-Semitic" (pp. 201-202). He explains away the obviously-false Jewish claim that Poles alone killed the Jews of nearby Wizna as just a false "perception" (p. 129). Gross egregiously rejects no less than 20 Jewish and Polish postwar testimonies (none of which were coerced, and one which even came from Palestine), all of which identify the murderers of Jedwabne's Jews as Germans (pp. 131-132), on the accusation that they merely adhered to some sort of template of blaming Germans (p. 243). How convenient! Following Gross, it would be even easier to dismiss the few mostly-hearsay Pole-blaming testimonies in existence by fingering the Polonophobic motives, leitmotifs, and false perceptions of the accusers.

Chodakiewicz stresses the need for further research into seldom-explored topics. As an example, he cites the well-documented massacres of Poles in the villages of Naliboki and Koniuchy by Jewish Soviet partisans. (p. 159). I cannot agree with Chodakiewicz's equation of Gross and the Holocaust Industry with Gross and the revival of feudalism in Poland (p. 157). Unlike the former, the latter has exactly zero chance of fulfillment.

Chodakiewicz has written an invaluable work. Would that the media give 1% of the coverage to Chodakiewicz that it gave to Jan Thomas Gross! Instead, the persistent adulatory coverage given to Jan Thomas Gross, for all his demonstrably false claims and clearly invalid thesis, cannot be dignified as bias. It points to nothing less than a shocking lack of integrity in the media.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most Important Work Available on Jedwabne, May 3, 2010

By 

Nicodemus - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Hardcover)

Chodakiewicz was appointed by President George W. Bush to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. He also works for the Polish IPN. This book is an IPN publication.

This definitive work on Jedwabne is invaluable reading to anyone wanting to know the truth about what happened in 1941.

The work goes into great detail and does not sensationalise, but presents all the known evidence. He also reveals how Poles had their property grabbed by Soviet collaborators. The Wawernia family were threatened with arrest after a Jewish family took their apartment and possessions. The Catholic priests were thrown out of their home which was taken over the Communists. There is ample evidence of betrayal of Poles by their neighbours to the NKVD. He debunks the story about the Bishop of Lomza taking money then refusing to help Jews, pointing out that the Bishop was in hiding at the time and no one knew his location.

Every single of the 28 depositions submitted by nineteen persons before the court in 1947-49 blamed the Germans. Poles were not mentioned by any of the witnesses as instigating the crime. The depositions were given freely, one being sent from Palestine.

"...the Germans coming...from Lomza. They were the gendamerie, four or five trucks...The Germans swarmed out and chased the Poles out of their houses. When they collected over a dozen persons , they took them along...they placed Poles on both sides of the street. Every dozen meters or so there was a German with a rifle ready to shoot so no Jew could escape. And this way it turned out that the Poles were doing it. Not the Germans.."

16 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS VERSION TELLS THE TRUTH!!!; GERMANS CLEARLY TO BLAME., August 25, 2007

By 

Academic - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, After (Hardcover)

Why isn't this book in every library? It is incredibly researhed and logical. Highly recommended! If you really want to read what "really" happened. No ridiculous sensationalisms (like Gross' version), but black and white facts.