Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.."

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.

This is a problematic book written by a historian who comes close to peddling the kind of anti-Semitic ideas about Jews as hostile foreigners undermining the Polish nation as could be found in the interwar era, if not earlier. To such Polish nationalists, Jews are ultimately to blame for Polish anti-Semitism, including, but not limited to, the Jedwabne massacre. Chodakiewicz is not totally within this camp, but the book can easily be taken as verification of this position.

Jan Gross's _Neighbors_ is not a perfect book. It makes some valid sweeping polemical claims in its challenges to a strain of Polish nationalist historiography, but should have utilized a more complete source base to describe the Jedwabne events with more precision. Nevertheless, its basic conclusions have been clearly borne out by an incomplete but thorough Polish government investigation. Despite its shortcomings, it is a far better and far more honest piece of work than that of the Polish ethno-nationalists who have attacked it. It is disturbing to me that this book has received enthusiastic positive reviews from Polish nationalist readers who see it as vindication for their views.