20th anniversary of publishing Neighbors by J. T. Gross

In May 2000, a book titled "Sąsiedzi. Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka" [Neighbors. Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland] by Jan Tomasz Gross came out thanks to the thus-far little-known "Pogranicze" Publishing House in Sejny. This small book of merely 120 pages shook the foundations of Polish historical awareness and triggered a widespread and emotional debate on the twentieth-century history of Poland.

The book describes a mass murder of Jews in the town of Jedwabne in Łomża County committed by the local Polish community incited by the German Security Police. On 10 July 1941, several hundred Jews from Jedwabne were burnt alive in a barn located near the town’s limits.

Presenting the crime and its Polish perpetrators to the public caused a "narrative shock" of sorts, for it undermined the self-image of Poles being solely the innocent victims of the Second World War.

Thus far, all debates on Polish attitudes towards the Holocaust and the Polish-Jewish relations during the war revolved around the issues of providing aid to Jews, helplessness of the witnesses to the Holocaust, or - at worst - indifference and passivity towards the Jewish tragic fate. Blackmail and denouncing - mentioned rarely and most reluctantly - seemed to be the worst within the scope of negative attitudes towards Jews during the war.

By describing a particularly drastic case of murdering Jews by Poles, Gross seriously challenged the cultural taboo. Even though numerous documents and witness accounts had been kept in the archives, and literary accounts had been present for a long time, they all remained in the sphere of national subconscious, unbeknown to the public. The problem of crimes committed on Jews by their Christian neighbors, including Poles, was practically absent from the public discourse.

The nationwide debate sparked off by the publication of "Neighbors" turned into a form of a national confrontation with the suppressed issue. Historians, journalists and intellectuals participated in this debate, including the highest ranks of state administration. During the ceremony of unveiling a new monument in Jedwabne, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski uttered the words of apology "in his own name, and on behalf of all the Poles whose conscience have been deeply shaken by this atrocious crime."

Publication of Gross’ book launched a new era in research on the attitudes of local residents towards the extermination of their Jewish neighbors. Soon it transpired, thanks to the studies conducted by the Institute of National Remembrance, that the crime in Jedwabne was by no means an exception, but rather an event in a series of Jewish pogroms that had taken place along the line of the eastern front, following the German invasion on the Soviet Union. In over twenty towns in east Mazovia and Podlasie, such pogroms were carried out by Poles.

Publication of Gross’ book launched a new era in research on the attitudes of local residents towards the extermination of their Jewish neighbors. Soon it transpired, thanks to the studies conducted by the Institute of National Remembrance, that the crime in Jedwabne was by no means an exception, but rather an event in a series of Jewish pogroms that had taken place along the line of the eastern front, following the German invasion on the Soviet Union. In over twenty towns in east Mazovia and Podlasie, such pogroms were carried out by Poles.

Historians’ interest in the archival resources which thus far had hardly been looked into and which resurfaced following the publication of "Neighbors" contributed to the development of academic studies on the course the Holocaust had taken on a local level. Numerous scholarly works devoted to this subject have since appeared, mainly penned by historians associated with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The dark side of this newly disclosed image of wartime reality were individual crimes - denouncing and murdering Jews who remained in hiding - which were commonplace after the Germans had liquidated the ghettos.