Dark Facts From 1941 Scar Poles’ Self-Image

JEDWABNE, Poland —  For decades, a simple stone memorial outside this rural town somberly declared: “Site of a massacre of the Jewish population. The Gestapo and Nazi military police burned 1,600 people alive on July 10, 1941.”

Last month, government officials took away the stone. For Jedwabne’s Jews, according to emerging accounts, were slaughtered that day not by the Germans but by their neighbors. First, some were tortured and killed in the streets and a cemetery, and then the rest were herded into a barn, which was doused with kerosene and set afire.

Shock waves from the fresh examination of the massacre are reverberating with growing strength across this nation, reshaping its self-image as a heroic victim in World War II and opening an uncertain path forward in often-strained ties between Poles and Jews.

“I can’t remember any other such wide debate in Poland about the past, even the Communist past,” said Zbigniew Nosowski, the editor of Wiez, a liberal Roman Catholic monthly magazine. “This is a serious debate concerning such issues as the roles of Poles and Germans in this massacre, national pride and questions of national guilt. This is a debate that touches the most important issues of our national identity.”

Rzeczpospolita, one of Poland’s most respected newspapers, launched the issue with an article last year headlined, “Burning Alive--In Jedwabne, the German Extermination of the Jews Was Carried Out by Polish Hands.” Based in part on research by a Polish emigre author, the article triggered a still-intensifying national discussion of the previously little-known mass murder here in Jedwabne (pronounced Yed-VAB-nay), a small, economically depressed town in northeastern Poland.

Estimates of how many died range from a few hundred to 1,600. But there is wide agreement that even if there were a few hundred survivors, the day marked the essential destruction of the town’s Jewish community. Confirmation late last month of the exact location of the barn’s foundation and the discovery of a mass burial site along one side may lead to more details.

The Polish government aims to put up a new, more historically accurate monument to the victims in time for a 60th anniversary memorial ceremony in July. Exactly what it will say is a difficult issue that has not been resolved. The governmental Institute of National Remembrance, set up last year primarily to examine the history of Communist crimes in Poland, has launched a major investigation into the Jedwabne events.

Germans, who had conquered the region in June 1941, were present during the Jedwabne killings, according to almost all accounts. But some documents indicate that on that particular day, they may have done little more than take photographs of or film the slayings for propaganda aimed at showing that people of occupied nations also hated Jews.

Some voices in the current debate still insist that Germans committed the crime. But most public discussion has been based on broad acceptance of the thesis that Polish residents of Jedwabne played an active role.

This is shocking to most Poles regardless of the degree of German involvement or the exact number of people who died--both matters of heated dispute and conflicting documentary evidence--because until now, the Holocaust has been viewed in Poland as something that the Nazis committed without help from ordinary Polish people.

The revelations are “the most serious scar” on the idea that ethnic Poles “were victims in World War II, and victims only, innocent victims,” said Stanislaw Krajewski, a board member of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland. “I don’t think the Polish debate about World War II, and the Polish self-image, can [ever again] be the same.”

Polish political and religious leaders, including President Aleksander Kwasniewski and Roman Catholic Cardinal Jozef Glemp, have responded with statements that Poland must come to terms with dark pages from its past.

Kwasniewski has said that he will attend the July memorial service in Jedwabne and offer an apology. “For me, the most important thing is that historical truth is known and that we say what needs to be said in such a situation: that we are apologizing for what our compatriots did,” he said.

In a March radio address, Glemp said: “This burning of the Jewish people alive in a barn where they were pushed by force by the Poles is undeniable.

“The moral aspect . . . is associated with apologizing to God for the sins of our forebears and apologizing to the descendants of those who suffered,” Glemp added. “Of course the scale of accepting guilt depends on finding the objective truth, finding the reasons for the sins and the circumstances of the crime. The reasons for such savage and hateful attitudes of Poles toward Jews, not found in other parts of Poland, have to be investigated.”

Some critics have said over the years that the Catholic Church did not do enough during World War II to try to stop the Holocaust.

Confronting the truth of what happened in the summer of 1941 in Jedwabne and some nearby towns where similar incidents took place may have beneficial effects, said Krajewski, who is also the Jewish co-chair of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.

“There’s a good potential for overcoming the main reason for bashing Poland, which really has been the complete lack of understanding among Poles, generally speaking, of how Jews were afraid of the anti-Semitism among Poles,” he said.

The main trigger for a reassessment of the massacre is the book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne,” written by Jan T. Gross, a naturalized American of Polish and Jewish heritage who is a professor of politics and European studies at New York University. An English version hits bookstores in the United States this week.

Gross’ research--based mainly on postwar testimony, including records of a two-day 1949 trial of some of the perpetrators--prompted the Rzeczpospolita report that first brought the issue to widespread public attention.

At the brief 1949 trial--conducted by Communist authorities at a time of hard-line Stalinism--12 of the 22 defendants, all ethnic Poles from the Jedwabne area, were found guilty, according to court documents recently cited by historian Tomasz Strzembosz. One man, Karol Bardon, received a death sentence, later commuted to 15 years in prison. The others received sentences ranging from eight to 15 years.

One of the issues being examined by the remembrance institute is whether any perpetrators who never faced trial are alive and should be brought to justice.

Although Gross acknowledges an ill-defined background role for the Nazis in the killings, his main point, as he puts it in his conclusion to the English version of the book, is that “the 1,600 Jedwabne Jews were killed . . . [by] their neighbors.”

In a nuance that has had some impact on the debate here, the Polish version, which was published in May, concludes by blaming the killings on “society” rather than “neighbors”--a seemingly broader charge that has added to the book’s sting.

The book’s impact is strengthened by Gross’ use of old testimony--including trial documents and other statements collected from witnesses in the 1940s--to vividly describe the killings in gory detail, naming names and thus putting a face on both victims and killers. Critics have questioned some of the material as not coming from witnesses, but the impression given by the documents Gross cites is overwhelming.

“Wisniewski pointed to a massacred cadaver of a young man . . . whose name was Lewin, and said to me, ‘Look, mister, we killed this SOB with stones,’ ” Bardon, one of those convicted at the 1949 trial, said in typical testimony quoted by Gross.

“In one part of town,” Gross then writes in summary of the early stage of the day’s killings, “Laudanski with Wisniewski and Kalinowski were stoning to death Lewin and Zdrojewicz; in front of Goscicki’s house four Jews were clubbed to death by somebody else; in the pond near Lomzynska Street a certain ‘Luba Wladyslaw . . . drowned two Jewish blacksmiths’; in still another location Czeslaw Mierzejewski raped and then killed Judes Ibram; the beautiful Gitele Nadolny, the youngest daughter of [a teacher] whom everybody knew because they had learned to read in her father’s house, had her head cut off, and the murderers, we are told, later kicked it around.”

Meanwhile, some men were chased to the cemetery, ordered to dig a pit, and then killed “every which way, one with [a piece of] iron, another with a knife, still another with a club,” reported another witness. At the cemetery, “Stanislaw Szelawa was murdering with an iron hook, [stabbing] in the stomach,” testified Szmul Wasersztajn, who said he was hiding in nearby bushes.

And all this was before the largest group of victims was herded into the barn, Gross writes.

Gross explains the massacre this way: “By partaking in the persecution of Jews during the summer of 1941, an inhabitant of these territories could simultaneously endear himself to the new [Nazi] rulers, derive material benefits from his actions--it stands to reason that active pogrom participants had first pick in the division of leftover Jewish property--and go along with local peasants’ traditional animosity toward the Jews.”

‘Nothing Was Said’

Krajewski said that “the basic problem is that Polish neighbors murdered their Jewish neighbors without being forced, that for 50 years after that nothing was said, that the [Polish] woman [in Jedwabne] who went against the current and rescued Jews met hostility after the war when it was discovered, and that Jedwabne was not completely unique.”

However, he added, Jedwabne also “was not typical, and Poles are not responsible for the systematic action that was the Holocaust.”

Although the wartime governments of several Central and Eastern European nations voluntarily allied themselves with the Nazis, and in France the Vichy government actively collaborated, Poles have always been proud of their fierce and at times almost suicidal resistance to the brutal German occupation.

An estimated 6 million Polish citizens died in the war--half of them Jews and the other half ethnic Poles of Roman Catholic heritage. Before the war, about 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland, roughly 10% of the population. Poles in general have been keenly aware of heroic efforts, recognized and honored by Israel, of individual Poles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. But for most people, the revelations about Jedwabne are something new.

“The murder committed 60 years ago on Polish Jews, our compatriots, terrifies us with its cruelty,” Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek said in a statement on the incident. “The participation of Poles in the crime in Jedwabne is unquestionable.”

Some Polish historians who recently examined the documents that form the basis of Gross’ book charge that he put too much trust in accounts ascribing responsibility for the massacre to Poles and that he gave too little credence to reports of Germans playing a decisive role.

Gross’ book is itself ambiguous on this point. One of the key documents he quotes is 1945 testimony by Wasersztajn, collected as part of general World War II research by the Jewish Historical Commission in Bialystok. Wasersztajn was saved from death in Jedwabne by Poles who hid him for the rest of the war.

After the German army entered Jedwabne on June 23, 1941, “rumors spread that the Germans would issue an order that all the Jews be destroyed,” Wasersztajn testified. “Such an order was issued by the Germans on July 10, 1941. Even though the Germans gave the order, it was Polish hooligans who took it up and carried it out, using the most horrible methods. After various tortures and humiliations, they burned all the Jews in a barn.”

Town Feels ‘Broken’

Residents of Jedwabne today--most of whom were either born after the war or moved here from elsewhere--generally acknowledge that Poles took part in the killings but stress that the Germans ordered it.

“We’re not guilty. Why are we suffering? Everybody’s talking about it, and it’s not the truth,” exclaimed Zofia Zejer, 63, who moved to Jedwabne in 1960 and whose late husband grew up here. “The Germans did it. The Germans gave the orders. . . . People feel really broken that they’re so unjustly blamed.

“Journalists were coming and asking how we will react if they put up a memorial saying Poles killed the Jews. I said: ‘That’s ridiculous. How during the war could Poles do anything without an order--just take people and burn them? So many families here in the countryside hid the Jews.’ ”

But Jedwabne Mayor Krzystof Godlewski, 45, who moved to the town in 1964, has emerged as a key voice urging that ugly facts about the past be confronted.

“I think the time has come to make certain things truthful, to get rid of the lies,” Godlewski said. “Most probably in Poland, in Germany, in other nations, such Jedwabnes exist. It’s time to speak about difficult issues. . . . I think the acceptance of this difficult truth will in a sense liberate us.”

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Holley was recently on assignment in Jedwabne. Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.