Coming to terms with the past

Poles commemorate Jedwabne massacre

RUTH E. GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BARRY COHEN
Editor

Poland has at last commemorated the Jedwabne massacre of 1,600 Jews — half the town's population — 60 years after the fact.

This remembrance has begun the process of the Polish people coming to terms with their relationship with Polish Jews — before, during and after World War II. Recently, the Arizona State University Jewish Studies Program sent a mission to Europe, June 27-July 11.

The group visited various locations in Poland, including Krakow, once home to a wide diversity of Hasidic communities; and the Auschwitz Museum, located at the former concentration camp.

On the mission, participants saw firsthand how Poland views itself and struggles to confront its past.

At the same time, it endeavors to recover its identity and national consciousness after decades of communist rule.

What follows are two articles investigating how Poles are coming to terms with their history: with a monument at the site where a grave injustice occurred, and with a documentary investigating the real culprits of the Jedwabne murders.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski presents a wreath at the site of the Jedwabne massacre at a 60th anniversary memorial ceremony. The event recognized the massacre of 1,600 Jews by their neighbors in the Polish town.

Photo by Curt Fissel/New Jersey Jewish News

Sixty years after hundreds of Jews in a Polish village were slaughtered by their neighbors, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewksi offered an apology and asked forgiveness.

"For this crime we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness," Kwasniewski told about 3,000 people gathered in the pouring rain at a ceremony in the village of Jedwabne.

"This is why today, as a citizen and as the president of the Republic of Poland, I beg pardon," he said. "I beg pardon in my own name and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime."

Joined by government officials, Jewish leaders and survivors and relatives of Jedwabne victims, Kwasniewski walked in silence from the village center to the site of the barn in which as many as 1,600 Jews were burned to death on July 10, 1941. Other Jews already had been butchered in a murderous frenzy of violence.

At the site, New York cantor Joseph Malovany said Kaddish. Jedwabne-born Rabbi Jacob Baker led prayers and a new wood and concrete monument to the victims was unveiled.

For decades, a smaller monument on the site had attributed the slaughter to German Nazis and the Gestapo.

Polish filmmaker puts massacre on the map

This was removed in March after a book titled "Neighbors" by Polish-American scholar Jan Gross - followed by a documentary film and other on-site research - revealed that the massacre was carried out by local Poles.

The revelations sparked what has been the most open, widespread and wrenching debate in Poland about that nation's role in the Holocaust.

"The remarkable characteristic of anything to do with Jews in Poland is its intensity," says British Jewish scholar Jonathan Webber, who attended the Jedwabne ceremony. "Poles are examining themselves when they examine Jewish issues."

After Poland became a communist nation following World War II, "history kind of stood still" until the end of communism in 1989, says Professor Jack Kugelmass, director of the Jewish Studies program at Arizona State University.

"Jebwabne comes as a tremendous shock to Poland ... because Polish memory of itself is as a suffering nation, but also as a heroic nation," he explains.

Only a minority of them collaborated with the Nazis, and Poles have whitewashed from the national consciousness the depth of Polish hatred for the Jews before the start of World War II, he adds.

Some 3 million of prewar Poland's 3.5 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, but Catholic Poles also suffered deeply under the Nazis. The official formulation was that 6 million Polish citizens were killed by the Nazis - 3 million Jews and 3 million Catholics.

Under communism, the ideal of Polish martyrdom, resistance and heroism in fighting the Nazis was bolstered.

What historian Marta Petrusewicz called a "myth of Polish innocence" was encouraged.

In this construct, dishonorable deeds and shameful historical events were covered up to prevent conflicts with the official version of history. Disgrace, shame and dishonor, however, could fester privately as dark secrets "protected" by taboos.

This is what happened in Jedwabne itself.

"I learned about the massacre as a 'Big Secret' as a child," recalls Marta Kurkowska-Budza, a young social historian at Krakow's Jagiellonian University who was born in Jedwabne. "You know - once Poles burnt alive Jews in a barn and robbed them."

Gross' book - and the ensuing debates and media attention - exploded these taboos.

For some, it was a cathartic relief. For others, it was a valuable key to rethinking history. For still others, it provoked further denial.

"To contemporary Jedwabne inhabitants but also Poles in general, the murder of Jews is this kind of traumatic, undomesticated history; the public debate is painful but was inescapable," Kurkowska-Budza has stated. "Public discourse is a battleground."

During the trip to the Auschwitz Museum, at the site of the concentration camp, Kugelmass asked his guide when the Jedwabne massacre would be documented in the museum.

"She felt that the whole issue of how Poland is going to come to terms with itself is going to take a very, very long time, if ever," says Kugelmass.

He says confronting its treatment of the Jews during and after the war is challenging the Poles to examine its very consciousness as a nation.

"You're really asking a people to basically look at itself and give up some of its most valued constructions with which it sees its own past - its own mythic history," says Kugelmass.

The intensity of feeling, both positive and negative, was apparent at the July 10 ceremony.

Many participants came from around Poland to the village more than 100 miles northeast of Warsaw, but missing from the delegations and mourners were the local Jedwabne priest and other Roman Catholic officials.

"These are all lies. I am spending the day quietly at home," Rev. Edward Orlowski told reporters. "It is Holocaust business. It is not my business. Germans are responsible, so why should we apologize?"

Many local villagers in the run-down town of 2,000 also stayed home.

Taped to the door of at least one shop was a defiant notice, signed by the "Committee for the Defense of the Good Name of Poland," reading: "We do not apologize. It was the Germans who murdered Jews in Jedwabne. Let the slanderers apologize to the Polish nation."

Indeed, opinion polls show that about half of Poles refuse to accept shared responsibility for the killings.

Senior Polish officials, in fact, say Kwasniewski was careful not to make his apology on behalf of the entire nation because the country was not responsible for the massacre.

The wording on the monument also reflected this view, to the dismay of Jews.

The new inscription removes reference to the perpetrators as having been German Nazis - but it does not say who actually did the killing.

It reads, in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish: "In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and surrounding areas, men, women and children, fellow dwellers of this land, murdered and burned alive at this site on 10 July 1941. Jedwabne, July 10, 2001."

It was unclear whether this inscription might be changed again once a final report from an investigation into the Jedwabne massacre and a similar slaughter carried out three days earlier in the nearby village of Radzilow is published.

The government's Institute of National Remembrance began the inquiry in September, and to date its findings bear out Gross' account.

"The said crime has been committed by burning the Jewish victims - men, women and children - in a barn located at the outskirts of the Jedwabne town," the institute stated recently.

"During the investigation currently conducted, 42 witnesses have been heard, including a group of eyewitnesses of the events," the institute says. "In the light of their accounts, it can be assumed that Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne actively participated in the crime.

"These were mainly young men in the number of about 40, acting jointly with eight German gendarmes present at the site."

Kugelmass adds that other attacks by Poles upon their Jewish countrymen have been documented during the war.

"We even know of 1,500 murders that took place after the war. ... Poland was a very dangerous place for survivors," he says.

One such attack occurred in the town of Kielce. Forty-two Holocaust survivors were killed when an accusation spread about a blood libel - later proved to be false - of a Christian child being tortured by Jews, explains Kugelmass.

"A mob broke into the communal home for survivors on Planty Street and hacked to death some of the inhabitants and took others into the forest and shot them, including babies," he says.

Despite the monument to the massacre at Jebwabne and the process of Poland's coming to terms with its past, Kugelmass stresses that the nation "should not be seen in the wrong way relative to other European countries ... in that anti-Semitism is a 'European phenomenon.' "

"Poland is not a rogue nation (in Europe) concerning its view that Jews are strangers (and) do not fully belong," he adds.

A ray of hope in Poland is the Jewish cultural festival in Krakow, he says.

"It's a wonderful city, and the musical groups are fantastic," he adds. The top cantors in Europe attend and participate in a worship service at the Remu synagogue on Friday night and the Tempel synagogue on Saturday morning, he says.

Another optimistic development in Poland is that fact that a Holocaust curriculum will soon be implemented in schools, in order to teach its children about the tragic experience of the Jewish people and its relationship with the Polish people, he says.

"This is a major, major development in Poland," adds Kugelmass.

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