Laurence Weinbaum
At the beginning of the
new millenium, an unprecedented national debate raged in Polish
society. The controversy was precipitated by the publication of the
book Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross that chronicled the
destruction of the Jews of Jedwabne at the hands of local Poles in
July 1941. A Polish government commission ultimately confirmed that
locals were indeed responsible for the slaughter at Jedwabne (and two
dozen other hamlets in the same area of Poland). The chilling
description of what happened to Jews in Jedwabne (which has since
become a synonym for killings by locals) is in some sense a
vindication of Jabotinsky’s grim prophecy about a looming catastrophe
about to befall the Jews of East Central Europe. The deep-rooted
hostility of the autochthonous population among whom the Jews
had lived for generations, and who saw Jews hindering their own
national development, posed a mortal threat to Jews, warned
Jabotinsky. In his work The Jewish War Front, penned shortly
before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky made clear, that even if Jews who
have been displaced from their homes and places of work do survive,
one could not expect that the people who have replaced them will
acquiesce to their return. Governments may be persuaded to uphold the
concept of civil equality – however, in practice this notion is doomed
to ruin. This scenario was played out after the war in Poland and the
rest of East Central Europe – where returning Jews were met with
antipathy, and often murderous violence. Jabotinsky’s detractors
focused on his undeniable failure to predict the outbreak of the war.
They also emphasize that at the end of the day it was the Nazis (not
“Germans”) who carried out the murders, not the autochthonous
populations. At worst, the “neighbors” were accomplices – not prime
perpetrators. But in the last decade, after the collapse of Communism
and with newfound access to archives buried beyond the now-rusted Iron
Curtain, we find that people of many nationalities were more than mere
accessories to the destruction of age-old Jewish communities. The
author takes pains to explain that the revelations about Jedwabne
notwithstanding, history is obviously more nuanced than many of us
would like to believe and the question of how Poles behaved during the
Holocaust resists simple explanations and sweeping generalizations.
