Laurence Weinbaum
At the
beginning of the new millennium, 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 hand of local Poles in July
1941. A Polish government commission charged with investigating the
massacre ultimately confirmed that locals, not German forces, were
indeed responsible for the slaughter at Jedwabne (and two dozen other
hamlets in the same area of Poland). In this article, Laurence Weinbaum
claims that the chilling description of what happened to Jews in
Jedwabne (which has since become a synonym for killings carried out 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. Although it is inaccurate to claim that Jabotinsky “predicted
the Holocaust” (as many of his followers do), he had warned that
the deep-rooted hostility of the autochthonous population among
whom the Jews had lived for generations posed a mortal threat and that
Jews should evacuate the area at once. Jabotinsky’s detractors focus on
the Revisionist leader’s 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. However (and without detracting from the guilt
of Germans and Austrians), 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 indigenous people of many
nationalities were often more than mere accessories to the destruction
of age-old Jewish communities. The extent of active local participation
in the destruction of the Jews was far greater than had originally been
believed and Jedwabne was but one example of a phenomenon that took
place across the length and breadth of East Central Europe. In his work
The Jewish War Front, penned shortly before his death in 1940
(and before the Final Solution had been put into motion), 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, but 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. The author takes
pains to explain that the revelations about Jedwabne notwithstanding,
history is obviously more nuanced than many of us would like to
acknowledge and the question of how Poles behaved during the Holocaust
resists simple explanations and sweeping generalizations.
