God’s playground or stamping ground of the devil?

Neighbors
Jan T. Gross
Princeton University Press
2022
304 pages
ISBN 9780691234304 

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The Polish national poet, Adam Mickiewicz, promoted the idea of Poland as the “Christ of Nations” with a messianic mission whose suffering would lead to ultimate glory. The historian, Norman Davies, referred to the concept when he titled his definitive history of Poland, God’s Playground. Another historian, Polish-born, Jan T. Gross, in his introduction to a new edition of his book Neighbors, reverses the epithet to describe the Polish experience during World War Two when the country “must have felt more like a stomping ground of the devil.”

World War Two brought immense suffering to Poland with the loss of twenty percent of the country’s pre-War population of thirty million and as the location of the Nazi extermination of Jews. Gross’s book focuses on a single episode of the Holocaust – the massacre of the Jewish population of the town of Jedwabne. When it was first published in Poland in 2001 the effect on Polish history studies of World War Two was traumatic. One historian claimed it was like being struck on the head with a hammer.

Jedwabne is a small town (pop. 1,624 in 2017) in eastern Poland, seventy kilometres north-west of the city of Bialystok. Nothing distinguishes it from thousands of similar towns, except for a shameful episode in its past. On July 10, 1941, Jewish men, women and children from the town and the surrounding area were chased by armed men into the town square. Some estimates put the number of Jews at 1,600, but this has been disputed. They were abused and beaten before being driven into a large wooden barn which was set on fire. Some of the men outside played accordions to drown out the screams as the Jews burned to death. Even by the brutal standards of the time it was an act of terrible barbarity. The thesis of Gross’s book is that the perpetrators were not German Nazis, but Polish townspeople and neighbours of the victims.

As the Wehrmacht and its allies conquered vast tracts of Eastern Europe the slaughter of Jews would be repeated in thousands of other locations, but to Polish people raised on a narrative of German guilt and Polish suffering the claims were unbelievable. The book opened a wound concealed during the decades of communist rule, but concealment did not result in forgetting or healing.

Gross is Professor Emeritus of War and Society and professor emeritus of history at Princetown University. His early books War Through Children’s Eyes: the Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939-41 (1981) and Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (1988) focussed on the devastation caused by the Soviet invasion in 1939 of what was then eastern Poland. The books were well-received by scholars and students and aroused none of the furore caused by Neighbors. Jedwabne lay in the area annexed by the Soviets at the start of World War Two in 1939 and then by the Germans from June 1941 when they invaded the Soviet Union.

While nobody disputed that a massacre took place on July 10, 1941, Gross’s critics concentrated on his methods and sources. The most detailed account of the massacre came from a Jewish survivor of World War Two, Szmul Wasersztajn, who wrote a report at the war’s end in 1945. This became the basis for a trial of a group of local men in 1949, accused by the communist authorities of collaboration with the German occupiers. The prosecutors were operating within Soviet guidelines in downplaying the religion of the massacred. The trials, which lasted one day in court, included statements from the accused in which they attempted to diminish their guilt by implicating others. From the court reports’ sources Gross compiled a fuller narrative of the massacre. As the 1949 trials took place in Stalinist times the focus was not on murdering Jews, but on collaboration with the Germans. The perpetrators were either acquitted or received minor prison sentences.

Critics of Gross highlighted his claims that the local authorities organized the pogrom, pointing out that the initial Red Army Soviet invasion of 1939 replaced the Polish authorities with Soviet officials who were displaced by the Germans in 1941. The new mayor of the town in July 1941 was appointed by the invaders whose role in the massacre is unclear. Did the Germans organise and direct the pogrom or did they – as some witnesses allege – confine their role to taking photographs? Historians debate the date of the beginning of the Holocaust, but the Nazis began the slaughter of Jews from the onset of the invasion of the Soviet Union. As soon as German units reached Bialystok on June 27, they initiated a pogrom that resulted in the deaths of at least two thousand Jewish people, including many burned alive in the synagogue.

In a new preface to the 2022 edition of Neighbors, Gross discusses the furious response to the publication of the book in 2001. Some critics focussed on his sources and methodology, but many attacked him personally. In certain circles he was, and still is, perceived as an enemy of Polish truth. Unfortunately, Gross’s publishers give his enemies material for disbelief in the publicity for the reissued book. The back cover claims that “half of the town of Jedwabne murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women and children – all but seven of the town’s Jews.”

Such hyperbole is not matched by the book’s contents and allows Gross’s critics to dispute his findings. However, it is obvious that the majority of the Christian citizens of the town were intimidated by the perpetrators and stayed away. As in the Yeats poem, The Second Coming, the worst were full of passionate intensity while the terrified “best” closed their ears. The massacre appears to have been perpetrated by some of the worst elements in the population, nominally Christian, but utterly self-serving. Gross writes of one murderer who co-operated with the Soviets, switched allegiance to the Nazis and became a zealous communist after the war.

Waserztajn claimed there were 1,600 victims, but he was not present in the town on the day. Anyway, how could anyone count the correct number? Historians point to a pre-massacre estimate of 562 Jews in the town in 1940. Gross takes issue with the Polish Institute of National Memory (IPN) which began to excavate mass graves in 2001 before Jewish rabbis insisted the work cease as it was disturbing the bones of the dead. The Institute estimated about 300-400 victims lay in the graves, but it is doubtful if we will never know the true figure.

The issue is deeply problematic for Polish historians and society. Critics of Poland seized on the issue as the result of decades of virulent antisemitism by elements of Polish society. The role of communism was also a factor; some Poles accused Jews of collaborating with the Soviets whom they viewed as defenders and liberators from the Germans. Davies commented on the controversy in a 2005 edition of God’s Playground: “The episode was in no way typical. It was not repeated in the vast majority of Poland’s 10,000 small towns and villages.”

One hopes he is right, but Gross maintained in a subsequent book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (2006), that there were similar massacres of Jews in the Bialystok region.

“The Jedwabne debate is magnificent,” declared Stanislaw Krajewski, a practising Polish Jew, in 2005, “and I feel proud that such a deep discussion was possible at all. There are no taboos any more today…”. For him the debate was a chance of reconciliation after decades of obscurity. He noted a gulf between Poles who wanted a truthful exploration of the horrors of the past and those concerned with the traditional narrative of Poles as victims.

In his new introduction Gross notes that the current Polish PiS (Law and Justice) Government promotes policies based “on the premise that any government has the right to advocate a vision of its country’s history that it likes”. He links the trend with the cavalier treatment of truth in the United States: “And even though mendacity flowing from the seats of government will not change history, I am afraid it will make writing honestly and learning about the past more of a challenge.”

A response by historians, The Neighbors Respond, was issued in 2002. The Institute of National Remembrance published a two-volume analysis of pogroms in the Bialystok region in 2002, but this has not been translated. The question of wartime collaboration and collective guilt has been inadequately dealt with in Poland and its neighbours Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States where narratives of national suffering are emphasised, rigid positions adopted and the issue is drawn into current politics.

Despite the controversy, Gross insists on the veracity of his original research, a vital contribution to Holocaust studies and to wider questions of hatred and bias in society. He is be commended for his dogged approach to truth-telling, whatever the cost.

Recommended reading:

Davies, Norman, God’s Playground, Vol.2, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Krajewski, Stanislaw, Poland and the Jews, Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew, Wydawnictwo Austeria, Krakow, 2005.

Polansky, Antony & Michlic, Joanna B. (eds.), The Neighbours Respond: the Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, Princeton Univ. Press, 2004.