NEW YORK CITY - February 15, 2002 - The Polish American Congress Holocaust Documentation Committee today issued the following:

A group of noted Holocaust researchers, professors and survivors are disputing the claims of a New York University sociology professor that the murders of hundreds of Polish Jews in Jedwabne were the result of actions taken by Polish Christians and not the Germans.

In 1941, the small Polish town of Jedwabne was the site of a mass execution in which approximately 300 to 400 Jews were either shot or burned.
Jan T. Gross, sociology professor at NYU and author of "Neighbors," has accused the Christian half of the town's residents of herding the Jewish half, which Gross numbers at 1,600, into a small barn and burning them alive.

However, experts such as Jan Moor-Jankowski, professor of forensic medicine at the NYU School of Medicine; Charles Chotkowski, director of research for the Polish American Congress Holocaust Documentation Committee, and survivor Boleslaw Domitrz have provided evidence that Gross's findings are grossly distorted.

Domitrz, a boy at the time, recalls seeing only uniformed Germans standing around the burning barn.
"When we realized we were the only Poles out there, we became scared that the Germans would see us and throw us into the fire," said Domitrz. "We turned around and ran right back as fast as we could."

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, a writer and survivor of a Nazi-German concentration camp (Sachsenhausen number 28865), confirms Domitrz's story by writing from eyewitness accounts.

According to their accounts, the Jews were ordered by the Germans to march in a mock-funeral procession and divided into two groups, one of about 50 able-bodied men
and the other of at least 250 defenseless women, children, and older people. The first group was directed into a small wooden barn and ordered to dig a grave inside the barn.
As the diggers stood near the grave, the Germans shot them and ordered several Poles to drag their bodies into the shallow grave. The Germans then ordered the second group into the barn and set the barn ablaze. The next day, the Germans ordered the Poles at gunpoint to bury thedecomposing bodies of the hundreds of victims in the second grave, located just outside the barn.

A 2001 investigation by the Polish government found bodies of the victims of the July 10, 1941, massacre buried in the two graves mentioned above. Thorough search and drilling some 170 test cores in the vicinity found no other graves of the Jews executed in Jedwabne.[The number of corpses estimated by the partial exhumation, that the Jewish side demanded to end before the grave was fully researched, is estimated between 200-300, a far cry from Gross's 1600. K.J.]

"This is nothing more than a person trying to exploit the miseries of war for their personal gain," said Pogonowski. "We know that Gross's book is inaccurate and he is just one more in a line of people who are Holocaust profiteers. We are outraged at how callously they revise history."

Frank Milewski, Polish American Congress, 2002-02-27

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