original article

It seems that some good comes out of even the most disconcerting of events. The allegations about the murder of Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne during World War II is hurtful to Polonians. In his review of "Neighbors," the book by Jan T. Gross that accuses Poles of committing the massacre, reviewer Istvan Deak, a non-Pole, presented some facts about which we have been attempting to educate the general public for years, often with little apparent success.

Some quotes from Deak's review, published (surprisingly) in the May 31, 2001, issue of the "New York Review of Books" follow:

"Farmers were hard hit by Soviet confiscations of land as well as by anti-Soviet partisan activity and the even more violent retribution by the Soviet army and police that followed ..."

"Many times in modern history, whether under Russian or other foreign rule, it was a punishable offense for a Pole to refer to his own country as Poland."

"During World War II in Europe only Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Poland never surrendered to the Nazis, even though Poles were simultaneously persecuted by the Soviet Communists."

"More than a million non-Jewish Poles were killed in German prisons and camps; thousands upon thousands died fighting [alongside the Allies]...."

"Although there was a tremendous rise of political anti-Semitism in independent Poland during the inter-war years, Jewish political and cultural activity also flourished there."

"Asking questions about a crucial historical event does not make one automatically an anti-Semite, yet this is how some of Gross's Western supporters have chosen to view those raising questions about parts of his work. No book of history should be treated as Holy Writ, especially not a book which is based on a limited number of documents."

"Such lack of awareness [about Jedwabne] might seem inconceivable; yet until recent stories were published, I wonder how many Americans had ever heard of what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the end of May 1921, when the city's whites, incited by the press and by politicians, massacred several hundred innocent blacks. Although I am a professional historian, I heard of this atrocity only last year, forty-four years after I arrived in the U.S. The Tulsa massacre, moreover, took place when the United States was at peace, whereas Jedwabne occurred during a terrible war, under alternating cruel occupations, and in the midst of total administrative and political chaos."

Well put, Mr. Deak ... and thank you for providing some measure sense and accuracy among the flood of claims and premature apologies.

T. Ron Jasinski-Herbert, POLONIA TODAY ONLINE, 0000-00-00

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