The Polish American Journal
May 2001

Selling the Holocaust is a gigantic enterprise that has less to do with preserving the memory of Jewish victims than exploiting the Holocaust for political, ideological and economic purposes. The consequence is that history has become a major casualty.

In the absence of any quality control on the type of books that are published, Holocaust historiography is subject to a kind of Gresham's Law where bad history drives out good history, making it difficult for even professional historians to determine where sensationalism, propaganda and martyrology ends and history begins.

To have a book published by a major publisher on the Holocaust, the author must meet only a few criteria: Does the book depict Jewish victimization in pristine terms (i.e., nothing negative or compromising about Jewish behavior)?

Even if the book tangentially deals with Christian victims of the Nazis, does the author drown these Christians sufficiently in anti-Semitism to compromise their victimhood and emphasize their role as victimizers in order to main the sovereign wartime experience of the News?

Better yet, does the author depict non-Jewish groups, especially Catholic Poles, as either Nazi collaborators or accomplices or perpetrators of atrocities?

If these criteria are met, then it is extraordinarily easy for an author to garner notoriety for his book in leading American newspapers and news magazines, which are notoriously unsympathetic with the Polish dimension of Polish-Jewish relations.

This is what has happened to Professor Jan T. Gross, a Jews who emigrated to the West from Poland in 1968. His book, "Neighbors," publisher last year under its Polish title, Sasiedzi, was recently released in the United States by Princeton University Press.

Gross is not a professional historian, but a sociologist, an important point in analyzing the merit of the book.

Gross's thesis is that Christian Poles were solely responsible for killing 1600 Jews in the village of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland in July, 1941. As he puts it, "Half of the population... murdered the other half."

His explanation for the atrocity is that anti-Semitism made the Poles do it. Polish-Jewish relations had been good before the war, would the Poles suddenly decide to kill their Jewish neighbors?

Gross presents the tableau of hundreds of Poles mindlessly slaughtering Jews because now, quite suddenly, they despised them and lusted after their property. Is this scenario really credible? What had changed in Polish-Jewish relations? Gross dismisses a critical fact -- Jewish treason in eastern Poland, where Jedwabne is located, during the Soviet occupation.

Eastern Poland was inhabited by Poles, Jews, Belorussians, Ukrainians, and others who fought, brutalized and betrayed each other in one of the worst place in wartime Europe in June, 1941, the Nazis broke their non-aggression pact with the Soviets, who had occupied eastern Poland since September, 1939, and invaded the area.

There is a mountain of documentation which shows that in this area, occupied by the Soviets during 1939-1941, a significant number of Jews collaborated with the Soviets in the arrest, deportation and death of thousands of Poles. Jedwabne Jews were no exception.

When the Soviets reconquered the area from the Germans in 1944-1945, Jews again were prominently involved in the destruction of the Polish Home Army and the arrest and execution of Poles loyal to the Polish democratic government, then in exile in London. That process of Jewish involvement in the persecution, imprisonment and execution of Poles continued throughout the Stalinist era.

Even though in his earlier writings Gross had admitted Jewish complicity with Poland's enemy, he now conspicuously dismisses this aspect of Jewish behavior because to acknowledge it would depict Jews as victimizers of Poles, a contradiction of the prevailing Holocaust image that all Jews were victims.

Cast in the light of Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, it should not be too surprising that some Poles may have sought out Jewish traitors and tried to kill them.

It worked the other way too. Several hundred Poles, including women and children, were murdered by a Jewish-Soviet partisan unit in Koniuchy in 1944. One of the members of the unit was even honored by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

AS IS SO OFTEN THE CASE WITH SENSATIONALIST ACCOUNTS OF THE WAR, the author raises more questions than he answers. He bases his claims primarily on the allegations of Szmul Wasersztajn, who was not an eyewitness to the events at Jedwabne but was in hiding some distance away, and the testimonies elicited during the Lomza trials in 1949 and 1953, a period when Poles underwent the brutal Stalinization of their country.

Regarding German documentation concerning Jedwabne, Gross claims he looked for it but "I was unable to find it."

I am not entirely convinced Gross personally investigated German and, for that matter, former Soviet archives during his research on his book. He makes the quaint observation that he asked two scholars, both of whom allegedly familiar with German archives, about Jedwabne and neither of them heard of it.

Does asking two colleagues about the subject replace the need to immerse oneself personally in critical documents, which are absolutely essential to prove one's allegations about what happened at Jedwabne?

Even though Gross admits the presence of the Gestapo in Jedwabne and even acknowledges that without the Germans the massacre would not have occurred, he insists that the Germans confined themselves to the role of bystanders and clears them of responsibility.

The fact that in other nearby towns in the county of Bialystok -- Tykocin and Wizna -- the Germans were responsible for the massacre of Jews does not make Gross doubt his allegation that the Poles were entirely responsible for the atrocity.

Since the publication of Gross's controversial book, new documentary evidence has come to light which suggests that the Germans, not the Poles, were primarily responsible for the massacre.

According to one report, the Polish role was limited to less than 50 people, who were forced to guard Jews in the town square prior to their execution. Even the number of murdered Jews has been called into question. One report pointed out that a scanning of the grave site uncovered German bullets (Poles would not have been allowed to possess guns and rifles) and that approximately 400, not 1600, Jews perished. Whether 400 or 1600 lost their lives is not the point. It was an atrocity that every decent person should deplore.

But the fundamental question of who was primarily responsible for the massacre is still unanswered. Was it the Germans? Was it the Poles? If the Poles were involved, what was their precise role in the affair?

GROSS'S CREDIBILITY IS SERIOUSLY COMPROMISED when he asserts his own bizarre idea of historical methodology. He asserts that the testimonies he read should be accepted as "fact" without first skeptically reviewing the material and seeking independent verification. That's quite a reversal of fundamental historical methodology!

It is astonishing that all the Holocaust experts who have given their nihil obstat to this flawed volume completely ignored this strange approach to establishing historical truth. Gross seems more concerned about the alleged lack of Polish national grief over the Jews than about determining precisely and accurately what really happened in Jedwabne. The Washington Post quotes him, saying, "I deeply believe that getting to know what happened in Jedwabne will become a breakthrough in our historical myths and will help us clean our conscience."

Obviously, he is more concerned about Polish than Jewish historical myths. Poles should honestly face the negative aspects of their behavior toward Jews. But what about Jews candidly facing their collaborationist past with Poland's enemies? Gross is silent on this point.

IT IS TESTIMONY to the power of the "Holocaust Industry," to borrow Professor Norman Finkelstein's apt description, that an obscure event that occurred in eastern Poland sixty years ago should be dredged up in this slim volume that is long on sensationalism and short on acceptable historical evidence and receive the hysterical media acclaim that it has received.

We are a long way from the quality control Holocaust historiography desperately requires. Now more than ever we need fair and balanced investigations of the Holocaust and the related genocides of eastern Europeans by the Nazis.

The highly sensitive subject of Polish-Jewish relations can no longer be painted with the broad brush of anti-Semitism. The subject needs trained professional historians to present all the facts and who refuse to apply one standard of moral behavior to Jews and a more severe one to Poles. Let us hope that the research currently underway by the Polish National Institute of Memory will give us the answers to Jedwabne that Professor Gross failed to provide us.

Dr. Richard Lukas is a retired professor of history. He taught at seven universities in Ohio, Florida and Tennessee and is the author of seven books. "The Forgotten Holocaust" went through several editions, including a Polish one, and is now considered a classic. "Did the Children Cry, " which sold out in hardback, will be published in paperback this month. It won the Janusz Korczak Literary award, sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League and the Kosciuszko Foundation.

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Richard Lukas, , 0000-00-00

http://www.iyp.org/polish/history/jedwab