Polish Town Still Tries to Forget Its Dark Past

New York Times, February 8, 2003
By PETER S. GREEN

JEDWABNE, Poland - This is a small rural town in denial,
although the facts are now clear.

On July 10, 1941, shortly after the Nazis occupied this
poor farming town in northeast Poland, hundreds of Jews
from Jedwabne and surrounding hamlets were assembled in the
town square, where some were brutally killed, while others
were beaten and finally forced to run down Cemetery Road to
Bronislaw Sleszynski's thatch-roofed barn.

Kerosene was then poured on the barn and it was set alight,
burning more than 400 people alive.

The story was nearly forgotten until 1999, when the
historian Jan Gross assembled evidence that Jedwabne's
pogrom was not, as local legend had it, the work of Polish
townsmen acting on orders from occupying Nazi soldiers.
Instead, documents and eyewitness accounts showed that
Catholic Poles organized and carried out the massacre of
their Jewish neighbors.

The entire nation undertook an extraordinary examination of
collective conscience, and a reappraisal of the
long-accepted view here that Poland, which lost six million
people - three million of them Jews - in World War II, was
a victim and not a perpetrator as well. The debate
culminated in a trip to Jedwabne by Poland's president,
Aleksander Kwasniewski, to apologize for what Poles of one
faith did to Poles of another.

Last month, however, the public prosecutor who reopened the
investigation of Jedwabne in 2000, Radoslaw Ignatiew,
closed the inquiry, saying that he could not find
sufficient evidence to implicate anyone still alive. In
trials in 1949 and 1953, more than a dozen Poles were
convicted of killing Jedwabne's Jews.

The prosecutor's report says some 400 Jews died in the
barn, at the hands of local Poles. Bones and charred
remains were exhumed, and contemporary accounts inidcate
that half the adult men in Jedwabne, as well as women and
children, took part in the pogrom, some watching, some
helping to round up those who tried to escape and others
killing Jews with their own hands.

Despite those damning details, to most local people, the
closing of the investigation seems like vindication for
their firmly held view that there is little or no need to
apologize for the past.

"The Jews were cooperating with the Russians," an elderly
man leaving Jedwabne's church shouted at an interviewer.
"You can ask what the Jews did to the Poles, but no one
asks."

Poles were forced by the Nazis to kill the Jews, he said.
"Siberia," he added, asserting that Jedwabne's Jews were
killed for helping the Red Army deport Catholics to the
East during the brief Soviet occupation of Jedwabne.

"It's the Germans who put the Jews to death and it's a lie
that it was the Poles who did it," said the town's priest,
Father Edward Orlowski. He claimed to have proof the real
killers were a German unit commanded by a Jew turned Nazi
general.

The Catholic Church's leader, Cardinal Josef Glemp, has
done nothing to rein in Father Orlowski. Instead, he
attended a Mass to honor the Jedwabne Jews, then asked
Poland's surviving Jews to apologize for having brought
Communism to Poland.

Others outside Jedwabne take a different view. Andrzej
Krajewski, a Warsaw philosopher, was rebuffed when he tried
to bring a group of psychologists to work with the people
here to confront what he termed their naturally defensive
reaction.

"Jedwabne became a symbolic place, and they became more
linked to it than all other Poles, even though in fact most
of the people in Jedwabne today were not there in 1941,"
Mr. Krajewski said. "It's safer to deny that it happened,"
he said, "because if you admit it was wrong you have to go
the next step and say who did it."

In a newly built house about 100 yards from a monument at
Mr. Slezsynski's barn, Dorota Ramotowska, a 24-year-old
hairdresser, said that the massacre should be forgotten.
Over tea in her comfortable living room, Ms. Ramotowska
offered a jumbled explanation. The killing was wrong, she
said, then added: "It was a long time ago, and it's not
necessarily true."

"Besides, the Jews were also responsible for things against
the Poles," she said. Her husband's late grandfather, who
was tried in 1949 for complicity in the pogrom, and other
aging relatives told a story quite different from what has
been reported, she said.

Michal Chajewskis, Jedwabne's newly elected mayor, said
bluntly that it is time to finish "this circus."

"If the Poles were so guilty of this crime, then why was
the evidence not presented before?" he asked. Besides, he
said, Jedwabne was only one of more than two dozen towns in
the region where anti-Jewish pogroms were carried out in
the summer of 1941.

"You can't keep talking about this interminably," said
Krzysztof Moenke, the principal of Jedwabne's school. "Even
the Institute for National Remembrance said it was at the
instigation of the Germans."

Ms. Ramotowska said that when tour buses visit in summer,
and she sees fingers pointed at her, she feels as if she
were responsible for the pogrom. She is inclined to leave
Jedwabne, a place tainted by a deed for which, she said,
she is not and cannot be responsible.

"Of course the truth has to be known," she added, "but then
you have to deal with the past and go on. You can't keep
picking at the wound."