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05.07.01, 21:12
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George F. Will
July 10, 1941, In Jedwabne
Why did half of a Polish town murder the other half? The
answer may be terribly simple July 9 issue � Sixty years ago, on July 10, 1941,
half the polish town of Jedwabne murdered the
other half. Of 1,600 Jews, about a dozen
survived. Why did the murderers do it? Prof. Jan
Gross of New York University may not fully
realize that he has found the answer.IT IS IN HIS astonishing little book (173 pages of text)
just
published by Princeton University Press. The title,
�Neighbors,� is an ice dagger to the heart, but only after the
book has been read. The word �neighbor� connotes moral
sympathy (�neighborly�) as well as physical proximity. But
not on July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne.
Gross says, �This is a rather typical book about the
Holocaust� because it does not offer �closure���I could
not say to myself when I got to the last page, �Well, I
understand now�.� Perhaps he is flinching from the awful
answer his book supplies.
On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet
Union, which was occupying the part of Poland containing
Jedwabne. On June 23 a small detachment of Germans
entered the town. There were almost immediately some
isolated atrocities by Poles against Jews�one man stoned
to death with bricks, another knifed and his eyes and tongue
cut out. German policy encouraged pogroms by local
populations, and there were some ghastly ones near
Jedwabne. One of the first questions asked of the Germans
occupying the town was, Is it permitted to kill the Jews?
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After the carnival of killing, the Germans reportedly
thought the Poles �had gone overboard� and said to them,
�Was eight hours not enough for you to do with the Jews as
you please?� But the murderers were not socially marginal
people. At a town meeting�democracy,
really�Jedwabne�s leaders met with the Germans. Gross
quotes a witness: �When the Germans proposed to leave
one Jewish family from each profession, local carpenter
Bronislaw Szlezinski, who was present, answered: We have
enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy all the
Jews, none should stay alive. Mayor Karolak and
everybody else agreed with his words.�
The mayor coordinated the killing, but otherwise,
Gross says, �people were free to improvise.� Peasants from
nearby villages got word of the planned pogrom and came
to town as to a fair. A Pole recalls that �the Jewish
population became a toy in the hands of the Poles.� The
Holocaust has been called a manifestation of modernity
because of its industrialization of murder. But in Jedwabne
hooks and wooden clubs were used. A head was hacked
off and kicked around. To escape the killers, women fled to
a pond and drowned their babies, then themselves. But
most were burned alive in a barn while the town was
searched for the surviving sick and children. A witness: �As
for the little children, they roped a few together by their legs
and carried them on their backs, then put them on
pitchforks and threw them onto smoldering coals.�
Gross estimates that half the town�s men participated,
and because the killings were concentrated in a space no
larger than a sports stadium, everyone �in possession of a
sense of sight, smell, or hearing either participated in or
witnessed the tormented deaths.� A murderer in uniform can
resemble a cog in a machine, but the last faces seen by
Jedwabne�s Jews were the familiar faces of neighbors. It
was, Gross says, �mass murder in a double sense�on
account of both the number of victims and the number of
perpetrators.�
The Germans� involvement was confined to
photographing events and, in one instance, offering the sort
of advice professionals offer amateurs. A witness recalls
that when Poles with thick clubs were battering six Jews, a
watching German said, �Do not kill at once. Slowly, let
them suffer.�
In 1996 Daniel Goldhagen�s book �Hitler�s Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust� argued
that German society was saturated by an �eliminationist
anti-Semitism� that produced a high degree of voluntary
participation in genocide. His premise�that Hitler merely
unleashed a cultural latency and fulfilled the sick logic of
German history�reduces Hitler�s role to that of mere
catalyst. Goldhagen did stress the powerful role of Third
Reich propaganda. But, then, what of the Poles of
Jedwabne, who were not Germans and who did their
uncoerced murdering after just two weeks of German
occupation, before being conditioned by propaganda?
Christopher
Browning, author of
�Ordinary Men,� a study
of middle-aged German
conscripts who became
consenting participants in
mass-murder police
battalions in Poland,
argued that cruelties
inflicted by the Khmer
Rouge against fellow
Cambodians and by
Chinese against Chinese
during Mao�s Cultural Revolution cannot be explained by
Goldhagen�s model�centuries of conditioning