Jedwabine, Poland — The rough stone monument in this farming village shocks with its terse language: "Site of a massacre of Jews. Gestapo and Nazi soldiers burned 1,600 people."
But the Polish words etched into the small gray stone belie an even more horrible truth. Communist officials who had it erected surely knew. So did most of the villagers, though they rarely spoke of it.
A monument in Poland's eastern village of Jedwabne commemorates the massacre of 1,600 local Jews who died July 10, 1941. Although the massacre has long been considered a Nazi atrocity, a new book details how the Jews were burned alive by their fellow townsmen. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a former communist, has said he will issue a formal apology for Jedwabne on the 60th anniversary of the massacre in July, and change the inscription on the 1963 monument, which currently reads "Site of a massacre of Jews. Gestapo and Nazi soldiers burned 1,600 people."
Now all Poland is being jolted awake to the awful reality: The Jews of Jedwabne were locked in a barn and burned to death on July 10, 1941, not by Nazis, but by their neighbors fellow Poles.
Grim details laid out in "Neighbors," a book by Polish emigre Jan Tomasz Gross, have helped blow the cover off decades of communist propaganda, and forced Poles into sober reassessment of their self-image as victims and never collaborators in Nazi oppression.
The nation's president is offering an apology, and the head of its Roman Catholic Church plans special joint prayers of Catholics and Jews.
Jedwabne (pronounced Yed-VAB-neh) was not the only wartime pogrom by Poles, but it was the biggest and perhaps now the best documented. Poland's reluctance to confront the truth has nurtured among many Jews an image of Polish complicity in Nazi horrors, in stark contrast to a national memory that emphasizes heroic resistance and well-documented risks Poles took to shelter Jews.
While historians generally accept that Poles were at least in part responsible for the Jedwabne horror, there has never been a credible investigation, just a speedy two-day trial in 1949. "Neighbors," based in part on witness accounts from Jewish survivors and non-Jewish townspeople, is the first thorough treatment of the massacre.
Gross writes that when Nazi commanders moved into the eastern Polish village, they "easily reached agreement" with town officials on what do about the Jews. Hundreds, including women and children, were soon brought to the town square. They were beaten with clubs and stones, then herded into a barn, which was locked and set ablaze.
"Had Jedwabne not been seized by Germans, the Jedwabne Jews would not have been murdered by their neighbors," Gross writes. "But the direct participation of Germans was limited mostly to taking pictures and filming.
"The 1,600 Jedwabne Jews were murdered not by the Nazis or Soviets, but the society."
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