The Day We Burned Our Neighbors Alive

Tablet

“I can’t sleep at night. I see it as if it were yesterday. … That terrifying scream that probably didn’t last for more than two minutes, it’s still inside me.” The woman speaking these words was 10 years old on July 10, 1941, when she saw her fellow Poles driving their Jewish neighbors into the barn. Schoolboys jeered at their Jewish classmates, hounding them toward death. Mothers wrapped their babies tight as they tried to shield them against the blows. Within minutes nearly all the town’s Jews—hundreds of them, from infants to old people—would be burned alive. The 10-year-old girl at the window watched the townspeople of Jedwabne pour gasoline at the barn’s four corners and set it alight. Then came the scream.

This account comes from Anna Bikont’s book The Crime and the Silence, which appeared in 2004 in Polish and six years later in French (it won the European Book Prize in 2011) but has just now been translated into English by Alissa Valles. In her work as a reporter for the Gazeta Wyborcza, the liberal Polish newspaper, Bikont has done obsessive, heroic work, interviewing witnesses, perpetrators, and survivors of the Jedwabne massacre and similar mass killings of Jews in the nearby towns of Radzilow and Wasosz. She has discovered a bizarre psychological phenomenon: The townspeople of Jedwabne still insist that they are the victims of Jewish slander. The massacre, they say, was perpetrated either by a few thugs, probably people from out of town, or by the Germans.

Bikont uses the townspeople’s own words to demolish their claim to innocence. She shows that virtually all of Jedwabne knows who the leading murderers were, who stayed home that day in July 1941 and who joined the bloodthirsty mob. These truths were passed down for decades in hints and whispers at kitchen tables and over rounds of vodka. What happened in 1941 was, as Polish President Krasniewski bravely called it, not a pogrom but a genocide, Jedwabne’s wholehearted effort to shatter every trace of Jewish life. Minutes after the killings the town went on a massive looting spree, robbing Jewish homes of silverware, furs, and furniture. These were their neighbors, people they had known for years.

How could an atrocity like Jedwabne happen? Looking for an answer, Bikont confronts the troubled depths of the unequal relationship between Poles and Jews. The trouble stems from Poland’s sense of itself as a perpetual victim nation, crushed over and over by greater powers like Russia and Germany. Until the news about Jedwabne spread, 60 years after the killings happened, it was hard for Poles to think of themselves as the doers, rather than the sufferers, of historical evil.

The Jedwabne massacre first invaded Poland’s public consciousness in 1999, when the filmmaker Agnieszka Arnold released a documentary based on her interviews with local residents.
Historian Jan T. Gross used the transcript of Arnold’s film as the basis for his book Neighbors, published one year later, which described the long-repressed mass murder in chilling and carefully footnoted detail. Yet many Poles reacted with disbelief

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