It is an unprecedented memorial upheaval, bearing on its Jewish past during the Second World War, that Poland has just undergone in the course of the year 2001. A small book titled Sąsiedzi (Neighbors), written by Jan Tomasz Gross — an American academic of Polish origin, or more precisely of Jewish and Polish origin (the matter of “origin” constituting, in these debates, a weighty “argument”) — on the history of the murder, on July 10, 1941, of the Jewish population — 1,600 people — of a small town in eastern Poland, Jedwabne, by its Polish neighbors, is the cause of it.
Polish historiography — whether that of the communist period, or the freer one of the historians who had emigrated during the same period, or again that of the post-1989 era — had scarcely addressed the question posed by Gross: that of an active co-responsibility on the part of certain segments of the Polish population in the extermination of the Jews. Until then there had prevailed in Poland a more or less complex representation of Judeo-Polish relations since the war, one that excluded such behavior. It was advanced in particular that the Armia Krajowa (A. K.), the Home Army — regarded as a veritable legitimate clandestine state — had had condemned, and sometimes executed, the szmalcowniks, those blackmailers who hunted down Jews at the exits of the ghettos and in public places; that it had delivered arms to the fighters of the Warsaw ghetto; that it was Poles who had created in 1942 Żegota, the famous organization for aid to the Jews; that at Yad Vashem it is the Poles who form the largest national group of Righteous. That if there were resentments and manifestations of antisemitism toward the Jews, it was not so much because of the violently antisemitic climate of the prewar period as because of the collaboration of the Jews with the Soviet occupier between 1939 and 1941, or with the communist authorities from 1944 onward. All these arguments combined and referred back to one another, forming a corpus in which the negative memories were “compensated for” by ad hoc rationalizations.
By “negative memories” one must here understand, for example, the taking possession by the Poles of Jewish property from 1942 onward, and the juridico-moral obligation to restore it to the rare survivors who reclaimed it after the war. If several thousand Jews were murdered between 1944 and 1947, it is largely because of this, but not solely: “the action of the trains,” of which Joanna Tokarska speaks in the article below — in which the partisans of the Polish far right, grouped within the organization NSZ (initials of the National Armed Forces), pulled the Jews out of the trains in the name of the anti-Judeo-Bolshevik combat in order to kill them on the spot — accompanies a globally hostile vision of the Jewish world within Polish society. These “negative memories,” little investigated — the works of the anthropologist Alina Cała are an exception here — or classed as “exceptional,” were on the contrary bound to a system of rationalization/relativization in which the figure of the Jewish communist dominated: traitor in 1939, Soviet occupier in 1944, colonel of the security services in 1950, émigré in 1968. This complex image, Jan Gross — by bringing to light the fact that an important part of the Polish population of the town of Jedwabne, taking advantage of the presence of the German army in July 1941, had deliberately committed a collective murder with manifestly material motivations — greatly damaged.
In Polish consciousness and historiography over the past fifty years, the reality of such an act seemed inconceivable. One could attribute crimes to isolated, marginal individuals, to war profiteers, to the lumpen, to extremist groups — but not to a local rural population, even acting at the instigation of the Germans. This occultation finds, moreover, its material trace in the monument that the authorities had erected, in the 1960s, to the memory of the victims of Jedwabne. On the spot where the 1,600 Jews, brought there by their Polish neighbors, perished burned alive in a barn, it was written: “Place of the martyrdom of the Jewish population. The Gestapo and the Hitlerite gendarmerie burned 1,600 people alive on 10. VII. 1941.” This inscription constitutes the very quintessence of the memory of the Jews as it was constructed in Polish communist historiography twenty years after the war. A certain truth could evidently not be silenced: the Jews of Jedwabne were indeed exterminated on July 10, 1941. But a lie was able to slip in: the Germans were the guilty ones.
Gross’s book provoked a public debate on Polish responsibility, leading historians, journalists, politicians, churchmen to question themselves, to take positions. Some historians discovered that similar massacres had taken place in other towns of eastern Poland, engendering questions about the role of the Germans in these crimes: to what point had they pushed the local populations, or to what point had they constrained them, as certain detractors of Gross have suggested? Other historians contested Gross on method: too great a reliance accorded to testimonies, absence of German sources, exaggeration of the number of victims. Journalists set out in search of the still-living witnesses and found them, notably persons suspected of having directly participated in the crime. The Institute of National Remembrance, empowered to investigate complaints, has moreover undertaken an investigation into the crime of Jedwabne that will in all likelihood lead to indictments. A very rare occurrence for a crime so remote: an exhumation even took place as a result, one that was not pushed too far owing to the reservations, of a religious nature, of certain Jewish organizations. On July 10, 2001 — sixty years to the day after the massacre of Jedwabne — an official commemoration was held there in the presence of Aleksander Kwaśniewski, president of the Polish republic, who delivered a speech of repentance, and of numerous other figures come from Poland and from the world over. The Church of Poland had carried out a similar gesture, by a mass celebrated in Warsaw on May 28, 2001.
The article that follows, by the anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, is one of the most interesting and most significant of this discussion. The author, who knows the German debates, has had the capacity to measure the gap existing between the work of memory that unfolded in Germany and the “syndrome of innocence” widespread in Poland. She does not judge; she tries to understand why, in this Poland with its complicated history, the debate on the Jewish past took on a national and even an international dimension.
