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4: Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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51 among historians there has been growing interest in the question of popular participation in the Holocaust of European Jews, particularly in the territories to the east of the Soviet Union’s 1941 western border.1 Many factors have contributed to this avalanche of high-quality scholarly texts— among them the opening of the archives after the fall of communism, the centrality of a particular ethnic group’s complicity in the mass murder of Jews to the perception and self-perception of the respective nations, and the incessant public demand for works that deal with these kinds of emotionally charged issues. Although scholars research events that occurred in different places and under substantially different circumstances, they address a number of problems that are to some extent similar, among them the role of traditional antisemitism in determining popular participation in the murder of Jews, the extent to which the experience of the Soviet occupation framed the perception of Jews as Communists and enemies of the local gentiles, and finally the influence the Germans and their allies exerted on the locals’ attitudes toward and treatment of Jews. One small book, Jan Gross’s Neighbors, occupies an especially important place in this recent historiography. The book not only reconstructed one especially horrid episode of the mass murder of Jews, in which the participation of local gentiles (Poles) was truly massive, but made, in a manner which is both subtle and radical, a number of general theoretical suggestions. Gross’s rendering of the Jedwabne story as the one in which “half of the 4 Patterns of violence The local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, July–august 1941 Vladimir Solonari 52 vladimir solonari population of a small East European town murdered the other half” is predicated on his intimation that the killers were guided neither by Nazi occupiers ’ orders nor, really, by their own resentment against the Jews’ supposedly “treacherous behavior” during the Soviet occupation (which, he insists, was not nearly as massive as the Polish general public and even historians came to believe) but rather by the centuries-long antisemitic tradition in Poland.2 Although Gross does say that the Holocaust has to be accounted for as a “system which functioned according to the preconceived (though constantly evolving ) plan,” he expresses his doubts about the tendency in the scholarly literature to read Shoah as a “phenomenon rooted in modernity” and invites us to see it as a “heterogeneous phenomenon,” as “a mosaic composed of discreet episodes, improvised by local decision makers, and hinging on unforced behavior .”3 By invoking the imagery of the Henryk Sienkiewicz national saga of seventeenth-century wars, Trilogy, from the pages of which the murderous peasant mobs appear as if by magic, Gross suggests that the motivations of killers should be sought not in the context of the multiple occupations of 1939–41 and the Nazis’ racial war but in the longue durée of Polish and—more broadly—East European history.4 The immediate debates over Jan Gross’s book tended to focus on what actually happened in Jedwabne and the surrounding areas in July 1941, and among the many merits of such debates is that they helped to clarify with exceptional precision the highly complex and volatile context in which the event took place.5 But the book and the debates it provoked have wider implications for framing the research agenda on the motivation of local non-Nazi killers of Jews in other areas of the Soviet borderlands during World War II. This chapter locates itself within this context of scholarly preoccupations and self-consciously addresses the debates over Gross’s book as especially relevant for the case it studies. The chapter seeks to establish patterns of popular antisemitic violence in the two eastern provinces of Romania, Bessarabia and Bukovina, in July and August 1941 and to explain variations.6 The tragedies in Bessarabia and northern Bukovina took place simultaneously with the Jedwabne slaughter, and the character of the place—the western Soviet borderlands —was also comparable, although, of course, in this case the “land” at the “border” was Romania, not Poland. The killings took place in the first days of the new authorities’ arrival, and thus the behavior of the local gentiles could not have been affected by the experience of their life after “liberation” (by either Germans or Romanians) or by their witnessing wartime barbarities . Instead, both Poles in what was then eastern Poland and Romanians (Moldovans) in eastern...