Jan Gross’s Neighbors and Poland’s Narrative Shock

Rare are the books that make history and alter collective memory. Jan Tomasz Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is one.

Neighbors described in painful detail how, in the summer of 1941, ethnic Poles tormented and murdered their Jewish neighbors in the small town of Jedwabne, in northeastern Poland. While Polish indifference toward the genocide of Polish Jews had been discussed in the mid-1980s following the broadcasting on Polish television of Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary film Shoah and the 1987 publication of Jan Błoński’s essay “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” in the prominent Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny, it is Gross’s Neighbors that burst the dam and led to extended public debate and soul-searching about Polish violence against Jews during and after the Second World War. Almost immediately upon its publication, the book generated vigorous debate among historians.¹ The Jedwabne pogrom was also the topic of passionate discussions in public seminars at cultural centers and churches, on radio talk shows, museums, or student clubs, and it was a common topic in private conversations taking place in homes, at workplaces, in stores, or on public transports. The Institute of National Remembrance, founded to investigate and enable the prosecution of crimes against the Polish nation committed during the Second World War and the communist period, quickly opened an official investigation into the murders described by Gross.² On July 10, 2001, on the sixtieth anniversary of the pogrom, the (leftist) government erected a monument at the site where several hundred Jews were forcibly brought to a barn and burned alive, and President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized on behalf of the Polish nation.

Neighbors created such a rupture in the national narrative of the war that one could speak of Poland “before” and “after” its publication. Not only were Poles no longer cast as the main victims of the war; they were now perpetrators of some of its horror. By disrupting the Polish narrative of martyrdom—for one cannot be both a sacrificial victim and a willing executioner—Neighbors provoked what I have called “narrative shock,” the questioning of a key story of the nation, shaking its identity to its core.³

The shock was so great that many turned to denial and counteraccusations: “It was not Poles who killed the Jews, but the Germans,” “There were far fewer Jews murdered than Gross claimed,” or even “The Jews had it coming after all, since they collaborated with the Soviets.” Such opinions were frequently expressed in newspaper editorials and letters to the editor, academic panels, public roundtables, and church sermons. A counter-memorial to Polish victims of the war, monumentalizing that perspective, was dedicated on Jedwabne’s main square in 2003.⁴ Almost predictably, in 2011, neofascist vandals defaced the Jedwabne memorial to the Jews who were murdered by spray-painting on stones surrounding the monument the statements “They were flammable” and “I do not apologize for Jedwabne.”⁵

Among groups on the right, any attempt at discussing Poles’ participation in the Holocaust is perceived as defamation and a profanation of the Polish nation, which is held sacred. It is to counter what they call the “politics of shame” and to protect the nation at home and its “good name” abroad, that the Law and Justice government, supported by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the right-wing Radio Maryja, and various nationalist organizations are engaged in a process of remythologization that ranges from outright denial to the promotion of new narratives of Polish-Jewish relations. In recent years, for example, attention has been redirected toward Poles who rescued Jews and who are honored by Israel as “Righteous among the Nations.” Their actions have been commemorated in numerous museums, monuments, murals, and movies. The historian Jan Grabowski has nicknamed that rhetorical strategy the “Righteous defense.”⁶ Public attention has also been redirected toward other Polish stories of Polish martyrdom, such as the Katyń Massacres, where some twenty thousand Polish army officers, intellectuals, and civilian prisoners were murdered in 1940 by...