Patterns of Violence: The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941

Patterns of Violence

The Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941

Recently, there has been growing interest among historians 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 complicity in the mass murder of Jews of people of a particular ethnic origin to the perception and self-perception of the respective nations, and the incessant public demand for works that deal with this kind of emotionally charged issues. While scholars research events that occurred in different places and under circumstances that were substantially different as well, 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 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 Polish general public and even historians came to believe) but rather by the centuries-long antisemitic tradition in Poland.² While 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 17th-century wars, Trilogy, from the pages of which the murderous peasant mobs appear as if by magic, he 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 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 article 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 article seeks to establish patterns...