On Continuity and Discontinuity in Polish-Jewish Relations: Observations on Fear

Jan Tomasz Gross , Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady żydowskiego miasteczka, Sejny: Pogranicze, (2000; English edition: Jan T. Gross , Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Two book-length selections of responses have been published in English: Thou Shalt Not Kill: Poles on Jedwabne (Warsaw, Poland: Więź, 2001); Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlics , eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). In Polish see J an T. Gross , Wokół Sąsiadów: Polemiki i wyjaśnienia (Sejny, Poland: Pogranicze, 2003). A larger sampling of commentary from the Polish press is available at http://www.pogranicze.sejny.pl/archiwum/jedwabne/index.html . Poland's Institute of National Memory published two volumes resulting from its investigation of the events recounted in Gross's book: Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak , eds., Wokół Jedwabnego (Warsaw , Poland: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2002).

For example, Deborah E. Lipstadt in Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2006; David Margolick in New York Times Sunday Book Review , 23 July 2006. Lipstadt wrote that “after reading Fear, the next time I hear someone say the Poles were as bad as the Germans, I will probably still challenge that charge ... but my challenge will be far less forceful.” Margolick suggested that, “whatever Gross may believe, he buttresses [former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir [who once claimed that Poles imbibe hatred of Jews with their mothers' milk] more than he discredits him.”

Difficult Postwar Years: Polish Voices in Debate over Jan T. Gross's Book, Fear (Warsaw, Poland: Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Polish Institute for International Affairs, 2006).

Urszula Krupa and Witold Tomczak to Foreign Minister Anna Fotyga, 31 July 2007, http://www.urszulakrupa.pl/news.php?id=111. See also, inter alia, “Oświadczenie w sprawie antypolskiej książki Jana T. Grossa, skierowane do Ministra Spraw Zagranicznych Anny Fotygi,” 8 February 2007, Niedziela, 18 February 2007 (http://www.sunday. niedziela.pl/ artykul.php?lg=pl&nr=200409&dz=spoleczenstwo&id_art=00043).

The extent, character, and causes of the violence, however, have been subjects of disagreement. See David Engel , “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Postwar Poland, 1944-1946” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998):43—85; Marek Jan Chodakiewicz , After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2003). The latter is a contentious work that has drawn much criticism: see the reviews by Antony Polonsky in American Historical Review 109 (2004), 1000—1001, and David Engel in Polin 18 (2005),424—29. For a favorable review, see Peter D. Stachura in History 89 (2004), 164.

An example: Gross recalls a scene from a 1987 documentary about the Kielce killings, where a woman told how some foodstuffs that remained at the site of the incident were left outside for anyone who wished to take. The foodstuffs included some old matzo. The woman indicated that people “took matzo because it tastes good.” Her interviewer asked why they took matzo if they believed that it was made with the blood of Christian children. In Gross's description, “the lady smiled again, shrugged her shoulders, and dismissed the question with a chuckle” (pp. 165—66). Others might simply note the irony and move on. Gross later builds upon the scene to develop his provocative thesis about the relative insignificance of traditional religious prejudices as a cause of the Jews' hostile reception. On this thesis, see below.

Marcin Gadziński , “`Strach'—książka, która wstrząśnie Polską,” Gazeta Wyborcza , 5 July 2006.

On the thesis, see below. For its adumbration, see Neighbors, 146—51.

Neighbors, 135.

In the original Polish version of Neighbors, Gross clearly suggested that contemporary Poles might well be implicated in what happened at Jedwabne: “When pondering that epoch ... the need arises to reflect upon what makes ... us—as members of a collective possessing a distinct subjective identity, to which we belong because we are conscious of our partnership in it—capable of such deeds.” Sąsiedzi, 91 (emphasis in source). The English edition posed the question more abstractly: “When reflecting about this epoch ... we ... might be compelled to investigate what makes a nation (as in `the Germans') capable of carrying out such deeds.” Neighbors, 134.

Gross made the assumption explicit in an interview published in one of his university's in-house newspapers: “I am not telling things in Fear that were unknown. I am merely putting them together differently, and by doing so bringing up a mirror, if you will, to help a community that I care about to look itself in the eye.” Jennifer Greenstein Altmann , “ Historian's Work Uncovering the Past Helps Community `Look Itself in the Eye' ,” Princeton Weekly, 26 March 2007.

Gross quotes anthropologist Jane Goodall: “Pseudospeciation ... in humans means ... that members of one group ... may not only see themselves as different from members of another group ... but also behave in different ways to group and non-group individuals. In its extreme form [it] leads to dehumanizing of out-group members, so that they may come to be regarded almost as members of a different species” (p. 254). In his view, the communist regime in postwar Poland engaged in massive “pseudospeciation” of class enemies. He thus argues that wartime complicity in the spoliation and murder of Jews left Poles morally defenseless against the totalitarian communist assault: “People know that they cannot credibly claim rights that they have withheld from others, and communities that assisted in the annihilation of their Jewish neighbors thereby morally surrendered to a new organizer of public order poised to carry out comprehensive social engineering. Those who had helped the Nazis were unwittingly among the most effective instruments of postwar Sovietization” (p. 256).

See, for example, Maciej Kozłowski , “Habent sua fata libelli ,” http://fear.piastinstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88&Itemid=54 . Kozłowski was Poland's ambassador to Israel.

Neighbors, 123.

This calculation assumes that total Jewish deaths following the Second World War numbered 500—600. For derivation of this figure, see Engel, “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence,” 49—60. The figure chimes roughly with the 400—700 victims in a slightly longer interval (July 1944 through January 1947) estimated by Chodakiewicz, After the Holocaust, 213. Gross believes these estimates to be too low, asserting that “the militia and the Security Service systematically ignored anti-Jewish violence in their reporting” (35). However, even if a figure of 1,000 is employed, the rate of Jewish deaths after both the First and Second World Wars would still be approximately equal.

For a survey of the violence after the First World War, see Frank Golczewski , Polnischjüdische Beziehungen 1881—1922: Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1981), 182—233. For details of the bombing at Leżajsk, see Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletin, 8 August 1945.

For an assertion that the militias (or “independentist insurgents”) “represented all Polish political groups but the Communists,” see Chodakiewicz, After the Holocaust, 1. For rebuttal, see Engel in Polin 18.

Violence played a role in Polish-Jewish relations in 1937 as well. See, among others, Jolanta Żyndul , Zajs′cia antyżydowskie w Polsce w latach 1935—1937 (Warsaw, Poland: Fundacja im. K. Kelles-Krauza, 1994).

This phenomenon has recently been discussed in Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939—1945:, (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxii, 609—62 passim. For analyses of the situation in individual countries, see the essays in David Bankier, ed., The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WWII (Jerusalem: Berghahn Books, 2005.)

After Poland, the country that posed the greatest danger to Jewish physical safety appears to have been Hungary, where two major riots, in Kunmadaras and Miskolc in May and July 1946, respectively, claimed a total of five lives.

On the behavior of occupied populations in the former Soviet territories see, among others, Martin Dean , Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941—44 ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000 ); Karel C. Berkhoff , Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 71—88; Andrew Ezergailis , The Holocaust in Latvia 1941—1944: The Missing Center (Riga, Latvia, and Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996); Vincas Bartusevičius , Joachim Tauber , Wolfram Wette , eds., Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Cologne, Germany: Böhlau , 2003); Anton Weiss-Wendt , “Holocaust of the Estonian Jews, 1941—42: Sonderkommando 1a and the Problem of Collaboration,” unpublished MA thesis, New York University , 1999. On the expropriation of Hungarian Jewry in the context of deportation to Auschwitz, see Ronald Zweig , The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Second World War's Most Terrible Robbery (London: Allen Lane, 2002).

Gross did locate a kernel of his thesis in the writings of several members of “the upper crust of the Polish intelligentsia,” in particular Mieczysław Jastrun (p. 129). The writings of these intellectuals were speculative, however, not based upon extensive investigation of attitudes prevailing in other social strata. In fact, Gross himself notes that, “blinded by social distance,” they were “unable to read the mood of [Polish] society” (p. 167). Indeed, in Hungary evidence has been found in such sources of fear of retaliation by Jews against Hungarians for wartime persecution and cooperation in mass killing, but lethal violence did not figure in postwar Hungarian-Jewish relations as it did between Jews and Poles. See László Karsai, “`Shylock is Whetting his Blade': Fear of the Jews' Revenge in Hungary during World War II,” in Bankier, The Jews are Coming Back, 293—311.

For discussions of this concept in a different context, see Sammy Smooha , “ Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,” Israel Studies 2 (1997): 198—241; Oren Yiftachel , Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

This self-conception was analyzed in detail in, among others, Olgierd Górka , Naród a państwo jako zagadnienie Polski (Warsaw , Poland: Biblioteka Polska, 1937 ).

For an analysis of the ideological premises of the principal wartime underground groups that later constituted the bulk of the postwar armed anticommunist insurgency, including an ethnic nationalism that left no room for Jews in the future Poland, see Ryszard Nazarewicz , Drogi do wyzwolenia: Koncepcje walki z okupantem w Polsce i ich tres′ci polityczne, 1939-1945 ( Warsaw, Poland: książka i Wiedza, 1979). See also Engel in Polin 18, 429.