Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
by Jan T. Gross

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Book Reviews of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Book Review: Rememeber that racial prejudice wasn't just a Nazi trait
Summary: 4 Stars

This quote is horrific yet it is what we have become accustomed to hearing in many books that concern themselves with the Holocaust. Yet what makes the case of the Jedwabne Jews, the subject of Neighbors so special is that their murderers were not German soldiers but the ethnic Poles of the village who had been their neighbours and supposedly their friends for generations.

During and after the war many Germans and non-German murderers have excused themselves their crimes on the grounds of following orders. Gross' account provides evidence that at the point of the murders there was no plan by the Nazis to wipe out the Jewish population in Jedwabne (seven survived) since their answer to the final problem was mass genocide. Killing in dribs and drabs was certain to be messy.

Jedwabne was under Soviet rule until 1942. The Germans moved in early on in 1943. According to Gross's interpretation of his sources the Poles of the village saw any change in rule as better than Stalin's tyranny. They also considered all Jews to be Communist sympathisers. To this day the remaining survivors deny this affiliation, and in any case it is no licence to kill. I

Gross has discovered documents in which some Polish villagers asked German soldiers if they could oust the Jewish population and the Germans replied in the positive.

From here on the book chronicles various individual murders, leading up to the mass execution of almost the entire population of Jews, in a barn that was torched.

Even if one could fathom out this sort of mindless hatred, what the accounts prove is that there was something more twisted about certain Jedwabne Poles - they were psychopaths.

Neighbors is a short book, and a third or more consists of sources. One chapter is dedicated to telling us how to read sources. This seems a little pointless and patronising, especially to readers of history who know they must an ability to interpret sources subjectively and objectively. However apart from this the book is very informative and tight. Sometimes sources are so powerful and straightforward we barely need the comments that Gross. Neighbors is a research piece and acts as such to show that more research like this needs to be done.

Surviving accounts from Polish villagers tell how Jews, including women and children, were forced to strip naked, do ridiculous gymnastic exercises in front of people who only a few days before they had considered as friends. The butchers (and that's exactly what they were) mutilated children in front of their mothers, raped women and then drowned their victims, and pillaged their property in a medieval fashion using whatever they could lay their hands on as weapons from rocks to sticks to bricks. One particularly disturbing source states that after a certain rape and murder of a young woman the nutcases who had killed her played football with her head.

I am angered whilst writing this and this is surely Neighbors desired affect. It is almost inexplicable to know how this metamorphosis could happen to the Poles. I would suggest that this was no metamorphosis but a case of seeing an opportunity to do what they had wanted to do for a long time. Gross does not dwell long upon the reasoning. This is disappointing but perhaps he feels we already have some knowledge of eastern European history. Nowadays in a time of relative peace in Europe accounts such as this are still essential because the roots of hatred, it seems, can never be burned. New roots are born from human nature and from hidden anger that is vented after particular events take place. Old dislikes are re-fuelled as we have seen recently in the events of September 11th. Religions, beliefs, nationalism and animal instincts such as power, greed, and selfishness show that the human race is as uncivilised as any other animal. Worse still we do it on a larger scale which damages the Earth as well as ourselves.

Gross has revisited Jedwabne with a television documentary maker and discovered that people in the village (young and old) are scarred by the events. Only now is a proper grave going to be built for the dead, who up until now are all piled together in a pit. Many of the murderers and eyewitnesses are still alive, and living in the village. They are haunted by the events. The townsfolk of Jedwabne it seems are being punished enough by staying alive in this ghost town. We cannot bring back the poor 1600 souls who perished, screaming as they went up in flames. They perished not at the hands of Hitler's Germany but by the hands of their so-called friends. Gross believes that there may be other cases such as this.

The fear that I have as a civilised human (and there are a few of us about) is that nothing can ever change as it seems totally artificial to be civilised. The civilised are always alienated and violated. However many uprisings and revolutions succeed in downing tyranny there will always be a new animal with new schemes to 'civilise' the world but at least we must have hope. Bringing the truth to the surface, as Neighbors does, goes some way to accomplishing this.

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