Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

As nearly everyone must be aware by now, Jan T. Gross has touched off a fiery debate by showing that Poles were not simply victims during the Nazi occupation. In the town of Jedwabne, in the late summer of 1941, some participated, with some degree of willingness, in the murder of Jews alongside whom they had lived for generations. In the book's most quoted line, "half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half" (p. 7). Drawing on eyewitness testimony (much of it from depositions taken by Polish prosecutors in 1949–1953), Gross argues that the extermination of some 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne requires a rethinking of the Holocaust in Poland, and of Polish-Jewish relations in World War II.

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This is one historical controversy on which one can easily be informed: essentially an extended essay, not much longer than a New Yorker article, the book can be digested in one evening. This brevity is both one of its real strengths and a shortcoming as well. Much of the controversy has centered on Gross's evidence. First, there is its reliability: can the testimony of survivors of a horrific slaughter, or testimony recorded for a Stalinist court, bear much weight? And, second, does the evidence show that Poles in Jedwabne took the initiative in forcing their Jewish neighbors into a barn that was then set alight? Or is the tale more familiar: murder orchestrated by Nazi officials, with the Poles as helpless accomplices? While it has to be said that Gross does not nail his case beyond question, such certainty would be an impossible task given the nature of the event and of the evidence. This reviewer finds the evidence quite convincing, especially as Gross himself is candid about source limitations. At any rate, these arguments have been exhaustively rehearsed elsewhere; here, I will focus on two issues that have received rather less attention, although they are additional reasons to read the book.

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