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

Jedwabne is a small town in Northeastern Poland. It is 19 kilometers northeast of Lomza, the nearest city. On January 8, 1949, Jedwabne’s security police “detained fifteen men” (18). There were around 2,000 people living in the town at the time. Most of those arrested were “small farmers and seasonal workers” (18). Some of the men rounded up had families, while others were single. The youngest to be detained was 27, while the eldest was 64. All the men were ordinary. They were tried four months later alongside seven other men, including Boleslaw Ramotowski, because of evidence from the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland, which described to the Ministry of Justice how these men had engaged “in the murder of Jewish people” (18). The evidence relied on the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn, one of the witnesses to the pogrom in Jedwabne.

Wasersztajn testified “before the Jewish Historical Commission in Bialystok on April 5, 1945” (18). According to him, there were 1,600 Jewish people in Jedwabne before the start of World War II. By the end of the war only seven were left, due to the efforts of a woman named Wyrzykowska who lived nearby.

On June 23, 1941, Wasersztajn continued, Germans entered Jedwabne and “started an anti-Jewish pogrom” (20). Though Wasersztajn’s date is incorrect, he vividly described how a mob stoned one citizen with bricks; another was stabbed, had his eyes plucked out, and his tongue cut off. The latter victim died 12 hours after being attacked. Two young women with newborns ran to drown themselves in a pond before they could be apprehended and attacked. The next day a local priest told the community to end the pogrom because German authorities would dispose of the remaining Jews. The pogrom stopped. Meanwhile, “rumors spread that the Germans would issue an order that all the Jews be destroyed” (20). The rumor turned out to be true: The Germans issued the order of extermination on July 10, 1941. That morning eight Gestapos arrived and met with “representatives of the town authorities” (21). The Gestapo asked the representatives what they were going to do with the town’s Jews. The consensus was “that all Jews [had to] be killed” (21).

Wasersztajn described how “hooligans armed themselves with axes, special clubs studded with nails, and other instruments of torture and destruction and chased all the Jews into the street” (21). They then chose 75 young and healthy Jews, “whom they ordered to pick up a huge monument of Lenin that the Russians had erected in the center of town” (21). Though the monument was “impossibly heavy,” the Jewish inhabitants carried it “to the designated place […] under a rain of horrible blows” (21). Once they reached their destination, the mob forced them to dig a hole in which they threw the monument. Finally, the Jews “were butchered to death and thrown into the same hole” (21). Another form of cruelty meted out against them was that Jews were forced to “dig a hole and bury all previously murdered Jews, and then those were killed and in turn buried by others” (21). Additional tortures included burning the beards of elderly Jewish men, killing newborn babies who were suckling at their mothers’ breasts, beatings, forcing victims to sing and dance amid their torment, and, the culminating event, burning people alive.

For the burning, the Jews were told to queue in a column, with four in each row. The rabbi and Kosher butcher were placed in front and given “a red banner” (21). The hooligans ordered the group to sing. They were beaten savagely until all were rounded up in a local barn. Some tried to resist being quartered, to no avail. Once every Jew was inside, “the barn was doused with kerosene and lit” (22). Meanwhile, the hooligans “[searched] Jewish homes, to look for the remaining sick and children” (22). They carried the infirm to the barn, while the small children were either carried or “roped […] together by their legs” (22). The children were then put on pitchforks and tossed “onto smoldering coals” (22). After the bodies in the barn burned, the thugs took up axes and “[knocked] golden teeth from still not entirely decomposed bodies” (22). Those Jews who had been rounded up at the last minute “were actually burned alive” (22).

Gross concludes the chapter by wondering about the significance of the Jedwabne pogrom. He muses about why this event has never really figured among historians, despite the inhabitants of Jedwabne living with knowledge of the event “for three generations” (23). He wonders how “the Polish citizenry [will] process the revelation when it becomes public knowledge” (23).

Gross posits that there may be “documentary footage shot at the time of the pogrom” (24). One former resident, Julia Sokolowska, noted in her deposition that Germans took numerous photographs of the pogrom, which they used as evidence of how the Poles had participated in murdering Jews. In addition to photographic records there are extensive written ones—testimonies from Jews about the Shoah, or Holocaust. Gross didn’t rely on these testimonies but on documentation from the executors of the pogrom. The problem with using such testimony is that those “suspected of wrongdoing might wish […] to play down their own role in the events under scrutiny” or “to trivialize the events themselves” (26).

During 1949 and 1953, Poland was deeply entrenched in Stalinism. Thus, numerous courtroom defendants brought to the Lomza Security Office “were beaten during interrogation” (27), in efforts to force them to make depositions that may not have reflected the truth of their experiences. During the depositions, defendants were asked three questions centered on the following—where they lived in July 1941, if they participated in the murder of Jews, and who else participated in sequestering and murdering Jews. The investigation ended after two weeks, revealing that the Lomza Security Office gave the case little priority.

Ramotowski and his cohorts “were accused […] of having acted in a manner that fostered the interests of the German state” (28) when they rounded up and burned 1,200 Jews on June 25, 1941. This date, of course, is incorrect. The Jedwabne massacre took place on July 10, 1941—a fact that “is reflected in numerous depositions” (28). Many months passed before either the prosecutor’s office or the court corrected the error. The indifference to this error is a result of virulent antisemitism during the late 1940s and early 1950s—another characteristic of Stalinist rule. The regime did not find it in their interests “to underscore Jewish wartime suffering at the hands of the Poles” (29).