Accusation Without Defense: Poland and the Jedwabne Controversy

East European Politics and Societies, 2011

On 10 July 1941, Jewish inhabitants of the little town of Jedwabne were burnt alive in a barn by their Polish neighbors. This was probably the worst act of violence inflicted on Jews by the Poles during World War II. By examining postwar legal proceedings related to the Jedwabne massacre, this article looks at the attitude of Polish authorities towards crimes committed by the Poles on Jews during the war as well as the reaction of the local community to its own dark past. Although a group of perpetrators were put on trial in 1949 and 1953, criminal court files reveal the indolence and ineffectiveness of Communist Poland’s justice in such cases. The documents also expose a conspiracy of silence among residents of Jedwabne and their solidarity with the defendants. On the other hand, a scru-tiny of civil court proceedings discloses mechanisms of appropriation of the victims’ property by the perpetrators. An analysis of a subsequent investigation into the Jedwabne case carried out in the 1960s and 1970s proves that it predominantly aimed at erasing the truth about Polish involvement in the crime, and as its result German gendarmes were officially pointed out as the sole culprits. Only after the restitution of democracy in 1989 was Poland able to openly confront black pages of its history including the Jedwabne massacre.

The Nazis carried out their mass extermination of the Jewish people mainly on Polish soil. Poles witnessed all the stages of this crime. For this reason, one might expect that "Holocaust denial" should not take root in Poland. But a kind of rivalry of Polish martyrdom's narration were already under way quite early after the war. Tradition of pre-war Antisemitism and the focus on dealing with own trauma were not conducive to an empathic contemplation of the Jew's tragedy during the Holocaust. Of course, such emotions among Polish society were an object of political manipulation of different fractions of communist regime. Due to this tensions a specific form of the Holocaust denying developed, especially in 1968. A kind of struggle over memory is still continuing in the contemporary Antisemitism in Poland. Remembrance is being divided between "Jewish" and "Polish" themes. This paper examines development of Holocaust Denying's propaganda motives and absorbing of elements of Auschwitz lie in Poland after 1989.

German History, 2004

In post-1989 Poland, the primary struggle over the state-sponsored politics of memory revolved around the concept of "critical patriotism" (patriotyzm krytyczny). Advanced in the early 1980s by the dissident intellectual Jan Józef Lipski, and taken up in the 1990s by the left and liberal historians and journalists, this approach to collective memory calls for a critical inquiry into the darkest chapters of Polish xenophobiaincluding the history of anti-Jewish, anti-Ukrainian, and anti-German violence. 1 In more general terms, the advocates of critical patriotism argue that the state-sponsored politics of memory should promote critical reflection about the past as necessary to build a pluralistic and tolerant polity. 2 In contrast, the conservative milieu rejects this approach as a "pedagogy of shame" (pedagogika wstydu) and an attempt at "extinguishing Poland" (wygaszanie Polski). 3 Instead, the state-sponsored politics of memory should strengthen the national pride of the continuous fight for Poland's freedom and resistance against foreign oppression during the long nineteenth and the short twentieth centuries. The dramatic events of Polish history that became object of mnemonic tensions after 1989, like the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in 1943-44, the Warsaw Rising in 1944, the expulsion of Germans around 1945, the anti-Soviet resistance in the direct aftermath of the Second World War, the opposition to the communist regime in the 1970s and 1980s, or the round table agreement from 1989, are of little interest beyond East Central Europe. The exception here is the history of the Holocaust. The massive distortion of Holocaust memory and interpretation that can be observed in Poland since 2015, when the national-conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) took power, illustrates the defeat of "critical patriotism." Remarkably, the leaders and supporters of the ruling party do not consider their memory politics as one of the two opposing strategies but as the only acceptable interpretation of the past. This anti-pluralist approach to history is rooted in the dogmatic assumption that Poland must "get up off its knees." Repeated countless times since 2015, this slogan is a reaction to the allegedly blind Westernization that shaped Poland's post-1989 history and an attempt to restore its lost dignity. 4 As one of the leading militant historians in the ranks of PiS stated few weeks

Perspectives on European Politics and Society, 2003

In this paper I would like to discuss the proposition that attempts undertaken recently in Poland to re-examine Polish-Jewish relations from the Second World War fulfil a function that is far from in the interests of historical accuracy, truth and moral obligation towards the victims. I argue that the recent debate about Polish guilt for the massacre of the Jedwabne Jews in July 1941 was determined by the interests and needs of different political groups holding power in Poland a decade after the collapse of communism.

Holocaust Denial, 2012

In recent decades, the subject of collective memory has become a compelling preoccupation of academics of various disciplines as well as non-academics. French historian Henry Rousso has pointed to memory as a "value reflecting the spirit of our time."¹ One aspect of the study of collective memory is that of the "dark past" of nations in their relations with their ethnic and national minorities, the ways in which nations recollect and rework the memory of such a past, and how this memory impacts on each of their collective identities. Various new studies reveal that as with other uncomfortable memories haunting Europe, the Holocaust was repressed and excluded from public debate for a relatively long period of time.² The development of public debate on the subject was dependent on a political stability that permitted public reckoning, as well as the acceptance of self-criticism within a particular collective culture.³ One can argue that in many former Baltic and East European communist states, such as Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, and the Ukraine, that such debates have yet to take place. Between 2000 and 2002, Poland was the foremost national community undergoing such a prominent and profound public discussion, triggered by the publication of Neighbors by Jan Tomasz Gross, which describes the collective murder of the Jewish community of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland by its ethnic Polish neighbors on July 10, 1941. Rather than reviewing the historical events, or providing a critique of Gross's book, I shall focus on the dominant Polish canon of remembering the Holocaust and wartime Polish-Jewish relations in the postwar collective memory and I will look at the extent to which the debate over Neighbors led to a critical reevaluation and rejection of that canon.

Cultures of History Forum, 2019

One year after the Polish parliament adopted an amendment that would criminalize certain statements about Polish involvement in the Holocaust, this article revisits both the original amendment and the political developments since. It argues that allthough the law was eventually changed to calm down concerns about freedom of speech, sanctions still exist and their longer-term effects on Polish society and public discourse are daunting.

School vs Memory Conference, conference organised by the Czech Ministry of Education, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and Charles University in Prague. Paper presented: Polish perpetrators? Polish history textbooks and the memory of the Jedwabne massacre. 10-11 October 2014, Prague, Czech Republic

This essay discusses the memory of the Holocaust in Poland since the Jedwabne debate 2000–2002, and focuses on the specific developments between 2015 and the present. It briefly examines the achievements of critical history-writing field in postcommunist Poland, and discusses the ‘ideological war’ launched against that field by right-wing conservative pundits, historians, and politicians. It argues that radical agents within the PiS AQ1 government and its guardian institution of national memory, IPN ¶ , use three forms of amnesia to suppress and counteract the critical history-writing about the Holocaust in Poland: (1) repressive erasure by implementing legal measures and denying funding to academic institutions and individuals who conduct research on Poland’s dark past; (2) prescriptive forgetting of Jedwabne and other dark aspects of Polish–Jewish relations before, during, and after the Holocaust as a necessary measure in the interest of the entire Polish collective; and (3) amnesia as a constitutive element in the rebuilding and maintenance of an ‘ethno-nationalistic national identity.’ It contends that according to PiS’s historical policy, the historian can only be a servant of the state who remakes and reshapes history according to the orders of the state. This is the gravest danger to the historical profession and to democracy in Poland and elsewhere. There is no doubt that in the future the biggest challenge for professional historians in Poland and in other countries of post-Communist Eastern Europe will be integrating and synthetizing the soothing pages of the history of relations with Jews with the dark aspects of these relations before, during, and after the Holocaust. To achieve this, not only will historians have to permit different voices and interpretations, but also to reject current discursive schema of ‘black and white’ ideologically driven history about the collective past and the treatment of history as an ideological weapon.