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A “Potent, Devilish Mixture” of Motives: Explanatory Strategy and Assignment of Meaning in Jan Gross's Neighbors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

William W. Hagen
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Abstract

In this forum on Neighbors by Jan T. Gross (Princeton, 2001), four scholars respond to the book and to the issues of evidence, causality, and interpretation that it raises. Janine P. Holc summarizes the contents and the book's approach and explores the roles of individual choice, on the one hand, and ethnic identity categories, on the other, in Gross's presentation of the causes of the massacre of the Jewish residents of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbors. She argues for an approach to reading Neighbors that links the emotive mode in which some of the narrative is expressed to a productive engagement with traumatic or violent historical episodes. This type of history resists finality and closure and creates an avenue for active engagement by members of ethnic (or other) communities with violent and traumatic pasts. Wojciech Roszkowski discusses three aspects of the debate on Neighbors in Poland: the credibility of the book, the facts of 10 July 1941 and their moral meaning, and the representativeness of the Jedwabne case and the question of “innocence” or “guilt” of nations. While arguing that the credibility of Neighbors is low and that Gross's thesis that “one half of the Jedwabne inhabitants killed the other half” has not been proven, he writes that it is impossible to deny Polish participation in the massacre. Yet, as with other documented cases of Polish wartime evildoing, it is unfair to blow this incident out of proportion and produce unwarranted generalizations. Past and present realities are always more complicated than simple stereotypes that “Poles” or “Jews” are to blame or that they have always been innocent. William W. Hagen argues that Gross vacillates between a robust positivism promising that “a reconstruction” of “what actually took place” is possible, such that guilt and motive may confidently be assigned, and an interpretive pessimism suggesting that “we will never 'understand' why it happened.” In his assignment of causality, Gross offers a largely unconnected, in part inferential or speculative, array of determinants and motives. Although some of the causes Gross adduces are certainly persuasive, his analysis does not address the Jedwabne perpetrators' and witnesses' perception of the cultural meaning of the inhuman violence their Jewish neighbors were suffering. Hagen offers some suggestive historical evidence on the Poles' subjective response to the Jewish genocide and to their own wartime fate, arguing that the Jedwabne Poles' participation in the mass murder of the Jews must be conceived as a response, mediated by the penetration of ideological anti-Semitism into the countryside, to profound anxiety over the individual and social death menacing Polish identity under Soviet and Nazi occupation. Norman M. Naimark argues that the appearance of Gross's Neighbors has created an entirely new dimension to the historiography of World War II in Poland. The book demonstrated, as has no other work, the extent to which the Poles were directly involved in the genocide of the Jews. The clarity and force of Gross's presentation provides Polish historiography with an unprecedented opportunity “to come to terms with the past.” The essay also suggests that the Jedwabne massacre needs to be looked at in the context of overall German policy “in the east” and in comparison to similar horrors taking place roughly at the same time in Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Latvia. The Nazis intentionally (and surreptitiously) sought to incite pogroms in the region, filming and photographing the horrific events for audiences back home. Their own propaganda about the “Jewish-Bolshevik” menace both prompted and was ostensibly confirmed by the pogroms. In his response, Jan T. Gross replies to Roszkowski's criticism concerning historical credibility.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , Fall 2002 , pp. 466 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2002

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References

1 Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction ofthejeiuish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, 2001), 8 Google Scholar, 12, 140-41.

2 Gross, Jan T., “A Tangled Web: Confronting Stereotypes concerning Relations between Poles, Germans,Jews, and Communists,” in Deák, István, Gross, Jan T., and Judt, Tony, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, 2000), 80 Google Scholar.

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5 Gross, “A Tangled Web,” 76-80.

6 Gross, Neighbors, 20, 22.

7 Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust, 2d ed. (Ithaca, 2000), xi Google Scholar.

8 Gross, Neighbors, 13.

9 Ibid., 74 (my emphasis).

10 Ibid., 78.

11 Gross, Neighbors, 132-33. Yet, despite Nazi policy, Gross concludes that, “in general nobody was forced to kill the Jews,” though the Jedwabne record raises precisely this question without answering it unambiguously.

12 Gross, Neighbors, 37-38, 122-23.

13 Ibid., 124-25.

14 Ibid., 162.

15 Ibid., 162-63.

16 Ibid., 103, 155.

17 See Harten, Hans-Christian, De-Kulturation und Germanisierung: Die nationalsozialistische Rassen- und Erziehungspolitik in Polen, 1939-1945 (Frankfurt, 1996)Google Scholar, which includes references to the older literature.

18 The worst Polish pogrom on record since the partitions was the militarily sparked violence in Lwów/Lemberg in November 1918, which claimed some 72 dead and 443 wounded among its Jewish victims. Golczewski, Frank, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen 1881- 1922:Eine Studiezur Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wiesbaden, 1981), 197 Google Scholar. See also Bendow, Josef (pseud, for Tenenbaum, Joseph), Der Lemberger Judenpogrom November 1918-Jänner 1919 (Vienna, 1919)Google Scholar; Chasanowitsch, Leon, Diepolnischenjudenpogrome im November und Dezember 1918: TaisachenundDokumente (Stockholm, 1919)Google Scholar; Kozlowski, Maciej, Zapomniana Wojna: Watka o Lwów i Galicję Wschodnią. 1918-1919 (Bydgoszcz, 1999)Google Scholar, chap. 17.

19 Klukowski, quoted in Gross, “A Tangled Web,” 90-91.

20 Gross, Neighbors, 133.

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26 On these and related interpretive issues, see Hagen, William W., “Before the ‘Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Antisemitism in Interwar Germany and Poland,” Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996): 1–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Hertz, Aleksander, The Jexvs in Polish Culture, trans. Lourie, Richard (Evanston, 1988)Google Scholar; Cala, Alina, The Image oftliejew in Polish Folk Culture (Jerusalem, 1995)Google Scholar.

28 Cala, Image ojthe Jew, 128, 131, 150, 222.

29 Ibid., 116.

30 Gross, Neighbors, 99, 153-54.

31 Gross, Revolution from Abroad, 222 and chaps. 5-6 passim.

32 Gross, Neighbors, 118.