The Cruelty and Kindness of Strangers
ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.
The Cruelty and Kindness of Strangers Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland By Jan T. Gross Princeton. 261pp. $19.95. The Fragility of Goodness: Why...
...others had their eyes plucked out and their tongues cut off...
...Before they were killed, many of Jedwabne's Jews were made to sing outlandish songs and perform degrading acts...
...Because the Jews were robbed as well as killed—their "leftover" dwellings and belongings were seized by the pogrom's participants—Gross attributes the massive violence, in part, to materialist designs...
...And yet possible...
...Among other things, as of March 1941 Bulgaria was linked to Germany, Italy and Japan as an Axis nation...
...A stigma evidently attached to those who had aided Jews in the War years...
...Jan T. Gross' Neighbors defies this sense of settled knowledge by bringing to light a startling yet little known chapter of this story...
...Gross alludes to popular myths about the Jews as Christ killers and predators who, among their misdeeds, allegedly used the blood of innocent Christian children to celebrate the Passover festival...
...As Tzvetan Todorov demonstrates in The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust, the situation there during World War II was vastly different from the one in Poland...
...But a generally favorable public opinion contributed to the undertaking...
...How, in short, can the killings of Polish Jews by other Poles "engage Polish collective identity" today...
...In both cases German forces were in the area and must have given their consent, but the actual slaughters evidently were carried out by local Poles...
...And if so, why...
...The killings were savage and indiscriminate: the young and the old, men, women and children, were mercilessly beaten, whipped, knifed, stoned, clubbed, drowned, and burned...
...The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgarian Jews Survived the Holocaust By Tzvetan Todorov Princeton...
...Then, they were butchered and thrown into the same hole...
...The beards of elderly Jewish men were set on fire...
...Reviewed by Alvin H. Rosenfeld Professor of English...
...Todorov's analysis of the documents he has collected does not provide exhaustive answers, but it is sufficient to reach a conclusion that is noteworthy for its sobriety and the hope, albeit tempered, it seems to hold out...
...Todorov brings together a number of documents, many of them previously untranslated letters, diaries, memoirs, and government reports...
...Thracian and Macedonian Jews were not spared this disastrous end, yet the great majority of the Jews of "old" Bulgaria were more fortunate and survived the War...
...They included the country's King, Boris III, leaders of the Orthodox Church and, in particular, Dimitur Peshev, a deputy of Parliament who worked in various ways against the anti-Jewish laws and the deportation orders...
...According to Gross, a son of her nephew who stayed in Poland was cursed as a "Jew" whenever his playmates got angry with him...
...Virtually all of them were wiped out in a single day in July 1941...
...She settled in Chicago...
...Inevitably, Gross asks: What were the motives of those who humiliated, tortured and murdered their fellow citizens...
...In the postwar period, Antonia Wyrzykowska, who put her family at risk by harboring Jews amid the Jedwabne pogrom, came under suspicion for her actions and felt it necessary to leave her native country...
...Its Jewish population was less than 50,000, a small fraction of the size of Polish Jewry, and was generally well integrated...
...Gross notes, were the "undisputed bosses over life and death" in this part of Poland...
...He concedes that it was in the selfinterest of various Bulgarian officials and institutional leaders to help save Bulgarian Jewry...
...It stimulated and supported numerous appeals, protests, intercessions, slowdowns, diversionary tactics, and other moves, all aimed at forestalling the plans of Theodor Dannecker, Adolf Eichmann's special representative, to deport the Jews of Bulgaria en masse...
...In an effort to account for those actions...
...On the evidence of the Bulgarian example—which in Nazi-occupied Europe finds a parallel only in Denmark—Todorov is moved to ask a number of challenging questions, and some of them carry a special resonance in the light of Jan Gross' story: "When we know that evil is striking our neighbor...
...To his credit, the author tells his story with restraint and avoids simplifying or sentimentalizing it...
...AntiSemitism was not absent, but rarely assumed the virulent forms it took on elsewhere in Europe...
...In fact, 11,343 Jews from those areas were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz...
...The crime was coordinated by the Mayor, Marian Karolak, and several of his aides...
...26.95...
...Indeed, it sometimes seems little of significance remains to be uncovered...
...If possible, even achievable, in Bulgaria, why not elsewhere...
...And how...
...224 pp...
...The killings could not have taken place without the approval of the German occupying forces, who...
...Neighbors tells a compelling story admirably...
...The town's 90-year-old rabbi was ordered to walk at the head of a large mass of his fellow Jews with his hat on a stick, and all were made to sing, "The war is because of us, the war is for us...
...do we do anything about it...
...Gross, a Polish-born scholar who is a professor of history at New York University, reveals however that it was their familiar "neighbors" who carried outthe massacre...
...Only a dozen of Jedwabne's Jews survived, including seven who were sheltered by a Polish couple in a nearby village, Antonia and Aleksander Wyrzykowski...
...Nevertheless, as of 1941 and '42, the country's Jews were vulnerable to racial laws and—especially in Thrace and Macedonia, both controlled by Bulgaria — they were also subject to deportation...
...Althoughhe restricts his focus to Jedwabne, he mentions two other massacres that occurred just days earlier—in nearby Radzilów, where some 1,500 Jews were tortured and killed, and in Wasosz, where 1,200 were murdered...
...Under the punishment of heavy blows, 75 young Jewish men were ordered to pick up a huge monument of Lenin, carry it around, and bury it in a hole they were forced to dig...
...They show that even during a time of unprecedented atrocity, "goodness can flourish too...
...After the War, the town erected a monument to its slaughtered Jews that attributed their fate to Nazi perpetrators...
...How did so many not only live so long with the knowledge of what happened but support the fraudulent postwar history that attributed the atrocities to others...
...some had their throats slit...
...director, Boms Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University Thanks t? an enormous literature that has accumulated over the years, we know a great deal about the persecution and mass murder of European Jewry...
...How can Poland, a nation brutally victimized by the Germans during World War ?, reconcile itself to the disturbing realization that a segment of its population was actively in league with the Nazis, and in some ways even outdid them in cruelty and destruction...
...Most of Jedwabne's Polish inhabitants were either participants in the pogrom or witnesses to it...
...Only 12 survived...
...Precisely who initiated the slaughter remains unclear...
...From the evidence presented in this book, though, it is irrefutable that "one day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half...
...This is plausible up to a point, but it does not explain the passions that drove the murderers and the viciousness with which they tormented the Jews before burning most of them alive...
...Gross' revelations are based on eyewitness sources and postwar trial testimony...
...These primitive notions no doubt kept alive a kind of atavistic anti-Semitism, yet one feels they do not reach the deepest layers of the Poles' ferocious behavior...
...In Bulgaria proper, though, plans to deport the Jews were thwarted by the concerted efforts of a variety of political, religious and intellectual figures...
...Thus, while the annihilation of the Jews of Jedwabne is now the most fully documented of these crimes, it apparently was not an isolated incident...
...Following this sadistic sideshow, the Jews were herded into a barn that was doused with kerosene and set on fire...
...once introduced into public life, evil easily perpetuates itself, whereas good is always difficult, rare, and fragile...
...Local musicians played loudly to drown out the screams of the 1,500 or more people who were burned alive...
...His small book detailing the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne raises large questions about the roles Poles and Germans played in some of the bloodiest actions against Jews during World War II...
...The murderers were a cross section of the town's population—small farmers, shoemakers, masons, a carpenter, clerks, a letter carrier—"a bunch of ordinary men," as the author describes them...
...In one case a young woman was decapitated and her severed head kicked around like a soccer ball...
...Located in northeastern Poland, 60odd miles from Bialystok, Jedwabne had some 1,600 Jewish inhabitants in the 1930s—approximately 60per cent of the town's population...
...It should be widely read and discussed, for the complex, unsettling issues it raises still need to be fully explored...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
