The Jedwabne pogrom

On Thursday 10 July 1941, in the small town of Jedwabne (PL) in the Łomża district, almost all the Jewish inhabitants who were in the town that day were murdered. From the morning, residents of the town and the surrounding villages drove the Jews out of their homes and herded them into the market square, where they were beaten and humiliated. Around midday a group of Jewish men was forced to break up a statue of Lenin and carry its pieces to a barn on the edge of the town; there they were killed. A few hours later several hundred people, women, children and the elderly, were driven into the same wooden barn, the doors were shut, the building was doused with kerosene and set alight. The people inside were burned alive.

The crime, described in Polish literature as the pogrom or the massacre in Jedwabne, was for half a century officially blamed on the Germans, even though a dozen Poles had been convicted of taking part in it as early as 1949. The investigation of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), concluded in 2003, established that the direct perpetrators were Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding area, and that the Germans inspired and permitted the crime. The number of victims remains disputed: the IPN concluded that at least 340 people died, while the inscription on the monument erected in communist Poland spoke of 1,600.

A small town between two occupations

Before the war Jedwabne was a small town in the Łomża region; according to a 1937 guidebook it had about 2,500 inhabitants, around 40 per cent of them Jews. In September 1939, after the Soviet invasion of Poland, it found itself on the Soviet side of the demarcation line and in the autumn was incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR. NKVD documents from 1940 list 1,762 Poles, 562 Jews and 97 Belarusians in Jedwabne; Jewish refugees from the surrounding area also came to the town. The Soviet occupation brought arrests and deportations, and the Polish underground in the area was broken up. Some Poles blamed the Jews for collaborating with the new authorities; this stereotype, laid over pre-war antisemitism, played a tragic part in the summer of 1941.

The German attack on the USSR on 22 June 1941 halted further deportations being prepared by the NKVD. On the evening of 23 June the Germans entered Jedwabne, greeted by some of the inhabitants as liberators. A German gendarmerie post was set up in the town, eleven men strong according to one witness, along with a Polish town administration under Mayor Marian Karolak. Violence began in the first days: people regarded as Soviet collaborators, Jews among them, were beaten and killed, and Jewish men were forced into degrading labour.

A wave of killings in the Łomża region

Jedwabne was not an isolated case. Behind the front of the battle of Białystok–Minsk came units of the Security Police and the SD which, under the instructions of Reinhard Heydrich, were not to hinder the “self-cleansing efforts” of the local population, and were even to encourage them covertly, so that the pogroms would look spontaneous. The same happened in those weeks in Lithuania, where the Kaunas pogrom had already taken place at the end of June, and in Eastern Galicia, where a pogrom swept through Lwów at the turn of June and July.

In July 1941 Jews were murdered with the participation of the local population in many small towns of the Łomża and Białystok regions. On 5 July in Wąsosz (PL) residents of the town and nearby villages killed their Jewish neighbours; the IPN, which closed its investigation in 2016, put the number of victims at no fewer than 70, while other sources give as many as 250. On 7 July in neighbouring Radziłów, after a small German unit arrived, local Poles drove the Jews into a barn and burned them alive; the figure most often given is about 800 victims. Rumours of what had happened in Radziłów reached Jedwabne two days before the crime.

German documents found by the IPN historian Edmund Dmitrów show that at this time a Security Police commando from Ciechanów and Płock, led by SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper (PL), was present in the Łomża district. According to witnesses, it was this unit that was in Radziłów on 7 July. Whether the same commando was in Jedwabne on 10 July the investigation did not determine; proceedings against Schaper in Hamburg were discontinued in 1965.

10 July 1941

According to the IPN’s findings, on the evening of 9 July some Jews were warned by Polish acquaintances that something was being prepared against them. Some witnesses speak of a meeting between German officials, who were said to have arrived “by taxi”, and the town authorities. On the morning of 10 July residents of the surrounding villages began arriving in Jedwabne by horse and cart. The Jews driven from their homes were gathered in the market square and ordered to pull grass from between the cobblestones. They were beaten and some were killed as this went on. The IPN prosecutor concluded that at least about forty Polish men from Jedwabne and the surrounding area took an active part in the crime, armed with clubs, swingletrees and other implements; the upper limit of the number of perpetrators could not be established.

Many witnesses saw uniformed Germans in the town that day. According to the IPN, a small group of them probably assisted in driving the victims to the market square, and their active role was limited to that. It could not be established whether they escorted the victims or were present at the barn; testimony on this point is contradictory.

A group of around forty Jewish men, the local rabbi among them, was forced to break up the statue of Lenin, which stood in a small square on the road to Wizna (PL), and to carry its bust on poles to a barn belonging to Bronisław Śleszyński. These men were killed in a manner that has not been established, and their bodies were thrown into a pit dug inside the barn, together with the concrete bust. An hour or several hours later – witnesses speak of an hour and a half, or of late afternoon – a second, much larger group was led out of the market square, about 300 people of both sexes and all ages by the archaeologists’ estimate, including children and infants. They were shut in the thatched barn, which was doused, probably with kerosene from a former Soviet store, and set on fire. After the crime the property of the murdered was looted.

Some managed to escape or hide. The IPN concluded that at least several dozen people survived, hiding in the town and the surrounding area until November 1942, when the Germans liquidated the small ghettos in the region. Seven of them, including Szmul Wasersztajn (also spelled Wasersztejn in the documents), were sheltered from the autumn of 1942 until January 1945 by the family of Antonina Wyrzykowska (PL) in the village of Janczewko, later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations. In March 1945 Wyrzykowska was savagely beaten by neighbours from the local underground.

What has been established and what remains disputed

The first trial was held in Łomża in May 1949. Of the 22 defendants, the Łomża District Court convicted 12: Karol Bardoń was sentenced to death, which Bolesław Bierut commuted in 1950 to 15 years’ imprisonment, and the others to terms of 8 to 15 years; after an appeal two of those convicted were acquitted. Several defendants told the court that their statements had been beaten out of them. In 1953 and 1954 the Voivodeship Court in Białystok twice acquitted another defendant, Józef Sobuta. The courts established neither the number of victims nor the role of the Germans.

The figure of 1,600 victims came from post-war studies, including those of the historian Szymon Datner, and in the 1960s it was adopted in the investigation files. The inscription on the monument stated that “the Gestapo and the Nazi gendarmerie burned 1,600 people alive”. The IPN considered this figure “highly improbable”, pointing among other things to the population data. A limited exhumation, carried out in late May and early June 2001 with respect for Jewish religious law, which forbids disturbing graves, uncovered two mass graves at the site of the barn. On this basis the prosecutor accepted a figure of at least 340 victims, with the reservation that they could not be counted exactly, because possible graves in the Jewish cemetery, among other places, had not been examined. Gross and some other researchers accept much higher figures.

On 30 June 2003 prosecutor Radosław J. Ignatiew discontinued the investigation because no living perpetrators had been found other than those tried after the war. In the statement of reasons he wrote that the role of Polish civilians had been decisive and that the crime was committed “on German inspiration”. The Germans bear responsibility for it in the broader sense (sensu largo): the mere presence of German gendarmes and other uniformed Germans, even if they behaved passively, amounted to consent to the murder. The perpetrators in the strict sense (sensu stricto) were Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding area. The IPN was unable to establish why most of the inhabitants remained passive: whether out of acceptance or out of fear.

Beyond these findings historians continue to disagree. Some, like Tomasz Strzembosz, saw the crime above all as a German provocation and stressed the coercion applied to the Poles. Others, like Jan Tomasz Gross, hold that the Germans merely permitted a crime that the Polish neighbours planned and carried out themselves. There are also disputes over the numbers of victims and perpetrators and over the part played by the experience of Soviet occupation.

Neighbours and the apology

The case was brought to wide public attention by Jan Tomasz Gross (PL)’s book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (PL), published in Polish in 2000 and based largely on Wasersztajn’s account and the files of the 1949 trial. The book set off one of the most profound debates about the past in Poland since 1989. In September 2000 the IPN opened its investigation, and in 2002 it published “Wokół Jedwabnego” (Around Jedwabne), a two-volume collection of studies and documents.

The old monument was removed in March 2001. On 10 July 2001, the 60th anniversary of the crime, at a ceremony during which a new monument was unveiled at the site of the barn, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologised in his own name and in the name of “those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime”. The inscription, in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish, which begins with the words “In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and the surrounding area”, does not name the perpetrators.

What came next

For the Jews of Jedwabne who survived 10 July, it was only the beginning. At the end of July the region passed from military rule to German civil administration as Bezirk Bialystok. The survivors hid in the villages or ended up in the Łomża ghetto (PL), set up by the Germans in August 1941. In November 1942 the Germans liquidated the ghettos of the district and sent their inhabitants to their deaths. After 2000 Jedwabne became a symbol of the most painful chapter in the Polish-Jewish history of the war, and it remains a subject of dispute to this day.