49 pages • 1 hour read
Jan Tomasz GrossNeighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “What Do People Remember?”
Aharon Appelfeld, one of the most important authors in modern Hebrew literature, returned to his hometown near Czernovitz, where he spent the first eight years and six months of his life, in 1996. He left the village in June 1941. He acknowledged that he remembered very little of those years, but his absence of memory “nourished” him and made him feel connected to this place, despite having been a citizen of Israel for many years. He wrote 30 books that drew “directly or indirectly upon the village of [his] childhood, whose name is found only on ordinance maps” (93). He recalled how, on a Saturday, 62 people were terrorized by other villagers wielding “pitchforks and kitchen knives” (93).
When Appelfeld returned, he arrived with his wife and a film crew that recorded his experience. He spoke with locals and asked them where the murdered Jews were buried; no one had an answer. Then, when the villagers found out that he had lived there during his childhood, a schoolmate came to greet him. Later, “a tall peasant came up” (93) and pointed toward the burial site, which was on a hill. Appelfeld learned that the information that the villagers had tried to keep from him was common knowledge throughout the community. Even children knew the story of the pogrom.
With the villagers’ help, Appelfeld found his mother’s grave. Similarly, and also in Poland, another writer named Henryk Grynberg found his father’s skeleton “near the place where the family had hidden at the time” (95). Grynberg’s father was killed in spring 1944. Moreover, everyone in the village knew who killed the elder Grynberg, why he was killed, when it happened, and where the body was buried. Grynberg’s search for his father’s grave was the subject of the documentary The Place of Birth, directed by Pawel Lozinski.
Just as the villagers in Appelfeld and Grynberg’s former communities knew about the murders of Jews, those currently living in Jedwabne, Gross asserts, also know about their town’s history of atrocity. This leads Gross to conclude that each town has preserved “detailed recollections of this epoch” (95), which has been the right approach in dealing with and understanding their history.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Collective Responsibility”
The Nazis employed various methods to carry out the “final solution.” One of them was to allow local populations to carry out pogroms, particularly after the start of the Russo-German War. Gross asserts that, while there were a few sadists, especially in concentration camps where prisoners were forced to kill each other, no one was really forced to kill any Jews. Generally, people chose to kill. Even in instances when people did not commit murder, there were innumerable ways they may have inflicted irreparable psychic pain and torment.
Author Michal Glowinski depicts such an episode in his memoir. He recalls being a little boy accompanying his aunt Maria to a café in Warsaw, where he sat alone eating pastry while his aunt made a few phone calls. As soon as she left, “the young Jewish boy became an object of scrutiny and questioning by a flock of women” (99). They stared at him, encouraged others to come look at him, and then conferred with each other about what to do with him. The consensus was that they had to call the police, which the boy knew “was equivalent to a death sentence” (188). He recalled how “normal” and “ordinary” the women were, and that they were probably rather virtuous in how they conducted their daily lives.
Gross wonders how such episodes can help a nation understand itself. An article published in Poland’s largest newspaper in 1994 engaged the nation on the subject of “the murder of several Jews in Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising, in the summer of 1944, committee by a Polish Home Army detachment” (100). The newspaper received many letters in response to the article, demonstrating how strongly people felt about the event 50 years later. Gross concludes by wondering how people feel about the Jedwabne pogrom, which reveals a much higher level of Polish participation in the Holocaust than was previously imagined.
Chapter 14 Summary: “New Approach to Sources”
Gross asserts that is not true that only Germans murdered Polish Jews. He also encourages the reader to accept what witnesses report in their accounts until they “find persuasive arguments to the contrary” (101). It took Gross four years to understand the contents of Wasersztajn’s deposition. Moreover, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw holds more than 700 depositions collected from Holocaust survivors shortly after the end of the war. The testimonies tell stories of Polish collusion with the murders of Jews. Though some of the testimonies seem incredible upon reading them, Gross encourages those who encounter such tales to suspend their disbelief. However, these stories only tell part of the story—that is, they are stories that end relatively happily because they are the histories of those who survived. Even testimonies that were “interrupted by the sudden death of their authors” (103) tell only part of what they wanted to say. Thus, the true story of the Holocaust is likely far more tragic than we will ever know based on the “surviving evidence.”
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
Appelfeld tells of a pogrom very similar to the one in Jedwabne. In Czernovitz, too, residents took up crude instruments—domestic objects—to drive out the town’s Jews. Both Appelfeld and Grynberg’s stories reveal that pogroms are open secrets in these seemingly quiet, idyllic villages. Tales of pogroms became a part of the town’s collective memories. They are oral histories, but villages keep these tales quiet from the rest of the world. It is as though the residents have formed a sacred pact, maintained by succeeding generations.
What is not clear is how people in Jedwabne and other villages with a shared history of atrocity feel about this shameful shared history, and what they believe it reveals about their collective identity. Gross contrasts the collective memory of the Polish villagers with what he and others outside those communities know. Gross encourages the reader to internalize a perspective on historiography that accepts the limitations of historical records while also embracing the vivid sensorial details that personal testimonies offer. These records make the Holocaust feel more palpable in a way that clinical statistical figures cannot.
