Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

In June 1941 the local populations in former Polish territories incorporated into the Soviet Union received the Nazis “as an army of liberators” (110). In several towns citizens handed Nazi soldiers flowers to welcome them, “not realizing that [the Germans were] the most serious enemy of Polishness [sic]” (110). The Poles hoped that the Germans would chase the Soviets out of their towns so that they would not be displaced. When the Russo-German War broke out and the Soviets surrendered just several days later, the occupied Poles were overjoyed. They reunited with friends and relatives that they had not seen in a long time and rejoiced that they wouldn’t be sent to Russia—displacement was at the root of the Poles’ loathing for the Russians.

At the end of the Russo-German War, “over half of the prewar territory of the Polish state had been liberated by June and July of 1941 from Bolshevik rule” (110). Gross compares the differing responses to two occupations of Polish territory, which included Jedwabne: the conquest by the Red Army in 1939 and that by the Wehrmacht, or unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, in 1941. There was not widespread enthusiasm among the Jews in response to the communist takeover, nor was there broad collaboration with the Soviets within the Jewish community. Conversely, the non-Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Polish territories was “broadly engaged in collaboration with the Germans” (112).

Gross relays “the most shattering exemplar of moral disintegration during those years,” a story related by former maid, Karolcia Sapetowa, “a peasant woman from a hamlet near Wadowice,” which he deems “a hymn to love and selfless sacrifice” (113). Sapetowa knew a Jewish family that lived in a nearby ghetto. In 1939 the father was killed, leaving behind his wife and three children. The children went to stay with Sapetowa shortly before the ghetto “was liquidated” in March 1943 by SS men and Ukrainians who were members of an “auxiliary German police formation” (115). Neighbors found out that Sapetowa was hiding Jewish children. She became a target of threats. However, the head of the village sided with her, which eased her concern. To stave off her aggressors, she “appeased [them] with an occasional gift, or paid them off” (115).

Sapetowa narrated how “SS men were always looking around” (115) and discussing their plan to take Jewish children to a barn, wait for them to fall asleep, and then behead them with an ax. Sapetowa was determined not to “give up the children at any price” (116). She one day got the idea to announce that she would drown the three children she was harboring. She put the children on a cart, rode around the village to show the neighbors, and then, later that night, returned home with the children.

All three of the Jewish children survived, and Sapetowa declared her great love for them. Gross contrasts Sapetowa’s love with the macabre sigh of relief that an entire village gave when they believed that Sapetowa had killed the children, thereby freeing them from the prospect of reprisals from the SS. To avoid being punished by Nazis, many Poles seized Jews in nearby hamlets and brought them to town. In other instances they murdered the Jews immediately. By doing so, “an inhabitant of these territories could simultaneously endear himself to the new rulers […] and go along with […] traditional animosity toward the Jews” (117).

Gross concludes that “the natural allies” (118) of the communists were people who were subjugated under German occupation. However, there were many true communists before the war—that is, those who adhered to the ideology as opposed to conforming “because the Red Army was garrisoned across the country” (118). Gross argues against the notion that the Jews “served as the social backbone of Stalinism in Poland” (120) because of the fact that there were hardly any Jews left in Poland after the war. Most were killed and those “few who survived fled as soon as they could” to cities (119-20).