Poland marks 80th anniversary of Jedwabne pogrom

Poland has marked one of its most ambivalent anniversaries: the pogrom 80 years ago when locals in an eastern Polish town murdered 340 Jewish friends and neighbours.

In the middle of the second World War, as control over eastern Poland shifted from Soviet to Nazi occupiers, the people of Jedwabne herded local Jews into a barn and set it alight.

Up to 125 people survived the pogrom, though many were later murdered in Nazi death camps. For decades the 1941 massacre was cloaked in silence, squeezed between competing post-war narratives.

“We were victims, but unfortunately we were also victims of [other] victims,” said Shevah Weiss, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor and former Knesset speaker, at the event.

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Some 20 years ago the Jedwabne pogrom came to light after research by the historian Jan Gross and Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN).

In 2001 a memorial was erected to the victims and then president Aleksander Kwasniewski apologised on behalf of the country, an apology repeated by his successor, Bronislaw Komorowski.

Some 20 years on, however, the pogrom – and that apology – have been dragged into an emotive culture war.

PiS-allied president Andrzej Duda did not attend the 80th anniversary ceremony in Jedwabne and was represented instead by an official. In 2015 Mr Duda attacked the Jedwabne apology because it suggested that Poland as “a nation of victims was also a perpetrator”.

Loss

Poland lost at least six million people in the second World War, including three million Jews, and has the greatest number of “righteous among nations” – citizens who helped Jews in the Holocaust – at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem memorial.

But a 2002 IPN report into Jedwabne found 40 local Poles were responsible for the massacre “in the strict sense” while noting responsibility in “the broad sense” for Nazi occupying forces.

Holocaust survivors and their families have criticised the PiS government for emphasising a hero-victim narrative of Polish history that challenges documented cases of Polish Nazi-era collaboration.

This lies at the heart of a new law that, survivors say, will make it almost impossible for them to apply for restitution incurred during the Nazi occupation – even if Poles were responsible for their loss.

Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid has attacked the proposal as “an immoral law that will seriously harm relations between [our] countries”.

Poland’s foreign ministry says the Bill will replace an open-ended restitution claim window with a 30-year period, adding that Poland is “by no means responsible for the Holocaust”.