Like many people reading The Irish Times today, I was fortunate to receive some wonderful books, long coveted from reading about them in the literary pages, as Christmas gifts: novels by John McGahern and Ian McEwan, a memoir by the American writer Elizabeth Hardwick, a new volume of short stories by Alice Munro and others. So why, in receipt of such bounty, did I sit down and reread a book which I was given to review (and failed to turn in the copy) some months ago.
Neighbours by Jan T. Gross is a small volume. Much of its 200 pages consists of witness statements, maps, photographs, papers from historical archives. The story which forms its core takes up less than 20 pages, but is almost impossi ble to absorb at first reading.
The author, who is Professor of Politics and European Studies at New York University, confesses that, even after tracking down all the documents relating to the story, he did not at first comprehend the full horror of the final episode.
In brief, Neighbours tells of a summer day in 1941 when half the population of "a small eastern European town" murdered the other half.
Sixteen hundred Jewish men, women and children were clubbed, stabbed, mutilated and finally burnt to death by their Polish neighbours, with whom they had lived in apparent amity. The local rabbi and the Catholic parish priest, for example, were on regular visiting terms.
Seven of Jedwabne's Jewish population survived. They were rescued by a farming family who hid them for the duration of the German occupation of Poland.
After the war the Polish family were humiliated and harassed to the point where they were forced to leave the area.
At the time of the massacre there was a small German army garrison, staffed by 11 soldiers, in Jedwabne.
They knew what was going on, for the killings took a full day and the smell of burning flesh pervaded the town. They did not intervene, but neither did they play any part in the actual killings. Indeed one of the citizens of Jedwabne who was later charged with the crime of collaborating with the Germans pleaded indignantly that he was innocent.
The murder of the Jewish population had been organised independently of the Germans by honest, upright and, above all, patriotic people living in the town.
When I started writing this column I intended to include some of the more horrifying details of the massacre, particularly those relating to young children and the disabled.
But we are still in holiday season, so I'll desist.
Suffice to say that this was a project in which the whole community played a part.
I picked up Neighbours again after watching the brief news bulletins over Christmas, which told us that the Israeli government had stuck to its decision to prevent Yasser Arafat from travelling to Bethlehem to attend midnight Mass.
Despite appeals from the Pope and the certain knowledge that this prohibition could only prove to be a public relations disaster, the Israeli government persisted in its determination to humiliate the Palestinian leader and, through him, his people.
I did not need to return to the account of what happened in Jedwabne over half a century ago to be reminded of why the Israelis have reason to feel at their very core that, despite the evidence to the contrary, the Jews are alone against the world.
Nor was it to try to understand, yet again, the old, terrible question: how can a people who have experienced an unimaginable history of persecution now inflict such suffering on the neighbours with whom, sooner or later, they must learn to live? Jan Gross, in his impeccably restrained historian's style, makes this point in his introduction to Neighbours.
"There were things that people could have done at that time in Jedwabne and which they refrained from doing; and there were things which they did not have to do but nevertheless did." He readily admits that when he had finished writing the last page of his book he was unable to say: "Well, I understand now."
All that is certain is that nobody forced the citizens of Jedwabne to murder their Jewish neighbours. They did so because good men and women failed to stop them.
We have much to be grateful for in Ireland this Christmas. We have good reason to know that there have been times during the past 30 years when we, too, could have taken the road that leads to Jedwabne. That has not happened. Unlike the Middle East, peace in Northern Ireland is more firmly rooted than it was a year ago.
We cannot yet afford to take that for granted. At the beginning of his book Prof Gross quotes Abraham Lincoln's message to Congress in 1862: "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history".
If we in Ireland are to move forward in such a way that history is finally rendered powerless to engulf future generations, then we have to find a way of dealing with what thousands of people have suffered during the violence of the past 30 years.
These victims and their families have a right to the truth and need it if they are to have any hope of achieving closure on each individual tragedy.
This is not an easy process, as the Saville inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday has demonstrated all too clearly. It may be that the search for truth will raise more questions than it answers.
But we need to go on asking the questions as the starting point for a better future.