Poland’s chief rabbi has described as a “disgrace” new memorial stones to a wartime pogrom in Nazi-occupied Poland, disputing that ethnic Poles were among the perpetrators.
At least 300 and as many as 1,600 Polish Jews – many women, children and the elderly – died on July 10th, 1941, in the village of Jedwabne in northeastern Poland when they were rounded up and burned alive in a barn.
Research in the last 25 years has established that local villagers, ethnic Poles, were among those who rounded up and killed their neighbours.
These revelations in 2000 about the Polish perpetrators caused a national earthquake and, in subsequent years, have transformed the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom into a key battleground of Poland’s politicised memory culture.
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Many historians, as well as Poland’s state Institute of National Remembrance, note the complicated nature of the country’s tragic past. Most see broader responsibility for this and other Holocaust-era crimes with the German occupying force and its genocidal policies.
Many on Poland’s nationalist hard right, however, insist this pogrom was an exclusively German endeavour. Given the millions of Polish victims of nazism, a founding stone of modern Polish history and identity, they reject the idea of Poles perpetrating anti-Jewish crimes as an exercise in blame-shifting.
The new memorials – large rocks mounted with metal plaques carrying text – reflect this nationalist reading of Polish history. One plaque says, in Polish and English, that “evidence and witness accounts disprove the claims of Polish perpetration of the murder of Jews in Jedwabne … in reality, this crime was committed by a German [army] unit.”
The new crowdfunded memorials, installed unofficially in advance of the 84th anniversary of the massacre, were described by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as “an apparent attempt to distort the story of the massacre of Jews” to “absolve the perpetrators” through the “blatant falsification of history”.
A second plaque says the partition of Poland for more than a century until 1918 was “an unimaginable tragedy for Poles … [but] a source of satisfaction for many Jews”.
A third plaque claims that, in the interwar period, “many Jews openly sympathised with communism and identified with the Soviets, who were hostile to Poland”.
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, described the messages on the memorial plaques as a “manifestation of the disease that is anti-Semitism”.
A key driving force behind the memorial plaques is author Wojciech Sumliński, who has written books critical of recent historical research. For him, the last decades of research into Polish involvement in the Jedwabne pogrom is an “attempt to extort billions of dollars from us”.
Last week, Sumliński attended the official inauguration of the plaques, which included a Catholic Mass.
In a statement, the Yad Vashem memorial said it was “profoundly shocked and deeply concerned by the desecration of historical truth and memory at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland”.
Its demand for the Polish government to remove the memorials is unlikely to be met, however, as the stones have been installed on private land.
Polish foreign minister Radolslaw Sikorski has criticised the memorials and warned that “there is no consent for an escalating campaign of racism and anti-Semitism” in Poland.
The Jedwabne anniversary prompted a second controversy after a far-right opposition politician claimed in a live radio interview that the gas chambers in Auschwitz were “fake” and the death camp memorial was pursuing a “pseudo-historical narrative”.
Grzegorz Braun, who attracted 6 per cent in Poland’s recent presidential election, faces a criminal investigation for his remarks. He is already under investigation for using a fire extinguisher in 2023 to put out the Hanukkah candles on a menorah in the Polish parliament.
