The Crime and the Silence

Starred review from July 6, 2015
Polish journalist Bikont undertakes a thorough follow-up to Polish-American historian Jan Gross’s 2001 book Neighbors, about the July 1941 pogrom in the rural eastern Polish town of Jedwabne. Bikont spent several years tracking down and interviewing the few eyewitnesses to the event—as well as their children and other relevant parties—in Poland, Costa Rica, Israel, and the U.S. She goes well beyond Gross in marshaling information to counter persistent claims that the Jewish massacre was perpetrated by Germans: overwhelming historical evidence incriminates Poles. In the process of investigating, she learned that the July pogrom in Jedwabne wasn’t an isolated act; killings of Jews by Poles took place “in several dozen towns in the area.” Bikont also notes the near-ubiquity of anti-Semitism in the area at the time—such that protecting Jews was an unpopular, even dangerous act—and the persistence of anti-Semitism throughout Poland to the present day. The narrative is disrupted at times by digressions into relatively tangential matters, especially in more personal sections called “Journal.” Still, Bikont has performed an extraordinary journalistic feat in documenting this
terrible, historically contested atrocity. Illus.

Starred review from May 15, 2015
Polish journalist Bikont (editor: And I Still See Their Faces: Images of Polish Jews, 1996) delivers a daring exposure of the crimes of her countrymen in the first week of July 1941. At the time, the deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne and those of Radzilow and Wasosz were glossed over, until a book commemorating them appeared just before the 60th anniversary. Jan Tomasz Gross based her book Neighbors (2001) partly on the Jedwabne Book of Memory, edited by rabbis Julius and Jacob Baker. It was the first time the testimony of eyewitness Szmul Wasersztejn was published, a good first step for Bikont to begin her search for witnesses. Sixty years after hundreds of Jews were herded into a barn that was then burned to the ground, the author found a host of disturbing reactions from the local residents. There are blatant denials that any Poles took part and assurances that it was the Germans who forced locals to participate. Many told Bikont that since it occurred so many years ago, she should just leave it alone. Her persistence in chasing down those who might tell her the facts took her all over Poland and to Israel, the United States, Cuba, and Costa Rica. Her most shocking discovery was the still-virulent anti-Semitism in the area. For years, the Catholic Church had preached against the Jews, so when neighbors were exiled to Siberia during the Russian occupation of 1939-1941, the Jews were the best scapegoats, and it was a good excuse for the beginnings of the pogroms. The elements of competitive suffering that the author uncovered in her interviewees appear to be just more excuses. Bikont's fearless research-she even confronted the brothers known to have led the Jedwabne murders-makes this a fantastic book. It was first published in Poland in 2004, and the European Book Prize it won in 2011 (for the French version) should be only the first of many awards for this significant work.

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April 15, 2015

In 2001, Jan Gross's Neighbors brought attention to long-suppressed events in Jedwabne, Poland: on July 10, 1941, inhabitants rounded up their Jewish neighbors and burned them alive in a barn. Bikont has received Poland's highest journalism award for her coverage of the country's subsequent stuttering soul-searching.

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