July 10: Jedwabne, Poland: Independent of the Nazis, local Catholic Poles round up the local Jews and murder dozens in the town square. The 400 surviving Jews who were not murdered in the village square, are run down Cemetery Road to Bronislaw Sleszynski’s thatch-roofed barn. Kerosene was poured on the barn and set alight, burning all 400 alive.
The atrocity was almost forgotten until 1999, when the historian Jan Gross (of NYU) assembled evidence that Jadwabne’s Jewish pogrom was not, as local lore had it, the work of under-siege Polish townsmen acting on orders from the advancing Nazi SS. Instead, documents and eyewitness accounts confirmed that local Catholic Poles unilaterally organized and carried-out the massacre of their Jewish neighbors.
In due course, in 2001, the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, came to Jadwabne to apologize to (the ghosts of) the Jews for what Poles of one faith unilaterally did to Poles of another faith.
In trials in 1949 and 1953 more than a dozen Poles were convicted of murder in the killing of Jedwabne’s Jews.
The state public prosecutor – who opened his own investigation 17 years later in 2000 – issued his formal report in January 2003. It relates that half the adult Catholic men in Jedwabne, along with Catholic women and children took part in the pogrom, some watching, some helping to round up those Jews trying to escape, and others killing Jews with their bare hands.
On the heels of the state prosecutor’s report, Michal Chajewskis, Jedwabne’s newly–elected mayor said bluntly, apparently, that “it is time to finish with this circus.” “Besides,” he said, “Jedwabne was only one of more than two dozen towns in the region where anti–Jewish pogroms were carried out.” ***
*** NY Times: February 8, 2003
“Polish Town Still Tries To Forget Its Past” by Peter S. Green
note: The advancing Nazis apparently encouraged pogroms throughout regions of Poland.