A Chosen Few Read Free Page B

native country. The Jews of Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere in central Europe must constantly fight American and Israeli Jews wishing to take their art treasures to Israel.
    Poland suffers from the chronic outbreak of history. In onesense, these debates are healthy. They were never allowed until the late 1980s, when the Communist regime was losing its control of the national dialogue. In 1987, the first such national debate erupted when the Catholic press suggested that the Jews were owed some sort of compensation by the Poles for the Polish role as bystanders in the German Holocaust. Since then, at least nine other crises have occurred, including fights over the operation of Auschwitz as a historic site, and the memory of the post-war Kielce pogrom. The most recent such battle began in May 2000 when the Polish press reported that Jan Gross, a Polish Jew who had emigrated during the 1968 wave of anti-Semitism, was about to publish a book in Polish on Jedwabne.
    Jedwabne was one of those pieces of Polish history that Jews knew about but of which Poles somehow had no memory. The entire Jewish community of this town, some 1,600 Jews according to Gross, were locked in a barn and massacred, not by Germans but by the local townspeople. There were not even Germans present giving orders. What happened was completely on the initiative of Poles—Poles as perpetrators.
    This came as no shock to Polish Jews. Jedwabne was one of several such Polish massacres. Another took place in the nearby schtetl of Radzilow. And there may have been ten or more similar incidents, all in the same area. No one, including Jews, knows of this happening anywhere else in Poland. This was an infamously anti-Semitic area. Before the war it was the only rural stronghold of the Jew-hating National Democratic Party.
    The Jews and non-Jews of Poland are well aware that there were Poles who saved Jews and resisted Nazis. There was an armed resistance, the first prisoners sent to Auschwitz were anti-Nazi Poles. Several hundred Poles were executed by the Germans for trying to help Jews. Even in Jedwabne, one of the local women, Antonina Wyrzykowska, saved seven Jews by hiding them. Rather than becoming a national hero, she was so abused that she immigrated to the U.S. She is still hated in the town because not only is she a witness to what they did but she is proof that individuals could have done something to stop it.
    Poles through the debates of the 1980s and 1990s have come to accept that not all Poles were heroes. Many were bystanders. Some turned Jews in and cooperated in other ways with the German plan of genocide. But, by the year 2000, most Poles were still not ready to accept the fact that Poles had actively participated in the Holocaust, that they had been perpetrators. Dariusz Stola,searching through only what he regarded as the major dailies and weeklies of Poland, counted 270 articles on Jedwabne during the twelve months following the first news of the Gross book.
    Gross’s book was greeted by disturbing defenses. It was only a few hundred Jews, some said. Gross is a Jew who wrote the book at the behest of the American Jewish community that hates Poland, said others. Or why should Poles apologize for the killing of Jews when the Jews don’t apologize for the killing of Poles.
    Some who gave testimony for the book have been driven out of town. These witnesses said they have been waiting all these years to tell someone but no one ever asked. Konstanty Gebert, now a well-known journalist, went to the town and reported, “It is a village seething with hatred.”
    After more than a year of debate, on July 10, 2001, Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish President, went to Jedwabne and in a ceremony that was broadcast on national television, apologized for the way Poles had acted there. He said, “It was justified by nothing. The victims were helpless and defenseless.” He asked forgiveness “in my own name and in the name of the Polish people