Polish-Jewish relations during the German occupation of Poland were tortuous at best. As the Nazi occupiers ruthlessly exterminated Polish Jews in a methodical campaign of genocide, the vast majority of Polish Christians lay low and reacted with indifference. Still others collaborated with the Nazis, or risked their lives to save Jews.
The predominant response of Poles to the Holocaust disappointed and embittered Jews. Their reaction was encapsulated in Polish American historian Jan Tomasz Gross’ book, Neighbors, which caused a sensation in Poland.
Published in Polish in 2000 and in English a year later, Neighbors focused on a massacre of Jews in the northern Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.
According to Gross, Poles murdered their Jewish neighbors in Jedwabne. The accusation outraged many Poles, who blamed the Germans. Poles were convinced that they were victims rather than perpetrators during Germany’s brutal occupation.
The right-wing government that governed Poland from 2015 until 2023 pursued the theme of Polish victimhood. In accordance with this objective, the Polish state built a museum in 2016 to honor Poles who had rescued Jews.
Gross’ explosive volume and the reaction it elicited is at the center of Poland Versus History, a documentary by Joanna Grudzinska. It is scheduled to be screened at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, which runs from June 4-14.
Apart from Gross, Grudzinska also interviews scholars on the same wave length: Jan Grabowski, a Canadian Polish historian, and his colleague Barbara Engelking, the authors of Night Without End. In addition, Anna Bikont, a Polish journalist who wrote a book about Jedwabne, appears on screen.
Grudzinska’s starting point is Wysokie Mazowieckie, a town in Poland whose Jewish residents were murdered during the Holocaust. As a high school teacher takes his students on a tour of a Jewish cemetery, he admits he never knew that Jews lived here. “I know nothing of their lives,” he says, conveying the impression that this Jewish community has been erased from Polish consciousness.
Having since learned that Poland was home to 3.3 million Jews before World War II, representing 10 percent of its population, he adds, “There is no history of Poland without the history of Jews.”
Strangely enough, Grudzinska omits this cardinal fact, as if it is irrelevant. Nor does she provide an overview of the 1,000-year presence of Jews in Poland, another glaring omission.
From here, she goes on to deal with a central issue — the attempt by the post-2015 conservative government to evade Polish responsibility for the wartime murder of Jews in Poland. The new Polish president, Andrzej Duda, declared that Poland was in need of a “history policy” to determine the full truth of how Poles related to the fate of Jews during that period. To that end, Polish historians were encouraged to accentuate the role of Poles who helped Jews in their hour of duress.
Historians such as Gross, Grabowski and Engelking did not toe the party line, especially infuriating Poles in conservative nationalist circles.
Grudzinska, who seems aligned with historians such as Gross, devotes a fairly significant portion of her film to the pogrom in Jedwabne. She personalizes it by bringing in Shmuel Wasserstein, a survivor who immigrated to Costa Rica after the war. In 1997, he and his family visited Jedwabne. Their trip was emotionally wrenching. Bikont interviews a Polish woman who hid Wasserstein.
Gross thinks that deeply-ingrained antisemitism, accentuated by the belief that Jews welcomed the Red Army to eastern Poland in 1939, impelled Poles to kill their Jewish neighbors. He points out that similar anti-Jewish massacres occurred in the vicinity of Jedwabne, and that a pogrom erupted in Kielce in 1946. On the other hand, he mentions a Polish woman who saved two Jewish children after their parents were deported to a Nazi concentration camp.
Grabowski discusses a Home Army pogrom that took place in Redziny-Borek, in southeastern Poland. He discloses that a monument was erected there in memory of the commander of that Home Army unit.
Engelking believes that the truth about Polish-Jewish relations will prevail. But as this impassioned film suggests, historians like Engelking, Gross and Grabowski are in a minority in Poland.