In Poland, a return to the scene of an unspeakable crime
A journey to Jedwabne, site of the massacre of 1,600 Jews, kindles both anger and a sense of redemption
A journey to Jedwabne, site of the massacre of 1,600 Jews, kindles both anger and a sense of redemption
(JTA) — A senior state historian in Poland is seeking the exhumation of bodies of Jews murdered by Polish villagers, citing a witness whom he said claims that Germans organized the slaughter. Krzysztof Krasowski, a leader of the regional office of the Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, in Białystok, last month sent the request…
Amid a public debate about the complicity of Poles in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust, Poland’s education minister implied that historical accounts of such atrocities are inconclusive. In an interview Wednesday with the TVN24 network, Anna Zalewska spoke of “biased opinions” in describing Jedwabne, where on July 10, 1941, at least a few…
JEDWABNE, Poland (JTA) — Some 150 people attended a commemoration on the 75th anniversary of a massacre of hundreds of Polish Jews by their neighbors in the country’s northeast. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, also attended Sunday’s ceremony in the town of Jedwabne, whose history is controversial in Poland because it involves…
The anti-Semitic bloodbath that consumed the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941 might have been forgotten to history were it not for the scholarship of the Polish-American historian Jan T. Gross. Now, it would seem, Poland’s new government wishes Gross himself could be forgotten. In his short study, “Neighbors,” published in 2001,…
Courtesy of Marcel Lozinski On July 10, 1941, the Polish villagers of Jedwabne engaged in a mad orgy of torture and murder, aimed at their Jewish neighbors. Anna Bikont, a Polish journalist and columnist, tells this horrifying story in her new book, “The Crime and the Silence.” Part history, part memoir, the book will be…
The remains of victims from the Jedwabne pogrom were reburied at a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of the massacre in the Polish town. Dozens of people gathered Wednesday at the site in Jedwabne where Poles murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors on July 10, 1941. Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Piotr Kadlcik, the…
In the exemplary Wilma Theater production (and U.S. premiere) of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s “Our Class,” a scrim-veiled, eerily illuminated representation of a barn does triple duty. It serves, first of all, as the stage version of the barn where, in 1941, as many as 1,600 Jewish residents of the town of Jedwabne were herded and then…
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