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    Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
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    Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
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    Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
    Ebook213 pages3 hours

    Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

    By Jan T. Gross

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A landmark book that changed the story of Poland’s role in the Holocaust

    On July 10, 1941, in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children—all but seven of the town’s Jews. In this shocking and compelling classic of Holocaust history, Jan Gross reveals how Jedwabne’s Jews were murdered not by faceless Nazis but by people who knew them well—their non-Jewish Polish neighbors. A previously untold story of the complicity of non-Germans in the extermination of the Jews, Neighbors shows how people victimized by the Nazis could at the same time victimize their Jewish fellow citizens. In a new preface, Gross reflects on the book’s explosive international impact and the backlash it continues to provoke from right-wing Polish nationalists who still deny their ancestors’ role in the destruction of the Jews.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateSep 17, 2012
    ISBN9781400843251

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    Reviews for Neighbors

    3.5/5

    18 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      We like to think about the atrocities of World War II as things perpetuated by Hitler, by Nazis, by Germans, by other. It's a comfortable idea that the Holocaust was perpetuated by special monsters. If special monsters did it all, then the world is a safer place because those monsters are gone.Unfortunately, it's not true. Six million Jews were victims of genocide. An additional five million non-Jews were murdered for their religion, race, political affiliation, sexuality, etc. There are not enough special monsters to murder, torture, maim, and brutalize eleven million people. And those numbers don't even count the folks who survived.Neighbors looks at an event in one town. An event carried out by regular people on their neighbors, on people they knew, on people they had known their whole lives, on people they allowed themselves to "other".Regular people participated in the Holocaust. Regular people bear the burden of these murders. Regular people must participate for atrocities to happen because there are not enough monsters in the world to do it alone. Neighbors is frightening because it demands that we look to ourselves and ask if we could be those people.
    • 4/5
      one year at Yom HaShoah, I read this book.
      I have now visited Jedwabne twice, talked with the people and even danced Hine Ma Tov in the town square. Our last visit fell the week that the last Jew of Jedwabne died.
      There is much controversy over the book, how much is true, etc...
      overall, the book is an excellent read.
    • 1/5
      A popular yet controversial book has received very poor expert reviews due to not being historical and due to lack of historical method of research. In fact, several historians specialising in the topic have written books in which most of the author's claims have been proven to be either exaggerated (numbers don't add up), based on weak evidence (e.g.: verbal account from a single source). A biased work (author cherry-picked accounts backing his thesis, ignoring anything else written in the subject matter). Sadly, it takes some effort to verify the author's claims and most of the subject literature is published in Polish. Some readers take what they read literally. Also: Virality of any message in the era of internet is proportional to it's emotional load and has nothing to do with truth.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What would it do to your self-image as a country if it wasn't the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust, but your neighbors? What if the Nazis stood by and watched while the people that had lived next door to you, in some cases for decades, brutally murdered every Jewish person in your town? Jan T. Gross examines that very question as he examined the slaughter of 1,600 Jews in Jedwabne in the Summer of 1941.
    • 4/5
      In 1939, approximately 3,000,000 Jews lived in Poland. Only about 50,000 of them survived to see 1945. And in 2006, only three thousand Jews still called Poland home. There are many reasons why this happened. The Nazis were ruthlessly efficient in the "art" of genocide. Death camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor ended the lives of millions. And after the war, many survivors wished to leave Europe for a more hospitable lands, such as Palestine or the United States. But that is not the whole story.Long before the Nazis came to power, there were pogroms in what is present-day Poland (among other countries). Anti-Jewish riots and murders date back to the 14th Century in Poland, with Jews being blamed for everything from the Black Death to murdering children to the assassination of political leaders. And when the Nazis came, it started again. And after the Nazis were gone, the pogroms didn't end - the author mentions Kielce a few times, although without going into much detail. That is not to say that Poles didn't suffer greatly under Nazi occupation (because they did) or that Poles didn't try to help their Jewish neighbors (because some did). But the roots of anti-Semitism in Poland, running centuries deep, gave rise to circumstances where the murder of Jews was not only tolerated, but encouraged. Jedwabne is only one such instance.This book details the disgusting brutality of which human beings are capable. The Jews of the town were humiliated, beaten, raped, and ultimately driven into a barn, which was locked from the outside and doused with kerosene. The Jews' neighbors, who set the blaze, watched as it burned to the ground. Other Jews were beheaded, buried alive, or forced to drown themselves - all by their Polish neighbors.The book itself is slim and sparse on analysis. The language in which it is written is also overly formal; a casual reader may have difficulty following it. Readers who are not familiar with what happened in Poland during Nazi occupation or with Polish names may also have difficulty with this book as well. But it is an important book, one that I think many should read.However, I found myself wishing that this book was more than it is. I was hoping for something that delved into the depths of Polish anti-Semitism, giving a context of why the massacre of Jedwabne could have happened in the first place. This book, however, often feels like it is just skimming the surface. And with only 124 pages of large-print text with wide margins, it truly has no room to explore the events or challenge the reader. This is why I only give it 3.5 stars.This book, however, does shed a little light on the dirty secrets that many wish to keep buried in the past. Yes, the book ignited a firestorm of controversy when it was published, and rightfully so.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      After the German military took over the Polish town of Jedwabne, the Polish townspeople got together, rounded up the Jews, and started killing them. They had the town surrounded with some folks on horseback so that anyone who tried to run away thru the fields would be caught. There were so many people beating them to death with rocks and tools was not going to kill them all so they herded a great many of them into a barn just off the square and burned them alive.

      The Germans were taken aback at the savagery of the attack and slaughter. The Germans gave permission but from witness accounts did not appear to have guided or participated. In fact, some of the few survivors survived because they were working for the Germans in their custody. One other family hid some of the Jews.

      A quote: "So it was not only the sight of the massacre of Jews that was unbearable. Also, the screams of the tormented people were numbing, as was the smell of their burning bodies. The slaughter of Jedwabne Jews lasted an entire day, and it was confined to a space no bigger than a sports stadium. Sleszynski’s barn, where the majority of the pogrom victims were burned in the afternoon, was but a stone’s throw from the square in the center of town. The Jewish cemetery, where many of the victims were knifed, clubbed, and stoned to death, is just across the road. And so everybody who was in town on this day and in possession of a sense of sight, smell, or hearing either participated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne."

      Several townspeople near the barn played musical instruments to drown out the screams of the burning people in side.

      This book analyzes the event and history of the area to provide some understanding of what happened. It's a sad and horrible history that should not be forgotten so we can guard our culture from creating narratives of belief where anything like this could be excused or accepted again.



      The hardcover version of the this book is almost pocket sized. So it's shorter than you would think based on page count. Not sure why they decided on the small size but still easily readable.
    • 4/5
      Some pretty difficult reading. What makes human beings do this? Wowee.
    • 4/5
      A powerful book relating the story of Jedwabne, Poland where the Polish population is responsible for the murder of the town's Jewish population in 1941. I have long lived with the myth that all Poles were sympathetic to the Jews, but historically this wasn't the case - as anti-semitism continued after the war and into the communist take over of Poland. Most telling is how this anti-semitism was fed by the Catholic clergy. This book has important lessons for us today - as hatred is preached from pulpits and temples and mosques. It was Abraham Heschel who said that the Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers - it began with evil words.
    • 4/5
      I read this for my Holocaust class. I think many people, me included, when they hear about the Holocaust they assume it was only Germans killing the Jews. This book examines the town Jedwabne where Polish people killed their Jewish neighbors. It opened my eyes. It amazed me how the truth was kept hidden for years.
    • 2/5
      Sets the record straight (for non-Poles, at least) about who massacred the Jews in Jedwabne, Poland, in 1941. Gross tries to make an historiographical case study out of it but fails.Brief story briefer: 98+% of Jedwabne's Jewish residents were murdered in early July 1941. History held that it was the work of German special forces, and the community allowed (perhaps even encouraged) that story. However, trials held in Poland in 1949 revealed publicly that Jedwabne residents played the critical roles in the murders, and oral historical evidence accumulated over the subsequent half century indicated that the community knew all along that it was they, and not the Germans, who committed the murders.There really isn't much to be said about the murders: they happened in the course of a very few days, with the vast majority occurring on a single day. Nor is there much to be said about why Christians killed their Jewish neighbors. There is more to be said (though not much of it is) about why the community allowed a false history to be told for so long, and what that may suggest about the domestic whos, whys, and hows of Poland's alliance with the Soviets.So my first big criticism is that this book is even shorter than it appears (even with its narrow pages, wide margins, and copious photos and notes). It's like a précis of a longer, more academic book. The simple fact of the matter is that the story of the event itself is not that long; yet it occupies the bulk of the text. The more interesting historical and historiographical questions are dispensed with in a very few pages each, basically by presenting an hypothesis and discussing how it might be examined historically, without actually engaging in such examination.My second big criticism is that the book is too abstruse for what it is. The style is more appropriate to the professional academic historian than the casual reader. For a non-Pole, the catalogue of unfamiliar personal and place-names is difficult to keep straight, and Gross assumes that once a name has been identified the reader will remember it throughout the book (a gazetteer at the end would have been helpful in this regard, and no great burden to include given the extensive photos and notes.) Then, because this book is less about History than the study and telling of it, the story isn't presented in narrative form until halfway through; prior to that chapter, the story's various historical contexts that interest Gross are examined. The upshot is that the reader picks up the story in disordered bits and pieces before the narrative version is given. While Gross may have historiographical reasons for that, I think it would have been just as effective, and much simpler, to present transcripts of official documents and oral histories, perhaps with annotations. The second half of the book (the hypotheses half) falls victim to high-syllable-count academic-speak that, given the brevity with which its subjects are treated, is not worth the effort of decipherment.None of this is to dismiss the importance of the events or how they have been portrayed since: just that this book attempts far too much for its size (and, given that, a good portion of its audience), and consequently doesn't really succeed in any respect.
    • 3/5
      Neighbors tells an account of the massacre 1600 Jews in the town of Jedwabne by their Gentile neighbors. It is an academic examination of the causes of these murders. Well researched and thought provoking, but perhaps not suited for the general reader.
    • 5/5
      This short book combines excellent documentation with important questions and observations about the meaning and implications of the events described. Despite the storm of controversy surrounding the book’s publication, this is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand what happened in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation, and the legacy of those times. I’ll call it as I see it: a modern classic.