The sequence reminds me of the work of Professor Robert Kavanaugh, from Williams College Massachusetts, on ‘magical thinking’. A Researcher pairs a group of 4 to 6 year old’s and after a while brings their attention to a box in the room, and he opens the lid to show all of them that it is empty. He then says: ‘Lets make-believe that a very hungry animal called Freddy the Fox lives in the box. At some point he remarks: ‘I think I hear him coming out of his house’, but tells the kids to remember ‘We are just pretending’.

At this point he receives a call and tells the children that he has to leave and that he will return in a few minutes. In his absence the children are secretly observed. Every time this test is conducted the result is the same. Some of the children begin to worry that the hungry fox might come out and hurt them. A few get closer to try to hear any sound, but they are afraid to open the lid. Others find hiding spots. The banter between them is on the basis that there really is a fox in the box!

The children are relieved when the Researcher returns and a few make remarks about how worried they were of the fox getting out, or how they had to hide, or how brave they were, etc. When the lid is opened to confirm it was only make-believe, occasionally one or two of them are astonished and say ‘it’s disappeared’. Some are so convinced that even when talked to at a later date, they still believe the fox was really there.

Jan Tomasz Gross would have us believe that the overwhelming majority of people living throughout Poland at the time, whether in villages in the countryside or in the towns and cities, no matter what their station in life, top to bottom, they were so deeply driven by anti-Semitism that they murdered, plundered and profited from their Jewish neighbours. Whether religious or not, they did not live up to their Roman Catholic beliefs. They were either directly involved or complicit in some way, before or after the fact, acting under the cover of German occupation, or in collaboration with them, and sometimes independent of them.

As an adult, before I believe something, I want proof. These crimes are so heinous and outrageous that I want complete and accurate proof, with nothing added, omitted or altered. Proof strong enough to meet the standards and pass the test of thorough and competent cross examination.

Jan Tomasz Gross has failed to do this in his lecture, and he has failed miserably.

Gross gives lip service to a belief in individual accountability but without a convincing explanation, he assigns collective guilt to peasants, to the elite, to regular folks, and to the broad community of people of Polish culture, living in Poland at the time.

He ignores the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’, and convicts unindicted people by relying almost totally on hearsay and anecdotal evidence. We are supposed to agree with his conviction by ignoring the inherent weaknesses of this type of evidence on the basis that he has researched it thoroughly and in his opinion he is confident that those offering it were highly motivated to provide it accurately and without embellishment for the sake of posterity.

But this begs the question that even if it were true, such evidence is still inherently weak and highly unreliable. The inherent weakness of anecdotal and hearsay evidence cannot be overcome no matter how many times Professor Gross repeats saying that he is highly qualified and on the basis of thorough research, in his opinion, he is persuaded by it.

Human beings are not God. They make mistakes and they have unreliable memories. Witnesses see only a part of the whole picture, they can be unaware of non-visible elements, remember things in the wrong sequence, forget bits and pieces, conflate a particular event with other things they remember. This is true no matter how hard they try to ‘tell it how it was’. Even motivated with good intentions people can be selective and unconsciously embellish what they saw. Furthermore, how can one reliably judge that the people actually found guilty all did what they did solely or primarily based on racism, without having some analysis in the discussion to motives other than anti-Semitism?

Sorry Professor Gross, I am an adult not susceptible to ‘magic thinking', furthermore, I am a human being, not a lemming, and I am not making the leap you ask me to make. The evidence you presented in your lecture in support of your conclusions is inherently flawed, weak and flimsy. I cannot in clear conscience extrapolate the convictions of an infinitesimal number of Polish individuals, taken as a proportion of the population that you accuse, and assign this guilt to virtually the whole Polish culture. It would be immoral for me to do so.

What I find to be even more egregious is that neither in the introduction nor in the arguments presented by the discussant was there coverage of the peer review of Professor Gross’s work by researchers that have investigated not only the same primary source material he investigated but many other primary sources that he overlooked.

Adam Czarnota, the discussant, because he had not researched the primary sources, was limited to providing an alternative interpretation on the basis of giving a context to the evidence Professor Gross provided. The evidence itself was not questioned nor subjected to any kind of ‘cross examination’. Nevertheless a caveat about existing peer review could have been provided since many examples can be easily found on the internet. Many professional and highly qualified researchers that have checked and researched all the primary sources that the lecture is based on, have articulated shortcomings in Professor Gross’s publications. The same shortcomings are consistently identified by each of them. Here are a few:

• Superficial research
• Failure to consult all available sources
• Referencing non-existent archives
• Quoting selectively in a manner distorting the author’s original meaning
• Relying on hearsay and gossip
• Rejecting eye witness accounts that contradict his thesis by labelling the witness as anti-Semitic
• Failure to cross check witness accounts and give weight to each on the basis of contemporary documents

Some of Professor Gross’s main critics in alphabetical order are:

• Marian Baginski
• Marek Chodakiewicz
• Norman Davies
• Krystyn Kersten
• Bogdan Musial
• Jerzy Nowak
• Slawomir Radon
• Thaddeus Radzilowski
• Dariusz Stola
• Tomasz Strzembosz
• Piotr Wandycz
• Marek Wierzbicki
• Leszek Zebrowski

Whether deliberately or inadvertently, in my opinion the only thing Professor Gross’s lecture has achieved is promote animosity and help create a Polish version of the Shylock stereotype. A stereotype identified as Bieganski by Dr Danusha Goska in her book "Bieganski".

A feature of Australian culture that I greatly value is the belief in ‘a fair go’. I would expect that the UNSW and the AHRC also subscribes to this idea. If they do, they should take steps to check out the feasibility of inviting an academic of equal standing to act as ‘cross examiner’ of the anecdotal evidence Professor Gross presented in his lecture to support his accusation of deep anti-Semitism by the overwhelming proportion of people of Polish culture living in Poland during World War II and shortly after. In this way we will have heard the case for the defence and not just that of the prosecution and consequently have a better basis on which to make a judgement about the validity of the accusation.

Felix Molski

Jan Tomasz Gross - lecture - transcription

some more links:

www.rp.pl/artykul/86847.html

bieganski-the-blog.blogspot.com/2011/01/open-letter-to-jan-tomasz-gross.html

fear.piastinstitute.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=54

www.internationalresearchcenter.org/en/holocaust-forgotten-or-revisited/a-different-view-on-the-lomza-region-in-poland