The co-director of the network for the interdisciplinary study of law and that network together with the Australian Human Rights Centre is very pleased you could come for tonight’s lecture and discussion of the paper based on research in a book, ‘on the peripheries of the holocaust, the relations between Poles and their Jewish neighbours or Jews and their Polish neighbours, during the Second World War.

Just to give you a sense of the order of the proceedings, I’ll say a word or two about our speakers, about the subject about tonight. They will speak. There will be time for questions and discussion. Andrea Durbach, Deputy Director of the Australian Human Rights Centre, will close the discussion and, I hope, thank the assistants and you, and if everybody is well behaved there will be drinks afterwards outside in the lobby.

Continuation of the lecture & discussion

Well let me start with our speakers. Professor Gross is, as you have read in the flier, Norman Tomlinson Professor of War and Society and Professor of History at Princeton University. He was born in Poland, he began by studying Physics there, but he was involved in the intellectual ferment and intellectual uprisings in March of 1968, as a result of which he spent five months in prison and then was thrown out of the university. After that time, he left Poland with his parents and ended in, ah, didn’t end, because he hasn’t ended but he got to the United States, where he completed a doctorate in sociology at Yale. He has taught, he has had positions in New York University, in garbled, at present in Princeton, he has had some of the great fellowships that are on offer in the United States, Guggenheim, Fullbright, Bronze Medal Fellowship.

He has written extensively and was known for some time on the war period in Poland, the Nazi occupation, the Soviet takeover. And for that and other activities, he received in 1996, the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, which was given to people outside Poland for exemplary activities in connecting Poland and the world. He became famous, and the word notorious is not completely out of place, with books over the last ten years. At first, Neighbours, the destruction of the Jews of Jedwabne by their neighbours, Fear, anti-Semitism in post war Poland, and most recently this year The Golden Harvest, and he will be speaking in a moment as you will’ve guessed.

Adam Czarnota, who as I have mentioned is co-director of our network, also was born in Poland, and also studied there, managed to finish his degrees there in the Nicholas Copernicus University in Poland, taught there, and then when he came to Australia has been teaching in a number of universities in Australia and particularly in this one, teaching legal and social philosophy for some period of time. He has also had fellowships and appointments in garbled.

Let me get to the subject of our discussions. Rarely in the history of a nation, or of an author or of a book, just one book, manage to galvanise, to frame or reframe and to redirect public discussion about matters of national moment, about ethnical memory, about one’s sense of the past of one’s nation and the nature of one’s nation’s history and culture. There are very few books which have done that. Neighbours began that process, in and of itself, though it was a very short book. The process has continued with the two other books that I have mentioned. The only parallel, at least close parallel which occurs to me which had this kind of effect was the bringing them home report, which came out in 1997 in this country. And lest that analogy seems fanciful, if you think for a moment about the character of the reaction to both books, both books were not intended or thought likely to sell out, they sold out. Both gave rise immediately, and over a long period, to passionate, angry, emotional responses. And interestingly, convictions that what was said in them was false and occasionally true, by people who didn’t at the beginning even have time to have read them, and then after they had time not all of them read them still. So something else was going on, something important was going on, than the reaction to the cold words on the printed page, and it’s clear what it was. Words, arguments about painful histories, deep and central to a nation’s development and sense of itself aren’t just questions about facts, they are wounds, or they can be wounds and many people have felt wounded, and many people have sought to repair these wounds in one way or another. Or to deflect them, to deny the possibility that what wounds them could have any truth in them.

I think those reactions are natural enough, they’re predictable and their necessary in the sense of self and identity of the people in the culture, committed to that culture, part of that culture have. They’re necessary but they are quite irrelevant to the facts which agitate them. Because the facts will, or complaints about the facts whichever way you want to take them, debates about those facts, the answering of those debates depends on careful and close analysis of the facts in question. And most very often in the most painful of the episodes, as in the subject of the Bringing Them Home Report, and even more in the subject of the war, the facts are not easy to have, they require a great deal of digging, of amassing, of collecting and then of interpreting and that interpreting is not the garbled of the matter, it requires imagination, and with that moral imagination. So a lot is going on. Because it’s all important, it is quite clear that debates about these matters, these central, painful, fundamental matters should not be restricted to universities. On the other hand, they have a place, a central place in the universities because of what’s required before the passion is engaged, or a part of the passion is engaged. Before the self-evident convictions of people who know nothing is real acquaintance with what the evidence tells and thought about it.

So it is very appropriate that university and particularly this university should host a discussion of this sort and that’s why I am very pleased that we are able to. It is appropriate too that this law school, with its Centre for Human Rights, and with its network of people looking at legal problems not from inside the wall always but in problems that ultimately come to the law to consider, to deal with, to try to sort out, often ineffectively and often too late. It’s appropriate that the university subject these matters of public controversy and these works of public debate to some serious investigation. And so I am delighted to welcome you all and to give us a chance to subject Jan Gross’s work, with all the courtesies and civilities appropriate to an academic debate and not a public fight. Thank you very much.

Jan Tomasz Gross

Well thank you very much, thank you very much for the invitation here and thank you very much Martin for your kind introduction. Garbled.

I would like to shed light in this lecture on the phenomenon of killings and the plunder of Jews by local people in German occupied Poland. Crimes which occurred on the periphery of the holocaust. In terms of numbers of Jewish victims, this was only a small fraction of the total killed by the Nazis. The loot that remained in local hands, not equally insignificant, primarily because of the housing stock which was taken over by local residents was also only a tiny part of the Jewish wealth that had been plundered during the World War II. But as mysteries pertaining to the holocaust abound, these marginal phenomena, adversarial interactions between Jews and their fellow citizens in occupied societies have been catapulted decades later into the centre of preoccupation for national historiographies. They have attracted extraordinary public interest, both in eastern and in western Europe. So a marginal issue in the historiography of the Shoa turned into a sticky one judging by public and professional attention, not letting go of easily as far as European societies under occupation are concerned. To address this subject, one needs to contend with yet another sort of marginality due to the fact that information provided by Jews about the fate that they suffered during the war has often been viewed with incredulity.

What I am returning to in the first place was a perverse consequence of unbelievable radicalism of anti-Jewish policies pursued by the Nazis. I am quoting now from an essay by Geoffrey Hartman, the renowned literary scholar who as a child emigrated from Germany.” Disbelief touched the survivors themselves. Two phrases stand out in their testimony, ‘I was there’ and I could not believe what my eyes had seen’. The second phrase is not purely rhetorical, Applefield writes, everything that happened was so gigantic so inconceivable that the witness even seemed like a fabricator to himself.” Unquote. I can testify to this battlement with the outsized scale of holocaust events as reported by witnesses from personal experience. It took me four years and a pure lucky coincidence to realise that the testimony of one Szmul Waserzstajn to describe the crime in Jedwabne, the subject of my book Neighbours, was not an exaggeration but a pretty faithful description of what had happened.

Another reason for doubting information about the unfolding catastrophe of European Jews was a long lasting memory of allied propaganda hoax dating back to the First World War. At the time, tales of German atrocities allegedly committed against the civilian population, especially in Belgium, were grossly exaggerated. Consequently reports of mass murder coming out of occupied Europe, twenty years later, were still viewed with caution by journalists and Government officials in England and the United States. With regard to this agenda the demeaning stereotype of Jews and Christian garbled tradition, we can appreciate why Jewish sources were apriority that with deep ambivalence.

The French Israeli historian, Renee Posnanski, describes for example a generalised scepticism, as she puts it, of high functionaries of the Foreign Office. As a general principle she characterises using their own words the state of mind the British government circles I quote now, “Jews have a tendency to exaggerate the severity of persecution to which they are subjected”. Unquote. A weighty point of view when held by those who control the most important propaganda people broadcasting into occupied Europe, the BBC. In order to ensure the effectiveness of war propaganda her concern was not to exaggerate any claims and especially those pertaining to the persecution of Jews - the latter, in order not to give plausibility to a German argument that the war was being waged by the Allies on behalf, and in the interest of the Jews.

From east to west, from DeGaullists France-Libre broadcasts to radio programs authorised by General Sikorski’s Polish Government-in-exile, both DeGaulle and Sikorski were self-exiled at the time in England, those trying to beef up anti-Nazi resistance in their home countries were anxious not to emphasise the victimisation of the Jews, lest they render plausible the Nazi argument that Jews were pulling all the strings in London and in America.

It mattered also that the predominant mood of public opinion in countries under occupation was anti-Semitic. There should not be any privileged victims in France and discretion in Jewish matters is advised , General DeGaulle’s Free France movement was warned by its rapporteurs from across the Channel. The Polish Prime Minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was bluntly told by his underground commanders that he should not, that he should cut expressions of sympathy for the Jews from radio broadcasts, because they made a bad impression in Poland.

Pace idiosyncratic views of the British Foreign Office or reasons why the plight of the Jews was de-emphasised in European countries under occupation - as far as the Anglo Saxon study of the war is concerned, the original direct culprit may have been none other than Raul Hilberg, the doyen of holocaust historiography. We are all indebted to him and we will be forever standing on his shoulders, but he dismissed victim’s personal narratives, as unreliable and from this point of view, irrelevant.

Hilberg was interested, as was his right, in the German machinery of mass murder. And he did show indeed how its functioning can be pieced together from documentation generated by institutional participants in the process. And once the subject opened up, historians, for some time were primarily interested in independent agents. Naturally, a story to be dug up in the German archives, rather than in the memoirs of surviving Jews.

So, what can historians do with individual testimonies? Other things being equal, even though as we know they never are, the problem of availing ourselves of testimony of eye witnessed accounts about the holocaust, derives it seems to me from processing the evidence according to ordinary procedures and linguistic usage of categories employed. When we take in hand an eye witnessed account of the holocaust victim we place it mentally in a familiar context. We read it as a statement from an injured party. There is a victim and a victimiser in the scenario and we hear in the narrative the victimisers side of the story, presumably one side of the story. And where there are sides, or if you will, parties to these conflicts then we expect to hear from one party only partial truth.

There is an alternative, through the garbled to realise that the vocabulary employed, victim testimonial witness, puts a deceptive frame on our thinking. The semantic hereditary of such concepts leaves us a stretch because there is no advocacy in the narratives of garbled. I know that we should not naively accept an author’s statement intently as the one and only guide to the reading of a text, but they should not be discarded out of hand either. We must remember that the Jewish testimonies about the Shoa have been deliberately written in order to provide an exact account of the catastrophe. This is evidenced in numerous memoirs and journals kept by Jews at the time. The same intention is found in collective efforts, such as the garbled initiative garbled in the Warsaw ghetto, the daunting work of the artists from the ghetto , or Herman Crook’s diaries and records compiled in Wilno.

Since it appeared impossible to save the mass of Jewish people methodically annihilated in Nazi organised killing process, a sense of obligation grew among the Jewish record keepers, they say so garbled preserved the evidence of the very process of destruction. Thus revealed, future readers cannot dismiss author’s intentions lightly. Clearly their aim was to produce an account of what happened, not to embellish the story. If anything the record keeper’s difficulty was reversed, the reality surrounding them was such an exaggeration of everything people were accustomed to in the course of everyday life that their concern could only be whether posterity would be capable of believing in what had really happened. The record, as it were and definitely all holocaust era diaries, detailed unique, specific to the place and reflecting the vagaries of each author’s individual testimony one finds a common theme, a recurring line. ‘Whatever we may have foreseen and written about many times’, I am quoting now by way of example from Herman Crook’s entry of October 28th, 1942, ‘It is all hardly a fraction of the actual situation’. Unquote. We cannot grapple with the surrounding reality all diaries keep on saying, it cannot be communicated fully.

Corpus memories laboured against enormous odds. Most strikingly against their own incredulity at what was happening around them. The predicament was bewildering, nobody will believe us if we say it how it was, and yet we can at best only tell a fraction of what has actually happened. Did they have any need or inducement to exaggerate or embellish their narratives? I think not. Rather, the one and only ultimate satisfaction, a hopeless task we know, could come from being able to say to themselves as readers of what they have left us, yes, that’s exactly what happened. They left carefully crafted, deliberately assembled, meaningful documents of the epoch which deserve to be treated as such. And in order to make sense of our century’s dark times we should read their testimony as it was conceived. One line at a time.

Personal testimonies, may have finally entered the mainstream of holocaust historiography with the most recent grand synthesis, Saul Friedlander’s, The Years of Extermination (published in 2007) where the author draws on such material abundantly.

Christopher Browning has published, last year, a similarly grounded study of a forced labour camp in Starachowice. And on the back of his completing his book on communal genocide in Bucholz. The giants in the field, drawing freely on personal testimonies of holocaust victims and survivors, historiographical standards have shifted.

But so far it has been a struggle to fend off criticisms which easily dismiss writing on the basis of personal documents as not properly grounded and providing merely anecdotal evidence. In the meantime, for an entire spectrum of interesting subjects, the fate of Jews hiding on the so called Aryan side, or resistance in provincial ghettoes for example, almost no other empirical evidence is available. The task before us then, is to figure out how to obtain a reliable understanding of a general phenomenon, in my case, killings and plunder of Polish Jews by their fellow citizens, on the basis of personal statements, which by their very nature offer only episodic and discrete information.

Ever since the story of the murder in Jedwabne was debated in Poland, ten years ago, historians of the holocaust began to study court cases prosecuted after the war on the basis of the August, 31, 1944 decree of the Provisional Polish Government. It is customary to refer to them now in the shorthand as the so called, August Case. The defeat of either for criminalisation of broadly conceived aid and assistance furthering German occupiers goes to the detriment of the Polish society. Occasionally, the murder of Jews was prosecuted under this law as well.

Some two decades after the war all the August Cases from court districts around the country were conveniently assembled in one archival collection under the custody of the main Commission for the investigation of Hitlerite crimes. Today, they are in the holdings of the Institute for National Memory. I’ll draw here on the very useful contribution of two historians who examined all the August Cases in the Kielce voivodship containing evidence about murders of Jews by the Poles in the countryside of this region. All together about two hundred and fifty people were brought to justice there for their alleged involvement in the murder of several hundred Jews. The authors, Alina Skibinska and Jakub Petelewicz, complimented their knowledge acquired from archival readings with interviews conducted with garbled.

A historian of the holocaust garbled find a way that this is a source revealing only a tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon under study, apparently, due to a reluctance of prosecutorial authorities after the war to bring such cases to court. But most importantly this is a body of evidence from which Jewish voices are almost entirely absent. These were not cases brought by Jews. The Jews that appear in these depositions were killed. And there were no Jewish witnesses left to testify about the killings. On the other hand this material, even though affording us only a partial insight, represents the entire collection of a certain kind of evidence bearing on the issue. So, with respect to it we cannot be accused of a sample bias. By itself this does not necessarily allow to obtain a reliable general report of what happened, one would still have to know about the ecology of the crime, to make sure that all murder episodes have not clustered in some small subregion of the area for example, or if the entire region can be considered, so to speak, typical with respect to this kind of crime, and similar to the rest of Poland. To allay doubt on this last point, let me mention a recent study of another voivodship, Mezeszowszczyzna, where murders of Jews by local Poles are documented in at least one hundred and ten locations. In any case, with these caveats in mind, taking all of the evidence of the particular kind under consideration is always a good practice.

We need to focus now on what is at stake here, and what kind of question we are bringing to the evidence occurring at this point. Essentially we want to adjudicate between two interpretations of the phenomenon of murder and plunder of Jews by their fellow Polish citizens during the war. One interpretation would simply claim that stuff happens. People get killed during the war. There was a lot of violence all around and so it got privatised at times, banditry was rampant, people lost their moral bearings. There is always scum in the society, and anyway one should not generalise on the basis of isolated cases - in short, this was deviant behaviour. Or else, it wasn’t. And, in order to find out, I suggest that we must read the contents of the cases to learn what actually happened and make sense of it.

I am going now to quote extensively from the above mentioned article describing numerous murders of Jews hiding in the Kielce countryside by the Polish population. I splice together fragments of texts scattered over several pages in a continuous manner. I am beginning to quote. So these are words of two Polish historians, their conclusions on the basis of reading of a number of cases.

“Killings by shootings, with an axe, or using a wooden pole were accompanied by acts of physical and psychological cruelty towards Jews who had been caught. Women were raped, people were beaten, pushed around, cursed at, and verbally humiliated. The accused, the alleged perpetrators of crimes against the Jews, were peasants. Polish, so called ‘dark blue’ policemen, from outposts closest to the site of murder, members of various guerrilla organisations, who frequently were the very peasants living during the day in their villages, rather than staying in forest detachments. In very many cases, the accused held some position or function in the local officialdom. Village heads, deputy village heads, district heads, and police of district office, members and commanders of local fire brigades, members of village guards. They were, without exception, of Roman Catholic denomination, grown up men in general without a prior criminal record. They had stable family life, wives and children. Some of them were members of the Communist Party (PPR), or worked in the Peoples Militia, the Police Force after the war. The evidence comes from trials that were brought to court after the war, to help us, we know the details of the event. By virtue of their functions, at least a part of them belonged to the local elite in the countryside.

Women had often witnessed and observed what had happened. They belonged to passive crowds which carried the killings with the hands of a few of their most active participants. One could even venture a proposition based on depositions from witnesses and the accused that there were many active participants and observers in almost each of these crimes. As far as murders perpetrated in villages we can even speak about an aggressive, criminal crowd, where a few people play an initiating and leading role, while everybody else, by witnessing the crime provide at the same time a background and a moral alibi for the crime committed.

In a certain sense the entire village takes part in it, with a different degree of involvement or witnessing and after the war the entire village keeps in its collective unconscious memory events which then took place with its participation”.

I am quoting all the time.

“This anonymous crowd constitutes an extremely important element for the analysis of this phenomenon. Its presence allows to diffuse responsibility for the crimes committed and, in a certain sense, silently gives permission to do what had been done to the Jews.

In numerous files we read detailed descriptions of the crimes during which victims and perpetrators talked to each other. Jews defended themselves, begged and appealed to the conscience and pity of the killers. After this man was killed this little boy stood up and said to everybody present, ‘Poles, spare my life, I am not guilty of anything, it is my misfortune that I am a Jew’. They tried to bribe the perpetrators with what they still had and thus save their lives. We were playing cards when somebody dropped in and said that the Jew had been caught. I went outdoors. In front of the house stood a group of people and Moszek begged to be let go. He was with his little son and they cried. This little Jew said, give them boots daddy, maybe they will let us go. Crimes were perpetrated against individuals known, often by them, against neighbours, against local garbled.

A special category of perpetrators were the functionaries of the Polish dark blue police. In the majority pre-war employees of the state police. Policemen implicated in crimes against the Jews were heads of families, typically with several children at home. Their material status was usually rather good. In their actions against the Jewish populations one can notice a large element of freedom and independence from superior German authorities. In the cases at hand there was not a single instance in which apprehended Jews were escorted back to a ghetto or to a police station, which will also mean death for them, they are usually killed right away or in a neighbouring forest and local peasants are ordered to bury the corpses.

The direct motive to commit the majority of murders and denunciations of Jews hiding in the countryside was the desire to plunder them. To take over their belongings which were imagined to be considerable. This was a pernicious consequence of the stereotype about Jewish wealth. Peasants imagined that by killing those people they would get hold of their riches. One should suppose that in a psychological sense the fact that hiding Jews were paying for shelter and food and often at very high prices by local standards reinforced the belief that they had lots of money which can be taken from them with impunity. Indirectly the same motive underlay the murders of Jews who no longer could pay off those giving them shelter. People were getting rid of them, just as they were getting rid of Jews who had witness crimes committed earlier.

In over a dozen closely researched cases there is mention of characteristic and telling facts which accompanied the crime. After having finished, peasants gathered in the apartment of one of the participants to drink vodka as if to celebrate with a mig and joined in to divide the spoils and probably garbled. Unquote. I have finished the long quote.

The above certainly does not represent my reading of the evidence from the files of August Cases tried in the Kielce district. It has been provided by two young Polish historians. If offers a composite image and all the enumerated elements certainly could not be found in every episode they took under scrutiny. But it is nevertheless abundantly clear that any consequent deviance will have to be stretched beyond capacity to encompass the kind of behaviour that Skibinska and Petelewycz have described. Instead we can note multiple ways in which killings of Jews by peasants in the Kielce countryside were socially sanctioned. Regular members of the community took part in them not miscreants or marginal people easily identifiable garbled. Indeed, the local elite participation bestowed on these crimes a kind of official imprimatur. Killings were carried out openly, often publicly, drawing crowds of onlookers. Direct perpetrators of these crimes, the most active participants, as far as one can tell, remained members of local communities, in good standing. It was mentioned earlier, some joined the Communist Party garbled after the war. In almost every file there are group affidavits signed by inhabitants of the village where a murder took place, vouching for the good and honourable character of the accused. This is proof, Skibinska and Petelewycz observed, and I continue the quote, “that the village was in solidarity with the accused and that in the consciousness of its inhabitants there was no need to prosecute or to expiate in any way for the crime”. End quote.

In the conclusion of this article the authors finally draw on interviews they conducted in the region sixty years after the event. They noted almost total lack of interest in the fate of murdered Jews. And that, and I quote, “if any emotion could be found in conversations it was a disapproval directed towards the victim”. Unquote. Given the deep religiosity of the peasants they wonder why obligations vis a vis other human beings derived from Christian ethics were never invoked. A close reading of Skibinska’s and Petelewycz’s study makes us wonder whether the question how many Jews have been killed by the local population in Poland is the right one to ask in order to find a proper measure of this most tragic aspect of Polish-Jewish relations between the war. Should we be asking instead how many murderers of Jews and their accomplices were among the Poles. Because to quote an American legal scholar “open criminality implicates all who know of the conduct and fail to act”. Unquote. One Jew killed by one direct perpetrator but in a public manner with approval and encouragement of the crowd of onlookers represents a collective deed implicating all those present. A group experience of ultimate transgression matching forever a local community where it took place in this boundary because local people had to live from now on, side by side, with a murderer.

I want us to now visit a murder scene in the village of Gniewke. In another part of the country. A large village of five thousand inhabitants, split administratively in two. In May of 1942 a group of local notables, including two village heads, a commander of the voluntary fire brigade and half a dozen other associates, ferreted out several Jewish families hiding in the vicinity. Men, women and children, sixteen percent all together, were brought to the house of the garbled family, centrally situated in the village, not far from the church. The captured Jews were held there for several days in two rooms, separated by a small kitchen. One of them was turned into a garbled. Women were raped there while men were subjected to water torture to make them reveal the whereabouts of goods left with friendly peasants. Goods on which they drew to pay for food and shelter while in hiding. Once the torturers obtained the desired information their emissaries visited the peasant households demanding the surrender of Jewish ‘rams’ they were called at the time, lest the Gestapo be informed.

The word got around in Gniewczyn that the Jews were being forced to give up what remained of their belongings. One of the Jewish women managed to run away from the torture house, but was caught by her pursuer, an acquaintance with whom she went to school, who dragged her by the hair back and across the village. Her mother, who earlier avoided the dragnet showed up the next morning kneeling on the steps of the church to beg the priest for the lives of her daughter and grandchildren. But he declined to help.

After a few days, when the torturers concluded that they got all Jewish property to be had, they called the gendarmes. The Germans came to the village, where they were hosted with a good meal and then took Jews into the courtyard, ordered them one by one to lie face down on the ground and everybody, beginning with the small children, was shot dead.

We owe this detailed description to an eyewitness, a boy fourteen years old at the time, who wrote up the story now, after he says, all the main protagonists had died. But for this narrative, which appeared in the April 2008 issue of the Catholic Monthly, Znak, a historians inquiry revealed only one trace of this mass murder in printed sources - a note in the registry of German crimes kept by the earlier mentioned Commission, stating that sixteen Jews were murdered in 1942, in the house of Leib Trinczer by gendarmes who came from a nearby town. That it was a crime for which local Poles were responsible, a well-known fact in the entire community, would have not been revealed to outside observers except for one man, in personal testimony.

The close-up of the Gniewczyn murder scene foregrounds two phenomena of which one is well known and the other is speculation. Memory of wartime atrocities against the Jews is very well preserved (and passed on from generation to generation) in the Polish countryside. Journalists and scholars stumble upon it every time they take the trouble to make an inquiry. Reporters who went early to Jedwabne, before it became the site of a national scandal, got local folks to speak unselfconsciously about it. Ethnographic studies conducted in the countryside on other related subjects by Alina Cala in the 1980s, or Joanna Tokarsk-Bakir in 2006, for example - also revealed the same, almost inadvertently. The reason I believe is that these occurrences were quite common and therefore quasi normal, so to speak, and simultaneously also rare events with significance that took place in these communities, and remains the subject of conversations for years to come at local gatherings.

The second significant aspect of the murder revealed in this close up, is the role torture played in the Gniewczyn crime. Torture it seems was ubiquitous in peasant-Jewish encounters. One reads about brutalisation of Jewish victims including the rape of women in numerous depositions. Peasant violence, killings and rapes in the Kielce countryside, as we just heard, are documented in court cases prosecuted after the war. But the story of Polish-Jewish relations is hardly different when told by one who has many good friends among the peasants. An ethno-musicologist who for dozens of years has been collecting peasant folklore and is enamoured of village life and its culture.

The most painful thing for me of the described incidents and examples, I am quoting from a 2008 interview with Professor Andrzej Witkowski, is the attitude in the countryside towards Jews and the universal sense of triumph because they are no longer there. Universally, and one more thing which I rarely wrote about and which weighs terribly on my conscience, the killings of Jews who were hiding in the forests, by the peasants. The number of these crimes and incidents that I know about, it is a terrible burden. In the book I tell one horrifying story, how the father of singer S, garbled the musicologist writes about music really, brutally killed two small Jewish girls and how with his band later raped and killed a Jewish woman hiding in a forest. And I know its only a story, one of many, which I have not recounted, of how a beautiful young Jewess, with two small children escaped from a transport near Bialo Brzegy. They knew her, everybody stresses. She went into a forest and a bunch of young men her age, with wooden poles, followed her. She would have been twenty three years old, the children were three and four, and some twenty youths beat them to death with those poles, just for pleasure. Nobody got anything out of it. Historians as a rule have not page much attention to such details, focusing on the fact of the murder instead. But it stands to reason that when time and circumstances permitted, local people applied themselves to forcing the Jews to reveal where their mythical gold had been hidden. I quote now.

“A certain Marian Haba sought shelter in Cholerzyn (a village not far away from today’s Krakow international airport in Balice). He remained in hiding, in the village, until the locals heard a rumour that Haba had gold stashed in the area. A ‘blue’ policeman summoned a while later by the peasants said: ‘when I arrived in the village I saw not a human being but a shapeless form. People told me that they had killed the Jew because he was said to have buried five kilograms of gold’ ”. Unquote.

We are sort of beginning to understand the disturbing feature which surfaces occasionally in the way Jews collectively remember this period. A recurring observation that the locals (this could be Ukrainians, Lithuanians, or Poles as the case may be) were ‘worse than the Germans.’ After all it is well known and Jews know this better than anybody else that the holocaust was a Nazi invention which they carried around Europe as they conquered the continent. A disturbing feature in Jewish narratives of the wartime accounts mentioned above can be explained by pointing out that death administered by people well known to the victims evokes special suffering because they must have also felt betrayed. But now we realise that at the hands of neighbours, that death at the hands of neighbours must have been also, literally, very painful.

Much of the evidence about killings or denunciations of Jews by peasants in the Polish countryside consists of uncorroborated personal testimony from survivors, their relatives, or acquaintances. Typically it is brief and notes the facts without many details. Much of the time it is second hand information, for example knowledge that had been sought out and acquired, after the fact, by a concerned family member. Thus, the body of evidence is not ‘systematic’ in any sense of the word; and it has not been part of any record, so to speak. So, strictly speaking, we should abstain from generalising observations on the basis solely of what we can find about the frequency and distribution of these crimes .

To be sure we can pose such questions only because frequency is sufficiently high and distribution sufficiently broad to preclude an easy refutation that these were isolated episodes in strictly confined areas. But the heart of the argument has to be made not by asking what percentage of Polish peasants were hunting down local Jews, we would never be able to provide reliable statistics on this, but rather by reconstructing how these murders were conducted and as a number of detailed narratives exhibit concurring characteristics, we can make a leap towards a general understanding of the phenomenon.

It is so because society with a common past and shared customs and institutions has a degree of internal coherence. One should view it as analogous to a text or a system rather than a quilt stitched together from randomly assembled pieces. As a result, practices and attitudes engaging fundamental values, those concerning life and death, for example, must be intelligible beyond the confines of any local community. This is why, even in the absence of firm knowledge about the distribution and frequency of peasant murders of Jews we can still tell whether they were an accepted social practice from close analysis of a discrete number of episodes. Given the character of these murders, that they were open, well attended and widely discussed public events and given the identity of people involved, that these were regular folks, including members of local elites, a thick description of localised community events deals knowledge about behaviour in peasant society at large.

Let me now move to the question of plunder, which as we already know is intimately related to the killings of Jews by their neighbours. We must be aware of course that we are operating at the very end of a long food chain here. Real, massive plunder took place as a result of State action in Western Europe and Germany proper. For Jews were solidly middle class and had substantial wealth which had been taken over through a long process of Aryanisation, forced emigration, outright confiscation and also deportation and killings. “Throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich”, writes Saul Friedlander, and I continue quoting, “looting of Jewish property was of the essence. It was the most easily understood and most widely adhered to aspect of the anti-Jewish campaign. Rationalised, if necessary, by the simplest ideological tenets”. Unquote.

The Third Reich benefitted most from the plunder of Jewish wealth. But Vichy France, for example, tried to get its cut as well. So this is not a uniquely East European story, though the ‘hands on’ aspect of it probably is. Mass killings in the Podlaskie region in which the murder at Jedwabne was but one episode were accompanied by widespread and thorough plunder of Jewish property. It would be more difficult to name townspeople who did not plunder Jewish houses while their inhabitants were being incinerated in the large barn on the outskirts of Radzilow, an eyewitness to the murders told a journalist years later. Everbody seemed to be in the streets grabbing what they could. In the well-known diary of doctor Zygmunt Klukowski from Szczebrzeszyn, from another part of the country. ‘We read how’, and I quote again, ‘a lot of peasants with wagons came from the countryside and stood waiting the entire day for the moment when they could start looting, as rumours had it that Jews would be resettled on that day. News keeps reaching us from all directions about the scandalous behaviour of segments of local population who robbed empty Jewish apartments. I am sure our little town could be no different.’ Unquote.

French catholic priest, father Patrick Dubois, while searching for mass graves of Jews in the Ukrainian countryside and talking to local witnesses heard from one of his interlocutors, and I quote: ‘One day we woke up in the village and we were all wearing Jew’s clothes.’ Unquote. I am sure the same occurred in numerous localities east of the river Elbe. And things were not much different on the other end of Europe either. And the most ancient Greek Jewish community was deported from Salonika, and I quote now ‘As soon as they were marched away, people rushed into their houses, tore up floorboards and battered down walls and ceilings, hoping to find their valuables. There was a complete breakdown of order wrote an official at the time and the second hand shops of the city began to fill up with stolen goods.’ Unquote.

But again, whether we quote evidence from three of from thirty three incidents we are confronted with a discrete number of episodes and we remain epistemologically on the ground of anecdotal as opposed to systematical. So in order to overcome the inherently incomplete character of data we need to keep asking how things were done in order to get a general understanding of what happened. And we can reach that understanding by analysing in detail the character of crimes committed, as well as by reading people’s minds, so to speak, wherever a record of conversation has been preserved.

Let me offer a few examples. In her memoirs Chaja Finkelstein reports how just as the mass killings were unfolding in her Radzilow someone suggested that she turn over whatever she still had, since together with her family she will certainly be killed and it was only right, Chaja’s interlocutor argued, without malice, for the good people, who knew the Finkelstein’s to get these possessions or else the killers would be rewarded. To a Jewish man trying to find a hiding place with a peasant acquaintance near Wegrow, the latter’s son in law said matter of factly, and I quote: ‘Since you are going to die anyway why should someone else get your boots? Why not give them to me so I will remember you?’ Unquote. Miriam Rosenkrantz had a moment of déjà vu during the pogrom in Kielce and I quote her: ‘the horror of the ghetto came back to me in this scene when I worked with sorting down feathers and we were about to go back to the ghetto and they were saying that that’s the end, that they were deporting us for sure, and then this Polish woman, an acquaintance looked at my feet and the following exchange took place – ‘Really you could leave me your boots, missy. But Mrs Joseph, I’m still alive.Well I wasn’t saying anything only that those are nice boots.’ Unquote. Replied Mrs Joseph.

What we are eavesdropping on by listening to these exchanges are truly out of the ordinary ideas. These snippets of conversations are built on an inversion of important principles regulating people’s lives in common. The message addressed to a Jewish interlocutor with the expectation of a voluntary surrender of property to a Polish person is embedded in recast understanding of private property rights as well as the nuance of goodwill binding people who live in close proximity to one another. Until these conversations took place we could safely assume that local people viewed the right to private property as inviolate, and the only occasion when they felt it might be suspended in other words when claims could be made legitimately to surrender what people rightfully owned would be to relieve extreme hardship which befell on some other members of the community, in case of flood, or tornado or earthquake for example. In other words an act of goodwill sustaining reciprocity for times when extreme hardship would in turn fall on themselves.

What does it mean that three different people on three different occasions, and one could of course hold many more civil exchanges as they caught the attention of Jewish interlocutors and were recorded, express exactly the same very unusual thought about matters of fundamental importance in the life of a community. I find it implausible that such convergence of ideas inverting the meaning of private property and neighbourly obligation as far as the Jews were concerned was purely coincidental. Again, I am alluding here to the assumption that practices and important beliefs in society are interconnected and must be congruent. In other words, what is accepted as a matter of fact in one of its segments could not be directly negated in another, or else we could not be experiencing cognitive dissonance. Thus to my mind this anecdotal evidence, and it would remain anecdotal even if we quoted ten or fifteen such episodes, is an indication of a shift in shared norms concerning acceptable behaviour towards the Jews. In the eyes of their Polish neighbours Jews ceased to be human beings and were perceived instead, to use the expression coined by garbled as deceased on garbled. It may seem that I am grasping at straws here but it is important to develop ways of argumentation portraying plunder of Jews for what it was, namely a social practice, rather than a criminal or a deviant behaviour of some rogues or individuals. And that plunder was widespread and sanctioned by norms is revealed precisely, by the form of reference to it, capture, in language.

We find a record of this shift in normative expectations not only among individuals speaking about interpersonal relations but in institutional evaluations concerning the relationships within groups. Such as an early report of the underground sent to the London government in exile from Poland, indicating that Jews are non-responsive to Polish, in other words Catholic fellow citizens approaches, to take their goods even though it is clear that otherwise everything will only end up in German hands. Evidently by not consenting to be despoiled by their neighbours, Jews were somehow favouring Germans over Poles. And so the stakes are right, a recalcitrant Jew, unwilling to surrender his or her boots to a Polish acquaintance is not only unfriendly but implicitly also unpatriotic.

Conversely, when retail Jewish commercial property and real estate was ordered by German decrees into Aryan trusteeship – an opportunity for enrichment, which was take up with eagerness by Polish lawyers, for example – this was also defended by suggestions that members of the corporation were rescuing this wealth from German hands. A line which at least the main underground publication, Biuletyn Informacyjny, was not buying, as it warned the legal profession in an article of July 19th, 1940 that such behaviour was objectionable. And since the practice of Aryanisation was continent wide, Poland, as we shall see in a moment, was not the only place where similar arguments had been advanced.

Where do we go from here? Let me conclude this discussion of plunder with a few snippets of conversation, followed by views articulated in important underground memoranda. A certain Jozef Gorski, a well to do land owner from central Poland, writes the following about the holocaust in his memoirs:

“As a Christian”, and I am quoting him,” I could not not feel compassion (double negative in the original) with my fellow human beings – but as a Pole I looked at what was happening differently. I considered Jews to be an internal enemy, so I could not help feeling glad that we are getting rid of this enemy and what’s more and not with our own hands, but thanks to the deeds of another external enemy. I could not hide satisfaction when I rode around little towns and saw that there were no more Jews. Asked by Tourn, a local German official with whom he was on this occasion, do Poles perceive being liberated from Jews as a blessing? I replied, it is, of course being sure that I am expressing the opinion of the overwhelming majority of my fellow nationals”. Unquote.

And Gorski was reading the minds of his fellow nationals correctly. Some variation of a detail we will have to put up a monument to Hitler for having got rid of the Jews was overheard in private conversations all over Poland. We have testimony to this effect not only from Jews who were successfully passing as Aryans and later recounted what they saw and heard in their wartime milieus but from numerous Polish witnesses as well. Given such a widespread consensus of opinion it is no wonder that with the war’s end approaching, highly placed functionaries of the Polish underground State advised the government in exile in London about the looming, or else, Jewish problem. The official position of the government, the Polish government in exile, had been that all changes resulting from decisions taken by the occupiers with respect to matters involving geographical boundaries, citizenship rights and status, property confiscations, all purported legal changes in other words, were null and void. But London was warned, repeatedly from the home country that the matter was not so simple as it may have seemed.

Return to the status quo for garbled and resumption by Jews of that economic growth from before the war was an impossibility, reported Roman Knoll, the head of the Foreign Affairs Commission in the apparatus of the government delegate, as it was called the underground civilian administration in occupied Poland. The non-Jewish population had taken over Jewish positions in the social structure, he wrote in 1943, and this change is final and I quote him now: ‘garbled in character, should Jews attempt to return on us, rumours and exaggerated estimates circulated about the numbers of Jews who had managed to escape into the Soviet interior and were expected to return to Poland after the war. People would not perceive this as a restoration but as an invasion which they would resist even by physical means.’ Unquote.

In July 1945 another distinguished politician of the London affiliated underground, Jerzy Braun, conveyed his observations about the growing anti-Semitism in Poland, and I quote him: ‘Today, there is no place for a Jew in the small towns and villages. During the past six years finally, emphasis in original, a Polish garbled State has emerged which did not exist before. It completely took over trade, and supplies, mediation, and local crafts in the provinces. Those young peasant’s sons and former urban proletarians who once worked for the Jews are determined, persistent, greedy, deprived of all morals, reports in trade and superior to Jews in courage and flexibility. These masses will not relinquish what they have conquered. There is no force which could remove them.’ Unquote.

It was understandable that Jews, who survived the onslaught but could not return to their hometowns, leave ruined and broken telling the rest of the world that Poles are anti-Semitic, and I quote again: ‘But what they take for anti-Semitism’, Braun concludes, ‘is only an economic law which cannot be helped’. Unquote. And truth be told, a majority of Polish peasants came into possession of Jewish property, because Jews all over Europe and ipso facto, in Poland had been killed by the Germans. Some peasants helped their luck and most liked what happened, but their involvement in these crimes was opportunism, all the time arguing for is recognition that when the opportunity arose, they were not shy to take it.

Please take a moment to consider our illustration. This is a familiar image people have seen in countless variations. Peasants, at harvest time after work well done, resting contentedly with their tools behind the pile of crops. Some may have taken a snapshot of this kind on summer vacation with distant relatives in the countryside. Others carry it as a souvenir from a scouting expedition held in farms in the back country bringing in their crops. It was regularly splashed every summer, across the front pages of newspapers half the world over in Communist countries in celebration of yet another bountiful harvest provided by collectivised agriculture. And visitors came upon it more or less artistic refined renditions in painting galleries and museums. Yet despite belonging to a bucolic genre, people at ease surrounded by nature, talking to one another, in a moment they will probably burst into singing, the photograph, and not just because it’s fuzzy it is disquieting. Garbled from behind the assembled group rather than coniferous trees one could speculate it was taken in the desert. Something feels off kilter with the landscape which cannot be pegged easily to a geographical location. The image strikes the viewer as familiar and strange at the same time. And when one finally notices the crops scattered in front of the group, skulls and bones no less, the mystery even deepens. Who are the people in the photograph and what are they doing?

We are in the middle of Europe, just after World War II has ended, that is in the middle of the twentieth century. And we see in the photograph a bunch of peasants standing atop of a mountain of ashes. These are the human ashes of 800 000 Jews, gassed and cremated in the Treblinka extermination camp between July 1942 and October 1943. The Europeans captured in the photograph have been digging through the remains of holocaust victims hoping to find gold and precious stones that Nazi executioners may have overlooked despite carefully checking the body cavities of murdered Jews. One of the earliest mentions of this phenomenon together with a few photographs of Treblinka’s eerie landscape came from two fellows who visited the site of the Treblinka extermination camp on September 12th, 1945. The entire area they reported was scarred with holes several metres deep with human bones scattered all around. People sifting through the mounds of human ashes didn’t even bother to answer when asked what they were doing. The area was large, the scale of excavations enormous. Thousands had to have worked to produce this lunar landscape. Mutual relationships in the Treblinka area were simply incredible the authors of the report wrote. ‘People who enriched themselves with gold dug up from the graves by night, plunder their own neighbours. We were terrified because in a peasant house some dozen metres from the house we spent the night, a woman was tortured with live fire to reveal the place where she was hiding gold and valuables’. Unquote. And while the scale of the Treblinka excavations was unique the practice of digging up Jewish remains from the sites of mass murder to strip them of valuables was common.

But the plunder of Jewish wealth, the main story illustrated in the photograph was a continent wide affair. It took place on the Atlantic Ocean in the west as far east as the German armies reached in their campaign against the USSR. It was accompanied by opportunistic behaviour of the local population, despite the locals also being subjected to exploitation by Nazi conqueror. In Salonika, and I quote: ‘Jewish tombstones were to be found in urinals and driveways and had been used to make up the dance floor of a taverna built over a corner of the former cemetery itself. The garbled had been ransacked for the treasure that had supposedly been hidden there. Many Jewish skulls and bones are visible.’ Unquote. Evidently, peasants from Eastern Europe were not the only ones to act in this manner.

In 1943, in anticipation of German defeat various associations were formed in occupied France to protect the interests of those Frenchmen who had acquired the so called Aryanised Jewish property. Such associations continued to exist albeit under new names after the garbled. They defended their constituents as fiercely against the restitution of Jewish businesses or apartments to their rightful owners. Those who bought Jewish property protected French interests, I am quoting the associations findings, ‘by buying property the Germans threatened to liquidate the purchasers preserved a precious inheritance for the national economy.’ Unquote. Thus framed, stripping the Jews of their assets was cast as a responsible and patriotic behaviour. Little wonder that in April of 1945 hundreds of demonstrators went to the streets of Paris crying death to the Jews and France for the French. The few Jews returning to their hometowns after the war from Salonika to Warsaw were made unwelcome by foreign neighbours already comfortably ensconced garbled.

The story of the plunder of Jewish assets occasionally reaches large circulation press when Swiss banks are challenged to produce Swiss foreign accounts or national museums are forced to return stolen Jewish paintings acquired from one of Hitler’s art dealers. However, its significance is not revealed in momentary focus of journalistic zeal, but the very fabric of what Saul Friedlander identifies as the broad consent to the Nazi organised holocaust by institutions and people in occupied Europe.’ Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews. Some of the Christian churches declared that the murdered Jews were part of the flock, up to a point. To the contrary, many social constitutes, many power groups were directly involved in the expropriation of the Jews and eager, by it, and agreed for their wholesale disappearance. Thus’, and this last sentence is emphasised, ‘by Nazi and related anti-Jewish policies, could unfold to the most extreme levels without the interference of any major countervailing feature’. Unquote. Many across the continent have benefited from the Nazi policies stripping Jews of civic and property rights and eliminating them from public life, or rather as it sometimes garbled, of stripping the Jews of life altogether. A question and answer to frame this twentieth century European cover story, so dramatically illustrated with the picture you see on the screen, could run like this: What does a Swiss banker and a Polish peasant have in common? And the answer to this question, only a slight exaggeration, will be a golden jewel extracted from the jaws of a Jewish corpse.

Martin Krygier

Now Adam Czarnota will respond

Prof. Czarnota's speech & discussion - klick here

Transcription by Felix Molski