The Specter That Still Haunts Eastern Europe

"Neighbors," by Jan T. Gross

This slim volume, and Professor Gross' fuller, follow-up book, "Fear," are a graphic portrayal of the specter that still haunts eastern Europe - not Marx, not Stalin, but its own heart of human darkness.

Though I dissent somewhat with Prof. Gross' historiography, his little book delivers out of all proportion to its size. Professor Gross has done his country a great service in unflinchingly exposing the soulless criminality of both Jedwabne and, in "Fear," of Kielce; but of course he is a prophet without honor at home, at least for the current generation, which prefers to wrap itself in comforting myths of Poland as "the Christ of Nations" - not the crucifier of others.

My divergence with his analysis, however, doesn't single Poland as an especially barbarous or cruel nation. Poland is certainly not alone in eastern Europe's history of violent racism. Every one of its nations has given its own bloody form of expression to this sickness, against Jews or other convenient scapegoats. What makes it particularly disturbing in Poland, however, is its coincidence with Poland's own myth of martyrdom, and the devastating reality of Nazi occupation and mass murder on Polish soil. How could Poles inflict such suffering, given their own great suffering, and turn a blind eye to it? The answer is in the blind eye that Poles have turned to much of their real history.

While bemoaning Poland's partition at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, its partisans have nicely ignored Poland's own partitioning of the Ukraine, Belorussia, and Lithuania in 1920 - also in league with the USSR. It was at this time that the myth of "Zydokomuna" was fully galvanized, leading to the same kinds of atrocities which erupted during and after WW II. The events of "Neighbors" were not special to the 1939-1947 period, but were endemic in the unsettled era after WW I, as the Goodhart mission to Poland fully documented.

But of course the actors in Jedwabne and Kielce are not following a ghost-written script, but engaged in deeds with deeply personal meaning for themselves. While Professor Gross rationally deconstructs the myth of Zydokomunism, he sees these atrocities as a function of guilt complexes. I do not get that feeling from these perpetrators (who are much like other perpetrators with whom I have direct exposure.) These people sincerely believed in that myth, and targeting Jews was a conscious act, so they felt, of getting back at the "Bolshevik regime" foisted on them from the East. Thus, while Professor Gross stresses moral and psychological causes, I see the basis of this social terror as equally political.

Poland was still a society in flux, still in the grip of wartime psychoses and the throes of guerrilla resistance, with all its attendant terrorism. To stike out at Jews was to hit not only a soft human target but the "Judeo-Bolshevik regime's" own underbelly, and as such was consciously encouraged by all those hoping to defeat the new order. That the Communist Party backpedalled from its official humanism, ultimately embracing this anti-Semitism, was actually a victory for these forces. In this sense, Communism was defeated in 1956, not 1989.

But while I may differ with Professor Gross on Polish history, no one with a sense of humanity or justice can dispute the moral power of his works on postwar Poland. They are warnings on the dark side of humanity that stand above time and place, to be heeded by all.