by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

December 4, 2008

Jan Gross grew up in postwar Poland with an almost rosy view of how Jews had been treated by their countrymen there. It was only once he began to read accounts of the war, and to conduct his own research, that he discovered how widespread Polish complicity had been in the Nazi victimization of Jews, both during and after the war.

In a talk at Kean University in Union on Dec. 1, the Princeton-based writer and scholar delineated Polish anti-Semitism and how it rose to new levels of murderous violence after World War II. It was inflamed, he suggested, by the experience of Nazi brutality and by the fear of losing Jews’ property seized in their absence.

In a time of general lawlessness, and perhaps driven by a reluctance to face their own wartime crimes, Polish civilians assaulted thousands of returning Jewish survivors.

Gross said there were lots of stories of attacks, “and they were framed as odd events — freak stories — but more Jews were killed in pogroms in Poland than anywhere else: between 1,500 and 2,500.” Ironically, Jews fled to safe refuge in Germany — to the displaced persons’ camps there.

His talk, based on his latest book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, was part of the annual series sponsored by the Holocaust Resource Foundation and hosted by the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean. Earlier in the day, he conducted a seminar for post-graduate students and teachers taking part in the course offered by the foundation.

Gross drew international attention and aroused fierce controversy in his birth country with the publication in 2001 of his third book, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community of Jedwabne, Poland.

His first book, Polish Society under German Occupation came out in 1979. His next, in 1988, The Revolution from Abroad, looked at the Soviet Union’s impact on the Baltic States from 1939 to 1941. In Neighbors he turned the focus inward. The book, based on painstaking interviews with eyewitnesses, exposed the fact that the 1,600 Jews killed when Nazi forces reached the town of Jedwabne in 1941 were murdered by the townspeople — not the Germans, as Poles had always claimed.

Gross said he faced much anger and repudiation in Poland. But he also experienced great support, much of it from ordinary people. Possibly as a result of the much more open debate that followed the book’s publication, he said, Polish academics have been bringing out some excellent books on the subject of discrimination and the Holocaust.

Gross described his upbringing with a non-religious Jewish father and a Catholic mother, whose first husband had also been Jewish. In their circles, much as in prewar Germany, among the progressive intelligentsia, religious identity was almost irrelevant, and people — like his mother — risked their own well-being to oppose discrimination.

The family immigrated to the United States in 1969. Gross earned his doctorate in sociology from Yale six years later. He went on to teach courses on Soviet and Eastern European politics and World War II at New York, Emory, and Yale universities as well as at universities in Paris, Vienna, and Cracow, before taking up his present position at Princeton, as the Norman B. Tomlinson ’16 and ’48 Professor of War and Society.

‘No sense of closure’

Gross said he first began to register the prejudice endemic in Polish society when he read a book written just after the war by a woman who battled to retrieve children sheltered by Poles to return them to their parents or other Jewish caregivers. She said that many of those courageous sheltering families were afraid to let it be known what they had done, lest they suffer the wrath of their neighbors.

To his horror, he discovered that attitude was widespread. “It didn’t make sense to me,” Gross told the Kean audience. “It was bizarre.”

He began to discover how much ordinary people had colluded in German efforts to identify and isolate their Jewish neighbors, and later — in full view of others — to brutalize and kill them. Gross said that a third to a half of the Polish Jews died that way long before they reached any camps.

After the war, the old blood libels, rooted in medieval tales that Jews used the blood of children to make matza, took on a new form. Rumors spread that these starved people wanted it to drink, to restore their strength.

Those who knew better warned the Jews to leave, for their own safety. “The stories would be hard to take seriously, but the rumors had legs,” Gross said. “They would bring people out in a burst of fury time and again.”

Asked after the lecture if his books have provided him with a sense of closure about anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Gross said there could be no such thing. “We can just lay out the facts and reflect on them. The subject is so immense; there can be no sense of closure ever.”

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