49 pages • 1 hour read
Jan Tomasz GrossNeighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Plunder”
Gross considers what happened to Jewish property after the pogrom. Even those who survived the war lost everything. Józef Sobuta and Karol Bardón were among those who confiscated property. Sobuta and his wife, Stanislawa, moved into a home that once belonged to the Stern family. Stanislawa claimed that “the surviving son of the owner” asked the couple to move in because “he was afraid to live there alone” (79). However, another witness to the pogrom claimed that people commonly took over Jewish property “without anybody’s permission” (79). Gross concludes that those who organized the pogrom later confiscated Jewish property. Mayor Karolak and Sobuta, in fact, organized the transportation of Jewish property to a local warehouse shortly after the town had murdered most of its Jewish neighbors.
On January 11, 1949—shortly after the authorities arrested participants in the pogrom—the Lomza Security Office received a letter from Henryk Krystowczyk. In the letter Krystowczyk wrote that his brother, Zygmunt, had been killed in April 1945. Zygmunt was a member of the Polish Worker’s Party (PPR), which was how the Polish Communist Party identified itself at the time. Zygmunt had been tasked with organizing “a peasant cooperative” (80), which he did before being elected its chairman. In his new leadership role he renovated a steam mill that had previously belonged to Jews. Zygmunt was a carpenter and acquired the wood for his project from the barn that the Germans built for Bronislaw Sleszynski, to replace the one he had allowed the Poles to burn. Zygmunt was killed, Henryk claimed, by a man who wanted the mill.
Gross equates the Jedwabne Jews’ legacy on the community with that of a neutron bomb dropped on a town: all property owners “were eliminated, while their property remained intact” (82). Gross suspects that “material expropriation” was as much a motivating factor in Jedwabne as in other European towns that persecuted and murdered Jewish citizens.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Intimate Biographies”
The wives of the pogrom’s participants sent petitions to the Lomza Security Office. The women claimed that their husbands were forced into the town square by the German gendarmerie, along with Mayor Marian Karolak and town council secretary Wasilewski. Some perpetrators, such as “one of the greatest evildoers on the day, the older Laudanski brother, Zygmunt” collaborated with “each successive carnivorous regime […] in his zeal to please” (86). There were, according to Gross, four people who collaborated with the Soviets before they worked with the Nazis and killed Jews during the pogrom. Jerzy Laudanski, Zygmunt’s younger brother, was among those who worked with both communists and fascists before being arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and imprisoned in Warsaw for working with an underground dissident organization that resisted occupation. Jerzy denied ever working with the Germans to kill Jews and defined himself as a Polish patriot who had only ever espoused nationalist values. The Germans sent him to concentration camps, where he lived for three years before being liberated by the Soviet army. He was only 20 when he returned to Poland. He was among those accused in the Ramotowski trial and sentenced for his participation, despite his protests that he had not been involved in the pogrom and was never a Nazi sympathizer. Jerzy “was sentenced under a paragraph that penalized not so much concrete deeds as the fact of collaboration with the Germans” (89). He was released on parole in 1957.
Gross concludes that “ordinary Poles slaughtered the Jews” (89) in Jedwabne. They varied in age and social class. By all appearances, they were decent citizens. They were all, also, familiar faces.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Anachronism”
Murder and pillaging were “in the standing repertory of collective behavior” in Eastern Europe “during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (90). Ugly, antisemitic rumors swirled about Jews—that they used the blood of Christian children to prepare Passover matzoh, for instance. The rumors were so universally believed that those who survived the war became fearful when they saw a Gentile parent in their community looking for a missing child.
What is remarkable about the pogrom in Jedwabne, according to Gross, is that the residents of that small town had not “[soaked] up the vicious anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda” (92) that had permeated Europe. They also used crude and rather primitive methods to conduct the pogrom, including fire and water. Thus, Gross encourages the reader to understand “the Holocaust as a heterogeneous phenomenon” (92), though it was still systematic.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
Gross establishes greed as a motivating factor in the pogrom. All over Europe, Jews were rumored to have been prosperous, thereby spawning envy among Gentiles for their supposed wealth. Testimonies reveal that those killed in Jedwabne were no more prosperous than anyone else. The plundering of the few valuables that Jedwabne Jews owned was justified based on absurd rumors about Jewish cruelty against Christians, particularly children. The stories portrayed Jews as cannibalistic monsters who preyed on the most vulnerable. That these rumors focused on children reinforced the idea of Jews as predatory. The Poles’ eagerness to believe such rumors indicates the ease with which people will accept and propagate nonsense to justify oppression, ghettoization, and even mass murder.
Jedwabne residents were less sophisticated and poorer than those in urban areas, but they still managed to subdue and kill their neighbors with the base instruments at their disposal, even parts of their local environment, such as the swamp. Bronislaw Sleszynski’s willingness to volunteer his own barn for the mass killing could have occurred for several reasons. Perhaps his barn was old and dilapidated, and he saw an opportunity for the community to build him a new one, gratis (the town did, indeed, build Sleszynski a second barn). Or perhaps he believed such an act of generosity and personal sacrifice would make him a local legend and an honorable citizen whom succeeding generations would remember.
