Introduction: Historians and Historical Reconciliation

Abstract

“For this crime, we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness,” declared the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, in Jedwabne on a rainy July 10, 2001. He was addressing his fellow Poles about a “particularly cruel crime.” Sixty years earlier in Jedwabne, as many as 1,600 Jews were killed by their neighbors—people with whom they had shared the small town.1 The immediate spur to the president's remarks was the publication of Jan Gross's Neighbors in 2001. Gross's book had instigated Poland's confrontation with its past, and the events it described had come to be seen as a poignant symbol of Polish-Jewish relations.2 “Today,” said Kwaśniewski, “as a man, citizen and president of the Polish republic, I ask pardon in my own name and in the name of those Polish people whose consciences are shocked by this crime.”3 The ceremony represented a high point in Poland's struggle with its history, a struggle that was at once about both past events and the nation's identity. The government had done much to investigate the crime, especially through the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which it charged with scrutinizing gross historical violations of human rights and war crimes. Its extensive research and published report on Jedwabne erased the world's doubts about the historical events.4 Yet many locals boycotted the ceremony. And the Church was not officially represented, with Cardinal Jozef Glemp demanding that Jews apologize at the same time for collaborating with the Soviets in Poland from 1939 to 1941, and the local priest commenting, “It is Holocaust business. It is not my business.”5 The Polish Church, a central component of national identity, reflected its ambivalence about the president's acknowledgment by expressing mere “regret” about the killings. The citizens of Jedwabne on the whole rejected their newfound fame, and the mayor, who had supported the president's acknowledgment and advocated that a memorial be erected, was forced to resign, and later emigrated to the United States.6

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