Members of the Jewish community in Poland and officials from the country marked today the 85th anniversary of the pogrom of Jews in the village of Jedwabne, while radical Polish nationalists attempted to disrupt the commemoration and joint prayers.
The commemoration and prayers were initiated by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, exactly 85 years after Poles, with the blessing of the German occupying authorities, burned alive around 300 of their Jewish neighbors in a barn and killed another 40 by other means.
“We are here to pray and to mourn. The most important thing is that we are doing this together. I hear some opposition to our commemoration and I thought: what does it mean to be against prayer? Are they some kind of extreme atheists?” said Schudrich.
Participants in the commemoration, including hosts from the Jewish community and the presidents of both houses of the Polish parliament, were met on a nearby private property by about 300 far-right extremists, led by accused antisemite and troublemaker, MP Grzegorz Braun from the Confederation of the Polish Crown.
Near the site of the crime and today’s commemoration, the extremists erected a cross, a memorial plaque with their version of the crime, a large banner reading “Enough Jewish lies! The crime in Jedwabne was committed by Germans,” as well as portraits of individuals they accuse of lying about the crime—Rabbi Schudrich, historian Jan Gross, and three former Polish presidents—Lech Kaczyński, Bronisław Komorowski, and Aleksander Kwaśniewski, with the message “liars about Jedwabne.”
Kwaśniewski, the only Polish president who apologized for the crime committed by his compatriots in 1941, told the newspaper Rzeczpospolita today that he would do the same again.
“I would apologize again today. Those words were necessary. Knowing that not everyone feels the same, I said that I apologize on behalf of those whose hearts are filled with shame and pain for everything that happened then,” said Kwaśniewski.
Kwaśniewski linked the manifestations of radical nationalists and far-right extremists, who try to attribute the crime to the Germans even though the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has documented that Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors, to the rise of parties based on the denial of historical facts and on lies.
“Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Germany and Braun in Poland, these are no longer political fringes, which gives cause for concern and for the mobilization of democratic forces who understand this danger,” Kwaśniewski added.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk reminded that while Poles were in solidarity with Jews during the German occupation in World War II, there were often things that to this day should be a source of shame.
“We must be able to look history in the face. We, like other nations, especially in this region with such complicated and dramatic relations between peoples and minorities, also experienced dramas, but we ourselves were also the cause of dramas for others,” said Tusk on the anniversary of the pogrom of Polish Jews.
U.S. Ambassador to Warsaw Tom Rose said that today belongs to the victims, not the murderers or those who try to justify them, adding that crimes like those in Jedwabne were the exception, not the rule, in occupied Poland.
“Helping a Jew was punishable by death. The same fate awaited any Pole who did not report someone helping Jews. The Nazis sought to make the entire Polish nation complicit in the Holocaust. Despite these inhuman circumstances, few Poles betrayed their Jewish neighbors. Thousands died trying to help them,” Rose said in a video message posted on X.
The investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance and postwar trials showed what really happened—that the Germans watched from the sidelines or inspired the crime, while the Jews were killed by Poles.
Earlier surveys on Polish students’ knowledge of the pogrom in the village of Jedwabne in eastern Poland, such as the one conducted on the 75th anniversary, showed that as many as 46 percent of Polish students believe that in that pogrom, Germans killed Poles who were hiding Jews.
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