(As I’ve been saying...)
…the Polish-American historian Jan T. Gross’ 2001 book Neighbors, which documented a brutal 1940 pogrom of Jews in the town of Jedwabne, provoked a firestorm of criticism. According to Gross, 1,600 of “Jedwabne’s Jews were clubbed, drowned, gutted, and burned not by faceless Nazis, but by people whose features and names they knew well: their former schoolmates and those who sold them food, bought their milk, and chatted with them in the street.”
Such revelations, which offered a slight challenge to the narrative of Polish resistance, were met with fierce hostility. The great hero of anti-Soviet resistance, former President Lech Walesa, dismissed Gross as a “mediocre writer” and a “Jew who tries to make money.”
