At the site of a 1941 massacre in Poland—where local residents murdered their Jewish neighbors—unidentified individuals on Monday installed a large monument with plaques that falsely blame the atrocity on the Nazis and accuse Jewish Communists of murdering Poles.
Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi in Poland, called the incident at Jedwabne near Bialystok a “disgrace,” the Gazeta Wyborcza daily reported on Thursday.
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, has said that at least 340 Jews were butchered by their neighbors in the massacre at Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, amid a power vacuum following Germany’s invasion of Poland.
Revisionist historians and nationalistic activists have insisted that Poles were solely victims of Nazi savagery who did not perpetrate atrocities against Jews during World War II and the Holocaust. Before September 1939, three million Jews lived in Poland, almost all of them murdered—about 90%—during the war that lasted until 1945.
In 2018, the Polish legislature passed laws that make it illegal to blame Poles for Nazi crimes, a move that caused political friction between Warsaw and Jerusalem.
The Nazis also murdered millions of non-Jewish Poles in Poland. And many Poles hid, rescued and saved Jews during the Holocaust, in addition to those who betrayed them to the Nazis.
The text in English and Polish on the plaques, which were apparently placed illegally about 30 yards from the official Jedwabne memorial, offers a revisionist account of what happened there.
One of the plaques reads: “After the Soviets took over eastern Poland, Jews assumed administrative roles and, knowing the local realities, denounced Polish patriots who were then deported and murdered by the Soviets. Only the German attack on the Soviet Union halted these repressions,” but “then the Germans began killing Jews just as they had previously killed Poles by the millions.”
According to the ahistorical account, the Germans “devised a plan to cleanse the rear areas of the front from Soviet officials, many of whom were of Jewish origin. According to some historians and eyewitnesses, [there are] accounts of Polish responsibility for the murder of Jews in Jedwabne,” but “in reality, the crime was committed by a German pacification unit under the command of Hermann Schaper,” reads another plaque.
Alerted the Polish media
Local activist Kamil Mrozowicz discovered the plaques while preparing for the annual ceremony at Jedwabne on the anniversary of the killings, and he alerted the Polish media.
Asked by JNS who he thinks was responsible for the display, he said it was most likely the work of “neo-fascists” associated with two far-right local organizations and pointed to a recent social media post by Wojciech Sumliński,” a journalist who has been promoting the narrative exonerating Poles from the Jedwabne murders.
On June 26, Sumliński tweeted: “We are taking Jedwabne back from the liars—we are taking away their ability to slander Poland and Poles, an ability they have exploited repeatedly for decades! Thanks to your support, we will create a place of remembrance there, serving as an alternative to the deceitful monument that exists today.”
JNS queried Sumliński, who did not respond by press time.
