Eastern Europe: The Experience and Legacy of the Holocaust

-Published in 2000, was a groundbreaking and controversial book-raised tremendous amount of debate (as well as anger and denial) in Poland -explores the problem of anti-Semitism and voluntary collaboration in the Holocaust by local peoples in occupied regions. -Jan Gross studies in detail the mass killing in 1941 of around 1,500 Jews who comprised half of a small Polish village of Jedwabne. -raises questions about the Memory politics and memory practices of Poland today. -takes place in Jedwabne, Poland, 1941

In Nov 1942, when the Germans began putting ghetto inmates on trains to Auschwitz for extermination, seven of the surviving Jedwabne Jews escaped again and made it to the nearby hamlet of Janczewko. There Polish farmer Antonina Wyrzykowska and her husband Aleksander Wyrzykowski harbored the 7 Jedwabne Jews for 26 months from Nov 1942 to Jan 1945, despite hostility from neighbors and German searches of their property. The fugitives included Moshe Olszewicz, his wife Lea, and his brother Dov; Jacob and Lea Kubran; Jozef Gradowski; and Samuel Wasersztajn, a Jedwabne resident who later provided testimony about the massacre. After the war, the Wyrzkowskis were harassed and beaten up for what they had done.

-"institutionalization of resentment" and 'divide and conquer' under the Nazis (and the Soviets) -"Intentionalist" vs. "Functionalist" debates-he does not wish to participate in those -Not only racial, but also an important political dimension to the Jedwabne massacre Disrupted claims -a range of studies have come up with different number of victims of the Jedwabne massacre, varying widely from Gross's 1,400 estimate to a Polish national study finding only over 300 killed -exact number of victims aside, the general point is that local Polish people actively participated in this pogrom.

a small village in Poland where a sudden massacre of Jews took place

The institutionalization of "resentment" or pitting people against one another (which in the German case, underpinned the Holocaust)

testimonials of the villagers themselves, just after the event and many years later

False

a burning barn

The film is a contemporary drama. It takes place in the fictional village of Gurówka in 2001. The story begins with the return of Franciszek Kalina to his hometown in rural Poland after having lived in Chicago for two decades. He learns that his brother Józef is shunned by the community for acquiring and displaying on his farmland dozens of Jewish tombstones which he discovered had been used by German occupying forces as paving stones in a now abandoned road. Józef is gathering the tombstones everywhere in the settlement and moves them into his own field to survive from oblivion. Against the growing opposition of the town residents, the Kalina brothers attempt to learn more about what happened to the Jews of the village. Their personal relationship, harsh after the brothers met, warms and becomes more cooperative after they both find themselves opposed by the whole village. The older priest blesses the brother and urges him to continue gathering the tombstones while the new one, to head the parish soon, displays no sympathy for Jews. Franciszek discovers in a local archive that his father along with other men of the village got the land that had been owned by Jews before the war. He is eager to study the truth. After speaking to some of the oldest residents in the village, the brothers subsequently realize that half the residents of the village murdered the other half (led by a neighbor and their father Stanisław Kalina). This discovery results in a terrible fight and split between the brothers after a dispute about the bones of the Jews they found the night before. After learning that their own father was directly involved in the murder of the Jews who were burned to death in the family's former house, the brothers' roles are reversed. Now it is Józef who wants to keep the truth from coming out to the world, while Franciszek wants the world to know the truth and for the bones of the murdered Jews to be taken to their wheat field and buried with their headstones, so as to not compound the terrible sins of their father and neighbors. In a fight, Franciszek comes close to killing his brother Józef but Franciszek stops himself, puts the ax down and leaves the village by bus to go back to America. But he is returned to the village by a hospital nurse/doctor—the daughter of one of the oldest surviving neighbors who had known the truth but kept it secret—only to see his brother Józef beaten, stabbed, and then nailed high on the inside of the barn door, his arms outstretched. His wrists and feet held by wooden cleats. The movie ends with a scene of a group of young and older Israeli Jews being led by an Orthodox Rabbi reciting the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer in memory of the dead, in front of a formal memorial stone, at the now restored cemetery in the area of the stones that Józef had placed in his fields, while Franciszek watches with respect, lights a candle, leaves it on one of the tombstones and nodding slightly to the scene, turns and walks away.