 | Prószyński i S-ka
Warsaw 2004
© Anna Bikont
180x256
352 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-7337-694-1 |
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Anna BikontWe from Jedwabne
Summer 1941 in northeastern Poland: German soldiers replaced the occupying Russian soldiers, who were on the retreat. Pogroms were carried out against Jewish communities by Poles in at least twenty-four towns in the Łomżyński region. Of these, the most infamous is Jedwabne.
What, if anything, is left to be written about Jedwabne after Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors? Anna Bikont realised from the start that his book hadn’t closed the issue at all, but rather opened it up, a Pandora’s Box indeed. We from Jedwabne is a very personal account (recorded from August 2000 to February 1 2004, in the form of a diary) of striving to find the truth, the truth behind the events of a few days in the July of 1941 and all of their consequences, but above all the truth regarding the people the author tracked down in Poland, Israel, the United States, and South America. Among them are would-be victims, murderers, witnesses, and a handful of the Righteous; a second generation marked by the crime; children of victims and children of murderers; those who have known from the beginning of the crime, but who have not wanted to break their silence, and those who have courageously come to terms with the truth, even when this meant admitting their own fathers were murderers. Their portraits – colourful, moving, tragic, sometimes tragicomic, saturated with the past and reaching into the present – accompany the diary to make up the second point of foundation for Anna Bikont’s book. The town of Jedwabne is also a protagonist, today, more than 60 years after the crime took place. The author examines how memory has been retained here, and what a society does on being confronted with its dark history. The book launched the virtual recreated shtetl of Radziłów on the internet, which was annihilated at the same time as Jedwabne, as well as a painstakingly reconstructed map of the pre-war, Jewish Jedwabne with houses recreated and bearing the surnames of their inhabitants.
“The book you hold in your hands is a singular achievement. The author, with great stubbornness and determination, took up the challenge of reconstructing facts and separating myth from reality. The reports of the would-be victims who survived contradicted the eye-witness reports of those events, the personal testimonials of people with documents. Bikont looked through all the statements and all the sources with a critical eye. Thanks to her Herculean labours, we can get a true picture of the events.”
Jacek Kuroń
Bikont hasn’t lost her mind. She has written one of the most important of the books on ‘neighbours’ to date. The most courageous and best documented. Beautiful and terrifying. Merciless. There are no saccharine hopes that time heals all wounds, or that a reconciliation between the Polish and Jewish peoples is within easy reach.
Przekrój magazine
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