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One summer day in 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half, 1,600 men, women, and children, all but seven of the town's Jews. Neighbors tells their story. This is a shocking, brutal story that has never before been told. It is the most important study of Polish-Jewish relations to be published in decades and should become a classic of Holocaust literature. Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts and other evidence into an engulfing reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history. His investigation reads like a detective story, and its unfolding yields wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism. It is a story of surprises: The newly occupying German army did not compel the massacre, and Jedwabne's Jews and Christians had previously enjoyed cordial relations. After the war, the nearby family who saved Jedwabne's surviving Jews was derided and driven from the area. The single Jew offered mercy by the town declined it. Most arresting is the sinking realization that 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. As much as such a question can ever be answered, Neighbors tells us why. In many ways, this is a simple book. It is easy to read in a single sitting, and hard not to. But its simplicity is deceptive. Gross's new and persuasive answers to vexed questions rewrite the history of twentieth-century Poland. This book proves, finally, that the fates of Poles and Jews during World War II can be comprehended only together.

Jews --- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) --- Juifs --- Holocauste, 1939-1945 --- History. --- Histoire --- Jedwabne (Poland) --- Jedwabne (Pologne) --- Ethnic relations. --- Relations interethniques --- -Jews --- -Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Judaism --- Catastrophe, Jewish (1939-1945) --- Destruction of the Jews (1939-1945) --- Extermination, Jewish (1939-1945) --- Holocaust, Nazi --- Ḥurban (1939-1945) --- Ḥurbn (1939-1945) --- Jewish Catastrophe (1939-1945) --- Jewish Holocaust (1939-1945) --- Nazi Holocaust --- Nazi persecution of Jews --- Shoʾah (1939-1945) --- Genocide --- World War, 1939-1945 --- Kindertransports (Rescue operations) --- History --- Nazi persecution --- Persecutions --- Atrocities --- Jewish resistance --- -Ethnic relations --- -History --- -Yedwabne (Poland) --- Yedṿabnah (Poland) --- Ethnic relations --- Hebrews --- Yedwabne (Poland)

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Poland suffered an exceedingly brutal Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Close to five million Polish citizens lost their lives as a result. More than half the casualties were Polish Jews. Thus, the second largest Jewish community in the world& only American Jewry numbered more than the three and a half million Polish Jews at the time& was wiped out. Over 90 percent of its members were killed in the Holocaust. And yet, despite this unprecedented calamity that affected both Jews and non-Jews, Jewish Holocaust survivors returning to their hometowns in Poland after the war experienced widespread hostility, including murder, at the hands of their neighbors. The bloodiest peacetime pogrom in twentieth-century Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce one year after the war ended, on July 4, 1946. Jan Gross's 'Fear' attempts to answer a perplexing question: How was anti-Semitism possible in Poland after the war? At the center of his investigation is a detailed reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom and the reactions it evoked in various milieus of Polish society. How did the Polish Catholic Church, Communist party workers, and intellectuals respond to the spectacle of Jews being murdered by their fellow citizens in a country that had just been liberated from a five-year Nazi occupation? Gross argues that the anti-Semitism displayed in Poland in the war's aftermath cannot be understood simply as a continuation of prewar attitudes. Rather, it developed in the context of the Holocaust and the Communist takeover: Anti-Semitism eventually became a common currency between the Communist regime and a society in which many had joined in the Nazi campaign of plunder and murder& and for whom the Jewish survivors were a standing reproach. Jews did not bring communism to Poland as some believe; in fact, they were finally driven out of Poland under the Communist regime as a matter of political expediency. In the words of the Nobel Prize& winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, Pola

Antisemitism --- Pogroms --- Jews --- Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) --- Communism --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Judaism --- Genocide --- Massacres --- Anti-Jewish attitudes --- Anti-Semitism --- Ethnic relations --- Prejudices --- Philosemitism --- History --- Persecutions --- Influence. --- Poland --- Kielce (Poland) --- Ethnic relations. --- Influence --- Kelʹt︠s︡y (Poland) --- Kielce, Poland (City) --- Ḳilts (Poland) --- Ḳelts (Poland) --- Ḳeyltsah (Poland) --- Ḳeyltseh (Poland) --- קיילצה

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Guerre mondiale (1939-1945) --- Relations --- Récits personnels polonais. --- Ukraine (ouest) --- Biélorussie --- Pologne --- World War, 1939-1945 --- Poland --- Ukraine, Western --- Belarus --- Soviet Union --- History --- Foreign relations

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History of Eastern Europe --- anno 1930-1939 --- anno 1940-1949 --- Poland --- Russia