The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne by Anna Bikont
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Culpable Amnesia

Between global histories of the Holocaust and individual biographies of those caught up in it lies this: a story of the story to uncover the facts of the massacre of a Polish Jewish village by its neighbours during WW II. Local involvement, even leadership, of the killing cannot be denied. Yet today's residents vehemently resist recognition of the roles their parents and grandparents played. Nor will they permit investigation of events that they simply prefer forgotten.

Bikont is an absolutely compelling writer, inter-weaving the history of the massacre with the story of the continuing cover-up. Among other things she demonstrates how anti-Semitism remains a particularly Polish problem. The complicity of the Polish Catholic Church in the Holocaust, its aftermath, and its historical obfuscation is especially troubling.

As recent events throughout Europe have shown, anti-Semitism is not only a matter of history, it remains a powerful force that needs only the slightest stimulus to be unleashed.

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