History & Memory

I would like to thank Sławomir Kapralski for his response to my article, and I hope both articles will provide a stimulating discussion on the problematics of collective memory. However, a crucial misreading of my views needs addressing. I did not claim that there was "genuine communal recollecting" of the massacre in Jedwabne. If that were the case, long before the publication of Jan Gross's book, the old inscription on the monument commemorating the murdered Jews would have been replaced by one stating openly that Poles had perpetrated the massacre. In fact when I referred to "genuine communal recollecting" I did so in the context of Kurkowska-Budzan's descriptions of instances of spontaneous communal commemoration of the tragedy in Jedwabne. Since these spontaneous commemorations have not so far helped the people of Jedwabne to openly acknowledge the responsibility for the massacre, I questioned whether such mythologized remembering can be relevant to the present-day inhabitants of the town (p. 173).

The memory project I referred to was not a complete recipe for "genuine communal recollecting" accepted by all Jedwabnians but an undertaking by a group of people to help the inhabitants of Jedwabne openly acknowledge who had murdered the Jedwabne Jews and to commemorate the tragic end of the Jewish community in the area (pp. 157–58). It is true that the project was headed by only a few people and subsequently did not have large popular support. However, there is strong evidence that the process was undermined by various factors and the few people of good will in Jedwabne were denied the time and space needed to develop the project, to involve different parts of the community in it and to build support for the specific plan of action that had been agreed upon at the meeting of 8 May 2000 in Jedwabne.

Sławomir Kapralski claims that the "official strategy" of how to deal with the Jedwabne debate—although "manipulative" and partly subordinated to "the Polish raison d'état"—"helped, as far as it could, to reveal the truth" (p. 188). I would argue that the truth about the massacre was not revealed by the official commemorations in July 2001 [End Page 195] but by the IPN's investigation, which was completed a year after President Kwaśniewski's apology. As for "the manipulative official strategy," it was certainly not successful when it came to "deepening the historical consciousness of Polish society" (p. 188). In an opinion poll taken after the official apology and after the completion of the IPN's investigation, 50 percent of the respondents were unable to say who they thought had committed the massacre. Among those respondents who had an opinion, the majority believed that the Germans had been more responsible for the killing than the Poles, although the latter had also been involved in the massacre.¹ Kapralski explains such responses as defense reactions "against the unpleasant truth because it may threaten a positive image of the group" (p. 191). This explanation—true for any national group implicated in shameful behavior—cannot be contested. However, is this the sole reason why Poles cannot, 60 years after the war, acknowledge their dishonorable past?

I would suggest that the "official, manipulative strategy" of how to deal with the Polish-Jewish past is a major contributing factor. The long tradition of exploitation of Polish-Jewish relations, or the memory of these relations, has had consequences for Polish historical consciousness. Since 1918, when Poland was striving for independence,² through World War II,³ the formation of a communist government, the power struggle in the communist party⁴ and the economic crises of the 1980s,⁵ to the present, as Poland seeks to be a partner and ally of the West, Polish-Jewish relations have been used by groups in power to facilitate their domestic and international political aims. In 2001, in the long tradition of "manipulative strategy," both the former anticommunist opposition and the former supporters of the communist regime used the Jedwabne debate as an opportunity to stigmatize political opponents and integrate their own electoral bloc. The dishonesty of the political establishment and...