Fwd.: The Destruction of a Jewish Community in Poland by their neighbors

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>    Neighbors : The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne
>    Jan Tomasz Gross
>    US List Price: $19.95
>
> [Go to http://pnews.org/boards/class and follow the link from the Barnes
> and Noble banner to acquire this book]
>
>    Hardcover - 216 pages ( 1 April, 2001)
>    Princeton University Press; ISBN: 0691086672
>
>    Reviews
>    Book Description
>
>    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.
>
>    Synopsis
>
>    In the summer of 1941, half of the Polish town of Jedwabne murdered
>    the other half - 16,000 of the town's Jews. This book pieces together
>    eyewitness accounts and other evidence into a reconstruction of that
>    horrific July day remembered well by locals but forgotten by history.
>
>    About the Author
>
>    Jan T. Gross is Professor of Politics and European Studies at New York
>    University. He is the author of, among other books, Revolution from
>    Abroad: Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western
>    Belorussia (Princeton) and a coeditor of The Politics of Retribution
>    in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton).

>



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