Buried, Filmed, Denied
Buried, Filmed, Denied: Jedwabne of 10 July 1941, October 7, and the Assault on Historical Truth
The Jedwabne massacre, of 10 July 1941, of its local Jewish community by a cohort of non-Jewish Polish neighbors entered public memory and history writing in Poland only after almost sixty years of silence. The Hamas massacre, of October 7, 2023, of Israelis at the Nova Festival and in local kibbutzim in southern Israel, accompanied by the abduction of 251 Jewish and non-Jewish individuals including, elderly, babies and toddlers, was filmed in real time by its perpetrators, victims, and survivors. Yet both massacres reveal that evidence alone cannot protect Jewish victims and survivors from anti-Jewish hatred, denial, distortion, and moral inversion.
For me, as a historian of the Holocaust and its memorialization and East European Jews, July 2026 has been an especially revealing month. It has brought into sharp focus the persistence of silence, the suppression of uncomfortable knowledge, and the continuous manipulation of historical truth. It has reminded me of something that historians know well: that truth does not protect itself. Historical truth must be researched, documented, communicated, taught, and defended systematcally. It must be defended not only against crude denial, but also against half-truths and lies, ideological manipulations, invented symmetries, and moral inversions. We must remain truthful to the truth even when the surrounding culture no longer wishes to hear it.
This July, two commemorations became connected in my mind. On 10 July, the eighty-fifth anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne was marked in Jedwabne, north-eastern Poland. Five days later, on 15 July, I visited the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on the final day of its London presentation. The exhibition was situated in a ‘hipster’ neighborhood of East London, tucked away behind a narrow alley and surrounded by visible security. Even its physical location seemed to communicate something about the present moment: the commemoration of murdered Jews and Israelis required protection, discretion, and vigilance in the British capital. The instructions on a ticket directed visitors down an unmarked alley before they reached the exhibition space.
What does the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 have in common with the Hamas-organized and executed massacre in southern Israel on 7 October 2023?
I call them, metaphorically, “Two Jedwabnes.” However, let me be clear from the start that I do not use this phrase to suggest that the two events were historically identical. They were not. They took place in profoundly different political, military, geographical, and cultural settings. Nor do I equate October 7 with the Holocaust. Historical comparison must examine and illuminate difference as well as similarity; it must never flatten distinct histories into one another.
The connection lies elsewhere. Both were massacres of ordinary Jews, young and mature, male and female. Both were followed by deliberate attempts to displace the Jewish victims from the center of their own tragedy by portraying the respective perpetrators as victims and heroes. And both reveal how quickly Jewish victims and survivors can be denied the right to remain victims—how their suffering can be qualified, rationalized, politically instrumentalized and turned back against them.
What happened in Poland?
Poland during the Second World War was occupied by two totalitarian powers: Nazi Germany for more than five years and the Soviet Union for almost two. It was therefore a socially and morally complex world, marked by terror, political upheaval, competing loyalties, fear, opportunism, and violence. Yet the testimonies of non-Jewish eyewitnesses to the Jedwabne massacre—especially those who were young at the time and saw the murders with their own eyes—show a basic moral understanding: that the murder of unarmed Jewish men, women, and children was evaluated as wrong. Even when in the aftermath, local perpetrators intimidated witnesses and pressed them into silence, the distinction between good and evil was not extinguished. Today, in the digital and post-truth era, that elementary moral boundary appears increasingly lost if not lost for good in some circles. We saw this in the celebrations and rationalizations of the October 7 massacre not only among supporters of political Islam, but also among sections of the Western radical left, including academicians, students, journalists and medical staff, who describe themselves as human-rights activists and anti-racists.
The first Jedwabne: a massacre during an interregnum
On 10 July 1941, several hundred Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne—men, women, children, and elderly people—were humiliated, beaten, and murdered. Many were driven into a local barn and burned alive. The perpetrators were non-Jewish Polish inhabitants of the town and surrounding area. Of course, Germans created the political and military conditions in which the massacre took place. An official Polish state investigation carried out by the Institute of National Memory under the chairmanship of Prof. Leon Kieres concluded, in 2002, that at least 340 Jews were murdered in the barn.
The massacre occurred during a particular moment of political transition—what historians have described as a period of interregnum between two occupations. The Soviet administration and Red Army had just fled the area after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. German forces had entered the territory, but the new occupation’s administrative and coercive apparatus had not yet been fully consolidated. Yet the rapid collapse of one political order and the not-yet-complete establishment of another created a volatile space in which local actors pursued antisemitic hostility, political revenge, material enrichment, opportunism, and personal vendettas.
Jedwabne was neither an isolated eruption nor a uniquely local aberration. As two Polish historians Andrzej Żbikowski and Krzysztof Persak have shown, similar anti-Jewish violence occurred in more than fifty other locations in the same broader region during the summer of 1941. The violence included public humiliations, beatings, robberies, forced labour, expulsions, pogroms, and murder. It formed part of a much wider wave extending through territories that had been under Soviet occupation—from the Baltic region through north-eastern Poland and Galicia to Ukraine and Bessarabia.
This wider geographical context does not diminish local agency. On the contrary, it allows us to see more clearly how the Nazi war on Jews, German presence, inherited home-based antisemitism, as well as greed, and the collapse of social restraints interacted. Jedwabne was simultaneously part of a German-created landscape of genocidal violence and an act of intimate violence committed by people who knew many of their victims personally.
From the surviving testimonies and eyewitness accounts, we possess only fragmentary glimpses of the final encounters between victims and perpetrators. Yet these fragments are devastating. Victims pleaded with people whom they recognized as their neighbors, sometimes addressing them by first name. They appealed to neighbors with whom they had shared streets, shops, schools, markets, and the ordinary rhythms of small-town life. “Do not kill me.” The history of Jedwabne is therefore not only a history of murder. It is a history of the destruction of a local multi-ethnic local community and neighborly relations.
A crime buried beneath public silence
For almost sixty years after the war, the truth about Jedwabne massacre remained at the margins of Polish public consciousness. The postwar monument erected in Jedwabne placed responsibility exclusively upon the German Gestapo. Survivors preserved their memories, and accounts of the crime appeared in postwar testimonies and legal records, but the massacre did not become part of the accepted national narrative of the Second World War in Polish society. That changed at the turn of the twenty-first century, first through the documentary film of Agnieszka Arnold and then through the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross’s slim but revolutionary book Neighbors.
As Antony Polonsky and I argued in our introduction to The Neighbors Respond, the importance of the debate was not simply that it supplied new historical information. It opened a space for questions that had long remained silenced—questions that had never been asked publicly with sufficient force.
How could neighbors turn against neighbors? Why had this history remained so marginal? What did it reveal about antisemitism, Nazi occupation, local agency, opportunism, and the relationship between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles? Gross did not present Jedwabne as a completed and safely enclosed chapter of the past. He addressed it as a challenge to the present.
In my own work, I have described Neighbors as establishing a powerful counter-memory to the accepted postwar canon of Polish history—a canon constructed in different forms by communist elites inside Poland and anti-communist elites abroad, and accepted by much of Polish society. Within this established canon, Poles appeared almost exclusively as heroic resisters, rescuers, and innocent victims of the two totalitarian occupations. The experiences of Polish Jews were not integrated into Polish history, while difficult questions about antisemitism, indifference, exploitation, betrayal, and local participation in anti-Jewish violence were pushed to the margins and excluded.
Gross’s Neighbors made that exclusion impossible to maintain. The book inspired historical and forensic investigations of Jedwabne and other sites of anti-Jewish violence in Poland. It contributed to the emergence of the Polish school of critical Holocaust history. It encouraged a younger generation of non-Jewish Polish scholars to investigate rural society, local administrations, denunciation, property transfer, intimate violence, rescue, exploitation, and the relationship between German and non-German perpetrators.
It also transformed Jedwabne into the central battleground over Polish collective identity. The public debate about Jedwabne that lasted more than two years (2000- 2002) was never merely about the precise number of victims, the reconstruction of individual actions, or differences between historians. At its deepest level, it concerned the meaning of Polishness and the question of whether a mature national community could accommodate uncomfortable truths about itself.
Remembering to remember—and remembering to forget
From the beginning of the public debate about Jedwabne massacre, radical-right, conservative, and ethnonationalist circles produced their own counter-history of the massacre. They presented the discussion of Jedwabne as an expression of “anti-Polonism.” They coined the phrase “the Jedwabne lie,” deliberately echoing the Polish expression for the “Auschwitz lie.” They invoked the “ungrateful Jew” allegedly saved by Poles only to defame Poland, and the “Judeo-communist Jew” supposedly responsible for Soviet brutal ocuupation and therefore for the violence inflicted upon Jews. These were not marginal rhetorical events. They constituted an organized attempt to reverse the historical and moral meaning of the crime. The victims were converted into accusers and enemies, while those who challenged the historical evidence presented themselves as the true injured party.
The right-wing assault on the memory of Jedwabne began during the Jedwabne debate, 2000 – 2002 itself, and has developed into an increasingly militant campaign utilizing different political narratives, especially between 2015 and 2023. A highly revealing development had taken place during the eightieth-anniversary commemoration on 10 July 2021. A Polish citizen of Syrian origin, accompanied by radical-right Polish nationalists, disrupted the commemoration using rhetoric that brought Polish ethnonationalism together with themes associated with political Islam. Jews were accused of killing innocent Poles after the Second World War and of allegedly perpetrating a “Holocaust” against Palestinians. The conclusion was explicit: Poles therefore had nothing for which to be ashamed in relation to Jedwabne. At the same anniversary, demonstrators insulted the Israeli flag, attacked the memory of the victims, and shouted at Jewish participants that their ancestors should not have rescued Jews.
The 2021 commemoration revealed an ideological convergence that was not yet as clearly visible as it would become after October 7. Home-grown Polish radical-right ethnonationalism merged with rhetoric borrowed from political Islam and extreme anti-Israel activism.
The participants did not need to agree on every ideological question. They were united by a narrative in which Jews became an eternally guilty collective: responsible for Soviet communism in Poland, responsible for the policies of the contemporary State of Israel, and ultimately responsible even for violence committed against Jews themselves. The suffering of Palestinians was not invoked primarily to express compassion for Palestinians. It was instrumentalized as a weapon against the memory of murdered Polish Jews.
In 2025, the assault on the memorial became more concrete. Seven large boulders bearing revisionist and antisemitic inscriptions were placed beside the monument. Demonstrators used loudspeakers to disrupt the ceremony, and Jews who had gathered to commemorate the victims were threatened, including the chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich.
The atmosphere intensified again during the eighty-fifth anniversary in July 2026. While a group of Jewish representatives, diplomats, political leaders, clergy, and ordinary citizens gathered at the memorial, a far-right demonstration was organized nearby. The radical rightwing politician and Holocaust denier, Grzegorz Braun and his supporters displayed a banner dismissing the established history of Jedwabne as “Jewish lies.” This is what I call “remembering to forget” in its most recent form – the commemoration is shouted down, and overwhelmed by a competing monumental narrative of exclusive Polish innocence.
Entering the Nova Exhibition
Five days after the Jedwabne anniversary, I visited the Nova Exhibition in London. The contrast between the evidentiary worlds of the two massacres could hardly have been greater.
Our knowledge of the final hours of the Jews of Jedwabne comes from small fragments: the written and oral testimonies of a small number of survivors and eyewitnesses, postwar interrogations of perpetrators, legal proceedings, archival documents, later historical investigations, and the physical site itself.
The massacre of October 7 was documented almost in real time. Hamas- and Jihadist-led attackers killed 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, and abducted 251 people to Gaza. The hostages included women, children, elderly people, foreign nationals, Bedouin citizens of Israel, migrant Thai workers, as well as Jewish Israelis involved in humanitarian and medical actions for Gazans.
The perpetrators carried cameras and mobile telephones. Security cameras recorded their entry into kibbutzim and homes. Victims filmed the attacks and sent messages while hiding. Survivors recorded what they saw. Parents received final telephone calls from their children of different ages who understood that they might not survive.
The Nova Exhibition confronts visitors with this abundance of evidence: abandoned shoes and tents, burned and bullet-ridden cars, destroyed festival structures, CCTV recordings, telephone messages, survivors’ testimonies, and images made by the perpetrators themselves. The exhibition describes itself as a space of remembrance and bearing witness, reconstructing a festival devoted to music that ended in a massacre.
One of the recordings that remains with me preserves the voice of a Hamas attacker telephoning his father from the mobile phone of a Jewish woman he said he had murdered. He boasted that he had killed ten Jews “with my own hands” and urged his father to look at the photographs he had just sent him. Against this voice of pride and joy in murder stand the final messages of victims: short calls and recordings to parents and other loved ones, saying, “I love you” and “I am sorry”. The contrast is almost unbearable. On one side, the excitement of the perpetrator announcing that he has killed Jews. On the other, the final human need of the victim to affirm love and connection with loved ones before death. The exhibition also confronts visitors with the gendered dehumanization of women and girls. The bodies of murdered women were abused and publicly displayed – evidence accumulated of rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attacks on October 7 and against hostages in Gaza in post-October 7 time.
When evidence is everywhere—and recognition disappears
The first Jedwabne remained largely outside public consciousness in Poland and beyond for almost sixty years because evidence was fragmented, survivor voices were few and marginalized. An official, communist-created monument to the Jewish victims in Jedwabne imposed a false interpretation, and the accepted national narrative both among communist and anticommunist Polish elites in the country and in exile left little room for painful Jewish experiences that complicated Polish self-understanding.
The “second Jedwabne” has been obscured not by a shortage of evidence in a form of images, video and audio documentation. The October 7 massacre was filmed by perpetrators, victims, survivors, CCTV cameras, emergency workers, and soldiers. Yet within hours, political and ideological groups, including members of the progressive left-wing academia in the West were celebrating the attack, rationalizing it, and presenting it solely as an act of Palestinian liberation and resistance.
This is one of the most disturbing characteristics of the digital post-truth era. Evidence no longer establishes a shared reality. A victim’s testimony can be dismissed as propaganda. Hamas driven reports can be used to discredit hundreds of independently documented crimes. Algorithms on social media reward outrage, speed, repetition, lies and ideological loyalty rather than patient verification and truth. Evidence no longer is enough.
By visting the Nova exhibition, I have reached the conclusion that we have entered an age in which people may watch a massacre and simultaneously deny that they have seen it.
The historical contexts of Jedwabne and October 7 massacres are radically different, but the subsequent narratives share a disturbing common feature. In relation to Jedwabne, Jews were chiefly blamed for being the carriers of Judeo-communism. The victims were said to have brought violence upon themselves because Jews had allegedly collaborated collectively with the Soviet occupiers between September 1939 and the summer of 1941.
In relation to October 7 massacre, murdered and abducted civilians have been treated as embodiments of Israeli state and therefore as collectively responsible for every dimension of the protracted and complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict for which the blame was put squarely on Israel. The Jewish/Israeli victims have become figures representing “settlers,” “colonizers,” “Zionists,” and “Zio-Nazis”, who deserved to die because of who they are. In both cases, individuals were dissolved into a politically useful abstraction rooted in anti-Jewish hatred and dehumanization. Their murders were explained away as retaliation or historical necessity.
Jan Gross and the continuing search for truth
On 11 June 2026, one month before the annual Jedwabne commemoration, I participated in a panel at the PIASA conference in Lublin honoring Jan Tomasz Gross with the Susanne M. Lotarski Distinguished Achievement Award. At my lecture, I described Gross’s books Neighbors, Fear, and Golden Harvest as a triptych. Neighbors reveals a crime that had remained buried beneath the surface of public consciousness in Polish society. Fear explores the persistence of anti-Jewish violence after the Holocaust and the moral and emotional consequences of a reckoning that had been postponed. Golden Harvest, written with Irena Grudzińska-Gross, examines the material, social, and mnemonic afterlives of the destruction of Polish Jewry—the appropriation of Jewish property, the plundering of Jewish graves, and the relationship between material benefit, memory, and silence.
Viewed together, these works illuminate anti-Jewish violence and its aftermath, responsibility and denial, silence and speech. They show that the history of mass violence does not end when the killing stops. It continues through memory, institutions, family stories, political language, monuments, taking over the property and the refusal—or willingness—of societies to confront difficult knowledge.
The history of the reception of Neighbors also offers a warning. An exposed crime and broken silence can be transformed once again into erasure. Counter-memory can itself be attacked by a counter-history based upon anti-Jewish lies, resentment, conspiracy, and the desire to restore national innocence. That is why public exposure to archival documentation and solid education matters so much.
Documenting October 7 for a world that turns away
The work of documenting October 7 has only begun. The Dinah Project brings together legal and feminist experts to document sexual and gender-based violence committed during the massacre and against hostages. This work is particularly important because many victims cannot testify: they were murdered. Others remain too deeply traumatized to speak publicly. The absence of direct testimony from a murdered victim cannot be transformed into proof that the crime did not occur. The USC Shoah Foundation has recorded more than four hundred interviews with survivors, witnesses, relatives, and first responders. These testimonies preserve not only the violence itself, but also the lives that existed before it and the difficult process of living afterwards. Documentary filmmakers are also recording the experiences of Israeli children and youth, who were abducted, lost parents or siblings, and spent terrifying hours hiding while loved ones around them, including members of their peer groups were murdered.
Our responsibility to the future
The two “Jedwabne massacres” teach us that neither the scarcity nor the abundance of evidence guarantees remembrance. In the case of Jedwabne, truth can remain buried for almost sixty years beneath a false monument and covered with false historical narratives.
In the case of October 7, truth can also be filmed, uploaded, circulated around the world—and buried within hours beneath anti-Jewish hatred, ideological slogans, manipulated images, algorithms, and moral indifference. The victims of Jedwabne could not record their final moments. Some of the victims of October 7 did. But possessing their voices does not ensure that the world will listen.
This is why historians, archivists, documentary filmmakers, educators, legal scholars, and survivors must continue their work even when the world turns away. We must preserve the evidence, record testimonies, reconstruct individual lives, expose misinformation, and teach future generations how to distinguish historical investigation and truth from propaganda.
At PIASA conference in Lublin, I concluded my tribute to Jan Gross by saying that historians have responsibilities not only to the past but also to the future. That responsibility now includes the documentation and memorialization of October 7. The Jedwabne massacre of 10 July 1941 teaches us that truth can remain buried for decades. The October 7 massacre teaches us that truth can be filmed, watched, and still denied. Our task today is to prevent the truth about both events from being buried and erased.
