Reddit reviews The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne

You keep deflecting and sidestepping--what historians say its "totally false"? What is their evidence? How do they explain Grabowski's evidence? How do they explain the fact that ~250,000 Jews escaped from the ghettos in Poland, but ~50,000 survived in Poland? Where did those 200,000 people go?

Do you realize that statements like "here's a guy who disagrees" do nothing to address those questions?

Gross' book is far from perfect--there are totally legitimate scholarly criticisms. This isn't surprising: he's trying to reconstruct events from over 70 years ago. Some of the details he discusses are almost certainly not exactly right. But the general picture he paints of how Jews were treated by Poles in the country side has been confirmed by other studies. Grabowski's is among the most extensive.

I provided a link with extensive excerpts from Grabowski's book--including specific quotes form specific Nazi documents stating explicitly, for example,

>For the Germans, Jew-hunting depended on large-scale involvement by the local Polish population. Testimonies to this effect are found in German documents as well. One of them was a “working memorandum” issued by the Warsaw-area SS and police commandant in March 1943, titled “Concerns: Arrest and liquidation of Jews who remain in hiding.” The document, which is reproduced in Grabowski’s book, states, “In order to succeed, one has to involve the Sonderdienst [Special Services], the Polish Police and the informers. It is also necessary to involve the broad masses of Polish society.” The document added, “Persons who have helped to apprehend the Jews can receive up to one-third of the seized property.”

>To achieve their goal, Grabowski explains, the Germans developed a system of prizes and punishments, which they intertwined in their propaganda against “the Jewish threat.” Punishment for hiding Jews, for example, could be death, arrest or fines. “Peasants, firefighters, elders, and Polish rural youth were forcibly made parts of the German system and were subject to brutal German reprisals and equally brutal German discipline,” Grabowski writes. At the same time, he observes that the "deadly efficiency" of this system depended on “the zeal and willingness of its participants.”

You can go get the book, and read it yourself. You can also read Anna Bikont's The Crime and the Silence, which is a journalists account of investigating the Jedwabne massacre desribed by Gross and contains interviews with witnesses, perpetrators and survivors. Either way, at the very least read the books instead of reflexively trying to fucking erase the horrible shit that people have done to make yourself feel better.

They doth protest too much to avoid confronting Polish anti-semitism. They still get asshurt as shown in this