Massacres of Podlachie

In the small towns of Podlachia, on the borderlands of Poland and Belarus, the arrival of the Germans was followed by a series of massacres committed by the Polish neighbours of the victims, under the watch of or with the encouragement of German detachments but by their own hands. In Wąsosz, in Radziłów, and then in Jedwabne, the Jewish population was gathered in the town square, beaten, then locked in a barn that was set on fire. Szczuczyn and Tykocin followed.

Jedwabne has become the name for this entire sequence following the book by Jan Tomasz Gross, which opened in Poland a public debate of rare intensity and led the Institute of National Memory to reopen the inquiry, with partial exhumation. What these towns compel us to look at is not the German order but what it made possible in places where it did not need to be given.