Pamięć Polaków o zbrodni w Jedwabnem

Abstrakt

In 2000 and 2001 there was an ongoing public debate in Poland on the mass murder of the Jews in a little town of Jedwabne. The crime was committed in 1941 by local Poles encouraged by the Nazi German authorities who upon an outbreak of the German-Soviet war in 1941 took over from the Soviets a role of the occupying power. The debate began with a publication of ”The Neighbors”, a book by Jan Tomasz Gross, and was concluded with an apology expressed by Aleksander Kwaśniewski, a President of Poland, during a commemorative ceremony on the site of the crime. The debate was on the entirety of behavior and attitudes of the Poles towards the Holocaust and reached to the bottom of the Polish national identity heart. It is a very well documented debate but there is a problem with its social impact: what knowledge and what opinions on the Jedwabne crime remained in the minds of the Poles, especially in the minds of the ”common people”, not the elite. The article answers this question citing the findings of the social surveys carried out in 2002 and 2011.