Jedwabne – it's not what you think

“It happened the next day after we made the discovery that changed everything. We were one step away from getting answers. Suddenly, everything stopped.” 

These were the words of Professor Malgorzata Grupa when speaking to the journalist, Wojciech Sumliński. Grupa was the chief of the archaeological team conducting exhumation of the remnants of the Jewish victims of mass murder in Jedwabne that took place on July 10, 1941. The work was commissioned in March 2001 by the Polish Council for the Commemoration of the Martyrology of the Polish Nation (Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk I Męczeństwa).  

This was in response to the international scandal and accusations made by some Jewish organizations claiming that Poles and not Germans were the perpetrators of the war crime on Jews of Jedwabne. In the light of these accusations, forensic analysis was justified to clear the Polish name. The field dig was carried out by a team of Polish archaeologists and anthropologists from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, led by the international authority Professor Andrzej Kola, and by forensic pathology experts from the Medical Academy in Białystok, and was conducted under strict supervision from the Jewish officials and religious leaders. The exhumation in Jedwabne was the key to understanding what could have happened there, how many victims were there, and how they died. 

Polish history, especially those parts about the second world war and the occupation of Poland, is very complicated.  To make this long, convoluted story as simple as possible, here is what we know vs. what some Jewish organizations claim and what they told the world about the Jedwabne murder. According to the Jewish claims, on July 10, 1941, 

Polish residents of Jedwabne murdered 1,600 Jewish residents by bestially beating them, raping, humiliating them, and finally burning them alive in a barn. The Jews were forced to dismantle and carry a vast concrete monument of Lenin; they were forced to sing “the war happened because of us” as they walked to the barn. After they were burnt inside the barn using gasoline, the Poles robbed the bodies. All this happened while there were no Germans in town. Poles simply woke up and carried out the horrific pogrom. 

This narrative is an incredible distortion of facts, dismissing all Polish eye-witnesses and defying everything we know about the reality of the occupation of Poland. The story is taken out of context without any references to the complexities and the dynamics of everyday life under the occupation, first Soviet and later German, in the area where Jedwabne is located in Eastern Poland. 

On top of that, the only official version that is acknowledged by most Jewish academics and historians is based on the Jewish witnesses, most of whom were not even in Jedwabne or whose knowledge was second or ever third-hand obtained from other people. Most testimonies contradict each other, and their statements have no consistency and reliability that often sound stereotypical and implausible with inflated numbers and exaggerated details.

To understand even a fraction of the convoluted political games in play here, let me briefly outline the situation in Eastern Poland during the second world war. In September 1939, Germans and Soviets attacked Poland hand-in-hand, according to their secret agreement called Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Stalin and Hitler divided Poland and brutally dealt with ethnic Poles. Over 1.5 million Poles from the Eastern territories, then under the Soviet occupation, were killed or exiled to labor camps in Siberia, from where most never returned.

 Ethnic Jews played a prominent role in this; some came with the Soviet army, and some were residents who enthusiastically denounced the Poles to the Soviets for ideological or economic reasons. Polish witnesses testify that many Jews reveled in repeating to the Poles, “Your Poland is no more.” The Soviets hunted particularly for those men who fought in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920, in which Poles stopped the Bolshevik revolution from moving toward Poland and further toward Western Europe. 

One witness remembered how his father hid under a large down blanket his mother made, and his mother put the five children on top to cover him from the Soviets barging into the house. His sisters, teenagers at the time, remembered the cries “Jews are coming, Jews are coming,” followed by the Soviet soldiers bayoneting men 16 years old and older. Another example, one of the leaders of the Soviet Army attacking Poland was Semyon Krivoshein, a Jew. 

Local Jews became in charge of the administration and treated ethnic Poles with brutality. Poles saw them as the enemy.

In 1941, Germany attacked its former ally, the Soviet Union. When Germans invaded Eastern regions of Poland, previously under the Soviet occupation, the first thing they did was search for the Soviet communist agents who they were convinced operated in those areas. 

They could not afford to have enemy partisan groups behind their backs as they advanced toward the Soviet Union. One of the major German war strategies was pitting ethnic groups against each other, and knowing the political and ideological hostility between the Poles and the Jews, they took advantage of this. They blamed their own operations on the local Polish population, who supposedly took murderous revenge on the Jews. 

In the Polish archives, there are documents issued by Hitler and his high commanders in June 1941, calling for the formation of the special armed units, Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, that would swiftly operate in the Białystok/Łomża district, targeting in brutal reprisal upon communist Jews and those who fought on the side of the Soviet Union. 

These mass murders were conveniently photographed and filmed by the Germans and later shown as propaganda material to the Germans at home and to the world audiences. Polish witnesses testify about reading the news on “Polish murder” in Jedwabne and seeing photographs printed in the German newspaper in Łomża.

Witnesses remember those times and testify consistently what the atmosphere was around Jedwabne during the war. A father hid for years, first from the Soviets and local Jews and later from Germans. They sustained themselves on what they called soup and what, in reality, was sewer water stuffed with cockroaches. 

Another man remembers how as a 6-years old child, he ran away from the German soldier, and the German amused himself out of momentary boredom by shooting at him. He remembers jumping from one leg to another, skipping bullets. A grandmother remembered that waking up in the morning, and they wouldn’t know what language would be spoken today and who the prime enemy would be; the battlefront was moving so swiftly and so violently from one side to another. They lived under the bombs and bullets every day.

After the war ended, the Soviets, now the Western allies and victors, took over Poland and imposed the brutal Stalinist regime with the murderous UB Security Agency feared by all Poles as its executor. The Soviet Jews returned, again taking revenge on the patriotic Poles. Polish heroes who fought against Germans and rescued Jews, such as Witold Pilecki or Kazimierz Leski, were persecuted based on false accusations from the Stalinists of collaboration with Germans; they were tortured and killed or imprisoned for over ten years. Their murderers were the very same Jews they rescued after decades of cover-up and whitewashing, power-hungry twisted monsters whose identities are not well known today. The world is so focused on German crimes that the Soviet crimes seem less attractive. 

The same happened to the 14 Polish men accused in the Jedwabne murder. They were members of the local underground resistance, active during the Soviet occupation. The Stalinists arranged their mock trials based on forced testimonies from local farmers, often illiterate, who “signed” their false testimonies under torture, blaming the Jedwabne Poles for the crime and collaboration with Germans.

So here is a really interesting part. In 1948, the court in Łomża prosecuted a ring of criminals extorting properties remaining after the Jews were murdered in Jedwabne. Seventeen local Jews and two Poles were sentenced for representing themselves falsely to be the murdered victim’s legal heirs. Eljiasz Grądowski was one of the ring’s leaders. At that time, it would not occur to anyone to question who committed the crime in Jedwabne. When registering their rights to inherit, the criminals consistently testified that their deceased relatives were “burned in Jedwabne by Germans on July 10, 1941”. Eljiasz Grądowski stated that he “saw everything with his own eyes.” Jewish historians who today claim Polish guilt have never discovered this detail – it was hidden for decades until one of the Polish archives’ security personnel found it. This defies all lies about Polish responsibility for the crime.

According to Polish witnesses, many Germans were in Jedwabne on that day. Germans beat, terrorized, and forced some Poles to participate. One woman’s husband came home with swollen and bloodied face after a German soldier beat him with the butt of his gun. Another woman testified how a German soldier held his gun to her daughter’s head. Poles were in panic. At that time, going to a forest or having unauthorized food was punished by death. Poles had no arms and no gasoline. Putting together a murder of that magnitude was simply not possible without Germans.

Some witnesses testified that the Germans brought the so-called Mazurs, Polish citizens speaking Polish but loyal to Germany. Similarly, there were the so-called Volksdeutsche, Polish citizens of German roots, often born in Poland, speaking perfect Polish but with loyalty to Germany. So, the so-called Poles blamed for the crime were probably those Poles who we cannot associate with the patriotic population fighting against the Germans (and the Soviets) as Western allies. 

The number of Jewish victims is also unrealistically inflated by Jewish historians. One Polish witness stated that her grandparents' house was built out of the wood of one pine. It had one small room and a kitchen. The barns were not much larger. From the technical point of view, no barn in Jedwabne could hold 1,600 people, no matter how thin. Professor Kola’s team assessed the maximum number of victims at 400.

In the Polish archives, there are documents describing the orders and activities of Einsatzgruppen in the Lomza district under the command of Hermann Schaper. The German courts prosecuted Schaper in 1967 for war crimes, but he was acquitted due to his poor health, and the Poles received information from Hamburg that the entire evidence in Schaper‘s case was destroyed. Incredible! What a magical coincidence!

And finally, there is the main witness in the case of Jedwabne, A Polish Jew, who was hidden and saved by the village Poles, Szmul Wasersztajn, on whose testimony in the late 1940s and 1950s the entire accusation against Poles was based. 

It turned out he was away from Jedwabne on the day of the crime, and it was discovered during the 1967 and 2000 investigations that he was an undercover Stalinist UB agent (security agency that all Poles feared) and therefore was associated with Poland’s enemies in whose interest it was to smear Poland. Other Jewish “witnesses repeated his lies,” and the stereotype was passed around the world.

But this case goes much deeper. Some Jewish organizations today accuse Poles of being complicit in the Holocaust and demand $300 billion in compensation. They also claim the so-called “heirless” properties in Poland, a case which very much resembles the extortions that happened in Jedwabne in 1948. During the second world war, Poland was razed to the ground, destroyed by 85%, and later rebuilt by its citizens out of their own meager funds; the claim seems incredibly lucrative considering the prosperous condition of many of those properties today. A condition they were never in before.

The legal and moral ground is being carefully prepared. The international consensus needed to introduce new laws addressing World War II compensation from Poland is being built patiently. In schools around the world today and in the United States, students are taught about the Jewish Holocaust but don’t hear anything about Poland. Poland on whose lands the entire drama played out, the battles, the resistance, the German concentration camps, and the suffering of the ethnic Poles, is completely ignored, silenced. The Yad Vashem historians post “educational” videos that I call “miseducation,” such as that by Yehuda Bauer, who claims that World War Two started in June 1941, that Germans really never wanted the war, and that the Soviet Union was occupied, nonsense out of this world.

The Bielski Brothers, Jewish Soviet partisans, who by their own admission were never in battle with Germans but instead plundered and pillaged the local Polish civilians torturing them and cutting them to pieces with axes, are today portrayed by Hollywood as “heroes” in movies such as Defiance with Daniel Craig in the leading role. 

With the phrases all over the media, such as “Polish concentration camps” and the word “Germans,” absent from this narrative, it seems the ground is being prepared for the new version of history in which Nazis are Polish, and the Germans thank the Western Allies for “liberating them from the Nazis.” With this narrative in mind, in ten years, the world's public opinion, the new brainwashed generation of judges, lawyers, and journalists will have no problem thinking it is justified that Poland paid a horrific price of billions of dollars to the Jewish Holocaust industry. 

No one seems to be willing to confront one subject that became a favorite taboo, but which the Poles have every right to ask: what were the Jews doing when they were in the position of power when they could help the Poles and fight for “their” country when ethnic Poles were being oppressed and murdered by the Soviets in 1939-1941? It is estimated that over 250,000 Jews joined the Soviets during their attack on Poland in 1939. 

They violently fought against the Polish underground resistance AK, which battled the Germans. Staggering numbers.

I recently heard an audacious statement from one of the Jewish historians who said, "Polish underground resistance AK, did not take care of Polish Jews properly; therefore Polish Jews did not owe Poland anything.” Amazing mentality. At its most active period, AK Polish Home Army counted 350,000 fighters, out of which 100,000 were killed in battle, in prisons, and in concentration camps. 

The fighters managed rescue operations for roughly 4,000 of those imprisoned and tortured. They didn’t even manage to rescue General “Grot” Rowecki, who Gestapo murdered. They never managed to attack and conquer any of the concentration camps. This means one in three or four Polish fighters was killed. Did this release their families or other fighters from loyalty to their country? Of course not. Poles volunteered; they fought in the Warsaw Uprising, where 200,000 civilians were killed. 

They resisted and fought; if they couldn’t fight in Poland, they fought in other countries. England and France, and they never asked why they should be dying for others. So, the complaints of some Jews that Poland did not do enough for them and, therefore, they were released from loyalty is pathetic. 

The Bielski Brother partisans, Polish citizens who allied themselves with the Polish enemy, should have been court marshaled and shot for treason. They would have been in any other modern Western country. Instead, they are celebrated as “the fighters.”

Jedwabne seems to be just smoke and mirrors to pave the way to the international consensus in which all will agree on the new narrative. 

As Angela Merkel said, the world seems to be slowly accepting this new understanding that World War II began in 1941 and Germans were liberated from the Nazis. In 2020, when the world was preoccupied with the Coronavirus pandemic, the United States quietly signed the so-called JUST Act, s. 447, adding a new element of pressure on Poland about giving away heirless properties to Jewish Organizations in the United States and Israel. I see this blaming Poland for the Germans' crimes as the world's greatest moral failure since it refused to believe Polish reports in 1942 describing what Germans were doing to the Polish and Jewish population on Polish-occupied lands.

So, what happened next during the Polish attempt to get to the truth in the case of Jedwabne?

“It was incredible. I have never encountered anything like this,” Professor Grupa continued in her conversation with Sumlinski. “The Chief Rabbi of Jews in Warsaw and Łódź, Michael Schudrich, was on the phone all the time. With Israel, with Washington D.C., he seemed very agitated. He scrutinized our every move. “

Every team member of the archaeological group from Torun had over one thousand hours of exhumation experience behind their belt before they were hand-picked to conduct the exhumation at the site of the murder in Jedwabne. Every day, the Polish archaeologists made discoveries that confirmed what all local Poles knew: Germans committed the crime in Jedwabne.

Under the remnants of the barn, they found shells type Mauser and type Mosin, bullets, igniter, and detonator with German inscriptions, which would suggest that arms were fired at the site of the murder. This means Poles could not have been the ones shooting because they had no arms; they were not allowed under the death penalty. 

They also could not have had gasoline; they were not allowed; they had no automobiles, motorcycles, or power tools. Life in Jedwabne was simple; people moved on horse carriages. On May 24th and 25th, the archaeologists discovered golden wedding bands, golden chains, silver pocket watches, and more shells type Mauser 7.92 millimeter. This meant that all those precious pieces were there for several decades. The Poles did not rob the bodies. Some of the shells found in the grave were intact, interpreted as coming from bullets that hit the human body, preventing the metal from distortions caused by the heat of the burning barn. This meant the victims were shot at. Only Germans could do it.

Finally, on May 30, the scientists found another shell type, Mauser caliber 7.92, but not the presence of the shell was essential but “where” it was found. This discovery led to the investigation's collapse and the commotion caused by the Jewish representatives. Professor Grupa describes the screams, scenes, threats, and intimidation from the accompanying Jewish overseers. The dig was shut down.

So, what was the discovery? The shell came from a bullet fired by the type of machine gun Germans designed in 1939 and issued about 1,700 as prototypes to be tested on the battlefield. The only ones to have those guns were, therefore, the Germans. And the shell was found in the depth of no less than 60 cm (23 inches), “under” the remnants of the concrete statue of Lenin. Underneath, there were remnants of the group of victims carrying the statue. 

They were shot “before” burning the barn, and the bullet had to be there at that time. It couldn’t have been inserted there later; it was impossible, the ground was untouched for decades, and the statue was too heavy to move. 

This is indisputable proof that the Germans fired the shot. There is no other reasonable explanation. The interpretation is straightforward. Germans murdered the Jedwabne Jews as they murdered the Jews in other nearby villages, in the same pattern, using the same methods, filming the crimes and blaming them on the Poles. And this lie is repeated today by groups of people who should be the first moral guardians of history. Instead, they exploit human tragedy and emotions for monetary gain and political power. Shameful.

Assistance with translation and Joanna Pietruszeski