Shouldn't Jews also admit their guilt for collaborating with the Bolsheviks in sending Poles to Siberia or prison . . . or for the leading role played (in post-war Poland) by the Communist secret police of Jewish ancestry? -- Cardinal Glemp, in the Niedziela interview

New York Monday, May 28, 2001

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Polish Church Apologizes for 1941 Massacre of Jews

By Rob Strybel

WARSAW (Reuters) -- Poland's Roman Catholic Church was taking an important step to improve relations with the Jewish community Sunday by apologizing for the Poles who took part in a massacre of up to 1,600 Jews during World War Two.

The 1941 massacre in the town of Jedwabne came to prominence last year with the publication of "Neighbors," a book by émigré scholar Jan Gross, who alleged that Poles, not occupying Nazi Germans, had brutally murdered Jews and taken their possessions.

"We wish to apologize above all to God, but also to the wronged, on behalf of those Polish citizens who committed evil against citizens of the Mosaic faith," Polish Primate Jozef Glemp said in an interview in the Catholic weekly Niedziela.

An expiation service being held in Warsaw's biggest church, near the site of the former Jewish Ghetto, was to include a prayer by Polish-born Pope John Paul, a champion of Christian-Jewish reconciliation.

But the service was unlikely to succeed in bringing Catholics and Jews together since it coincided with the Shavout, a major Jewish holiday.

The American-born rabbi of Warsaw and Lodz, Michael Schudrich, said in a letter to Glemp he could not attend the service because "I cannot be in two temples at once."

Gross's book ignited one of the country's biggest national debates since the 1989 collapse of communism in Poland, a staunchly Roman Catholic country.

Jewish circles expressed satisfaction that the blame was finally being placed where it belonged. But many Poles, accustomed to viewing themselves as war victims and heroes, resent being regarded as co-perpetrators of the Holocaust.

"Neighbors" describes how the Jedwabne Jews were bludgeoned, beaten and stabbed to death by their Polish neighbors, and how most were herded into a barn and burned alive, but many details of the case remain unclear.

Historians and journalists have questioned whether the Jedwabne Poles had acted on their own, as Gross maintains, or were forced to cooperate at gunpoint by the Germans.

Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, who had occupied the Jedwabne area for nearly two years prior to Germany's invasion, has also been cited as a possible motive for the pogrom, a point repeatedly raised by the Church.

"Shouldn't Jews also admit their guilt for collaborating with the Bolsheviks in sending Poles to Siberia or prison ... or for the leading role played (in post-war Poland) by the Communist secret police of Jewish ancestry?" Cardinal Glemp asked in the Niedziela interview.

Poland's National Remembrance Institute (IPN) has started an investigation into the massacre and promised to bring those responsible to justice. Half a century ago, 23 Poles were sentenced for complicity in the massacre.

The IPN, a state body probing war crimes, is now supervising the exhumation of the mass grave in Jedwabne to determine the exact number of victims and how they died.

The Church has often been at loggerheads with Jews over a variety of issues in Poland, including a Catholic nunnery and religious symbols at the Auschwitz death camp, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the war.

In the mid-1990s, Pope John Paul had to intervene to remove the nunnery from the vicinity of the Auschwitz camp, viewed by the Jews as their biggest burial ground in the world.

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