Massacre continues to haunt

Were Polish Jews killed by Nazis or neighbours?

Time has been cruel to Jedwabne, yet there are few signs now of the horror that this village witnessed almost 60 years ago.

With Poland under German occupation, a terrible massacre took place here, which decades later has divided and horrified the Polish people.

The nation is now questioning its own innocence and the crimes committed against the Jews.

In July 1941, it is alleged, 1,600 people were murdered here, killed not by the Nazis but by ordinary Poles.

Whole day of killing

"It's a very dramatic incident. It lasted a whole day and there was a lot of killing and torture going on," said the historian Jan Tomasz Gross.

Jedwabne - "A whole day of massacre"

"Half of the population, ethnically Polish, murdered the other half, their Jewish neighbours and German involvement in this was rather minimal.

"This was a very dramatic explosion of violence in which neighbours turned against neighbours and have committed this horrendous act".

He said the pogrom culminated in hundreds of Jews being forced into a barn and burned to death. His book on the murders has shocked Poland and kicked off a nationwide debate.

Evidence rejected

But the people of Jedwabne feel wronged.

The timber yard is one of the few thriving businesses in the battered village. Its owner - far too young to have witnessed the incident - speaks for many in rejecting the evidence.

Nazi caricature of the Jews

"It has been written that there were 1,600 people, but it is impossible to put all those people that live here in a small barn like that. It is impossible," she said.

Another resident Frankicev Karvovski, was just a boy when the massacre happened. He remembers seeing smoke from the burning barn containing the Jews.

He says some in his family offered them protection, but it's clear other villagers took part in the pogrom. Contradicting the historian, he claims they were forced to kill by the Germans.

Forced to kill

"I think Germans started it. It's possible they had joined these hooligans but also my uncle who lived here in Jedwabne, he was forced by the Germans.

"They told him to beat, they gave him stick or something to join. When Germans didn't look he would just let these Jews pass.

"This was German order - even those hooligans I told you about, they were also forced but I think they went too far. They did too much".

Dariusz Yakimovic of the Borderland Cultural Projects says a decade after they won their freedom from Communism, the Poles are for the first time looking critically at their own role on the Holocaust.

Painful truth

"Some people do not understand why the Jewish population has so much negative approach towards Polish people," he said.

Did Poles carry out Hitler's lethal work?

"I want to live in a world where the truth is spoken, you know, even if it's painful: that I can look into the eye of a Jewish person without knowing that there is something behind which we did not speak about yet".

It's true that many Poles did indeed protect and hide Jews from the Nazis at great risk to themselves. Yet for Jan Tomasz Gross that's only part of the truth - the record needs to be set straight.

Horrible fate

"Unfortunately, the Polish population - in a variety of ways - assisted the Germans in persecuting the Jews. There was a multitude of citizen initiatives, as a result of which thousands and thousands of Jews suffered a horrible fate," he said.

Now a high-level historical investigation is under way to get at the truth of the Jedwabne massacre. Its findings are unlikely to please the inhabitants of this tiny windswept town.

Polish crimes can't be equated with those of the Nazis, but the truth could prove painful nonetheless.