“Even those who come at the book from a historical and geographical distance will be obliged to pace themselves. It is not just a question of taking in individual spasms of bestial cruelty. It is also a broader question: the rate at which we can stomach the truths of man’s inhumanity to man, and ruminate on their causes.”
“When the Germans returned to Jedwabne in July 1941, they would have had fresh in their minds the directive issued days earlier, on June 29, by Reinhard Heydrich, then chief of the Reich Main Security Office: No obstacles should be placed in the way of aspirations toward self-cleansing in anti-Communist or anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied territories. Rather, such aspirations should be provoked without leaving traces, and if need be they should be intensified and led onto the right track…. The aim is to produce popular local pogroms.”
“One of the broad conclusions of prosecutor Ignatiew’s investigation, which ran parallel with Bikont’s own, came as a shock to her: namely, “how universal the tendency to lie is in this case.” The number of Poles who swore they saw Germans organize and carry out the massacre, with specific memories of personnel, uniforms, and military equipment, amounts to a kind of mass hallucination; or it would, except that the inventiveness of memory makes the various accounts mutually contradictory.”
“It is this relish for killing and the flaunting of spoils that asks us the hardest question. We can identify proximate causes of what happened: the extreme anti-Semitism of public life, the moral trahison of the professional classes, the particular circumstances by which Jedwabne and nearby towns changed hands in wartime, the age-long resentment of those who are different, and so on. These are the small “whys,” which lead us to an overwhelming “why”—one at which language as well as thought often fails.”
“God taking leave of absence for a day? Satan slipping into town? Demons awakening? For those with a nonreligious, and more mechanistic view of the world, explanation might be slightly easier, though no less bleak. It will tend to be located in a lack—a loss—of the imagination, a kind of mass autism, and a habituation to the banality of evil.”
“As the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising put it, “There’s something in man that makes him like killing.””
“In medieval times, it was a tradition at Jewish prayers to read out long lists of the names of those who had died in pogroms. This led to the creation of “books of memory.” Bikont’s book is more than a book of memory. It is also a book about forgetting, about the pollution of memory, about the conflict between the easy, convenient truth and the awkward, harder truth. It is a work that grows from its journalistic manner and origins into the powerful writing of necessary history.”