To the Editor: August 3, 2001 George Will's article of July 9 in Newsweek (p.68) and the Wall Street Journal editorial "Poland's Reckoning" of July 12 parrot a false account now circulating about a tragic event that occurred sixty years ago. This account, born out of hatred, advances the preposterous notion that Poles in a German-occupied Polish town rose up in defiance of their German captors for the purpose of committing an atrocity against Jews, their neighbors. This "hate Poland" campaign maligns without veracity the people of Poland. In reality, by July 1941, Jedwabne was under brutal control, at gunpoint, by the Germans. Jedwabne was captured and occupied twice, first by the Soviet Union in Sept. 1939, and then by the Germans in June 1941. The German occupiers of Jedwabne installed ethnic Germans who could speak Polish to serve as the new town administration, including a new mayor who was a Polish-speaking German citizen born in Upper Silesia. On July 10, 1941, German police and SS-Troups, actively assisted by the new German mayor and other Polish-speaking Germans, conducted a horrible massacre of Jews by burning many of them in a small barn. The German occupiers temporarily locked the remainder of the local Jewish population in a ghetto newly created by the Germans near the marketplace of Jedwabne. Details of the massacre and its site currently are being investigated by the Institute of National Memory within the Ministry of Justice in Poland. Preliminary reports of this investigation indicate that some 200 victims are buried in the mass graves in Jedwabne resulting from this incident. Although most of these victims were Jews, there were a few Christian Poles as well. After the war an officer of the Soviet terror apparatus in Poland issued an order to inscribe on a marker at the site of the massacre that 1600 Jews were burned in the barn by the Germans. The Soviet policy was to overstate the number of people killed by the Germans in order to hide their own extensive executions. In Dec. 1940, figures by the Soviet occupiers indicate a total of 652 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne. So, none of the actual facts on the ground confirm the 1500 to 1800 Jewish victims as stated in current American press. But, of course, for the largely God-believing population of Poland, the murder of even one Jewish person is too many. The evidence that the atrocity was carried out by the Germans is abundant. A large number of spent German cartridges were found at the execution site, while the Polish population could not possess guns under threat of death by the German occupiers (and previously, the Soviet occupiers). The Germans had to use their own trained personnel to set suddenly the whole barn on fire. Under both Soviet and German occupations, Poles were not able to get gasoline, a scarce commodity that was saved for the occupational forces only. Many of the Jewish victims of the incident had personal objects indicating that they were prepared for a transport by the Germans to another locality. Thus, the Jews, as was the case of the Polish population of Jedwabne, did not suspect that the Jewish victims were entering a horrible death trap. Anyone familiar with atrocities carried out by Germans throughout the World War II recognizes that this style of mass execution was a German procedure of choice. Just nine days before the atrocity at Jedwabne, the chief architect of the Holocaust and head of the German terror apparatus, Reinhold Heydrich, issued an order to his SS-Troops. In this order he instructed them to not involve the Polish population in pogroms against the Jews. Heydrich pointed out that Polish leaders and other prominent Polish people were themselves targeted for execution by his Nazis forces. The only possible scenario is that the Germans who arrived from Ciechanow brought to Jedwabne several hundred gallons of gasoline in individual canisters. These canisters soon were to be used to simultaneously soak the walls of a barn from all sides and then to set the barn on fire ignited from a safe distance. In this manner professional killers of the Germans terror apparatus would produce the sudden fiery explosion, which engulfed immediately the entire barn with some 200 Jewish victims in it. This sudden engulfing with flames of the entire barn was reported by many eye witnesses. Engulfing the entire barn suddenly was necessary to carry out the mass murder; anything more limited would have allowed the victims to escape through the non-burning part of the barn. The false accounts of this German atrocity in the American press are based on a recent book, not by a historian, but by a sociologist, J. T.>Gross. Mr. Gross revealed his attitude toward Poland and the Polish people by picking a local hero of the Polish anti-German and anti-Soviet underground, Jerzy Laudanski, and making him the main villain of his controversial book "Neighbors." It is on record that Mr. Laudanski was tortured by the Gestapo in the notorious Pawiak prison in Warsaw; he did not betray anyone. He was transferred to Auschwitz, then to the Gross Rosen camp, and finally to Sachsenhausen near Berlin. In 1949 he was tortured to extract a false confession for a Stalinist show trial on Jedwabne. In this trial, he was sentenced by the communists to fifteen years of prison. Moreover Mr. Gross had the audacity to dedicate his book "Neighbors" to Shmul Wasserstein the interrogator and torturer for the Soviet terror apparatus in postwar Poland. Aleksander Kwasniewski, former sports-minister in the pre-1991 communist government and now the president of Poland, is given credit in the editorial "Poland's Reckoning" for apologizing "as a human being, a citizen, and the President of the Republic of Poland" for the atrocious crime committed in Jedwabne on Jewish men, women and children sixty years ago. His complete statement, however, is full of innuendoes, appeals to the supposedly guilty conscience of the Polish nation, and a veiled assumption of Polish national responsibility for the massacre. Mr. Kwasniewski thus violated the basic democratic principle of the independence of the judiciary from the executive branch of the government (i.e. the president). Without waiting for the conclusion of the ongoing official criminal investigation, he falsely accused the Poles of planning, initiating, and carrying out the burning of hundreds of Jews in the barn (as Mr. Gross insinuates in his "Neighbors"). I believe that this is a part of an effort, by the former communist elite, who are still in positions of power, to ally themselves with the Holocaust profiteers and to obscure the 45 years of the communists' crimes against the Polish people. Presently, they attempt to smear the Polish Resistance by accusing it of crimes against Jews. Thus, Mr. Kwasniewski and others in the clique of former communist oppressors are attempting to confuse many of the formerly oppressed Poles and their offspring. In the present state of affairs in Poland, people are voting their pocketbook in protest against the economic hardship brought on by the shock therapy of privatization and a serious loss of production; it has lead to nearly 20% unemployment while Polish exports became a small fraction of imports from the West and East. Consequently, many Poles now experience a lower standard of living than during most of the communist rule. In their desperation, they elected by a slim margin a president who was a minister in the former Soviet-controlled communist government. On the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal of April 11, 2001 the term "Holocaust profiteers" was coined in order to describe people accusing IBM of collaboration with the Nazis. In the meantime, that accusation against IBM has been withdrawn from the New York courts. Similarly, Mr. Gross, who alleged that 1600 Poles in Jedwabne murdered 1600 Jews supposedly living there, is now discredited by the results of the exhumation; he also is facing charges in Polish courts by the Laudanski family for slander and falsification of records. It is possible, although as yet unproven in this case, that a few criminals from the general population participated in the massacre, just as some criminals in the U.S. and elsewhere on occasion commit murder, rob, and destroy buildings. That there is absolutely no evidence that the Polish community committed this atrocity is consistent with a long-established fact:: the Jewish population thrived in Poland and for centuries dominated the Jewish culture in the world; the Jewish minority in the Polish State increased 75-fold from 1373 to 1764. The whole matter of using false accusations to vilify Poles as anti-Semites is personally painful to me: I am 50% disabled by 64>months of imprisonment by the Gestapo and in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. I am the author of a book, "Jews in Poland - A Documentary History - The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congress Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel" which clearly documents how the Jewish population grew significantly and thrived in Poland for most of the past millennium. And it must not be forgotten that in addition to three million Polish Jews another three million Christian Poles were killed in WWII. Poland thus lost six million citizens and suffered horrible terror and devastation from both the German Nazis and the Soviets, because it refused to align itself on the side of either Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. Modern-day authors, especially those repeating false accounts of others, must not be allowed to continue Hitler's work of division and hatred along ethnic lines. Sincerely, Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski P.O. Box 10037, Blacksburg, VA 24062 540-951-2343 Voice 540-951-1329 Fax iwo@bellatlantic.net