Birthplace And Neighbors: A Comparative Analysis

Birthplace and Neighbors are sources about wartime Poland and were written and filmed in the 1990s. These two documents have similar revelations about wartime Poland, however, they are presented through two ways bearing witness, Birthplace, and writing history, Neighbors. There are tensions and benefits to both pieces. Importantly, both are critical for understanding the complexity of wartime Poland. Bearing witness is personal and intimate with an attempt at closure. While history can be confrontational, a force to understand the complexity of the past and ask larger questions about the past. Jan Gross author of Neighbors uses the Jedwabne program to reveal the complexity of Jewish-Polish relations and to displace the myth of Poles solely …show more content…
Both cases highlight the want to take the Jewish property and view Jews as having more than others. Memories of horrendous acts last in the minds of those who witness it, and in their communities. The Jedwabne program was preserved through the generations. Gross places Jedwabne in the larger context of Polish memory in towns where Jews were murdered, these memories are kept alive. There is a rural memory in Poland of what happened to their Jews. There are Poles who deny responsibility for Jedwabne, but the residents know the Jews were murdered by their neighbors. Gross is using Jedwabne for creating a greater "polish awareness to horrendous crime," that runs counter to their collective memory. He wants Poles to understand the complexity of what happened during the Holocaust in Poland. The memory of the killing of Abram and his son did not leave the people who saw it. But there is another side to memory is the people remember Grynberg. There is a rural memory that is alive in Poland that remembers their Jews. Individuals have these memories of his parents from childhood to their marriage and their sons, alongside the dugout, his father's, and brother's death, and where his father was buried. So many people knew what happened to his brother, and father because so many people saw what …show more content…
It is not a confrontation with the past, rather, it is simply the question of what happened. Birthplace opens the conversation about Polish-Jewish relations during the war, but it is through listening. There is a want to understand for the closure of the past. Neighbors are not for closure, instead, it is to rip apart and reconstruct the collective memory to reconcile it with history. History is to understand and embrace the complexity of the past. Bearing witness is to work for closure in the past.
Gross' writing is confrontational, asking for a revaluation of the understanding of Polish-Jewish relations, and for a changing of the collective memory of wartime Poland; historical writing forces to take the complexity of the past. While bearing witness is personal and intimate in a way that history is not and cannot be. While there are differences in the representation of these sources, both are part of understanding wartime Poland. These sources were created within years of each other, and both are an attempt to better understand rural experience in wartime