Symbolism In Jan Gross's 'Neighbors'

In Jan Gross’s Neighbors, one reads the story of a horrific pogrom committed by the inhabitants of Jedwabne (a village in Poland) against their Jewish neighbors. In the film Aftermath (Pokłosie; 2012) by Władysław Pasikowski, one finds a parallel—the film was inspired by the Jedwabne pogrom—but this time told sixty years after the fact. Both stories share a similar past: a small village inhabited by Poles, who, during the early days of the Second World War, committed a pogrom against their Jewish neighbors. In Neighbors, Gross discusses the circumstances before, during, and after the pogrom through legal documents culled from three Soviet trials stemming from a 1945 testimony by an eyewitness, a man named Szmul Wasersztajn, who described in …show more content…
This was symbolized during the film’s conclusion when the younger brother, Józef, was found nailed to the barn door, drawing a direct parallelism to how Christ was crucified. Further, the film and the book detail the brazenness of some Poles with regards to Jewish property, since, Franciszek discovers—after his brother was denied a bank loan on the basis that their father technically could not will the property—that the farm that they thought had been in their family for generations had once belonged to local murdered Jews. Their farmstead was not the only one, most of their neighbors’ properties had once belonged to the Jews that were killed in their village. As Gross states, those who committed the pogrom in Jedwabne could “drive material benefits from his actions… and go along with local peasants’ traditional” anti-semitism (Gross 162). Hence people freely claimed Jewish property as their own under the auspices that they had killed so many Jews within the village that there would be no relatives left to claim the properties, which was what Franciszek heard from the municipal records office when he went down to look at the property …show more content…
This was not an isolated incident of local collaboration since some participants came from a nearby village which had committed an earlier pogrom in June 1941 in the village of Radzilow. There, too, was another similar pogrom committed in Kielce by a Polish mob on “July 4, 1946… where forty-two Jews” were killed (Gross 146). While indeed Germans took some part in the pogrom of Jedwabne, their presence was starkly minimal, an eyewitness in 2000 said that “Neither on this day… nor on the preceding day did I see any Germans” in Jedwabne (Gross 69). A similar statement is shared according to the recollections of Julia Sokolowska, who said that “I did not see any Germans beating the Jews,” this is further corroborated with the recollections of Karol Bardon, who also said that “I did not see any gestapo men or gendarmes” in the courtyard of Jedwabne where the Jews were gathered during the pogrom. In Aftermath, the two brothers confront many of the villagers, who at first claim that Nazis (or “Krauts”) came, then soon the village’s Jews were gone, as if nothing really happened. Yet in the film’s closing moments, they hear the full story from the four the herbalist woman and the Headman that it was the villagers, not the ‘Krauts’ who murdered the Jews of