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PARTISAN REVIEW
To remove what is at best a half-truth, a self-protective distortion on
the part of the perpetrators or others wishing to ease the reputation of
Poles, hardly exhausts the reasons for publishing this harrowing
account. The headlines of the
New Yorker
article make that clear. They
come as a triple layer that starts with "Annals of War," proceeds to
"Neighbors," and adds, "One day in 1941, half the population of a
small town in Poland murdered the other half. Why?"
Journalism as a mode of reporting, even when the subject is an event
dating back many years, is characterized by conflicting trends: sensation–
alism, on the one hand, and rendering the sensational intelligible, on the
other. So, as in a macabre detective story, an irrational eruption in the
form of an unexpected corpse functions like a grisly question mark that
stimulates a lengthy search for a solution, one that uncovers more corpses.
The account itself begins with a date and location: "In January of 1949,
security police detained fifteen men in the town of Jedwabne in northeast–
ern Poland." This composition of place is an utterly conventional narra–
tive opening, yet makes sense if it elicits questions in the reader, especially
after the rest of the story with its many specific dates has been absorbed.
Why the hiatus between the end of the war and the trials of 1949? Why a
further hiatus between those trials and today's fuller disclosure? What is
the significance of the town being in northeastern Poland?
These questions are easily answered by the historian, but the up-front
specificity of date and place remains over-determined.
It
tells us this did
not happen "once upon a time" and in some country of the mind. The
historian must insist on the instant of happening, on these dates and not
others; moreover, the spontaneity of the massacre itself is part of the rid–
dle. Yet dates and actual place-names also limit by their very concrete–
ness the effect of what is told: it happened then and over there, and what
happened is "history."
This containment of the event turns another containment into a bitter
irony. The German commander, as reported, objected to the butchery
taking more than eight daylight hours. Why he objected we do not know.
Was it because of habitual Germanic or military precision, was it a taunt
to humiliate the Polish killers, or did he wish to make the conquered
Poles feel entirely controlled? Were those eight hours of murder insignif–
icant in his mind compared to the Nazi vision of a thousand-year
Reich?
A fictional telling not only could explore these motives but would not
need a double-edged rhetoric of specificity. Fiction's "once upon a time"
suggests "once and always." Jedwabne's condensation of time, more–
over, the fact that the slaughter was organized and evolved so swiftly, in
the space of a day or less, adapts it intrinsically to a precept of classical
