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Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, âThe Massacre in Jedwabne, July 10, 1941: Before, During, Afterâ (Columbia UP, 2005)
Description: On July 10, 1941, Poles in the town of Jedwabne together with some number of German functionaries herded nearly 500 Jews into a barn and burnt them alive. In 2000, the sociologist Jan Gross published a book about the subject that, very shortly thereafter, started a huge controversy about Polish participation in the Holocaust. In the furor that followed, many simply took it for granted that Grossâs interpretation of what happenedâthat radically anti-Semitic Poles murdered the Jews with little prompting from the Germansâwas simply correct. But was it? This is the question Marek Jan Chodakiewicz tries to answer in The Massacr...