Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Deliverance, by Michael Maik. 2004

Jewish Source: Jedwabne Murderers Were Germans, Not Poles. So the Germans Own Jedwabne Massacre

Jedwabne was a German deed. Author Michael Maik writes,

“Refugees from Jedwabne and Radzilow arrived, who were coincidentally saved from death, and who saw with their own eyes and felt the hell on their flesh. With the help of local farmers, the Germans gathered the Jews of these places, with the rabbi and leaders of the community at the front, in the market square. At first, they beat them cruelly and forced them to wrap themselves in their tallitot, to jump and dance, accompanied by singing. All this was done under an unceasing flood of lashes from cudgels and rubber whips. At the end, they pushed all the Jews, while beating and kicking them, into a long threshing house and set it on fire with them inside. This was the end of Jedwabne and Radzilow.” (pp. 38-39).

Note what Maik says and does not say. He says that Poles were involved as accomplices in the roundup of Jews. He does not say that Poles participated willingly, and, more important,  does NOT say that Poles were involved in the actual German burning of the Jew-filled barn.

Michael Maik, who died in 1967, couldn’t know that his diary would, at very least, cast reasonable doubt on the media-promulgated account of Jan T. Gross, who would have us believe that Poles spontaneously conducted the massacre, while Germans merely stood around and took pictures!

For another Jewish source that affirms the Germans, and not the Poles, as the main killers of Jedwabne’s Jews, see my review of: THE WARRIORS, by Harold Zissman:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/jedwabne-german-deed-zissman/