Suchergebnisse

Aus polnischer Sicht

This is an edited version of an interview conducted in 1991 and first published in New Politics 4, no. 2 (1993): 155–72. The editors of EEPS publish this version after the recent death of Karol Modzelewski, 1937–2019. In the 1991 interview, Modzelewski reflected on the difference between Solidarność 1980–1981 as a mass social movement and the very much changed Solidarność that in 1989 formed the first non-Communist government in the Soviet bloc. His comments have a premonitory relevance for Polish politics today.

A review essay on a book by Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Press, 2001). The nature of relations between the Jewish & Polish communities in Jedwabne circa 1941 is studied to determine factors responsible for the Jedwabne pogrom of the local Jewish community. Comparisons between the Jedwabne incident & the Anglo American community's 1921 massacre of African Americans in Tulsa, OK, are drawn to raise the question of why certain communities would commit such atrocities against ethnically different neighboring communities. The Polish religious & political communities' acknowledgments of the Jedwabne pogrom in 2001 are then considered to illustrate how Polish society has publicly denied its past wrongdoing. Gross's use of sasiedzi instead of blizni in the title of the Polish-language edition of the book is questioned since the former term denotes neighboring communities that have little interaction with each other. Additional attention is dedicated to examining the Polish community's receipt of the public apologies for the Jedwabne pogrom & whether such acknowledgments were motivated by material or religious & moral determinants. J. W. Parker