Buried, Filmed, Denied: Jedwabne of 10 July 1941,  October 7, and the Assault on Historical Truth

The Jedwabne massacre, of 10 July 1941, of its local Jewish community by a cohort of non-Jewish Polish neighbors entered public memory and history writing in Poland only after almost sixty years of silence. The Hamas massacre, of October 7, 2023, of Israelis at the Nova Festival and in local kibbutzim in southern Israel, accompanied by the abduction of 251 Jewish and non-Jewish individuals including, elderly, babies and toddlers, was filmed in real time by its perpetrators, victims, and survivors. Yet both massacres reveal that evidence alone cannot protect Jewish victims and survivors from anti-Jewish hatred, denial, distortion, and moral inversion.

For me, as a historian of the Holocaust and its memorialization and East European Jews, July 2026 has been an especially revealing month. It has brought into sharp focus the persistence of silence, the suppression of uncomfortable knowledge, and the continuous manipulation of historical truth. It has reminded me of something that historians know well: that truth does not protect itself. Historical truth must be researched, documented, communicated, taught, and defended systematcally. It must be defended not only against crude denial, but also against half-truths and lies, ideological manipulations, invented symmetries, and moral inversions. We must remain truthful to the truth even when the surrounding culture no longer wishes to hear it.

This July, two commemorations became connected in my mind. On 10 July, the eighty-fifth anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne was marked in Jedwabne, north-eastern Poland. Five days later, on 15 July, I visited the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on the final day of its London presentation. The exhibition was situated in a ‘hipster’ neighborhood of East London, tucked away behind a narrow alley and surrounded by visible security. Even its physical location seemed to communicate something about the present moment: the commemoration of murdered Jews and Israelis required protection, discretion, and vigilance in the British capital. The instructions on a ticket directed visitors down an unmarked alley before they reached the exhibition space.

What does the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne on 10 July 1941 have in common with the Hamas-organized and executed massacre in southern Israel on 7 October 2023?

I call them, metaphorically, “Two Jedwabnes.” However, let me be clear from the start that I do not use this phrase to suggest that the two events were historically identical. They were not. They took place in profoundly different political, military, geographical, and cultural settings. Nor do I equate October 7 with the Holocaust. Historical comparison must examine and illuminate difference as well as similarity; it must never flatten distinct histories into one another.

The connection lies elsewhere. Both were massacres of ordinary Jews, young and mature, male and female. Both were followed by deliberate attempts to displace the Jewish victims from the center of their own tragedy by portraying the respective perpetrators as victims and heroes. And both reveal how quickly Jewish victims and survivors can be denied the right to remain victims—how their suffering can be qualified, rationalized, politically instrumentalized and turned back against them.

What happened in Poland?

Poland during the Second World War was occupied by two totalitarian powers: Nazi Germany for more than five years and the Soviet Union for almost two. It was therefore a socially and morally complex world, marked by terror, political upheaval, competing loyalties, fear, opportunism, and violence. Yet the testimonies of non-Jewish eyewitnesses to the Jedwabne massacre—especially those who were young at the time and saw the murders with their own eyes—show a basic moral understanding: that the murder of unarmed Jewish men, women, and children was evaluated as wrong. Even when in the aftermath, local perpetrators intimidated witnesses and pressed them into silence, the distinction between good and evil was not extinguished. Today, in the digital and post-truth era, that elementary moral boundary appears increasingly lost if not lost for good in some circles. We saw this in the celebrations and rationalizations of the October 7 massacre not only among supporters of political Islam, but also among sections of the Western radical left, including academicians, students, journalists and medical staff, who describe themselves as human-rights activists and anti-racists.

The first Jedwabne: a massacre during an interregnum

On 10 July 1941, several hundred Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne—men, women, children, and elderly people—were humiliated, beaten, and murdered. Many were driven into a local barn and burned alive. The perpetrators were non-Jewish Polish inhabitants of the town and surrounding area. Of course, Germans created the political and military conditions in which the massacre took place. An official Polish state investigation carried out by the Institute of National Memory under the chairmanship of Prof. Leon Kieres concluded, in 2002, that at least 340 Jews were murdered in the barn.

The massacre occurred during a particular moment of political transition—what historians have described as a period of interregnum between two occupations. The Soviet administration and Red Army had just fled the area after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. German forces had entered the territory, but the new occupation’s administrative and coercive apparatus had not yet been fully consolidated. Yet the rapid collapse of one political order and the not-yet-complete establishment of another created a volatile space in which local actors pursued antisemitic hostility, political revenge, material enrichment, opportunism, and personal vendettas.

Jedwabne was neither an isolated eruption nor a uniquely local aberration. As two Polish historians........

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