Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland |
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Jan T. Gross
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Pages: 272 (Paperback)
ISBN: 0099441667
Pub: Arrow Books Ltd
Pub date: 2003-02-06
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 76520
Reader Reviews:
very poor (0/0 people found this helpful)
Jan Gross in anti polish writer.Historians do not take J.Gross seriously but some ignorants in history can .Historians accusing Gross of ignoring sources which did not confirm his own views and labeling all of Polish society as antisemitic.
Very poor (5/12 people found this helpful)
I found this controversial book surprisingly easy to fault. This is not to say that this is what i set out to do; simply that as a History student i am careful in taking a critical attitude to history works. I would state the merits if there were enough of them. This is, for a start, an extremely short book (about 100 or so pages) with massive print, so that the overall length genuinely struck me as unusually short and suggests a lack of depth.
Perhaps the author is exceptionally effective in condensing his points? Sadly, this is not the explanation at all. Time and again, claims are made that are not backed up, questionable conclusions are reached, and a lack of genuine effort at unearthing the truth is betrayed. Few witnesses are mentioned, and the contradicting memories of that are seem to be missed by the author.
A very amateurish attempt at chronicling an extremely important aspect of the Second World War.
A tour de force by Jan Gross (6/10 people found this helpful)
The destruction of the Jewish community of Jedwabne has been a disturbing event in retrospect: innumerable Poles had participated in the deportation and elimination of the Jews in this small Polish town. Apart from moral issues, similar to pro-Antonescu Romanians who never waited for Hitler's henchmen to show up, there are serious problems concerning antisemitism and utilitarian opportunism in Jedwabne. Without giving away Gross' revelations, the book is a serious mindcracker for genocide scholars: when and why does a neighboring bystander community become a perpetrator, or a rescuer?
Jan Gross does not answer this disturbing question, but he DOES incite further research on this topic: why did some Hutus destroy their Tutsi neighbors? Why did Kurdish tribes participate in robbing and killing Armenians? Why didn't Bosnian Serbs or Croats hesitate to maltreat, rob and kill Bosnian Muslims?
The first step to answering these questions lies in reading Jan Gross' excellent study, "Neighbours".
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Categories
Amazon.co.uk places this book into the following categories:
Books -> Subjects -> History -> World History -> World War II 1939-1945 -> Countries -> Poland
Books -> Subjects -> History -> World History -> World War II 1939-1945 -> Origins
Books -> Subjects -> History -> World History -> World War II 1939-1945 -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> World History -> World War II 1939-1945 -> Battles & Campaigns -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Military History -> General AAS
Books -> Subjects -> History -> Military History -> Wars, Battles & Campaigns -> General AAS
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