Event Highlights: The Crime and the Silence with Anna Bikont and Irena Grudzinska Gross
On October 29, the Boston University Center for the Study of Europe welcomed Polish-Jewish journalist Anna Bikont, author of The Crime and the Silence, translator Alissa Valles, PhD student at the Editorial Institute, and Irena Grudzinska Gross, Resident Scholar and Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University for a conversation about a horrific act of violence committed in the 1940’s that was largely covered up until the year 2000.
In July of 1941 (during the German occupation of Poland), the half Jewish and half Catholic town of Jedwabne, Poland, experienced an atrocity when the Jewish inhabitants of Jedwabne were rounded up and abused. “Most of the young men were killed with farmer tools, with axes,” explains Bikont. “The whole Jewish population, the elderly, the women, the children—families often in number between six and eight children—all of them were hoarded into a barn and the barn was set on fire.” The massacre resulted in at least 340 deaths of Polish Jews.
Bikont began the conversation with an anecdote about how she first took interest in the Jedwabne massacre. Between 1982 and 1989, Bikont was a solidarity activist and was one of the founding journalists of Poland’s largest underground publication, Tygodnik Mazowsze, a weekly publication released by a group of women in some of Poland’s most dire times. She went on to co-found the polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza (meaning Electoral Gazette), which is still in publication today.
“I felt it would be fascinating to tell the story of what happened in a town that, after 60 years, out of the blue, a book appeared and they were confronted with history,” explains Bikont. Here, Bikont is referring to author Jan Gross’s book, Neighbors, published in 2000 as the first public documentation of the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne. After deciding that Bikont wanted to cover the story, she went to the Gazeta Wyborcza’s editor Adam Michnik. Michnik, however, didn’t want to publish fragments of Jan Gross’s book, nor did he want the topic to be written about again in Gazeta. “It was the first time that someone told me I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, and it was my newspaper!” exclaims Bikont. “I was so shocked about it that I asked for a leave, a one-year leave, and that is when I started to write the book.”
Originally conceived as a supplement to Jan Gross’s Neighbors, Bikont’s The Crime and the Silence blossomed into a terrifying but beautiful work – part history, part memoir – about the debate in Poland about the Jedwabne massacre in 1941 and about Bikont’s own struggle to raise her children as Jews in Poland in the last few decades. Her book, originally published in Polish, has been published in Warsaw and Czarne (Poland), France, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and in September, the United States.
With Bikont was her translator, Alissa Velles, She described the translating process in great detail, calling it “nightmarish” and touching upon trends in Holocaust literature. “If you spend any amount of time with this material, I think you start dreaming about it. But I think one of the things that drew me to this book, what made me want to translate it—because I asked Anna if I could, I wasn’t commissioned to do it—is the way it combines and contrasts a sort of traditional historical narrative with a personal narrative. Holocaust literature is dominated by traditional historiography on the one hand, which has its own beauties and difficulties and pitfalls, and memoirs on the other hand. I think it’s very rare and risky for a writer to combine those two because what happens when you read the book is that not only do you follow Anna’s research into what actually happened and the different desertions that occurred over time, but you follow her own process of self-scrutiny and her awareness of the intimate temptation of prejudice, of describing things in a certain way and that protects you from pain.”
The Crime and the Silence is an incredibly important portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its horrific truth from the perspectives of both heroes and perpetrators of the violence. Bikont expertly details the myths that were built upon hidden memories and what happens when a society refuses to accept a dark past.
Listen to the edited recording of this event on WBUR’s World of Ideas:
Toria Rainey ’18