President Bush handled adroitly the assumption of responsibility and liability for the recent air accident in response to Chinese demands for an apology. It should be a timely example for Poland's president A. Kwasniewski because, strangely enough, an apology-mania is spreading among politicians in Poland, as if apology, with all its legal implications, was equivalent to an expression of regret.

Current Polish apology-mania was stimulated recently by a propaganda booklet Neighbors written by New York sociologist J. T. Gross apparently frustrated by his obscurity.

It appears that Gross wrote Neighbors in order to finally attract attention. In the process he demonstrated an extraordinary hatred for the Polish people.

He alleges that in 1941 Polish neighbors murdered their Jewish neighbors while Germans tried to protect at least some of the victims. The booklet about events of 60 years ago is based on selected and anecdotal reports manipulated to make it a thrilling horror tale - a fiction passing for a documentary.

Gross's previous books were ignored by critics in the United States, but now he is basking in the limelight of publicity created by his accusations against Poles while under Soviet and German occupation.

The case in point is a massacre of allegedly 1600 Jews in the town of Jedwabne where in Dec. 1940 the NKVD registered only 652 Jews. In Summer of 1941 Germans entered Jedwabne and brought with them Polish-speaking ethnic Germans to serve as Gestapo controlled new town administration to replace their Soviet predecessors. On July 10, 1941 German police and military, actively assisted by the new mayor and the local hooligans (who did not know German plans), conducted a horrible massacre of local Jews by burning many of them in a small barn. The reminder of local Jews was locked up in a new ghetto created near the marketplace. Details of the massacre can only be established by forensic evaluation based on exhumation and search of the site. After the war an officer of the Soviet terror apparatus ordered to inscribe on a marker on the site of the massacre that 1600 Jews were burned in the barn by the Germans. Uncritically, Gross accepts this number. The Soviets had a policy to overstate the number of people killed by the Germans, perhaps to hide the number of victims of their own postwar executions. Gross dedicated his book to Szmul Wasersztajn, who according to the Catholic Information Agency (KAI, Warsaw, 2,28,01) was a member of communist secret police under the NKVD and used the name "Calka,". Several versions of Wasersztajn's dairies are on record. In them he depicts the tragedy of Jedwabne on the basis of hearsay even though he himself did not see the tragic events as he was hiding in another location. Gross describes a soccer game played by local Poles using freshly cutoff bleeding head of a Jewish victim. There is no evidence that this ever happened. It was rejected together with the entire Wasersztajn diary even by the NKVD supervised post WWII communist court when Jews Jakub Berman and Goldberg-Rózanski headed the communist terror apparatus. Gross's narrative is mainly based on communist prosecutors' files and he describes Polish resistance as "bands."

However, even communists political police, in contradistinction to Gross, considered the Wasersztajn's depositions worthless for their show-trial of Polish anti-communists in Jedwabne.

In one of his earlier publication, Gross himself documented the prevalence of Jews among NKVD agents in Poland. Therefore, it is pertinent to quote Simon Wiesenthal who said on his eightieth birthday:"I know what kind of role Jewish communists played in Poland after the war. And I as a Jew, do not want to shoulder responsibility for Jewish communists, I can not blame 36 million Poles for those thousands of [wartime] extortionists." Typically no Jewish survivor of the war has been tried in the courts in Israel, no matter how terrible crimes he might have committed in Europe during or immediately after the war.
Who is to express regrets for the collaboration between the "Jewish committees" and the NKVD in Soviet occupied Poland? Then, the last memory of Poland by many a Polish citizens before the door was slammed shut on a boxcar bound for Siberia was that of a Jewish communist militiaman slamming the door. (There was no similar collaboration between Polish Catholics and the Nazis for example.) However, the problem of an apology by the Jews for collaboration is more complicated. Let us consider the fact that the last experience of Jewish victims packed into boxcars, bound for the gas chambers, was that of a Jewish ghetto policemen slamming shut the death car door. Available data indicate that an average Jewish policeman in the Warsaw Ghetto sent to gas chambers about twenty two hundred victims. In this tragedy what kind of an act of contrition is due and by whom? - Polish Catholics do not seek reparations, moral or financial, for procommunist activities of their Jewish compatriots which included executions and deportations to the gulag archipelago . They hope that mutual respect can replace the rather counterproductive charge and countercharge pattern which the propaganda booklet Neighbors, by J. T. Gross, engenders. Enough is definitely enough.
In 1939 Poland defended its freedom and refused to join either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Poland suffered an inferno created by German Nazis and by the Soviets who's terror apparatus stayed on Polish soil for 45 postwar years.. Mutual transgressions within Poland's population took place.

Today full reconciliation requires each ethnic and religious group in Poland to adhere to the principle : We forgive and we ask for forgiveness.(As Polish bishops wrote to German bishops.) That goes equally for Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Belorussians, Catholics, Protestants, Greco-Catholics, and Jews.

Jewish refusal to share fully and sincerely in this commitment will result in protracted antagonism and an opportunity for those who exploit the suffering inflicted by the Nazi Germans and the Soviets and turn this suffering into a profitable business and an opportunity for cynical ego trips.
  Already on April 19, 1996 the real estate tycoon Rabbi Israel Singer, General Secretary of the World Jewish Congress stated that "More than three million Jews died in Poland and the Polish people are not going to be the heirs of the Polish Jews. We never going o allow this. (...) They're gonna hear us until Poland freezes over again". If Poland does not satisfy Jewish claims it will be "publicly attacked and humiliated" in the international forum. By now a number of class- action suits against Poland was filed in American courts which have no jurisdiction over Poland. After Germany and Switzerland now Poland is the current target for a shakedown.

Note: It could become a serious threat to Poland if these law suits were backed by the United States Government especially if the World Jewish Congress or any other Jewish organization could force the succession rights to all Jewish properties not reclaimed by individual Jews survivors and heirs. Some wild claims include Poland's responsibility for Jewish properties on the prewar territory, half of which was lost to the USSR after the war. Considering the fact that before the war Jews in Poland had per capita three times higher net worth than the national average, this kind of development would place that country under foreign domination both economically and politically. This kind of demands backed by an international political blackmail of the type recently applied to Switzerland could well result also in opening up endless German claims for property lost in Poland as a result of the international postwar settlements ordered by the Allies. The threat of a shakedown complicates Poland's chances of admission to the European Union.
The apology-mania in which people who did not commit the crime apologize to people that were not at the crime site benefits politically the post-communists by confusing and intimidating the Polish electorate. The liberal Tygodnik Powszechny printed a statement by president A. Kwa niewski that somehow the show-trials during the Stalinist terror in the 1940s have saved the honor of Poland because the tragedy of Jedwabne was used in some of them in order to destroy known anti-communists.
Since people are voting their pocketbook practically everywhere the post-communist take advantage of the plight of Polish farmers who can not compete against the subsidized western European farmers. The post-communists are also helped by the high unemployment, which was "outlawed" under the communist rule and the fact that despite economic growth for most of the Poles the standard of living now is lower than before the market shock-therapy.