To the Editor of The Wall Street Journal July 12, 2001

Dear Sir:

Your July 12 editorial Poland's Reckoning is misleading. Instead of using editorial generalizations let us say clearly that in 1939 Poland defended its freedom and refused to join either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Poland suffered the worst wartime terror created by the German Nazis and by the Soviets (whose terror apparatus stayed on Polish soil for 45 postwar years). Before German attack on the USSR on June 20, 1941, in Dec. 1940, the NKVD registered 652 Jews in the town of Jedwabne where you have alleged the "Poles" burned 1500 Jews on July 10, 1941.
In reality, upon occupying Jedwabne the Germans appointed Polish- speaking ethnic Germans to serve as the new town administration to replace their Soviet predecessors (mostly local Jews) On July 10, 1941 German police and military (based at Ciechanow), actively assisted by the new mayor (a German citizen from Upper Silesia) and some known local criminals, conducted a horrible massacre of 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 are being currently established by ongoing investigation of the site. Apparently, after the war an officer of the Soviet terror apparatus ordered to inscribe on a marker at the site of the massacre that 1600 Jews were burned in the barn by the Germans. The Soviet policy was to overstate the number of people killed by the Germans as was done in the case of the victims of Auschwitz.
Preliminary reports of the investigation indicate that in the mass graves in Jedwabne there are some 200 victims buried - most of them Jews with a few Christian Poles. A large number of spent German cartridges were found at the execution site. The victims had personal objects indicating that they were prepared for a transport to an other locality.
The Germans brought a truck full of gasoline canisters, to set the barn on fire. (The Germans used a similar procedure in several localities near Jedwabne.) There was no gasoline available then to the Poles, who also could not posses guns under death penalty, enforced by both the Germans and the Soviets during their respective occupations of Poland. The Stalinist show trial in 1949, mentioned in your Poland's Reckoning, was complete with forced confessions extracted by tortures (confirmed even by Gross). Soviet purpose was to punish the accused for their membership in the Polish anti-communist underground rather than to bring justice to Jewish victims.
Jerzy Laudanski, the main villain of the controversial book Neighbors by the New York professor of sociology (not of history) J. T. Gross, is a hero of Polish anti-German and anti-Soviet underground. It is on record that Mr. Laudanski was tortured by the Gestapo in the notorious Pawiak prison in Warsaw, and did not betray anyone. He was then transferred to Auschwitz, to Gross Rosen camp, and finally to Sachsenhausen near Berlin.
Aleksander Kwasniewski, former minister in the pre-1991 communist government and now the president of Poland, is given credit in your editorial for apologizing "as a human being, a citizen, and the President of the Republic of Poland" for an atrocious crime committed in Jedwabne on Jewish men, women and children sixty years ago. His statements are full of innuendos, appeals to the supposedly guilty conscience of the Polish nation and a veiled assumption of Polish national responsibility for the massacre. Mr. Kwasniewski, thus, violated the basic democratic principle the independence of the judiciary from the executive branch of the government (i.e. the president). Without waiting for the conclusion of the ongoing criminal investigation, he accused the Poles of planing initiating, and carrying out the burning hundreds of Jews in a barn (as Gross insinuates in his Neighbors). I believe that this is a part of an effort, by the former communist elite, who are still in positions of power, to obscure the 45 years of their crimes against the Polish people. Presently they attempt to smear the Polish Resistance by accusing it of crimes against Jews. Thus, Kwasniewski and others in the clique of former communist oppressors and their families are successfully confusing many formerly oppressed Poles and their children.
In the present sad state of affairs in Poland people are voting their pocketbook and they still protest the economic hardship of the shock therapy of privatization with nearly 20% unemployment. Most Poles now experience a lower standard of living than they had during most of the communist rule. In their desperation they elected by a slim majority a "post-communist president" Kwasniewski. He uses the tragedy of the Jewish genocide of WWII in an attempt to gain political support of those Jewish institutions and individuals, who exploit the genocide during World War II for political and financial gain. Your editorial page of April 11, 2001 coined the term Holocaust profiteers for people accusing IBM of collaboration with the Nazis. In the meantime this accusation has been withdrawn from the NY courts Similarly J. T. Gross, the author of the book Neighbors, now discredited by the results of the exhumation is facing accusations in Polish courts by the Laudanski family for slander and falsification of records. The whole matter of vilifying of Poles is personally painful to me: I am 50% disabled by sixty four months of imprisonment by the Gestapo and in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. It must not be forgotten that in addition to three million Polish Jews another three million Christian Poles were killed in WWII. These six million represented 20% of prewar population of Poland.
Sincerely,

Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski    Blacksburg, July 5, 2001

Author, among others, of: Poland - A Historical Atlas (200 maps and graphs), Hippocrene Books, NY, 1987,
Jews in Poland - A Documentary History - The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel, Hippocrene Books, NY, 1993,
Unabridged Polish English Dictionary (200,000 entries), Hippocrene Books, NY, 1993,
Poland an Illustrated History, Hippocrene Books, NY, 2000.

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