A discussion of Anna Bikont’s book "The Crime and the Silence”, which tells the story of the July 1941 massacre of Jews in the Eastern Polish town of Jedwabne, where local Poles rounded up their Jewish neighbors and burned them in a barn; Bikont investigates the long silence in the years following these events, and the fierce debate initiated in Poland and internationally by historian Jan T. Gross’s book “Neighbors”. The debate broke some of the taboos central to the Polish sense of identity, but left many untouched, among them the anti-Semitism prevalent in the Catholic Church before, during and after WW II, the part the Polish armed underground played in crimes against Jews, the scale of these crimes and their material motivation.
Anna Bikont is a psychologist and writer associated with the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper since its inception in 1989. Her book 'Le Crime et le Silence' won the European Book Prize in 2011.
