The Crime and the Silence
-
- £3.99
-
- £3.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the European Book Prize
'A masterpiece' Jan T. Gross
'Terrifying and necessary' Julian Barnes
'Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal' Kate Atkinson
On 10 July 1941 a horrifying crime was committed in the small Polish town of Jedwadbne. Early in the afternoon, the town’s Jewish population – hundreds of men, women and children – were ordered out of their homes, and marched into the town square. By the end of the day most would be dead. It was a massacre on a shocking scale, and one that was widely condemned. But only a few people were brought to justice for their part in the atrocity. The truth of what actually happened on that day was to be suppressed for more than sixty years.
Part history, part memoir, part investigation, The Crime and the Silence is an award-winning journalist's account of the events of that day: both the story of a massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Polish journalist Bikont undertakes a thorough follow-up to Polish-American historian Jan Gross's 2001 book Neighbors, about the July 1941 pogrom in the rural eastern Polish town of Jedwabne. Bikont spent several years tracking down and interviewing the few eyewitnesses to the event as well as their children and other relevant parties in Poland, Costa Rica, Israel, and the U.S. She goes well beyond Gross in marshaling information to counter persistent claims that the Jewish massacre was perpetrated by Germans: overwhelming historical evidence incriminates Poles. In the process of investigating, she learned that the July pogrom in Jedwabne wasn't an isolated act; killings of Jews by Poles took place "in several dozen towns in the area." Bikont also notes the near-ubiquity of anti-Semitism in the area at the time such that protecting Jews was an unpopular, even dangerous act and the persistence of anti-Semitism throughout Poland to the present day. The narrative is disrupted at times by digressions into relatively tangential matters, especially in more personal sections called "Journal." Still, Bikont has performed an extraordinary journalistic feat in documenting this terrible, historically contested atrocity. Illus.
