Jedwabne Massacre, Jedwabne, Poland, 1941

The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, children, and elderly, many of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive. At least 40 ethnic Poles carried out the killing; their ringleaders decided on it beforehand with Germany's Gestapo, SS security police or SS intelligence, and they cooperated with German military police. According to historian Jan T. Gross, "the undisputed bosses of life and death in Jedwabne were the Germans," who were "the only ones who could decide the fate of the Jews." Knowledge of the massacre did not become widespread until 1999–2003. Polish filmmakers, journalists, and academics, in particular Gross's history Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (2001) raised public interest. In 2000–2003 Poland's Institute of National Remembrance conducted a forensic murder investigation; it confirmed that the direct perpetrators were ethnic Poles. The country was shocked by the findings, which challenged common narratives about the Holocaust in Poland that had focused on Polish suffering and heroism, and that non-Jewish Poles had little responsibility for the fate of Poland's Jews. In a 2001 memorial ceremony at Jedwabne, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologized on behalf of the country, an apology that was repeated in 2011 by President Bronisław Komorowski. With the Law and Justice (PIS) party's rise to political power in 2015, the subject again became contentious. The PIS has a controversial "history policy"; President Andrzej Duda publicly criticized Komorowski's apology.