Jedwabne Massacre Memorial

On the edge of Jedwabne, on ul. Krasickiego, stone blocks mark out a rectangle on the grass. It is the outline of the barn where the town's Jewish residents and Jews from nearby were burned alive on 10 July 1941. The 2001 memorial and the neighbouring Jewish cemetery form one of the most important Holocaust memorial sites in Poland – and a place that changed Poland's debate about its past.

History: what happened on 10 July 1941

Before the war Jews made up a large share of Jedwabne's population; in the 18th and 19th centuries they were a clear majority. After the Germans arrived in June 1941, on 10 July Polish residents of the town and surrounding villages drove their Jewish neighbours into the market square, where they were abused. A group of men was forced to smash and carry away a statue of Lenin and was then killed. In the afternoon the rest – men, women and children – were herded into a wooden barn outside town, which was locked, doused with kerosene and set on fire.

An investigation by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in 2000–2003 established that the direct perpetrators were at least about 40 Polish residents of Jedwabne and the surrounding area, acting at German instigation and with German officers present in the town. Estimates of the number of victims vary: after the 2001 exhumation the IPN said the two graves could hold the remains of 300–400 people, while many historians put the number killed at several hundred to around a thousand.

What to see

• The 2001 memorial – a tall stone with an inscription in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish, commemorating the Jews of Jedwabne and the surrounding area – men, women and children, co-inhabitants of this land – who were murdered and burned alive on this spot. It replaced a 1963 monument whose inscription blamed only the Germans and gave an inflated death toll.
• The barn outline – a line of granite blocks around the memorial marks where the barn stood.
• The Jewish cemetery – right next door, founded in the 19th century and covering 1.29 hectares. Several dozen fieldstone headstones survive, the oldest from 1847 and 1850. In one corner stands a matzevah-shaped monument with an inscription in Polish and Hebrew.

Remembrance

On 10 July 2001, at the 60th anniversary ceremony, President Aleksander Kwaśniewski apologised here for the crime on behalf of himself and those Poles "whose conscience is moved"; in 2011 President Bronisław Komorowski asked for forgiveness again. Jedwabne's then mayor, Krzysztof Godlewski, who championed the commemoration, received the Jan Karski Award in 2002. During the exhumation a second grave was found containing fragments of the Lenin statue.

Tripto tip

The memorial stands in open ground on ul. Krasickiego, a few hundred metres east of the former market square. It is a place of mourning: following Jewish custom, visitors leave small stones on the memorial. The Jewish cemetery is not visited on the Sabbath or Jewish holidays, and men cover their heads. Allow 30–45 minutes; the exhibition on Jedwabne at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw provides helpful context.