FREEDOM REGAINED 515strong emphasis on the primacy of culture. The Polish translation of God's
Playground first appeared in a censored version in 1989, when speaking ill of
Ivan the Terrible was still judged unacceptable. The full version, which
appeared in 1990, was officially adopted for use in schools and universities.
Given Poland's obsession with history, it was ironic, that this particular prize
fell to a foreigner. Distance helps.
Jewish matters were also able to make some progress. Throughout the
Communist era, the official convention had maintained that all war crimes
without exception had been committed by 'Fascists' or 'Hitlerites'; and it had
presented all the victims of those crimes as faceless 'patriots' belonging to no
particular group or as 'men, women, and children of various nationalities.'
Among other things, the unique character of the Holocaust was never
explained. The special sacrifices of Catholic Poles and of the wartime resistance
movement were dismissed. And the fearsome catalogue of Soviet crimes was
scrupulously avoided. The whole post-war generation in Poland was brought
up with little awareness of the complexities of wartime sufferings. So free debate
and dialogue were long overdue. Two place-names, Jedwabne and Eishyshok,
were to take on emblematic status in the discussions which developed.
Jedwabne is a small country town in the province of Bialystok. In 1939-41,
under Soviet occupation, it had been the scene of murders and deportations con-
ducted by the NKVD with the help of an overzealous Communist militia. In July
1941, under the incoming German occupation, it became the scene of an atroc-
ity in which hundreds of Jews were burned to death in a barn that was torched
by local revenge-seekers. It was in no way typical of the intercommunal condi-
tions which prevailed during the war in Poland's ten thousand towns and vil-
lages. And the research, on which the revelations of the 1990s were based, was
partial and slipshod. Even so, the revelations provoked a healthy realiszation
that the Polish record, like that of other nations, carried stains that needed to be
confessed and redeemed. With some delay, they eventually inspired a fitting cer-
emony of remembrance at Jedwabne presided over by the President of Poland.^3
'Eishyshok', in contrast, had been a small Jewish shtetl in the former eastern
Poland, now Eisiskis in Lithuania. In 1941, it had witnessed the wholesale mas-
sacre of the Jewish population by the Germans. In July 1944, when Soviet forces
were hunting down the Polish underground in the region, it witnessed a shoot-
out between a unit of the NKVD and a patrol of the Home Army. In the course
of the shoot-out, a number of Jews, who had somehow escaped the earlier mas-
sacre, were killed. Polish sources tended to regard these deaths as regrettable but
incidental—what the Americans would call 'collateral damage'. Jewish sources
argue that they were the result of a deliberate and malicious act of anti-
Semitism.^4 Fifty years later, it is wellnigh impossible to reconstruct facts, let
alone motives. But controversy can be fruitful. It was important on the one hand
to break the reluctance among Poles to examine the darker comers of their past,
and, on the other hand, to dispel the taboo, which could still be met on the