Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

Twentieth-century Europe was marked by the totalitarian regimes of German dictator Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, and the Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin. Though they did not invent totalitarianism, they were its most vociferous proponents. Under their regimes societies were intellectually and morally “crippled” and learned to institutionalize a politics of contempt and resentment. Urban areas despised those in rural areas; workers in manufacturing disliked peasant laborers; middle-class rural folks despised the poor among them; the young resented the old; and ethnic groups eyed each other with suspicion.

Totalitarian rulers were so adept at occupying territories and cultivating abettors within those territories that, according to philosopher Hannah Arendt, many of “the Nazis’ first accomplices and their best aides truly did not know what they were doing nor with whom they were dealing” (11). During World War II, “collaboration” first became a term that connoted “morally objectionable association with an enemy” (11). Much of Europe registered disgust at any mention of the Nazis after their rule, still angry with their “loss of civic rights, […] police supervision, loss of the right to travel or to live in certain desirable places, dismissal, and the loss of pension rights” (13).

In August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, in which they compromised over Poland.