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Rating: 
Summary: Gross Misrepresentation
Review: although most of them can hardly express themselves they have seen fit to hurl insults at this wonderful book. reading their attacks and misrepresentations only serves to underscore the insidious hatred that still prevails in poland and allowed the slaughter to occur. That they choose to blind themselves to reality should come as no surprise.
Rating:
Summary: Gross Misrepresentation
Review: As interesting as the book may or may not be, let alone the questionable methodology employed by Gross, I find the customer comments much more telling. I especially find interesting one writer's comment: "although most of them can hardly express themselves they have seen fit to hurl insults at this wonderful book." Is this just another case of argumentum ad hominem or simply a gross misunderstanding? Can't we all just get along! Finally, always remember that a sentence begins with a capitalized letter; it does come in handy if you are trying to express yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: Poles killing Jews in German occupied Poland.
Review: Gross's book Neighbors illustrates the latent anti-Semitism prevalent in pre-war Poland and the murderous result when the Poles took action against their Jewish neighbors. In the town of Jedwabne, two thirds of the residents were Jewish, and after
the Germans occupied the Russian half of Poland, the Polish residents of the town and surrounding countryside decided to take things into their own hands. They massacred the 1500 residents and took their property. The book briefly details the massacre and the burning of the barn where most of the Jewish residents were jailed. The Germans took no action, so the Polish residents were the chief culprits in these murders. After the war, the Poles blamed the Germans and until recently the crime was covered up. Gross details how the town residents did know and reveals this in the book.
I have read some of the comments from some of the other readers. It is hard to acknowledge crimes committed by one's nationality. Unfortunately this crime and other related did take place, and people do have to owe up to these things. I have traveled extensively through Poland and find the same anti-Semitic feelings even today. Both the Poles and Jews were victims in WWII, but the Poles also victimized the Jews. If I have any criticism of Gross's book, it is that it was far too short. Gross needed to describe in more detail these murders that took place in 1939-1941 period throughout Poland.
Rating:
Summary: Poles killing Jews in German occupied Poland.
Review: Gross's book Neighbors illustrates the latent anti-Semitism prevalent in pre-war Poland and the murderous result when the Poles took action against their Jewish neighbors. In the town of Jedwabne, two thirds of the residents were Jewish, and after
the Germans occupied the Russian half of Poland, the Polish residents of the town and surrounding countryside decided to take things into their own hands. They massacred the 1500 residents and took their property. The book briefly details the massacre and the burning of the barn where most of the Jewish residents were jailed. The Germans took no action, so the Polish residents were the chief culprits in these murders. After the war, the Poles blamed the Germans and until recently the crime was covered up. Gross details how the town residents did know and reveals this in the book.
I have read some of the comments from some of the other readers. It is hard to acknowledge crimes committed by one's nationality. Unfortunately this crime and other related did take place, and people do have to owe up to these things. I have traveled extensively through Poland and find the same anti-Semitic feelings even today. Both the Poles and Jews were victims in WWII, but the Poles also victimized the Jews. If I have any criticism of Gross's book, it is that it was far too short. Gross needed to describe in more detail these murders that took place in 1939-1941 period throughout Poland.
Rating: 
Summary: seminal study of Polish participation in Holocaust murders
Review: In the small Polish city of Jedwabne, a stone monument notes that some 1600 Jedwabne Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Professor Jan Gross' concise and convincing monograph, "Neighbors," marshalls direct historical evidence and a creative historiography to prove "beyond reasonable doubt, and as Jedwabne citizens knew all along, it was their [Polish] neighbors who killed them." Gross, with excruciating detail, dissects the July 10, 1941, murder of practically every Jewish man, woman and child in that small Polish city. What makes Gross' research important is that this slaughter was not Nazi-inspired, but initiated, orchestrated and celebrated by Poles themselves. This direct indictment of Polish involvement (not mere complicity or helpless bystanding) shatters a half-century of Polish myth-making about that nation's alleged victimhood during World War II. Professor Gross does not sensationalize the actual murder itself. A day-long orgy of violence, which was at once primitive and comprehensive, featured the climax of burning alive those Jews who had not perished in the mayhem of the day. In fact, not only did the non-Jewish Poles of Jedwabne participate; participants from other nearby Polish communities, themselves veterans of other pogroms, journeyed to Jedwabne to commit depredations on the Jewish population. Instead, Gross focuses on the impact this research may have on Polish national identity. In this sense, Gross simultaneously adds to and departs from standard interpretations of the Holocaust. His research is the least creative in his reaffirmation of the now widely-accepted thesis that those involved in the destruction of European Jewry did so volitionally. Jedwabne's murderers are "willing executioners" in the purest sense of the word. "Everybody who was in town on this day and in possession of a sense of sight, smell or hearing either participated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews of Jedwabne." Yet "Neighbors" will not leave its mark on Holocaust historiography as a mere reaffirmation of the Browning/Goldhagen thesis of uncoerced genocide. Professor Gross' monography deserves praise for the questions it poses and the new directions it stakes out. More important is Gross' investigation of how thoroughly Jew hatred has saturated Polish society and how that vicious prejudice found outlet through the Nazi policy of annihilation. His research disabuses theorists who propound a "modernist" interpretation of the Holocaust. His analysis of the Jedwabne massacre asks for a "heterogeneous" interpretation of the event; one which acknoledges that many participants acted with the most primitive of instruments, without bureaucracy to direct their efforts and from a myriad of purposes and motivations. He challenges future historians to accept and cherish the accounts of survivors instead of treating them with skepticism. "The greater the catastrophe the fewer the survivors. We must be capable of listening to lonely voices reaching us from the abyss." Finally, Professor Gross may make his greatest contribution to the future of a genuinely free Poland with his invocation to an inclusive history of Poland's involvement in the destruction of its own population, its own Jews, during World War II. Eschewing collective responsibility, Professor Gross nonetheless warns Poles of the danger of ignoring this extraordinary event in its past. To ignore involvement in mass murder vitiates future claims to moral coherence. It is this call to conscience that makes the terse "Neighbors" a critical additition to Holocaust historiography.
Rating: 
Summary: Accepts questionable testimony, ignores others
Review: There is little doubt something terrible happened to the Jews of Jedwabne. There is also little doubt that Poles had something to do with it, and bear some responsibility. Yet Prof. Gross takes the extremely detailed testimony of mostly one person as unquestioned truth, and does not seriously consider other witness accounts, for instance, of primary Nazi rather than Polish involvement.
This, of course, is another manifestation of the Polish-Jewish historical conflict being painted only in colors of black and white: All Jews good... All (except perhaps .001%) Poles bad.
"Neighbors" briefly touched on a core issue in this region in Poland. At the time of the Soviet invasion from the east, many Poles were removed from their homes. Some were killed, many were sent to work camps (copper mines and the like) in Siberia. The infrastructure that removed the Poles from the area (with Soviet blessing) was "90% Jewish", based on many eyewitness accounts. Could this have turned some good Poles into bad? Gross brushes this aside with an attitude implying complete irrelevance and/or disbelief. Why do Gross and other Holocaust writers not consider ALL inhumanity, not simply the specific inhumanity they want to see?
Poles and Jews need to come to terms with their past. This did not seem necessarily true-one sided-one witness version of a terrible act will do more harm than good.
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