The publication in the year 2000 of an account of the terrible events that took place in the small town of Jedwabne on July 10th, 1941 opened up an unprecedented and frequently bitter debate in Polish society.
That a massacre of Jedwabne's Jews had taken place on that date was already known. According to the official record the number of victims was about 1,600 and the killings were planned and executed by German forces, perhaps with the assistance of local hooligan elements.
Jan Tomasz Gross's book, Neighbours, disputed one essential element of that story, German responsibility, arguing that the involvement of the Gestapo or gendarmerie in the mass killings was either peripheral or non-existent. In Gross's account, a large group of local men on the day in question herded all their Jewish fellow citizens into Jedwabne's main square, kept them there all day, beating and humiliating them, then marched them to a barn on the outskirts of town where they burned them alive.
In what kind of world might this have happened? The Poland which regained its independence after more than a century of foreign domination at the end of the first World War was a multi-ethnic state with significant national minorities of Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians and Germans; a third of the population spoke languages other than Polish.
There were two ways of addressing this complexity. One was to make a broad and inclusive definition of Polishness, and this was indeed the preference of the soldier who had secured independence, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski. The alternative was to define nationality more narrowly, in practice confining citizenship to those who spoke Polish and were Roman Catholic. This was the preference of Pilsudski's rival, Roman Dmowski, leader of the National Democrats or Endecja.
In the 1930s, the views of Dmowski were in the ascendant and the nationalist and Catholic intelligentsia engaged in increasingly wild and vicious "pro-Polish" and anti-Semitic propaganda in local newspapers and the diocesan press. It was an anti-Semitism not just of the tavern but also of the drawing room, where elegant gatherings applauded well-turned comments on "the loathsome Jewish character".
When war came in 1939, Poland was partitioned between Germany and Russia, Jedwabne being occupied by the Soviets. Sections of the Jewish population, particularly the young and poor, expected great things from the Bolsheviks and were active in helping the NKVD identify "class enemies" and "reactionaries", who were deported to Siberia, a journey that often meant death. In 1941, however, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and marched east; and as the Soviets fled from Jedwabne and the Germans marched in, the Poles looked for a scapegoat. Who better than the Jews?
Much of the debate in the essays collected in The Neighbours Respond centres on two issues: responsibility and context. First, as a matter of fact, who was responsible, or chiefly responsible, for the killings? Here the evidence does not allow too much ambiguity: yes, Germans may have been there and have encouraged Poles to act as they did. But even Prof Gross's sternest critics admit that local men took "an active part" in the massacre and that these were not just a few hooligans but "a dozen or several score".
It is chiefly in the consideration of context that the wriggling begins. For, in what has become a familiar intellectual manoeuvre, and not just in Poland, events which we could not possibly condone we say we can nevertheless understand. Thus there is a considerable effort on the part of distinguished academic and clerical patriots to point out the criminal activity of "the Jews" and the sufferings of "the Poles" (mutually exclusive categories, it would seem) in 1939-41. What of course this boils down to in practice is the argument that the murder by a village thug of a two-year-old Jewish child can somehow be explained by the actions a year earlier of a 17-year-old Jewish Bolshevik.
There are two categories of people, it seems, who have been particularly hurt by Prof Gross's accusations and the huge publicity they have attracted. First there are those who live in Jedwabne today, who mostly have no connection with the inhabitants of 1941. These citizens appear to be divided in their attitudes, torn between a wise and humane mayor and a bigoted and ignorant parish priest.
The other offended party is the ideological right, which senses, not for the first time, "a campaign against the Polish nation" (staffed, curiously enough, largely by Poles). But these, says historian Jerzy Jedlicki, are "people whose racial and religious biases are so deeply engrafted in their brain tissue that no experience will root them out".
It may also perhaps be said that the Poles are a nation - like many another perhaps - whose popular historians constructed for them over decades and centuries a narrative of unalloyed heroism which was always too good to be true. In this context, the present volume, with its compelling and distinguished revisionist contributions - not least from Jesuit historians who insist the truth can set us free - is all the more to be admired.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
The Neighbours Respond: The Controversy Over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland Edited by Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic Princeton, 469pp. £12.95