WARSAW, Poland – Sixty years after as many as 1,600 Jews were killed in eight hours in a village in northeast Poland, the nation’s president on Tuesday offered a strong apology. It was not Nazi soldiers, he said, but ordinary Poles who beat, stabbed and, finally, burned their fellow villagers alive in a barn.
“This was a particularly cruel crime,” the president, Alexander Kwasniewski, said in the village of Jedwabne at a ceremony broadcast live on Polish television. “It was justified by nothing,” Mr. Kwasniewski said of the violence. “The victims were helpless and defenseless.
“For this crime, we should beg the souls of the dead and their families for forgiveness,” he said. “Today, as a man, citizen and president of the Polish Republic, I ask pardon in my own name and in the name of those Polish people whose consciences are shocked by this crime.”
For decades, a simple stone memorial at the site of a barn where many of the victims were burned to death blamed the incident solely on the Nazis.
That monument was removed in March. A new memorial was unveiled in its place Tuesday with an inscription that states simply: “In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and surrounding areas, men, women, and children, fellow-dwellers of this land, murdered and burned alive at this site on 10 July 1941.”
The apology, planned for several months, has not been popular in Poland, where many see themselves as victims and resisters caught between the Nazis and the Soviets during the war. In Jedwabne on Tuesday many villagers, including the parish priest, boycotted the ceremony.
