We are talking about the region which was under Soviet rule only for two years, between 39 and 41. And when the Germans, in quotation mark, liberated them from Soviet rule, the population wanted to and took revenge on Jews. And horrendous pogroms, horrendous progroms were taking place in the summer of 1941. In Poland, in the Baltic states, and in the western Ukraine. In Poland, it was one particular event about which we have an excellent book. A massacre, which took place at Jedwabne. Jedwabne, the title of the book is Neighbors. And what happened here, was that the local Polish peasants had gathered Jews, and the numbers, that were killed vary from 300 to 1,500, put them in a barn and burned the barn on them. Now the participation of the Germans in this, and to what extent that it was instigated by the Germans, is a very much debated issue, namely Polish historians like to say that it was really encouraged by the Germans. It may have been encouraged by the Germans. There is no question about it, however, that the actual murder took place by people who were neighbors, hence the title of the book. I again would like to read aloud a passage from the writing of a German officer. This is the German Officer who actually was the leader in one of Einsatzgruppe. He described what happened in an incident in in Lithuania. A young man, he must have been a Lithuanian, with rolled-up sleeves, was armed with an iron crowbar. He dragged out one man at a time from a group and struck him with the crowbar with one or more blows on the back of the head. Within three-quarters of an hour, he had beaten to death an entire group of 45 to 50 people in this way. I took a series of photographs of the victims. After the entire group has been beaten to death, the young man put his crowbar to one side, fetched an accordion, and went and stood on the mountain of corpses and played the Lithuanian national anthem. The behavior of the civilians' presence was unbelievable. After each man had been killed they'd begun to clap, and when the national anthem started up, they joined in singing and clapping. Well, but this was, of course, an area where pogroms had taken place historically, going back to the 19th century. However, obviously, the pogroms, which in an earlier period claimed a few hundred victims. Here we are talking about thousands. Here we are talking about something which had not been seen before. We have good evidence that the soviet authorities. First of all, they didn't like the Jews because of their occupational structure, has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or nationalism. But secondly, because they understood that putting Jews in position of leadership, and it would be dangerous being associated with Jews and Communists. And consequently, we have figures that the Jews were actually underrepresented. >> Right. >> Given their percentage of the population in various positions in local parliaments. To be sure those parliaments were meaningless entities, but in the symbolic sense. So it is not true that the Jews were responsible for the suffering of the people in 1939 and 1941. The suffering, however, was genuine. Indeed, the Soviets killed the local people with great abandon. You may remember the event of Katyn which Soviet authorities murdered something like 20,000 Polish officers. And the Germans dug up the graves and it was a great propaganda victory for them. Well, what was going on here? It is difficult to make any distinction between the Baltic states and Poland, and the Ukraine, in as much as this fiery anti-Semitism was about the same. Estonia was the first, which became entirely Judenfrei, without Jews, as Estonia had this distinction. Now the remarkable thing is that this particular extraordinary wave lasted only for a relatively short period in the summer of 1941. Few months later this stopped. It stopped, because the Germans wanted to and succeeded imposing a degree of discipline. Secondly, it may be that the surrounding population may have lost their desire, because they may have come to the understanding that today we kill the Jews and tomorrow we kill Ukrainians. Which they did not really appreciate at the very outset. But as I say, within the history of the Holocaust, this, the summer of 1941 for me has a special place. There is something more horrendous going on than their extermination camps.
