Hope beyond the hatred.

In the little town of Jedwabne, nestled in the heart of Poland, all the Jewish inhabitants--mainly old people, women, and children--were rounded up and burned alive by a group of German policemen and Polish townsfolk on July 10, 1941. No one knows exactly how many Jews were killed, but the best guess is around 300. And no one knows the precise circumstances of the attack. How many local Poles versus German security forces were involved in the atrocity? Most important, who initiated the massacre, and what were the motivations of the killers?

In 2001, New York University professor Jan Tomasz Gross, an expatriate Polish Jew, published a book called Neighbors that characterized the massacre as not just another Nazi atrocity but the product of a spontaneous pogrom of innocent Jews by their Polish Christian neighbors. Though there were widespread reports of cordial relations among Christians and Jews in Jedwabne prior to the Nazi occupation of 1939, Gross argued that deep-seated Polish anti-Semitism lurked just beneath the surface, and proved fierce enough to motivate genocide when the opportunity arose.

Western journalists, particularly in the United States, immediately adopted Gross's interpretation unquestioningly, as did most of Poland's intelligentsia. Not so former University of Virginia historian Marek Chodakiewicz, now academic dean at the Institute of World Politics, who decided to investigate the crime for himself. He ...