Reflection by Caly McCarthy

In large part I see Neighbors and Ida as compliments to the same story, just focusing on different scales. In this sense, they do tell different stories, but they trend in the same direction; Poles committed heinous crimes against their Jewish neighbors without acknowledgement from the wider world.

Gross challenges the victim status of Poland when he asserts that individual citizens willfully participated in the pogrom against the Jews of Jedwabne. This narrative lent itself to a national identity crisis as more and more towns were shown to mirror the pattern of Jedwabne, and the reality became known that neighbors killed neighbors, not under the threat of totalitarian leaders, but by their own volition.

Ida, on the other hand, examines the story of one family.  It surveys the legacy of pain caused by the mass murder of Jews, as experienced as an affront to personal identity. On the eve of taking her vows to become a Catholic nun, Ida learns that she is Jewish, and that her family had been killed by its neighbors for their religious identity.

One apparent difference between Neighbors and Ida was the reticence for locals to speak out regarding what they witnessed/participated in.  According to Gross, there was a wide-spread awareness in Poland about citizen-led pogroms, even if it was not widely known outside Polish borders. Gross identifies a host of valuable sources that attest to this, including: Agnieszka Arnold’s documentary, Where Is My Older Brother Cain?, a memorial book of Jedwabne Jews, and records from court proceedings. In Ida, however, residents were very reluctant to even acknowledge that they knew Ida’s family, let along that they had harmed them. Perhaps this is because Ida and her aunt posed a threat to them? How, though, could they be more threatening than a court of law?