Gross’ Neighbors and Pawlikowski’s Ida both examine the legacy of the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland, albeit in different ways. In the film, Ida and her aunt look back twenty years after the massacre of Polish Jews to determine the fate of Ida’s family. Ida and Wanda must act like historians, pursuing the testimony of her parent’s neighbors and examining these primary sources critically for bias and incentive. Similarly, Gross performs a more traditional historical analysis as he too pursues court documents and other remnants of this era to discover the true role of the Polish in these massacres.

It is helpful to use some of Gaddis’s concepts in The Landscape of History to compare these two works. Neighbors and Ida demonstrate the concept of self-similarity across scale; although Gross is looking at an entire town and Pawlikowski’s focus is on a single family, the incentives and behaviors at play are very similar. While the book has a much larger scale, the two function as complements because a greater understanding of the individual experience is crucial to making sense of the larger phenomenon. Similarly, the context of the largely phenomenon is an important part of understanding the significance of these small-scale stories. While the message and research behind Ida and Neighbors may differ on the surface, both are historical accounts of the same historical period that reach parallel conclusions.