Although Jan Gross’ Neighbors and Pawlikowski’s Ida  both speak to similar events surrounding the destruction and murder of Jewish communities perpetrated by Christian Poles during WWII, I beleive that Ida politicizes the issue in a way that Jan Gross purposely avoided in order to retain academic objectivity. The intent of Neighbors was to bring light to the fact that it was indeed communities of Christian Poles that had carried out town massacres of entire Jewish populations (sometimes) even before the Nazis had arrived to lay territorial claims after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and to make sure that Poland was able to constructively deal with its complicit past in a legitimate way. Ida, on the other hand, seems more concerned with the depth that religion is integrated into Polish culture and naming specific persons responsible and holding them accountable on an individual and societal level.

Ida herself is Jewish and even after we follow her during a “coming of age” style narrative she still chooses to remain in the nunnery. At one point in the film, Wanda tells Ida that her vows will mean nothing if she has never sinned and therefore nothing to repent. I believe that this line could have meant to implicate the Poles who carried out the massacres and sought protection in their religious communities and the unwillingness to admit these crimes. Wanda and Ida also personally seek out the family that was responsible for the death of Ida’s parents and brother in order to come to terms with their loss. Wanda was also a federal judge for the Soviet regime after the war and eventually kills herself. The film is multifaceted and speaks to many political and social dimensions that the book doesn’t although I believe part of Gross’ intention was to foster discussion in Poland about the events that took place and that this film is one of the responses.