After reading Neighbors and watching Ida, I feel like they generally serve as complimentary pieces. Both works shed light on the fact that Poles were just as guilty in the murder of local Jews as Germans were—perhaps, in some cases, even more guilty.

Ida, in a way, illuminates and confirms a particular anecdote included in Neighbors. Towards the end of the book, Gross includes the story of Aharon Appelfeld’s return to his hometown 50 years after the murder of 62 Jews there. When he tried to find where there were buried, many adults tried to keep from telling him. However, when he asked the children, it was clear that even they, who weren’t alive at the time of the killings, knew about them. Eventually the man who buried the bodies shows him where the grave is. A similar scene is depicted in Ida, when the man who killed and buried Ida’s parents and her aunt’s son is at first reluctant to admit knowledge of the grave (as are many in the town), but eventually takes the pair to where the victims were buried.

Although it seems, in some respects, that many Polish people mentioned in Neighbors are much more forthcoming with information about the murders than characters in Ida were, it should be noted that the characters in Ida had nothing to lose by concealing information from to random women. In contrast, the people interviewed in the trials mentioned in Neighbors probably stood to lose a lot if they lied and the court found out about it.

Both works show an interesting aspect of wartime Poland: the fact that many found hiding Jews unconscionable and unacceptable, but were perfectly willing to murder them to fix the situation. The killer in Ida killed the Jews his father was hiding, and on many occassions mentioned in Neighbors, citizens of a town turned upon those hiding Jews and pressured them to kill those Jews, demonstrating that pressure to kill Jews did not always come from the Nazis. It seems to me that Ida and Neighbors both serve to show both the guilt of the Polish people and their continuing knowledge of what happened during the war, although they may, at times, be reluctant to admit it.