Hello everyone,
Just a note that, because we have an essay due this week, you will not have to write up a blog post. See you tomorrow!
CJB
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.
Ida and Neighbors are arguably both complimentary and stand alone pieces. As compliments of each other, Ida’s story continues the timeline of events initiated in the story told in Neighbors. While Neighbors directly, and sometimes gruesomely educates readers of the physical horrors and torture that Jewish population at Jedwabne experienced, Ida follows up on the story and reveals to viewers that event’s aftermath did not end when the flames died out or last cries of victims’ agony were heard. By the end of the film, Ida is caught between two worlds; conflicted between a life with and without her nun’s habit. She staggers between two identities, one she once recognized without question, and other she never before contemplated. Neighbors’ Poles are arguably morphed to inflictors of violence that they most likely once did not want to be. Ida’s Feliks, once a murderous Pole, lives a relatively hidden and quiet life, but when Wanda, Ida’s aunt, seeks him out and reminds him of his violent past, he crumbles as well. Both Ida and Neighbors tell stories of individuals’ psychological and physical torment surrounding the events and aftermath of 1940s Poland.
Although Ida’s story focuses on the turmoil that ancestors of Jewish lost loved ones in World War II face, Ida’s personal story and journey throughout the film, involves both an identity epiphany and crisis. Anna, happily soon to be Catholic nun, suddenly becomes Ida a Jewish survivor of Polish violence in the Second World War. Naively happy in the convent, Ida’s world is suddenly shaken and stirred by her alcoholic, chain smoking aunt Wanda; a once famous prosecutor. After Wanda’s death, Ida takes pause and removes her nun’s habit for a night, experiencing what life would be like without a vow to God, but a vow to a husband and family (her epiphany that happiness does not have to come from a lifelong commitment to God). However, in the end, Ida dons the habit once again, but is no longer the same. Now caught between religious and secular, devout and sinful, Catholic and Jewish, Ida walks jarringly towards an unsatisfying life, cut off from the outside world and all the pain, but also love that it has to offer. Ida is between black and white, one life or the other, but are either of those lives as simple as black or white? What happens if to those that have experienced both worlds, like Ida; how are they went to chose one without ever being reminded of or tempted by the other?
The question is a difficult one, as Ida and Neighbors can be viewed as either complements or separate entities, and both answers can be argued with validity. However, it was very interesting to view the two pieces as complements. I was unable to attend the movie viewing on Sunday because I had a paper due at midnight, so I watched the movie on my own. I actually read Neighbors first, and it was hard not to see parallels. Neighbors mentions that a very small number of Jews survived the massacre, Ida can be seen as a possible life for one of the few Jews who escaped. While Ida does not directly explain how and why Ida’s parents were murdered, it does emphasize the fact that a family was killed by a trusted neighbor. Much like the killings in Neighbors, local Jews were killed not by uniformed Germans, but by young and familiar Poles.
However, it is important to acknowledge the differences, as well as the complements, from both of these stories. Ida is a hauntingly good movie, eliciting feelings of sympathy, despair, and at times, hopelessness. As noted in our Method’s book, a good movie intends to draw in an audience, and needs to keep viewers entertained, moving the plot forward, and following a general storyline that includes an exposition, rising actions, etc. While a historical account still needs to keep readers interested, it is not forced to fit a mold or plot line in the same way as a movie. There, Neighbors does appeal to emotions such as horror and outrage, it is done without the need to keep the reader entertained and in suspense in the same way as the maker of a movie. Neighbors sought to tell a forgotten and covered up horror of WWII, which was that the lives of many Polish Jews were lost not at the hands of the Nazis, but by their neighbors. The book includes quotations from depositions that describe with horrifying detail the massacre of the Jedwabne Jews. However, these accounts were often followed by describing the methods by which the sources were procured. While it is important to substantiate historical claims with evidence, this slowing down of the narrative proves to be a defining difference between Ida and Neighbors. Gross uses methodology and research to uncover an atrocity of the past. There is certainly a human aspect in history, although it is still largely based in facts. A film like Ida, however, is able to create a more relatable form of history. Rather than read scattered accounts, the viewer can follow the story of one Jew who survived, largely because she had no idea of her true identity. The power of Ida was its ability to cast a light on the personal effects felt by the war, while historical works such as Neighbors makes the creation of such movies a possibility.
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.
If studying the historical method has taught me anything, it is that there are multiple ways of telling a story. The way in which an event is presented depends on how the historian wishes to present the event. Jan Gross, in his controversial and highly influential book Neighbors, decides to present the killing of Jews by their Polish neighbors during the Holocaust in a factual light, whereas Pawel Pawlikoski decided to portray a more personal version of this atrocity in his film Ida. Although the two accounts discuss the same topic, one focuses on the event itself while the other focuses on the potential consequences the event could have had for individuals. Despite the two different approaches, both are necessary for study if one wants a full grasp of the horrors of the pogroms in Poland during the Holocaust.
Gross, in Neighbors, raises the argument that the Polish, not German Nazis, were the ones who massacred 1,600 Jews in the Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. He provides chilling eyewitness accounts, court records, and other forms of evidence to expose the brutal killings of these people. Gross goes into disturbing detail when he describes Jews being beaten, humiliated, and eventually herded into a barn and burned to death. While his bluntness in describing the killings makes the book hard to stomach for those with good consciences, he does not describe in-depth any singular victim, but rather, explains the fates of multiple Jews who died that day. While this technique of focusing on the event as a whole and describing multiple victims rather than just one creates a vivid image of the tragedy, it does not allow the reader to form a deep connection with any singular person who suffered from the pogrom.
Ida enters the discussion of the Polish killings of Jews in a completely different manner. The movie centers on a young nun who, upon learning that she is a Jew, follows her aunt to the town where her parents died, and slowly learns the details of their deaths. In addition to learning how Ida’s parents and cousin were violently killed by the son of the man who was protecting them, we also see how the trip affected her and her aunt, Wanda. Wanda’s distress over the loss of her sister and son, as well as her disappointment with Ida’s becoming a nun rather than returning to her old identity, drives her to commit suicide. Ida, meanwhile, begins to lose her Christian faith and experiments with her aunt’s promiscuous lifestyle before she is able to go back to the convent. The audience grows to pity Ida and Wanda, and forms an emotional connection with them. However, the movie leaves out many of the historical facts surrounding the Holocaust and the pogroms.
The stark differences between Neighbors and Ida make them perfect complements to each other, especially for people studying the pogroms of Poland. In order to truly grasp the importance of a historical event, it is not enough to just know the facts: one has to understand the consequences of such events, on both grand and small scales. If people were unable to form any emotional attachments to a historical tragedy, then nothing would be learned from it: people would ignore the travesty and possibly allow it to happen again. However, one also cannot ignore facts, since they are important in understanding how and why something happened, which will allow posterity to avoid repeating any of the same mistakes.
I think that Ida and Neighbors, while complimentary, and certainly related, tell different stories,
Ida providing a human aspect that Neighbors lacks. The film creates a face and a story for the staggering statistics and numbers that make up the backbone of Gross’ book. While Neighbors is compelling in its own right, with snippets of personal anecdotes and half-included tales of a larger story, Ida provides the story the book presents evidence for. The film fills in the lacuna; Ida’s quest for her family’s history and her own story acts similar to my own quest for details while reading Neighbors. The book is wonderful in that it constructs a case with supporting evidence and testimony. However, the film follows a continuous storyline focused on one character, giving it a resolution I simply did not find in the book.
While I enjoyed the book (as much as a book about a massacre can be enjoyed), I found it difficult to wrap my head around. How could ordinary people, much like you or I, orchestrate the murder or an entire village of people, of their neighbors? Although Ida did not answer this question for me, it did provide me with a face to focus on, to represent a larger group. While it is hard to visualize the perpetrators of this violence, I found it similarly difficult to imagine the victims. Just as I could easily be the murderer, I could also be the murdered. In a situation so far removed from anything I have experienced, it is impossible to know which side I would stand on. I like to imagine I would stand on the side of justice and humanity, heroically saving the Jews, but history has proven this unlikely. It is far more plausible that I would either be killed, if I was Jewish, or partake in the massacre- although as a woman, my chances at simply being a bystander are higher (however, this is horrible in its own right).
I think the lesson here is that the book and the film need to be taken together. The book provides the hard knowledge, an accurate account of what happened, while the movie makes the massacre more relatable. Together, I questioned my role in history- who I would be if caught in a similar scenario. Neighbors made me curious for more information, while Ida made me question myself.
By Madeline Kauffman
I believe Ida and Neighbors to be excellent pieces of work that compliment each other quite well. Both focus on the horrific events that occurred during World War II, in which the Poles committed horrible crimes against the Jewish population within their nation. The main difference between the two, however, is the use of scale. Gross’ Neighbors was useful to read first, as it concentrated on the entire town of Jedwabne and the pogrom that took place there. The reader obtains crucial knowledge in regards to what happened and how the Jewish population was murdered (and by who) within this specific town. Through the analysis of numerous sources, Gross essentially reveals the villains of these mass murders to be the Polish neighbors, rather than the German occupiers. The reader also understands that events similar to the one that occurred in Jedwabne happened throughout multiple towns within the Polish nation.
Ida goes on to focus on one particular family and explores the more personal aftermath of the tragic and hideous murders of the Polish Jews. From the movie, one can understand how the events that are described and analyzed in Neighbors, affected the survivors, family members, and friends of those who were killed. The narrowing of the scope to two individuals, Ida and her Aunt, provides a deeper look at how these people came to terms with the atrocities, and the difficulties they had with gaining information about their relatives. The difficulties they had along their journey ultimately reflects back to Neighbors, in which Gross explains the denial that was, and most likely is still, seen amongst the Polish people with regards to the acceptance of the murders and the role their people played in them.
Ida and Neighbors, though separate pieces of work created by separate individuals, work together to provide the important context needed to understanding Poland during World War II, and offer different perspectives and levels of scale to aid in one’s overall comprehension of the massacre of the Polish Jews.
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.
After reading Gross’ Neighbors and watching Pawlikowski’s Ida, I believe that the pieces of work compliment each other while sharing two different stories related to the horrific events that occurred during a time in history. While sharing two different stories related to World War II Poland, each work is able to share different details from different perspectives. Although both Neighbors and Ida give a fresh perspective to the horrors of World War II Poland, Neighbors seemed to read more like a secondary source to the events of the Jedwabne massacre. After explaining the events that took place leading up to the massacre, Gross proposes the argument that the Jedwabne massacre was committed by the Polish against their neighbors, the Polish Jews. Gross is then able to defend his argument with details of the massacre that he discovered through his historical research. In Ida, Pawlikowski uses the main character to reflect the effects of certain events like the German occupation of World War II on an individual. In the film, Ida is a young woman about to take her vows as a nun in the Polish Catholic Church in 1962. Before she becomes a nun, she must locate her aunt which takes her on a journey to locate the graves of her Jewish parents that were murdered during the German occupation of Poland. This journey of discovery leaves a long term effect on Ida and her identity. Although Pawlikowski’s Ida is more fictional and focuses on the story of one girl, I believe that it reflects the similar stories of the struggles of the small group of Poles affected by World War II Poland. By reading Gross’ Neighbors and watching Pawlikowski’s Ida, I am able to gain a more historical context on World War II Poland and the causes of the Jedwabne massacre while gaining a more personal and individual context on the effects of these events.