Well recently I was reading a monography of my family's home village. There were lots of Jews so there was established a little ghetto during war. And you might be suprised that there were ppl who wanted to help, smuggling food to their friends. There were also some families who have hidden Jews. Unfotunately little Jews suvived war but there are still alive few Jewish ppl who orginate from that village and still (although they emigrated to other countries) are sending letters to their friends in Poland.
If I, myself, know such cases when ppl helped Jews in some unknown little village, then how many more village like this one can be in Poland? I dont want to make heros of my fellow countymen - I know there were lots of bad and greedy Poles who made lots of harms to Jews, but I dont want Poles to be showed like war criminals. Most ppl were
not engaged in any way in Holocaust so why they should wear this trait or label of jew's persecutors??
The ppl you have accused of rejecting any bad periods in fact have right.
Have their own personal right. They have it because they just dont recall in their own experiece or experience of their family any recollection of Poles killing Jews. It seems they dont know such cases from the first hand or from their own experience, thats why they dont agree with such statments. I dont say that Gross have no right either (I dont have any competence to criticise his statments). I just remind you that there is never one truth. There are only personal truths. It depends where you've been, where you've lived. I understand those ppl.
The main problem is that people arent able to discuss this subject in proper way. There are always extremes from one side to another: "We were not killing jews, we were heplping them, be thankful" or "You were not hepling Jews, you were killing them, be shamful" nothing between. Its a problem of both sides who dont want to acknoledged to each other either the merits and crimes... and to notice the most important thing that there was a whole bunch of different man-kinds - there were criminals, there were heros and there were ordinary ppl.
I feel that if you have to make some statments about attitudes of Poles towards Jews during the war it would be that the majority of Polish ppl neither help nor done harm to Jews.
I feel deeply sorry that in my country there were such incidents like Jedwabne but I also dont quite understand why whole polish nation should feel the responsibility for a bunch of hicks from some village...
Whole nation should feel resposibility for their govermen's acts. Thats why we should feel the repsonsibility for March'68 and generally afterwar antysemitism which forced lots of ppl of jewish origin to emigrate...
Isaac Beshavis Singer is a really good example of how bridges can be built. I have to admit I mix Singer frequently up with Isaac Asimov, but that was an American.
I will add here also Ludwik Zamenhof who came to the conviction that the main reason ppl cant communicate is that they use different languages... thats why he created esperanto ;)