I am unhappy to cite this anticommunist, but… quoting Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, pages 18–20:
Even though the [Axis] gave the order, it was Polish hooligans who took it up and carried it out, using the most horrible methods. After various tortures and humiliations, they burned all the Jews in a barn.
During the first pogrom and the later bloodbath the following outcasts distinguished themselves by their brutality: Szleziński, Karolak, Borowiuk (Borowski?) Mietek, Borowiuk (Borowski?) Wacław, Jermałowski, Ramutowski Bolek, Rogalski Bolek, Szelawa Stanisław, Szelawa Franciszek, Kozłowski Geniek, Trzaska, Tarnoczek Jerzyk, Ludański Jurek, Laciecz Czesław.
On the morning of July 10, 1941, eight gestapo men came to town and had a meeting with representatives of the town authorities. When the gestapo asked what their plans were with respect to the Jews, they said, unanimously, that all Jews must be killed.
When the [Axis] proposed to leave one Jewish family from each profession, local carpenter Bronisław Szleziński, who was present, answered: We have enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy all the Jews, none should stay alive. Mayor Karolak and everybody else agreed with his words. For this purpose Szleziński gave his own barn, which stood nearby. After this meeting the bloodbath began.
Local hooligans armed themselves with axes, special clubs studded with nails, and other instruments of torture and destruction and chased all the Jews into the street. As the first victims of their devilish instincts they selected seventy‐five of the youngest and healthiest Jews, whom they ordered to pick up a huge monument of Lenin that the Russians had erected in the center of town.
It was impossibly heavy, but under a rain of horrible blows the Jews had to do it. While carrying the monument, they also had to sing until they brought it to the designated place. There, they were ordered to dig a hole and throw the monument in. Then these Jews were butchered to death and thrown into the same hole.
The other brutality was when the murderers ordered every Jew to dig a hole and bury all previously murdered Jews, and then those were killed and in turn buried by others. It is impossible to represent all the brutalities of the hooligans, and it is difficult to find in our history of suffering something similar.
Beards of old Jews were burned, newborn babies were killed at their mothers’ breasts, people were beaten murderously and forced to sing and dance. In the end they proceeded to the main action—the burning. The entire town was surrounded by guards so that nobody could escape; then Jews were ordered to line up in a column, four in a row, and the ninety‐year‐old rabbi and the shochet [Kosher butcher] were put in front, they were given a red banner, and all were ordered to sing and were chased into the barn. Hooligans bestially beat them up on the way.
Near the gate a few hooligans were standing, playing various instruments in order to drown the screams of horrified victims. Some tried to defend themselves, but they were defenseless. Bloodied and wounded, they were pushed into the barn. Then the barn was doused with kerosene and lit, and the bandits went around to search Jewish homes, to look for the remaining sick and children.
The sick people they found they carried to the barn themselves, and as for the little children, they roped a few together by their legs and carried them on their backs, then put them on pitchforks and threw them onto smoldering coals.
After the fire they used axes to knock golden teeth from still not entirely decomposed bodies and in other ways violated the corpses of holy martyrs.⁶
(Emphasis added.)
The anticommunists massacred at least four hundred of Jedwabne’s Jews, but the actual total could have been as high as one thousand six hundred.
Click here for other events that happened today (July 10).
1883: Johannes Blaskowitz, Axis commander, existed.
1903: Werner Best, head of the Reich Security Main Office, came to life.
1921: Adolf Schicklgruber traveled to Augsburg, Germany to attend a political meeting to which he received no invitation. (He would immediately clash with fellow party members.)
1928: The Regio Escerito released members of the Blackshirt paramilitary organization between the age of 26 and 36 so that they could join the Blackshirt combat legions.
1932: Clashes between Fascist protesters and the police resulted in eighteen deaths in the Weimar Republic.
1937: Kamoi arrived in Ise Bay.
1940: As the Imperial Japanese deployed the new A6M Zero fighters against Chinese forces, the British authorities put 451 Fascist POWs, 55 Fascist sympathizers, and 2,036 civilians from the Third Reich—mostly Jewish refugees—collectively categorized as ‘enemy aliens’, all together on the British troop ship Dunera whose intended passenger capacity was only 1,600!
1941: The Finnish Army began an assault toward Lake Ladoga north of Leningrad, and Joachim von Ribbentrop asked Tōkyō again to attack Vladivostok. Coincidentally, Chen Jie ordered the operations of his embassy in Berlin to shut down, thus officially cutting diplomatic ties between the Third Reich and China. Aside from that, the 13th Panzer Division captured Zhytomyr, Ukraine, and the Axis crossed the Dnieper River further east.
1942: Axis submarine U‐67 heavily destroyed Allied tanker Benjamin Brewster sixty miles south of Louisiana at 0619 hours; twenty‐five died while fifteen lived, and the wreck would burn for nine days (melting much of the ship). Aside from that, Axis 4.Panzerarmee and 6.Armee met near Kalach‐na‐Donu, southern Russia, and 17.Armee and 1.Panzerarmee continued to advance to Rostov, northeast of Moscow. The 4th Panzer Army and 6th Army advanced swiftly southward between the Donets River and the Don River in southern Russia while the 1st Panzer Army advanced toward Rostov‐on‐Don. As well, elements of the 15th Panzer Division unsuccessfully counterattacked the Australian positions near El Alamein in the afternoon.
1943: Comandante Cappellini (Aquilla III) departed Sabang, Sumatra at 1935 hours, escorted by Axis sloop Eritrea.
1944: Erwin Rommel received the Romanian Order of Michael the Brave 3rd Class and 2nd Class, then two hundred twenty‐one former prisoners of Bergen‐Belsen concentration camp and sixty‐one former internees in Vittel, France who had received permission from the Third Reich to go to Palestine, arrived in Haifa at 1700 hours!