Pologne contre histoire, Poland versus History

I was a young girl when Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors was published at the very beginning of the 2000s. Among my family and the Polish diaspora in France, as well as in Poland obviously, the book created a sort of conflict, on several levels. Firstly because my family and their friends are very powerfully linked to Poland, often as democratic activists. Polish democracy was the goal of their dissident youth, the fight of their militancy in Poland or in the diaspora. This democratic fight was inherently close to a genuine link with the Polish people. Some went to prison, others helped a lot, there was a feeling of shared destiny. So for the Polish, discovering this pogrom perpetrated during the war on their Jewish neighbours was deeply upsetting, they would rather it had been false, or so says one of the characters in the film. For those of them who are Jewish, the acute consciousness of sharing an inner experience came out. Suddenly, they understand the fate of their parents, their family, they understand the silence around Jewish deaths in Poland during the war. For those of them who are exiled, this exile suddenly becomes Polish AND Jewish. Therefore it was like destinies had been split up and brought together again through pain, with time rushing to the future and the past and what is to come. It was a sort of historic situation in the strong sense of the term, of torsions between past and future. I experienced this through the point of view of the diaspora and I saw these upheavals, the changes undertaken, and in that moment I became aware of history in the making, and of the extent to which historical truth is one of the conditions of democracy. What really struck me was the reversibility of things, the difficulty of grasping something about the truth of an event, the impact on the lives of several generations, the slowness of the monster in revealing itself, the strength of denial opposing it… The discussions were endless, the past would come back, overpowering, against history on the way.

And then history imposed itself among us, and we matured, got older, grew up, with this new knowledge of the relationship between the Polish and the Jews, and I think that for my family and their friends, it allowed us to grasp a more precise destiny, I would say. But for the country, history has not been able to impose itself yet. The truth of Neighbors has become a political cornerstone, a dividing line between nationalism and progressionism in Poland, and nationalism was gaining ground. Soon the Poland for which the democrats had fought was becoming a neoliberal, nationalist country with fascist tendencies. And Neighbors, this history, has always been at the centre of divisions. I finally basically inherited of this story as Jan T. Gross is almost a member of my family, so everywhere there were VHS tapes with televised debates from the 2000s collecting dust in diaspora apartments. Finally this story made of image and sound, this story with an almost biblical quality to us—in the sense that James Baldwin gave to the interest for history: “maybe the most mystical of our attempts”, was waiting to be edited. Then, logically, historians were attacked by the nationalist right, as their research on the scope of the crime progressed… When the country finally gets rid of the far right, in 2023, I feel it is time for me to make the film. I had thought for a long time that Jan Gross was an interesting character, cine-genic, with mystery, and that all of this history was a little bit of a myth, a symbolic fight between acceptance and oblivion. At last, a film uniting Jewish deaths in Poland was important, taking these events from a half-told memory, but in the distance of time and with the calm and determination to make a story with sovereignty, to maybe be able to truly bury them in our heads, to give them a tomb.

They form an uninterrupted chain, their commitment has been going on for about thirty years, it represents the majority of their work life. I wanted to meet them after seeing their archive from the 90s and the 2000s. Filming them today in the territory they work in allowed me to show the invisible past in the present of Poland, invisible because it is untold, altered, or lied about. Every one of them had a territory, a place. The film also undertakes a topography of their research. I would say that for them, thinking together of a staging to embody their research allowed them to share the humanity, the simplicity of their gesture.

The film was shown in Poland, at Krakow festival in May 2025, two days before the presidential elections, won in a very close race by a nationalist historian! Despite a discreet communication surrounding the programming of the film, also criticized, the cinema was full of smiling young people, well aware, to whom the lies of the state are proven. I think the film is part of the cultural objects that can act towards constituting a democratic front. There is this personal insistence from all of us, from me and the historians, and from Jan Gross especially, that is also the insistence of Wasserstein’s family coming back to Poland, that is impossible to feel indifferent about when you come across it, and you live in Poland. The stories in the film are deeply moving because they change the collective imagination, they name what has happened. The goal was to raise things to the place for sharing, to get out of the polemic. I have no idea what the future life of the film in Poland will be like, but if the far right’s “historical politics” crusade escalates again, it will suffer the consequences. They went as far as to attack a symposium of historians in Paris, and they take part in assault against research, against critical thinking, they hate these emancipatory movements and want to silence them to put their voters to sleep in a childish and heroic vision of the past. A war declared by a number of governments of the extremes in the world. Fortunately, you can’t predict the future!

Shmuel Wasserstein has existed to me and to everyone from the very start, since it is his testimony which brought Jan Gross to reveal the truth about what happened in the village and the region. I had seen in reports and films a small excerpt of an archive in which he talks in front of the sign of the village. It is during these scoutings found at the house of Anna Bikont, one of the characters, a tape of the family journey, shot and edited by his son Saul. I only watched it when editing. We were struck by the beauty and the simplicity of Saul’s shots, self-ignoring filmmaker, filming the emptiness, filming from his emotional experience of his father’s trauma, the journey to Jedwabne, their stay in Poland at the end of the 90s, not long before the book was released. This now Costa Rican family comes back to their land, and there they only find old ghosts and emptiness. This archive really moved me, firstly because my holidays in Poland have always had this confused identity of “we are resting but we remember, we recall, we question, in short, we tire ourselves out”—a classic tragicomedy from my childhood—since we were able to go back to Poland in 1988. The Wassersteins are on holiday, it creates tears and emotion, it creates absence. Then, stories of returns to Poland after the war, stories of the void, the emptiness, and of the disappearing of the Jewish world in Poland, I had read a lot of them, and Saul’s camera said what others had written with the strength of their sorrow, and I think his shots contain these words. Then there are a thousand details, which we would scrutinize in the wrong copy left by Saul, prosaic details, time T photography of a real yet impossible return. A family, its members, their different knowledge of things, a tried transmission and a camcorder to remember how we tried to remember.