Contains a new afterword.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 155-200) and index.

Outline of the story -- Sources -- Before the war -- Soviet Occupation, 1939-1941 -- The outbreak of the Russo-German War and the Pogrom in Radzilów -- Preparations -- Who murdered the Jews of Jedwabne? -- The murder -- Plunder -- Intimate biographies -- Anachronism -- What do people remember? -- Collective responsibility -- New approach to sources -- Is it possible to be simultaneously a victim and a victimizer? -- Collaboration -- Social support for Stalinism -- For a new historiography.

On a summer day in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Poland, half of the town of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half: 1,600 men, women, and children-all but seven of the town's Jews. In this shocking and compelling study, historian Jan Gross pieces together eyewitness accounts as well as physical evidence into a comprehensive reconstruction of the horrific July day remembered well by locals but hidden to history. Revealing wider truths about Jewish-Polish relations, the Holocaust, and human responses to occupation and totalitarianism, Gross's investigation sheds light on how Jedwabne's Jews came to be murdered-not by faceless Nazis, but by people who knew them well.