The Crime and the Silence

Description

A monumental work of non-fiction exploring a wartime atrocity and its sixty-year denial Winner of the European Book Prize 'A masterpiece' Jan T. Gross 'Terrifying and necessary' Julian Barnes 'Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal' Kate Atkinson On 10 July 1941 a horrifying crime was committed in the small Polish town of Jedwadbne. Early in the afternoon, the town's Jewish population - hundreds of men, women and children - were ordered out of their homes, and marched into the town square. By the end of the day most would be dead. It was a massacre on a shocking scale, and one that was widely condemned. But only a few people were brought to justice for their part in the atrocity. The truth of what actually happened on that day was to be suppressed for more than sixty years. Part history, part memoir, part investigation, The Crime and the Silence is an award-winning journalist's account of the events of that day- both the story of a massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past.

Anna Bikont is a journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza,one of Poland's largest and most celebrated newspapers, which she helped found in 1989. For her articles on the crimes of Jedwabne and Radzil w, she was honored in 2001 with Poland's most prestigious award in journalism, the Press Prize. In 2008 and 2009, Bikont was a Cullman Fellow of the New York Public Library.

An astonishing act of investigation and documentation. In the face of lies, denial and massive indifference, Bikont has established exactly what happened ... The result is a terrifying and necessary book, unsparing in its detail, but deeply heartening as an act of historical reclamation. * Julian Barnes * Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal. * Kate Atkinson, Books of the Year, Wall Street Journal * A powerful and important study of the poisonous effects of racism and hatred within a community. * Guardian * A masterpiece of historical journalism ... A must read for anyone interested in the Holocaust and its aftermath. * Jan T. Gross * A hauntingly plausible contemporary history, tactfully delivering truths that we might all do well to contemplate. * Timothy Snyder, author of Black Earth * Humane, measured and painstakingly researched ... It is a hard-won testament to the importance of historical truth. * Daily Mail 'Must Reads' * Beautifully written, devastating and very important. -- Louis Begley * The New York Times * One of the most important and most dramatic books of the last decade. -- Ryszard Kapuscinski Magisterial... meticulous in its procedures, absolute in its commitment to truth. Bikont's book is a book about forgetting, about the pollution of memory, about the conflict between the easy, convenient truth and the awkward, harder truth. It is a work that grows from its journalistic manner and origins into the most powerful writing of necessary history. * The New York Review of Books * The Crime and the Silence deserves to be read by everyone interested in the fraught politics of apology and the ongoing struggle of nations and communities to ascertain and accept difficult historical truths. -- Lawrence Douglas * Irish Times *