Jedwabne plaque avoids explicitly blaming Poles for massacre of Jews

The government has announced the text of a plaque commemorating a World War Two massacre of up to 1,600 Jews by their Polish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne that does not explicitly place blame for the killings on the Poles. The plaque will be placed on a monument to be unveiled at the 60th anniversary of the massacre on July 10, 2001. It reads: "To future generations, so that the sin of hatred, inflamed by the German Nazis, will never again turn the peoples of this soil against each other." The government' s Council for the Protection of Sites of Martyrdom (ROPWM) said it consulted various communities, including the Jewish, about the inscription and did not make it more explicit in view of the ongoing investigation by the National Remembrance Institute (IPN). "We have to distinguish between finding the guilty and commemorating the deaths of the Jews killed at Jedwabne," said ROPWM head, Andrzej Przewoznik. (Reuters, Gazeta Wyborcza, pp.1,4) M.K.