WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — In the Polish town of Jedwabne, where historians agree that townspeople killed most of their Jewish neighbors during World War II, a brand-new “information center” denies the crime.

The information center is housed in two shipping containers that stand taller than anything else at the memorial site. On the side of one container, in Polish, are the words “The earth doesn’t lie” — a slogan promoted by those who believe that exhuming the site would exonerate the Poles of Jedwabne.

The containers were installed earlier this month and celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony shared online by Wojciech Sumlinski, a right-wing Polish activist. Last year, he took credit for placing seven boulders near Jedwabne’s official memorial, bearing plaques that deny Polish responsibility and claim that Jews historically conspired against Poles.

“We call it a denial museum, because that’s what it is,” Abraham Waserstein, whose grandfather Szmul Wasersztein was one of the few survivors of the 1941 massacre, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the new installation. “Putting these containers in Jedwabne [is] further desecrating the only remnants of Jewish community left there, our family’s legacy there.”

Waserstein, a law student at Duke University, said he and his family have reached out to local advocates with the goal of removing the new pavilions. But they may be fighting an uphill battle: The boulders that Sumlinski installed last year remain at the site and can be seen in the footage he posted of the new additions.

Szmul Wasersztein was among a handful of Jews who escaped on July 10, 1941, when Polish residents rounded up and killed hundreds of their Jewish neighbors, mostly by burning them alive in a barn.

Wasersztein’s deposition in 1945 was key to recording the Jedwabne massacre and led to the convictions of 12 Polish residents in 1949. His testimony also formed the heart of “Neighbors,” a 2000 book by historian Jan Tomasz Gross that sparked intense national debate. The crimes of Jedwabne, rupturing historical narratives that centered solely on the victimhood and heroism of Poles under the........

© The Times of Israel