Anna Bikont spoke about her book, The Crime and the Silence, at Politics & Prose on Tuesday, October 19, 2015.

An award-winning journalist in her native Poland, Bikont won the European Book Prize in 2011 for this investigation of the cultural and moral reverberations of the 1941 Jedwabne massacre. Building on Jan Gross’s historical account in Neighbors, Bikont chronicles her nation’s public debate over its violent anti-Semitic past and assembles the testimonies of Jedwabne’s witnesses and participants to probe the sources of such chilling hatred.