Exactly 60 years ago the residents of a small Polish town turned on their Jewish neighbours, herded them into a barn and burned them alive.
Yesterday the Polish President, Mr Alexander Kwasniewski, begged forgiveness for one of the darkest chapters in Poland's wartime history at the official opening of a memorial to the hundreds murdered in the north-eastern town of Jedwabne in 1941.
But the service stirred up more controversy, from relatives of victims who felt the ceremony was a whitewash, and from locals who feel unjustly blamed.
"For this crime we must beg those who died and their families to forgive us," said Mr Kwasniewski in front of some 3,000 people, including elderly survivors of the massacre and relatives of victims.
"This was a particularly cruel crime, justified by nothing," he said. "This is why today, as a citizen and as the President of the Republic of Poland, I beg pardon, in my own name, and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime."
A post-war investigation into the massacre found that Nazi soldiers were entirely to blame. The real story lay hidden until a historian published a book last year with new evidence showing that ordinary Poles were responsible for killing as many as 1,600 Jews in one night. The book prompted public soul-searching in Poland and a new investigation into the massacre.
In March authorities removed a decades-old monument blaming "Nazi and Gestapo soldiers" for the massacre, and the still-incomplete inquiry has accepted that locals were involved. But the matter of ultimate responsibility is still not clear.
Mr Kwasniewski called on Poles to admit that their forebears were not always victims of the Nazis, but sometimes willing accomplices, and not all Poles are ready to face up to the past.
About half of Jedwabne's 2,000 residents, including the local Catholic priest, Father Edward Orlowski, stayed away from the ceremony after Cardinal Jozef Glemp complained that Poles were being "constantly vilified".
"These are all lies," said Father Orlowski. "I am spending the day quietly at home. It is Holocaust business. It is not my business. Germans are responsible, so why should we apologise?"
Opinion polls show that half of Poles still refuse to accept shared responsibility for the killings.
"The Germans were to blame. They had pistols and machine-guns. The Poles could do nothing," said one woman at the ceremony.
"We do not apologise, It was the Germans who murdered Jews in Jedwabne," read a sign in a grocery shop.
Jewish groups and families of the victims are angry that the memorial to the massacre, a burnt Jewish gravestone set in a granite-walled field, glosses over the incident as it does not name the perpetrators.
"Poland has yet to acknowledge its share in the terrible truth, that people of the Polish nation killed the Jews of Jedwabne," said Mr Ty Rogers from New York, who lost 26 relatives in the massacre.
Additional reporting: Reuters
