This low stone wall marks the circumference of the barn in Jedwabne, where more than 300 Jews were burned to death in July 1941.

After our visit to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery , the first stop on our tour of Holocaust sites in Poland was the little town of Jedwabne, a shtetl in the northeast of Poland. In this town, in 1941, at least half the population had been Jewish for centuries.

Nevertheless, on July 10, 1941, as the Germans were taking over northeastern Poland, the Polish residents...