Poland's president made a fresh apology Sunday during a ceremony remembering a 1941 pogrom which saw hundreds of Jews massacred by their own neighbours.
The 70th anniversary commemoration of the Jedwabne progrom, in which 340 to 1,500 people were killed according to varying estimates.
"Once again, I beg forgiveness," President Bronislaw Komorowski said in a message read at the foot of the memorial during the ceremony in Jedwabne, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) north of Warsaw.
The ceremony in Jedwabne was attended by a high official of Poland's Roman Catholic Church. Jewish religious leaders, ambassadors from Israel, Germany and the United States and an envoy from President Komorowski.
In 2001, Polish-American historian Jan T. Gross published a book describing how the massacre was perpertrated by Polish villagers and not by the Nazi occupying forces, as had been previously assumed.
A subsequent investigation by Poland's Institute of National Remembrance confirmed most of Gross' findings but also found that some Nazi officers were in fact present during the massacres.
Many of the victims, including women and children, were burned alive after villagers led them into an emptied barn and set it alight with kerosene as German officers shot those who tried to escape.
On the progrom's 60th anniversary in 2001, then president Aleksander Kwasniewski made an official apology to the Jewish people on behalf of Poland.
The revelations on Jedwabne caused widespread soul-searching in Poland as they shattered an entrenched national belief that all Poles were never anything other than victims of the Nazis.