The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

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  Journal

  AUGUST 28, 2000

  “It’s a lie that Poles killed the Jews in Jedwabne,” says Tadeusz Ś., a retired doctor from Warsaw and an eyewitness to the events of July 10, 1941.

  My boss, Adam Michnik, the editor in chief of the Gazeta Wyborcza, receives this visitor in his office. When Adam informed me that according to Tadeusz Ś., who was referred to him by a friend, the crime committed in Jedwabne could not be blamed on the Poles, I heard in his voice both excitement and relief. I knew he hadn’t been able to come to terms with the facts revealed by Jan Tomasz Gross in Neighbors. We’d talked about it many times. Before Gross’s book appeared in May 2000, I’d said in a Gazeta editorial meeting that we should report on the little town confronting the crime from its wartime past.

  Gross reconstructs events on the basis of three different sources: postwar testimony given by Szmul Wasersztejn, court papers from the postwar trial in which the defendants were charged with collaborating with the occupation forces, and the Jedwabne Book of Memory, recollections of Jewish emigrants from Jedwabne recorded in the United States. He draws tough conclusions and formulates even tougher hypotheses. In Jedwabne, Poles burned all the town’s Jews in a barn, a total of sixteen hundred people. “It was a collective murder in both senses of the word,” writes Gross, “in terms of the number of victims and of their persecutors.”

  Adam rejected all my proposals to go to Jedwabne. Nor did he want to publish excerpts from Gross’s book before it was released. Now he wants me to hear for myself what really happened. He has insisted that I be present at this meeting, although Tadeusz Ś. wanted to meet with him alone. Our visitor doesn’t allow us to record the conversation or print his surname. Reluctantly he agrees to let me take notes. In 1941 he was fifteen. He happened to be in Jedwabne on July 10. He says he was on his way to the dentist.

  “In the morning two Germans in black Gestapo uniforms rode into the market square on motorcycles. From a balcony I watched them ordering the Jews to assemble. They put the rabbi’s black hat on a stick to mock him. I followed the Jews all the way to the barn.”

  “How many Germans did you see at the barn?” asked Adam.

  “Three. Germans like to do things properly, so they had the barn owner brought out to open it with a key, though they could have just lifted the doors out.”

  “And that was all done by three Germans?”

  “There were probably more of them in plainclothes. There were three in uniform, with handguns. I saw the Jews go into the barn of their own accord, as if they were under hypnosis.”

  “And they didn’t try to escape when it was on fire?”

  “No, they didn’t. It’s horrible.”

  “Did any Poles take part in this crime?”

  “No, none.”

  “In every society there’s some criminal element. Pick up any newspaper, you’ll find plenty of reports on rapes, murders. During the occupation there were szmalcowniks, people who blackmailed Jews in hiding.”

  “Only in big cities. You don’t know the provinces. It’s native-born Poles, the impoverished gentry, who live there. They wouldn’t think to take revenge on the Jews for betraying Poles to the Soviets. At the barn they were shouting: ‘Get yourselves out of there, Yids!’ There were just three Germans standing there with sawed-off shotguns, not even rifles. The older people who were there thought it was wrong. They talked about it at church the week after.”

  “They thought they themselves had been wrong?”

  “No, the Jews. Not one of them had it in him to turn on the Germans.”

  “The Poles thought the victims were in the wrong?”

  “For not defending themselves.”

  “But if someone is being murdered in front of me, I should come to his aid, right? And if I don’t, because I’m scared, or stunned, because the situation is too much for me, I’d blame myself, not the victims.”

  “Poles would have helped them if they’d fought back against the Germans. When the Jews grabbed rifles and went around town under the Soviets, they were real tough guys, but when the Germans took them to the barn, what did they do? Folks get offended if you get them caught up in something like that. The Jews should have defended themselves. People called them cowards because they waited for the Poles to defend them and didn’t do anything for themselves. But saying that there were sixteen hundred people in there is a lie and a joke.”

  “And how many of them do you think there were?” I interject.

  “A thousand, no more,” Tadeusz Ś. replies. I look at Adam and see his face go pale.

  At the end Ś. warns us again: “Please don’t mention my name. I don’t want those Jewish vultures to lie in wait for me at my house.”

  SEPTEMBER 1, 2000

  The Institute of National Remembrance announces it is launching an investigation into the Jedwabne massacre. When I run into Adam Michnik in the hallway at the Gazeta Wyborcza, he tells me that the conversation with Tadeusz Ś. haunts him. He suggests I use it as the basis for a short story set in the town of J. during the war. But I don’t write fiction.

  I decide to put in a request for a year’s unpaid leave and go to Jedwabne for myself, if I can’t do it for the Gazeta. There must be a memory of the atrocity in the town, there must be some witnesses. I will try to reconstruct the facts, but also what happened to the memory of those events over the last sixty years.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 2000

  The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. I hold five little pages written in a sprawling hand, with certain words crossed out. It’s Szmul Wasersztejn’s Jedwabne testimony, translated from the Yiddish. “Infants were murdered at their mothers’ breasts, people were brutally beaten and forced to sing and dance. Bloodied and maimed, they were all herded into the barn. Then gas was poured on the barn and it was set afire. Afterward thugs went by Jewish homes, looking for the sick and the children left behind. The sick they carried to the barn themselves, children they hung in pairs by their little legs and dragged them there on their backs, then lifted them with pitchforks and heaved them into the hot furnace of the barn.”

  SEPTEMBER 6, 2000

  The Jedwabne Book of Memory was edited by two rabbis, the brothers Julius and Jacob Baker, who emigrated from Jedwabne to America before the war; for twenty years only a hundred copies existed. Today I read it on the Internet. In the book I find testimonies about 15 Tamuz 5701—or July 10, 1941—recorded by Rivka Vogel (“Goys cut off the head of Gitele, Judka Nadolnik’s daughter, and kicked it around like a soccer ball”), Itzchok Newmark (“With a song on their lips, the Poles poured gas on the barn crammed with Jews”), Awigdor Kochaw (“A gang of boys beat me mercilessly and dragged me into the market square; they hounded and savagely beat the tortured, hungry, and thirsty people who were fainting from standing all day in the burning sun”), and Herschel, the t
hird Baker brother from Goniądz, about forty kilometers northeast of Jedwabne (“Completely exhausted, my mother reached Goniądz on July 14; fleeing from the massacre, she ran from Jedwabne through the fields and forests … She was beside herself after what she’d seen, Poles destroying all the Jews.”)

  SEPTEMBER 28, 2000

  On a trip to Wilno with a group of friends, Irena Grudzińska Gross among them. She says that a few years ago Jan Gross wanted to include Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony in a Polish edition of his essay collection The Ghostly Decade. Irena read it and advised him to leave it out. How can you believe something as monstrous as that on the basis of a single testimony?

  NOVEMBER 17, 2000

  An interview with the historian Tomasz Szarota in the Gazeta Wyborcza. He accuses Gross of not even attempting to explain why “fifteen hundred persons in the prime of life, led to their deaths by fewer than a hundred men armed only with sticks, didn’t try to defend themselves or at the very least to escape.”

  It’s hard to understand how Szarota, author of an excellent book on pogroms in Nazi-occupied Europe, could bring himself to utter those words. There were elderly people in that crowd, women with infants, toddlers holding on to their mothers’ skirts (Jewish families were often large), whereas young men were scarce—from Wasersztejn’s testimony it emerges that they had been killed earlier that day. How many examples does Szarota know of a crowd of people led to slaughter rebelling and attacking its executioners?

  In the investigation conducted in the late sixties and early seventies, prosecutor Waldemar Monkiewicz of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes claimed a unit of 232 Germans led by Wolfgang Birkner had arrived in Jedwabne that day, July 10. Referring to this claim, Szarota reproaches Gross for not having studied the role of the Germans in the atrocity: “I doubt that the prosecutor plucked those 232 Germans out of the air, or the trucks for that matter, or the figure of Wolfgang Birkner. In any case it can’t be right that the name Birkner isn’t mentioned once in Gross’s book.”

  Personally, I would approach any investigation conducted in the late 1960s, at the time of an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by the state, with extreme caution. Gross had testimonies from the 1949 trial at hand. How is it that not one of the witnesses noticed a convoy of trucks? I don’t know how many Germans were there by the barn in Jedwabne, but Tadeusz Ś., who was trying to convince Adam Michnik that the Poles were innocent, saw three of them.

  NOVEMBER 21, 2000

  I’m told a man phoned the Gazeta saying he was prepared to talk about Radziłów. I call him back. Jan Skrodzki now lives in Gdańsk, but is originally from Radziłów, eighteen kilometers from Jedwabne. Three days before the massacre in Jedwabne, the whole Jewish population of Radziłów was rounded up and burned.

  On July 7, 1941, he was a small boy and watched from behind the curtains as Jews were driven to their deaths. He saw no Germans. He tells me, “I feel responsible for Jedwabne, for Radziłów, for everything that may still come out.” We agree I’ll go to see him in Gdańsk.

  NOVEMBER 23, 2000

  At the Jewish Historical Institute I read Menachem Finkelsztejn’s testimony on the burning of the Jewish community in Radziłów. And there—he testifies—the perpetrators were Poles. I struggle through horrific scenes of rape, beatings, children thrown into the burning barn, a Jewish girl’s head hacked off with a saw, and I want to believe that the horror itself made survivors exaggerate and overstate the facts.

  In an attempt to understand the outburst of barbarity, Finkelsztejn writes, “The grain of hatred fell on fertile soil, expertly primed by the clergy over many years. The desire to get hold of Jewish business and Jewish riches further whetted the locals’ appetites.”

  NOVEMBER 24, 2000

  A colloquium of historians discusses Gross’s book at the Polish Academy of Sciences. From the threshold one feels an emotional charge rare at scholarly gatherings in Poland.

  Tomasz Szarota presents the current state of knowledge on Jedwabne. He cites a number of publications authenticating the claim that the Białystok commando unit led by Birkner was operating in Jedwabne. But there is just one source, namely prosecutor Monkiewicz, who repeated this over and over, at every opportunity, as he did at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jedwabne’s town charter.

  Gross introduces a different tone. He speaks sharply, frankly, ironically. He reminds Szarota of a meeting in May, at which Monkiewicz declared that Poles had not killed Jews in the Białystok district in July 1941, nor aided in their killing, and that there had been just one instance in which Germans forced Poles to join hands, and that was to form a chain to prevent Jews from escaping.

  “I realized we could dismiss the prosecutor,” says Gross. “It’s a sad state of affairs when an academic authority like Tomasz Szarota lends credence to a muddled version of the tragedy in Jedwabne by bringing Monkiewicz’s views into wide circulation. We talked about this, Tomasz,” he addresses Szarota directly, “and I told you Birkner being in Jedwabne was an invention and you should forget about Monkiewicz.”

  After several people have drawn attention to the scholarly shortcomings of Gross’s book, Marek Edelman steps up to the microphone. “Everybody here would like to find some proof that Gross is a shoddy historian, that he made a mistake and Mr. So-and-So was killed earlier and Mrs. Such-and-Such later. But that’s not what this is about,” says the last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “Jedwabne was not the first case, nor was it an isolated one. In Poland at that time the mood was ripe for killing Jews. And it wasn’t all about looting. There’s something in man that makes him like killing.”

  Professor Jerzy Jedlicki, who is moderating the discussion, speaks: “Hatred toward Jews, contempt and mockery of Jews, are part of twentieth-century Central European culture, and that includes Poland. By that I don’t mean to say everybody would have been prepared to commit atrocities. But the destruction of the Jews was watched with amusement by a significant part of the local Polish population. That amusement, the laughter that accompanied the Holocaust—I remember it, because at that time I was on the other, Aryan side of the wall. Until today, our stance, and I include myself in this, has been a flight from the subject, a cowardly fear of the darkness lurking in our collective history. With his books, Gross rouses us from our torpor. And that’s the most important thing.”

  The colloquium lasts almost five hours, and at times it’s like a group therapy session. A young Polish staff member of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., speaking of the tide of hatred toward Jews that she’s encountered during the year she’s been in Poland reading archival materials, bursts into tears.

  NOVEMBER 25, 2000

  There wouldn’t have been so many people in Jedwabne prepared to kill if they hadn’t felt the support of like-minded others and of the authorities. A psychology professor writing this in the Gazeta refers to studies showing that Poles treat their own national suffering as a kind of special contribution or investment for which the world is more in debt to them than it is to others. “We see ourselves as exceptional, ascribe to ourselves moral achievements, a unique contribution to world history. Studies show that people who think this way more readily accept the killing of innocents.”

  At Jacek Kuroń’s. I tell him about the conference of historians. Jacek’s memory accords with Edelman’s: a social climate permitting harassment of Jews. In Lvov he saw with his own eyes how young people threw stones into the ghetto. It didn’t shock anyone, and he heard the same refrain all around him: “Hitler’s doing the job for us.”

  “Even the Holocaust didn’t change that,” says Jacek. And he tells me about living in Kraków in the summer of 1945 with his parents, grandparents, and younger brother, Felek. One day on a walk his grandfather tugged Felek’s hand and the child began to cry. Right away a crowd started to gather, yanking the elderly man back and challenging him. They thought he was a Jew and the boy a Polish child who was going to be turned into matzo. Just because
Felek was blond and his grandfather wore a cap. Not long after there was a pogrom in Kraków.

  “Hatred,” Jacek goes on, “comes from a person having a subconscious feeling of guilt. At some level he knows a whole people was destroyed here, and he benefited from it, because he’s got a house or at least a pillow that belonged to a Jew. He won’t face up to it and hatred takes root in him.”

  He quotes a passage from a text published in the Gazeta by Jacek Żakowski, a prominent political commentator: “Jan Gross speaks for himself, and I for myself. None of us has the right to reproach another for what happened to his compatriots or ancestors.” “Nothing good ever came of people not feeling responsible,” Jacek comments.

  DECEMBER 5, 2000

  A letter to Adam Michnik from Kazimierz Laudański. The older brother of Jerzy and Zygmunt Laudański, who were sentenced to fifteen and twelve years in prison respectively, for the killing of Jews in Jedwabne, presents his version of events. In it, the Germans are the main protagonists, actors, whereas the Jewish Communists “together with the NKVD drew up lists of Polish families for deportation to Siberia.”

  One can’t help asking: if we accept that the crime was committed by the Germans, what can it have to do with Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD?

  Protesting the vilification of his brothers, Kazimierz Laudański praises his family’s patriotism.

  Jan Gross, who read the documents in the case conducted against the Jedwabne murderers after the war, found among them a letter from Zygmunt Laudański to the Communist authorities, describing how he had been an NKVD informant during the Soviet occupation and had joined the Polish Workers Party after the war. “It is on shoulders like these that our labor system can be built,” he wrote. Gross was struck by “the relentless conformism of a man who tries to anticipate the expectations of each successive regime in an age of gas ovens and engages himself to the hilt each time—first as an NKVD informant, then as a Jew-killer, finally by joining the Polish Workers Party.”