The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Kazimierz concludes his letter to Michnik with the words “We were and are always prepared to serve our country pro publico bono.”

  This is apparently too much for Adam. The embargo is lifted. I phone Laudański to arrange an interview for the Gazeta.

  DECEMBER 9, 2000

  Pisz, a hundred kilometers north of Jedwabne. Kazimierz Laudański is waiting for me at the turnoff to the little road leading to his house. Before we even reach the house he has asked me where my parents are from and what my mother’s surname was. There was nothing wrong with my mother’s maiden name, and her first name was also just as it should be. At least after a Pole who was in love with her got her Aryan papers and a baptism certificate, and married her. That’s how Lea Horowicz disappeared in Lvov in 1942. She disappeared so completely that I only learned of my origins as an adult by accident, standing in the street.

  My mother didn’t keep in touch with her family; no uncle or cousin ever visited our house. I accepted that my mother, an independent-minded, rebellious person, found family ties and gatherings a boring, middle-class obligation that she didn’t feel like fulfilling. Only when I was fully grown and graduated from college did I meet a man in his fifties at our dacha outside Warsaw, whom my mother introduced as the son of her beloved sister murdered in the Soviet Union in 1937, at the time of the Great Purge. I was with friends, so I just said hello to him and ran on to the river. A few years passed before I saw him again. I told him he was the only relative I knew on my mother’s side—perhaps he knew something about our family? “Our grandfather Hirsz Horowicz…,” my cousin Oleś Wołyński began.

  I systematically called all the friends and acquaintances in my address book from A to Z. “I’m Jewish,” I announced. Somehow the fact didn’t make much of an impression on anyone but me, though a Solidarity advisor I knew suggested we not take any more people of Jewish origin on at the editorial office of the Tygodnik Masowsze (Masowsze Weekly), Solidarity’s underground paper, which I had cofounded. (“There are so many of you already, and if you get caught, it might hurt the cause,” he said—but in good faith and with genuine concern, not hostility.) The biggest surprise was that most of my friends already “knew.” If only because the mother of one of them had been in the same class as my mother at a renowned Jewish gymnasium, or high school, before the war.

  “Why did no one tell me?” I asked them. One of them was convinced I knew but had decided to pass for a hundred percent Polish (I’d often asked him what it was like being Jewish). Another friend thought it was up to my mother to reveal my origins (he apparently accepted the supposition—to him self-evident—that Jewishness was something shameful that had to be “revealed”). A third concluded that if I didn’t know, I was better off.

  Kazimierz Laudański invites me into the house. A well-kept villa in the center of town, elegant china on the table. He’s prepared for me a map of the town as it was in 1941, drawn on graph paper. The street names, churches, cemeteries are marked in blue pen, the synagogue and barn in red. Of the massacre in Jedwabne, he says it resulted from German orders. When I ask how many Germans were there, I’m told there was a uniformed German on every corner. I ask him to point out on the map where they stood. He draws four little crosses. Four Germans.

  “The Jews in Jedwabne, whether they were burned that day or not, their fate was sealed,” Kazimierz Laudański says. “The Germans would have killed them sooner or later. Such a small thing and they slap it on the Poles, on my brothers of all people. We forgave the Gestapo, we forgave the NKVD, and here we have a little quarrel between Jews and Poles and no one can forgive?” Laudański goes on: “It’s not about defending my brothers. They were tried, rightly or wrongly, and you can’t convict them again for the same thing. I’m meeting you so you can tell Mr. Michnik that we shouldn’t be reopening old wounds. It’s not right to make our people out to be criminals. It’s wicked to accuse Poles of such things. And it’s not the time to launch a campaign to teach the Poles what’s right, when Jewish finance is attacking Poland.”

  I persuade Kazimierz Laudański that to write a piece for the paper I need to meet his brothers, too. We agree that I’ll come back.

  DECEMBER 10, 2000

  Kazimierz Mocarski, a retired school director who before the war lived in Nadbory, a village ten kilometers from Jedwabne, wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazeta. I visit him in his little town on the Baltic Sea.

  In his letter he described prewar Jedwabne: “Times were hard, we counted every penny. The richer Jewish shops could afford lower prices. The Poles reacted by knocking down stalls and smashing windows. Poisonous anti-Semitism, myths about Jews killing Christ, drove some of the people crazy with hatred.”

  He was fourteen at the time. He remembers that two days before the massacre a group of Jews passed by his house. “My mother was baking rye bread and gave them two loaves. She warned them, ‘Run as far away as you can,’ because we already knew the Jews had been burned in Radziłów the day before.”

  He knows from his mother that some of the peasants in their village saddled their horses and went to Jedwabne in the hope of looting Jewish stores and workshops, while a few people who didn’t want to take part in the pogrom fled from Jedwabne to relatives in the surrounding villages. A few days after the burning he was invited by a friend bragging about having moved with his family into a house that had belonged to Jews. He heard about the Jews having been beaten, rounded up, forced to say Christian prayers.

  “I go to Jedwabne sometimes,” he continues, “it’s an unhappy place, backward, without infrastructure. There are no jobs, people are crushed, they feel they’re victims. One of the slogans of the National Party before the war was that Jews were the cause of poverty. Now there are no Jews, but the poverty is the same.”

  I return to Warsaw by a circuitous route—via Jedwabne. I want to visit Leon Dziedzic, a farmer from near Jedwabne who has given several press interviews. This is rare in Jedwabne; generally the residents refuse to talk to journalists. From Dziedzic’s account it emerges that Poles not only carried out but also initiated the killing. “They say that the next day the German police station commandant flew into a rage at the Poles who’d led the pogrom: ‘You said you’d clean up the Jews, but you don’t know how to clean up a damn thing.’ He meant they hadn’t buried the remains and he was afraid of infection spreading, because it was hot and the dogs were already getting to them,” Dziedzic explained.

  But Leon Dziedzic has left Poland. From the time an article about him appeared, for which he’d allowed himself to be photographed, whenever he rode his bike to a store, someone would puncture his tires. He went to the States, where his wife and four sons had lived for many years.

  I find Leszek Dziedzic, the fifth son, who stayed on the farm. This fall he was visiting his family in the States while his wife stayed in Poland with their children, ten-year-old Tomek and fourteen-year-old Piotrek. “I came back earlier than I’d planned because I was worried for my wife and children after what my dad had said. And on the street people were saying: ‘Don’t think you can get away, we’re ready for you.’ We fear for our kids. We take them to school and pick them up.”

  I go to see Janina Biedrzycka, the daughter of Śleszynski, the man who owned the barn in which the Jews were burned. I already know how she’s received previous uninvited guests. First she refused to let a film director in, and the next time she told her, “I thought you were a Jewess but the priest told me you were Evangelical. There were decent Evangelicals among the Germans.” She met a local reporter with the words “Do you have any ID? You don’t have a Polish name. I don’t care either way because they all listen to the Jews anyway, nobody wants to know the truth.”

  “There are houses that belonged to the Jews in Jedwabne, but I live in my own,” she begins the conversation with me. “I didn’t get anything out of it. I know how vengeful the Yids are.”

  She can’t say the word “Jew” in anything under a shriek. Of the atrocity, she says it was t
he work of the Germans.

  DECEMBER 15, 2000

  I visit my cousin Oleś Wołyński. Gross’s book didn’t shock Oleś. The idea of Jews being murdered by their neighbors was a plausible scenario.

  Before the war, Oleś’s mother and father were active in the Communist International and Oleś spent the first years of his life in Moscow. When his parents fell victim to the Great Purge—both were shot in 1937—he was put in an orphanage, and from there he went to the Lubyanka prison and then to the Gulag.

  “In Siberia I didn’t encounter any anti-Semitism,” he says. “I first heard anti-Semitic talk in 1954 in Mińsk, still in the Soviet Union. In the hospital where I wound up, the nurses were talking over my head about a friend of theirs who was marrying a Jew. ‘I would throw up if I had to go to bed with a Jew,’ I heard one of them say. After repatriation to Poland in 1958, I went to a holiday guesthouse for police in Zakopane, in the mountains, for my TB. There I found the same primal, passionate, visceral anti-Semitism. People repeated an idiotic story about the head of the Polish Radio Orchestra, who had emigrated from Poland: he had wanted to smuggle valuables out of the country, so he had a pan cast of gold, but it was too shiny, so he fried an egg in it and packed it unwashed. The customs officer found the filthy pan suspect. That story had everything: Jews have gold, are arrogant and slovenly.”

  Oleś, who has a habit of carrying on conversations by means of books, fishes out of his vast library Zygmunt Klukowski’s Diary of the Occupation. The author, a doctor and social activist who headed a hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, took daily notes during the war. He described the behavior of Poles during a liquidation raid on Jews on November 22, 1942: “They took part eagerly, hunted down Jews, drove them to the magistrate or police station, beat them, kicked them. Boys chased little Jewish kids, who were killed by policemen right in front of everyone. I still see before me Jews beaten up, groups of Jews led off to their deaths and corpses thrown any which way onto wagons, bruised and bloodied. Many of the city dwellers looted and stole what they could, without the least shame.”

  DECEMBER 16, 2000

  I drive to Pisz, this time to meet all three brothers Laudański. I take a slightly longer route, via Łomża, to pass through Jedwabne by daylight for the first time. Great stretches of open space, here and there scant clumps of trees. The flat Mazowsze landscape makes me realize how small the hope would have been that you could hide from persecutors here. But it’s winter now, while then it was July, and there were unharvested crops in the fields.

  When you enter the town from the Łomża side, you see the remains of the Jewish shtetl. Its atmosphere can best be felt in an alley off the Old Market, with its narrow passageway between houses, its broken cobblestones. Little wooden houses huddled to the ground, low windows, everything is tiny but the large puddles of melting snow. You’d only have to hang mezuzahs on doorways with excerpts from Deuteronomy to ward off the powers of evil, and you could shoot a film here about the events of sixty years ago.

  I walk across the market square, now John Paul II Square, where the Jews were driven together that July day. With the map I was given by Kazimierz Laudański I drive to the site of the crime. A fenced-off plot of ground with a stone inscribed: Place of Execution of Jewish Population. Gestapo and Hitler’s Police Burned 1,600 People Alive. July 10, 1941. Thick shrubbery on the far side, but my map says those are the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. I go in deeper and see broken gravestones protruding from the snow.

  In Pisz the Laudański brothers are waiting for me. We sit across from each other, drinking tea, eating homemade gingerbread. Kazimierz Laudański and his brothers are well-known as beekeepers in the area, and customers come all the way from Germany for their honey. The brothers—poised, calm—present well, they speak their parts like a well-learned lesson.

  We’ve been talking for more than three hours and I’m on something like my third piece of gingerbread before we come to the events of July 1941.

  The youngest of the brothers, Jerzy, is the least talkative. A smile plays around the corners of his mouth.

  From Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony: “The Germans gave the order to destroy all the Jews, but Polish thugs took it and carried it out in the most horrible ways. At the time of the first pogroms and during the slaughter the following scum distinguished themselves by their cruelty:…” Jerzy Laudański is among the few dozen names given here.

  “I was at the barn,” says Jerzy Laudański, “but at a distance of about thirty meters. There were a lot of people in front of me.”

  I wonder how many such people there could have been near the barn. And how many of them limited themselves to watching.

  Toward the end Jerzy Laudański tells a story. How Karol Bardoń (one of the men charged in the postwar trial with killing Jews in Jedwabne) went to the prison authorities, saying he wanted to give testimony about who took part in burning the Jews. “I heard it from a prison orderly,” says Laudański. “Bardoń threatened to put a hundred men behind bars, but when they gave him paper to make a list, his hands were paralyzed and he couldn’t speak, and that’s how he died in prison. ‘A miracle happened,’ was the orderly’s comment.” Does that mean, I wonder, that Bardoń could have given the names and surnames of a hundred perpetrators? But I ask no provocative questions.

  “We don’t have any problem with Jews, but you’ve got to stop reopening the wounds,” Kazimierz Laudański warns me in parting. “What were Jews doing in the secret police after the war? What can I say? It’s a disgrace, so why should we reproach each other?”

  I listen to them and can’t avoid the impression that scenes from 1941 are being replayed under their eyelids. I have a hotel booked in Pisz, but I decide to make my way home by night. I drive on a road completely deserted and covered with ice, just to get as far away from the Laudańskis as I can.

  DECEMBER 17, 2000

  Gdańsk. Jan Skrodzki, who was born in Radziłów, meets me at the station and takes me to a tidy apartment in a block on an embankment at the edge of a wood, where I’m greeted by a shaggy dog called Cha-Cha and given homemade brandy.

  “It wasn’t the Germans who did it, it was our people,” he starts.

  I give him the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, which I photocopied at the Jewish Historical Institute. The scenes described in it are so horrifying it is hard to imagine Polish memory finding a place for them. But to Skrodzki nothing comes as a surprise—on the contrary, he adds specifics, fills in the details. I read him a description of Poles from the start joining in German operations brutalizing Jews. People bound to wagons were driven to the muddy river near the town. “Germans beat them, Poles beat them. The Jews cry in anguish, but they, the Germans and Poles, rejoice.”

  “He’s talking about the Matlak, a narrow, shallow stream,” he explains. “There was a meadow alongside the Matlak where farmers kept geese and ducks, and between the stream and the buildings on Nadstawna Street there was peat land and ditches where peat was cut. That’s where they drove the Jews.”

  He’s prepared to talk about the massacre and to be quoted in the Gazeta. We talk for nine hours, but I don’t dare ask him the obvious question: Where was your father on July 7, 1941?

  DECEMBER 19, 2000

  Pisz. I have a meeting at the local museum with its retired director, Mieczysław Kulęgowski. I was led to him by a chain of people, each referring me on. He is supposed to tell me about the Laudański brothers—apparently he could say a lot about them, he’s from Jedwabne himself—but when we meet he is so frightened it’s hard for me to get anything out of him. I’m not surprised. At the museum, a granddaughter of one of the Laudańskis is waiting for us, as if by coincidence. How did she find out about this meeting? It’s obvious one of the people in my chain of communication informed the brothers. Mieczysław Kulęgowski explains why he doesn’t want to talk to me: “Maybe I carried the fear with me from there, but today friends warned me about talking to you: ‘You’d better not get involved.’”

  He on
ly recalls that in the summer of 1941 he went by Jewish homes with his pals: “They were all occupied and looted, but I was looking for the plates that hung on the doorposts. I liked unrolling what was inside, there were Hebrew words written on hide, sheep’s hide I think. After the war, when they founded a museum in Pisz, I gave those mezuzahs to the museum.”

  DECEMBER 20, 2000

  In the evening I’m back in Pisz. Unannounced, I knock on the door of the little house on the edge of town where Mieczysław Kulęgowski lives. Maybe I’ll get something out of him now? Finally, after three cups of tea, he reluctantly begins to talk: “In 1941 I was twelve years old. Some mothers didn’t let their children outside that day, July 10, but I was always sticking my nose into everything. When Poles were going from house to house chasing Jews into the market square, you heard screams and weeping everywhere because they were taking the children and elders, too. Poles used clubs to force the Jews into rows, and they didn’t put up any resistance. There weren’t sixteen hundred of them, a thousand at most. I was at the barn. There wasn’t a big crowd outside, just some men, maybe fifty of them. I was standing a little off to the side with my friends. The fear was that they’d take you for a Jewish child and throw you into the flames. It was a hot summer, it took only a little gas and some matches. When they set the barn on fire, the screaming went on until the roof caved in. Józef Kobrzyniecki threw children into the burning barn. I saw it with my own eyes. I heard that Kobrzyniecki led the mob and that he beat them the worst, and that he even went by the houses to stab people hiding in attics with a bayonet. Other murderers were named, too: Karolak, the Laudański brothers, Zejer. When I grew up I left the town right away and since that time I haven’t wanted anything to do with it.”

  He cautions me, “Please don’t mention my name, the Laudański brothers are still alive, I buy my groceries in Pisz, I met one of them in the street once and it sent a shiver down my spine. I really don’t need that.”