The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  The Przegląd Łomżynski (Łomża Record), the official weekly of the ruling party, which engaged the nationalists in a heated debate, reported on the incidents and informed its readers in the next issue that “Chana Sosnowska has died, a victim of crimes committed by the Camp for a Greater Poland.”

  She was the wife of a shoemaker from Jedwabne who lived next door to the Wasersztejn family, a friend of Szmul’s mother. Meir Ronen, then Meir Grajewski, who lived in Jedwabne before the war, remembers her: “On the way home from school, I saw a truck with a woman lying on it, covered in blood. It was Chana Sosnowska from Przytulska Street, who went to market in Radziłów every Thursday to sell shoes.” Rabbi Jacob Baker of Jedwabne also remembers her. He ordered shoes from her several times, and after the pogrom he visited her in the hospital. He was a yeshiva student in Łomża at the time, so he was asked to visit her. He remembers fanning her in the hospital that exceptionally hot April. Soon after he took part in her funeral. He also recalled an earlier victim of anti-Semitism in Jedwabne: “This was in 1932. We heard a cry, and we found Mosze Lasko in a ditch. They found the people who did it, and they admitted they’d done it for a laugh. Mosze was going somewhere on business and instead of a business deal he got his own funeral.”

  The exact course of the Radziłów pogrom is known to us from a report drawn up by the Interior Ministry branch in Białystok. The police put members of the Camp for a Greater Poland in jail in Radziłów as a preventive measure. But a mob broke into the jail and set them free. As a result, Jewish stalls were demolished, Jews were beaten up. Shots were fired from within the mob, and the police, under attack, used its weapons. Two participants in the pogrom died on the spot and two more died later from injuries sustained.1

  Seventeen participants received suspended sentences from three months to two and a half years. Józef Przybyszewski, the editor in chief of the attack squad’s paper Camp for a Greater Poland Youth, published in Łomża, was designated the moral instigator of the Radziłów pogrom and sentenced to two years in prison, but the appeals court in Warsaw overturned the verdict and declared him not guilty.

  The Białystok office of the Interior Ministry reported to Warsaw, commenting on events in Radziłów (with an emphatic “confidential and very urgent”): “The Camp for a Greater Poland is an extreme threat to public order and safety. It enjoys the wholehearted support of the clergy. In the Białystok area the Camp for a Greater Poland is an integral part of the National Party, carrying National Party ID cards, etc., and is the ideological avant-garde of the National Party.”

  The minister of the interior dissolved the organization. But it didn’t help much. Administrative decisions in faraway Warsaw could at most thwart the nationalists’ movements a little; in the region, they held sway. The youth activists of the Camp for a Greater Poland strengthened the ranks of the National Party, turning their officially dissolved cells into sections of the National Party Youth and causing a further radicalization of the National Party in the sphere of “a solution to the Jewish question.”2

  It was the youth section of the National Party that inspired the so-called school strikes in many towns in the environs of Łomża in the autumn of 1934, according to regional historian Henryk Majewski. These were a boycott by children of classes taught by Jewish teachers, combined with protest meetings by parents in front of school buildings.

  In the following years words increasingly led to actions. Other towns repeated the scenario that was played out in Wysokie Mazowieckie, sixty-five kilometers north of Jedwabne, in September 1936: “At the local market, Jewish merchants were beaten and slashed with knives. Many fled, leaving their wares unsupervised, and wares were looted.”

  In Radziłów every Thursday, on market day, attack squads knocked down stalls and beat up Jews.

  Here are some typical Interior Ministry reports from the Białystok area in 1936: “At a fair in Długosiodła 51 windows were broken, 15 stalls knocked down, five Jews beaten up”; “In Wyszonki-Kościelne 474 windows were broken at night, 17 doors hacked with axes, two shops destroyed, wares ransacked, and two persons lightly injured with stones”; “At a National Party meeting in Łomża, a delegate from Warsaw ordered the creation of special squads that, after special training, would be used exclusively for fighting Jews.”

  “The village youth,” a report ran, “whipped up by the slogan ‘Beat the Jew’ propagated everywhere and at every step by the National Party as well as from the pulpit, have fallen into a dangerous psychosis that threatens public safety. More and more frequently we see spontaneous and autonomous actions against Jews.”

  Every month the Interior Ministry office in Białystok put together this kind of report, called a “report on Polish political movements and the sociopolitical life of national minorities”—they can be found in the state archive in Białystok. These reports are worthy of any sociologist, offering an excellent picture of the changing moods in the region. They show the state authorities’ hostile attitude not only toward the Camp for a Greater Poland but toward the nationalist movement as a whole. The state was bothered not only by nationalists’ attitude toward their Jewish fellow citizens but also by the opposition party’s sharp criticism of every move by the government, every resolution of parliament. The reports prove incontrovertibly that the Polish state felt responsible for its Jewish citizens, that it tried to protect them, and that it arrested and sentenced members of the attack squads. The reports emphasize that the Jews tried to show their loyalty to the Polish state.

  4.

  One can gain a sense of the depth and scope of anti-Semitism in the region from reading the local press, especially the Łomża diocese weekly Życie i Praca (Life and Work), which was aimed at farmers. Its editor in chief was Father Antoni Roszkowski. When the weekly was closed by the authorities in 1935, it reappeared almost immediately under the same church banner and with the same editor in chief, only under a new title: The Catholic Cause. The paper was printed by the diocesan press, under the bishop’s wing, which for the most part protected it from confiscation. Along with advice on battling weeds and vermin, an important theme was “unceasingly reminding our brothers of the Jewish menace.”

  Here are some front-page headlines: “Jews Take Liberties,” “Take Land from the Jews,” “Polish Youth Suffers for Jewish Wrongs,” “How Poland Became Jewified.” “The Polish people have matured and come to see that they have to break off relations with the Jews, not in a year or two, but now,” we read in an editorial titled “Let’s Break with the Jews.” “No people would suffer what we have suffered from the Jews for many years. Jews have grabbed control of our trades and crafts. The horrible specter of a Jewish Poland hovers before our eyes. We do not wish to repay evil with evil, our response must be worthy of a Christian and cultured people. We will break off relations with the Jews. Jews are not suitable friends for young Poles, friendly relations with Jews do not befit a Christian and must be broken off. We should sound the alarm. The Jews are obstructing the Poles’ path to greatness. Reason and conscience demand that we cease to consort with Jews.”

  The Germans are held up as an example. They have found “a good way to deal with the excess of Jews.” “The National Socialist plan to throw the Jews out of Germany would truly be a heavy blow to Jewry,” runs a commentary on the Nazi program. A text called “A Warning to Jews” reads: “The Jews have it too easy in Poland if they dare to criticize Poles.” They write: “Such a massive Jewish population no country can stomach or sustain.” “No delaying,” urges an editorial, arguing that there should be no Jews in Poland.

  Jews are told to be reasonable: “Poland is the way it is, but it’s for us to put things in order, and I’d like Jews to get that into their heads!” “Jews should make every effort not to pester our people needlessly. It will be good when Jews understand that it is for their own benefit to curb their appetite for Polish land, for buildings, business, and work in our cities.” But no great faith is put in Jews’ reasonableness or curbing of appetites
, and more in action by local Poles. The appeal goes out: “When a little child goes out for a bun or a candy, a pencil or a notebook, or the head of the household goes to buy goods, the path should lead only to a Polish shop. Poles buy from Poles!” They paint the vision of a “Jewish Poland” where “Yids squeezed out of trade” buy up land and “the Polish people, immemorial custodians of that land, are condemned to a life of misery and wandering among strangers,” for “every Jewish farm is a thorn in the side of the Polish farmer.” “It seems the time has come for Jews to understand that Poles are the boss in Poland.”

  Even priests were exposed to the danger: “Two Jewish agents who have material for priests’ cassocks have appeared in the area of the Łomża diocese. They show the visiting cards of various priests in our diocese, which makes it easier for them to persuade people to buy from them. Honorable Priests are therefore warned not to give their visiting cards to these Jews, for in so doing they support Jewish trade without any good reason, contrary to the slogan ‘Our people buy from their own, and only their own.’”3

  Parenthetically, people were told not to believe too readily in popular sayings about Jews: “Until recently many have spoken disparagingly about Jews, one often heard things like: ‘A Jew’s a dope, he’ll buy old rope,’ ‘You work like a Jewish farmer,’ ‘You look like a Jew on a horse.’ None of this made any sense and it detracted from our caution and vigilance against Jews … Folks laughed at Jews, and all the while those incompetent, simple, ordinary Yids took over all of our trade, took control of crafts, became landowners, factory owners, doctors, lawyers.”

  Life and Work and later The Catholic Cause played an active role in the boycott of Jewish shops. “Whoever buys from Jews or uses the services of Jewish doctors, lawyers, craftsmen, will answer to God and the people for the growth of poverty and crime in Poland, for the rise of Communism, godlessness, and socialism.” People were encouraged to fight Jewish competition by devious means: “In Stawiski, the Polish bakery wasn’t doing very well, but someone put the word out that typhus fever was going around among the Jews and they were using loaves of bread to beat each other, and business at the Polish bakery picked up.”

  Examples of successful boycotts were cited without any mention of the beatings and destruction of market stalls that accompanied them. Violence was not yet openly encouraged, but it was made clear that various tactics were permissible. The grandiose defense speeches at the trials of nationalist attack squad members were reported by the newspapers, even when the charges involved beatings and lootings.

  After the pogrom in Radziłów in 1933, the censors confiscated a whole edition of Life and Work. The next issue of the paper already carried an ironic appreciation of the pogrom in the note, “A Fine Example of Helping One’s Neighbor,” about the arrests, in connection with the Radziłów pogrom, of two brothers who had left their farm unattended and their mother alone at home. “However, the old woman and the farm have been looked after by friends of the men under arrest, former members of the Camp for a Greater Poland, who worked together to plough and sow the farmland.”

  According to the National Party’s ideology, Poles were supposed to not only weed Jews out of retail trade and crafts, but also refuse to sell them land or allow them into schools or state offices.

  The diocesan press repeated: “No Christian family will give its child into Jewish hands.” “Protesting against letting Jews into Polish schools, we Catholics are only doing what our faith commands … Our Catholic conscience and national pride command us to get rid of Jewish teachers.” When a state office employed a Polish citizen of Jewish origin, there was outrage under the headline “A Jew Instead of a Pole”: “The rumor we once gave voice to has proved true, for a Jew has become head physician at the Łomża Health Fund. The fact that the most prominent positions in Poland are occupied by persons of an alien race pains the Polish population.” Or “Just such an impossibility that has nevertheless become a reality, is a Jew, a certain Turek, being the representative of the Union of Farm Workers. Is it not extraordinary that a person who by race, religion, and nationality is alien to the Polish spirit should decide the fate of a purely Polish union?”

  The diocesan press was the local population’s window on the world. The column “National News” reported on “Jewish usury,” “Łódź’s de-Jewification,” “Gold Stolen from Churches Bought by Two Lvov Jews,” “Jewish Teacher in Nowo-Święcane Spreads Communism,” and “the Jewification of the Boy Scouts.” Under the heading “World News”: “Rumors of Ritual Murder,” “Jews Whipped for Opening Shops on Sunday” (in Tripoli), and so forth. Most energy was devoted to spreading modern, economic anti-Semitism, although traditional, religious anti-Semitism also had its place in these publications. Recommending reading materials to their parishioners, they praised a brochure by Father J. Unszlicht, An Outline of the Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ, which dealt with the “perversity of Jews in relation to Jesus.”

  5.

  One can argue about the immediate influence the press had in an area where one-third of the residents were illiterate and another third finished two grades of school at most. Reading documents from the postwar trials of participants in the massacre, one notices some of the witnesses and defendants sign with a cross. (Jan Cytrynowicz told me that peasants in Wizna buying three-quarters of a liter of oil would take three quarts paying for each separately, because they couldn’t do addition.) But the town elites, including the priests, read the local press. And it was they who set the tone.

  In its approach to the Jewish question the diocesan press was no different from the press in other parts of Poland, and sometimes things got much worse elsewhere. Toward the end of the 1930s, brutal anti-Semitism was an obsession in the press.4 A firm majority of Catholic papers argued that the battle with the Jews was a virtue in the eyes of God, not a vice, and they called for people to work to rid the country of Jews.

  What was fundamentally different about the Łomża area, as the historian Dariusz Libionka has shown, was the high degree to which priests were involved in the activity of the National Party. The Łomża area was quite a phenomenon in that regard.5

  The National Party already enjoyed the support of a majority of parish priests in the Łomża diocese, and the highest percentage fell in Łomża County (twenty-three of twenty-eight parish priests). Local bishop Stanisław Łukomski, a friend and collaborator of National Party leader Roman Dmowski, conducted a strong campaign against “introducing teachers and pupils of other faiths, particularly Jews, into Polish schools.” At the Congregation of Deans in 1929, he had already ordered parish priests to report on the number of Jewish teachers and pupils and offered as a model Father Rogiński of Wysokie Mazowieckie, who had “achieved the removal of a Jewish teacher.” Libionka also makes the point that Bishop Łukomski was exceptionally effective among higher church authorities in popularizing the notion of “ridding trade of Jews”—in a 1935 address to the clergy in his diocese he urged them to follow the example of a priest who had made his parishioners swear not to buy anything in a Jewish shop.

  From the reports of the Interior Ministry it clearly emerges that it was priests who propagated the National Party ideology from the pulpit and in addresses on national holidays. Activities on the party’s behalf were mainly organized by branches of the church-based groups of Catholic Action, which in the Łomża area were de facto appendages of the National Party, active in the greater part of the parish. Priests pressured their parishioners with threats and entreaties to participate in party activity. The curate Jan Rogowski of Piątnica, a village located between Jedwabne and Łomża, would ask residents when he went Christmas caroling if they were members of the National Party, and if they weren’t he threatened not to hear their Easter confessions or bless their Easter dishes. Father Marian Wądołowski urged the population in the nearby village of Mosty to join the Catholic Action club, “because it is a second pulpit—what can’t be said from the pulpit can be freely said there.”

&nb
sp; Any pretext sufficed to prompt an anti-Jewish statement: the building of a Christian bakery or a Catholic house, Easter or the harvest festival, the Feast of the Assumption or the blessing of National Party pennants.

  A notice in The Catholic Cause: “After the service on May 3, 1936, a procession took place in the town of Jedwabne with the participation of about 1,500 members and sympathizers of the National Party, accompanied by an orchestra and bicyclists carrying flags. There were two speeches, and during the procession there were cries of ‘Long live the Great Polish Nation,’ ‘Long live Polish national trade,’ ‘Down with Jewish Communism.’ Said procession was a success and made a great impression in Jedwabne and its environs.”

  The alarm was sounded: “Reports are growing of religious celebrations at which parish priests call on people to ‘rid the country’s trade and industry of Jews,’ and which end with cries of ‘Beat the Jews,’ ‘Jews out.’”6 A Father Cyprian Łozowski of Jasionówka in the Białystok region, who “propagates anti-Jewish acts at a May 3 Academy and has his church choir sing ‘Lord, Rid Poland of the Jews,’”7 appears in one Interior Ministry report.

  The Church taught Poles hostility and contempt for Jews from childhood. Younger children participated in the Eucharistic Crusade called the Knighthood of Jesus; the elder children joined the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Catholic Associations, where they performed plays—the title “The Jewish Matchmaker” leaves little to the imagination; the adults attended lectures such as “On the Urgency and Means of Battling Jewish Communism.” When a school hired a Jewish teacher, protest signatures were collected in the parish. In the Parish Chronicle of Łapy near Białystok a priest proudly describes a successful 1934 campaign to remove a Jewish teacher from a school.