The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Besides the increasing anti-Semitic disturbances, the Jewish community was also worried about the coming war. Whereas previously, Zionist activists had had to campaign vigorously among young people to get them to leave for Palestine, there were now many more eager to go than had been foreseen when the quota was imposed by the British Mandate. Almost every Jew in the region dreamed of emigrating or at least sending his or her children to Palestine—or even better, to America. Not many made it.

  Journal

  JANUARY 2, 2001

  I call to wish Stanisław Ramotowski a Happy New Year. He’s just been discharged from the hospital with a prescription for some kind of salve, but his leg is still so painful that he can’t sleep. I call the doctors I know; despite the vague description they all agree that if this patient doesn’t get real medical help soon he may develop gangrene, leading to amputation or a painful death. I have to find him a hospital in Warsaw.

  JANUARY 4, 2001

  Białystok, seat of the regional branch of the Institute of National Remembrance. I’ve come to read documents from the Jedwabne trials. In the first trial in 1949, when twenty-two persons were charged with perpetrating the crime, eleven received prison sentences from eight to fifteen years; Karol Bardoń was sentenced to death but the sentence was subsequently commuted to a fifteen-year prison term.

  Hundreds of pages of court reports in an awkward hand, with spelling errors. The years in which the interrogations were conducted make me regard them skeptically. I got my first impression of a Stalinist investigation from reading testimonies in Soviet trials and from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But here no one is trying to link the accused to any subversive organization.

  Gross wrote that the investigation was extraordinarily slipshod and that the whole thing bore little resemblance to a political trial. True, yet the testimonies sound authentic.

  The suspect Władysław Miciura named these men as having taken part in the Jew-hunting: Eugeniusz Śliwecki, Franciszek Łojewski, Józef Sobuta, Franciszek Lusiński. “And there were also a lot of peasants from the countryside whom I didn’t know. Most of them were young, they enjoyed the hunt and were cruel to the Jewish population.”

  The suspect Antoni Niebrzydowski: “There were a lot of people standing guard. I stress that when we stood guard over the Jews so they couldn’t escape, they wept bitterly.”

  In the discussion in the press about Jedwabne one keeps hearing the argument that we can’t believe the testimony of the accused men because it was extracted under duress. They spoke of beatings during the investigation and there’s no reason not to believe them. The suspects may well have been beaten, people in police custody were “routinely” beaten at that time. It’s strange that no use was made of the “forced” testimonies, in fact they were openly made light of. No attempt was made to reconstruct events, only routine questions were asked, and when the accused gave the names of additional killers, nothing—at least in the court documents—indicates that anyone took the trouble to locate them.

  What’s more, the witnesses said the same things as the suspects.

  Roman Zawadzki: “Józef Żyluk came with a truncheon and took away a Jew who was hiding in the mill before the killings, but Józef Żyluk found him and took him away, another Jew was also taken … and Józef Żyluk herded the aforementioned Jews into the marketplace and later all the Jews were burned.”

  Julia Sokołowska: “Marian Karolak was the leader of the action I mentioned, he had a truncheon and he was whipping up all the Poles to kill Jews. I saw with my own eyes how Karolak brutalized Jews in the market square with his truncheon and drove Jews from their homes into the square and beat them so badly with his truncheon it was a terrible sight, all that killing.”

  Aleksandra Karwowska: “Józef Kubrzyniecki, residing in Jedwabne, stabbed eighteen Jews with a knife, he told me this at my house when he was putting in our stove.”

  Józef Grądowski, who escaped the pogrom but who was in the square that day, saw two Gestapo officers dragging Jews into the square, and only Poles apart from that: “I was sitting in the middle of the square, weeding grass … Many people were standing guard at that time, for each Jew there must have been five people standing guard. There weren’t any people who were just onlookers; those who were there were helping round up the Jews. Polish children were wandering around the square. I heard two Polish women walking along the street, saying: ‘Got to make sure there aren’t any witnesses left.’”

  In none of these trials did the investigating officers or the court take the slightest interest in establishing the personal details of the victims. The surnames of the victims appear only incidentally. And so Wincenty Gościcki, a suspect, testifies on the subject of individual murders that took place on July 10, before the Jews had been driven into the barn: “My wife got me up early, saying: ‘I feel terrible, they’re beating Jews with sticks right by our house.’ I went outside. I was called outside by Urbanowski, who said: ‘Look what’s going on,’ showing me the bodies of four Jews. They were, one, Fiszman; two, two of the Stryjakowskis; and Blubert.”

  JANUARY 5, 2001

  Still poring over documents at the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance.

  At the trial both suspects and witnesses contradicted the statements they had made during the investigation. From the new versions of events—as well as from the applications for early release made by families—you could reconstruct an ordinary day in Jedwabne. Sadly, July 10, 1941, was not that kind of day. But in the statements, the residents are wholly absorbed in their daily routines. Karol Bardoń (death penalty) repairs his car all day. Władysław Miciura (twelve years in prison), employed by the police as a carpenter, spends it wielding a carpenter’s plane. Stanisław Zejer (ten years) is cutting clover in a field, on the mayor’s orders. Antoni Niebrzydowski was weeding potato beds, and Czesław Lipiński also “spent time in the potatoes.” Józef Żyluk was working in his garden, Feliks Tarnacki was riding his bicycle, Zygmunt Laudański was doing repairs in the kitchen, and Bolesław Ramotowski was just standing around.

  Every other minute I have to break off reading the documents, because I’m trying to find a better hospital for Stanisław Ramotowski (the Bolesław Ramotowski who was convicted is no relative, he tells me).

  The Białystok Institute of National Remembrance has only just been set up, which means it’s squeezed into three rooms in an office building. I sit facing prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew, who is conducting the investigation into Jedwabne. A small man with round metal-rimmed glasses, a stiff collar, a tight necktie. His posture and manner are stiff. He lives in Łapy, just outside Białystok.

  “I wasn’t sure if I should come to the institute. I worked on murder cases, I was very engaged in what I did, I’d sit up late into the night. Formulating charges so that a murderer can’t wiggle out of punishment, I tell you, it’s better than an orgy,” he tells me in a dry, dispassionate voice.

  Sitting with Ignatiew is useful to me in that I constantly engage him in small talk by commenting on what I’m reading. The letters written by townspeople made a big impression on me: “I attach an affidavit of loyalty,” and then you read that citizen So-and-So “was a good person, a good citizen of the Polish State, and of good reputation.” Dozens of signatures at the bottom. The investigation doesn’t leave much doubt as to what these good people were doing on July 10, 1941. “Can loyalty between local Poles really have kicked in to this degree when it came to the killing of Jews?” I venture. “In the first interrogations the suspects and the witnesses both knew a lot about the massacre, but by the time of the trial they’ve forgotten. Mustn’t witnesses have retracted their testimony because the families of the suspects asked them to and because they were neighbors among whom they were going to live out their lives?” I wonder out loud. “It’s appalling how sloppy this investigation was,” I keep saying.

  Ignatiew isn’t entirely sure an informal conversation with a journalist doesn’t violate some professional rule, and it�
�s probably only old-fashioned courtesy to a woman that keeps him from cutting me off. But I have no doubt we read the case documents in the same way. It’s hard for me to imagine that the current investigation isn’t monitored and influenced by “political elements,” but the prosecutor doesn’t give the impression of a man who can be steered, particularly when it comes to the truth in a legal case.

  JANUARY 6, 2001

  I drive Stanisław Ramotowski from his miserable provincial hospital to Warsaw for a consultation.

  JANUARY 7, 2001

  An e-mail from my friend the poet Ewa Lipska in Vienna, who asked me if anything more could be written about Jedwabne after Gross’s book. I replied that this was a strange question coming from a poet, and I told her about my research so far. “My dear, you’re right,” she replied. “I wasn’t taking into account that life can’t be reduced to a string of historical facts. A few months ago, before the whole discussion about Jedwabne, a woman from Łomża wrote to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. She’d read Wiesenthal’s book Justice Not Vengeance, and described to him the history of her family, her town, the neighbors who stoned a Jew in 1941. At the end she asked him for a photograph. I replied to that letter in his name, I was deeply moved. It’s a good thing people in Poland are beginning to talk about all this.”

  JANUARY 10, 2001

  Visit to Ramotowski in the Warsaw hospital where, miraculously, he was admitted. We don’t talk about Radziłów, because whenever I ask him any question about the killing of Jews he looks nervously down the hallway in case someone is listening.

  JANUARY 12, 2001

  Conversation with the theater director Erwin Axer at a dinner. He’s skeptical about publicizing the Jedwabne affair. He tells me his late cousin Otto Axer, a graphic artist (and a friend of my father’s), heard what happened to his father in the war only a few years before he died. I know what he’s talking about. I read the beautiful story in the press. On the day Jews were told to report for “transport to the labor camps,” Paul Axer, an elderly music teacher from Przemyśl, took off his yellow armband, gathered up his cat and fold-up chair, and set out on foot, ultimately reaching the banks of the San River. There he unfolded his chair and sat until dark, gazing at the river’s depths. He was found by a couple of shepherds, brother and sister, who took him home, where they had room for him after their grandfather’s recent death. He didn’t make it till the end of the war, but he died among people who took him into their family. Erwin Axer corrects me: it wasn’t a chair and a cat, it was a stool and a balalaika.

  “His whole life, Otto loathed the peasants for their anti-Semitism. He was always saying they denounced Jews during the war. And then it turned out it was peasants who’d saved his father and the whole village knew about it. Besides, Jews denounced Jews, too,” Erwin Axer concludes pointedly.

  JANUARY 13, 2001

  I visit Stanisław Ramotowski in the hospital as I’ve been doing every day. This time only briefly. “I’m in a rush,” I explain, “because I have to take my daughter Ola to the synagogue. Ola is preparing for her bat mitzvah, a ceremony for a girl turning thirteen. A ceremony your wife wouldn’t have had because in her time they only held bar mitzvahs, for boys. Ola has Hebrew lessons and meets with a rabbi to work on her own commentary on an excerpt from the Torah, which she has to present during the ceremony at the synagogue.”

  “You really are a brave woman to tell me these things,” Ramotowski comments. “Because you really don’t look Jewish at all.”

  JANUARY 15, 2001

  In the hospital, a talk with the attending doctor. They can’t amputate Ramotowski’s leg on account of his age, eighty-seven, and his heart condition. He’ll have to undergo many months of treatment.

  Meanwhile his wife, whose osteoporosis makes her unable to walk and who is almost completely blind, has remained behind in Radziłów, in the cottage where the cold seeps in through cracks in the beams and the privy’s out in the yard. Every day I call Stanisław’s niece to pass on greetings to his wife. I hear that Marianna isn’t getting out of bed and has stopped eating. The only thing to do is to bring her to the same hospital as Ramotowski. She really needs a checkup, too.

  JANUARY 17, 2001

  I arrange a date for Marianna to be admitted to the hospital and bring the news to Stanisław like a precious gift. She has already been prepared for the journey by his niece. But he stiffens, saying it’s out of the question. He is furious. It takes a lot to get out of him what’s the matter. There are four old resistance fighters on his ward (he’s in a military hospital because he was in the Home Army during the war) who giggle constantly at jokes about Jews. When his wife appears they’ll see she’s Jewish and give him a hard time.

  “How will they know?” I ask.

  He answers my question with a question: “Does she look and talk like a woman from Radziłów?”

  JANUARY 18, 2001

  In the Jewish Historical Institute archive I take microfiche from wooden boxes from Jedwabne and surrounding towns: Kolno, Radziłów, Stawiski, Szczuczyn, Wizna, Tykocin, Wąsosz. Dozens of testimonies of Holocaust survivors that, besides giving descriptions of German atrocities, also describe pogroms carried out by Polish neighbors. An appalling picture emerges from them of what was going on all across eastern Poland after the Soviets left. Germans ordered Jews to weed squares and conduct “funerals” for Lenin or Stalin, that is, smash statues with a song on their lips. They were humiliated and beaten with the help and to the applause of locals. Jews were taken out of town and shot or killed in the road in broad daylight, and Poles helped hunt Jews down. In three cases, villages were almost entirely annihilated, and this was done—so write Holocaust survivors—by Polish inhabitants with the permission or even at the urging of the Germans. Not just on July 7 in Radziłów and July 10 in Jedwabne, but earlier, on July 5, in Wąsosz.

  Szymon Datner, a renowned historian who worked at the Jewish Historical Institute and with the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, took down witness statements and edited some of the testimonies for the Jewish Historical Commission in the Białystok district after the war. He wrote about Wąsosz: “This quiet little town was the first to fall victim to bloodthirsty instincts. The police and local hooligans went to the houses of Jews in town and carried out a “sacred task” after the example of the slaughter in Kishinev, he wrote, referring to the most famous Russian pogrom, which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. There was killing in homes and on the street. Women were raped and had their breasts cut off. If children were found with their parents at home the children were killed first. They were smashed against the walls.”

  I should add the massacre in Wąsosz to my book.

  From Radziłów there is a series of testimonies, one by Menachem Finkelsztejn, one by Chana Finkelsztejn, and a collective testimony edited by Datner, about one family that got away in Radziłów: the Finkelsztejns, husband, wife, and four children. Menachem and Chana must be siblings. Chana describes not only the massacre but their time in hiding. “The peasants, supported by the village head, wanted to tie us up and take us to the Gestapo. We escaped, each in a different direction, I with my younger brother … We suffered hunger, cold, filthy conditions. Death stared us in the eye every day. During this time we changed hiding places fifty-two times.”

  Datner writes that in 1945, right after the liberation, peasants murdered two Jews from Radziłów, Mosze Dorogoj and his son Akiwa, immediately after they came out of hiding, because they were inconvenient witnesses to the massacre. At that news the Finkelsztejns fled to Białystok, which was their salvation. What became of them later? Can they still be alive? How can I find them?

  JANUARY 19, 2001

  My thoughts keep returning to the marketplace in Jedwabne. Did the Jews know they were going to their deaths? Or did they delude themselves into thinking they would survive, up until the moment when the flames erupted?

  In Menachem Turek’s testimony, which I read at the Jewish Historical Institute,
there is a story about Jews from Tykocin, a little town in the Białystok region, who were taken out of town and killed by Germans on August 25. This came after a whole series of killings, both German and Polish, but the Jews did not give up hope. “It was announced that all Jews were to assemble in the marketplace the next day at 6:00 a.m., men, women, and children, with the exception of invalids. Many of the women were in hysterics. There was weeping and confusion, they began running to visit each other. Wringing their hands, raising their eyes to heaven, they asked: What’s happening, what are we to do? There was a spontaneous gathering at the rabbi’s. Some thought they should run away, others maintained nothing terrible would happen, and if part of the community fled, firstly they would be caught, because the whole area was hostile to Jews, and secondly, the Jews who stayed behind might suffer because of the ones who fled. They tried to get some information, but the Poles kept quiet. After a long discussion they decided they would all go to the marketplace together. It was a long night, nobody got any sleep.”

  JANUARY 20, 2001

  In today’s Gazeta, an interview with the chairman of the Institute of National Remembrance Council, Sławomir Radoń. He comes to one conclusion: Gross is damaging Poland. At a press conference in December he was already saying Neighbors was a dishonest, unreliable book, that the pogrom was organized by the German authorities, and that the Germans provided the fuel to set the barn on fire. Is this going to be the Institute of National Remembrance’s official position?