The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  In his 1946 study, historian Szymon Datner writes, “For virtually the entire population of the Łomża and Szczuczyn districts, who were under the spell of the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic ideology of the National Party movement, the occasion arose to rid themselves—under the highest German protection—of their centuries-old neighbors and competitors, those alien and accursed Jews.”

  Menachem Turek remembers, “To the sounds of savage threats, cries of revenge, and curses, a mob drunk on looting, led by nationalists who were experienced in boycotting Jewish shops, dragged everything that fell into their hands from Jewish homes. This was a heavy blow not only because family possessions gathered and preserved for generations disappeared overnight and the next day not a single pot was left for a family to cook its dinner in, but because it was all done by inhabitants of the same town.”

  Basia Kacper of Szczuczyn testifies that the pogroms were organized by “decent Polish youth and hooligans.” She mentions “Jonkajtys the school head” as their organizer.

  I look through a later text by Datner from the Jewish Historical Institute newsletter of 1967, The Destruction of the Jewish Population in the Białystok Region. It was cited at the session at the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences as proof that the July 1941 pogroms were the work of the Germans.

  “The invasion of German troops was accompanied by the cruel and bloody slaughter of the Jewish population,” Datner wrote. The town of Wąsosz “fell victim first”; in Radziłów “people were burned alive”; in Jedwabne they “perished in cruel conditions.” Only an attentive reader will notice the impersonal construction, mentioning no perpetrators, and the subsequent sentence: “However, the greater part of the slaughter in these first months of occupation the Germans carried out on their own.”

  JANUARY 21, 2001

  A conversation with Helena Datner-Śpiewak, Szymon Datner’s daughter. We’ve been friends for years; I visited her while her father was still alive and living with her.

  Helena tells me she has known about Jedwabne for a long time, from her father, but only now has she realized the scale of the crime. I ask her why her father wrote a piece in 1967 that refused to say straight out that the pogroms were the work of the local populations, which he knew because he had taken the testimonies of survivors. In 1946 he wrote about pogroms carried out by locals. Was it that this book, which he wrote in Yiddish, wasn’t destined for a Polish readership? And if not, what happened during those twenty years to make him reluctant or unable to repeat the truth he revealed right after the war? Did he think only a text that airbrushed the truth could pass the censors? Did he fear a wave of Communist Party–orchestrated anti-Semitism would destroy the Jewish Historical Institute and that its archive would end up in the trash? Perhaps he was terrified, in a state of mind not unknown to many Jewish Historical Institute employees, and not without reason.

  Helena says that the existence of the institute was indeed under threat at that time, but her father only became its director in 1969, and remained so only briefly. He was not a timid man, it seems to her. At the height of Stalinism he was fired from the institute because he protested when some insult to the Joint Distribution Committee was added to a text of his—in accordance with the mandatory party line. Until 1956 he did various jobs, was a mason’s assistant, taught literacy classes. “In the Stalinist period it was much more dangerous to behave decently,” says Helena, “and my father paid a high price for it. But later, during the anti-Semitic campaign, he joined Kazimierz Kąkol, the editor in chief of the then disgraceful weekly Prawo i Życie (Law and Life) and the author of vile texts, and in 1968 my father’s book A Forest of Righteous Men appeared, about Poles who rescued Jews.” Datner’s joining with Kąkol makes one realize what fear must have been caused by the renewed hatred toward Jews. Publishing a book like that at that time meant taking the official line—one of the leitmotifs of the anti-Semitic campaign was the theme of ingratitude: Jews slander Poland, though so many Poles risked their lives for them. The book, as Datner wrote in the introduction, was to “illustrate the stance taken by the Polish people in the face of the Jewish people being cut off at the root in full view of the world.”

  “My father always stressed that he hadn’t written a single word in the book that was untrue,” says Helena. “And whenever anyone started speaking badly of the Poles he would say he wouldn’t have survived without the help of Polish peasants after his escape from the ghetto.” Datner described how his hosts in the village of Dworzysko near Sokołka in the Białystok region provided the partisan division he had joined with food and once warned them against the Germans. Once, he told Helena they were Belorussians, not Polish peasants.

  In a chapter on Poles in the Białystok region who had saved Jews I find the name of Antonina Wyrzykowska of Janczewko near Jedwabne and the names of those she sheltered: Izrael (Srul) Grądowski (he must be the same man whose trial testimony I read); Jankiel Kubrzański (later he will become Jack Kubran); Berek, Elke, and Mojżesz (Mosze) Olszewicz; Lea Sosnowska (later, Lea Kubrzańska or Kubran), Szmul Wasersztejn.

  JANUARY 25, 2001

  Marianna Ramotowska in the hospital on Szaserów. Ramotowski spends hours sitting in her room. He tells me that his wife testified in some trials (I must find information on the trials and her testimony), and he was interrogated many years later by the prosecutor and asked how he’d saved his wife. He told the prosecutor that the Poles had committed the atrocity. “He started screaming at me that it was the Germans. I got upset, grabbed my cap, and said: ‘If you know better, there’s nothing for us to talk about,’ and left.”

  Was the prosecutor who interrogated him Waldemar Monkiewicz? And did he see trucks full of Germans in Radziłów as well?

  JANUARY 27, 2001

  In the Rzeczpospolita (Republic), a piece by a well-known historian, Professor Tomasz Strzembosz, “Collaboration Passed Over in Silence.” The author cites stories about Jews in the Jedwabne area who killed Poles and also collaborated with and made denunciations to the Soviet authorities, and concludes: “The Jewish population, and especially the youth and urban poor, took part en masse in welcoming Soviet troops. Weapons in hand.”

  Where are those masses of Jews supposed to have gotten their arms from? It’s ridiculous.

  The professor, as he wrote in 1991 in the journal Karta, researched the anti-Soviet partisan groups in the Białystok district, concentrating on the Kobielno wilderness area, the marshes along the banks of the Biebrza river that are almost inaccessible for the greater part of the year. Several dozen partisans were in hiding there, at times several hundred camped out, mainly those who were in hiding from the Soviets. Now Strzembosz refers to people he interviewed years ago and with whom he carried on a correspondence regarding Kobielno. As proof of the Jews’ collaboration, Strzembosz quotes a letter by a local resident, Kazimierz Odyniec, who wrote that “the corpses of Polish partisans who had fought in Kobielno were carted off by a neighbor of my uncle Władek Łojewski, the Jew Całko.” But what does that prove? Polish peasants were regularly forced to transport Jews to the ghettos and sites of execution, but it would be nonsense to treat this as collaboration.

  Strzembosz cites several witnesses from Jedwabne. One of them was Łucja Chojnowska, a relative of the Laudańskis’: “In Jedwabne, where the majority of the population was Jewish, there were only three homes that didn’t fly the red flag when the Russians came. Our house was among the three.” But Jedwabne was only about 40 percent Jewish. The statement that only three houses didn’t fly a flag means that almost all Polish homes welcomed the Russians with red flags.

  Another local, Jerzy Tarnacki of Jedwabne, described how they came to arrest him: “A patrol made up of the Polish citizen Kurpiewski and a Jew named Czapnik came for me and my brother Antek.” So: one Pole and one Jew.

  After citing testimonies like this, Strzembosz takes the moral high ground: “Even if the Jews didn’t see Poland as their fatherland, they didn’t have to treat it like the occu
pying forces did and work with Poland’s mortal enemy to kill Polish soldiers and murder Polish civilians fleeing eastward. Nor did they have to take part in selecting their neighbors for deportation, those terrible acts of collective responsibility.”

  “Deportation” is a word with an overwhelming emotional charge; whole families, mothers, children, elderly people fell victim to deportations, and the truth about them was suppressed for years. Just like the murder of Jews in Jedwabne. But the professor must know what most readers don’t know: that along with all the Poles, thousands of Jews were also deported from Poland (according to the historical estimates, Poles made up 50 percent of deportees, Jews 20 to 30 percent, though they constituted no more than 10 percent of the population). The special role of deportations in Polish martyrology is a separate matter. Compared to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the deportation of Jews into the interior of Russia, even to Siberia, offered what later turned out to be the greatest chance of survival.

  Strzembosz reproaches Gross for basing his work on “security police materials gathered from the brutal investigations of 1949 and 1953, at a time when Polish bishops were condemned for treason against the Polish nation and spying for ‘imperialists.’” Had he cast an eye over the trial documents he would have noticed that although the Jedwabne killers were tried at a time when there were show trials of priests and bishops, the trial on Jedwabne was an ordinary criminal trial. Writing about collaboration and treason by Jews who welcomed the Red Army, the author seems unaware that the alternative to the Soviets wasn’t a free Poland but a Nazi regime. Use of the term “treason” has another built-in trap. The same terms should be used for the Polish population that welcomed the German troops to the area with flowers and triumphal gates in June 1941. After all, they did so for analogous reasons—they weren’t glad that Poland was under foreign occupation, they were glad the hated Soviets had gone.

  Ten or fifteen years ago, when Strzembosz was doing his research in the area, many more perpetrators and witnesses of the Jedwabne massacre were still alive than are today. How many of them did he interview? Just think of the invaluable material he had at hand. It seems unlikely to me that he never came across the subject of the killings of Jews in the course of his research. On the other hand, it’s possible he wasn’t paying attention. He was studying the fate of the partisans of Kobielno, denounced and killed on the spot by the NKVD or deported to Russia, so he didn’t want to hear anything else. To the question of why he never touched on the theme of the crime committed against the Jews before, Strzembosz replies that Polish-Jewish relations was never his field. Which doesn’t prevent him from suddenly becoming an expert on the subject after the publication of Gross’s book.

  FEBRUARY 2, 2001

  In the Republic, Adam Cyra, an employee of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, delivers a homily to Jerzy Laudański, a prisoner of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. Regarding the crime in Jedwabne, Cyra has nothing more to say than that his hero was tortured and tried in a Stalinist court for participation in the crime. “Kazimierz, Jerzy Laudański’s eldest brother, defends him with zeal, believing in the just verdict of history,” Cyra says, bemoaning the Laudańskis’ fate.

  The Republic published this piece without a word of commentary. Or rather, with a visual commentary: camp photographs of Jerzy Laudański. The connotation is obvious: the striped prisoner’s uniform of Auschwitz is probably the clearest symbol of victimhood in twentieth-century Europe. Photographs like that also play a polemical role: Jews reserve to themselves the right to be the worst victims of Auschwitz, and here you have a Pole, and one slandered by Jews, to boot. The text leaves no doubt: a righteous man, a hero, is being attacked. As if only decent people were deported to Auschwitz.

  In the hospital with the Ramotowskis. Marianna doesn’t get out of bed, but Stanisław has made himself at home in the hospital; he knows everyone around him and has a lively social life (the chief doctor complains to me that he spends the whole day on his feet). When I arrive, he pulls me out of the ward, we find a spot where he can smoke, and sitting on hard chairs we talk for hours.

  Stanisław went drinking with the killers many times, to get from them details of the crime. He had no children. He had no one he could tell the truth. But he wanted to know. Now I am getting that knowledge out of him.

  FEBRUARY 4, 2001

  In Radziłów with Jan Skrodzki. We begin by visiting a childhood friend of his, Marysia Korycińska, and find her sister, brother-in-law, and husband. Jan Skrodzki recalls the Jewish cemetery, some two kilometers from town, where after the war he saw only a tombstone here and there.

  “They took those stones away for sharpening axes,” Marysia’s husband, Józef Koryciński, says, taking up the subject. “I don’t think there was a farmer in Radziłów who didn’t have whetstones made of burial stones. They cut down all the tall pines that grew there for firewood. I remember them, because during the war we went there to gather crows’ eggs, and a crow isn’t like a raven, it doesn’t build its nest on a low branch.”

  “When people started rebuilding, they took gravel in wheelbarrows and plastered their walls with Jews,” Marysia’s brother-in-law Józef K. chortles. “And the new authorities used whatever the country folk hadn’t stolen in the night to build some road. Sorrel grew wild on the graves, it stood tall, and you always earned those few extra zlotys.”

  “What are you going on about?” his wife interrupts. “Sorrel like that would be foamy, there was a lot of fat in that ground. Who would eat sorrel like that from a cemetery?”

  “But it fetched a good price.”

  Jan and I are staying with his family in Radziłów. We talk with his cousin Piotr Kosmaczewski. After the war Piotr drove people who were being interrogated “about the Jews” to the railway station, and waited all day at a farm near the station to pick them up and take them home. He drove Jan’s father, Zygmunt Skrodzki. He also remembers another trial that involved charges “about the Jews.” In his view it was no more than a pretext for interrogating people connected to the anti-Communist underground, but still, this means there was more than one trial on Jedwabne. This is a big discovery.

  FEBRUARY 5, 2001

  We visit Jan Skrodzki’s old friends one by one. One of the people we talk to pulls out a book about Home Army operations in the region by Jan Orzechowski, whose underground name was “Strzała” (Arrow). It has photographs of Home Army members from Radziłów. I know three of their names from Menachem Finkelsztejn’s testimony. From the pages of a book on Polish patriots the faces of three murderers gaze out at me.

  FEBRUARY 6, 2001

  Back in Warsaw, where Adam Michnik has arranged for me to talk to the film director Jerzy Skolimowski. Adam is urging him to make a film about Jedwabne. He thinks there is bound to be a film and, fearing it will be anti-Polish, he wants to get ahead of the curve. I’m supposed to supply heroic figures. A friend of mine who’s helping me take care of the Ramotowskis thinks they are the perfect heroes for a movie: a Jewish woman and a Pole, a great peril, a great love that lasted sixty years: in other words, all the ingredients of a good screenplay. However, I dampen Skolimowski’s enthusiasm, which in any case is only moderate. I explain to him that Jedwabne doesn’t provide the best material for a pro-Polish film.

  2

  I Wanted to Save Her Life—Love Came Later

  or, The Story of Rachela Finkelsztejn and Stanisław Ramotowski

  Stanisław Ramotowski was on his way from Kramarzewo to Radziłów when he saw the first German tank on the road. It must have been June 23, 1941, because he remembers the Russians had fled Radziłów the day before. Antoni Kosmaczewski was sitting on the tank, and as soon as he saw Ramotowski he yelled, “Take your hands out of your pockets!” Ramotowski thought, He’s already feeling like a big shot, in a position to lecture people on how to behave toward the new authorities. He couldn’t have known that two weeks later Kosmaczewski would participate in the murder of Radziłów’s Jews.

  “In the Kramarzewo I
knew,” Ramotowski tells me, “people lived quietly, nobody looted or went around killing Jews. Until one day I met my friend Malinowski from Czerwonki and he says to me: some people are getting together from the villages in the area to do the same job they did the day before in Wąsosz. And what had they done in Wąsosz? The farmers drove by Jewish houses in wagons and murdered the men, women, and children with axes. The streets were drenched in blood. I ran to warn the Finkelsztejn family right away.”

  The Finkelsztejns had a mill in Dziewięcin, right next to Kramarzewo; their garden bordered the Ramotowskis’. One of their daughters was already married; their other daughter—Rachela—had long been a favorite of Ramotowski’s.

  Marianna Ramotowska, formerly Rachela Finkelsztejn, and her husband, Stanisław. Dziewięcin, near Radziłów, 1950s. (Author’s private collection)

  Marianna and Stanisław Ramotowski in an Evangelical nursing home near Warsaw toward the end of their lives, 2001. (Photograph © Krzysztof Miller / Agencja Gazeta)

  “She was delicate, with two little braids. She’d worn glasses since she was a child,” he says, looking at his wife with tenderness and pride.

  Sixty years after Rachela first stole shy glances at him, Ramotowski himself is still a handsome man, tall and fair with a noble profile and big blue eyes with a perpetual twinkle. And Rachela? I look at old pictures of her and see a modest girl, skinny, alert, and bespectacled.

  “What did your parents say?” I ask.

  “They weren’t crazy about the idea. Before the war, my wife’s mother once pursued us so hotly when we were going to hide in the corn that Marianna lost a shoe.”

  “But back then you called her Rachela. Do you still sometimes call her that?”