The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “In this area most people joined the NSZ, or National Armed Forces, the underground army that hated Jews,”1 he recounts. “Dominik Grabowski and I were the ones from Kramarzewo who were in the Home Army. Sometimes I got an order to distribute arms somewhere. Once I got a pile of machine guns, all beat-up fossils. I had to drive down the road between Szczuczyn and Białystok, where I saw one German car after another. I thought, Risk a human life for a load of junk? But orders were orders. I made it. Later there was an operation near Czerwony Bór, where a lot of Germans were shot, so maybe one of those guns did the job. Marianna came with me on operations; she said she didn’t want to live without me anyway.”

  Three times they encountered someone from Rachela’s family. The first time Ramotowski ran into his wife’s brother-in-law, the one who was the black sheep of the family.

  “We were near the village, at the Laskowskis’, and once they asked me to cross the river and help them mow on the other side. Over there, two men came out of the rye, in German uniforms, holding guns. I almost died, because it was Lejbko, her brother-in-law, with a friend—they’d recognized me by my voice. The friend was the son of Zandler, who had a dry-goods store in Radziłów before the war. After the massacre one of the killers, Aleksander Godlewski, moved into Zandler’s house. They had killed two Germans. They said, ‘Today we’re crossing over to the Soviet side. If we live through the night, we’ll survive.’ They wanted to find the Russian partisans.”

  One day Rachela’s sister appeared at Ramotowski’s mother’s house. She had been in the synagogue in Radziłów, but had been taken with other Jews who’d survived the pogrom to the Milewo estate near Grajewo. A German was in charge there, but no one really guarded them closely.

  “They were so terribly hungry there. She would come all the way over to us at night, by narrow lanes, about twenty kilometers, to ask for something to eat for her children. She was completely different from Marianna, strong as an ox and so proud she had never even spoken to me before. It was only when she came to us so horribly poor that she said, ‘Stanisław, help me.’ I scraped some food together, lard, bread, butter. But I had to bring her back, too. Dominik Grabowski, with whom we were hiding then, gave me his cart. I loaded some peat on the cart, hid her and the food underneath, and drove off. There was a militiaman on guard at the little bridge in Kramarzewo, but he didn’t stop us.”

  Another time when Ramotowski was working in the fields of some farmers who were hiding them, a voice called out to him from the grain. “I looked and I saw a guy with a big head of hair, unshaven, and it was her cousin, Lejbko Finkelsztejn; he’d escaped from a transport to Treblinka. He was jumping with fleas, his whole body was crawling with them. I gave him some clothes, came back with a razor, and shaved him. He got involved with some thief from the town, they went out at night and stole geese. I tried to talk some sense into him but couldn’t get him to listen. Somebody told the police about him and they came to get him; they caught him and killed him.”

  I ask him how many people helped them, how many knew about them.

  He: “In the beginning, four households in Kramarzewo knew. They weren’t helping us, but they knew. When Marianna’s family had been taken away we took more trouble to hide properly, I didn’t trust anybody then. The devil could get into anyone. We stayed with good friends from before the war, the Laskowskis from Kramarzewo and the Karpińskis from Czerwonki. I had an aunt in Konopki, and when we went by she called me ‘darling, dearest,’ but the first night already she told us to go, she couldn’t stand being so scared. She didn’t even give us a piece of bread for the road. Another uncle was prepared to hide us, but his son was the village head and gave him a terrible time about it. We stayed with a sister of my father’s in Pieńki. It was all right there, and Rogowski lived in that village, too; we spent the night at his house sometimes. In Glinki there were two brothers, Franciszek and Józef Mrozicki, who were hiding from the Germans. They had a hiding place under the floorboards and we could go there to get some sleep. Friends from the Home Army knew how to contact me. In the daytime I worked in the fields for farmers I knew; in the evening I brought Marianna something to eat.”

  She: “So many nights we had to sleep in the woods, in gorges, in bunkers with the rats.”

  A critical time for Jews in hiding came with the evacuation of those territories by the Germans in 1944, when the front line shifted.

  “But we stayed. I dug out a hole in a field and concealed it with a stone slab. German soldiers were coming from Kramarzewo and cutting a path through the rye right where our hiding place was. One shoved the slab aside with his foot and we were face-to-face. Marianna spoke to him in German. He told us the misery he’d suffered in the war and walked on.”

  In the evening a car came with another German and took them to a safe place beyond the front line.

  “Toward the end of the war the Germans themselves felt shaken up,” he goes on. “They were coming from Stalingrad, poor guys, all beat up, that’s how we could tell it was almost over. Once the Czerwonki village head happened to come by the Karpiński settlement; he noticed us and went to find a German to tell him there was a Jewish woman staying with the Karpińskis. A German came by, asked if it were true, but he didn’t insist, he didn’t search the house.”

  As soon as the war ended they moved into the ruins of what was once the Finkelsztejns’ house.

  She: “Stasinek’s mother was against me at first, but after the war she came from Kramarzewo to see us every day. I suppose she realized I was worth something.”

  They rebuilt the mill. He was the miller, she did the accounts.

  “That should be said—they let us rebuild,” says Mrs. Ramotowski, nodding.

  At first, I think she means the Communist authorities, who could have taken the mill from them, but she means the neighbors.

  I ask whether there was talk of the killings in town.

  He: “In whispers or when people were drinking. Father Dołęgowski once came to carol with us; he was so fat you could barely pull him out of the sled. I asked him, ‘Doesn’t it bother you when a murderer comes to church wearing a Jew’s fur coat?’ Everybody knew that Dziekoński killed Jews and went around in Wolf Szlapak’s coat. He didn’t reply. Marianna was scared, she was tugging my sleeve.”

  I ask whether anyone survived from her extended family.

  She: “They all died in Treblinka. Only my brother-in-law survived. He made it over to the Soviet side, he ended up in a camp, but got out in the end. After the war, he went to Sweden. He wrote to me from there asking whether his wife and children were alive. I didn’t answer.”

  “Why not?”

  She: “I didn’t want to and you couldn’t. The Dorogojs, a Jewish father and son from Radziłów who survived in hiding, were killed right after the war ended. Kosmaczewski and his brother had someone ask them to come drink half a liter of vodka and make peace with them, but in the hallway they came down on the Jews with axes. So there wouldn’t be any witnesses. We lived in fear and they stole from us. All kinds of things happened.”

  He: “A few of them forced their way into the mill we’d just rebuilt, ordered me to lie on the floor, held a gun to my head. Earlier they’d left a note signed ‘Tiger,’ demanding twenty sacks of flour. They threw grain around and threatened the next time they’d blow up the mill. That time it wasn’t for hiding Jews, it was pure robbery. But the next time, two years after the war had ended, Marianna wanted to buy back an oak cupboard that belonged to the family. It was in Rydzewo, at Chrostowski’s—he’d even dug up trees from the Finkelsztejns’ garden and taken them home. Somebody didn’t like her wanting it back.”

  She: “They hung a note with a death sentence on our door. Because I wanted to pay for my own cupboard. I could have had a better one for the money, but it was a family keepsake. It was dark wood, in three sections, little doors on the side, two shelves inside.”

  He: “Two guys from Rydzewo hung that note on our door, Nietupski and Skrodzki. The Nat
ional Armed Forces issued a lot of those sentences in our parts. They stole, beat people up, killed people. I went to my own people, who were in the Home Army. They got our sentence retracted. Somehow we survived. But there was pressure all the time.”

  “And did you get the cupboard back later?”

  “Oh no, later I didn’t want it anymore.”

  Marianna had a miscarriage soon after the note was nailed to their door. She couldn’t have children after that.

  “Did you have anything left from your family home?”

  “We had a whole set of dishes made of Ćmielów porcelain. One of the neighbors gave us back two soup plates. Another neighbor gave us back a laundry basin, also of his own will. Good people.”

  Ramotowski interrupts her: “You’re being ridiculous. Fat lot of goodness, giving back what doesn’t belong to you. They would come by later: ‘Lend me this, lend me that.’ Not just them, others, too.”

  “They thought you had to pay for the fact that you had a Jewish wife?”

  “That’s what it came down to.”

  I ask Stanisław if his marrying a Jew was held against him.

  “You can’t really say that—she was respected.”

  Marianna chimes in: “They respected me for having been baptized, and they nodded to me when I passed.”

  He: “Once the carpenter Wiśniewski, one of the killers, was drinking beer at the bar at the inn. He was chattering on about my wife being Jewish. I went back at him: ‘Haven’t you killed enough of them already?’ and slugged him. He hushed up and left and didn’t jibe at me after that. I was with a couple of friends then, and one of them said, ‘You’re brave, all right, Stanisław.’ I said I was just speaking the truth. Fabian Mordasiewicz came up to our table and threatened me: ‘Maybe you should keep your truth to yourself.’”

  I ask Marianna Ramotowska if it ever happened after the war that someone came up to her and said they were ashamed of what the Poles had done.

  “No, but they weren’t that bad to us, either; they knew we wouldn’t accuse them. On the contrary, when there were suspicions in any case, we went to testify on their behalf. I testified for Władysław Łasiewicz, who was in the militia and in the Home Army. Once when he met Stasinek on the road he yelled at him: ‘Get into the potato field!’ Moments later, a whole army patrol passed by.”

  I read the testimony of Marianna Ramotowska at the trial of Feliks Godlewski, who was charged with killing Jews: “I am a baptized Jew … I heard from Jews that they had an exceptionally good opinion of Godlewski. He always helped them, before and after the incident.”

  Despite the incriminating testimonies of other witnesses, the Ełk court decided to exonerate Godlewski. In the justification of the verdict it says: “We must emphasize the significance to the case of the testimony of Marianna Ramotowska—Jewish by origin—who presented the defendant Godlewski as someone who enjoyed an exceptional sympathy and good reputation among Jews. If the defendant Godlewski therefore had taken any part in the destruction of the Jews or had been hostile toward them, he would certainly not have earned this sympathy among them.”

  “And I also testified in the trial of a man who later came to me, kneeled down, threw his arms around my legs, and kissed me,” she adds, in tears.

  Every time I try to find out who this third man was, Marianna bursts into suppressed sobs. In the end she confesses to me that it was Leon Kosmaczewski.

  I say: “Kosmaczewski is said to be among the worst murderers. Did you know what they all did, Godlewski, Łasiewicz, and Kosmaczewski?”

  “I didn’t know what the first two had done that day, and later they truly helped us. Everyone knew about Kosmaczewski. We would have helped any of the killers, otherwise we wouldn’t survive.”

  He: “For them, killing a human being was like killing a fly. We lived here like sparrows in a bush. That’s why there were no guilty verdicts. We had to defend them.”

  She: “Once, Henryk Dziekoński came to the mill, the one who had taken me to the ghetto back then. ‘I can’t take this, I’m going to kill him,’ said Stanisław. And I said, ‘Pour him out a bit more flour. Evil must be answered with good. Show him how to live in the world.’” (This was one of the stories Marianna Ramotowska told me many times, always in tears.)

  In 1955 the secret police installed surveillance bugs around Ramotowski’s farm, with his consent. They were keeping tabs on a neighbor, Jadwiga Dąbrowska, a relative of the partisan Stanisław Marchewko, a.k.a. “Fish,” who died two years later, in 1957, betrayed to the secret police by his fellow partisans.

  “In the evening we went to Ramotowski’s house,” a major in the secret police reported back on his business trip, “and after discussing with him the subject of introducing a working group to his farm, he presented the proposal to his wife, noting that since they couldn’t very well do otherwise, they should agree and keep it secret, to which she expressed her assent, stressing that she understood the importance of keeping it quiet. Ramotowski’s brother accepted our proposal in the same way. After they had committed to keeping the secret, Ramotowski showed us a place in the pigsty where our staff might set themselves up, and he went home to take his rest.”

  I never spoke about this with Stanisław. Nor did he tell me about it himself, and these papers only came to light after his death.

  In the course of our dozens of conversations, Ramotowski remembered more and more killers.

  “Aleksander Godlewski, oh, he was a killer, but he never went on trial. When I was walking around in Radziłów, he would duck into a side street. Once I said to him, ‘Come on, let’s go get a pint; why are you avoiding me?’ It was such a relief to him; he didn’t even let me pay for the beer.

  “Mieczysław Strzelecki was one of the killers, he was a thug and a swine; Leon Paszkowski, Wincenty Piotrowski. I saw Jan Szymanowski and Jan Kreska driving their wagons from Żebry to go killing in Radziłów. Szymanowski was one of the first to kill in Wąsosz, but it still wasn’t enough for him. And from Wąsosz there was also Karwowski who came; he later became their boss in the National Armed Forces. From Konopki there was Jagódko, he was terrible, and then Wiśniewski from Mściski, who had married a girl in Radziłów. I think of each of them from time to time.

  “There were a lot of people like Felek Siedlecki, who didn’t exactly join in but who watched and egged on the others. Or Bolek Siedlecki—you couldn’t say he rounded people up, though he was in the square at the time. But there were plenty of people who were doing the killing. God forbid you ever meet any of them”—he looks at me anxiously, speaking of murderers who have been dead for years.

  “Feliks and Mietek were real butchers,” he says of the Mordasiewiczes. “There was a third brother, Jan, no better than they were. Professional thugs. But those who killed didn’t have an easy death themselves later. A friend of mine who was in the hospital next to Feliks Mordasiewicz told me he was calling out the names of the Jews he’d killed. Death was nearing and it was all coming back to haunt him. The family tried to shut him up, but he was shouting in his hospital bed, ‘There are a lot of them in the grain, out with them.’”

  I brought Ramotowski all the newspaper articles I had on Jedwabne and Radziłów. He started reading them on the spot, before I left. (Marianna told me he had borrowed every book in the Radziłów public library five times.) One time we were looking at a Radziłów paper from the sixties, at pictures of an orchestra at a funeral.

  “Lovely shot,” he commented. “Look, he’s a killer, and there’s another killer. That guy’s son once asked me if my wife would forgive him for his father’s behavior. Another time Jan Chrostowski was sick in bed. He and his wife sold moonshine vodka. I went to get some vodka. He ordered a chair to be brought for me and confessed to me what he had done to the Jews. ‘If you would only take a tiny part of the burden off me, you and your wife,’ he said. I said to him, ‘Man, we don’t have anything against you, but for forgiveness you’ll have to look somewhere else.’”

  In th
e sixties, the villagers stopped bringing grain to the mill, and the Ramotowskis had to live off their farm. It is located in an impoverished area, the earth is miserable there, but I’ve rarely seen the kind of poverty and desolation that I did on their farm. The house was sunk on its dilapidated foundation, wind howled in gaps between the beams, the toilet was in the yard, its doors fallen off and never put back on their hinges. I don’t know why it was so bad. Was it because Marianna spent most of her life perched nervously on a stool and didn’t know how to make a home? Stanisław told me that she didn’t like cleaning and cooking and wasn’t good at it, and so he did it. Not perfectly, I suppose. Was it because Stanisław was a drinker? He had half-destroyed hands with frostbitten fingers; they’d had to be thawed once after he fell asleep in the snow on his cart. The horse brought him home, saving his life.

  But it seemed to me the main reason for their poverty was Marianna’s belief that she had to keep paying off Stanisław’s family in order to be accepted by them. When I met them, they were supporting two families—couples of working age with children—on the modest sum Stanisław received from Yad Vashem after he was recognized in Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations: a Gentile who had helped to save Jewish lives. Once I told Ramotowski my hypothesis.

  “That you see these things.” He looked at me in admiration. “I thought of so many hiding places in the house, but no matter how well I hid the money, my wife would always find it in time for the next family visit.”

  No one from Radziłów ever made the slightest effort to help these two ailing old people. But as soon as the Jedwabne affair flared up, the name Ramotowski was on everybody’s lips.

  “He got himself a short little Jewish girl. Pretty, though. He was after the mill.”

  “When the Germans were hunting Jews, people in Radziłów wanted to help. Like that Ramotowski, who married a Jewish woman. She converted to our faith. She wasn’t shunned; everyone talked to her.”

  You heard this all the time. That she was beautiful and rich. Whereas it was Stanisław who was the looker in that marriage, and the Finkelsztejn home was pretty well cleaned out, plundered, the mill reduced to its foundation, and the locals must have known that. Evidently they somehow had to explain to themselves why one of them took a Jewish woman as a wife.