The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “When the war was over,” says Ramotowski, “I said to my wife: ‘Now, my sweetheart, you’re free; go where you will.’ She said she wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if that’s the way it is, we’ll be together ever after.’ And that’s how it has been.”

  For the next sixty years they didn’t part, even for a split second. When I saw them the first time, they looked as if they were posing for a portrait. He was sitting near her, holding her hand. Later I saw that this was how they spent most of the day. “Stasinek,” the nearsighted Marianna called whenever he moved away for a moment. “I’m coming, Marianna,” he answered with no sign of impatience.

  “Didn’t you ever think of leaving Poland?” I ask.

  He: “I was ready to go to America, her cousins were always inviting us, but Marianna wouldn’t go for the world. I told her again and again: ‘Kiddo, let’s leave this rotten place.’”

  She: “I was attached to the place where I was born, my ancestors lived here for three centuries.”

  He: “She was afraid I’d be attracted to other women over there. But even if I had been, I would never leave her, not for long anyway. I was always lucky with the ladies, but I liked the one I had and I wasn’t such a bad guy. If ever I came home late, I kissed her, showed her some affection, and somehow it passed. There isn’t and there could never be anyone like her in Radziłów. The others couldn’t hold a candle to her.”

  Journal

  FEBRUARY 7, 2001

  I set off for Jedwabne at dawn to attend a meeting of residents who are to be informed by prosecutor Ignatiew of the principles on which his investigation will be conducted. A vandalized manor house where in Communist times there was a cultural center and movie theater. At the entrance I introduce myself to a small group of men as a journalist from the Gazeta Wyborcza. A chorus of voices responds:

  “Heard about the deportations? And you know who was behind all that?”

  “Your people, the Jews. When the Soviets were here, the Jews wanted to put a movie theater and toilets in our church.”

  I try to interject that synagogues were turned into movie theaters and storehouses, too.

  “Sixteen hundred people in one barn? You must be kidding.”

  I ask why no one questioned the inscription on the monument earlier—it gave precisely that number as having been burned by the Gestapo.

  “You spat on us and our children. We’re not going to talk to you.”

  Father Edward Orłowski, the parish priest, enters the hall with Janina Biedrzycka (the woman whose father gave his barn for the burning of the Jews) and sits down at the table on the stage. There are maybe two hundred people in the hall, the majority men between thirty and fifty years old. When the prosecutor counters anti-Semitic remarks, he is met with a menacing growl. Voices speaking of Jews denouncing people to the NKVD are rewarded with applause.

  “It’s lies they’re writing. Even if you packed them in like herrings in a barrel you couldn’t get sixteen hundred Jews in there.”

  “We’re not anti-Semites. I played with Jewish kids. But it has to be said: when Poles were taken off to Siberia, there were two Jews standing guard at the door.”

  “Who’s accusing the people of Jedwabne? We don’t even have to ask: we know that money rules.”

  “Let the institute put Gross on trial for his lies.”

  One of the men in the hall tells me later, without giving his name, “That guy on the right who was yelling loudest that the Jews got Polish patriots deported, he knows very well that his father denounced my father, and even joined the NKVD when they came to arrest him. Later he got down on his knees, pleading with my father to keep it a secret.”

  For the first time I see Father Orłowski in action. Jovial, sturdy, energetic, with a powerful voice and a round face made even rounder by his bald head. After the meeting he steps off the stage, stands before the camera—Channel 2 is shooting a report on Jedwabne—straightens his cassock, and declaims: “They want to make us believe we’re murderers. The peaceful coexistence of Poles and Jews was violated by the Jews during the Soviet occupation. When Poland was conquered in 1939, no town was as quick to organize a resistance movement as Jedwabne. Poles died in Auschwitz. What they’re saying is not just slander against Jedwabne, but against the Polish people. We have to defend ourselves.”

  I go with the prosecutor to the town hall, and introduce myself to Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski, who invites us to tea.

  “It’s beneath human dignity to be a bean counter in a matter like this,” the mayor says. “Maybe there weren’t sixteen hundred victims, but thirteen hundred or fewer. What does it matter? We have to come to terms with the fact of this crime—with Christian humility. The Jewish citizens of Jedwabne were cruelly murdered. It’s good that this has been brought to light. The whole thing about Jews collaborating with the NKVD is just a red herring—we should be talking about changing the inscription on the monument.”

  I ask how he intends to do this in a town where the priest is calling on parishioners to defend themselves against the truth.

  “A handful of people took part in the crime. The townspeople are outraged that the condemnation has fallen on the whole community. Many of them are convinced the Germans carried out the atrocity. That’s what they used to hear and it’s hard to change their minds. Perhaps it could be shown that in 1949 some innocent man was convicted, that would show people that the Institute of National Remembrance wants to get to the truth. The townspeople have been put in an extraordinarily difficult situation. They need time to digest it. It’s natural to choose the easier truth. But I see from the town council how the more difficult truth is gradually sinking in.”

  At this moment one of the councilmen comes in.

  “Even if you quartered sixteen hundred Jews, you couldn’t fit them in that barn. I was born in 1950, but I know from my parents and neighbors that the Jews were destroyed by Hitler. Whoever says it was Poles was paid to say that. Poles rounded them up, for fun or under duress, I don’t know, but a German was standing there with a gun.”

  I interrupt him to ask what he thinks the monument’s inscription should say.

  “Sixteen hundred Jews were not burned here. That lie has to be rectified.”

  Godlewski—a tall man with a handlebar mustache, a talented actor—stands behind him and makes desperate faces at me, covers his eyes, his ears, lifts his hands to the heavens.

  I visit the priest at the presbytery, and open the conversation politely: “A lot of your parishioners came to the meeting with the prosecutor, which I know you organized.”

  “I announced it in church. I told people to go and they responded to my call,” he says with satisfaction. “Everyone agrees that the Polish and Jewish communities lived in perfect concord, like a loving family. It went wrong with the Russians’ invasion of Poland, when many Jews joined the NKVD and friendships with Poles were broken off. We have to look at Gross closely. Jedwabne is the tip of the iceberg.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “If the Jedwabne affair is dealt with in the way Gross would like, it’ll be like knocking a hole in the hull of a ship and waiting for it to sink. The truth is that the Germans did the killing, not the Poles. But Jews do things that way.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “When we had Bible class the priest told us, ‘A Jew will put a cap on a stick and tell you: “Watch out, there are two of us.”’ That’s what the Jewish character is like. In New York I met a Jewish multimillionaire who bragged about the huge factory he sold to the Germans during the war: ‘They gave us a lot of gold and drove us to Hamburg, and from there we sailed to America.’ Here his whole people was perishing and he did that—the ultimate swindle.”

  “Do you ever hear anti-Semitic remarks in your parish?”

  “We don’t have the problem of anti-Semitism here.”

  “What do you think the inscription on the monument should say?”

  “Here the Jews were destroyed by the
Nazis. That’s a compromise that should placate both the Jews and the Poles. Otherwise the town will have to defend itself.”

  “How do you see that?”

  “Maybe we’ll have to get organized, we have a lot of patriots here. I’m considering setting up a committee to defend the town’s good name.”

  I’d looked for Leszek Dziedzic in vain at the meeting with the prosecutor, so I go by his house in Przestrzele, about three kilometers from Jedwabne.

  “I don’t go to the priest’s parties,” he says, “but you tell me what happened.”

  He listens to my account without moving from his chair, and comments, “Same priest, same people. Their only problem is, there aren’t any Jews left to kill.”

  FEBRUARY 8, 2001

  From articles on Jedwabne, of which there have been several in the press, I found a few names and got the addresses from the phone book.

  Above all, I want to meet a Jewish woman who lives here, identified in the press as Helena Ch. She was baptized during the war and married a Pole. I read about her: “Black bushy eyebrows, lively blue eyes, hair covered with a flowery scarf. The Tygodnik Katolicki Niedziela [Sunday Catholic Weekly] lay open on the kitchen table. ‘Don’t give my name, why would you? That name is gone, those people are gone. It was God’s will they should all perish in the barn. I don’t bear any grudge. Poles gave me life. It’s been quiet for so many years, why revisit it all? Don’t give my name. I’m not worried about myself but about my children. When my son was studying in Białystok he let his beard grow. I had to ask him to shave it off or people might have a bad association. Later he wanted to name my grandson David, but I explained to him people might get angry. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I want to die in peace. Quietly, peacefully.’”

  I go by her house, but Helena Chrzanowska, as I have learned her full name is, asks me in a low voice not to disturb her and her husband. He is very sick; they need peace and quiet.

  Another Jedwabne resident, Henryka Adamczykowa, told a journalist, “I can still hear the screaming of people being led to their deaths. I can smell the burning.”

  She lives in an apartment building; I talk to her through the door. After the unpleasantness that followed the publication of the article I read, she doesn’t want to talk to any more journalists. The next name I try is Halina Popiołek. She remembered that her father, Józef Bukowski, said on July 9, 1941, that the townspeople were plotting against the Jews. She saw Jews being herded and beaten with sticks. She saw “our folks” making young Jews carry a statue of Lenin.

  She lets me in but is reluctant to talk about the atrocity.

  “For years I went to light a candle on the anniversary of the massacre, and on All Saints’,” she explains. “This year, when I turned up with candles on July 10, there were journalists there, photographers, some TV cameras, and my picture was in the local paper. The priest bawled me out, my neighbors turned their backs on me. I hear everywhere that I was paid off by the Jews. I won’t ever say anything again.”

  I express my regret that Helena Chrzanowska won’t talk to me, either.

  “You have to understand her. How many times have people insulted her for being Jewish. I would never call a person names like that,” she assures me.

  I visit Alina Żukowska; I know from Zygmunt Laudański, one of the killers, that she was in Jedwabne on that day, July 10, 1941. I find her chopping wood. She lives in a crumbling communal apartment without central heating. For twenty-eight years she darned stockings. She doesn’t stop working for a minute during the whole two hours of our conversation. The cold is so biting it’s hard to take notes because my hands are freezing.

  “Did Zygmunt Laudański tell you then that he fled into the fields because he didn’t want to participate in hounding Jews?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” says Alina Żukowska, who seems to have forgotten she testified on behalf of several of the accused, including Zygmunt Laudański, at the trial in 1949. “I’ve already given testimony to prosecutor Ignatiew. He didn’t get in touch with me before, so what does he want from me now? I was in Pisz last year, they had already started writing about Jedwabne then. I met Jerzy Laudański, asked him, ‘Have you read it?’ And he said he hadn’t. He was lying. Everybody’s lying.”

  Żukowska ridicules what Gross quoted from the trial of Karol Bardoń, one of the men convicted, who died in prison. “I read in Gross that Bardoń told the court he didn’t round up Jews, because he was a mechanic at the police station and he was repairing cars all day. What cars? They didn’t have as much as a motorcycle, or even a bicycle. When they wanted to go somewhere they had a local hitch up a cart. Bardoń was sentenced to death, then pardoned, and he ate our Polish bread in prison. Even though he was from Silesia, he was a German stooge, not a mechanic. And there’s a Jew in Gross’s book who’s lying, Icek Neumark, who says he escaped from the barn, but he wasn’t even there. I saw him go into hiding the day before. That rotten Jew Wasersztejn left the country and passed sentence on Jedwabne.

  “That night, after the burning of the Jews, I met the Laudańskis’ neighbor, Genek Kalinowski. He said the mayor had ordered everyone to stand guard at the cottages overnight because the Jews might take revenge. I sat with the Laudańskis in front of our sheds. Now the Laudańskis are playing grandees, their pictures in the paper, they want to whitewash themselves, make out they’re so clean. So why were they convicted? I didn’t see them at it. But you could hear the screaming two kilometers away.”

  “Did you ever hear someone say afterward, ‘It’s a pity they’re gone’?”

  “Until the Gross book came out, no one mentioned the Jews.”

  One of the people I talked to yesterday has introduced me to a woman who witnessed the atrocity. She agrees to talk to me, but won’t allow me to print her initials. She was ten years old at the time.

  “I saw the Smułek family being driven out. It was all people they knew doing it, Poles. There weren’t any Germans there. The Choneks, for whom my mother had worked before the war, said to her when they were on their way to the market square: ‘Our hour has come.’ That’s how indifferent they were, how resigned, their children weren’t even crying. Bielecki, on horseback, chased a young Jewish woman, Miss Kiwajkowa. When he was in prison under the Soviets, she’d taken care of his children.”

  I check the name on my laptop. There it is. Władysław Bielecki, who chased Jews on horseback, is mentioned by Antoni Niebrzydowski, one of the suspects in the trial of 1949.

  “It was scorching hot,” the woman continues. “A Jew, well on in years, wanted to go to the well in the market square to draw water, and a boy who couldn’t have been more than twelve hit him and pushed him away. The Poles were holding sticks, pieces of tire, and they were furious. They must have cut up those tires earlier, right? I followed the Jews when they were put into rows. There were young girls and women, such pretty ones, some pregnant and some with children in baby blankets. I saw boys of twelve hounding Jews; a lot of those taking part were in their late teens. Some were herding their own schoolmates. How could they look them in the eye, killing them? I was afraid to go near the barn in case they forced me in, too. They poured gasoline from a can at the barn’s four corners. It caught fire immediately. I can’t sleep at night. I see it as if it were yesterday. There were many more participants in the crime than were later convicted. It was an inferno of hatred. That terrifying scream that probably didn’t last for more than two minutes, it’s still inside me. This morning I woke up at four again because it came back to me. Why I went there, a little girl, I don’t know. Maybe so that I could be a witness to the truth now.”

  Before the war her parents worked for Jews, and her mother always spoke well of them. She remembers the names of her Jewish neighbors: the Powroźniks, who had a grocery, the Prawdziweks had a granary, the Kiwajeks had a farm, the Fiszmans a sawmill.

  At the Dziedzices’ home in the evening, Leszek tells me about Helena Chrzanowska.

  “You can’t talk to her about wh
at she went through; she can’t bear to remember it. She keeps saying, ‘May God forgive them, it’s not for me to judge.’ Once a woman from the neighborhood told her to get her son Józek to run for town council. She replied, ‘God forbid, he can’t run, if anything goes wrong, they’ll say it’s the Jew’s fault.’ When I tried to persuade her that it probably wouldn’t be that bad, she confessed that a neighbor of hers, an older man, had threatened her across the fence: ‘We’re not done yet, we can still finish what we started.’ I know him, his family took part in the killing. He can barely stand, but he could still manage to do someone in. And recently, I went to the pharmacy. Miss Helena was just buying something. A neighbor comes in, sees her, and starts yammering about Jews, just like that, on purpose.”

  In the midst of the conversation, Dziedzic interjects: “Because in your religion…” It was clear to the participants in yesterday’s meeting with Ignatiew that I must be Jewish, since I work for the “Kosher Times,” as they call the Gazeta Wyborcza here, and don’t yet use their code phrases “Soviet collaboration,” “Jewish conspiracy,” and “Gross’s lies.” But why does Leszek Dziedzic decide I’m Jewish? He probably can’t imagine that someone who’s not herself a Jew would wish to discover the truth or feel for those who were murdered. Experience tells him it doesn’t happen. He has always been completely isolated in his compassion for the victims.

  FEBRUARY 9, 2001

  Łomża. In the state archive I look for minutes of prewar meetings of the town council, which had to be made up of a mixture of Poles and Jews. The archivist explains that the documents could just as well have made their way east with the Red Army, in which case they might be in Mińsk or Grodno, as west with the German army, in which case they might be in Gdańsk, for example. Or they could have wound up elsewhere by accident. Probably they were destroyed. It transpires that the archivist herself is from Jedwabne. I ask if she knows what’s being said in the town.