The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “This week I was at my mother’s. The priest warned people in his sermon not to reveal to strangers anything that might damage Poland.”

  She pulls out an invaluable item: “List of Post-German and Post-Jewish Real Estate Abandoned in the Jedwabne Area,” drawn up on September 3, 1946. It includes dozens of names of former Jewish owners of houses and lands.

  I drive to Jedwabne to find my next subject, but he won’t let me print his name, either. “In the sixties, when I was no more than ten, I overheard drunken neighbors quarreling about it. Who got the most gold, who raped a Jewish woman. One guy screamed, ‘You asshole, I know where you got that fur-lined coat.’ And another replied: ‘And you thrashed that Jewish girl behind the mill and cut her throat.’ I remember who it was, but I don’t want to give any names, I’m just telling you. Another time I heard adults talking about a couple of thugs who went into a Jewish home, and one of them hit a child with an iron rod—so his brain splattered the man’s clothes, and he made the mother clean it up. Another time, a friend’s mother told a story in my presence, not seeing me there, about locals going to Polish homes to rustle up a gang to ‘get the Jews.’ This woman wrapped her husband’s head in bandages to make it look like he was sick and couldn’t get up. Sure, the Germans incited the Poles, but some of the locals were already on the same page with the Germans. It wasn’t all imposed. All the older people in town know that. No Pole was ever harassed by Germans for not burning Jews. On the other hand, Poles went from house to house, made others join them, and sometimes they really came down on someone if he wouldn’t go with them.”

  Back to Łomża for a visit with Jan Cytrynowicz. He was baptized before the war, and after it ended he lived in Jedwabne, where he ran a leather workshop until his retirement. He lives in a tidy little house in the center of Łomża. He, his wife, and a small dog on the ground floor, their son on the floor above them.

  I read him my notes from the 1949 trial documents. Cytrynowicz demonstrates extensive knowledge of the subject. His wife, Pelagia, keeps raising her voice: “What is all this nonsense he’s telling you? We are always arguing about it. Would a Pole have done such a thing if a German wasn’t standing behind him with a rifle?”

  I ask Cytrynowicz, who survived the war in Russia, when he first heard about the atrocity.

  “Right after the war. I tanned sheepskins for coats, and they paid me in grain and salt pork. I was a bachelor, I liked to drink. My drinking buddies didn’t know about my background at first, I wasn’t from Jedwabne, after all, so after a few glasses of vodka they would boast: ‘I chased him all over town,’ ‘I stabbed him hard.’ They were happy they’d killed a couple of Jews. But sober, they didn’t say anything. Just that the Jews had gone to the burning of their own accord, because their religion told them to. Peasants wore spencers, those short homemade jackets. If someone went to church in a fur-lined coat, you knew it had belonged to a Jew.”

  “And when your friends found out you were Jewish, did their attitude change?”

  “I was baptized as a boy, and so as a Catholic I was considered a Pole. Girls cuddled me, none of them called me a Jew-boy. But I felt a strangeness. If I’d met any Jew at that time I would have left Poland, as did many Jews after the war, but I didn’t have any contact at all. Where were you going to find a Jew after the war? Even if there was one he’d be afraid to admit it.”

  Once in Przasnysz a man came up to Jan and whispered, “You a Jew by any chance?” He denied it, but the man didn’t believe him and said if he went to such and such a place, he could arrange to emigrate. That was after 1956, when for a short time Jews were legally permitted to emigrate. But by then he had a Catholic wife.

  I return to Jedwabne on an ice-covered road. Krzysztof Godlewski invited me for the evening. A nice big villa, his sweet wife (a teacher), three children. He was born in 1955. He’s not from Jedwabne itself but from the area. He became mayor in 1992, he’s in his third term. Immediately after reading Gross’s Neighbors, he laid a wreath at the monument on July 10 with the chairman of the town council, Stanisław Michałowski. At the next council meeting, the councilman Stanisław Janczyk proposed buying yarmulkes for Mayor Godlewski and Chairman Michałowski to portray them as “serving Jewish interests.”

  FEBRUARY 10, 2001

  I start the day in Łomża, where I ferret around in local libraries. I look in on the reading rooms of the Wagów Society, the public library, and the Northern Mazovia District Museum. I read issues of Wolna Łomża (Free Łomża), a paper from the time of the Soviet occupation. “Everyone should unmask the lordly minions who—in wholesale and speciality stores—sold out the interests of the masses in Poland before the war.” In the same issue there’s a piece by Chaim Katz, a shoemaker: “The liberation has come for me, I’ll be able to work in a co-op, I won’t have to live in poverty anymore. I would have been able to accept that penniless existence if it weren’t for the Poles’ attitude toward me.” Texts like this in an occupation paper couldn’t have aroused sympathy for Jews.

  Following the trail of names mentioned in the 1949 court trial documents, and also deciphering initials that have already been published in the press, I look for witnesses in Jedwabne and its environs.

  I’ve found a strategy for talking to people. The chief principle: don’t ask about the massacre. Those questions send people into a panic. Instead, I open my laptop. I say, “Were you at the meeting with the prosecutor? That was quite a drama. Shall I read you my notes?” Or, “I found testimonies from the 1949 investigation in the archive. Do you remember that both the Laudańskis were convicted? I’ll read you what they said.”

  Discreetly I note down the commentaries. For example: “Just look at that, Eugeniusz Śliwecki was accused of doing Jews! He was a mailman, always quiet and friendly. Well, he messed around with his own daughters, you think he wouldn’t with a Jewish woman?” “Czesław Strzelczyk was in on it. Bloody sadist, he took a pitchfork to his own wife. He was active politically, on the Russian side when they were here, on the German side under the Germans, and when People’s Poland came in he built podiums and gave speeches.” “There were three Kubrzyniecki brothers, all thugs. Even before the war they had a bad reputation. When people from around the area came to the parish fair, the Kubrzynieckis stood in the road and robbed them. They’d go to bars and get loaded on vodka, they lived off thieving. Józef Kubrzyniecki was a stove fitter, but he had a taste for robbing and brawling, and his wife was his equal in every way.”

  It’s clear that among Jedwabne’s older generation it’s universal knowledge who did the killing and who got rich off the Jews—I hear the same names over and over: Jerzy Laudański, Feliks Tarnacki, Eugeniusz Kalinowski, Józef Kubrzyniecki, Czesław Mierzejewski, Stanisław Sielawa, Józef Sobuta, Michał Trzaska.

  I ask each one of my interlocutors if they remember themselves or from family stories the surnames of any Jedwabne Jews. “With Jews, you just knew their first names, really,” they told me.

  I drive to Janczewko, a few kilometers past Jedwabne, to have a look at the Wyrzykowskis’ farm buildings, where Szmul Wasersztejn was in hiding, and to inquire after the former residents of the farm—I already know the Wyrzykowski family doesn’t live here anymore. One of the locals points out the house to me but doesn’t want to talk. Walking across the abandoned farmyard, I am met by a man who turns out to be Wyrzykowska’s nephew Franciszek Karwowski, who lives in Jedwabne but whose son owns a field here.

  “In the country only my family knew about the Jews in hiding here, nobody else. Once, four policemen on horseback came looking for them. They tore up the floorboards with bayonets but they didn’t find them. After the war, Home Army soldiers beat my aunt unconscious because they thought she had gold from Jews. When I heard one of them, Wądołowski, had got himself veterans’ papers, it was like someone stuck a knife in my heart.”

  Strangely enough, however, since Neighbors has come out he doesn’t feel the greatest anger toward the men who brutalized his aunt.


  “And how did Wasersztejn show his gratitude to my aunt? How could he write that Poles killed Jews since he was saved by Poles himself? With that one testimony he ruined all the good she had done him. None of those seven Jews came out with that kind of nonsense, just him. There was a burning in Radziłów, killings in Szczuczyn, but whatever you say, we helped Jews and made enemies by it. When I was supposed to go to the States, friends warned me: ‘Don’t go: when Jews find out you’re from Jedwabne they’ll kill you.’”

  When I was checking in the Gazeta’s web archive to see if we had published anything on Jedwabne before Jan Gross’s book was published, I found one piece in the Białystok supplement from April 1999 titled “Let’s Have Some Fun: We’ll Burn Rysiek.” It was about a court case in which people were tried for setting a Jedwabne man on fire. The killers testified they’d done it as a joke. When I go by Przestrzele to see Leszek Dziedzic, whose father helped hide Szmul Wasersztejn, Dziedzic tells me, “That Rysiek was a loner, a bit of an eccentric, but a cultured man. His drunken pals dragged him out of the house, poured gas on him, set him afire. They were repeating exactly what was done to Jews two generations ago.”

  On the way back to Warsaw I drop by the Cytrynowiczes—Jan, the baptized Jew from Jedwabne, and his Gentile wife, Pelagia—for coffee. The lady of the house gives me a warm welcome but makes it clear from the threshold that although she was not at Jedwabne in that time, she knew for sure that her husband was talking nonsense when he said Poles burned the Jews. I ask her about her native town.

  “I lived in Grajewo. There was a wooden storage container in the marketplace, no bigger than the table we’re drinking tea at. They caught Jews, forced them down onto the container, and beat them up.”

  “Who beat them?”

  “I have to say I saw Poles from Grajewo doing it with my own eyes. One of them hit a Jew on the head with a hammer. I was watching from the kitchen window, shaking. A Jew came by to hide in our cellar; Mama hid him there. She was afraid he’d stay on.

  “Another time I was walking by the synagogue when the Jews had been forced to leap from an upper floor. They were lying there with broken legs. Sad to say, it was Poles, but on orders from the Germans, who were standing there with guns.”

  “Did you see those Germans?”

  “They must have been standing nearby giving orders. Polish people coming up with it themselves? Being so heartless?”

  “Miss Pelagia,” I ask, recognizing in her the dangerous sort of person who wouldn’t hurt a fly, “if a German with a gun had told you to beat up a girl your own age at that time, and then he’d gone off somewhere else, what would you have done?”

  She doesn’t reply. Nor does she interrupt my conversation with her husband, even when I read out notes from the 1949 investigation, which I had avoided doing before. In them their daughter’s father-in-law appears as one of the suspects.

  I stay with them too long and once again drive back to Warsaw after dark, on an icy highway.

  FEBRUARY 11, 2001

  Maria K. of Jedwabne (from a piece published in a local weekly in the eighties): “So many people took their wagons and went out looting!… I’m not afraid to speak of it because I didn’t profit by the burning. Just one down quilt, two pillows, and a cupboard my mother brought me. And how complicated to get it all home!”

  In the General Weekly, Jan Gross reminds us in his article “The Pillow of Mrs. Marx” that the first reaction to his book Neighbors was a piece by the prominent anti-Semitic journalist Jerzy Robert Nowak in the largest Catholic paper, Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily), which said the whole thing was about finagling compensation for lost Jewish property. Gross says: “That argument didn’t surprise me, because among people ideologically close to the Our Daily writer, associating Jews with money is a common reflex.” And he goes on to describe—following the Holocaust scholar Saul Friedlander—a scene that took place on Kristallnacht, when all over Germany and Austria thousands of Jewish shop and house windows were broken, sometimes along with lootings and beatings. Mrs. Marx, wife of a kosher butcher in the town of Wittlich, went out to meet her German neighbors, saying: “What have we ever done to harm you?” And years later the grandson of Mrs. Marx’s neighbor turns up at a lecture to say that his grandmother, tormented by pangs of conscience, still keeps the pillow she got that night at the back of her closet.

  Gross writes that a church collection in the Łomża diocese to fund maintenance of the Jewish cemetery in Jedwabne could be a significant gesture. He also points to something that has been bothering me: the general concern with what will be thought of Poles abroad. After all, for half a year after Neighbors appeared, a relative quiet reigned. Up to the moment people realized the book was about to appear in the United States. Anxiously looking for our reflection in the eyes of others won’t help, writes Gross. It’s about the work of coming to terms with our own history.

  FEBRUARY 12, 2001

  The president of the Institute of National Remembrance, Leon Kieres, at a meeting with American Jews in New York: “It is certain that in Jedwabne, Jews died at the hands of Poles. The truth, even if it is hard, must be accepted with humility.”

  I read World War II memoirs that I bought at the Wagów Society in Łomża.

  In the reminiscences of Henryk Milewski, who was deported to Siberia, and from 1989 onward served as the president of the Association of Siberian Deportees in Łomża, one Jew appears: Aaron Szwalbe of Zambrów. This fellow passenger on the transport became an object of scorn to the author, who calls him a “speculator.” Szwalbe was a wholesaler, played all kinds of tricks dealing in tanned hides. Naturally, the Polish patriot could not abide the con games of the Soviet workplace. “A Jew sees fraud as a positive act,” he commented. “And he was above all a Jew. The word speaks for itself.”

  Stanisław Gawrychowski, the son of a prewar village head and author of On Patrol with the Home Army 1939–1945, also has his views. “The Poles’ attitude toward Jews—there were 500 of them in Wizna—was fair and square. You can’t say that of the Jews.” And later he writes about the Soviet occupation as a paradise for Jews and a hell for Poles: “After the Russian invasion in 1939, the majority of Jews showed their hostility to all things Polish. They came to believe they were the lords of these lands, and Poles felt it very painfully and intimately. The Jews shouted ‘Bravo’ and the scorned and powerless Poles watched the traitors and occupying forces with tears and hatred in their eyes.” Next to the statement that before the war the Poles’ attitude toward Jews was fair and square, this doesn’t sound convincing. When a Pole collaborates, he’s a renegade, but when a Jew collaborates, it’s proof of what Jews are really like.

  Both books confirm what has emerged from my conversations with people in Jedwabne. In this region, anti-Semitism is the default position, nothing to be ashamed of.

  Jerzy Smurzyński, author of the book Black Years in the Łomża Lands: Nazi Mass Murders in 1941–1945 in the Light of Documents, reconstructs the dates and names of victims of the Nazis. Only the ethnic Poles. In that period, almost all Jews in this area who were Polish citizens were killed. Weren’t they worth mentioning, just once?

  FEBRUARY 14, 2001

  A visit to the Ramotowskis near Warsaw, where they found a place in a nursing home run by the Evangelical Church. It’s a joy to see Marianna, who has revived in the stylish two-room apartment with a balcony and a view of birch trees. She’s transformed from a granny swaddled in four sweaters into an elegant lady. I’ve brought her a green-checked skirt and a brown turtleneck. She steers her wheelchair toward the window and peers at the colors through her thick glasses. “Good thing the sweater’s brown; if it were bordeaux, I couldn’t wear it with a green skirt.”

  I’ve prepared a selection of press clippings for Ramotowski. I read him the historian Jerzy Jedlicki’s essay in Polityka (Politics) arguing against the idea, which I hear again and again, that the fuss caused by Gross’s book only provokes an anti-Semitic response: “We won’t cure ourselv
es with fantasies, either. Virtually unnoticed the younger generation in Poland has been infected with anti-Semitism; they have no knowledge or experience of it, but some of them already react to the usual signals and slogans. They should at least know what they’re talking about and what they think they believe. It’s time to call things by their proper names.”

  Stanisław nods his head in acknowledgment but can barely believe that any periodical in Poland would publish such things.

  I visit the Karta Center for the documentation of contemporary history, which provides me with interviews conducted by a historian in the nineties with partisans who participated in the postwar struggle against Communism in the Białystok region.

  “With us, hostility to Jews derived from prewar times,” he was told by Józef Stankiewicz of Długołęka, code name “Kmicic,” who was imprisoned in the Stalinist period. “For the local population, religious questions were very important, and the crucifixion of Christ. National Party members appeared in our village and spread their propaganda. It got to the youth, especially in that time of high unemployment. I wrote on the door of my house: No entry for Jews, Gypsies, or devils. One Jewish woman told my mother: ‘Ludwika, you’re a good person, but your son is a devil.’ After the German invasion a friend urged me to join the National Armed Forces. ‘Józek, do you want to fight for a free Poland?’ ‘I do,’ I replied. ‘Look, the Home Army is with the government. They want to fight for that free Poland—together with the Jews. Jew or Pole, it’s all the same to them.’”

  FEBRUARY 16, 2001

  A lunch with the great Polish writer Tadeusz Konwicki. The subject of Jedwabne comes up, though it is not raised by me—I watch myself, because common sense tells me it isn’t the only topic of conversation.