by Anna Bikont
“In the Vilnius area we didn’t have anything like that,” says Konwicki. “Jews were killed by the Germans with the help of Lithuanians. If someone had asked me before if anything like this could happen, I would have said with a clear conscience: no, Poles wouldn’t be capable of such a crime. Not that I had such a high opinion of Polish society. I concerned myself professionally with its weaknesses and failings, but I was convinced that we had been spared the mark of cruelty. I thought things like that could happen only in the Balkans. It shocked me, hurt me, it was devastating.”
In reaction to the anti-Semitic campaign in 1968, Konwicki invented a Jewish grandfather who had a romance with his grandmother, and made the romance the background of one of his novels. In it, he wrote: “What a strange word, Jew. There’s always an instant of fear before you say it.”
Another letter from Kazimierz, one of the three Laudański brothers implicated in the massacre, awaits me back at the Gazeta offices. It’s dated February 12. Laudański is emboldened by success; his tone is getting more strident. “Poles are acccused of anti-Semitism, but it’s hard to demand of us that we love our neighbors when they are traitors. The fact that Professor Gross dares to put out such nonsense freely is its own testimony to our tolerance. In Iran he probably wouldn’t have the nerve. Mr. Gross demands that Poles build a monument to victims in Jedwabne, confess to the crime in the epitaph, and have the entire Polish elite including the clergy at the monument’s unveiling. But who will put up hundreds of monuments on the trail through the Urals to Kołyma for our Poles, the Siberian exiles? Because there are different kinds of neighbors. Wouldn’t it be better to shut up? Do we have to hold up the Egyptian, Spanish, or German exile before the people of Israel? The prescription is simple: change your attitude to your neighbors and to … money.”
In the Republic there’s a reply to the historian Strzembosz’s article from Józef Lewandowski, a historian in Uppsala. He takes issue with the thesis that no one killed Jews in Poland between the wars. He reminds readers that in the months immediately following Polish independence, pogroms took place: in Lvov a total of forty to two hundred victims is given, in Vilnius there’s mention of fifty-five dead. In Pińsk, Major Łuczyński ordered the shooting of thirty-five Jews (as Communists, though it turned out later they’d been a Zionist group gathered to distribute food aid rations). He recalls a conversation he had in Israel with an old painter from the Pińsk area who had greeted Polish independence enthusiastically and who told him how that enthusiam had died at the news of the events in Pińsk.
I remember a conversation I had with my elderly aunt (she was born in the nineteenth century) when I visited her in a kibbutz outside Haifa. She spoke Russian with me even though she knew Polish; she refused to use the language. She told me how the Polish army invaded her little town in 1918, the year Poland achieved independence, and drunken soldiers suggested to Jewish boys hanging around the market that they go to the bakery and take as much bread as they could carry. And when the children came out with loaves of bread under their coats they shot at them like ducks.
A phone conversation with Ignatiew. I tell him that when I’m in Jedwabne a tide of anti-Semitism engulfs me, that I’ve never encountered anything like it before, and it hurts. Ignatiew, who typically keeps his distance, unexpectedly starts on something personal. He’d never given much thought before to the fact that there were Jews in Poland; nor could he remember hearing any anti-Semitic remarks. Now he’s not sure whether he might have simply missed them, because he now hears them at every turn. “To the point where I began to wonder,” he jokes, “if Poles hadn’t imbibed it all with their mother’s milk. But my background is White Russian, my great-grandfather and grandfather fled the revolution and stayed in Poland.”
In the evening a visit to my friend Jacek Kuroń in the hospital—a place he can’t stand but where he returns now with increasing frequency. We talk about nonremembrance. I tell him that after July 10 there were still a few dozen Jews who’d survived by some miracle living in the so-called ghetto in Jedwabne—two designated houses. I haven’t found anyone who can remember when the last Jews disappeared from the town—according to the testimonies at the Jewish Historical Institute it was in November 1942—as if not only the memory of the massacre had been wiped out but also the memory of the Holocaust.
During the war, everyone was a witness to the Holocaust, says Jacek, who was then in Lvov. He keeps breaking off his story to inhale a little oxygen from a tank (on top of every possible organ failure he is now battling chronic pneumonia). He remembers Jews with shaved heads in striped uniforms crossing the city in groups of four on the way to work in the Janowska concentration camp. They were made to sing (Jacek croaks: “Marshal Śmigły Rydz didn’t teach us a thing / but glorious Hitler came and set us all working”). He remembers hearing a shot while playing in a courtyard and seeing the body of a Jewish boy in a pool of blood. He remembers images from the ghetto, children starving to death on the streets—he saw them when traversing the ghetto on the tram to go to the swimming pool. When he talks to friends who were children or teenagers during the war, he most often hears that no, they didn’t notice the Holocaust, because the Jews were behind the ghetto walls.
“We lived in a vortex of death, but they didn’t see a damn thing,” Jacek marvels.
FEBRUARY 18, 2001
I’ve set aside a bunch of books on Polish-Jewish relations for Ignatiew. But the prosecutor is also gaining knowledge on his own, because when I call him he says, “I’ve been reading about the pogroms in Odessa, in Kishinev. I tell you, that was real anti-Semitism! That whole thing about imbibing it with a Polish mother’s milk here is no explanation. It’s not only in Poland.”
FEBRUARY 19, 2001
I’m looking for someone to lead dancing and provide entertainment at my daughter Ola’s bat mitzvah party. Her bat mitzvah falls on Shushan Purim, the day after Purim, which is the merriest Jewish holiday. According to tradition people should be joyful, dance, and drink. But classmates of Ola’s start calling to say they won’t be able to come if there’s dancing: this year Purim falls in the period of Lent. Because I associate everything with Jedwabne—I know it borders on an obsession—I immediately imagine towns where Catholics were fasting, remembering the crucifixion of Christ, at the same time that ordinarily quiet Jews were whistling and stamping in the synagogue, and their children were making a ruckus with groggers and clappers.
FEBRUARY 23, 2001
Back in Jedwabne. I’ve made a list of Jedwabne-born residents who were at least ten years old in 1941. On the way, in Łomża, I drop by to see Mr. Zejer, the retired plumber whose father went to prison for the atrocity in Jedwabne and died in prison. The son was by then old enough to remember something. His family doesn’t let me in.
Antonina Narewska appears in an article on Jedwabne in a local monthly. She recalls her prewar friendships with Jewish girls and how she missed her Jewish classmate Dwercia Łojewska, who emigrated to Palestine. “Later, when ‘it’ happened in our town,” she says, “I thanked God for saving her life.” She doesn’t say a word about who did “it.” But I hear Miss Narewska is under house arrest—her family won’t let her out.
I knock on her door. “My mother-in-law isn’t going to talk to you,” says a furious voice.
I knock on the door of a villa that belongs to an older gentleman who I heard had seen Jews being herded into the marketplace when he was a little boy. A man who looks about forty opens the door.
“You’re not sticking your nose in here, lady!”
He slams the door in my face with such force that I barely manage to jump away.
At least the older residents who live alone are prepared to talk to me, although the conversations are not very fruitful. It’s worse when the younger generation lives in the same house. It’s hard to get across the threshold. At the next stop the conversation is just as brief:
“Father’s not here.”
“And when might he be back?”
“Not today
, I’m sure of that.”
“I’ll come by tomorrow, then.”
“He won’t be here tomorrow, either.”
At the Cytrynowiczes’ in Łomża. As soon as I come in Miss Pelagia starts up in an excited voice: “I was just in Jedwabne. All they’re talking about is how many Poles the Jews denounced to the Soviets. It’s the only topic. Jedwabne has no business defending itself like that! What are they trying to say? That genocide is allowed if it’s payback for something else? I told my grandson what his grandfather on his father’s side did on July 10, 1941! It’s right that he should know!”
FEBRUARY 24, 2001
Jedwabne. Not for the first time I meet with an older lady, an eyewitness to the abuse and killing of Jews. Every time we meet, new details come back to her. “Right after the Soviets left I was passing by the bakery and saw a boy lying there who’d been stoned; he was tall and fat, he could have weighed more than a hundred kilos. He was still breathing.”
It’s probably this boy who is mentioned in a letter from prison by Karol Bardoń. On the day the Germans entered the town, Bardoń was summoned by Jedwabne resident Wiśniewski. “Pointing at a young man of Jewish origin named Lewin, about 22 years old, lying there murdered, he said to me: ‘We killed that son of a bitch with stones.’”
Later, Wiśniewski showed him a stone weighing about twelve to fourteen kilos and said, “We bashed him with that stone. I don’t think he’s getting up.”
The lady I’m talking to also remembers that the day before the burning, a lot of young people came in from the surrounding countryside and chased Jews to the synagogue, where they forced them to sing and destroy their holy books.
FEBRUARY 27, 2001
Warsaw. The courthouse on Leszno Street, Criminal Justice Department VIII. I’m looking for prewar court cases concerning the crime in Radziłów. But there’s no central case registry; I have to look in the archives of regional courts. To get to a particular trial you have to know the names of the accused. I know from Skrodzki that in the Radziłów trials the accused were Leon Kosmaczewski, Władysław Łasiewicz, and Aleksander Godlewski, and that they stood trial in Ełk.
I phone the regional court in Ełk and discover that the documents may be at the regional prosecutor’s office. From there I’m referred to the state archive in Ełk. There I hear that it may have been an out-of-town court session, I’d have to look in Białystok or Olsztyn, not to mention that the documents might have been destroyed.
After a few phone calls to Ełk I realize that without prosecutor Ignatiew’s help, finding the documents of the Radziłów investigation could take me months. But I also know the press should keep its distance from the judiciary. When I worked on economic affairs for the Gazeta it wouldn’t have occurred to me to work with a prosecutor. After a consultation with the paper, I call Ignatiew and give him a list of Radziłów murderers I drew up with Skrodzki, specifying those whom I know were the subjects of investigation. He warns me that if he finds the documents, he won’t be able to give me access to them without permission from his superiors.
FEBRUARY 28, 2001
At Marianna Ramotowska’s birthday party. She is eighty-six. Both Ramotowskis are very taken with their new priest in Warsaw, Father Sikora. “A priest who’s so friendly to us?” Stanisław marvels. “Maybe it’s because he’s Evangelical.”
I phone Father Michał Czajkowski. I heard him on television talking about the teachings of the Church before the war: “It was teaching people contempt. And then we’re surprised that people lost their sense of conscience. That contempt paved the way. The murderers are a great moral and religious problem for me but so are the Christians who didn’t help, even though they could have, the ones who were indifferent. For that kind of passivity we answer to God.” I don’t know him personally, but I want to thank him. He has just had an indignant call from Father Orłowski in Jedwabne, who sought him out at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, where Czajkowski is a professor. There, someone high up in the university assured him that Father Czajkowski does not represent the views of the Catholic university.
MARCH 1, 2001
In the Karta Center’s Eastern Archive I read copies of testimonies held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, stories of people from the Białystok region deported to the USSR. The historian Tomasz Strzembosz has read these testimonies before me (I find recent entries by him in the files) and he uses them to demonstrate that Jews collaborated and informed during the Soviet occupation.
These recollections, recorded during the war, have a special weight. When I talk to contemporary residents of Jedwabne, I can believe they’re reacting to the revelation of the crime by trying to cast guilt upon the victims. But there’s no reason to think that people who left Poland before the massacre was committed and who couldn’t even have known about it (no one from Jedwabne would have written to relatives about killing Jews) gave testimony with the intention of bearing false witness.
I read questionnaires from the Łomża district, which included Jedwabne, and the Szczuczyn district, which included Radziłów. It might appear that Strzembosz and I read the same files. But two people can read the same thing very differently. Indeed, the testimonies do mention Jews bossing people around, but one finds the greatest concentration of Jews collaborating with the NKVD in general statements. When concrete situations are described, their number falls drastically. It’s the very nature of prejudice.
It would be useful to compare these testimonies with data relating to the participation of Jews in various official bodies. Only then could we assess the degree to which they reflect reality, and how much they reflect the subjective feelings of the witnesses. At the very start of the discussion about Jedwabne, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, a historian of the Borderlands (the lands on the border of eastern Poland and the USSR), wrote about this problem in the Gazeta, saying that the “conviction that Jews collaborated with the NKVD was quite widespread and may have contributed to the crime in Jedwabne. Even if the sources indicate that the basis for the conviction was very weak.” On the basis of Soviet documents with statistics on nationalities, he showed that there was no mass collaboration with the Soviet occupying authorities by Jews. In the Jedwabne area, the vydvizhentsy, or local careerists, openly collaborating with the Soviets included 126 Poles (70 percent) and 45 Jews (or 25 percent). Jewish vydvizhentsy made up 3.2 percent of the Jewish population of the area; among Poles, vydvizhentsy were 0.34 percent. It’s true that Jews collaborated in greater numbers than Poles in proportion to their population, but Jews still constituted only a small portion of the national population.
Strzembosz extensively cites the testimonies in which Jews appear in an unfavorable light as a counter to Gross’s book. Somehow nobody seems to remember that these very testimonies were discovered, brought into the light of day, and used as the basis for a book by Irena Grudzińska Gross and Jan Gross: In Nineteen-Forty, Holy Mother of God, They Sent Us to Siberia. What I’m reading in the Eastern Archive at Karta are copies—the Grosses read the originals. Irena told me how they were deposited at the Hoover Institution in the seventies and how she and Jan took the manuscripts out of the boxes. Many of them had whole sections redacted, but they could occasionally manage to read fragments underneath that seethed with anti-Semitism. The testimonies of Polish citizens deported to the interior of the Soviet Union were collected and edited at the Documentation Bureau of the Polish Army in the East for the authorities in emigration, in case of talks with the Allies on the future borders of Poland. They were intended to document Soviet repressions, deportations, election fraud, and so forth. Apparently someone thought they should black out the things that didn’t show Poles in the best light, such as the anti-Semitism of the deported Poles.
Despite this kind of censorship, anti-Semitism comes through in most of the testimonies. When Tadeusz Nitkiewicz, a pharmacist from Wizna, describes how Jews “welcomed the arriving Red Army by brutalizing our soldiers and population mercilessly,” one must take his nonsense w
ith a grain of salt.
In the Gazeta archive I read the Catholic News Agency Bulletin: “Gross based his whole book and the verdict it contains on the testimony of Szmul Wasersztejn, an employee of the Security Service; this was what Professor Tomasz Strzembosz—who has long studied this period of Polish history—concluded on the basis of testimonies by two reliable witnesses interrogated by Wasersztejn in the postwar period.”
I know from the Dziedzices that Wasersztejn left Poland immediately after the war.
As reconstructed by the Catholic News Agency, the massacre looks like this: “German policemen surrounded Jedwabne. They used dogs to force Poles to take part in the massacre. The Jews did not try to defend themselves or escape, but passively obeyed orders.” The Bulletin refers to the words of John Paul II, who calls for the truth to be fully uncovered. The Catholic News Agency is seconded by Kazimierz Laudański. He has sent me a copy of a letter he sent to Adam Cyra at the Auschwitz Museum (dated February 24): “Szmul Wasersztejn was an able officer of the Security Services up to 1968, which is why Professor Gross, as a sophisticated and experienced historian, put his trust in him. He went everywhere, he saw and heard everything. Another Sherlock Holmes in an invisibility cape. He saw the Jewess Ibram raped and killed, beards burned, infants murdered at their mothers’ breasts to the strains of an orchestra. Didn’t he see and hear a little too much for one little boy?”
I think the Laudański brothers could indeed provide much more reliable information than a hunted man, whose perspective was necessarily limited. How frustrating it must be for them: knowing details from their own observation that would undermine Wasersztejn’s testimony, but not being able to put facts straight without giving themselves away.
MARCH 2, 2001
My article on the Laudańskis is to run next Saturday. I’m making some additions. Adam Michnik, returning the latest version of the article to me, has urged me to try to grasp the mentality of the townspeople in that particular area at that time by talking to regional historians and sociologists. I’ve had several such conversations, but I didn’t get much out of them. The subject of Jedwabne sets people on edge. Today a well-known sociology professor simply hung up on me.
