by Anna Bikont
In the evening, a meeting with the playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek, who plans to write a play, a novel, maybe a story; in any case it will be set in Jedwabne. In his view the situation is falsified by the dichotomy “Jews vs. Poles.” We should instead talk about Jews and Catholics, because both are fully legitimate Polish citizens, differing only in religion. There’s something to be said for that view.
MARCH 3, 2001
An evening phone call to Jedwabne. Consternation in the town after President Aleksander Kwaśniewski’s statement in the Israeli newspaper the Yediot Akhronoth: “It was a genocide carried out by the Poles of Jedwabne against their Jewish neighbors. We must therefore bow our heads and ask forgiveness. After this, Poles may become better as a people.” The president has announced that on the sixtieth anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre he will apologize to the Jewish people in the name of all Poles.
Jacek Kuroń’s birthday party. I spend it talking to Marek Edelman. I say I hadn’t fully realized the scope and intensity of anti-Semitism in the years before the war broke out.
“Before the war,” Edelman remembers, “I was beaten up more often than under the Germans; right before September 1939 it was easy to run into nationalist paramilitary squads—hunting Jews. I also remember the feeling of fear mixed with shame when I went in the first months after the war to register at some office with dozens of people standing there and I had to say my surname aloud.”
I tell him about the shoemaker from Radziłów named Dorogoj, who managed to survive the war with his son. Both of them were butchered with axes when they came out of hiding in 1945.
“I went to Kielce immediately after the pogrom there and at every station I saw a few corpses; they were Jews dragged off the trains and killed. There is information collected by the Jewish Committee after the war showing that fifteen hundred Jews were killed in the ‘railroad operation.’”
I tell him about Stanisław Ramotowski, who saved a whole Jewish family on the day of the massacre and hid them with his mother, who received no payment.
“What does it matter?” Edelman counters. “In Warsaw probably about a hundred thousand Poles took part in rescuing Jews; they did it for various reasons—to spite the Germans, but for money, too. It’s true it was hard to go into hiding without money. I know examples of people who took money, and how! They asked more every time, but when the ghetto was cut off, and later when the ghetto was gone and they saw they wouldn’t get anything out of it, they went on hiding Jews with complete devotion.”
I go on to tell him that of the Finkelsztejn family, only one person survived the war: Rachela, now Marianna Ramotowska. There’s another Jewish woman who lives in Jedwabne, who survived the slaughter and also married a Pole. The two women never visited each other; they wanted to blend into the local population, no doubt hoping their sin of being Jewish would be forgotten.
Edelman tells me about the mother of Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, the great Polish poet who was killed in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Edelman found her in Warsaw after the war; she was living in poverty and he had money for her from the Joint Distribution Committee. She wouldn’t take it. “That’s nothing to do with me,” she said. She was afraid her Jewish background would tarnish her son’s posthumous glory as a Home Army soldier who fell in an uprising of Poles.
MARCH 4, 2001
In the liberal Catholic monthly Więź (Bond), an article by Archbishop Józef Życiński: “It would be insane to suggest there could be any justification for a mass burning of human beings in a barn. Therefore, let us not look for imaginary historical documents that might turn the Jedwabne tragedy into a trivial episode. There can be no such documents, because you can’t reduce the deaths of innocent people to an episode. Today we need to pray for the victims of the massacre, showing the solidarity of spirit that was lacking at the hour they passed away from the land of their fathers where they lived.”
Meanwhile, a representative of the Popular Christian Alliance of Łomża arrived to meet with Jedwabne residents. He read them an open letter he’d brought them: “In response to the vicious worldwide campaign to slander Poland itself, the undersigned state that the atrocity in their town was committed by Germans.” A Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne has been set up, with Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski at its head.
Of course, some politicians were bound to take advantage of the mood in Jedwabne. I wasn’t surprised that a committee had been formed. But why was the mayor heading it and not the priest? I happen to be in the editorial offices when our correspondent sends in a short interview with Godlewski. I read it and can’t believe my eyes. He speaks the language, albeit somewhat tempered, of the anti-Semitic sector of the local population, using the expression “Jewish interests.” This is now the main tendency of the Jedwabne deniers, to say that the whole story was dreamed up by Jews who want to demand billions of dollars in damages from Poland. In the course of several visits to Jedwabne, I’ve come to know and like him, though I suspected he might have a problem standing firmly on one side or the other. He didn’t fit the part of the lonely sheriff. On the contrary, he’s a cheerful, sympathetic fellow, the kind of person who doesn’t want to offend anybody. Not because he’s timid, but because he’s convinced something can always be done to make everyone happy.
I call him. He tells me how someone stood up in the town hall and said in a menacing tone, “The mayor has a chance to rehabilitate himself; he should head the committee.” He talks to me by turns in two different discourses. First he explains that if he hadn’t joined the committee, they would have collected signatures for a letter written in hateful language, which would have compromised both the town and the country. Then he explains that the residents of Jedwabne rightly feel indignant, because only a handful participated in the massacre—the dregs of society—and now all local Poles are being accused, which might become a basis for financial claims. Then he is furious with the president for having no doubt about who is guilty of the crime, and at the press for reaching a verdict while the investigation is still under way. I repeat that he knows as well as I do that the committee’s aim is to airbrush the truth. After a conversation of almost an hour, Godlewski asks me to read back to him what he said to the Gazeta, so he can cut the unfortunate phrases.
MARCH 5, 2001
I call Godlewski. His voice is somber. The members of the committee are demanding that the letter be tougher. I quote him what Primate Glemp said yesterday on the Catholic radio station Józef: “The massacre, perpetrated by burning alive the Jewish population after forcing them into a barn, cannot be denied … To recognize our generational responsibility is to ask God for forgiveness for the sins of our ancestors and ask forgiveness from the descendants of those who were wronged.” Finally, a proposal for Poles and Jews to join together in prayer.
Godlewski’s voice changes at once: “After what the primate said, I’ll convince the committee to formulate its letter differently.”
In fact, I read Godlewski only the fragments of Glemp’s interview that offered a glimmer of hope. The piece as a whole doesn’t sound promising. The primate disassociated himself from the idea that the Church should participate in the ceremony of July 10 in Jedwabne: “This is not about any rash, hysterical atonement.” He hinted at some kind of Jewish conspiracy: “Brothers and Sisters! A year ago an important Jew informed me that the matter of Jedwabne would soon be given publicity.” In other words, the Jews had a plan ready for Jedwabne.
The primate, referring to a letter about the Jedwabne commemoration from the rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, with an invitation to communal prayer, recalled that the rabbi invoked a text from scripture. The Gazeta editors ask me to check from which book of the Bible the quotation is taken. I call Schudrich on his cell phone. He happens to be in New York. I hear his inimitable Polish: “Jedwabne is important, but other things are very, very important. I was just going to call you.” It turns out he has his daughter Arianna on his other cell phone: she’s calling from a store in Brookly
n to say they only have napkins with the words “bar mitzvah,” not “bat mitzvah.” But they are lovely napkins with a golden Star of David. What kind should they bring to Ola’s party? Before I hang up I remind him of the quotation and note down the reference: Deuteronomy 21:1–9.
Ola’s bat mitzvah is such a huge, emotionally charged project for our family that I talk about it nonstop. Before long I realize how confused people in Jedwabne are by my decision not to keep my Jewishness a secret. One of them assured me, “I give you my word of honor. I won’t tell anyone about your background.” It wasn’t until someone at the Institute of National Remembrance swore not to breathe a word about it at work, that I was really dumbstruck. I knew many people with a Jewish background were afraid their origins would come to light, but I had seen in that more a sign of trauma, their own or one inherited from their parents, which made them see a threat where none existed. Only now do I realize how many Poles see something intrinsically wrong with being Jewish.
MARCH 6, 2001
In the morning a conversation with Krzysztof Godlewski (his tone is determined): “I’m going to propose my own version of the letter, in accordance with the primate’s message. We must accept the truth, even the most painful truth. I’m considering a spectacular gesture, getting a group of people to pray at the site of the massacre, kneeling there together.”
This sounds like an exercise in positive thinking. I ask if it wouldn’t be better to give up on the committee and form a new one, in support of the ceremony on the sixtieth anniversary of the crime. This seems to bring him back to reality. He sighs. “For now I can’t see anyone volunteering for that.”
In the evening another talk with Godlewski (his tone now downcast): “I’m hearing a completely different interpretation of the primate’s sermon in town: we should stand up against the Jews’ persecution of Poland. Either the committee accepts a statement in accordance with my understanding of the primate’s message, or I resign. I can only hope the bishop will come out with an unambiguous sermon.”
The bishop of Łomża is to deliver a homily in Jedwabne on Sunday, March 11. Members of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, like Godlewski, are expecting a sermon providing moral clarity. It’s just that each side expects something different.
MARCH 7, 2001
I call Godlewski, who has resigned from the committee.
“I went into it in the hope that we could work out a consensus,” he says. “I wanted to temper those who, instead of covering their head with ashes during Lent, have perpetuated the town’s bad reputation. You can defend its good name by admitting guilt. I didn’t want to abandon people here and leave them to the mercy of hysterics. But I can’t fight them all by myself.”
At the same time, the Jedwabne affair is obviously accelerating; not a day goes by without an article or pronouncement of some kind in the press. Prime Minister Buzek declared that “the participation of Poles in the crime in Jedwabne is beyond any doubt.” Edward Moskal, the president of the American Polish Congress, who lives in Chicago and enjoys great popularity in Jedwabne, denounced the accusations leveled at Poles, explaining that “the Jews decided that Poland should not be Poland but a suburb of Israel,” and the president of the Institute of National Remembrance, Leon Kieres, is working for “lackeys with a strange sympathy for Jewish demands … All they want is to quell their own insatiable appetites.”
Baffled by contradictory statements, the residents of Jedwabne are waiting tensely for their bishop to speak. Meanwhile the town has adopted a catchphrase for the ceremony announced by the president: “Jew is coming to apologize to Jew.”
In Warsaw, there’s already a rumor going around about why the primate first disassociated himself from the ceremony and shortly afterward announced he would participate in the Mass given for the victims. People are saying he was admonished by the pope.
MARCH 8, 2001
A visit to the Ramotowskis. At times Marianna speaks fluent Polish, carrying on a conversation with me about the latest skirmishes in the government, then she falls into dialect: “I gone,” “I throws.” She must have spoken that way with the locals in order to fit in. I ask her for the names of relatives, but she doesn’t hear my questions. She doesn’t hear well generally, but her hearing is also highly selective. When we talk about what’s going on in politics and the world, Marianna, who listens to the radio all day, hears me pretty well, but when I ask about the crime in Radziłów, her hearing worsens dramatically. When in turn I speak of the crime with Stanisław, Marianna’s hearing comes back and she reminds her husband not to say too much.
MARCH 9, 2001
My friend Nawojka is bringing agar from Munich to replace nonkosher gelatin for gefilte fish. Her plane is delayed and Shabbat, when we are not allowed to cook, is about to begin. By this time the fish is done, it just has to be covered with aspic. I should call around to find out if anyone can lend me some emergency agar. But I’m at the editorial offices of the Gazeta, where my four-column article on the Laudański brothers, “We of Jedwabne,” is being set. It contains some passages on contemporary Jedwabne. Because more has gone on there this week than in the last sixty years, I’m constantly adding and authorizing things. Now I have to choose: either I look for gelatin, or I phone Godlewski to find out if the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne has announced its members. Luckily, it turns out the paper’s first edition closes twenty minutes after Shabbat begins. I manage to call Jedwabne and check all the facts.
MARCH 10, 2001
Ola’s bat mitzvah. The synagogue is full. Among our guests, Bożena and Jan Skrodzki, who came from Gdańsk, and Stanisław Ramotowski. Several hundred people, including almost all of Ola’s class, and many children came with their parents, no doubt participating in synagogue services for the first time.
Ola presents her commentary on the Torah and tells us why she has chosen Lea, my mother’s name before the war, as her Jewish name: “In choosing it, I wasn’t thinking of the biblical Leah but of my grandmother. My grandmother, who died three years ago, wished to hide from us the fact she was Jewish. She was afraid that it might make our lives as difficult as hers had been. In fact, this was a great sacrifice on my grandmother’s part: breaking off with her family, starting a new life. I loved my grandmother and I still love her very much, and this time not flowers or stories about her will perpetuate her memory, but my new name, Lea.”
In accordance with tradition, candy—kosher candy, of course—is thrown at Ola.
Now it’s my turn to speak. I talk about a Passover Seder at my friends Małgosia and Kostek Gebert’s house. As the youngest child, Ola, then four years old, asked the questions, “Why was that night different from all other nights?” “Why do we eat bitter herbs tonight?” The Geberts’ daughter, Zosia, then eleven and the oldest child at the table, answered, “We eat bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of our life in Egyptian servitude for forty years.” Falling asleep later that night, Ola whispered, “Remember, Mama, when we were walking forty years in the desert in Egypt and I was crying so terribly, terribly hard?” I remember the feeling of relief that Ola would be able to draw strength from some tradition, whereas I, whose mother never told me about my origins, about her life before the war, but who also never had me baptized, had always felt somehow without an anchor.
Stanisław Ramotowski is delighted with the ceremony, the synagogue, Rabbi Schudrich.
3
We Suffered Under the Soviets, the Germans, and People’s Poland
or, The Story of the Three Brothers Laudański
Of the ten men convicted in the 1949 trial for the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne, Zygmunt and Jerzy Laudański are the only ones still alive. They live in Pisz, eighty kilometers north of Jedwabne, as does their older brother, Kazimierz Laudański, the unquestioned head of the family. Whether he was in Jedwabne on that July day in 1941, we don’t know; the accounts are contradictory. He himself claims that he arrived three days later to find out what happened to his broth
ers. But there is a witness who insists that Kazimierz Laudański went to Jedwabne with him the day before the massacre and remembers details of their trip together. In any case, it was Kazimierz who got his brothers out of Jedwabne after the atrocity, and after the war he found them jobs and places to live. “They’re always with me,” he says. “I give them advice, and they listen to me.”
In the case files from 1949, one can find basic information about the accused on a yellowed form where the blanks have been filled out in an uncertain hand, under the heading “Dossier on Suspects of a Crime Against the State,” furnished by the county security service in Łomża:
Name and Surname: Zygmunt Laudański
Date of Birth: January 12, 1919
Relatives Employed in State Institutions: Brother Kazimierz Laudański, County Council Secretary for Pisz
Professional Schooling: Mason
Education and Knowledge of Languages: Five grades elementary school
Habits and Addictions: Doesn’t smoke
Suspected of: Killing Jews in the Town of Jedwabne, Łomża County
Membership: Polish Communist Party (PZPR) in Pisz
Posture: Straight
Eyes: Blue
Teeth: All healthy
Speech: Pure Polish
Etka Rochla Prawda (née Sztabińska) and her husband, Chaim Józef Prawda. They were killed by Poles on July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne with their children, Welwel and Bari. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)
Daughters of Abraham Aaron Ibram, owner of a fancy-goods shop in the New Market in Jedwabne. Left to right: Rywka, Loczke, and Judes. Jedwabne, 1930s. Judes managed to survive on July 10, 1941, but after the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942, Poles found her hiding place, raped her, and killed her. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)
