The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  The 1949 case files also have a dossier on his brother Jerzy, who was born three years later and completed seven grades of school. Under “profession” is given “shoemaker.” He has “particularly important contacts” with the “German Police in Jedwabne”; his speech, besides being “pure Polish,” is also “loud.”

  Despite their years, the brothers still have erect postures and loud voices.

  From Zygmunt’s testimony of January 16, 1949: “Yes, I took part in the murder of Jews in Jedwabne … Some guy from Jedwabne came and told me the mayor of Jedwabne was calling on me to go and round up the Jews in the marketplace. When I got there, the Polish population had already rounded up about a thousand five hundred persons of Jewish nationality in the marketplace. Then Mayor Karolak told me to make sure no Jews escaped from the marketplace. The Jews were carrying the Lenin statue around the market. Later, we herded all the Jews with the statue out of town to Bronisław Śleszyński’s barn, where they were burned.”

  From Jerzy’s testimony of January 16, 1949: “At that time I took part in driving the Jews into the marketplace. Eugeniusz Kalinowski and I … made about eight persons of Jewish nationality go into the marketplace. When we got back there from driving them all out of their houses, Jews were already carrying the Lenin statue around the market singing a song, ‘The war’s our fault.’ Who ordered them to sing it I don’t know, but we Poles made sure the Jews didn’t run away. I stress that there were Germans around, too. Later Marian Karolak, the mayor of Jedwabne, gave us the command to herd all the Jews in the market to Bronisław Śleszyński’s barn, which we did. We drove the Jews to the barn and told them to go in, and they were forced to go in, and after they were all in there, the barn was locked and set alight. Who set the fire I don’t know. After the fire I went home and the Jews were burned. There were more than a thousand of them.”

  Not only the Laudańskis’ own testimonies were incriminating; there was also the testimony of other witnesses and fellow suspects.

  Czesław Lipiński, suspect: “Eugeniusz Kalinowski, Jerzy Laudański, and a German came to me and we took a Jew and two little Jewish women to the marketplace. When we were rounding up the aforementioned Jews with the Germans, I found a stick on the way and I picked it up.”

  Julia Sokołowska, witness: “Jerzy Laudański participated in the murder of Jews with a rubber truncheon. He chased them into the marketplace; he beat them and drove them to the barn, where the previously mentioned Jews were burned. I stress that Laudański was the head Schutzmann [policeman] in Jedwabne. I saw the aforementioned beating a Jewish woman in a pigsty.”

  Bronisława Kalinowska, witness: “The townspeople started killing Jews. The way they tortured Jews, you couldn’t bear to look. I was standing on Przytulska Street and Jerzy Laudański, who lived in Jedwabne, came running down the street and said he’d already killed two or three Jews. He was very worked up and he went on running.”

  Stanisław Sielawa, witness: “Jerzy Laudański, Jerzy Kalinowski, and a Russian beat the Jew Eluń after the burning. They threw him down, beat him with sticks, and when I started questioning them they told me it’s coming to you, too, just like the Jews. I stress that after the beating the previously mentioned Jew couldn’t get up for two weeks. I saw the previously mentioned fact with my own eyes.”

  Zygmunt Laudański was sentenced to twelve years in prison, of which he served six; Jerzy Laudański was sentenced to fifteen, and he served eight.

  In the accounts, both direct and secondhand, that I heard from present or former residents of Jedwabne, the name Laudański was almost always mentioned among examples of particularly active participants in the crime.

  They were even mentioned by those who insistently denied that the Poles had committed the atrocity. Like Jadwiga Kordas, an eyewitness: “Maybe that Jerzy Laudański was getting his revenge,” she said to Father Eugeniusz Marciniak in the book Jedwabne in the Eyes of Witnesses. “Professor Strzembosz asked me about him and I said: ‘Because his father was arrested, and they came to take his mother to Siberia, but she escaped.’ And the professor says: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And probably that’s the way it could have happened.’” She added that Jerzy Laudański “had a whip, but he didn’t use it on anyone. I didn’t see him thrashing anyone. He just drove them out of their houses and kept the order.”

  Kazimierz Laudański, outraged: “The court case came seven and a half years after the crime. The secret police roughed people up, but no one talked then about little Yids, small kids being thrown into the burning barn. And now after sixty years people are saying these things. When none of us are alive anymore, people will say the Jews had their eyes put out.”

  Zygmunt Laudański: “There was nothing as horrible as all that. People are making it up now in revenge. It’s nonsense that my brother and I killed over a thousand Jews. Our family was and is honest. Our honesty can’t be drowned out by this tragedy.”

  Kazimierz lashes out at him: “It’s me who’s talking now. You shut up, Zygmunt. You’ll talk when I tell you.” He goes on: “We’re from a truly patriotic Polish family. Our family has suffered enormous losses, fallen and martyred. It’s no accident all three of us are alive. We don’t smoke, we don’t drink vodka. How can they call my brothers thugs? What we did, we did out of patriotism: from time immemorial not one of us ever associated with an enemy of the nation.”

  In a letter to Adam Michnik, Kazimierz wrote about himself and his brothers: “Like all of the Polish people, we suffered under the Soviets, under the Germans, and under People’s Poland.”

  “Our people organized the roundup of Jews, but didn’t take part in the burning. They behaved as peaceful people,” says Kazimierz Laudański, who supposedly wasn’t in Jedwabne that day. “There was fear, there was compassion, and there was a terrible stench within a radius of three hundred meters. The shocked Poles kept saying, ‘It’s God’s punishment.’ It was a diabolical stunt organized by the Germans. The Germans directed it, and used the Poles like actors in the theater. But Poles wanting to burn Jews, there was nothing like that.”

  We talk about prewar times. Jews leased garden plots from peasants in the summer, so Kazimierz Laudański says he decided to get in their way by doing the same thing. The chemist Michał Jałoszewski, a local National Party activist, gave him five hundred zlotys to start his business.

  “I invested in apples and in the traveling cloth trade. Poles always bought from Jews because they sold cheaper. Why? Because Jews had capital. They had mines, warehouses, they controlled everything. And I was getting annoyed that I didn’t have work.”

  In his letter to Michnik, Laudański went on to say, “President Mościcki personally recommended me to the Łomża district head for employment in the administration of independent Poland.” When I ask him how Ignacy Mościcki, president of Poland between the wars, knew of his existence, he tells me he’d written him a letter because he was afraid that as a nationalist in Piłsudski’s time he would have trouble finding a government job. “I opened with: ‘You, Father, are the safekeeper of the Polish nation…’ And later: ‘Despite the fact that we’re nationalists and our forefathers fell fighting for Poland in the uprisings, we are now at a disadvantage…’ I was always lucky, but you have to give luck a hand. I left trade to my brothers and parents, and thanks to President Mościcki I became a clerk’s aid. When the war broke out I was making 176 zlotys—more than a schoolteacher.”

  Kazimierz Laudański tells me about his father: “He was active on the church construction committee; he was close to the priests, which made him hated by the Communist cell.”

  The Laudańskis’ father, Czesław, a local National Party activist, led a boycott against a Jewish teacher in Jedwabne. People I talked to remember that children walked out of class when Miss Hackerowa came in, until the board of directors finally succumbed and fired her.

  The Laudańskis’ favorite subject is the Soviet occupation.

  Kazimierz Laudański: “The Soviets came an
d threw Father in prison. My mother and my two brothers fled into the woods to hide. Everyone knew who was the indirect cause of the deportations: Jewish Communists. When they came to take away families at night there would be one NKVD officer, one Polish Communist, and two Jews. The NKVD didn’t know us, but the Jews were our neighbors.”

  “And who came for your father?”

  Zygmunt butts in: “I wasn’t home at the time, but Granny said it was two Russians and a Pole.”

  “To prove to you it was the work of Jewish Communists,” Kazimierz cuts in, no doubt realizing the Jew is missing from the account, “I’ll tell you that there were a lot of rich Jews in Jedwabne; none of them were deported or had their shops taken away. Only the Jew Jakub Cytrynowicz was deported; the Jews got back at him for having converted to Catholicism.”

  However, the truth—of which Kazimierz cannot be ignorant—is that shops were taken from everyone, and that Cytrynowicz was not even remotely the only deported Jew.

  I ask what hiding during the Soviet occupation was like.

  “You moved from place to place in the area, and five months went by that way,” says Zygmunt Laudański. “I was a stonemason and I would sleep where I was working. I had a girl in a village where I’d worked, and in another place I’d know someone else. My cousins would put me up, and my uncle did, too. He had a big wooden house, and he built a double-layered roof, where my mother would sometimes sleep with me and my brother. But it wasn’t a very nice place to hide: my uncle believed in dreams and he’d wake me at midnight, saying, ‘Go jump on your bike! I had a dream about a black dog being run over!’ It was a dog’s life. I preferred to write to Stalin. If it had been the other way around, I’d have written to Hitler and praised Hitler. That much is clear. With the letter it was like this: While I was still in hiding, I found out the Russians were organizing meetings where they would explain their purpose was to liberate us, and they handed out the Stalinist constitution. I borrowed a copy, examined it, and I saw the fourth paragraph said that in the Soviet Union no one is responsible for anyone else, neither the father for the son, nor the son for the father. At night I went to the priest to get writing paper and I wrote to Stalin. I wrote straight out that Stalin had liberated us from the capitalists and the Fascists, and I was taking up not arms but the pen, standing on the ground of the constitution. I started like this: ‘The Polish people are very grateful to the Red Army for liberating them from Fascism and capitalism, and for wealth which will be communal…’ You don’t write to the devil with a holy pencil, miss. And I went on to say that I had to hide because my father had been arrested and they could come for me to punish me in his place. ‘If that happened,’ I declared bravely, ‘half the population will take to the woods.’”

  Zygmunt Laudański wrote about this letter in July 1949 from Ostrołęka prison in an application to the interior minister:

  “At that time I did not join the gangs then being formed in our parts, but sent a request to Generalissimus Stalin that was forwarded by the Moscow procurator’s office at 15 Pushkin Street to the NKVD in Jedwabne with the order to study it carefully. After they questioned me and carried out a local investigation, they found I had been unjustly damaged and I was freed from hiding from deportation, and given compensation. After studying my views, the Jedwabne NKVD allowed me to join the work of liquidating anti-Soviet evil. At that time I made contact with the NKVD in Jedwabne (I will not give my code name in writing). At the time of the contact my superiors ordered me to take an anti-Soviet position to make me more effective and not betray me to the reactionaries.”

  “They sent my letter from Moscow to the NKVD in Jedwabne,” Zygmunt Laudański tells me. “A month went by and they told my cousin to tell me that if I reported in I’d be vindicated or declared innocent. I wrote an application in my father’s name to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin. I had taken a Russian language course for army conscripts, and the next letter I wrote to Stalin, on my father’s behalf, was in Russian. There was a Russian officer quartered with us, and he corrected it for me. In May 1941, I reported to the NKVD to get them to pass on the letter for my father’s signature. I get there and the boss says, ‘Bandits killed a good man of ours.’ They had just killed the deputy head of the NKVD in Jedwabne, Shevelyov. I say, ‘Zhalka’ [Too bad]. And he says, ‘If you want you can help us find the bandit.’ I ask him, ‘How?’ He says, ‘You know people. When you see new faces around town, let us know.’ ‘How?’ I ask. He says, ‘We have a mailbox at the station. Leave a note there and sign it, but not with your surname, sign yourself Popov.’ I say, ‘Kharasho’—Russian for ‘fine’—‘I’m sure I’ll be in touch.’ He just asked, it wasn’t a commitment. That trick came off well for me. I got a reply from Stalin that my father should be freed or tried, because they couldn’t keep him so long under investigation, and that I would be informed. But then the war broke out. The partisans came and knocked down the wooden monument erected where Shevelyov had been buried, and I think they dragged him out of his grave, too.”

  Kazimierz Laudański wrote about Shevelyov’s killing in a letter to Adam Michnik—but not to explain how his brother became an NKVD agent. On the contrary, killing Shevelyov was an act in line with the patriotic traditions of the Laudański family and other Jedwabnians: “Now, patriotism … The very existence of the partisans, the death of our aunt in the fight against the Soviets and the death of so many other Poles speaks for itself. Just as in Warsaw Poles killed Kutschera, so they killed Shevelyov, who was the same kind of torturer, in Jedwabne.”

  The German-Soviet war found Kazimierz Laudański about eighty kilometers south of Jedwabne, in Ostrów Mazowiecka: “When the Germans came in,” he says, “they burned down the Jewish quarter, rounded up Jews, chased them down the road, made them dig a hole, and killed them there. A friend of mine was there and he had to watch the Germans shoot them. He came back pale as a sheet, trembling. That was a Pole’s fate.”

  “You said Jews joyfully greeted the invading Red Army,” I say. “But when the Germans arrived, didn’t some locals ever go out to greet them?”

  “Before war broke out between Germany and Russia, the Poles were in a terrible situation—constant arrests, deportations to Siberia. The population prayed to God: ‘May Lucifer come, if only this devil goes.’”

  “So Poles were glad when the Germans arrived?”

  “When the Germans attacked the Russians, the prison doors opened. There was euphoria. Thousands of people who’d been hiding out in the forest came home. Everyone was happy: that the head of the school had come back, or a neighbor, a son who’d been hiding in the forest. How could my brothers not be glad that Father came home from prison and Mother from the forest?”

  From the joy prompted by the German invasion we proceed to the heart of the matter.

  “Why,” I ask each Laudański, “were the Jews of Jedwabne burned in the barn?”

  “It was the Germans’ revenge,” each brother answers in turn.

  They refer to an event that took place in the winter of 1940 to 1941.

  Before the war there were about fifteen German families living in Jedwabne, of whom the majority moved to the Reich in the period of the Soviet occupation, in accordance with the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, which divided future control over Polish territory between Soviet Russia and Germany. At that time a commission came from Germany to evaluate the value of the property left behind in order to make restitution.

  “Officers in shining coats stepped out of two black cars,” Jerzy Laudański tells me, “and Jews crowded around those cars, throwing wet snow into them and being so provocative that the Germans had to call the Soviet militia to their aid.”

  Jerzy Laudański heard about this in the prison yard from Karol Bardoń, who had been sentenced in the same trial as he had. Bardoń supposedly told him that one of the Germans who came to Jedwabne in July 1941 was from that team and that he had threatened: “They gave us a hard time, we’ll teach them
a lesson.”

  “That’s probably why,” Zygmunt Laudański comments. “The Jews were wrong to do it, why throw snow?”

  Kazimierz Laudański admits that right after the Soviets left, Jews were punished by mobs.

  “There was a lot of revenge,” says Kazimierz. “But who did they kill? It was the Communists and snitches who were tried by mobs and lynched. They were the ones who got it. The Jewish community is one thing, Communist gangs another. Our guys acted in self-defense, just like in all the other uprisings, which we’re not ashamed of. But when you make an omelette you’ve got to break some eggs. And since there were some uneducated people there, they might have caused the deaths of a lot of innocent people. But Polish and Jewish Communists were wrong to collaborate with the NKVD. Traitors get their throats cut.” He makes a throat-cutting gesture.

  Karol Bardoń, the man who got the heaviest sentence for the massacre in Jedwabne, described in his testimony this settling of scores on the first day after the entry of the German army: “There were some people in civilian clothes holding poles as thick as tow bars standing in front of the Germans, and the Germans were yelling at them: ‘Don’t kill them right away!’ ‘Give it to them slowly, let them suffer.’ Of the six people beaten and later shot by the Germans in the woods nearby, three were Polish and three Jewish. Bardoń named Jerzy Laudański as one of the participants in the beatings.

  On July 9, 1941, word spread in town and in the surrounding area that the next day they were going to get rid of the Jews in Jedwabne. This is repeated in many accounts. Peasants in the area got their tools ready for the day: stanchions, sticks, poles; they cut themselves what were called truncheons, or lengths of thick electric cable. On the morning of July 10, a group of uniformed Germans appeared in Jedwabne in one or two cars. The mayor sent messengers to Polish houses to tell the men to report to the magistrate’s office. There they were given the order to drive the Jews out into the marketplace, and they were probably told which houses or neighborhoods to go to.