by Anna Bikont
Stanisław Danowski, witness in the 1953 trial, an offshoot of the first Jedwabne trial in 1949: “Karolak summoned people, gave them vodka, and then he got those who were willing—and there were plenty of them—to rout the Jewish population from their homes.”
They were driven out under the pretext that they had to pull up the weeds from between the cobblestones in the marketplace, to clean it up. The Germans who had come to town were there when the Jews were driven into the marketplace. Stanisław Zejer, a suspect, testified that Jerzy Laudański and Bolesław Rogalski, a postal worker, “having got themselves poles … went to drive six families into the market square, they were Kosacki Mendel (family of four); Szymborski Abram (family of six); Gutko Josel (family of four)—I, Zejer, don’t remember the names of the other families.”
A crowd of people from Jedwabne and the surrounding area stood around the throng of Jews. This is repeated in almost all the testimonies, that “the rounded-up Jews were surrounded by a mob of people.” There were also a few Germans, in uniform, with weapons. Among those who organized the chasing of Jews from their homes, the names return again and again: Bardoń, Wasilewski, Sobuta, Eugeniusz Kalinowski, and Jerzy Laudański.
The locals split off a group of a few dozen men and led them to a little square fewer than a hundred meters from the market, where there was a statue of Lenin. They forced the Jews to smash it, and then they were made to carry pieces of Lenin’s torso on wooden poles and to sing. A rabbi, the elderly Awigdor Białostocki, was put at the head of the procession. They made him carry a red flag in one hand, and in the other a pole with his hat on it. Noon was approaching as the group carrying Lenin circled the marketplace. They were humiliated in various ways, beaten, ordered to sing and do squats (“I saw Wasilewski and Sobuta picking out a few dozen Jews there and making them do a funny kind of gymnastics,” said Roman Górski, a suspect in the investigation of 1949).
The marketplace was loud with cries and weeping. First a large group of men was led out of the marketplace, and in the next stage the women, young people, and children were driven into the barn.
Testimonies from 1949 and 1953: “They were driving out Jews. I didn’t see any Germans in the crowd” (Wincenty Gościcki, suspect). “We Poles stood on one side and the Jews on the other, grouped in fours, so they wouldn’t run away. I had no order from the Germans to chase Jews” (Józef Chrzanowski, suspect). “The police helped hunt down the Jews in town, but at the barn there were mostly Poles” (Stanisław Sokołowski, witness). “I was ordered to go and get gas to pour on the barn for Eugeniusz Kalinowski and Józef Niebrzydowski. They took the gas, eight liters of it, and poured it on the barn when the barn was filled with Jews” (Antoni Niebrzydowski, suspect).
All three brothers maintain that no one in town really expected the Jews to be burned. Is it possible, I ask, that news of the burning of Jews in nearby Radziłów three days previously didn’t reach Jedwabne? “I didn’t hear anything of the kind back then,” says Jerzy Laudański.
Kazimierz Laudański presents his version: “When I got to Jedwabne you could still smell the hideous stench of burned flesh. I worked out what had happened. The Germans found a barn beyond the bridge, on the Łomża side. They wanted to requisition it from Józef Chrzanowski, who was serving in the German army, and he begged them in German not to. They found another barn near the Jewish cemetery. ‘We’ll burn down the barn,’ said the Germans, ‘and build a new one in its place.’”
Zygmunt Laudański: “On the critical day we were crossing the marketplace. We looked and there were Jews weeding it with spoons. It was overgrown with grass. They were doing it quietly, as if it was nothing. Poles were watching. Karolak, whose house was on the market square, told me to come and do repairs on his kitchen. His wife said, ‘Mr. Laudański, I’m sorry to ask you on a day like this’—because it was the day the Jews were rounded up, maybe she knew what was going to happen to them, and she was a decent woman—‘but my husband the mayor has to receive some Germans, and we can’t make tea here because the stove isn’t working.’ I cleaned the stove, carried out the ashes, covered the ashes with clay. When I had finished I headed toward Przytulska Street, but there was a German on guard saying, ‘Zurück’ [Back]. I went toward Łomża, but there was a German there, too, telling me the same thing; I went toward Wizna—same thing. So I went through a backyard in the direction of November 11 Street, where my friend Borawski lived. We had a chat. No one had any idea of the horror going on. I went on, went to sit in a cornfield, and when I got back to my own yard I saw smoke.”
Zygmunt Laudański gave this version of events in 1949, when he appealed his guilty verdict from prison. However, at that time he added a detail that testified to the fact that someone was aware of the horror. With a Gestapo officer, Mayor Karolak was leading a Jew from a courtyard: “a tailor, whom I had given some trousers to alter a few days earlier while the Soviets were still in power; when he saw me he called me over and gave them back to me, unfinished, explaining he didn’t know if he’d be back.”
It’s hard to imagine a Jewish tailor, driven out of his home by the Gestapo and conscious that he might not return, taking a piece of unfinished work with him on his last journey. Nor is it clear why Laudański went to “sit in a cornfield” in a situation where “no one had any idea of the horror going on.”
Jerzy Laudański: “The mayor gave directions, but the initiative was German. I was standing near the bakery and mixed with the crowd.”
“How did you come to be there?”
“Curiosity. When your car crashes, you know how many people are going to stand around gawking. Something was going on, the Germans were rounding up Jews, making them carry the statue of Lenin. No Pole was sorry they were carrying Lenin, unless they were fans of his.”
“Were the Poles beating up Jews at that time?”
“There were Poles in the marketplace, but I didn’t see any Jews beaten up. The Jews were talking quietly, quietly weeding the earth between the stones. Germans like order, so the Jews were made to weed the marketplace. And then they all went on their own steam, it looked spontaneous.”
“What do you mean, ‘spontaneous’?”
“The Jews obeyed and went spontaneously, the Poles followed them spontaneously, because nobody expected a tragedy like that. If people say it was the Poles who killed them, it would be a disgrace for Poland. It’s not true.”
“How did the Poles react?” I ask Jerzy Laudański.
“Some liked what was going on. Others didn’t, but everyone was curious. People joked that not long before, under the Soviets, Jews wouldn’t have been cleaning up the marketplace.”
“And you?”
“I was near the barn, but about thirty meters away. There were a lot of people in front of me.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“I was talking to friends.”
“Did no one try to help the Jews?”
“Who could have helped them?”
Jerzy Laudański invokes the figure of Maksymilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic saint, who as a prisoner in Auschwitz chose to starve himself to death in the place of a condemned fellow prisoner, also a Pole. “There was one great hero, Father Kolbe, but he knew he had TB and wasn’t going to get out of the camp alive. But he was a hero anyway, because many a man might know the end was near but wouldn’t give his life for another.”
“And the Germans?”
“I think the Germans were at the back taking pictures.”
In the course of a few hours of conversation I hear the same thing from Jerzy: the Jews went in front, then the Poles, then the Germans.
“What were their uniforms like?” I ask.
“I couldn’t tell you.”
Zygmunt Laudański changes the subject from German uniforms to German guilt.
“The Germans did it on purpose using Polish hands.”
“But what did those Polish hands do?”
But he doesn’t respond to that question. Instead he spin
s me a yarn about many Jews escaping and ending up in the Łomża ghetto. He suddenly becomes more animated, remembering the business he did there, buying up clothes and shoes.
I ask Zygmunt Laudański what he knows of the looting and by what principle Jewish homes were occupied by Poles.
“People took over homes because some of them lived in basements. They spontaneously moved into the homes and the magistrate didn’t throw them out. Some people say things were looted. Where the police didn’t manage to take everything away, maybe someone would drag something out, bedsheets or clothes. But it was the Germans who sold things at auction: they’d hold up the rags and say such and such a price—in rubles, because at the beginning of the war there weren’t any deutsche marks.”
“A German sold Jewish clothing for rubles?”
“He wanted to make enough for a beer.”
“Do you remember the screaming?” I ask Jerzy Laudański.
“When they were locked into the barn, they yelled something in Yiddish. I don’t know what. It was a spontaneous shout, maybe to open the doors, or maybe that’s how they prayed. Then they were stifled by the smoke. When they fell silent, it was till the end of the world.”
“Did the memory of that screaming ever wake you up in the middle of the night?” I ask Zygmunt Laudański.
“A young person doesn’t react that way. It never kept me awake at night.”
“And what did you think about it all?”
“What could I think? It happened, that’s all.”
“Do you regret anything in your life?”
“Ask anybody: I don’t have a single enemy, and nobody ever said anything bad about me at work, either.”
“I understand you fulfilled your obligations, but do you regret anything you ever did?”
“Nothing whatsoever.”
A moment later Zygmunt Laudański adds that he couldn’t hear the screaming anyway, because he was more than two hundred meters away.
After the Germans arrived and a German police station was set up, Jerzy Laudański went to work there. At the trial in 1949, he admitted this and charged his brother Zygmunt with having told him to work there. Jerzy Laudański now says that he never worked at the police station; he only went by a few times because the mayor had him take the policemen’s shoes to his brother-in-law, who was a shoemaker. In Jedwabne I was told that Jerzy was in the first auxiliary police force, and then he became a guard. In any case, the police did not use messengers or runners at first but had Jews do the jobs required.
“I came to get my brother Jerzy, to tell him to run away,” Kazimierz Laudański explains to me.
“Why was he supposed to run away?”
“Because the Germans needed young men like him for the police. We’d already run away from the Russians; now he had to run away from the Germans.”
It’s not clear why Kazimierz Laudański thought at that time that there was anything wrong in working at the German police station, considering that he also worked for the Germans. He was a clerk working in the administrative machine designed for the destruction of the Jews in Poręba nad Bugiem, which was part of the General Government.
Frequently in my later conversations with the inhabitants of Jedwabne, I encountered eruptions of hatred toward Jews. The Laudański brothers display no such emotion. They are calm and self-assured. After a monotonous recitation of their own version of the events of July 1941, the brothers energetically move on to other subjects.
Kazimierz Laudański claims that in Poręba he belonged to the Home Army and distributed underground publications. But at the same time he tells me without embarrassment that he was an official in the German administration working inside the Holocaust machine, and that he was interrogated after the war “about Jews from Poręba on the Bug River.” (Unfortunately I couldn’t find the court records for this case to determine what the charges were.) He himself tells me of the order that arrived in Poręba on February 10, 1942, saying the Jews were to be sent to Treblinka. (Given the early date this was probably the labor camp Treblinka I, not the death camp, which was established later.) He was told to make a list of all Jews, and the ones who didn’t leave within the set time period were to pay a fifty-zloty fine. This is his account of the Holocaust: “In May another order came and then all of them went to Treblinka. Well, not all, because one of them survived and became the secret police chief in Ostrów.”
He also tells me about his brother’s life during the occupation: “I think Jerzy was a hero. He spent three years in German camps and never betrayed anyone. Here’s a photograph of him in the camp. Jurek, show the lady.”
Holding out a camp picture of himself, Jerzy Laudański says: “I was a member of the Home Army. They entrusted me with the distribution of underground newsletters. There was a massive manhunt across the county of Ostrów, and a few dozen of us were picked up in the woods. I was held for four months for interrogation in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. Twice they took me off to the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue. I was a concentration camp prisoner.”
When I ask Jerzy Laudański if he could give me the name of any person in the Home Army he worked with, he tells me he didn’t know any names, they all used pseudonyms. Which is odd, because when I talked to other Home Army members from the region they said it was a small community where everybody knew everybody else. In Jedwabne I had also heard Jerzy Laudański was caught smuggling Jewish gold. Not that I’m inclined to believe that right away, since the theme of enriching oneself with “Jewish gold” is one of the constant themes in local conversation and mythology.
I called the Auschwitz Museum. They referred me to Warsaw, to the Pawiak Prison Museum. If Jerzy Laudański had been transported from there, that’s where his documents should be. But the files from that period were burned. The only thing we have to go on is Laudański’s own testimony—given in the nineties—that he was picked up in a raid while in the woods with a Home Army detachment. There is no evidence to confirm this.
After the war, the brothers set out to help build the new order of the Communist Party with great zeal. Kazimierz was active in various wings of the party. Zygmunt Laudański: “We had two partisan groups in Jedwabne, the Home Army and the National Armed Forces. Some thought I was in the Home Army, others that I was in the National Armed Forces, but I never belonged to either. After the war they were tried in military court in Jedwabne and the new authorities announced we had to go to the trial. A peasant told them how his last cow had been taken away and beaten so that its ear bled, to that day it had an abcess and it was deaf. And I left Jedwabne right then in 1947 to stay out of that whole mess. After People’s Poland was established and my brother became secretary for the municipality in Biała Piska, he got me a job in a shop there. That was the shop where they later came to arrest me.”
Many times, in prison, he gave an account of his life after the war: “I went to the remote town of Biała in order to work for the good of the state and support my family, free from the reactionary gangs operating in our area.” He wrote to the Office of Public Security in Warsaw on July 4, 1949, proposing himself as an informant: “As a former member of the Polish United Workers’ Party and party cell supervisor until my last days in my former place of residence, one who at meetings sounded the call for social justice such as we enjoy today, I now seek that justice for myself and I would like to experience it and to open the eyes of reactionaries who are glad whenever a worker cooperates with the system and is thrown in jail” (sentence review application to the Supreme Court in Warsaw, November 8, 1949).
Jerzy Laudański’s brother got him a job as controller of material benefits in the office of the district authorities. “The farmers had to deliver grain quota and we went to check how much each municipality delivered. We made sure they gave the right amount, because they were resistant. There was a rumor the Russians were taking grain to Russia by plane.” In the documents there is mention of Jerzy Laudański being sentenced in 1947 to nine months of camp labor in Mielęcin.
Kazimierz Laudański’s professional and political careers were not affected by his brother’s arrest. He went on working as municipal secretary and was politically active.
“On the anniversary of Stalin’s death a crowd gathered in Biała. And I get up and praise the great Stalin.”
He gets up from his chair and his voice sounds younger and stronger as he repeats the speech from all those years ago:
“‘Great Stalin was a leader. The victorious Polish people will never forget it. He did not die without heirs. He urged us to be critical and self-critical. If Stalin asked you today what you did for the Polish nation, how would you look him in the eye?’ And I pointed: this is a mess and that is a mess. I showed my fist. The secret police and the party applauded me, but the crowd was with me, too, because they saw I was putting on a parody. I always had guts.”
Zygmunt Laudański also offered his services to the authorities: “I wish to testify to the secret police about very important evidence that remains. I urgently request this, and it will clear up the case” (letter sent to the president from Ostrołęka prison, June 4, 1949). But the authorities did not respond.
The Laudańskis tell me about being beaten during their interrogation. They had spoken of it at their trial, retracting their testimony, and they wrote about it from prison, appealing their sentence. They say they confessed because they were beaten. Their father, Czesław Laudański, was also arrested, but he didn’t confess and was released.
“Why did they let your father go?” I ask.
“Well, they found no proof against him.”
“And why were you found guilty?”
