by Anna Bikont
“We were suspect, because we had been in hiding during the Soviet occupation.”
The suggestion that their father, who was imprisoned during the Soviet occupation, was not an easy target for the new Polish Communist regime, but Zygmunt, who collaborated with the NKVD, was, makes little sense. But generally the brothers Laudański are impressively prepared for their conversations with me. They have a ready answer to every question.
Zygmunt Laudański got out of prison in 1955.
“How did people treat you after you got out?” I ask.
“Very well. The director of the dairy in Biała came to me and said, ‘Come work for us.’ They knew they could rely on me.”
In 1956, Jerzy Laudański wrote to the minister of justice from Sieradz prison, four pages of graph paper covered in even, controlled writing: “I fell victim to the legacy of prewar politics at such a young age, because at that time, young people were educated solely in a nationalist spirit. All the more so as I came of age and was shaped as a citizen of the Fatherland at a time when the most ferocious anti-Jewish battles were raging. People, young people, were raised on all sorts of anti-Jewish slogans … After our Liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, I did not go the way of those who despised their ruined Fatherland and indulged in a luxurious existence in the West, only to return later as spies or subversives. Without a moment’s hesitation, I returned to my ravaged Homeland, to the People for whom I had sacrificed my youth before I was twenty years of age … I am a laborer and the son and grandson of laborers, and I have met with nothing good in my life; I am broken by fate. Presently, having learned this much from life, I have perfect proof of who made me, a young man, suffer so terribly: it was Fascism, capitalism, the prewar government ideology, these are what condemned me to languish so long in prison.”
A last opinion on “holding the prisoner Laudański” was put forward at Sieradz prison in 1956: “General observation and interviews have not revealed hostility to People’s Poland. He considers his sentence just, but excessively harsh.”
Jerzy Laudański was set free in 1957.
These days the brothers meet often, talk politics, share the same preoccupations. “We brothers are nationalists, we’re on the right,” says Kazimierz Laudański. “As they say: there must be order, Ordnung muss sein.”
Journal
MARCH 11, 2001
I was still sleeping after the bat mitzvah reception when Bishop Stefanek of Łomża addressed a crowd of the Jedwabne faithful: “My friends in Warsaw told me long ago in the privacy of their high state offices: ‘There’s going be an attack on Jedwabne, and it’s all about money.’” In this I hear an echo of Primate Glemp, who said he’d been warned of the attack by “an important Jew.” And what can you expect from the residents of an impoverished town when the tabloid tone pervades even bishops’ palaces?
“The people behind the attack want to provoke a new spiral of hatred,” the bishop went on. “The same hatred made Nero burn Rome and blame the Christians for it.” Bringing to light the truth about Jedwabne is, in his words, part of the “Shoah business.”
I call a few people in Jedwabne in the evening to ask them about the bishop’s visit. They tell me:
“There was a lunch at the presbytery, and then the priest and the bishop went to the site of the massacre. They didn’t even light candles. They stood there, chatted about the Germans having done it.”
“The bishop met with the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne and said, ‘What do they want from you, dear people? What do they want from your priest, who is fighting with such dignity against unjust claims?’”
“Leszek Bubel, whose anti-Semitic rags are popular in Jedwabne, was distributing copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion outside the church, and people reached out for them. As the host, our priest should have kicked him out, but what can you expect? In his sermon he called the Laudańskis a family of Polish patriots. It’s typical of small towns that the priest lords it over everyone. And now his voice has been strengthened by the bishop’s.”
“When the bishop was coming down the church steps, surrounded by people from the Good Name committee, one of them shouted to the reporters, ‘Here on the market square lives a Jewish woman who converted. She survived the war. Ask her how it was.’ But she won’t say anything, she’s terrified.”
I’ve heard before that Helena Chrzanowska, who still refuses to talk to me, is the town’s hostage. The priest forbade her to speak to anyone, whereas he uses her himself as an excuse for the town: here we have our own Jew who was saved by Poles.
“It’s getting worse and worse. Jedwabne has become a training ground for extremist nationalist groups,” the town council chairman Stanisław Michałowski tells me. “They swamp us with the products of their sick minds. What will happen when they form a united front with some of our colleagues?”
MARCH 12, 2001
On the front page of the Gazeta, a photograph of the church steps in Jedwabne after Mass. The bishop is standing a little toward the back; in front of him, representatives of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne; the figure of a stocky man in his prime stands out. It’s Stanisław Janczyk, head of the committee.
Earlier I checked out the key people chosen for the committee by Father Orłowski. One of them beat his wife so badly she ran away. “If he didn’t apologize to his wife and children, you think he’s going to apologize to the Jews?” my source said. Another works as a teacher and catechism tutor, but has an extra job at an insurance company for the clergy. When the priest asked him, he couldn’t refuse. A third went to prison for participating in a particularly cruel gang rape. They left the woman with a wine bottle in her vagina.
The man convicted of rape is Councilman Janczyk, the man in the photograph with the bishop. The same man who, at a council meeting, told off the mayor and council chairman for visiting the monument on July 10 last year. I phone him and ask, “When is the committee going to assemble formally and announce its members?”
“I’m certainly going to be on the committee. I talked about it with the deacon. He’s even getting calls from Warsaw professors who want to join,” says Janczyk.
“The president, the primate, and the prime minister have all spoken of the participation of Poles in the massacre and the need for an apology,” I reply.
“When they talk nonsense, I can’t accept it. That’s pronouncing a verdict on oneself. On me and on you, if you feel Polish. Bishop Stefanek says rightly: ‘Let them speak the truth about how it was.’ The president swore an oath to defend his fatherland, and now he’s coming out with this idiocy. Primate Glemp should wait for the investigation to be over.”
“But the parish priest is also pronouncing a verdict before the end of the investigation, saying the Germans did it.”
“The father is saying what really happened. They’re trying to blacken our name. The ones who are telling lies, they’re not our Jedwabne youth. The mayor’s not from here. If we change the inscription on the monument, we’ll have to leave Poland, because every child from Jedwabne, wherever he goes to school, will flee. Wasersztejn wants the inscription to be changed because he wants compensation from Poland.”
“People say you were convicted of a particularly cruel rape.”
“I was thrown into the case because my dad was village head before the war.”
“But were you sentenced?”
“That woman died a month later; she got an infection because she was pregnant and hadn’t been taking the right medication.”
“What was your sentence?”
“Ten years. I did seven years, me, an innocent man. More than twenty years have passed, so my record is clean now.”
“But don’t you agree you may not be the most suitable person to defend Jedwabne’s good name?”
“I wanted to act for the good of Poland, not just for the good of Jedwabne, but if some jerk digs that stupid stuff up, I’ll step down.”
I leave a transcript of my conversation wi
th Janczyk at the editorial offices of the Gazeta. I’m going to Jedwabne tomorrow. The Gazeta lawyer confirms that the term of his sentence has expired, so Janczyk’s record really is “clean now.” The Gazeta editors decide to publish the conversation. A public person’s life must be transparent; it shouldn’t be veiled by the statute of limitations.
MARCH 13, 2001
I’ve come to Jedwabne for a longer stay, to experience what goes on in a place confronted with the memory of an atrocity. I walk down Przytulska Street holding a list from 1945 that I found in the Łomża archive, with the prewar addresses of Jedwabne residents. The handmade tables on big sheaves of office paper show that on Przytulska, a street leading to the market, almost all the houses belonged to Jews.
I read off the names of the owners of the houses, squares, and gardens like an elegy to the vanished Jewish town: Całka Wasersztejn, Mejer Grądowski, Jankiel Piekarski, Symcha Grajewski, Jankiel Blumert, Mosiek Kamionowski, Alter Marchewko, Daniel Szklarkiewicz, Mosiek Lasko, Josle Cynowicz, B. Gorfinkiel, Abram Zaborowski, Auhhter Blumert, Osier Krzywonos, Fajba Drejarski, Jutke and Wolf Zimny, Brauszejn Gutman, Kiwi, Szmul Wajsztejn, Abram Zajdensztat, Eli Pecynowicz, Icek Stolarski, Jankiel Semborski, Berek Szmuił, Meszek Zaborowski, Mojsze Białoszewski, Ici Kapuśniak, Jankiel Josel, Berek Jedwabiński.
At number 3 there’s a wooden house; at number 5, a brick house; and at number 7, a wooden one, just as it says on the old list. A man of about forty rides past on his bike.
“I noticed you’ve been sniffing around here since yesterday.”
I show him the list of homes and ask if he ever heard anything about the people who lived here before the war.
“You’re Jewish, right? I could tell by your accent. There’s nothing for you here. These homes belonged to Germans.”
The man, once a truck driver, now says he lives off nothing, doesn’t get any social support.
“Maybe somebody was mad at the Jews, so he had to do something to them. Anyway it wasn’t just Jedwabne, there was Stawiski, Wąsosz, Wizna, Radziłów.” He reels them off to me, so he must know something of what happened here sixty years ago. “Why are they being left in peace? Because our mayor let the Jews in, and in Radziłów the village head wouldn’t let them in. My mother spoke well of Jews, she said they gave her work.”
I go from door to door. Maybe someone who lives here played with one of the Jewish kids on Przytulska Street as a child?
A house on the even-numbered side. In a yard strewn with junk, by a dilapidated shed, an older woman is chopping wood. I ask if she perhaps remembers the names of Jewish friends from before the war.
“Don’t you try to scare me. Whoever’s got what doesn’t belong to them may tremble in fear, but this house was left behind after the war. I don’t know who lived here before. It doesn’t concern me who killed whom. Why should it concern me if I’m not from here? Now people come here, buy you a vodka, give you money, they’ll always find someone to tell them what they want to hear. And then they accuse the Poles.”
“So why did the primate say that Polish participation in the crime in Jedwabne is beyond question?”
“He said no such thing, it would be a lie.”
I try my luck with the houses on the odd-numbered side.
The brick house at number 1 Przytulska Street is empty, garbage piling up in the yard. Once, there was a boarding school here. At number 3 an older lady comes to the door. I am told the house used to belong to Germans, and she came here from Wizna in the sixties: “Once, Father went to Wąsosz for grain, it was 1941 but the Germans hadn’t come yet, and he met two little Jews. They showed him cherry leaves, and that summer they were brown and twisted, a sign that the Lord Jesus had decreed that ‘blood will flow onto you and onto your children.’ They read it in the Talmud that God had decreed that they would perish, and they accepted it.”
In a friendly tone, without any of the anger I usually encounter, she tells me how it really was. Listening to anti-Semitic ravings from seemingly sweet elderly ladies is probably even more disturbing than listening to an openly anti-Semitic and unsympathetic priest.
At number 5, a man: “I was born in 1931, but I came here after the war. Gross writes a pack of lies. When I came here a lot of people were still alive who told me how the Germans rounded up the Jews.”
At number 7, a well-dressed man in his thirties, the owner of a business, speaks to me across a fence: “Jews have positions in government and the Church. Why are you digging it all up? Because it’s a gold mine. Now the Jews want to get money out of us. Those journalists who come here, they’re Jewish citizens. Gross looks like a bum. The Jews behave as if this were their home, but when I’m in a foreign country I can’t do whatever I like. It was wrong of the Jedwabne authorities to let journalists in to dig up Jewish truth. It’s not our truth.”
Polish truth, Jewish truth. It’s obvious to many residents that there are two separate truths here.
At number 9, a leather workshop. A man in his forties leans out. Like the previous man, he talks to me without opening the gate. “I don’t comment on political matters,” he says coldly, and closes the house door behind him. So that’s what the Cytrynowiczes’ son-in-law (and son of one of the participants in the massacre) looks like.
I go no farther. Janina Biedrzycka lives in the next house. I’m already acquainted with her nasty views.
Perhaps going around Jedwabne with maps showing what used to be Jewish property wasn’t the greatest idea. I put the papers in my backpack. I stop residents in the former Old Market to ask them where the temple stood before the war, and they tell me quite politely they don’t know, though you might expect them to be tired of the hundreds of questions put to them by journalists visiting the town recently. Radio reporters run around the market, sticking out microphones to anyone they meet, cameras shoot footage, Western TV crews park their cars outside city hall.
In the evening, after returning to the hotel, I read in the Gazeta about the electoral convention of the SLD (Union of the Democratic Left) in Łódź on Sunday. “In the matter of Jedwabne we can never express our pain sufficiently or use the word ‘sorry’ often enough,” the party leader Leszek Miller said. Asked at the press conference how he knew what had really happened in Jedwabne, he replied that he recommended that everyone read Anna Bikont’s piece in the Gazeta.
MARCH 14, 2001
At the hotel I read the morning papers. Father Stanisław Musiał, a Kraków Jesuit, comments on Bishop Stefanek’s sermon for the Gazeta. He says he read it “with sadness and astonishment.” “It’s hard to find a more despicable or cruel crime in human history,” he says. “Jedwabne reveals to us and to the world a new truth about our people (after all, the Jedwabne killers were members of our Church). I would expect priests of the Catholic Church not to waste time looking for circumstances that mitigate the scale and significance of the crime in Jedwabne, but to help Polish Catholics whose compatriots soaked their hands in the blood of innocent Jews to find a path to God, to civil society, and to peace with themselves. Unfortunately the Church in Poland didn’t undertake this pastoral task immediately after the war, nor did it do so later.”
No one points to anti-Semitism as a sin of the Polish Church as clearly as Father Musiał. I know he has suffered various kinds of trouble and chicanery from Church authorities because of it. I talked to him once and thanked him for what he wrote. He asked me if I knew of a derelict synagogue that, if rebuilt, would be used for prayer by Polish Jews. He wanted to hold a collection among his parishioners for such a reconstruction. Later I heard how much hostility he encountered among his parishioners for his stance in the Jedwabne affair. I doubt that he could raise that money.
Jedwabne. A shop on Przytulska Street with a sign saying WESTERN CLOTHES and a sign on the door reading 50% DISCOUNT. It was closed yesterday.
“I’m not from here,” the nice older saleswoman tells me. “But I heard the house was built after the war.”
I ask how sales are going.
“Badly. Only people with money come in.”
I am witness to the purchase of a necktie—before, it cost one zloty, with the discount it’s fifty groszy.
A traveling salesman comes into the grocery store on the market square—once upon a time he would have been Jewish—and displays a little dressing case: a measuring tape, scissors, a sewing kit, twelve colors, eight zlotys for the lot. The woman shopkeeper turns the box around, interested. “If you come back tomorrow I’ll have the money ready and buy it off you.”
A visit to city hall.
“We had our budget cut this year,” say the social security center workers. “The money we had last year for temporary benefits would have been our salvation. We could have helped the neediest clear their debts.”
From their stories a picture emerges of a town in decay, one that hasn’t managed to find its place in the new reality. Once, there was a knitwear factory where ladies’ panties and bras were assembled, but it collapsed at the beginning of the post-Communist period. There used to be an agricultural co-op, but only the building is left. You can look for jobs with the Cooperative Bank, the city, in schools. There are shops, doctor’s offices, a veterinarian’s practice, two hair salons, a post office, and that’s it. There are a few private firms, but they don’t employ many people: Kruszywa supplies gravel, Polbruk produces paving blocks, Sonarol fits windows, Viga is a company trading in anything and everything. Last year the furniture manufacturer Ital-Polfin closed down after being in business only two years.
“People probably go on living here from pure habit,” say my interlocutors. “And also if you wanted to leave, it’s hard to sell your home, a lot of houses stand empty.”
My Gazeta piece on the Laudańskis has an unexpected effect. One of the women at the municipal offices says: “Everybody knows that Laudański scum did it all, and afterward got out as fast as they could. Is the town to blame for that?”
I look in on the mayor.
“We have about forty percent unemployment in this town,” says Godlewski. “Add to that the hidden unemployment in the countryside, where several adults work a few hectares. People feel they’re worse off than before 1989. Poverty is spreading. Under the Communists you couldn’t squeeze into the morning bus to Łomża; the cotton factories employed three and a half thousand people. There was a lot of fake employment, too, like at the state stores where there was never anything for sale, but you could always make a living. Maybe that’s why part of the population in Jedwabne reacts aggressively. They’re down on their luck, and it’s hard to expect noble feelings from people to whom life is brutal.”
