The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “My sister, who lives a hundred kilometers away, called me as soon as she heard about the ceremony to say she’d come to it, but when I told her what had been going on here in town, she was scared off.”

  I ask her if people who see things the way she does might not come forward, and form a committee for the ceremony.

  “Why should I join anything? It’s the loudmouths who form committees. Whenever I think about it, I start crying.”

  At the Cytrynowiczes’ in Łomża. I ask more questions of Jan and Pelagia for insight into how they could bear to live among killers for so many years. But apparently I’m the only one to whom the question occurs. In Jedwabne there’s no separation between those who participated in the killing and looting, and those who didn’t accept it.

  Jan recounts, “As soon as I moved to Jedwabne after the war I hired Stanisław Sielawa to put a door in at my workshop. If I’d known then what he’d done maybe I wouldn’t have taken him on. But I’m from Wizna, I was a stranger to Jedwabne, and I knew him because he’d been the vet’s driver before the war when the vet had to go to the slaughterhouse in Wizna. You were young so it didn’t bother you so much. Water under the bridge, you know—the war.”

  When Cytrynowicz was arrested for some administrative offense, he shared a cell with Roman Górski, one of the men convicted in the 1949 trial. “He didn’t show any anti-Semitism to me, didn’t talk about Jews,” his cell mate praises him, “and when he got out he bought part of a horse’s harness from me.”

  In the evening, at the hotel, I read a text distributed to trusted workers at one of the government offices in Łomża. The handsomely printed brochure “What Happened in Jedwabne and How,” sent across the Atlantic by the Polish American Congress, begins with the statement “there’s no crime in the history of Poland that the Jews hadn’t already commited.” The list of crimes begins with the murder of Abel and the crucifixion of Christ, and ends with the “Moscow-Jewish-Communist provocation of the Kielce pogrom in 1946.”

  Tocki, the editor, gave me copies of all the articles in Contacts concerning the massacre. I read the Wroniszewskis’ 1988 Contacts article again closely, through the prism of the knowledge I had recently acquired. They mentioned Wasersztejn’s testimony but found it unreliable. They accepted on faith the findings of prosecutor Monkiewicz, that there had been “over two hundred German thugs” there. Nonetheless, it is an invaluable source, because the Wroniszewskis talked to many witnesses still living at that time. Two of their interviewees are people who I’ve heard took part in the killings. They quote one of them, Eugeniusz Śliwecki, as stating that the Nazis were the animating force behind the crime and had just used a few local hooligans to help them. What a conspiracy of silence there must have been, since no one ever told the Wroniszewskis about him being a participant in the killings.

  Gabriela Szczęsna’s Contacts article on the atrocity in nearby Wąsosz, “Conscience in the Trenches,” leaves no doubt about who did the killing. “It’s to our eternal shame,” say people from Wąsosz. “Blood ran in the streets, poured from haycarts, marking the final journey of Jews to a trench outside the village. They were thrown in there at random: the living on top of the dead, the dead on top of the living. Earth was packed on top of them all and stamped down by the killers, who finished people off with sticks, spades, axes. Two days after the atrocity, on Sunday, the killers came to church. Many wearing clothes the others instantly recognized. Nor did they try to hide their newly acquired watches. Years passed. Once, the priest declared: ‘Whoever has anything taken from Jews must buy something for the church.’ And that’s what they did.”

  MARCH 16, 2001

  Jedwabne. A pile of newspapers on the first pew by the entrance to the church. The fat headline jumps out: “Szmul Winterszajs, Jew, Secret Police Rat, Polish Workers Party–Führer der Waffen Secret Police, Falsely Accuses Poles of Jedwabne Massacre!” That’s from the paper the Najjaśniejsza Rzeczpospolita (Most Serene Polish Commonwealth). I also find it at the kiosk across from the church, displayed by Maria Mazurczyk, an activist with the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne.

  Szmul Wasersztejn is public enemy number one in Jedwabne. The line of attack is simple: Wasersztejn was in the NKVD during the Soviet occupation, and in the UB after the war. Tomasz Strzembosz, who as Jan Gross’s main adversary has made himself the best-known historian in Poland, said in a March 3 interview for the weekly the Głos (Voice) titled “They Were Secret Police Memoirs”: “I know Wasersztejn acted as investigator with the rank of lieutenant in specific cases. This information is confirmed by all, that Całko, also known as Całka, was Wasersztejn and that he was an officer of the Łomża secret police after the war.” And why is this information confirmed by all? Because the residents of Jedwabne, feeling supported by Strzembosz’s authority, are eager to slander Wasersztejn.

  Public enemy number two is Gross. How dare he tell such lies and give sixteen hundred as the number of victims? It doesn’t matter that Gross didn’t come up with the number, and got it from some archive no one had previously studied. Right after the war the new mayor of Jedwabne reported to the Commission of Magistrates’ Courts that 1,642 Jews had been killed, of whom 1,600 died in the barn and 42 by shooting. That number was given by Polish witnesses and participants in the massacre (“I took part in guarding the Jews in the square,” said suspect Władysław Dąbrowski in the investigation of 1949. “There were over fifteen hundred of them, rounded up by the local Poles”). That number was actually confirmed by the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland. Why would the Main Commission exaggerate the number of Jewish victims? Until yesterday you could see the figure on the monument. The residents had forty years to suggest it be changed. And besides, if the Germans perpetrated the crime, why do people suddenly want to lessen the measure of German guilt?

  I’ve arranged to meet Janusz O., a teacher who moonlights selling insurance to priests, and who joined the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne. Now it appears he’s left it, although the membership list is still secret, so it’s not easy to figure out. People say he changed his mind because his wife is related to one of the killers. I ring the buzzer at the gate and hear the familiar sound of a door being slammed shut.

  “My husband isn’t here, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

  I insist I had arranged by phone to meet him. I wait in the car.

  “Please don’t park in front of our house,” Janusz O.’s wife calls out to me after about an hour.

  When discussing the people involved in setting up the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, I heard it said more than once of two men, a certain Goszczyński and Śleszyński (from a different family than Bolesław Śleszyński, the owner of the barn), that they were “from pure families.” In other words, families in which no one participated in the massacre. So in spite of all the denials, a memory of the truth persists. It’s passed on, however, in linguistic codes comprehensible only to the initiated. On the one hand there are those “from pure families”; on the other, those who “made a fortune in Jewish gold.” Some of my younger interlocutors remembered these things being said of some of their neighbors. Before Gross’s book came out they didn’t give much thought to what it might mean.

  Talk of “God’s punishment” is also widespread. The two teenage daughters of mailman Eugeniusz Śliwecki got food poisoning from sausage at a wedding and died. At the funeral people whispered that the daughters had answered for the sins of the father. Two sons of another participant in the massacre drank themselves to death. Yet another had a disabled son.

  “You can often find him in the square where people park in Łomża,” Leszek Dziedzic told me. Dziedzic, a farmer from Przestrzele near Jedwabne, is becoming a closer and closer friend. “He waits for someone to give him a zloty to watch their car. He has deformed arms and crooked legs and sometimes he says to me, ‘Daddy did this to the Jews,’ and makes the gesture of cutting a throat, ‘and God in Heaven did this
to me,’ and he shows his crooked arms.”

  Several of those I phoned to arrange a meeting asked me not to park in front of their house. So I cross the darkening little town on foot to find the spot where I parked. As I am turning the key in the door, a man of about sixty comes up to me.

  “I looked out from time to time to make sure your car was all right,” he says, and goes on without any questioning: “I was a year old at that time, so I don’t remember much myself. I spent my adult life in a mine in Silesia, but when I was in school I heard stories about our people killing, and finishing the wounded off in the rye fields nearby. If we don’t all go to the monument together, it’ll bring shame on the town.”

  On my way back to Warsaw I wonder how many people like that there are in Jedwabne.

  MARCH 17, 2001

  I’m off to the Ramotowskis in a minute. I’m bringing Stanisław one of the Hoover Institution testimonies, that of Stanisław Mroczkowski, a farmer from the village of Czerwonki. In Kramarzewo, where Ramotowski lived, there was a candidate for local office in Soviet times, one Zitkowski from the village Zakrzewo, “a poor farmer, a thief, who killed the farmer Antoni Gliński of Zakrzewo a few days after the elections, for which he was not punished.” Ramotowski not only doesn’t remember if he voted for Zitkowski, but he can barely remember if he voted in Soviet elections at all. For over a year and a half he was a citizen of another country, and now I have to convince him that he must have taken Soviet citizenship and, when he was given his new ID papers, that he must have taken the oath “not to strive for the restoration of an independent Polish state.” We are good enough friends by now that I know he wasn’t trying to hide this information from me. He simply obliterated it from memory. Wartime experiences of all kinds must have been pushed so far into oblivion that they never entered public consciousness. Whereas others are seemingly etched in stone. It’s hard to find anyone of the older generation in Jedwabne or Radziłów who doesn’t vividly remember a Jew pointing a rifle, jumping off a truck to oversee the deportation of a Polish family, as if it were yesterday. But it’s a phantom of their imagination. The Soviets arrested people at night or at dawn. In the dark it’s hard to tell from behind curtains who exactly is standing on a truck or what his nose looks like. The names of these Jews are rarely mentioned, though they would have been familiar neighbors. Apparently the Soviet occupation is subject to mystification, and a thick layer of stereotypes has obscured individual experience.

  I’m worried about Stanisław. I consult with Marek Edelman on Ramotowski’s state of health or, rather, illness. Edelman promises he’ll look in on him.

  Every few days I call prosecutor Ignatiew, who seems used to it by now. Especially as I don’t ask him anything much; I just share my observations with him. We once talked about Jakub Kac, one of the first victims in Jedwabne, beaten to death by locals right after the Russians left. Kac was by then an elderly man, around seventy. What could the killers have wanted? Under the Soviets he had worked as a guard at the youth club that had replaced the Catholic club; was that enough to get him killed? I heard more than once in Jedwabne that “Kac pissed against the church.” I told Ignatiew this sounded to me like an old anti-Semitic fable, a bit like Halina Zalewska, Jan Skrodzki’s cousin, saying Dora Dorogoj was killed because she “stood at the cross and blasphemed.” Ignatiew asked me if I could point him toward some source that could show that relieving oneself against a church belonged to the repertoire of anti-Semitic imaginings.

  So I leafed through Alina Cała’s book The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture. In the seventies, Alina set off into the Polish provinces to carry out a study. She thought it would be a difficult subject, but people talked to her eagerly and colorfully. She understood that the image of the Jew didn’t function at the margins of folk culture but was an integral part of it. “The Jew is necessary to the dichotomous separation of the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’” One of the respondents quotes a prewar song from the Białystok area: “Don’t buy from Jews, only from your own / Take a knotted stick / Chase them out of Poland / Why let Jews lord it over us? / Let them be the Arabs’ horses in Palestine!” But there are no examples that corroborate my thesis. I phone Alina.

  “A Jew relieving himself against the church?” She ponders the question. “No, I’ve never heard that one.”

  MARCH 18, 2001

  “Writing these words, I feel schizophrenic: I am a Pole, and my shame about the Jedwabne murder is a Polish shame. At the same time, I know that if I had been there in Jedwabne at the time, I would have been killed as a Jew.” Adam Michnik’s piece “The Shock of Jedwabne” appeared today in the Gazeta and The New York Times. “I do not feel guilty for the murdered, but I do feel responsible … that after they died they were murdered again, denied a decent burial, denied tears, denied truth about this hideous crime, and that for decades a lie was repeated … Why then did I not look for the truth about the murdered Jews of Jedwabne? Perhaps because I subconsciously feared the cruel truth about the fate of the Jews during that time.”

  Adam reminds people how courageously Poles behaved during the war, how they fought, how they died, how many Righteous Gentiles there were. “For these people who lost their lives saving Jews, I feel responsible, too. I feel guilty when I read so often in Polish and foreign newspapers about the murderers who killed Jews, and note the deep silence about those who rescued Jews.”

  What deep silence is Adam talking about? The trees planted at Yad Vashem for the Righteous Among the Nations and the inscription Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world are the most resounding universal symbol that even in the worst of times, times of evil and contempt, there are people who do good.

  MARCH 19, 2001

  I’m trying to find Jan Skrodzki some descendant of the Jew Konopka, who once warned Skrodzki’s parents of an imminent deportation to the Gulag. Skrodzki knows only that he was a grain merchant. When we went to Radziłów he insistently asked about him, but no one remembered his first name. Skrodzki keeps saying: “I owe that Jew who saved us some kind of compensation. If they put up a truthful inscription commemorating the massacre, I’d like to put up a little memorial stone next to it: The Jew Konopka lived here. He saved my life.”

  I search genealogical lists of Radziłów Jews on the Internet. After going onto the website jewishgen.org and clicking on “Jewishgen Family Finder,” a site where people from the same town or with common ancestors can meet, and after searching the keyword “Radziłów,” I find twenty e-mail addresses, among them Jose Gutstein and his website radzilow.com. I soon find myself looking at photographs, recollections, a “virtual shtetl” of Radziłów—a whole world resurrected by an American in Miami.

  There’s an extraordinary testimony on the site: an interview with Chaja and Izrael Finkelsztejn conducted for Yad Vashem. They are the parents of Chana and Menachem, whose accounts I read at the Jewish Historical Institute and whom I’ve dreamed of finding ever since. On July 7 the whole Finkelsztejn family was driven into the market square in Radziłów. “I witnessed the Germans organizing the local Poles,” Chaja Finkelsztejn testified. “However, the Poles carried out the whole operation.” Three of her brothers perished in the barn in Radziłów. Chaja keeps saying she can’t talk about it, that it’s all in her 360-page memoir, written in 1946, which she gave to Yad Vashem. I must go to Israel to read it. Chaja was born toward the end of the nineteenth century, so she is no longer alive, but maybe I can find her children. The Finkelsztejns lived at 32 Yotam Street in Haifa. True, that was forty years ago, but it gives me something to work with.

  MARCH 21, 2001

  I drop by the Gazeta to read articles kept in our archive under the file name “Jews in Poland/History/General Materials. Kielce Pogrom. Ejszyszki. Jedwabne.” There’s such a deluge of texts that a separate file has been created for “Jews in Poland/History/Jedwabne.” In the week I haven’t looked at the file, an impressive pile of interviews, statements, and articles has collected—mainly attacking Gross.
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br />   Lech Wałęsa talking to journalist Monika Olejnik on Radio ZET: “There’s no point making such a fuss because somebody wrote a book and made some money. How many Jews worked for the security services after the war and murdered Poles? Not one Jew has apologized to us for that.”

  The chairman of the World Association of Polish Home Army Soldiers: “The call for a nationwide apology to the Jews for the massacre in Jedwabne is, to say the least, premature and wildly exaggerated.”

  The Parliament of Student Self-Government of the Catholic University in Warsaw in an open letter to Bishop Stefanek: “We express our support for his Excellency’s position regarding the massacre in Jedwabne.” And they go on about the profits the Jews are after by slandering the Polish people.

  The National Board of the SLD (Union of the Democratic Left)—the post-Communist party: “Almost the whole Jewish population of the town perished at the hands of their Polish neighbors. The Jedwabne massacre is cause for pain and shame.”

  It’s cause for pain and shame that only the post-Communists can bring themselves to say these words.

  MARCH 24, 2001

  Jedwabne. I’ve heard that the main power player in town besides the priest is Wojciech Kubrak, a doctor by profession, and at present district head of Łomża. He published “A Declaration by the Łomża District Board on the Jewish Pogrom in Jedwabne,” in which the board distances itself from the ceremony: “Although the Institute of National Remembrance investigation is still in progress, the verdict has already been pronounced.”

  Jedwabne lives a mirrored life. Journalists and politicians feed on statements made by the town’s residents, but the reverse process is far more powerful. The residents speak of what happened in their town in the language of journalists, historians, and politicians. And so from the time Tomasz Szarota gave his interview to the Gazeta, people in Jedwabne speak of the “Białystok Commando” as an obvious and irrefutable part of the story. Similarly, the phrase “truckloads of Germans” has entered into general currency.