The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Age was an important determinant of attitudes toward the Soviet occupation, and not only in the case of Jews. Film screenings and dancing were also attractive to some of the local Polish youth. Jan Cytrynowicz, the Jedwabne Jew who was baptized before the war, remembered that in Wizna, Poles ran the beer and wine taverns, where there was cheap wine and beer in pints, so the youth, both Polish and Jewish, liked gathering there.

  “When the Russians came,” a former resident of Radziłów told me, “the film screen was set up in the marketplace, for everyone, and who had ever seen any movies in Radziłów? I remember films about the revolution, with Orlova, a famous actress. And events organized at the ice house.”

  I asked how relations between Polish and Jewish children at school changed with the arrival of the Soviets. “The Jews were confident in class, they liked to show off,” I heard from a man who had grown up in Radziłów. “They felt confident because as they liked to say, Stalin’s wife was ‘one of theirs.’ Oh, they were no saints. They made fun of us in front of the Soviets. There were Polish boys who carried red flags, too, but not as many. Of all the members of the Communist youth organization Komsomol there was one Jewish girl who had the most arrogant attitude toward the Poles; we called her Fat Sara. She called the Poles ‘Polack dogs,’ and Polish kids for her were ‘Polack puppies.’ I had a Russian teacher named Marusya who made me sit in the first row next to that Jewish girl. She moved away, saying she wouldn’t sit next to a ‘Polack puppy.’ At school and on the street you had to make way for the Jews.”

  “Make way how?”

  “A Jewish kid would be standing there, taunting, ‘Your government is gone, your government is done.’”

  “We got along fine with them,” another man from Radziłów remembered. “Right after the Russians arrived they proudly said, ‘Our comrades are here,’ but they sobered up pretty quickly. A teacher tried to get them to join the Soviet scout group, the pioneers, but they didn’t want to join, at least not the ones I remember.”

  “Soviet education ruined kids,” Chaja Finkelsztejn recounted. “There were holidays, posters with thundering slogans, dancing, singing; it all drew kids like a magnet. For the older kids there was the Komsomol; the younger ones had the pioneers. They got red scarves, so they were happy. My kids said thanks but didn’t wear the scarves, although the Polish teachers made it clear this might get them into trouble. I didn’t want my kids to go on those field trips, but the teachers found us and dragged them off to the Soviet authorities in Jedwabne. My older son suffered a lot, he was called a Jewish nationalist because he didn’t join the Komsomol. At school somebody wrote an illicit slogan on the wall: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning,’ and the Jewish director sent from the Białystok NKVD suspected Menachem Finkelsztejn of having done it.”

  7.

  So Jews welcomed the Soviets more often and more warmly, but the Soviets made their lives a misery anyway. Jews may have collaborated with the Soviets more frequently, but do we know that for a fact? Though Jews did not play a dominant role in the Soviet power structure or the Soviet system of repression, Poles were convinced that the Jews were responsible for the persecution of Poles. What made the idea of Jews being solely responsible for all evil endure in the memory of so many of their neighbors?

  Chaja Finkelsztejn: “Quarrels and fights often broke out between Jews and Christians in queues. There were plenty of Jews who said, ‘Your two decades of being the boss are over.’ The Poles remembered that.”

  In fact, it wasn’t so much about those few Jews in every small town who showed special zeal in their service to the Soviet authorities, who informed on others and intimidated them. There were Poles doing the same thing, and everyone knew it, even if they later erased it from their collective memory. It was about the remarks like “Your time is over,” which Jews hurled at their recent nationalist persecutors with relish.

  In the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, called the Ringelblum Archive, there is a description of a school in Rutki where Polish teachers had taught for a long time; two Jewish teachers arrived, refugees from the General Government (or German-occupied zone). The local doctor and veterinarian also employed Jewish refugees in their practices. The refugees were in a difficult predicament, sleeping in strangers’ houses, unsure whether the next day would bring new decrees as to where they could or could not reside. From their point of view they were vulnerable, uncertain of their future; from the point of view of the Polish residents, the new Jewish teachers, doctor, and vet were in an excellent position—they had usurped the place of Polish locals deported to Siberia.

  A large portion of school time was dedicated to propaganda, anniversaries, and poems about friendship with the USSR. Polish and Jewish teachers did the same things in class. But according to Chaja Finkelsztejn, Polish teachers “organized splendid festivities to mask their true sympathies and play the part of loyal subjects of the new authorities.” Polish teachers who prepared celebrations in honor of the October Revolution at school may well have packed lunches after school for anti-Soviet partisans hiding in the marshes by the Biebrza river.

  Bolesław Juszkowski remembered that when he had to go vote, he found Soviet soldiers in the election hall “dancing with Jewish girls” to the sound of a band (Hoover Institution testimony).

  It caused bad blood, the Jewish girls dancing with Russian soldiers when Poles were obliged to turn up to vote for the loss of their fatherland.

  Another Ringelblum Archive testimony tells of how things were in Wasilków: “It was quiet and cheerful; there were movies and a Jewish theater that had frequent concerts and plays; there was a wind orchestra, a mandolin orchestra. Jews felt good, very free. They could walk down any street, even the ones where they had formerly been pelted with stones. You didn’t hear anyone say ‘dirty Jew.’”

  Poles were irritated by the happy Jewish boys unafraid to go out on the street.

  “The Poles were grief-stricken after losing to the invaders, and you didn’t see that grief in Jews,” wrote Chaja Finkelsztejn. “You could even see most Jews were glad. ‘Jews are in charge,’ said the Poles. Most young Jews were living it up, there were a lot of weddings, under the Soviets you could get married for three rubles. You saw a lot of freshly minted married couples, feeling content and happy, and a lot of babies were being born, couples sat with their prams in parks where until then only the Polish intelligentsia spent time.”

  The Soviet occupation imposed on almost everyone—except those in hiding and in armed resistance units—the necessity of some degree of collaboration. If they wanted to avoid arrest or deportation, residents of Radziłów or Jedwabne had to participate in numerous meetings, decorate their barns with portraits of Lenin and Stalin and red flags, take part in the electoral farce, and accept Soviet citizenship. It must have been a humiliation of the kind that afterward is consigned to the most profound oblivion. How much easier to replace reality with a stereotype like “the Jews collaborated,” all the more so if you know those who might have corrected this misconception had perished. And the cognitive dissonance must have been particularly hard to bear for the nationalists, who by definition considered themselves exceptionally patriotic. The strange new situation in which the “kikes” were given relative equality in civil law must have been a provocation to those neighbors raised on prewar anti-Semitism.

  “If the Jews had kept quiet under the Soviets like they did before the war, things wouldn’t have ended the way they did,” claims Janina Biedrzycka, the Jedwabne barn owner’s daughter. To prove this she tells me of neighbors who greeted her family courteously before the war but stopped doing so under the Soviets. Biedrzycka’s father had organized anti-Jewish actions before the war, but even so his Jewish neighbors had been afraid not to greet him politely. Now they were no longer afraid. And suddenly here are all these Jewish officials, Jewish policemen, Jewish teachers. It must have been a shock to most of the Radziłów and Jedwabne population, and one that exac
erbated their sense of vulnerability and frustration.

  8.

  When the current residents of Jedwabne say—as many do—that Jews were the ones who determined who was deported from Polish territory to the Soviet Union, they are wrong. It wasn’t local Jews who dictated repression tactics to Soviet Russia. In the first great deportation, on the night from February 9 to 10, 1940, it was military and civilian osadniks1 and foresters who were taken away. No Jewish denunciations were required for that.

  “The Russians wanted to deport the tailor Lewin and my dad just for having fought for Polish independence toward the end of the First World War,” Tadeusz Dobkowski of Zanklewo, a village between Jedwabne and Wizna, told me.

  “At first they deported people who belonged to some category designated for deportation, like foresters or teachers, or because they’d committed some act of hooliganism,” Jan Cytrynowicz explains to me. “A friend of mine from Wizna was deported for getting drunk at a Communist meeting and pissing in a jug.”

  “Young Jews were happy. They went around smiling, I saw that,” says his wife, Pelagia, who spent the occupation in Grajewo. “They felt an aversion to Poles. They felt they’d been oppressed, and now under the Russians they’d cast off their chains. But we don’t know that someone who was happy that way really went and put in a complaint against Poles.”

  The second wave of deportations, in April 1940, targeted the families of those previously arrested: police officers, senior officials, leaders of political parties, the local intelligentsia. The third wave, in June 1940, involved “refugees”—persons who had fled from the General Government. Jews formed over 80 percent of this wave of deportation (and a substantial number of them expressed a desire to return to the General Government, so not all Jews were so thrilled with the Soviets).

  Zionist activists were also deported. The head of the NKVD reported (on September 16, 1940): “The region is known for being riddled with insurrectionary elements as well as various Polish and Jewish parties and anti-Soviet organizations: the National Party, the Jewish Bund, Zionists.”

  For Jews, June 1940 went down in history as the time of great deportations, while Poles remember it as the time of the NKVD raid on the Kobielno wilderness area on the Biebrza river, where partisans and people evading imprisonment or selection for deportation were hiding in inaccessible swampy terrain. The raid was accompanied by many arrests. Some of those arrested were sent to Jedwabne, which under the Soviets was promoted to the regional capital; a temporary jail had been set up in a basement under a pharmacy.2

  But the jails and prisons in the region were also crowded with Jews who had tried to conduct some kind of economic activity, in other words, to buy or sell something outside the official state economy; they were put behind bars as speculators.3

  The last wave of deportations, in June 1941, was intended to cut off at the root the partisan independence movement, which was strong in this region. Polish Catholic informers were a hundred times more useful than Polish Jews for this purpose. Since Jews were never accepted into Polish underground organizations in the Jedwabne region, it would be hard to count on them for intelligence.

  In the early morning of June 22, 1941, a Sunday, trucks pulled up to many homes in Jedwabne and the surrounding villages, and the NKVD rounded up the relatives of earlier deportees. “Poles railed against Jews and clearly showed their hostility,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, describing the mood created by that last June deportation. “I saw with my own eyes how very early in the morning several trucks stopped by a large group of arrestees and NKVD officers. A few older Jews happened to be walking to the synagogue for morning prayers. They stopped to see what was happening. Suddenly we heard the bitter cry of a Polish woman: ‘Jews, you see them sending our people to Siberia! A curse on you!’ But what had the Jews done wrong? Didn’t the Soviets send Jews off to Siberia by the thousands? But we heard this all the time and more and more often. We felt storm clouds gathering.”

  The Soviets had evacuation plans ready in the event of war against the Germans. Those prisoners kept in Łomża were to be transported to the Gulag. But they didn’t manage to move them. When troops entered the town on the first day of the Soviet–German war, June 22, more than two thousand freed prisoners returned to their homes. Meanwhile, trains had left for the east with their wives, parents, and children, who had all been arrested.

  Pogroms took place in dozens of villages in the region at the end of June and beginning of July 1941. Most testimonies say that the newly freed prisoners—activists of the prewar National Party—took part in them.

  Journal

  MARCH 29, 2001

  Jan Skrodzki and I set off for Radziłów. Entering the town, I no longer notice the flaking plaster and crooked pavement—I begin to see the beauty of the simple wooden architecture of the old squat Jewish homes. It wasn’t until I had seen them on Gutstein’s website that I could appreciate them in real life.

  Jan and I are going back to see the childhood friend of his whom we visited last time. This time Jan tells her straight out that we’ve come to find out the truth about the massacre. “It was the Poles who did the killing,” he announces, and Eugenia K., who has not left the town in seventy years, expresses polite surprise: “Not the Germans? Lordy me!” And changes the subject.

  I become aware in Radziłów, where Jan Skrodzki introduces me as his cousin, that when we speak to people without a direct connection to the crime, their emotions remain tepid. This indifference is usually shaded one way or another, friendly or hostile, but it is indifference more than anything else. Only in Jedwabne, which is under fire from the media and where my role is that of a journalist, does the community seem split between those who have carried the hatred of that time across sixty years into today’s world, and those who, in their sleep, can still hear the victims screaming.

  The topic that raises the residents’ tempers is the postwar period. They can spend hours going over old ground: who was killed, when and why, and on whose orders. There was practically a civil war in these parts. Not only representatives of the new Communist order were killed. Many people lost their lives around here in fratricidal battles between various offshoots of the underground. The partisans fought each other, and in the course of those battles, women and children were sometimes killed. In the surrounding villages, the residents kept night watches so as not to be taken by surprise.

  This is the special painful history of the Polish inhabitants of these lands, their very own remembered fear. The story of the burning barn is someone else’s history.

  Two heroic tales stand out.

  One is about the partisans’ takeover of Grajewo, when on May 8, 1945, two hundred underground soldiers came into town, let prisoners out of jail, destroyed local documents in the possession of the secret police, and occupied the treasury and the district administration building.

  The second was when Jedwabne freed itself from Communist power for one day, four years later, on September 23, 1949. An underground group took over the municipal offices and then summoned the residents to a gathering where they were urged to fight the Communists.

  Cytrynowicz remembers it well: “They took a car from butchers going to market. They drove it into the marketplace. Twelve of them, in English uniforms. They announced that the British army was in Poland, Warsaw was in revolution, and the Communist government had fallen. People stormed the co-ops, mainly grabbing vodka.”

  In the journal Karta I read the story of “Wiarus,” also known as Crazy Staszek, a.k.a. Stanisław Grabowski, commander of the National Armed Forces unit that led the operation. Grabowski’s group smashed up two shops and the municipality offices, then they convened a meeting and called for a fight against the Communists. Terrified police didn’t intervene and the unit left town quietly after the meeting. In 1951 partisans attacked a bus to Jedwabne on which a cashier was traveling with money. They ordered the passenger to read out a flyer saying that Stalin “wants hunger and cold.”

  Everyone in the
area knows the pseudonyms of the last partisans. “July” fought up to 1952, “Groove” to 1954, “Fish” to 1957. They were killed when their fellow partisans betrayed them, and often by a brother’s bullet.

  “By day you were scared of the secret police, who came to arrest you for real or alleged help to the underground, and at night you were scared of the partisans,” Jan Skrodzki and I were told by Skrodzki’s relative Edward Borawski when we visited him in Trzaski.

  “The guys from the National Armed Forces mainly went in for looting,” Stanisław Ramotowski told me. “A lot of men around here were in the National Armed Forces, not from Kramarzewo and Kiliany, those were always decent towns, but from Żebry and Kownatki, sure.”

  Several more times in conversations I came across that mention of “decent” villages where people joined the Home Army, and bad ones where the National Armed Forces held sway.

  A resident of Radziłów told me, “The National Armed Forces were active here, but I never heard of them carrying out any operation against the Germans. They were called a ‘gang of thieves.’”

  These two narratives, of the heroes and the villains, are not entirely independent of each other. It was often units led by underground heroes who looted and robbed; their leaders were not able to discipline those under their command, and in time they joined in.

  The day after tomorrow my article on present-day Jedwabne, “Please Don’t Come Back,” is to appear in the Gazeta. From early morning I’m traveling between Radziłów, where I leave Jan Skrodzki for the moment, and Jedwabne, where I’m still fact-checking and getting authorization for quotes. Later I drive up on a hill outside of Radziłów, where there’s a cell phone signal and I can dictate corrections over the phone.