The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  On the road from Radziłów to Jedwabne I receive a message from Dr. Noszczyk, saying Ramotowski is being quite impossible, demanding he be discharged from the hospital despite the severity of his condition. I point out to the doctor that if Ramotowski hadn’t been so unbearably stubborn, he would never have rescued his Jewish wife to spite the whole town.

  MARCH 30, 2001

  Jan Skrodzki and I drive to Grajewo, about thirty kilometers from Radziłów, to see Jan J., the older brother of a school friend of Jan’s. His wife, furious, spews anti-Semitic jokes. We hear that Leon Kosmaczewski is most certainly still alive, and we are given his address in Ełk.

  “He keeps bees, a peaceful man, never hurt a fly,” Jan J. says of Kosmaczewski. Jan J. can’t be unaware that he is speaking of one of the chief murderers of July 7, 1941. Another beekeeper, like the Laudański brothers.

  We set off for Ełk at once, it’s very near Grajewo. But we discover that Kosmaczewski died two years ago; we find only his daughter.

  We go on looking for Klimaszewski, the man who set the barn in Radziłów on fire. We’ve heard he later joined the Home Army and was active in the veterans association in Ełk. We got his address from the phone book. We drive there: dilapidated apartment blocks, no one opens the door. Skrodzki learns from the neighbors that the tenant died two years ago. But he gets into a long conversation, as always, from which we learn that the Klimaszewski who lived there was in the Home Army and veterans association but he couldn’t have been the one we’re looking for because he was much older. We’ll keep looking. We know one of the people we talked to met him not so long ago at a sanatorium, so we’re counting on him being alive. Luckily Skrodzki shows no sign of being bored with our search. He is used to the large number of dead-end roads you go down before you find witnesses.

  Tomorrow the Gazeta is printing my piece on “Jedwabne Today,” with extensive quotes from Stanisław P. He told me his story about the massacre while expressing a wish to remain anonymous, like others I’ve talked to. He is from a family that has lived on the market square in Jedwabne since the mid-nineteenth century.

  “On July 10,” he told me, “Father hid in the garden and then in the attic at my grandmother’s house on November 11 Street, which is now Sadowa Street. I have to make it clear he was hiding from Poles, so they wouldn’t force him to go and kill Jews. My parents didn’t know the Jews would be herded right by where they were hiding. My mother, when she saw the march of death, took my older sister and fled in the direction of Łomża. Mother remembered that screaming up to a few days before she died, and when she heard it, she was already far from the barn. If my parents, who lived in the eye of the cyclone, were able to get away from the market unhindered, it means it was possible for people not to take part in the massacre. It’s not true that the Poles were held at gunpoint by the Germans. No one forced anyone. Maybe some German was standing on the sidelines somewhere, but Mother didn’t see any. She passed freely through Jedwabne with her child. There may have been a dozen policemen watching what was going on, but no big military force came to town. It was the Laudańskis who did it, among others. On the day of the massacre they went by Polish homes, saying, ‘Come with us. You’re either for us or against us.’ The whole town knew the part they played. My family didn’t tell me about violent scenes. Once Mother, showing me a photo of her seventh-grade class, pointed out her Jewish friends: ‘She was burned, and she was burned, and this girl had her throat cut.’ I came to this knowledge gradually, and I didn’t learn about many events until the seventies, when I started asking the witnesses myself. In 1980, I started working at the Łomża governor’s office and one of the employees there, who had been a teacher in Jedwabne, told me about the burning of the barn and the murders committed elsewhere. He gave names and details. He told me about Kubrzyniecki—how he chose his victims from the Jews rounded up. Later I heard from another witness who said he had gone to his privy and found a Jew there with his throat cut, still alive and gasping for breath. Discussions about how many people fitted into the barn are ridiculous. There was killing on almost every street and in many yards. And what happened by the pond? Corn grew thick there and people combed through it and if they found a Jew they’d drown him. Jews were drowned in wells, too. It’s known who killed whom, they weren’t quiet murders, everything took place in broad daylight. ‘When a Yid was caught in the fields he was buried on the spot’: that’s what the people of Jedwabne tell you themselves. The barn was still burning when some of the locals started grabbing Jewish property. What conscience does a woman have who stole a feather quilt when it was still warm, or dragged out a poor neighbor’s clothes? They say now that the Germans took the stuff and carted it off. Those rags and ruins? The Germans took antiques and furs from the Warsaw residences of lawyers and industrialists.”

  I decided I’d try to convince him to appear under his full name. In Jedwabne itself I don’t encourage anyone to reveal their personal details, but with Stanisław P. it’s different. He left the town in the eighties. He’s one of the few who achieved something substantial, finished their education, have a high status in their profession. His voice must mean something to the townspeople. But I can’t get through to him anymore. Just before I send my piece to the printer, between the first and second proofs, I call the paper to tell them to cut all his statements from the piece. I’ll ask him for a separate interview for the Gazeta. Maybe an interview like that will give someone in Jedwabne something to think about.

  Stanisław P. had pointed out to me that it makes no sense to get worked up about the fact that an atrocity like this didn’t become public knowledge for sixty years. “After 1945, even talk about the Russians deporting people to Siberia was taboo, not just officially, but in family circles. I remember the disbelief of my fellow students when I told them that where I came from, near Łomża, we were under Soviet occupation in the years 1939 to 1941. Sure, they knew Stalin occupied Lvov and Vilnius, but that he got as far as Białystok or Łomża, that they wouldn’t believe. The Soviets distorted all that history, not just Jedwabne.”

  Today the papers write that four Mauser rifle cartridges have been found on the grounds of the barn.

  “This confirms those people were shot,” Minister Przewoźnik declares.

  None of the people I talked to, who say there were a lot of Germans, ever mentioned shooting. I call Ignatiew and tell him this. He doesn’t contradict me, so apparently his witnesses hadn’t mentioned shooting, either.

  APRIL 1, 2001

  Back to Warsaw in the morning. I’m turning the key in the apartment door when the phone rings. Yet another person full of noble intentions explains to me that putting Jedwabne in the spotlight is causing a trauma the locals don’t deserve, especially those whose families took part in the massacre. Something simply must be done to help—therapists, priests. I feel how reluctantly the caller listens to what I have to say: that the people whose families took part in the massacre feel just fine, better at any rate than those whose families helped Jews, and maybe it is the latter who are more in need of support.

  Father Czesław Bartnik in the largest Polish Catholic newspaper, Our Daily: “In Poland national minorities are still causing wounds to fester, especially Jews. The Polish ship is going down.”

  APRIL 2, 2001

  The Institute of National Remembrance has initiated an investigation into the massacre in Radziłów. “Finally!” Jose Gutstein, the author of the Radziłów website, e-mails me from Miami. “And so—may I put a request to you? Will you help them? I wrote to Director Kieres of the Institute of National Remembrance, offering my help. I asked them to include Radziłów in the ceremony. It was probably the Radziłów massacre that ‘inspired’ the people of Jedwabne. It would be a shame if Radziłów were excluded from the program of commemoration.”

  The Gazeta is printing “More of the Bad Kind,” my interview with Stanisław Ramotowski. It begins with my asking him if he thinks it’s a good thing the institute opened the investigation. Ram
otowski sighs. “Oh my God, it’s so good.” But he still won’t yield to my urgings and give testimony to prosecutor Ignatiew. I can’t understand why he tried to resurrect the truth his whole life if he doesn’t want to report it in testimony for the Institute of National Remembrance, which will have greater historical weight than my reports. He in turn can’t grasp why I’m giving him such a hard time about it. He’s never told anyone what he learned—never, no one. I have the feeling with other interviewees that I am freeing them from the burden of carrying the truth alone. Stanisław claims he’s telling me all of what he knows just because he’s come to like me.

  The historian Tomasz Strzembosz wrote a letter to the Gazeta saying that I accused him of trying to use Jewish collaboration with the Soviets as an explanation for the Jedwabne masscre. He called it an insinuation.

  I sit down to reply to him: “I am very sorry if what I wrote upset you. It didn’t enter my mind that to write that a historian explaining something is an insinuation. On the contrary, I thought the explanation of phenomena was one of the fundamental responsibilities of a scholar. If the main theme you touch on in the context of Jedwabne is Jewish collaboration with the NKVD, I take it that you are trying in that way to explain the crime to your readers. Just as I, writing about Jedwabne, quote extensively from the prewar anti-Semitic diocesan press, and not at random. I am trying to find some partial explanation of the massacre.”

  In Our Daily, recollections of wartime Jedwabne from Leokadia Błaszczak, who now lives in Warsaw. She writes about the Soviet occupation, when “Jews supplied the Soviets with lists of names of Polish ‘enemies of the people’—prewar policemen, military men—and later took over their homes and belongings.” I have never heard of such a case in Jedwabne. Here you have Freudian projection in its purest form. It was Poles who took over Jewish property in Jedwabne.

  According to her version, on July 10, 1941, paddy wagons appeared in the market square and uniformed Germans soldiers jumped out of them. She then went with her younger brother to watch what was happening. She saw Polish boys rounded up by Germans with birch whips in their hands, “defenseless, terrified little boys, forced to stand guard by Germans armed with rifles.” She walked along with the Jews to the barn, where the Germans who escorted them chased the non-Jewish children away.

  She thinks the vilest thing about the whole story is the fact that “Szmul Wasersztejn, a longtime secret police investigator, quietly left for Israel in March 1968 like the worst Judas without suffering any consequences for having tortured Polish patriots, handed over innocent Poles to the secret police on the charge of having ‘participated in the slaughter of Jews.’ But the 19-year-old Jerzy Laudański, a fine man and fierce patriot, a soldier with the Home Army, prisoner of the Pawiak prison, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, who under torture betrayed no one, was arrested after he returned to his fatherland and subjected to horrific torture in secret police dungeons … Jan Gross, who isn’t fit to lick the boots of this hero of the struggle against Hitler, of a concentration camp martyr like Jerzy Laudański, permits himself—in a miserable little book worthy of the gutter press—to slander the name of Laudański and that of other noble Poles of Jedwabne.”

  Leokadia Błaszczak is the daughter of Franciszek Lusiński, named among participants in the massacre—his name appeared in testimonies in 1949 (which also mention her brother, then sixteen years old and sharing his father’s name, Franciszek, as being one of those who took part in driving Jews into the marketplace). I myself have heard the name Lusiński several times in interviews:

  “Lusiński dragged a Jew from the group being marched to the barn and killed him in front of his own smithy.”

  “Franciszek Lusiński boasted that when he struck the Jew hard with a hammer or die, the man flew a meter into the air before he fell down dead.”

  APRIL 3, 2001

  At a scholarly conference on “The Other in Literature and Culture,” I hear a talk by cultural anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir: “The Jew as Witch, the Witch as Jew, or How to Read Interrogation Transcripts.” Tokarska-Bakir describes the demonization of Jews and the Judaization of witches on the basis of trials conducted in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in what is now Lower Silesia. She analyzes how the two categories were confused at that time, witches accused of profaning the Host and abducting Christian infants (to use their blood in making ointments, maści, instead of matzo, maca), and Jews accused of conducting clandestine rituals as well as engaging in sodomy, cannibalism, and metamorphoses into cats.

  Wherever I go, the subject I’ve chosen offers me new paths of inquiry. Especially since a bizarre confusion of mind on the subject of Jews and their customs reigns in Jedwabne and its environs, and after many centuries people still seem to think it obvious that Jews use Christian children to make matzo.

  In the afternoon, Stanisław Ramotowski and I set off for Kramarzewo—he wants to sit on his porch and watch the brook rushing by his cottage.

  APRIL 4, 2001

  At seven in the morning I’m woken by the phone. It’s Ramotowski telling me we’ve got to return to Warsaw immediately. I get in my car and drive over to see him. He’s heard from his nephew what’s being said about him in town and that the priest has been looking for him, probably in order to shut him up. He’s had enough. I remind him we still have his bank and insurance affairs to sort out.

  I begin the day with a visit to Łomża. I’ve managed to persuade Stanisław P. to let me publish an interview with him under his own name. Stanisław Przechodzki is the director of the Podlasie District Public Health Center. I sent him the text earlier, and am due to get his authorization at 9:00 a.m. The text will appear in the Gazeta tomorrow. But now we have a deadlock. In his conversation with me, Przechodzki pronounced on various general topics, like the necessity of respecting other peoples and faiths. Now he has rewritten the interview, keeping these general views in but cutting out both the emotional content and the factual description of the crime. The new version of the piece makes no sense at all. In the end we return to my version.

  I look in on Ramotowski in Kramarzewo and drag him out of the house so he can show me where the Jewish cemetery used to be. Skrodzki and I couldn’t find it. Pointing to a field outside the town, he says disapprovingly: “Sowing crops in a cemetery doesn’t bother them, either.”

  In the evening I’m in Jedwabne at the Godlewskis’. I learn that there was a closed meeting of the town council with the governor today on the matter of financing an access road to the massacre site. The governor said that according to public finance regulations, a donation from the highest level of government could not exceed 75 percent of the projected cost, so Jedwabne has to pay 25 percent. Krzysztof Godlewski explains to me that this is a big opportunity: after the ceremony the guests will leave, but the asphalt roads will stay, and the town will be able to pave the marketplace in the bargain and modernize the sewage system. But proposing to the council members that they lay out 25 percent “for the Jews” is like waving a red cloth in front of a bull.

  APRIL 5, 2001

  Driving to get Ramotowski I stop by a school in Radziłów on the way. I ask whether in connection with all the recent media attention, they have figured out how to discuss Jedwabne with the schoolchildren.

  “Neither the pupils nor the teachers have given me any sign that we should talk about the whole business at school,” says the nice young headmistress, who seems taken aback by my question. The school has a website; you can tell the school webmaster has put a lot into it. I click on “The History of Radziłów” and read that “a group of killers from the Grajewo unit of the Einsatzkommando 8, led by Karl Strohammer, came one day in trucks, chased the Jews into a barn, and set it on fire.” There’s not even a date.

  I drive to Kramarzewo. Today I’m taking Stanisław Ramotowski back to Warsaw. At the moment, he’s hiding in his nephew’s room off the kitchen. Yesterday Agnieszka Arnold’s documentary on Jedwabne and Radziłów (which included my interview with hi
m) was shown on TV, and by early morning two cars had appeared in the courtyard—the local radio and a foreign TV crew. His nephew told them his uncle wasn’t home. We drive through Jedwabne and visit the Dziedzices in Przestrzele. Leszek’s wife, Ewa, whose husband also appeared in the documentary, has spent the last two nights crying for fear their house will be burned down. Sixty years after the fact, Ramotowski, Righteous Among the Nations, and Leszek Dziedzic, whose grandmother sheltered Szmul Wasersztejn, feel compelled to hide from their neighbors after showing their faces on television.

  Back in Warsaw, before going to sleep, I read my interview with Stanisław Przechodzki, published in today’s Gazeta. Seeing it in print I’m even more impressed by his courage.

  “First, the Germans gave permission for it. Second, before the war there were powerful National Party influences, and numerous anti-Jewish excesses took place. Third, there was an active group of people led by Mayor Karolak ready for a pogrom, and they hatched a plan and incited the rest of the townspeople by saying, ‘Look, it turned out well in Radziłów, they’re rid of the problem.’ And finally, fourth, Satan got into the town. It’s probably just the way human nature works, when a man sees a lot of bloodshed, pain, and suffering around him, it makes him an even worse person. Today the problem of the victims has vanished. Leon Dziedzic, who was ordered to bury bodies, told how they were intertwined with each other like roots, you couldn’t separate them. It was mothers who died there, with their children clasped to their chests! And no one’s conscience is bothered by it, because those weren’t human beings but Jews. And Jewish traitors, to boot, who’d denounced people to the NKVD. I never heard that before,” Przechodzki stresses, “the deportations to Siberia being blamed on the Jews. In Jedwabne it was Poles who did most of the denouncing.