The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “There’s no use pretending, we still have anti-Semitism here. I always hoped the atrocity would be brought to light. But I never suspected the case would take on the proportions it has, that it would turn into a political game, a driving force for nationalist groups.”

  Przechodzki comments on statements by the witnesses that typically appear in right-wing publications (and are quoted by the historian Tomasz Strzembosz as well): “In Our Daily, Ryszard Malczyński tells us he saw from the church tower Germans rounding up Jews. What was Mr. Malczyński doing in that tower? He says the priest had told him to fix a roof tile. It’s 10 a.m. on July 10, 1941, and the priest tells him to mend the roof? Franciszek Karwowski claims in the same article: ‘On the morning of July 10 my father heard that the Germans were to destroy the Jews in Jedwabne that day. So he harnessed a horse, because he wanted to retrieve a scale he’d lent to [the Jew] Kosacki.’ So Karwowski’s father knew in a village several kilometers from Jedwabne that they were going to kill the Jews, and the priest didn’t know and decided it was the right day for fixing the roof? Jadwiga Kordasowa, née Wąsowska, a teenager at the time, went to the site of the massacre three days after the burning, to the threshing floor. She remembers: ‘At the northwest apex, a pyramid of bodies, almost up to the ceiling.’ She, a young girl, went to the barn after they perished? What psychic resilience it would have taken to go there of one’s own will. Leon Dziedzic, who was forced to go there, says that when they were removing the bodies, each one of them vomited dozens of times. Why did she go there? We know some of the people in Jedwabne went to the barn to loot.”

  Przechodzki goes on: “I’ve been reminded of the 1949 trial and how witnesses were intimidated. They were threatened that if they didn’t withdraw their testimonies they would see their own bodies in coffins. The secret police was in Łomża, far away, and neighbors were right next door. They were afraid of no one as much as their neighbors. A witness was going to go home after he gave evidence and wanted to wake up the next morning. And what was going on after the war? A great many assassinations, families settling scores, and some were about Jewish property. Today the same atmosphere of intimidation prevails in Jedwabne. Doesn’t that show you the scale of the crime, if there’s still intimidation sixty years on? It means some of the witnesses don’t pass on information to the Institute of National Remembrance or they give false testimony. I think that people who try to intimidate witnesses should be aware of the legal consequences. To my mind the role of a priest in a town like Jedwabne should be telling people, ‘It wasn’t you who did this, but the generation of your fathers. They didn’t make a reckoning, so it falls to you to do so. If you lie, how will you stand before God?’ Defending murderers and falsifying facts now makes you an accomplice to the crime. Participating in a lie, I would feel as if I’d taken part in that massacre, because the dead can’t rise again to tell us how they were murdered.”

  APRIL 6, 2001

  Yesterday the newspapers carried as their main news story that the crime in Jedwadne was carried out by the Germans. Today it’s in all the headlines. All because Professor Edmund Dmitrów of the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance said that he found in the German archives that the crime in Jedwabne could have been led by Hermann Schaper, commando leader from Ciechanów, because he was in Radziłów.

  I read about Schaper in Chaja Finkelsztejn’s Yad Vashem testimony. Her testimony was the basis for the initiation of proceedings against Schaper. Chaja saw him that day in the marketplace, and she recognized him twenty years later from a photograph. But she states clearly that two cars with Germans, Schaper among them, arrived in the morning and left soon after, leaving the residents to deal with the Jews themselves. Without that knowledge I could easily believe it was all the work of some Schaper. I think bitterly that no one will believe Przechodzki, now that there’s a more palatable truth being offered.

  APRIL 7, 2001

  An event dedicated to Jedwabne in the crypt of a Warsaw church on Chłodna Street. “This is about the martyrology of the Polish people,” says historian Andrzej Leszek Szcześniak. “They are trying to take that martyrology away from us. It’s a theft of suffering. The hysteria around Jedwabne is aimed at shocking Poles and extracting sixty-five billion dollars from our people in the framework of the Holocaust business.”

  I know Szcześniak well. The author of history textbooks, on which he had a monopoly in Communist times, he has deftly opened a path for himself from Communist times to the Poland of today under the guise of nationalism, changing only the adjectives in his textbooks (for example, the word “thriving,” which in People’s Poland belonged to the “revolutionary movement,” has come to describe “independence movements,” and instead of a “diligent and modest” Lenin we now have a “ruthless and cunning” Stalin). I’ve done battle with him in the pages of the Gazeta with my sister, Marysia Kruczkowska, pointing out, among other things, the anti-Semitism that suffuses his books. After our piece was published, more than two hundred scholars, artists, and writers protested to the Education Ministry against teaching the young from his textbooks. But an equally large group immediately stepped forward with a letter defending the textbook and the “Polish values” contained in it.

  Bohdan Poręba, a film director known for his anti-Semitic views, introduces himself as a friend of Father Orłowski of Jedwabne: “The lady who hid seven Jews says she was beaten. Most of those seven went to work for the Communist secret police. She was thrashed for being on the side of the secret police [applause in the hall]. It was slaughter all around at that time. Let’s count the corpses frozen in Siberia and people tortured by the Jewish secret police. Reconciliation is possible, but not by our licking their boots. Let’s talk about Jewish crimes [applause]. We’re not discussing what happened sixty years ago. We’re discussing whether we’re going to be able to breathe. The people have been humiliated. The idea of a Polish state without Poles is back.”

  For Bohdan Poręba the actions of world Jewry constitute a coherent course whose aim is “to crush the Polish people.” That’s why the publicizing of Jedwabne and the publication of the “famous anti-Polish comic book Maus, where Poles are pigs,” were planned to coincide.

  In the early 1990s my then husband, Piotr Bikont, was encouraged by Lawrence Weschler to translate Maus: Story of a Survivor, Art Spiegelman’s graphic account of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust. Weschler, then a writer for The New Yorker, had introduced us to Spiegelman. A major Polish publisher acquired the rights to the book, and then for ten years couldn’t decide whether to publish it or not. Apparently several respected individuals, called in for expert advice, criticized the book for its “anti-Polishness.” Maus, whose main story takes place in Poland, had already been translated into many languages, when unexpectedly two young people who founded the publishing house POST in Krakow contacted Piotr, saying they wanted to publish it. And so by a complete coincidence Maus was published at the same time that the discussions about Jedwabne were raging.

  “There’s no point in debating Anna Bikont’s vile insinuations,” one of the panelists cries out. “Nothing happened in Jedwabne to justify one of Adam Michnik’s hacks leveling base accusations at the National Party. We’ll defend ourselves and unmask the lies of Jewish chauvinists.”

  The assembled decided to convene a Committee to Defend the Honor and Dignity of the Polish Nation, and wound up the gathering by singing the patriotic song “Rota” (Oath).

  APRIL 9, 2001

  In the Washington-based weekly The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier’s response to an article by Adam Michnik: “My friend has produced a contorted moral calculation … Michnik begins by reminding his readers that the Poles were also victims … And Michnik repairs also to the Poles who rescued Jews during the war … ‘Do the murderers deserve more recognition than the righteous?’ Michnik asks. Well, yes, they do, because there were many more of them (I write this as the grateful son of a Jewish woman who was saved by Poles) … I am puzzled by the
haggling tone of his reckoning with Jedwabne.”

  APRIL 10, 2001

  In the Gazeta editorial offices I read letters sent to me after my piece today on Jedwabne: “Woman, what’s keeping you in Poland? May you be consumed by hellfire for your perversity and lies. Poland for the Poles”; “Miss Bikont, Jewess possessed by crazy anti-Polonism, we’ll be meeting soon. A kamikaze has already been assigned to you”; “You’ve managed to ignite a Polish-Jewish war in your newspaper. A few more such stories in your pages, and I’ll become an anti-Semite, I already associate Jews with lying and swindling.”

  One letter is written in a radically different tone, and it is the only one signed: “After your report I howl and cry. Enough hatred toward other nationalities. When I was five years old I lost my mother, and I was the fifth child in our family. It wasn’t the priest who came to our aid in that difficult situation but Icek Borensztajn—that’s a name I’ll never forget. I’m letting you know that I’ll be in Jedwabne on July 10. Anna Mazurkiewicz, Wrocław.”

  APRIL 12, 2001

  Father Henryk Jankowski of the Church of St. Brigid—where in the time of Solidarity and martial law, the Lord’s Tomb was used to convey bold political statements—has joined in the discussion on Jedwabne, not for the first time, and given full rein to his anti-Semitism, presenting a partially burned miniature barn as the Lord’s Tomb with a skeleton rising from it and the inscriptions: The Jews killed Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us, too and Poles, rescue Poland.

  APRIL 13, 2001

  I’m on my way to Gdańsk, where Jan Skrodzki and I have arranged to meet Antoni Olszewski from Radziłów. He knows a lot. Olszewski keeps saying as we talk, “This wickedness happened in a Christian country.” We find out from him that Klimaszewski, the man who set fire to the Radziłów barn and whom we looked for in Ełk, is dead.

  APRIL 18, 2001

  Jedwabne. A little right-wing publication left in the church prints letters sent to Father Orłowski: “During the two years of Soviet-Jewish power the Jews of Jedwabne systematically deported hundreds of Polish families, and not one Jewish family. The lists were drawn up in the temple under supervision of the rabbi.” The witness goes on to write that his family hid a Jew on July 10.

  This is classic. It’s almost impossible to find an anti-Semite in Jedwabne who doesn’t maintain that his family hid a Jew. The people who really hid Jews at that time are still too scared to speak about it.

  I’ve tried to meet with Jerzy Ramotowski several times since I read his remarks in the weekly Contacts: “From July 10, 1941, on, the names of the perpetrators were an open secret.” It’s from him that Tocki, the chief editor of Contacts, heard of the grim secret of Jedwabne back in the eighties.

  This local history teacher, now retired, is the one person who was always interested in the crime committed so many years ago and who collected accounts. He met with Gross. From then on he sometimes came home from the Relax bar roughed up. Because Jerzy Ramotowski knows a lot and drinks a lot. I’ve heard that after he was beaten up by his bar buddies, he started speaking with the voice of the Jedwabne deniers. I’m still determined to meet with him. I’ve made several appointments to see him, waited in the agreed-upon place, but he never shows up. He doesn’t this time, either.

  I drop by Godlewski, who is very tense. For some time negotiations have been going on with Henryk Biedrzycki, the heir of Bronisław Śleszyński, owner of the barn and the surrounding land. In the sixties, when the authorities came to build a monument, the parcel of land was purchased by the treasury. Surveys have shown that the Jews’ mass grave extends beyond the terrain indicated at that time, and an additional piece of land must be acquired. The provincial governor’s office has assessed the land to be worth thirty thousand zlotys. Meanwhile, the anti-Semitic publisher Leszek Bubel has offered a hundred thousand dollars. Obviously Biedrzycki preferred Bubel, both in terms of the price and the political views they share. However, he has proposed to the government that he’ll sell them the land for a hundred thousand, naturally, because why would he sell at a loss? And he will do it under the condition that in a year’s time, the groundskeeping be handed over to the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne. The plan is to erect an adjacent monument to the memory of Poles killed by Jews. Bubel has no doubt this plan will be readily accepted by the town council.

  The same things are constantly repeated in Jedwabne: it’s all about money; Gross and journalists, false witnesses and world Jewry are enriching themselves at the expense of the townspeople. Meanwhile, it seems that the only person who has a chance of getting rich is the grandson of the farmer who made his barn available for the burning of Jews.

  I manage to cross Janina Biedrzycka’s threshold to ask her about the Germans rebuilding her father’s barn. But I get nowhere.

  “That’s nonsense. The Germans did the burning, and the Jews denounced Poles to the Soviets. I saw it with my own eyes. I’m so upset about all this, because I simply hate lies.”

  Not only did Biedrzycka see Jews writing nonexistent denunciations with her own eyes, she also heard nonexistent Germans addressing the Jews through a megaphone in the market square on the morning of July 10, 1941. She was told what they were saying by a Jewish friend whom she’d taken into hiding in her attic: that the Jews were to be put on a labor transport and should form groups of four. She saw them obediently forming groups.

  I learn that my interview with Przechodzki is having an entirely different effect than I’d hoped. Slander has been spreading about his father, how he took part in looting and got rich on Jewish gold. Exactly the same as the Dziedzices. When it got around that Leszek was talking to journalists about the massacre, people started to say that his father had dug up gold teeth out of the ashes. As soon as anyone lifts the veil of secrecy an inch, he or his family is immediately accused of participating in the crime.

  An acquaintance tells me about a conversation with Krystyna N., who said no one was going to go to the ceremony because the whole thing was just about money. When I spoke to her in March she claimed the town was split into two camps, but there were more who felt sorry for the murder victims. It looks like she’s stopped feeling sorry.

  On the way back to Warsaw I stop off at Przestrzele.

  “We’ve finally decided to leave Poland,” says Leszek Dziedzic. “We’ll stay to go to the ceremony. It’s not just about the attacks on us, but the whole atmosphere.”

  I’m not surprised. The other target of the smear campaign is the mayor, who is also thinking more and more of emigrating.

  APRIL 19, 2001

  With my daughters Ola and Maniucha and some friends I’ve set off for a few days in the Tatra Mountains, in the Five Lakes Valley. We’re just coming up to the last stretch before the shelter when my cell phone, which isn’t even supposed to have reception here, rings. It’s Stanisław Ramotowski, who’s feeling very poorly. I don’t know by what miracle I manage to get my sister, Marysia Kruczkowska, on the phone, but she promises to go to see him immediately.

  APRIL 22, 2001

  Back in Warsaw. At the hospital where my sister has brought Ramotowski, I hear Stanisław has had a heart attack. Even worse, his X-ray showed a spot indicating lung cancer. Two months ago the film showed nothing.

  APRIL 24, 2001

  In the room at the Jewish Historical Institute that houses the files on the Righteous Among the Nations, I search for documents on the Wyrzykowskis of Janczewko, who sheltered seven Jews. I find a 1963 letter from Mosze Olszewicz about awarding the Wyrzykowskis the medal of the Righteous Among the Nations. There is also a letter from Antonina Wyrzykowska: “I hid seven people for 28 months under the manure in our pigsty. I emphasize they didn’t have a penny. For me it wasn’t about money, but about saving human lives, it wasn’t about religion, just about people. After the liberation I was beaten more than once and they, too, were under threat, so I had to leave the area where I was born.”

  There’s correspondence from the Lewins of Wizna related to th
e recognition of the Dobkowskis of Zanklewo. The whole family is registered at Yad Vashem, the Dobkowskis’ parents and their three sons, among them the Zanklewo farmer I visited in December last year and his brothers. They received medals; their parents had already died. There’s a letter from the brothers: “In May 1945, our family was subject to an act of revenge carried out by unidentified partisan units for having sheltered the Lewin family. The action consisted of beating and abusing our father and taking away all our possessions and leaving the family without means to live.”

  I found the address of one of the brothers, Wincenty Dobkowski, in the correspondence. In the evening I call him in Ełk. “Such filth, such lies are being spouted now. And why?” Dobkowski says nervously. “So there were some thugs in Jedwabne. They put twelve men on trial, the ones the Germans sent out and forced to stand guard over the Jews. I respect Israelis, but then you also have to say what the Jews did under the Soviet occupation. How can they say the Polish people did it? Our peoples should be reconciled, anti-Semitism shouldn’t be stirred up again.”

  I tell him I’m going to Israel, where I’m visiting the Lewin siblings, whose address I got from his brother in Zanklewo. As soon as he starts to speak of Izaak and Ida—or Janek and Tereska, as they were called when they were in hiding—Wincenty Dobkowski’s voice softens.

  “You have to meet each of them separately, because they don’t speak to each other. They quarreled over their mother’s inheritance. Such a pity, there’s just the two of them in the world and they went through such hard times together.”

  APRIL 25, 2001

  In an anti-Semitic rag with the telling name Nasza Polska (Our Poland), I read an interview with a woman from Jedwabne who now lives in Toronto. “My brothers and sisters and I were lying on the floor at home, throwing up,” she says of the time right after the burning of the Jews. “There was a nauseating smoke spreading across all of Jedwabne, carried by the wind, penetrating into houses, poisoning everything.” She was ten years old at the time, living on Przytulska Street. At 3:00 p.m. she had gone out with her mother to visit an aunt who lived on Cmentarna Street, and they saw the procession of Jews with the rabbi at the front, carrying his hat on a stick.