The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Why did they go out at precisely that moment to see the aunt who lived on the route of the Jews’ march? Evidently they wanted to get a look. This is the umpteenth time I hear of parents letting their children watch the scene of the Jews being rounded up in the market square. This is the ludic dimension of the massacre.

  MAY 4, 2001

  “For Our Sins and Yours”—the front-page headline of the Gazeta conveys perfectly the meaning of the primate’s speech at Jasna Góra. Józef Glemp announced that a formal apology for Jedwabne will be made in Warsaw on May 27. At the ceremony, the Episcopal Convention will pray—he stressed—not only for the Jewish victims in Jedwabne but also “for the evil visited upon Polish citizens of the Catholic faith, in which Poles of the Jewish faith took part … The Poles,” the primate continued, “were also wronged … suffered from evil perpetrated by Jews, including during the period when Communism was introduced in Poland. I expect the Jewish side to make a reckoning with its conscience and bring itself to apologize to the Poles for those crimes.”

  MAY 9, 2001

  At Jacek Kuroń’s. When I last visited him in the hospital we talked about the interview given to the Gazeta by the éminence grise of the National Party movement in the new Poland, the current justice minister, Wiesław Chrzanowski. To the question of whether the deaths of Jews who lived in Jedwabne should weigh on the conscience of the interwar nationalist movement, Chrzanowski replied, “Why that again? Why would it weigh on our conscience? There weren’t even any National Party members there.” This part of the conversation enraged Jacek. He showed me a passage where Chrzanowski says the bastion of the nationalist movement before World War I and between the wars was the Podlasie region.

  “But that’s exactly where Jedwabne and Radziłów are,” Jacek fumes. “He says it was there that the activities of educational institutions created by the National Party had their greatest results. And he doesn’t see what those results were!” He reads me the article he has prepared for the Gazeta against Chrzanowski’s theses “on the beneficial influence of the educational work of the National Party”: “The Institute of National Remembrance is currently conducting an investigation into the massacre in Jedwabne and trying to determine what role the German occupying forces played in it. They certainly had a role, but that is a marginal factor in the face of the century-long educational campaign of Polish national hatred.”

  I’ve given Jacek a running account of my reading in the regional prewar diocesan press and told him about the processions dominated by the National Party, which culminated in the demolition of Jewish shops. Jacek carefully notes down the names of the towns where such violent excesses occurred: Wąsosz, Radziłów, Jedwabne, Szczuczyn, Grajewo, Tykocin, Kolno, Suchowola, Wizna, Zaręby Kościelne. He wants to add them to his text. Jacek, who for years furnished the Western media with detailed information on the Communist state repression of the Committee in Defense of the Workers (KOR), well knows that general statements sound stronger when they are grounded in fact.

  MAY 10, 2001

  I read documents in the court case against the Radziłów killer Henryk Dziekoński obtained by the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance. I try to decipher the clumsy handwriting of the person taking down testimony.

  “We received an order from the Gestapo to round up the Jews in the market and torment them,” the accused begins. “We responded very eagerly and compliantly to the order.” His detailed account of the eager and compliant execution of the order must have surprised the court in Białystok: they sent him for psychiatric testing.

  MAY 12, 2001

  With Jan Skrodzki, whose main occupation for several months now has been helping me find witnesses to the Radziłów massacre, I drive to Reda, on the sea, to see a witness he has tracked down. Jan has a bulldog’s grip. He read a piece in a Gdańsk newspaper in which an anonymous witness from Radziłów appeared, and tracked him down by methods known only to himself.

  Andrzej R. is an extraordinary witness. He was thirteen at the time and ran from place to place taking notes on what was going on because he dreamed of being a reporter. He saw Jews being tortured in the first days after the Soviets entered the town and he actually saw the massacre being perpetrated.

  “At the end of each day when everything was over, I rushed home to make notes by candlelight.”

  The journal was lost, Andrzej R. did not become a reporter, but he preserved in his memory dozens of scenes, including who killed and when and how. He recognized friends of his, boys and girls, among the crowd being rounded up. And what he saw he remembered. Hour by hour. He speaks of it without emotion. Now he is trying to describe it anew. He shows me his efforts. Carefully recorded in a lined notebook, circular sentences without any of the concrete detail we got out of him. He’d like to publish his account under a pseudonym.

  The massacre was taboo in most houses, that’s easy to understand. But it’s harder to see why the same taboo applied to—and still applies to—those who helped Jews. Andrzej R., who gave the names of murderers, hesitated before telling me whose field it was where father and son Dorogoj hid in a mud hut: “That farmer’s daughters are still alive. I’d have to ask their permission.”

  5

  I’ll Tell You Who Did It: My Father

  or, The Private Investigation of Jan Skrodzki

  Jan Skrodzki, an engineer retired from the Gdańsk shipyard, was a little boy when, from a window of his parents’ house in Radziłów, he saw Jews driven to their place of execution by Poles. When he left the town as a teenager he vowed never to return. At gatherings with family and friends he always said openly that it was locals who had burned the Jews in Radziłów. It always ended in a quarrel, but Skrodzki stubbornly went on saying that no German had held a gun to anyone’s head, and that anti-Semitism and a lust for pillage were the causes of the atrocity.

  He has an astonishing memory; he talks about things that happened in his childhood as if they were still before his eyes. He describes the image he saw from behind a curtain as if looking at a photograph:

  “I was six years, seven months, and fourteen days old at the time. First I saw how Jews were forced to pull up weeds in the marketplace; it was paved and weeds grew up between the stones. Then from another window I saw the column of people on Piękna Street. Later I saw plenty of film showing Jews being rounded up elsewhere. SS men, guns, dogs: there was nothing like that here. It was our people from Radziłów and the surrounding villages. They must have plotted it earlier—on such and such a day we’ll kill them—how else would they have all met up like that? It wasn’t any underclass doing it. There were a lot of young people, not with little sticks but with heavy clubs.

  Jan Skrodzki with his dog, Czacza, at home in Gdańsk, 2002. (Courtesy of Jan Skrodzki)

  Szyma, Bencyjon, and Fruma, children of Szejna and Mosze Dorogoj. Radziłów, 1922. Bencyjon emigrated to Palestine before the war. Fruma fled as soon as the Germans entered Radziłów and survived the war in Soviet Russia. Szyma, also called Dora, was brutally murdered by Poles in July 1941. Jan Skrodzki’s father, Zygmunt, was one of the perpetrators. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)

  “I often hear there’s no anti-Semitism in Poland now. I always say, ‘There are a lot of anti-Semites in my family, and of the people I know, every other one, or maybe every third, is anti-Semitic, and I could easily have been, too.’ And where did we get our anti-Semitism? The priest preached it from the pulpit, that fat Father Dołęgowski. And Poles in Radziłów lapped it up because they were uneducated or completely illiterate. Envious of Jews because they were better off. While Jews were working harder, organizing their work better, supporting each other.”

  Skrodzki speaks of his father with pain and respect: “He was a sought-after tailor, and he employed several skilled artisans. How is it possible that such a wise, honest man, an outstanding tailor too, could be such an anti-Semite?”

  He knew that to compete with the Jews, his father opened a bakery and got an excellent baker
in from nearby Tykocin, Mr. Odyniec, also a National Party member. As if that weren’t enough, he had a sign painted to say: CHRISTIAN BAKERY.

  “Why Christian bakery?” Jan asks, and replies to his own question: “Just to annoy the Jews. He must have really been a good tailor, because after the war when we moved to Milanówek near Warsaw he was taken on at the Industrial Design Works, the best design institute in Poland. He was courageous, too; during the war he joined the Home Army, and he had a radio in a hiding place he’d made between the stove and the floor.

  “When the amnesty was proclaimed my father appeared with his division. The guys then brought all their arms in to the station on trucks. They were naive. Two months later the authorities came for my father, they threw him in jail, and he spent nine months there before the trial took place—it was at the court in Ełk. My mother was left to take care of all the kids. I was in eighth grade at school in Łomża and I had to drop out for a year to help at home. In the meantime they started to prosecute the criminals who had killed Jews. My father was put in jail a second time. They didn’t manage to convict him for the Home Army, maybe they could get him convicted for the pogrom? Nothing was proved against him.”

  It’s Skrodzki who proposed to go with me to Radziłów. He knows best who to talk to and how. He’s prepared to help me get something out of people who won’t want to talk to me, a stranger and a journalist in the bargain. And he can do his own investigating while we’re at it. He wants to find out what the people whom he remembers fondly from childhood were doing that day.

  The first time we went was in February 2001. Jan was thoroughly prepared. He had a list of people who were in town in 1941, and who live in Radziłów today. And a separate list of people who participated in the murders, reconstructed from things he himself had heard as well as from Menachem Finkelsztejn’s testimony. Next to the names of people about whom there was no doubt he had put a plus, and where he wasn’t sure, a question mark.

  We went by his cousins’ house. An affluent farm, well maintained, with an old Mercedes in the driveway. On the front steps, when we were already at the door, Skrodzki suddenly switched from addressing me formally as pani (Miss) to the informal ty (you): “I told them you were my cousin,” he explained. “Otherwise they won’t talk to you.”

  Somehow the conversation with his cousins wouldn’t get going. The chatty Skrodzki reminisced about his childhood. How under the Soviets his father stopped sleeping at home for fear of being deported. He went into hiding, and when the news got around that families would be deported, his mother gave Jan to relatives to hide, and she found a hiding place somewhere nearby with her two youngest children.

  Then our hostess spoke up: “When there’s talk about the Soviet times I always think of what used to be said around here about the Jews sending people to Siberia.”

  Skrodzki protested, “With us, it was a Jew who saved our lives, because he told my mother what night the Soviets were coming for us. I was taken to the Borawski family in Trzaski on a truck. When anyone came by they hid me in the closet or the annex. There were no Jews living there, and to be quite clear, my hosts were hiding me from the Polish neighbors. If that Jew hadn’t told Mother about the deportation we wouldn’t be talking right now. Mama would have died on the way to Siberia with her three children.”

  “That’s true,” his cousin admitted. “The Jews knew everything in advance because they pointed out who to deport.”

  Skrodzki explained that there are bad apples among every people, and a decent Jew wouldn’t collaborate with the Soviets any more than a decent Pole.

  “You’re right,” said the cousin’s wife. “When I was a cleaning lady in America, once I worked for Jews, and another time for Germans who had family pictures with people wearing swastikas. Both were decent people.”

  Skrodzki tried to turn the conversation to the subject of the massacre. He started by recalling Zalewski, their uncle and an eminently decent fellow. He said he’d heard from his daughter Halina that a Jewish woman who had been beaten up by one of the Mordasiewiczes had run to the Zalewski house for help.

  “That’s right,” his cousin chimed in, “because the Mordasiewiczes’ mother was deported to Siberia, with a small child. If someone’s family hadn’t been deported they wouldn’t have been there that day. Anyway, why are we talking about it, none of them is even alive anymore.”

  “If you know none of the killers is alive, does that mean you know who they were?” I blurted.

  “I’m not going to speak ill of the dead, especially since they’d suffered injustice.”

  And that was the end of it.

  We visited a number of Jan’s childhood friends. Accustomed to steering conversations myself, I had to be patient, because I was only Jan’s cousin on his wife’s side who had come along almost by accident. To visit everyone on Jan’s list would have taken many days. All the conversations went on for hours. Jan took the lead and I fidgeted restlessly, waiting for him to start asking about the massacre. After all, I thought, they must guess what brings us here. A lot was already being said and written about nearby Jedwabne.

  “Do you remember,” Skrodzki asked one friend from childhood, “that my father owned the most powerful Pfaff sewing machine, and he was one of the first in Radziłów to have a Diamant bicycle?”

  “Your uncle Zalewski had a Pfaff, and a Singer, too, the kind where you moved the treadle with your knee. I was a journeyman working for him then, but only your uncle used a Pfaff, and only the ablest, Antoni Mordasiewicz, was allowed to sit at it.”

  I had already heard from Stanisław Ramotowski that this Mordasiewicz was not only an able journeyman but also a murderer. Yet there I was listening to them going on about sewing machines, about Henio’s sister who had her eye on Jan, and Henio who in his turn liked Władzia. They could also talk without end about postwar partisan groups, how “Groove” was killed, how Marchewka was killed. Only after exhausting these topics did Jan reveal why he had come: “I have to find out about everything, because the Institute of National Remembrance is examining the Jedwabne affair, they’re sure to come to Radziłów, and they’ll ask me about Father, so I have to be prepared. Cousin Anna, you take notes,” he tossed off in my direction, which allowed me to do so without raising suspicion.

  I soon understood this tactic would get us invaluable information that I would never have gotten by myself. It was exactly this kind of conversation, this small talk about old times, that gave us that chance.

  “You remember there was a guy, his nickname was Dupek [Ass],” Józef K. related. “You know, the guy who set the barn on fire, the widow’s son, Józef Klimas.”

  When we talked to anyone over seventy it was hard not to wonder if he or she had taken part in the atrocity. And so when we visited Franciszek Ekstowicz, a tailor trained by Jan’s father, and I looked into this quiet man’s noble, chiseled face, I thought: No, not him, I’m sure.

  Franciszek Ekstowicz had been herding cows that day and only got back to town in the early evening. I asked him if his friends who were looting abandoned houses hadn’t called on him to join them.

  “I went into one house; Kozioł, the son-in-law of the Jewish woman who lived there, was an educated man and he had a lot of books. My friends took out the chairs, the table, but I took the Jew’s books. They laughed at me later: ‘Stupid guy, he took the paper.’”

  When I asked him what the books were, he was quick to withdraw, as if I’d demanded restitution. A minute later, perhaps not by accident, he quoted the poets Adam Mickiewicz and Adam Asnyk. But I didn’t dare to ask him directly if those were the “post-Jewish books” that he took from Kozioł’s house.

  The second day of our visit we realized Jan’s cousin must have looked in the rooms where we had slept. Remarks she made to Jan showed she had read his notes, where under the heading “probable murderers of July 7, 1941,” he had written her uncle’s name in his clear handwriting, if with a question mark. From the looks she cast in my direction I inferred sh
e had also familiarized herself with my appointment book, in which I’d written “Call Mr. Skrodzki” several times.

  We left Radziłów in the late afternoon, it was already dark, and it would have been more sensible to leave early the next day, but the atmosphere where we were staying was tense—to put it mildly. I drove on icy roads with snowdrifts. The drive to Warsaw, which usually took me three hours, this time took seven and a half.

  Not long after our expedition to Radziłów, Skrodzki received a letter from his family commenting on his bringing me there: “The devil must have gotten into you, Jan.”

  He sent back the copy I had given him of the historian Szymon Datner’s text “The Holocaust in Radziłów” with corrections, giving the proper spelling of names often extremely distorted in the article. There were a few ambiguous fragments in the text. The following sentence, for instance: “The first victim fell, a tailor named Skondzki, and Antoni Kostaszewski committed the bestial murder of a seventeen-year-old girl and Komsomol member, Fruma Dorogoj, saying she wasn’t worth a bullet. They cut her head off in the forest near the Kopańska settlement and threw her body in the swamp.” Reading this again, it occurred to me that the text was badly edited, that the tailor wasn’t the first victim but a perpetrator of the atrocity, along with Kosmaczewski (I already knew that was the real name. I also knew the murdered girl was in fact called Szyma, not Fruma). When Skrodzki told me his father was a tailor I wondered if there hadn’t been another confusion of names; it’s not hard to turn Skrodzki into Skondzki.

  Janek must have had the same thought, because when he returned Finkelsztejn’s testimony to me with corrections, he had crossed out Skondzki and written in Skrodzki in pencil, with a question mark. Then I proposed that if he was worried about that tailor being his father, I would take him to see Stanisław Ramotowski, who is the walking memory of the massacre.