The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  We asked why nobody pointed a finger at the killers after the war.

  “They were scared.”

  “Why do you think, to keep the peace.”

  “I’m telling you, they were scared,” Marysia Korycińska said, supporting the first speaker. “When Feliks Godlewski was drunk once, he got up and made a gesture of cutting someone’s head off with a scythe, saying, ‘A man to me is nothing more than a whistling of the air.’”

  “I have to get at the truth to atone for what my father did,” Jan Skrodzki said the next time we set out in search of witnesses, this time in Pomorze and Kaszuby. He found no understanding. One subject, Andrzej R., brought a form for a contribution to the High Divinity Seminary. “Why spend all that money driving around Poland? Pay for a Mass to be said for your father and your conscience will be clear.”

  In Ełk we found Leon Kosmaczewski’s family. A spacious villa on a slope right on the lake where Kosmaczewski’s daughter and twenty-year-old granddaughter live; he himself died two years before, at the age of eighty-eight. He was in good health to the end. They had no intention of talking to us, but Skrodzki gave them no chance to throw us out, saying his mother’s maiden name was Kosmaczewska, so that as a child he had called all Kosmaczewskis “Uncle.”

  “They accused him of raping a Jewish woman in the marketplace, but he saved a Jewish woman,” his daughter shrieked. “A German asked him, pointing at the woman, ‘Jude?’ and he said no, and allowed her to escape. A few years later a Jewish woman turned up in town asking about him, I’m sure it was the one he saved, wanting to thank him. We know Father stood trial, but that trial was started by a vicious rumor. He had been denounced because of a deal gone wrong, a woman from the neighborhood had a feud with Father.”

  The granddaughter chimed in, “Granny said Grandfather saved a Jewish woman from Kramarzewo, and now they just write anything. There’s one historian you can take seriously, Professor Strzembosz. We’re not going to listen to any nonsense from anybody else.”

  Skrodzki and I both knew the Jewish woman from Kramarzewo could only have been Marianna Ramotowska. We also knew she had given false evidence in his defense in court because she feared for her life.

  Skrodzki tried to cut her off, but he is a mild man, and the woman kept raising her angry voice. Finally, he got up from his chair.

  “I’m not going to listen to this. The responsibility falls on us, their children. If you can’t acknowledge it, so much the worse for you. Anna, let’s go!”

  And we left.

  Janek seems like a content person. He has made a success of his life, was the only one of six siblings to get a higher education. He became a recognized professional engineer. He sent his two daughters to medical school. When he had to join the Communist Party in the sixties, he joined, and as soon as he could leave after 1980, he left. He greeted Solidarity with relief, as did many party members. He sang in the Solidarity choir at the Church of St. Brigid in Gdańsk. He values order and discipline. He likes getting to the train station early and planning his time so that he never has to rush. He thinks punishment is a necessary part of raising children. He loves talking about his dog, about sailing. He likes to tell jokes. I would like to understand why he of all people, an “ordinary Pole,” decided to carry the burden of memory throughout his life.

  Journal

  MAY 13, 2001

  I’m off to Israel in a week. I want to talk to the witness to the massacre whom Gross cited in Neighbors. I’ve already called Awigdor Kochaw several times, trying to arrange a meeting, but I always get the same reply: he’s not well, he doesn’t feel like talking. I felt he was hostile toward me. I was afraid seeing someone from Poland might be traumatic for him. So I sent my uncle Szmul Horowitz to see him—Szmul is the founder and director emeritus of a home for the elderly in Tel Aviv, and one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. It helped. Szmul is supposed to call him again when I’m in town. Kochaw promised him he would receive us.

  A long piece by Tomasz Strzembosz in the newspaper the Republic: “Satan’s Entry or Arrival of the Gestapo?” (a reference to my Gazeta interview with Stanisław Przechodzki, which had as its title a quote from Przechodzki: “Satan Entered into Jedwabne”). Adopting the ironic style of the brothers Laudański, killers of Jedwabne (who mocked Wasersztejn: “Didn’t he see and hear a little too much for a teenager?”), the respected history professor comments on the testimony of Awigdor Kochaw, who fled from outside the barn where his family perished: “Would he go back to the barn to listen in on murderers’ conversations?”

  Strzembosz refers to two witnesses to prove the Germans committed the crime in Jedwabne. The first is Stefan Boczkowski, who lived in Grądy Małe in 1941; he wrote the professor a letter: “We both walked along with many other locals at some distance behind the tail end of the column of Jews. When they had all been forced into the barn a military truck carrying troops drove up at great speed, and some of the soldiers jumped off the truck while the remaining soldiers quickly started handing the ones on the ground canisters of gasoline, and they started pouring the gasoline in the corners of the barn, also at lightning speed.” An army truck, soldiers jumping off, an operation at lightning speed, these are the images that I see, too, after watching so many movies about the war.

  Strzembosz doesn’t go into why “many other locals” followed the column of Jews and what Stefan Boczkowski, a fifteen-year-old boy from Grądy Małe, was doing in Jedwabne that day. Grądy Małe is four kilometers from Jedwabne; it’s one of the villages from which wagons with peasants armed with clubs and sticks set off on the morning of July 10.

  The second witness is Apolinary Domitrz from the village Rostki, quoted in an interview for Życie Warszawy (Warsaw Life). Domitrz now resides in Greenpoint, the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He says he was grazing cows with two friends in the meadows between Rostki and Jedwabne, about half a kilometer from the barn. When the flames blazed up, they ran to Jedwabne right away. “We rushed across the marketplace. It was quiet, everything was shut down, no one was on the street. And the barn was on fire. So we headed to Cmentarna Street. The Germans were retreating from the heat.”

  “And the others?”

  “What others? There were only Germans. We didn’t see a single Pole there. Just us.”

  Of Gross’s book he says: “All one big lie, sir. How could he make all of that up? When a friend and I read it we couldn’t believe how anyone could tell lies like that.”

  The Warsaw Life journalist who interviewed Domitrz counters that President Kwaśniewski does not question the guilt of the Poles.

  “So was Kwaśniewski there or what? I was there, not him, and I saw what happened.”

  Strzembosz finds all of this very believable, ignoring the fact that the two accounts contradict each other. If, as Domitrz says, there were “only Germans” at the barn while the Jews were being burned—which in his view, by the way, was their punishment for giving Christ to be put to death, and the only Poles were Apolinary himself with his two friends, then Stefan Boczkowski couldn’t have seen what he saw, because he wouldn’t have been there. Not to mention that you only have to look at the map to see that Domitrz’s tale is topographically implausible. Rostki is two kilometers south of Jedwabne, and the barn was situated on the northeast side of town, about half a kilometer from the market as the crow flies. By now, the accumulated idiocy and unjust accusations flung at Gross have overrun all bounds.

  Professor Tomasz Strzembosz is a recognized historian, whose books on the armed underground in Warsaw during World War II are very popular, and he is a social activist. He feels compelled to defend the Poland of the Home Army and the Polish people. “The Jedwabne affair awoke a demon in this traditional Polish patriot,” a historian friend of his explains.

  That is precisely why all Strzembosz’s absurd statements pain me so much. Jerzy Robert Nowak, the prolific anti-Semite who is now writing a book on the “lies of Gross,” doesn’t bother me as much—I’m prepared to accept
that in any case like this there will be a lunatic fringe. Anyway, according to the probability theory of Gauss (who invented the bell curve), without Jerzy Robert Nowak, we wouldn’t have on the opposite side of the curve those Polish Catholics who from a profound need of their own, undertook to clean up Jewish graves in the seventies. Still, historians who know Strzembosz say he is not an anti-Semite, and his life’s achievements inspire respect and recognition. He is to me the embodiment of what a decent Pole is capable of saying about Jews when the image of his fatherland and his compatriots is at stake.

  MAY 14, 2001

  Konstancin. Stanisław Ramotowski’s birthday. He keeps saying, “God forbid anybody finds out where we are.” But at the same time he’s a sociable person and he’s glad when I bring guests along. He particularly likes my sister, Marysia. This time I’ve brought my friend Helena Datner-Śpiewak, which turns out to have been a great idea. After a few minutes they’re talking like old friends. Helena tells Ramotowski about her father, Szymon Datner. How he fled from the Białystok ghetto to fight the Germans. He managed to join a Russian Jewish partisan group, but had to run away after he and a friend shot two guards. To the end of his life it pained him that he had killed. Soon after the liberation of Białystok, he became chairman of the District Jewish Committee, as well as, briefly, a member of the Communist town council. He put forward a bill to ban the teaching of German in schools permanently, and the council passed it. But he didn’t intend to stay in Poland. He left for Palestine. He came back because he was in love and Helena’s future mother didn’t want to leave Poland. “Just like my wife—she wouldn’t leave, either,” Stanisław says, nodding in sympathy.

  MAY 15, 2001

  A shocking interview with Primate Glemp for the Catholic Information Agency. The primate says that for a long time now the Church has been subjected to a smear campaign aimed at making it apologize for crimes against Jews; Gross’s book was clearly written on commission and the massacre in Jedwabne had no religious subtext whatsoever. After which he pulls out a full array of anti-Semitic clichés, including pearls like this: “The Jews were smarter and knew how to exploit the Poles,” and “Jews were disliked for their strange folklore.” And of course: “Shouldn’t the Jews admit that they’re guilty toward the Poles, especially for the period of collaboration with the Bolsheviks, their collaboration in the deportations to Siberia, the way they sent Poles to prison?” At the end, the primate says anti-Semitism doesn’t exist; however, anti-Polishness does. A commentary the Gazeta added to the interview reminds the primate that the Church’s anti-Semitism isn’t an invention of Gross’s, since the pope has previously apologized to Jews for it.

  MAY 17, 2001

  A phone call from Leszek Dziedzic asking me if I can stop by, because his father, Leon, has come from America for the memorial ceremony. I jump in the car and three hours later I’m in Jedwabne.

  Leon Dziedzic—small, slight, shy—sits in the kitchen in a peaked army cap turned back to front. He was fourteen when he was selected to bury the remains of Jews burned in the barn. He knows a great deal about the crime, but it’s not easy to talk to him about it. His voice breaks, he tries to hide his tears. I ask him how he explains the crime to himself.

  “They needed underwear so they took it from Jews.”

  Leszek interrupts: “Tell her, Dad, like you told me: they went out killing for a shitty Jewish nightshirt.”

  Leon Dziedzic says the lust for pillage compounded the anti-Semitism instilled in them in religion class at school: “There were those who were pillars of the church, who carried the banners in religious processions, and then went and ripped open the bellies of Jews. I reminded a neighbor who, no matter what the topic is, always sticks in something nasty about the Jews: ‘You yourself pray to a Jew and his Jewish mother.’ The neighbor replied, ‘Leon, you’re an idiot.’ And his brother, a priest who happened to be visiting, backed him up. Don’t I know Jesus wasn’t baptized till he was thirty, and the apostles were Jews? But people around here don’t know any religion at all. Before the war I’d eat the matzos my friends brought with them to school. People said there was Christian blood in that matzo, and after the war I got up the nerve to ask Helena Chrzanowska about it. And she said it was all a lot of nonsense.”

  Leon Dziedzic continues: “Miss Helena had a difficult life here after the war even though she’d been baptized and married a Pole. And yet she never complained, though she did burst into tears once, and said that if she’d known how strong the prejudices were she would never have married, so she wouldn’t have children.”

  I wonder how I might get back in touch with Helena Chrzanowska. Leszek Dziedzic suggests he pay her a visit and try to persuade her to talk to me. If she agrees he’ll come back for me.

  I ask Leon Dziedzic how he was chosen to remove the bodies after July 10.

  “A few days after the massacre they ordered one person from each street in town and from the outskirts to report for duty. They picked young people like me. We tried to figure out who was who, the charred bodies were on top, and toward the bottom they were only slightly singed. When the murderers set the barn on fire, people had all rushed to one air shaft on the east side. They were all piled up. It was impossible to say how many there were, because we’d take out an arm and then a head separately, with pitchforks. We buried them in pieces. Three policemen stood guard over us. There was a lightly singed shoe box, someone picked it up and gold coins fell out. A lot of people started gathering them, but a policeman ordered the money be returned; only one guy, who stuck a coin in his boot, kept it. I picked up a watch and threw it into the grave, because it wasn’t mine.”

  Leon Dziedzic saw freshly shoveled earth across the road from the barn, on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery—a sign that Jews had been buried there, the ones who had been killed separately, not in the group.

  He had helped Szmul Wasersztejn twice, the first time toward the end of June 1941, before the massacre: “The Russians had left, the Germans hadn’t taken over yet, and the thugs were already gearing up for pogroms. Jews were getting their belongings out and burying them somewhere or leaving them for safekeeping with farmers they knew. Szmul hid his things in a field, in a potato cellar. After a few days it looked as if the situation was calming down and he’d be able to go bring them home safely. I knew Szmul well, so he asked me for help. We went in a wagon and were stopped by three guys in the market square. They hit Szmul, started looking through the clothes, unharnessed the horse and lashed it with the whip, and I got a few lashes, too. Those three later took part in herding the Jews into the marketplace.”

  Leszek, with some difficulty, gets his father to give me their names: Bolesław Ramotowski, Napoleon Piechocki, and Jerzy Tarnacki.

  The second time the Dziedzices helped Szmul was after the massacre.

  “I went to the barn to put down straw for the horses and almost stuck him with the pitchfork. I heard a voice: ‘Leon, forgive me, it’s me, Szmul.’ I said, ‘Quiet!’ because the walls had ears. The lady next door lived with a German and would come over to steal our chickens … When dusk fell my mother put on an extra layer of clothes over her regular clothes, to bring to Szmul without anyone noticing, he didn’t have anything warm to wear. She said she was going out to feed the dogs; there were eight kids and one of us might let something slip. Later Uncle Klemens brought him to Janczewko, to the Wyrzykowskis.”

  When Szmul Wasersztejn moved to Białystok immediately after the war, he sent a letter to Leon’s mother, asking her to visit him there. He gave her shoe leather for her five sons, and cloth to make dresses for her daughters.

  As Leon Dziedzic remembers it, they hid Szmul Wasersztejn right after July 10, 1941, but as I reconstructed his life it became clear to me that Szmul hid with them after the hunt for Jews that took place in the autumn of 1942, and thus a whole year later. Ramotowski in turn insists that Rachela’s family were taken to the Radziłów ghetto in 1943, whereas it must have happened much earlier, because by 1943 there w
as no longer any ghetto in Radziłów. As far as dates and numbers go, you can’t rely on anyone.

  Leon is hurt because his sister-in-law, wife of the late Klemens, greeted him on this visit with the words “Got a lot of those teeth you took from the Jews?” She knew very well the locals made a practice of searching the bodies of murdered Jews for gold teeth. It’s always the same: whenever someone felt compassion for Jews, immediately others sniped that he or she loved Jews because of their riches.

  “I gave it to her straight about what my brother-in-law Klemens did back then, because I saw it with my own eyes,” continues Leon Dziedzic. “He didn’t kill anybody, but he did do some looting. Just before the Germans came, a Jewish family was fleeing on a cart with everything they owned, and he and a friend forced them to get down and they took it all away from them. The Jews continued on foot, in tears.”

  Leon Dziedzic tells me that some were troubled by the crime committed by their compatriots: “Janek Kalinowski, who had a smithy near the cemetery, was keeping an anvil and tongs there for Szmuił, a smith from Przestrzelska Street. Janek had nothing to do with the Kalinowski who killed Jews. Janek was told by the local killers to take over the workshop equipment. They came to Kalinowski to run a smithy, because the Germans had said the Poles could kill all the Jews as long as all the workshops were manned afterward. I was a guard across the street at a meat co-op, and Janek Kalinowski brought up the story of that equipment many times.”

  Leszek comes back empty-handed. Miss Helena is sorry but she’s very ill.

  “She’s scared, you’ve got to understand that,” says Leszek. “My dad, too, since they showed him on TV, he’s worried they’ll burn our house down. I reassured him: ‘Dad, if someone’s stupid enough to throw money at me, let them go ahead, I’m insured.’ I’m not sorry for anything, at least I don’t have any illusions about where I live.”

  MAY 18, 2001