The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

News from Jedwabne. After long negotiations, Biedrzycki agreed to sell the land under the monument back to the government for half the price offered him by Bubel. For fifty thousand zlotys, that is.

  A call to Ignatiew. I look through my notes from the Jedwabne trial proceedings again and am unable to figure out why some are convicted and others cleared, though everything points to them all being guilty. Did some of them agree to collaborate with the secret police—there was still a kind of civil war going on in these parts—and so their murder of Jews was swept under the carpet? Ignatiew replies that a journalist can posit any hypothesis, whereas a prosecutor has to have proof. But I hear a note of acknowledgment in his voice.

  MAY 22, 2001

  Tel Aviv. I ask Uncle Szmulek to help me find the Finkelsztejns of Haifa in the phone book. They lived there in the seventies, when someone was sent by Yad Vashem to record their testimony. Chaja and Izrael were by then already elderly, but perhaps their children are still living? There are several dozen Finkelsztejns in the phone book. Szmulek patiently phones them one by one, engages them in some kind of conversation, but each time he indicates that it is not them. Eventually, after about seven calls, we give up.

  MAY 23, 2001

  Jerusalem. I cross an empty city from which tourists have vanished because of terrorist attacks. I’m going to see Meir Ronen, who lived in Jedwabne before the war. I got Ronen’s contact information from Morgan Ty Rogers, a young New York lawyer who prepared the Internet version of the Jedwabne Book of Memory. Ronen is a distant relative of his.

  Meir is a delicate, frail man of great elegance, startled by my visit. He hasn’t spoken Polish in the last sixty years; he suggests that his son-in-law, who lives nearby, translate from Hebrew to English for him. But it took only a quarter of an hour for him to return to the language that had seemed buried irretrievably in the remotest corners of his memory. I never heard such beautiful Polish spoken in Jedwabne. He has preserved in his memory the names of all the Polish kings and of all the children in his class. And many bitter recollections, such as how toward the end of the thirties, the teacher made Jewish children move to the back rows of the classroom and Polish children stopped speaking to them. I don’t have to ask him many questions. For many hours he tells me about his Jedwabne. I listen and see the shtetl that survives only in his memory. He remembers being quite small and his still-living great-grandfather, Nachum Radzik (who is the ancestor he shares with Ty Rogers), telling him his own great-great-grandfather was in the delegation that set out to Catherine the Great with a petition to grant Jedwabne the status of a city. (In fact, the rights of the city were granted in 1736, but maybe this great-great-grandfather had been in some other delegation to the tsarist court and family legend preserved the story of him helping to found the city with the participation of Catherine the Great herself. In parting he says: “Good night, madam.”

  MAY 24, 2001

  I look on the Internet in the morning and read an article in the Gazeta about the preparations for the exhumation.

  I remember Ignatiew asking my opinion before I left about whether exhumation was permissible for Jews. I said it wasn’t really, but that there are exceptions to the rule. And that if he sought a rabbi who would support an exhumation and be prepared to participate in it, he would surely find one, because in this matter as in most, rabbis have differing views.

  Yad Vashem. In the archives I find the memoir of Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów, and also testimonies from nearby Wizna about what happened in Jedwabne, by Izrael Lewin and Awigdor Kochaw. Unfortunately there’s nothing from Wąsosz, the village where Poles killed all their Jewish neighbors five days earlier than in Jedwabne.

  I spend all day searching for material and making photocopies. Using the archive is expensive, but the worst thing is having to do it myself. Technical tasks were always the bane of my life. And here the photocopier gets stuck every thirty pages or so. It’s stuffy, I get pages from different files mixed up, and they’re often unnumbered. I try to ask in Russian—the language the young women working in the archive speak with one another—what is written in the last line of one page and the first line of another, to check if they correspond. But they can’t help me—they don’t know Yiddish.

  Chaja Finkelsztejn’s testimony and the memoir she deposited have been lying unread in the Yad Vashem archive in Jerusalem, just like her son Menachem’s testimony at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Not many Polish historians know Yiddish, and perhaps not many contemporary Israeli historians know Yiddish, either. The testimonies of the Holocaust are written in a language that also perished in the Holocaust.

  In the evening Uncle Szmulek translates the testimony of Izrael Lewin of Wizna for me; Lewin survived the war in hiding with his wife and two children. In December of last year I was in Zanklewo to look at the buildings where they hid. In Ełk I visited Witek Dobkowski, the son of the farmer who hid them. I’ve arranged to meet Izrael’s children here in Israel; he is no longer alive.

  Lewin describes the first days in Wizna after the Soviets left. Józef Gawrychowski, brother of the Wizna village head, who had heard about the pogrom being planned, came to them with the intention of taking them home with him. “He was a good friend of mine,” Izrael Lewin wrote. “The Soviets were going to send him to the polar bears in Siberia unless he paid sixty thousand rubles. He came to us in the middle of the night, weeping. I was the kind of Jew who always had money. I went to the cupboard, took out the money, didn’t ask for a receipt.”

  When the Germans came, Wizna was bombed and people slept out on the street. “The village head ordered the Jews of Wizna to move to Jedwabne,” Lewin wrote. “The Poles knew that Jews from the small towns were gathering in Jedwabne. One day, on a Wednesday in Tamuz, the day before the massacre, goyim came to Wizna from Jedwabne carrying sticks and went from house to house saying: ‘You have two children, send one to Jedwabne with a good stick.’” But Gawrychowski warned the Lewins not to go to Jedwabne and drove them to Łomża. When the Lewin family had moved into the ghetto there, they heard stories about Jews, including many from Wizna, Radziłów, and Stawiski, being burned in the barn in Jedwabne.

  “Some got away,” he continued, “among them a woman from our town, Rywka Leja Suraski, who went to the doctor’s house in Jedwabne and begged the doctor’s wife: ‘Save me.’ The doctor’s wife hid her in the stable, threw a pile of straw over her, and covered it with a rag, and Rywka lay there till morning. Her husband was burned with their children. One day Rywka showed up in the ghetto where we were. ‘I have my children here,’ she said, taking out white bones from her blouse. ‘This is Jankiel and Mosze.’ Risking her life, she’d gone to the barn and taken the little bones. She was in hiding somewhere, but she would come to the ghetto and show everybody the bones.”

  The Lewins ended up in the ghetto and before it was liquidated they tried to find a hiding place. Izrael Lewin knocked on the doors of Poles he knew before the war. One of the houses belonged to the Dobkowskis.

  “‘If you can’t do it,’ I told Dobkowski, ‘I won’t blame you. And I’ll give you all my property, because the end is coming for us, and I don’t want the Germans to get it all.’ I gave him several gold rings, a few gems, a gold needle, a gold watch, a couple of lengths of fabric. I kissed his hand. The goy made us a shelter in the cellar, disguised it. That goy was taking a big risk, because this was right in the center of town. After a few weeks he thought we should get some air, and he introduced us to the dogs—they were frightening dogs, but they learned not to bark at us … He wouldn’t keep Jews for free. He exploited us terribly. My wife looked after the child that had just been born to them, I sewed, they made us do all the kitchen work, including preparing slop for the pigs. We did it all at night.”

  Once, they were almost thrown out after the Germans came after Sunday Mass to scare the local population.

  “They said: ‘We came to your country to rid you of Jews. When you needed a quart of gasoline, they took one of your chickens. Th
ings are beginning to change now. But there are still a lot of Jews in the parish. You’re sheltering your own enemies. When we find a Jew, we will burn the property and shoot everybody, so any farmer who hides Jews will rot in a grave with them.’ The lady who was sheltering us came back and yelled at her husband: ‘You bastard, as soon as we laid eyes on them I said, Shut the door and put the chain on it!’ and she hit him. We heard every word. The children understood everything and cried. Then his mother came in, saying: ‘It was settled when you took them in.’ She said there was hope because the front was coming closer. She always acted as our advocate. She’d say: ‘If you let them go, the Germans will catch them and they’ll have to say where they were hiding, and we’ll all be lost.’ If there’s a life after death, may his mother be held in reverence there.”

  In 1944 the front line moved closer to Wizna and the village was evacuated. Each member of the family set off alone to look for some work on a farm in the area, pretending not to be Jewish. Izrael grew a handlebar mustache and went to farms offering his services as a tailor. The Russians were already on the far banks of the Narew and Lewin knew it was a matter of a week—if he could last that long, he knew he’d get through it. He was taken on at another farm. “The woman brought out her fabric. I told her I’d cut everything first and then start sewing. I was thinking: if she starts to suspect I’m Jewish but all the cloth is already cut, she might think it’d be a pity to throw me out. There was enough sewing for a month. And when I finished and she had a shirt for her husband and a vest for herself, she didn’t think about whether I was Jewish, but about what a good job I’d done.”

  Izrael’s wife, Chaszka Fejga, also took part in the interview at Yad Vashem. She recounted how they returned to their home when the war had ended. “I went by to see a non-Jewish woman I knew, to ask her for a frying pan. Her husband was in the Home Army. She said to me: ‘If you want to live, run away, they’re coming for you.’ My husband wanted to stay in Wizna, but I said: ‘No way. We’ve been through so much, we kept ourselves alive, and now we’re going to let a Home Army soldier come and take it all away from us?’ So we left.”

  MAY 25, 2001

  I read on the Internet that the grounds surrounding the barn site in Jedwabne have been covered with green netting and put under police guard. It is forbidden to go near or take pictures. Archaeologists, prosecutor Ignatiew, and Rabbi Schudrich are on the spot. The rabbi’s comments are quoted: “Exhumation is forbidden in Judaism, but I understand this decision.” His openness is impressive; I know he is among the opponents of the exhumation.

  In the section for the Righteous Among the Nations, I look for testimonies from Jedwabne, Radziłów, Wąsosz. Once again there is nothing from Wąsosz.

  An afternoon in Tel Aviv, where I arranged to meet Izrael Lewin’s daughter, formerly Tereska. Ida Sarna is now a retired bank director.

  She tells me about her escape from the ghetto. “Father didn’t want to go. He said, ‘May what comes to everyone come to me, too.’ Mother thought you couldn’t go off into the unknown with a sick child (I suffered from chronic arthritis). But I tugged my parents’ sleeves, begged them, swore I’d be strong enough. I was the one in our family who wanted to live. I don’t remember thinking even once during the war that I was going to die.”

  She tells me about her time in hiding: “As soon as we crossed the threshold at Bolesław Dobkowski’s house you could tell right away it was a decent house, because there weren’t any things stolen from Jews in it. I doubt I’d have the courage he had to hide us. Their children didn’t know we were Jewish, they thought we were American cousins, and they couldn’t let anyone find out about us because America had declared war on Germany. Lent came and from the attic I heard people from the whole village gathering near the Dobkowski house, singing, ‘Jesus crucified by the Jews, Jesus sold for thirty silver pieces, Jesus betrayed by the traitor Judas.’ You heard it everywhere before the war: ‘They killed God and then made sure they lived better than the Poles.’ Father kept track of when Pesach was, and Yom Kippur, and observed the holidays. I didn’t want to. I was furious that I was Jewish.”

  Ida Sarna Lewin goes on: “In 1944 the front line came close, the village was evacuated, and from then on we had to manage on our own, without a hiding place. I went to work for the Germans. I wore a shawl on my head like a Polish peasant woman, because my hair was red. But at least my eyes were blue. The Germans didn’t think there were any Jews left, so they weren’t suspicious, and we didn’t know about Auschwitz or Treblinka, so we weren’t so terribly afraid.”

  Of the period after the war: “Father went on working as a tailor in Łódź, at 27 Wschodnia Street. We left in 1950. We were scared to live in Poland under Soviet occupation. We already knew what the Russians were like from spending two years with them in Wizna at the start of the war.”

  Ida Sarna Lewin has never gone back to visit Poland, because she was always afraid of what might happen to her there.

  “I go to an exercise class for stress reduction, and when we are instructed to imagine something very pleasant, I imagine the view from the attic at Dobkowski’s, where we were sometimes allowed to climb and breathe fresh air—the fields, greenery, lake, sky. I’d like so much to see that view again, but I’m still scared. My grandma was killed in a pogrom in Wizna. There was no Gestapo or SS there, just a few Wehrmacht soldiers and Poles who’d been given vodka by the Germans. And how many Jews did the Poles kill after the war?”

  Members of my own family, from Skryhiczyn, a village situated on the Bug in southeastern Poland, have told me many times of the affection and longing they feel for the Polish landscape.

  My uncle Monio, or Mosze Anaf, who right before the war spent four years in kibbutzes in Kielce and Warsaw preparing to emigrate to Palestine, visited Skryhiczyn many times and encouraged his cousins to emigrate.

  They kept telling him: Look at our Bug River, look at our forests, in Palestine there’s nothing but sand, swamps, and mountains. “If it hadn’t been for their fondness for Skryhiczyn, they would have survived,” Monio said to me sadly, years later. When he settled in Rosh Pina, a little town in the Galilee hills, he brought raspberry shoots, wild strawberries, and lilies of the valley back from Poland for his garden, where the branches of fig, mandarin, orange, avocado, and every kind of olive intertwined.

  Uncle Avinoa Hadasz from the Kinneret kibbutz once took me to the bank of the Jordan, a place where pilgrims poured out of buses pulled up to the side of the road and washed their feet under three-hundred-meter-tall eucalyptus trees. “This land belongs to the kibbutz,” Avinoa told me. “Here we sell bottles of Jordan water, because the Christians believe Christ was baptized here. Father always took me here when I was little. We came to swim, catch fish, have important conversations. My father planted these trees, and I helped him. Father chose this river bend because it reminded him of a bend in the Bug near Skryhiczyn.”

  MAY 26, 2001

  I’ve arranged to meet Ida Sarna Lewin’s brother Izaak Lewin, a retired army driver.

  He tells me Witek Dobkowski, son of the farmer who hid him, is now his best friend. “He spends several months a year here with me. I visit them. In Israel, Witek sometimes comes to the synagogue with me, and when I’m in Poland, I go to church with him.”

  I ask Izaak how he can bear hearing his close friend saying Germans killed the Jews in Jedwabne, and that Jews denounced Poles to the Soviets.

  “I’m ashamed to tell him it was the Poles who did it. It would hurt him, and after all, without his parents, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

  He tells me how he stumbled on a meeting in Jedwabne on February 17, 1945.

  “I was headed for Wizna on foot. People were gathering for a meeting, because they were about to elect a village head. They were shouting at each other, ‘Not him, he collaborated with the Germans!’; ‘Not him, he collaborated with the Soviets!’ They were at each other’s throats. No one stood up, no one said a terrible tragedy had taken place here.
I thought, Not my cart, not my horse, and took off as fast as I could go.”

  After the war the Lewin family moved to Łódź. On a tram Izaak heard someone say: “Damn, there are still so many Jews around.” The next day a military Jeep pulled up next to him; they were questioning the passersby about something. He suddenly realized these Polish-speaking soldiers in British uniform must be Jews from the Palestine brigades. He ran up to them. They were organizing the Bricha—the underground effort that facilitated the illegal emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine. By 1946 he made it there.

  Like most survivors, he didn’t talk about what he’d been through in Poland. “We were happy being in this country. I didn’t tell my children anything, so they would be healthy and normal. Until Witek came to visit I didn’t know I could still speak Polish. It was only when I took the children to Poland, and by that time they were grown up, that I told them how I’d survived.”

  For six years he has come to Jedwabne every July 10.

  “When I went back to Wizna for the first time, I stood on the spot where the old temple had been. There’s a house there now. Its owner came out: ‘I bought it, I can show you the papers.’ He thought I wasn’t there to look but to take it away from him. When I go to Jedwabne I remove the weeds at the monument, I bring paint and repaint the fence in the colors of the State of Israel—blue and white—and I say a prayer, though I’m not religious.”

  The way the Lewin siblings tell the story of their time in hiding differs in essential details.

  Izaak says he was friends with Witek and played with him. Ida says they didn’t play with anyone, just sat quietly in the dark with their legs pulled up. When they went into any of the rooms, it was only to do some kind of housework, not to play, and it was always at night, when the Dobkowski children were asleep.

  In Izaak’s version, the priest knew where they were hiding. He knew their father, who had sewn him his cassock before the war. When Bolesław Dobkowski went to confession, the priest told him: “Those people must survive,” and each time he passed on his greetings to them. In Ida’s version the priest reminded his flock in his sermons not to hide Jews, because the Germans would not only kill the whole family in retribution but burn down the village, too. Dobkowski’s wife returned from church in tears and shaken.