The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Ida claims Izaak, who is several years her junior, was too young, he doesn’t have his own memories, he erased everything from his memory when he came to Israel. He’s spent a lot of time with Witek and only knows what Witek told him. It seems that Ida preserves Jewish memory and Izaak acquired Polish memory.

  In the afternoon Szmulek and I drive to Yehud to meet Awigdor Kochaw. He greets us with a rant against my boss for his article in The New York Times (the same one that appeared in the Gazeta). He speaks pretty good Polish, sometimes interjecting English words.

  “I read on the Internet that Mr. Michnik called Poland a heroic nation and praised the Poles for how they helped the Jews. Is that all he has to say about Jedwabne?”

  I try to protest that that is not the only thing Michnik or the Gazeta have to say about Jedwabne, but Kochaw doesn’t let me finish.

  “I wouldn’t have agreed to see you. We’re only talking because I didn’t want to offend your uncle.”

  After two hours Kochaw’s gracious wife asks us firmly to stop. Kochaw has throat cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy, he’s between the first and second sessions of radiation. To the pain of remembering is added the physical pain of speech.

  MAY 27, 2001

  Back to see Kochaw in Yehud. This time I went alone. Szmulek gave me directions for a shortcut and told me to follow the signs. However, at one fork in the road the place names were only in Hebrew and Arabic. I was late, which is something I really can’t stand.

  Kochaw returns several times to a story about Chonek Kubrzański, who stood up against his tormenters in the marketplace on July 10. He refused to carry the statue of Lenin and they beat him with sticks until he collapsed.

  “Not everybody went like sheep, as people say,” he comments. He tells me of his wartime life with pride and spirit, but also as if he were answering some kind of unspoken reproach, as if the victims should be ashamed of their defenselessness. This is a problem many Jews struggled with after the Holocaust. I myself remember discussions with my Haifa uncle, Pinio, or Pinchas Rottenberg, who left for Palestine before the war. I was furious that he could consider it unworthy that people go to their deaths without resisting, holding their mother or child in an embrace.

  I tell him that exhumations are under way in Jedwabne, but that when I called there I heard they may be called off as a result of rabbis protesting.

  “Why would those Moshki decide about the exhumation?” Kochaw rages. “I call rabbis Moshki because of the Zionist upbringing I received in Poland, at a secular Zionist school in Wizna. Moshki was a derogatory word Poles used for Jews, and I use it for the rabbis.”

  In the evening, Szmulek and I start calling the next Finkelsztejns in the phone book. Again in vain.

  “Here the ‘blacks’ are always protesting against exhumations,” I’m told by Szmulek, who like Kochaw does not attempt to hide his dislike of Orthodox Jews. “We couldn’t build a single highway in this country if we listened to them.”

  MAY 28, 2001

  Five-thirty in the morning. I’m leaving with Izaak Lewin to celebrate Shavuot at a farm cooperative with which he has friendly relations.

  “Look.” He proudly points out the Bank Leumi building we pass on the way. “My mother, when she went to synagogue in Radziłów, put a kopeck into the blue tin for the purchase of land in Palestine. That money built this bank.”

  He tells me about his mother. From the time the Germans took his two brothers from the Łomża ghetto to be shot, she kept saying there was no God, but she still kept kosher. When they fled the ghetto, they went to see a friendly farmer in Kramkowo. The farmer didn’t want to keep them there, but he changed his mind when his mother showed him a gold ring. Just one night; the next morning he told them to move on. “What, a fat ring like that for one night?” his mother raged. When he refused to give it back, she smacked him in the face and took it away from him. In November 1944, when the front shifted, she was commandeered as a Pole to cook for the frontline troops. A Ukrainian realized she was Jewish. She warned him, “If you denounce me I’ll tell them we know each other because you had a Jewish woman as a lover, and they’ll kill us both.” After that he stayed well away from her. At the very end of 1944, she made it to Królewiec with the retreating German army. She got her hands on a sled, loaded it with clothes, down quilts, and food, and made her way to Wizna on foot, pulling the sled for more than a hundred kilometers through the snow.

  We pass Haifa and soon reach our destination, a moshav, or farm cooperative. The loudspeakers blast Israeli disco music. Everybody is dressed up, even the tractors are decorated: they do a “dance of the tractors” in front of the stage. “In the course of the past year,” we hear over the microphone, “our moshav delivered eleven million liters of milk from eleven hundred cows, and one million four hundred and fifty thousand eggs.”

  Izaak: “Our agriculture holds first place in the world for productivity per hectare, and we have a space program, too. Many people in Poland can’t imagine how well we live here. Look at how healthy our young people are! Jewish children never looked like that before the war. Before the war what were we? Nobody. And now we’re creating a healthy, purebred people.”

  I can’t muster much enthusiasm for any form of nationalism, but Lewin has so much optimism and warmth that I can’t bring myself to object.

  On the way back I tell Izaak about my meetings with Kochaw.

  “Awigdor doesn’t like Poland,” Izaak comments. “When I talk about Poland I say some critical things, so people here won’t take me for a traitor, but mostly I say good things. My friends wonder why I go there. I explain to them that I love the river there, the forest, the river path, the houses where Jews used to live. I tell them about the symbolic monument in the forest at Giełczyn dedicated to the memory of three thousand murdered Jews from the Łomża ghetto, two of my elder brothers among them, and the sixteen thousand Poles who perished in wartime in that area. They don’t believe it. ‘But the Poles helped the Germans kill Jews, what did the Germans have against the Poles?’ they ask me. My heart is torn. I feel for Poland, she hurts me and yet I long for her. We lived alongside Poles, my childhood was spent there. I knew some good Poles: Gawrychowski, the village head before the war, to him my dad was a citizen just like any other. If there had been more like him, a few more Jewish children would have lived, and look how many children came from those children! I have seventeen children and grandchildren. But I also saw what the Poles did. I grew up playing with Poles, but in 1941 our good neighbor Parnas came looking for our father to kill him and take over the other half of the house. When a Jew was wandering in the forest, Poles would catch him and take him to the Gestapo or kill him themselves. Papa gave lengths of cloth to his best Polish acquaintance, you could say friend, for safekeeping. One day when we were in hiding we got on Dobkowski’s cart to go get those linens and bring them back with us. Instinct saved us—he was taking a bit too long to get the stuff so we drove the horse off at the last minute, when we were already being surrounded by people trying to catch us.”

  Izaak tells me about his visit to Wizna a few years ago.

  “Every single person there says to me, ‘We hid Jews,’ ‘We helped,’ ‘We gave food,’ and I just think to myself, But no one survived, so where are those people you saved? I don’t want to think about it and people shouldn’t write about it.”

  In the afternoon, Ruta, my cousin Igal Bursztyn’s wife, takes me along for a meeting with a friend, an older lady from New York. Ann Kellerman remembers the school she attended in Vienna in the thirties. One day they made the Jewish girls move to the back rows. At first their friends kept turning around to them from the front rows. They were reprimanded severely. When that didn’t help, the teachers rapped their knuckles with a ruler, and they left a row of empty desks between the Jewish and Austrian girls. After three days the Austrian girls stopped noticing their Jewish friends. When they knocked into one of the Jewish girls running during recess, they didn’t say sorry; they didn’
t speak to them when they ran into them on the street.

  “We ceased to exist for them.”

  I tell her that I heard a similar story a few days ago in Jerusalem, about being moved to the back rows and a feeling of alienation from former friends. It was about a school in Jedwabne.

  MAY 29, 2001

  Off to Jerusalem to meet Meir Ronen.

  “After your visit I couldn’t sleep for three nights, because everything came back to me,” he says in greeting. He spent those days at the computer, where he tried to make an Excel sheet for me of who died in Jedwabne and where they lived. It is titled “List of Jewish Families Burned by Neighbors in Jedwabne.” The list starts in the New Market with Abram Ibram, who lived on the front side with his daughter and son-in-law. On Łomżyńska Street there was Chawa Alenberg, on Przytulska, Szolem Atłasowicz. Altogether there are more than a hundred names preserved in Ronen’s memory.

  “You’re surprised I remember so many people?” Ronen says. “I remember every stone in Jedwabne.”

  MAY 30, 2001

  I phone Stanisław Ramotowski in the morning to hear how he is feeling. He tells me about a kaddish said for the Jews of Jedwabne on Sunday, three days ago, in the Warsaw Church of All Saints on Grzybowski Square. He watched the reports on TV and must have been moved, because he complains that if I’d been in Poland, we would have gone there together. When I proposed to him before my departure that a friend of mine could take him, he snorted that he’d been in enough churches in his life.

  I only saw a report on the Internet, but I can easily imagine the impression made by the sight of fifty bishops, led by Primate Glemp, clad in penitential purple. And the words spoken by Bishop Gądecki, as an introduction to the liturgy of penance: “As pastors of the Church in Poland we wish to stand in truth before God and His people, and especially before our Jewish brothers and sisters, regarding with sorrow and remorse the crime that took place in July 1941 in Jedwabne and elsewhere. Its victims were Jews, and among the perpetrators were Poles and Catholics, persons who had been baptized. In Jedwabne, and wherever any man inflicted cruel violence on another, it was God who was most grievously wronged.”

  Back at Yad Vashem. In the corridors I meet Professor Szewach Weiss, the current Israeli ambassador to Poland, for many years chairman of the board of the Yad Vashem museum. We talk about the inscription on the monument in Jedwabne, which has just been made public: In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and surroundings, men, women, children, fellow stewards of this land, murdered and burned alive in this place on July 10, 1941. A warning to posterity that the sin of hatred incited by German Nazism should never again turn the residents of this land against one another.

  Weiss expresses his opposition to the inscription sharply: “What does that mean, ‘against one another’? It means the victim is guilty, too. I’m also appalled by the content of the inscription—it leaves out who committed the atrocity, which may make sense, given that the Institute of National Remembrance hasn’t yet completed its investigation, but the second sentence sounds extremely evasive.”

  I look in on Professor Izrael Gutman, who heads the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. I tell him about my conversation with Kochaw, and how tormented he seemed by memories.

  “I saw a picture of him in the newspaper,” he tells me, “in his living room, with an old photo of a synagogue somewhere in eastern Poland on the wall. I would never hang a photograph like that in my house. For some Israelis the shadow of the past presses on every moment of their lives. For others, working to build the country was therapeutic, and they manage to be happy despite their memories. I am a good example of this. For twenty years I was a member of a kibbutz and felt and lived the life of my country to the hilt. That gives me strength.”

  I ask him if he knew before Gross’s book who committed the massacre in Jedwabne.

  “I didn’t know. We treat the testimonies of survivors with reserve; usually they could only have seen part of the events they describe, the rest they add from hearsay. I relied on Szymon Datner’s article of 1966, where I read that the Germans committed the crime on those lands in the summer of 1941, with the collaboration of local thugs. When I read the same text again recently, I saw you could easily read the truth between the lines. We made a mistake, and I feel guilty. I didn’t believe the people of a small town could be capable of a crime like that. I thought the indifference, the willingness to denounce Jews, was specific to larger cities,” continues Gutman, who during the war was in the Warsaw Ghetto and then in Auschwitz. “I thought none of that applied to little towns where Jankiel and Mosze were neighbors you knew well. It turns out it was precisely in little towns like that that the anti-Semitism instilled before the war reached its most extreme form.”

  In the Yad Vashem café I meet with Professor Aron Wein, chief editor of Pinkas Hakehillot, a commemorative book of Jewish communities in many volumes. I ask Wein why his encyclopedia doesn’t say what really happened in Jedwabne and other towns.

  “From the testimonies I read it was clear that the local population had a part in killing Jews in June and July 1941. When I was editing I wrote ‘mob,’ because I didn’t know exactly if there were also Belorussians or Lithuanians in that part of Poland, and I didn’t want to insult the Polish people.”

  I hear there’s a former resident of Jedwabne, who left during the Soviet occupation, now living in the kibbutz named Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters, near Haifa.

  Szmulek phones the kibbutz. Sadly, Meir Paparle died two years ago, and his daughter knows nothing of her father’s native town. But Szmulek has a four-volume book of recollections of the founders of the kibbutz and promises to find me Paparle’s story.

  MAY 31, 2001

  In Yehud I visit first Kochaw and then Jakow Cofen vel Geva, who lives one street away in a lovely house with a garden. His name was Jakub Pecynowicz, but like many Polish Jews he changed it to a Hebrew name after arriving in Israel. The Pecynowiczes owned a mill in Jedwabne, and it was they who hosted Kochaw’s family after they had been thrown out of Wizna. He speaks Polish hesitantly, searching for words.

  On September 1, 1939, the Pecynowiczes fled town before the advancing German army. They had made it to Zawady in the direction of Tykocin when the Germans crossed the Narew River and surrounded the town. They drove the refugees—among them many Poles from Jedwabne as well as from Wizna, Radziłów, Szczyczyn, Grajewo—into the church. The Germans abused the Jews, pulled their beards, made them clean up excrement with their hands, threw chocolate into the rubbish and then made them eat it under threat of being shot. They chased all of them out into a fenced field. The Jews were to build a shelter, but only the Poles were allowed to stand under it. The Jews stood all night—they weren’t allowed to sit, it was raining. Toward morning the Germans ordered the Poles to carry out a pogrom. Pecynowicz, frozen to the bone, went up to some Poles he knew for a moment, to warm up. He heard one of them arguing they should hold back from the pogrom, with others still undecided gathering around him.

  “But some other Poles went to work, grabbing our arms, legs, stripping off our shoes and pants, and then the undecided ones joined in, too. One Jew resisted his coat being taken off, and a German helped a Pole undress him, jabbing the Jew with a knife.”

  When he got home, the neighbors had already managed to carry off all his belongings.

  “That crippled guy Stanisław Sielawa took most of what we had. My brother went to him: ‘Just give me back two pots so we can make ourselves something to eat.’ And then the Soviets came.”

  In the first weeks before the mill was taken from them they paid the representatives of the new authorities in millet, barley, and buckwheat. Jakow Geva thinks that’s why they weren’t put on the deportation list. But how could they imagine it could save all their lives?

  “I was the only one who survived, and I had a sister who had ten children. They took me into the army and that’s how I stayed alive. In Russia I got a letter from home saying everyth
ing was fine with them. I went with the Soviet army as far as Georgia, Azerbaijan. There were nineteen Poles in the company apart from me. They got packages and shared them among themselves, but they never treated me.”

  When he returned to Poland in 1945 on a Russian repatriation train, there were Jews at the stations warning him not to go home because Poles would kill him. And telling him they had to stick together, because when anyone found a Jew on his own, they’d throw him off the train and shoot him.

  “I was afraid to look around in Jedwabne. I was afraid to separate from my friends. We arrived at the seaside, in Szczecin. When we got off the train, stones were thrown at us, but a delegation from a kibbutz showed up right away and told us we could join them and emigrate to Palestine.”

  He made his way by a circuitous route across half of Europe and was almost in Palestine when the British caught him just off the coast. He was sent to a camp on Cyprus, where he spent two years. While there he heard what had happened in Jedwabne. He worked maintaining the gardens. Eventually he moved to the settlement where he lives to this day: Kiryat Białystok. The settlement was built for Jews from the Białystok region who arrived after the Holocaust, by Jews from the Białystok region who emigrated before the war.

  JUNE 1, 2001

  Yehud. My last meeting with Kochaw. Every meeting takes the same course. Kochaw talks until his wife interrupts us. Again and again, always with slightly different details, he tells me about the Jews of Wizna, how they were massacred, partly in Wizna, partly in Jedwabne, and how he passed for a Pole in order to survive. Listening to him I feel as if he has recorded his recollections on a memory loop, played back to himself hundreds of times, and is now reading back to me a text already fixed in his head. He speaks under such strain that I don’t dare interrupt him with questions. Only when he stops do you see how exhausted he is.