by Anna Bikont
Once again Szmulek and I call a bunch of Finkelsztejns. Finally we find Menachem Finkelsztejn’s widow. She speaks good Polish. I learn that her husband graduated from the Technion here and was a construction engineer. No, she can’t tell me anything about his experiences during the war. When I press her, she cuts me off:
“I know nothing. Do you think I’m stupid? I survived the war in Poland, too, hiding in bunkers, forests; I saw things. We never told each other about it. We never spoke a word of Polish to each other. Neither our son nor our two daughters know anything, because my husband never talked to them about it.”
I hear that her sister-in-law Chana, Chaja’s youngest daughter, is alive, but the two women aren’t in touch.
I tell Szmulek about my Jerusalem encounters with Meir Ronen, how vividly he remembers Jedwabne, though he never visited it after the war, and the Polish language, which he never used after the war.
“I remember Skryhiczyn only too well,” says Szmulek. “I’d like to forget it but I can’t. I had family there, friends—Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian. I didn’t want to go when our cousin Pinio organized a trip in the eighties. Somebody might think I’d come to take his land away. In recent years a lot of Poles have started coming to Israel. They work illegally here, you hear Polish spoken in the street, and I feel close to them somehow, I like to hear them talk, though their Polish is a bit different from the language I knew. When a person lives far from where he was born, he always feels like a branch grafted onto another tree. Even when the graft was successful.”
6
If I’d Been in Jedwabne Then
or, The Story of Meir Ronen, Exiled to Kazakhstan
“I, Meir Ronen, born in Jedwabne on February 20, 1926, left the town for good in April 1941. I attended an elementary school named for Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet, who wrote, ‘Many played the cymbals / But none dared play before Jankiel.’ We had a wooden house on Przytulska Street. Forests all around and the rivers Narew and Biebrza. The landscapes were beautiful, but they were the only good thing …
“Our family lived there for generations. I remember a lot of family stories about the time before World War I. Jedwabne had a developed textile industry then, and two of my uncles were smugglers; they’d cross the border at Kolno, smuggling gloves and hats.
“My father, Symcha Grajewski, graduated from the gymnasium before World War I. He had excellent Polish, as well as Russian, Hebrew, German. He was in the Polish Legions, and in the war of 1920 he fought for Polish independence against the Bolsheviks. He had an iron shop and a writing service. He also gave lessons to children in whatever subject they needed. He helped organize the Union of Reservists’ parade in Jedwabne and went on picnics in the woods with them. There was dancing, singing, marching exercises, the fire brigade orchestra played, conducted by an organ player who was also the sexton.
“Father wrote letters for people, all kinds of applications to the courts and authorities. Wasilewski, who later became an assistant to Mayor Karolak under the Germans, opened an office to compete with him. He hung out a sign: POLISH LETTER-WRITING BUREAU. In Kajetanów, Mierzejewski and Górski were on trial, and Wasilewski wrote to the Stawiski court on their behalf. The defendant and the plaintiff came to court with the same letters. The same ink, the same style, almost the same contents, just the one thing in which they differed—their names—was different. The court rejected them outright and laughed at them. Then they went back to my father. They had spent a lot of money on lawsuits, so Mierzejewski’s daughter came to us and asked my father to reconcile them. Father met with Górski and asked him how much he would cede to Mierzejewski. He said, nothing. Then he asked Mierzejewski the same thing. He was told, not a button. They paid my father five zlotys, but who could advise them? The Mierzejewskis lost everything in those court cases, and they owed a lot to Abram Zajdensztadt, who had loaned them money.
Elementary school class. Jedwabne, 1933. The school was attended by Polish and Jewish children. Meir Grajewski (later Meir Ronen), first row, third from right; his elder sister Fajga behind him in a polka-dot dress. In the back row, three boys who survived the war in hiding with Antonina and Aleksander Wyrzykowski: second from left, Szmul Wasersztejn; third, Mosze Olszewicz; fourth, Jankiel Kubrzański. Also in the photo: Butcher Nornberg’s daughter, in the second row, fourth from left. Meir Stryjakowski, grandson of Jedwabne rabbi Awigdor Białostocki, is standing in the back row second from right. The photo also shows children from the Zajdensztat, Zimny, Jedwabiński, and Kamionowicz families. (Courtesy of Meir Ronen)
“Before the war a lot of Poles owed Jews money and so they made sure they didn’t have to pay off their debts.
“In the middle of the marketplace there were the town hall, two wells, and a few chestnut trees. In May we used to go catch mayflies. First the school was on Sadowa Street, then it moved. They built a new school building behind the mill, all modern, with central heating and a parquet floor. People came to Jedwabne in trucks from Warsaw and Königsberg to buy farm produce, and there were also two squares for selling livestock. On Wednesday, market day, it was hard to get through, so many people were out trading.
“On Tuesday toward evening, people started chasing geese and pigs out to the marketplace. A lot of Jews traded grain, selling it all the way to East Prussia. Białystok Jews came for flour. Shoemakers, coopers, wheelwrights were all Jews, but among blacksmiths you had Poles as well.
“We didn’t have any Hasids at all. Only the rabbi wore sidelocks, and no one wore a tallit. In that region the Lithuanian Jews were very pious, they wore beards and hats, but I don’t remember any of them ever settling in Jedwabne. During Jewish holidays you felt a celebratory atmosphere in town, whole families—at that time six children wasn’t a lot—walked across the market square to the synagogue, which was on Szkolna. There was an eternal Babel in the market, Polish and Yiddish mixed together, and on Yom Kippur, it was quiet as the grave. And when the Catholic holidays came, Jews tried not to show themselves in the street, because a lot of people came into town from the villages then, often drunk.
“The state holiday of November 11 was celebrated by both Poles and Jews; there was a special Mass in church and prayers in the synagogue. On the birthday of Marshal Piłsudski, the first chief of state in independent Poland, schoolchildren gathered in the marketplace and Mayor Walenty Grądzki spoke from a podium. We went to temple with little flags to pray for the marshal, and I remember the mayor and police commander Bielecki participating in the synagogue prayers.
“Quite a few Jewish organizations were active in town, but there weren’t many Jewish Communists. At night they would hang out red flags, and once on May 1 they released doves painted red. Commander Bielecki, who was friendly with my father, observed who didn’t go to synagogue on Shabbat and arrested them for Communist activity. Because what sort of Jew wouldn’t go to synagogue on Shabbat?
“Marshal Piłsudski kept a firm hold on the nationalists, because he had a conscience. When he died on May 12, 1935, every Jewish home in Jedwabne hung out a red-and-white flag; so did many Polish homes, but far from all. Later they put a monument to Piłsudski in the New Market, which was then taken away by the Soviets. After the marshal’s death, my father’s colleagues in the Reservists Union said to him: ‘We don’t need Jews in our union.’ I can still see my father tossing his Legion cap into the stove. He was still friends with some Poles: Dr. Kowalczyk, the butcher Kozłowski, Chodnicki, Białoszewski, and Śleszyński, who later gave his barn to burn the Jews.
“In 1937, a pogrom was being organized in Jedwabne. Rabbi Białostocki and Jona Rotszyld, my uncle, went to see the priest and he promised there wouldn’t be any pogrom. My uncle had an iron shop, and they bought everything for the construction of the church in Jedwabne cheap in his shop, and he’d give the church something as an offering sometimes, too. Not long after that he left for Palestine and took my sister with him.
“Our Polish neighbors were the Polkowskis and the Ostrowskis. Ryszard Ostro
wski, the policeman’s son, used to come over to visit me, and my sister had Polish friends over, most often Śleszyński’s daughter. Then there was the driver’s son on the Prusowa estate, who had a terrible stutter; in our house he stopped stuttering because we showed him warmth. After school I went to Hebrew school and the driver’s son waited at our house for me to come back and help him with his homework. I was five when my parents sent me to the cheder, but the rabbi who taught there had a horse whip and after he whipped me once I didn’t go back. Then one of my uncles brought over Alter Wiski, a teacher from Wołkowysk, who set up a private modern school, where we went after Polish school.
“The new school had rows of desks, not a common table like at the cheder, and they taught us to write Hebrew. We Jewish kids didn’t go to Polish school on Saturdays, which was not at all to the liking of the teacher, Skupniewski. But what irritated him most was that we always had our homework done on Monday. After Shabbat, Polish kids would come over to our house—they liked being treated to challah—and brought us their notebooks. If I went sledding on a Saturday my uncle would drag me home by the ear.
“I went to school without a cap but there were Jewish kids in Jedwabne who never went anywhere without their heads covered. After Piłsudski’s death, people started kicking them out of school for wearing yarmulkes. When we started school, there were thirty to forty Jewish children, and when I finished the sixth grade in 1939, there were only five of us left. When we spoke Yiddish to each other after 1935, the school head Skarżyński would say: ‘Get out of this school, you’re jabbering in Yiddish.’
“In the beginning we sat together with Polish children at school. I sat in the first row, otherwise I couldn’t see the blackboard; nobody in Jedwabne had spectacles at that time. One day a teacher made a fuss about a Jewish boy sitting up front. Then all Jews were told to move to the back of the class. The desks were for two, but we had to sit three at a desk. The teachers addressed us all the same way: ‘Moshek to the blackboard.’ Once when I didn’t get up, the teacher said to me, ‘I’m talking to you.’ I replied that my name was Meir, not Moshek, and he threw me out of the classroom.
“In the sixth grade, when we sat at the back, teachers didn’t correct our homework, and didn’t call us to the blackboard, unless it was to chew us out. We were strangers to the class. Polish children didn’t talk to us. Teachers would send us home because our ears were dirty or they spotted a flea on one of us. In those times kids had a lot of fleas, Polish kids just as much, but they were never sent home for it.
“After school we had to walk home, and that wasn’t always easy. Village boys waited for us, attacked us, beat us. We found a way around, behind the estate where there was a pond, bogs, and meadows. You had to walk fast over a narrow path in order not to fall into the bog. Once, the boys saw us and chased us, but one of them fell into a bog. He began to sink in, but we went back and held out a pole for him. Then they stopped harassing us, because we’d saved the boy from drowning.
“In the spring of 1939 they were putting fresh plaster up in the classroom. While I was standing guard, the youngest Śleszyński girl slammed the door in a nasty sort of way so the plaster fell off. The head, Skupniewski, said: ‘Moshek, it’s your fault. Go and kneel in the corner.’ For me that meant kneeling before the cross that hung there. I said, ‘I’m of the Jewish faith and I cannot kneel before the cross.’ ‘Get out of this school!’ he shouted. ‘And don’t come back!’
“In that last school year of 1938 to ’39, not a single Jewish child received a report card.
“When the Germans arrived in September 1939, relations between Poles and Jews were very chilly. Young boys robbed Jews, beat them, ran after Germans, pointed out the Jude, but they didn’t kill anybody.
“After the Russians came, there began to be shortages of everything: salt, gas, sugar. There were only ration cards. Before the new authorities forbade anyone from having a shop and introduced co-ops, the Russians would barge into Jewish shops and take everything they wanted without paying. Before the war, no matter how bad the Poles were, they still allowed us to go to temple on Shabbat and Jewish shops could close for the day. The Russians ordered us to work and send children to school on Shabbat. They threatened us that if a Jewish child didn’t go to school on a Saturday, one of his parents would go to jail. Jews tried to keep a low profile under the Soviets, because they were scared.
“During the Soviet occupation five Jewish louts threw their weight around.
“The first guy, Eli Krawiecki, had a shoemaker’s workshop. He would sew pieces of leather together for the shoemaker to make shoes out of them. He was the smartest of them, at least he had a skill. Under the Soviets he had no official function, but he led everything from behind the wings. The Poles later inflicted a cruel death on him: after the Russians had fled, Poles cut his tongue out and left him to die in agony.
“Chaim Kosacki: his father was a butcher, but he was a bum, he didn’t do anything. When the Germans arrived, the Poles delivered Kosacki to them and they shot him that same day.
“Abraham Dawid Kubrzański later died in the barn.
“Szajn Binsztejn was in jail for three years before the war for raping a girl. He was a real outlaw. In the synagogue, he was only allowed to stand behind the stove, and only when there was hardly anybody left, when they needed ten to make a minyan, then they’d take him.
“Mechajkał Wajnsztajn was the only one of the five to survive the war. They ruled the town in the first weeks before Soviet authorities established themselves. Their boss was a true Communist, the Pole Krystowczyk. This Pole became council chairman, and Binsztejn police commander.
“Those five guys were virtually illiterate. They wanted my father as their writer. But he told them: ‘What are you doing? The war’s only just begun; who knows what’s going to happen.’ Other people told them the same thing: ‘What are you doing, we live in Poland, why do you want to sow discord?’ It’s true that they informed on Poles. But our Polish neighbors blamed all the Jews for what a few no-goodniks did.
“I don’t remember other Jews having any links to the Russians. Sometimes someone had been a Communist before the war but he would prefer to keep out of the Russians’ way. There was a Jew in Jedwabne, Mosze Lew, arrested for Communism, who left for Palestine later, maybe in 1934. There he was so active as a Communist that the British threw him out and he returned to Jedwabne. He got married in Tykocin and he visited friends in Jedwabne just after the Russians had come, to ask them not to give him away, he was so scared of the Soviets. The Polish Communist party had been dissolved by Stalin in 1937, after all, and the Soviets announced that its members were provocateurs, summoned Communists from Poland to Russia, and shot them there.
“The Soviets began to draw up lists and arrest people. They arrested more Poles. They arrested my father on December 10, 1939. My mother and I had no word of him ever again. After the war I searched for him through the Red Cross. Maybe he was shot in prison, though rumors once reached us that he’d been seen sick in a camp near the White Sea.
“Mother and I were deported to Kazakhstan in March 1940. At that time I was fourteen years old. We traveled with four Polish families for a month and a half in crammed railway cars. Once every few days they let us out and gave us water to drink. They’d be standing with automatic guns ready to fire. In the cars there was a little window high up where you could get a lot of air. When we got in and I took a place near the window, one of the Polish women, Mrs. Białobrzeski, took me by the lapels, sat me down on the floor, and said, ‘You can sit down there, Jew-boy.’ And she put Polish children where I’d been sitting.
“We were taken to Kokshetau, and from there it was sixty kilometers to the kolkhoz in Frunze. This was between Siberia and the Kazakh steppes, on the horizon we could see high dark-blue mountains. The driver threw us out of the car into the street near the kolkhoz offices. We were hungry and dirty. We were so infested with fleas it was hard to bear. Later we all lived together, all of us from t
he same transport, in one mud hut. There were two huts there, without a kitchen; we lit a fire between them. We had no beds or chairs. There was Granny Grądzka, who was about eighty years old. She didn’t like Jews, but she liked listening to their prayers, especially the Kol Nidre. She was the mother of our mayor, who was friendly with Jews. Only Grądzka spoke to us like a human being. She kept saying prayers holding her rosary, and didn’t eat much. One day she said to me: ‘Mejerczyk, bring me some fresh water.’ She drank the water, crossed herself, and died. There was Jadwiga Bronowiczowa and her daughter, Danuta. Bronowicz was the son-in-law of Mayor Grądzki. Bronowiczowa didn’t like Jews any more than her husband did: he had a bakery in Jedwabne and when he’d had enough vodka, he went around beating up Jews. There was Mrs. Białobrzeski, the one who wouldn’t let me get any air in the train. She was the most contemptuous of us during that time. There was Szymańska with her seven children. They had a dairy in Jedwabne. Four of the children died of hunger. She got along somehow with Jews, you could talk to her.
“There were fifteen Polish families with us in exile—the men in prison, their wives and children here. Only Mama and me were Jewish. We were all sent to the same life of misery, but as for any of the Poles growing closer to us during that whole time, not a chance.
“We’d wash ourselves in the swamp when Kazakh children went swimming. They noticed I was circumcised, whereas the Polish kids weren’t, and the little Kazakhs told their parents. One day I was walking through the village and a Kazakh family was sitting on the porch, by a low table with a dish of meat on it, eating with their hands, and they called to me. Not to eat with a Kazakh is the worst possible insult. They asked me where I was from. I said Poland. ‘All right, but you’re not like the other Polish children. You walk by yourself and they beat you.’ I said I was a yevrey, a Jew. ‘We want to see what you look like,’ they said. I tried to run away but they caught me. I tried to tear myself away. They told the women to go. There I was with my pants down and they raised their hands to the heavens and cried out. They asked me if I ate pork. When I said I didn’t, they shouted even louder with relief: ‘You’re one of us, you’re one of us!’ They explained to me that my yevrey was the same as musulmanin, ‘Muslim,’ in their language.
