by Anna Bikont
This woman, Miss Z., still lives in the same house as she did then; I can try to visit her. “But she’s probably quite queer in the head by now, she only listens to Radio Maryja and keeps saying she saw a bunch of Germans in navy blue uniforms.” I try to protest: “But your mother never mentioned them.”
The teacher also tells me about an elderly Miss B., who lived on Cmentarna Street at the time of the massacre.
“She was about to look out the window, because she heard cries and screams, but her mother closed the curtains and shoved her under a quilt. She didn’t go out until late in the evening, when she and her friends recognized the charred remains of children they knew in the barn. A neighbor boasted that he’d just gone to get instruments from the houses—he knew which Jews played music, because they were classmates of his and had invited him to play with them. He buried them in the garden because there were rumors going around that the Germans were making people give back what they’d looted. When he later dug up the accordion, it was ruined.”
I go right away to see Miss Z., the retired teacher, and Miss B. of Cmentarna Street. Miss Z. doesn’t know anything, didn’t see anything, she’s ill. Miss B. won’t talk to me at all.
I look into the church. A bunch of anti-Semitic pamphlets are distributed in the pews, and they all include interviews with Father Orłowski. He is really good at pushing himself into the foreground and dealing with the media. The people around him don’t do nearly so well. The Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne seems to have dissolved after a few meetings, at least I don’t hear anything about it anymore. The priest’s idea to organize a counter-ceremony on July 10—dedicating a foundation stone for a monument to honor the Poles deported to Siberia after “Jewish denunciations”—was appreciated but did not find anyone prepared to carry it out despite the promises of the Chicago Polish community that they were prepared to finance the whole thing. They even sent the priest a proposal for the inscription: In honor of Poles who gave their lives to defend Jews, and of those Compatriots who were victims of Jewish collaboration with the Red Army and NKVD as well as the German occupying forces, as a result of which they were deported to Siberia and tortured there or perished in Nazi death camps.
I learn in town that the dentist Łucja Przystupa, the local negotiator, tells people that bones were brought to the barn before the exhumation, and that the Mossad tried to poison her dog. Among the active deniers are people from the educated town elite: a doctor, a dentist, a teacher.
I go by Przestrzele. It turns out Leon Dziedzic went once to the doctor, once to the neighbors, and heard enough to decide to return to America without waiting for the ceremony of July 10. Ewa and Leszek are sitting as if on hot coals; Ewa keeps going up to the window to check that no one is hanging around the house.
“Our friends have completely dropped us,” says Leszek. “No one calls us, as if we were strangers.”
“And how are your women friends or acquaintances behaving?” I ask Ewa.
“I have no friends anymore. I lost them all. If my husband weren’t a hunter who keeps a gun in the house, I wouldn’t get a single night’s sleep. I wake up at night and cry. The priest slanders us, saying Leszek isn’t a Catholic anymore since he says the things he does. People call us: ‘Hello, is that Israel?’; ‘Hello, is that the rabbi?’ It’s awful to walk down the street and hear ‘Jewish lackeys.’ And in shops my neighbors turn away from me as if I were a leper. In town, wherever I go, whether it’s the pharmacy or a store, I feel hostile eyes glaring at me. I go into the teachers’ lounge and the silence is deafening. Our children are constantly getting their fingers rapped. Piotrek had his confirmation, and Tomek was sitting in a church pew; the other parents didn’t know he was our son and said terrible things about us. We stopped going to church, someone might throw us out of the service. In general, we avoid everything, we try not to go out. I had a friend whose son used to come to see my children, but his classmates told him, ‘You hang out with those Jewish lackeys.’ He hasn’t been back.”
The Dziedzices’ son Piotrek tells me about school: “A boy in class said Poles had made a mistake; they should have killed all the Jews. The teacher didn’t say anything. A boy in my class has written a little ditty on his folder:
“Where are the Jews of yesteryear?
They all went up the chimney here.
“Everybody thinks it’s funny. And everybody tells stupid jokes about Jews all the time. In Tomek’s class the English teacher asked, ‘Who likes Jews?’ Only Tomek said he did. The teacher asked him why, and Tomek answered, ‘Because we all descend from Adam and Eve.’ And the class just laughed.”
Leszek announces to me, “We’ve decided to leave for America on June 14. We can’t take it any longer. It’s hard to make sure the boys don’t let anything slip about us going. When they go out we worry.”
I ask Piotrek and Tomek, “Do you have friends you’re sorry to leave?”
They both shake their heads no.
JUNE 7, 2001
An evening at the Godlewskis’, a conversation about the exhumation.
“So I’m sitting in the dentist’s waiting room,” Krzysztof recounts, “and an educated man comes in, college graduate, and he says to me resentfully, ‘You’re sitting here and they’re out there trucking in the bones.’”
They were supposedly trucking bones in so that “as many Jews would have died as Gross wanted there to be.” It’s unclear whether the priest came up with the idea himself, or repeated it after hearing it from someone else, but it’s spread like wildfire that the Jews organized the exhumation in order to remove the fragments of the Lenin monument from the barn and cover up the fact that they died as Communists.
Godlewski tries to convince me that the inscription proposed for the monument is a sensible compromise, that it’s a miracle that the council accepted the inscription—after his own efforts and those of Michałowski, along with their visits to the council members’ houses in the evenings to collect a sufficient number of votes.
I admire the heroic attempts Godlewski has made to retain faith in people. He once told me about two aunts of a friend who live somewhere near Pisz, who on July 10, 1941, made fritters all day, brought them to the pond behind the manor house—an overgrown, abandoned place, perfectly designed for hiding. They wanted to do something for the Jews who managed to escape the massacre. The fritters disappeared.
“I want to persuade her to get her aunts to tell the story publicly, so it’s clear there were people in Jedwabne who felt compassion for Jews.”
But there’s no way they’ll speak of it to journalists.
Until recently, Godlewski said, the council members insisted, “No Jews, no temple, no graves; we’ll lay a road right through it.” But “something gave at the last session.” It turns out that at the last session, on June 4, the council declared that it would “distance itself from the memorial ceremony, and will not agree to the council chairman and the mayor making statements and expressing views on behalf of the town council.” It’s not enough that the whole effort of organizing the ceremony on the side of the town fell onto his shoulders, but now the council is forbidding him to deal with any of it during work hours.
The town is due to receive guests on July 10, but nothing has been done, because the council members put up resistance to every move. Godlewski managed to get more money from “high up” to restore the marketplace and the roads to the cemetery. (I had a hand in this as I asked Adam Michnik to inform those at the top levels of government that the ceremony might not take place at all because there will be no way to get to the site, and the council won’t pay one zloty to build roads “for the Jews.”) In the end, there’s enough left over for the athletic hall, which has been under construction for about twenty years. But the problems have piled up, and every step of the way it’s been like pulling teeth. The land development plan needed to be changed—a formality, but without it no monument could be erected. At the June 4 council session the resolution passed by a mi
racle, or rather by accident. Sixteen members abstained from the vote; no one voted against. They only realized after the fact that the proposal was passed because one and only one person voted for it—Stanisław Michałowski—and in these circumstances one vote was enough.
The conversation continues until two in the morning. Godlewski sighs as we part, telling me about the next issue on which the council voted: “I’ll tell you what the council vote was on organizing a ceremony in Jedwabne. Two to seventeen. The two are me and Michałowski. We lost that vote. We’re completely alone. What I’d like most would be to get on a train and go anywhere else. I’m not staying in this town anyway.”
JUNE 8, 2001
Jedwabne. I try to meet with Józef, son of Helena Chrzanowska, the one Jewish woman living in Jedwabne with her Polish husband, but Józef’s in a state of such terror he’s even afraid to talk to me on the phone. When I get to Przestrzele, Leszek Dziedzic tells me he passed Chrzanowski in the marketplace: “One word with me and he was gone. He’s being hounded the same way we are, but he can’t escape to America and he’s afraid that if people see us together they’ll give him an even rougher time.”
This visit I didn’t manage to contact Halina Popiołek either; her niece still won’t let her leave the house. But two people burst into tears when they were talking to me, saying they couldn’t bear the relentless taunting and the late-night phone calls: “dirty Jew.”
I return to Warsaw, just in time to attend the launch of the book Jedwabne in the Eyes of Witnesses, published by the Agricultural Chaplaincy (printed “with the permission of the church authorities and edited by Father Eugeniusz Marciniak”). In it I read, “Wasersztejn joined the secret police and wrote pure libel. A Polish family risked their lives for him, and in return we were subjected to a smear campaign.”
The event is held in a hall in the All Saints’ Church in Warsaw—the same church where recently the penitential service was held. It’s here the notorious patriotic bookstore Antyk is situated, where you can get any anti-Semitic publication you want. I had no idea this meant hundreds of books and pamphlets. Waiting for the event to begin, I looked through the book being launched. Janina Biedrzycka offers proof that the Germans were guilty of the crime—otherwise her father would never have given over his barn: “Because if some Pole had come to my father and said, ‘Give us your barn,’ my father would have got up from his sickbed and said, ‘Burn them in your own barn!’”
The hall is packed, there’s the excited atmosphere of a rally. The event moderator, Father Eugeniusz Marciniak, introduces the guests, beginning with the priest of Jedwabne: “This is our brave Father Orłowski” (a storm of applause). “Here is Janina Biedrzycka, daughter of the man in whose barn the Jews were burned” (an even greater storm of applause). Father Marciniak: “Wasersztejn was an officer of the secret police in Łomża. Later he fled to Warsaw, where he was head of trade unions until 1956, there are documents to prove it.” Guest of honor Father Orłowski: “How can we deepen our ties with Judaism if there are documents like the ones on Szmul Wasersztejn?”
Until recently I thought 1945 was a turning point in the life of the Catholic Church—of course before the war the Church was largely xenophobic, but after the war that faded into the background, and the Church became the bastion defending society against Sovietization. I saw the patriotic bookstore Antyk as pretty anomalous. Of course there was Radio Maryja to consider. But it wasn’t until now that the example of the parish of Jedwabne brought home to me how the Church—at least in that area—tirelessly sustains its prewar anti-Semitism.
In 1945, the deaconry in Jedwabne was headed by Father Antoni Roszkowski, who before the war had edited Common Cause and then The Catholic Cause, which made the battle against Jews their leading theme. Which means that immediately after the atrocity the church sent a priest to Jedwabne whose work was partly responsible for Jews being killed without a pang of conscience. Father Orłowski has held sway in Jedwabne since 1988; before that he was the parish priest of nearby Drozdowo, a hotbed of nationalism, where National Party leader Roman Dmowski spent the last years of his life. As if nothing had changed.
JUNE 11, 2001
I visit Antonina Wyrzykowska at her son’s apartment in Milanówek, a Warsaw suburb.
“Do you feel satisfaction now that the truth about the massacre in Jedwabne has been revealed?”
“Why would I, I just feel afraid.”
“Will you come to the memorial ceremony in Jedwabne?”
“There’s no way. I won’t show my face anywhere around here again. My dear, I’ve really had enough. I used to come to visit from time to time, but afraid, God, I was always afraid.”
She hasn’t read Gross’s book, because she doesn’t read books either. She left school after the second grade.
JUNE 12, 2001
I go to Konstancin to take Stanisław Ramotowski back to my house, where he is to be interviewed by prosecutor Ignatiew. In the end I managed to persuade Stanisław to do it, though he’s sworn a dozen times that he’s “only doing it for me.” His health is deteriorating. He has fainting spells, high fever, he coughs up blood. On the way from Konstancin I tell him what I discovered on my excursion to Radziłów with Jan Skrodzki, including the fact of the Mordasiewicz brothers being killers. Stanisław interrupts me.
“Just make sure you write there was a completely different Mordasiewicz family in Radziłów. Stanisław Mordasiewicz is still alive and he’s a very fine man.”
Similarly, the name Ramotowski is common in the area. In Jedwabne one Ramotowski helped round up Jews in the marketplace, and in Radziłów another Ramotowski lived, no relative of Stanisław’s, who participated in the looting of Jewish homes. In Jedwabne I found out that there were two Łojewski families, Poles who took part in the atrocity, and a Jewish blacksmith named Łojewski whose family died in the flames. None of this makes my job any easier. I have to remain vigilant, because the same problem keeps returning: some people killed, others saved, others were Communists, and still others didn’t do anything, and they all have the same name.
JUNE 14, 2001
My last conversation with Leszek Dziedzic before the family leaves for the States. If they manage to get the necessary papers, they won’t come back. There were three houses in Jedwabne where I could always drop by at any time and be fed: Joanna and Krzysztof Godlewski, Jadwiga and Stanisław Michałowski, Ewa and Leszek Dziedzic. I’m left with two.
7
A Time Will Come When Even Stones Will Speak
or, The Soliloquies of Leszek Dziedzic
“I read Gross’s book as soon as it came out. Once, a friend came by and spent the whole evening reading it. He said, ‘I have to know if anyone in my family has blood on his hands.’ Some of the names in the documents are misspelled; I want to look into it properly. My father’s away, and when I ask my mother she bursts into tears and won’t say anything.
“On July 10, a mob killed the Jews. But if at that time the priest had barred the way and said, ‘You’ll go to hell for this and the devil will settle scores with you,’ they would have listened to him and held back, with the possible exception of a few thugs already deep in their cups.
“My father was friends with Szmul Wasersztejn from before the war. Szmul took him along to temple once, although Dad’s friends had said when you went in there you had to step on the cross. Dad took him along to church once. I always knew Szmul was hidden with us at first. But I also knew I shouldn’t tell anyone about it. One day in the eighties a Fiat 125 drove up in front of our house and there was a stranger on our doorstep. My grandmother Leokadia Dmoch had passed away, and my parents were out. But I remembered Grandmother talking about Szmul’s ears sticking out, so I recognized him at once. ‘My granny called you Staszek but you are Szmul,’ I welcomed him, and I showed him pictures of Grandmother in our family album. He kissed them and cried like I’d never seen any child cry. He said, ‘My mother gave me life, but she couldn’t help me save it, and this woman risked he
r life and the lives of her eight children to save my poor Jewish life.’
Leszek Dziedzic in front of his house in Methuen, Massachusetts, 2012. (Courtesy of Leszek Dziedzic)
“The killing was all about Jewish property, but ever since Gross’s book came out I keep hearing people say the Jews had it coming to them, because they denounced Poles. When our neighbors were rounded up for deportation my granny ran out to give them dry rusks for the journey. She didn’t see any Jews there. In Przestrzele where we lived it was a Polish woman who betrayed her neighbors to the Soviets, and in the next village it was a Pole. I know the names of five Poles from this area who denounced people. I’m sure some Jew did, too, because there are lowlifes among any people.
“I was crossing the marketplace with my family when a Western TV crew was setting up equipment. My son’s friend pointed at the cameraman: ‘That tall guy is Jewish.’ I asked him, ‘How do you know?’ ‘He’s well-dressed and he’s got a camera.’ He’s got stuff, so he must be a Jew. That boy must have heard that at home. When people were going to market and a child was nagging them to take him along, people around here would say, ‘I’m not taking you, because children have to kiss the Jewish lady’s beard at the entrance.’ And when a child wouldn’t go to sleep his parents said, ‘The Jews will turn you into matzo.’ That’s how they brought up children, even after the war. How is a kid like that supposed to respect another people? When I read an interview with Rabbi Jacob Baker, I thought, He, whose people we helped to destroy, is able to speak of Poland with such feeling, and how do we speak of Jews?
