The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “I always liked going around with my father and listening to grown-ups talk. Jews were respected in our home. Granny told us about not having money to bury her husband before the war; she had been left with eight children. She went to Father Szumowski, who said, ‘If you don’t have money, bury him in the cabbage patch.’ A Jewish acquaintance lent my grandmother the money without interest or a date by which it had to be returned. Granny managed to pay him back in full before the war broke out. After the war you could get a perpetual lease on land, but my family weren’t tempted, because it had all been Jewish land.

  “Look at the slogans in the tabloids: ‘If you’re Polish you’re with us’; ‘Buy Polish products, remember that buying from Poles means Poles live well.’ They were handing them out in front of the church when Bishop Stefanek was celebrating Mass. Nowadays we’re seeing a replay of the same thing we had in the thirties, when the nationalists were sowing hatred. They can’t even come up with anything new. A strange way to show your patriotism, destroying and murdering other peoples.

  “I don’t remember when I realized that Jews had made up half of our town. I’m sure I knew that there was one Jewish woman left in town, she had been baptized, Miss Helena. We used to leave the truck in her courtyard when we drove into Jedwabne. I also knew where the grounds of the Jewish cemetery were, though it wasn’t enclosed. Once I was driving past and somebody was driving around on an excavator. I said, ‘What are you doing here with an excavator, these are human remains.’ He knew it, too, but it evidently didn’t bother him.

  “On the day of the massacre my grandmother didn’t let any of her children go out. She always said a day would come when they’d say who was responsible for Katyń, and who killed the Jews. She didn’t live to see either.

  “They showed a TV report on Jedwabne where one of the townspeople, Damazy Kiełczewski, was shouting: ‘Let them come from Israel and take away their ashes. We’ll help them load up.’ I heard similar words at a gas station. I’m ashamed for the people of Jedwabne. The Polish Republic was a homeland to many peoples, and a pogrom was an act against the Polish state, it was Poles killing Poles—it was just that some were of the Jewish faith. Jews had their own material and cultural achievements, and they paid taxes like everyone else in Poland. They weren’t ‘parachutists’ who appeared during the Soviet occupation, though I heard that version from someone in town recently, too. My great-grandfather settled in the Borderlands, and when the revolution came they fled and they had just enough money to buy a house in Przestrzele. We’ve lived here for eighty years. Many of the Jews killed were from families who had lived here for hundreds of years.

  “There were a lot of killings after the war, people were scared of visitors at night, afraid they’d come, smash things up, steal things, murder you. Father said you had to have a good sense of who was coming; they came at night and asked, ‘Who do you support?’ If they were National Armed Forces, and you said you supported the Home Army, they could kill you. The National Armed Forces were fighting, but only to rape women and rob their husbands. It would help not only if Poles apologized to Jews, but if Poles apologized to Poles for everything that was looted in these lands.

  “It’s a certain kind of people here. Whatever bad happens, it turns out the Jews are to blame. I’ve been hearing it from the day I was born. Whether it’s bad government, or bad weather, or a cow dies, it’s always a Jew who’s to blame. Dad had money because he was a good provider and he saved, Mama would get up at night to gather strawberries to take them to sell in the morning. When I got home from school I’d go to the neighbors and cut wood for them for a zloty, or pick black currants for them, and the money I made I gave to my dad. It’s interesting that they always envied us our money, never our hard work. They said, ‘The Dziedzic family have Jewish money.’ Anyone who’s got money is either a Jew or he got it from a Jew. I got Jewish money, as they say here, once in my life: a hundred dollars from Szmul for my son. People here live on the pensions of their parents who handed on their farms. There’s a saying: ‘Lord, give me a family with four pensioners and one cow.’ Cows take some work, whereas pensions just flow into your pocket.

  “For ages I asked my father about the massacre, but he was evasive. He’d say it was better to keep very quiet about all that. Sometimes he would sit on the porch for a bit and cry, and the family would say, ‘Papa’s remembering the Jews.’

  “There’s a lot of hate around here now. It seems God has given us all the talk about Jews to try us. There’s no other subject of conversation—whether you’re in the hospital or in a government office. I went to Łomża to put an ad in the paper, I have silage for sale—Jews is the only thing people wanted to talk about. I heard from one guy, not even the dumbest in town, that the pope is a Jew. I responded, ‘It’s not for nothing they wear yarmulkes from the bishop upward.’ I’m in a store, the owner’s mother comes in and says, ‘We should kick out all those Jews coming here for interviews.’

  “I’ve been trying to piece together conversations I overheard by chance. My grandmother couldn’t forgive her son for marrying into ‘a family like that’ after the war. I couldn’t tell you at what point I realized she called it ‘a family like that’ because Uncle Klemens’s wife’s father and brother had a hand in the destruction of Jews.

  “When someone tells me the Germans did it, I ask them, ‘And when a Jew was lying by the fence, clubbed to death, was it a German who did that, too?’ When they talk about the deportations, I can’t even bring myself to say again that Poles denounced people, too. I just ask, ‘And what had the children done wrong?’

  “I passed a neighbor on the road whose uncle was one of the killers. He recognized my car and said, ‘I feel like throwing up.’ Then he spat. But I was never afraid of anything. That’s why I can talk plainly in Jedwabne about what the Poles did to the Jews.

  “There are names that come back all the time. The Laudańskis first, lame Stanisław Sielawa, he was terrible, and then there was Mariak, Genek Kalinowski, who was killed right after the war, Czesław Mierzejewski, Józef Kobrzyniecki, Sobuta, Trzaska, Piechowski, Marian Żyluk, Bolesław Ramotowski the glassmaker, a drunk who beat his horse and his father with the same stick, Władysław Łuba, the one who inherited his blacksmith’s tools from the Jews he drowned. It’s hard to hide, many people saw them killing. Jews didn’t only die in the barn, there were private reckonings with Jews in ponds, in their own courtyards. The killers had learned their trades from them and now they wanted to take over their workshops.

  “The truth will never be buried entirely. A time will come when even stones will speak. I often think, It would be enough if in Jedwabne and in every village in the area there were one person with the courage to tell the story to his children. And if the next generation had at least one child who passed it on when it grew up. And so the truth will live.

  “If a Pole does something good we praise ourselves to the sky, but when it’s bad, he’s no longer one of ours. We can’t change the fact that we have this legacy from the past. The Germans are partly responsible, but the point is not to lay our own blame on someone else, the Germans have enough on their conscience as it is.

  “I can’t get my head around the fact that Śleszyński’s grandson is haggling over the price he wants on the land for the monument. His grandfather voluntarily gave his barn to burn the Jews and now they’re paying his grandson for that land? I wonder if he’ll realize on his deathbed what he took money for. That land belongs to the people that lie there. Some partisans were killed on our piece of land. A man came to us asking if he could buy a corner of our land and put up a gravestone for his father-in-law. I told him, ‘It’s yours, it was sanctified with their blood.’

  “I have an ongoing argument with my neighbors. In shops, at the dump, at the gas station, in church, wherever it is, I speak my mind, wherever it gets me. I met a friend in church with whom I sing in the choir. He gave me a flyer saying the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, and told me to pass it on
. I told him what I thought about it, that his father was a decent man who was in the Home Army and he took no part in the massacre. Another guy told me the government’s full of Jews. I said, ‘When Jews were reading books, I was playing soccer—and what have you done to get a government job?’ ‘That’s true,’ he admitted, ‘I didn’t get much schooling.’

  “A man who has blood on his hands won’t tell you what he did. But he’ll talk about others killing. The thugs had a problem afterward: how to divvy up the hide they took off the Jews. There were so many feuds and denunciations. In every quarrel neighbors would remind one another: and you killed that Jew, and you stole from that Jew. Before Gross’s book it wasn’t a secret to anyone who had been the killers, even though no one spoke of it out loud. It was only after the book came out that people kept quiet and it turned out suddenly nobody knew anything.

  “I’m trying on my own to reconstruct what happened here in Przestrzele. In two families out of eight there were people who participated in the killing. Later they remembered they happened to have been in Jedwabne that day. Two guys from Przestrzele killed Helena Chrzanowska’s uncle and cousin. It was like this: Four Jews were in hiding together, spending the night in a haystack. German police were driving by as one of the Jews was walking in the field, and they saw the grain move. They shot him, and then his father came toward them, he didn’t care anymore, he screamed at them to kill him, too. Later they found the other two in the hay. The Germans had the farmers dig a hole, where they threw the bodies, and they told them they could kill the other two with spades and bury them with the others, or bring them in to the police station. The Jews tried to persuade them to let them go, saying, ‘You don’t think the Germans are going to check how many people are in the hole, do you?’ They had let them go when the neighbor came from across the street to tell them they had to catch those Jews, because if the Germans found out they’d burn the whole village down. Two of them, Domitrz and Edek Kotyński, caught up with them on horseback and brought them to the police station.

  “‘A patriot wouldn’t talk that way,’ they tell me. I reply that I’m not a murderer’s patriot, but a patriot of my country, and I’m not betraying my homeland, only the murderers.

  “Once, an acquaintance of my dad’s met me with the words, ‘You Jewish lackey, if I had a gun I’d shoot people like you. Let your father come back from America, they’ll find his head in the Przestrzelak.’ And I told him, ‘Just make sure you bury it properly, I don’t want it to be like the time you killed that Jewish girl and dogs tore her body to pieces.’ And I added, ‘People like you gave us 1941, and you’d go on doing the same thing.’ He disappeared. He knew what I was talking about, because it was his brother-in-law who raped, murdered, and buried a Jewish woman. It was like this: The brother of that killer Mierzejewski was hiding a Jewish woman in his house in Kajetanów. She was supposed to be moved to another place, when two guys from Przestrzele caught her, raped her, killed her, and buried her, not very well, on the bank of the stream. She surfaced in the spring.

  “They don’t stop short of slander. They ask me, ‘How much money did your father get from the Jews for giving an interview?’ I said to one, ‘What did your father get for killing Jews?’ He turned redder than a beet. The blood on the fathers’ hands burns the children. I heard from one guy that my father dug around in the ashes for gold teeth, and now what a defender of Jews he is. I came back, ‘Right, right, and then he and your dad melted it down in your basement.’ Someone was sneering that they hadn’t found sixteen hundred bodies when they did the exhumation; he said, ‘Now let the Jews tell us where they’re buried.’ I said, ‘They can’t tell you because you killed them all.’ I can’t help but react to that bullshit they go around spouting, but how many times can you swing at them?

  “Well, and what if there were fewer than sixteen hundred Jews? They killed the whole people. If there had been three times as many Jews, they would have killed three times as many; apparently there weren’t. Does a smaller number make the guilt smaller? No, it’s the same. It’s hard to imagine this massacre. The burning itself meant terrible pain, and then there was the suffocation. And those people hadn’t done anything to anybody. When I think about it I see a father going into the fire with a child. The child trusts his father to save him, but he can’t do anything.

  “Once, it happened that some vague acquaintance came up to me in the marketplace and shook my hand. And once Stanisław Michałowski congratulated me out loud in a shop. All the decent people in Jedwabne are frightened. Sixty years ago the Jews who lived in Jedwabne and were Polish just like us were robbed of their lives by their own neighbors. And now the killers’ descendants harass us for speaking the truth.

  “Someone jibed at me once that I don’t have a Polish surname because it doesn’t end in ‘ski.’ My uncle Klemens’s son called me a rabbi’s son, asked me why I don’t wear a yarmulke. Apparently he thinks that’s an insult. My attitude is that I’ve never been scared of anyone. At the disco I’d say, ‘Don’t start up with me or you’ll get hurt.’ One punch for me was usually enough. But lately my mind has been so affected by all this chatter that I instinctively turn my back to the wall when I go into a store, so no one can hit me from behind. They threaten to burn us. I think they’d be too scared to do anything to us, but I go out to the porch and shoot in front of the house to make a point. My wife and I are most concerned about the children.

  “I won’t leave any friends here. When I most needed them they turned out to be false friends. What will I say when my American grandson asks me about my memories of my homeland? That Jedwabne was no place to live?”

  Journal

  JUNE 18, 2001

  I’ve brought Ramotowski to my house. Today Marek Edelman, who promised to examine him, is coming from Łódź. I give them lunch. Edelman says he finds him in pretty good shape.

  “The main thing is for him not to get short of breath,” Edelman says.

  I press him to tell me the prognosis.

  “He could go on like this for a few months, half a year, even longer.”

  In the Republic an interview with Professor Feliks Tych, the director of the Jewish Historical Institute and author of The Long Shadow of the Holocaust. Based on a reading of hundreds of diaries (most of them unpublished), he claims that at least 10 percent of Polish society was—sporadically or for a substantial period of time—engaged in activities to help Jews, a majority regarded the Holocaust with indifference, and at least 20 to 30 percent thought the Germans were helping the Poles deal with their Jewish problem. “It’s a bitter conclusion, but as a historian I cannot shy away from saying it publicly, even though for many years I didn’t even want to say it to myself.”

  Until recently such an interview would have had no chance of appearing in a mainstream newspaper. I remember the reactions to Jan Błoński’s article “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” in the Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly) in 1987, which spoke of the sin of indifference. It provoked a storm of protest, and I’m not talking about nationalist and anti-Semitic circles but liberal Catholics. Gross’s book has opened up an entirely new level of discussion.

  Tych recalls a truth self-evident elsewhere in the world and difficult to accept in Poland. There was no common fate for Jews and Poles in wartime. Every Jew was sentenced to death, even children. Of those who found themselves under German occupation, 5 to 7 percent of ethnic Poles were killed, as opposed to 98 percent of Polish Jews.

  In the evening I summarize the Tych interview for Jacek Kuroń and he tells me of his first day at school in Lvov during the war. His family had just moved, so he knew nobody in the class. The teacher said, “Good thing the Jews are gone.” The children in the class responded with laughter, and he didn’t dare react.

  “My guilt for not speaking up then made me speak up for the rest of my life,” says Kuroń.

  JUNE 20, 2001

  The same unpleasant thing happens to me for the umpteenth time. It surprises me, or I should really say
it hurts, when some of my friends and acquaintances say directly or at least suggest to me that I’m “not objective,” because of my background. I have the feeling I’m in the hot seat all the time. (I’m repeating the experience of generations of assimilated Jews, though my ancestors already went through this process.) At the same time—if you don’t believe the nonsense about the Jedwabne affair being stirred up so Jews can demand billions in compensation from Poland—it’s not quite clear to me why I supposedly prefer Poles to have killed Jews in Jedwabne, rather than Germans. The same friends and acquaintances see nothing subjective in the fact that the matter of Polish guilt is being investigated by Poles at the Institute of National Remembrance without questionable blood in their lineage, like Kieres or Ignatiew. (To be clear, I don’t accuse them of prejudice, I’m just pointing out a certain lack of balance in the matter.)

  JUNE 25, 2001

  Białystok. I’ve come for several days to look at pre- and postwar documents. In the town archive, I run into employees of the local branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, which is right next door. One of them starts to say, “As prosecutor Ignatiew probably told you…,” suggesting with insidious hostility that Ignatiew favors one journalist—from the Gazeta, to boot—over others.

  I’m tempted in these situations to say bluntly, “You want to know to what extent my articles come from leaks by the prosecutor? Here I have to disappoint you, but I work hard enough not to need the prosecutor to establish facts for me, not to mention that Ignatiew is an exemplary official who does not reveal confidential information about an investigation. If anyone is helping anyone here it’s I who am helping him, by offering him access to witnesses I’ve found. On the other hand, the prosecutor is a support to me, something like a therapist.”

  Because both of us are clearly obsessed with Jedwabne, because we think about it morning, noon, and night. I can always call him, relate to him a recent conversation, and let off steam. I’ve managed finally to get through Ignatiew’s stiffness, his habit of calling me pani redaktor (“Miss Editor”), which makes me cringe. We’re on first-name terms now, I can even say we’re friends. At times I permit myself to exclaim that I can’t take it anymore, I’ve had enough, I’m emigrating. Ignatiew listens and calms me down: “But you know they’re not all like that, look how screwed up his life has been because of all this. You were talking to an unhappy, sick person—hatred is a disease.”