The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  JUNE 28, 2001

  Jedwabne. Stanisław Michałowski called an extraordinary session of the council, because the matter of the memorial ceremony now hangs by a thread. A country road leads to the site of the massacre and the Jewish cemetery across from it, a road that turns to mud when it rains. A construction company was supposed to lay asphalt on the last stretch of it, but Bubel, the anti-Semitic publisher, persuaded “his” council members not to allow the work to be done on the last section of road, which means guests won’t be able to get to the monument.

  “The town administration stopped bidding for the asphalt paving of the little road leading to the monument,” Godlewski tells me. “No one is bothered that firms have already been hired to do all the work. The governor sent a telex saying that they’re going to take away our funding, and then we’d have to pay out of our own pockets for the construction that’s already been done on the market square. The town would never be able to afford that. The majority reason as follows: ‘Give us money; we’ll take it and do with it what we like. We’ll repair the market square but not the road to the cemetery.’ One council member was shouting, ‘We won’t agree to a road for Jews,’ and another, that the town should demand compensation for the ceremony. They wanted at any price to leave the construction undone so that it would be a physical impossibility to get to the monument. I proposed that I would resign in exchange for the completion of the road. I said, ‘I think I made a mistake, and I’ll offer my resignation, but let’s finish what we started, because the town is going to have to pay for it.’ And Councilman Dmoch says, ‘Resign now, what are you waiting for?’”

  The vote on the road work was 7:7. The road will be finished, since in a tie the vote of chairman Stanisław Michałowski counts for two.

  “Those seven council members who voted for the continuation of road work,” Godlewski continues, “are probably just more sensible than the others; they got scared so much money would have been thrown away. One of the council members signed because he found out I had been invited to a reception at the American Embassy and he wants me to arrange visas for his daughters. But I want to believe that those seven will turn up at the ceremony, and that’s almost half the council, so maybe half the townspeople will come, too?”

  But the locals read Bubel. Recently he published a conversation with a resident of Jedwabne about how Gross’s book was written: “They wrote it in Przestrzele, at the Dziedzices’. Mayor Godlewski was there with some other guys, drinking and writing.”

  After Bubel wrote that Michałowski’s company bypassed the official bidding procedure and got a lucrative commission to replace the windows in the municipal offices, along with a dozen more spurious accusations, the town has been buzzing with gossip about these “scams.” Seen from Warsaw, Bubel’s little rag isn’t very significant, but in Jedwabne it determines people’s thinking.

  “I can’t take it anymore, what he’s doing to me,” Michałowski explodes. “None of it is true, but people who’ve known me for years read these idiocies and believe them. Bubel approached me earlier to get me to work with him, he wanted to meet, he called on me, but I showed him the door. He had the nerve to creep into council sessions. He started banging his fist on the table. I warned him. He declared war on me. At every step he undermines me, makes me look like a swindler and a crook, tries to intimidate me. Someone had me followed, probably his people, they even took pictures of my house.”

  “We laid cobblestones in the courtyard, so people say we did it with Jewish money,” Stanisław’s wife, Jadwiga, adds. “Crazy things like that. I replied to one guy that, sure, we’re going to lay out a Star of David in cobblestones, too.”

  I arranged with a friend from Jedwabne that at dusk—so no one will see him—he’ll get in the car with me and drive me around town. He’ll show me which houses are from before the war—I want to re-create prewar Jedwabne house by house. We drive around the grid of streets several times with me scrunched down in the backseat. My guide tells me about the Polish houses as well, and the town fills up with murderers.

  “Kubrzyniecki lived here, the one who killed Jews with a knife. Żyluk lived here, not the one who was a big killer, but his brother who also joined in. Bolek Ramotowski lived here. Oh, this is where the man lived who smashed a child’s face and made the mother clean his shirt. We’re on Przytulska Street, a lot of the thugs were from here—Sielawa, Śliwecki. Przestrzelska Street—the same, a street of killers, Śleszyński, Gościcki …

  And the next time around: “All of Jedwabne is a cemetery. Here there was a well where two Jews were drowned. Here was a smithy, where Lusiński pulled a Jew out of the line and killed him with an axe. Here…”

  JULY 2, 2001

  President Kwaśniewski in an interview for Der Spiegel: “The visit to Jedwabne is the greatest challenge of my presidency.”

  In Łomża, employees of the Łomżyńska Cotton Works, which went bankrupt two years ago, called a press conference to announce that on July 10 they will blockade the access route to Jedwabne. They stressed this had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but with their not being paid the salaries owed them for two years.

  I call Rabbi Jacob Baker in New York to arrange to meet him in Poland. We have a long and lively conversation in English, even though I only asked him about a possible date to meet. He brands the murderers: “I hear people are talking about how many were killed. It’s not good to hear that. They killed as many as they had at hand, and if they’d had more, they’d have killed more.” And yet he defends Poland to an extent: “The murderers acted not only against Jews but against Poland. Your Polish prime minister before the war would never have agreed to that. Sure, a boycott, he called for that, but killing—never.”

  The rabbi is preparing the address he will give at the ceremony. “I’m assuming the children and grandchildren of the murderers will come to pray. I wouldn’t shake the hand of a murderer, because it has blood on it, but if he is sorry for his sins, I’m ready to talk to him. We don’t want revenge, only remembrance.”

  I call Krzysztof Godlewski, as I do regularly, to put my finger on the town’s pulse. “It’s raining, the construction work has started, nobody is helping us. It’s long-term stress, translated into successive packets of cigarettes smoked. And my friends only come to me with propositions I can’t refuse: take that day off. Who’s coming to the ceremony? I know my mother is. Women have more heart.”

  JULY 6, 2001

  In the morning, Izaak Lewin comes straight from the airport with his grandsons. We’re going to the synagogue to say kaddish—according to the Jewish calendar, today is the anniversary of the atrocity. My daughters, Ola and Maniucha, came back from their vacation especially to be here for the prayer ceremony. I’ve brought Stanisław Ramotowski. Asked to say a few words, he tells—with great panache and feeling—stories about rescuing his wife, and accepts the storm of applause naturally, as if this weren’t his first public appearance. How much good he could have done if he’d been invited to schools to tell kids it’s worth standing up to the mob and saving a person’s life.

  In the Republic, an interview with the ethnologist Alina Cała titled “Separate Streets, Shared Buildings,” about the interweaving of the customs of two communities that lived on the same land for centuries. The Hasids’ dress, Alina says, took shape in the eighteenth century under the influence of the Polish nobility’s high-collared long jacket, the żupan. Paper-cutting, the pride of Polish folk art, probably came from Jewish culture, the round Łowicka paper cuttings are adaptations of rozejle, the multicolored cuttings in the shape of little roses that Jews stuck on their windows at Shavuot. Alina describes how powerfully Zionism referred to the Polish Romantic tradition, how Polish Jews frequently joined Zionist organizations under the influence of their schoolteachers’ tales about the Polish struggle for independence. She quotes a young man who heard patriotic Polish songs and burst into tears: “Why can’t we Jews sing songs in praise of a fatherland?”

  I remembered Meir
Ronen, who after sixty years of no contact with Poland, was able to reel off to me all the Polish uprisings.

  JULY 7, 2001

  For the umpteenth time I try to get through to the minister in charge of placing monuments. He is responsible for inviting the families of the murder victims to the ceremony. I had called earlier, right after I got back from Israel, when I read that the Polish government was going to ask them. I wanted to pass along the addresses I had. This didn’t seem to be of interest, but I faxed a list of addresses, anyway. Three weeks later, when I called Israel and found out from Jakow Geva’s daughter that no one had contacted them, I contacted the minister’s office again. I’ve been bounced from one official to another, treated like a tiresome petitioner.

  The same thing happens when I contact other officials from the prime minister’s staff who are responsible for the organization of the ceremony. Wherever ill will can be shown, it is. I call the staff office and give them names of people who want to go to the ceremony; I know there are quite a few buses going. At the third name I hear: “And who is this lady? Okay, but she’ll have to be the last one.”

  JULY 8, 2001

  Two visits today—a journalist from a Dutch weekly and a journalist from Austrian radio. Lately two foreign journalists a day is the norm. They are preparing articles or broadcasts about July 10. They go to Jedwabne. They try to talk to the locals, who are unwilling; they mostly hear that Jews denounced their neighbors. They meet Father Orłowski, who loves giving interviews. They are confirmed in their idea of Poland as a country of anti-Semites and backward Catholics. They go to the town hall, where they talk to Godlewski. A conversation with him confirms the idea they took away from their visits in the first period of Solidarity, of Poland as a country of brave people unmarked by Communism (often it is I who send them to the mayor, because I want them to encounter that better Poland, too).

  Each of them has his or her own perspective, and when I can I always try to learn something of interest. When I pointed out to an American journalist that the main witness to the massacre, Szmul Wasersztejn, died in 2000, the same year that Gross published his book, he presented his “theory of the last witness.” When crimes are analyzed in different parts of the world, crimes discovered after being hushed up for years, it often turns out that they were revealed precisely at the moment when the last witnesses were dying. A Japanese TV crew plans to film an hour-long documentary about Jedwabne in connection with the discussion being aired in their country about crimes against the Chinese during World War II. The documentary is meant to show the courage with which Poland is confronting the dark pages of its history.

  JULY 9, 2001

  At the Gazeta we’re preparing tomorrow’s issue on the sixtieth anniversary of the massacre. I brought photographs Meir Ronen gave me in Israel. I have to write captions for them, but it’s hard to see who’s who. In the end I figure out that sometimes I have the people on a photograph written down from left to right, and other times from right to left (apparently in Hebrew you tell what’s in a picture from right to left, just as you read). I call Ronen. Is he sure Szmul Wasersztejn is the little boy in the last row with the ears that stick out, and is it really Jakub Kubrzański and Mosze Olszewicz on either side of him, the two with whom he survived in hiding, under the Wyrzykowskis’ barn? Yes, it’s them.

  I look at the mock-up of tomorrow’s edition. In big print: “A Place That Shrieks,” a class picture from a Jedwabne grammar school, an editorial called “Standing with the Truth,” and Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Mr. Cogito Seeks Advice”:

  So many books dictionaries

  bloated encyclopedias

  but no one to give advice

  they studied the sun

  the moon the stars

  they lost me

  my soul

  refuses the solace

  of knowledge

  so I wander at night

  on our fathers’ roads

  and here

  is the town of Bracław

  amid black sunflowers

  the place we abandoned

  the place that shrieks

  it is Shabbas

  as always on Shabbas

  a New Heaven appears

  —I’m looking for you Rebbe

  —he’s not here—

  say the Hasidim

  —he is in the world of Sheol

  —he had a beautiful death

  say the Hasidim

  —very beautiful

  as if he crossed

  from one side

  to the other side

  he was all black

  held in his hand

  a flaming Torah

  —I’m looking for you Rebbe

  —beyond what firmament

  did you hide your wise ear

  —my heart aches Rebbe

  —I have troubles

  Rabbi Nachman

  might give me advice

  but how do I find him

  among so many ashes

  I draw it to the managing editor’s attention that he wanted a picture of Jedwabne’s Jews, but he chose for the front page a class picture from 1936, by which time Polish children already formed the majority. But alongside the photo, he runs a handwritten note with the names of the pupils and teachers. The pupils were then fourteen or fifteen. In 1941 they will have been twenty. Three of the Polish boys have the same first and last names as later killers. But are they the same people? I’m inclined to think it’s a good choice, a photograph that shows future victims, perpetrators, and witnesses of the massacre sitting side by side, smiling at the photographer.

  A friend calls me late in the evening to tell me to listen to the Catholic Radio Maryja. The whole evening’s broadcast is devoted to Jedwabne.

  “President Kwaśniewski is going to be flagellating the wrong person,” I hear, “us, not himself, not a criminal with a Communist background, where Jews played their part; he was raised with all that. Kwaśniewski is exposing Poles to disgrace.” They announce that five thousand people have already signed an appeal saying Kwaśniewski’s apology in their name harms their personal interests. In less than an hour Radio Maryja mentioned me several times, in the category of “Jews and traitors to the fatherland.” I turn it off, because it gets boring—hate speech endlessly repeats the same thing.

  JULY 10, 2001

  In the double-decker bus I ride with Stanisław Ramotowski, there are about twenty people; there are eight in the bus next to us. Escorted by police cars with revolving lights, in a cavalcade of government buses, partly empty, we speed away to the ceremony in Jedwabne.

  Stanisław dozes at the front of the bus, I sit in back near Jakow Geva, the former Jakub Pecynowicz from Jedwabne, and his daughters Rywka, Chaja, and Rachel.

  Jakow Geva, smaller than each of his daughters, sits in a tense silence. We come to the place a kilometer outside of Jedwabne where a weekly market is held. We straggle onward on foot through mud and rain.

  The zones intended for guests are cordoned off by police. Chopin’s Marche funèbre sounds in the market square. Behind a blue-and-white flag of the State of Israel, I see Izaak Lewin, his daughters, his son-in-law, and two grandsons. They are dressed in white shirts and white yarmulkes, the Jewish color of mourning. He’s here. The family, the flag, and the names of the Jews of Wizna murdered in the Jedwabne barn printed in big letters on a board. I recognize the list dictated to me in Israel by Awigdor Kochaw, which will tonight be shown on television throughout Europe.

  A tense Krzysztof Godlewski addresses the families of the murdered: “I have the privilege of speaking to you in the name of the town authorities and residents. I welcome you to the hospitable land of Jedwabne. It moves me deeply that we meet here today to bear witness to the truth.”

  President Kwaśniewski: “For this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness. Therefore today, as a citizen and as the president of the Polish Republic, I apologize. I apologize in the name of those Poles w
hose conscience is moved by that crime.”

  The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Szewach Weiss, speaks in Polish and Hebrew: “The people who lived here side by side and knew each other’s names, Rachele, Jankele, Leja, Dejałe, Moszele—and we know each person has a name and these names have meaning—were murdered and burned by their neighbors.”

  I only regret that no one said anything in Yiddish, the language that sounded in this marketplace for centuries.

  Stanisław Ramotowski leans over to me: “The president speaks well. If even one man tells the truth, it’s a lot. And so many good people have come, they keep coming up to me to say something cordial and shake my hand. I just hope it doesn’t die down. The same thing that happened in Jedwabne happened in Radziłów and Wąsosz and now it’s important not to abandon those murdered people.”

  Behind the barriers for the guests, some people listen attentively to the speeches, but most are just gawkers. They came to see what a Jew looks like, to see the president. There are also those who behave with flagrant hostility, talk loudly, make silly faces, probably displaying their notion of Jewish mannerisms.

  We walk in a silent procession to the site of the crime. Rabbi Baker gets up from his wheelchair and leans on a cane: “I stand here as a compatriot of the murdered and the murderers. We are here because of tears wept by Jews and people of other faiths. This has made a great impression in heaven. The president has said that Poland—our Poland—asks forgiveness. Those he asks for forgiveness should bestow it. May these tears, which should enter history as one of Poland’s finest moments, cleanse this earth of hatred.”