The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  It’s bone cold, rain is coming down, and it looks as if the wind is going to blow over the diminutive rabbi. Groups of young men standing on the road leading to the cemetery, who shouted “Yids!” when we walked past, now try to drown out his speech with music blaring from speakers, and make humping motions to the beat.

  The climactic moment comes with the psalms, performed by the world-famous New York cantor Joseph Malovany. His song, his cry, are as powerful as if he wanted to gather up the remains of the dead in the cloak of the psalms, whose cry resounded across these same fields sixty years ago.

  In the zone for guests there are pitifully few people from political or cultural life, and only three priests. No high-level Church representatives. My friend Róża Woźniakowska-Thun leans over to me: “I’m shocked. I was afraid I wouldn’t make it here on time and there would be crowds. There’s nobody here. And where are my spiritual guides?”

  I complete the list of those who are absent: Antonina Wyrzykowska was too frightened to come. There’s no one from the Wasersztejn family. Nor did Awigdor Kochaw come—the only living Jewish witness who was in the market square that day.

  8

  Your Only Chance Was to Pass for a Goy

  or, The Survival of Awigdor Kochaw

  They were being herded down a country road amid fields of rye. They’ll kill me anyway, he thought, but I’ll try to escape. He bounded out of the crowd, lowered his head, and broke into the rye at full speed. He ran a ways and threw himself down. He lay motionless, holding his breath. He knew the grain would start waving at the slightest movement.

  He heard the shouting of boys trampling the grain in search of escapees. Nearby someone shouted, “Damn you, shut up!” Then a whimper or stifled sob. He realized they were raping a girl nearby.

  He held his breath again and listened closely. He expected to hear gunshots, maybe even grenades exploding. He thought the Poles were just leading the Jews to the site of execution, where the Germans would be waiting—as they had been before, in Wizna, where he was born. But he didn’t see any soldiers. The racket died down, and he went on lying low, nestled into the earth. Suddenly he heard a noise in the distance, like buzzing or air vibrations, and then a column of smoke shot into the sky.

  A fire has broken out, he said to himself, and sighed in relief. The houses in town are made of wood, and the fire brigade is all volunteers. They’ll rush to put out the fire and leave the Jews in peace.

  He lay in the grain and thought comforting thoughts: How many Germans can there be? Not that many, and when the Poles go home the Germans won’t be able to handle so many Jews. Or: It’s good not to hear shooting, maybe there will be no victims. Only, why the stench of burning flesh? But it was possible that someone’s cowshed or barn had caught fire with livestock inside.

  Jewish Tarbut school in Wizna, fifth grade. Awigdor Nieławicki (later Kochaw) is sitting on the left in the first row. (Courtesy of Izaak Lewin)

  Dina and Icchak Nieławicki of Wizna. On July 10, 1941, they were staying with their cousins, a miller’s family in Jedwabne, and they were killed by Poles there. Their son Awigdor, who fled from near the barn, survived. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

  He wanted to believe this, so he didn’t stop to wonder why a shriek had gone up just before he saw the column of smoke. He lay in the grain until the sun set. When everything had quieted down and it had grown dark, he set off to check on the Pecynowiczes, relatives from Jedwabne, where his family had gone after they fled Wizna. On the way there he met a Jew who had been hidden in a Pole’s basement during the massacre, and who told him about the burning. He warned him that the farmers had started looting, so it would be a terrible mistake to go to the Pecynowiczes, who were considered wealthy.

  Then he knew he had been a witness to the burning of the Jedwabne Jews. He prayed his two sisters, eleven-year-old Cypora Fajga and seven-year-old Chaja Szejna, had not been in the procession from which he had managed to escape. He was fearful about the fate of his parents, whom he had last seen on July 8.

  “A few of us found each other, two from Wizna,” Kochaw remembered. “We sat in the grain for two days. One of us, a baker, sneaked off to some Polish friends for food. The farmers combed through the fields looking for people hiding, so we decided that each of us would try to get to Łomża on our own. I hoped I would find my parents there, at my uncle’s house.”

  Poles had to have passes, and Jews weren’t allowed to travel at all. Awigdor saw Germans checking the traffic on a bridge over the Narew River. He could swim across at night, but he didn’t want to move around a strange city in the dark. He noticed that the soldiers weren’t stopping carts. Some farmer got off his wagon and crossed the bridge on foot, leading his horse. Awigdor crossed just behind him, pretending to belong with the farmer. That was his debut as a Pole.

  Once in Łomża he went straight to his uncle’s house, but he didn’t find him at home. He realized it was Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He saw a minyan in a courtyard; his uncle was one of the ten Jews at prayer. No one had heard about the massacre in Jedwabne, as not many people went there and news traveled slowly. They listened to his story as if he were mad.

  Awigdor Kochaw, then Awigdor Nieławicki, the sixteen-year-old eyewitness who escaped from a column of Jews being led to slaughter on July 10, 1941, lived in Israel for over half a century, but he spoke Polish so well that it was only when he asked me for the word for the season between winter and summer that I realized how remote the language was to him.

  He showed me a photograph with the caption Wizna 1937, Fifth Grade of the Tarbut School—a Zionist organization active in Eastern Europe that prepared youth for life in Palestine. One’s gaze is drawn to the smallest boy, looking out rakishly from under a school cap turned sideways. It’s him. He is the smallest boy because he skipped a grade. It had grown more and more difficult to be a Jew in Poland, and in one year, four families with children had left Wizna for Uruguay, the United States, and Palestine. They’d had to dissolve the fourth grade, and the weaker students repeated the third grade while the ones who excelled, like Awigdor, jumped straight to the fifth. Hebrew was the language of instruction, but they also taught literature, history, and geography in Polish, because students from the school were allowed to continue their education in Polish schools. Recognition by the Polish educational authorities ensured the school a grant from the government. However, a growing wave of anti-Semitism led to a 1937 decision in the parliament to abolish grants to Jewish schools, and the tuition was high in Wizna—six zlotys a month.

  “Of my class, three of us survived,” Kochaw recounted. “Dawid Pędziuch, the one in the middle of the bottom row, managed to leave for Palestine; his sister was burned in Jedwabne. The one on the right, Kron, survived the war in Russia. And me. In the picture there’s also Zalman Męczkowski, with whom I was supposed to travel to Prussia in 1943, but he didn’t turn up at our agreed meeting place. He had family in Palestine, so I don’t think he survived, because he would have contacted them after the war. Unless he stayed in Poland, but that’s impossible—he was a Zionist.”

  In the Tarbut School they were taught to recite by heart poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik, “our Hebrew Mickiewicz,” as Kochaw calls him. In his most famous poem, the epic “In the City of Slaughter,” written after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the poet accuses Jews of failing to put up resistance when pogroms took place.

  Then wilt thou flee to a yard, observe its mound.

  Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless—

  A Jew and his hound …

  The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung

  Unto the self-same heap where swine seek dung;

  .….….….….….….….….….….

  Where seven heathen flung a woman down,

  The daughter in the presence of her mother,

  The mother in the presence of her daughter

  .….….….….….….….….….r />
  Do not fail to note,

  In that dark corner, and behind that cask

  Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,

  Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath

  The bestial breath,

  Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!

  .….….….….….….….….….

  How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?

  They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord,

  They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word.

  .….….….….….….….….….….….…

  Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs

  The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs

  Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,

  Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees!

  The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!

  Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame,

  So sanctified My name!

  It was the flight of mice they fled,

  The scurrying of roaches was their flight;

  They died like dogs, and they were dead!

  .….….….….….….….……

  Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you

  Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;

  Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.

  What says the Shekinah? In the clouds it hides

  In shame, in agony alone abides …1

  Many years later Kochaw met one of his teachers in Haifa; she had emigrated to Palestine before the war. Her husband, a senior official in the Histadrut labor union, asked him how he had survived. He replied that he didn’t want to earn the scorn that in Bialik’s poem even God feels toward the victims.

  “That Zionist education,” he repeated to me, “gave me strength not to become a sheep led meekly to slaughter.” He said, “When I was in the army in Israel, they put pressure on you to change your name to a Hebrew one. After all, if I was in a unit with a Moroccan Jew, he’ll never be able to pronouce the name Nieławicki. I had family, so I decided to settle on a name together with them. My cousin, who later died in the Six-Day War in 1967, chose the name Bnaja. I didn’t like it and went my own way. I found some relatives of my mother whose name was Stern, or ‘star’; in Hebrew, Kochaw. They had become the Kochawi family, because at that time it was a fashion to add a Polish ending. I didn’t want the ending.”

  According to family legend the surname Nieławicki, used by Awigdor’s family in Poland, came from his great-great-grandfather’s briefly owning land in Nieławice. Those were the days of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Napoleonic Code, which allowed Jews to own land. After the property was sold he moved to Wizna, where he built a large, sturdy house.

  “Once, my parents were doing work on the house,” he remembered, “and under the paint they found an inscription: 1812, Nieławicki. I brought my whole class over to show them how long the house had been in our family.”

  That’s where Awigdor was born, and that is where he lived with his parents and his grandfather Meir Hersz Nieławicki for the first years of his life. The grandfather, who did well for himself selling miscellaneous supplies to the tsarist army, bought land in Przestrzele near Jedwabne. Awigdor’s father, Icchak Nieławicki, was one of thirteen children; during the war against the Bolsheviks in 1920 he was an infantry soldier and fought to defend Warsaw. His sister Menucha Perel died before her nephew Awigdor was born. One day she encountered some drunken Polish boys. One of them said, “I have to kill a Jew,” and stabbed her to death with a knife. The next day they got their draft cards and that’s how they avoided the law.

  After the 1936 pogrom in Przytyk in central Poland, when Jews trained in self-defense (they even had firearms) put up a fight against the peasants, one of Awigdor’s paternal uncles, Joszua, called Szyjek, decided to prepare the Wizna Jews to defend themselves and hoarded knives and axes. He thought they should fight, that pogroms should not be known only for Jewish deaths. Listening to him talk, little Awigdor decided to stop studying Polish, because he was going to Palestine anyway. He didn’t do his homework, and refused to answer in Polish at the blackboard. His mother persuaded him that a knowledge of languages can never hurt, and anyway a Hebrew school without Polish wouldn’t be recognized.

  At home they spoke Yiddish, but his parents also knew Polish, Hebrew, German, and French.

  “Mama corrected me when I was speaking Polish to the farmers from the neighborhood: ‘Don’t wag your hands, that’s how Jews talk.’ That saved me later when I was pretending to be a Pole,” Kochaw remembered.

  “In 1929 the parliament passed the agrarian reform requiring Jews to sell their land,” he said, “and my grandfather sold his property and lent money to landowners in Janczewo, Krzewo, Bronów, and Bożejewo. They needed funding because with the reform came an order to improve the soil. Soon they started letting their dogs off the chain when my grandfather came to collect his loan payments. Only the landowner Trener, a German from Bożejewo, paid his loan off in regular installments.”

  All the Jews he knew wanted to go to Palestine. Even his uncle Becalel, who had served with the uhlans, or Polish light cavalry, a traditional subject of patriotic songs, and—when his grandfather still had his land—drove a horse-drawn carriage among the farmhands. His father laughed about his brother going to Palestine, joking that there his work would also be driving around in a carriage like a lord.

  “Our whole family was waiting to emigrate, but I was the most eager,” said Kochaw, who was a woodworking apprentice with a neighbor after he finished the seventh grade. They didn’t go, because they couldn’t get any money from their debtors. To emigrate to Palestine you had to show you had the sum of a thousand pounds sterling each in the bank and have another thousand for the journey.

  Grandfather Stern, owner of a mill, bought a large property for his daughter Dina’s dowry, in Chudnie near Nowogród. His son-in-law leased it to a certain Podgórski. “They paid him back in the beginning, but when people started saying the Jews were to blame for all the evil in the world, they stopped,” Kochaw remembered. “Father took the matter to court. A lease contract was valid for many years, so we couldn’t sell the property before the court ruled on it. Just before the war we won the case in the Supreme Court, but we didn’t get our money back anyway.”

  Of the Soviet occupation, Kochaw remembers most clearly that suddenly everybody became very poor. His father went to see Trener, who as a half German was about to go to the Reich with his wife in accordance with Soviet-German agreements. Trener gave Kochaw’s father two cows and had him load up his wagon with food. “If we survive,” he said in parting, “we’ll meet and figure out how much I still owe you.”

  Kochaw’s birthplace, Wizna, was bombed on the second day of the Stalin-Hitler war. The target of the attack was the floating bridge the Soviets were preparing to throw across the Narew. The market square was burned, but Grandfather Nieławicki’s house survived. The residents of the town scattered into the surrounding fields, and Awigdor’s father loaded some possessions onto a wagon—they were going to hide in the country for a while.

  “We looked around and saw prisoners released from Soviet jail, drunk, looking for Jews to beat up,” Kochaw related. “The marauders caught up with us. They beat us with poles, took the horse and wagon. Our relative Fejbusz Lejman was with us, he was old and sick, and died two days later from the beating. We saw a niece of Izrael Meir Dymnicki, the smith, raped in a field. He himself, a sturdy peasant over seventy, had said, when other Jews had fled, ‘I’m not afraid, I know everybody in this town,’ and stayed put. He was sitting on his porch when the rabble came. ‘Get the Jew!’ they yelled. When they found a Jew they’d beat him to death.”

  They went back to Wizna, where Jewish homes were being occupied by residents whose houses had been bombed. The Jews crowded into the few bu
ildings left to them. The Nieławickis hid in Awigdor’s grandfather’s attic. The town was run by “partisans,” as Kochaw calls them, who had been in jail or in hiding during the Soviet occupation. Now they beat Jews in the street and warned Poles not to sell food to Jews or keep them in their homes.

  “The Germans used them as helpers,” Kochaw continued. “I remember a boy from the National Party, his name was Brzozowiak. He would chase Jews, yelling ‘Juden arbeiten!’ (Jews to work!). My grandfather Nieławicki was among the ones he chased. The Germans drove all the Jews Brzozowiak caught out of town and shot them. The next day the Germans appeared on Srebrowska Street, where many Jews were hiding with the blacksmith Monko. They ordered the men to dig holes in the yard and shot them, too. The Germans didn’t touch the women. But when they killed the Goldmans, father and son, the wife and mother begged them: ‘Kill me, too.’ And they did. It was the same when they shot Kron; his wife, Chana, asked them to kill her, which they did.”

  When the village head of Wizna declared after the air raid and the fire that there was no room for the Jews in the town, a number of them went to Łomża, others to Białystok, but most went to Jedwabne. Awigdor’s parents, Icchak and Dina Nieławicki, and their children took refuge at the house of their relative Eli Pecynowicz, who had a mill just outside Jedwabne, on the road to Radziłów. On Tuesday, July 8, 1941, Icchak decided to go back to Wizna to get some of his belongings from a Polish friend, and his wife decided to go with him. They were to be back in two days. On Wednesday night, a school friend of cousin Dewora Pecynowicz’s ran over to warn them: “Tomorrow they’re going to finish off the Jews, you’ve got to run away.” A family council was called, but the elders underestimated the threat from the Polish side.

  Just in case, Awigdor decided to spend the night in the field, and two of his cousins joined him, Josef Lejb and Beniamin Pecynowicz. The rest of the family slept at home. It was a chilly night, and the mosquitoes were biting so no one got any sleep and the cousins were frantic. It was still dark when the cousins set off for the German police station—they worked there grooming horses and chopping wood for the kitchen stove, and they had to turn up at dawn. Awigdor was awoken early in the morning by the rattling of wagons. This gave him pause, because it wasn’t a market day. Then he heard the sound of windows being smashed and women screaming. He knew at once it was a pogrom, and he made for Wizna to warn his parents to stay away. A couple of teenagers started chasing him. Dressed in three pairs of pants and shirts so as not to freeze in his sleep, he couldn’t outrun them. They began beating him and one said, “Why take him to the marketplace, let’s do him in on the way.” But then they passed an older woman, who said, “You caught a Jew, now take him to the others and get rid of them all in one go!”