The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  And so it was that Awigdor Nieławicki found himself in the market square in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, in a crowd being sent to slaughter. When he got there the Jews were weeding between the cobblestones, singing, “The war’s the fault of us Jews.” The Poles had stanchions, poles, clubs, knives. He saw a familiar face—a carter from Wizna, Chonek Kubrzański.

  “He refused to carry the statue of Lenin and he was putting up a fight. They hit him with iron bars until he collapsed,” Kochaw told me.

  They were ordered to line up in fours and march down a road leading out of town; the barn was just on the outskirts of Jedwabne. Awigdor tried to stay on the inside, to avoid getting hit. Because everyone was trying to protect themselves the same way, the procession swelled, filling the whole road.

  “We had already left Jedwabne behind,” he continued, “when I thought, They’ll kill me anyway. But I’ll try to escape.”

  He got away and made it to the Łomża ghetto.

  One day a friendly farmer from near Wizna, Pieńkowski, arrived in search of the Nieławicki family. He had brought butter and eggs. Awigdor had urged his family to store their property with him, because it would be safe only with a Pole.

  “Pieńkowski had resisted, saying he didn’t know when he could return it to us, and he would be ashamed to buy anything, to take advantage of the situation,” said Kochaw, to whom it was important to rescue from oblivion the name of one of the few Poles known to him who actually helped Jews. “This was a time when people drove their wagons up to Jewish homes and took everything for a song. When they were setting up the Łomża ghetto there were rumors that you could only bring twenty kilos of luggage with you. The day before we moved into the ghetto I took all our family’s things to Pieńkowski. On the way to the ghetto people stood by the side of the road, grabbing bundles and jeering. The Jews comforted themselves: ‘We’ll have peace in the ghetto, we’ll survive somehow.’”

  Not until the Łomża ghetto, where the few surviving Jews from Jedwabne found themselves, did it sink in what had really happened. Then Awigdor realized that the noise that had reached him when he was lying in the grain was the sound of a communal prayer said before death, Shma Israel, Adonai elohenu, Adonai echad (“Hear O Israel…”). Jewish martyrs throughout history had died with this profession of faith on their lips.

  Together with his cousins Josef and Beniamin—who had survived because they had spent the day at the police station—Awigdor began to assess the losses in his family. A Pole told them he had seen Eli Pecynowicz and his wife and daughters in the barn. Awigdor understood that this meant he would never see his sisters, Cypora and Chaja, again—they had spent the night at their uncle’s. He put out feelers around the area and asked everyone he met about his parents. The family they had in Zambrów had no news of them. Nor had Jews from Piątnica who came to the Łomża ghetto seen Icchak or Dina Nieławicki.

  In the beginning, he and his relatives were squeezed into one room with thirty people, but the Germans began selecting people for deportation and soon there were barely ten of them left. The Judenrat organized work assignments. They would go out on Monday, work on construction, sleep somewhere side by side, and return to the ghetto at the end of the week. They were not paid anything, and fed only once a day. No one guarded them very closely. The Germans knew that the Jews saw the ghetto as a relatively safe place and that they had very little hope of surviving outside it.

  When Kochaw was working between Drozdów and Wizna, he got away briefly to see Pieńkowski, who was moved to tears. He suggested to Awigdor that he come to sleep at their house after work, and promised to ask the police if he himself might not hire the boy to work on the farm. Pieńkowski’s wife and son both kept saying, “You don’t look like a Jew at all, and you speak Polish just like any of us.” It was they who gave him the idea of surviving as a Pole. Pieńkowski seized on the plan right away: “We’ll tell everyone you’re from Wizna, because I have family there. You can help us harvest potatoes until the war’s over.” They thought at that time that the Germans would lose and the Russians were about to come back.

  He sneaked into the ghetto a few times, because he “needed to talk to Jews,” and he also brought food to his family members. Despite threats, there was information being shared among the Jews from the area. In the ghetto he heard that a few Jews were still living in Wizna, and working for the Germans. He heard that his uncle Becalel had survived, the one who liked to play the lord and who had returned from Palestine before the war. He was told that some Pole had seen his parents after the pogrom in Jedwabne and that Rywka Leja, who was in Wizna, knew who this Pole was. This was confirmed by Rywka Kajzer, who had managed to escape from the market square in Jedwabne with her daughter.

  One day he risked a trip to Wizna, and Rywka Leja told him how to find the Polish neighbor who said he’d met his parents. He found the man, who confirmed that he had seen Icchak Nieławicki with his wife and daughters after the killing was over. He described their clothes, said they were on their way to Zambrów and then to Łomża.

  For a long time Awigdor refused to abandon hope and did not say kaddish for his parents. When I met him he was still considering various versions of their deaths. The first was that his parents were killed after July 10, somewhere on the way from Zambrów to Łomża. The second was that they died in the fields between Wizna and Jedwabne at the hands of thugs who were prowling the area, intoxicated with killing. And finally, the third possibility, that they were in fact in the crowd driven to the barn, because he thought his mother’s face had flashed by him in the marketplace. He suspects his source must have gotten something mixed up, because it’s not clear how the daughters were supposed to have turned up at their parents’ side; the girls had stayed with the Pecynowiczes.

  Another day Awigdor looked in on a house in Wizna where several Jewish families lived. The two brothers Sokołowicz were drivers for the German police; before the war they had had a dairy and produced butter for export. He heard that his uncle Joszua was in hiding with a peasant; in Wizna they were giving out new identity papers, because the municipal building had been burned down and they were trying to re-create the registry of residents. He thought at that point that it was better to have Jewish papers than none at all.

  “Rumors were spreading that every Christian who hid a Jew would be executed,” Kochaw related, “and Pieńkowski’s wife and daughter were terrified: ‘We’re afraid they’ll kill our husband and father; we can help you, but in another way.’ I was counting on getting through the winter with them, so I felt as if someone had punched me in the face.”

  He didn’t want to go back to the ghetto, didn’t think it was safe, so he decided he would try to pass for Polish. He set off for Wizna across the fields, and went to the authorities, where he found an official who didn’t know him. “Name? Wiktor Mielnicki. Father’s name? Ignacy. Mother’s name? Eugenia.” The official automatically filled in under religion: Catholic.

  “It was a temporary document, without a photo. At least I was carrying something. I heard there was a farmer near Kramkowo with a large farm whose sons had been sent to Russia, so he was looking for a farmhand. I showed him my papers right away. He promised me food in exchange for labor. I didn’t need anything else, but I asked: Maybe you can give me something from time to time to bring to my mother? I always talked about my mother, my grandfather, brothers, because that’s what distinguished Poles from Jews, that they had family. He promised me flour and ham once a month.”

  Someone must have recognized Awigdor, though, because one day the Germans arrived. It was the winter of 1941–1942. He guessed who was coming because he heard the sound of sleigh bells, and Poles were not allowed bells; he hid himself in the hay. He heard his boss explaining: “I have one boy working for me, I don’t know anything about him, you’d have to check.” They searched the hay above his head with pitchforks but they didn’t find the hiding place, which he’d prepared earlier. He ran away as soon as they were gone.

  H
e found his uncle Joszua, who had spent a whole month in a peasant’s attic and thought all Jews apart from him had been killed. He complained to his nephew that his host tormented him by wondering out loud if he’d keep him there through the winter.

  “It would have been impossible for my uncle to pretend to be Polish, although his looks were more Aryan than mine,” Kochaw said, explaining why they didn’t go into hiding together. “He was a true Zionist.” Awigdor went from village to village. “Praise the Lord,” he would start and end every conversation. And he would tell his story: that he was looking for work, because he’d been sent to Prussia to do forced labor and had run away. He was usually given a bed in the stable over the horses, or in a barn, so he could prepare a hiding place and an escape route. Once, he heard the peasants talking about Jews having built a bunker in the marshes and hiding there. When he found his uncle Becalel, he heard from him that their relatives the Zacharewiczes—Awigdor’s grandmother, whose maiden name was Zacharewicz, had three brothers, Szaja, Abraham, and Izrael—were hiding in the marshes.

  He made it to the other side of the Biebrza river. He found the bunker and inside, thirty young Jews—the elders and children had been killed. They had some money, which they used to buy food from Poles, and two revolvers. They dreamed of joining some partisan group, but in these lands no partisans would accept Jews.

  “I didn’t want to stay with them because I didn’t think they’d survive,” said Kochaw. “Too many locals knew that Jews were hiding somewhere in the marshes. Anyway, they didn’t invite me to stay because they were already living in terrible poverty.”

  Szaja Zacharewicz’s son Daniel, whom Awigdor knew well because he had lived in their house when he was at school in Wizna, looked a hundred percent Polish and spoke Polish like any peasant. Awigdor said to him, “Come with me, your only chance is to pass for a goy.” He refused, but advised Awigdor to find his sister, who had been baptized and married a Pole before the war, and his brother-in-law was a good man. Awigdor went to them, and his brother-in-law found him a job.

  “He got a Jew from Tykocin, a leatherworker who was permitted by the Germans to work in the area, to recommend me as a Polish journeyman,” Kochaw remembered. “We ate with the Polish peasant family out of one pot, I as a Pole with them at the table, he as a Jew sat to the side and got the leftovers. He never let on that he knew what I was. On Saturday he went back to the ghetto and I stayed with the farmer.”

  He met a boy who had fled from a German farm near Klaipeda, and who told him all the men were at the front and the farm women needed a helping hand. He told his classmate Zalman Męczkowski, who also looked Aryan and worked at a mill as a Pole, “My papers aren’t worth very much, least of all around here, because if I was so close to home, why didn’t I get permanent ones? Let’s go to Prussia, they haven’t seen a Jew there since 1939, they won’t remember what one looks like, and the Poles have mostly fled because the work was too strenuous for them.” They agreed to leave for Prussia on November 5. But on All Souls’ Day 1942, the Germans decided to cleanse the town of all remaining Jews and take them to the Łomża ghetto.

  “The day before I was drinking with the boys from the village, by then I’d learned to drink vodka,” Kochaw related. “I came back at night so drunk I didn’t go into my hiding place, I didn’t even pull the ladder up. It was dawn when I heard a voice above me say, ‘A Jew, a Jew.’ I pretended to be asleep. Someone kicked me: ‘Get up, you Jewish piece of shit!’ And I went, ‘Hell, are you taking me with my noble Polish blood for a Jew?’ I turned over on my other side and pretended to sink back into a drunken sleep. My hosts said, ‘If he’s a Jew, take him.’ I understood from what they said that they were supposed to catch all the Jews in the area. They brought me to the village head. I didn’t know how my persecutors had found out I was a Jew, but I knew it was a death sentence. There were two older Jews from the Łomża ghetto there who had been hired as laborers. I went over to a bench on the other side of the building, saying, ‘I’m not sitting with those Jews.’

  “I was left with one guard,” he continued. “I say to him, ‘They’re going to take me to do forced labor, but I just escaped from Prussia. I’m not a Jew.’ I started opening my pants. He said, ‘It’s not me, it’s the Germans who’ll check.’ I told stories about Jews, and asked him: ‘How can you, my Polish brother, do this to me?’ Nothing helped. I tried another method. I pretended to fall asleep, my head was nodding, and he dozed off as well. My hands and legs were free, I thought I was a dead man anyway, but maybe I could make a run for it. I jumped for the door and ran through the village. He was shouting, ‘Catch the Jew!’ A boy ran after me, grabbed hold of me; I looked and saw he was one of the boys I’d been drinking with the day before. I say, ‘Stanisław, let me go, I’m not a Jew, they just want to send me to Prussia.’ He let me go. They started shooting at me. I crossed a yard where there were four dogs, and not one of them barked. I was always good with dogs.”

  He spent the night in the swamp. In the morning he met a woman he knew from the Łomża ghetto, Farberowicz’s daughter from the village Krzewo, whose husband had been shot. She had her two sons with her. She asked him, “Awigdor, I know you pass for Polish, take my little Szmul with you.”

  “But, you see, miss, I couldn’t take him with me. His Polish was very bad.” This was the only time while telling his story that Kochaw addressed himself to me directly, as if he was taking me for his judge.

  What happened to Raszka Farberowicz later we know from the Yad Vashem testimony of Izrael Lewin of Wizna. Her husband was shot in the ghetto where he lay ill at the time of a liquidation operation. She hid with her children until—as Lewin was told by Poles he knew—she drowned herself in a pond. The Germans killed her children.

  Zalman wasn’t at the agreed-upon meeting place, so Kochaw decided to make his way to the other side of the Narew River alone. He hid his mother’s papers and letters under a stone in a field. He kept only a passport photograph of her, because in it she was wearing a black coral necklace—she was in mourning for her father—and the way the beads fell they looked like a cross.

  “I got on the ferry and helped push off, because I knew if I did that no one would ask me about anything. I was a good swimmer, I could ride horses and ski, I could row a boat, all of that helped me. I got work right away, laying stone foundations, two marks a day. I would have worked for free, but I couldn’t tell them that. After two weeks the farmer came to say they were looking for Jews who had fled Zambrów, and that they would check papers. I ran away. The banks of the Narew were frozen. I took off my clothes, held my shoes and clothes on my head. There was ice at first but it soon broke and I swam a kilometer or two downstream. I was so frozen I could hardly get my clothes back on.”

  He looked for work again, saying he had run away from a job with a German farmer. He taught himself to pretend to rummage for something in his pockets, his Polish document from Wizna falling out by accident—a sign he wasn’t a Jew. He bought himself handwoven shirts like the ones peasants wore. He went by village farms. He listened to stories of locals who’d been to Prussia, he paid attention so as to remember the names. His own stories about his adventures, which his hosts liked to hear, he embellished with what he’d heard. He learned prayers and carols, in order not to be different from the Poles.

  It took him a few months to walk to Prussia; he crossed the border near Kolno.

  “There were a lot of German colonies there, but you also met Poles,” he related. “There were bogs where you could hide at night. I’d creep up to a house at dawn and if I heard ‘Get a fucking move on,’ I knew it was a Pole talking to his cow during milking, so I went in to ask for work. I said I’d escaped from Klaipeda, I’d always tell them something interesting about the escape, so they would feed me and I would help on the farm.”

  He spent a few days here, a few days there. He lived on milk taken from cows in the meadows, and he dug up rutabagas and sugar beets from the fields.

  He came t
o like the people on one farm, and their backwoods house surrounded by an orchard; he began to dream of staying there until the end of the war. He wanted them to believe him, so he told them he was going to let his mother know he had found work, so she wouldn’t worry about him. He thought the story about his mother would protect him from any suspicion that he was a Jew. He wandered around the area for ten days, without food, in freezing temperatures.

  “I came back frozen through and hungry, but definitely Polish.”

  His ingenious plan assured him barely a few weeks of relative peace and quiet.

  “The farm would have kept me till the war was over, but it turned out they were driving around checking papers. It wasn’t even about Jews but escapees of all kinds, and I didn’t have the right papers.”

  He went back to his native parts. Once, he heard from a farmer that “there was some little Jew wandering around here.” He spotted the boy in an orchard, he was of Awigdor’s age, ragged, unshaven, dirty. Kochaw felt a lump in his throat; it had been a long time since he had seen another Jew. Earlier he had come across a Jew from Russia who had whistled the Zionist hymn (and later national anthem of Israel) “Ha-Tikva.” Now Awigdor hummed “Ha-Tikva” and saw immediately that the boy knew the melody. Awigdor said, “Ani Yehudi” (I am a Jew). The boy answered in Yiddish. His name was Lajbel Kadysz and he was from Stawiski. He had been hiding in the woods. His father knew a lot of farmers in the area, so he would get a piece of bread every now and then. Every day he looked for a trace of the partisans so he could join up.