The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “We heard Soviet cannons and I felt the end of the war was near,” he remembered. “The Germans were preparing to withdraw; I told him, ‘Be careful, because there’s one partisan group here, the National Armed Forces, and they would be happy to kill you.’ I helped him get better clothes and told him to pretend to be Polish. We agreed to meet up in Eretz Israel.”

  Awigdor found a household in the village Biodry where they treated him like a son. One night, it was already March 1944, there was movement in the courtyard, and he heard someone say: “We’re the Polish army.” The men made the house their base for a month. Once, they asked Awigdor if he could take them to Prussia, because they wanted to get arms there. He didn’t believe them. He was sure they’d guessed he was a Jew and wanted to kill him, only not in a Pole’s backyard. But he went with them. He had no choice. He showed them a place across the Prussian border where a few laborers, including a Frenchman, a Belorussian, and a Ukrainian, were guarded by just one German. They ambushed them, and freed the laborers. Then they tied up the German and took his gun. It was only then that Awigdor believed the men were real partisans.

  “They called themselves the Home Army, and I hadn’t heard that name before,” he said. “Their aim was to liberate Poland from the Germans and establish an independent non-Communist government. I wanted to join them, but their leader replied that he had intellectuals and students in his unit, the kind of people who had to hide in the woods. ‘We prefer to have folks like you in houses as a backup.’ ‘But I don’t have a home,’ I said, ‘I fled from Prussia, the Germans are looking for me, I want to fight for the fatherland.’ And I stayed. Some of them were anti-Semites, but they didn’t have the hatred in them that I knew from my part of the country. Only one of them told us he had killed some Jews. The rest just made jokes about Jews and sang anti-Semitic songs.”

  Awigdor remembered that in the autumn of 1944 when the Warsaw Uprising failed, an order came telling them to break up and bury their guns. Again he was on his own. He found out by accident how Kadysz had died. Peasants had caught him, he’d broken away from them, they chased him, he took a gun from one of them but he didn’t know how to use it. The persecutors outnumbered him. They tied him up and killed him.

  “We’d promised each other: if you don’t survive, I’ll try to take revenge for you, and you will do the same for me,” he remembered, and added: “I found that village and stayed there for over a month until I had done what I had promised.”

  I couldn’t get more out of him. Only that it was later said in the region that a Jew had taken revenge from the grave.

  He was afraid to appear in Wizna, thinking that if anyone recognized him he was a dead man. Instead, he went to Łomża, in search of a fellow Jew, no matter whom. Once, he followed someone because he thought he was Jewish. He understood he’d made a mistake when the man arrived home and two grandchildren ran out to meet him. He knew there were no Jewish families left. He was eighteen years old and completely alone in the world.

  Every story of Holocaust survival is made up of hundreds of lucky lightning-fast decisions. Many speak of instinct, intuition, providence. What strikes one in Kochaw’s tale is the iron consistency with which he carried out his plan for survival: passing for Polish. He was superb at analyzing risk, faultless at estimating his chances, and he was just an adolescent. He tried to get into the Red Army, knowing that military skills would come in handy in Palestine, but he was rejected. He reported to the Polish army, where he was warmly received, with the words “Poland is Communist now and even a Jew can become a pilot.”

  “I got on the train with my transfer papers,” he said. “And there I met two soldiers who I realized were Jewish. They told me there was just as much anti-Semitism in the new, pro-Soviet Polish army as there was in the underground Home Army. ‘We’re just waiting for the right moment to leave the country. All Jews are meeting in Białystok. The code word is Am Cha [Our People].’”

  On May 11, 1945, Kochaw found himself in Białystok. He stood in the city center, said, “Am Cha,” and someone came up to him right away and told him where the Jewish Committee was. There he gave testimony about his life during the war. Two others appeared and gave testimony, too: a Jew from Kolno who had pretended to be Russian and a blond, blue-eyed fellow from Szczuczyn who had passed for Polish.

  The one who’d pretended to be Russian told him that they could already hear the sound of Soviet cannons when his Home Army unit declared it would cleanse Poland of the Jews and Communists. When someone informed them that there were Jews hiding in the marshes on the eastern side of the Biebrza river, they went there, found the bunker, threw grenades into it, drove everyone out. They made them dig holes, and they shot even the wounded. He remembered what the Jews looked like: a tall blond guy with a mustache, and one who was short and dark. It was him they told to cover the bodies with soil. Then they shot him. From his story Awigdor recognized the bunker he had found in the winter of 1941–1942, and Zajman Zacharewicz, the only dark member of the Zacharewicz family.

  At the Jewish Committee, people put up notices, searching for family. Kochaw wrote: “I’m alive. I arrived here on May 19—Awigdor Nieławicki.” Nobody responded. However, he saw on the notice board that a Miss Zacharewicz from Styczków, born 1940, was still alive. He searched for the little girl, the only surviving member of his whole large family; he threw lines out all over Poland, but he didn’t find her. It was not until 1953 that he tracked her down in Israel, where she lived on a kibbutz near Haifa.

  While in Białystok, Awigdor entered what he calls the Zionist underground—the Bricha. He was given a Lithuanian girl to care for, and they took off. Their first stop was in Będzin in Silesia, where they founded a kibbutz—where Jews worked together and prepared for kibbutz life in Palestine—in a former Jewish building. They found a large library with books in Yiddish and Hebrew, many of which were ripped up. They glued and sewed them back together and cataloged them. There were Polish books, too, and it was there that Awigdor first encountered the canon of Polish literature. The next time he took a Polish book in hand was half a century later—Jan Gross’s Neighbors.

  Awigdor, at eighteen, was one of the older kibbutzniks. Guns had been given to them by Jewish deserters from the Red Army. He made a hiding place for the guns behind the stove and organized an armed guard every night.

  “I foresaw what later happened in the Kielce pogrom,” he said. “When that happened I was already in Palestine and I thought to myself that was exactly what we were prepared for every night. We would have died anyway, but we would have shot first.”

  They left the country on false passports as Greek Jews. The first point of contact was in Bratislava at the Pod Jeleniem hotel, then in Holland, from where Jewish brigades took them to Marseille. There they were loaded on a ship like herrings in a barrel one night, 750 people in total. Near Haifa they were caught by the British but by a miracle managed to reach land. The British had interned hundreds of Jews on Cyprus.

  By March 1946, Awigdor was in Palestine. He joined the Haganah, the underground army, and later as a regular soldier he took part in all the wars Israel fought. First he lived on a kibbutz, but when he married and had a son, he rebelled against the kibbutz law that decreed that children were to be brought up separately, without their parents, and he and his wife started to make their own way. He worked as a mechanic for agricultural machines and as an airplane mechanic for El Al.

  Kochaw gave a forty-eight-page testimony to Yad Vashem in 1968. Writing out his testimony, the copyist noted, “His recollections came to him freely, without the aid of questions from me. He spoke for many hours, as if reading a text he had in front of him, one written with precision. He spoke loudly, clearly, and was distressed by what he was relating” (just as he spoke to me, over thirty years later). The copyist went on: “He claimed that the majority of Jews from his village, Wizna, were burned in Jedwabne, and that this was done with German permission, but that they died at the hands of Poles.” And the cop
yist added: “I don’t understand this part.”

  Journal

  JULY 11, 2001

  In the morning I take Antonina Wyrzykowska to early services at the synagogue in Warsaw. Rabbi Michael Schudrich gives thanks to Antonina in a ceremony, handing her a menorah.

  “Mrs. Wyrzykowski, who hid seven Jews from Jedwabne, reminds us all how we should live our lives.”

  “Not at all,” Antonina’s son whispers in my ear. “A good person has a dog’s life.”

  I drive Antonina and her son to Milanówek.

  “You can throw away what they gave you, Mother,” says her son. “Just like the people you rescued who went to Florida and invited you to the synagogue only to hand you a bunch of dried flowers. Couldn’t they have thrown in a hundred dollars in an envelope?”

  I receive from Antonina the menorah she was given in the synagogue, along with a bag of walnuts from her neighbor’s garden, three jars of pickled mushrooms—one marked with a sticker that says honey has been added to the vinegar—an icon from Jerusalem, and two prayers to the Lord Jesus. As long as I’ve known her, Antonina has showered me with presents, to which she likes adding things with Jewish symbols or Hebrew writing. With relief she rids herself of awkward gifts.

  In the afternoon, a visit to Rabbi Jacob Baker in a government hotel on Parkowa Street. I bring a map of Jedwabne; I want him to help me figure out who lived where. But the rabbi’s eyesight is very bad and he can’t read anything. I try to find out how his meeting with Father Orłowski in Jedwabne went yesterday—it was given a lot of press attention.

  “We won’t talk about it,” says the rabbi’s brother-in-law Lester Miller, also a rabbi. “We came here to spread peace and love.”

  JULY 12, 2001

  I go to Jedwabne with the Geva family. We’re driven in a little bus belonging to CBS News, which is filming a report for 60 Minutes.

  Jakow Geva (formerly Pecynowicz) tells stories the whole way and his eyes are sparkling. “I feel as if I were twenty years old,” he declares. He brings to mind a psychotherapy patient who, after coming to terms with some trauma, finally gains access to his happy memories.

  His three daughters, Rywka, Chaja, and Rachel, are all around forty, energetic, warm, talking simultaneously. Rachel tells me her parents’ story.

  They met in 1947 on Cyprus, where Jews trying to get to Palestine illegally were held in a camp.

  “They were both alone, without family, with the feeling they had no one in the world except each other. It was there that Papa found out that Poles burned his family. Mama had lost her husband and little daughter in Russia. She was born in Warsaw, graduated from the university. The family spoke Polish at home. She didn’t know Yiddish or Hebrew, their only common language was Polish, but Dad didn’t want to speak Polish with her.”

  “I didn’t let even one Polish word slip,” adds Jakow.

  “Father taught Mother Yiddish and that’s what they spoke all their lives,” Rachel continues. “Everybody else around them tried to speak Hebrew, but Father insisted on speaking the language he’d spoken at home. They were both tormented by memories. Mama was no longer able to be happy, and it was hard to live in our house. We didn’t want to be like our parents or hear about their sufferings. When I was seven years old I would check under the pillow for Nazis. We wanted to feel strong, like everyone else, feel the strength of a new thriving state with its army and kibbutzes. We were ashamed of our house, of the fact our parents spoke Yiddish, that they were too old to be parents and dressed differently from the people on the kibbutzim. We dreamed of having parents born on the kibbutz. In the last years of her life, Mama, who had Alzheimer’s, only remembered Polish. We took a woman from Poland in to care for her. We were afraid of Father’s reaction. But Barbara was so nice, she’d kiss Mama, call her ‘darling.’ So much so that even Papa started speaking Polish with her.”

  “Now we’re proud of Dad for having survived,” Rywka chimes in. Her sisters pick up the sentence and repeat it, in English to me and in Yiddish to their father.

  When we get to Jedwabne, Jakow Geva acts like a farmer showing us around his land. He wants to chat with neighbors in his street. Not about what happened on July 10 but about his town as it is preserved in his memory. “We kept turkeys, ducks, geese, chickens. We bought a young cow and gave her grain three times a day, and potatoes, hay—and after a month and a half we had lard and sausage for a whole year,” he says, finding Polish words without any trouble. “Mama was in the kitchen all the time and whenever someone came by she’d treat them to something. After the grain had been harvested Papa would let a Polish woman from the neighborhood glean the sheaves left in the field. We were among the wealthiest people in Jedwabne. What did it mean to be rich in Jedwabne? It meant you lived like a human being. But not that you had a car. There was only one car in the town back then, it belonged to Kuropatwa and he made money driving people between Jedwabne and Łomża. We had everything we needed at home, and even though around us everybody wanted to escape from here, we had no thought of emigrating.”

  We’re in the Old Market in Jedwabne, walking down Szkolna, the cobblestone street where the synagogue once stood. Today there’s a pigsty on the site.

  Godlewski receives the Geva family at the town council offices. I get into a conversation with a town official. “There were more guards at the ceremony than guests. They changed at the offices, checked that their holsters weren’t sticking out from under their suits. They told us: ‘We’re here under duress, too.’ I don’t have an opinion about the event itself, but I think the road work should have been done, because the Jews spent four hours here and left, and the asphalt’s still here and it’s ours, not the Jews’. I heard Ambassador Weiss in the market, he’s a good man, even if he’s a Jew. He said he still felt homesick for Poland, that for eight hundred years Jews lived in this country. I don’t want to justify anybody, but you also have to understand that eight hundred years is a long time for a visit and not everybody has to like it.”

  We drive on. At the end of Przytulska Street, where the Gevas’—or rather, the Pecynowiczes’—house and mill stood, there’s now a gas station. A young woman leans over the fence of the house next door.

  “We had a mill right here,” Jakow Geva begins in a chatty way, with a wide shy smile.

  “It’s we who didn’t live here back then that suffer most now,” the woman replies.

  “The road to the cemetery was there. And this was our private road.” Geva points, still smiling.

  “Why should our children suffer for it?” she interrupts him angrily.

  “The house was all wood. One story, long, and then there was the granary and oil press. I had four brothers and two sisters. There was Josef, Frumka, Mosze, then I came into the world, and then there were Sara and Jenon Chone.”

  The woman at the fence, now exasperated: “I don’t know what happened to the house. We built ourselves a new one.”

  Most people living in Jedwabne moved here from somewhere else and they don’t have the intractability of the native residents, but they do have a feeling of having been wronged, quite understandably for that matter, when blame is cast upon them. What connects both is their refusal or reluctance to sympathize with the suffering of the Jews.

  Geva remembers neighbors, the Goszczyckis. We go into the courtyard, knock on the door. A man of about fifty with a handlebar mustache opens the door. Jakow Geva introduces himself by his former surname, Pecynowicz. We hear a cry: “Get out of here, now,” and the door slams shut. Geva rings the bell again, thinking it was some kind of misunderstanding. The same middle-aged man opens the door.

  “Antek Goszczycki used to live here,” Geva explains. “We lived together as the best of neighbors.” The man: “He’s my father, but he’s very ill. Please turn off the cameras! And don’t write anything! I’ll have to take that notebook away from you, miss! We’ve had enough of false accusations, the kind we heard from the president’s lips. Rabbi Baker was a neighbor of my father’s, an
d now he says the Poles did it. And he’s supposed to be a neighbor? Who put Poles on the deportation lists for Siberia? So stop being so arrogant.”

  We walk toward the marketplace. Geva recognizes the next house, where his cousins the Cynowiczes lived. He knocks before I have time to intervene. It’s Wojciech Kubrak’s house. I prefer not to imagine what kind of welcome we’ll get there. Worse, Kubrak’s mother-in-law appears in the doorway. Irena Chrzanowska normally lives in Białystok. I heard from several people about her attacks on Gross during a launch event for Neighbors at a Białystok bookstore: “I deny what you say!” she cried. “Jedwabne was swarming with Germans. They went at the Poles with whips!” She said she saw it all through gaps in the high gate of the house. But here’s Irena Chrzanowska, an elderly lady sweet as an angel. “Please come in, I have all the papers for the house in order. I will show you.”

  She got the papers legalizing the transfer of half of the house—one half already belonged to her family before the war—from Cynowicz’s heir when he came from Bombay, some time after the war was over. “We arranged for him to make out a document for free, because he came to like us.”

  Hersz Cynowicz’s details can be found on the Internet list of Chiuno Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno. Cynowicz was one of 2,139 Jews whom Sugihara rescued by issuing them transit visas for Japan. That’s how Cynowicz made it to Bombay, where he became a leader of the Jewish community.

  In the Jedwabne Book of Memory, Cynowicz described his postwar visit to Jedwabne. It’s a long way from Bombay to Jedwabne, and Cynowicz would probably never have made the trip if it hadn’t been for the official visit to India in 1957 of a Polish delegation headed by the Polish prime minister. As the leader of the Jewish community, Cynowicz was invited to a meeting with the prime minister, who was impressed that a Polish Jew occupied such a prominent position and proposed that Cynowicz visit Poland on the fifteenth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Not long afterward he was notified by the Polish Embassy that there was a visa waiting for him. After the ceremony, he was given a government car with a driver. “We drove by Maków, Ostrołęka, Łomża. I didn’t see Jews anywhere,” he recounted. Accompanied by a militia commander he went to visit his parents’ house and the place where the mill had stood that belonged to his cousins, the Pecynowiczes. “I went to the cemetery,” he remembered, “in the hope of finding at least the graves of my ancestors and the ashes of those who had been burned alive. But the goys had ploughed the place up so no trace of the massacre would remain. I left Jedwabne brokenhearted.”