The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Jakow Geva and Irena Chrzanowska begin a conversation about old times.

  “My uncle Cynowicz grew vegetables and had quite a bit of land.”

  “Just three acres,” Chrzanowska counters, “and a horse and a cow.”

  “Two cows,” Geva corrects her.

  “A cow and a calf,” Chrzanowska specifies.

  Jakow is beaming—finally someone is sharing his memories. He doesn’t seem to hear how sharply Chrzanowska snaps at me, telling me not to take notes.

  Chrzanowska doesn’t dwell on the subject of the massacre. They return to prewar recollections, exchange the names of neighbors. She remembers exactly who lived where: “Wasersztejn on the corner of Łomżyńska Street, beyond that Bijonka had a shop, later Atłasowicz, Kubrzańska, the smith Łojewski, then there was a building where seven families lived, including the Nożyks. Konowicz had a shop on the square, and Ibram a haberdashery, and a daughter, Judytka, who was so pretty.”

  Then she starts telling a story about her family hiding a Jewish woman that day. She mentions some piece of paper she got from the council saying Poles were permitted to have Jews stay in their homes, which she showed when they came to get the woman. Geva, moved, goes up to her and clasps both of her hands. I wonder if she used the same phony story to get Cynowicz to sign his house over to her for nothing when he came on a brief visit from Bombay in 1958.

  If you believe these stories, which were also spun by the suspects and witnesses in the 1949 trial, the people of Jedwabne were solely concerned with hiding Jews. What struck me most was how they gave the first and last names of the people they rescued that day. I knew that the people who had really saved Jews were afraid to admit it. It was only when I discovered that the Germans allowed Poles to hire Jews in the Jedwabne and later the Łomża ghetto—they who had survived the pogrom—for unpaid farmwork, that I understood where all those Jews living in Polish homes came from.

  I take the Gevas to Łomża to see the exhibition To Our Neighbors, organized in the Municipal Cultural Center by two young locals. They collected prewar photographs (I gave them the ones I got from Meir Ronen and Izaak Lewin) and photographs from right after the war, including a photo of the paving stones in the marketplace, taken by a conservationist in 1946. Did he have any idea he was immortalizing a spot that became the first station of a road to Golgotha for Jedwabne Jews on a hot day in July 1941? There’s also a photo from after the war of a wild party, a long table, laughing faces. Two of the partying men are killers, accused in the 1949 trial. Perhaps this was a celebration of their return home?

  “I’m from Przytuły, not far from Jedwabne,” says one of the organizers, Przemysław Karwowski, in response to a question about how the idea for the exhibit came to him. “My grandfather, a police commander, set up a shop when he retired and did business with Jews. When my grandmother went to Jedwabne to buy goods at the market, she went by two Jewish sisters with whom she was friends. They later married, one became Mrs. Konowicz, the other Stolarski, and they had daughters. Grandmother went to market in July 1941 and both sisters were terrified, afraid to leave the house; they begged my gran to save their girls.

  “My grandparents lived in a building where some of the neighbors were relatives of Jerzy Tarnacki, who collaborated with the Germans from day one, and was in the German police force. Gran was frightened, but she promised she’d find the girls a safe address at a settlement just outside of Przytuły. She didn’t do it in time, and two days later they all perished.

  “Przytuły is ten kilometers from Jedwabne, but they smelled the terrible stench all the way there. Gran was in despair. In my family there was always the sad acknowledgment that our Jewish neighbors were gone, but no one ever talked about who burned them. I found that out from Gross’s book.”

  Stanisław Michałowski and his family come to the exhibition to greet the Geva family.

  I speak off to one side with his daughter Kasia Czerwińska, a Polish teacher in a Jedwabne school.

  “I can’t stand it here any longer,” she says, telling me about the anti-Semitic jokes that are part of a typical school day, and how unpleasantly she is treated for failing to join in the mockery.

  AUGUST 5, 2001

  I’m on holiday by a lake 120 kilometers from Jedwabne. In the evening I drive to see Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski. Today there was a council meeting at which people shouted repeatedly that “our Mayor Godlewski and Chairman Michałowski had no right to go to the ceremony. They represented only themselves.” The council members accepted Godlewski’s resignation.

  “After the session that damned anti-Semite Bubel came up to me,” the now ex-mayor tells me, “and he says, ‘You could have had a hero’s glory, and now what? You did for the Jews what they wanted and now they’ve abandoned you.’”

  We sit over a vodka and recall the past year, so difficult for both of us. “Remember when you told me you were Jewish? Well, I’m sure you understand…,” says Krzysztof. Before I could tell him no, I don’t understand why just because of my Jewish origins he would suspect me of something, Krzysztof has already finished with the words “… and then I saw—you’re a Polish woman like the best of them! What a great lass! I’m so fond of you, Anna!”

  AUGUST 6, 2001

  Jedwabne. I hear more details of the council session yesterday. Bubel was sitting sprawled in the front row. Godlewski’s resignation was greeted with cheers. When Stanisław Michałowski announced that he, too, would resign at the next session, applause broke out as well.

  “Bubel went up to his friends on the council and gave them instructions,” Michałowski tells me. “Looking at his smug face I understood who won here.”

  I arrange to meet Piotr Narewski, a farmer tapped to be the next mayor.

  “What did the residents of Jedwabne learn from the events of this year?”

  “People united in opposition. They behaved splendidly. Their not participating in the ceremony was an expression of that.”

  In Łomża at the Cytrynowiczes. Jan puts aside for me all references to Jedwabne in the local press. This time there’s a rarity: an interview in the local paper with Bishop Stefanek of Łomża—a place where Jews worked together and prepared for kibbutz life in Palestine—who warns that the Poles will put up a fight as long as the Jews don’t calm down. Those are his words! He says the massacre in Jedwabne was planned and executed by the Germans, “cleverly involving the local population.” He feels for the Poles.

  “What was needed was a healing gesture toward those who were drawn into the crime,” says the bishop. “Because there have been no such gestures, the wounds have deepened. In the USA many of our compatriots are accused of coming from a genocidal nation. This is a problem that must be dealt with. Otherwise the Poles will defend themselves, and in self-defense you don’t measure the blows.”

  The bishop presents his version of events. They burned only Communists: “It wasn’t a total extermination, just a sacrifice, chosen from that part of the Jewish community that remained in town and did not flee with the Red Army.” The Germans did it. He speaks of “the tragedy of the Poles who, captive to the occupying forces, watched their neighbors perish … and, at the same time, were tempted to lend a hand.”

  AUGUST 8, 2001

  A conversation with Stanisław Ramotowski. He was feeling worse every day and the doctor decided to tell him he has inoperable lung cancer. As is his habit, his response was to rebel.

  “How can that be? So I’m lost, I don’t get a second longer than the Lord decreed?”

  AUGUST 20, 2001

  I return to Warsaw from vacation, and drop in to see Ramotowski. It’s getting harder and harder for him to breathe; he needs an oxygen tank. “It’ll be as much time as God’s granted me,” he says. “It’ll just be hard leaving you on your own like this.”

  A letter from Leszek Dziedzic in America: “If you have a moment to describe the ceremony, we’d be very grateful. Especially Father, who’s on hot coals for the mailman every day, hoping for a letter
from you. He’s very sorry he wasn’t there.”

  AUGUST 28, 2001

  Back in Jedwabne. I hear that “no one talks about the Jews anymore.” Or: “They had their Jewish holiday, we had no part in it, and now we have peace and quiet, thank God.”

  Probably the same peace and quiet that the residents of Jedwabne felt after July 10, 1941: the problem of the Jews had vanished.

  I’m trying to find people in Jedwabne who participated in the ceremony of July 10; I know they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I watch a videotaped television report on the ceremony with Stanisław Michałowski. He picks out a few familiar faces from the crowd: a villager from near Jedwabne, a teacher, a cleaning lady, an office clerk.

  I visit each of them in turn. Not one agrees to having his or her name mentioned. The teacher explains: “It’s hard enough to live here.” Another participant, a man of about forty, tells me: “I thought, Let whatever’s going to happen, happen. I hid a knife in my sleeve. When I got back from the cemetery, people taunted me: ‘Where are your side-curls?,’ ‘When are you leaving for Israel?,’ ‘What the fuck did you go there for?’”

  AUGUST 30, 2001

  Ramotowski asks me to bring him a pot and pan.

  “They feed us well here, but I want to scramble some eggs in the frying pan, and the pot’s for some broth. Who’s going to make me scrambled eggs on the other side?

  He tells me a long story—though talking is painful for him—about a Jewish girl he liked before Marianna.

  “She was from Wąsosz. Her family, the Skroblackis, had a cloth shop; I rode my bicycle all the way there to see her. I’d arrange to meet her on a bridge and take her for a little ride, she sat on the crossbar. Once, she took me to the shop and I saw her cut me a length of cloth from a bale, for a suit, because mine had completely threadbare sleeves. Her father, Wolf Skroblacki, was there and didn’t protest. It was the summer of 1941 when I saw her again. I was on my bicycle on the way to Szczuczyn, she was walking toward Wąsosz. She told me that while she’d been in Szczuczyn visiting family, Poles had murdered her parents with axes, and she was going home to let them kill her, too. She didn’t want to live without her parents. I tried to stop her, I argued with her: ‘I’m already hiding one person, I can hide another; together you two will feel more at ease.’ She refused, it was ‘no no no.’ And so we parted ways. I liked my Marianna before the war, but I’d liked that other girl more.”

  I ask the girl’s name.

  “That’s the worst part. Every day I regret not saving her. At night, I lie awake and can’t remember her name.”

  The next story is about he and his wife keeping kosher and observing Shabbat in the first years of the war.

  “There were separate dishes for milk and meat. Marianna explained it to me, and I was happy to go along with it. Friday with us was different than with others. We lit candles and put on good clothes. We didn’t work on Saturdays. But later she neglected it, we got a girl in to help with the housework and we couldn’t keep it up. Marianna wouldn’t have pork in the house, but she made sure no one noticed her refusing it when we were visiting other people.”

  I saw him about a hundred times this year and it seemed he’d told me everything. Why did he only tell me this story when he knew he was dying?

  “Did your wife make you swear you wouldn’t tell anybody?” I ask.

  Ramotowski smiles and I see that I hit the nail on the head.

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  I’m in London for a few weeks when I receive the news about the terrorist attacks in America.

  In a suburb I visit Rafael Scharf, one of the founders of the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies at Oxford. He attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kraków and left for England before the war. I tell him I’m unable to understand why Rachela Finkelsztejn, by then Marianna Ramotowska, wouldn’t leave Poland after the war. She had relatives in America and Palestine. Maybe she felt her Jewish family would never accept her goyish husband, an uneducated man, in the bargain?

  “After the war wasn’t a good time for mixed marriages,” says Scharf, who tells me his story: He dreamed of Palestine. But the war broke out, and he spent it in England. His English wife knew when she married him that as soon as possible, they’d leave for Eretz Israel. After the war she said, “Let’s go.” But he understood that he couldn’t do it to her, that she would always be an alien there, that his friends would lower their voices when she came into the room. They stayed in England. They only visited Israel.

  In Poland, Scharf belonged to a student branch of Jabotyński’s Zionist-Revisionist party; he was under Jabotyński’s spell and so in Israel he directed his first steps to King George Street in Tel Aviv, where the party was based (by this time Jabotyński had died). A moment after he arrived, Menachem Begin came in—a fellow party member from student days, and a friend. But he wouldn’t shake Scharf’s hand. He said to no one in particular, “Well, look, Felek Scharf is here as a tourist.” And then he spat. The old gentleman tells me this with such an expression of pain on his face; it was as if the conversation had taken place yesterday.

  “I’ve lived more than sixty years in London,” he says, “and I still feel like a stranger here. Israel is always my point of reference, when I read the paper I start with the news from Israel, that is my world. But I couldn’t condemn my wife, who is not Jewish, to that move.”

  OCTOBER 1, 2001

  Back in Warsaw. I go to Konstancin immediately. Ramotowski is feeling lousy. He has no strength to entertain me and asks me to tell him a story he has already heard from me several times, about a Ukrainian boy who was a friend of my aunt’s. Every time I tell it I embellish it with new details.

  In Skryhiczyn my family lived among Poles and Ukrainians, I tell him, but only one boy, Włodek Kuluk, who played the balalaika, was admitted to the inner circle of my future aunts and uncles. When in the thirties my aunt Ida Merżan sent a story about Skryhiczyn called “My Goat and I” to Janusz Korczak’s Mały Przegląd (Little Review), Korczak proposed she go to work in the Orphans’ Home on Krochmalna Street, and before long she brought Włodek to Warsaw. He worked in an orphanage in Otwock for handicapped children (Aunt Ida, a renowned Korczak scholar after the war, told me that when the children saw a dog, they asked if it was Jewish or Aryan, as they were unable to grasp that the whole world wasn’t subject to a dichotomy of race).

  Early on September 1, 1939, one of the first bombs dropped on Warsaw hit the Otwock orphanage. Włodek Kuluk brought a large number of the children with him to Warsaw and moved with them into the outbuilding of a friendly guard. It wasn’t a great idea to keep a crowd of children who spoke only Yiddish in occupied Warsaw, so Kuluk took them to Białystok, which was already under Soviet occupation (like most of the employees of childrens’ homes, and to the vexation of Dr. Korczak, he had Communist sympathies). The children got into a childrens’ home and he was conscripted into the army. A tall, handsome blond fellow, he was transferred to Moscow, to an honor guard. One of my aunts, Ita Kowalska, a Communist and before the war a political prisoner, recognized him as he stood guard in front of the office of the newly established Union of Polish Patriots. After the war my aunt worked to introduce Communism to Poland, and as soon as it was established she brought Kuluk in from the USSR. He in turn, as soon as he got back, set about looking for Jewish children, in the framework of the Bricha—an illegal organization that sought to send Jewish survivors to Palestine. He was to travel with them as their guardian.

  Aunt Ita found out three days after the train departed that at the station, when documents were checked, it had been discovered that he was not a Jew, which seemed suspicious, so he was sent to the secret police on Szucha Avenue. She went to intervene on his behalf with some vice minister. “How can it be,” she asked, “that when a Jew thinks he’s a Pole, he can become a minister, but when a Pole thinks he’s a Jew, you arrest him?” They let him go. But that was 1948, and the train he missed was one of the last trains leaving Poland with Jews.
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  It wasn’t until after 1956 that my uncle Pinio Rottenberg brought Kuluk to Israel. Pinio had no doubt that Israel was the only proper place for Jews, and he extended the principle to Kuluk. It entered family legend that Kuluk cofounded the zoo in Tel Aviv. In any case, he worked there. Until the Six-Day War, when two gentlemen from the Mossad turned up at his house and gave him forty-eight hours to leave Israel.

  I keep that part of the story from Stanisław, who identifies with Kuluk and hears the tale of his Israeli life as his own alternative and desired fate. The Mossad no doubt suspected a non-Jew who wanted to live in Israel of being a Soviet spy. At least that’s what Kuluk told one of my aunts, who bumped into him by accident in the Warsaw Zoo in the seventies, leading a group of schoolchildren on a field trip. After returning to Poland he gave no indication that he was back to anyone in our family, and he never wrote to Pinio, which remained a source of sadness to my uncle twenty years later when he told me about it.