The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  OCTOBER 5, 2001

  Conversations with friends about the extent to which the Jedwabne affair had an influence on the parliamentary election results: Unia Wolności (Freedom Union), the only post-Solidarity party that had members present at the Jedwabne ceremony on July 10, did not make it into the parliament; while for the first time two parties whose members openly voice anti-Semitic views—the LPR (League of Polish Families), the party of Father Rydzyk and Radio Maryja, and the populist Samoobrona (Self-Defense)—did get in. A prominent right-wing politician, when asked about this in the Gazeta, replies that the Jedwabne affair had an indirect influence on the League’s popularity: “A conviction grew among the masses that strangers—politicians, journalists, historians, and finally forces abroad—had decided to make murderers out of us.”

  OCTOBER 7, 2001

  Jedwabne. I’ve come to attend the October session of the town council. As Krzysztof Godlewski was forced to resign, a new mayor must be elected. There are two candidates, a farmer and a veterinarian. In the corridors I hear that the farmer has a good chance, because he’s supported by the parish priest. But the vet also has a strong position. It is he who puts the “stamp of purity” on milk containers and gives permission for artificial inseminations, so no farmer will vote against him.

  I begin to chat with one of the councilwomen.

  “Godlewski was a good mayor; you can’t say anything against him,” she says. “He was the first decent one; before he came in we always had swindlers, abuses, manipulations. It all went wrong for him because of the Jews, because he let them in.”

  “Should he have kept them out?”

  “There was no good solution. I’ll tell you, privately, what I think: Jews are human beings, too. And those Polish families shouldn’t have joined in when the Germans were out killing. Only please, miss, don’t mention my name.”

  Janusz Żyluk is in the hall. I jotted down a conversation I had with him half a year ago at the residents’ meeting with Ignatiew. He came up very close to me and addressed me in such an aggressive tone that I recoiled. “Are you going to write more of your lies?” “I can also write your truth, sir, and have you authorize the statement,” I answered politely, but he only snarled back, “I’m not going to talk to you.” Leszek Dziedzic, whom I told about the incident, identified him as Janusz Żyluk. He hasn’t lived in Jedwabne for years, but he comes back often, and his father took part in the massacre.

  He came up to me again at the next council session: “My father was arrested after the war. When he got out of prison, his back was black and blue from beatings, and he died soon after. You visit me in dreams like a bad omen. Why do you hate Poles so much?” And during the next break: “I know Poles took part in it, too. It hurts when people say that everyone murdered, because there were three groups: the ones who wanted to, the ones who were forced to, and the ones who watched.” When I told Dziedzic this, he said Janusz Żyluk was one of the few tormented by his conscience; he doesn’t know how to handle it, and if anyone covers his head in ashes around here, it’s him. When I leave the council meeting, Janusz Żyluk turns to me: “Would you be able to get me a Talmud?”

  Stanisław Michałowski is not at the session; he’s in the hospital. I visit him in Cardiology. He’s badly affected by the witch hunt whipped up by Bubel, or rather the fact that so many people want to believe in Bubel’s misdeeds. Michałowski’s family lived here for generations, his grandparents had a restaurant on the market square, they were a well-known, respected family. Just as he was: after having built a construction company, he now manages a market ground. Before he got involved with the monument to the massacre he was the most successful and respected citizen in Jedwabne. No one had previously questioned his position.

  OCTOBER 9, 2001

  I call Janusz Żyluk to tell him there is no Polish translation of the sixty-four volumes of the Talmud, but a friend of mine has four volumes of an English edition and can lend them to him.

  “I see. There are some things they don’t want others to know,” Żyluk replies.

  He must have read quite a bit about the Talmud. Those are key words in anti-Semitic publications. In the prewar Catholic press they wrote, “The Hebrew faith is a mere fiction, intended to confuse naive persons of other faiths, while the real Jewish religion is based on the Talmud and other so-called ‘holy books’ about which prosecutors would doubtless have a great deal more to say than professors.”

  Żyluk is obviously torn between what he hears around him and reads on anti-Semitic websites, and what gnaws at him and worries him—a consciousness of the crime committed.

  “There’s no one here,” he says to me, “who could look at his own family and say he has nothing on his conscience. Maybe it was because of the toxic air blowing from the marshes, maybe the Church’s influence. When they put up a monument in the sixties that said Place of Execution of Jews. Gestapo and Nazi Police Burned 1,600 Jews Alive, people came to hack off Place of Execution of from the inscription, for fun, to make it look like it said Jews’ Gestapo. It’s a stupid town. They don’t even realize that they’re doomed. I don’t know any people here anymore, everyone moved away. I went to the cemetery. I said kaddish in my own way, laid a pebble. I asked my mother about the whole thing just once, but she was scared. She’s dead now. No one wants to tell me what my father did. You’ve read the case documents. Is there anything there about my father? If you find anything, please let me know.”

  OCTOBER 26, 2001

  I try to re-create a map of the town before the war; the Jewish accounts I have are contradictory and I know the reconstruction will be impossible without drawing on Polish memory, too. I find Jan Górski, born in 1909, who has lived in Jedwabne since before the war.

  “I can mark on your map where the Polish families lived,” Górski says politely, “but the Jewish ones? There were plenty of Jews everywhere. Why do you need to know?”

  I speak to Antoni Rakowski, born in 1923, one of the young people, like Leon Dziedzic, ordered to bury the charred remains after the massacre.

  “I lived in Rostki, two kilometers outside of Jedwabne. In our village we said, ‘Pole, Jew, or devil, everyone’s a human being.’ No one from Rostki had a hand in any of it. When we were burying the bodies, I couldn’t look: a Jewish boy, might have been ten years old, who’d clawed at the earth in his agony. I didn’t go to the ceremony. I know people laughed at the president kissing Jews.”

  I don’t get very far with the business of re-creating the map: “Give me a break. I remember but I’m not going to tell you.” It’s a real taboo; easier to get the names of killers. But perhaps it’s no wonder, since the priest keeps saying that Gross wrote it all on commission for Jews who want to get their houses back. “The Jews are about to come and take what belongs to them” is a phrase I hear all the time.

  OCTOBER 27, 2001

  Jedwabne. At the monument I look over the crushed candles, rotting flowers, the ripped-out wires of the lights that were supposed to illuminate the monument at night. I hear that the town’s chief of sanitation is afraid to clean up here, because the new mayor could fire him for it, and it’s hard to find work in the area.

  I phone him. A good sign: the chief doesn’t have an allergic reaction to my name. He explains that cleaning up the cemetery isn’t part of his official duties; he’d have to have a written order. I ask if he waits for a written order to keep the grounds in front of the Catholic cemetery tidy. “Sometimes we perform those services without an order,” he admits.

  “When I was a boy,” he tells me, “we used to gather walnuts in the ‘little graves,’ as they were called, which meant in the Jewish cemetery, but the subject of Jews never came up. When people started talking about it, people in Jedwabne were given jobs, they worked on the new pavement, money came from the ministry, there were jobs on the archaeological dig in preparation for the exhumation. A lot of good came of it for the town. You’d have to be blind not to see that. On the other hand, the decision to call an end t
o the exhumation because the Jews demanded it was a shock to me, that deference of Polish authorities to Jews. It’s Jews who rule the world with money.”

  OCTOBER 28, 2001

  Jedwabne. I go by the presbytery. The priest and I speak of the investigation currently under way. The priest says he is in the possession of documents that cast a new light on Ignatiew’s inquiry.

  “I have documents, but I can’t reveal them, because I’m bound by the privacy of the confessional. I can, however, reconstruct the facts. The massacre was carried out by the Gestapo from Ciechanów. Via Białystok, Ostrołęka, and Suwałki, orders were coming from Berlin that Jewish Communists had to be liquidated. The Germans had identified sixty Jewish units fighting arm in arm with the NKVD. It was decided to do battle with them. In the market square in Jedwabne, they read out a decree for the execution of Communists. The Judenrat of Białystok passed on to the Gestapo a list of Communists who were to be liquidated in Jedwabne and its environs, twenty-seven towns in total. The Judenrat had a bone to pick with the Communists, because they cut off the ears and genitals of Judenrat members for collaborating with the Gestapo. Moreover, Wasersztejn in his testimony described precisely the methods used by Jews against Jews, lying about it being the Poles, residents of Jedwabne, who did it to the Jews. You can’t say it was about Jews, that’s not why they went after them, it was because they had been fighting alongside the NKVD. And the Germans had the idea that you had to destroy the enemy unto the third generation, that’s why the families of those Communists were rounded up, too. The proof that they died not as Jews but as Communists is the fact that they were buried with Lenin’s head. After all, we know the whole exhumation was carried out in order to remove that symbol, which was a reminder of the reason they were killed. Nothing else was done during the exhumation.”

  The priest is excellent on military matters.

  “Three groups came to Jedwabne: the storm troops, the motorized units, and the air support troops who were near Ciechanów and wore blue uniforms. It was they who brought the cans of airplane fuel from the airport in Przasnysz. And there was a car of civilians from Mazury, who considered themselves Germans but spoke Polish and wore civilian clothes to make it more plausible that they were Poles.

  “A journalist from America came to me once and said, ‘I’m a Jew,’ and I said, ‘I thought so.’ He asks if the Jews would have survived in Jedwabne if they hadn’t joined the Communists. I say that they’d have lived longer, because they wouldn’t have been burned as Communists in July 1941. Those are the historical facts. The operation was led by Gestapo commander Captain Marcholl. He was the Suwałki Jew Waldemar Maczpołowski. He betrayed Jewish resistance units, and for being a traitor to his people Himmler promoted him and made him a captain for the whole of Eastern intelligence. The Germans protested that he was circumcised, but Himmler said he would decide who was a Jew and who a friend of the Reich. That’s the truth.”

  Delivering this insane nonsense, the priest radiates well-being and confidence.

  “I’ve had seven operations for intestinal cancer, had twenty-seven centimeters removed, and I’m still alive. It’s clearly the work of God. The more curses hung over me, the more I recovered my health. So that the truth be told. The most important thing is that my parishioners behaved well. The lies inflicted painful wounds, but didn’t break them. I’m proud of the residents of Jedwabne.”

  OCTOBER 30, 2001

  In the Catholic monthly Bond, Izrael Gutman’s article “Them and Us” is published, countering the historian Tomasz Strzembosz’s thesis about the “collaboration passed over in silence” of Jews and Soviets. Gutman writes from Jerusalem, showing the weakness of the source material on which Strzembosz based his claims. For example, a “Jewish rebellion” in Grodno is supposedly proven by the account of a teacher who on September 17, 1939, saw Jews with red armbands on balconies shooting at people in the street. “How clever of those Jews to have red armbands and rifles ready on September 17, the day the Red Army invaded Poland,” Gutman comments. “It’s just a little strange they’d be shooting at residents of whom statistically half were Jews.”

  “Those poor Jews,” he continues, “were mostly religious folk for whom firearms were terrifying and spilling human blood unthinkable.”

  NOVEMBER 9, 2001

  Jedwabne. After many attempts I finally managed to arrange a meeting with Jolanta Karwowska, one of the two teachers from Jedwabne who in July of last year participated in a two-week program at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. For several months there was a hullaballoo at the school about that trip. First the priest expressed his disapproval, and no one came forward, until finally he gave two candidates his stamp of approval.

  The door to the big, well-kept house is opened by a nice-looking young woman with a cold eye. I’ve heard about her before; she participated in the first session of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne. I ask her for her impressions of the Holocaust Museum.

  “I wish the Poles could protect their interests in the same way. You can’t limit history to the history of the Holocaust.”

  “Did the trip cause you to reflect on what happened here, in this area?”

  “It’s not easy to make sense of the confusion in Jedwabne, so many people have become tangled up in it. Poles won independence in 1918 but enjoyed it for only twenty years. They owned the land and they wanted to keep it for themselves. In 1939 it turned out that others, the Russians, the Germans, were lying in wait to destroy that independence. The Poles saw they had to look out for their own interests. What could the poor people do? The Jews were guests here. They felt no tie to the land. And the people they’re accusing were ordinary folk, each one had feelings, a heart. We know what would have happened to those who didn’t carry out orders, the Germans didn’t let anyone meddle with their plans.”

  “Have you read Gross’s book?”

  “Excerpts. It was so extreme I’d feel sick if I read the book. I might miss a night’s sleep.”

  “I know you’re writing a master’s thesis called ‘The Catholic Community in Jedwabne, 1939 to 1945.’ What will you write about the behavior of the Catholic community on July 10, 1941?”

  “July 10 is not within the scope of what I’m writing. Everywhere the rest is passed over, all people talk about is July 10. That’s why I want to describe the rest. It’s a matter of truthful and objective history.”

  “Would you have gone to the ceremony if you’d been in the country at the time?”

  “Isn’t it all about making money from Jedwabne?” she replies. “They talk about compensation the Poles should pay out. Isn’t that what it’s all about? If it turned out the Poles did it, there would be a basis for financial claims.”

  “Do you ever hear anti-Semitic remarks from your pupils?”

  “The problem of anti-Semitism doesn’t exist at our school.”

  “Will you accept the Institute of National Remembrance verdict?”

  “I’ll probably still be skeptical. Knowing how clever the Germans were, how can we know there weren’t any Germans in disguise among the civilians?”

  “Have you touched on the subject with your class?”

  “Yes, but we didn’t try to settle who was a victim and who a perpetrator.”

  NOVEMBER 10, 2001

  I look in on the Jedwabne Lyceum and am struck by a bulletin board dedicated to Jedwabne history. In a prominent spot, a photograph of the old monument with the inscription saying the Jews were murdered by the Gestapo. I visit a teacher I’m friendly with to find out how this could be. I tell her of my visit to Karwowska.

  “It’s she who put it this way, we can’t change the board until the investigation results are known, and then we’ll see. It’s a gesture, showing what the school has to say to the children about the affair.”

  I drop by the church, as I’ve become accustomed to doing, to pick up the latest anti-Semitic news.

  NOVEMBER 11, 2001

  Białystok. I phone Jan Soko�
�owski, who, after Neighbors was published, sent a letter to newspaper editors saying that Śleszyński, owner of the barn in which the Jews were burned, had been beaten to death in revenge after the war. Śleszyński’s daughter Janina Biedrzycka made him withdraw his statement, because journalists sought her out, asking for details. He sent around a new letter, explaining that he found Gross’s insinuations contemptible: “Describing the death of Mr. B. Śleszyński, I was reporting a version of events I’d heard that claimed Jews murdered him for providing the barn for the burning. It turns out this was a rumor. I was trying to defend the honor of the residents and natives of the town of Jedwabne against the ‘Jedwabne storm’ unleashed in the mass media with the release of the book Neighbors. It was written by the Jew Jan Tomasz Gross. It’s worth reading to learn how Jews lie.”

  Sokołowski enthusiastically invites me to visit.

  I listen to his crackpot version of history.

  “On the morning of July 10 some trucks with Germans arrived. I saw seven of them myself. They were sitting on benches inside the trucks, sticking their heads out, which is how I could see how many of them there were. A group of Jews fled in the direction of the pond, followed by the troops in black uniforms with pistols. A few locals participated as well. Kubrzyniecki, it must be said, was prejudiced against Jews. But I advise you to study this problem—look at dates of birth and it will immediately become clear to you what the real background of the killers was. The cruelest among the killers were born in 1920. Here’s how it was at that time. During the Polish-Bolshevik war the Jews didn’t go off to fight for Poland’s freedom, no Jew from Jedwabne fought, only Poles. These Poles’ wives stayed at home, and if they had husbands who had no land themselves but only hired themselves out, they didn’t have anything to live on. So they went to work in Jewish households. The Polish women got pregnant from the Jews who worked with them.

  “Just you look at old photographs, you can tell right away that the Tarnackis and Kalinowski are Jewish boys. They weren’t recognized by their Jewish fathers because their mothers were Polish. Are you surprised at them having a bad attitude?”