by Anna Bikont
Although I try not to let on how hard it is for me to listen to this kind of idiocy, I probably don’t manage to find the right tone, because at one point Sokołowski starts looking me over closely. I realize he must have been expecting someone completely different. I get out in a hurry when he starts yelling at me, just in time to avoid him attacking me physically and ripping up my notes.
NOVEMBER 16, 2001
Stanisław Ramotowski feels so poorly he’s unable to get out of bed. He feels he’s suffocating, as if he were being held underwater. But he does not utter even a word of complaint. You can tell he’s suffering only because he turns his face to the wall and is silent. He has to pretend or his wife, so used to his tender care, would stand by his bedside and cry, “Stanisław, get up, you can’t leave me alone.”
NOVEMBER 20, 2001
Ramotowski is lying in the hospital with his eyes closed. A doctor comes and speaks of his condition as if he were already a superfluous object. I point out he is a living person. Stanisław, who seemed unconscious, reaches for my hand and kisses it. The whole time he has been ill he has been the model of an English gentleman in his manners, sense of humor, and reticence.
Kazimierz Laudański’s next open letter to Adam Michnik was printed in an anti-Semitic rag under the title “If We Share a Fatherland.” “Your friends and colleagues treat Poland like a wicked stepmother,” he begins, and informs Michnik that Gross, “with his book of lies, is making Poland an abomination in the eyes of the world,” and now “the gifted journalist A. Bikont is preparing for print a book with similar content.”
In their bitter struggle for survival the Laudański brothers would probably be prepared to write to the devil. At the time of the Soviet occupation they sent letters to Stalin and the NKVD, and after the war, to the minister of security and the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party. Kazimierz Laudański told me he’d recently written to the Episcopate. Evidently now the Laudańskis think the time has come for letters to the editor in chief of the Gazeta Wyborcza.
Inserting this clipping into the correct ring binder—I have twenty-three of them, this one labeled Jedwabne/Murderers—I glance at the Laudańskis’ previous letters and statements and a shiver runs through me. In one of the local papers I notice a sentence that had escaped my attention until now. Jerzy Laudański says, “Wasersztejn testifies that he saw 75 men chosen for their youth and strength carrying the monument, that those men were ordered to dig a hole, and then killed. In fact it was carried by a dozen or so men, who were later taken to Śleszyński’s barn.”
The exhumation showed that a group of thirty to forty young Jews carrying the Lenin monument were murdered inside the barn, not outside it. This was an unexpected finding, nobody mentioned it, and most of the accounts spoke of the first group of Jews being driven into the cemetery.
Just as there were many witnesses to the burning of the Jews, because gawkers and petty accomplices to the crime ran behind the crowd being driven to the barn, the only witnesses to the massacre of the first group of Jews inside the barn were the murderers themselves. It’s hard not to think that Jerzy Laudański was among those who murdered the first group of Jews.
NOVEMBER 22, 2001
With Marta Kurkowska-Budzan to Łódź to see Marek Edelman.
I contacted Marta because Edelman wished to speak to her. He met her a year ago at a history symposium talking about Gross’s book. A girl had come up to him there, saying she was a first-year student at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, and confided to him, “Because I’m Polish and from Jedwabne, I always had the feeling I carried a terrible secret. I heard about it in the sandbox, and Dad told me, ‘Never admit you’re from Jedwabne.’”
At least that is how Edelman remembered it. Marta may look like a girl, but she has a doctorate in history. And she doesn’t seem like someone tormented by her town’s past at all. She boldly faces up to history. Using her access to sources, she recorded conversations about the massacre with Jedwabne residents. When she was in the first or second grade a friend told her a big secret, that the Poles had burned the Jews in Jedwabne and had then gone to the barn to look for jewelry and gold teeth. Marta never forgot this, although the word “Jews” didn’t mean anything to her. Many years later she considered writing her doctoral thesis on what happened sixty years before in her town, but the academics she consulted advised against it. She returned to it after her doctorate was completed. She began taping interviews. Then Gross’s book came out. Marta is considering a postdoctoral project that would analyze three towns burdened with traumatic memory. She recently organized a trip for schoolchildren from Jedwabne to Kraków. She told me, “Only a couple refused to cross the threshold of the synagogue.”
“How resolute she is,” Edelman says to me in the kitchen, with a slight reproach in his voice that I brought him someone other than the cowed girl that he remembered who hides the fact that she’s from Jedwabne.
In the train Marta and I talk about the myths that have grown up around the massacre. Each of us has heard endless stories about punishments falling on the murderers: one person drank himself to death, someone else fell and was killed on the spot, another person died in a fatal accident or had handicapped children. Stanisław Ramotowski returned to it again and again, that sooner or later the murderers were punished by God. “All of the people active in the massacre,” he claimed, “were killed not long after, mostly in accidents. I remember one myself who was crushed by a tree, and another who died of tuberculosis, and a third who went crazy.”
Both Marta and I heard a story about how the grass once grew in the shape of a cross between the paving stones of a park in the market square in Jedwabne, and when it was mowed, it grew back in the same shape. That was on a spot where a Jewish woman and her infant were killed in the square (though in the version I heard the woman and her child were killed on that spot by a gang of thugs after the war). Marta also knows a story about criminals who drowned a rich Jew in his fur coat—given that it was a hot summer, it demonstrates how a myth can have little connection to reality—and when they hauled the body out of the water it was naked, the furs and valuables had disappeared. In Marta’s eyes all these stories are an attempt to assimilate the traumatic memory of an event that eludes rational explanations.
Marta, to whom the residents react less defensively than they do to me, remembers one local Pole using a Yiddish word, another singing her a Jewish song.
NOVEMBER 23, 2001
I spend the morning in the hospital with Stanisław Ramotowski. I don’t know if he’s conscious of my presence.
A phone call in the afternoon: Mr. Ramotowski died at 5:45 p.m.
NOVEMBER 24, 2001
I drive to Konstancin to tell Marianna. “What time did it happen?” she asks. “Because I had a strange feeling yesterday just before six.”
Stanisław’s body will be taken to the area where his family lived. In the evening I phone his niece in Kramarzewo and hear from her that the burial is tomorrow. A burial right away? On a Sunday? It’s not at all in the Catholic tradition. It’s probably arranged this way so that no one from Warsaw will be able to make it.
NOVEMBER 25, 2001
We set off in three cars, I and some of my friends who met Stanisław through me. We arrive at the cottage. In the kitchen men sit on benches that have been brought in, in the dining room adjacent to the kitchen Stanisław’s body is laid out, around him women in black singing.
At the cemetery the priest gives a bland speech from which we are given to understand that Stanisław’s only achievement was living here. “You have to say something,” a friend of mine urges me. I take the microphone and tell the story of how Stanisław saved a Jewish family while around him other residents of the town were killing Jews or hiding so as not to be a witness to the massacre.
“You seem not to understand the situation,” his nephew says to me later. “Stanisław was a respected and liked person here, and then what happened when you took my uncle away and
it all became public? People call me ‘Jew’ now. Please understand me, miss, I don’t have anything against the Jewish people, but you have to admit it’s unpleasant. And what a hassle it was to get my uncle buried! It’s I who lose most in all of this.”
NOVEMBER 28, 2001
I try by phone to reach Szmul Wasersztejn’s son Izaak, whom I’ve arranged to meet in Costa Rica, to confirm my arrival. I’m told he’s in Boston with his daughter. I phone there and find out that he’s in Puerto Rico with his other daughter, who’s likely to give birth prematurely, so he’ll probably stay there until the baby is born. And I’m about to fly to the States, and I have a ticket from New York to San José, a cheap one, naturally, which can’t be changed.
NOVEMBER 29, 2001
Jedwabne has elected its new mayor, the vet. He has all the right views—he doesn’t like Jews.
Before my departure to the States I leave my article on Krzysztof Godlewski at the Gazeta. I’d like to end it with the new mayoral elections. They certainly close an era in the life of the town, a time when two sides clashed. Now only one side is left standing. But I can’t get anyone on the phone, I only get the wives. The election of a new mayor is such a big event that not a single man comes home sober that day.
NOVEMBER 30, 2001
My flight is at 9:00 a.m. From the airport I call Godlewski. His voice is somber. “No one abstained from the vote,” he tells me, “which means they all accepted I won’t be their mayor anymore.” “What do you mean, all?” I ask. “What about Stanisław Michałowski?” Silence. “What do you mean, Stanisław didn’t resign in solidarity with you?”
I call Michałowski, who explains that he wanted to resign, but the council removed the item from the agenda, and maybe it’s better that way because it’ll be easier for him to help Krzysztof find another job. I’m not convinced. We get into such a lively conversation that it only ends when the stewardess signals for me to turn off my cell phone.
9
A Desperate Search for Something Positive
or, The Soliloquies of Krzysztof Godlewski, Ex-Mayor of Jedwabne
“In my office I found a letter from Montevideo, this was a year before Gross’s book came out:
“‘I, Esther Migdal, born in Jedwabnie. In 1937 I go to Uruguay. I, my sisters y brothers y my mama. My granny Chana Jenta Wasersztejn stayed there. I’m sorry, because I do not remember much in Polish, is already 62 that I do not speak Polish. I know Poles killed whole city of Jews, who killed my granny her daughters—whole family took the house now he lives in that house. You thugs. You criminals. What says your priest? now you have house it didn’t cost anything you can dance. What bad my granny do? Please sir, write how you killed whole city of Jews.’
“My first response was anger. I wanted to throw the letter away, but I hesitated. I wanted to reply, but I didn’t know what to say. The letter gave me no peace. When I read Neighbors I saw something had to be done.
“I understood that it was an atrocity and hushing it up is contemptible. But I also thought, Others will follow me and we will show the Jews that it was an incident, caused by subversive elements, and that we are a people who love, who feel compassion for others’ suffering. Stanisław Michałowski and I went to the monument on July 10, 2000, carrying a banner that said In memory of the murdered Jewish residents of Jedwabne, and as a warning to others. From the Community. We did it as representatives of the town authorities, but we paid for the banner with our own money. Somehow we could anticipate that the town council would not agree to that expense. But I believed it was just a matter of time.
Krzysztof Godlewski at the site of the monument in Jedwabne, 2001. (Photograph © Grzegorz Dąbrowski / Agencja Gazeta)
“I started to remember conversations I’d overheard as a child, though children were usually sent away when people talked about it. Sometimes it was said of one of the neighbors that ‘he was at the barn when the Jews were burned.’ But the word ‘Jews’ was still a complete abstraction to me at the time.
“I see how hard it is for the residents to live with the consciousness that Jedwabne is seen as a town of murderers. I had an idea for turning it around. The city should show that there were a few thugs in Jedwabne, but there were also Poles who saved Jews. I wanted to propose that the school in Jedwabne take the name of Antonina Wyrzykowska. I put the matter forward at a town council meeting. It wasn’t received very well.
“Jedwabne needs its people to show their best side, like a fish needs water. One of my friends said to me, ‘You’re right, your crown won’t fall from your head if you say you’re sorry,’ and it warmed my heart. I’m desperately searching for something positive. I tell people, ‘I’m not a public prosecutor. Let’s do what can be done and if it turns out the truth is otherwise, it’ll only be to the good.’ I’ve said again and again, ‘I’m only saying a massacre was committed and we must pay our respects to the victims.’ At council meetings I explain, ‘All we have to do is what any Christian should do, ensure them a dignified place of rest.’ The most important thing is that the families of the victims who are coming to the ceremony should see warmth in our hearts. Then they’ll understand that a handful of people were guilty, not the whole community.
“I can already imagine the ceremony. I’d like Rabbi Baker’s grandson and a grandson of one of the murderers to shake hands. Or at least I embrace the rabbi. Not a pompous welcome but the kind that might bring a tear to someone’s eye, something capable of moving people, bringing them to their knees. I’d like to say, ‘Brother Jews, you who were born here, we are deeply moved to have you here as our guests.’
“I confessed my hopes on a local TV program: that newlyweds would sometimes go to the cemetery to lay flowers, as they do in Katyń, where the Soviets killed thousands of Polish officers, and that the monument would become one of the Stations of the Cross. I said in the council that I’d go to the ceremony out of a heartfelt need. Many residents took that as an insult. I felt people looking at me with resentment. One man stopped me before the ceremony: ‘I’m going to fucking shoot anyone who tramples my rye.’
“Most of the residents know Poles took part in it. But they argue, ‘We can’t admit it, because the Jews want compensation, and it’ll be more than our children can afford.’ How to convince them otherwise if they get this kind of thing from their priest?
“I tried to create a lobby, but it didn’t happen. One of the councilmen told me stories he remembered hearing from family and neighbors about how and where they killed Jews. But after he was refused a visa to the United States, he started saying it was because of the massacre and he changed his tune completely. I keep hearing either that it’s not true about the Poles being responsible or that we shouldn’t let it drag on because the Jews will take advantage of us and loot all of Poland. They say, ‘Krzysztof, be careful. You’ll say something you shouldn’t. You may get hurt,’ but it’s not kind advice, it’s a threat. The most well-meaning comments I hear are like, ‘Why are you doing this? You’ll lose a good job.’ At a meeting of council members and mayors of the Łomża district someone once answered my ‘Good day’ with ‘Shalom,’ and everyone laughed. In stores I hear people call me ‘that Jew Godlewski’ behind my back. Other acquaintances, people from whom I wouldn’t expect it, also try to tell me it’s a Jewish conspiracy and it’s all for compensation. Lies started circulating about my father, who was in Wronki prison for a few years for being a member of the Home Army; people said that he took part in the killings, that he chopped a Jew’s head off, and that my mother-in-law, who lives in the USA, married a rabbi.
“All the time I was looking for the right tone. I tried to justify my fellow Poles by thinking what I had been like ten years ago. I was anti-Semitic. I was given a book about Jews wanting to buy up all of Poland and make us their slaves and I believed it. In school I accepted the propaganda. I believed the Russians were our friends and the Americans imperialists. And though when I was twelve I heard for the first time a conversation with horrifying des
criptions of the atrocity, it didn’t sink in that it was our neighbors who had done this. It was a time of tough anti-German propaganda, I knew the Germans were bad, the Russians good, so I couldn’t get my head around people having collaborated with the Germans. When a classmate told me about the Katyń massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets I didn’t want to believe him, either. In time I changed my views, so I believed everybody had that chance. I kept thinking there would be a breakthrough by the time of the ceremony.
“On July 10, a councilwoman, watching the ceremony from behind the curtains of her window on the marketplace, snarled just before I was to speak, ‘So welcome them, fucking welcome them, you won’t have a job tomorrow.’ The next day I went to work and right on the front steps a visitor greeted me with the words ‘Still in Poland? Haven’t the Jews taken you off to America yet?’ I can’t cure them. I’ve had enough. People go on saying we’re making money, that the Jews are backing us. They’re convinced that Stanisław Michałowski and I are traitors, that we must be getting something out of this.
“For me the debate in Jedwabne can’t be reduced to Polish-Jewish relations; it forces us to ask difficult questions of ourselves as Catholics—about honesty, decency, about how many of us helped those in need of our help. Why were there so few Righteous Gentiles? Why are the Jews alleged to be responsible for every bad moment in our history? And so I stood up to the majority of townspeople.
“What hurt most was that when Stanisław Michałowski and I put in our resignations, no one defended us. I’m so depressed I’d take a train anywhere. I didn’t mean to insult anyone.
“What I’ve been doing in the last year has had no connection with my duties as mayor, and I wasn’t prepared for that, either spiritually or professionally. You become mayor to build roads, improve the way a health center works, not to teach people to love one another and weep over another’s death. For twenty years I planned to leave this town, I thought about how to get away, and now I know why I stayed. I’m glad fate granted me the honor of participating in the ceremony of July 10. After all, one can easily live out one’s life without leaving a trace of any kind.
