The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “This year gave me a lot of strength. I thought a lot about suffering, pain, forgiveness. Once, I woke up terrified that I was in a burning barn. Maybe if I hadn’t met you, and Gross, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. I didn’t know I was so stubborn. I didn’t know I had so few good friends. I’m not the same person anymore. I was one of the boys and I estranged myself from them.

  “My wounds are probably long-lasting, because—although it’s hard to admit—they were inflicted by people dear to me. I think any decent person would have done what I did, and I’m sad that my former friends are suspicious of me. I’d rather lick my wounds in solitude.”

  Journal

  DECEMBER 1, 2001

  New York. My daughter Ola and I go downtown with friends to lay a rock at the site of the tragedy of September 11.

  DECEMBER 2, 2001

  With the Jedwabne Book of Memory in a backpack, Ola and I retrace the paths of Jews from Radziłów and Jedwabne who arrived in America in large numbers during the last two centuries. “The Jews from Jedwabne who landed in New York,” we read in the book, “were mostly people who had never before slept in a strange house or sat at a stranger’s table. They did not go there for fun, but to win bread for themselves and relatives left behind in their native shtetl on the other side of the ocean.”

  When they saw the horizon with the Statue of Liberty looming up before them after many weeks of ocean travel in a crowded cabin, they still had to pass through the border control point on Ellis Island. The island, now transformed into a museum, was a place where the fates of thousands of refugees from poverty and religious persecution lay in the balance. They waited in queues for many days and even weeks for a decision on whether they would be sent back or accepted into the new world. Those who remained in New York headed for the Lower East Side, then the most densely populated area on earth, where dozens of people slept in one room and the courtyard privy was the only bathroom for an entire building. Gradually they scraped together a living, working over twelve hours a day in sweatshops. There, the emigrants re-created the life of the shtetl. In the old country, Jedwabne and Radziłów were more than sixteen kilometers apart, but ties were close, strengthened by numerous marriages. In New York only one street lay between the synagogues of Jedwabne and Radziłów, and the communities were linked by homesickness for the old country, which led to frequent meetings. When Kalman Lasky from Radziłów arrived in America, he joined the Chebra Par Israel of Yedwabne, and he, a Radziłover, was elected president of the organization for many years.

  Rabbi Jacob Baker belongs to the next generation of Jedwabnians who crossed the Atlantic. “When the Polish steamer Batory carried me to New York in mid-February 1938,” he wrote, “my first wish was—in accordance with the words of Joseph arriving in Sychem (Genesis 37:16): ‘I’m looking for my brothers’—to visit the beautiful synagogue built by fellow countrymen from Jedwabne at 216 Henry Street, on the Jewish East Side. Crossing the threshold of this building, I met with many surprises, the first of which was the familiar melody of Jedwabne Yiddish, distinguished most by the characteristic pronunciation of the consonant ł.”

  From the guidebook we learn that there were five hundred synagogues on the Lower East Side at the beginning of the twentieth century. I’d read previously that the magnificent Jedwabne synagogue was built during the nineteenth century. In 1891 the community organized around it registered itself in the state of New York under the name “Chebra Par Israel of Yedwabne, Russia.” In turn, the Jews of Radziłów who made a home in New York met at the Radzilover synagogue on Division Street. We find ourselves there first, once we are out of the subway. It’s Saturday, and a century ago all the shops on this street would have been closed on this day, and families with children in their best clothing would have been making their way to morning prayers. Now Division Street, like all streets in this neighborhood, has street signs in two languages: English and Chinese. Hundreds of little stores are open, everywhere you hear Chinese disco music. There’s no trace of the Radzilover synagogue. Just as we find no trace of the Jedwabne synagogue; there are new school buildings on the site from which hundreds of black kids are spilling out.

  DECEMBER 3, 2001

  I’ve arranged to meet Rabbi Baker. I get on the subway in Manhattan and get off on King’s Highway in Brooklyn—a completely different world. The languages on the street are Russian and Ukrainian. Bilingual signs on the stores, in Cyrillic (KANDISHONERY PA NIZKIM TSENAM) and English (AIR CONDITIONERS ON SALE). I pass many signs for kosher bagels and a stand with Russian Harlequin romances. I count dozens of periodicals in Russian, two in Yiddish, and in English, The Jewish Press and The Jewish Week; one can also obtain the Polish-American Nowy Dziennik (New Daily). I walk quite a long way from the subway station to the slightly more elegant part of King’s Highway where Rabbi Baker lives.

  The rabbi and I speak English, but every now and then he throws in Polish words: maliny (raspberries), jagody (blueberries), grzyby (mushrooms), szkoła powszechna (elementary school), widły (pitchfork). HaShem, the unspoken name of God, appears in every other sentence.

  “Rabbi Awigdor Białostocki told me when I was little, ‘I already envy you for who you will become one day.’ In America I went on studying to be a kosher butcher. I spent a large part of my life in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I had fixed hours in the week when I would butcher kosher meat. Later, I had enough to live on in the rabbinate and no longer worked as a shochet. I sang as a cantor. I have five children and nineteen grandchildren. America is proud of its Jewish children.”

  He isn’t very firmly rooted in the real world. His sight is bad, he sees only outlines. He doesn’t read books or newspapers or watch television. All of this facilitates his communion with the spirits of his ancestors. He lives according to two books: the Torah and the Jedwabne Book of Memory. When I ask him about his memories of Jedwabne he tells me about the carter Kuropatwa, who preferred to condemn himself and his family to death in the flames rather than abandon his rabbi; about the lumberjack Neumark, who tore the axe from the hands of one of the cruelest murderers, hacked open the barn door, and got his family out. The rabbi relates these stories as tableaux vivants; his words have color and texture.

  It’s hard for him to reach back to those memories that are truly his own. He left so long ago; it’s been more than sixty years. He left a world that was—despite the growing anti-Semitism—somehow safe, because it was familiar and predictable. He knew every Jew in his town, and knew of many, many others within a radius of twenty kilometers. He would always feel homesick for that world: on the ship taking him to the new country, in the American provinces, in the modest apartment in Brooklyn where he moved in his old age. That homesickness was poured into the Jedwabne Book of Memory. “I typed it out with one finger,” he wrote. “I had no funds to hire a typist. I thought of the greatness of the martyrs and the pages were wet with my tears.”

  “How can they say,” the rabbi laments, “that Jews collaborated with the Soviets? In Jedwabne not one Jew was a Communist.”

  I point out to him that there was a small Communist cell in Jedwabne and that Meir Ronen retained bad memories of five of his fellow townsmen, ardent collaborators with Soviet authorities. Baker shakes his head skeptically. When I begin to tell him their names, he informs me at the mention of the very first, Binsztajn, that there was trouble with him even as a child, and later he went to jail for the rape of a handicapped Jewish girl, and that he didn’t go to synagogue. In other words, in the rabbi’s understanding, he had excluded himself from the Jewish community.

  The rabbi is not without his vanity. Remembering the Jedwabne Book of Memory, he keeps saying, “I as the author of the first book on Jedwabne,” and when he mentions Gross’s book, he calls it “that book that came out of my book.”

  The Baker brothers’ book (Julius Baker, who was also a rabbi, died) fits perfectly into the mold of books called in Hebrew Pinkas zikaron and in English “Yizkor” books. A book whose aim is to rescue from oblivio
n a person or a world that has ceased to exist, it derives from the early medieval tradition of reading out during prayers long lists of names of those who perished in pogroms. After the Holocaust these books became such a common thing for compatriots’ associations to undertake that in Israel a new profession was born: editor of books of memory.

  Each book of memory contains a myth of origins—a story about the first Jewish settlers—the history of a particular community, profiles of worthy persons, like the water carrier or the town eccentric, then there’s a description of what happened during the Holocaust, and an account of a ceremony in memory of those who were murdered. As a rule, books of memory, says Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, do not fulfill the requirements of historical monographs, but they provide invaluable material for the cultural anthropologist by showing the process by which the myth of the happy Jewish shtetl is created. Among the three hundred books of memory studied by Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz—including the Jedwabne Book of Memory—one hundred contained maps drawn by hand, from memory.

  I examine the sketch of the town that opens the Jedwabne Book of Memory. It has extraordinary charm: apple trees designate gardens, fir trees the surrounding forests. The street names are in Hebrew; only Nowa Street, where no Jews lived, is also indicated in Polish. The church is much smaller than the synagogue, though in reality it was the other way around. Although the drawing represents prewar Jedwabne, there is also a burning barn.

  According to Goldberg-Mulkiewicz, books of memory often reflect the perspective of the particular donors. Thus, we often see some things blown out of porportion, special weight given to certain themes. That’s why the Jedwabne book devotes so much attention to kosher butchering—that’s what its authors, both Rabbis Baker, spent most of their lives doing.

  Rabbi Baker tells me about the butcher Mendel Nornberg, who was his teacher. “It’s difficult work. Kosher butchering geese is easier, but chickens and ducks, there’s a lot to learn. I heard a knife was found in the barn, I’m curious if it was his. I’d recognize it right away. Nornberg always held his knife between his teeth, so there must have been marks on it.”

  DECEMBER 4, 2001

  I left Poland with the phone numbers of some former Jedwabnian Poles now living in or near Chicago. I called them ahead of time from Warsaw, and was prepared to go there if an eyewitness agreed to talk to me.

  “My mother-in-law said no after all,” I’m told by a relative of one of them. “She says that the fear never left her. At the time she was a girl of eleven. Her family went into the fields at five in the morning to avoid participating in the killing and she was ordered to stay home and not go out. But she ran off with some girlfriends to see what was going on. She saw boys attack a Jewish boy with a harrow; they caught him when he tried to run away and they jumped him. She heard a young Jew screaming in the fields as he was being stabbed with a knife, begging, ‘Kill me.’ ‘They didn’t kill him,’ she said. ‘They left him with a drop of life in him to suffer a while longer.’”

  A map of Jedwabne drawn from memory by Rabbi Julius Baker after the war, when he was already living in America. Translation from the Hebrew of places marked by Rabbi Baker: (a) road to Łomża; (b) pond; (c) Przytulska Street; (d) road to Radziłów; (e) Old Market; (f) bank; (g) Beit Midrash; (h) passageway; (i) New Market; (j) sawmill; (k) horse market; (l) Przestrzelska Street; (m) road to Kajetanów; (n) Jewish cemetery; (o) square where the burning took place. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

  DECEMBER 5, 2001

  San José, Costa Rica. Happily, Szmul Wasersztejn’s son Izaak is home; he’s given me the diary his father published at his own expense. I’m reading it day and night, marking passages, which Anna Husarska, a journalist and translator from Poland, has promised to translate for me professionally. She’s here for a conference on human rights.

  Describing the roundup of the Jews in the marketplace, Szmul quotes the various slurs flung at them by Poles. What’s interesting is that no one called them Communists! But they did call them “war profiteers.” Evidently the locals still had in their heads the Soviet propaganda they’d been fed for half a year.

  DECEMBER 6, 2001

  I set off to visit volcanoes in the company of Anna Husarska and Professor Wiktor Osiatyński, who is here for the same conference. We go in a rented car with a driver, Osiatyński in front; I sit in back with Anna, who translates excerpts from Wasersztejn’s diary for me viva voce. We crawl across tall hills whose slopes are violet and red with flowers, monkeys dart about here and there, and Anna reads the naturalistic details of the massacre, “children hacked into pieces, dying in their mothers’ arms,” “heads crushed to a bloody pulp of flesh and bone.” “He must have taken that from the Old Testament,” Osiatyński tries to joke, and I feel I’m going too far, inflicting this kind of material on him in his time off. So I choose some more pleasant fragments for translation. Of which there are many.

  Wasersztejn said that this book was his testament; it is intended to remind subsequent generations of the destruction of the Jews of Jedwabne, but he also included in it many stories about his trade.

  He devoted half his life to dealing in selling shoes, and owed his prosperity in Cuba to the profit he made on sneakers. He tells an unverifiable story about some Ukrainian Jew who had two and a half million pairs of army sneakers in storage when the war ended. There was probably not a single person in Cuba whom Szmul didn’t urge at one time or another to buy sneakers at a discount. His book is full of practical tips for the footwear merchant. For example, it doesn’t pay to sell shoes on credit to persons employed on banana plantations, because they are transient and it’s hard to chase them down for the second payment.

  I give Anna a section to translate where Szmul tells what he did on the Shabbat after he got to Costa Rica:

  “One of our clothing stores was in a neighborhood where prostitutes did business with their drunken clients at night; on Friday nights it had the busiest traffic. It occurred to me I could set up a stand there with women’s underwear. As you’d say nowadays, I conducted marketing research. The clientele in the neighborhood favored red and black lingerie. In a fellow countryman’s store I bought six pairs of red and black panties and six bras in each color. I put the articles on display on Friday night. At 10:00 p.m. the first woman came by with her man of the moment. Stroking his head, she asked him to make her happy with red panties and a frilly bra. He got out his money and the girl assumed ownership of the items. The news spread like wildfire around San José’s red-light district. By 1:00 a.m. when I closed up shop, I only had two pairs of panties and two bras left. We managed to keep that nighttime clientele going for a long time.”

  This excerpt gives me some hope that the Wasersztejn family will agree to meet me on Shabbat, which begins tomorrow, and will let me take notes, too, which religious Jews usually don’t allow on the Sabbath.

  It’s not easy in the diary to distinguish truth from what is made up or embellished. Did the following cinematic scene really happen? Before Wasersztejn leaves for Cuba in 1946, he has to get out of military service. In Warsaw he somehow gets through security and past the secretary to the most senior general and declares, “You may have had problems in your life, but they were small problems. Mine is enormous. Poles killed my whole family. The earth of Jedwabne is like a sponge saturated with Jewish blood. You can shoot me on the spot, but I’m not joining the Polish army.” And he is exempted.

  I’ve arranged to meet his widow in the afternoon. Behind a six-foot fence, the residence where the solitary widow lives is guarded by two small stout security men armed with clubs. In the anteroom is a chaise longue with a cushion in the shape of a Torah scroll. We tread on a carpet so thick and fluffy our shoes vanish into it. In the living room there is an abundance of knickknacks carefully arranged in display cases, ornate mirrors in gold frames, elaborate crystal chandeliers, a porcelain poodle with porcelain puppies, tall statuettes of elegantly dressed Viennese ladies. Next to one of the
m, coyly pulling back the edge of his robe to reveal a porcelain foot on which two doves have alighted, stands Moses holding the Ten Commandments.

  Szmul met Rachela back in Poland, in Bielsk Podlaski, when he was buying a house for the woman who hid him during the war, Antonina Wyrzykowska. He remembered noticing Rachela’s attractive figure right away. Rachela tells us, “I fell in love with him immediately. It’s easy to fall in love when you’re fourteen years old.”

  After he got to Cuba he found out by accident that Rachela was in New York, and he contacted her at once. “My brother didn’t like it,” Szmul wrote in his book. “He tried to find me a better match behind my back; he argued that I could daydream of Rachela because it was a beautiful dream, but a Holocaust survivor should act pragmatically. He thought I should marry a Cuban Jewish woman, beautiful, intelligent, and with capital. He gave details about me to Jewish businessmen, who suggested he might introduce me, his younger brother, to their appetizing daughters.” But Szmul dug in his heels. He brought Rachela to Cuba and they were soon married.

  Rachela belongs to a category of Jews who have a fierce aversion to Poland and no nostalgia whatsoever. She survived the Holocaust in a family of Polish peasants who hid them for money. “Every month we paid them in gold coins to live in a pigsty; the man didn’t know where we hid the money, that’s how we survived. After the war Poles killed Jews returning home. They killed my mother’s brother.”

  Like many survivors, they never exchanged a word of Polish. They spoke Yiddish and sometimes Spanish. Rachela speaks to me in Spanish, though I know from Wyrzykowska she can get by in Polish. When I ask about a few unclear passages in her husband’s diary, she can’t help me.