The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “I’d be all weighed down carrying bundles of butter, the flat kind, but big chunks,” Wyrzykowska told me. “We had a designated hole, and sometimes Szmul arranged for us to be let through the gate with a wagon, and we’d bring in flour and bread. Only you had to put on a badge that said ‘Jude’ as soon as you came through the gate. I had one and so I could move around the ghetto without risk,” she said in a tone implying this was the most ordinary thing in the world.

  “The first time I saw Antonina she was handing us potatoes and beets through the barbed wire,” said Lea Kubran, formerly Kubrzańska, who survived the war at the Wyrzykowskis’, when I met her in the United States. “Once, I ran into her again in the ghetto; she had a yellow badge pinned on. I never heard of any other Pole going around with a badge like that. If they’d caught her, she would have been shot on the spot.”

  Szmul soon came to be part of the Wyrzykowski family. He slept in the children’s room.

  “He got used to us calling him Staszek,” said Wyrzykowska. “He went with us to May services, I remember. He sang our Polish songs, church songs. With fine, pure pronunciation, even though when he talked he didn’t pronounce things as well.”

  “Franciszek, the finest man under the sun, made it his life’s goal to save not only my life but my soul,” Szmul Wasersztejn remembered of Antonina’s father many years later. “He wept over my being a Jew; Jews didn’t go to heaven. Every night he’d lecture me about Jesus.” Wasersztejn agreed to be baptized. “I didn’t see any particular problem with it, we believed in the same God, and it made Franciszek happy that I was going to be saved.”

  Wyrzykowska remembers her father sprinkling Szmul with holy water and that no one outside the family attended the christening.

  When in the autumn of 1942 the Nazis carried out the liquidation of the ghettos and rounded up Jews living outside them, Wasersztejn managed to avoid the roundup. But the Wyrzykowski house became the least secure place in the area, because the Germans knew he lived and worked there. So the Wyrzykowskis asked Antoni Karwowski, Antonina’s brother, to hide him for a few weeks, until they’d made a good hiding place for him at home. Then Mosze Olszewicz and his brother Berek turned up.

  “In 1941 my brother and I fled from a pogrom to the Łomża ghetto, and later our parents and sister joined us there,” Mosze Olszewicz wrote in 1975 from Buenos Aires in a letter to the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Studies. “We were in the ghetto for a year. At the time of the liquidation the Gestapo surrounded the ghetto and we understood this was the end. We crawled through the barbed-wire fence and wandered around the area in blizzards and bitter cold until we felt we couldn’t hold out anymore. Then I remembered a Christian woman. We went to her and asked for a crust of bread. Her husband gave us not only bread but hot milk and more. I can’t even begin to describe their goodness. We were there all night and in the morning when we should have taken off, he said, ‘Don’t go, you’re someone’s children, too, if we have something to eat so will you. What comes to us will come to you. We can’t let you fall into the hands of murderers.’ His wife agreed with his every word.”

  “Olszewicz was the builder of the hideout; he figured it all out as if he had an engineering degree,” Wyrzykowska said of him with great respect. “My husband said he was going to the market in Jedwabne and when he came back the Jews had to be hidden so well that he couldn’t find them. Then they could stay. My husband came back and couldn’t find them; he shouted loudly, on purpose, ‘To hell with you, you’re not staying here.’”

  When the hideout was ready, they moved Szmul in. Then Mosze, with their permission, brought in his fiancée, Elke, as well. Next Srul Grądowski turned up; Szmul had met him after the massacre and given him the Wyrzykowskis’ address. The last to come was Jankiel Kubrzański.

  “Kubrzański turned up after the Łomża ghetto ended,” Wyrzykowska related. “It was cold, and he, poor fellow, was wearing the kind of light coat that’s lined with air. ‘Mrs. Wyrzykowski, have you seen any of my people?’ So I showed him the hideout. ‘Hop right in.’ I told my husband that Kubrzański had been to the house asking about other Jews. He was interested in what I told him, but I could tell from his face that he didn’t want to take in any more Jews. Didn’t want to because of food; it wasn’t easy to feed five people. They ate nothing apart from what we gave them. So I didn’t tell him I’d already moved Jakub Kubrzański into the hideout.”

  The Wyrzykowskis could have no illusions about what might happen to their family if Jews were found to be living with them. They had two small children; Helenka was seven, Antoś was two.

  “Only I knew there were seven of them,” said Wyrzykowska, “because those two—Kubrzański moved his fiancée in right away—they were there at my own risk, the whole time. My husband thought we were hiding five. When the hiding was over, Kubrzański turned up at the house immediately, pretending to drop by, because we’d known him before the war. My husband said, ‘Why didn’t you come to me, I would have hidden you.’ I’m sure it’s true my husband would have agreed, but why give him more to worry about?”

  One day another Jew turned up, a relative of Srul Grądowski’s.

  “He was a young boy who had escaped from a camp,” Antonina remembers. “I gave him better food than I ate myself, and every kind of medicine we had in the house, but he only lived a few days. My husband took him out beyond Kownaty. It was hard to dig a grave in the frozen ground. I don’t know what his name was. I didn’t know the others’ surnames either, only Szmul’s and Kubrzański’s.”

  The two couples, the Kubrzańskis and the Olszewiczes, shared a hideout under the pigsty, and Szmul, Grądowski, and Berek were under the chicken house. They could be in contact at night, when they’d go out to get some fresh air; the buildings were connected by a roof. But they rarely did make contact, because it was best for safety reasons that only one person left the shelter at a time.

  Wyrzykowska remembers that the greatest problem was feeding seven extra mouths for two and a half years. At that time everything went by ration cards. Each member of the family got a card allowing them to grind twenty kilograms of grain into flour for their own use. This wasn’t enough to make bread for everyone, so Wyrzykowska’s father ground wheat using two stones.

  “One neighbor asked me why we baked so much bread, and Mother explained it was for rusks. The war might get worse and you had to have food stored. Another neighbor asked why we cooked so many potatoes. ‘Darn it,’ said Mother, ‘that’s the kind of pigs we’ve got. They won’t eat anything but potatoes, potatoes, and imagine, they have to be peeled.’”

  “We were hungry all the time, though Antonina tried so hard,” said Lea Kubran. “The Germans took a quota of food, and the family itself didn’t have too much to eat. But we never suffered from the cold because the shelter was so small that the steam from a few mouths could heat it.”

  Two Germans sent from the police station in Jedwabne to guard Janczewko lived in the same courtyard, about a hundred meters from the pigsty.

  “We had an indoor cellar that was clean, walled, and the Germans requistioned it,” Wyrzykowska told me. “They slept in one part and had a pantry in the other where they smoked meat and kept stores for the whole police force in Jedwabne. Because of that our Jews couldn’t go anywhere, even at night. The pigsty was walled off, with a roof made of boards. They cut a tiny peephole with a knife and when they saw the Germans had gone off somewhere they’d go upstairs. They got some air, stretched their legs, relieved themselves in a can that I’d remove later, and that was the whole adventure. As it was they didn’t have enough room for each one to lie down. They spent their time sitting up, and then one person would put his legs over the other’s chest. I often looked in on the chicken house, and I brought Szmul, Berek, and Grądowski the same food we ate. Once a day I’d bring potatoes or kasha to the pigsty, pretending it was for the pigs, and then I’d throw in some bread in the evening.”

  “Antonina couldn’t bring us food; she carr
ied a pot for the pigs so no one would see it was for people,” Lea Kubran told me. “And she’d have to choose the right moment to hand us the pot. Many evenings we’d say, ‘It isn’t worth all this trouble,’ but a new day would rise.”

  In the winter of 1942 a rumor went around that the Germans were going to form the Poles into an army to deploy against the Soviets. Wyrzykowski found out he was on the draft list and went into hiding in a neighbor’s shed. One day Wyrzykowska’s brother ran over to his hideout with the news that the Germans had come to their property with dogs to hunt down Jews. He ran home, feeling he couldn’t leave his wife alone in a situation like that.

  “One man in the village,” said Stanisław Karwowski, Wyrzykowska’s nephew, “who went from house to house selling moonshine, they called him Walenty, noticed a Jew at my aunt’s house once and told someone whose daughter worked at the police station. She brought the police over immediately. Four of them turned up on horseback with dogs.”

  “The policemen put me up against the wall, one of them held his gun on me and they told us to hand over the Jews,” Wyrzykowski wrote in his Yad Vashem testimony. “They said if I handed them over, nothing would happen to me; they’d only shoot the Jews. I told them there weren’t any. I knelt down and cried a lot and prayed God to let me keep my life and save my family and those people.”

  Wyrzykowski showed great presence of mind. When the Germans saw straw trampled in the barn he explained he slept there because their house was cramped. When they were about to burn the straw to test his words, he begged them not to, because the fire would engulf the whole farm.

  “I don’t know who told me, because I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out on my own,” said Wyrzykowska, “but I had sprinkled gas around the pigsty every day. The Germans searched for Jews with dogs, but where there’s gas a dog loses its sense of smell. The Lord came to our aid, too, and he’s still helping, because four of them are still alive.”

  “When the police came,” Lea Kubran related, “we were all prepared to commit suicide; we had razor blades ready to cut our veins. When they left, we were sure our hosts would tell us to go, because they might not get away with it the next time. Wyrzykowski knocked on the door, embraced my husband, and said, ‘My dears, if they didn’t find you this time they’ll never find you—you stay with us until the war’s over.’”

  Wyrzykowska saved not just seven Jews but a German in the bargain.

  “Once one of the policemen staying across the street from us was left alone. He got sick and I found him lying on the ground writhing in pain. I gave him soda and vinegar, which we always used as a medicine, but it didn’t help. I went to my people hiding in the pigsty and asked them how to say in German, ‘Your comrade is sick.’ I harnessed a wagon, went to the police station, and said, ‘Kamrad krank.’”

  Luckily no one at the police station realized Wyrzykowska had spoken to them not so much in broken German as in perfect Yiddish.

  “They came for him right away. When he was better and when the other German wasn’t looking, or anybody else, he helped me with the threshing. There were other good Germans here, they gave the children candy and when the end of the war was near they said, ‘Hitler kaput.’”

  When the front moved and they had to evacuate Janczewko, the Wyrzykowskis prepared a hiding place in a potato field, because they were afraid a fire might break out on the front line and burn everyone in the pigsty alive—at night they carried poles and planks out and dug up earth for a hideout. Once the Russians arrived on January 23, 1945, the Jews came out of hiding.

  “It was still night when we were liberated from the pigsty,” Mosze Olszewicz wrote in his letter to Yad Vashem, “and we came out into the bright world, full of air and light. We were weak, sick, physically and mentally broken. They looked at our pale faces, our emaciated arms and legs, our blinded eyes, and they brought us back to life with warm words, bringing us the best things they had to eat.”

  “The first day of freedom no one could stand on their own legs,” Lea Kubran remembers.

  The Kubrzańskis and Olszewiczes soon moved to Łomża. Srul Grądowski had himself baptized and remained in Jedwabne. Szmul went on living with the Wyrzykowskis.

  One day Antonina’s brother came to Janczewko in despair to warn them he had heard six Poles plotting to kill Wasersztejn. The two men went into hiding right away, leaving Antonina alone with her two children and elderly parents.

  “My brother was at the gathering of the plotters,” Wyrzykowska said. “He came to our house immediately: ‘I decided to tell you, because it would be a pity, they went through so many months of suffering and you suffered so much with them.’”

  Leon Dziedzic, whose brother was also at the plotters’ meeting, is sure it was a gathering of the local unit of the Home Army.

  Wyrzykowski hid in the hope that this was just “guys settling scores” and that as a woman, Antonina would be safe. But the attackers had no pity for women, either.

  “At night,” Wyrzykowski described, “the partisans came for the Jew; they wanted him to be handed over so they could kill him and then they wouldn’t bother us anymore. My wife told them he’d left. They beat her so badly there wasn’t any white skin left on her, she was all black and blue.”

  “She was a devout Christian, I thought they wouldn’t harm her,” Szmul Wasersztejn recalled. “At midnight six men turned up who had taken part in the pogrom in Jedwabne. They beat old Franciszek and Antonina, threw them on the floor, kicked them, beat them, trying to find out where I was. They stole whatever caught their eye. They forced that brave woman to hitch up the horses and drive them to Jedwabne with the spoils of their looting. She just asked them to leave her sick father in peace. When she got back it was light, she got down from the cart and passed out. She had wounds on her face and the traces of beatings on her back. The children saw it all.”

  “They ordered me to lie down on the floor and they beat me with clubs,” Wyrzykowska recounts. “They beat me so that there wasn’t a spot on my body that wasn’t black and blue. They screamed, ‘You Jewish lackeys, you hid Jews, and they crucified Jesus. Tell us where you’re keeping the Jew.’ I said, ‘The Jew left a long time ago.’ They had all left by then, except Szmul was still there, hiding in a hollow in a neighbor’s potato field. They mauled my father. They took all our best things. I held out. I even hitched up the horses to drive them home.”

  Next day the Wyrzykowskis joined the Olszewiczes and Kubrzańskis, who were staying somewhere on the outskirts of Łomża. Wyrzykowska remembers a nocturnal expedition to Janczewko—to get a cow for milk to stave off their constant hunger—as the most harrowing moment in her life. It was a time when many gangs roamed the countryside and they wouldn’t have been able to take a cow safely in the daytime; if they met any thugs at night it meant certain death.

  Later they moved to Białystok. They slept side by side on the floor. There was nothing to eat.

  The incident of Wyrzykowska’s beating ended up in court. “On the night of March 13 to 14, 1945, ten armed Home Army terrorists beat up citizen Wyrzykowska, resident of the village Janczewko in the Łomża district, for hiding Jews during the German occupation and presently maintaining good relations with them,” one reads in the Białystok security service report, under the heading “Typical Acts of Terror by AKO Gangs in the Report Period.” (The AK, or Home Army, in the area had transformed itself by that time into the AKO, or Citizens’ Home Army.) The documents show that Antonina Wyrzykowska testified to the security service in Łomża on April 9 that she had been beaten up by a gang. She said, “I can’t live here, they’ll kill me.” She gave names. Most of them belonged to the armed forces based in the forest and didn’t answer the summons, but we know that at least one of them, Antoni Wądołowski, was convicted.

  Wyrzykowska decided to escape across the “green border”—to leave the country by sneaking across borders—with Szmul and the Kubrzańskis and Olszewiczes. The Olszewiczes found their way via Budapest to Italy. The othe
rs found themselves by late spring near Linz, in an Austrian refugee camp. “We walked more than we rode,” Lea Kubran told me.

  “There were only Jews there, I was the only Pole. I had left my children and whenever I saw a child in the street I felt such pain I couldn’t bear it,” Wyrzykowska relates. “After a few weeks I went home.”

  In the first testimony he gave to the Jewish Historical Commission, Szmul claimed that he “had married the woman who saved him.” Wyrzykowska doesn’t want to talk about that; certainly there was no official wedding.

  When did they fall in love? Was it when they drove to the ghetto together, before Szmul was in hiding? Or was it during the period in hiding? Right after? What was the Wyrzykowskis’ marriage like after she came back from the refugee camp in Austria? Of Wyrzykowski I only know he was a noble person, a handsome man, and that after the war he became a drunk.

  “I talked about it with Szmul many times,” I hear from Chaim Sroszko of Jedwabne, who now lives in Israel. He met Szmul in 1945 in Białystok, and was in constant touch with him until his death. “He told me at a certain point he realized he had no right to a woman who had left her children for him. He decided to go back to Poland with Antonina to help ensure her safe return to her family.”

  The Kubrzańskis lived for almost four more years in a displaced persons camp in Austria before obtaining visas for the United States in 1949.