by Anna Bikont
Facts can be pried out of Wasersztejn’s descriptions when they are compared with the accounts of other witnesses; his testimony also evokes the atmosphere of those days. The first days after the Soviets withdrew must have been much as Szmul described them in his diary:
“The municipality issued a decree that Jews had to clean the streets in town, whether cobbled streets or dirt roads full of mud. Each family was assigned a section of road to clean. They had to sweep the walkways, remove horse manure, keep the gutters clean, clean public buildings, remove garbage. If they refused they were whipped. Jews were forced to close their shops. People stopped buying shirts from my mother. Food reserves went fast. A potato was a treasure. Under cover of night, gangs of thugs threw rocks through windows, yelling ‘Go to Palestine.’ Many merchants were beaten for not closing up shop. Drunken gangs ruled the town. Anti-Semitism had created an atmosphere in which that scum could call themselves ‘defenders of the community.’ Pogroms occurred in several places. Killings, robberies, rapes, destruction of Jewish property. We were like flitting shadows.” In his 1945 testimony, he mentioned that one gang that went from house to house beating and robbing Jews included the brothers Wacław and Mieczysław Borowski, who “played the accordion and clarinet to drown out the screams of women and children.”
Then comes the moment on July 10 when neighbors become party to the atrocity: “We had played with their children when we were children. We’d done them favors, given them potato peelings for their hogs. Now their voices sounded implacably: ‘All Jewish residents are to gather in the marketplace without delay.’ From the moment the Germans arrived in town we became garbage to them. Mama looked for our Torah. A neighbor, grabbing her roughly by the arm, threw her out of the house, yelling: ‘Don’t you play with me, miss, or I’ll run out of patience.’ We tried to go with some dignity, but some of them poked our backs with sharp poles, herded us on, cursed us: ‘Jewish dog,’ ‘Son of a bitch,’ ‘Profiteer,’ ‘Damn Christ-killers.’”
Many of these scenes cannot be confirmed or denied, as they probably had no witnesses—apart from the victims and their persecutors, many of whom have talked later about what happened. “On Sadowa Street two girls, almost completely naked, were raped by gangs. Sara, Sosnowski’s daughter, was separated from her son and raped by five men in a granary. They crushed her pale, smooth body. Knowing she worked in a bank, they tortured her so she would tell them where the money was.” Is that really the way his neighbor Sara, daughter of Hana and Zundel Sosnowski, died?
Szmul remembers saving himself by proposing a deal to a classmate called “Mushałko” (in fact he did go to school with Tadeusz Musiałek): If he got him out of the marketplace, Szmul would give him a few kilos of tobacco he had hidden near his house. When they got away from the marketplace Wasersztejn supposedly told him there was no tobacco, but that he had to survive because there had to be a witness who would reveal to the world the insanity of the atrocity taking place (it’s hard to believe that Szmul, who had such a strong instinct for self-preservation, would have used such an argument, which would very likely have provoked the man to kill him). After a brief scuffle, he said, he escaped and hid in the Jewish cemetery in an open grave, covering himself with grass.
In his 1945 testimony it goes like this: “He agreed to get me out, but not my brother, who was in the group led by the lame ‘Diewicszi.’ I begged him, but he said there was no fooling with the lame guy. He drew a finger across my throat: ‘Shut up, all Jews are going to be killed at 4:00 p.m.’ My heart contracted. They were all doomed to an unworthy death: my mother, my little brother. Someone had to remain alive, perhaps the God of Israel would help me stop the injustice. Mushałko was trembling with rage, his eyes were full of hatred. Two burning circles. He spat on me, hurled insults at me, came at me to take my head off. He ran for reinforcements, I fled to the cemetery. Twenty meters from my father’s grave I saw an open grave.”
Only the cemetery is not in the direction of the Wasersztejn house, and there’s no reason Musiałek would have led him that way.
If Szmul really hid in the cemetery, which was not yet (as it is now) covered with a grove of hazel trees and was one of the most dangerous places in town, where many killings took place that day, he had to have hidden himself very well in the grave—how much could he have seen from there?
However, he claimed he saw the first group of Jews being led to the vicinity of the barn. The murderer with a prosthetic leg must have been the lame Stanisław Sielawa (the Costa Rican journalist calls him “Diewicszi”), who is said to have cut off the heads of victims with an axe; his helpers stabbed them with knives, and then they piled the murdered and dying into a pit dug in advance. But Wasersztejn couldn’t have seen Sielawa killing Jews, because—as transpires from the exhumation—the first group of Jews, the ones forced to carry the statue of Lenin, were killed inside the barn. On the other hand, the Jews in that first group were killed in the fashion described—gathered in one place and killed with an axe and knives. There must have been tales told about it in town and Szmul must have heard them after the massacre, from Poles.
In the first, brief testimony taken from Szmul Wasersztejn by the Jewish Historical Commission, we read, “The subject was in the bushes. He heard screams where 128 men, the strongest ones, were all killed in one location.” He must have heard the screams without realizing they were coming from the barn. Immediately after the war, he told his friend Chaim Sroszko he had hidden in the cemetery. He told a Jew he met in Białystok, and who gave testimony to the Jewish Historical Commission in 1947 about what Szmul had told him, that he not only heard but also “hid between the graves and saw everything.” He must have persuaded himself of the truth of his story.
He described events that immediately followed the burning of the Jews: “Women and children went out looting, one house after another. The men killed and the women and children robbed.” When he visited Poland in the eighties, he heard from an old acquaintance, “Szmulke, I know who took your mother’s things.” He didn’t want to know who it was.
At dawn on July 11 he heard the voices of two young Jews who had survived as he had. Together they made it to the house of a friend, then to another. There the people gave them food and drink, shed tears with them over the dead, but were afraid to keep them. The head of the household found out that the Germans had forbidden further killing of Jews. Szmul returned to the house on Przestrzelska Street in the hope of finding his mother or brother there. The house had been plundered, the sewing machine and the stores of food were gone. He sat on the threshold and burst into tears.
A passing German took him to the police station. There were already sixteen escaped Jews there, and later, as he describes it, the Germans refused to hand the Jews over to the Poles. “We need them”—they supposedly said—“for cleaning our horses and shoes.” The Jews moved into one of the post-Jewish homes and reported for work in the morning. Once, one of them came back with a torn rectum after being raped by drunken policemen. Szmul didn’t go to work the next day. He went back to his plundered home and wept.
It was there that Aleksander Wyrzykowski saw him and took him to work on his farm in Janczewko. Szmul writes that the killers of July 10 looked for him there. He hid in the basements and granaries when they came to the farm in Janczewko to sniff around. He succeeded in escaping because he was better at finding hideouts than they were.
In the autumn of 1942, when the Germans ordered the Jews working on farms to be rounded up, and police patrolled the area picking up runaways, Wasersztejn managed to avoid the hunt and hide in a barn belonging to the Dziedzic family, who brought him back to the Wyrzykowskis’ a few days later.
Szmul remembers that it began to snow and Wyrzykowski saw tracks leading up to the stable. There he found Jakub Kubrzański and Mietek Olszewicz with his brother Berek, two girls they’d met in the ghetto, Lea and Elke, and the older Srul Grądowski. In his book he writes, “Wyrzykowski was terrified, but he hid it from them, he embraced the
m. He ran to his wife, ‘We have six more Jews.’ They brought them bread and water. The Jews had already forgotten that such kindness was possible, they ate the bread in tears. Wyrzykowski said there were too many of us, that he and his family would be shot for it. I realized I should thank them, leave without resentment, and look for another solution. I said I was leaving to share the fate of my brothers. We were thinking of going to Belorussia through the swamps.”
The next day Wyrzykowski appeared: “As a Christian I cannot send you off to your deaths, but I can’t send my own family off to die for you, either. First I was tired and I thought I had no choice—you had to leave the farm. But then I thought of a fairer solution. My wife and I are going to the market in Jedwabne. We’ll be gone for many hours. Szmulek, you know I’m familiar with every inch of this property. If you can find a place where we can’t discover you, I promise to feed you until the day that God ensures your survival. But if I find your shelter, this will be your last night here. I’ll give you water and food for four days, clothing, and a hunting knife. Szmulek, is that clear?”
They all wandered around the farm, unable to find a good hiding place. In the end, Szmul wearily sat down on the edge of the pigsty. Then he teetered and fell into a heap of manure. He got up in a rage and kicked the ground. “How mysterious are the ways of God,” he wrote. “And there was light. What I saw on the toe of my shoe was a chunk of sticky red clay.” He came up with the idea of digging a tunnel and a subterranean shelter.
“I called the others. I said: ‘We’ll be living on two square meters, breathing the excrement of pigs and the urine of sheep. We need dry grass, manure, and fresh animal shit.’ At five p.m. everything was completed. The girls found great stuff for covering our catacomb: two pieces of cardboard, seven planks in good condition, dry grain, half a sack of chicken feathers, and an old lamp—we took all those treasures down underground with us. We swept away all the outside tracks, we felt like worms living in the earth.
“We covered ourselves up with a pig’s trough. We heard Aleksander and Antonina going from the house to the barn, from the barn to the pigsty. They looked for us in the privy, the chimney, the chicken coop, the granaries, in the fields, in the garden. They got to the toolshed, threw all the tools out, banged on the wall, looked under the piles of sheep’s wool. Weeping, they asked God for forgiveness for having made the Jews flee to Belorussia on snowbound roads so that they might never get there. The first night we were underground wasn’t easy. It’s hard to describe the stench of pig shit. Piss is acidic, and then the decaying manure giving off hydrogen sulfide—that natural process choked our breath.”
Wasersztejn describes how at eight in the morning he theatrically strode into the Wyrzykowskis’ house. He said their hideout would stand up to the Gestapo and the pogroms, and Aleksander responded, “I’ll keep my word. You’ll get one meal a day. There has to be someone on guard day and night, and when it’s quiet two people can come out of the stables. Only Szmul can come to the house under cover of darkness. Szmulek, now you should say goodbye to our kids, tell them you’re leaving. I’ll bring you water for a bath twice a week. I’ll give you a jar for relieving yourselves. Antonina will talk to the women about what to do when they have their periods. From now on your lives depend on us and our lives depend on you. We will launder your clothes, iron them, mend them, trim your nails and give you an Old Testament, because my father-in-law told me for Szmul that’s the Jewish Bible.”
In fact, Wyrzykowski proposed to Mosze Olszewicz that he build a hiding place and Olszewicz built it. Szmul wasn’t there at the time, he was hiding with Antonina’s brother. “When Szmul came it was all ready,” Lea Kubran remembered in conversation with me. Wasersztejn must have heard the story about building the hideout many times, in detail, from Olszewicz and become so familiar with it that it felt like his own story.
“The first days were a nightmare,” Szmul wrote. “I remember Elke screaming hysterically when she discovered roundworms five centimeters long. Srul gagged when a worm called a cheese worm, white with a brown head, fell straight into his mouth. We suffered terribly, we threw up, but with time we became adjusted to the environment. We got used to watching the world through cracks. Our sense of smell grew more acute. The smell of baking bread reached us through the stench. We ceased to be Szmulek, Lejka, Elke, Mosze, Berek, Srul, Jankiel. We were the brotherhood of the pigsty. Just like Alexandre Dumas: all for one and one for all. Amidst the worms and dirt we were a metazoan, a subterranean monster with fourteen hands, ears, eyes, and nostrils, seven heads, mouths, and asses, five penises, two vaginas, and just one need: to survive. We had to surrender totally to each other where feelings were concerned, utterly resigning our own personalities. And share everything but the women. Elke and Lejka loved two of the men. And though we others also had our sexual needs and aching members, we should thank God we had the strength to control our sexual appetites.”
Wasersztejn describes how one day Germans came to Janczewko looking for a place to encamp. They chose the Wyrzykowski farm. They had two trucks, they pitched a tent, set up a kitchen under the tent, and took the barn for living quarters.
“When the Germans were staying in the barn above us, one of the women was ready to give birth,” he wrote. “Antonina brought a sheet, scissors, alcohol. She explained how the woman should push, breathe. Right after that the Germans turned up with dogs. They were laughing so much we knew they were drunk. They began to snore. In the night the woman went into labor. She had a rag in her mouth to keep herself from screaming. I told my friend that bringing a child into the world when the Germans were so close would get Antonina killed and I left it to his conscience. I saw an urgent question in his eyes. He spoke softly with his woman. The underground mother was contorted with pain, she bit the rag so hard blood flowed from her mouth. The child began to come out, and as soon as its little head appeared the father put a hand on its mouth to stop it from crying. He held it there till it turned blue; the mother lost consciousness. He held it until it was still. We cut the navel. When the mother came to she prayed in Hebrew, stroked the dead child, and cried herself to sleep. The father kissed the child’s forehead. When the Germans left to go on patrol he took the remains and went out and buried them under a heap of shit. How many more months were we to go on crouching there, amid the stench? And now we were tormented by the memory of the child whose life we’d sacrificed so that we could live.”
This testimony has the sincerity of passion and despair. But Szmul could not have been an immediate witness to the child’s birth and death—in fact, there were two shelters and Szmul was hiding in the other one. Nor was there an additional German unit bedding down in the barn over their heads.
He spent more than two years underground. “One morning,” Szmul wrote, “Antonina came to us: ‘The Germans have gone, you can come out. I hope you remember what it feels like to be vertical.’ A person doesn’t need sun, light, food, freedom as much as he needs to move. We started dancing, jumping, stretching, raising our arms to the sky. The Red Army soldiers, with their coarse faces, stinking of vodka, prodded us, laughed, gave us vodka, but also kept us in their sights. We cried at the sight of the blue sky—we weren’t moles anymore.”
Wasersztejn set off for Jedwabne. The roads were—as he wrote—stained with blood. There were corpses of German soldiers all over the place. The Poles had torn from them everything of value. First that seemed horrible to him, but then he looked at his own ragged shirt, pants, and leaky shoes tied up with string, and decided he had the right to look for something better. He managed to gather together a cap with ear muffs, officer’s boots, gloves, and a military coat made of leather. He and Izrael Grądowski happened upon a Soviet unit. “Good news,” said the officer, “we’re executing Germans today. I’m sure you’ll enjoy that.” They quickly moved on.
Wasersztejn knew he’d leave Poland, but he wanted to ensure the Wyrzykowski family’s material security. “Their house was built in a time of poverty. I thought I
had the right to choose some house that had belonged to well-off Jews and move it to Janczewko. There was a nice wooden building occupied by a Pole. I went in and told him to get out because it was my house. He was going to put up a fight, but Soviet trucks happened to be passing by and I greeted an officer. The Pole got scared and ran out the back way.”
He didn’t manage to move the house. The same evening he was warned thugs wanted to kill them and he escaped, finding his way first to Łomża, and then to Białystok. He and the Wyrzykowskis moved into a suburb, sleeping side by side on the floor. He started trading. He’d buy cloth and thread in Łódź and sell them in Białystok. To avoid the squads searching the trains for Jews, he hid near the tracks and jumped on at the last minute when the train started moving. “I remembered,” he wrote, “someone talking about how great trade was in cloth from Łódź. I got money for a ticket, two bales of cloth, and I’d have half a zloty left for something to eat. A railway official who didn’t hate Jews told me about four places where Polish fascists were killing Jews by the railway tracks.”
In Szmul’s detailed account there isn’t a word about him taking Antonina Wyrzykowska with him to Austria, tearing her away from her husband and children. But we know one way or another that when Wyrzykowska decided to go back to her family, he brought her back to Poland.
He stayed another brief period in Poland, and returned to trade. Through the Joint Distribution Committee he found his eldest brother, Mojżesz, in Cuba, where he had been since 1938. Szmul’s mother, Chaja Sara, had worried ceaselessly about their future in Poland from the time her neighbor Hana Sosnowska had been killed in the pogrom in Radziłów in 1933, and so the family had shelled out the money for Mojżesz’s passage at the price of many privations.
