The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Mojżesz cabled: “Szmulke, don’t go anywhere, wait for my letter.” Szmul wrote back that the farmers who had hid him had lost their farm and everything they owned because of it, and he swore not to leave Poland before he had ensured their security. His brother sent him enough money to buy the Wyrzykowskis a house in Bielsk Podlaski, a horse, a mare with two foals, two cows, a radio, and some furniture.

  Szmul left the country by plane via Stockholm (“God of Israel, I never saw so much food, such elegant women, such beautiful clothes”). From Göteborg he sailed on a ship to the island of Aruba in the Antilles (“I saw a black man for the first time. On the pier people stood with signs in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish: ‘If there are any Jews on this ship, come to us.’ And there were Aruba Jews who took care of us.”) On November 15, 1946, he landed at the airport in Havana. He saw no one whom he recognized as his brother, so he said loudly, “I am Szmul Wasersztejn,” and found himself in the arms of a man crying and saying, “Szmulke, Szmulke.” Of the whole family only the two of them had survived. But he saw uncertainty in his brother’s eyes as to whether it was really him. “I asked him: ‘Remember, Mosze, the little black cow with white patches that gave us more milk than the light one? Remember the shirt Mother made for it? Remember we had four hectares of grain? And those short pants you passed on to me when you left for Cuba? And our charcoal iron? And remember the brick missing in our bread oven?’ When I said that he knew for sure it was me.”

  He started out in business right away. His brother gave him six dozen hides for riding breeches, and he set off with them into the interior. “I told a countryman in the town of Cienfuegos how I’d survived and about the murder of the Jews. He felt sorry for me and bought three dozen hides, and gave me the addresses of eight other Jewish merchants. Every time I had to tell them the story of the massacre and every time they put in orders for shoes. That’s how I began.”

  Szmul soon realized this was a great marketing strategy. “Like an old broken record on a hand-cranked gramophone I told the story again of the events of 1941 to ’45 and closed a 700-dollar deal,” he wrote with disarming frankness. “Not many Cubans have traveled across Cuba as much as I have. Havana was alive with music and singing, couples embraced on the coast boulevard washed with the foam off the sea waves, and I went on selling, day and night. At the end of 1947 I had 25,000 dollars.”

  In 1948 he married Rachela Goldwaser, whom he’d met in Poland. His business kept growing and his wife worked alongside him, day after day, from dawn to dusk. They started a factory for tennis shoes, and saved a lot. By the beginning of the sixties they were wealthy Cuban citizens.

  When Fidel Castro came in, the Wasersztejn family managed to leave the island. They lost their whole fortune. They found themselves in Philadelphia, not knowing the language or having any idea what to live on. The money they’d illegally sent to the United States disappeared. The children went hungry, Rachela wept. One day Szmul read a description of Costa Rica in a back issue of the local Jewish newspaper: magnificent volcanoes, a large middle class dominated by Jews, a democratic government, and beautiful women. It sounded enticing, so he found Costa Rica on a map. Then he found the Costa Rican consul in Philadelphia, who turned out to be Jewish, which seemed to him a good omen. He noted that he spent a dollar on an umbrella, because the consul had warned him that it rained a lot in Costa Rica.

  “He arrived on Sunday, and by Monday he had his own shop,” I was told by Maria Wiernik, a friend of Rachela’s in Costa Rica.

  Wasersztejn described his first steps, when he was still alone. In the morning he went for a walk in the commercial quarter of San José and saw a sign that said: BUSINESS FOR SALE. “It was a small business but packed with shoes, exactly the thing I knew.” Although he didn’t manage to convince the owner he would pay for the shop with his earnings, he did convince the next one along the street. He called his wife: “I have 30 pairs of shoes, you can come.” Soon, this time in the landscape of Costa Rica, he resumed the customs of the prewar shtetl. He journeyed on rutted roads, looked for ways to ford rivers, and went from door to door. He knocked, and offered his wares: shoes on credit.

  “I became a respected man. Every day I’d go to the Soda Palace for a coffee,” Szmul wrote of himself when he had won a place among the financial elite of Costa Rica. On the 1997 video recording his trip to Poland, he declares proudly when he steps onto the plane, “We’re traveling first class!”

  After school, the children helped him sell shoes. But he took care to give them a good education. Izaak is a doctor of pharmacology, the owner and director of a laboratory that produces medications. Saul is a medical doctor, and Szmul’s daughter, Rebecca, went to law school.

  “He pushed us to study and work,” Saul told me. “He’d always say that God gave Jews a head for business so they could give work to others. There were twelve hundred people working in his shoe factory. It filled him with pride that thanks to him, so many people could support their family. For him, to be a good person meant working hard, giving work to others, supporting charitable causes.”

  While other boys were playing soccer, going to the beach, or visiting New York, the Wasersztejn boys were working to help their father. They didn’t know him outside of work. They went to bed before their parents got home at night, and when the children woke up they’d already left. Saul wasn’t even tall enough to reach the tabletop before his father told him, “You’re different from other children: they have uncles, grandfathers, and you don’t. They were killed by their Polish neighbors. You were named after your uncle whose head was split open with an axe when he was twelve years old.”

  “My father associated any news of atrocities committed in the world with Jedwabne,” the elder brother, Izaak, said. “He thought he should warn the world, because if the world knew about Jedwabne the evil wouldn’t happen again. He wanted the people he loved to know about it. It was his obsession. I had to listen to him talk about the massacre hundreds of times. A child, to become a happy person, has to grow up trusting other people. Hearing again and again about the killing of the Jews by their Polish friends, I lost that trust. To go on living I had to block those memories in myself. They come back to me in depressions. My brother Saul suffers from the same thing, but somehow we manage to live and work. Our brother Gerardo is schizophrenic. There used to be no mental illness in our family. We are marked by Jedwabne.”

  They often wondered why their father was unable to show tenderness, never hugged them, never kissed them, never took them out for ice cream, to the races, to the movies. Maybe he tried to be tough outwardly because he was sentimental by nature? Maybe all his feeling was burned away in the barn that day and he no longer had any tenderness in him?

  Szmul taught his sons to respect the State of Israel. “People respect us because we have our own state,” he said. “They didn’t respect us before.” He subscribed to Israeli newspapers—Yehuod Hamot, the Jerusalem News. He’d start his day with them. He didn’t go to synagogue—just once a year, on Yom Kippur. That was the only day in the year he didn’t work, but at sunset, when the Day of Atonement had ended, he ran over to open his store.

  “I wanted to be different from my father,” Saul told me, “show that there were other ways to be good. That’s why I became a doctor. But when my father started to have health problems I got involved in running the business with him.”

  Wasersztejn had shops that sold schmattas, or clothes and shoes, and a shoe factory. When the market flooded with Chinese products the factory started to lose money. Saul finally managed to persuade his father to shut it down and limit himself to shoe stores. They ran the business together for twenty years. A friend of the family told me they fought so badly they sometimes came to blows.

  “We had fierce arguments, mostly about him wanting to invest in land; I knew it didn’t pay,” Saul said. “Jews wanted to educate their children and own land, that was supposed to give them a feeling of security, and they couldn’t buy land in prewar Poland. When m
y father died I realized I’m really not so different from him. I don’t work on Saturday, but only because my wife forbids me to. I take a two-week holiday, because my wife insists. But still, I run the business from dawn to dusk. I own seventy-one shoe stores all over the country. And you know what? Lately I’ve been investing in land.”

  The video of the Polish trip shows Wasersztejn kneeling down, crying, kissing the earth near the site of the murder. He shows his sons: “That’s the road I escaped by. Here’s the rock I hid behind. Here’s where they drowned the girls in the pond.” And, “For hundreds of years they lived alongside us as neighbors, and then they dragged us out of our houses and killed us in Śleszyński’s barn, at three o’clock in the afternoon.” He says kaddish. “Dear mother, dear brother, how hard it’s been without you all these years. I think of you every day.”

  Earlier in Jedwabne, I’d heard about that visit. How Wasersztejn had come, wanting to give everybody one hundred dollars because he was ashamed of the lies he’d told. How he went to Janczewko on the outskirts of Jedwabne, where he’d been in hiding, and cried, and when someone came down the street he took out a ten-dollar bill. Stanisław Karwowski, Antonina Wyrzykowska’s nephew who lives in Jedwabne, told me, “I’m ashamed to say what he gave me when he came back all those years later: forty dollars. But the neighbors told everyone it was three thousand.”

  “Every spot in Jedwabne was marked by his memories. Here a child had fallen, there he’d heard screams, here the priest had locked the church door,” Izaak says.

  In the marketplace in Jedwabne they were told, “Don’t ask any questions, just get out of here.” They’d planned to stay longer, but they left at once.

  When Jan Gross visited Szmul in Costa Rica, there was no longer any getting through to him, Szmul was absorbed in his illness. I was in San José just after his death, which occurred in February 2000.

  He could barely hear a thing in the last months of his life. He told his sons he heard his mother—she was in the barn crying out to him, begging him for help.

  By the time he became the target of attacks and insinuations, he was already gone, and it may have been better that he was spared all that. He became the whipping boy for all those who denied Poles did the killing in Jedwabne. Right after Gross’s book appeared, people in the town started claiming that Wasersztejn had been on a truck with a gun when Poles were deported to Siberia.

  “He was a young boy on whom fell the burden of supporting his mother and younger brother, because their father had died before the war,” Rachela remembered from her husband’s stories. “He went from village to village buying meat and selling it on the black market. He was trying to survive. He didn’t know a word of Russian and he gave the Soviets a wide berth.”

  Rachela’s words fit with what I heard from Meir Ronen in Israel: “I knew Szmul from school, we called him ‘Pietruszka’ [Rooster] because he was a redhead. During the Soviet occupation he didn’t spend time with any of the idiots who supported the new order.” In 1939, when the Soviets arrived, he wasn’t yet seventeen. Friends a year younger were indoctrinated by Soviet schooling, and the ones who were a year older, subject to the Soviet army draft, were sent to classes in Russian and Marxism-Leninism. He narrowly avoided both.

  Leon Dziedzic of Przestrzele remembered him from that time: “I saw him often during the Soviet occupation because he traded in meat, and in our barn—it was quiet in Przestrzele—he would slaughter and flay the animals. Sometimes he slaughtered a pig, too, but he did that secretly, not only from the Soviets but from other Jews, because for them it was a sin.”

  At the public meeting of Jedwabne residents with prosecutor Ignatiew, the barn owner Śleszyński’s daughter, Janina Biedrzycka, asked, “Why does that Jew sign himself Wasersztejn, when his name was Całka? I have a name and I don’t change it. Would he have changed his name if he hadn’t collaborated?” In fact Wasersztejn was called Wasersztejn both before the war and till the day he died. During the Soviet occupation, when all residents of Jedwabne were forced to take Soviet passports, which gave each person a patronymic, he probably wrote “Całkowicz” down as his patronymic. His father’s name was Becale, or Całka—and that’s why the Wyrzykowskis called him Staszek Całka when he worked for them; in those days it sounded a hell of a lot better than Szmul Wasersztejn.

  In the winter of 2001, Professor Tomasz Strzembosz gave wide currency to the news that, as he maintained, “confirmed on all sides that Całko or Całka was Wasersztejn and that he was an agent of the security services in Łomża after the war.” The Catholic Information Agency picked up on this.

  “I wrote that I was witness to the fact that Wasersztejn left Poland right after the war,” I hear from his friend from Jedwabne, Chaim Sroszko. “I demanded they publish a correction. No response.”

  In the right-wing press and in several books on Jedwabne, the same phrases are repeated, with Professor Strzembosz cited as an authority: “the agent Wasersztejn,” “Jewish thug,” “secret service hood,” “it’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Jewish secret service agents lecture their victims on morality.” People in Jedwabne who eagerly read the anti-Semitic press soon started to repeat these phrases.

  “Wasersztejn tortured my father at the secret police prison, that’s the truth about Jedwabne,” one of the residents shouted at me. I asked when that was. It had supposedly taken place in the fifties. Of course by then Szmul had long since left Poland.

  I asked Szmul’s sons if they ever tell anyone about their father’s experiences. “A person living on the Pacific would never understand it,” said Izaak. “Once, I told a prominent intellectual here what my father was dictating a book about, and he thought it was a work of fiction.”

  Szmul wrote to remember and warn others, and also, in spite of everything, to inspire. That’s why his book offers descriptions of people facing death with dignity.

  “A pious Jew, who looked like he had stepped out of one of the books of the Prophets, wrapped himself in a prayer shawl, enveloped a 500-year-old Torah with his body, raised a prayer book to the heavens, and, proclaiming the power of God in Hebrew, stepped into the flames. A moment of silence fell. The monsters were paralyzed for a moment by the strength of his Jewish faith and they silently watched his prayer shawl, which was throwing off giant tongues of fire.

  “One dragged out a beautiful Jewish girl by her hair, her name was Telca. He walked to the edge of the cemetery where I was hiding and made her lie down, saying he was going to have her. She kept resisting, until finally she said: ‘Stop this slaughter and I’ll give myself to you.’ The man shuddered as if someone had hit him on the head. He struck the girl with a savage cry. From that mouth that men dreamed of as an oasis in the desert, no sound came. He lifted her up and threw her into the burning barn.”

  He also describes finding out from a Pole who “hadn’t killed anyone with his own hands but whose silence and passivity made him a criminal” how his twelve-year-old brother had died. He had been in the group of young Jews who were killed with axes near the barn. “He was strong and handsome. The Jews were taken to the lame man, who killed them with an axe and shoved them into a grave with his crutch. They left my brother almost until last. He tried to defend himself with a spade. They tried to beat him to death with clubs. It would have killed any other man, but Saul wasn’t like any other man. He fell, bleeding, but got up again. They beat him on his head, and he got up. The lame man came at him with the axe. Saul got up a third time, though his head was coming off his torso, took a few steps toward the butcher, and that guy took out a World War I bayonet, stabbed him three times, and cast him into the grave.”

  In conversations with survivors in the Łomża ghetto, with his fellow captives in hiding at the Wyrzykowskis’, and finally with Polish witnesses, Wasersztejn must have fixed every detail of the massacre in his mind. Later all the facts, woven together and multiplied, tormented him day and night, forming what he himself called an “orgy of blood.” He told the
story hundreds of times, until it had been transformed into myth.

  He must have seen himself as the last repository of the truth about the Jedwabne massacre. For decades, reports of it failed to penetrate human consciousness. Hence his book, written in blood. He started dictating it in 1995 and finished in December 1999. Can he have hoped that someone would hear the tale one day? No more than a castaway on an uninhabited island who throws a bottle into the ocean in the hope that someone will find it and take his fate to heart.

  Journal

  JANUARY 1, 2002

  In Łódź at Marek Edelman’s birthday party. I talk to his daughter-in-law, the painter Zofia Lipecka, about her installation on Jedwabne. The Warsaw Center for Contemporary Art at Zamek Ujazdowski was to have shown it, everything was on track, when something went wrong. Her e-mails remained unanswered, and in the end, it turned out there was no money for the installation.

  Marek Edelman was active in the Bund, a party that said the place for Jews was in Poland and that they should fight for social justice for all, not emigrate to Palestine in search of the Promised Land. He has remained faithful to that view his whole life. (After the war, the Bundists would go to train stations to try to halt the flood of Jews fleeing Poland.) But when in 1968 anti-Semitism received government endorsement and his children, Ania and Aleksander, would come home from school in tears, he thought it best for them to emigrate to France with their mother. Alina Margolis-Edelman invited a school friend of Ania’s, Zofia Lipecka, over for Easter, and Zofia stayed with them and finished school in France. Alina, a pediatrician, now travels with the humanitarian missions of Doctors Without Borders. She was in Vietnam to help the boat people fleeing a Communist hell, in El Salvador, Chad, Bosnia. Ania became a chemist, Aleksander a biophysicist, and Zofia Lipecka a painter and Aleksander’s wife.