The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  JUNE 14, 2002

  I’m going to Radziłów with Jan and Bożena Skrodzki. I was invited along with them to the wedding of the grandson of a farmer from Trzaski who hid Jan during the Soviet occupation. I’ve just given Jan the documents from another trial discovered by the Institute of National Remembrance. The accused is Antoni Kosmaczewski, Leon Kosmaczewski’s brother. He testified that he killed seventeen-year-old Dora Dorogoj in revenge for her collaboration with the NKVD, and that he did it together with Zygmunt Skrodzki. They committed the crime in June 1941 in broad daylight, a hundred and fifty meters from inhabited buildings.

  “I felt hatred toward Dora Dorogoj,” Kosmaczewski stated during his interrogation, and explained why. On April 13, 1940, she was on the NKVD truck that came to his house to take him away. He was released after four days in jail.

  “When the German forces entered our region in 1941,” Kosmaczewski continued, “and the Red Army retreated, I started looking for Dora Dorogoj to take revenge on her. I found out she sometimes came to the Kopańczyks at their settlement in Słucz … I then asked Kopańczyk: ‘Don’t take pity on her, but when she comes to you, send someone to let me know—me, Antoni Kosmaczewski, that is—that she’s with you.’ About two days later a messenger from Kopańczyk came to me in Radziłów, I don’t know his name, to tell me Dora Dorogoj was in their house. At that time I went straight to Zygmunt Skrodzki, the tailor who lived in Radziłów, who had also been looking for Dora Dorogoj. We set off for the Kopańczyks, where Dora Dorogoj was peeling potatoes. When we went into the house, Dora Dorogoj recognized us and was very frightened. Skrodzki told her to collect her things and come out into the yard. When we went out into the yard Skrodzki gave her a beating with a stick right there in the yard because she was stubborn and refused to go. Skrodzki found a shovel in the yard and gave it to Dora to carry. She began to beg and say: ‘I know where I’m going.’ Skrodzki replied: ‘You should know.’ We walked a hundred and fifty meters from the Kopańczyks’ buildings—I think it was one of the Kopańczyks’ fields—and Skrodzki and I ordered her to dig a hole. When she had dug a hole about 60 centimeters deep, 80 by 50, we started to beat Dora Dorogoj. Zygmunt Skrodzki beat her with a stick, like the swipple on a flail. I, Antoni Kosmaczewski, struck her with a rock I held in my hand. And so we both beat her until she was dead and we buried her in that hole right after we killed her.”

  No search of the area was conducted for the remains of the murdered girl. When Kosmaczewski retracted his testimony at the same trial and Skrodzki never admitted guilt, the court exonerated them for lack of evidence.

  “They killed her in the swamp and cut off her head,” Halina Zalewska told me. Menachem Finkelsztejn testified: “The killers concluded a girl wasn’t worth the bullet, that’s why they cut off her head.”

  A few days after Dora was killed, the Dorogoj family was burned in the barn in Radziłów. Her father, Mosze, and one son, Akiwa, escaped. Chaja Finkelsztejn remembers in her memoir that after July 7, 1941, the Germans let them live in their own home, where Dorogoj had his workshop, because they needed a shoemaker. “They asked the priest to baptize them,” she wrote, “but the priest refused.”

  When the Germans deported the remaining Jews from Radziłów, the Dorogoj father and son fled.

  “I knew the Dorogojs from before the war,” Stanisław Ramotowski had told me. “They lived in a redbrick house on Nadstawna Street. He was a shoemaker, but one of the poorest. I knew they were in hiding, because the elder Dorogoj once crept out to my mother’s house, trying to find me, but by then I was already in hiding myself. They hid, but a few people knew about them.”

  They managed to take the basic shoemaker’s tools with them and supported themselves by making shoes, which someone from the village collected and sold.

  “I had a look at the cellar where they survived the war,” Andrzej R. told me. “It was a bunker dug out of the ground, covered with rocks that the farmer had cleared from the field and thrown into a heap. In the spring of 1945 there was still a pile of scraps from a shoemaker’s workshop there.”

  In the same trial Antoni Kosmaczewski confessed to killing both Dorogojs after the war. Every older inhabitant of Radziłów knows the brothers Kosmaczewski took part in that crime.

  In Kosmaczewski’s account, in February 1945 he supposedly heard from farmers in Słucz that the Dorogojs had come out of hiding, moved to a farm there, and were threatening that when the Red Army arrived and the hour of retribution with it, they were going to shoot Kosmaczewski with their seven-shooter number 9. Kosmaczewski testified how he killed them: “The evening of the next day I took a wagon of my brother’s, Józef Gabriel Kosmaczewski, and Józef and I drove to Walewski. I told him that the Russians were coming close and the Jew Dorogoj was threatening to kill me and Zygmunt Skrodzki in revenge for the death of his daughter, Dora Dorogoj, whom we had killed together. I hinted to Walewski that I had a liter of vodka in my pocket and I was going to apologize to those Jews in order to be reconciled with them and ask their forgiveness for killing the daughter. Walewski listened and believed me when I said I had vodka and was really going to apologize. He went to Samołki, where the Jews were, and brought them back to his own yard … I was standing in the hallway with an axe, hidden behind the curtain … The old Dorogoj on entering the hallway was struck by me on the head with the blunt end of the axe and he fell without even a squeak. Seeing this the younger Dorogoj began to run away screaming. I caught up with him and tripped him so he landed on the ground, and in a second I hit him on the head twice with the axe, the blunt side, and killed him dead … After killing those Jews I called my brother Józef, who was about 10 meters away, and Feliks Mordasiewicz, resident of Radziłów, but present in Słucz at that time. When they arrived we loaded the Jews onto a sled and drove them into the forest at Słucz and threw them down on the snow, leaving them aboveground. There I searched them for arms, but found none.”

  JUNE 15, 2002

  Trzaski. The mood at the bridegroom’s house is festive, but Jan Skrodzki announces, “I want you as my friends to know why Anna and I are going to Radziłów and what I found out about my father.” And disregarding the excitement of the wedding he reads them the description I just handed to him: “Zygmunt Skrodzki beat her with a stick, like the swipple on a flail…” He only stops reading when the ceremony of leading the bridegroom to his wedding begins.

  We drive to the church in a cavalcade of cars, and afterward attend the wedding feast in a Jedwabne restaurant. I briefly drop in on friends. They can’t get over the fact that someone from the area had the courage to invite me to such an event: “In Jedwabne everyone would be scared he’d get his cottage burned down.”

  JUNE 16, 2002

  With the Skrodzkis I go to see Franciszek Ekstowicz, the man who was once a journeyman with Skrodzki. Jan reads him Kosmaczewski’s testimonies.

  “That was not your father who did the killing,” Ekstowicz protests. “I swear to you. Kosmaczewski had a falling-out with your father and that’s why he pointed the finger at him.”

  “I know he’s not telling the truth,” Jan says to me after we leave.

  I ask his wife, Bożena, how Jan, given the chance to accept the “easier truth,” doesn’t take advantage of it.

  “You saw yourself how Franciszek wasn’t really paying attention, he was moving around the kitchen, but when the name Dorogoj was dropped he froze. He knows it is the truth and Jan knows it. In some sense Jan always knew, but it’s only now that he’s engaged in this research that he has finally admitted it to himself. His mother once said to his father in anger, ‘What kind of life have I had, I was alone—you went to jail for killing a Jewish girl.’ And why did his father cut himself off from the family toward the end of his life? And before that never wanted to meet anyone from Radziłów, even a former journeyman, who lived in Otwock, not far away? He was running away from his own memory.”

  JUNE 17, 2002

  More people I’ve heard of before are turning up i
n the pages of Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir.

  There’s Lejzor Zandler, who bossed everyone around under the Soviets as the manager of the Finkelsztejns’ nationalized mill, and gave propaganda speeches against the former owners, or “vampires.” I know the rest of his story from Ramotowski, who met him during the German occupation, when he was intending to find his way to the Soviet Union and join the Communist partisans there.

  There’s the medic Mazurek, described by Chaja as one of the most important people in the village after the Germans arrived, next to the priest and the village head: he is the same older gentleman who was a friend of Ramotowski’s mother. It was at his urging that Rachela got herself baptized, and Mazurek himself became her godfather and a witness at her church wedding to Stanisław Ramotowski.

  There’s Marian Kozikowski of Konopki, who took part in the atrocity but also got the Finkelsztejns out of the market square. His name appears several times in the trials of the Radziłów killers. Józef Ekstowicz testified that Marian Kozikowski was in the auxiliary police and gave him the order to set the barn on fire. If Kozikowski was in the auxiliary police, the Finkelsztejns could have left the market square with his permission. He was lord and master in town that day. He must have saved the Finkelsztejns for money.

  There’s Wolf Szlapak, a family friend of the Finkelsztejns and a Zionist activist who traveled around Poland collecting money to buy land in Palestine. He was supposed to go to America, but he didn’t make it before the war broke out. Stanisław Ramotowski remembered Szlapak from before the war, when he used to see him in his iron shop on the market: “Tall, handsome, he looked as distinguished as if he were some kind of leader.”

  Chaja describes how before the war the Zionists invited emissaries from Eretz Israel to the town. They spoke about Palestine in a crowded synagogue. The Communists tried to break up the meeting and Wolf Szlapak called the police. Chaja emphasizes that he didn’t mention that the people disturbing the peace were Communists.

  That must have been the same gathering I read about in the Interior Ministry reports: “On May 2, 1932, at the Municipal Court in Szczuczyn, the trial took place against Abram Strzałka and 12 other Jews, Communist members of the Perec Jewish Library Association in Radziłów, accused of disturbing the public peace in the town synagogue. The court sentenced each of the accused men to pay a fine of thirty zlotys or go to jail for seven days.”

  Wolf Szlapak was murdered on July 7 before his fellow Jews perished in the barn. Halina Zalewska told me about it: “Mieczysław Strzelecki first took Szlapak’s valuables and then shot him in his own bed.”

  When I was in Radziłów with Jan Skrodzki this time, we looked over Szlapak’s old house on the Radziłów marketplace. Made of logs, it stands unaltered to this day, slightly sagging, and not so grand for a wealthy merchant.

  It is occupied by Stanisław Mordasiewicz. This is the man whom Stanisław Ramotowski kept telling me I shouldn’t confuse with the family of the killers Mordasiewicz, because he’s such a decent guy. He must have distinguished himself among the local population before the war, because when Wolf Szlapak’s brother turned up in town after 1945 (he survived because he had been deported to the Soviet Union) he offered Mordasiewicz the purchase of Wolf’s house at a knockdown price.

  Stanisław Mordasiewicz knew Szlapak’s killers had buried him in his own yard. He dug up the remains. He wrapped them in a sheet, laid them on his wagon, and buried them in the Jewish cemetery. He told no one about it, because he wouldn’t have survived in the town.

  13

  The Dreams of Chaja Finkelsztejn

  or, The Survival of a Radziłów Miller’s Family

  The Polish residents of Radziłów and the Germans are rounding up the Jews, forming them into a double column that stretches the entire length of the street from the Beit Midrasz to the church. They beat them with poles and the butts of rifles. The Finkelsztejn family—Chaja; her husband, Izrael; and their children, Menaszka, Szlomko, Szejne, and Chana—quietly leave their house to hide from their persecutors. They slip away as if they were invisible. But they see the Germans and Poles yanking out the beards of Jews, laughing till their sides split. The family steals past walls of houses plastered with caricatures of Jews from Der Stürmer. But the houses end and the fleeing family can no longer take refuge behind walls. They stand by the fence of the churchyard. In desperation they decide to hide there. Chaja unlatches the iron gate and … wakes up.

  This is the first of the prophetic dreams that would accompany Chaja Finkelsztejn until the end of the war, guiding her steps, giving her strength and raising her spirits.

  The Finkelsztejns were among the wealthiest families in town. Chaja’s husband was a miller. They knew the local peasants, who brought them their grain for milling. They took care to maintain neighborly relations; Izrael added flour to the scale, threw in little presents for the peasants’ children.

  Wedding photograph of Chaja and Izrael Finkelsztejn. Radziłów, 1921. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)

  Chana, the fourth and youngest child of Chaja and Izrael Finkelsztejn. Radziłów, 1937 or 1938. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)

  Their mill stood by the road leading out of Radziłów toward Jedwabne. When the Soviets arrived, they requisitioned the mill and shortly after they threw the owners out. “A compassionate Christian,” as Chaja recalled in the memoir she wrote right after the war, rented them a place to live. With heavy hearts they burned their archive of Zionist activity, dating from 1917. The Soviets took repressive action against Chaja and Izrael on two counts: because they were seen as “bourgeois elements” and as Zionists. Izrael was repeatedly brought in for interrogation. Every night they trembled in fear of deportation. Chaja prepared for that eventuality, buying reams of cloth in the knowledge that money might lose its value from one day to the next, but cloth would always be ready currency. They managed to avoid deportation thanks to Chaja’s efficiency in bribing Soviet officials. They got their house back, albeit with a policeman as a lodger. They watched through the windows how the new managers of the mill settled in, among them the tailor Lejzor Zandler, a Communist sympathizer before the war, and the Pole Malinowicz.

  When Chaja proposed that a Jewish refugee from Krynki tutor her children, the man exclaimed, “Am I dreaming? So there are still Jews who feel the need to learn Hebrew and the Talmud?” They studied in secret, with the shutters closed.

  On Yom Kippur 1940 her husband, employed as a manual laborer at what used to be his own mill, moved the hands of the clock forward two hours and in that way made it to evening prayers. The Jews prayed in the Beit Midrasz, because the Soviets had turned the synagogue into a storehouse. In January 1941, on the anniversary of the mill’s nationalization, it held a celebration called “A Year Without Property Owners.” “After that a few old Christian workers of ours came to us,” Chaja wrote. “They told us it had started with long speeches about what happiness the Communists had brought the workers by getting rid of the proprietors, who were drinking their blood. They had cursed us. Lejzor Zandler had spouted all kinds of slander and filth about us. Someone from our own family had joined in. We’d brought him up, taught him his trade, and he chose a new path following false prophets. I pointed out to him once that he should remember his past, that he had been an instructor preparing Jews for departure to Palestine, and that he was wrong about Communism, that Communism wasn’t going to liberate the Jews, that as soon as the wind turned the Russians themselves, our old pogromchiks, would spill Jewish blood. ‘A state of Israel is our only hope,’ I explained to him. And he joked, ‘Maybe you want a blue-and-white flag with a star on it? If you don’t shut up, you’ll end up in the Gulag in Arkhangelsk.’”

  In June 1941 they were warned that a deportation was imminent and that they were on the list. But that very night the Russian-German war broke out.

  Franciszek Rogowski, a wealthy peasant from Trzaski, four kilometers from Radziłów, came to see them immediately. “He belonged
to the gentry, his brother a doctor, another a priest, the three others were still students. He managed the farm with his father and one of his brothers. He wanted to show his sympathy. We asked him to hide our belongings. First he was scared, then he agreed. He suggested he could take our cow, too. If the need arose, we could hide with him. But he’d only hide our family, and he’d only do it in such a way that none of the neighbors saw us arrive.”

  They transported to Trzaski the baskets and suitcases they’d already packed, which took up an entire shed at the farm. But when they went to the Rogowskis after the German invasion to sit out the first days of the German occupation, they were not welcome: “We read from their faces that they were more interested in our belongings. Their eldest son, with feigned kindness, invited us to sit down and told his mother to give us bread and milk. That woman, who once had been as friendly to us as the rest of the family, had changed her attitude. She hardly said anything. She frostily invited us to the table. We were not overwhelmed by the honor. I told the children to eat something. But they felt the chill, too. Our little boy fell asleep, exhausted, and when he woke up he started to cry for us to leave because they were going to kill us. He saw in them a readiness to kill in order to have our things.”

  The next day Chaja decided to go home, because she was worried about the ducks and geese left on the farm. She put on her shoes, tied a scarf around her head, and, pretending to be a village woman, set off for the town. She stood amid the crowd of onlookers when the inhabitants of Radziłów enthusiastically greeted the invading Germans. “I remembered how they’d entered Radziłów in 1915,” she later wrote. “The same pride, the same heads held high. But how did they look in 1918 as prisoners of war? They were beaten by peasants armed with poles. I prayed for the day when they would be on the run again. I was sure it would come, but would we live to see it?”