The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  The villagers rushed to see who had been killed. Then they reported who they’d recognized, who had been burned, who had suffocated, and who had only singed hair. They said that small children were untouched by the fire, because their mothers had shielded them with their own bodies. You could find out about almost every Jew killed in town. How he had behaved in the face of death, whether he’d begged for mercy or only prayed. They said the butcher’s wife had been killed, even though she tried to convince the killers that she understood that the Jewish God had forsaken them and that she would run to the church to ask the priest to baptize her. A bricklayer who’d worked for the Finkelsztejns before the war and who after completing the work had raised a toast to the Jews who gave Poles work, told them that he had witnessed the death of Chaja’s brother. He explained, “One word from me and he would have been spared, but I thought: His whole family was killed, why would he want to live?”

  Peasants from Trzaski went to the priest in Radziłów and told him the Finkelsztejn family wanted to become Catholics. “The priest told us to send our children to religious instruction with the Polish children. After the first class they came home. They’d recognized Jewish clothes on their classmates. When the priest praised their progress, even people who’d been our enemies before began to visit us in the village. The conversations were always about the same thing: who looted how much and how rich the Jews were. They said Szlapak had a whole room full of all kinds of goods, that they took a box of silver cutlery from there for the priest along with other things his housekeeper could use. The killers boasted of their heroism, describing how the Jews screamed, how they’d tormented the girls, they imitated the grimaces of the victims,” Chaja wrote, summarizing the tales she was subjected to in the village.

  Chaja recognized her own belongings, too, but she never let on. One peasant woman from Trzaski complained to her that the Radziłówians wouldn’t give the peasants Jewish clothes because they hadn’t been there during the killing, trying to draw her into an argument about who should receive the victims’ property. The woman said, “I see it differently. We didn’t kill, so we should get what belonged to the Jews. We deserve it more.”

  They lived in Konopki and worked in the fields. “Our hosts talked to us all the time about how wonderful it was that we were converting to Catholicism. Because of it we could go to heaven, unlike the other Jews who would turn to dust. And we would see the light that Jews couldn’t see. They told us about a Jew named Dawid who constantly asked the time, though he was looking at the sun. ‘Because the Jews crucified Christ and that’s why darkness fell on them and why they saw darkness at midday.’ We felt we were choking on those words.”

  It shows in the Radziłów parish records that a baptism took place on the morning of July 21. The Finkelsztejns came to town with a large entourage. Chaja received the name Anna; Izrael—Bolesław. Menachem became Józek; Szejna—Marysia; Szlomo—Janek; and Chana—Jadzia. The same morning the fifty-year-old Bolesław was married to the forty-seven-year-old Anna in accordance with Catholic rites.

  An anti-Semitic booklet distributed to villages fell into their hands. In it they read the story of a monk who heard a child weeping in church every Friday. One day he hid behind the pulpit and saw the priest with the host in one hand and a needle in the other. He was pricking the host, blood was spouting from the host, and a child’s sobbing was heard. The priest was arrested and turned out to be of Jewish origin. “We understood that the point of that booklet being distributed in the village was to prevent those fanatically pious and primitive villagers from helping us,” wrote Chaja. “But they went on taking care of us. They probably thought we had great riches.”

  They lived in Konopki until the autumn of 1942. Chaja doesn’t mention it, but until that point they must have been officially hired from the Germans by their host (the Germans “rented out” Jews for unpaid farm labor to the Poles), and they actually met the payments themselves. In November 1942, when the ghetto was liquidated, the village head informed them they should pack their things, because they were to be delivered to the military police station. They persuaded him to let them go into hiding. Later they heard stories about the peasants being told to bring their wagons to transport the Jews to the Bogusze estate—the last stop for the Jews of Radziłów before Treblinka.

  One peasant woman told them she couldn’t watch what people were doing to the Jews, how women took bundles and warm clothes away from the Jewish women and even ripped their dresses. She confessed that she herself had taken a Torah and other holy books from the rabbi’s house after the burning of the Jews, because she’d heard there were dollars hidden in them, but she hadn’t found anything.

  The Finkelsztejns hid in the village of Dusze, where they were found by Radziłów thugs, herded onto a wagon, and taken to the police. They managed to leave the eight-year-old Chana with the family that had sheltered them. Money was effective in dealing with the Germans, and the priest’s intervention took care of the thugs. When the Finkelsztejns got back, their things had already been divided up and their little daughter had been handed over to a murderer with whom the host family had had a quarrel about the fact that they were keeping Jews. They found their daughter, but their things were gone. From then on they were on the run, moving between neighboring villages: Trzaski, Konopki, Dusze, and Kubra.

  They changed hiding places frequently, never telling anyone whose house they had come from or whose they were going to, so that the people who hid them didn’t know about one another. They were afraid because they thought they were the only surviving witnesses to the massacre. Many of the farmers distilled vodka, and when the villages celebrated, the family trembled in fear of some drunk betraying them. And it did happen that the tipsy village head quarreled with their host about having kept them too long. The village head said the war was going to be over soon and because of the Jews the farmer would get excessively rich. He yelled that the Finkelsztejns had to go, otherwise he’d give them up to the Germans. When he’d sobered up he came by to apologize.

  There were a few Jews in the area—sometimes they’d come to the window and ask for bread. Some Poles threw stones at them, then captured them and handed them over to the police for a kilo of sugar. One of the farmers who hid the Finkelsztejns told them—without comment—that one village head gave a Jew up to the police, who sat him on the hot stove and asked who had hidden him, and later let their dogs loose on him. But the Finkelsztejns themselves were always told that the priest asked after them and reminded people to help the miller’s baptized family.

  Once, they heard one man who hid them asking a farmhand to leave him his hammer: “You took so much from the Jews, you didn’t have anything in your workshop before, and now you, your father, your brother, have all this equipment.” And the man replied, “The priest told us that it’s for our work, our blood that the Jews sucked.” At another house, Chaja listened to a farmer’s mother saying, “It’s right that this came down on the Jews, because they killed Christ. They’ve made ghettos for Jews in America by now, too.” The Finkelsztejns couldn’t react.

  One night Chaja dreamed she was walking down the street in Radziłów and met an acquaintance, Wiśka Dubin, running from the street where everyone was burned, and saying, “Chaja, we have our revenge.” Two days later they read in the newspaper that the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad. By night Chaja dreamed of the Germans’ defeat, by day she dreamed of Palestine.

  People were saying with increasing frequency that the war was almost over, but policemen also came to villages more and more often to do house searches at night. “Many young men hid,” Chaja wrote, “but they only hid when the police came near. Otherwise they were marching around the village, singing drunken songs about the fall of Warsaw.”

  It was increasingly difficult to find a place to hide. “The farmers said they didn’t want to die at the end of the war because of us.” They had to split up because no one wanted to risk hiding such a large family. “We decided to hide our
two youngest daughters in a good place far away from us, because we might not survive together. I taught them the history of the Jews. I talked to them about the Spanish Inquisition, the Marranos, Spinoza, the places where there had been pogroms: Pińsk, Kishinev, Białystok, Przytyk, Radziłów, and the history of Zionism. I kept telling them: ‘When you’re safe, don’t believe what the murderers say, that there are no Jews left on earth. There are sure to be Jews somewhere, and you should find them and ask them to send you to Palestine.’”

  In the spring of 1944 they heard Franciszek Rogowski had died. He was the man with whom they’d kept their things and where they’d gone to retrieve them one by one. “Such a disaster. He was a decent man, but his wife was a real lowlife and their children were under her influence. While he was alive, she couldn’t do anything.” Izrael went there with one of the children when the Finkelsztejns no longer had anything to live on. “They said that there had been a search for our things, that they’d had to bury them, that they were spied on because of us. My husband left with empty hands. Not a minute went by before Rogowski’s eldest son came out to watch where he was going. None of us went back there again.”

  Chaja goes on to remember Franciszek Rogowski’s wife bumping into them later in Dusze, at the Karwowskis’: “She took our hostess aside. Karwowska came back pale. But I told her: ‘Mrs. Karwowski, you knew where we lived, everything we had, the divans, velvet curtains, clothes, the things we had stored up for bad times, we gave all of it to them for safekeeping, and when her husband died, they wouldn’t give it back to us. They would have flung us into the arms of death in order to keep it all.’ I began to cry and she wept with me.” It was a real relief for the Finkelsztejns to stay with the Karwowskis at Christmas 1943. They could stay as long as the farmhand had off. “The head of the household received us warmly, like an old friend. He gave us a place to sleep in the granary. In the morning he brought us hot milk. With tears in his eyes, he assured us the war was almost over. He talked about the horrible things done in the surrounding villages by people he never would have thought capable of such things. There was another wealthy man in Dusze, his wife and Mrs. Karwowski spent time with us, comforting us. That week gave us strength to keep going.”

  They changed their hiding place more than fifty times. They lived in filth, in stifling spaces, in fear. From time to time at night Chaja would sneak into a cottage to boil their clothes in a pot. The children told one another riddles in Hebrew and dreamed of a deck of cards. Chaja’s son Menachem found cards they used to make a deck. They played Sixty-six, Clobyosh, Thousand. “That village had a group of partisans,” Chaja wrote, “they got underground newspapers but not one of them could read, so the village Home Army commander who knew where we were hiding came to us, stood by the trough, and Menachem read the news to him.”

  One day Chaja dreamed that she was wandering in the fields looking for a hiding place. She spotted someone on a bicycle. She recognized Marian Kozikowski, the killer who had led her and her family out of the marketplace. He said, “Come to me, I have a good place for you.” She woke up and realized Kozikowski was far from home, doing labor in Germany. No one in the family objected when she proposed they set out for Konopki, to Kozikowski’s wife.

  After much pleading and the promise of payment, Kozikowska agreed to give them a spot in the attic of her barn. But only for two people: Chaja and Menachem. They brought Chana in secretly and managed there for five months. Izrael visited them in despair with their daughter Szejna; they didn’t know what to do with themselves, they had hidden in so many places in the course of a few days, and they hadn’t eaten for several days. But Chaja and the two children had nothing, either. She saw her husband looking like an old man of eighty, wrinkled, with dull eyes. Szejna, then fifteen, consoled everyone, saying they’d find another shelter, they’d live out their lives among Jews in clean beds.

  “Our hostess Marianka made sure we had nothing to protect us from the cold. She wanted it to look as if we’d just arrived and she’d known nothing about it. She told us it wasn’t worth the sweat, that we wouldn’t survive anyway; she heard the peasants talking and knew that as soon as we came out of hiding, they’d kill us. And we went on saying that we’d reward those who helped us. Marianka’s mother-in-law bemoaned the fact that her son had been taken by the Germans. She said: ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again, he has grave sins on his conscience, he killed Jews, but only after the whole village urged him on.’ To console her, I told her that he had saved our family from the flames and that that would be in his favor, and that he would survive. And he did.”

  When the family could find no shelter in the winter of 1944 they went to the Rogowskis’. “They led us to the hiding place. They already had one prepared because they were hiding food from the Germans. It was very cold there. At night there was a blizzard and snow came through the cracks. They brought us hot food. Once we went to their kitchen, the women were spinning, they had compassion for us. It was the first time in three years we were in a room. The son said it was terrible what had been done to the Jews. But the mother said since we’d been there she hadn’t been able to sleep. The village head knew about us and wanted us to leave the village. He told people at meetings they shouldn’t hide Jews, because they could get killed. We stayed with them until they told us to leave.”

  By now, the first Soviet planes could be seen in the sky. They counted the days to the German defeat. Chaja’s next dream gave them new psychic strength: a Zionist meeting, everyone is leaving, and the family wants to leave, too, but the doors are locked. Then Wolf Szlapak comes to tell them to wait quietly until he brings them the keys. They considered it an omen that their family friend Szlapak had come from the other world to help them.

  Meanwhile, the next cataclysm was at hand. The inhabitants of Radziłów and its environs were given the order to evacuate, because the front line was moving in their direction. The Finkelsztejns remained behind in the abandoned village, in a cramped shelter under the threshing floor, which was filling with water. There Chaja suffered bouts of claustrophobia, feeling as if they’d been buried alive. Their host had left them two half-baked loaves of bread and a rusty water pot and told them where the rutabagas were kept. They ate moldy bread, nibbled on frozen rutabagas, and drank water red with rust. Chana cried with hunger; Menachem said he wanted only to live long enough to eat his belly full. All of them asked, “Will we ever sit in a warm room watching rain and snow fall outside?” Chaja told them they would survive and make it to Eretz Israel.

  When Menachem got a hand infection and fainted from fever, she dreamed the war was over and her son was chosen as a delegate to a Zionist congress. Hope returned to her. She saved her son by putting a tourniquet above the elbow and applying cold compresses day and night for several days.

  When the front line moved, the Finkelsztejns made their way to the Karwowskis’ in Konopki, where they’d spent Christmas the year before. “I won’t throw you out,” Karwowska promised. They encountered kindness more rarely than a hunger for profit. “We found a human heart, that was rare. Before that it was as if I had been turned to stone.” When it got too dangerous they moved on, but they left the emaciated Chana at the Karwowskis’.

  In January 1945 they found their next and last shelter with the Klimaszewski family. Zosia, the sixteen-year-old daughter, who showed them much compassion, was ill with typhus. Chaja describes how Zosia’s mother refused to take her to the hospital despite her pleas, because it would have meant giving up her own down blanket. And she was worried that since she hadn’t yet buried any of her children they didn’t have an angel in heaven to wait for her. She greeted her daughter’s death with relief.

  They came out of hiding as soon as the Soviets appeared on January 22, 1945. The Konopki village head warned them to stay in hiding, telling them that the previous day father and son Dorogoj had been murdered. But the Finkelsztejns set off for Knyszyn, and from there to Białystok. “The few Jews who survived were attacked,” Ch
aja wrote. “There was a count of seventy Jews from the area killed on the roads and in villages. In Białystok it was dangerous, too, you couldn’t go out at night. A gang attacked a house near us where Jewish bakers lived. They beat them and told them to stop baking or they would be killed. A Jewish woman was shot in broad daylight in front of the door of the shop she was opening. We were sitting on hot coals.” Once, when someone knocked on their door at night, they barricaded themselves in. In the morning it turned out it had been the militia. They were furious, shouting, “Pity Hitler didn’t finish you off. We’re going to rip you to shreds, we’re not protecting you.”

  The children went to school in Białystok. When Szejna first said her surname, the whole class burst out laughing. The teacher hushed the kids and spoke about equality. Chaja found her children a Hebrew teacher. They left for Łódź, where Menachem became director of a school preparing Jews for life on a kibbutz. The dream of Palestine was about to be fulfilled.

  They left Poland with Greek repatriation papers. They traveled the road covered by many Jews trying to reach the Promised Land after the Holocaust: false papers, an expedition crossing borders illegally, moving between transit camps, their ship arrested when they could already see the lights of Haifa, internment in a camp on Cyprus. By 1947 they were all in Palestine. Szlomo was eager to join the army, though he wasn’t yet sixteen. He said, “Mama, remember how many times we dreamed of fighting the enemy? And now you tell me to wait until they call me up. Do you want someone else to die in my place?”

  Izaak Lewin of Wizna, who survived the war in hiding with his parents in a village halfway between Wizna and Radziłów and met Szlomo in a camp in the Italian town of Selvino, told me about him: “Szlomo was more of a hero than I was. He lived on ideals. I stuck with the other boys from our camp, but he took off to join the Palmach, the elite unit of the underground Jewish army, right away. They did the most fighting and lost the most men.”