The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  How many victims were there? Marcin Urynowicz, attempting to determine this on the basis of various contradictory reports, thought that in 1939 the Jewish community in Jedwabne numbered roughly a thousand people. We don’t know how many Jews lived in Jedwabne in 1941, but no more than that. In the barn, he claims, considerably fewer than a thousand people must have perished—it’s known that some were killed individually, with clubs, axes, and some managed to hide from the killers that day.” (But he doesn’t take into account how many refugees had come to town from Radziłów, Wizna, Stawiski, and other smaller Jewish settlements in the area.)

  Did the Germans plan the massacre in Jedwabne or merely give permission for it? Professor Edmund Dmitrów carried out a meticulous search in German archives. He found no documents that would enable us to ascertain what role the Germans played.

  DECEMBER 1, 2002

  I was planning to reconstruct the course of events in Jedwabne, Radziłów, and Wąsosz, the three places where Poles murdered all their Jewish neighbors.

  At the Institute of National Remembrance in Białystok I read accounts of the atrocity in Wąsosz, where in one night, July 5, 1941, all the Jewish residents were killed with spades, pitchforks, axes. How many Jews perished is hard to say, probably 250. The July nights were short, so that when the bodies of murdered people were carried off on wagons it was already getting light and everybody could watch what was going on from behind their curtains. It happened on Saturday night, so people going to Sunday Mass saw pools of blood in the streets. There was a trial in 1951, but no one was convicted.

  I put off Wąsosz, and now I realize I don’t have the strength to confront another nightmare.

  I start editing my book.

  14

  Decent Polish Kids and Hooligans

  or, On the Murderers of Jedwabne, Radziłów, Wąsosz, and the Surrounding Areas

  1.

  Reading a book on the Polish underground in the Łomża district I found a mention of one Maksym Jonkajtys of Szczuczyn, “head master of a grammar school, selfless patriot, one of the first partisans during both the Soviet and German occupation, shot in 1943.” However, I didn’t immediately realize this must have been the same school head Jonkajtys who, according to the testimony of Basia Kacper from Szczuczyn, led the pogrom in his native town.

  I had read Kacper’s testimony at the Jewish Historical Institute at the very beginning of the road that led me to write this book. I remember being struck even then by the phrase she used: the pogroms were organized by “decent Polish kids and hooligans.” But a long time passed before I became fully aware of the horror of this phrase, and, at the same time, its precision. I had to go through the testimonies of Holocaust survivors a second time to realize that I’d had the knowledge underlying Kacper’s formulation at hand the whole time.

  The local teacher, postmaster, policeman, medic—the testimonies at the Jewish Historical Institute from Stawiski, Jasionówka, and other places in the Łomża area where Jews were killed show that the representatives of these professions, prestigious in the prewar Polish provinces, not only incited people to the atrocities but took part in them themselves. The role of the local political elites in the ominous events of the summer of 1941 is even more obvious.

  (Photograph © Krzysztof Miller / Agencja Gazeta)

  2.

  As a rule the town elites in this part of Poland were made up of prewar National Party members. Many of them were in prison during the Soviet occupation, or went into hiding for fear of being arrested, taking part in the anti-Soviet partisan movement.

  After the Soviets left and the Germans invaded, it was these people who tended to set the tone in the towns, organized civilian guards, and were in theory there to preserve the peace but in practice carried out acts of revenge, in the first place against Communists, both Jewish and Polish, but immediately afterward, against their Jewish neighbors. These makeshift civilian guards and police squads—units that had existed for just a few weeks (until the German authorities had installed themselves—and the Germans employed some of their members in the auxiliary police, or Hilfspolizei)—led the majority of pogroms and massacres.

  In Radziłów people remembered Henryk Dziekoński and Feliks Godlewski committing their atrocities wearing the white-and-red armbands of the civilian guard. After the war Henryk Dziekoński tried to convince the court that the killing of Jews had been prompted by ideas; he stubbornly repeated during the investigation and at the trial that he had called upon the locals to refrain from looting, and simply to burn Jewish property. He didn’t want anything to sully this act of patriotism.

  Only after the political elite of Radziłów had become active did the lowlifes and criminals of the town join in.

  In Jedwabne, National Party members included Bronisław Śleszyński, who gave his barn for the burning of the Jews, and Czesław Laudański, father of the brothers Jerzy and Kazimierz, convicted for their part in the crime.

  In many towns, particularly smaller ones, the auxiliary police formed on the basis of the civilian guards was the only force representing the German occupation. (However, many of those Poles participating in the atrocity, who were at one with the Germans on the Jews, quickly ceased to collaborate with them, and some of them went to the partisans; other Poles remaining in the auxiliary police assisted the partisan underground.)

  Of the eight men accused of taking part in the murder of Jews in Radziłów—and I know from witnesses that all of them in fact played a leading role in it—six were in the resistance during the Soviet occupation and joined the Home Army during the German occupation, and some of the eight were active in the Polish underground after the war. One of the killers, Feliks Godlewski, is described as follows in a book dedicated to local Home Army heroes: “In the underground resistance from 1939. In Kedyw (Special Forces) from 1944. Fought with 3rd squadron 9th mounted rifles in Grzędy. Determined and courageous. Condemned to many years in prison after the war.”

  The only thing is, Godlewski was convicted in the trial on the murder of Jews in Radziłów. But in local memory this sentence is just another item in his heroic biography (in the course of the investigation he was additionally charged with beating individuals collaborating with the Soviet authorities).

  It is also known of other participants in the Radziłów atrocity that they fought with the Home Army. And so we read in Chaja Finkelsztejn’s diary the following remark about Zygmunt Mazurek: “He was among those killing Jews, but he was one of the more intelligent murderers.” The Mazurek family belonged to the local intelligentsia; Zygmunt’s father, Jan, a medic, was a decent man who looked after Jews who’d been beaten up. “The son makes sure his father has enough to keep him busy,” Chaja commented. Zygmunt Mazurek, code name “Kuba,” who worked as a teacher (he became a doctor after the war), was the person in Radziłów with the highest rank in the Home Army. After the war he was the legendary deputy leader of the regional hero “Bruzda” in the most famous underground operation in the region—the taking of the secret police, militia, and Soviet command buildings in Grajewo in May 1945.

  Several of the men accused in the 1949 trial of killing Jews in Jedwabne were later active in the underground. Bolesław Ramotowski, Roman Górski, and Franciszek Łojewski were Home Army soldiers (they left the underground in 1947). After the war, National Armed Forces meetings took place in the house of one of the leaders of the massacre, Józef Sobuta (who had taken part in demolishing Jewish shops before the war).

  However, in Jedwabne, in contrast to Radziłów, murderers taking part in the partisan movement and underground operations was more the exception than the rule. Karol Bardoń played an important role in the town council in Jedwabne: he had come to the area from Silesia in the thirties (he worked as a mechanic, first in Radziłów, in Chaja Finkelsztejn’s mill, then in Jedwabne, in Hirsz Zdrojewicz’s mill). In Soviet times he had a post in the Soviet administration and was head of the Jedwabne municipal supplies department. Maybe he was a German agent and he was
dealt with as a representative of the Germans? In late June, early July of 1941, the town was under the rule of mayor Marian Karolak. And it was he who led the operation to round up Jews. Why did everyone submit to him? Was it because, as the son-in-law of the long-serving prewar mayor Walenty Grądzki, he had the support of the town elite?

  The Wąsosz massacre was headed up by nine men, as was established in the 1951 investigation. All nine murderers were prewar members of the National Party. Marian Rydzewski, the leader, was in the National Party, in the Home Army during the war, and after the war, in one of the armed underground organizations. Townspeople remembered him years later in an article in the local weekly Kontakty: “The worst animal was one guy who later joined the Home Army. People remember that he marked each victim on his rifle with notches.”

  3.

  Bielsk Podlaski, Choroszcz, Czyżew, Goniądz, Grajewo, Jasionówka, Jedwabne, Kleszczele, Knyszyn, Kolno, Kuźnica, Narewka, Piątnica, Radziłów, Rajgród, Sokoły, Stawiski, Suchowola, Szczuczyn, Trzciane, Tykocin, Wasilków, Wąsosz, Wizna: the postwar court documents record acts committed against Jewish neighbors in several dozen towns in the area. In many of them the Germans were the initiators and executors and the Poles joined in, helping them to drive the Jews into market squares, beat them and humiliate them, and sometimes kill them. Elsewhere, Poles were the immediate culprits, and Germans served as instigators and co-organizers. But in Kolno, Rutki, Grajewo, and Szczuczyn it seems that the anti-Jewish incidents were not provoked by the Germans at all, but had the character of grassroots initiatives provoked by the Polish population, according to the Institute of National Remembrance. Why in this region did pogroms and killings reach a level unequaled in other parts of Poland? And how is it possible that people whose hands are stained with the blood of innocent victims quickly appear—as members of the Home Army—in the guise of national heroes? From a certain point onward these questions accompanied me in my writing of this book. I returned to them again and again in the course of my various conversations.

  Professor Adam Dobroński, a historian from Białystok and a specialist in the history of the region, had no intention of replying to such awkward questions. He diverted me as best he could by lecturing me on the region’s history, which was in itself a kind of indirect response.

  “Jedwabne, historically it belonged to the Łomża gubernia. A nursery of Polish national identity and Catholicism; that’s how the area was described in the nineteenth century. It was a realm of petty nobles. If we’re talking about participation in popular uprisings, the Łomża area was in the forefront.” These lands stood out for their systematic supply of nationalist MPs. In 1905, at a time when the territories belonged to the Russian partition, the National Party won all the mandates in the elections for the Russian parliament. “The petty aristocracy absorbed nationalist ideology like a sponge,” Dobroński continues. “It was felt that this was a patriotic Catholic area with an alien element, the Jews. Add to that the shifting of the borders after World War One, which resulted in the Łomża district becoming a periphery, and the economic crisis of the thirties, which deepened the stagnation in life here. These were towns without a future, without any impulse to progress. The local population suffered a cultural degradation, it was characterized by primitivism, and the war exacerbated that state of affairs, at the same time preserving the memory of forebears who had fought to defend faith and fatherland.”

  Listening to his disquisition, I was not yet aware—nor was he, in all probability—that his arguments go to the very heart of the problem that torments me. Even when you have all the information in hand, it’s hard to grasp that a readiness to commit atrocities and a readiness to give one’s life for the fatherland could flow from the same source—but a source that was poisoned somewhere along the way.

  4.

  On my very first visit to Jedwabne I came across the name of Jerzy Tarnacki, a man who participated in the killing of the Jedwabne Jews on July 10. Many of the witnesses I talked to had a vivid memory of him: as a member of the prewar nationalist squads (“He bullied and provoked young Jews, and when there was a wedding in the synagogue he caused as much disruption as he could”); as a common looter (“Even before they started killing Jews, he was already looting Szmul Wasersztejn’s property”); as the man who drove Jews into the market square and who, with Józef Sobuta, made them destroy the Lenin statue (“He beat Jews and made them sing”); and, finally, as a schutzmann, a policeman under the Germans (“He was worse than many of the Germans, and when it was clear the Germans would lose, he went into the forest”).

  He is accused in witness statements from the 1949 trial (“I saw with my own eyes how Jerzy Tarnacki took part in the killing of Jews. He was forcing a Jew into the market square and he had a stick in his hand; what he did to that man I don’t know, I just saw him leading the aforementioned Jew in the direction of the fire”).

  It is evident from the trial documents that he was not arrested and he did not stand trial, because he’d gone into hiding. He was sought by the militia.

  We know that Tarnacki was part of the partisan group in the Kobielno wilds, and was active in the anti-Communist underground after the war.

  The historian Tomasz Strzembosz refers to his correspondence with Tarnacki in articles describing the nefarious role of Jews during the Soviet occupation, and the selflessness of the Polish patriots whose partisan hideout was in the Kobielno wilderness. Of the Kobielno partisans, among them Jerzy Tarnacki, who is mentioned by name, Strzembosz wrote, “Those whom I managed to find, they are the ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ the remainder of a battered generation of Fighting Poland. I bow my head low before these people.”

  At the office of the Białystok branch of the Institute of National Remembrance I studied a microfilm with a security service docket dated 1952, written (with many mistakes) in the hand of Jerzy Tarnacki. In it he promises “to execute all tasks entrusted to him conscientiously, not hiding any actions hostile to People’s Poland,” “not to speak of his collaboration with anyone, even the nearest of kin,” and also “to arrive punctually at the arranged meetings.” He makes it clear that he will only collaborate with those employees who recruited him and under no circumstance ask them to visit his house. He selects the alias “Above Board.”

  The Jerzy Tarnacki who murdered Jews and went to work for the German police as a schutzmann, the Jerzy Tarnacki who joined the partisans in Kobielno and was active in the Home Army and the anti-Soviet underground, and, finally, the Jerzy Tarnacki who collaborated with the Communist secret police—they are all the same man.

  5.

  So, taking part in the murder of Jews didn’t disqualify a person from being accepted into the ranks of the Home Army. Unfortunately there is absolutely no doubt about this—murderers could become soldiers in the Polish underground army, even if they had committed their crimes in broad daylight, in the center of town, in front of many witnesses.

  In this area, every underground organization would have tolerated people in its ranks who were guilty of killing Jews. The difference was that with the National Armed Forces, having saved or helped Jews definitely disqualified you, while the Home Army opened its ranks to both killers of Jews and protectors of Jews. The same Zygmunt Mazurek who belonged to a gang that tormented Jews, proposed that the Home Army accept Stanisław Ramotowski, who he knew had saved a Jewish family, married a Jewish woman, and been in hiding with her.

  6.

  In the autumn of 1943, Józef Przybyszewski, who represented the National Party in the Polish government-in-exile based in London, became the regional delegate of the émigré government in the Białystok district. I decided to check to see if the similarity of surnames with the editor in chief of Camp for a Greater Poland Youth, the periodical of the anti-Semitic extreme right wing of the National Party, was coincidental. Przybyszewski was convicted by a prewar court and charged with being “morally responsible for the Radziłów pogrom” in 1933. I find out that they are one and the same man. />
  In my notes on the prewar period I find quotes from Przybyszewski’s programmatic article “Our Position on the Jewish Question”: “The Greater Poland movement will endure so long as there are Poles in Poland who sell their country into Jewish hands, consider giving Lvov to the Ukrainians or Vilnius to the Lithuanians. Poland must be nationalist, and Jews are a race unsuited to assimilation.” And also notes from Interior Ministry reports: “On December 13, 1932, a meeting took place in Radziłów of members and sympathizers of the National Party numbering about 60 persons. The National Party secretary from Łomża, Józef Przybyszewski, gave a speech arguing that Jews are the most privileged people in Poland, crowding all Polish schools, growing so arrogant that they go so far as to murder Polish fellow students. He called on those gathered to boycott Jewish merchants and to organize themselves under the flag of the National Party, which, as he put it, would soon take power in the country after the fall of the current government.”

  Why did the Polish government in London choose a rabid anti-Semite as their representative in the region? They knew the local population had joined with the Germans in persecuting and killing Jews. Not only did the underground authorities refuse to support this, they warned people loud and clear not to succumb to German propaganda. However, they evidently thought—surely with some grounds—that one could build networks of resistance in this region only on the nationalist movement, with its powerful anti-Semitic coloring. Chaja Finkelsztejn, who heard singing from her hiding place, wrote, “The youth marched through the village singing of the fall of Warsaw. They sang with such pain, those same people who had bathed in the blood of innocents.”

  Jan Gross in his book wrote that the murderers were “just like anybody else, quite ordinary people,” using a phrase from Christopher Browning. In the discussion about the book it was often said that it was the underclass who took part in the killing. A prominent sociologist, Antoni Sułek, wrote, “The most active participants in the atrocity were not ‘ordinary people’ but people from the margins of society, from the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, unsettled, unfettered by bonds of family. Not the kind of people who had their own houses but the kind who hoped to get housing and property from Jews; not farmers thinking of the approaching harvest but idle village ‘youth,’ not fathers but overgrown boys and loners.”