The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  APRIL 30, 2004

  The historian Dariusz Stola, whom I asked to read my book, has given me an array of comments beyond factual ones. He says I react neurotically when someone approaches the matter differently from me, that I, too, often take an accusatory tone, that it’s clear there’s too much bitterness in me. He also draws to my attention how much of what is happening now in Jedwabne is being played out in the theater of the imagination.

  “The people you talk to live in constant fear that someone’s going to burn their house down, kidnap their children, knock them down in a dark alley. But no one has been physically hurt, right?” he asks to make sure.

  Fair enough. Apart from one older lady who was beaten by family members, people annoyed by nocturnal phone calls, isolated incidents of bullying like pushing someone in a shop so they drop their groceries, idle threats—not one of my interlocutors has been hurt. It’s just that here are respected members of the community who had relatives, friends, acquaintances, a position, and who suddenly felt cast out of the circle as they were surrounded by hostility and condemned to ostracism, often by their own families. Is that so trivial? I spend the night reading through my book and deleting sentences written bitterly, neurotically, in an accusatory tone.

  JUNE 15, 2004

  I’ve been poring over the map of prewar Jedwabne based on postwar aerial maps, and two local surveys. I add the information I’ve gathered, giving specific people specific addresses.

  The List of Post-German and Post-Jewish Real Estate Abandoned in the Town of Jedwabne, which I found in the Łomża City Archive, is an inestimable help to me. It is from 1946, but it includes the surnames and addresses of prewar owners of some houses and properties. Luckily the list also contains data on the size of the houses. That makes it easier to reconstruct which family might have lived in which of the little blocks drawn on the map. I have at my disposal a list drawn up by Tzipora Rothchild (who emigrated to Palestine before the war) for the Jedwabne Book of Memory in the seventies. I have information from so-called notification reports of people who perished in the Holocaust, from Yad Vashem. Unfortunately, they contain dozens of ambiguities that derive from the fact that they are filled in and sent to the institute not only by the families of victims but also by their friends and acquaintances, so the same person may figure in several places and then the birth dates, names, or number of children typically do not correspond.

  The greatest help to me is the extraordinarily precise memory of Meir Ronen. When I met him in May 2001 in Jerusalem, he told me—street by street, house by house, neighbor by neighbor—about people alive only in his memory. He gave their names, often their addresses as well, and I took it all down, so that the abstract space of prewar Jedwabne began to fill with details.

  In the work of deciphering the addresses, family connections, and assets of the inhabitants of Jedwabne I am also helped by Chaim Sroszko from Holon near Tel Aviv, with whom I’m in constant phone contact. Years ago, just for himself, Sroszko reconstucted over two hundred names and all the shops in Jedwabne, but sadly he can’t find the papers. It turns out he is the one who dictated the list to Tzipora Rothchild that appeared in the Jedwabne Book of Memory. Now he labors for the third time, for me. Adding his remarks and corrections, I see not everything adds up. Sometimes I have to choose between his memory and Meir Ronen’s. I have the sense there’s no way of avoiding some errors, that some doubts cannot be resolved, that in many cases question marks will remain.

  I also have individual names and addresses of Jedwabne Jews that I jotted down from various documents, such as the case documents on transfers of post-Jewish houses to new owners, “1939 data on fire insurance,” and an excerpt from a directory published in 1929 by the International Advertising Association, in which there may be no addresses but the owners of shops and businesses are given.

  A different problem I struggle with is the spelling of names and surnames. Most of them were translated from Yiddish to Hebrew, from Hebrew to English, and then I translated them into Polish (in Hebrew there were already various versions of some of them). The word “guess” is sometimes more appropriate than “reconstruct.” On Tzipora Rothchild’s list there’s the surname Skocznadel. It seemed so implausible to me that I didn’t know whether to put it in, when a friend of friend made me realize that the name literally means “leap-needle,” and so this was probably a tailor’s family.

  JULY 1, 2004

  I read the prosecutor’s findings. I now have the opportunity to compare what the same witnesses told me and what they told the prosecutor.

  We come to similar conclusions, but here and there mine go further, because I’m not inhibited by the rigors of a legal investigation. Ignatiew’s findings are a shock to me for reasons I didn’t anticipate: they show how universal the tendency to lie is in this case.

  Ignatiew must have disqualified many eyewitnesses as unreliable. I’m not talking about inaccuracies related to some, even essential, details—even a person with an excellent memory can make a mistake—but fabrication, lies.

  My anti-Semitic interlocutors did a lot of shouting about kosher newspapers and Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD, but seldom did they bother to tell clearly fabricated stories. In the testimonies for the prosecution about July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne, they tell bald-faced lies. In these stories, the streets of Jedwabne were seething with Germans.

  According to Halina Czarzasta of Kajetanów there was talk before July 10 of a petition that the Jews made to the police requesting guns so they could settle scores with the Poles. On the day of the massacre she herself set off for Jedwabne, where she saw a group of Jews carrying the bust of Lenin on the road to the cemetery, followed by a dark green military car escorted by German soldiers on foot and a few Polish civilians to the side, one with a stick. She heard many single shots.

  According to Stefan Boczkowski from near Jedwabne (who told the same story in many interviews), when the Jews were herded to the barn two or three military trucks filled with uniformed Germans pulled up. They unloaded metal containers from the trucks and set the barn on fire.

  According to Teodor Lusiński of Jedwabne (who also put on a good show for the press) a jeep drove into town at 4:00 a.m. along with eight trucks covered with tarpaulins, each carrying uniformed Germans with guns. At 4:00 p.m. this witness heard orders given in German through a megaphone that the Jews were to stand in rows of four. He saw men carrying the Lenin bust enter the cemetery, where at a German command the Jews lay down side by side, lifted their top garments to bare their chests, and proceeded to kill one another using bayonets that were handed to them. At night he heard a sequence of shots. Later he learned that the surviving Jews had tried to pray at the burnt barn and the German guard fired at them.

  According to Jadwiga Kordas from near Jedwabne, two trucks drove slowly across the marketplace at about noon with armed policemen from a special unit—a “death squad.” The Germans shot at Jews fleeing the market and later from the burning barn. The next day when the witness returned to Jedwabne, it was already being said that only Jews who had collaborated with the Soviets and their families had been killed. The Jewish doctor who treated the witness declared that the burned Jewish Communists deserved what they got because under the Soviet occupation they’d used the Jewish temple as a toilet.

  Tadeusz Święszkowski from Grądy Małe saw two military trucks with tarps coming. He wasn’t at the barn. In the afternoon he went to Kajetanów to visit his uncle, so he only saw the smoke from a distance. Later he heard that three hundred Jews had been rounded up in the marketplace of whom half escaped, thanks to the help of Poles among others.

  Tadeusz Święszkowski is my Tadeusz Ś., the retired Warsaw doctor whom Adam Michnik and I met in August 2000 and who refused to have his name printed. In the version he gave us, he saw two Gestapo officers on motorcycles coming into town. He himself followed behind the Jews and saw three Germans driving about a thousand Jews into the barn.

  Ignatiew summarizes the reliability
of witnesses in a few sentences. He counts among the unreliable witnesses those referred to by Strzembosz, including Tadeusz Święszkowski.

  I read a list of objects retrieved from the ashes during the exhumation: keys, hundreds of kopeck coins used under the Soviet occupation, silver coins and gold coins, one with Piłsudski’s profile, dental bridges and crowns, seventeen gold wedding bands, three seals, earrings, medallions, brooches, plastic and metal buttons, rings, a bracelet, necklaces, watches, a gold-colored pendant in the shape of an open book with Hebrew writing, a tallit pin, bent spoons (used to weed grass in the marketplace), metal shoe caps and rubber soles, cape hooks, a zipper tab, a safety pin, trouser buckles and suspender clasps, snaps, eyeglasses, a metal box with shoemaker’s nails, a sewing machine drum, a thimble.

  JULY 10, 2004

  I lay a rock on the monument to the murdered. A bus came from the Jewish community in Warsaw and kaddish was said. I don’t think anyone from Jedwabne came.

  15

  Strictly Speaking, Poles Did It

  or, A Conversation with Prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew

  You wrote in your ruling, summing up the results of the investigation into the crime of July 10, 1941: “At dawn inhabitants of the surrounding villages began to arrive in Jedwabne with the intention of carrying out the plan made earlier to kill the Jewish inhabitants…” That first sentence is really enough, you could leave it there. I don’t think I’d dare to formulate it so categorically. What is it that makes you so sure?

  At the time of the exhumation many valuable objects were found in the graves: watches, jewelry, gold rubles. It would have been no problem to take them from the Jews standing in the market square and leave town. In Jedwabne the looting didn’t start until the barn was set on fire. That’s why I assume people came to town to kill.

  You say, “The perpetrators of the crime, strictly speaking, were the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and its surroundings—a group of at least forty men … They actively participated in committing the crime, armed with sticks, crow bars, and other tools.” Let us try to trace how you came to the description you gave of the atrocity in your final findings. You read Gross’s book …

  It was the very beginning of our tenure at the prosecutor’s office of the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance. I was the prosecutor, clerk, storekeeper, chauffeur, and even the cleaner; I went around dusting after hours so that the two rooms we’d been assigned would look decent. It was my first case at the Institute of National Remembrance. Gross’s book did not make for easy reading, it aroused opposition, denial. I was raised in a patriotic tradition. I’d heard of the wartime blackmailers of Jews, szmalcowniks, but I felt an inner resistance to believing that Poles had murdered Jews. Yet it didn’t take me long to realize that a prosecutor is above all an investigative officer who should rely on the established evidence, setting aside his own convictions.

  Anna Bikont and the prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew of the Institute of National Remembrance. In front of Stanisław Ramotowski’s house in Dziewięcin, near Radziłów, 2001. (Photograph © Krzysztof Miller / Agencja Gazeta)

  When did you first realize that the story Gross told had really happened?

  That wasn’t the goal of my investigation. I wasn’t concerned with whether Gross’s book was good or bad, true or false, though I was often asked questions like that.

  All right. Professor Strzembosz read the trial documents from 1949 and saw in them a manipulated Stalinist investigation in the course of which many innocent people were convicted. And you, did you see something different?

  It was immediately clear to me that the proceedings of 1949 were conducted improperly.

  But the conclusions you drew were different from those of Strzembosz.

  They hadn’t even tried to determine the personal details and number of victims, the precise course of events. Witnesses gave the names of many of the perpetrators, but the court wasn’t interested. In that trial, twenty-two locals were accused of having participated in bringing Jews to the marketplace and then leading them in a procession to the barn, on the Germans’ initiative. That was it. Despite the fact that it was obvious from witness statements that some of the perpetrators had participated directly in acts of murder. It was terrifying, what you could learn from the trial evidence—how carefully the crime was organized: one group drove the victims from their homes, others blocked off the roads leading out of town, a third group guarded those gathered in the market square.

  Those were Stalinist times, young Home Army soldiers were being condemned to death, and here were obvious killers being cleared. You can’t tell from the case documents why some were convicted and others were released. Do you think they released the ones who agreed to collaborate with the secret police?

  More people were arrested than were later charged in the trial. In the monitoring and investigative documents of the Łomża secret police, you can find information about a person being charged, and then that person is not mentioned in the accusation either as a defendant or as a witness. In the case of one of the men suspected of participating in the atrocity, we found evidence of his having signed an agreement to collaborate with the secret police.

  Historians and journalists liked to refer to prosecutor Monkiewicz’s findings from the 1970s.

  I don’t want to comment on that investigation. It makes me uncomfortable.

  Please try, it’s very important. Monkiewicz stated that a unit of 232 Germans led by Wolfgang Birkner arrived in Jedwabne on trucks on July 10, 1941.

  There is no indication that the operational group led by Birkner, which was then near Białystok, retreated eighty kilometers. Especially in a situation when the Germans had so many unsecured areas in front of them. It’s a supposition produced out of thin air, without the support of any data. The prosecutor assumed the perpetrators of the crime were Germans. But if it was the Germans, which Germans? Apart from Birkner’s command, there were local policemen there, of course. In the conclusion, he indicated the surnames of policemen from Jedwabne remembered by witnesses. That conclusion about Birkner and the policemen was passed on to the German authorities for criminal prosecution, to help them find the culprits. What Monkiewicz sent to the German investigators returned to Poland like a boomerang: people here could say the Germans did it, because it’s in the German files.

  Monkiewicz himself now speaks about the guidelines he’d received from the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, that he was to prosecute only German criminals. Was the investigation set in motion with the express purpose of erasing traces of Polish participation in the crime?

  What I can say for sure is that the investigation was badly conducted. The 1949 trial fulfilled the basic principle of an honest trial, because no one was convicted who wasn’t guilty, though not all the men accused of participating had charges brought against them.

  The second investigation led by Monkiewicz took almost eight years, from 1967 to 1974. In all that time nothing was done beyond the interrogation of sixteen witnesses. They didn’t re-create the course of events, there are no indications at all that any use was made of the criminal trials of 1949 and 1953.

  At the same time, Monkiewicz conducted a parallel investigation into the crimes committed by the police in Jedwabne. During those proceedings someone gave testimony that on the day that people were burned one of the residents of the village Korytki was very active in herding the Jewish population into the Jedwabne market square. The man accused was summoned and interrogated as a witness. But they only asked him about the circumstances of the killing of members of his family in 1943 by the Germans!

  Reading those documents I thought that as an official in the employ of the Polish state and in view of the memory of those murdered I would do everything within my power to conduct the next investigation properly. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to determine if there were living perpetrators of the crime who had not yet stood trial. That meant criminal proceedings were dismissed. But Institute of National Reme
mbrance prosecution investigations also have the goal of revealing the fullest possible truth about the circumstances of the crimes being studied. I really put enormous effort into finding as much information about the crime committed in Jedwabne as possible. It was important to me to determine the names of the murder victims, so that they wouldn’t remain anonymous. Sadly, I only managed to find some of those names.

  During the time you were conducting the case, there were several false alarms sounded in the press—ammunition shells being found in the barn, so the Germans had done it …

  After the press had been told that shells had been found near the site of the crime, witnesses started testifying that they’d heard shots. Before that I’d only found one such statement.

  In March 2001 you launched the next investigation, into Radziłów. I knew from interviews with witnesses that after the war there had also been trials “for the Jews” there. I gave you the names of the defendants, the only way to find the cases and the place where the trials took place—Ełk. Before that no one suspected there had been trials anywhere but Jedwabne.

  A portion of the documents from the postwar trial survived thanks to the director of the state archive in Ełk, a born archivist. He told me that in the early sixties an order was conveyed to him to lose, which is to say destroy, all archival documents on cases related to the August decree (“on the punishments of Fascist and Nazi criminals … and traitors to the Polish Nation”), leaving only a select few. The man described how he’d gone to the prosecutors he knew, saying to them, “I’ll give you a stamp to confirm you destroyed them, and you put away those documents on some high shelf.” He phoned people outside of Ełk, but they didn’t know him or trust him, and they destroyed the documents. A few years later a new decision gave them permission to preserve those documents. We don’t know what percentage of documents relating to criminal cases was destroyed. Questions of the culpability of certain persons were switched to separate proceedings, but we didn’t find the documents for those cases. Trial procedure dictates that we give the suspects the benefit of the doubt, and so we had to assume that although we were unable to find the documents, the people who were charged at the time had been tried.