The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

    7. After the Soviets left in June 1941 and peasants from the surrounding villages met in Jasionówka to loot Jewish homes, the same Father Łozowski “shouted and lectured at people and didn’t allow them to do it” and also “threatened them with Hell if they went on doing such an injustice,” as described after the war by the survivor Pesia Szuster-Rozenblum. He was probably a supporter of the economic boycott, which was supposed to force Jews out of Poland, but didn’t support violence and looting. However, he wasn’t able to prevent the pogrom.

    8. The Jedwabne parish chronicle notes in 1937: “From the time when regent Romuald Rogowski, in collaboration with Mayor Walenty Grądzki, hired firemen for twenty zlotys to ring the bell all day for the funeral of Marshal Piłsudski against the parish priest’s will, which was condemned by the whole parish population, the church authorities have issued an interdiction against the Jedwabne fire brigade, banning it from participating in church celebrations.” In the parish chronicle of nearby Łapy we read: “The year 1938 is a period of the greatest development ever of the Catholic spirit in Łapy. It is a period of full bloom for Catholic Action. True, the godless Union of Rail Workers, with its close ties to the Polish Socialist Party, going hand in hand with Jews, is still active, but the range of their activity is shrinking more and more.”

    9. Parties and associations that had branches or affiliates in the towns and villages of the Łomża area included Zionist parties of various stripes: General Zionists, Poale Zion-Right, the religious Mizrachi, the Revisionist Zionists, the socialist Bund; educational, cultural, and sports associations: the Zionist Tarbut, the Association of Evening Classes, the Education Association, the Jewish Association for Athletics and Sports Makabi, the Bundist League of Cultures; youth organizations: the leftist Zionist scouting organization Ha-Szomer ha-Cair, He-Chaluc, which prepared young people for life in Palestine, and Brit Trumpeldor, a revisionist Zionist youth organization; mutual-aid organizations: Jewish Guilds of Butchers, the Central Union of Jewish Artisans, Gemilut Chesed, a savings and loan bank, the Jewish Shareholders Bank, the Jewish Cooperative Bank of Real Estate Owners, Keren Kajemet, or the Jewish National Fund, which collected funds for the purchase of land in Palestine, the League of Aid for Workers in Palestine, and others.

  10. An Interior Ministry official has preserved for us an image of these conflicts. On the occasion of a visit to Białystok on July 2, 1933, by Włodzimierz Jabotyński, an advocate of the armed struggle for a Jewish state in Palestine, two thousand supporters of the Revisionist Zionist Party gathered, and when they set off to the synagogue carrying banners, a group of Bundists and the right-wing Poale Zion-Right members threw rotten eggs at them. Jabotyński also came to lecture in Łomża, where Jews from Jedwabne and Radziłów probably had a chance to hear him. He was very popular in the area. Szmul Wasersztejn describes in his diary that when he got to the police station in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, the Germans interrogated him about whether he or his father belonged to Jabotyński’s organization and whether it had helped him hide during the pogrom.

  11. In Radziłów, 1932 saw the peak of Polish Communist Party activity. Here are its activities: In March, a banner was hung out—Down with the bloody Fascist dictatorship, long live the Polish Republic of councils, long live the Polish Communist Party. In April, Chona Zeligson and Zajdel Rozenbaum were picked up while distributing Communist appeals. During a church fair in July, Chona Moruszewski and Zajdel Rozenbaum let loose in a crowd two pigeons painted red, with antistate slogans on ribbons. In September, Abram Moszek Bursztyn delivered sixty-six Communist appeals to a confidant for distribution, and a hundred appeals to “Comrade peasants” were scattered in a pasture. It is hard to know how many Communist Party members there were in Radziłów itself; the existing data relate to the whole district committee, which covered various areas, sometimes including Grajewo, sometimes Szczuczyn as well, and mention is made of dozens of people. After: Józef Kowalczyk, The Polish Communist Party in the Łomża District, 1919–1938, Warsaw: PWN, 1978.

  2. I Wanted to Save Her Life—Love Came Later: or, The Story of Rachela Finkelsztejn and Stanisław Ramotowski

    1. NSZ: Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, or National Armed Forces, a Polish underground armed formation at odds with the Polish Home Army over what the National Armed Forces considered the excessively conciliatory stance of the Home Army toward the Soviet Union and Red Army; the National Armed Forces, which were blatantly anti-Semitic, took the view that the Nazis were a lesser threat than the Soviets, and they continued anti-Soviet partisan operations after the war ended.

  3. We Suffered Under the Soviets, the Germans, and People’s Poland: or, The Story of the Three Brothers Laudański

    1. Osadnik (Polish; settler, colonist) was the word used in the Soviet Union for a veteran of the Polish Army given land in the Kresy, or Borderland territories (current western Belarus and western Ukraine), ceded to Poland by the Polish-Soviet Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 (and occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939).

    2. “An especially large number of Russians came to Jedwabne. It was the headquarters of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia, the Regional Executive Committee of Delegates of the Working People, the Regional Department of the NKVD, and others. All the highest positions were occupied by new arrivals (per Michał Gnatowski, “Dokumenty radzieckie o postawach ludności i polskim podziemiu niepodległościowym w rejonie jedwabieńskim w latach 1939–1941” [Soviet documents on popular attitudes and the underground Polish independence movement in the Jedwabne region in 1939–1941], in Wokół Jedwabnego [About Jedwabne], vol. 2, eds. Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, 2002).

    3. Mark Timofiejewicz Rydaczenko, secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party of Belorussia in Jedwabne, writing on June 19, 1940, to his counterpart in Białystok, described “the attempts of hostile elements to penetrate trade and cooperative institutions to raise prices and sell products to speculators, arousing the discontent of the working masses.” Many Jews were jailed or deported on such charges. The fact itself that Jews were employed in shops they used to own made them suspect individuals. From Informacje o sytuacji polityczno-ekonomicznej w rejonie jedwabieńskim (Information on the political-economic situation in the Jedwabne region), September 16, 1940: “Labor collectives, points of sale, regional cooperatives of grocers and groceries are inundated with former tradesmen and speculators—for example the salesman Hersz Dembowicz used to be a speculative tradesman, the saleswoman Dwojra Kon used to own a glove shop, Chilewska Chana used to be a speculator…” (in Michał Gnatowski, Niepokorna Białostocczyzna. Opór społeczny i polskie podziemie niepodległościowe w regionie białostockim w latach 1939–1941 w radzieckich źródłach [Insubordinate Białystok: Popular resistance and the underground Polish independence movement in the Białystok region, 1939–1941, in Soviet sources], Białystok: Białystok University, 2001).

  6. If I’d Been in Jedwabne Then: or, The Story of Meir Ronen, Exiled to Kazakhstan

    1. The British government ran internment camps on Cyprus from August 1946 to January 1949 for Jews attempting to immigrate to Mandatory Palestine in violation of British policy.

  8. Your Only Chance Was to Pass for a Goy: or, The Survival of Awigdor Kochaw

    1. From Complete Poetic Works of Hayyim Nahman Bialik. Israel Efros, ed. New York, 1948.

  12. They Had Vodka, Guns, and Hatred: or, July 7, 1941, in Radziłów

    1. Members of the gangs that went by Jewish homes from June 23 to July 7, beating and robbing, were: the brothers Jan and Henryk Dziekoński; the brothers Aleksander, Feliks, and Stanisław Godlewski; the brothers Leon and Antoni Kosmaczewski; Ludwik Kosmaczewski, Paulin’s son (so called to distinguish him from another Ludwik Kosmaczewski); Jan Kowalewski; Stanisław Leszczewski; Zygmunt Mazurek; Bronisław and Leszek Michałowski; the brothers Jan, Antoni, and Feliks Mordasiewicz; Aleksander Nitkiewicz; Józef
Paszkowski; Wincenty Piotrowski; Aleksander Polkowski; the brothers Andrzej, Ignacy, and Józef Ramotowski; Zygmunt Skrodzki; Mieczysław Strzelecki and his sister Eugenia; and Józef Sulewski, a.k.a. Nieczykowski.

    2. The parish record book has an entry saying that Jan Ekstowicz, thirty-five years of age, a farmer from Radziłów, came at 8:00 a.m. on July 30, 1941, and two ten-year-olds were baptized: Jan Gryngras, son of Szmul and Rejza Bursztyn, and Stanisław Wierzba, son of Szymek and Ryfka (Herszek’s daughter).

  Acknowledgments

  I thank the heroes of my book, who agreed to return to their darkest memories.

  I thank all those who helped me, by taking me in as I wandered in search of witnesses and documents, by reading my manuscript, and simply by offering support at the difficult time in my life when I was working on this book.

  Special thanks are due to Joanna Szczęsna, who edited the book at each successive stage of its composition.

  I would also like to mention my friends in America. I didn’t take it very well when well-meaning acquaintances (and less well-meaning strangers) discouraged me from writing a book on the crime in Jedwabne, and that is why the first version was written in cafés in Manhattan, and—thanks to the benevolence of Lawrence Weschler—in a guest room at the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and in the office of Professor Marta Petrusewicz at CUNY. During that time I was hosted by Ann Snitow and Daniel Goode, Joanna and Lawrence Weschler, Anna Husarska, Sławomir Grunberg, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, and Ewa Zadrzyńska.

  I will cherish in grateful memory the creator of the website www.radzilow.com, Jose Gutstein of Miami, who agreed to the publication of prewar photographs of the people of Radziłów, and also the late Rabbi Jacob Baker of Brooklyn, who gave his consent for the publication of photographs and maps of prewar Jedwabne.

  I lack words to thank my American translator, Alissa Valles, for her brilliant work. I also express my gratitude and admiration for my editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Ileene Smith. I’m deeply honored by the amount of time, heart, and skill Alissa and Ileene invested in my book. Working with FSG, in every department I dealt with, was a happy adventure all the way. I remain in grateful debt to all of these people.

  Index

  The index that appears in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.

  About Jedwabne (Machcewicz and Persak, eds.)

  Adamczykowa, Henryka

  Adenauer, Konrad

  Agricultural Chaplaincy

  Agudat Israel

  Alenberg, Chawa

  All Saints Church, Warsaw

  America, Jews’ emigration to; Chicago, Ill.; New York, N.Y.

  American Polish Congress

  Anaf, Monio (Mosze)

  Antyk

  Arnold, Agnieszka

  Association of Young Catholic Men and Women

  Atlas, Morris (Mosze Atłasowicz)

  Atłasowicz, Aunt (aunt of Jack Kubran)

  Atłasowicz, Judes

  Atłasowicz, Małka

  Atłasowicz, Szolem

  Auschwitz

  Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

  Axer, Erwin

  Axer, Otto

  Axer, Paul

  Baczyński, Krzysztof Kamil

  Bagińska, Elżbieta

  Bagińska, Sylvia

  Bagiński, Czesio

  Bagiński, Henryk

  Baker, Herschel

  Baker, Jacob (Jakub Piekarz); Dziedzic and; Jedwabne Book of Memory, see Jedwabne Book of Memory

  Baker, Julius; Jedwabne Book of Memory, see Jedwabne Book of Memory

  Bardoń, Karol; testimony of

  Bargłowski, Aleksandr

  Bartnik, Czesław

  Batista, Fulgencio

  Begin, Menachem

  Belbud, Chana

  Belorussia

  Ben-Gurion, David

  Ber, Wolf

  Bernard, Jehoszua

  Bialik, Chaim Nachman

  Białobrzeski, Mrs.

  Białostocki, Awigdor

  Białoszewski, Mojsze

  Białystok; Institute of National Remembrance in; Interior Ministry in

  Bibiński, Stach

  Bible

  Biedrzycka, Janina

  Biedrzycki, Henryk

  Bielecki, Władysław

  Bikont, Maniucha

  Bikont, Ola

  Bikont, Piotr

  Binsztejn, Basia

  Binsztejn, Szajn

  Birkner, Wolfgang

  blackmail

  Black Years in the Łomża Lands (Smurzyński)

  Błaszczak, Leokadia

  Błoński, Jan

  Blumert, Auhhter

  Blumert, Jankiel

  Boczkowski, Stefan

  Bond, see Więz

  books of memory; see also Jedwabne Book of Memory

  Borawski, Edward

  Borensztajn, Icek

  Borowski, Mieczysław

  Borowski, Wacław

  Bosakowski, Ryszard

  Brandys, Marian

  Bricha

  Bronowiczowa, Danuta

  Bronowiczowa, Jadwiga

  Browning, Christopher

  Bubel, Leszek

  Bukowski, Józef

  Bundists

  Burgrafowa, Józefa

  Bursztyn, Abram Moszek

  Bursztyn, Igal

  Bursztyn, Rejza

  Bursztyn, Ruta

  Bursztyn, Szmul

  Buzek, Jerzy

  C., Czesław

  Cała, Alina

  Camp for a Greater Poland (CGP)

  Camp for a Greater Poland Youth

  Castro, Fidel

  Catherine the Great

  Catholic Action

  Catholic Cause, The, see Sprawa Katolicka

  Catholic Church, Catholics

  Catholic House

  Catholic Information Agency

  Catholic News Agency Bulletin

  Catholic University

  census

  CENTOS

  Chicago, Ill., Polish community in

  Chojnowska, Łucja

  Choromański, Józef

  Chower, Józef

  Christians; see also Catholic Church, Catholics

  Chrostowski, Jan

  Chrostowski, Waldemar

  Chrzanowska, Helena; death of brother Icek

  Chrzanowska, Irena

  Chrzanowski, Józef

  Chrzanowski, Wiesław

  Chrząstowska, Maria

  Church of St. Brigid

  CIA

  Ciszewski, Bolesław

  Committee in Defense of the Workers (KOR)

  Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne

  Committee to Defend the Honor and Dignity of the Polish Nation

  Common Cause

  Communism, Communists; Komsomol; Operation Peter Pan and

  concentration camps; Auschwitz; Treblinka

  Contacts, see Tygodnik Kontakty

  Costa Rica

  Council of Christians and Jews

  Cuba

  Culture

  Cynowicz, Hersz

  Cynowicz, Josle

  Cyprus

  Cyra, Adam

  Cytrynowicz, Jakub

  Cytrynowicz, Jan

  Cytrynowicz, Józef (Jósek)

  Cytrynowicz, Pelagia

  Cytrynowicz, Sara

  Czajkowski, Michał

  Czapnicki, Awigdor

  Czapnicki, Chaim

  Czarzasta, Halina

  Czerwińska, Kasia

  Czerwiński, Lejbko

  Czerwoniak

  Dąbrowska, Jadwiga

  Dąbrowski, Władysław

  Danowski, Stanisław

  Darkness at Noon (Koestler)

  Datner, Szymon; A Forest of Righteous Men; “The Holocaust in Radziłow”

  Datner-Śpiewak
, Helena

  deportations; first wave of; last wave of; second and third waves of

  Depression, Great

  Destruction of the Jewish Population in the Białystok Region, The

  Diary of the Occupation (Klukowski)

  Disneyland

  Długosiodła

  Dmitrów, Edmund

  Dmoch, Leokadia

  Dmowski, Roman

  Dobkowski, Bolesław

  Dobkowski, Tadeusz

  Dobkowski, Wincenty

  Dobkowski, Witek

  Dobkowski family

  Dobroński, Adam

  Dołęgowski, Aleksander

  Domitrz, Apolinary

  Domiziak, Aleksander

  Dorogoj, Akiwa (Icek)

  Dorogoj, Bencyjon

  Dorogoj, Dora (Szyma)

  Dorogoj, Fruma

  Dorogoj, Mosze (Mordechaj)

  Dorogoj, Szejna

  Drejarski, Fajba

  Drozdowo

  Drozdowski, Aleksander

  Drozdowski, Dominik

  Drozdowski, Olek

  Dubin, Wiśka

  Dudziński, Władysław

  Dusze

  Dworzysko

  Dymnicki, Izrael Meir

  Dziedzic, Ewa

  Dziedzic, Leon

  Dziedzic, Leszek; Baker and

  Dziedzic, Piotrek

  Dziedzic, Tomek

  Dziedzic family

  Dziekoński, Henryk

  Dziekoński, Jan

  Dziennik Bałtycki (Baltic Daily)

  Edelman, Aleksander

  Edelman, Ania

  Edelman, Marek

  Ekstowicz, Franciszek

  Ekstowicz, Jan

  Ekstowicz, Józef, see Klimaszewski, Józef

  Ełk

  Ellis Island

  Episcopal Convention

  Eucharist

  Farberowicz, Raszka

  Farbowicz, Motłe

  Finkelsztejn, Chaja