“So…you did what the Nazis wanted to get them off your back?”
Kuczynski looked away again for a long time. But making Jews pull down a statue didn’t sound like a war crime.
“The vor, it changed everything,” he said, heavily. “The Jews and us, before the vor ve all got on fine. Other places in Poland, not so good. But in our town, no problems. We called each other by first names; we gave them food, they took water from our vells. We were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. Why not? The town it vos mainly Jewish. Most of the houses, Jews lived there.”
He paused again. It seemed as if he was gathering his strength to continue.
“There vos one family, Jews, who I knew. Ajzensztejn. Boruch and Symma.”
He almost whispered their names. Then he swallowed hard.
“They wery good to me. I vos orphan boy; my father sent away, my mother dead. Boruch and Symma, they looked after me ven I vos hiding from Bolsheviks. They gave me dinner, mended my clothes, almost adopted me. I vent there Friday nights. I can still smell challah bread baked that day, see candle lights, hear songs they sang round table. They taught me Jewish customs, even prayers. Boruch, he vos tailor, and he showed me quality of fabrics, how to look after them.”
He looked down at his knees again.
“There vos one daughter. Blume. She vos 16, so beautiful. I vonted…ve vonted to be, you know, boyfriend and girlfriend, but she could not…her parents…it vos because I was not Jew.”
Now Kuczynski started showing signs of real distress. He wiped his eyes and rocked back and forth. When he resumed, he seemed almost to be talking to himself.
“The same day Germans made Jews destroy statue, that day they did more terrible things. The Gestapo rounded up all Jews, beat them with clubs and pushed them all into barn. There were dozens of Germans, dozens of Gestapo. By the end of day, all of them dead. All Jews of town. Boruch, Symma, Blume…all of them. Gone.”
Tears now streamed down his face.
“And you? Where were you while all this was going on?”
“I didn’t see much…but I heard…ve all heard screaming, terrible screams…”
He was obviously lying.
“And afterwards? What happened then?”
He wouldn’t look at Russell but now kept his head lowered.
“I had such guilty feelings. Blume…maybe I could have done more to save her. They knew…they knew something bad vos going to happen. For days before, Germans had been killing Jews in nearby willages. There were rumors, terrible rumors…I didn’t believe them, I brushed it all aside, but Boruch, he vos vorried.
“One night he said he had big thing to ask me. He give me big box. Inside were all waluables, silver plates and candlesticks and goblets they used for their Jewish ceremonies.”
Russell followed his gaze to the locked cabinet. Of course.
“Vos also smaller box inside. He told me inside was holy book, been in Symma’s family many generations. Wery old, wery precious. He asked me to hide it all in safe place in case something happened to them. I took it all and buried it on my farm.
“After vor, when communists inwaded Poland and started killing Poles and sending so many this time to Russia, I got out and came here as refugee, with box Boruch gave me. I dig it up. I keep it all safe all this time.”
It was all just too pat, thought Russell. So much had been left out. Questions swirled inside his head.
“Joszef is actually a hero.”
Veronica had moved forward silently and was now perched on another armchair. Her eyes never left Russell’s face.
“He rescued all those precious things from the Germans, even though he was running for his life from the Gestapo and the communists. What he’s only been through. And now the government has the nerve to try and prosecute a sick old man, drag his reputation through the mud.”
Now Kuczynski looked at Russell again. His expression was blank, inscrutable.
“I not vor criminal. I wictim of Germans, Bolsheviks, now blessed British too. I carry scars, here.”
He pointed to his head.
It was true, thought Russell, that he had not sold any of the valuables he had brought from Poland to make money out of the tragedy he had witnessed. If, though, any of that tale was true. This whole fantastic story about his friendship with the tragic Jewish family—who had conveniently all perished—burying their valuables on his farm, his feelings for the daughter Blume…all of this might well be a pack of lies too. How could be believe it? Kuczynski had thoroughly deceived him, after all. He wasn’t going to fall into that trap again.
“What were you doing in the synagogue? Why did you pretend to me you were a Jew?”
Now the old man’s expression changed again: it was the look on his face Russell had seen in the early days as he worked on Eliachim’s manuscript. It was a look of cunning, greed—and a great coldness. He gripped the arms of his chair and leaned forward intently. His eyes seemed to bore into Russell’s skull.
“The Jews, they hold all secrets of vorld.”
His voice was now little more than a hoarse whisper. Russell had to crane forward in his own chair to hear.
“I ask myself, what they have I don’t have? These Jews—they not normal people. They run vorld. They run America, all banks and finance houses, Goldman Sachs, TV, politicians, journalists, doctors, lawyers. Top judges, all Jews! Movie directors! All Jews! Wherever you look, Jews in background pulling strings. Even blessed Royal Family, they also have Jews.”
Really? But he was in full flow.
“So is vorld full of Jews? Are there many millions, billions of Jews in vorld? No! Wery, wery few Jews in vorld. But still they control it! Even when no Jews around at all in country, they still control it. This is most amazing thing. Jews, they should have been viped out long, long ago. Everywhere in history they been attacked, killed, driven out of homes, country after country after country.
“In Poland before vor vere many, many Jews, three million. In my town were mostly Jews. By end of vor, all gone, almost every one. Wiped out. In Europe two out of three Jews killed. Any other people, they would have vanished from face of blessed earth. But still Jews run vorld. Still more powerful than anyone else. Still tvist America round little finger. Is not amazing fact? So from vere they get this power?
“In Poland I know them, I look at them, ask what they do so different from me. I learn their language, their songs, their holy ceremonies. But I vos not one of them. I could not be one of them. They were different, separate, special. I felt deep inside me they were special. Vy should they be more special than me? They vere not better people than me, is good and bad in all of us.
“I go to priest in town and ask him why Jews are so special. He say to me, Jews killed our savior, they killed God. That’s why they special, they belong to devil. But I not believe this. I good Catholic, I go to mass, but this make no sense. Because I see whatever done to them they still love God. I see they have special line to God. They don’t have priest who talk to God, they do talking themselves. And such talk. As if they know him. As if he family.
“I see when Germans attack them, humiliate them, treat them worse than dogs, even when do things to them so terrible I cannot speak about, they still pray to God. After they are killed, their families still pray to God. When they put body in ground, they don’t scream and shout for vengeance. They don’t curse God. They praise him.
“And I see how God protect them. Sure many, many Jews killed. But I watch, afterwards, as Jews don’t disappear but get even stronger, how whole vorld looks to them. Look at science, look at medical inwentions, look at hi-tech. All Jews! So why he protect them like this? Why he listen to them? Why he not listen to prayers of Polish people that they not suffer so much? Why Jews have such special place in his heart?
“I think and think but I cannot answer this qvestion. I think, if I
do what Jews do, do what I see them do in Poland, maybe God make me special too. So I go to synagogue to be part of them, to learn from rabbi, to get holy blessing.
“And all the time I look at book I brought from Poland, that Boruch told me was holy book, and I know secret of Jews must be in it. Because is miracle that book surwives so long, with so many killings and burnings and destructions. But book still here. And I think I chosen to look after it. And when I see you, I realize this too was meant to happen, that you sent to me to unlock secrets of book, secret that explain why Jews chosen by God.”
Kuczynski slumped back in his chair. There was a silence. The only sound was the ticking of the clock.
Russell sat, stunned. The whole mad, infernal logic was now laid out before him. How could he have failed to understand the signs? Treating Eliachim’s manuscript like a holy relic—no Jew would ever have done that. And a deep-dyed anti-Semite…no, wait, he had taken all the signature obsessions of antisemitism and turned them into a kind of Jew-worship. Believing the canard of the global power of the Jews, he actually wanted some of that for himself.
His head was spinning. Focus, he thought. The manuscript. Crazy and outlandish as Kuczynski’s story seemed, the looted property seemed the most plausible part. However Kuczynski had come by it, his admission that it had belonged to a Jewish family in the area made Russell believe that the manuscript was genuine and not a forgery. He just had to retrieve it.
“I may still be able to help you.”
“You see I not vor criminal? You see I cannot be, that Jews vere my friends?”
Kuczynski’s eyes lit up eagerly.
“I can certainly see that you were faced with some, ah, very difficult and complex situations,” Russell volunteered.
“So you tell your police friends is all big mistake? You tell them they got wrong man?”
“If you give me the book. I might be able to use it to argue your case.”
“He can’t,” said Veronica suddenly. “He’s got rid of it.”
“What! What! Got rid of it? How? What do you mean?” cried Russell, leaping to his feet.
“What you done, stupid cow!” shouted Kuczynski, lunging forward in his chair. “Now he never speak for me to police!”
“You imbecile, he was never going to speak up for you to the police,” said Veronica coldly. “He was just playing you along. As he has done from the start.”
She lit a cigarette. Her hands were steady.
“I told you he was trouble, didn’t I, but you wouldn’t listen. You and your obsession with that bloody book. I told you it would bring us bad luck. You should’ve burned it years ago.”
“What! You’ve burned it?” Russell was beside himself.
“What you gonna do, tell the police about it?” sneered Veronica.
“Not burned, no. But now where you never ever find it. Ever.” said Kuczynski, almost as if talking to himself.
“Now get out,” said Veronica, “before I throw you out the door myself.”
In his pocket, he fingered his iPhone on which he had recorded Kuczynski’s confession.
21
HE PACED UP and down. He couldn’t concentrate. At night, he was finding it hard to sleep; a succession of images processed through his mind as soon as he closed his eyes—Kuczynski, Waxman, the hooded thugs with the flashing blade, his father.
What was happening to him? At every stage, events were conspiring against him. Why wasn’t anything working out anymore? He thought about the workman in the church, about the thugs outside the mosque. No no, no way that workman could have been right.
It was unthinkable. Go down that road, start thinking like that and Russell would end up turning into Michael Waxman. The youths who chased him down the street were probably just bored, out of work, the disadvantaged. The thing about alcohol was just a pretext, an excuse for a bit of violence. It meant nothing more than that.
To think otherwise, to allow himself even to entertain the possibility of the otherwise thought, was to go over a personal precipice spinning into a vacuum.
He couldn’t possibly allow himself to think like that because of the kind of people who did. The reactionaries, the uneducated, the narrow-minded. People like Elliott. Ugh! And once he thought like them, even on one single issue, that would be it as far as his own friends were concerned. He would just cease even to exist in their minds, he would become an un-person. But worse even than that, he would stop being a decent human being. He would find himself in some circle of hell.
The reason he was so unsettled, so panicky, was that he suspected that precisely such a process had already started. And that was making him frantic.
He looked in the fridge. It was empty, apart from some bottles of Budweiser, a half-eaten tub of hummus and a yogurt past its sell-by date. He went out to the local mini-market to get some food for supper.
At the checkout, his phone rang. It was Alice. He held the phone to his ear while with the other hand he tried to stuff his items into the bag.
“You do know that Rosa is now coming out with one weird idea after another, thanks to you.”
No, he didn’t know.
“She thinks abortion is wrong in most cases, sperm donation is anti-family and she’s not going to have sex until she gets married.”
“Well, I haven’t told her any of that.”
“It’s this zealot rabbi you introduced her to. He’s been brainwashing her.”
“Really? Sounds more like she’s thinking of becoming a Catholic.”
“Oh that’s right, just joke about it. Nothing’s to be taken seriously with you, unless it’s about you. I suppose you don’t care your daughter will be seen as some kind of freak, to be bullied and become a laughingstock at school. Of course, I know what this is really all about; she’s just getting at me.”
“Maybe she just doesn’t like the example she’s been set. I mean, what’s so terrible about respecting herself and caring about family life?”
“What’s happened to you all of a sudden? Sound like you’ve gone all Moral Majority. Why have you become so right-wing? Why have you become so Jewish?”
The bag he was balancing as he filled it with groceries toppled over. Eggs and a jar of mayonnaise smashed on the floor and spattered his trousers and shoes. Shit.
“There’s nothing right-wing about the truth,” he heard himself say, as he waved helplessly at the bored checkout girl. Oh no, maybe he really was turning into one of them. And just imagine if Alice or anyone else discovered he had actually been in cahoots with a war criminal, who if he wasn’t actually a Nazi was as close as dammit. He went hot and cold at the thought. It was unthinkable.
“And if she really is being bullied, shouldn’t you be doing something about it?” he said weakly into the phone. But she had already hung up.
22
DETAILS ABOUT KUCZYNSKI in the newspapers were scarce. Where might he find out more, he wondered miserably. He Googled “war crimes” on his laptop. There was a story from 2010 about how Scotland Yard had been criticized for disbanding its specialized war crimes unit. He clicked on another story which said the unit’s caseload had now been taken up by a group of senior detectives inside SO15, the Yard’s counterterrorism department.
SO15—he’d known an officer quite well who had gone to that unit, although he hadn’t spoken to him since he’d been poached from hate crime. He scrolled through his contacts directory. Yes, there he was: Chief Superintendent Ian Avery. Praying that he had not changed his cellphone number, he dialed it.
Avery answered. Bingo. Good to hear from Russell again, long time no see and all that and what could he do for him? Yes, he was indeed one of the officers handling war crimes. Well they could all do without it, quite frankly—after all it was hardly the same priority as the war on terror, was it, and they were all stretched enough in the unit as it was, what with all the
cuts.
“Frankly, I don’t think this guy Kuczynski’s even going to be charged,” he said. “Quite a lot of sensitivity among the powers-that-be about being seen to persecute such an old man. We could’ve done without the reptiles getting hold of the fact that we’d fallen over him. Now we’ll probably be hung out to dry whether we prosecute or don’t prosecute. But really, we’re not talking Heinrich Himmler here; this guy was a minnow.”
“So what did he actually do?” Russell’s heart was in his mouth.
“Seems he lived in a Polish town that flipped back and forth during the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Jedwabne, it was called. It started out briefly under German occupation, then fell under the Soviet Union when it joined forces with Hitler in 1939, and then when that fell apart the Nazis took over the town in 1941.
“What happened then was almost beyond belief. Under the Nazis, half the town went and murdered the other half. More, in fact, because more than half the town was Jewish. It was all totally horrific. They rounded up all the Jews and herded them into a barn, where they proceeded to burn them alive. When it was all over, just seven Jews remained alive in Jedwabne. Seven.
“No question this was a very great war crime. But this guy Kuczynski’s role just isn’t clear. After the war, the Russians put a number of people on trial for the barn. Kuczynski wasn’t one of them, but that doesn’t mean anything. The trials were a farce.”
“What, political show trials?”
“No, quite the opposite, in fact. The Russians were sloppy, couldn’t have cared less, because the victims were Jews. Stalin also wasn’t very keen on them, you may recall. So there was a total abuse of process, defendants beaten until they confessed, prosecutor even getting the date of the atrocity wrong.”
“So what makes you think Kuczynski was involved at all?”
“It was the Simon Wiesenthal people, you know, the group in Switzerland that goes round bringing Nazis to book, who alerted us to him, said he’d been involved and that he was living in the UK.”
The Legacy Page 18