by Anna Bikont
DECEMBER 21, 2000
Mieczysław Kulęgowski told me he had an uncle in Zanklewo, not far from Jedwabne, a wealthy farmer who sheltered a Jewish family from the neighboring town of Wizna, in return for which his farm was set on fire by Polish neighbors after the war. He gave me the name: the uncle is no longer alive, but his children are, and they were old enough at the time to remember. I drive there.
Zanklewo, a backwoods village on the road from Jedwabne to Wizna. A well-kept, prosperous farm, a warm welcome. Yes, that’s right, says the uncle’s son, his parents hid a tailor from Wizna, Izrael Lewin, with his wife and two children. He was a teenager at the time and remembers it well.
“They were hidden under the floor, near the stove. No one knew about it, it only got out after the war.” He speaks of the postwar anti-Communist partisans: “In 1945 partisans took our clothes, cattle, pigs, and burned the farm buildings. We were left with nothing. That was the time when if someone was a little better off, gangs stole from him, so they must have thought we had Jewish gold. Those were impoverished times. Under the Polish partisans there was just as much fear as under the Russians or Germans, or worse.”
That fear must persist, because as we say goodbye my interlocutor asks me never to mention his name.
DECEMBER 22, 2000
I decide to begin work on my book with Radziłów, before the atrocity committed there becomes as widely known as the one in Jedwabne. It will be easier to talk to people there.
I drive to Kramarzewo near Radziłów to look up Marianna Ramotowska, née Finkelsztejn, who was rescued by Stanisław Ramotowski. I reach a wooden cottage hunched over a stream. On the threshold Ramotowski announces he’s not going to talk, but I somehow manage to get inside.
It’s bone cold in the house. His wife sits wrapped in several sweaters. She’s slight, frail, and wears thick glasses. She’s even less willing to talk than her husband. She’s hard of hearing, unable to walk. It’s Ramotowski who makes me a cup of tea. We begin to talk, but he keeps drawing back.
“The Jews were driven out by Poles. Even if I knew who, I wouldn’t tell you for the world. I can’t. We have to live here.”
Or: “I won’t tell you how I arranged with the priest to get married in wartime, when I wanted to marry a Jewish girl. A thousand horses couldn’t drag it out of me, those are religious matters.”
“Don’t say anything, Stasinek, God forbid,” his wife pleads, holding his arm. She calls him by his tender diminutive, Stasinek for Stanisław.
I tell her that at the Jewish Historical Institute I read the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, and I ask if he was a relative of hers. Though they have the same surname, Mrs. Ramotowski claims she has no idea who he is. It doesn’t sound convincing; I have the impression she’s terrified of everything that reminds her of her Jewish origins.
Ramotowski, too, stubbornly refuses to answer my questions, “because I live here among these people and they might come for me.” But when I tell them I’ll come back to see them in the New Year, he’s clearly pleased. He seems to feel isolated. When I ask him directly, he says he had friends in Wąsosz, sixteen kilometers from Jedwabne, a Jewish woman and her Polish husband, they married during the war but they have since died. He mentions in passing that in Wąsosz the Poles did the same with the Jews as they did in Radziłów and Jedwabne.
DECEMBER 28, 2000
In the library I read the Sprawa Katolicka (The Catholic Cause), a regional diocesan weekly of the thirties. The subject of Jews as the greatest threat to Poland is raised obsessively. The contempt, and the deep satisfaction in the fact that Jews were starving in some village because of the economic boycott—it’s astonishing. I knew the prewar Catholic Church was in large part anti-Semitic, but it’s another thing entirely to read these hateful texts in the context of the atrocity to come.
1
Lord, Rid Poland of the Jews
or, On Polish-Jewish Relations in Jedwabne in the Thirties
It is the tenth of Tishri 5699, or, according to the Gregorian calendar, October 5, 1938: Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the most important Jewish holiday. On that day, all Jews go to the synagogue. Crowds of people flock across the market square. The next day no Jewish child in Jedwabne or Radziłów will go to school, and Jewish shops will be closed until sunset. There are no Catholic townspeople to be seen, only Yiddish can be heard that evening. In Jedwabne the mayor’s mother, Mrs. Grądzki, who’s not particularly fond of Jews, stands leaning against the wall of the synagogue on Szkolna Street as she does every year; she is moved by their songs. She has come to hear her favorite, the Kol Nidre, the prayer for absolution of oaths forgotten, or taken rashly or under duress.
The older children go to synagogue and participate in the daylong fast, but the young ones—many households have up to seven or eight children—are entrusted to Polish neighbors that day. They are given a hard-boiled egg or milk straight from the cow, which they drink from their own cups—the neighbors respect that the children are to keep kosher. They understand each other well enough—Yiddish is a language they hear every day: in shops, on the street, working with Jews. Some Poles speak it fluently. Among those in Jedwabne who speak good Yiddish is Bronisław Śleszyński, the man who will give his barn to burn the Jews.
It is May 3, 1939: a big Eucharistic procession on a national Polish holiday. In church the choir sings, “We raise our plea before your altar / Lord, rid Poland of the Jews.” In their Sunday best the faithful come out after Mass to participate in a celebration organized by the church in collaboration with local members of the National Party, a party founded by Roman Dmowski, whose obsession was the eternal Jewish conspiracy against Poland.
Seventh-grade graduation ceremony. Jedwabne, 1936. Meir Ronen from Israel (formerly Meir Grajewski from Jedwabne) told me: “My sister Fajga Grajewska, who was in the class, took this photograph with her to Palestine. There are several Jewish children here, although most Jewish kids had been taken out of school by their parents after being harassed by teachers and classmates. We had been friends with Polish children, but by the end of the thirties they stopped treating us as friends.” (Courtesy of Meir Ronen)
The procession moves through the streets around the market square, on either side a file of girls in white carrying bouquets of flowers, and in between them, little boys in surplices, with bells. They are followed by older kids belonging to the Association of Young Catholic Men and Women, and adults bring up the rear of the procession, which fills the street from end to end. They are accompanied by an orchestra and flag-bearers on bicycles. On the steps of the church on the square a National Party member invited over from the larger town of Łomża, gives a speech. He speaks of Poland today, dominated by the foreign element, and Poland tomorrow, when the nation will liberate itself from its enslavement to international Jewish finance, and Poles will buy only from Poles. At the visitor’s side stands the parish priest, also a National Party member. The people gathered unfurl banners: Peasants and workers into trade—Jews to Palestine or Madagascar; A penny to a stranger harms the nation; Rid Poland of Jews. They shout slogans and sing:
Ah, beloved Poland,
you’ve people in the millions
and on top of all that
you’re filled up with Jews.
Rise up, white eagle,
smite Jews with your claws,
so that they will never
play the master over us.
That day the Jewish inhabitants of the town don’t leave their houses, don’t allow their children to go out. The next day they will say with relief that it wasn’t too bad: a gang of National Party members getting drunker and drunker, singing patriotic songs to the accompaniment of an accordion, and yelling “Beat the Jew,” until deep into the night, but only a few windows were broken in Jewish homes.
1.
Although the Jewish and Christian inhabitants of Radziłów and Jedwabne did not ordinarily look very different (in these parts Hasidim were rare and Jews most often dr
essed like regular townspeople; the elders wore hats), although their children generally went to the same schools (Jedwabne had no separate Jewish school; Radziłów did, but it was private and few parents could afford the fees), although Jews and Christians often lived side by side in the same apartment buildings, and there were friendly ties among children, neighbors, and business partners—they lived separate lives and spoke different languages. Jews, especially the young, got along fine in Polish, but at home they spoke Yiddish. The keeping of kosher kitchens ruled out reciprocal invitations to visit. Jewish children often studied Hebrew and Jewish history after school, and they also helped their parents in their shops or workshops. Polish children went to help on the farms (even the Poles who lived in small towns usually had farmland, cows, and pigs), and often for that reason left school after a few grades.
Social and cultural life ran on separate tracks. Immediately after World War I there had still been a few things Poles and Jews did together—picnics, festivities initiated by the volunteer fire brigade, the riflemen, or the reservists—but Jews often met with an unfriendly response from Poles, and in the latter half of the thirties they were simply thrown out of these organizations. The lives of Catholics revolved around the parish and the world of churchgoers, as well as events organized by the National Party, which was blatant in its exclusion of Jews.
In this region 90 percent of both communities were poor or destitute. Remembering the thirties in his diary, Mosze Rozenbaum of Radziłów, who emigrated to Australia in April 1939, wrote that hunger would wake him at night and he wasn’t able to concentrate in class. In winter he would go out into the courtyard and eat a handful of snow to fool his stomach out of its pangs.
However, the Jews were not as poor as the Poles whom they employed—women in the household, men in the workshops. The Sabbath czulent was often the most nutritious dish the Polish neighbors’ children had a chance to eat all week, when they brought their school notebooks over to a Jewish friend’s house on Saturday night. When the Catholic neighbors were told that the Jews were the cause of their poverty, many had no trouble believing it.
Morris Atlas, formerly Mosze Atłasowicz, who left Radziłów before World War I, asked his father in a letter from across the ocean in the latter half of the twenties whether he should come back to Poland to help him in his old age. His father’s answer was brief: “Better stay where you are. This isn’t a good country for Jews.”
2.
The stories told by Catholics and Jews about how good relations were before the war can be explained by a need on the part of Catholics to erase their guilt and a nostalgic idealization of youth by Jews. When a wave of anti-Semitism swept across Europe in the thirties, the people of Jedwabne were up to the European standard. You could even say they were in the avant-garde. The Łomża area in which Jedwabne was located had been a bastion of right-wing National Party support for more than a century. The National Party was the most powerful political force in the region; its leitmotif was the battle against Jews, and it turned shtetls in the impoverished and backward part of Poland into places pulsing with political activity. The summons to “Beat the Jew” mobilized youth in the National Party, organized as the Youth Movement of the Greater Poland Bloc, which had fascist tendencies.
“The rabbi’s yard was right next to the yard of the school head, whose daughters were friends of mine,” said Halina Zalewska from Radziłów. “We would watch the rabbi from the roof when he went to the outhouse, we’d keep the door open and call him names, not letting him catch us. He was like a rat, his eyes were black, and his wife came out and said: ‘Oy, young lady, that’s not nice of you, I’m going to pay a visit to your daddy and tell him what you’re up to.’ We liked pestering the rabbi. The same with the Jewess Psachtowa. She kept a shop, and since she had bad eyesight, children buying seeds or fruit drops would give her buttons instead of change.”
Jan Cytrynowicz, who lived in Wizna before the war and had been baptized, remembered how, before the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, when one room in the house has to have an open roof, boys plotted at a meeting of the church youth group to let cats into Jewish homes. Jan Skrodzki recalls his older friends catching ravens and releasing them in the synagogue in the middle of prayers. There was no electric light then, Jews prayed by candlelight, and the ravens flew toward the light, extinguishing the candles. Stanisław Przechodzki, born in Jedwabne after the war, heard his mother relate with distaste how groups of young people would go by Jewish homes on Shabbat with a concertina and disrupt their contemplative day, how Jews’ yarmulkes were yanked off their heads and Jews were made to pay a zloty or two to get them back. She said the Laudański brothers were instigators of this sort of thing.
There wouldn’t be anything so terrible in these stupid pranks—kids getting up to no good as they do all over the world—if they hadn’t taught contempt and hostility toward Jews, feelings that were reinforced in the course of their upbringing.
“I remember Kazimierz Laudański standing in front of a Jewish shop telling people not to buy there,” Jakow Geva, then Jakub Pecynowicz—who lived in Jedwabne before the war—told me.
“At a Polish shop you could get two doughnuts made of lesser-quality flour for five groszy, whereas at a Jewish shop they’d only ask three,” remembered Leon Dziedzic of Przestrzele, on the outskirts of Jedwabne. “But when I went by the Jewish shop there were two guys standing there with sticks, pointing and saying: ‘The Polish shop is over there.’”
Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów described in her memoir how, toward the end of the thirties, customers would come into Jewish shops by the back door, as they were too afraid to be seen coming through the front entrance.
Jan Cytrynowicz remembers an acquaintance of his father telling a story with great hilarity about a Jew who came to his native village selling things door-to-door, and the local peasants forcing a nonkosher sausage into his mouth, while he fought so hard blood was spilled.
Professor Adam Dobroński, a historian specializing in the Białystok region, of which the Łomża area (including Jedwabne and Radziłów) was a part, cited an anecdote to me about the National Party announcing a contest in one of the villages in the area: a sheep for the brave fellow who kicked a Jew.
Szmul Wasersztejn, in the memoirs he dictated in Costa Rica not long before his death, said how hard it was for him to live in a country where “half of the population thinks you’re a poor Jew, a rat, and tells you to bugger off to Palestine, insults you and throws rocks through your windows,” a country where “gangs of thugs give Jewish children a thrashing under any pretext, make them kneel and take off their caps.” And he told how humiliated he was to be taught by his father that, as a Jew, he should always step down from the sidewalk when a priest or a soldier was passing by.
When I asked him about Polish-Jewish relations before the war, Jan Sokołowski of Jedwabne offered me his point of view: “Well, what do you think it was like, when the Jews made Poles do all the heavy jobs, like carpentry and bricklaying, and they themselves only made hats or ran mills or were in some kind of trade? A bun cost five groszy at a Pole’s and two groszy at a Jew’s, so how can you talk about competition here? You took your horse whip into church on a Sunday because it might get stolen, that’s how poor people were. And when you were poor, you went to a Jew. You could get money on credit, the Jew would write it into his book and then he had the Pole in his power. A farmer would have to sell a cow sometimes to give the Jew his money back.”
3.
Several people I interviewed used the word “revolution” in connection with a pogrom that took place in Radziłów on March 23, 1933; they all used the word with a positive connotation, with the notion that it was a revolution of nationalists, a prelude to their takeover of power.
Halina Zalewska remembered the event that swept up the whole town: “‘A revolution,’ they said. Shooting, windows broken, shutters closed, women shrieking, running home.”
Another person told me, “A cousin of my fat
her’s driving earthenware pots to market was injured in that revolution. He was lying on the foldout bed, that was what we had for a sofa bed in those days: by day it was a bench, at night you folded it out and there was a straw mattress inside. The medic Jan Mazurek tried to help him, but he died anyway.”
“In the market square, windows were broken and tubs of herring knocked over,” another witness recalled. “Four peasants were shot, and a lot of people went to jail. They were held in the Czerwoniak in Łomża, the old tsarist prison, then they were taken to the bishop to do unpaid work.”
Only Stanisław Ramotowski, a Pole who saved a Jewish family during the war, unambiguously called it a pogrom: “I saw a gang out breaking Jews’ windows. And policemen killing a man who’d knocked down a Jew’s tub of herring. The nationalists weren’t boys, they were grown men, the same ones standing in the marketplace with crowbars, in front of Jewish shops. I saw a few of them again later on in the attacks.”
These were members of the Camp for a Greater Poland, the outgrowth of an alliance between peasants and the middle class that had its own action squads. Peasants from small villages led by middle-class Łomża youths drove from town to town in trucks instigating anti-Jewish brawls. The height of the camp’s activity fell in March 1933. Hitler’s accession to power in January of that year opened up new perspectives: it turned out that anti-Jewish slogans, which until then had been bandied around in Germany and Poland by a single group—the Nazis—had a chance of becoming the basis for an official state ideology. The camp organized campaigns in different parts of Poland, but the worst pogrom in this area took place in Radziłów.
Years afterward, Mosze Rozenbaum also remembered this pogrom. First he described the weekly market, which took place on Thursdays. The Jewish merchants of the surrounding villages brought in sheepskin coats, knee boots, pickled herring. Polish peasants sold wheat, rye, buckwheat, and oats. Small Jewish merchants bought up all the grain and sold it on to Germany. That day, when school had let out, Mosze saw the devastated marketplace, after the “peasants from the nearby villages had invaded Radziłów armed with iron crowbars and wooden cudgels, attacking Jews.” Chaja Finkelsztejn remembered carts headed for the market just as they did every week. But that time they weren’t loaded with produce. There were peasants sitting on them armed with poles and clubs. Not one window was left intact in any Jewish home after the pogrom.