by Anna Bikont
A visit to the next office. “Only God forbid you tell anybody who you talked to”; “It’s best if you put your notebook away, we’ll be honest with you.”
“Are you ladies from here?”
“I am, unfortunately.”
“My parents came here after the war, in 1951, or as they’d say now, on the tenth anniversary of the burning of the Jews.”
“I came here in 1974, so my parents couldn’t have rounded up any Jews.”
“If only Adam Małysz, the ski jumper, came from Jedwabne!” the first lady says, and sighs.
“My friend and I were trying to work out how to change the birth records here, because you’re ashamed to admit you’re from here. I might ask to have Kossaki put down as my birthplace, that’s where I grew up. It’s part of the Jedwabne municipality, but you wouldn’t see that right away.”
“My daughter defended her master’s thesis,” another lady responds. “They lowered her grade after asking her if she was from Jedwabne. People in town are already talking about new troubles with getting a visa.”
“Our children are embarrassed,” says a third. “My son had a pen with the company name Sonarol—Jedwabne on it. I called him in Białystok and he told me he’d hidden it. He’s twenty-four, a student, and he’s ashamed of his pen because it says ‘Jedwabne.’ Nowadays no one would get it into their head to kill a neighbor for having a different religion.”
The husband of one of the women comes in: “Gross heard from three drunks in a bar what was supposed to have happened here, and the more beers he bought them, the more had happened.”
“Are you sure that’s how it went?” I ask. “Gross met with a bunch of drunks, and then the prime minister, the president, and the primate came out and spoke about the participation of Poles in the massacre?”
“Did the Jews apologize for denouncing Poles to the NKVD?”
“Franek, you’d better go.” His wife soothes him.
I wanted to bring Halina Popiołek—the one person in Jedwabne who for years has been going to the place where the Jews were burned to light a candle on the anniversary of the atrocity—a copy of the Gazeta with my piece on the Laudańskis. Her niece opens the door.
When she sees me she starts shrieking: “She’s not here. Do you know how old my aunt is? And the lies she tells? Please don’t come back here!”
I try to protest politely that I’m not there to get any information, just to give her my piece.
“Leave at once, please. I’m not letting journalists onto my property, I’ll have to deal with the consequences later.”
A man in his thirties calls to me from the other side of the street and invites me in.
As it turns out he’s a relative of Ms. Popiołek, Henryk Bagiński. It is he who drives her to the site of the massacre.
“My wife is unemployed, I’m unemployed, but around here they say we get paid well for lighting a candle from time to time, that we’re living on Jewish money. People call my aunt to say they’re going to burn her. Now, would it be so hard to pour gasoline in the window at night, and who would ever trace the person who did it?”
I’m in the habit of driving to Przestrzele to see the Dziedzic family between visits to Jedwabne, even though it’s quite a long drive. I know several people in Jedwabne who have the same sensitivity as Leszek Dziedzic, but I don’t know anyone whose voice sounds as clear: Yes is yes, no is no, regardless of whether he’s talking to me or his own neighbor. As a result, he doesn’t have an easy life. He tells me how people are constantly sniping at him.
“I don’t know what they have in store for us. I don’t think they’d burn our house down, but they can make our lives miserable, it’s enough for a neighbor to put something in a container of milk so it won’t meet requirements—and what will we live on then?”
I ask him if he hasn’t considered emigrating to America for good, since his whole family is already there.
“My brothers and my mother, all of them can manage, but I’m not one for living anywhere but on my own piece of land. I’m crazy about farming. Whatever I earn in America I put into my land, and every year I hope the land gives it back, though for that I’ll have to wait for the economy to pick up. My land is here and no one’s going to chase me away or forbid me to say whatever I want to say.”
Late evening at Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski’s house. Delightedly he quotes me excerpts from an interview given to a Polish journalist by Rabbi Jacob Baker, who emigrated from Jedwabne to America as a young boy: “I could give many examples of Jews and Poles living peacefully together in Jedwabne. We trusted each other.” “I grew up with Poles, had them as friends, we were like one family.” “You are decent as a people. But unfortunately some Poles succumbed to Hitler’s propaganda.” Particularly important in Godlewski’s view are Rabbi Baker’s words to the effect that the majority of residents of Jedwabne did not participate in the atrocity, just “a group of degenerates and thugs from surrounding villages, driven by an urge to loot Jewish property.”
“What a fine person, how I’d like to shake his hand,” says Godlewski. “Now people will understand that the Jews aren’t accusing everybody, just a few criminals. A couple of no-goods joined with the Germans and we have to bow our heads for them, but it wasn’t the community that did it. I respect Gross, but in this case he exaggerated.
“But is there any hope at all,” he asks me anxiously after a moment, “that on July 10 Rabbi Baker, of a massacred people, and our bishop, who speaks of the ‘Shoah business,’ will stand side by side?”
I have with me a printout of the Internet text of the Jedwabne Book of Memory, edited by two rabbis, Jacob Baker and his brother, Julius, but I don’t dare quote it to Godlewski, in case it dashes his illusions. In it, Rabbi Jacob Baker expresses himself quite differently: “After a series of shameful cruelties on the part of their Christian neighbors, who acted with the permission of the Nazi authorities, the brutalized Jewish community of Jedwabne, 1,440 persons in total, were burned alive. It’s obvious to us that the Jews of Jedwabne must have lived for centuries among similarly cruel and inhuman neighbors. And here the question arises: how did they survive so long?”
The vision of Polish-Jewish relations in Jedwabne as a centuries-long nightmare amid cruel neighbors may be exaggerated, though it’s easy to imagine a man most of whose family was murdered by Poles seeing it that way. In the whole book there are only a few episodes indicating relations were sometimes good, like the description that Gross cites of a priest walking arm in arm with a rabbi.
Now Rabbi Baker has changed his point of view nearly 180 degrees, in favor of idyllic remembrances. Was he moved so deeply by Poland’s preparedness to face up to the crime’s legacy? Perhaps he thought that by speaking what Godlewski called “an easier truth,” he would touch people’s hearts in Poland? Or that it would be better for the Jews that way? I must ask him these questions at some point.
I return to the hotel after midnight and stay up late reading the Jedwabne Book of Memory. In 1660 the first group of Jews moved to Jedwabne from Tykocin. The oldest records on the Jedwabne synagogue are from 1771, but they speak of its expansion, so it must have been built earlier. It burned to the ground in September 1913. The fire was blamed on a peasant woman who was milking a cow by gaslight and knocked the lamp over. When the straw caught fire the woman ran for water, instead of putting out the fire with the milk. The fire, which consumed the synagogue and three-quarters of the buildings attached to it, seemed to the following generations of Jedwabne Jews the worst imaginable misfortune that could befall their God-fearing town.
The book is full of nostalgic recollections, most of them written in Yiddish. “Although fifteen years ago Yiddish was the dominant language at meetings of the Jedwabne community in New York,” the Baker brothers write mournfully, “today almost 70 percent of our community do not understand the language. So we were obliged to copy, translate, and redact the main parts of this book into English and Hebrew.”
Hersz Cynowicz
’s recollections go back farthest into the past. His grandmother Malke told her grandchildren of Napoleon’s armies marching on Moscow and soldiers quartered in Jewish homes in Jedwabne. A few authors remembered life at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. They described village tailors darning, mending, and altering clothes; away from home for months, they carried kitchen dishes with them to keep kosher. Children were taught their prayers and reading and writing Yiddish by the melamed, who used tried-and-true methods—the instruments of persuasion were the strap and the ruler, with which knowledge was rammed into kids’ heads. These little schools were usually set up in the kitchen of the house where the teacher and his family lived. There were also better-equipped schools in Jedwabne, with desks and inkpots, run by better-educated teachers, but not everyone could afford them.
Tzipora Rothchild remembers that when Jedwabne, before World War I a quiet place on the fringes of the Russian Empire, received news of workers’ protests, it precipitated a one-man strike: “Nachum Mosze Piątkowski’s son Arie rebelled against his father. Nachum Mosze beat him with an iron ring and Arie screamed with pain and shouted, ‘I’m a socialist, I’m not going to work at night, after hours!’ His father had to send him to America to prevent other workers from being infected by socialism.”
Posterity has also preserved a story about Józef Szymon Markusz, the only person who dared to criticize the community’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Józef Chower. It happened around 1850, during the Kol Nidre service. The rabbi raised the question of Jews engaged in smuggling goods across the Prussian border and thereby avoiding paying taxes to the government. Markusz, who was sitting among the wealthiest members of the community, got up and interrupted the rabbi: “If that’s the case, kindly tell me why you accepted the position of rabbi in a border town?” At that time Jedwabne, like other border towns, owed its prosperity—in large part—to smuggling.
MARCH 15, 2001
In Łomża I go by the editorial offices of Tygodnik Kontakty (Contacts Weekly), which was the first periodical to publish reportage on the atrocity back in the eighties. I have an appointment with the editor in chief, Władysław Tocki.
“I heard of it first twenty years ago,” Tocki tells me. “I was writing an article on looters, and that’s how I found myself in the cemetery in Jedwabne. There, I bumped into a history teacher, Jerzy Ramotowski, and he started talking, unexpectedly. After a few sentences he broke off: ‘You’re not getting any more out of me, and if you write this I’ll deny it. You don’t understand. There were two hundred Jewish homes abandoned here. They disappeared and their property was left behind. Almost everybody had a hand in it. That’s why no one in town will tell you what happened here.’ I tried to talk to the locals but hit a wall of silence. If it had been the work of the Germans, I’m sure they would have talked about it. They confirmed the fact of the crime in every aspect of their behavior. The key evidence was the silence.”
In 1993, Contacts Weekly published an article on the massacre in Radziłów; in 1995, one on the Wąsosz massacre; in May 2000, another one, on the massacre in Jedwabne. There was no response. Nothing, total silence. “The only reaction I got,” Tocki says, “was in the summer of 2000, when guests who visited our website wrote, ‘Tocki, the editor, must be a Jew.’
“My research shows that the scale of local collaboration with the Soviets was significant. Activists in the prewar nationalist movement were captured by the Russians, who said, ‘Either you collaborate, or we’ll deport your whole family.’ When a Jew collaborated, he boasted about it. He dreamed of parading around in a uniform with a gun. You only found out about a Pole collaborating when he was exposed.”
I’m in Jedwabne around noon. I learn that an excavator drove up to the monument in the morning and removed the stone with the inscription saying the Jews were murdered by the Gestapo and the Nazi police. The operation was lightning-fast, and no one was informed, “in order to prevent any incidents.”
It’s almost impossible to drive to the site of the crime. The furrows left by the tractors traveling back and forth are a big deterrent. At the place where the barn stood, the earth is trampled. There are fields all around, and across from the site stands a forest of hazel trees, which hides the broken Jewish gravestones sticking up here and there—you have to look carefully to notice them.
I look in on Henryk Bagiński and his wife, Elżbieta, and find Ms. Popiołek with them. She has been forbidden by her niece to receive anybody at home.
“People didn’t see a thing, but they go on screaming, ‘It’s all lies,’” she says. “If they saw what I saw…”
“Do you think there are many people in this town who feel sympathy for the victims?”
“Not a lot. Because the priest keeps screaming, ‘It’s not true.’ The thing that I mind most is the hostility in my own house, such pain and humiliation. If it turns violent again I’ll go to the police. At first I was glad everything had come out. I prayed, ‘Lord, let good triumph over evil.’ And now I can only cry. If they mean to kill me, too bad, let them kill me.”
“Nobody defends my aunt, they’re all too scared,” says Bagiński. “The journalists listened to her, recorded her, and then they left her in the deep end without asking if she could swim. Someone should go on TV finally and say there will be consequences for anyone obstructing the investigation.”
Like everyone else around here the Bagińskis flip from channel to channel to find something about Jedwabne. Cable news—because cameras with their logo were seen in town. Channel 1—because they’ve announced a studio discussion. The news programs Wiadomości, Panorama, and Białystok TV—because they’ve scheduled reports. I look at the smiling face of the Bagińskis’ beautiful daughter, Sylvia, who was taken out of school years ago and now studies at home because she suffers from a degenerative disease—she’s thrilled that Białystok TV caught her on camera for a split second.
We watch the report together. A journalist reads a letter: “We protest against the slander of our town.” My hosts comment nervously. “Why didn’t they bring us that letter?” Bagiński wonders. “They knew we wouldn’t sign it? How could they know?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” says Elżbieta. “They came by with a letter yesterday about construction work on Kościuszko Street. They said: ‘We need your signature so they’ll let us build this road instead of a road for the Jews.’ They had three copies. Maybe the third was that letter?”
But it wasn’t the letter. The world of the screen was getting mixed up with the real world. Białystok TV was showing a report filmed a few weeks ago, on a matter that was already old news—the letter by the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, then being formed, protesting against “the worldwide campaign that is using outrageous methods to slander the committee and all of Poland.” There were rumors going around town that some letter from townspeople was sent to the parliament, but without signatures. And indeed—the signatories remained anonymous.
On the other hand, the letter my hosts received yesterday was an initiative of the councilwoman Zenona Kurkowska. She came up with the idea that when the money comes in for restoration of the market square and the roads leading to the barn, the town should instead use it for roads that would benefit the residents, or replace the cobblestones on Kościuszko Street in the town center with asphalt, to improve the town. And she’s started gathering signatures in support of this plan.
I’m already familiar enough at city hall that I go by even when the mayor’s out, sit at his desk, am given tea with lemon, and type up conversations I’ve just had. Having my own spot like this is invaluable. Unfortunately the offices are only open till 4:00 p.m. There’s no place in Jedwabne or in Radziłów where I can get a cup of tea, apart from a bar where I’d be the only woman in a company of boozy men. If I hear in Radziłów that the person I want to talk to will be back in two hours, I drive to Jedwabne and back to Radziłów, because there’s absolutely nowhere else to go. The weather is better now, but in February
I sometimes drove two hundred kilometers a day on roads not properly cleared of snow between Łomża, Radziłów, and Jedwabne.
I knock on the door of one of Jedwabne’s rental apartment buildings and chat with a series of locals about a proposal to name a school here after Antonina Wyrzykowska. To those who haven’t heard of her I explain that Wyrzykowska sheltered seven Jews during the war. Their response is not fit to print. One of the residents gives me a card with the poem “The Truth About Jedwabne,” signed Jan Gietek of Porędy.
The Germans did it, learnèd Mister Gross,
It’s time you kissed us Poles upon the nose.
It was the Jews who helped, you pseudo-Neighbor,
Deport Poles Eastward to do hard labor.
By that time the Jews had already forgot
How Judas was with silver bought.
So if there’s a fashion for apology,
Let the Jews apologize for Calvary.
Photocopies of this nasty doggerel are passed from hand to hand in Jedwabne like a Solidarity pamphlet during martial law.
An unexpected conversation with a woman of about forty who lives in Jedwabne, Krystyna N.: “Ever since I was a child I knew Poles had burned Jews in the barn. In my family no one went around hunting Jews. I remember Mother talking about how people hid Jews in their cellars until their money and property was gone and then killed them. About two years ago my sister and I went to look at the monument for the Jews. There was a swastika painted on it. I read your piece on the Laudańskis, murderers walking around with their heads held high. It’s hard living in this town. It’s split into two camps. If you could look into our hearts there are more who feel compassion for the victims, but all you see on the outside are the ones who are against the ceremony, because they make the most noise.