by Anna Bikont
When I was conducting my first interviews, several members of the younger generation were surprised to discover that there had been an investigation into the Jedwabne affair in 1949, and that there were convictions. They told me, “They were tried for being in the partisan underground, not for the Jews.” Forgotten facts can easily reenter the current of memory. Now the Stalinist investigation belongs to the body of information known to everyone. “We know there was a trial, they found the guilty ones and convicted them. Since they were already tried once, why do it a second time?” It must mean the Jews want money.
Crossing the market square, I suddenly make a simple connection: the same people who say that Jews deported Polish patriots to Siberia also say they saw—or their families saw—lots of Germans on July 10. Others just saw lone Germans in the market square, a policeman taking pictures, but only in the square, not on the road to the barn. I call Ignatiew to share this observation with him. He offers no comment. I know he won’t reveal to me the results of his investigation, but if I were mistaken he’d probably contradict me, saying my attitude to the case is too emotional. I’ve heard this response from him several times already and it was hard to deny it.
I visit Leszek Dziedzic.
“What they’re most afraid of,” he says, “is that the Jews will take away what was stolen from them. People keep saying, angrily, ‘The Jews will come to get their things.’ Not ‘our things,’ but ‘their things.’ If things are ‘theirs,’ they should be returned.”
I explain to him that connecting the recovery of memory to the recovery of former Jewish property only serves to spread fear among the townspeople, and I’m sure no descendant of Jews from Jedwabne will turn up to get some ramshackle cottage back.
“But they should come and get them back,” he insists.
The truth is that Jews left their property here, and Poles of Jedwabne, Radziłów, and the surrounding areas took advantage of it. There are testimonies to this effect from surviving Jews from nearby towns in the Białystok region. “The Poles’ slogan was ‘Wasilków without Jews.’” Paintings and photographs were slashed, down quilts were ripped up. During the pogrom the leaders shouted: “Don’t break anything, don’t tear anything up. It all belongs to us anyway” (testimony of Mendel Mielnicki, 1945).
“Poles from Zaręby Kościelne, wishing to take over Jewish property, sent requests to the German authorities in Łomża to liquidate the Zaręby Jews as well. Prominent residents signed these requests, Dr. Jan Gauze among them” (testimony of Rachela Olszak and Mindel Olszak, 1945).
“Someone in hiding heard Christians talking after Jews had been taken away. One guy was saying what he’d seen was terrible, one woman told him: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get used to it, we’ll be better off without them.’ Then she looked at the buildings nearby, which she’d long dreamed of owning. Every Pole furnished his home with stuff they took from Jews. They felt they were the bosses now, their hour had struck” (testimony of Pesia Szuster-Rozenblum on the liquidation of the Jasionówka ghetto, 1945).
Dziedzic speaks calmly, determinedly, but as soon as his children disappear from his field of vision he gets up, looks for them in the yard, calls after them. I read him back what he has said, which I would like to insert in my Gazeta piece on Jedwabne today—making sure he wouldn’t prefer to remain anonymous, but he agrees to the publication of everything he’s said under his own name. He is the only such example among the people I talk to.
For the situation in town is deteriorating. People who just a few weeks ago talked to me without withholding their names (talking not about the crime, but about the current situation in Jedwabne) now say when I ask them to authorize quotes, “We already have so much trouble. I’m sorry, but I’d like you to leave my name out.” The part of the Jedwabne population that shouts the loudest that the Jews are to blame for everything, though they form a minority, is nevertheless in ascendance in this town. They feel powerful. They have Father Orłowski’s support. They have their own scholarly authority—even the least sober-minded of my interlocutors, whom no one would suspect of reading history books, has invoked Professor Strzembosz.
Before, they were frustrated people, living in a town without prospects or hope. Now, prominent people—politicians, MPs, senators—devote their time to them. They are also visited by personalities such as the film director Bohdan Poręba. The fact that he is known not only from films but also for belonging to an anti-Semitic Communist organization in the eighties called Grunwald doesn’t bother anybody here. They don’t like Communists unless they’re anti-Semites. And when people from this area emigrate to America—remittances from relatives who work in the United States are one of the main sources of income in these parts—they are sure of being embraced by the Chicago Polish community as Polish victims unjustly accused by Jews, and of being helped to find work.
Thinking of all this, I have the absurd sense that history is repeating itself. Before the war, too, the local parish priest organized the community around hatred toward Jews. National Party activists from the greater world—Łomża, even Warsaw—began visiting settlements far from the main roads, and small-town life took on a new glamour.
The most aggressive deniers of the Poles’ responsibility for the massacre are among people in their forties, usually from families who lived here during the war. Now a second generation stands guard over a falsified memory.
In the evening I read the Catholic paper Our Daily at the hotel; it includes a report from Jedwabne—people were talking about it in town today—involving an event with the historian Tomasz Strzembosz. It was held in the parish house. Janina Biedrzycka, whose father gave his barn for the burning of the Jews, treated the gathering as her own throne room. She recalled the German atrocities in Łomża: “They killed the only true Poles.” She hasn’t noticed that the Germans wiped out all Jews there, one-third of the city population. And she summed up: “Because we Poles have no one to remember us. This is not our country anymore.”
MARCH 25, 2001
Leszek Bubel, publisher of a whole array of anti-Semitic periodicals and books along the line of “Know Your Jews,” has convinced some of the town council members that Edward Moskal should be made an honorary citizen of Jedwabne. Moskal is president of the Polish American Congress and has just published a statement expressing outrage at the accusation that Poles committed the Jedwabne massacre.
Bubel, a completely marginal figure in Poland, has already grown to be a local hero and a permanent fixture in Jedwabne. He participates in council sessions, has dinner with the parish priest, visits council members.
“He called me about that honorary citizenship,” Godlewski tells me when I visit him at home. “He said: ‘If you say what people want to hear, you can make a career. You have a chance to be somebody, to shine, make history.’”
Bubel’s initiative would probably have been carried through if it hadn’t been for Stanisław Michałowski, as council chairman, asking Bubel to leave the session.
I keep having the same conversation with Godlewski. I recount to him the anti-Semitic views voiced by one of his council members, and he says that it’s hard to talk to me because for me everything is black-and-white.
“The residents of Jedwabne have come under attack. They are accused of crimes, although the people who live here now didn’t commit them. That’s why it’s hard for them to accept that the killers were from here. They have to mature to be able to carry the burden. That takes time, but I see a gradual transformation.”
But it is hard to see any transformation. The council doesn’t like anything that’s going on, least of all the mayor receiving Western journalists and film crews—Jews, in other words—in his office. Godlewski tried to persuade the council members to place a marker where the synagogue once stood, and perhaps to sell that parcel of land back to the Jewish community. He didn’t dare suggest it be given to the community as a gift. Nevertheless, he was told he was trying to give all of Jedwabne back to the Jews. The vice chairman of
the council, Piotr Narewski, said, “The mayor is educated, that’s why he thinks differently from us.”
I look through letters the mayor has received recently. On top, a letter from one Andrzej Kamieński of Warsaw, who proposes that Jedwabne institute a stipend for study in Poland for a high school senior from Israel orphaned by a terrorist attack. Other letters are written in a completely different tone. “Idiot Mayor, get that Jewish scum out of town. You have no Honor or National Pride. You were paid off by Jews, you’re an enemy of Poland.” Letters of support come from people who still associate him with the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne: “We stand with you. The Jedwabne affair is a case of Goebbels propaganda, Jewish-style.” “Don’t let any kind of cemetery be established here. Even the Gospels say the Jews are a tribe of serpents. Make sure the minority doesn’t become the majority. Group for the Open Integration of Polish Patriotic Organizations.”
I drop by to see a man who has been very nice to me but who refuses to appear under his own name. “I get calls: ‘You son of a bitch, you Jewish lackey, we know how to deal with you.’”
The close-knit, aggressive group of the killers’ families and people who live in formerly Jewish homes dominate everyone else. Those whose families participated in the massacre and the looting feel they have to defend themselves. The killers’ families are the ones who intimidate others, for fear the truth about the crime will be revealed. The war brutalized people, and when there were no more Jews to kill, Poles started killing one another.
Even Leszek Dziedzic has lost the optimism he showed in our first meetings, when he believed the confrontation with truth would bring about a catharsis, at least for some of the locals.
“Most of all people are outraged that the president announced he will come here and apologize. They’d like to bar him from entering the town. No one here plans to attend the ceremony. They keep saying no local should dare show his face, and that curtains should be shut in every window. But I’m certainly going to be there with my family. The word ‘sorry’ must be spoken. And if those who did the killing don’t want to apologize, I’m prepared to apologize for them, for the fact that the land on which I was born produced such bloodthirsty monsters.”
MARCH 26, 2001
A press conference at the state archive in Warsaw called by director Dr. Daria Nałęcz. Files from the municipal court of Łomża are presented. They are documents from 1947 civil cases in which Jewish heirs of houses in Jedwabne sought a declaration of the deaths of the prewar owners, so that they could sell the houses. The heirs testified that the Jews died at the hands of the Germans. It seems obvious they couldn’t have said anything else if they wanted to live in peace in the town. Why hasn’t this person, who is surely trained to read documents critically, understood that? I don’t suspect her of any bad faith beyond a desire for media attention, but I can already imagine how much empty fuss will be made over this.
MARCH 27, 2001
For two days Stanisław Ramotowski has been coughing up blood and feeling too weak to get out of bed. Through the writer Tadeusz Konwicki, who is friendly with a prominent vascular surgeon, Dr. Wojciech Noszczyk, I’ve arranged a personal consultation with the doctor, to whose hospital I have brought Ramotowski. It turns out his condition was very bad, and he survived only because Noszczyk intervened immediately.
The newspaper headlines after Daria Nałęcz’s press conference show it got results: “Germans Did the Burning…” (Życie, Life), “Witnesses Accused the Germans” (Życie Warszawy, Warsaw Life), “No Part Played by Poles” (Our Daily).
I call acquaintances in Jedwabne and Łomża. Town council chairman Stanisław Michałowski tells me that after the war, intermediaries went around previously Jewish towns looking for Poles living in Jewish homes and offering them legalization of any sales transaction for a small fee. They found citizens of Jewish origin who, to make a little money promised to them by the intermediaries, declared their families had lived in Jedwabne, on Przytulska Street number such-and-such, and that they were the only heirs.
Another person I talk to: “I thought what a different perspective you have if you’re from Jedwabne and you know what we know. Those were all civil suits, they were about recognizing the homeowners as deceased so their real estate could be sold. And who was it sold to? Poles. So the transaction was already agreed on and it was just a matter of rubber-stamping it. Polish citizens of Jewish origin testified that the Germans had been the killers. If people are still receiving threats now, after sixty years, what must the atmosphere have been like a few years after the war, when gangs roamed the countryside, when not a month went by without a murder? No one in their right mind would have said the Poles had done the killing. Why would they? Poland hadn’t even come out of the shock of the war, there wasn’t a single family that hadn’t lost someone. The atmosphere was anti-German, the Fascists were blamed for all the evil perpetrated. Neither the authorities at the time nor the people cared about revealing the truth. And now those lies are coming back like a boomerang.”
I remember that in one of the issues of Karta, in a collection of documents on secret police activity in those Borderland territories, there was a description of houses being sold under false pretenses with the involvement of secret policemen from Białystok. The procedure is described by Eliasz Grądowski of Jedwabne, who survived because he was deported during the Soviet occupation, and after he came back, he got into shady dealings in formerly Jewish homes. Papers were sold to people who already had the property. Some of them must have taken part in the massacre, hence they had the loot. In court they said the Germans did the killing, and now their version is becoming objective truth, confirmed and buttressed by real documents.
I learn from my calls to Jedwabne that councilman Janczyk, the man who participated in the gang rape, since my interview with him has not wanted to make statements in the name of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, but has filed a suit against the Gazeta for a million dollars in damages. At least that is what he says. I reminded one of the people I talked to that to file a suit, Janczyk would have had to pay a deposit of about a hundred thousand dollars.
MARCH 28, 2001
Jan Skrodzki has come from Gdańsk; we’re driving to Radziłów tomorrow. In the evening I take Jan to a Ministry of Justice training center near Serock. I want to introduce him to Ignatiew, who is there on a professional training course. In the middle of Skrodzki’s tale about the massacre in Radziłów, Ignatiew suddenly turns to me: “This was your people being killed. It must be hard for you to hear these things.”
Ignatiew’s concern is particularly touching because he doesn’t seem the type of person who readily comes out from under the shell of his official persona.
I try to understand what really happened during the Soviet occupation.
The historian Dariusz Stola brought to my notice how the fact that the Germans were present in this area in the first weeks of September 1939 permits us to compare the behavior of the locals toward Jews in 1939 and 1941. (In 1939 the Germans appeared in a gentler guise, but the differences were not dramatic enough to explain the events of late June and early July 1941.) In September 1939, when Jews were returning to the homes they had left empty for the time it took the German army to pass through, they found them looted by their Polish neighbors. In June 1941, even before the German troops arrived, pogroms, lootings, and killings took place. In September 1939, a large part of the population felt alienated from and hostile to Jews. In June 1941, an explosion of hatred followed. Alternative: the hostility erupted into violence. What happened in those two years of Soviet occupation to make neighbors hate each other so much?
There aren’t many good witnesses on the subject here. Although I would bridle when people started bringing up Jewish collaboration with the Soviets in the context of Jedwabne (absolving oneself of guilt by blaming the victims is a dirty tactic), in the end I became convinced that, beyond prewar anti-Semitism, the key to figuring out what happened on July 10
was the Soviet occupation. That was the fuse.
4
You Didn’t See That Grief in Jews
or, Polish and Jewish Memory of the Soviet Occupation
It is New Year’s Eve 1940, a Saturday, and a dance is about to start in the former Catholic House, which has been turned into a House of Culture. More than a year has passed since the Red Army invaded the town. The town is no longer in Poland but in western Belorussia. The inhabitants themselves voted for this and took Soviet passports. What else could they do, since refusing to vote could mean deportation? Besides fear and forced taxes, the Soviet authorities also brought some lures with them: Saturday dances, film screenings, various festivities that may have been tedious but sometimes involved free beer. Besides, it gave them something to do. Russian women brought to town by representatives of the new political order dress up to go out. Their Polish neighbors, watching from a next-door window, laugh at them for putting on nightgowns and mistaking them for ball gowns. Jewish girls dress up while their mothers chide them that it’s still Shabbat. Many young people are going to tonight’s party, most of them Jewish, but not all. It is not until later that Poles will say only Jews went to these events.
Nowadays the residents of Radziłów and Jedwabne like to say that it was the Jews above all who joined the NKVD, who informed on others and pointed guns at Poles being deported to Siberia. From their stories you might think that in reality it was the local Jews who established the Soviet occupation. They recall how Jews jeered: “You wanted Poland without Jews, now you have Jews without Poland.”