The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Jewish Tarbut School. Radziłów, 1930s. The school was closed during the Soviet occupation. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein)

  Halutz youth organization. Jedwabne, 1930. Approximately fifteen of them managed to get to Palestine before the war. The organization was disbanded during the Soviet occupation. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

  This is seen differently by Jews. They count on the fingers of one hand the Jewish collaborators they knew, and explain that the clear majority of the religious community of merchants and craftsmen could not possibly be happy with the Soviet system, which was atheistic and deprived them of their private property. And in fact, although the Holocaust came later, the Soviet occupation had already destroyed the entire fabric of social life built up over centuries: the Jewish municipal government was liquidated, Hebrew schools were closed, Yom Kippur became a normal workday, political parties were dissolved, and Zionist activists and Bundists were put on deportation lists.

  1.

  “In September 1939 many Jewish homes were looted,” Menachem Turek testified about the town of Tykocin to the District Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok in 1945. “It soon felt as if everything had become ownerless, not just the material property people had accumulated but even human life. The day before Yom Kippur, when the Kol Nidre was being said, when the Jews gathered in the synagogue and asked God for mercy, five trucks drove into town carrying German soldiers from the nearby main road who were retreating in accordance with the treaty with Soviet Russia, and they hacked open the locked doors of Jewish shops with axes, loaded everything onto cars, and left town, happy with the loot they’d managed to grab.”

  “The Germans didn’t have time to commit many murders,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote in her memoir, having loaded her family and possessions on a wagon upon hearing news of the war. They set off in the direction of the nineteenth-century fort town Osowiec in the hope that Polish forces would stop the German army there. When she returned to Radziłów on September 16, she found her house looted by neighbors. “On Yom Kippur the Germans went to the synagogue, threw out the men praying there, ordered them to take off their coats and give them to Poles.” The date was September 23, 1939.

  2.

  The Jews and the Poles of Jedwabne and its environs did not share the same fate and do not share the same memory.

  For Jews the invasion of Poland by the German army on September 1, 1939, was a nightmare scenario made real. Terrifying reports had already reached them from the Reich, and these were confirmed by the conduct of the Wehrmacht, which deliberately humiliated Jews and egged on the local populations to do the same. For most Jews the Soviet occupation also meant hard times, but it offered some hope of survival, and also a certain thinly disguised satisfaction that the Poles were now as badly off as they were themselves.

  For the Poles, the Soviet occupation meant the loss of independence. It’s true that the German army marched eastward in early September 1939, but there was a powerful belief that the Germans would soon be defeated, as had been proclaimed by prewar propaganda. People had been told to be more afraid of Soviet Russia than of Hitler. It was only with the Stalin-Hitler pact that the inhabitants of the area realized they were captives. Added to this were fear of deportation and the inevitable deterioration of living conditions caused by the taxes imposed by the Soviets.

  The Red Army entered the Jedwabne area on September 29, following the agreement on the withdrawal of German troops. The NKVD was the army’s advance guard, giving the local Communists their instructions; hence the identical scenario for all places of welcome: in a marketplace decorated with posters and red flags, the Soviets were greeted with flowers presented by delegations of local residents waiting, in accordance with ancient Polish custom, with bread and salt, at tables covered with red cloth.

  The barn owner’s daughter, Janina Biedrzycka, remembers that the Soviets were welcomed to Jedwabne by two Jewish couples, Socher Lewinowicz and his wife, and the Chilewskis. But when I question her further, it turns out she also remembers two Polish Communists and a word of welcome pronounced by a Pole. But besides the “official” hosts of the welcome ceremony a sizable group of rubbernecks, children, and young people gathered. Many of the testimonies of Poles deported to the USSR preserved at the Hoover Institution repeat that Jews were in the majority. A locksmith from Grajewo described “individual Jews and a paltry number of Communist sympathizers welcoming the Red Army with bread and salt and a red banner reading: ‘With Stalin into France and Great Britain.’ Because these imperialist states provoked the war and Comrade Stalin would liberate us without war.”

  It’s hard to say if the majority of those welcoming the Russians were really Jews. The event was momentous enough for many residents of the town to want to have a look (after all, Janina Biedrzycka remembers the welcoming of the Red Army because she was there, too). But among the cheering crowd, apart from a few Polish Communists—the Communist movement was weak in these parts—Jews were no doubt in the majority, because they had reason to feel a sense of relief. In Jewish accounts it looks like this:

  “The Jews breathed a little more freely, but not entirely, because various marauders turned up in town, as well as some reactionary elements who sympathized with the Germans fleeing the approaching Red Army,” said Menachem Turek of the situation in Tykocin. “Those people spread crazy rumors, such as we were already familiar with, for example that Jews in Grodno and other towns had poured boiling water on the heads of Polish soldiers, and they said all Jews should be killed. This inflammatory behavior had no effect, because on the first day of Yom Kippur, Soviet tanks thundered into town and for quite a while their noise silenced or muffled the voice of poisonous anti-Semitism—the anti-Semitism nourished by the right-wing nationalist regime dominant here in the last few years before the war. The Jews of Tykocin received and saluted the Red Army with special sympathy, they felt free, breathed fresh air, and gratefully and respectfully offered their services to the Soviet authorities, who began to introduce an order based on the principles of love for humanity and nations, equal rights, freedom and equality.”

  In a book of memory at the Israeli kibbutz named after the Ghetto Fighters, Meir Paparle remembered, “When the Russians came we were very happy, my brother Wolf Ber was simply beyond himself with joy. Russian soldiers came and asked him for something and he wouldn’t even take money from them, he was so happy. The whole town was delighted with the Russian troops.” In 1941, Paparle was fifteen years old, lived in Jedwabne, and was called Jedwabiński.

  Turek, a graduate of Batory University in Vilnius, already had Communist sympathies before the war. Meir Jedwabiński’s three older brothers were also Communists (in Jedwabne there was another such family, where four of five sons were Communists—the Catholic Krystowczyk family). But even Jews who felt very remote from Communism felt relief at the entry of the Red Army. Like Chaja Finkelsztejn, wife of a Zionist activist, from one of the wealthiest families in Radziłów, and whose memoir shows that she had no love for Communists at all. “We heard on the radio that our area was passing into Soviet hands, and we thought maybe we would survive,” she wrote. “Many hoped that when the Soviets arrived they’d make the Poles return the things they’d looted from us.”

  3.

  Before Soviet administration was established, many towns organized civilian guards. The Soviets renamed them auxiliary militia divisions. Polish accounts repeated that they were made up of Jews. The Jews themselves talk about Jews who made themselves of service to the Soviets in this first period, but they emphasize that they were the exception rather than the rule.

  Meir Ronen of Jedwabne, who was deported to Kazakhstan and left for Palestine after the war, told me, “There were five Jews, ruffians, lording it around Jedwabne. They ran the town in the first weeks before the Soviet authorities got set up. And a Pole, Krystowczyk, a Communist.”

  “In Radziłów, Jewish Communists put themselves at their disposal, there were some bootlickers, plenty of them, and they prov
oked all the misfortune,” remembered Chaja Finkelsztejn, who complained many times of the “Jewish devils,” or those who eagerly collaborated with the new authorities. The hostility between Zionists and Communists before the war now found an outlet: Jewish collaborators were only looking for ways to cheat her family.

  “In Wizna maybe five Jews followed the Communists,” Izaak Lewin told me in Israel, remembering what his father had told him, “among them one old tailor, who said, ‘I’ve been going to the synagogue for twenty years to pray for the Communists to come.’ Everyone laughed at him. The other one was Awigdor Czapnicki. When he emigrated to Israel he tried to meet up with my father, who said, ‘I don’t want to know him.’ How few Wizna Jews survived, and yet my father didn’t want to know him. That must say something about how Jewish Communists were disliked among Jews.”

  One Pole deported by the Soviets, Lucjan Grabowski, wrote of such zealots in recollections preserved by the Hoover Institution: “Three Jews armed with rifles and red armbands came to Kapice from Tykocin. They no longer said dobry dzien [“good day” in Polish] in greeting, but zdrastvuyte [Russian]. When I took a good look at them I recognized one of them, it was Fiska, the ragman’s son. His father often came to Kapice to buy rags. During the National Party’s boycott of Jews we more than once drove him out of the village with stones.”

  It’s easy to imagine those young Jews who only dreamed of getting back at their recent persecutors. The humiliated, when they can take revenge, rarely show their most sympathetic face. Swaggering around town with rifles must have seemed pretty impressive to them. They wouldn’t have hesitated to give the Soviet authorities names of National Party activists, who were both enemies of Communists and persecutors of Jews.

  In those earliest days Jews turned to the new authorities for help recovering their lost property, looted from Jewish houses and shops by their Polish neighbors right after the Germans had arrived. “A number of house searches were carried out, as a result of Jewish merchants accusing Poles of stealing various goods from them while they were away. There were a lot of arrests of people against whom local Jewish Communists had claims,” said Marian Łojewski, a locksmith from Jedwabne, in an account preserved by the Hoover Institution.

  “When the Soviets marched in, there was an outbreak of joy among Jews,” remembered Mieczysław K., a former resident of Jedwabne. “Some of the youth started wearing red armbands and joined the police. It didn’t last very long, the Soviets kicked them out; they preferred to deal with things themselves. The poorer Jews went on swaggering around a bit: from their point of view the Soviets were bringing liberation. The slightly wealthier ones felt just as much under threat of deportation as the Poles.”

  4.

  In the fall of 1939, Soviet authorities began to organize a referendum on adding the territory they had occupied in eastern Poland to western Belorussia, and elections of parliamentary representatives.

  Their propaganda machine was excellent. A witness from Downary, about fifty kilometers from Jedwabne, described the preelection campaign: “They made a little boy brought in by his father say, ‘God, give me candy.’ Then he had to say, ‘Comrade Stalin, give me candy,’ and a soldier went over to him and handed the boy a fistful of candy.” A farmer from the village of Słucz near Radziłów remembered that after voting, you were allowed to buy two hundred grams of candy, two packets of cigarettes, and two boxes of matches.

  The candidates for the western Belorussian parliament chosen were Czesław Krystowczyk, the Polish Communist from Jedwabne, and, as Tadeusz Kiełczewski of Jedwabne put it, “an illiterate floozy from the village of Pieńki-Borowe.”

  The Soviet authorities didn’t appoint Jews to local office in greater numbers than others, least of all in the municipal administration, probably thinking Jews were already more sympathetic to them than Poles, and Polish candidates would command more respect. Evidence of this is the case of Chaim Wołek, examined at a session of the Regional Party Committee in Jedwabne. Wołek was selected to represent the nearby village of Łoje-Awissa at the Regional Council of Delegates, but at a preelection meeting in the village he was “mocked as a Jew,” and withdrew his candidacy.

  Karwowski of Jedwabne remembers a story told about a local Jew who came with his rifle to arrest a certain Polkowski. “Polkowski asked him to let him go, but the Jew says: ‘Do you know who you’re talking to? I’m the government.’ Polkowski gave him a punch and ran away. Later everyone joked that Polkowski had overthrown the government.”

  “Jews only acted as militiamen at the very beginning,” Kazimierz Mocarski from near Jedwabne related. “The Soviet authorities understood they’d made a mistake, because they weren’t suited for the role. The village environment was anti-Semitic and Jews couldn’t get people to obey them. Once, three Jewish policemen turned up in my village, Nadbory, because someone had informed them that one inhabitant (unrelated to the above-mentioned witness) owned a gun, and they were ordered to take it away from him. His brother hid the double-barrel shotgun under his coat. They searched the house but didn’t have the nerve to do a body search and left empty-handed.”

  From October 1939, when western Belorussia was created, the provisional militia was replaced by the Workers and Peasants Militia. Not many locals, neither Poles nor Jews, were given jobs in the Soviet militia or administration. The Soviets brought their own cadres from eastern Belorussia—the so-called vostochniks (easterners). This is confirmed unanimously by Soviet sources and by archives in the Hoover Institution, which cover a longer period than the first few months.

  5.

  What did an ordinary day under Soviet occupation look like? In the testimonials at the Hoover Institution, the Soviet occupation is portrayed as an invasion of barbarians. The new authorities carried out a census and an inventory, to be used as instruments of pillage. They appropriated household equipment and livestock; they felled forests. A visit in the night could mean deportation, but also the looting of jewelry and clothing. Apart from the pillaging and deportations, the people I talked to emphasized another theme: the poverty and coarseness of the occupying forces. They like to recount how the Soviet officers picked rotten cabbage left in the fields, how they slaughtered pigs and cooked the meat right there in the marketplace.

  Chaja Finkelsztejn described daily life under the Soviets in her memoir: “The Soviet Army arrived in our town with its whole propaganda machine. They said they wouldn’t let workers go on foot, they’d drive cars. There were lines everywhere for bread and everything else. They formed in front of shops even before anyone knew what was going to be for sale. We took everything they gave us. That’s what it was called: dayoot [Russian for “they’re giving”]. When the Soviets came, at first Christians kept their distance and didn’t participate in the holidays we were told to celebrate. But they soon accepted the situation and joined in everything. The Soviets formed a sielsowiet, a village council with both Jews and Poles. They were much easier on the Christians than on the Jews. The life of a modest Jewish merchant was impossible, and that meant most Jews. Christians could have two and a half acres of land and sell produce on the street, and even meat, while Jews were forbidden to. So Jews entered into partnerships with Christians and sold things through them.” She described how even the workshops of poor Jews were requisitioned and turned into cooperatives, how cheders and Hebrew schools were shut down, how children had to go to school on Saturdays.

  Herschel Baker, who lives in Florida but is originally from Jedwabne, told me, “Communism literally invaded our house: a few Russians broke in and took our shoes. Those may have been the good times, but only for a person who had nothing to lose and didn’t want to buy anything. We had to work for them, not for ourselves, and we barely had enough money for bread. But we felt safer, because the local hooligans were scared. I have to admit the Russians treated everyone the same, and that was a good thing; but they took away everything you had, and of course that was bad. I already lived with my own family in Goniądz. There were a few J
ews in the police force there, and they probably liked it. I remember we Jews were unhappy with the Soviets, and the Poles were unhappy, too. Everyone was impoverished, including the rich Jews, so we were all on the same level as the Poles, who had been poorer before the war. It’s hard to say Jews rose higher, it was more like we were all reduced to the same level of poverty. I myself had to hide because I was an ‘exploiter’—I had employed thirty people before the war—and they were about to deport me.”

  6.

  “I can do without that kind of liberation, I hope it was the last one.” These words of Mendel Srul, a milkman from Łuck, are quoted by Irena Grudzińska Gross and Jan Gross in the book In Nineteen-Forty, Sweet Mother of God, They Sent Us to Siberia. Many of the older generation must have thought the same thing, at least those who had managed to build something for themselves. It was different for the young.

  They were not as fed up by the worsening living conditions, nor was keeping the Sabbath their greatest worry. It seemed to them that in western Belorussia they’d finally be able to feel at home, that a Jew was no worse off than anyone else, and they often remarked that among the Soviets, Jews even got to be generals. Soviet teachers didn’t distinguish between Jewish pupils and others, and didn’t make Jewish children sit in the back rows. Not long ago Jews had had no chance of continuing their education beyond grade school, and now they were encouraged to go back to school, and more than that, they were invited to continue their studies in the many schools attached to factories in Soviet Russia. This was the dream of a large part of Zionist youth, because that kind of education would come in handy when they were building a new state in Palestine.

  Meir Paparle’s father, who was a shoemaker in Jedwabne, became night watchman in a hospital under the Soviets. He would probably have preferred to have his own workshop, even if it kept him in poverty, so as not to be forced to work on Shabbat. But for his sons, the Soviet occupation was the chance of a lifetime to move up in society. “My brother Wolf Ber went to the Russian forces,” Paparle wrote. “He served in Jedwabne, patrolled the streets there. My other brother Ruwen also joined the Russian forces. I signed up with some other Jewish and Polish boys to go to Sverdlovsk in the Urals and work in a factory.”