The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “From then on the Kazakh boys hit the Polish boys but knew they shouldn’t hit me. They helped us, and they always asked for some help from me first so I wouldn’t feel insulted, and they’d give me flour, grain, milk for it. The Kazakhs barely spoke Russian, and I quickly learned to speak Kazakh. I’m sure my mother and I would never have survived without the help of the Kazakhs.

  “They didn’t like the Russians the way Poles didn’t like the Jews. In Jedwabne, when a child didn’t want to go to sleep, they said to spook him, ‘A Jew’s going to come and get you.’ And there, to spook a child, they said, ‘A Russian’s coming to get you.’

  “The climate was tough, forty degrees Celsius below zero, blizzards. I went to school but I had to stop at the ninth grade—they wouldn’t give me board then because my father was an enemy of the people. I worked in Karaganda as a mechanic in an ammunition factory. They didn’t send me to the front, just made me repair broken weapons, because they didn’t have a lot of arms to go around. Later I worked on Lake Balkhash in a bronze mine. They half-starved us. I left there looking like a skeleton.

  “In private the Russians said: ‘Russia’s our mother, Stalin’s our father. I’d rather be an orphan.’ But at kolkhoz gatherings everybody got up and said: ‘Glory to Stalin.’

  “They deported four Jewish families from Jedwabne: us, Sara Kuropatwa, Chana Belbud with her children, and Kubrzańska, whose husband repaired bicycles. I survived with my mother and Sara Kuropatwa. Kubrzańska was sent to Siberia, she went to a mill to grind wheat, a blizzard got going, she lost her way and froze to death. Chana Belbud got a letter from her husband that he’d been let out of prison and he was coming to join them in Kazakhstan. He never made it; on the way he was arrested for speculation and was sentenced again. When she found out she broke down and died of heart failure. Sara Kuropatwa was married. Her husband returned to Poland in 1945, looked for her, didn’t find her, and with a new wife he made his way to Palestine in 1947. There he found out Sara was alive and so he had two wives. She never forgave him to the end of her life, and never wanted to speak to him again.

  “On the way back from Siberia I met Soviet soldiers who’d been at the front around our region. They told me I wouldn’t find anyone I knew because the Germans and Poles had killed all the Jews. I got to Brest-Litovsk on a repatriation train. At the border they didn’t meet us with flowers but with stones. It wasn’t even all Jews on the train, there were some Poles as well, but from rage at the Jews, they didn’t mind beating a few of their own, too. I was advised not to show myself in Jedwabne.

  “When I went back to Poland, and heard what happened, I asked, ‘Dear God, where were You?’ For a moment I stopped believing in God. It’s a cruel subject, better not to speak of it. If you didn’t have Jewish blood, I would never say this to you.

  “I wonder what would have happened to me if I’d been in Jedwabne that tenth of July. Would some Polish pal of mine have hidden me? I doubt it. After all, my Jewish friends all perished, no one hid them. The Poles ceased being friends to us by 1938. Ryś Ostrowski didn’t even say hello to me in the street—why would he rescue me? Maybe some friend would have burned me? It was my friends who murdered my friends.

  “I knew I wanted to leave Poland as soon as possible. The State Repatriation Office sent us to a suburb of Szczecin. Then came the pogrom in Kielce. I often heard people say, ‘How come there are so many Jews left? Didn’t Hitler do away with them?’ If they saw a lone Jew they’d rough him up. I had trained in Russia to be a metalworker, so I went to state workshops, but there they told me, ‘We don’t need Jews, go and work for the secret police.’ But I didn’t want that kind of job.

  “I joined the underground group Bricha; we left Poland without any papers. I walked to Czechoslovakia, from there to Austria and onward, almost halfway across Europe on foot. Then the British caught us on the northern coast of Palestine, arrested us, beat us, and sent us to a camp on Cyprus.1 I managed to run away from there. Mama had got to Palestine earlier. She got here in 1947. Her two brothers and sister had moved here before the war, and my uncles adopted my sister, because we hadn’t received permission to emigrate. Here I met my wife. She’s from Łomża, her father worked at the town hall before the war. The Soviets arrested him and sent him and his family to Kazakhstan. They got away in 1946, like thousands of Jews after the Kielce pogrom.

  “Mechajkał Wajnsztajn, one of those five louts who served the Soviets, was mobilized with the Red Army. He survived the war that way and came to Palestine in 1947. He had the nerve to visit my mother there to tell her it wasn’t he who’d denounced us but someone else. A few boys and I were ready to take his head off. I never raised a hand against anyone before then, but I was ready to kill him. My mother talked me out of it and begged me to spare his life. She told me his wife, Nehame Horowitz of Jedwabne, was pregnant and I mustn’t make any more Jewish orphans.

  “From the ship that brought me to the coast of Palestine I went straight to the front. In the army I did arms maintenance. In 1962, Adenauer gave Ben-Gurion arms and they sent me to an anti-air artillery school in Germany. Ben-Gurion introduced the principle that if you had a state passport it had to have a Hebrew name, so that was when I changed my surname from Grajewski to Ronen. I lived with German soldiers and used to think in Poland that would have been impossible, to treat a Jew that decently.

  “I’ll never go to Jedwabne; I wouldn’t survive it. The church poisoned people so that they turned into beasts. You can count on your ten fingers the Jews who survived from Jedwabne. The priest knew, the Łomża bishop knew, but not a word, lips shut, they didn’t say anything to their flock to restrain them. It’s painful.

  “Look at this photograph from 1938, from the Jewish summer camps my father organized for the CENTOS, the national Jewish organization that helped children in Jedwabne. The photo survived because we sent photographs to my uncle in Palestine and after he died I found it at his children’s. First row from the right: he was burned, he was burned, she was burned. That’s Jospa Lewin, Józef Lewin’s sister, who was tortured by Poles in the marketplace right after the Germans came, and she was burned with the others. In the second row, Motłe Farbowicz, second from the right, emigrated to South America before the war. The rest: he was killed, he was killed, he was killed…”

  Journal

  JUNE 3, 2001

  After my return from Israel I go through back issues of the Gazeta. Adam Michnik’s reply to Leon Wieseltier’s piece: “For many years after the war Poles grieved for their murdered compatriots without acknowledging that the fate of their Jewish neighbors was incomparably more tragic—an utterly exceptional tragedy in the history of humanity. On the other hand, there has prevailed among Jews—as Rabbi Klenicki put it—a ‘triumphalism of pain’ … Poles also have a right to the memory of their own pain. And they have a right to expect that Jews will be aware of it as well.”

  I read about the exhumation. The conclusions are astonishing. Two graves were discovered. In the smaller grave they found charred, crushed fragments of the Lenin monument. This means a first group was driven into the barn, the one carrying the bust of Lenin, and killed inside. The other grave is outside the barn, alongside it.

  JUNE 4, 2001

  Due to the protests of religious Jews, there will be no more exhumation. Now we will never know how many people perished in the barn in Jedwabne.

  In Jedwabne what happened was not a pogrom but a massacre with a genocidal character, the historian Dariusz Stola writes in the newspaper the Republic. He cites data from eighteen hundred pogroms in the Ukraine: even when several thousand victims fell in one town, in each case only part of the Jewish community perished. He points to the effective organization and execution of the crime in Jedwabne, the different roles people played: some rounded up Jews, others searched for Jews hiding in attics and cellars, others went on horseback to catch fleeing Jews on the edges of town. Stola also draws attention to the order in which people were killed—first the able-bodied men�
�and to the division of labor—a group of killers striking with irons and clubs, one who sets fire to the barn, the ones who joined in to help, often visitors from nearby villages, and the ubiquitous onlookers. When the men accused in the 1949 trial withdrew in court the statements they’d made during the investigation, they claimed to have been part of that last category.

  A crime on this scale, Stola argues, could not have been committed from a “common impulse” or an uncoordinated explosion of hatred. There was a power structure in what he calls the “Jedwabne state,” which had its own hierarchy: Germans on top, then Karolak, Sobuta, Wasilewski, Bardoń, the town authorities in those first days, then the Laudańskis and other helpers of death. People knew that day that the authorities would permit violence against Jews, that violence was expected and would be rewarded with a share of the spoils.

  JUNE 5, 2001

  Antonina Wyrzykowska, who saved seven Jews and now lives in America, is coming to Poland. I heard the news via a string of acquaintances that leads to Maria Sikorska, with whom Antonina will be staying. Antonina was Maria Sikorska’s domestic help for many years. Mrs. Wyrzykowski is about to arrive. I ask Maria Sikorska what Wyrzykowska told her about hiding Jews.

  “Nothing. Then one day I went to see a film—in those days they showed you a newsreel beforehand. I look and suddenly I see on the left … I recognized her red dress, even though the film was black and white … and I cried, ‘But that’s my Antonina!’ They were pinning the medal of the Righteous on her. If I hadn’t seen her there, she would never have told me about it herself. Even though I was close to her, supportive of her. She still writes me letters saying she carries my picture with her and prays for me every day. I’m eighty-eight years old, and the sister I take care of is ninety-five; we’re probably both kept alive by the force of Antonina’s prayers.”

  I knew Maria Sikorska was one of the four Lew sisters, renowned Jewish beauties before the war, two of whom married well-known Polish poets.

  I say, “Mrs. Wyrzykowski, who rescued seven Jews, must have liked the idea that it was you, someone from a Jewish family, who showed her so much kindness.”

  “Well, you know, one doesn’t speak of such things,” Ms. Sikorska replies. “Antonina has no idea, when she got back from Jerusalem, she brought me rosary beads.”

  Wyrzykowska arrives. Well-groomed, pretty, warm, laughing, or rather nervously giggling. She gives brief answers to my questions, and Ms. Sikorska adds to them. It is Sikorska who tells me Wyrzykowska is still cared for by the people she saved.

  “Remember when you came back from America and brought a hundred photographs, and on one of them you’re lying on a sun bed and Ms. Kubrzańska is handing you a drink on a tray?” says Ms. Sikorska with evident amusement at the reversal of roles in her housekeeper’s life.

  I ask Mrs. Wyrzykowski why for so many years she didn’t even tell Ms. Sikorska that she sheltered Jews.

  “Well, you know, one doesn’t speak of such things,” she says, repeating the exact words I heard from Sikorska only a moment earlier.

  The Institute of National Remembrance has released the following sensational news on the results of the aborted exhumation: in the remains of one of the victims they found a cartridge case from a Mauser rifle that shows burn marks, indicating that shots were fired at this person at the entrance to the barn, and a brass part that was melted on the inside.

  It all makes sense, except that no one fired any shots. It can’t be an accident that in Radziłów witnesses speak of shooting (which doesn’t mean Germans were present, because Poles fired shots with guns they got from the Soviet storehouse), whereas in Jedwabne even those who saw nothing but SS uniforms heard no shots. Why is the Institute of National Remembrance creating this farce?

  One way or another, we know that a front line ran through Jedwabne at least twice in the twentieth century. First was the front line in World War I, in 1915, then in January 1945, when there was fighting in the immediate vicinity of the town and there were Soviet and German corpses everywhere. I heard about this from several Jedwabne locals, who said, “There were as many corpses as grains of sand on the seashore.” So that’s why there were so many cartridge cases in the ground.

  The Germans didn’t shoot anyone, but what was their role? I have no doubt that the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, and before that in Radziłów, was part of a German operation carried out across a wide stretch of territory. It’s hard to imagine Poles supplied with alcohol and guns—as in Radziłów—killing Jews on their own initiative while the police sat quietly by, without any concern that they might soon become targets as well. We know the directive issued by Reinhard Heydrich, then chief of the Reich Main Security Office, on June 29, 1941: “No obstacles should be placed in the way of aspirations toward self-cleansing in anti-Communist or anti-Jewish circles in the newly occupied territories. Rather, such aspirations should be provoked without leaving traces, and if need be they should be intensified and led onto the right track, however in a way that prevents the local ‘self-defense groups’ from later citing any orders or political assurances given them … The aim is to provoke local popular pogroms.”

  But what happened in Wąsosz, Radziłów, and Jedwabne goes beyond what we are accustomed to calling a pogrom; what’s more, that total massacre was committed more effectively and quickly with each new approach. In Wąsosz, the killing was done house by house. At night the locals broke into homes, killed their victims with axes and clubs, then drove the bodies off to a place outside town. In Radziłów, all Jews, young and old, were driven into the barn, many got away, the hunt went on for two more days, the escapees were brought to one place and killed there. Thus the individual killings were an essential supplement to the massacre. In Jedwabne, the ones who could have most easily fled or defended themselves were made to carry the Lenin statue, led out of town, and killed first. The several dozen individual murders were an epilogue, not a prologue to the crime.

  The Germans came to Radziłów in two cars on the morning of July 7, and the wagons of the peasants in the area had been on the move since daybreak. That is certain. Stanisław Ramotowski saw them, and the night before he was warned of the pogrom that was under way, otherwise he’d never have managed to hide the Finkelsztejn family. From conversations I’ve had with witnesses, it seems that a few Germans appeared in the marketplace on the morning of July 7 and ordered the Poles to kill all the Jews. Does that mean the local population was organizing a pogrom that day and the Germans, hearing about it, came to town to direct their actions, suggesting one collective murder? In accounts from Jedwabne one keeps hearing about the same small group of Germans—one or two cars—who the day before probably had a meeting with Mayor Karolak and the temporary town government. In other words, the Germans urged the town’s leadership to carry out a collective murder. But Szmul Wasersztejn remembers that at the meeting, it was the town representatives who were unanimous in saying all Jews had to be destroyed: “When the Germans proposed to spare a Jewish family from each professional group, Bronisław Śleszyński replied, ‘We have enough professionals of our own.’” Is it possible that in the case of Jedwabne the Germans only expressed their approval and instructed the Poles on how best to carry out the crime, and then helped the Poles round up the Jews in the market? That version would seem to be supported by the fact that the people who didn’t want to take part didn’t leave the house that day, or left town to visit relatives or friends in the area. One can only hope prosecutor Ignatiew is able to establish all of this.

  JUNE 6, 2001

  I drive to Jedwabne, where I’ve arranged to talk to two schoolteachers. A teacher from the gymnasium told me that in class, when they were working on a nineteenth-century novel that includes the character of a poor Jew, the children said it would be a good idea to stone him. And when a friend of hers once asked them how they imagined other peoples, it was simply shameful what the children wrote about Jews.

  “The only accepted life model here is to put money in the tray on
Sunday and then drink all week, beat your wife, and moan about the Jews,” says a high school teacher. “You should hear the things that are said in the teachers’ lounge. The atmosphere is so tense that arguments don’t get through to people. And the kids at school are constantly telling Jewish jokes. They even get up in class and ask why there are so many Jews in Poland. Once, I tried to turn the subject around, I said they felt threatened because they didn’t know anything about Jews, about their history, their culture, that they need knowledge, because it’ll make their lives easier, upon which one pupil got up and said, ‘Why should I study if the Jews are in charge anyway.’ Where my family comes from I don’t hear this constant griping about Jews. And it has always been like this here, even before Gross published his book. Probably because the Poles killed them here and enriched themselves on their Jewish property?”

  She herself is not from Jedwabne. When she came here in the sixties, she would hear people say, “The Poles did it,” but she only found out what had happened here when she made friends with a colleague, a woman born in Jedwabne. During the war, this woman lived on the little square where the Lenin monument stood. She told her what she saw through the window: Jews falling down carrying big chunks of the smashed Lenin, and Poles finishing them off on the spot. The woman’s mother, who hid a Jew in the attic that day, often returned in memory to the crime, even gave details, but was afraid to mention names, apart from one: Kubrzyniecki, who had long since died. Her father told her how one day a local guy who had worked for them for years came to the house. In a new coat, with a signet ring on his finger, he declared he wouldn’t be coming to work anymore, because he and his wife were “taken care of.” Her father told him, “I don’t go around in a dress coat every day, just a worn shirt, but mine doesn’t stink.”