by Anna Bikont
I read about Wasersztejn’s Cuban adventures until deep into the night. He describes how in the fifties many Jewish businessmen cautiously began to support Fidel Castro, because they didn’t like Batista’s repression. Szmul didn’t like Batista, either. After the revolution he thought they should sit it out, put all business on hold. He believed a more liberal regime had to come, but things got worse and worse. “Homes and stores were taken over by the government. Fidel hit the middle class. I saw the lines for meat. I began to look around for a way to get out fast. Rachela didn’t understand. She fell into a depression, cried a lot. She thought it would all pass.”
First they sent a son out of Cuba, the same one I’d talked to on the phone—Izaak, so he “wouldn’t be brainwashed.” He arrived as an eleven-year-old boy in the care of a Jewish family in Philadelphia.
Many children left Cuba at that time as part of the CIA Operation Peter Pan, whose goal was to protect young minds from Communist indoctrination. These children, now adults who have battled with the trauma of sudden separation from their parents—some for a few years, others for their whole lives—now have books written about them.
DECEMBER 7, 2001
I’ve arranged to meet Izaak. We talk in a narrow cubbyhole with boxes stacked up to the ceiling: Izaak’s firm sells medications. I have a lot of questions concerning various aspects of Szmul’s memoir, but he can’t answer any of them. His father was constantly telling him about Jedwabne; he remembered the suffering and nothing more.
On the way back I tell the cab driver I came from Poland because there’s a lot of controversy at home about a Jew from Costa Rica. He nods proudly, as if we are talking about natural resources: “Oh yes, we have a lot of well-known Jews here: the transport minister, the minister of culture, and a candidate for vice president.”
I learn that Jews here are called “Polacos.” The verb polaquair is also used for traveling salesmen, introduced here by Eastern European Jews.
I find a sentence in Wasersztejn’s diary: “In business they called me ‘Polacos,’ but it wasn’t good or bad, because in Costa Rica they really don’t care who you are.”
DECEMBER 9, 2001
I’ve been invited to a Hanukkah party at Rachela’s. Her sons Izaak and Saul are there, with two grandchildren and Rachela’s friend Maria Wiernik. The Colombian servants, two dark women of considerable volume dressed in white lace aprons, bring in food—potato latkes, doughnuts, and blintzes with sour cream, the same things Rachela and Szmul ate in their family homes at Hanukkah—at least the same to look at, because they taste simply horrible. Above all, they’re extremely sweet.
I can finally deliver my gift—the photography album to which I wrote the text, I Still See Their Faces: Photographs of Polish Jews. Happily this morning, the last day of my stay, my suitcase caught up with me after being unloaded in Nicaragua by mistake.
“He didn’t go to synagogue,” Wiernik says of Szmul, “but when any repairs were needed, who was the first to pull a check out of his pocket? Szmul. The rabbis, the lawyers, the doctors, all of them knew him well and respected him.”
Izaak drives me home. Driving down Avenida Central, San José’s main thoroughfare, we pass Szmul’s shoe stores, now run by his son. Each of them has a different name: Pompile, Zapatos, Fantasia. No chain, just dozens of small businesses.
“I have one question for you,” says Izaak. “How can a Jew live in Poland?”
I try to explain, probably not very well, because Izaak goes on to say: “When I was in Warsaw, I went to the synagogue to ask Jews the same question and none of them could tell me.”
I remember my conversation with Ramotowski about the only Jew in Jedwabne, Helena Chrzanowska, living as a Catholic in the middle of town. “How can anyone live like that?” Stanisław wondered. “It’s quite different with us, we live on the outskirts, and when I go out I see my little creek, not the faces of killers.”
For myself, I am unable to fathom why either Helena Chrzanowska or the Ramotowskis were willing to go on living amid murderers. From Izaak Wasersztejn’s point of view there’s no difference between Jedwabne, Kramarzewo, and Warsaw—all of Poland is a graveyard.
DECEMBER 12, 2001
Brooklyn. The next meeting at Rabbi Baker’s. The conversation moves to Jan Gross. “He’s an honest man, a romantic figure,” says the rabbi. “But he’s no Jew.”
For a religious Jew only the mother matters, and Mrs. Gross was a Polish landowner. She was in the Home Army and participated in operations to save Jews. Jan Gross discovered quite by accident after publishing Neighbors that the first landowner in the Łomża district, then called Wiska, was his ancestor on the maternal side, Andrzej Wydźga. He said, half-joking: “In Jedwabne my peasants massacred my Jews.”
DECEMBER 13, 2001
I travel to New Jersey to meet the rabbi’s brother Herschel Baker, born in 1911. We speak English, but from time to time he interjects a perfect Polish sentence. He is kind and gentle, with great charm and a very unusual biography. Before the war he was doing very well in Poland, during the Soviet occupation he went into hiding, and during the German occupation he also hid, but he still managed to engage in trade.
“Older Jews spoke Yiddish among themselves and two languages, Polish and Yiddish, mixed harmoniously in the market,” he nostalgically remembers of Jedwabne, which he left in 1931 to move to his wife’s hometown. “We had good contacts with our Polish neighbors. I was friendliest with our neighbors’ son Franciszek Sielawa. We went to each other’s homes, played palant [rounders]. After finishing Polish school we studied at the yeshiva, but when Father died—I was sixteen—I started supporting the family and my brothers continued their studies and became rabbis. My children’s first language was Polish. We knew they’d go to Polish school, so while they were small we spoke Polish at home, not Yiddish. We knew they were about to learn Yiddish and Hebrew in the cheder, and we wanted them to speak Polish well. Otherwise, how could they live there?”
“Did you feel Poland was your homeland?”
“Of course. I was born there, lived there, had a flourishing business—manufacturing and selling clothes for men and women—and good relations with everybody. I took potatoes and grain in payment from peasants because they had no money. I employed a lot of Poles.
“Toward the end of the thirties there were already too many thugs pestering us, and almost every Jew dreamed of nothing but having a ship’s ticket in hand. Not me. Thugs stood watch at the front door of my shop—by 1938 no client would come in by the front door, but they did come in the back, because they’d rather do business with me than with Poles. They could get things cheaper from me and I never overcharged. When people had some money, they’d entrust it to me to invest, so they’d have more. Because I wouldn’t leave I lost everything—my wife and our two boys of four and six perished in Treblinka.”
He had to hide during the Soviet occupation because he was in danger of being deported as a “bourgeois element.” “I lived with peasants I knew. Before the war I’d lent them money and I’d had to visit them many times to get it back, so we already knew each other well. I went home briefly when the Germans arrived and then I had to use those acquaintances again.”
When the Germans arrived, the Bakers’ (then the Piekarzes’) mother lived in Jedwabne with her brothers, the Pecynowiczes. Father Piekarz was dead, and two brothers, now Julius and Jacob Baker, lived in America. The head of the school advised them the day before the massacre to make sure they were out of town the next day. At dawn on July 10, Mrs. Piekarz heard the rumble of wagons rolling into town and later she heard screaming, so she ran to her son in Goniądz. She dressed like a Polish woman and spoke Polish without an accent, which helped her on the road. She ended up in the ghetto with Herschel and his wife and children. Only Herschel managed to hide when the Jews were deported from the ghetto.
“I was in hiding for three years. I’d go see the peasants I knew very early in the morning, at five or six. I’d ask: What do you need mos
t? They’d say: butter, potatoes, cheese, clothes, grain—good grain was expensive! I always tried to find the very best. I had maybe forty households like that in the area that I supplied; they were barter deals.”
I ask where he stored his goods.
“They weren’t storehouses but hiding places in the fields, in attics, in the gulleys left by potato storage mounds. Late at night, when everyone was asleep, I’d sleep in some barn, so the farmers wouldn’t notice. I was up before they were. If I was coming from the north I pretended I’d come from the south. I knew never to say too much, never to say where you’re going and where you’ve come from. Sometimes when I was in someone’s barn I heard what they were saying about Jews and I was frightened. But they didn’t speak badly of me, they were terrified, but friendly. Sometimes someone would take me in for a while. I lived with a village head and his sister, who was a nun; she took care of me and tried to persuade me to convert to her faith.
“When the war ended I rode a bicycle from Goniądz to Jedwabne. I met Stanisław Sielawa. I didn’t know yet he was one of the killers. ‘Herszek, you still alive?’ he said, and I heard menace in his voice. They were a nice family, poor, with five boys and one girl, they had no regular employment, and they’d work for Jews. There were more people like them, sympathetic enough, but when the opportunity presented itself they turned into murderers. I went to see an old friend of my mother’s. She advised me, ‘Don’t stay here overnight, it’s not safe. Don’t go back the same way you came, because they might be waiting for you.’ I left Jedwabne that night and never set another foot there. Not there or anywhere else in Poland.”
He landed in the United States in 1946, worked in the garment industry, dealt in real estate. Before he emigrated he transferred ownership of his house to the brother of the nun who’d sheltered him longest. “Anti-Semites beat him up for having saved a Jew. He had to pack up his wife, his two children, and flee. They settled in Gdynia. I sent him a few dollars every month. When he passed away his children wrote to me, they’d say they wanted black pants with a stripe, for example, and I’d send them.”
DECEMBER 14, 2001
A meeting with Jacob Baker, the last before my return to Poland. I decided to speak to the rabbi today about the testimonies on July 10 that have been preserved in the Jedwabne Book of Memory, about what is true and what is myth. I study it carefully. Based on texts recorded by a generation now nearing the end of its days, it is a collection of moving, clumsily written accounts of personal experience and stories heard from others; on the one hand they are airbrushed and on the other they are blackened by time. The book serves not only to reconstruct past events and the period of the Holocaust but above all to perpetuate the memory of the shtetl that was left behind and appears in nostalgic recollections as the mythical paradise of childhood.
“First I had to answer one fundamental question,” Rabbi Jacob Baker writes, “namely: should I mourn the destruction of my people, praise the beauty and spirituality of childhood memories, or should I gather the scattered remains of my community and help them change their lives, become eternal representatives of our cherished tradition? I came to the conclusion that the basic aim was to immortalize martyrs and resurrect the truth about how they lived so we—and our descendants—could come to know the essence of the moral strength that allowed our ancestors to shape successive generations of proud Jedwabne Jews up to the 15th of Tamuz, July 10, 1941. The killers not only humiliated and slaughtered their victims, they also wanted to wipe out all memory of them. They murdered them twice, first literally grinding them into the dust, and then trying to avoid responsibility for what they’d done. To forget our martyrs would be to become accomplices in their murder.”
How, then, to preserve their memory? By presenting them beautifully. The convention of the book of memory is somewhat reminiscent of the magical realism of the Latin American writers I hold dear. Facts are intertwined with fiction. The story is not subject to the rules of logic but aims to reveal the hidden meaning of events. Although good-natured jokes about this or that rabbi are occasionally cited, the picture of the whole is uniform. The town is inhabited by deeply religious Jews living in fear of God, acting in accordance with the Torah commandments, prepared to heroically sacrifice themselves for their community. Subjected to relentless persecution, they show great courage. And when they die, it is joined in prayer with their rabbi.
“The whole Jewish community with Rabbi Białostocki,” writes Herschel Baker, “embracing and kissing each other, said the Kaddish and Szmone Esre and perished in the flames.” But we know that the rabbi was forced to walk at the head of the group of men carrying fragments of the Lenin monument and was killed along with them, before the burning.
In the Jedwabne Book of Memory there is a story about a carter from Jedwabne named Kuropatwa whom Baker referred to in his speech at the July 10 ceremony: “He once saved a Polish pilot from death at the hands of the Russians, so the executioners said he didn’t have to go with the others to the barn. He spat in their faces and scorned their mercy. He didn’t want a life granted him by those murderers. He cried: ‘I go where my rabbi goes!’ His wife and daughter tried to persuade him that if he obeyed those people they all might get away with their lives. Kuropatwa declared his decision was final, that he would go with his rabbi, that they could do what they liked. His wife and daughter flung themselves on him with kisses and cried that they would go with him, and they all joined hands, ran up ahead, and jumped in among those designated for burning. All of them began to pray, led by the rabbi. They were seized by a common obsessive conviction that not one accidental thought should sully the purity of their sacrifice.”
One of the authors of the book, Itzchok Yankel Newmark (in Poland, Icek Janek Neumark), describes the moment when the Jews were driven into the barn as follows: “Stanisław Sielawa stood at the door with an axe ready to chop off the head of anyone who tried to run away. The sudden force of the hot explosion burst open the door. I saw Sielawa waving his axe, I managed to grab it from him, I caught hold of my sister, her five-year-old daughter, and her son. I saw my father collapsing into the flames.”
This heroic scene is a desperate polemic against those who say Jews went like lambs to slaughter. But there are witnesses who remember that the porter Neumark went into hiding earlier and was not in Jedwabne that day.
Neumark also tells of a feat he performed during the Polish-Bolshevik war in 1920, when soliders of the Polish army supposedly organized a provocation: they killed one of their own and dumped the body outside the house of the rabbi of Radziłów. In retribution an order was given to execute ten rabbis and fifty other prominent Jews. The only chance of ensuring their survival was bearing a letter with a plea for intervention to the bishop of Łomża, and this dangerous mission was entrusted to Neumark, who went to the bishop on horseback, evading an ambush, obtained the bishop’s favor, and managed with the aid of a letter from him to avert the execution. Due to the blessing of the rabbis who survived—we read in the book—Neumark was later able to escape the burning barn in Jedwabne and survive a concentration camp.
If the array of recollections and accounts in the Jedwabne Book of Memory constitute a mixture of fact and imagination, Neumark’s story of saving sixty Jews from a martyr’s death at the hands of demonic Polish soldiers is a complete fiction. The only part of this tale that may be true is the memory of the violence of Polish troops during the 1920 war. In the Jedwabne Book of Memory, his story is given the same status as the other testimonies. Neumark survived Auschwitz and the March of Death. He emigrated to Australia with his wife, whom he met in the camp. It was she who recorded his story for the book. Neumark himself remained illiterate to the end of his life.
In the Auschwitz Museum archive I find the year of his birth: 1910. If he really carried out his first heroic feat in 1920, he would have been a mere ten years old.
The story about Kuropatwa is also most certainly legend. None of the Polish residents of Jedwabne are able to corrob
orate it.
I have neither the heart nor the courage to talk to the rabbi about his stories being no more than edifying and moralizing fairy tales. So I listen once more to the tales of the carter Kuropatwa’s bravery. And the stories I already know so well, of how he himself as a yeshiva student in danger of losing life and passport performed the kosher slaughter of a calf, and did it in the cowshed next to the police station. His eyes sparkle when he asks me, “Have I already told you how I once saved a pious Jew from starving?”
DECEMBER 15, 2001
Right after meeting the rabbi, I set off for Lawrence, Massachusetts, to visit the Dziedzic family. It’s been six months since they emigrated to the United States. They are renting a small apartment on the first floor of a house, and seem happy.
“I go to bed,” Leszek tells me, “and in my dreams I’m in Jedwabne and I can’t get away. When I wake up luckily I’m back in America. But every night I dream of Jedwabne all over again.
“Thanks to God and the Jews we’re managing somehow,” he declares. “In Jedwabne they say Jews fixed things, and in a way they’re right because if you hadn’t helped us we wouldn’t have been able to leave.” (When he was applying for U.S. visas for the whole family I got him recommendations from Jacek Kuroń and Marek Edelman.)
Leszek sits at the computer arguing with online anti-Semites. Piotrek, their son, decided to get straight As at school, to show everyone in Jedwabne the Dziedzices are worth something after all.
DECEMBER 20, 2001
Back in Warsaw.
It becomes clear at yesterday’s press conference at the Institute of National Remembrance that there’s no evidence that the Jews in the Jedwabne barn were killed by Germans. In the spring they were calling what was found—a bullet from a 9 mm pistol issued with German officers’ equipment—proof that the Germans were not only present at the scene of the crime but also fired shots at the victims. After expert analysis it also turned out that most of the shells, until now the crowning proof, are from World War I–era Russian guns. Some of them were fired from rifles used in World War II but not introduced until after the massacre, in 1942. They should have called it “a metal capsule of unknown provenance made of tin melded from an alloy of colored metals”; that’s what experts said.