The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  As usual, the sensational material—Germans committed the atrocity at Jedwabne—was on the front pages, whereas this unappealing truth did not receive any particular attention in the media.

  DECEMBER 21, 2001

  In Łomża visiting the Cytrynowiczes. I reconstruct Jan’s life story from my notes, checking the details with him.

  It was 1928. He was four years old. A cart drew up in front of his mother’s house in Ostrołęka and some people loaded him onto it. The person who ordered the kidnapping was his father, Jakub Cytrynowicz, who had left his Jewish wife for a Polish woman and decided his son should live with them in Wizna and receive a Christian upbringing.

  From that time on his name was Jan. Once, some Ostrołęka Jews came to Wizna who had been asked by his mother to take him back from his father, but Jakub called for friends of his, National Party squad members who went around breaking Jews’ windows, and they wrested the boy from his mother’s envoys.

  “His father didn’t get along with his first wife, who was Jewish,” Jan Cytrynowicz’s wife, Pelagia, says, “but he had five children with her. Four of them as a Jew, because he left when she was pregnant, and a fifth, a girl, after he’d become a Catholic and traveled to Ostrołęka on business. That’s the kind of man he was.”

  Jakub Cytrynowicz later abducted two more of his sons. This time he hired a photographer who went from house to house offering to take pictures. Jakub promised him twenty zlotys. He was supposed to grab the older boy and the daughter Sara, whom he’d already somehow managed to have baptized, because Jan remembers they called her Irena in his father’s house. But the photographer took two boys, one of them still too young to walk. For that mistake Cytrynowicz deducted ten zlotys from his fee.

  I ask Jan Cytrynowicz if he was friends with Jewish children in Wizna.

  “It was like this: Jews saw me as a goy, Poles saw me as a convert. Because I’d been baptized, I didn’t have Jewish friends. And as long as I got along with my Polish friends, there was no difference, but when we quarreled I would get: ‘you Jew,’ ‘clipped dick,’ ‘because you come from Jewish stock.’ When someone cracked a joke about Jews they’d look to see if I was laughing along.”

  Jan and his stepmother worked with his father, learning the leather trade. “My stepmother was a kind, noble woman,” he remembers. “She was better to us than a mother is to many children. And we were always tormenting her. Father would say, ‘Go bother your stepmother.’ And we did. She obeyed him, too; she was in love with him and yielded to him. She raised us and she worked all day from dawn to dusk in his workshop in the bargain.”

  After he turned thirteen his father allowed him to visit his mother in Ostrołęka. He went once, remembered the taste of matzo, but he didn’t want to go back. He remembers the baptisms of his brothers, his first communion, and his confirmation. He was an altar boy, and his father played in the church orchestra.

  I tell Jan that I spoke about him in Israel with Awigdor Kochaw, who was in the same class as one of his brothers. Kochaw remembered kids calling the Cytrynowicz boys “clipped dick.” Wincenty Dobkowski in turn recalled Jan’s father walking around the marketplace on Yom Kippur with a pig snout on a stick to spite the Jews.

  “Nonsense,” says Jan Cytrynowicz.

  But Pelagia enters the fray: “Don’t you say anything good about your father or I’ll get upset.”

  “My father was what he was, but he didn’t let anyone push him around,” Cytrynowicz says. “He went along with the nationalists’ cries against the Jews, but he never joined the boycott of Jewish trade and services, because he would have lost on it. He had himself shaved by the Jew Froim. He bought veal shanks at a good price from Jewish butchers, because they didn’t know how to remove one vein from the shanks and therefore the meat wasn’t kosher. He had five workers in his leather workshop, and those shanks made it cheaper for him to keep them.”

  Pelagia interrupts him: “I’d really like to know when they ate those veal shanks. In the morning they prepared a pot of potatoes and kasha with milk, and that was supposed to last the family and the workers all day. But he ate something better all by himself in his room. I know because my aunt, Jan’s stepmother, told me when we lived with her after the war.”

  “I don’t approve of his behavior,” Jan confesses, “beginning with his belonging to a nationalist organization, his going around with them and yelling, ‘Bully the Jew.’ We lived in a two-story house. Downstairs was our apartment and workshop, and the Czapnickis lived upstairs. They traded in saccharine, and their son Chaim was a member of a Zionist organization. They would have meetings and sometimes parties at home. Father was always quarreling with them, and once, when he was drunk, he went upstairs to make a scene; he wanted a fight, but it was he who got a licking. Out of spite he informed on Czapnicki, telling the customs office he illegally exported saccharine across the border to Prussia. For that they gave him five zlotys as a ‘border guard associate.’”

  This incident took place just before the war broke out. As soon as the Soviets arrived, a provisional government and police force were formed in Wizna. Chaim Czapnicki worked for this provisional authority. Jan Cytrynowicz attributes to this his father’s deportation by the Soviets. Czapnicki must have found the receipt for five zlotys among official papers and informed on his father. They caught him smuggling flour to Białystok. He got a five-year sentence as a “dangerous element” and was deported to somewhere near Chelyabinsk.

  Jan signed up to move to Wołkowysk (now in Belarus). He worked in a cement factory and went to the technical school attached to the factory. When the Germans arrived they closed the school and he lived in poverty, living now with one, now with another friend. Once, he was on a train and a policeman in the railway guards, a Pole, recognized his Jewish accent. “I should have gone somewhere deeper inside the country, where there were Belorussians, Lithuanians, Tatars, because where there were a lot of different nationalities each one had its own accent and it was harder to pick out a Jew.”

  He was put on a transport to the Wołkowysk ghetto. It was the winter of 1941 to ’42. He was sixteen. He spoke no Yiddish, and was baptized. A Pole among Jews. “Not that they picked on me or reproached me with anything. But you felt it in the air, and no one spoke to me.”

  He worked in the slaughterhouse, flaying animals. One day there was a commotion during a transport to the ghetto and he escaped. He survived, he says, because he was alone. It wasn’t hard for him to run away, but his contemporaries had sisters, mothers, grandmothers in the ghetto, and it wasn’t easy to decide to leave their families behind. Jan was hidden by classmates. He saw a notice on the street that anyone who brought a Jew to the police would get a kilo of sugar. Once, he saw a terrified boy with Semitic features yanked along by a man. When it became more and more difficult to find a place to stay with anyone in town, he began wandering in the direction of Wizna. On the road in Grądy he managed to find work chopping wood in a German kitchen. When the Germans knew the end of the war was drawing near, they requisitioned cows and horses, took him as a carter, and told him to herd the animals westward. Toward the end of May or the beginning of June 1944, before the front halted at the Biebrza river, he realized he was near Radziłów, where he used to go before the war, and he ran away. He hid in the area, again working for Germans, in field kitchens.

  When the war ended he found his stepmother in Jedwabne. In 1947 his father returned home. He’d been director of a shoemaker’s workshop in the Soviet Union and had done some black-market business on the side. He’d done well: he kept gold rubles and gold in the lining of his clothes. “My father soon found himself a new woman, and he persuaded Józek to testify that his stepmother had collaborated with the Germans during the war. That was so she wouldn’t get anything in the divorce.”

  Józek was the youngest brother, the one stolen from his mother before he could walk, and he’d spent the whole war with his stepmother. Their house in Wizna was bombed in the first days of the war and their ste
pmother had moved to Jedwabne with Józek because it was “easier to find housing there.” Someone informed the authorities that Józek was Jewish and the police came for him. They dressed him in thick clothes and used him as a training object for dogs. They would shout “Jude” and the dogs would attack him. He wouldn’t have survived if his stepmother hadn’t bribed the occupation-time mayor with moonshine and pork fat. The mayor declared to the Germans that Józef (or Jósek) Cytrynowicz was a Polish child, Jakub Cytrynowicz had merely given him his name when he married a widow who was pregnant. It worked. They released him and employed him as a stable boy at the police station.

  After his father left his stepmother, Jan went on living with her while working with his father at a leather workshop. They quarreled more and more often. “Father only recognized the patriarchy. He wanted me to obey him and I wanted to get married and make a life of my own.”

  Pelagia: “They fell out over me. When Jan and I got married, he never spoke another word to me. You tell the whole truth now, Jan. Whatever awful things my father-in-law came up with, he’d not hesitate to do them. He liked disputes, he always had to be at odds with someone. Did you tell her how he put his own son in jail?”

  After 1989, Jan Cytrynowicz got in touch with the Jewish community and now regularly meets up with two people of Jewish origin who live in Łomża.

  “At times I’m not even ashamed I’m a Jew, like when I’m with you,” Cytrynowicz remarks with a kind of wonder.

  I realize I don’t know his Jewish name or the Jewish names of his father and brothers. It is an effort for him to recall them. His father was Szajsa, Tadek was Szmul, and he doesn’t remember Józef’s original name.

  “And you?”

  “Jesio.”

  He seems spooked by the sound of his own Jewish name said aloud.

  “I’m telling you things so personal I never told them to anyone. So I’ll tell you one more thing. I was so ashamed of my mother before the war that when she came to see us at our father’s house, I wouldn’t go to her for anything in the world. Because she was Jewish. That’s the way it is: a Jew who’s reminded he’s a Jew feels fear and shame.”

  I’ve often encountered the phenomenon of shame for one’s Jewishness in Poland. I remember what a problem this was for the prominent Polish writer Marian Brandys, whom I interviewed for the Gazeta when he was already in his eighties. I knew his father had been arrested before the war in the witch hunt against Jewish bankers. I asked him about the experience of being Jewish in prewar Poland. The questions were painful for him. Marian once said an extraordinary thing to me: “I’m not ashamed of my background, but it pains me to talk about it.” I told him about my daughters, Ola and Maniucha, who went to a Jewish kindergarten and taught me about Jewish customs and holidays. It shocked him that anyone could want to be Jewish of his own free will, and he worried about my possibly harming my children.

  I asked him what was most difficult for him in being a Pole of Jewish origin. He replied, “When I was interned in a camp for officers in Woldenberg, and the native Polish officers demanded a separate barracks for the Jewish officers.”

  There, denouncers identified Jews to the camp leadership. In the Jewish barracks there were a considerable number of Poles from families who’d been asssimilated for generations, and some of them only found out about their roots at that time. In the Polish barracks a group of officers organized anti-Semitic talks, based on materials supplied by the Germans. Brandys felt he couldn’t bear the humiliation of proving his Polishness and decided to formally convert to Judaism. History is for him the foundation of identity, so he asked a friend, a scholar of Hebrew literature, to tell him about the Jewish kings. He went to bed full of good intentions to learn Jewish history, but when he woke up in the morning he realized he didn’t remember a thing and till the end of his life, no matter what barracks they put him in, his king would remain the Polish king Łokietek, not King David, and his homeland would be the Polish language.

  He devoted one of his books to his time spent in Woldenberg, without once mentioning the Jewish barracks.

  DECEMBER 30, 2001

  A visit to Antonina Wyrzykowska to wish her Happy New Year.

  I ask her about various things I learned from Wasersztejn’s book. But Miss Antonina, as usual, doesn’t remember. I read her a description of one of the women she hid giving birth and Antonina bringing scissors to cut the umbilical cord. Wyrzykowska would make a good actress. Her eyes widen, she can’t believe Szmul would make up something like that. She’s so convincing I could almost take that terrifying episode from Szmul’s time in hiding as just another one of his fantasies, if it weren’t for the fact that Antonina’s husband, Aleksander, mentions it in a letter sent to Yad Vashem in the sixties.

  10

  Only I Knew There Were Seven of Them

  or, The Story of Antonina Wyrzykowska

  If it hadn’t been for her, there’s no way he would have survived the war. And if it hadn’t been for his testimony, the truth about Jedwabne would never have come to light. Antonina Wyrzykowska and Szmul Wasersztejn met as teenagers. She was sweet, pretty, cheerful; to the end of her life she was a good-looking woman and she giggled like a teenager. He was a homely redhead and a Jew. First fate threw them together unexpectedly and then separated them.

  Wyrzykowska never told her children or anyone else what happened in Jedwabne. She didn’t want to tell me about it, either. I had to get the truth out of her gradually, building on what I already knew.

  “Did you in Janczewko,” I asked, “know right away who had killed the Jews in Jedwabne? The Germans or the Poles?”

  “Who did it I don’t know to this day; after all, I wasn’t there.”

  “Did people mention the names of any of the killers?”

  “How would I know things like that?”

  “Miss Antonina, you know very well…”

  “My child, would you like some more tea, or a piece of gingerbread, maybe?”

  We spoke many times, and she was always very careful about what she said. She tried to give the impression that she didn’t know anything, didn’t remember anything. Only occasionally, especially when I wasn’t taking notes, she would let something slip.

  Izrael Grądowski (Józef Grądowski after the war). Next to him his wife, Fajga, and their sons: Abram Aaron, Reuwen, and Emanuel. Jedwabne, 1930s. Izrael, one of the Jews saved by Antonina Wyrzykowska, was the only one of the family to survive the war. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

  Jankiel Kubrzański (Jack Kubran after the war), one of the Jews saved by Antonina Wyrzykowska. He is the small boy standing on a stool; his mother, Brosze Kubrzańska, is holding him. Next to them his great-grandmother is holding his sister, Giteł (right), and cousin Judes. His aunt Atłasowicz, Judes’s mother, is holding her other daughter, Małka. Jedwabne, 1920s. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

  “You could see smoke and hear screams, and it was five kilometers from Janczewko to Jedwabne. Soon we knew what had happened. I cried, my mother cried, and one of our neighbors did, too. There were a lot of people in Janczewko who didn’t cry, because they saw the Jews as enemies. Czesia Wądołowska was rushing back and forth to Jedwabne with sacks. She brought back furs, till she hurt herself with all that lugging and died soon after.”

  On another occasion she sighed, and said: “Before the war I did the day’s work my father owed the church, which was under construction, and I should have felt at home there. But when I saw women come to church after the war in fur coats that had belonged to Jews, I didn’t feel at home there anymore.”

  Another time she confessed: “You feared neighbors more than anyone else. If anyone had guessed we were hiding Jews none of us would be alive today. And there’s still fear, because of the men who beat me up after the war for hiding Jews—three are still alive.”

  “And who were they?”

  “How would I remember after all these years?”

  She was born in 1916 and lived in Janczewko, a settlement n
ear Jedwabne—not more than a dozen cottages from the road. Her father, Franciszek Karwowski, spent his time working, praying, and helping others. He never swore. He never missed Sunday Mass. When one of his neighbors stole from him he prayed for the Lord to forgive him because he knew not what he did. Antonina’s mother, Józefa, scolded him, “You fool, pray louder, so they can take everything we have.” Antonina left school after second grade. Her father “bribed” the Jedwabne principal to let his daughter leave school before the mandatory grade, because she was needed to work.

  “At least I can sign my name,” says Antonina.

  At sixteen, she was married off by her parents to a neighbor from the house across the road, Aleksander Wyrzykowski.

  There were no Jews in Janczewko. Antonina went to market in Jedwabne and sometimes ran into Szmul there when she brought cloth to his mother, and she sometimes had her bicycle fixed by Jakub Kubrzański, who worked in his father’s workshop. Later she saved both of their lives.

  “Some time after the Jews were burned in the barn,” Wyrzykowska recounted, “my husband saw Szmulek sitting on the steps of his house. He asked him if he wanted to come and work with us; at that time Poles could employ Jews and pay the Germans for the labor. Szmul jumped on the wagon right away and they drove to Janczewko. From that time onward he helped us in the fields.”

  He was there officially—Antonina’s husband managed to arrange with the German-appointed mayor, Marian Karolak, for Szmul not to have to report to the police station in Jedwabne every week. But they didn’t let a lot of people know that Szmul was working with them. The Wyrzykowskis and Wasersztejn together, trading with the ghetto, earned what was required to pay the Germans for the right to employ a Jew. They’d go to the ghetto on Sunday, when traffic was heaviest, because Jews who worked on farms during the week would be going back. There were many people then trading with the ghetto, mostly buying up anything of any value at low prices, a loaf of bread for a ring. The Wyrzykowskis and Szmul were exceptions in that regard—they had to make a little money, but mainly they were trying to get food to the hungry.