The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Zofia’s installation shows close-ups on several monitors of the faces of people listening to Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony. There are public figures like Jan Gross, friends, acquaintances, and also completely random people, seventy-five of them in all. “Some of them are listening intently, others weeping,” says Zofia, who read to them and recorded their reactions. “I cried over it like a baby many times,” Zofia tells me. “There are Poles, Jews, French people, as well as a Chinese woman, an Algerian woman, a Vietnamese woman who was reminded of the Vietnam War by the descriptions of the cruelty inflicted, or the black cleaning lady in the cultural center where I work, who later tried to console me by saying as a Pole I really don’t have to feel so guilty.”

  JANUARY 3, 2002

  I extend my leave from the Gazeta, because I’m only half done with my book.

  I’m trying to reconstruct the life of Józef, formerly Izrael or Srul, Grądowski, one of the seven Jews rescued by Antonina Wyrzykowska. I saw a prewar photo of him in the Jedwabne Book of Memory. An elegant man in pince-nez with his handsome wife, Fajga, in a low-cut dress and with three robust boys, Abram Aaron, Reuwen, and the youngest, Emanuel. A bucolic scene, photographed in the open air, a rarity in those times. I found out about him in Jedwabne; I’d read about him in trial documents and in Wasersztejn’s diary. I talked about him a lot in America with the brothers Jacob and Herschel Baker and with Lea Kubran, in Israel with Jakow Geva, and recently with Antonina Wyrzykowska.

  I’m able to reconstruct what happened to him on July 10, 1941. In the morning three Poles armed with clubs forced their way into his home; he knew them—Feliks Żyluk, who lived in the same building, best of all. They dragged the whole family out to the market square. They were led away from the square by a Pole from Szczuczyn, where Fajga came from. Grądowski never revealed his name.

  He and his wife and two of their sons moved into the provisional ghetto in Jedwabne. When in the fall of 1942 the Germans ordered all Jews to report to the police station, Grądowski was worried that they hadn’t been told to bring any tools. He thought they weren’t being summoned for work and they should run away. He managed to get to the Wyrzykowskis in Janczewko, where he hid until the end of the war.

  What happened to the rest of his family is unknown. Grądowski said his wife and children were caught by policemen and taken to the ghetto in Zambrów. However, Leon Dziedzic claims two of Grądowski’s sons were killed in Przestrzele near Jedwabne. They were hiding in a haystack in a field belonging to a neighbor of the Dziedzices. It was November, it was freezing, and before they had time to look around for a better shelter the woman saw them and reported them to the village head. He passed it on to the police, who came for them and shot them on the spot.

  After the war was over Srul Grądowski went to Szczuczyn in the hope that someone in the family had survived there. Szmul Wasersztejn accompanied him; the roads were perilous and it seemed safer for the two of them to navigate them together. They found no one. Srul, who was nearly sixty, almost two generations older than the other six saved by Wyrzykowska, didn’t have the strength to go with them to try to sneak across the border. He found his old home in Jedwabne. He had himself baptized. He married a Polish woman who had worked in their household before the war. He wanted to melt into the surroundings, and so he changed his name to a Polish one. He didn’t seek contact with surviving Jews, didn’t report to the District Jewish Historical Commission to give any testimony. He was some kind of middleman in takeovers of formerly Jewish houses, giving false testimony about alleged relatives.

  Rabbi Baker, then Jakub Piekarz, a student at the Łomża yeshiva, knew Izaak from before the war. He’d taught Grądowski’s sons Hebrew, which paid for a pair of shoes that lasted him the whole school year. “At that time he was one of the nicest people in Jedwabne,” Baker recalled. “But later Izrael became Józef and they granted him his life on the condition he give up the lives of others. That can’t be forgiven.”

  The rabbi relied on the account of Rywka Fogiel in the Jedwabne Book of Memory: “At that time of misfortune Izrael Grądowski profaned the name of God. On the day the Jews were burned he and his family ran to the church, fell at the priest’s feet, and asked him to baptize him. In this way he saved his own life. It was that man who turned against his own brothers. About 125 Jews managed to go into hiding and escape the burning. The newly converted Christian betrayed their hiding places to the Poles.”

  I know this isn’t true. Grądowski was baptized in August 1945 (this is confirmed by an entry in the Jedwabne parish record book). There wasn’t even anyone for him to betray the surviving Jews to. They themselves had left their hiding places to move into the ghetto, which seemed to them the safest place—after what the Polish population had done—because it was guarded by the Germans.

  On the other hand, what Jakow Geva told me is true: after the war Grądowski tried to trick Jedwabne families who’d emigrated to the States and Palestine, telling them their relatives had survived and attempting to get money out of them.

  Lea Kubran remembered that Grądowski wrote to them after the war—she was then with her husband in a displaced persons camp in Austria—asking them to send him a Jewish calendar. Later they found out that he wrote in letters to Jedwabne Jews on the other side of the ocean that he still felt himself to be a Jew, witness the Jewish calendar on his wall. Then he would ask them for money.

  Herschel Baker also told me about this. Right after the war he’d visited Grądowski. “His wife opened the door and said, ‘He’s not talking to any Jews.’ I said, ‘Please call him.’ She slammed the door in my face. He was at home and must have heard us talking, because I recognized his voice when he asked her, ‘Who was that?’ When I left Poland I made contact with my brothers by mail from a transit camp. They wrote that Mama and other Jedwabne Jews had survived, they’d heard about it from Izrael Grądowski, and they’d sent money for him to pass on to them. But I already knew very well they were dead. He wasn’t an honest man.”

  As if that sin of taking money for people he knew to be dead weren’t enough, the Jedwabne Book of Memory adds a much more terrible one to it, that of betraying his fellow Jews. So as to exclude him once and for all from the community of pious Jews.

  In 1947, Całka Migdał from Uruguay mentioned him in a letter to the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (the letter that sparked the Jedwabne trial): “The one man who remained alive was Srul Grądowski. We don’t want to ask him too much, because he is alone among so many non-Jews that he may be afraid of speaking the truth. Please find out if Srul Grądowski is worthy of our aid. He used to be our neighbor. We cannot understand how a single Jew could have survived among so many who helped to destroy all the Jews of the town, how he can look them in the face.”

  In fact, he managed to live there because, like Marianna and Stanisław Ramotowski of Radziłów, he testified on behalf of the murderers. Called as a witness, he kept saying the Germans carried out the massacre, and he declared the accused men innocent.

  Of Józef Żyluk, who herded him and his family out to the market: “I owe my life to Żyluk.”

  Of Aleksander Janowski: “I doubt he participated in the burning of the Jews because he’s an honest man with an excellent reputation.”

  Of Roman Górski: “He came to us when we were in the marketplace, wanting to hide my family, but his daughter called him because his wife had taken ill.”

  Of Władysław Miciura: “That day I was taken to the police station, and Miciura and I did some carpentry work there … I never saw Miciura leave the police station.”

  The court wasn’t interested in the fact that these testimonies were mutually contradictory, because according to the needs of the accused men, Grądowski was either in the market square, in the magistrate’s office, or at the police station.

  Józef Grądowski signed letters along with other townspeople stating that the convicted men were upstanding citizens. In his request for an appeal of the trial, Zygmunt Laudański referred to
Grądowski as someone who could testify to his innocence.

  The time came, however, when he decided to tell the truth. “At the time the Jews were rounded up I was a Jew,” he declared in the trial of Józef Sobuta on December 11, 1953, in the courtroom of the District Courthouse in Białystok. “I knew Sobuta and saw him in the market square when he chased Jews with a club in his hand.” But at the next trial against Sobuta in 1954 he said, “He shouldn’t be condemned because it won’t bring back those people who died. I didn’t speak of Sobuta’s part in the massacre during the investigation because I was afraid, knowing the police wouldn’t protect me in Jedwabne, but at the trial I am saying what happened, because I’ve made a pledge to tell the truth, come what may.”

  Grądowski told the court: “During the burning of the Jews a Jewish child squirmed out of a shed and a Pole saw the child, caught him, and threw him onto the fire; he was a bad man. I took a Polish orphan in instead and I’m raising him as my own without regard for the harm done me by Poles.”

  The court ruled that his testimony was unreliable. However, it did listen to the testimony of Sobuta’s wife about Grądowski having demanded two hundred zlotys to testify on his behalf and not getting the money. In an investigation launched in 1967, Grądowski was interrogated again, and told what really happened, but then retracted it.

  “About eight in the morning Feliks Żyluk, Antoni Surowiecki, and [Antoni] Grzymała came to me … They were carrying iron and wooden cudgels.” He held to his story in a confrontation with Antoni Grzymała, but six months later, at a subsequent interrogation, he reversed his position and said that these three hid him and his family in Żyluk’s house, and that the Jews were driven into the market by “men I didn’t know, dressed in civilian clothes, wearing masks, who spoke to us in Polish.”

  Grądowski died in 1971 at the age of eighty-two. More than a decade later, the Łomża periodical Contacts interviewed his wife, and she agreed to talk under the condition no names were used, neither hers nor anyone else’s. But it’s easy to decipher who she was talking about. After the war Feliks Żyluk was once again Grądowski’s neighbor: “My husband never reproached him with taking part in the pogrom and dragging him from the house to the square by force … My husband was very pious and it’s probably only for that reason that he bore various insults.”

  It seems that he became less submissive toward the end of his life. Leszek Dziedzic remembered that when someone started speaking ill of Jews or harassing him, Grądowski had a saying: “So why do you kiss that Jew’s feet in church?”

  Mrs. Grądowski continues: “Feliks Ż. built his children a house in Ełk. During some visit to his native parts he heard of the death of my husband. He came to me indignant that I hadn’t let him know of the burial. I couldn’t hold it back then: ‘My husband would turn in his grave if I had invited you.’ And now Feliks is in the graveyard as well, and my time is coming, and no one will remember the old injustices and hardships.”

  His wife survived him by a quarter of a century, dying in 1996. In Jedwabne I heard the same story several times, how Grądowski took in a boy to raise him, but God punished him for an insincere conversion and his adopted son, Jerzy, turned into a bum and finally drank himself to death. Jerzy’s widow told me these are slanderous stories—he died of a grave illness, she said.

  Antonina Wyrzykowska still cherished fond memories of Srul, later Józef Grądowski. When she moved from Janczewko, she seldom went home, but when she did she always went to see him.

  “He had a funeral parlor,” she tells me. “There was another undertaker in Jedwabne, and when the owner heard of anyone’s death he’d go to the family to say, ‘I hope you’re not going to the Jew?’ But what kind of Jew was Grądowski, since he’d converted a long time ago and had a Catholic wife? When they took in the boy, he wasn’t a Jew at all and still people would pester him about being Jewish. Józek kept his Yiddish accent until the end of his life and when he saw me he’d say, ‘Mrs. Wyrzykowski, I haven’t forgotten what you did for me. When your father dies I’ll give him a coffin for free.’ Grądowski died, and my father lived another ten years, to his ninety-fifth birthday.”

  JANUARY 5, 2002

  Whenever I have a free moment, I go to see my aunt Hania Lanota in the countryside. She’s translating for me the memoir of Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów. It is written in Yiddish, with fragments in Hebrew and occasionally a sentence in German. It makes no difference to Hania. She translates aloud as fluently as if she were reading me a book written in Polish.

  JANUARY 27, 2002

  I spend another day with my aunt, translating Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir. Her description of the massacre is a masterpiece of reportage. Chaja is observant, penetrating, with great feeling for narrative, tone, use of detail.

  And so on the morning of July 7 she saw a Gestapo officer and the council secretary Stanisław Grzymkowski looking through the broken windows into the Beit Midrasz. After the Radziłów Jews had been burned, Chaja realized that she’d witnessed the search for a place of execution, and that they’d probably rejected the synagogue in the center of town out of fear that the fire would spread to buildings nearby. It was probably Grzymkowski who had suggested the unused barn standing at a safe distance from town; in Chaja’s version its owner had left for Argentina, so he couldn’t protest.

  The problem is the absence of names; Chaja either doesn’t give them at all or gives only first names. Her account is so solid and precise, it would be good to fit the right surnames to the acts she describes.

  FEBRUARY 9, 2002

  Professor Strzembosz, who lent credence to all those who denied the guilt of the Poles, has been named Person of the Year 2001 by the Tygodnik Solidarność (Solidarity Weekly): “While the liberal left seeks ‘a terrible knowledge about the grandfathers and fathers of contemporary Poles’ in order to buttress their smug theories about the moral impoverishment of ‘this nation,’ while certain media outlets endlessly seek to outdo each other in spitting on Poland and abusing her, Tomasz Strzembosz seeks the truth about her.”

  FEBRUARY 10, 2002

  Jedwabne. A meeting of residents in the religious education hall. The priest gives the lecture I already know so well on the Jews killing themselves and each other on their own initiative. Many older people, some of whom must have been witnesses to the events of that time, nod along with the priest when he speaks of the integrated German forces.

  I ask the priest to comment on the Institute of National Remembrance’s statement that the bullets that came from the cartridges found in the barn were not fired in 1941, and so there is no evidence for the Germans having been present. “The truth will come out,” he answers calmly. “The townspeople have other cartridges they keep in their houses.”

  FEBRUARY 19, 2002

  Hania Lanota translates a further section of Chaja’s memoirs for me.

  When Jews could still live outside the ghetto, with farmers who paid the Germans for Jewish labor, the Finkelsztejns lived in a village near Radziłów. “Father bundled straw for the first time in his life,” Chaja says sadly. “My niece and I ploughed the fields and Menachem, who only knew how to carry a bag of books, had bleeding hands from the farmwork.”

  Hania comments sharply that this part of the martyrology could have happened to any city dweller unused to village life. She herself was raised in Warsaw, but spent a lot of time before the war in Skryhiczyn with our family, working in the fields. And those Jews who worked the land, among them many of my aunts and uncles, turned out to be fantastic workers later on the kibbutzim in Israel. Evidently Hania doesn’t like Chaja much, she finds her too severe. It’s true her judgments of people are razor-sharp. But in her defense I must say she is often equally tough on Jews.

  In the fall of 1942, when the Germans demanded that Jews return to the ghetto, the Finkelsztejns went into hiding. Hania Lanota, who herself escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and hid on the Aryan side, reading to me how the murderers come to the village demanding that Chaja
’s family be handed over, keeps saying, “It’s monstrous! In Warsaw people feared blackmailers but I could walk down the street, I had friends from before the war whose houses I visited. This woman lived in a kind of zoo where wild animals had been let out of their cages.”

  The family who hid Chaja told her that in front of the Łomża ghetto wagons had stopped that were supposed to take Jews on their last journey, and peasant women had grabbed bundles from the Jewish women and stripped them down to their underwear. Did anything like that happen in Skryhiczyn, the village from which my family was transported to the ghetto? One day the Skryhiczyn peasants were ordered to drive their wagons to the ghetto and drop the Jews off at the train, which transported them straight to a death camp. They were driven by peasants they’d known for years. How did those forced helpers of death behave? Did they talk to them? Were they silent? Did they say goodbye? Maybe they took their belongings because “they wouldn’t need them anymore”?

  FEBRUARY 20, 2002

  Every child in Jedwabne “knows” that it was Jews who did the interrogating, convicting, and sentencing in the Jedwabne trial. At the same time, as becomes clear from the legal documents from 1949—which the Institute of National Remembrance is analyzing—the investigation was conducted by an ethnic Pole, and the interrogations of the accused men were conducted by eight ethnic Poles and three Belorussians (just as in the 1953 trial, a Pole conducted the investigation, and interrogations were led by four Poles and one Belorussian).

  I try to find the prosecutors of that time.

  Paweł Tarasewicz, who in 1950 rose to become the head of the secret police in Ełk, now lives in Białystok: “I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t in charge at that time, I don’t remember the case.”

  Włodzimierz Wołkowycki, a young clerk at the time, now lives in Bielsk Podlaski: “I went to Jedwabne many times, interviewed a lot of people, I’d like to help you but I don’t remember anything.”