The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Stefan Kulik, who now lives in Warsaw, claims from the start that it’s a mistake. When I read him his personal data from the court papers, he remembers something, but when I ask a further question on beatings during the investigation he once again remembers nothing. “I have inner ear trouble, I was in the hospital for it, and that makes it harder to remember things.”

  FEBRUARY 24, 2002

  I read the documents of court cases conducted after the war concerning crimes committed against Jews by locals in towns in the vicinity of Jedwabne and Radziłów.

  The employees of the Institute of National Remembrance are now tracing them, and there were quite a few. In virtually every town there were instances of Jews being killed. There are a few cases that tell us of massacres committed after the great wave of pogroms in late June and early July 1941, killings from late summer or autumn 1941, when the Jews were in ghettos and only left them occasionally when they were hired by the Germans to do unpaid labor for Polish farmers.

  Stanisław Zalewski pleaded guilty to murders committed in August 1941 (he was sentenced to death in 1950). The victims were twenty Jewish women, fifteen to thirty years old, hired from the Szczuczyn ghetto for garden work on the Bzura estate, not far from Szczuczyn. “We rode there on bikes,” Zalewski said. “Earlier we’d gone to the estate smithy and fit the ends of poles with steel to make them better for killing. An hour later two hay carts arrived from the Bzura estate, one of them driven by Krygiel, and the other by Henryk Modzelewski. When the carts drove up to the house we chased the Jewish girls from the cellar and told them to get on the carts. We drove them to the Boczkowski forest, where a pit had been dug. There we ordered the Jewish girls to strip down to their slips and panties, only two young Jewish girls who had old clothes were not forced to undress. We began leading them one at a time to the pit and beating them to death with poles. Tkacz killed four Jewish girls. Before they killed one of the girls five men raped her. After raping the girl I took Tkacz’s wooden pole and personally killed her, hitting her three times on the head with the pole, and she fell into the pit. I took slippers and a dress from the murdered Jewish women. Three days later the German police came to the village head and on their command I showed them the site of the massacre. One policeman asked me what we’d used to kill them, and I said poles. When I spoke these words I was struck with a truncheon by a German policeman, who said: ‘Why didn’t you bring them back to the ghetto?’ Then they told me to bury them better.”

  One of the witnesses said of the participants in the massacre, “We were all in the National Party.”

  Not much later a Jew named Magik was tortured in the environs of Szczuczyn. “In the autumn of 1941,” one of the witnesses testified, “my mother Kazimiera and I were returning on the road from the village Skaje to Szczuczyn where we’d harvested potatoes, and I saw clearly how Konopko Franciszek, holding a birch stick as broad as a hand, with Domiziak Aleksander of Szczuczyn, who was holding the same kind of birch stick, drove the Jew Magik, whom I knew and who manufactured candy in Szczuczyn up to 1939, toward the Jewish graves. When the above-mentioned men chasing the Jew reached us I heard Magik plead with Domiziak, ‘Let me go, Olek. I fed your children, I gave you so much candy for free, I have a gold watch I’ll give to you.’ I saw Konopko kick the Jew Magik from behind with the tip of his shoe and say: ‘Go to hell, you motherfucking Jew.’”

  FEBRUARY 25, 2002

  I’m reading court documents from the Radziłów trials and Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir by turns, trying to reconstruct the atmosphere in the town after the July massacre.

  Apparently, life took on a certain glow. People enjoyed their new cottage, their new down quilt, their new bucket. They bustled around repairing the newly won houses, and since most of them had been looted earlier, windows were put in, stoves were fixed, walls were whitewashed. Although we learn from Chaja’s memoir the satisfaction was perhaps not as strong as the envy felt toward those who’d gotten their hands on more loot.

  The 1949 and 1953 testimonies of Helena Klimaszewska cast light on the skirmishes over the houses claimed. Klimaszewska was mother-in-law to Józef Ekstowicz (called Klimas or Klimaszewski, after his grandmother), the youth who set the barn on fire in Radziłów. In August 1941 she came from Goniądz to Radziłów with his grandmother, as she’d heard that “there were empty houses there after the liquidation of the Jews” and that “Godlewski was in charge of the formerly Jewish homes.” She asked him “to release one formerly Jewish home.”

  “Don’t you dare,” said Feliks Godlewski, standing on the threshold of the house he’d taken from the murdered Zandler.

  Klimaszewska pointed out to him that he already disposed of four houses himself.

  “A shitload that’s got to do with you. My brother’s coming from Russia, where the Soviets sent him, and he’s got to have a house.”

  Klimaszewska persisted in asking about a house.

  “When we had to liquidate the Jews, none of you were to be seen, and now you want houses,” Godlewski said angrily, and he sent his children to the police nearby to get Henryk Dziekoński (one of the leaders of the massacre who went to work for the Germans), so that he, as a representative of the authorities, could talk sense into the woman.

  “If the gentleman won’t give it to you, you’d better leave,” instructed Dziekoński.

  Helena Klimaszewska also remembered that when she was talking to Godlewski, Józef Ekstowicz’s grandmother kept babbling to him about her grandson being sent out to set the barn on fire when they needed him, and now they wouldn’t even give him a house.

  In Radziłów the market still took place on Thursdays, only there were no Jewish stalls, and the trade was mostly barter. Since the ruble had lost its value, no one trusted the deutsche mark, either. The Jews who’d survived the pogrom lived crammed into one room near the synagogue. There were about thirty of them, including two refugee families from Kolno. Chaja Finkelsztejn’s nephew was there, too. He told her the police had taken them under its protection, so they no longer needed to fear death at the hands of Poles, but they had to do pointless hard labor for the Germans, like removing stones from the river, and they were guarded by a Pole who made sure they didn’t take a moment’s rest.

  Thanks to Chaja’s memoir I can reconstruct the course the massacre in Radziłów took much more fully than I did in the Gazeta. At this point, I think I could describe the events hour by hour.

  The theme of stolen things returns again and again in the memoir. We read of women rushing to plunder her house while the men escort the Jews to the barn. Chaja describes being in hiding and looking through gaps in the sheathing of a barn on Sundays at farmers’ children going to church dressed in clothes stolen from her own children. Moving from one household to another, everywhere they found Jewish clothing or furniture, because even those who didn’t pillage were given such things in payment for butter or honey. What Chaja describes in her memoir I already read once in the form of a poem by Sara Ginsburg, known by her pen name, Zuzanna Ginczanka:

  Non omnis moriar—my proud possessions,

  tablecloth meadows, staunch fortress shelves,

  my billowing sheets and precious bedclothes,

  my dresses, my bright dresses will outlive me.

  I leave no heirs behind when I depart,

  so may your hand dig out all Jewish things,

  Chominowa of Lvov, brave snitch’s wife,

  prompt informer, Volksdeutscher’s mother.

  May they serve you and yours, for why

  should they serve strangers. My neighbors—

  what I leave is neither lute nor empty name.

  I remember you, as you, the Schupo near,

  remembered me. Reminded them of me.

  May my friends sit and raise their glasses,

  drink to my grave and to their own gains:

  carpets and tapestries, china, candlesticks—

  may they drink all night and at dawn

  start the search for gems and go
ld

  under sofas, mattresses, quilts, and rugs.

  O how the work will burn in their hands,

  the tangles of horsehair and tufts of wool,

  blizzards of burst pillows, clouds of eiderdown

  stick to their hands and turn them into wings;

  my blood will glue oakum and fresh feathers

  transforming birds of prey into sudden angels.

  Ginczanka was in hiding on the Aryan side, first in Lvov, then in Kraków. She wasn’t as lucky as the Finkelsztejns. Someone denounced her. We don’t even know when and in what circumstances she died. And by what miracle the sheet of paper survived with the prophetic poem, an adaptation of Słowacki’s famous “Testament,” which she wrote just before her death.

  12

  They Had Vodka, Guns, and Hatred

  or, July 7, 1941, in Radziłów

  The massacre in Radziłów is exceptionally well documented, thanks in large part to the testimonies of the Finkelsztejn family. They are extraordinary witnesses: both parents and children were in the marketplace that day, and when they hid in dozens of places after the massacre they heard stories from the people who hid them and on that basis reconstructed the course of events day by day, hour by hour, in the belief that the day would come when they would bear witness. The eldest son, Menachem Finkelsztejn, gave testimony in 1945 to the District Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok. The father, Izrael Finkelsztejn, testified in 1945 in the first investigation into the participation of Poles in the massacre. The mother, Chaja Finkelsztejn, gave a detailed account of the killings and the events that preceded them in the memoir she wrote in 1946. In April 2002, in Kansas City, I talked to the youngest daughter and the only living Jewish witness of the massacre. In 1941, she was seven years old.

  Much information is provided by the testimonies from the trials that were held between 1945 and 1958. The men accused of participation in the murder of Jews were: Henryk Dziekoński, Józef Ekstowicz, Feliks Godlewski, Antoni Kosmaczewski, Leon Kosmaczewski, Ludwik Kosmaczewski, Henryk Statkiewicz, and Zygmunt Skrodzki.

  I spoke to several dozen eyewitnesses to the massacre—and some of them, I have to assume, were not only witnesses but, as underage boys, also minor accomplices to the killing.

  Sara, daughter of Pesza and Izrael Gutsztejn, and her husband, Jakob Zimnowicz. Radziłów. They were killed by Poles on July 7, 1941, together with their eight-year-old daughter, Szulamit. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)

  Pesza Gutsztejn of Radziłów. She was seventy-one years old when she was killed by Poles on July 7, 1941. Her great-grandson Jose Gutstein in Miami created the virtual Radziłów shtetl: www.radzilow.com. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)

  1.

  When the Russians fled Radziłów on the night of June 22–23, many Jews left their homes to wait out the first days of the German invasion elsewhere. The Polish inhabitants of the town—whether a majority or only a segment of them is hard to establish now—watched the arrival of the Germans with relief; after the hated Soviet occupation any change seemed to them for the better. A few Poles joined forces to prepare a triumphal gate; someone dragged from the attic a dusty portrait of the Führer that had been displayed at city hall for a few days in September of 1939.

  Menachem Finkelsztejn described the deafening cannon fire that woke the residents of Radziłów in the early-morning hours of June 22. “The eight hundred Jewish inhabitants of the town understood the gravity of the situation right away.” Some decided to flee to the east, but on the roads they met “well-armed Polish Fascist gangs” who stopped Jewish refugees and robbed and beat them. They tried to hide in the surrounding villages, in the fields, to avoid the moment when the army would enter the town. But the peasants didn’t allow them into their yards. “Having no alternative, they all began to return to their homes. The Poles in the area watched the terrified Jews with scorn and pointed to their own throats, saying: ‘Now it’s going to be—cut the Jew’s throat.’”

  Chaja Finkelsztejn saw young people putting up the triumphal gate, cleaning it, festooning it with greenery and flowers. Menachem testified that they hung a swastika on it, with a portrait of Hitler and a banner with a Polish slogan, Long live those who freed us from the Jewish Communists! The subjects I interviewed remembered the same thing. Franciszek Ekstowicz saw poles being driven into the ground, entwined with flowers, and some banner hung between them. Andrzej R. is prepared to swear that the inscription was short: Welcome and another word he doesn’t remember, and that green branches were woven around the poles.

  The army came in on tanks. Eugenia K., then seven years old, watched the townspeople throw flowers on the tanks, which passed through Radziłów and continued on. Chaja Finkelsztejn, who was standing at the gate dressed as a Polish peasant woman, remembered what some people were saying: “The Christians welcomed them with enthusiasm, shouts of ‘You are our saviors! You’ve saved us from the Soviets!’ ‘Look how handsome they are, how the smell of perfume wafts around them,’ one Christian woman gushed.” Chaja was moved by the sight of wounded Russian prisoners of war led through the town, while the locals threw stones at them.

  A few daredevils jumped up on the tanks to help track down Red Army marauders. “The Russians were fleeing across the Biebrza river,” a witness told me, “and there were Poles sitting on the tanks showing them where to cross to catch the Russians.” A temporary authority was made up of Polish residents. Henryk Dziekoński, who was part of it, testified at his own trial: “With friends I started to organize a municipal authority to keep the order,” and he gave the names of the other eight members of this self-appointed authority. Of nine of them I heard from witnesses that they participated in the massacre. They paraded around with rifles left by the Soviets and with red-and-white armbands.

  Chaja Finkelsztejn described the town in those first days as follows: “Christians sat on benches in front of their homes, in holiday dress and a festive mood. They were all people we knew. Seeing how happy they were I had no desire to greet them. Very small Christian children pointed out Jews in the street to the Germans, crying: ‘Jude, Jude.’ They set their dogs on Jews, shouting: ‘Get the Jew!’”

  Scores were settled with Communists and traitors—as several people told me, those are the rules of war. That part of history is not covered over in silence.

  Halina Zalewska told me, “Just before the Germans came there was a big deportation, the women and children had already been sent away, and the men were kept for interrogation and then freed by the Germans when they disarmed the old Osowiec fortress the Soviets had been using as a base. So those farmers came home enraged and ready for a brawl.”

  Andrzej R. told me, “The deportation just before the Germans arrived was later called Black Thursday. They not only deported people but told the remaining relatives to come to a meeting, where it was explained to them why the deportations were right. A local Jew came out and said, ‘All you ravens who squawk are going to Siberia.’ Poles found that guy right after the Russkies left. That was the afternoon of June 23. First they tortured him in the marketplace. They tied a big flat stone to his neck with string and made him look into the sun. When he closed his eyes they beat his head with a stick. There were two men standing next to him, one smacking him on the head with a stanchion from one side, the other from the other side. Meanwhile, the Poles were asking him where the Kapelański family was. Kapelański was an organist who had been deported with his family. They led him down Łomżynska Road to the bridge and threw him off. The water was shallow. I watched what they were doing to him until it was over.”

  Halina Zalewska remembers the victim was blinded by the sun before he died.

  Chaja Finkelsztejn met a Jewish girl, a school friend of her son’s, who had spoken warmly of the Soviets at a ceremony at the gymnasium. “Her lips were black and blue, she’d been beaten up by Polish friends overnight.”

  On the same day the Russians left, the locals flung themselves at the military
store in the temple on Gęsia Street that stocked clothes, food supplies, and rifles. They started with Soviet stores, but bands of locals also broke into Jewish homes—many Jews had left town for those first few days and were hiding with people they knew in the countryside or sleeping in the nearby fields.

  Radziłów was on a drunk. That was because of the distillery that was taken over.

  Czesław C. told me, “As soon as the Russkies left, our boys went to the Słucz distillery. It was full to the brim. Poles were thirsty for vodka, and some of them held a grudge against the Jews, and that grudge was well-founded.”

  Mieczysław Kulęgowski told me, “They brought buckets of vodka back from the Słucz distillery, and some of them died in the process because a storehouse caught fire. They had vodka, guns, and hatred.”

  The German tanks were followed by the arrival of a group of Wehrmacht soldiers in Radziłów. They savaged Jews, and were keen for Poles to participate. They cut off old men’s beards, mutilating them with scissors and beating them. On June 25 they put on a display of what Poles were allowed to do to Jews. That some of the locals happily participated in this, we know from both Jewish and Polish witnesses.

  Menachem Finkelsztejn described the Germans ordering Jewish men to gather at the synagogue, and the Poles standing guard at the exit roads and turning people on their way out of town back by force. Germans ordered Jews to take their holy books from the synagogue and burn them. Later “they harnessed Jews to wagons, got on the wagons themselves and whipped them with terrible force, driving down every street.” Jews were driven to the muddy river, told to undress completely and go into the water.

  Andrzej R. has a detailed memory of this scene. “They harnessed Jews, drove them on with a whip. There was a barrel on the wagon and the Germans sat on the barrel in their swimming trunks, because that June was hot. We stood and watched. Kids were laughing; after all, no one knew how it would end, so in those first days there was a lot of laughter.”