The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, “The Gestapo gave the Poles a free hand for three days. They searched every nook and cranny, every place where a Jew might hide. When on the third day the Gestapo drove up to the pit where those Jews who hid had been killed, an eight-year-old boy emerged from among the corpses. They wouldn’t allow him to be killed and he lived on till the liquidation of the rest of the Jews. Then his terrible suffering ended.”

  In the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, in the testimonies of the accused and witnesses of former trials, in the conversations I conducted, the same names of the main culprits in the massacre are confirmed: the brothers Jan and Henryk Dziekoński; the brothers Aleksander and Feliks Godlewski; Edmund Korsak; Antoni, Józef, and Leon Kosmaczewski; Mieczysław Strzelecki.

  Andrzej R. says that one Jew who hid in a house on the outskirts of town was found by thugs and brought to Radziłów from near Racibór. They tied him to a wagon plank and cut off his head with a tree saw. “I didn’t see the act of sawing myself,” he says, “but I saw the headless body in a ditch.”

  Antoni Olszewski was three and a half years old at the time. He claims that he has fixed in his memory like a photograph an image of himself stamping on earth covering the body of a Jewish boy not much older than himself, murdered by neighbors. “Some time after the burning I saw a bloody cap in our cabbage patch. They had dragged out a child who was hiding nearby and beaten him to death. Mama screamed at them to bury him deep, otherwise our pigs would pull him out. The elders covered him with earth and I and Józek Szymonów stamped on it to make it firmer. I remember that stamping to this day, I could show you where it was.”

  Halina Zalewska told me, “The stench and the fatty smoke—it was human fat—hung in the house for weeks.”

  Andrzej R. told me, “Jan Ekstowicz, a World War I veteran who’d lost both his arms, took two children in, he had them baptized right away. But soon someone denounced him and the police took the kids away.”2

  5.

  How many Jews were burned in the barn in Radziłów? Menachem Finkelsztejn gave a figure of seventeen hundred Jews driven into the marketplace, and another time he said one thousand. But Jewish testimonies usually give an exaggerated number of victims. In the files on the trials the number most often given is six hundred. How many were murdered in the ice pit or wherever they were caught in town is even harder to say; the number three hundred is repeated, but given the fact that Radziłów probably had no more than six hundred Jews, this number must be too high. It seems plausible that about five hundred people were burned in the barn and about a hundred, maybe two hundred, fell victim to individual murders.

  How many killers were there? Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote that “almost all the Christian townspeople” gathered at the marketplace, forming a dense mass. “If one of the Jews, realizing what was coming, tried to escape and was lucky enough to get through the crowd,” wrote Menachem Finkelsztejn, “Polish women and children standing around as if at some kind of show stopped him and sent him back.” “All of Radziłów took part in the roundup of Jews and there were also people watching,” Józef Ekstowicz testified (as a witness in 1951). “Almost the whole population participated in rounding up Jews. There were men, women, and children,” testified Henryk Dziekoński (in his 1949 interrogation).

  “Can you say how many of us Poles of Radziłów took part in it?” Jan Skrodzki asked Jan R.

  “Ask me who wasn’t there, it would be easier to count. But people took part in different ways. Some were active, others semiactive, others just gawked. I remember one woman following behind the Jews, weeping.”

  Journal

  FEBRUARY 27, 2002

  New York. I’m here to spend two months working on my book. It’s all thanks to Lawrence Weschler, who has taken over the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and managed to find an office in the building for his charges. I am taking a little break from the role I’ve assumed of my own free will: social worker and shrink to a few decent people from Jedwabne and its surroundings.

  FEBRUARY 28, 2002

  I’m describing the history of the Finkelsztejn family on the basis of Chaja’s memoir and I dream of finding her daughter, Chana, of whom I know only that she lives in America. I haven’t managed to get her contact information from Menachem’s widow. I phone Uncle Szmul in Tel Aviv to ask him to try again. If she doesn’t have her sister-in-law’s address, maybe she knows someone who does? Szmulek calls me back to tell me he got the following reply: “She’s somewhere in Kansas, I don’t know the address, we’re not in touch, and besides, Chana has a memory disorder so nothing can come out of a meeting with her.”

  Since I now know it’s Kansas, and I’m in the States, I’ll try to find her there, nonetheless.

  MARCH 1, 2002

  On the Gazeta website I read accounts of the parliamentary sessions at which Institute of National Remembrance director Leon Kieres gave a report on the institute’s activities. MPs from the party League of Polish Families attacked him like a fight squad. “Because of your manipulations, silences, acquiescences, Director Kieres,” one MP shrieked, “World Jewry and President Kwaśniewski said kaddish in a display of chutzpah in Jedwabne in July 2001. When may we expect your resignation as the president of the institute so that a Pole can be elected to the post who cares about the truth of Polish history and who loves the Polish people?” Other MPs attacked the institute, saying that it is “harnessed to a battle against Polishness.” One of the MPs declared that what President Kwaśniewski said was the “culmination of the stoning of the Polish people” and that Kieres threw the first stone. These performances were rewarded with applause. Neither the parliament vice marshal who chaired the session nor any of the MPs replied. Kieres explained that he undertook the investigation as a Polish patriot, and that he comes from a Polish family. Read: he’s not a Jew.

  MARCH 15, 2002

  Today is my last day to buy the ticket to Buenos Aires that I reserved. I’m traveling there to meet Mosze Olszewicz, the man who hid under the Wyrzykowskis’ pigsty with his fiancée, Elke. With Awigdor Kochaw, he is the last living witness of the Jedwabne massacre. I’ve written to him, but in vain, and so I’ve decided to appeal to Antonina Wyrzykowska for help. She wrote the Olszewiczes a letter, and on the day before I flew to New York, I went by to say goodbye and to ask her to call Mosze from my cell phone just in case.

  “Anna is my friend and she’s done a lot for me,” I hear Antonina say to Elke Olszewicz. “I haven’t asked you for anything and I never will. Just receive Anna.”

  I want to make sure the Olszewiczes will meet me, so I phone to confirm the date. I hear Elke’s impatient voice: “Why dig it all up after so many years, who needs that? Please don’t call again.” And the receiver is slammed down.

  MARCH 30, 2002

  I manage to get through to Eliasz Grądowski, for whom I’ve left innumerable messages on his machine. He is eighty years old and still has a bicycle repair shop in Brooklyn. In 1941 he stole a record player from the cultural center in Jedwabne and that saved him—he was deported to Siberia. Although he wasn’t in Jedwabne at the time of the massacre, he appeared before the court in the 1949 trial as an eyewitness. He was one of the main figures in the bogus legalization of Polish takeovers of post-Jewish property. He invokes Antonina Wyrzykowska, who’s been a friend of his ever since he met her by accident in Brooklyn.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked her.

  “I’m waiting for the bus. And what are you doing here?”

  “I’m waiting for the bus, too.”

  His response to me now is angry: “You’ve exploited Antonina quite enough by now. In America you would pay thousands of dollars for the kind of interview she gives you. She should have a villa, but instead it’s journalists who make fortunes from it. How much are you getting for this?” The argument is the same as in Jedwabne—that the Jedwabne affair is all about money. And the sound of the phone being hung up is the same, too.

  A conversation with Lesze
k Dziedzic. For some reason he’s less enthusiastic about his life in America. It’s hard to get out of him what’s the matter.

  “I worked for my brother because I don’t have my papers yet, but his wife and I can’t see eye to eye about the Jews, we quarreled and now I’m out of work.”

  APRIL 4, 2002

  Ty Rogers tells me that as the attorney for the families of the Jedwabne victims, he presented to the Polish consul in New York in advance a list of people who should be invited to the ceremony of July 10, 2001. He was told the Wasersztejns could not be invited. “You know, you understand”; “It’s a delicate topic in Warsaw”; “We know what Wasersztejn was.” Unused to such conversations, he went on asking what the problem was until someone finally said, well, Wasersztejn was employed by the secret police, wasn’t he?

  I phone the Polish consulate to hear from the other side about Ty Rogers’s conversation with the consul regarding Wasersztejn’s alleged links to the secret police. What am I talking about, they say, there was no such conversation. When I press the consul, saying it’s unlikely an American lawyer would invent something like that, I learn that “in fact some such suggestion may have come from Poland and apparently reached Mr. Rogers.”

  Everything is based on insinuation. Wasersztejn did not work for the secret police after the war. But what if he had? Would that have diminished the horror of his mother’s burning in the barn?

  APRIL 12, 2002

  A phone conversation with Giselle, Chana Finkelsztejn’s daughter. Chana is alive, she remembers everything and will talk to me. She’s happy someone has taken an interest in her story after sixty years. What a relief! My obsessive inquiries, dozens of phone calls, compulsive Internet searches have paid off.

  I reserve an airplane ticket to Kansas City. I’ll be interested to find out if Chana is aware of her mother’s diary.

  APRIL 18, 2002

  Lunch with Irena Grudzińska Gross and Jonathan Schell. Like me, Schell is completely absorbed in writing a book. I tell him about the ghosts of the past, he tells me about the ghosts of the future—he’s writing about the threat of atomic energy—and we understand each other perfectly.

  An afternoon flight to Kansas City. Giselle Widman picks me up at the airport. The city counts four million inhabitants. The suburb we drive to at first glance looks like all the others, except that there’s a mezuzah over every door. On the street where Giselle lives, real estate prices depend on the distance to the synagogue. The synagogue is Orthodox, so no one is allowed to drive on Shabbat.

  APRIL 19, 2002

  Giselle brings her mother from the nursing home where she lives. A lovely, delicate, elegantly dressed lady in golden slippers. We speak English. I’ve prepared fifty-six questions. Unfortunately, Chana, now Ann Walters, has serious memory problems, just as her Israeli sister-in-law said.

  She’s every inch a lady, even in the face of illness.

  “I’m so sorry, I see the image before me, but when I want to describe it, it dissolves. Please stop me if I repeat myself,” she says, telling me the last happy memory of her childhood for the tenth time. It was during the Soviet occupation, and because the Soviets took care of talented children she was singled out and taken to Jedwabne to perform. She played a little fish caught on a line and begging for its freedom by dancing and singing for the fisherman.

  These must have been the same performances of which a woman from Jedwabne told me: “On the occasion of the October Revolution the former Catholic House, which had been turned into a club, organized a theater competition for the schools in the area. I was in a choir that sang Russian songs. First place went to the Radziłów school, which had a lot of Jewish girls.”

  Chaja mentioned little Chana’s performances in her memoir. She didn’t want to let her daughter go to Soviet events, but the Polish teacher persuaded her to give her consent. However, she didn’t go to see her daughter perform.

  Chana, or Chanełe, as she used to be called, remembers shards of the events.

  How her brother Szlomke came home bloodied before the war because children had thrown stones at him, shouting, “Jew!” and how Polish girls from the neighborhood came to play with her and then stopped coming because other children were making fun of them.

  How before the massacre, just after the Russians left town, Polish houses had crosses chalked on them in the morning, so the Germans could see right away which houses were Christian and which Jewish.

  How on July 7, 1941, she saw her Jewish girlfriend with curly blond hair—she can’t remember her name—being hit by someone and blood running down her cheek.

  How the priest said at the religious instruction classes she had to attend after July 7 in order to be baptized that the sweet baby Jesus was cruelly killed by the Jews, for which a curse had fallen upon them and that was why so much ill befell them.

  How her godparents promised her after her baptism that they would take the whole family—if they survived the war—to Częstochowa to thank the Virgin Mary for converting them to the true faith. But she knew from her mother that they’d only become pretend Catholics.

  How during the time they were in hiding, her mother woke her at night because she was speaking Yiddish in her sleep.

  Ann speaks in a low voice: “This murmuring stayed with all four of us after being in hiding.”

  In the afternoon Giselle takes me to pick up her son from his Jewish school. She tells me indignantly about the animosities at play here. The German Jews treat the East European Jews as inferior. The descendants of those who managed to flee Germany before the war call themselves “Holocaust Kristallnacht Survivors,” and don’t consider her mother a survivor because she wasn’t in a concentration camp.

  The school is situated in an enormous Jewish Community Center with conference halls, a café, shops, and in the middle a glass-walled library, where Holocaust literature predominates. It also holds the memorial book of “survivors,” in which Ann does not figure. I am introduced to the library director and the director of the center. I’m supposed to give an interview to the local paper. My visit is supposed to strengthen Giselle’s position in this community.

  A hefty young man in a yarmulke and oversize army pants comes up to us. So this is Ann’s grandson, who owes his existence to his great-grandmother’s heroism.

  A Shabbat dinner in the company of a large group of invited guests. The talk is in English. An older gentleman leans over to me and points out an elderly couple, whispering in Polish, “They’re a great couple, who would have thought she’s from Hungary? Because everyone else here is from Poland.”

  APRIL 20, 2002

  Ann is glad to have me listen to her stories. She makes mistakes, she repeats herself, but she also keeps retrieving crumbs from the recesses of her memory. She always remembered a peasant woman who took her in toward the end of the war, when she was dirty, flea-ridden, and sick, and treated her like her own child, bathing her and carrying her outside, because she wasn’t strong enough to stand on her own legs. “I can’t remember her name, and I so want to remember.” I promise her that I’ll go to the place where they were hidden and try to find out.

  After the liberation she went to a Polish school for two years. “I had no friends there, I just focused on hiding what I’d been through. Emotionally we had already been in Palestine for many years, but when we finally got there, I felt just as alien as in my Polish school. I watched the children playing and tried to imitate them, so no one would notice I was different. I was closest to my mother and my sister Yaffa (in Poland she was called Szejna), but we never talked about what we’d been through, we didn’t want to hurt each other. I may have gone too far in not talking or thinking about it, and for that reason when I search for memories I see a white sheet in my head.”

  She married, went to Kansas to be with her husband, helped him in his jewelry business, which never interested her. When ten years ago he demanded a divorce, it was a relief to her. She couldn’t talk to her husband about what she’d been through.


  “He was in a concentration camp, his family died in the gas chambers. It was as if he went around with a sign: ‘My parents died in the camps, I went through hell.’ He made it clear to me I didn’t have it so bad, because he’d had it much worse. To survive the camps you had to be clever. He managed. He wasn’t warm, he wasn’t compassionate, he was aggressive.”

  We phone Haifa to check in with Szlomid, Chaja Finkelsztejn’s granddaughter. She’s the daughter of Yaffa, Chaja’s daughter who is no longer alive. “Mama never told us what she’d suffered,” Szlomid tells me. “It’s probably part of Polish culture to shut your mouth and not tell people about what hurts? Maybe that’s why so much suffering came out of her when she was dying. At the end of her life she could only speak Polish, and the last months she was shaking as if in fear, repeating the same Polish words, which none of us understood.”

  APRIL 21, 2002

  At the local Jewish Community Center, Ann and I watch a video made years ago of her telling the story of being in hiding. Then and now, in her conversations with me, Ann often refers to miracles.

  “It was a miracle that when the squad came to beat us, Mama hid me under the bed and I got away.” “A miracle occurred when we were walking on the road after the burning of the Jews in Radziłów: a peasant who knew us shouted to us to hide in the rye—I remember the feeling of wanting to be deeper down in the earth—and no one found us.” “It’s a miracle, after all, that when we were driven out of our hiding place because the man hiding us got scared, and we were going through the village in the night, dogs barked but nobody looked out the window. And the second time was the same kind of miracle—two German policemen came into the yard and the man we were hiding with told us to get out immediately by the back door; everything gave us away, most of all the color of our skin, it was summer and we were pale as ghosts, but we got away.” Then about her brother: “It’s a true miracle Menachem didn’t die, even though he had a blood infection and was fainting with fever. The cat must have stolen a piece of pork fat from the housewife and was startled and didn’t finish it, and Mama put that fat on his arm and alternated it with cold compresses.” “It’s a miracle we managed to pass for Christian converts. They themselves said that by converting us and then saving us, they were opening a road for themselves to heaven.” “A miracle happened in the barn where we were hiding; we had a gas lamp there, gas spilled, and a fire broke out, but Daddy put it out. So many miracles happened to save us. God was good to us. And a few Christians were, too. Many Poles were hostile to us, but not all.”