by Anna Bikont
Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir is the story of a woman who defends her family like a lioness in the face of a historical cataclysm. “I was hard as steel and cold as iron”—she repeats that phrase many times. After these few days spent with Ann I realized how high the wall was that Chaja built to shield her children from the threat of the outside world.
First Chaja died of Alzheimer’s. Then the same happened to Ann’s brother Menachem, and finally to her sister Yaffa. It must really be a miracle that it is thanks to this family, so deeply marked by an illness that degrades memory, that the memory of the Radziłów Holocaust survived.
APRIL 22, 2002
Today I left for New London to meet Lea Kubran, who was hidden by Antonina Wyrzykowska.
Her husband, Jack Kubran—Jankiel Kubrzański in Poland—survived because on July 10, 1941, he was taken on to work at the German police station, which was the safest place in Jedwabne that day. Lea lived with her parents in nearby Szczuczyn. She survived because she happened to be at her friend Elke’s house across the street. Her cousin, who managed to jump out of the window, told her how their neighbors, peasants with whom they were friendly—her father used to lend his bicycle to them—had burst into their home. They murdered everyone with axes. Lea had six brothers and four sisters.
When she was little her mother read her a prophecy that there would be a war and only one person would survive from each family. Lea responded, “I want to be that person.” “I survived, because that was my destiny,” she says. “And I suffered and risked so much.”
After the pogrom in Szczuczyn she and Elke made their way to Łomża to Elke’s family. The Olszewiczes, Elke’s future in-laws, were already camping out there, having decided in time to move to a larger city in fear of a pogrom. Soon the next refugees arrived from Jedwabne: Mosze, the Olszewiczes’ son, and his friend Jankiel Kubrzański. They told terrible stories, which no one wanted to believe, about all Jews having been burned there.
Lea knows that Poles came for her future husband when he was working at the German police station on July 10, 1941, but the police wouldn’t let them take him. The Germans said, “You have enough Jews.” In the evening they told the Jews to go: “Go—we’re not going to protect you anymore.”
In the Jedwabne trial Karol Bardoń, one of the perpetrators, testified: “A few people went into the yard at the police station and tried to take away three Jews chopping wood. Then the station commandant came out to them: ‘Was eight hours to deal with the Jews not enough for you?’” Kubrzański must have been one of those three.
Before long everyone had to leave the house, because it was situated outside the borders of the ghetto being formed. But they stayed together for now. Lea fled the ghetto with Jankiel the day before it was liquidated. They hid with a peasant, but someone informed on them.
“The farmer came rushing into the pigsty shouting, ‘Run, the police are coming for you,’” Lea Kubran relates. “We started running, it was the autumn of 1942, but there was already heavy snow. They caught us, took us to the village head. They beat me, I still have a scar on my forehead. The Germans got drunk with the village head to celebrate having found Jews, and told the farmer they were supposed to drive us to the station in town on a wagon. The farmer took us on his cart. The farmer tied Jankiel’s hand to mine, two policemen sat in back, the farmer in front. They were taking us to our deaths. The policemen were so drunk they fell asleep in the cold, and the Pole said to us, ‘Run away, they’re asleep. I’ll wake them when you’re far away.’”
Lea breaks off to give us dinner. When she speaks English she has a heavy Yiddish accent, but her Polish is pure Jedwabne. She says “Bogu dzięka” (Thanks God) as often as Wyrzykowska does (“Thanks God my daughter got a good education”).
“We’d run a good distance,” she continues her tale, “when the Pole shouted loudly so we could hear him, ‘They’re gone! They’re gone!’ They beat and kicked the Pole and chased him away. We found a barn and burrowed into the hay, our hands still tied together. Jankiel dropped by Antonina’s on the way to find shelter. We knew Szmul Wasersztejn worked there and that we could count on Antonina. She told Jankiel the Olszewiczes were already with her. He stayed a night. I hid with a farmer I knew on the Narew River who’d told Jankiel he wouldn’t let me stay,” Lea goes on, “but I hid in his barn without him knowing it. My parents came to me in my sleep, telling me what to do, and then I felt as if my father had offered me his hand so I could pull myself up to the very top of the barn. Jankiel had promised to look for a place for both of us, and if it turned out we had to part, we’d find each other after the war—if we survived. Eleven days went by, maybe twelve. I thought, I’ll wait one more day for Jankiel and then I’ll drown myself. I cried myself to sleep, and the next day I heard voices. He hadn’t found another place so he’d gone back to Antonina, and she’d told him to bring me, too.”
When they came out of hiding after the war, they lived in the family house of the Kubrzańskis. Briefly.
“Poles were living there,” Lea continues her story, “but we reassured them that we only wanted to spend a few nights and leave, so they behaved well. One night partisans came. Olszewicz wasn’t there, he was looking for a place to live in Łomża, because we already knew it wasn’t safe in Jedwabne. Within a second Jankiel had stood on the sofa and pulled himself up, there was a trapdoor over the sofa, and angels must have guided his movements for him to have made it. I said there weren’t any men at home, and one of them slapped my face, saying I was lying. They went outside, and I heard them saying to their leader, ‘No men, just two women, what do we do with them?’ But they didn’t do anything to us, and the same night we fled to Łomża by foot.”
After the Kubrzańskis arrived in the United States they settled in Connecticut. Lea, after raising three children, worked as a cook at a Jewish school, twice winning first prize in a local contest for her chocolate cake. Jankiel, by then called Jack, began as a night watchman in a dairy, then a dairy worker, eventually rising to foreman.
The Olszewiczes settled in Argentina. “Elke and Mosze ran a business,” Lea tells me. “They sewed bags made of leather and plastic, the kind you use for shopping, not for going out to the theater; it was a good trade because there hadn’t been bags like that in Buenos Aires before. Mosze had such a good head for business he could have been minister of trade. In the ghetto he did anything to avoid doing forced labor. He sold and bought, going back and forth between the ghetto and the Aryan side. He used to say, ‘Where you have two people, you have a business.’”
Lea lived with Jankiel for more than fifty years, as did Elke with Mosze. It is only when I talked to Lea that I realized she and Elke were only about fifteen when they went into hiding, Berek Olszewicz the same; the others weren’t even eighteen yet.
APRIL 24, 2002
I’m scarcely on the ground at the airport in Warsaw when my cell phone rings. I am told Marianna Ramotowska is in the hospital. I go to see her straight from the airport. The first call I make is to Ignatiew. These are the times that make me fully aware of the extent of my obsession with Jedwabne.
MAY 3, 2002
Jedwabne. Dozens of photocopies are circulating around town of the letter sent last spring by the mayor and the town council chairman to the government authorities with a request for aid in preparation for the July 10 ceremony. Supposedly the new mayor found the letter in his predecessor’s desk and decided to make it public. “That disgraceful letter,” the town’s residents call it. Father Orłowski’s beloved anti-Semitic rag printed it under the headline “Proof of Betrayal,” taking the opportunity to accuse council chairman Michałowski of informing the “kosher crowd” about the mood of the townspeople: “Recently—discreetly, at home, not in his office—he talked for several hours to the chief Jewish slanderer Bikont of the Gazeta Wyborcza. This journalistic hyena has already frequently made her mark in the pages of the Gazeta Wyborcza with lying polonivorous articles. May the Poles of Jedwabne know who is informing o
n them.”
I try to joke about it with Michałowski, but I realize he’s not in a laughing mood.
I visit an older lady, Miss Szmidtowa, who lives in a secluded little house with a multitude of cats and dogs but without running water or gas.
On a video recording made by Szmul Wasersztejn I watch the welcome in Jedwabne: “Stasiulek!” she cried—using the fond diminutive they used for him during the war. “Stasiulek, come in.” In Szmul’s memoir I found a description of how he had turned up on the steps of her family home many years before—it was July 11, 1941—and she greeted him with the same astonishment and joy: “Szmulke, but I thought you were dead.” She and her mother wept when he told them that his mother and brother had been burned. They were afraid to keep him, but her father drove to Jedwabne and learned that Jews could safely return home, because the Germans had forbidden any further killing.
Leszek Dziedzic had tried in vain to persuade Miss Szmidtowa to talk to me when he was still in Poland.
“You see, she lives on her own in the middle of nowhere,” he said, attempting to explain her refusal to me. “Someone could come and throw a stone through her window and nobody would even notice.”
It’s not the first time I’ve dropped by her house, trying to get her to feel comfortable with me, drinking tea from filthy glasses. She enjoys my visits. But I haven’t gotten her to budge an inch.
“I didn’t round anybody up, I’d sooner give them bread. And I don’t know who did the rounding up. I didn’t want to remember, so it didn’t stick in my mind. I only know I’ve seen some bad times in my life.”
She denies ever hearing of Szmul Wasersztejn.
MAY 4, 2002
Jedwabne. I drive up to the house of Franciszek, Antonina Wyrzykowska’s nephew, with whom I’ve spoken once before.
He clearly doesn’t recognize me and thinks Father Orłowski sent me. The priest sends journalists to him as his expert on Wasersztejn. After all, Wasersztejn hid with his father in Janczewko for several weeks in November 1942. The son, however, keeps saying with pleasure that Szmul Wasersztejn is a lousy bum who slanders Poland. He probably doesn’t realize what he’s really telling me.
“Why did Wyrzykowska hide people?” Janina Biedrzycka once asked me. I said to her, “Why did you let them get away? If you hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been anyone to hide.”
MAY 8, 2002
Milanówek. A visit to Antonina Wyrzykowska. I ask her about her nephew, Franciszek.
“Franciszek wrote me that his son bought a broken tractor and I was supposed to get it repaired by President Kwaśniewski, because Franciszek can’t afford the spare parts. Someone else in the family asked me who I knew in TV, because I must have some good connections. I wrote back I know people who clean the streets and run the school cloakroom and if that’s any use to him, I could give him some contacts.”
“It was just any old life, mine was, my angel,” Antonina sums it all up in parting.
MAY 9, 2002
I phone Krzysztof Godlewski, who left for the United States a month ago.
“Jedwabne is nothing compared to Chicago,” he complains. “The local Polonia paper is printing a series called ‘Jedwabne—the Lie of the Millennium.’ I’m constantly hearing jokes about Jews and crematoria. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is basic reading. I don’t admit that I’m that Godlewski, the mayor of Jedwabne.”
MAY 29, 2002
The foundation of the president’s wife, Jolanta Kwaśniewska, has invited me to Jedwabne for a meeting she’s having with high school students. Twenty gymnasium high school students are traveling to America on a trip organized by an American organization, the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, with the support of Kwaśniewska’s foundation. I had heard about this trip before. Already in the fall the school was buzzing with talk about whose child would get to go to America. The main attraction is a trip to Disneyland. Early registration was conducted by Jolanta Karwowska, the teacher who went on the trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
“The children worship her like an icon and accept everything she says,” a teacher friend told me. “And she says she’s going to America to sound out the Jews. But also that she won’t be taken in by them. She goes around the school with a photo of the lady she met on her trip to the Holocaust Museum, whose foundation has now invited her to come to America with the children. She shows it around: ‘This is Miss Kaya, there’s a piano in the background and over it the Virgin Mary. She’s a Catholic. I wouldn’t go on a Jew’s invitation.’”
I intervened with the president’s office to prevent them from sending the children to America in the care of the school’s chief anti-Semite. Whether it’s a result of that intervention or independent of it, it’s a relief that she’s not the one going.
On the road to Jedwabne I talk to women working for Kwaśniewska’s foundation. They gave the students selected for the trip some homework assignments that we will now see. The students had to prepare projects on some religion or nationality present in the region. I ask how a school where anti-Semitic remarks are the order of the day deals with the Jewish people. Yes, it was a problem. The themes of Jews and Judaism were taken up only after several interventions by the foundation.
I share my skepticism with the ladies of the foundation. They tell me they have the task of rooting out racial prejudice. “To root out anti-Semitism would take considerable systematic work with the children,” I say. “Shouldn’t they be given some more doable task, like re-creating prewar Jewish Jedwabne with the children, or cleaning up the cemetery? Maybe then it might make sense to reward them with a trip to Disneyland?” But the ladies from the foundation argue that they are proposing an excellent educational program: building a bridge of understanding has been shown to work in childrens’ camps in the former Yugoslavia.
We arrive at the school, the auditorium has been decorated, the students are dressed up. Kasia Czerwińska (council chairman Stanisław Michałowski’s daughter) and Joanna Godlewska (Krzysztof Godlewski’s wife) greet me with kisses on the cheek. I’m aware this has a heroic dimension here. The third teacher I know says to me in passing, “Of course we have to pretend we don’t know each other.”
The young people are supposed to tell us about their projects. About the Lithuanians we learn how deeply rooted they were in this area, about the Tatars that they live in Gdańsk, and you can see their mosque there. The Jews sound like creatures from another planet.
There are tables set up: “Jedwabne yesterday” (two historical projects by students on their town, one of which doesn’t even mention the word “Jew,” even though at the end of the nineteenth century Jews accounted for over 80 percent of the town’s population, and after that, a still considerable part of it; the other has a photo of the old monument and of “Jedwabne today.” There is a color photograph of all the most important events in Jedwabne in recent years, like the bishop blessing the school, and one black-and-white photo downloaded from the Internet. It shows President Kwaśniewski laying a wreath at the monument. The shot was taken from above, so that the yarmulke he’s wearing is in the foreground. (Mayor Godlewski told me after the ceremony, “The president wore a yarmulke, and I knew I should wear a yarmulke because it was a religious ceremony, but I admit I chickened out—I was afraid they’d burn my house down.”) The yarmulke is a symbol of what the residents think of the ceremony of July 10: that it was a Jewish holiday. I go up to the little girl sitting at the table and ask her if she knows what happened in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.
“A crime was committed,” she recites quickly. “We don’t know who did it but we don’t feel any aversion to Jews, either.”
“What does that Jewish cow want from our kids?” I hear one teacher say to another.
I learn that the school organized a meeting with the parish priest for the children going on the American trip and their parents. He told them that the Jews were trying to get to the young. He talked about Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD, about Jews w
anting to cast guilt on the Poles to demand compensation, whereas on July 10, 1941, hundreds of Germans and 2,500 Mazurites came to town. The school’s history teacher sat next to the priest and said nothing. The school head assured people the trip was for purposes of tourism and “had nothing to do with any ceremony or Jews.” Now every parent parrots this when attacked by those whose children weren’t lucky enough to be selected for the trip: “Our child is going for purposes of tourism.”
JUNE 3, 2002
A phone conversation with the school head in Jedwabne, Krzysztof Moenke, who is accompanying the children to America. I ask about the meeting with the priest.
“The father didn’t want the young people to go unprepared. And it’s going to be a tourist trip.”
I ask why no one ever thought of inviting Antonina Wyrzykowska, the heroine of Jedwabne, who saved seven Jews, to the school.
“Before the affair flared up I’d never heard Wyrzykowska’s name,” the principal replies, somewhat off point. He has lived in Jedwabne since his birth and his parents were here during the war.
“But once you had heard of her?”
“I wouldn’t want to drag children into that subject. Jedwabne lived in peace. And what is Israel getting up to with the Palestinians?”