The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  “Szlomke came to see us,” wrote Chaja. “He had no permit to leave the barracks, but he crawled through the barbed wire because we were nearby. He wanted to see if he’d grown, he compared the marks on the door, and it turned out he had grown by several centimeters. He was hoping he’d get the day off at Passover, it would have been our first Seder together since 1941. But he had to leave at 5 a.m. I called to him ‘Szlomke’ as he was going…”

  This is how Chaja Finkelsztejn concludes her memoir.

  Szlomo Finkelsztejn was killed in 1948 near Kiryat Anavim on the way to Jerusalem.

  “After our arrival in Palestine,” I was told by Chana, now Ann Walters, “our parents became young again for a brief time, they sang Halutz songs after dinner, but after Szlomke died the house was never cheerful again.”

  Chaja managed to guide her whole family through the hell of the Shoah not just because they were wealthy, and not even because they managed to play the part (as she described it) of pious Christians. They survived thanks to her extraordinary strength of spirit. She managed to inspire her children with that hope, and instilled in them love for a distant country. She later paid the highest price for having succeeded: the death of a son in the name of a country that she had taught him to love.

  In 1966 a woman from Yad Vashem came to Chaja in Haifa to record her testimony. “She accused the Poles of having burned the Jews alive,” the woman noted. “She was so upset that it was difficult to understand what she was saying. She said she had three hundred sixty pages of memoirs and had waited for years for the chance to publish them.”

  Not only were Chaja’s memoirs never published, but it seems no one even read them during her lifetime.

  Journal

  JUNE 16, 2002

  It’s the third day I take Bożena and Jan Skrodzki along with me on a search for the places where the Finkelsztejns were in hiding. Chaja couldn’t have had much hope that anyone from Poland would ever study her memoir. Still, most often she didn’t give either the surnames of the killers or the helpers, nor did she mention the names of the villages, so that even a meticulous analysis of the text offers little chance of re-creating their itinerary. But we know that among the villages where the Finkelsztejns hid was Trzaski, where the Borawskis now live.

  In Trzaski we manage to find the house of Rogowski, who came to the Finkelsztejns to offer help as soon as the Soviets arrived. Without Chaja’s information that one brother was a doctor, another a priest, and three were students we would never have found them, because—as we heard at the Borawskis’—“you can throw a stone at any house here and find yourself face-to-face with a Rogowski.”

  We talk to the grandson, Leopold, who’s about fifty. He lives more in New York than here. He knows his grandfather helped the family of a Radziłów miller. I tell him Chaja described his family in her memoir and mourned the death of his grandfather (it all fits: Franciszek Rogowski died in March 1944). She writes most admiringly of the grandfather, less so of the rest of the family. I suggest I read him only what she says about his grandfather. “No, no, please, read it all,” his grandson says. So I also read the excerpts about Franciszek’s wife not wanting to return the Finkelsztejns’ things to them after her husband died, how she went by the neighbors’ to urge them not to store anything for the Finkelsztejns: “They would have flung us into the arms of death in order to keep it all.” I feel awkward reading these things, but when I glance at our host I see Chaja’s words aren’t making too much of an impression on him. When I finish, he asks, “Do you have any Jews in your family? I worked for a Jew in America; he was a decent man. Maybe you can help me find work in New York?”

  He tells various stories he’s heard about the war without much emotion. “My uncle told me a Jew had warned him he was going to be deported, and later when my uncle went to the barn when it was all over, he saw that Jew, partially burned.”

  “Just between us Poles,” Jan Skrodzki draws him out, “tell me, are you an anti-Semite?”

  “I don’t like Jews.”

  “And why is that?”

  “They live near me in New York, the kind with curls, religious Jews, and I just don’t like the sight of them.”

  The theme I know so well of God’s punishment runs through our conversations. And so there was a shoemaker who was a landlord, and one Pole chased him and helped burn him. The Pole moved into the shoemaker’s house, but when he fell asleep in his Jewish featherbed, he didn’t wake up the next day. Or the story about the Jewish family Cherubin, whom the Poles dragged out at night, killed, robbed, whose blacksmith workshop they took over, and how they later had abnormal children.

  JUNE 17, 2002

  We move onward following the route described by Chaja. Far from the highways, we travel along village roads to scattered cottages. Every time I talk to witnesses of the events of sixty years ago it turns out they can confirm almost every detail she mentions. But it isn’t until I get to the places where they were in hiding that the memoir written in Yiddish acquires a palpable reality.

  Nowadays you don’t meet many descendants of the former residents here. In Konopki, where nineteen families lived, only a few of them remain, and many houses are boarded up. Dusze has virtually emptied out. But all who remain remember the miller’s family. They don’t know their surname or their Jewish names, but they remember Chaja’s children Józek, Janek, Marysia, and Jadzia (or, respectively, Menachem, Szlomo, Szejna, and Chana).

  Previously when I visited various households where Jews were hidden, the people were nervous and asked how I found them, asked me not to mention their names. In Trzaski, Konopki, and Dusze, hiding Jews became a normal thing during the war, accepted by virtually the whole community, and people now speak of it without fear. Almost everyone we talk to remembers his father, grandfather, or uncle hiding a Jew—as well as the Finkelsztejns, two families hid in these villages, and like the Finkelsztejns, they would spend short periods of time with various host families. Only one of those we talk to brings out Gross’s Lies, the pamphlet from the series “Know Your Jews,” a standard text in nearly every Jedwabne home.

  “They converted and lived among us,” Franciszek Mroczkowski says. “We had a gramophone in our house, and Marysia came to dance. The Jew tailored a bit, he made me a cap, and he complained it wasn’t quite right, the shape, but it suited me. I gave him butter and salt pork for it. And so those Jews were saved. They thought they’d be equal to Poles when they were baptized, but Hitler ordered them to be destroyed and they had to hide in a bunker.”

  Franciszek Grądzki, the oldest of the residents of Trzaski (“I’m afraid to tell you what year I was born because death is listening in”), remembers Józek or Menachem Finkelsztejn warmly: “He was eighteen. The Jewish boy used to graze a cow with us. A good boy. We gave him a religious pendant and he wore it, but he refused a rosary.”

  This doesn’t mean the sympathy felt toward the family extended to Jews in general. Mroczkowski speaks with pride of his brother, who participated in a pogrom in Radziłów in 1933: “My brother was with the National Party, it was a decent, good organization, close to the church. He joined in the hullaballoo in Radziłów, when a Jew shot at a Pole from a balcony and the Polish police attacked. It was mandatory to turn up on those occasions. They harassed Jews,” he says, laughing.

  “Were they right to harass them?” I ask.

  “Poles weren’t doing well. Nowadays a worker will rebel and go on strike. I think right is on the side of the people who aren’t doing well, what do you think?”

  No one knows what happened to the Radziłów miller’s family later. Describing their time in hiding, people access their own memories, but describing their later history they draw deep from anti-Semitic stereotypes: of their riches, their working for the secret police, being part of a conspiracy.

  I promised Ann Walters, formerly Chana Finkelsztejn, that I’d find the name of the woman who took her in as her own child and nursed her back to life. From Chaja’s memoir I’ve deduced this w
oman must have lived in Dusze. I find the house. It’s a pretty redbrick structure, unoccupied. The neighbors tell me that during the war Zofia Karwowska lived here. They don’t know whether or where any of her descendants are living.

  JUNE 25, 2002

  In the Dominican church in Służewiec, Father Ryszard Bosakowski meets with students who are going to Jedwabne to clean up the Jewish cemetery. I find the whole group in distress. They had hoped to involve the local youth. Father Bosakowski had had a promising conversation with the lyceum director, but later he couldn’t get hold of her. The secretary repeatedly told him that the director was out, until she finally told him to direct all calls to the parish priest. And hung up.

  I phone an acquaintance in Jedwabne to ask how it’s possible that a school director would refuse a call from a priest. “I know, I know,” he replies with an obvious sneer, “you’d like her to become involved in the cleanup of the cemetery, but she’d lose her job within the month.”

  I hear that Tadeusz Ś., the man with whom Adam Michnik and I first spoke, tells people he had an encounter with “that Jewish bitch Bikont” and that he’s learning Hebrew because “you have to know the language of your enemies.”

  JUNE 29, 2002

  Trip to Zabrze. After the publication of one of my articles in the Gazeta, I received a letter from Grzegorz Karwowski (another Karwowski, no relation to the others appearing in this book) about how his family, who lived in the Radziłów area, had hidden Jews during the war. When I realized after an exchange of e-mails that one of them must have been Helena Chrzanowska, then called Sara Fajga Kuberska, now the one baptized Jewish survivor in Jedwabne, I persuaded him to take me along when he next visited his father, who now lives in Silesia.

  We take the train. On the way I tell Karwowski that I meet with such intense anti-Semitism in his native region that it feels to me almost like physical aggression. Reflecting on the causes of all the hatred unleashed by the “Jedwabne affair,” I came to the conclusion that the forgotten atrocity somehow weighs upon the current residents, even on those who had nothing to do with it, or didn’t even live there at the time. Karwowski has a different hypothesis. He thinks the residents of that poor region of Poland who travel to America to earn money, most often in the Chicago area, encounter the rabid anti-Semitism of the Polish community there and bring it back with them to implant it at home. Perhaps he has a point. The anti-Semitic leaflets from across the ocean and the words of support from the Polish community in America were in any case a factor in determining how the town behaved in the period when it became a focus of media attention.

  When we get there I learn that Grzegorz’s grandparents hid not only the future Helena Chrzanowska and her mother, but just before the Red Army arrived they also gave shelter to “one of the daughters of the Radziłów miller.” Antoni, Grzegorz’s father, was nine by then and remembered Chana Finkelsztejn: “She sat by the stove, very polite, without saying a word.” As if he were talking about the Chana I met in Kansas.

  Antoni doesn’t like all the fuss over Gross’s book. From his point of view, that of a man whose family sheltered Jews, it’s harmful to Poland. Although when we start talking about specifics, he has no doubt about what happened: “The Germans arrived. Jews entrusted their belongings to the wealthier farmers, because a Jew would be afraid to trust a poor man with anything. And that’s the worst disgrace, that the farmers who were entrusted with things by Jews weren’t concerned whether or not those Jews survived. There was terrible looting going on. When they were burning the Jews, one of my neighbors, Polakowska, went to a Jewish house and came back with bedclothes. But her husband refused to make use of them, he told her to throw them all into the road and burn them.”

  “Helena Chrzanowska’s family,” he tells me, “hid with us, but also with Onufry Kosmaczewski and the Klimaszewskis. But you shouldn’t think every family that hid Jews did it for humanitarian reasons. My parents didn’t take advantage as it happens, but right after the war you could tell who had hidden people for money. Dusze, Trzaski, Konopki—all those villages enriched themselves greatly during the war.”

  I’ve been trying to reconstruct Helena Chrzanowska’s family history for a long time. I knew her parents, the Kuberskis, lived in Kubra before the war—nearer to Radziłów than to Jedwabne. I talked to Janina Karwowska, a retired schoolteacher who lives there and got to know Helena better during the Soviet occupation.

  “We got to be friends when we were in the same class,” she tells me. “I visited them at home, she had me over for matzo. How clean it was there! Helena’s mother had married a smith from Kubra, but she came from Jedwabne. They lived in the village surrounded by Poles. They were well-liked and respected people, who readily helped others.”

  I know that peasants came for her father on July 7, and took him to the marketplace in Radziłów. Sara, then fifteen, witnessed it. This I heard from Leon Dziedzic. He didn’t know where she’d gone into hiding.

  Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir helped me trace what happened to her during the war.

  On July 7, 1941, the family with whom the Finkelsztejns were hiding told them that “they caught the smith Ezra from Radziłów and he’s dead.” The Kuberski family, the mother and four children, survived just as the Finkelsztejns had, and even in the same villages. They were baptized and for as long as possible were hired out to work in Polish households, for which the Germans were paid. Chaja Finkelsztejn met them once at a farmer’s she knew. She wrote about them without warmth: “The smith’s wife and her two sons and daughter converted to Catholicism, and the priest took them into his protection. Unlike us, they took it seriously, they believed in their new God. The smith’s wife would lie awake at night, praying with her rosary. When we saw that it pained our hearts.” She explained to Helena’s mother that the war wouldn’t last forever, that they were Jews, that after the war they could go to America or Palestine. She urged her not to pay attention to her daughter’s Christian suitors, because after the war the girl could marry a Jew. Chaja described the future Helena Chrzanowska: “She didn’t greet us. She was trying to show that they were real goys, that they were in a better position, even though we used to be rich once. Angrily, she asked her mother whether she’d fed the pigs. Then she repeated to the peasants what I’d said to her mother.”

  From October 1942, when the Kuberskis got a summons to report to the police station, they had to go into hiding. Helena’s mother changed hiding places often with Helena and her younger brother, Icek, moving around the Radziłów area. They were in Chrzanów, Kubra, Doliwy, Trzaski.

  Helena’s elder brothers got by on their own. “The smith’s sons stayed with Poles who were also in hiding from the Germans,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote. “I knew they would be betrayed. And sure enough, one of those brothers was sitting in a peasant’s cottage when the police passed by. They threw him out of the house. The policemen saw him and shot him, and they picked up the Christian family.” Chaja knew about it because news of this spread throughout the area immediately, and the farmer she was hiding with got scared and told her to leave the shelter.

  When Jan Skrodzki and I were in Trzaski, we found traces of the blacksmith’s family from Kubra. We kept hearing a story about farmers taken to the police station for having hidden Jewish boys. Their neighbors put all their salt pork and sausage together, and after a week they bought off the police, who released the farmers.

  “Helena never told me how she survived the war, and I never asked her about it,” Janina Karwowska tells me. “As soon as the occupation ended I remember her mother going to church with her and her brother Icek, where they prayed loudly and wept.”

  Immediately after the war her mother recovered her grandfather Abram Kruk’s house, right on the marketplace in Jedwabne, and she moved into it with Icek.

  Icek was killed right after the war. I first heard the story from Leszek Dziedzic: “Icek grazed cows in a field near ours, those were fields left by his grandfather Kruk. Friends who were grazing animals w
ith him killed him when they were playing.”

  Later I heard it again from several of the people I talked to, but without any names.

  “They were playing tag and throwing pebbles. He was younger than them but better at it. He won. They started throwing stones at him. He only just managed to get home. Those boys killed him because they’d lost to a Jew. They beat his chest so badly while he lay on his back that the boy lay dying for two days. He was a Catholic and when he felt he was dying in that field he asked them to give him a crucifix that he could kiss. They handed it to him upside down, and he was just conscious enough to turn it over and kiss it. He only just made it home. The mother of one of those young murderers went to the priest to say a Jew couldn’t be given a Catholic burial.”

  I ask Karwowska what she knows about Icek’s death.

  She was at their house at the time. “He was lying there half-conscious, dying, crying and crying until he passed away. Helena told me one of her brother’s pals had hit him on the temple by accident while they were playing.”

  I tell her Icek was stoned to death by boys from his village and that I’ve collected several witness statements that confirm it.

  “I remember,” Janina Karwowska says in astonishment, “Helena said they had no pity, the boys were throwing pebbles and it was all from a little stone like that. Her mother died shortly after that, I think it was the same year.”

  I recall what Antonina Wyrzykowska told me once. She knew Helena Chrzanowska well, they used to visit each other. Helena wrote to her in America: “If I’d known what kind of a life I’d have, it would have seemed a shame to save it.”

  Now I ask Antoni Karwowski if he knows how Helena’s brother Icek died. Not until I quote what other witnesses have said is he prepared to talk to me about it. He names the boys who grazed cows with Icek when he was beaten to death: Zygmunt, Genek, Władek. The first to throw stones at Icek was said to be Genek. He doesn’t want to give me the boys’ surnames, and I have no way of finding out.