The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  I always ask everyone about Helena Chrzanowska. I know so much about her by now, including her life after the war and that of her sons. I thought of devoting a chapter of this book to her, but I realize that too much of what I know is shrouded in secrecy.

  JULY 1, 2002

  I take part in a funeral ceremony in Kraków for Jan Kott, one of the greatest theater critics of the twentieth century and father of my friend Michał. Jan Kott died in December 2001 in Santa Monica, California, and in accordance with his wishes, his ashes are to be buried in Kraków.

  He came from an assimilated Jewish family—his father had him baptized so he would be rooted in Poland and Polishness. In an article written not long before he died, he said that after the Jedwabne affair the memory of his father came back to him.

  His parents did not wear armbands during the war, they lived in Kraków on the “Aryan side.” His father was picked up in a café where he was the middleman in some transaction, and held under arrest. In jail, when he took a shower with his fellow prisoners and they saw he was circumcised, they informed on him. That was the day he was to be released. His wife was already waiting for him at the prison.

  Jedwabne stirs memory, conscience. The editor of the Catholic monthly Bond at some meeting or other cited the story of a village priest who had peasants coming to him after sixty years to confess their betrayal of certain Jews to the Germans.

  JULY 10, 2002

  Prosecutor Ignatiew announced the initial results of his investigation yesterday: “The perpetrators of the crime, strictly speaking, were the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and its surroundings.”

  Just before dark I drive into Jedwabne to lay a rock on the monument. On the last two anniversaries Mayor Godlewski and council chairman Michałowski each laid wreaths there. Not this year. The former mayor has left the country; the chairman didn’t turn up.

  JULY 16, 2002

  I’m working on my book on a farm near Sejny in eastern Poland, far from the world, in a landscape filled with lakes, hills, and berries. An acquaintance calls from Jedwabne to tell me someone has hanged a cat in the Jewish cemetery and asking what office to inform. I call Ignatiew with that question, and in passing I also tell him about the lakes and hills.

  “Landscape patriotism, that’s good, too,” says a pleased Ignatiew, whom I use as a kind of vehicle for discharging my anger at my countrymen. He bears it bravely, but it must be hard for him.

  JULY 19, 2002

  I return from Sejny via Jedwabne. When Leszek Dziedzic and Krzysztof Godlewski left Poland I no longer had houses where I could drop by without flitting around in the dusk, trying not to be seen. I know I can always go by Stanisław Michałowski’s, but I also know a visit from me is not really what he needs. I understand, after all, he’s left here on his own.

  I look in on Henryk Bagiński, who drives up to the monument regularly in his little Fiat with a rake, plastic bags, and sometimes a scythe. He cleans up, gathers broken vigil lights, cuts the grass around the monument. He recounts to me an exchange he had with a neighbor on the street:

  “We’ll have to pay sixty billion after the president went and admitted it.”

  “No, we won’t, the whole of Poland isn’t worth that much.”

  “Your granny was fathered by a Jew, she was!”

  JULY 20, 2002

  Jedwabne. A conversation with Stanisław Michałowski. “Did the papers really have to write about this?” He’s talking about the Jan Karski Prize awarded to Krzysztof Godlewski and presented to him at a Brooklyn synagogue. “You have no idea what’s going on in town. People take this as clear proof it was all set up, that Godlewski was manipulating the town council from the start, taking Jewish money.”

  At first I thought of Jedwabne as a shabby little town whose destiny it was to bear the heavy burden of an inconvenient truth. To most of the residents the burden was undeserved—they neither took part in the atrocity, nor do they come from here. In time I became accustomed to thinking of it as an evil realm, like Tolkien’s Mordor. I keep telling myself that as I search for testimony on the massacre, I only come into contact with a small part of the souls of the people I talk to, with the darkness in them. The principal who allows children to be educated in the spirit of racial hatred is, after all, an enthusiastic organizer of kayaking trips. The young woman who made abusive phone calls to a friend late at night just because she’d gone to the monument (she distorted her voice, but it came out when the police put a tap on the phone) may be a caring mother. And maybe the mailman who found a summons from the prosecutor addressed to a witness and called the witness up to threaten him always was, is, and will be a reliable deliverer of mail. Maybe. But for a while now I’ve returned from each trip to Jedwabne sick (and I’m not talking about sick at heart, but with the flu, angina, bronchitis) and I’ve told myself it was my last trip.

  JULY 22, 2002

  A conversation with Marek Edelman. While I was away from Warsaw he left a message on my answering machine to say he absolutely had to talk to me about the article on Szmul Wasersztejn I published in the Gazeta.

  “How could you write that a witness didn’t see what he says he saw?” he asks. “You can never be sure about things like that. How many witnesses do I know who saw things they never could have seen, but they really saw them? Because they ran up and for a split second peeked into a train compartment through a crack in a plank, or the moon suddenly lit up a patch of a field. On the third day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, through a hole ripped in the wall somewhere around the fourth floor of a house at 24 Franciszkańska Street, I saw the carousel wheel on the Aryan side turning, and red and blue dresses of the girls blowing in the wind. I really saw that, though it’s not at all obvious I would have.”

  I drop by the editorial offices of the Gazeta to read letters that arrived while I was away.

  “I have been writing this letter in my mind for the last twenty-five years. Your article on Szmul Wasersztejn made me feel I have to share my reflections. Mama told me that in the village she came from there was a humpbacked woman named Józia, a Jewish orphan who was a fantastic seamstress. One Polish family wanted to shelter her, but other neighbors first got money out of her and then killed her. And so, dear countrymen, should we not ask forgiveness for Józia or for Jedwabne? And as a sidenote: not too long ago I worked at one of the ministries. I hung a nice poster of Janusz Korczak over my desk. The next day the poster was torn and I was warned I shouldn’t ‘hang Jews on the wall.’ Maria Chrząstowska, Warsaw.”

  The letters I receive at the Gazeta fall into three categories. Those with insults or stories of Jews torturing Polish patriots at the secret police (or both) form the majority. Those with the names of Poles who hid Jews, with the plea that we write about them. And letters like the one from Ms. Chrząstowska, saying that in such and such a place—on the road, in the woods, in a shelter, after the liberation—a Jew, or a Jewish family, a Jewish child, was killed by a next-door neighbor, someone who lived across the street, in the next village. Sometimes they even give the name of the town and the names of the perpetrators.

  AUGUST 25, 2002

  When I get back from Bavaria, where I worked on my book in the home of my friends Nawojka and Nicolas Lobkowicz, a letter from Professor Strzembosz in response to my Wasersztejn article is waiting for me at the Gazeta. Strzembosz admits that it looks as if Wasersztejn never actually worked for the secret police. On the other hand—he writes—“it has been confirmed that of the Jewish survivors of pogroms there were two who—without any doubt—worked for the secret police.” Just to play it safe this time, he doesn’t give their names.

  The professor seems not to have noticed that he has thrown his scholarly authority into the scales by repeating gossip as if it were source material. The whole right-wing press has been citing Strzembosz’s revelations as authoritative. The professor should write them a letter correcting the calumnies he cast on Wasersztejn.

  For him, Wasersztejn is not an individual, he’s a J
ew—a general, collective concept, and in that sense it makes no difference if it was Wasersztejn who was in the secret police or someone else. Any Jew will do. I wonder how Strzembosz would feel if I wrote that he worked for the secret police and then sent a letter to explain it wasn’t him but some other Pole whose surname starts with S.

  A conversation with Adam Michnik in the office; I show him Strzembosz’s letter. I complain about my country, as is my wont of late. Adam tells me to look around and see what a discussion of the past looks like in Lithuania or Ukraine, how difficult it has been for knowledge about collaboration to get out in France, even though the government and the better part of the population took part in it.

  SEPTEMBER 1, 2002

  I read the press from the summer. I find attacks on Ignatiew not only in marginal, openly anti-Semitic papers, but also in the widely read Catholic weekly Sunday. They are instigated by Bishop Stefanek: “Even such authorities as the Institute of National Remembrance have joined the laboratory of hatred. There was no investigation into Jedwabne but a celebration of all kinds of lies. Feigned investigation activities, feigned exhumation procedures. The most difficult thing for me to accept is that the Institute of National Remembrance involved itself in a political program to deceive society.”

  I talk to Ignatiew. “I’m not dreaming of the murdered in the barn anymore,” he says. “I sense that I fulfilled my obligation toward them well.”

  SEPTEMBER 10, 2002

  Back in Jedwabne. I keep telling Stanisław Michałowski that I’m surprised at his decision to stay on as council chairman after publicly announcing that he would resign together with Godlewski. He explains to me that I judge Jedwabne too harshly, that part of the population thinks differently than I seem to realize, and he feels he is their representative. He’s running in the October municipal elections, and that will be a test of how many people think like he does.

  I listen to the gossip going around town: the Dziedzices have settled in Israel; Godlewski, who worked with Gross from the first on the writing of his book, sneaked out of the country to receive a payment of a hundred thousand dollars for selling out Jedwabne; Michałowski also received money from Jews, only in secret.

  I hear details about the trip organized under the patronage of the president’s wife, Jolanta Kwaśniewska. The kids of Jedwabne had a ball in Disneyland in Florida. On the other hand—after protests from parents—they did not visit the Holocaust Museum or meet with students at a Jewish school, which had been envisaged in the initial plans.

  I drive to see a farmer near Radziłów of whom I heard he “killed and robbed Jews in Radziłów, and when there weren’t any more left, he killed and robbed Poles, for which he now receives a fat pension as a National Armed Forces combatant.”

  He’s eager to talk. In his version, there wasn’t a single Pole in the marketplace in Radziłów or on any street nearby on July 7, 1941, because that day the Germans had forbidden Poles to leave their houses. Swaggeringly, he tells me about the postwar partisans, about his part in retaking Grajewo from the Soviets in 1945. Tortured by the secret police, he gave up nothing. He spent a few years in jail and got out, while those who’d confessed got the death penalty. I quickly say my goodbyes. No point in fooling myself into thinking that I’ll get anything out of him.

  SEPTEMBER 13, 2002

  New York. My friends here have invited me to stay so that I can get some distance from Jedwabne and write my book. I’m spending two months in Manhattan. My daughter Ola, who goes to an American school during this time with Sara, the daughter of Joanna and Ren Weschler, tells me she said “See you Monday” to a friend after class. “Monday?” the girl, of Irish origins, said, amazed. “On Yom Kippur? Here we have that day off from school.”

  I think, sadly, that in Poland it wouldn’t occur to anyone even to remember the Jews on the Day of Atonement, a holiday that the Jews observed for centuries on Polish territory.

  SEPTEMBER 20, 2002

  I phone Krzysztof Godlewski in Chicago. Prosecutor Ignatiew’s finding that it was Poles who were the direct perpetrators of the crime came as a shock to him. “I have to accept it,” he says, “because I met Ignatiew and I have no doubt as to his thoroughness. But up until now I believed the investigation would show the Germans did it and that some of the worst locals joined in, and that we were apologizing for them.”

  I phone Leszek Dziedzic in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and fill him in on the gossip from Jedwabne.

  “I don’t have anybody to tell me what’s going on there,” he says bitterly. “I was born and raised in Jedwabne, I spent forty years there, half my life if God gives me a long life, and I don’t have anyone I can call to tell me the latest.”

  His father feels so homesick here that he declares every day that he’s going back to Poland because he wants to die at home. “I explain to him, ‘Daddy, the priest won’t even bury you, you know.’”

  OCTOBER 20, 2002

  New York. Leszek Dziedzic has come to meet Rabbi Baker, and I go along as his interpreter.

  Dziedzic declares, “You, Rabbi Baker, and I, Leszek Dziedzic, are both from Jedwabne. I came here to meet a neighbor. I don’t ask forgiveness for the murderers, they are alien to me. But I ask your forgiveness, Rabbi, on behalf of those who lacked the courage back then to help Jews.”

  “They think, ‘The Jews want to take away our homes,’” says the rabbi. “But we want the murderers to regret their guilt, not their homes.”

  “July 10 was a great opportunity for reconciliation,” Leszek argues, “but in Jedwabne the priest wouldn’t allow it. Tell me, Rebbe, why is that? We have one God, we took your faith, we pray to a Jewish Mother of God. How can Father Orłowski not be afraid to stand before God one day?”

  The rabbi: “I thought of asking him that, but he wouldn’t have an answer.”

  OCTOBER 28, 2002

  I call Stanisław Michałowski in Jedwabne to find out how the municipal elections turned out. He was not elected.

  “It’s a failure but not a disaster,” he says. “One hundred and twenty-eight people voted for me.”

  “How many votes did you get before?”

  “I lost two hundred and fifty-two since the last election. People said, ‘So why did you have to choose the wrong side?’ It’s payback for my contribution to the preparations for the ceremony in Jedwabne. The priest has a lot to do with it.”

  I try not to sound as if I’m saying “I told you so” (he should have resigned with Godlewski). Apparently I don’t succeed very well, because Stanisław adds, “I wanted to hide from you how people think here. I was ashamed. But it is the way it is.”

  OCTOBER 29, 2002

  In a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. A couple of friends from Poland have brought a friend, a girl who’s studying here.

  “Is your book for or against Gross?” she asks.

  I bristle. Did this, one of the questions I get most often in random conversations in Poland, have to find me in Manhattan? There is only one supposedly correct answer to a question put like that: my book will be against Gross. I prefer to write this book in New York, imposing on my friends’ hospitality, precisely so as not to hear questions like that. The girl hasn’t read Gross’s book, by the way, but she has an opinion.

  NOVEMBER 24, 2002

  Back in Poland. A visit to Marianna Ramotowska, who is more and more closed off in her own world. This time she doesn’t recognize me. When the present becomes increasingly foggy, the past takes on color. So I ask her caregiver, who spends twenty-four hours a day with her, whether Marianna ever recalls her childhood. No. Evidently she has locked away under seven seals her memories of the time when she was still Rachela.

  NOVEMBER 29, 2002

  I spend another day studying the two fat volumes of the Institute of National Remembrance’s About Jedwabne, edited by Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak. Over fifteen hundred pages, most of them documents—440 of them in all—found in archives in Białystok, Warsaw, Ełk, Jerusalem, Minsk, Grodno, L
udwigsburg. The Institute of National Remembrance book offers at least approximate answers to most of the questions filling the newspaper headlines in the course of the sharpest debate of the past few years. It’s Gross’s great achievement that he provoked more than a dozen scholars to turn their attention to materials no one had touched before.

  How many active participants were there in the crime in Jedwabne? Krzysztof Persak, who made a penetrating analysis of trial materials from 1949 and 1953, excluding ambiguous testimony, counted eighty-five persons mentioned by name and surname. The number of residents of Jedwabne and nearby villages who took part in the atrocity in some form he estimated at well over a hundred.

  Can the determinations of the 1949 trial be accepted? Law professor Andrzej Rzepliński showed in a devastating critique that the crime was minimized, and the investigation conducted with extraordinary inefficiency: it can’t be ruled out that some of the secret police officials and prosecutors shared the anti-Semitic prejudices of the accused men. “It is beyond doubt,” we read, “that the case was conducted in such a way as to reveal the least amount of evidence possible that might incriminate the accused and other Polish residents.” Rzepliński puts his faith in the testimonies of witnesses who pointed to murderers during the investigation but who withdrew their statements at the trial. And so, analyzing the testimony of Bronisława Kalinowska (“Jerzy Laudański was hurtling down the street saying he had already killed two or three Jews”), he states, “Her brave testimony during the inqury was ‘corrected’ in court, because this older woman, I have no doubt, was more afraid of the members of the Laudański family who remained at large and of the family of the other accused men than she was of the secret police.”

  Can we believe prosecutor Waldemar Monkiewicz, who claimed that 232 Germans carried out the massacre? No, says the historian Krzysztof Persak, who analyzed the case documents from 1967. For the documents do not even offer a trace of evidence that might lead one to that conclusion. “The conduct of the prosecutor at that time,” we read, “can only be judged as a manipulation of evidence and a falsification of the results of the investigation.”