The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  In fact, Jews were killed both by “quite ordinary people” (in Tykocin, as Menachem Turek testified, “the lives of Jews were put in the hands of a former shepherd, Antek Jakubiak, who became the commander of the newly minted police force”) and by “people from the margins” (like Józef Kubrzyniecki of Jedwabne, known before the war as a local hood who stole for a living).

  Jews were killed by people ready to serve any power, like the brothers Jerzy and Zygmunt Laudański in Jedwabne or Władysław Grodzki, the teacher from Jasionówka. Grodzki was in the National Party before the war, worked for the NKVD during the Soviet occupation, and, as soon as the Germans entered, began killing and robbing Jews, then joined the auxiliary police force (he was condemned to death after the war).

  “Quite ordinary people,” including people with stable lives, spouses, and numerous offspring, killed Jews—this emerges unambiguously from the investigation papers.

  Unfortunately, there was also a whole other category, the local patriotic elite, raised in a nationalist and extremely anti-Semitic spirit by the local organs of the National Party and by their own priests.

  7.

  I heard stories more than once about meetings of the Home Army after the war where plans were made to kill surviving Jews.

  The best-known case in the region involves the Dorogojs, Mordechaj and his son Akiwa (called Icek). They came out of hiding on January 23, 1945, right after the Soviets turned up. By January 28 they were dead. The open secret among the locals was that they had been killed by Antoni Kosmaczewski, who earlier had murdered Mordechaj’s daughter, Dora.

  At his trial, Kosmaczewski claimed that he had received permission from his Home Army superiors to kill the Dorogojs, who—as he testified—had threatened to kill him in revenge for his killing Dora. “So I was terrified and I went to my company leader, since I belonged to the illegal Home Army, to ask them what to do about those Jews … My leader told me that ‘if you have witnesses to it, get rid of them.’ The leader’s name was Bujnarowski; he was from Radziłów, but now he’s dead.”

  What to think of an accused man explaining that his Home Army leader was responsible for his killing of Jews after the war?

  My first impulse is not to believe that the Home Army could have had anything to do with it. But here the Institute of National Remembrance finds a document.

  LIQUIDATION REPORT, FEBRUARY 1945

  Date of liquidation: January 28, 1945

  Who carried out the liquidation and how: Home Army patrol

  Surname and first name of liquidated person and place of residence: Dorogoj Mordechaj, Radziłów

  Reason for liquidation and who suffered from his hostile activity: Soviet snoop, threatened the entirety of the organization’s work

  Make press announcement (Yes/No): No

  A second identical report concerns Dorogoj, Icek.

  The documents are signed by Lieutenant Franciszek Warzyński “Wawer” and Major Jan Tabortowski “Bruzda.” Both are legendary heroes in these parts.

  8.

  “The priest stood at the gate. Jews came to be baptized but the priest stood there and said nothing.” This is the scene described by Janina Biedrzycka, daughter of the owner of the barn in Jedwabne, who saw the priest’s behavior with her own eyes in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.

  Before the war, priests in the Łomża district often headed boycotts, and the vicar of Radziłów, Władysław Kamiński, smashed the windows of Jewish shops together with nationalist squads. There are no reports of priests taking part in the pogroms and murders of 1941, but we know that most of them took a passive stance, and sometimes even a permissive one. Many testimonies relate that a pogrom started after Mass (“On a bright Sunday Poles prepared sticks spiked with sharp thorns, bound with rope and barbed wire,” Mendel Mielnicki of Wasilków testified. “Coming back from church, all of them headed for the Jewish quarter and Jewish homes, and a pogrom began, with beatings and looting”).

  There were, however, some exceptions. Father Aleksander Pęza of Grajewo called on his parishioners to come to their senses, appealing to them not to collaborate with the Germans or to succumb to anti-Jewish provocations (testimony of Nachman Rapp, recorded in 1948).

  A priest from Rutki, together with the local school head, tried to restrain a group of men who’d been in hiding under the Soviet occupation and came out of the forest to settle scores with the Jews (testimony from Rutki, from the Ghetto Underground Archive).

  Father Cyprian Łozowski of Jasionówka beat with a stick those of his parishioners who plundered Jewish homes and threatened them with damnation (testimony of Jehoszua Bernard, recorded in a Budapest refugee shelter in 1945).

  We know of one documented case of local elites who defended Jews. In Knyszyn, after the German invasion, “Doctor Nowakowski, pharmacist Rzeźnicki, and the local priest intervened with the authorities, who stopped the persecution. The Jews went on living where they always had.” The Knyszyn priest and the local elite intervened a second time when the pogrom was being planned: “In July 1941 criminal elements in the Polish population got together. They were headed by the policeman Stach Bibiński, among others. They marked Jewish houses with a Star of David and Polish ones with a cross. The Jews lived in terror that night. The next day it was quiet, and that was thanks to the local intelligentsia, who had restrained the mob. The priest himself chased away a boy who was about to break windows. The same priest told the faithful in his weekly sermons not to persecute Jews but to help them, because no one knew what time would bring” (testimony of Samuel Suraski for the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance, 1948).

  Was any authority capable of restraining the pogrom fever among the local population as June turned to July in 1941? It is difficult to know. The fact remains that few tried. They deserve all the more praise for having done so.

  Journal

  JANUARY 10, 2003

  I listen to a cassette tape sold outside a Białystok church: it has a talk on it given in Częstochowa, at Jasna Góra, the most sacred place for Polish Catholics.

  “I would like to share with my fellow chaplains and my bishop some reflections on the Catholic-Jewish dialogue. For today we are dealing with Talmudic Judaism, which has nothing in common with Biblical Judaism. Jewish thinking, Jewish attitudes come from there, from the Talmud. We find it in The Painted Bird, in the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, in the recent reports on Jedwabne. It’s all made-up.”

  The name of the speaker is never mentioned, but I recognize the voice of the priest and professor Waldemar Chrostowski, vice president of the Catholic University in Warsaw.

  “Why is there talk of the number sixteen hundred, despite the exhumation?” I listen on. “We Christians wish to reconstruct the facts. For the Jews, the facts have no significance. We express sympathy, but their answer comes down to this: how much can we get out of this? Germany paid a hundred billion marks to Israel. When that source dried up, they started to look elsewhere. We didn’t know about a lot of these accusations, they were turned into moral categories, but then they were translated into sixty-five billion in financial compensation. They tried to do it through Auschwitz, through the business of the cross built in Warsaw. When that didn’t work, they switched to Jedwabne, preparing three years for it. We warned the offices of the president and prime minister that they should not allow the government to apologize to the Jews. Because after that money would have to follow.”

  Father Chrostowski, the former vice president of the Council of Christians and Jews, is the primate’s expert on the Christian-Jewish dialogue.

  APRIL 4, 2003

  In the Republic, Father Stanisław Musiał, with the same vigor with which he denounced anti-Semitism in the Church, takes on the war in Iraq. He writes of crime and lies, and attacks Catholic bishops in the United States who supported sending U.S. soldiers to Iraq. I don’t like this war either, I’m proud of my daughter Ola, who goes to antiwar demonstrations in New York after school. It only exacerbates my feeling of alienati
on, because the majority of the people I know in Poland are in favor of the war, and my newspaper is, too.

  APRIL 29, 2003

  The funeral of Father Orłowski, who played a crucial role in the denial of Poles’ responsibility for the massacre. Two bishops went all the way to Jedwabne for it.

  MAY 1, 2003

  A conversation with the sociologist Ireneusz Krzemiński, who has just finished a study of anti-Semitic attitudes. He repeated the same questions he posed ten years ago, in 1992.

  Only 14 percent of Poles think that in Auschwitz, where 90 percent of the victims were Jews, they killed mostly Jews. The fact that the Jews suffered more than Poles during the war is accepted by fewer Poles than before—barely 38 percent.

  “The results leave no room for doubt,” he says. “After the Jedwabne affair flared up, the number of anti-Semites in Poland increased significantly. Why? Jedwabne sharpened our sense of competitive suffering.”

  MAY 4, 2003

  I’m preparing captions for photographs from Jedwabne.

  The experience of wresting information from oblivion is familiar to me from my work on the album I Still See Their Faces. I remember the moment when I saw hundreds of pictures of Jews on the floor and at once realized I didn’t want to write the text I’d been commissioned to write on former Jewish shtetls. Instead, I should write captions for these photos, resurrect as much as possible of a lost world, reconstruct not just the fate of those in the photographs but the wanderings of the photos themselves.

  From the beginning it seemed to me that most of the photographs sent in to the contest were caught up in others’ lives, hanging on for dear life in the family albums of Polish neighbors, in the chests of drawers of distant acquaintances. It happened that someone had kept for half a century a photo found next to the railway tracks leading to the camp in Brzezinka, even though the people in the picture were strangers to the finder. But sometimes it seemed that this strangeness had been strictly self-imposed. In the third, fifth, tenth meeting or phone conversation, people would reveal to me that those were in fact family photos. Their Jewish relatives.

  And so it was that a woman who told me various details from the biography of a man in a Polish Army uniform—that he’d been in the Polish Socialist Party, that he’d been murdered at Katyń—burst into tears and admitted he was her father. “From the time our neighbors betrayed us during the war and we survived only by a miracle,” she explained, “my mother and I decided not to admit we were Jewish.” Her children know nothing of their origins. The next time I saw her she once again referred to the man in the photo as “that gentleman.”

  Similarly, a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology who comes from a prominent Jewish family gave me priceless information about her ancestors. She knew virtually everything about them, and felt deeply connected to the Jewish community. However, she never mentioned her background to anyone: “For obvious reasons it would be inappropriate.”

  JUNE 15, 2003

  According to the results of the recently conducted national census, Poland now has eleven hundred Jews.

  I remember last year’s visit from the census taker. The census had a question on nationality. But to indicate another nationality you first had to answer no when asked if your nationality was Polish. So I have no right to feel both Polish and Jewish! In any case the Polish language itself forces me to define myself in a certain way. The language has no expression that would allow me to call myself equally a Pole and a Jew.

  We had a discussion at home. Maniuszka said she feels Jewish, at least one-quarter, after her grandmother, but on the other hand she doesn’t really understand what it means to be Jewish if you’re not religious. So she chooses the Polish nationality. Ola has no doubt that it is wrong to put her in a position where she has to make an exclusive choice, and so if she has to, she would choose the Jewish nationality. Me, too.

  The census taker filled in the checks in the appropriate sections without batting an eye. On her way out at the door she said casually, “I did a two-week course to get this job. They taught us not to be surprised at anything.”

  JUNE 24, 2003

  I interview Imre Kertész for the Gazeta. The fact that this long-awaited Nobel for Hungarian literature had to fall to a writer not very well-known in his own country, who made the Holocaust the chief subject of his prose, prompted mixed emotions in Hungary. The Holocaust is a dark and painful topic that has been consigned to oblivion because of the participation of the Hungarians in the destruction of their Jews.

  Besides his subject, the fact that Kertész is a Jew does not sit well with many Hungarians. I tell him about the late, great Polish writer and essayist Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, whom I tried to get to talk about his Jewish origins in an interview I once did for the Gazeta. He was furious that I touched on the subject at all, and had me cut it out altogether when he authorized the interview before publication. He behaved as if having Jewish ancestors was something odious excluding him from the company of Polish writers. The saddest thing is that there’s something to that. Herling-Grudziński is not an isolated case; I know other Polish writers who passed over their Jewish origins in silence, sometimes even to the extent of lying about their childhood in autobiographical writings. This is a terrible testimony to present-day Polish anti-Semitism. It wouldn’t occur to a writer with French ancestors to hide them from anyone, and no one would look upon such a writer with suspicion, as if he were some kind of frog eater, not one of us Poles.

  One of the most devastating stories related to this subject was told by Alina Margolis-Edelman, Marek Edelman’s wife, who was in hiding during the war with a patriotic family of renowned Warsaw architects (they were told she was the daughter of a murdered Polish officer). When the ghetto was in flames in April 1943, her host said, “Pity Tuwimer isn’t frying in there with them.” It was offensive to a Polish patriot that a great Polish poet, Julian Tuwim, was also a Jew.

  Before Jedwabne it seemed to me this pretense of “racial purity” was connected to the trauma of the war. However, from the time I experienced alienation due to my own background, I think those writers or poets didn’t have the strength to confront the suspicion of their readers, to undergo manifestations of hostility and exclusion just because they had a bit of “foreign blood.”

  I tell Kertész how comforting I found his Guardian essay “The Language of Exile,” in which he explained why he, a Hungarian and a Jew living a large part of the year in Berlin and feeling at home there, feels in Hungary as if he were just visiting, a bit of an interloper. I tell him that it was only in the course of writing this book that I realized that to many of my fellow Poles I’m a “stranger.” And that I return to Poland from my increasingly frequent trips to New York concerned about what I’ll hear next. His essay helped me understand the obvious: that the sense of alienation doesn’t bother you when you’re abroad, because there’s no reason you would feel you belonged. It only hurts in your own country.

  “It’s best to be somewhere in between, somewhere on the road,” Kertész advises.

  JULY 10, 2003

  Jedwabne. My daughter Maniucha and I lay rocks on the monument.

  AUGUST 7, 2003

  Jedwabne. I’m trying to get authorizations for statements for my book. Henryk Bagiński agrees to reveal it is he who systematically cleans up the Jewish cemetery. On the other hand, there’s a person in my diary I feel close to who asks to remain anonymous, even on statements made publicly.

  JANUARY 19, 2004

  With complete self-sacrifice, Jacek Kuroń has struggled through the first version of my manuscript between dialysis sessions and intensive sessions in the hospital.

  “I don’t know how many people will read this,” he worries. “Theoretically I was prepared for the whole thing, you’d already told me so much about it, but even so I had to stop reading every several dozen pages, so hard did I find it.”

  I also sent my manuscript to a close friend in Paris, whose family was driven from Poland b
y the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. “I’m afraid,” she wrote me, “not many people will like your book. Quite apart from anti-Semites and other ‘patriots,’ a book like this will make decent and honest people feel bad, and no one likes that. I think my father will lose the little faith he still has in Poles and in being seen as Polish by anyone but himself (though he will certainly value the book). So the hardest is still to come, but I’m sure you know that.”

  APRIL 9, 2004

  Marek Edelman, reading the manuscript of my book, keeps putting it aside, moaning, “Who’s going to read this? Who’s going to be able to read it?” And that the reading inflicts an almost physical pain on him. “For me the hardest thing to bear is not that Jews were massacred in Jedwabne and the area,” he says, “but that it was done with such cruelty and that the killing gave so much joy.” After reading the first twenty or thirty pages, Edelman lets me know that he has been drawn into the book.

  APRIL 29, 2004

  Marianna Ramotowska has died.

  This occasion has brought home to me the meaning of the word “expired.” Stanisław suffered and strugged with his illness, but Marianna left the world quietly, gently. With every visit her bed seemed larger to me—she was always small and thin, but she got smaller and thinner, and her skin was like parchment.

  The doctor assures me she didn’t suffer.