The Crime and the Silence

by Anna Bikont

  The witnesses, Father Orłowski among them, speak of German units, motorcycles, trucks, shooting. This is openly mocking the murdered, isn’t it? What do you feel, when you listen to that kind of nonsense?

  I never assume that witnesses are mocking or consciously giving false testimony.

  Sure, because then you’d have to call a whole lot of witnesses to account for giving false testimony. Father Orłowski above all.

  I don’t think Father Orłowski or other interviewees consciously gave false testimony. If witnesses, having heard something about cartridge cases being found, tell me about shooting, that may mean that they put together new information from the media with the foggy image of the events that took place sixty years ago, and they’re truly convinced they heard that shooting.

  Every testimony, even from a person who has preserved a distorted image of the events, contributes something, especially if you follow up with questions about concrete details. For example, it may help us to exclude certain scenarios. I questioned the interviewees about how the Germans they saw on the day of the crime looked. Black service uniforms and saddle-shaped caps, khaki field uniforms with helmets, SA uniforms, air force uniforms, pistols in holsters or the aimed barrels of machine guns—I got a cross section of every army unit, including ones seen in movies. I heard about single shots, multiple shots, barrages from machine guns. Some saw uniformed Germans at the barn and only them, not a single Pole, because they were all hiding in terror. Or they saw Germans jumping off trucks. I heard that people were only killed in those Jewish families whose family members were accused of actively supporting the Communist system, and that the German commander who refused to burn Poles, Jews, and Russians together in the barn was shot by the SS. Others saw only Poles committing crimes.

  I rely on the existing knowledge but also, to a great extent, on intuition. I pay attention to unconscious digressions, in other contexts, which often say more than a whole long conversation about a particular subject. How do you eliminate unreliable witnesses?

  I ask a lot of questions that may seem to have no connection with the case or to be off subject. They best allow one to judge the reliability of a witness, at least whether he really was where he says he was and could have seen everything he testified to seeing. One of the witnesses, when asked about how the Jews were killed, stated that he was hiding by the market square and heard German soldiers shooting. In a neutral context I asked him about any sounds he might have heard that day. He hadn’t heard any. I also checked what texts about Jedwabne the interviewees had read. In a sixty-year-old case, that sort of pollution of memory by reading is very significant. It was evident that some of the witness accounts dealt in information derived from the media, which presented various views on the subject of the course of the crime and the culprits. For example, a witness tells me he saw seventy-five Jews carrying the Lenin monument. I ask him how he knows there were seventy-five. Because he heard them being counted one by one. But that’s a number Gross cited from Wasersztejn, and no one confirms it. I felt it was manna from heaven whenever I met a witness who hadn’t read Gross’s book or any other publication.

  The witness accounts are so different from one another that there was no way of verifying one account only with the aid of other accounts. I also verified them by relying on so-called material evidence, that is, facts determined by exhumations, documents and materials from archives, examination of the terrain, study of cartridge cases. Material evidence doesn’t lie, so if a witness’s claims are contradicted by it, I had to assume the person didn’t remember or was mistaken.

  And what about the reliability of Jewish witness accounts? What do you think of Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony?

  Wasersztejn reconstructed the course of events of the atrocity, but in some places his testimony is also unreliable. I think some of the scenes described in Jewish memoirs, both Wasersztejn’s and in the Jedwabne Book of Memory—killers using saws, casting children into the fire with forks, using a girl’s head as a football—did not actually take place. Maybe someone kicked a head, I can’t exclude that possibility, but the scene of a soccer match with a victim’s head doesn’t seem plausible to me. These events were so terrible that their description by the victims’ families often takes on a mythologized form.

  So let’s reconstruct what can be known.

  From the early hours of the morning, Jews were driven from their homes out into the market square. They were ordered to pull up the grass from between the paving stones. The residents of Jedwabne and its surroundings were armed with sticks, crow bars, and other weapons. A large group of men was forced to smash the Lenin monument, which was in a little square off the market. Around noon they were ordered to carry a piece of the smashed monument to the market square, and then to the barn a few hundred meters away. They carried it on two wooden poles. The rabbi was among them. Victims were killed and their bodies were thrown into a grave dug inside the barn. Pieces of the Lenin monument were flung on top of the corpses. The grave was probably not covered, because at the time of the exhumation they found burn marks on some of the pieces of the monument. The second, larger group of Jews was brought out to the market square later. It included women, children, old people. They were led to the thatched wooden barn. The building had gas poured on it, probably gas from the former Soviet storehouse in Jedwabne. In the case documents from 1949, Antoni Niebrzydowski stated that he gave out eight liters of gas from that storehouse. That quantity was enough to set the barn on fire.

  Does that mean that the people in the second group saw the massacred bodies of their fathers, brothers, and sons before meeting their own deaths?

  It’s possible.

  Did you ascertain what the last walk of the Jews of Jedwabne was like? Did they know they were going to their deaths?

  Quotidian objects were found with the remains, like a box with shoemaker’s nails, tailor’s thimbles, spoons, gold coins, and a surprising number of keys: to gates, houses, padlocks, cabinets. As if they had the illusory hope that they were setting off on a path from which they’d return one day.

  How many Jews were killed on July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne? You write that not fewer than 340 people were murdered. Didn’t more than that die?

  Not more than a few hundred. The number of sixteen hundred victims or something near that appears improbable. I asked all the witnesses about it and one of them had a convincing answer: “After the war I served in a unit, we had a roll call of about five or six hundred soldiers—and I associate that visually with the number of Jews I saw when they were led out of the market.” There were forty or fifty in the group carrying fragments of the Lenin monument; in the second group—several hundred, we can say no fewer than three hundred. That is the approximate number of victims found in the two open graves. But no work has been done at the Jewish cemetery. There are reasons to believe there might be another grave there. If someone killed a man in his basement or garden, he wouldn’t have buried him in his own backyard, by his own well. Rather, as there was a Jewish cemetery, they had to have organized transportation of the bodies and have buried them there. I can’t exclude the possibility that there are single graves somewhere. We probably didn’t find all the places where victims were buried. But even with earlier killings in other places, it’s hard to imagine there were more people killed separately than there were burned later in the barn.

  There’s also no way to accurately estimate the number of victims, because on the day of the atrocity there were Jews from surrounding villages—Wizna, Kolno—hiding in Jedwabne. Some Jews, perhaps several dozen, survived. The majority of them later lived in the ghetto in Jedwabne, a place separated off from the Old Market. From there they went to the Łomża ghetto, but not all of them. One of the witnesses said he’d seen a group of Jews from Jedwabne passing by Jerziorko, outside Łomża, after the atrocity. That witness’s father, a farmer, had a Jewish intermediary in the grain trade, in Jedwabne. And that man turned up at the witness’s house with his twelve-year-old daughter to
ask him to hide them. The girl said Christian prayers to prove she could pass for Polish. The witness’s family had to refuse for fear of being denounced by a neighbor.

  In Jedwabne and its surroundings I looked for an example of a Pole punished by the Germans for not having taken part in the killing—it would be proof that some had acted under duress. I didn’t find any.

  I don’t know of any such example, either.

  So can you speak of an order, if there was no sanction for not carrying it out?

  There was no need for any sanction, because there were people who eagerly set about hunting Jews. It could have been a vague order, that you’re to do something with the Jews, which is not an order as I understand it. Such orders might have been given in accordance with SS general and Nazi police chief Reinhard Heydrich’s directive as formulated in two documents toward the end of June and the beginning of July 1941. In an appendix added at the end of June 1941, Heydrich stated that anti-Communist and anti-Jewish actions should be provoked on newly occupied lands, but in a way that would leave no trace of German involvement. On the other hand, an order given to the leaders of operational groups on July 1, 1941, concerned the principles for carrying out “cleansing actions” meant to “pacify” the areas occupied by the Germans. It speaks of not including Polish groups with an anti-Communist or anti-Jewish bent in those actions. Or not to harm them, because they could be used to harm others in the future.

  In other words, the Germans’ role was to egg on the local population?

  What does egging on mean? If there hadn’t been conditions for the perpetration of a crime like that, no amount of egging on would have had any effect. We know of German reports from areas farther north expressing dissatisfaction that the local population couldn’t be incited to anti-Jewish excesses. It’s undeniable that there had been actions against Jews in the Łomża district before the war, and it seems to me that the Germans took advantage of the strong anti-Semitic feeling that already existed there.

  But can we determine whether the Germans put forward the idea “to clean up the Jews like they did in Radziłów,” or merely accepted and supported the tendencies of the locals, expressed by the town authorities?

  I wasn’t able to determine that. As a prosecutor I’m not going to enter into the realm of speculation. I have too little information, and for that reason some circumstances were never clarified. The crime in Jedwabne was committed at the instigation of the Germans. It’s not possible that an action on that scale happened without German acceptance. You have to keep in mind that Jedwabne was just behind the front line, in an area under German military administration. In the event of unexpected sui generis unrest in the town, the occupation forces would have reacted immediately. The presence, even passive, of German policemen from the station in Jedwabne, as well as other uniformed Germans—if we accept they were there—is in the eye of the law equivalent to permission to commit the crime. So the Germans should be ascribed criminal responsibility in the broader sense.

  Many witnesses say the locals who drove Jews into the square were accompanied by some uniformed Germans, apart from those from the police station. It was certainly a small group, not a powerful unit. The Germans had too many towns to guard, locations where they wanted to “clean up the Jews.” We have German reports of that time that express alarm: ‘We don’t have anyone to man the posts.’ Suddenly, the police in nearby Szczuczyn, five men, were supposed to keep order in seventy-four towns. The rapid advance into the Soviet Union meant that units of Einsatzgruppe B in the zone of army unit “Środek” were operating farther and farther east. They left behind them lands where they hadn’t used the opportunity to “clean up.” To take care of this, the Germans organized a few small operational groups toward the end of June and beginning of July to take over the tasks of Einsatzgruppe B in the area of former Soviet borderlands.

  I can state that the perpetrators of the atrocity were Polish residents of Jedwabne and its surroundings, at least forty men. There is no proof that the townspeople in general were the perpetrators. To claim that there was a company of Germans in Jedwabne is as implausible as maintaining the whole town went crazy. Most people behaved passively. I can’t judge where that passivity came from. Maybe some people felt compassion for the victims but were terrified by the brutality of the killers. Others, though they may have had anti-Semitic views, were not people quick to take an active part in actions of this kind.

  A few hundred burned in the barn, forty killers—that’s a lot fewer than Gross wrote.

  Those are our findings. The number of victims and culprits indicated emerges from analysis of the evidence. We were unable to come to a fuller count; in the trial documents from 1949, for example, there are the names of a significantly larger number of people connected to the committing of the crime. Only that information was not checked at the time. Now, after so much time has passed, it was impossible for my team to verify it.

  You were born in Białystok; you live not far from there in Łapy. Jewish life used to flourish in the towns in your area. Did you know about that before you got involved in the Jedwabne case?

  No, I was never interested.

  Jews were like aborigines to you?

  The concept was just as remote. From the time I worked on the investigation into Jedwabne I read a lot of material, books on the history and relations of Poles and Jews. But even so I don’t always know how to behave. I met Rabbi Schudrich and another rabbi from London at the Jewish cemetery in Jedwabne. When they said kaddish for the dead, I was going to say the Catholic prayer Eternal Rest, but on reflection I just said goodbye.

  Before I began working on Jedwabne, I had the feeling anti-Semitism was a marginal phenomenon. Since I’ve been involved with Jedwabne, I meet it every day. You, too?

  I believe— I’m convinced it’s not a universal sentiment. But I have to say in the course of the investigation I encountered blatant expressions of anti-Semitism.

  What was for you the most difficult moment in the investigation?

  When I saw the tooth buds of infants during the exhumations and imagined for a moment what I would feel if someone from my family had died that way, if those had been my children.

  Notes

  1. Lord, Rid Poland of the Jews: or, On Polish-Jewish Relations in Jedwabne in the Thirties

    1. According to reports by the Interior Ministry in Białystok, after the events of March 20, when Camp for a Greater Poland members broke fifty-three windows of Jewish properties in Grajewo and the same, though on a smaller scale, took place in Szczuczyn and Rajgrod, nine CGP members were arrested in Radziłów on March 23 as a preventive measure. In the morning, special CGP couriers went on horseback from Radziłów to the directors of CGP offices in villages nearby to round up as many men as possible to break them out. An organized crowd protested to the police, demanding the immediate release of the arrested men. Rocks and crowbars began to rain down on the policemen. A group of people demolished the jail and freed the arrested men. The mob scattered across the market and started to smash the windows of Jewish shops and loot all the stalls. Nine Jews were beaten up.

    2. The effectiveness of the disbanded Camp for a Greater Poland merged into the National Party is illustrated by a National Party convention in Łomża at which—as we read in a Interior Ministry report for September 1936—2,500 people sang the Greater Poland anthem in closing: “We bring rebirth to Poland / We stamp out baseness, lies, and filth,” standing to attention with one hand raised in imitation of the Hitler salute.

    3. Jews sewing cassocks and selling Catholic devotional objects must have been a particular outrage to the anti-Semites among the clergy. Father Trzeciak, a famous anti-Semitic priest, postulated the introduction of a ban on buying devotional objects from Jews and those peddlers who got their products from Jews: “This can be most effectively achieved by announcing that no religious cult objects deriving directly or indirectly from Jews will be blessed and no indulgences will be granted” (from D
ejudaizing the Manufacture and Sale of Devotional Items, a brochure quoted by Anna Landau-Czajka in “They Stood in the Same House: Ideas for Solving the Jewish Question in the Polish Press, 1933–1939,” Neriton, Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, 1998).

    4. This is shown very well in the writings of Dariusz Libionka, who cites the Poznań weekly, Culture, in 1936: “It is no accident that the idea has become common that Jews are parasites. In fact, our emotional relationship with them resembles the attitudes we have toward fleas or lice. Killing them, destroying them, getting rid of them. The point is that the Jew is quite different from a flea. The Jewish problem can exist even when there is no longer any Jew left.” Libionka shows that anti-Semitism was to the Catholic press a convenient tool for describing reality, battling liberalism in social mores, socialism, the Communist movement, everything that—to use the terminology of “Clerical News”—exposed “the fresh Slavonic soul to the moral influence of the oversophisticated Semitic spirit.”

    5. Dariusz Libionka, “The Clergy of the Łomża Diocese in the Face of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust” (in Wokół Jedwabnego [Regarding Jedwabne], Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw, 2002).

    6. The authorities, who had no doubt as to who had power over souls, conducted conversations with the clergy aimed at warning them. “At almost every market or fair anti-Jewish excesses have taken place,” they reported. “After conversations with the clergy they decreased. The number of towns where there are boycotts has increased, but they take a form which does not require police intervention. Bishop Łukomski has indicated to the clergy under his authority that there should not be active campaigns against Jews. However, members of the National Party apply the boycott with great determination. Christian tradesmen reward picketers. But picketing in groups of four wearing National Party sashes has been eliminated. The clergy have also intervened to get National Party members to stop carrying canes and clubs.” The clergy taught not so much that violent attacks were reprehensible as that they were ineffective. The report quotes one of the priests saying at a Christmas gathering: “Your fighting stance and hot temperament are known to all, but now is not the time for exploits whose victims are usually nationalists themselves.”