by Marci Shore
And so when Harvey arrived in Poland he rented a car and we set out to the former shtetl of Nowy Korczyn. There we visited the town chronicler, who was heavy-set with greased-back hair and a belly that hung over his belt. He and his sons kissed my hand when we arrived, in an old tradition of Polish chivalry. He showed us his fourteen homemade volumes—the Chronicles of Nowy Korczyn.
The town chronicler and one of his sons accompanied us to what had once been the synagogue, a simple rectangular construction of stone-covered brick built in the eighteenth century. Amid the ruins a front portico and a pediment recalling a classical Greek temple were still visible.
The chronicler’s son was young and bright and sweet. Later, when we were alone, the son told me of how he had been studying to become a priest but had been expelled from the seminary in Krakow: rumors had reached the seminary that his father had been meeting with Jews—Jews making a pilgrimage to the shtetl where their parents and grandparents had once lived. The seminary gave him seven days to leave; he was then quickly drafted into the army. He did not seem bitter, though.
“When God closes a door, then you must look for a window,” he told me.
“But Not in the Ovens”
When I returned to the United States in September 2000, I went to Brooklyn to see Aleksander Masiewicki. As we walked from the subway stop to his apartment Aleksander talked to me about his wife, Olga. They had been together for sixty-five years: in Poland, in Russia, in the Soviet labor camps during the war. It had been a very difficult life, but a very good marriage. In all sixty-five years they had been together, he told me, between the two of them there had not been a single bad day—not even in the camps.
I asked him, then, about the camps: in the months after the Red Army had occupied eastern Poland in September 1939, he and Olga had been among hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens deported to forced labor settlements in the Soviet interior, where nearly all froze and suffered from hunger, and many did not survive. They remained there until the general amnesty that followed Hitler’s June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, and the Wehrmacht’s march to Moscow. Their Soviet experience had been brutal, yet after the war they returned to Poland as they had left it: as believing communists.
And here in Brooklyn Aleksander Masiewicki explained to me: yes, there were people dying in the Soviet camps, “ale nie w piecach” (but not in the ovens). At the time of Auschwitz and Treblinka, this was a nontrivial distinction.
IT WAS NOVEMBER in Northern California. A cool, sunny Saturday morning. I was at the farmers’ market, buying apples and apricots, when Stephanie, now back in New York, called me on my cell phone to tell me that I should go home right away and see what Gazeta Wyborcza had just published.
By then some six months had passed since Jan Gross had brought the first copies of Neighbors to my apartment on Mokotowska Street. Since then, very little about the book had appeared in the press. Now I went home and found in the internet weekend edition of Gazeta Wyborcza a long interview with the Polish historian Tomasz Szarota.
About Neighbors the interviewer said, “That book is an atomic bomb with a long fuse.”
Now it was happening, I thought.
And it was only now, anticipating the publication of the English version of Neighbors, that Gazeta Wyborcza’s editor in chief, the former dissident Adam Michnik, relented and decided to pursue the Jedwabne story.
The historian Tomasz Szarota expressed much skepticism about the allegedly minimal role of Germans in the Jedwabne massacre and questioned how some 1,500 strong, healthy people would allow themselves to be led to death by fewer than a hundred people armed only with sticks. He made disparaging comments about Jan’s “emotional, essayistic style.” Tomasz Szarota did not doubt that the massacre had happened—that the Jews of Jedwabne had died at the hands of their Polish neighbors—but he asked readers to consider the context: a terrorized small town, the local anti-Soviet partisan movement betrayed to the Soviets, the betrayed Polish partisans arrested and murdered by the NKVD, a desire to settle accounts: at the time townspeople had believed that the informer was a local Jew. And there was the ever-present image of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” and the widespread belief that the NKVD—the notorious Stalinist security apparatus—was made up of Jews.
The next week, Jan responded in Gazeta Wyborcza:
Let’s say, that in fact a German police battalion was in Jedwabne that day and that Poles—under pressure (by local scum? the town administration? public opinion? German gendarmes?), embittered with the conviction that during the Soviet occupation Jews cooperated with the NKVD … murdered their Jewish neighbors: women, children, old people—everyone whom they fell upon that day. The first question: Do there exist some parameters, pressures, and embitterments that would cause the Jedwabne murder committed by Poles of Jews to be—“understandable”? Can we imagine a sequence of events leading to the murder in Jedwabne that would allow us in conclusion to say something in the way of “Aha, I understand,” or “It was a monstrous crime, but after all …,” or “It’s terrible, unforgivable, well, but yet …”?
That weekend edition of Gazeta Wyborcza broke the silence. Soon more than a hundred texts were appearing each month about Jedwabne.
The Polish Catholic Church was divided. Some of the clergy were defensive—and furious.
“Clearly,” Cardinal Józef Glemp said of Neighbors, “the book was written ‘on commission’ from someone.”
Others felt very differently. Father Stanisław Musiał told Jan that the place of Jedwabne’s priest should have been in the barn with the Jews.
In Warsaw, at the Władysław Broniewski Museum, Pan Sławek followed the debate over Jedwabne with pain. He did not doubt Jan’s story, and he did not defend the Polish peasants who had killed their Jewish neighbors. He was angered, though, by a public discussion that cast Poles as unreformable anti-Semites.
During the war, when the Polish Home Army courier Jan Karski had risked his own life to bring news of the Holocaust to London and Washington, who—Pan Sławek asked me in a letter—failed to react? And when in London in spring 1943 Szmuel Zygielbojm committed suicide, was this a protest against the murdering of Jews by Poles, or a protest against the Allies’ failure to react to the information Jan Karski had brought them?
Pan Sławek apologized for his tone. These were rhetorical questions. We both knew the answers.
“In the whole of this very painful and in fact monstrously muddled issue, one thing still astounds me,” Pan Sławek wrote to me that year.
Why is it Poles who are regarded as the worst anti-Semites? Why Poles and not the Germans, who planned and carried out the Holocaust? Why not the Soviets, who during the war cynically played the Jewish card.… Why is there not talk about present-day Russian anti-Semitism …? Of course this in no way diminishes our national guilt and responsibility, for the fact that someone else also acts shamefully is no justification for evil deeds.
We corresponded more about Poles, about Jews, and about anti-Semitism. In Poland I’d encountered American Jewish tourists who would ask me: How can you live in this horrible anti-Semitic country, this country where Poles go to the movies in the place that was once the Warsaw Ghetto, where they live on Jewish graveyards, going about their lives without regard for the dead?
In some way I, too, was offended by the questions. For I saw much more anti-Semitism in Poland than the tourists saw. I saw more because I understood Polish, I knew what the titles of the books being sold on the street meant, I could read the graffiti and the headlines of the right-wing tabloid press. But I also understood how Poles could live here. After all, I lived in Warsaw and I thought about the war every single day—and I also went to the movies.
“On the subject of treating Poland like a cemetery, I agree with you completely,” Pan Sławek wrote to me. “This is all well and good for people who drop in for a short while and very quickly are on their way. But regarding the claim that it’s so cruel to live a normal life, to have fun, to go to work an
d such in a place where so many people died, I have one small question: I’m sorry, but what should we do with ourselves? Should all of us emigrate? And besides, it’s our cemetery, too.”
An older and much respected historian, once an active participant in Solidarity and Jan’s longtime colleague, Tomasz Strzembosz, was much more enraged. There was an irony in this, for Jan had first begun to write about Jedwabne for Tomasz Strzembosz’s Festschrift.
“Did the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding villages enthusiastically welcome the Germans as saviors?” Tomasz Strzembosz asked Jan. “Yes, they did! If someone pulls me out of a blazing house in which I could burn to a crisp in seconds, I will embrace and thank that person. Even if the next day I regard him as yet another mortal enemy.”
That was not the only thing Tomasz Strzembosz had to say. There was more: namely, it was understandable that in 1941 the Poles in Jedwabne resented the Jews. After all, twenty-one months earlier the Jews had not mourned the end of the Polish Republic. On the contrary, they had welcomed the Red Army, they had collaborated in deporting Poles to Soviet labor camps.
Jan was very angry. It was not true, he argued, that it was the Jews who had sent Poles to Siberia. After all, Polish Jews had been overrepresented among the victims of those deportations, they had suffered at least as much as non-Jewish Poles had under the Soviet occupation.
“The whole stereotype of Jews supporting the Bolsheviks and communists,” Jan told Tomasz Strzembosz, “is nonsense.”
But the colleague with whom Jan had once had warm relations did not accept this. That the Jews had suffered as well under the Soviet occupation regime hardly meant that Jews had not collaborated with that regime.
“Why?” Tomasz Strzembosz asked. “Because that was a system that devoured its own children.”
Jan was misunderstood, portrayed by his critics as a Polish-Jewish émigré who relished the opportunity to expose Poles as anti-Semites. The truth was in some sense the opposite: Jan very much felt himself to be a Pole. Wandering upon that first account of the Jedwabne massacre in the archives had been devastating for him. He was haunted by the Jedwabne story—and by why his friends and his colleagues, why he himself, had left that material untouched for so long.
“I have one question,” Jan at a certain moment asked Tomasz Strzembosz and other colleagues. “How is it that for fifty years not a single historian dealing with the German occupation and Polish-Jewish relations has uttered so much as one word on the dramatic fate of the Jews of Jedwabne? This question is addressed to you in particular, Tomasz, because as a historian you cover not just that period but that very region. Why have you never written about it? Didn’t you know anything about it?”
Tomasz Strzembosz defended himself. He was not a historian of Polish-Jewish relations. He had been writing about other things, in particular about the Polish opposition to Soviet occupation between 1939 and 1941, before the Jedwabne massacre.
He added, “If I had gone any further, I might have been found dead in the mud. That was made clear to me.”
Jan refused to accept this.
“In spinning these reflections,” Jan said, “I am in no way attempting to affix onto Strzembosz the label of an ignoramus. Because the conjecture of ignorance is a very kind explanation for the silence about the fate of the Jews in his work. An alternative hypothesis would be that he knew about the fate of the Jews and wrote nothing.”
Tomasz Szarota, the historian whose interview in Gazeta Wyborcza had opened the Jedwabne debate, responded to Jan’s question as well.
“Gross cannot understand,” Tomasz Szarota wrote, “why no one had studied Jedwabne earlier. After all, he says, it was enough to go there, go into some corner bar, and start talking with people. My answer to that is that history is not written by going into bars.”
A meeting was held at Warsaw’s Historical Institute. Jan was there. And Tomasz Strzembosz. And Tomasz Szarota. And Marek Edelman.
Afterward Tomasz Szarota wrote, “I must candidly admit to the participants in the meeting at which Professor Gross took part at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Historical Institute, where I have worked for thirty-eight years, that it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.”
WHEN TOMASZ STRZEMBOSZ insisted to Jan that it was the Polish Jews who had collaborated with the Bolsheviks, Jan asked him in return, “Do you think Wanda Wasilewska, one of the main collaborators, attended synagogue?”
Like many others, this, too, was a rhetorical question.
Wanda Wasilewska was not Jewish at all. And she was indeed one of the main collaborators.
A fascinating figure who chain-smoked and drank endless cups of black coffee, Wanda Wasilewska captured my imagination with her inimitable amalgam of Stalinist dogmatism and feminine sentimentality, her philo-Semitism and her various lovers, her passionate ideological convictions and her peculiarly moving friendship with the poet Władyław Broniewski’s wife, Janina Broniewska.
During the war Wanda Wasilewska was a fervent believer in the Soviet project—she was Stalin’s confidante, and some said his lover as well. When in April 1940, in newly Soviet Lvov, the NKVD “accidentally” murdered Marian Bogatko, her more skeptical husband, she accepted their apology and never wavered in her loyalty to the Soviet Union.
When I’d visited him in Krakow, Czesław Miłosz had not wanted to speak of Wanda Wasilewska and Janina Broniewska at all.
“I don’t want to hear of those two women,” he told me.
Of Janina Broniewska he said only, “One of the most dangerous females.” Of Wanda Wasilewska he added, “I feel a horror at the very mention of this name.”
Janina Broniewska and Władysław Broniewski had one child, a daughter named Anka. She died tragically young, while in her twenties, yet not before she herself had given birth to a daughter named Ewa. After Anka’s death, Janina Broniewska raised her granddaughter. The letters Wanda Wasilewska wrote to Janina Broniewska, Pan Sławek told me, had never been given to the Broniewski Museum. Likely they remained in Pani Ewa’s possession.
Pan Sławek learned that Pani Ewa, by then around fifty, had recently married a man from Greece and had gone to live with him by the Aegean Sea. I wrote to her there, and she answered me. We began to correspond about her grandmother and about Wanda Wasilewska. Their letters, Pani Ewa told me, were not easy to decipher.
The correspondence is a dialogue between two intelligent, emancipated women, who wittily and in a specifically women’s way describe their daily lives: writing, home, children, later grandchildren. They smuggle political information in a way so complicated and known only to themselves, that to this day no one apart from them has been able to decipher it.
Her grandmother, Pani Ewa told me, had been married three times. All three husbands disappointed her.
“She was a strong woman,” Pani Ewa wrote.
She taught that to me. And I taught it to my daughter … even though my grandmother would caution: Remember—the weak, fragile ones come out ahead, as for the strong ones, men know that they’ll always manage on their own. And here my grandmother would tell of how, at the beginning of the war, her two husbands, en route to the front, appeared in turn (and my grandmother had her ten-year-old daughter from her first marriage and was pregnant with her second husband’s child) and both of them voiced more or less the same text: Oh, but you’re so capable, you’ll certainly manage on your own.
Janina Broniewska looked down upon weakness. She was disdainful of hysteria and unhappy with Władysław Broniewski’s behavior at their daughter Anka’s funeral: his sobbing, his throwing of himself at the coffin. In the presence of other people, Janina did not cry. Nothing broke her. It was her philosophy that even when faced with the most horrific dramas one had to pick up the pieces and move on.
Pani Ewa’s grandmother was wise and competent, responsible to a fault, the one person her granddaughter could trust completely. She insisted on honesty and transparency. On courage. Wanda Wasilewska was similar. Both women
could not stand anything that contained the slightest trace of “bourgeois mentality”: artificiality and pretentiousness.
From her childhood Pani Ewa remembered Wanda Wasilewska as a large woman with big feet, friendly and warm, surrounded by the aroma of perfumes.
The perfumes surprised me. But that was only one side. Janina and Wanda were honest and straightforward, they treated Ewa with warmth and friendship. Yet there were secrets, things they shared only with each other. As a girl, Janina’s granddaughter was jealous of their conversations, from which she was so often excluded.
“After all,” Pani Ewa wrote, “those were the Stalinist years.”
They were years when adults did not speak of politics around children. About Wanda Wasilewska’s much-adored second husband, murdered by the NKVD, Ewa was only ever told, “Marian perished.”
About her grandmother’s precise role during the Stalinist years Pani Ewa knew little. Until today she felt that period of her life to be a dark hole: the secrets kept by adults, the death of her mother, her loneliness. She disliked returning to those times.
“I slammed them behind me,” she wrote in one letter, “like a heavy door.”
Pani Ewa’s own political coming of age came in Warsaw in March of 1968. It was her first year at the university, where she was studying sociology. She was nineteen years old then, already married to a fellow student and eight months pregnant with their child.
It was because she had a doctor’s appointment that morning that she arrived late to the university, where the demonstration protesting the arrest of Adam Michnik and other students had already begun. She was looking for her husband. Instead she heard the clicking of boots, then saw the lines of armed militiamen coming toward her. With her enormous stomach, she began to run in the direction of the library. The militiamen with their shields and helmets and batons chased her, and she was saved only by a librarian who pulled her into the building and slammed the door. Through the windows of the library she saw, then, students being beaten, covering their heads, the screaming and the blood, then the glass from the shattering windows falling into the library.