The Crime and the Silence (29 page)

Cytrynowicz remembers it well: “They took a car from butchers going to market. They drove it into the marketplace. Twelve of them, in English uniforms. They announced that the British army was in Poland, Warsaw was in revolution, and the Communist government had fallen. People stormed the co-ops, mainly grabbing vodka.”

In the journal
Karta
I read the story of “Wiarus,” also known as Crazy Staszek, a.k.a. Stanisław Grabowski, commander of the National Armed Forces unit that led the operation. Grabowski's group smashed up two shops and the municipality offices, then they convened a meeting and called for a fight against the Communists. Terrified police didn't intervene and the unit left town quietly after the meeting. In 1951 partisans attacked a bus to Jedwabne on which a cashier was traveling with money. They ordered the passenger to read out a flyer saying that Stalin “wants hunger and cold.”

Everyone in the area knows the pseudonyms of the last partisans. “July” fought up to 1952, “Groove” to 1954, “Fish” to 1957. They were killed when their fellow partisans betrayed them, and often by a brother's bullet.

“By day you were scared of the secret police, who came to arrest you for real or alleged help to the underground, and at night you were scared of the partisans,” Jan Skrodzki and I were told by Skrodzki's relative Edward Borawski when we visited him in Trzaski.

“The guys from the National Armed Forces mainly went in for looting,” Stanisław Ramotowski told me. “A lot of men around here were in the National Armed Forces, not from Kramarzewo and Kiliany, those were always decent towns, but from Å»ebry and Kownatki, sure.”

Several more times in conversations I came across that mention of “decent” villages where people joined the Home Army, and bad ones where the National Armed Forces held sway.

A resident of Radziłów told me, “The National Armed Forces were active here, but I never heard of them carrying out any operation against the Germans. They were called a ‘gang of thieves.'”

These two narratives, of the heroes and the villains, are not entirely independent of each other. It was often units led by underground heroes who looted and robbed; their leaders were not able to discipline those under their command, and in time they joined in.

The day after tomorrow my article on present-day Jedwabne, “Please Don't Come Back,” is to appear in the
Gazeta
. From early morning I'm traveling between Radziłów, where I leave Jan Skrodzki for the moment, and Jedwabne, where I'm still fact-checking and getting authorization for quotes. Later I drive up on a hill outside of Radziłów, where there's a cell phone signal and I can dictate corrections over the phone.

On the road from Radziłów to Jedwabne I receive a message from Dr. Noszczyk, saying Ramotowski is being quite impossible, demanding he be discharged from the hospital despite the severity of his condition. I point out to the doctor that if Ramotowski hadn't been so unbearably stubborn, he would never have rescued his Jewish wife to spite the whole town.

MARCH 30, 2001

Jan Skrodzki and I drive to Grajewo, about thirty kilometers from Radziłów, to see Jan J., the older brother of a school friend of Jan's. His wife, furious, spews anti-Semitic jokes. We hear that Leon Kosmaczewski is most certainly still alive, and we are given his address in Ełk.

“He keeps bees, a peaceful man, never hurt a fly,” Jan J. says of Kosmaczewski. Jan J. can't be unaware that he is speaking of one of the chief murderers of July 7, 1941. Another beekeeper, like the Laudański brothers.

We set off for Ełk at once, it's very near Grajewo. But we discover that Kosmaczewski died two years ago; we find only his daughter.

We go on looking for Klimaszewski, the man who set the barn in Radziłów on fire. We've heard he later joined the Home Army and was active in the veterans association in Ełk. We got his address from the phone book. We drive there: dilapidated apartment blocks, no one opens the door. Skrodzki learns from the neighbors that the tenant died two years ago. But he gets into a long conversation, as always, from which we learn that the Klimaszewski who lived there was in the Home Army and veterans association but he couldn't have been the one we're looking for because he was much older. We'll keep looking. We know one of the people we talked to met him not so long ago at a sanatorium, so we're counting on him being alive. Luckily Skrodzki shows no sign of being bored with our search. He is used to the large number of dead-end roads you go down before you find witnesses.

Tomorrow the
Gazeta
is printing my piece on “Jedwabne Today,” with extensive quotes from Stanisław P. He told me his story about the massacre while expressing a wish to remain anonymous, like others I've talked to. He is from a family that has lived on the market square in Jedwabne since the mid-nineteenth century.

“On July 10,” he told me, “Father hid in the garden and then in the attic at my grandmother's house on November 11 Street, which is now Sadowa Street. I have to make it clear he was hiding from Poles, so they wouldn't force him to go and kill Jews. My parents didn't know the Jews would be herded right by where they were hiding. My mother, when she saw the march of death, took my older sister and fled in the direction of Łomża. Mother remembered that screaming up to a few days before she died, and when she heard it, she was already far from the barn. If my parents, who lived in the eye of the cyclone, were able to get away from the market unhindered, it means it was possible for people not to take part in the massacre. It's not true that the Poles were held at gunpoint by the Germans. No one forced anyone. Maybe some German was standing on the sidelines somewhere, but Mother didn't see any. She passed freely through Jedwabne with her child. There may have been a dozen policemen watching what was going on, but no big military force came to town. It was the Laudańskis who did it, among others. On the day of the massacre they went by Polish homes, saying, ‘Come with us. You're either for us or against us.' The whole town knew the part they played. My family didn't tell me about violent scenes. Once Mother, showing me a photo of her seventh-grade class, pointed out her Jewish friends: ‘She was burned, and she was burned, and this girl had her throat cut.' I came to this knowledge gradually, and I didn't learn about many events until the seventies, when I started asking the witnesses myself. In 1980, I started working at the Łomża governor's office and one of the employees there, who had been a teacher in Jedwabne, told me about the burning of the barn and the murders committed elsewhere. He gave names and details. He told me about Kubrzyniecki—how he chose his victims from the Jews rounded up. Later I heard from another witness who said he had gone to his privy and found a Jew there with his throat cut, still alive and gasping for breath. Discussions about how many people fitted into the barn are ridiculous. There was killing on almost every street and in many yards. And what happened by the pond? Corn grew thick there and people combed through it and if they found a Jew they'd drown him. Jews were drowned in wells, too. It's known who killed whom, they weren't quiet murders, everything took place in broad daylight. ‘When a Yid was caught in the fields he was buried on the spot': that's what the people of Jedwabne tell you themselves. The barn was still burning when some of the locals started grabbing Jewish property. What conscience does a woman have who stole a feather quilt when it was still warm, or dragged out a poor neighbor's clothes? They say now that the Germans took the stuff and carted it off. Those rags and ruins? The Germans took antiques and furs from the Warsaw residences of lawyers and industrialists.”

I decided I'd try to convince him to appear under his full name. In Jedwabne itself I don't encourage anyone to reveal their personal details, but with Stanisław P. it's different. He left the town in the eighties. He's one of the few who achieved something substantial, finished their education, have a high status in their profession. His voice must mean something to the townspeople. But I can't get through to him anymore. Just before I send my piece to the printer, between the first and second proofs, I call the paper to tell them to cut all his statements from the piece. I'll ask him for a separate interview for the
Gazeta
. Maybe an interview like that will give someone in Jedwabne something to think about.

Stanisław P. had pointed out to me that it makes no sense to get worked up about the fact that an atrocity like this didn't become public knowledge for sixty years. “After 1945, even talk about the Russians deporting people to Siberia was taboo, not just officially, but in family circles. I remember the disbelief of my fellow students when I told them that where I came from, near Łomża, we were under Soviet occupation in the years 1939 to 1941. Sure, they knew Stalin occupied Lvov and Vilnius, but that he got as far as Białystok or Łomża, that they wouldn't believe. The Soviets distorted all that history, not just Jedwabne.”

Today the papers write that four Mauser rifle cartridges have been found on the grounds of the barn.

“This confirms those people were shot,” Minister Przewoźnik declares.

None of the people I talked to, who say there were a lot of Germans, ever mentioned shooting. I call Ignatiew and tell him this. He doesn't contradict me, so apparently his witnesses hadn't mentioned shooting, either.

APRIL 1, 2001

Back to Warsaw in the morning. I'm turning the key in the apartment door when the phone rings. Yet another person full of noble intentions explains to me that putting Jedwabne in the spotlight is causing a trauma the locals don't deserve, especially those whose families took part in the massacre. Something simply must be done to help—therapists, priests. I feel how reluctantly the caller listens to what I have to say: that the people whose families took part in the massacre feel just fine, better at any rate than those whose families helped Jews, and maybe it is the latter who are more in need of support.

Father Czesław Bartnik in the largest Polish Catholic newspaper,
Our Daily
: “In Poland national minorities are still causing wounds to fester, especially Jews. The Polish ship is going down.”

APRIL 2, 2001

The Institute of National Remembrance has initiated an investigation into the massacre in Radziłów. “Finally!” Jose Gutstein, the author of the Radziłów website, e-mails me from Miami. “And so—may I put a request to you? Will you help them? I wrote to Director Kieres of the Institute of National Remembrance, offering my help. I asked them to include Radziłów in the ceremony. It was probably the Radziłów massacre that ‘inspired' the people of Jedwabne. It would be a shame if Radziłów were excluded from the program of commemoration.”

The
Gazeta
is printing “More of the Bad Kind,” my interview with Stanisław Ramotowski. It begins with my asking him if he thinks it's a good thing the institute opened the investigation. Ramotowski sighs. “Oh my God, it's so good.” But he still won't yield to my urgings and give testimony to prosecutor Ignatiew. I can't understand why he tried to resurrect the truth his whole life if he doesn't want to report it in testimony for the Institute of National Remembrance, which will have greater historical weight than my reports. He in turn can't grasp why I'm giving him such a hard time about it. He's never told anyone what he learned—never, no one. I have the feeling with other interviewees that I am freeing them from the burden of carrying the truth alone. Stanisław claims he's telling me all of what he knows just because he's come to like me.

The historian Tomasz Strzembosz wrote a letter to the
Gazeta
saying that I accused him of trying to use Jewish collaboration with the Soviets as an explanation for the Jedwabne masscre. He called it an insinuation.

I sit down to reply to him: “I am very sorry if what I wrote upset you. It didn't enter my mind that to write that a historian explaining something is an insinuation. On the contrary, I thought the explanation of phenomena was one of the fundamental responsibilities of a scholar. If the main theme you touch on in the context of Jedwabne is Jewish collaboration with the NKVD, I take it that you are trying in that way to explain the crime to your readers. Just as I, writing about Jedwabne, quote extensively from the prewar anti-Semitic diocesan press, and not at random. I am trying to find some partial explanation of the massacre.”

In
Our Daily
, recollections of wartime Jedwabne from Leokadia Błaszczak, who now lives in Warsaw. She writes about the Soviet occupation, when “Jews supplied the Soviets with lists of names of Polish ‘enemies of the people'—prewar policemen, military men—and later took over their homes and belongings.” I have never heard of such a case in Jedwabne. Here you have Freudian projection in its purest form. It was Poles who took over Jewish property in Jedwabne.

According to her version, on July 10, 1941, paddy wagons appeared in the market square and uniformed Germans soldiers jumped out of them. She then went with her younger brother to watch what was happening. She saw Polish boys rounded up by Germans with birch whips in their hands, “defenseless, terrified little boys, forced to stand guard by Germans armed with rifles.” She walked along with the Jews to the barn, where the Germans who escorted them chased the non-Jewish children away.

She thinks the vilest thing about the whole story is the fact that “Szmul Wasersztejn, a longtime secret police investigator, quietly left for Israel in March 1968 like the worst Judas without suffering any consequences for having tortured Polish patriots, handed over innocent Poles to the secret police on the charge of having ‘participated in the slaughter of Jews.' But the 19-year-old Jerzy Laudański, a fine man and fierce patriot, a soldier with the Home Army, prisoner of the Pawiak prison, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, who under torture betrayed no one, was arrested after he returned to his fatherland and subjected to horrific torture in secret police dungeons … Jan Gross, who isn't fit to lick the boots of this hero of the struggle against Hitler, of a concentration camp martyr like Jerzy Laudański, permits himself—in a miserable little book worthy of the gutter press—to slander the name of Laudański and that of other noble Poles of Jedwabne.”