The Crime and the Silence (30 page)

Leokadia Błaszczak is the daughter of Franciszek Lusiński, named among participants in the massacre—his name appeared in testimonies in 1949 (which also mention her brother, then sixteen years old and sharing his father's name, Franciszek, as being one of those who took part in driving Jews into the marketplace). I myself have heard the name Lusiński several times in interviews:

“Lusiński dragged a Jew from the group being marched to the barn and killed him in front of his own smithy.”

“Franciszek Lusiński boasted that when he struck the Jew hard with a hammer or die, the man flew a meter into the air before he fell down dead.”

APRIL 3, 2001

At a scholarly conference on “The Other in Literature and Culture,” I hear a talk by cultural anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir: “The Jew as Witch, the Witch as Jew, or How to Read Interrogation Transcripts.” Tokarska-Bakir describes the demonization of Jews and the Judaization of witches on the basis of trials conducted in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in what is now Lower Silesia. She analyzes how the two categories were confused at that time, witches accused of profaning the Host and abducting Christian infants (to use their blood in making ointments,
maści
, instead of matzo,
maca
), and Jews accused of conducting clandestine rituals as well as engaging in sodomy, cannibalism, and metamorphoses into cats.

Wherever I go, the subject I've chosen offers me new paths of inquiry. Especially since a bizarre confusion of mind on the subject of Jews and their customs reigns in Jedwabne and its environs, and after many centuries people still seem to think it obvious that Jews use Christian children to make matzo.

In the afternoon, Stanisław Ramotowski and I set off for Kramarzewo—he wants to sit on his porch and watch the brook rushing by his cottage.

APRIL 4, 2001

At seven in the morning I'm woken by the phone. It's Ramotowski telling me we've got to return to Warsaw immediately. I get in my car and drive over to see him. He's heard from his nephew what's being said about him in town and that the priest has been looking for him, probably in order to shut him up. He's had enough. I remind him we still have his bank and insurance affairs to sort out.

I begin the day with a visit to Łomża. I've managed to persuade Stanisław P. to let me publish an interview with him under his own name. Stanisław Przechodzki is the director of the Podlasie District Public Health Center. I sent him the text earlier, and am due to get his authorization at 9:00 a.m. The text will appear in the
Gazeta
tomorrow. But now we have a deadlock. In his conversation with me, Przechodzki pronounced on various general topics, like the necessity of respecting other peoples and faiths. Now he has rewritten the interview, keeping these general views in but cutting out both the emotional content and the factual description of the crime. The new version of the piece makes no sense at all. In the end we return to my version.

I look in on Ramotowski in Kramarzewo and drag him out of the house so he can show me where the Jewish cemetery used to be. Skrodzki and I couldn't find it. Pointing to a field outside the town, he says disapprovingly: “Sowing crops in a cemetery doesn't bother them, either.”

In the evening I'm in Jedwabne at the Godlewskis'. I learn that there was a closed meeting of the town council with the governor today on the matter of financing an access road to the massacre site. The governor said that according to public finance regulations, a donation from the highest level of government could not exceed 75 percent of the projected cost, so Jedwabne has to pay 25 percent. Krzysztof Godlewski explains to me that this is a big opportunity: after the ceremony the guests will leave, but the asphalt roads will stay, and the town will be able to pave the marketplace in the bargain and modernize the sewage system. But proposing to the council members that they lay out 25 percent “for the Jews” is like waving a red cloth in front of a bull.

APRIL 5, 2001

Driving to get Ramotowski I stop by a school in Radziłów on the way. I ask whether in connection with all the recent media attention, they have figured out how to discuss Jedwabne with the schoolchildren.

“Neither the pupils nor the teachers have given me any sign that we should talk about the whole business at school,” says the nice young headmistress, who seems taken aback by my question. The school has a website; you can tell the school webmaster has put a lot into it. I click on “The History of Radziłów” and read that “a group of killers from the Grajewo unit of the Einsatzkommando 8, led by Karl Strohammer, came one day in trucks, chased the Jews into a barn, and set it on fire.” There's not even a date.

I drive to Kramarzewo. Today I'm taking Stanisław Ramotowski back to Warsaw. At the moment, he's hiding in his nephew's room off the kitchen. Yesterday Agnieszka Arnold's documentary on Jedwabne and Radziłów (which included my interview with him) was shown on TV, and by early morning two cars had appeared in the courtyard—the local radio and a foreign TV crew. His nephew told them his uncle wasn't home. We drive through Jedwabne and visit the Dziedzices in Przestrzele. Leszek's wife, Ewa, whose husband also appeared in the documentary, has spent the last two nights crying for fear their house will be burned down. Sixty years after the fact, Ramotowski, Righteous Among the Nations, and Leszek Dziedzic, whose grandmother sheltered Szmul Wasersztejn, feel compelled to hide from their neighbors after showing their faces on television.

Back in Warsaw, before going to sleep, I read my interview with Stanisław Przechodzki, published in today's
Gazeta
. Seeing it in print I'm even more impressed by his courage.

“First, the Germans gave permission for it. Second, before the war there were powerful National Party influences, and numerous anti-Jewish excesses took place. Third, there was an active group of people led by Mayor Karolak ready for a pogrom, and they hatched a plan and incited the rest of the townspeople by saying, ‘Look, it turned out well in Radziłów, they're rid of the problem.' And finally, fourth, Satan got into the town. It's probably just the way human nature works, when a man sees a lot of bloodshed, pain, and suffering around him, it makes him an even worse person. Today the problem of the victims has vanished. Leon Dziedzic, who was ordered to bury bodies, told how they were intertwined with each other like roots, you couldn't separate them. It was mothers who died there, with their children clasped to their chests! And no one's conscience is bothered by it, because those weren't human beings but Jews. And Jewish traitors, to boot, who'd denounced people to the NKVD. I never heard that before,” Przechodzki stresses, “the deportations to Siberia being blamed on the Jews. In Jedwabne it was Poles who did most of the denouncing.

“There's no use pretending, we still have anti-Semitism here. I always hoped the atrocity would be brought to light. But I never suspected the case would take on the proportions it has, that it would turn into a political game, a driving force for nationalist groups.”

Przechodzki comments on statements by the witnesses that typically appear in right-wing publications (and are quoted by the historian Tomasz Strzembosz as well): “In
Our Daily
, Ryszard Malczyński tells us he saw from the church tower Germans rounding up Jews. What was Mr. Malczyński doing in that tower? He says the priest had told him to fix a roof tile. It's 10 a.m. on July 10, 1941, and the priest tells him to mend the roof? Franciszek Karwowski claims in the same article: ‘On the morning of July 10 my father heard that the Germans were to destroy the Jews in Jedwabne that day. So he harnessed a horse, because he wanted to retrieve a scale he'd lent to [the Jew] Kosacki.' So Karwowski's father knew in a village several kilometers from Jedwabne that they were going to kill the Jews, and the priest didn't know and decided it was the right day for fixing the roof? Jadwiga Kordasowa, née Wąsowska, a teenager at the time, went to the site of the massacre three days after the burning, to the threshing floor. She remembers: ‘At the northwest apex, a pyramid of bodies, almost up to the ceiling.' She, a young girl, went to the barn after they perished? What psychic resilience it would have taken to go there of one's own will. Leon Dziedzic, who was forced to go there, says that when they were removing the bodies, each one of them vomited dozens of times. Why did she go there? We know some of the people in Jedwabne went to the barn to loot.”

Przechodzki goes on: “I've been reminded of the 1949 trial and how witnesses were intimidated. They were threatened that if they didn't withdraw their testimonies they would see their own bodies in coffins. The secret police was in Łomża, far away, and neighbors were right next door. They were afraid of no one as much as their neighbors. A witness was going to go home after he gave evidence and wanted to wake up the next morning. And what was going on after the war? A great many assassinations, families settling scores, and some were about Jewish property. Today the same atmosphere of intimidation prevails in Jedwabne. Doesn't that show you the scale of the crime, if there's still intimidation sixty years on? It means some of the witnesses don't pass on information to the Institute of National Remembrance or they give false testimony. I think that people who try to intimidate witnesses should be aware of the legal consequences. To my mind the role of a priest in a town like Jedwabne should be telling people, ‘It wasn't you who did this, but the generation of your fathers. They didn't make a reckoning, so it falls to you to do so. If you lie, how will you stand before God?' Defending murderers and falsifying facts now makes you an accomplice to the crime. Participating in a lie, I would feel as if I'd taken part in that massacre, because the dead can't rise again to tell us how they were murdered.”

APRIL 6, 2001

Yesterday the newspapers carried as their main news story that the crime in Jedwadne was carried out by the Germans. Today it's in all the headlines. All because Professor Edmund Dmitrów of the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance said that he found in the German archives that the crime in Jedwabne could have been led by Hermann Schaper, commando leader from Ciechanów, because he was in Radziłów.

I read about Schaper in Chaja Finkelsztejn's Yad Vashem testimony. Her testimony was the basis for the initiation of proceedings against Schaper. Chaja saw him that day in the marketplace, and she recognized him twenty years later from a photograph. But she states clearly that two cars with Germans, Schaper among them, arrived in the morning and left soon after, leaving the residents to deal with the Jews themselves. Without that knowledge I could easily believe it was all the work of some Schaper. I think bitterly that no one will believe Przechodzki, now that there's a more palatable truth being offered.

APRIL 7, 2001

An event dedicated to Jedwabne in the crypt of a Warsaw church on Chłodna Street. “This is about the martyrology of the Polish people,” says historian Andrzej Leszek Szcześniak. “They are trying to take that martyrology away from us. It's a theft of suffering. The hysteria around Jedwabne is aimed at shocking Poles and extracting sixty-five billion dollars from our people in the framework of the Holocaust business.”

I know Szcześniak well. The author of history textbooks, on which he had a monopoly in Communist times, he has deftly opened a path for himself from Communist times to the Poland of today under the guise of nationalism, changing only the adjectives in his textbooks (for example, the word “thriving,” which in People's Poland belonged to the “revolutionary movement,” has come to describe “independence movements,” and instead of a “diligent and modest” Lenin we now have a “ruthless and cunning” Stalin). I've done battle with him in the pages of the
Gazeta
with my sister, Marysia Kruczkowska, pointing out, among other things, the anti-Semitism that suffuses his books. After our piece was published, more than two hundred scholars, artists, and writers protested to the Education Ministry against teaching the young from his textbooks. But an equally large group immediately stepped forward with a letter defending the textbook and the “Polish values” contained in it.

Bohdan Poręba, a film director known for his anti-Semitic views, introduces himself as a friend of Father Orłowski of Jedwabne: “The lady who hid seven Jews says she was beaten. Most of those seven went to work for the Communist secret police. She was thrashed for being on the side of the secret police [
applause in the hall
]. It was slaughter all around at that time. Let's count the corpses frozen in Siberia and people tortured by the Jewish secret police. Reconciliation is possible, but not by our licking their boots. Let's talk about Jewish crimes [
applause
]. We're not discussing what happened sixty years ago. We're discussing whether we're going to be able to breathe. The people have been humiliated. The idea of a Polish state without Poles is back.”

For Bohdan Poręba the actions of world Jewry constitute a coherent course whose aim is “to crush the Polish people.” That's why the publicizing of Jedwabne and the publication of the “famous anti-Polish comic book
Maus
, where Poles are pigs,” were planned to coincide.

In the early 1990s my then husband, Piotr Bikont, was encouraged by Lawrence Weschler to translate
Maus: Story of a Survivor
, Art Spiegelman's graphic account of his father's experiences during the Holocaust. Weschler, then a writer for
The New Yorker
, had introduced us to Spiegelman. A major Polish publisher acquired the rights to the book, and then for ten years couldn't decide whether to publish it or not. Apparently several respected individuals, called in for expert advice, criticized the book for its “anti-Polishness.”
Maus
, whose main story takes place in Poland, had already been translated into many languages, when unexpectedly two young people who founded the publishing house POST in Krakow contacted Piotr, saying they wanted to publish it. And so by a complete coincidence
Maus
was published at the same time that the discussions about Jedwabne were raging.