The Crime and the Silence (45 page)

The zones intended for guests are cordoned off by police. Chopin's
Marche funèbre
sounds in the market square. Behind a blue-and-white flag of the State of Israel, I see Izaak Lewin, his daughters, his son-in-law, and two grandsons. They are dressed in white shirts and white yarmulkes, the Jewish color of mourning. He's here. The family, the flag, and the names of the Jews of Wizna murdered in the Jedwabne barn printed in big letters on a board. I recognize the list dictated to me in Israel by Awigdor Kochaw, which will tonight be shown on television throughout Europe.

A tense Krzysztof Godlewski addresses the families of the murdered: “I have the privilege of speaking to you in the name of the town authorities and residents. I welcome you to the hospitable land of Jedwabne. It moves me deeply that we meet here today to bear witness to the truth.”

President Kwaśniewski: “For this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness. Therefore today, as a citizen and as the president of the Polish Republic, I apologize. I apologize in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime.”

The Israeli ambassador to Poland, Szewach Weiss, speaks in Polish and Hebrew: “The people who lived here side by side and knew each other's names, Rachele, Jankele, Leja, Dejałe, Moszele—and we know each person has a name and these names have meaning—were murdered and burned by their neighbors.”

I only regret that no one said anything in Yiddish, the language that sounded in this marketplace for centuries.

Stanisław Ramotowski leans over to me: “The president speaks well. If even one man tells the truth, it's a lot. And so many good people have come, they keep coming up to me to say something cordial and shake my hand. I just hope it doesn't die down. The same thing that happened in Jedwabne happened in Radziłów and Wąsosz and now it's important not to abandon those murdered people.”

Behind the barriers for the guests, some people listen attentively to the speeches, but most are just gawkers. They came to see what a Jew looks like, to see the president. There are also those who behave with flagrant hostility, talk loudly, make silly faces, probably displaying their notion of Jewish mannerisms.

We walk in a silent procession to the site of the crime. Rabbi Baker gets up from his wheelchair and leans on a cane: “I stand here as a compatriot of the murdered and the murderers. We are here because of tears wept by Jews and people of other faiths. This has made a great impression in heaven. The president has said that Poland—our Poland—asks forgiveness. Those he asks for forgiveness should bestow it. May these tears, which should enter history as one of Poland's finest moments, cleanse this earth of hatred.”

It's bone cold, rain is coming down, and it looks as if the wind is going to blow over the diminutive rabbi. Groups of young men standing on the road leading to the cemetery, who shouted “Yids!” when we walked past, now try to drown out his speech with music blaring from speakers, and make humping motions to the beat.

The climactic moment comes with the psalms, performed by the world-famous New York cantor Joseph Malovany. His song, his cry, are as powerful as if he wanted to gather up the remains of the dead in the cloak of the psalms, whose cry resounded across these same fields sixty years ago.

In the zone for guests there are pitifully few people from political or cultural life, and only three priests. No high-level Church representatives. My friend Róża Woźniakowska-Thun leans over to me: “I'm shocked. I was afraid I wouldn't make it here on time and there would be crowds. There's nobody here. And where are my spiritual guides?”

I complete the list of those who are absent: Antonina Wyrzykowska was too frightened to come. There's no one from the Wasersztejn family. Nor did Awigdor Kochaw come—the only living Jewish witness who was in the market square that day.

 

8

Your Only Chance Was to Pass for a Goy

or, The Survival of Awigdor Kochaw

They were being herded down a country road amid fields of rye. They'll kill me anyway, he thought, but I'll try to escape. He bounded out of the crowd, lowered his head, and broke into the rye at full speed. He ran a ways and threw himself down. He lay motionless, holding his breath. He knew the grain would start waving at the slightest movement.

He heard the shouting of boys trampling the grain in search of escapees. Nearby someone shouted, “Damn you, shut up!” Then a whimper or stifled sob. He realized they were raping a girl nearby.

He held his breath again and listened closely. He expected to hear gunshots, maybe even grenades exploding. He thought the Poles were just leading the Jews to the site of execution, where the Germans would be waiting—as they had been before, in Wizna, where he was born. But he didn't see any soldiers. The racket died down, and he went on lying low, nestled into the earth. Suddenly he heard a noise in the distance, like buzzing or air vibrations, and then a column of smoke shot into the sky.

A fire has broken out, he said to himself, and sighed in relief. The houses in town are made of wood, and the fire brigade is all volunteers. They'll rush to put out the fire and leave the Jews in peace.

He lay in the grain and thought comforting thoughts: How many Germans can there be? Not that many, and when the Poles go home the Germans won't be able to handle so many Jews. Or: It's good not to hear shooting, maybe there will be no victims. Only, why the stench of burning flesh? But it was possible that someone's cowshed or barn had caught fire with livestock inside.

Jewish Tarbut school in Wizna, fifth grade. Awigdor Nieławicki (later Kochaw) is sitting on the left in the first row.
(Courtesy of Izaak Lewin)

Dina and Icchak Nieławicki of Wizna. On July 10, 1941, they were staying with their cousins, a miller's family in Jedwabne, and they were killed by Poles there. Their son Awigdor, who fled from near the barn, survived.
(Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

He wanted to believe this, so he didn't stop to wonder why a shriek had gone up just before he saw the column of smoke. He lay in the grain until the sun set. When everything had quieted down and it had grown dark, he set off to check on the Pecynowiczes, relatives from Jedwabne, where his family had gone after they fled Wizna. On the way there he met a Jew who had been hidden in a Pole's basement during the massacre, and who told him about the burning. He warned him that the farmers had started looting, so it would be a terrible mistake to go to the Pecynowiczes, who were considered wealthy.

Then he knew he had been a witness to the burning of the Jedwabne Jews. He prayed his two sisters, eleven-year-old Cypora Fajga and seven-year-old Chaja Szejna, had not been in the procession from which he had managed to escape. He was fearful about the fate of his parents, whom he had last seen on July 8.

“A few of us found each other, two from Wizna,” Kochaw remembered. “We sat in the grain for two days. One of us, a baker, sneaked off to some Polish friends for food. The farmers combed through the fields looking for people hiding, so we decided that each of us would try to get to Łomża on our own. I hoped I would find my parents there, at my uncle's house.”

Poles had to have passes, and Jews weren't allowed to travel at all. Awigdor saw Germans checking the traffic on a bridge over the Narew River. He could swim across at night, but he didn't want to move around a strange city in the dark. He noticed that the soldiers weren't stopping carts. Some farmer got off his wagon and crossed the bridge on foot, leading his horse. Awigdor crossed just behind him, pretending to belong with the farmer. That was his debut as a Pole.

Once in Łomża he went straight to his uncle's house, but he didn't find him at home. He realized it was Tisha B'Av, a day of mourning commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He saw a minyan in a courtyard; his uncle was one of the ten Jews at prayer. No one had heard about the massacre in Jedwabne, as not many people went there and news traveled slowly. They listened to his story as if he were mad.

Awigdor Kochaw, then Awigdor Nieławicki, the sixteen-year-old eyewitness who escaped from a column of Jews being led to slaughter on July 10, 1941, lived in Israel for over half a century, but he spoke Polish so well that it was only when he asked me for the word for the season between winter and summer that I realized how remote the language was to him.

He showed me a photograph with the caption
Wizna 1937, Fifth Grade of the Tarbut School
—a Zionist organization active in Eastern Europe that prepared youth for life in Palestine. One's gaze is drawn to the smallest boy, looking out rakishly from under a school cap turned sideways. It's him. He is the smallest boy because he skipped a grade. It had grown more and more difficult to be a Jew in Poland, and in one year, four families with children had left Wizna for Uruguay, the United States, and Palestine. They'd had to dissolve the fourth grade, and the weaker students repeated the third grade while the ones who excelled, like Awigdor, jumped straight to the fifth. Hebrew was the language of instruction, but they also taught literature, history, and geography in Polish, because students from the school were allowed to continue their education in Polish schools. Recognition by the Polish educational authorities ensured the school a grant from the government. However, a growing wave of anti-Semitism led to a 1937 decision in the parliament to abolish grants to Jewish schools, and the tuition was high in Wizna—six zlotys a month.

“Of my class, three of us survived,” Kochaw recounted. “Dawid Pędziuch, the one in the middle of the bottom row, managed to leave for Palestine; his sister was burned in Jedwabne. The one on the right, Kron, survived the war in Russia. And me. In the picture there's also Zalman Męczkowski, with whom I was supposed to travel to Prussia in 1943, but he didn't turn up at our agreed meeting place. He had family in Palestine, so I don't think he survived, because he would have contacted them after the war. Unless he stayed in Poland, but that's impossible—he was a Zionist.”

In the Tarbut School they were taught to recite by heart poems by Chaim Nachman Bialik, “our Hebrew Mickiewicz,” as Kochaw calls him. In his most famous poem, the epic “In the City of Slaughter,” written after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, the poet accuses Jews of failing to put up resistance when pogroms took place.

Then wilt thou flee to a yard, observe its mound.

Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless—

A Jew and his hound …

The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung

Unto the self-same heap where swine seek dung;

.….….….….….….….….….….

Where seven heathen flung a woman down,

The daughter in the presence of her mother,

The mother in the presence of her daughter

.….….….….….….….….….

Do not fail to note,

In that dark corner, and behind that cask

Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks,

Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath

The bestial breath,

Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood!

.….….….….….….….….….

How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?

They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord,

They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word.

.….….….….….….….….….….….…

Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs

The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs

Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,