The Crime and the Silence (49 page)

We drive on. At the end of Przytulska Street, where the Gevas'—or rather, the Pecynowiczes'—house and mill stood, there's now a gas station. A young woman leans over the fence of the house next door.

“We had a mill right here,” Jakow Geva begins in a chatty way, with a wide shy smile.

“It's we who didn't live here back then that suffer most now,” the woman replies.

“The road to the cemetery was there. And this was our private road.” Geva points, still smiling.

“Why should our children suffer for it?” she interrupts him angrily.

“The house was all wood. One story, long, and then there was the granary and oil press. I had four brothers and two sisters. There was Josef, Frumka, Mosze, then I came into the world, and then there were Sara and Jenon Chone.”

The woman at the fence, now exasperated: “I don't know what happened to the house. We built ourselves a new one.”

Most people living in Jedwabne moved here from somewhere else and they don't have the intractability of the native residents, but they do have a feeling of having been wronged, quite understandably for that matter, when blame is cast upon them. What connects both is their refusal or reluctance to sympathize with the suffering of the Jews.

Geva remembers neighbors, the Goszczyckis. We go into the courtyard, knock on the door. A man of about fifty with a handlebar mustache opens the door. Jakow Geva introduces himself by his former surname, Pecynowicz. We hear a cry: “Get out of here, now,” and the door slams shut. Geva rings the bell again, thinking it was some kind of misunderstanding. The same middle-aged man opens the door.

“Antek Goszczycki used to live here,” Geva explains. “We lived together as the best of neighbors.” The man: “He's my father, but he's very ill. Please turn off the cameras! And don't write anything! I'll have to take that notebook away from you, miss! We've had enough of false accusations, the kind we heard from the president's lips. Rabbi Baker was a neighbor of my father's, and now he says the Poles did it. And he's supposed to be a neighbor? Who put Poles on the deportation lists for Siberia? So stop being so arrogant.”

We walk toward the marketplace. Geva recognizes the next house, where his cousins the Cynowiczes lived. He knocks before I have time to intervene. It's Wojciech Kubrak's house. I prefer not to imagine what kind of welcome we'll get there. Worse, Kubrak's mother-in-law appears in the doorway. Irena Chrzanowska normally lives in Białystok. I heard from several people about her attacks on Gross during a launch event for
Neighbors
at a Białystok bookstore: “I deny what you say!” she cried. “Jedwabne was swarming with Germans. They went at the Poles with whips!” She said she saw it all through gaps in the high gate of the house. But here's Irena Chrzanowska, an elderly lady sweet as an angel. “Please come in, I have all the papers for the house in order. I will show you.”

She got the papers legalizing the transfer of half of the house—one half already belonged to her family before the war—from Cynowicz's heir when he came from Bombay, some time after the war was over. “We arranged for him to make out a document for free, because he came to like us.”

Hersz Cynowicz's details can be found on the Internet list of Chiuno Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Kovno. Cynowicz was one of 2,139 Jews whom Sugihara rescued by issuing them transit visas for Japan. That's how Cynowicz made it to Bombay, where he became a leader of the Jewish community.

In the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
, Cynowicz described his postwar visit to Jedwabne. It's a long way from Bombay to Jedwabne, and Cynowicz would probably never have made the trip if it hadn't been for the official visit to India in 1957 of a Polish delegation headed by the Polish prime minister. As the leader of the Jewish community, Cynowicz was invited to a meeting with the prime minister, who was impressed that a Polish Jew occupied such a prominent position and proposed that Cynowicz visit Poland on the fifteenth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Not long afterward he was notified by the Polish Embassy that there was a visa waiting for him. After the ceremony, he was given a government car with a driver. “We drove by Maków, Ostrołęka, Łomża. I didn't see Jews anywhere,” he recounted. Accompanied by a militia commander he went to visit his parents' house and the place where the mill had stood that belonged to his cousins, the Pecynowiczes. “I went to the cemetery,” he remembered, “in the hope of finding at least the graves of my ancestors and the ashes of those who had been burned alive. But the goys had ploughed the place up so no trace of the massacre would remain. I left Jedwabne brokenhearted.”

Jakow Geva and Irena Chrzanowska begin a conversation about old times.

“My uncle Cynowicz grew vegetables and had quite a bit of land.”

“Just three acres,” Chrzanowska counters, “and a horse and a cow.”

“Two cows,” Geva corrects her.

“A cow and a calf,” Chrzanowska specifies.

Jakow is beaming—finally someone is sharing his memories. He doesn't seem to hear how sharply Chrzanowska snaps at me, telling me not to take notes.

Chrzanowska doesn't dwell on the subject of the massacre. They return to prewar recollections, exchange the names of neighbors. She remembers exactly who lived where: “Wasersztejn on the corner of Łomżyńska Street, beyond that Bijonka had a shop, later Atłasowicz, Kubrzańska, the smith Łojewski, then there was a building where seven families lived, including the Nożyks. Konowicz had a shop on the square, and Ibram a haberdashery, and a daughter, Judytka, who was so pretty.”

Then she starts telling a story about her family hiding a Jewish woman that day. She mentions some piece of paper she got from the council saying Poles were permitted to have Jews stay in their homes, which she showed when they came to get the woman. Geva, moved, goes up to her and clasps both of her hands. I wonder if she used the same phony story to get Cynowicz to sign his house over to her for nothing when he came on a brief visit from Bombay in 1958.

If you believe these stories, which were also spun by the suspects and witnesses in the 1949 trial, the people of Jedwabne were solely concerned with hiding Jews. What struck me most was how they gave the first and last names of the people they rescued that day. I knew that the people who had really saved Jews were afraid to admit it. It was only when I discovered that the Germans allowed Poles to hire Jews in the Jedwabne and later the Łomża ghetto—they who had survived the pogrom—for unpaid farmwork, that I understood where all those Jews living in Polish homes came from.

I take the Gevas to Łomża to see the exhibition
To Our Neighbors
, organized in the Municipal Cultural Center by two young locals. They collected prewar photographs (I gave them the ones I got from Meir Ronen and Izaak Lewin) and photographs from right after the war, including a photo of the paving stones in the marketplace, taken by a conservationist in 1946. Did he have any idea he was immortalizing a spot that became the first station of a road to Golgotha for Jedwabne Jews on a hot day in July 1941? There's also a photo from after the war of a wild party, a long table, laughing faces. Two of the partying men are killers, accused in the 1949 trial. Perhaps this was a celebration of their return home?

“I'm from Przytuły, not far from Jedwabne,” says one of the organizers, Przemysław Karwowski, in response to a question about how the idea for the exhibit came to him. “My grandfather, a police commander, set up a shop when he retired and did business with Jews. When my grandmother went to Jedwabne to buy goods at the market, she went by two Jewish sisters with whom she was friends. They later married, one became Mrs. Konowicz, the other Stolarski, and they had daughters. Grandmother went to market in July 1941 and both sisters were terrified, afraid to leave the house; they begged my gran to save their girls.

“My grandparents lived in a building where some of the neighbors were relatives of Jerzy Tarnacki, who collaborated with the Germans from day one, and was in the German police force. Gran was frightened, but she promised she'd find the girls a safe address at a settlement just outside of Przytuły. She didn't do it in time, and two days later they all perished.

“Przytuły is ten kilometers from Jedwabne, but they smelled the terrible stench all the way there. Gran was in despair. In my family there was always the sad acknowledgment that our Jewish neighbors were gone, but no one ever talked about who burned them. I found that out from Gross's book.”

Stanisław Michałowski and his family come to the exhibition to greet the Geva family.

I speak off to one side with his daughter Kasia Czerwińska, a Polish teacher in a Jedwabne school.

“I can't stand it here any longer,” she says, telling me about the anti-Semitic jokes that are part of a typical school day, and how unpleasantly she is treated for failing to join in the mockery.

AUGUST 5, 2001

I'm on holiday by a lake 120 kilometers from Jedwabne. In the evening I drive to see Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski. Today there was a council meeting at which people shouted repeatedly that “our Mayor Godlewski and Chairman Michałowski had no right to go to the ceremony. They represented only themselves.” The council members accepted Godlewski's resignation.

“After the session that damned anti-Semite Bubel came up to me,” the now ex-mayor tells me, “and he says, ‘You could have had a hero's glory, and now what? You did for the Jews what they wanted and now they've abandoned you.'”

We sit over a vodka and recall the past year, so difficult for both of us. “Remember when you told me you were Jewish? Well, I'm sure you understand…,” says Krzysztof. Before I could tell him no, I don't understand why just because of my Jewish origins he would suspect me of something, Krzysztof has already finished with the words “… and then I saw—you're a Polish woman like the best of them! What a great lass! I'm so fond of you, Anna!”

AUGUST 6, 2001

Jedwabne. I hear more details of the council session yesterday. Bubel was sitting sprawled in the front row. Godlewski's resignation was greeted with cheers. When Stanisław Michałowski announced that he, too, would resign at the next session, applause broke out as well.

“Bubel went up to his friends on the council and gave them instructions,” Michałowski tells me. “Looking at his smug face I understood who won here.”

I arrange to meet Piotr Narewski, a farmer tapped to be the next mayor.

“What did the residents of Jedwabne learn from the events of this year?”

“People united in opposition. They behaved splendidly. Their not participating in the ceremony was an expression of that.”

In Łomża at the Cytrynowiczes. Jan puts aside for me all references to Jedwabne in the local press. This time there's a rarity: an interview in the local paper with Bishop Stefanek of Łomża—a place where Jews worked together and prepared for kibbutz life in Palestine—who warns that the Poles will put up a fight as long as the Jews don't calm down. Those are his words! He says the massacre in Jedwabne was planned and executed by the Germans, “cleverly involving the local population.” He feels for the Poles.

“What was needed was a healing gesture toward those who were drawn into the crime,” says the bishop. “Because there have been no such gestures, the wounds have deepened. In the USA many of our compatriots are accused of coming from a genocidal nation. This is a problem that must be dealt with. Otherwise the Poles will defend themselves, and in self-defense you don't measure the blows.”

The bishop presents his version of events. They burned only Communists: “It wasn't a total extermination, just a sacrifice, chosen from that part of the Jewish community that remained in town and did not flee with the Red Army.” The Germans did it. He speaks of “the tragedy of the Poles who, captive to the occupying forces, watched their neighbors perish … and, at the same time, were tempted to lend a hand.”

AUGUST 8, 2001

A conversation with Stanisław Ramotowski. He was feeling worse every day and the doctor decided to tell him he has inoperable lung cancer. As is his habit, his response was to rebel.

“How can that be? So I'm lost, I don't get a second longer than the Lord decreed?”

AUGUST 20, 2001

I return to Warsaw from vacation, and drop in to see Ramotowski. It's getting harder and harder for him to breathe; he needs an oxygen tank. “It'll be as much time as God's granted me,” he says. “It'll just be hard leaving you on your own like this.”

A letter from Leszek Dziedzic in America: “If you have a moment to describe the ceremony, we'd be very grateful. Especially Father, who's on hot coals for the mailman every day, hoping for a letter from you. He's very sorry he wasn't there.”

AUGUST 28, 2001

Back in Jedwabne. I hear that “no one talks about the Jews anymore.” Or: “They had their Jewish holiday, we had no part in it, and now we have peace and quiet, thank God.”

Probably the same peace and quiet that the residents of Jedwabne felt after July 10, 1941: the problem of the Jews had vanished.

I'm trying to find people in Jedwabne who participated in the ceremony of July 10; I know they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I watch a videotaped television report on the ceremony with Stanisław Michałowski. He picks out a few familiar faces from the crowd: a villager from near Jedwabne, a teacher, a cleaning lady, an office clerk.

I visit each of them in turn. Not one agrees to having his or her name mentioned. The teacher explains: “It's hard enough to live here.” Another participant, a man of about forty, tells me: “I thought, Let whatever's going to happen, happen. I hid a knife in my sleeve. When I got back from the cemetery, people taunted me: ‘Where are your side-curls?,' ‘When are you leaving for Israel?,' ‘What the fuck did you go there for?'”