The Crime and the Silence (53 page)

“I confessed my hopes on a local TV program: that newlyweds would sometimes go to the cemetery to lay flowers, as they do in Katyń, where the Soviets killed thousands of Polish officers, and that the monument would become one of the Stations of the Cross. I said in the council that I'd go to the ceremony out of a heartfelt need. Many residents took that as an insult. I felt people looking at me with resentment. One man stopped me before the ceremony: ‘I'm going to fucking shoot anyone who tramples my rye.'

“Most of the residents know Poles took part in it. But they argue, ‘We can't admit it, because the Jews want compensation, and it'll be more than our children can afford.' How to convince them otherwise if they get this kind of thing from their priest?

“I tried to create a lobby, but it didn't happen. One of the councilmen told me stories he remembered hearing from family and neighbors about how and where they killed Jews. But after he was refused a visa to the United States, he started saying it was because of the massacre and he changed his tune completely. I keep hearing either that it's not true about the Poles being responsible or that we shouldn't let it drag on because the Jews will take advantage of us and loot all of Poland. They say, ‘Krzysztof, be careful. You'll say something you shouldn't. You may get hurt,' but it's not kind advice, it's a threat. The most well-meaning comments I hear are like, ‘Why are you doing this? You'll lose a good job.' At a meeting of council members and mayors of the Łomża district someone once answered my ‘Good day' with ‘
Shalom
,' and everyone laughed. In stores I hear people call me ‘that Jew Godlewski' behind my back. Other acquaintances, people from whom I wouldn't expect it, also try to tell me it's a Jewish conspiracy and it's all for compensation. Lies started circulating about my father, who was in Wronki prison for a few years for being a member of the Home Army; people said that he took part in the killings, that he chopped a Jew's head off, and that my mother-in-law, who lives in the USA, married a rabbi.

“All the time I was looking for the right tone. I tried to justify my fellow Poles by thinking what I had been like ten years ago. I was anti-Semitic. I was given a book about Jews wanting to buy up all of Poland and make us their slaves and I believed it. In school I accepted the propaganda. I believed the Russians were our friends and the Americans imperialists. And though when I was twelve I heard for the first time a conversation with horrifying descriptions of the atrocity, it didn't sink in that it was our neighbors who had done this. It was a time of tough anti-German propaganda, I knew the Germans were bad, the Russians good, so I couldn't get my head around people having collaborated with the Germans. When a classmate told me about the Katyń massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets I didn't want to believe him, either. In time I changed my views, so I believed everybody had that chance. I kept thinking there would be a breakthrough by the time of the ceremony.

“On July 10, a councilwoman, watching the ceremony from behind the curtains of her window on the marketplace, snarled just before I was to speak, ‘So welcome them, fucking welcome them, you won't have a job tomorrow.' The next day I went to work and right on the front steps a visitor greeted me with the words ‘Still in Poland? Haven't the Jews taken you off to America yet?' I can't cure them. I've had enough. People go on saying we're making money, that the Jews are backing us. They're convinced that Stanisław Michałowski and I are traitors, that we must be getting something out of this.

“For me the debate in Jedwabne can't be reduced to Polish-Jewish relations; it forces us to ask difficult questions of ourselves as Catholics—about honesty, decency, about how many of us helped those in need of our help. Why were there so few Righteous Gentiles? Why are the Jews alleged to be responsible for every bad moment in our history? And so I stood up to the majority of townspeople.

“What hurt most was that when Stanisław Michałowski and I put in our resignations, no one defended us. I'm so depressed I'd take a train anywhere. I didn't mean to insult anyone.

“What I've been doing in the last year has had no connection with my duties as mayor, and I wasn't prepared for that, either spiritually or professionally. You become mayor to build roads, improve the way a health center works, not to teach people to love one another and weep over another's death. For twenty years I planned to leave this town, I thought about how to get away, and now I know why I stayed. I'm glad fate granted me the honor of participating in the ceremony of July 10. After all, one can easily live out one's life without leaving a trace of any kind.

“This year gave me a lot of strength. I thought a lot about suffering, pain, forgiveness. Once, I woke up terrified that I was in a burning barn. Maybe if I hadn't met you, and Gross, I wouldn't be the man I am today. I didn't know I was so stubborn. I didn't know I had so few good friends. I'm not the same person anymore. I was one of the boys and I estranged myself from them.

“My wounds are probably long-lasting, because—although it's hard to admit—they were inflicted by people dear to me. I think any decent person would have done what I did, and I'm sad that my former friends are suspicious of me. I'd rather lick my wounds in solitude.”

 

Journal

DECEMBER 1, 2001

New York. My daughter Ola and I go downtown with friends to lay a rock at the site of the tragedy of September 11.

DECEMBER 2, 2001

With the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
in a backpack, Ola and I retrace the paths of Jews from Radziłów and Jedwabne who arrived in America in large numbers during the last two centuries. “The Jews from Jedwabne who landed in New York,” we read in the book, “were mostly people who had never before slept in a strange house or sat at a stranger's table. They did not go there for fun, but to win bread for themselves and relatives left behind in their native shtetl on the other side of the ocean.”

When they saw the horizon with the Statue of Liberty looming up before them after many weeks of ocean travel in a crowded cabin, they still had to pass through the border control point on Ellis Island. The island, now transformed into a museum, was a place where the fates of thousands of refugees from poverty and religious persecution lay in the balance. They waited in queues for many days and even weeks for a decision on whether they would be sent back or accepted into the new world. Those who remained in New York headed for the Lower East Side, then the most densely populated area on earth, where dozens of people slept in one room and the courtyard privy was the only bathroom for an entire building. Gradually they scraped together a living, working over twelve hours a day in sweatshops. There, the emigrants re-created the life of the shtetl. In the old country, Jedwabne and Radziłów were more than sixteen kilometers apart, but ties were close, strengthened by numerous marriages. In New York only one street lay between the synagogues of Jedwabne and Radziłów, and the communities were linked by homesickness for the old country, which led to frequent meetings. When Kalman Lasky from Radziłów arrived in America, he joined the Chebra Par Israel of Yedwabne, and he, a Radziłover, was elected president of the organization for many years.

Rabbi Jacob Baker belongs to the next generation of Jedwabnians who crossed the Atlantic. “When the Polish steamer
Batory
carried me to New York in mid-February 1938,” he wrote, “my first wish was—in accordance with the words of Joseph arriving in Sychem (Genesis 37:16): ‘I'm looking for my brothers'—to visit the beautiful synagogue built by fellow countrymen from Jedwabne at 216 Henry Street, on the Jewish East Side. Crossing the threshold of this building, I met with many surprises, the first of which was the familiar melody of Jedwabne Yiddish, distinguished most by the characteristic pronunciation of the consonant
ł
.”

From the guidebook we learn that there were five hundred synagogues on the Lower East Side at the beginning of the twentieth century. I'd read previously that the magnificent Jedwabne synagogue was built during the nineteenth century. In 1891 the community organized around it registered itself in the state of New York under the name “Chebra Par Israel of Yedwabne, Russia.” In turn, the Jews of Radziłów who made a home in New York met at the Radzilover synagogue on Division Street. We find ourselves there first, once we are out of the subway. It's Saturday, and a century ago all the shops on this street would have been closed on this day, and families with children in their best clothing would have been making their way to morning prayers. Now Division Street, like all streets in this neighborhood, has street signs in two languages: English and Chinese. Hundreds of little stores are open, everywhere you hear Chinese disco music. There's no trace of the Radzilover synagogue. Just as we find no trace of the Jedwabne synagogue; there are new school buildings on the site from which hundreds of black kids are spilling out.

DECEMBER 3, 2001

I've arranged to meet Rabbi Baker. I get on the subway in Manhattan and get off on King's Highway in Brooklyn—a completely different world. The languages on the street are Russian and Ukrainian. Bilingual signs on the stores, in Cyrillic (
KANDISHONERY PA NIZKIM TSENAM
) and English (
AIR CONDITIONERS ON SALE
). I pass many signs for kosher bagels and a stand with Russian Harlequin romances. I count dozens of periodicals in Russian, two in Yiddish, and in English,
The Jewish Press
and
The Jewish Week
; one can also obtain the Polish-American
Nowy Dziennik
(New Daily). I walk quite a long way from the subway station to the slightly more elegant part of King's Highway where Rabbi Baker lives.

The rabbi and I speak English, but every now and then he throws in Polish words:
maliny
(raspberries),
jagody
(blueberries),
grzyby
(mushrooms),
szkoła powszechna
(elementary school),
widły
(pitchfork). HaShem, the unspoken name of God, appears in every other sentence.

“Rabbi Awigdor Białostocki told me when I was little, ‘I already envy you for who you will become one day.' In America I went on studying to be a kosher butcher. I spent a large part of my life in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I had fixed hours in the week when I would butcher kosher meat. Later, I had enough to live on in the rabbinate and no longer worked as a
shochet
. I sang as a cantor. I have five children and nineteen grandchildren. America is proud of its Jewish children.”

He isn't very firmly rooted in the real world. His sight is bad, he sees only outlines. He doesn't read books or newspapers or watch television. All of this facilitates his communion with the spirits of his ancestors. He lives according to two books: the Torah and the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
. When I ask him about his memories of Jedwabne he tells me about the carter Kuropatwa, who preferred to condemn himself and his family to death in the flames rather than abandon his rabbi; about the lumberjack Neumark, who tore the axe from the hands of one of the cruelest murderers, hacked open the barn door, and got his family out. The rabbi relates these stories as tableaux vivants; his words have color and texture.

It's hard for him to reach back to those memories that are truly his own. He left so long ago; it's been more than sixty years. He left a world that was—despite the growing anti-Semitism—somehow safe, because it was familiar and predictable. He knew every Jew in his town, and knew of many, many others within a radius of twenty kilometers. He would always feel homesick for that world: on the ship taking him to the new country, in the American provinces, in the modest apartment in Brooklyn where he moved in his old age. That homesickness was poured into the
Jedwabne Book of Memory.
“I typed it out with one finger,” he wrote. “I had no funds to hire a typist. I thought of the greatness of the martyrs and the pages were wet with my tears.”

“How can they say,” the rabbi laments, “that Jews collaborated with the Soviets? In Jedwabne not one Jew was a Communist.”

I point out to him that there was a small Communist cell in Jedwabne and that Meir Ronen retained bad memories of five of his fellow townsmen, ardent collaborators with Soviet authorities. Baker shakes his head skeptically. When I begin to tell him their names, he informs me at the mention of the very first, Binsztajn, that there was trouble with him even as a child, and later he went to jail for the rape of a handicapped Jewish girl, and that he didn't go to synagogue. In other words, in the rabbi's understanding, he had excluded himself from the Jewish community.

The rabbi is not without his vanity. Remembering the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
, he keeps saying, “I as the author of the first book on Jedwabne,” and when he mentions Gross's book, he calls it “that book that came out of my book.”

The Baker brothers' book (Julius Baker, who was also a rabbi, died) fits perfectly into the mold of books called in Hebrew
Pinkas zikaron
and in English “Yizkor” books. A book whose aim is to rescue from oblivion a person or a world that has ceased to exist, it derives from the early medieval tradition of reading out during prayers long lists of names of those who perished in pogroms. After the Holocaust these books became such a common thing for compatriots' associations to undertake that in Israel a new profession was born: editor of books of memory.

Each book of memory contains a myth of origins—a story about the first Jewish settlers—the history of a particular community, profiles of worthy persons, like the water carrier or the town eccentric, then there's a description of what happened during the Holocaust, and an account of a ceremony in memory of those who were murdered. As a rule, books of memory, says Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, do not fulfill the requirements of historical monographs, but they provide invaluable material for the cultural anthropologist by showing the process by which the myth of the happy Jewish shtetl is created. Among the three hundred books of memory studied by Olga Goldberg-Mulkiewicz—including the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
—one hundred contained maps drawn by hand, from memory.