The Crime and the Silence (6 page)

Even priests were exposed to the danger: “Two Jewish agents who have material for priests' cassocks have appeared in the area of the Łomża diocese. They show the visiting cards of various priests in our diocese, which makes it easier for them to persuade people to buy from them. Honorable Priests are therefore warned not to give their visiting cards to these Jews, for in so doing they support Jewish trade without any good reason, contrary to the slogan ‘Our people buy from their own, and only their own.'”
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Parenthetically, people were told not to believe too readily in popular sayings about Jews: “Until recently many have spoken disparagingly about Jews, one often heard things like: ‘A Jew's a dope, he'll buy old rope,' ‘You work like a Jewish farmer,' ‘You look like a Jew on a horse.' None of this made any sense and it detracted from our caution and vigilance against Jews … Folks laughed at Jews, and all the while those incompetent, simple, ordinary Yids took over all of our trade, took control of crafts, became landowners, factory owners, doctors, lawyers.”

Life and Work
and later
The Catholic Cause
played an active role in the boycott of Jewish shops. “Whoever buys from Jews or uses the services of Jewish doctors, lawyers, craftsmen, will answer to God and the people for the growth of poverty and crime in Poland, for the rise of Communism, godlessness, and socialism.” People were encouraged to fight Jewish competition by devious means: “In Stawiski, the Polish bakery wasn't doing very well, but someone put the word out that typhus fever was going around among the Jews and they were using loaves of bread to beat each other, and business at the Polish bakery picked up.”

Examples of successful boycotts were cited without any mention of the beatings and destruction of market stalls that accompanied them. Violence was not yet openly encouraged, but it was made clear that various tactics were permissible. The grandiose defense speeches at the trials of nationalist attack squad members were reported by the newspapers, even when the charges involved beatings and lootings.

After the pogrom in Radziłów in 1933, the censors confiscated a whole edition of
Life and Work.
The next issue of the paper already carried an ironic appreciation of the pogrom in the note, “A Fine Example of Helping One's Neighbor,” about the arrests, in connection with the Radziłów pogrom, of two brothers who had left their farm unattended and their mother alone at home. “However, the old woman and the farm have been looked after by friends of the men under arrest, former members of the Camp for a Greater Poland, who worked together to plough and sow the farmland.”

According to the National Party's ideology, Poles were supposed to not only weed Jews out of retail trade and crafts, but also refuse to sell them land or allow them into schools or state offices.

The diocesan press repeated: “No Christian family will give its child into Jewish hands.” “Protesting against letting Jews into Polish schools, we Catholics are only doing what our faith commands … Our Catholic conscience and national pride command us to get rid of Jewish teachers.” When a state office employed a Polish citizen of Jewish origin, there was outrage under the headline “A Jew Instead of a Pole”: “The rumor we once gave voice to has proved true, for a Jew has become head physician at the Łomża Health Fund. The fact that the most prominent positions in Poland are occupied by persons of an alien race pains the Polish population.” Or “Just such an impossibility that has nevertheless become a reality, is a Jew, a certain Turek, being the representative of the Union of Farm Workers. Is it not extraordinary that a person who by race, religion, and nationality is alien to the Polish spirit should decide the fate of a purely Polish union?”

The diocesan press was the local population's window on the world. The column “National News” reported on “Jewish usury,” “Łódź's de-Jewification,” “Gold Stolen from Churches Bought by Two Lvov Jews,” “Jewish Teacher in Nowo-Święcane Spreads Communism,” and “the Jewification of the Boy Scouts.” Under the heading “World News”: “Rumors of Ritual Murder,” “Jews Whipped for Opening Shops on Sunday” (in Tripoli), and so forth. Most energy was devoted to spreading modern, economic anti-Semitism, although traditional, religious anti-Semitism also had its place in these publications. Recommending reading materials to their parishioners, they praised a brochure by Father J. Unszlicht,
An Outline of the Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ
, which dealt with the “perversity of Jews in relation to Jesus.”

5.

One can argue about the immediate influence the press had in an area where one-third of the residents were illiterate and another third finished two grades of school at most. Reading documents from the postwar trials of participants in the massacre, one notices some of the witnesses and defendants sign with a cross. (Jan Cytrynowicz told me that peasants in Wizna buying three-quarters of a liter of oil would take three quarts paying for each separately, because they couldn't do addition.) But the town elites, including the priests, read the local press. And it was they who set the tone.

In its approach to the Jewish question the diocesan press was no different from the press in other parts of Poland, and sometimes things got much worse elsewhere. Toward the end of the 1930s, brutal anti-Semitism was an obsession in the press.
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A firm majority of Catholic papers argued that the battle with the Jews was a virtue in the eyes of God, not a vice, and they called for people to work to rid the country of Jews.

What was fundamentally different about the Łomża area, as the historian Dariusz Libionka has shown, was the high degree to which priests were involved in the activity of the National Party. The Łomża area was quite a phenomenon in that regard.
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The National Party already enjoyed the support of a majority of parish priests in the Łomża diocese, and the highest percentage fell in Łomża County (twenty-three of twenty-eight parish priests). Local bishop Stanisław Łukomski, a friend and collaborator of National Party leader Roman Dmowski, conducted a strong campaign against “introducing teachers and pupils of other faiths, particularly Jews, into Polish schools.” At the Congregation of Deans in 1929, he had already ordered parish priests to report on the number of Jewish teachers and pupils and offered as a model Father Rogiński of Wysokie Mazowieckie, who had “achieved the removal of a Jewish teacher.” Libionka also makes the point that Bishop Łukomski was exceptionally effective among higher church authorities in popularizing the notion of “ridding trade of Jews”—in a 1935 address to the clergy in his diocese he urged them to follow the example of a priest who had made his parishioners swear not to buy anything in a Jewish shop.

From the reports of the Interior Ministry it clearly emerges that it was priests who propagated the National Party ideology from the pulpit and in addresses on national holidays. Activities on the party's behalf were mainly organized by branches of the church-based groups of Catholic Action, which in the Łomża area were de facto appendages of the National Party, active in the greater part of the parish. Priests pressured their parishioners with threats and entreaties to participate in party activity. The curate Jan Rogowski of Piątnica, a village located between Jedwabne and Łomża, would ask residents when he went Christmas caroling if they were members of the National Party, and if they weren't he threatened not to hear their Easter confessions or bless their Easter dishes. Father Marian Wądołowski urged the population in the nearby village of Mosty to join the Catholic Action club, “because it is a second pulpit—what can't be said from the pulpit can be freely said there.”

Any pretext sufficed to prompt an anti-Jewish statement: the building of a Christian bakery or a Catholic house, Easter or the harvest festival, the Feast of the Assumption or the blessing of National Party pennants.

A notice in
The Catholic Cause
: “After the service on May 3, 1936, a procession took place in the town of Jedwabne with the participation of about 1,500 members and sympathizers of the National Party, accompanied by an orchestra and bicyclists carrying flags. There were two speeches, and during the procession there were cries of ‘Long live the Great Polish Nation,' ‘Long live Polish national trade,' ‘Down with Jewish Communism.' Said procession was a success and made a great impression in Jedwabne and its environs.”

The alarm was sounded: “Reports are growing of religious celebrations at which parish priests call on people to ‘rid the country's trade and industry of Jews,' and which end with cries of ‘Beat the Jews,' ‘Jews out.'”
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A Father Cyprian Łozowski of Jasionówka in the Białystok region, who “propagates anti-Jewish acts at a May 3 Academy and has his church choir sing ‘Lord, Rid Poland of the Jews,'”
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appears in one Interior Ministry report.

The Church taught Poles hostility and contempt for Jews from childhood. Younger children participated in the Eucharistic Crusade called the Knighthood of Jesus; the elder children joined the Young Men's and Young Women's Catholic Associations, where they performed plays—the title “The Jewish Matchmaker” leaves little to the imagination; the adults attended lectures such as “On the Urgency and Means of Battling Jewish Communism.” When a school hired a Jewish teacher, protest signatures were collected in the parish. In the
Parish Chronicle
of Łapy near Białystok a priest proudly describes a successful 1934 campaign to remove a Jewish teacher from a school.

Jan Cytrynowicz said: “In church it was constantly emphasized that Jews had killed Christ, there could be no sermon without that theme. Father Rogalski of Wizna was forever calling on people not to buy from Jews, not to visit Jews. He held it against my father, who had converted, that he did business with Jews, and as a punishment he kicked me out of religion class. That's why my education stopped after elementary school. With an F for religion you couldn't pass to the next grade.”

Judging by the amount of space the Interior Ministry reports devoted to the priests of Wąsosz and Radziłów, the towns where Catholics murdered almost all Jews in 1941, they were particularly active supporters of anti-Jewish campaigns.

Father Piotr Krysiak of Wąsosz was an important figure in the National Party not only on the local level; he often visited Drozdowo, where the founder of the National Party, Roman Dmowski, moved toward the end of his life. It was under the intellectual leadership of Father Krysiak, the Interior Ministry reports stress, that a circle of National Party supporters came into existence, and it was the priest himself who organized National Party member meetings and called for picketing Jewish shops. Even on his way out, in September 1937, at a ceremonial farewell to the priest, who was retiring, he urged his parishioners to organize a picket in neighboring Szczuczyn as well.

Mosze Rozenbaum had Polish acquaintances who remembered Father Aleksander Dołęgowski, the Radziłów parish priest, proclaiming at the funeral of the National Party attack squad members in 1933: “If the blood of Jews does not flow to all four corners of the world, Christianity will perish.” Perhaps the words were not quite that brutal. In any case, we know from the Interior Ministry reports that Father Dołęgowski dedicated a Mass to the memory of the squad members on the first anniversary of the pogrom, and gave an address to five thousand people crowded into the marketplace.

By the Polish residents of the town, Father Dołęgowski was remembered above all as an exceptionally miserly priest. He kept gardens where he had the faithful work for meager wages, which as a rule he neglected to pay them. His curates were outspoken anti-Jewish activists—and it was they who led the boycotts.

First, the curate Władysław Kamiński. I was told that “he hated Jews so much that when he was drunk he shot at the windows of the tailor Monkowski, who lived across the street.” Stanisław Ramotowski recalled, “I saw with my own eyes how he went with boys from the National Party to break the windows of Jewish shops.” We know from the Interior Ministry reports that he gathered together kids from the senior classes and urged them to combat Jewish trade. As an official at the Interior Ministry department elegantly phrased it, “He put forward the argument that Jewish bakers mixed dough with their dirty feet and spat in it. He stressed that a student who dared to buy a product from a Jew would fail religion class.” On another occasion, Father Kamiński said in class that during the war between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1920, Jews had scalded General Rydz-Śmigły's head with boiling water, leaving him bald. For that reason the general harbors hatred toward Jews and plans to drive them out of Poland. It's unknown to what extent the curate was conveying Rydz-Śmigły's sentiments, but this was doubtless a way to express his own. At a National Party county convention in Grajewo in 1936, which brought together twenty-five hundred participants, the curate, appealing for a battle against Jews and Communism, thundered that it was for their own purposes that Jews permitted their women to marry Poles, and there were ministers who had Jewish wives.

The name of another curate of the Radziłów parish appears even more frequently in the Interior Ministry reports: Father Józef Choromański. In March 1937, the curate personally organized pickets of Jewish shops. In his religion classes he sneered at children whose parents shopped with Jews, and “the schoolchildren, remaining under the influence of the curate, were guilty of anti-Jewish speech and behavior.” On July 18 in Wąsosz, at the Catholic ceremony blessing the National Party flags, the curate spoke to a group of seven hundred people and organized picketing campaigns. On July 29, he intervened at a police station in Radziłów on behalf of arrested picketers. In Radziłów on August 12, he sent people out picketing (and after being transferred to nearby Kolno in 1938, he organized campaigns at the beginning of the school year in which Polish children blocked their Jewish fellow students from entering the schoolhouse).