The Crime and the Silence (61 page)

“The first days were a nightmare,” Szmul wrote. “I remember Elke screaming hysterically when she discovered roundworms five centimeters long. Srul gagged when a worm called a cheese worm, white with a brown head, fell straight into his mouth. We suffered terribly, we threw up, but with time we became adjusted to the environment. We got used to watching the world through cracks. Our sense of smell grew more acute. The smell of baking bread reached us through the stench. We ceased to be Szmulek, Lejka, Elke, Mosze, Berek, Srul, Jankiel. We were the brotherhood of the pigsty. Just like Alexandre Dumas: all for one and one for all. Amidst the worms and dirt we were a metazoan, a subterranean monster with fourteen hands, ears, eyes, and nostrils, seven heads, mouths, and asses, five penises, two vaginas, and just one need: to survive. We had to surrender totally to each other where feelings were concerned, utterly resigning our own personalities. And share everything but the women. Elke and Lejka loved two of the men. And though we others also had our sexual needs and aching members, we should thank God we had the strength to control our sexual appetites.”

Wasersztejn describes how one day Germans came to Janczewko looking for a place to encamp. They chose the Wyrzykowski farm. They had two trucks, they pitched a tent, set up a kitchen under the tent, and took the barn for living quarters.

“When the Germans were staying in the barn above us, one of the women was ready to give birth,” he wrote. “Antonina brought a sheet, scissors, alcohol. She explained how the woman should push, breathe. Right after that the Germans turned up with dogs. They were laughing so much we knew they were drunk. They began to snore. In the night the woman went into labor. She had a rag in her mouth to keep herself from screaming. I told my friend that bringing a child into the world when the Germans were so close would get Antonina killed and I left it to his conscience. I saw an urgent question in his eyes. He spoke softly with his woman. The underground mother was contorted with pain, she bit the rag so hard blood flowed from her mouth. The child began to come out, and as soon as its little head appeared the father put a hand on its mouth to stop it from crying. He held it there till it turned blue; the mother lost consciousness. He held it until it was still. We cut the navel. When the mother came to she prayed in Hebrew, stroked the dead child, and cried herself to sleep. The father kissed the child's forehead. When the Germans left to go on patrol he took the remains and went out and buried them under a heap of shit. How many more months were we to go on crouching there, amid the stench? And now we were tormented by the memory of the child whose life we'd sacrificed so that we could live.”

This testimony has the sincerity of passion and despair. But Szmul could not have been an immediate witness to the child's birth and death—in fact, there were two shelters and Szmul was hiding in the other one. Nor was there an additional German unit bedding down in the barn over their heads.

He spent more than two years underground. “One morning,” Szmul wrote, “Antonina came to us: ‘The Germans have gone, you can come out. I hope you remember what it feels like to be vertical.' A person doesn't need sun, light, food, freedom as much as he needs to move. We started dancing, jumping, stretching, raising our arms to the sky. The Red Army soldiers, with their coarse faces, stinking of vodka, prodded us, laughed, gave us vodka, but also kept us in their sights. We cried at the sight of the blue sky—we weren't moles anymore.”

Wasersztejn set off for Jedwabne. The roads were—as he wrote—stained with blood. There were corpses of German soldiers all over the place. The Poles had torn from them everything of value. First that seemed horrible to him, but then he looked at his own ragged shirt, pants, and leaky shoes tied up with string, and decided he had the right to look for something better. He managed to gather together a cap with ear muffs, officer's boots, gloves, and a military coat made of leather. He and Izrael Grądowski happened upon a Soviet unit. “Good news,” said the officer, “we're executing Germans today. I'm sure you'll enjoy that.” They quickly moved on.

Wasersztejn knew he'd leave Poland, but he wanted to ensure the Wyrzykowski family's material security. “Their house was built in a time of poverty. I thought I had the right to choose some house that had belonged to well-off Jews and move it to Janczewko. There was a nice wooden building occupied by a Pole. I went in and told him to get out because it was my house. He was going to put up a fight, but Soviet trucks happened to be passing by and I greeted an officer. The Pole got scared and ran out the back way.”

He didn't manage to move the house. The same evening he was warned thugs wanted to kill them and he escaped, finding his way first to Łomża, and then to Białystok. He and the Wyrzykowskis moved into a suburb, sleeping side by side on the floor. He started trading. He'd buy cloth and thread in Łódź and sell them in Białystok. To avoid the squads searching the trains for Jews, he hid near the tracks and jumped on at the last minute when the train started moving. “I remembered,” he wrote, “someone talking about how great trade was in cloth from Łódź. I got money for a ticket, two bales of cloth, and I'd have half a zloty left for something to eat. A railway official who didn't hate Jews told me about four places where Polish fascists were killing Jews by the railway tracks.”

In Szmul's detailed account there isn't a word about him taking Antonina Wyrzykowska with him to Austria, tearing her away from her husband and children. But we know one way or another that when Wyrzykowska decided to go back to her family, he brought her back to Poland.

He stayed another brief period in Poland, and returned to trade. Through the Joint Distribution Committee he found his eldest brother, Mojżesz, in Cuba, where he had been since 1938. Szmul's mother, Chaja Sara, had worried ceaselessly about their future in Poland from the time her neighbor Hana Sosnowska had been killed in the pogrom in Radziłów in 1933, and so the family had shelled out the money for Mojżesz's passage at the price of many privations.

Mojżesz cabled: “Szmulke, don't go anywhere, wait for my letter.” Szmul wrote back that the farmers who had hid him had lost their farm and everything they owned because of it, and he swore not to leave Poland before he had ensured their security. His brother sent him enough money to buy the Wyrzykowskis a house in Bielsk Podlaski, a horse, a mare with two foals, two cows, a radio, and some furniture.

Szmul left the country by plane via Stockholm (“God of Israel, I never saw so much food, such elegant women, such beautiful clothes”). From Göteborg he sailed on a ship to the island of Aruba in the Antilles (“I saw a black man for the first time. On the pier people stood with signs in Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish: ‘If there are any Jews on this ship, come to us.' And there were Aruba Jews who took care of us.”) On November 15, 1946, he landed at the airport in Havana. He saw no one whom he recognized as his brother, so he said loudly, “I am Szmul Wasersztejn,” and found himself in the arms of a man crying and saying, “Szmulke, Szmulke.” Of the whole family only the two of them had survived. But he saw uncertainty in his brother's eyes as to whether it was really him. “I asked him: ‘Remember, Mosze, the little black cow with white patches that gave us more milk than the light one? Remember the shirt Mother made for it? Remember we had four hectares of grain? And those short pants you passed on to me when you left for Cuba? And our charcoal iron? And remember the brick missing in our bread oven?' When I said that he knew for sure it was me.”

He started out in business right away. His brother gave him six dozen hides for riding breeches, and he set off with them into the interior. “I told a countryman in the town of Cienfuegos how I'd survived and about the murder of the Jews. He felt sorry for me and bought three dozen hides, and gave me the addresses of eight other Jewish merchants. Every time I had to tell them the story of the massacre and every time they put in orders for shoes. That's how I began.”

Szmul soon realized this was a great marketing strategy. “Like an old broken record on a hand-cranked gramophone I told the story again of the events of 1941 to '45 and closed a 700-dollar deal,” he wrote with disarming frankness. “Not many Cubans have traveled across Cuba as much as I have. Havana was alive with music and singing, couples embraced on the coast boulevard washed with the foam off the sea waves, and I went on selling, day and night. At the end of 1947 I had 25,000 dollars.”

In 1948 he married Rachela Goldwaser, whom he'd met in Poland. His business kept growing and his wife worked alongside him, day after day, from dawn to dusk. They started a factory for tennis shoes, and saved a lot. By the beginning of the sixties they were wealthy Cuban citizens.

When Fidel Castro came in, the Wasersztejn family managed to leave the island. They lost their whole fortune. They found themselves in Philadelphia, not knowing the language or having any idea what to live on. The money they'd illegally sent to the United States disappeared. The children went hungry, Rachela wept. One day Szmul read a description of Costa Rica in a back issue of the local Jewish newspaper: magnificent volcanoes, a large middle class dominated by Jews, a democratic government, and beautiful women. It sounded enticing, so he found Costa Rica on a map. Then he found the Costa Rican consul in Philadelphia, who turned out to be Jewish, which seemed to him a good omen. He noted that he spent a dollar on an umbrella, because the consul had warned him that it rained a lot in Costa Rica.

“He arrived on Sunday, and by Monday he had his own shop,” I was told by Maria Wiernik, a friend of Rachela's in Costa Rica.

Wasersztejn described his first steps, when he was still alone. In the morning he went for a walk in the commercial quarter of San José and saw a sign that said:
BUSINESS FOR SALE
. “It was a small business but packed with shoes, exactly the thing I knew.” Although he didn't manage to convince the owner he would pay for the shop with his earnings, he did convince the next one along the street. He called his wife: “I have 30 pairs of shoes, you can come.” Soon, this time in the landscape of Costa Rica, he resumed the customs of the prewar shtetl. He journeyed on rutted roads, looked for ways to ford rivers, and went from door to door. He knocked, and offered his wares: shoes on credit.

“I became a respected man. Every day I'd go to the Soda Palace for a coffee,” Szmul wrote of himself when he had won a place among the financial elite of Costa Rica. On the 1997 video recording his trip to Poland, he declares proudly when he steps onto the plane, “We're traveling first class!”

After school, the children helped him sell shoes. But he took care to give them a good education. Izaak is a doctor of pharmacology, the owner and director of a laboratory that produces medications. Saul is a medical doctor, and Szmul's daughter, Rebecca, went to law school.

“He pushed us to study and work,” Saul told me. “He'd always say that God gave Jews a head for business so they could give work to others. There were twelve hundred people working in his shoe factory. It filled him with pride that thanks to him, so many people could support their family. For him, to be a good person meant working hard, giving work to others, supporting charitable causes.”

While other boys were playing soccer, going to the beach, or visiting New York, the Wasersztejn boys were working to help their father. They didn't know him outside of work. They went to bed before their parents got home at night, and when the children woke up they'd already left. Saul wasn't even tall enough to reach the tabletop before his father told him, “You're different from other children: they have uncles, grandfathers, and you don't. They were killed by their Polish neighbors. You were named after your uncle whose head was split open with an axe when he was twelve years old.”

“My father associated any news of atrocities committed in the world with Jedwabne,” the elder brother, Izaak, said. “He thought he should warn the world, because if the world knew about Jedwabne the evil wouldn't happen again. He wanted the people he loved to know about it. It was his obsession. I had to listen to him talk about the massacre hundreds of times. A child, to become a happy person, has to grow up trusting other people. Hearing again and again about the killing of the Jews by their Polish friends, I lost that trust. To go on living I had to block those memories in myself. They come back to me in depressions. My brother Saul suffers from the same thing, but somehow we manage to live and work. Our brother Gerardo is schizophrenic. There used to be no mental illness in our family. We are marked by Jedwabne.”

They often wondered why their father was unable to show tenderness, never hugged them, never kissed them, never took them out for ice cream, to the races, to the movies. Maybe he tried to be tough outwardly because he was sentimental by nature? Maybe all his feeling was burned away in the barn that day and he no longer had any tenderness in him?

Szmul taught his sons to respect the State of Israel. “People respect us because we have our own state,” he said. “They didn't respect us before.” He subscribed to Israeli newspapers—
Yehuod Hamot
, the
Jerusalem News
. He'd start his day with them. He didn't go to synagogue—just once a year, on Yom Kippur. That was the only day in the year he didn't work, but at sunset, when the Day of Atonement had ended, he ran over to open his store.

“I wanted to be different from my father,” Saul told me, “show that there were other ways to be good. That's why I became a doctor. But when my father started to have health problems I got involved in running the business with him.”

Wasersztejn had shops that sold
schmattas
, or clothes and shoes, and a shoe factory. When the market flooded with Chinese products the factory started to lose money. Saul finally managed to persuade his father to shut it down and limit himself to shoe stores. They ran the business together for twenty years. A friend of the family told me they fought so badly they sometimes came to blows.