The Crime and the Silence (62 page)

“We had fierce arguments, mostly about him wanting to invest in land; I knew it didn't pay,” Saul said. “Jews wanted to educate their children and own land, that was supposed to give them a feeling of security, and they couldn't buy land in prewar Poland. When my father died I realized I'm really not so different from him. I don't work on Saturday, but only because my wife forbids me to. I take a two-week holiday, because my wife insists. But still, I run the business from dawn to dusk. I own seventy-one shoe stores all over the country. And you know what? Lately I've been investing in land.”

The video of the Polish trip shows Wasersztejn kneeling down, crying, kissing the earth near the site of the murder. He shows his sons: “That's the road I escaped by. Here's the rock I hid behind. Here's where they drowned the girls in the pond.” And, “For hundreds of years they lived alongside us as neighbors, and then they dragged us out of our houses and killed us in Śleszyński's barn, at three o'clock in the afternoon.” He says kaddish. “Dear mother, dear brother, how hard it's been without you all these years. I think of you every day.”

Earlier in Jedwabne, I'd heard about that visit. How Wasersztejn had come, wanting to give everybody one hundred dollars because he was ashamed of the lies he'd told. How he went to Janczewko on the outskirts of Jedwabne, where he'd been in hiding, and cried, and when someone came down the street he took out a ten-dollar bill. Stanisław Karwowski, Antonina Wyrzykowska's nephew who lives in Jedwabne, told me, “I'm ashamed to say what he gave me when he came back all those years later: forty dollars. But the neighbors told everyone it was three thousand.”

“Every spot in Jedwabne was marked by his memories. Here a child had fallen, there he'd heard screams, here the priest had locked the church door,” Izaak says.

In the marketplace in Jedwabne they were told, “Don't ask any questions, just get out of here.” They'd planned to stay longer, but they left at once.

When Jan Gross visited Szmul in Costa Rica, there was no longer any getting through to him, Szmul was absorbed in his illness. I was in San José just after his death, which occurred in February 2000.

He could barely hear a thing in the last months of his life. He told his sons he heard his mother—she was in the barn crying out to him, begging him for help.

By the time he became the target of attacks and insinuations, he was already gone, and it may have been better that he was spared all that. He became the whipping boy for all those who denied Poles did the killing in Jedwabne. Right after Gross's book appeared, people in the town started claiming that Wasersztejn had been on a truck with a gun when Poles were deported to Siberia.

“He was a young boy on whom fell the burden of supporting his mother and younger brother, because their father had died before the war,” Rachela remembered from her husband's stories. “He went from village to village buying meat and selling it on the black market. He was trying to survive. He didn't know a word of Russian and he gave the Soviets a wide berth.”

Rachela's words fit with what I heard from Meir Ronen in Israel: “I knew Szmul from school, we called him ‘Pietruszka' [Rooster] because he was a redhead. During the Soviet occupation he didn't spend time with any of the idiots who supported the new order.” In 1939, when the Soviets arrived, he wasn't yet seventeen. Friends a year younger were indoctrinated by Soviet schooling, and the ones who were a year older, subject to the Soviet army draft, were sent to classes in Russian and Marxism-Leninism. He narrowly avoided both.

Leon Dziedzic of Przestrzele remembered him from that time: “I saw him often during the Soviet occupation because he traded in meat, and in our barn—it was quiet in Przestrzele—he would slaughter and flay the animals. Sometimes he slaughtered a pig, too, but he did that secretly, not only from the Soviets but from other Jews, because for them it was a sin.”

At the public meeting of Jedwabne residents with prosecutor Ignatiew, the barn owner Śleszyński's daughter, Janina Biedrzycka, asked, “Why does that Jew sign himself Wasersztejn, when his name was Całka? I have a name and I don't change it. Would he have changed his name if he hadn't collaborated?” In fact Wasersztejn was called Wasersztejn both before the war and till the day he died. During the Soviet occupation, when all residents of Jedwabne were forced to take Soviet passports, which gave each person a patronymic, he probably wrote “Całkowicz” down as his patronymic. His father's name was Becale, or Całka—and that's why the Wyrzykowskis called him Staszek Całka when he worked for them; in those days it sounded a hell of a lot better than Szmul Wasersztejn.

In the winter of 2001, Professor Tomasz Strzembosz gave wide currency to the news that, as he maintained, “confirmed on all sides that Całko or Całka was Wasersztejn and that he was an agent of the security services in Łomża after the war.” The Catholic Information Agency picked up on this.

“I wrote that I was witness to the fact that Wasersztejn left Poland right after the war,” I hear from his friend from Jedwabne, Chaim Sroszko. “I demanded they publish a correction. No response.”

In the right-wing press and in several books on Jedwabne, the same phrases are repeated, with Professor Strzembosz cited as an authority: “the agent Wasersztejn,” “Jewish thug,” “secret service hood,” “it's not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Jewish secret service agents lecture their victims on morality.” People in Jedwabne who eagerly read the anti-Semitic press soon started to repeat these phrases.

“Wasersztejn tortured my father at the secret police prison, that's the truth about Jedwabne,” one of the residents shouted at me. I asked when that was. It had supposedly taken place in the fifties. Of course by then Szmul had long since left Poland.

I asked Szmul's sons if they ever tell anyone about their father's experiences. “A person living on the Pacific would never understand it,” said Izaak. “Once, I told a prominent intellectual here what my father was dictating a book about, and he thought it was a work of fiction.”

Szmul wrote to remember and warn others, and also, in spite of everything, to inspire. That's why his book offers descriptions of people facing death with dignity.

“A pious Jew, who looked like he had stepped out of one of the books of the Prophets, wrapped himself in a prayer shawl, enveloped a 500-year-old Torah with his body, raised a prayer book to the heavens, and, proclaiming the power of God in Hebrew, stepped into the flames. A moment of silence fell. The monsters were paralyzed for a moment by the strength of his Jewish faith and they silently watched his prayer shawl, which was throwing off giant tongues of fire.

“One dragged out a beautiful Jewish girl by her hair, her name was Telca. He walked to the edge of the cemetery where I was hiding and made her lie down, saying he was going to have her. She kept resisting, until finally she said: ‘Stop this slaughter and I'll give myself to you.' The man shuddered as if someone had hit him on the head. He struck the girl with a savage cry. From that mouth that men dreamed of as an oasis in the desert, no sound came. He lifted her up and threw her into the burning barn.”

He also describes finding out from a Pole who “hadn't killed anyone with his own hands but whose silence and passivity made him a criminal” how his twelve-year-old brother had died. He had been in the group of young Jews who were killed with axes near the barn. “He was strong and handsome. The Jews were taken to the lame man, who killed them with an axe and shoved them into a grave with his crutch. They left my brother almost until last. He tried to defend himself with a spade. They tried to beat him to death with clubs. It would have killed any other man, but Saul wasn't like any other man. He fell, bleeding, but got up again. They beat him on his head, and he got up. The lame man came at him with the axe. Saul got up a third time, though his head was coming off his torso, took a few steps toward the butcher, and that guy took out a World War I bayonet, stabbed him three times, and cast him into the grave.”

In conversations with survivors in the Łomża ghetto, with his fellow captives in hiding at the Wyrzykowskis', and finally with Polish witnesses, Wasersztejn must have fixed every detail of the massacre in his mind. Later all the facts, woven together and multiplied, tormented him day and night, forming what he himself called an “orgy of blood.” He told the story hundreds of times, until it had been transformed into myth.

He must have seen himself as the last repository of the truth about the Jedwabne massacre. For decades, reports of it failed to penetrate human consciousness. Hence his book, written in blood. He started dictating it in 1995 and finished in December 1999. Can he have hoped that someone would hear the tale one day? No more than a castaway on an uninhabited island who throws a bottle into the ocean in the hope that someone will find it and take his fate to heart.

 

Journal

JANUARY 1, 2002

In Łódź at Marek Edelman's birthday party. I talk to his daughter-in-law, the painter Zofia Lipecka, about her installation on Jedwabne. The Warsaw Center for Contemporary Art at Zamek Ujazdowski was to have shown it, everything was on track, when something went wrong. Her e-mails remained unanswered, and in the end, it turned out there was no money for the installation.

Marek Edelman was active in the Bund, a party that said the place for Jews was in Poland and that they should fight for social justice for all, not emigrate to Palestine in search of the Promised Land. He has remained faithful to that view his whole life. (After the war, the Bundists would go to train stations to try to halt the flood of Jews fleeing Poland.) But when in 1968 anti-Semitism received government endorsement and his children, Ania and Aleksander, would come home from school in tears, he thought it best for them to emigrate to France with their mother. Alina Margolis-Edelman invited a school friend of Ania's, Zofia Lipecka, over for Easter, and Zofia stayed with them and finished school in France. Alina, a pediatrician, now travels with the humanitarian missions of Doctors Without Borders. She was in Vietnam to help the boat people fleeing a Communist hell, in El Salvador, Chad, Bosnia. Ania became a chemist, Aleksander a biophysicist, and Zofia Lipecka a painter and Aleksander's wife.

Zofia's installation shows close-ups on several monitors of the faces of people listening to Szmul Wasersztejn's testimony. There are public figures like Jan Gross, friends, acquaintances, and also completely random people, seventy-five of them in all. “Some of them are listening intently, others weeping,” says Zofia, who read to them and recorded their reactions. “I cried over it like a baby many times,” Zofia tells me. “There are Poles, Jews, French people, as well as a Chinese woman, an Algerian woman, a Vietnamese woman who was reminded of the Vietnam War by the descriptions of the cruelty inflicted, or the black cleaning lady in the cultural center where I work, who later tried to console me by saying as a Pole I really don't have to feel so guilty.”

JANUARY 3, 2002

I extend my leave from the
Gazeta
, because I'm only half done with my book.

I'm trying to reconstruct the life of Józef, formerly Izrael or Srul, Grądowski, one of the seven Jews rescued by Antonina Wyrzykowska. I saw a prewar photo of him in the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
. An elegant man in pince-nez with his handsome wife, Fajga, in a low-cut dress and with three robust boys, Abram Aaron, Reuwen, and the youngest, Emanuel. A bucolic scene, photographed in the open air, a rarity in those times. I found out about him in Jedwabne; I'd read about him in trial documents and in Wasersztejn's diary. I talked about him a lot in America with the brothers Jacob and Herschel Baker and with Lea Kubran, in Israel with Jakow Geva, and recently with Antonina Wyrzykowska.

I'm able to reconstruct what happened to him on July 10, 1941. In the morning three Poles armed with clubs forced their way into his home; he knew them—Feliks Żyluk, who lived in the same building, best of all. They dragged the whole family out to the market square. They were led away from the square by a Pole from Szczuczyn, where Fajga came from. Grądowski never revealed his name.

He and his wife and two of their sons moved into the provisional ghetto in Jedwabne. When in the fall of 1942 the Germans ordered all Jews to report to the police station, Grądowski was worried that they hadn't been told to bring any tools. He thought they weren't being summoned for work and they should run away. He managed to get to the Wyrzykowskis in Janczewko, where he hid until the end of the war.

What happened to the rest of his family is unknown. Grądowski said his wife and children were caught by policemen and taken to the ghetto in Zambrów. However, Leon Dziedzic claims two of Grądowski's sons were killed in Przestrzele near Jedwabne. They were hiding in a haystack in a field belonging to a neighbor of the Dziedzices. It was November, it was freezing, and before they had time to look around for a better shelter the woman saw them and reported them to the village head. He passed it on to the police, who came for them and shot them on the spot.

After the war was over Srul Grądowski went to Szczuczyn in the hope that someone in the family had survived there. Szmul Wasersztejn accompanied him; the roads were perilous and it seemed safer for the two of them to navigate them together. They found no one. Srul, who was nearly sixty, almost two generations older than the other six saved by Wyrzykowska, didn't have the strength to go with them to try to sneak across the border. He found his old home in Jedwabne. He had himself baptized. He married a Polish woman who had worked in their household before the war. He wanted to melt into the surroundings, and so he changed his name to a Polish one. He didn't seek contact with surviving Jews, didn't report to the District Jewish Historical Commission to give any testimony. He was some kind of middleman in takeovers of formerly Jewish houses, giving false testimony about alleged relatives.