The Crime and the Silence (65 page)

Menachem Finkelsztejn described the deafening cannon fire that woke the residents of Radziłów in the early-morning hours of June 22. “The eight hundred Jewish inhabitants of the town understood the gravity of the situation right away.” Some decided to flee to the east, but on the roads they met “well-armed Polish Fascist gangs” who stopped Jewish refugees and robbed and beat them. They tried to hide in the surrounding villages, in the fields, to avoid the moment when the army would enter the town. But the peasants didn't allow them into their yards. “Having no alternative, they all began to return to their homes. The Poles in the area watched the terrified Jews with scorn and pointed to their own throats, saying: ‘Now it's going to be—
cut the Jew's throat
.'”

Chaja Finkelsztejn saw young people putting up the triumphal gate, cleaning it, festooning it with greenery and flowers. Menachem testified that they hung a swastika on it, with a portrait of Hitler and a banner with a Polish slogan,
Long live those who freed us from the Jewish Communists!
The subjects I interviewed remembered the same thing. Franciszek Ekstowicz saw poles being driven into the ground, entwined with flowers, and some banner hung between them. Andrzej R. is prepared to swear that the inscription was short:
Welcome
and another word he doesn't remember, and that green branches were woven around the poles.

The army came in on tanks. Eugenia K., then seven years old, watched the townspeople throw flowers on the tanks, which passed through Radziłów and continued on. Chaja Finkelsztejn, who was standing at the gate dressed as a Polish peasant woman, remembered what some people were saying: “The Christians welcomed them with enthusiasm, shouts of ‘You are our saviors! You've saved us from the Soviets!' ‘Look how handsome they are, how the smell of perfume wafts around them,' one Christian woman gushed.” Chaja was moved by the sight of wounded Russian prisoners of war led through the town, while the locals threw stones at them.

A few daredevils jumped up on the tanks to help track down Red Army marauders. “The Russians were fleeing across the Biebrza river,” a witness told me, “and there were Poles sitting on the tanks showing them where to cross to catch the Russians.” A temporary authority was made up of Polish residents. Henryk Dziekoński, who was part of it, testified at his own trial: “With friends I started to organize a municipal authority to keep the order,” and he gave the names of the other eight members of this self-appointed authority. Of nine of them I heard from witnesses that they participated in the massacre. They paraded around with rifles left by the Soviets and with red-and-white armbands.

Chaja Finkelsztejn described the town in those first days as follows: “Christians sat on benches in front of their homes, in holiday dress and a festive mood. They were all people we knew. Seeing how happy they were I had no desire to greet them. Very small Christian children pointed out Jews in the street to the Germans, crying:
‘Jude, Jude.'
They set their dogs on Jews, shouting: ‘Get the Jew!'”

Scores were settled with Communists and traitors—as several people told me, those are the rules of war. That part of history is not covered over in silence.

Halina Zalewska told me, “Just before the Germans came there was a big deportation, the women and children had already been sent away, and the men were kept for interrogation and then freed by the Germans when they disarmed the old Osowiec fortress the Soviets had been using as a base. So those farmers came home enraged and ready for a brawl.”

Andrzej R. told me, “The deportation just before the Germans arrived was later called Black Thursday. They not only deported people but told the remaining relatives to come to a meeting, where it was explained to them why the deportations were right. A local Jew came out and said, ‘All you ravens who squawk are going to Siberia.' Poles found that guy right after the Russkies left. That was the afternoon of June 23. First they tortured him in the marketplace. They tied a big flat stone to his neck with string and made him look into the sun. When he closed his eyes they beat his head with a stick. There were two men standing next to him, one smacking him on the head with a stanchion from one side, the other from the other side. Meanwhile, the Poles were asking him where the Kapelański family was. Kapelański was an organist who had been deported with his family. They led him down Łomżynska Road to the bridge and threw him off. The water was shallow. I watched what they were doing to him until it was over.”

Halina Zalewska remembers the victim was blinded by the sun before he died.

Chaja Finkelsztejn met a Jewish girl, a school friend of her son's, who had spoken warmly of the Soviets at a ceremony at the gymnasium. “Her lips were black and blue, she'd been beaten up by Polish friends overnight.”

On the same day the Russians left, the locals flung themselves at the military store in the temple on Gęsia Street that stocked clothes, food supplies, and rifles. They started with Soviet stores, but bands of locals also broke into Jewish homes—many Jews had left town for those first few days and were hiding with people they knew in the countryside or sleeping in the nearby fields.

Radziłów was on a drunk. That was because of the distillery that was taken over.

Czesław C. told me, “As soon as the Russkies left, our boys went to the Słucz distillery. It was full to the brim. Poles were thirsty for vodka, and some of them held a grudge against the Jews, and that grudge was well-founded.”

Mieczysław Kulęgowski told me, “They brought buckets of vodka back from the Słucz distillery, and some of them died in the process because a storehouse caught fire. They had vodka, guns, and hatred.”

The German tanks were followed by the arrival of a group of Wehrmacht soldiers in Radziłów. They savaged Jews, and were keen for Poles to participate. They cut off old men's beards, mutilating them with scissors and beating them. On June 25 they put on a display of what Poles were allowed to do to Jews. That some of the locals happily participated in this, we know from both Jewish and Polish witnesses.

Menachem Finkelsztejn described the Germans ordering Jewish men to gather at the synagogue, and the Poles standing guard at the exit roads and turning people on their way out of town back by force. Germans ordered Jews to take their holy books from the synagogue and burn them. Later “they harnessed Jews to wagons, got on the wagons themselves and whipped them with terrible force, driving down every street.” Jews were driven to the muddy river, told to undress completely and go into the water.

Andrzej R. has a detailed memory of this scene. “They harnessed Jews, drove them on with a whip. There was a barrel on the wagon and the Germans sat on the barrel in their swimming trunks, because that June was hot. We stood and watched. Kids were laughing; after all, no one knew how it would end, so in those first days there was a lot of laughter.”

Chaja Finkelsztejn: “The peasants wouldn't sell any food to Jews and took their cows away from them. Those who rented rooms to Jews told them to move out, because they were having their windows broken.”

On June 27, the German command left Radziłów, but the violence only grew. The spontaneously formed city authority was in charge, but groups of Germans would come by the town every now and then. From Chaja Finkelsztejn's testimony it emerges that on the same day the Wehrmacht left town, a large group arrived late in the evening—they are described as “Hitler's dogs”—in khaki clothing, on wagons with camouflage tarpaulins drawn by four horses. They forced their way into her home, beating everyone there badly, including the children, and ransacking the house. There were locals around, and the previously mentioned Henryk Dziekoński “showed them around” the house. The next day the peasants took the Jews' cows, herded them into the marketplace, and when the Germans came by again—with trucks this time—they were taken away. A sign that even if there was no German unit stationed in town, there must have been a post somewhere nearby. Because Jews could no longer buy food, the removal of their cows meant condemning them to starvation.

The scenes of homes being invaded, residents being beaten, dwellings being destroyed and looted took place every night. Numerous accounts allow us to reconstruct who belonged to those gangs.
1

Antoni Olszewski told me, “Thugs tied Jews to the bottom of Czesio Bagiński's wagon and hitched up his horses. He told me this himself once when I brought a sick horse to him. He said no one asked Bagiński for permission, he was a young man, they just pushed him off the wagon and did as they liked with the Jews. There wasn't a lot of water, just a muddy pool, but it was enough to drown them. I never heard of any German being there.”

Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, “The nights were terrible. Poles young and old were running around. They dragged clothes, linen, quilts, pillows out of our neighbors' homes. They took sheepskins from our neighbor, a furrier, and we heard the smashing of windows and wild cries. Every night we heard terrible screams and pleas for help. Jews hid in attic hideouts and in cellars, in rooms where you could move a wardrobe and hide a door. From many houses they took the fathers, beat them until they lost consciousness, brought them round and beat them again, dropping them off back home covered in blood. When women wept to see their husbands beaten like that, they said: ‘Shut up or we'll do the same to you.' That torture went on for two weeks.”

Halina Zalewska told me, “There was something going on every night. My mother said to the thugs, ‘Get it over now, one way or the other, I can't sleep with all this screaming and howling all the time.'”

Menachem and his father, Izrael Finkelsztejn, testified that the pillaging was frequently accompanied by rape. When Jan Skrodzki quoted an excerpt from Menachem's testimony about Jewish women being raped to his cousin Halina Zalewska, she protested vigorously, without noticing that she was actually confirming the testimony: “Those Jewish cows. What man would want them. Only the Kosmaczewski brothers raped, Leon and Antoni, and the Mordasiewicz from the other side of the garden plots. Kaziuk Mordasiewicz took Estera, the tailor Szymon's wife who did our laundry, and did with her what he liked. He led her into the muddy bank of the Matlak river, took her behind the weir and made her roll around. She begged us to intervene on her behalf. My father was even going to, but the thugs banged on the door and shouted: ‘If you speak up for Jews you'll be the first to be burned.' Well, they burned Estera with the rest of them.”

On Sunday, July 6, the horrifying news came that Poles had killed all the Jews in nearby Wąsosz. At noon, as described by Menachem Finkelsztejn, a lot of Poles from Wąsosz came to Radziłów. The locals didn't let them in, but they also didn't allow the Jews out.

“There were a lot of peasants, men and women, at all the roads leading out of town, watching every move made by the Jews,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote. “We heard peasants shout that they were trampling the grain so no wretch could hide in it.” Chaja's brother went to Father Dołęgowski to ask him to intercede: “My brother pleaded and wept and the priest did nothing but chide and scold.”

2.

On July 7 trucks drove into Radziłów from early morning carrying men from the surrounding villages armed with poles.

Stanisław Ramotowski: “It was still dark, in the night of July 6 to 7, when they started coming into Radziłów on trucks to crack down on the Jews.”

At about 7:00 a.m. two or three cars appeared in the marketplace. This was surely a group of officials from the security police and the security service led by Hermann Schaper, one of the small German units that aided in the “pacification” of these areas, and that were involved in (among other things) the local populations' “cleansing themselves” of Jews. Schaper was a Gestapo officer from Ciechanów. The Institute of National Remembrance managed to find the ninety-one-year-old Schaper, and prosecutor Ignatiew tried to interrogate him in April 2002. But he wouldn't say anything, offering his poor health as an excuse.

When was the murder of the Radziłów Jews planned? And who planned it? That they were gearing up for a pogrom that day was known beforehand. We can assume that the arrangements were made the day before between Schaper and the temporary authorities in Radziłów, though none of the witnesses remembers any meeting or earlier visit from the Germans. Of course, it's possible that no one remembered a visit of one or two Germans in a private car. We don't know how the deals were made. Did Schaper order the killing of the Jews, did he encourage it, or did he merely express his consent?

At dawn, when the peasants were heading for the pogrom, individual murders were already taking place. Mojżesz Perkal was beaten to death. One of Perkal's daughters, sixteen, half-alive, squatted down beside her dead father's body. The peasants dug a grave and threw her into it along with her father. Chaja Finkelsztejn heard about it at 7:00 a.m. from their former driver. “He was very upset,” she said. “He cursed the murderers: ‘Sons of bitches! To bury a girl alive!'”

Andrzej R. told me, “Three Germans arrived in an open car. I was standing nearby. They said, ‘It stinks of Jews here. When we come back in a few days make sure it doesn't smell like this.' They pointed to Feliks Mordasiewicz, who was standing nearby—it was his responsibility. ‘How am I supposed to do that?' he asked. Then they got five rifles out of the car, the long ones with a single shot.”

Halina Zalewska told me, “Four Germans arrived in the marketplace in two Jeeps, they wore caps with skulls on them, they'd brought rifles to be handed out. The young people especially went to listen to the Germans. The Germans told them, ‘You have Jews here whose fault it is that your families are freezing to death in Russia. Gather them all in the marketplace under the pretext of weeding the pavement.'”