The Crime and the Silence (73 page)

One day Chaja dreamed that she was wandering in the fields looking for a hiding place. She spotted someone on a bicycle. She recognized Marian Kozikowski, the killer who had led her and her family out of the marketplace. He said, “Come to me, I have a good place for you.” She woke up and realized Kozikowski was far from home, doing labor in Germany. No one in the family objected when she proposed they set out for Konopki, to Kozikowski's wife.

After much pleading and the promise of payment, Kozikowska agreed to give them a spot in the attic of her barn. But only for two people: Chaja and Menachem. They brought Chana in secretly and managed there for five months. Izrael visited them in despair with their daughter Szejna; they didn't know what to do with themselves, they had hidden in so many places in the course of a few days, and they hadn't eaten for several days. But Chaja and the two children had nothing, either. She saw her husband looking like an old man of eighty, wrinkled, with dull eyes. Szejna, then fifteen, consoled everyone, saying they'd find another shelter, they'd live out their lives among Jews in clean beds.

“Our hostess Marianka made sure we had nothing to protect us from the cold. She wanted it to look as if we'd just arrived and she'd known nothing about it. She told us it wasn't worth the sweat, that we wouldn't survive anyway; she heard the peasants talking and knew that as soon as we came out of hiding, they'd kill us. And we went on saying that we'd reward those who helped us. Marianka's mother-in-law bemoaned the fact that her son had been taken by the Germans. She said: ‘I don't know if I'll ever see him again, he has grave sins on his conscience, he killed Jews, but only after the whole village urged him on.' To console her, I told her that he had saved our family from the flames and that that would be in his favor, and that he would survive. And he did.”

When the family could find no shelter in the winter of 1944 they went to the Rogowskis'. “They led us to the hiding place. They already had one prepared because they were hiding food from the Germans. It was very cold there. At night there was a blizzard and snow came through the cracks. They brought us hot food. Once we went to their kitchen, the women were spinning, they had compassion for us. It was the first time in three years we were in a room. The son said it was terrible what had been done to the Jews. But the mother said since we'd been there she hadn't been able to sleep. The village head knew about us and wanted us to leave the village. He told people at meetings they shouldn't hide Jews, because they could get killed. We stayed with them until they told us to leave.”

By now, the first Soviet planes could be seen in the sky. They counted the days to the German defeat. Chaja's next dream gave them new psychic strength: a Zionist meeting, everyone is leaving, and the family wants to leave, too, but the doors are locked. Then Wolf Szlapak comes to tell them to wait quietly until he brings them the keys. They considered it an omen that their family friend Szlapak had come from the other world to help them.

Meanwhile, the next cataclysm was at hand. The inhabitants of Radziłów and its environs were given the order to evacuate, because the front line was moving in their direction. The Finkelsztejns remained behind in the abandoned village, in a cramped shelter under the threshing floor, which was filling with water. There Chaja suffered bouts of claustrophobia, feeling as if they'd been buried alive. Their host had left them two half-baked loaves of bread and a rusty water pot and told them where the rutabagas were kept. They ate moldy bread, nibbled on frozen rutabagas, and drank water red with rust. Chana cried with hunger; Menachem said he wanted only to live long enough to eat his belly full. All of them asked, “Will we ever sit in a warm room watching rain and snow fall outside?” Chaja told them they would survive and make it to Eretz Israel.

When Menachem got a hand infection and fainted from fever, she dreamed the war was over and her son was chosen as a delegate to a Zionist congress. Hope returned to her. She saved her son by putting a tourniquet above the elbow and applying cold compresses day and night for several days.

When the front line moved, the Finkelsztejns made their way to the Karwowskis' in Konopki, where they'd spent Christmas the year before. “I won't throw you out,” Karwowska promised. They encountered kindness more rarely than a hunger for profit. “We found a human heart, that was rare. Before that it was as if I had been turned to stone.” When it got too dangerous they moved on, but they left the emaciated Chana at the Karwowskis'.

In January 1945 they found their next and last shelter with the Klimaszewski family. Zosia, the sixteen-year-old daughter, who showed them much compassion, was ill with typhus. Chaja describes how Zosia's mother refused to take her to the hospital despite her pleas, because it would have meant giving up her own down blanket. And she was worried that since she hadn't yet buried any of her children they didn't have an angel in heaven to wait for her. She greeted her daughter's death with relief.

They came out of hiding as soon as the Soviets appeared on January 22, 1945. The Konopki village head warned them to stay in hiding, telling them that the previous day father and son Dorogoj had been murdered. But the Finkelsztejns set off for Knyszyn, and from there to Białystok. “The few Jews who survived were attacked,” Chaja wrote. “There was a count of seventy Jews from the area killed on the roads and in villages. In Białystok it was dangerous, too, you couldn't go out at night. A gang attacked a house near us where Jewish bakers lived. They beat them and told them to stop baking or they would be killed. A Jewish woman was shot in broad daylight in front of the door of the shop she was opening. We were sitting on hot coals.” Once, when someone knocked on their door at night, they barricaded themselves in. In the morning it turned out it had been the militia. They were furious, shouting, “Pity Hitler didn't finish you off. We're going to rip you to shreds, we're not protecting you.”

The children went to school in Białystok. When Szejna first said her surname, the whole class burst out laughing. The teacher hushed the kids and spoke about equality. Chaja found her children a Hebrew teacher. They left for Łódź, where Menachem became director of a school preparing Jews for life on a kibbutz. The dream of Palestine was about to be fulfilled.

They left Poland with Greek repatriation papers. They traveled the road covered by many Jews trying to reach the Promised Land after the Holocaust: false papers, an expedition crossing borders illegally, moving between transit camps, their ship arrested when they could already see the lights of Haifa, internment in a camp on Cyprus. By 1947 they were all in Palestine. Szlomo was eager to join the army, though he wasn't yet sixteen. He said, “Mama, remember how many times we dreamed of fighting the enemy? And now you tell me to wait until they call me up. Do you want someone else to die in my place?”

Izaak Lewin of Wizna, who survived the war in hiding with his parents in a village halfway between Wizna and Radziłów and met Szlomo in a camp in the Italian town of Selvino, told me about him: “Szlomo was more of a hero than I was. He lived on ideals. I stuck with the other boys from our camp, but he took off to join the Palmach, the elite unit of the underground Jewish army, right away. They did the most fighting and lost the most men.”

“Szlomke came to see us,” wrote Chaja. “He had no permit to leave the barracks, but he crawled through the barbed wire because we were nearby. He wanted to see if he'd grown, he compared the marks on the door, and it turned out he had grown by several centimeters. He was hoping he'd get the day off at Passover, it would have been our first Seder together since 1941. But he had to leave at 5 a.m. I called to him ‘Szlomke' as he was going…”

This is how Chaja Finkelsztejn concludes her memoir.

Szlomo Finkelsztejn was killed in 1948 near Kiryat Anavim on the way to Jerusalem.

“After our arrival in Palestine,” I was told by Chana, now Ann Walters, “our parents became young again for a brief time, they sang Halutz songs after dinner, but after Szlomke died the house was never cheerful again.”

Chaja managed to guide her whole family through the hell of the Shoah not just because they were wealthy, and not even because they managed to play the part (as she described it) of pious Christians. They survived thanks to her extraordinary strength of spirit. She managed to inspire her children with that hope, and instilled in them love for a distant country. She later paid the highest price for having succeeded: the death of a son in the name of a country that she had taught him to love.

In 1966 a woman from Yad Vashem came to Chaja in Haifa to record her testimony. “She accused the Poles of having burned the Jews alive,” the woman noted. “She was so upset that it was difficult to understand what she was saying. She said she had three hundred sixty pages of memoirs and had waited for years for the chance to publish them.”

Not only were Chaja's memoirs never published, but it seems no one even read them during her lifetime.

 

Journal

JUNE 16, 2002

It's the third day I take Bożena and Jan Skrodzki along with me on a search for the places where the Finkelsztejns were in hiding. Chaja couldn't have had much hope that anyone from Poland would ever study her memoir. Still, most often she didn't give either the surnames of the killers or the helpers, nor did she mention the names of the villages, so that even a meticulous analysis of the text offers little chance of re-creating their itinerary. But we know that among the villages where the Finkelsztejns hid was Trzaski, where the Borawskis now live.

In Trzaski we manage to find the house of Rogowski, who came to the Finkelsztejns to offer help as soon as the Soviets arrived. Without Chaja's information that one brother was a doctor, another a priest, and three were students we would never have found them, because—as we heard at the Borawskis'—“you can throw a stone at any house here and find yourself face-to-face with a Rogowski.”

We talk to the grandson, Leopold, who's about fifty. He lives more in New York than here. He knows his grandfather helped the family of a Radziłów miller. I tell him Chaja described his family in her memoir and mourned the death of his grandfather (it all fits: Franciszek Rogowski died in March 1944). She writes most admiringly of the grandfather, less so of the rest of the family. I suggest I read him only what she says about his grandfather. “No, no, please, read it all,” his grandson says. So I also read the excerpts about Franciszek's wife not wanting to return the Finkelsztejns' things to them after her husband died, how she went by the neighbors' to urge them not to store anything for the Finkelsztejns: “They would have flung us into the arms of death in order to keep it all.” I feel awkward reading these things, but when I glance at our host I see Chaja's words aren't making too much of an impression on him. When I finish, he asks, “Do you have any Jews in your family? I worked for a Jew in America; he was a decent man. Maybe you can help me find work in New York?”

He tells various stories he's heard about the war without much emotion. “My uncle told me a Jew had warned him he was going to be deported, and later when my uncle went to the barn when it was all over, he saw that Jew, partially burned.”

“Just between us Poles,” Jan Skrodzki draws him out, “tell me, are you an anti-Semite?”

“I don't like Jews.”

“And why is that?”

“They live near me in New York, the kind with curls, religious Jews, and I just don't like the sight of them.”

The theme I know so well of God's punishment runs through our conversations. And so there was a shoemaker who was a landlord, and one Pole chased him and helped burn him. The Pole moved into the shoemaker's house, but when he fell asleep in his Jewish featherbed, he didn't wake up the next day. Or the story about the Jewish family Cherubin, whom the Poles dragged out at night, killed, robbed, whose blacksmith workshop they took over, and how they later had abnormal children.

JUNE 17, 2002

We move onward following the route described by Chaja. Far from the highways, we travel along village roads to scattered cottages. Every time I talk to witnesses of the events of sixty years ago it turns out they can confirm almost every detail she mentions. But it isn't until I get to the places where they were in hiding that the memoir written in Yiddish acquires a palpable reality.

Nowadays you don't meet many descendants of the former residents here. In Konopki, where nineteen families lived, only a few of them remain, and many houses are boarded up. Dusze has virtually emptied out. But all who remain remember the miller's family. They don't know their surname or their Jewish names, but they remember Chaja's children Józek, Janek, Marysia, and Jadzia (or, respectively, Menachem, Szlomo, Szejna, and Chana).

Previously when I visited various households where Jews were hidden, the people were nervous and asked how I found them, asked me not to mention their names. In Trzaski, Konopki, and Dusze, hiding Jews became a normal thing during the war, accepted by virtually the whole community, and people now speak of it without fear. Almost everyone we talk to remembers his father, grandfather, or uncle hiding a Jew—as well as the Finkelsztejns, two families hid in these villages, and like the Finkelsztejns, they would spend short periods of time with various host families. Only one of those we talk to brings out
Gross's Lies
, the pamphlet from the series “Know Your Jews,” a standard text in nearly every Jedwabne home.

“They converted and lived among us,” Franciszek Mroczkowski says. “We had a gramophone in our house, and Marysia came to dance. The Jew tailored a bit, he made me a cap, and he complained it wasn't quite right, the shape, but it suited me. I gave him butter and salt pork for it. And so those Jews were saved. They thought they'd be equal to Poles when they were baptized, but Hitler ordered them to be destroyed and they had to hide in a bunker.”