The Crime and the Silence (76 page)

How many active participants were there in the crime in Jedwabne? Krzysztof Persak, who made a penetrating analysis of trial materials from 1949 and 1953, excluding ambiguous testimony, counted eighty-five persons mentioned by name and surname. The number of residents of Jedwabne and nearby villages who took part in the atrocity in some form he estimated at well over a hundred.

Can the determinations of the 1949 trial be accepted? Law professor Andrzej Rzepliński showed in a devastating critique that the crime was minimized, and the investigation conducted with extraordinary inefficiency: it can't be ruled out that some of the secret police officials and prosecutors shared the anti-Semitic prejudices of the accused men. “It is beyond doubt,” we read, “that the case was conducted in such a way as to reveal the least amount of evidence possible that might incriminate the accused and other Polish residents.” Rzepliński puts his faith in the testimonies of witnesses who pointed to murderers during the investigation but who withdrew their statements at the trial. And so, analyzing the testimony of Bronisława Kalinowska (“Jerzy Laudański was hurtling down the street saying he had already killed two or three Jews”), he states, “Her brave testimony during the inqury was ‘corrected' in court, because this older woman, I have no doubt, was more afraid of the members of the Laudański family who remained at large and of the family of the other accused men than she was of the secret police.”

Can we believe prosecutor Waldemar Monkiewicz, who claimed that 232 Germans carried out the massacre? No, says the historian Krzysztof Persak, who analyzed the case documents from 1967. For the documents do not even offer a trace of evidence that might lead one to that conclusion. “The conduct of the prosecutor at that time,” we read, “can only be judged as a manipulation of evidence and a falsification of the results of the investigation.”

How many victims were there? Marcin Urynowicz, attempting to determine this on the basis of various contradictory reports, thought that in 1939 the Jewish community in Jedwabne numbered roughly a thousand people. We don't know how many Jews lived in Jedwabne in 1941, but no more than that. In the barn, he claims, considerably fewer than a thousand people must have perished—it's known that some were killed individually, with clubs, axes, and some managed to hide from the killers that day.” (But he doesn't take into account how many refugees had come to town from Radziłów, Wizna, Stawiski, and other smaller Jewish settlements in the area.)

Did the Germans plan the massacre in Jedwabne or merely give permission for it? Professor Edmund Dmitrów carried out a meticulous search in German archives. He found no documents that would enable us to ascertain what role the Germans played.

DECEMBER 1, 2002

I was planning to reconstruct the course of events in Jedwabne, Radziłów, and Wąsosz, the three places where Poles murdered all their Jewish neighbors.

At the Institute of National Remembrance in Białystok I read accounts of the atrocity in Wąsosz, where in one night, July 5, 1941, all the Jewish residents were killed with spades, pitchforks, axes. How many Jews perished is hard to say, probably 250. The July nights were short, so that when the bodies of murdered people were carried off on wagons it was already getting light and everybody could watch what was going on from behind their curtains. It happened on Saturday night, so people going to Sunday Mass saw pools of blood in the streets. There was a trial in 1951, but no one was convicted.

I put off Wąsosz, and now I realize I don't have the strength to confront another nightmare.

I start editing my book.

 

14

Decent Polish Kids and Hooligans

or, On the Murderers of Jedwabne, Radzi
łó
w, W
ą
sosz, and the Surrounding Areas

1.

Reading a book on the Polish underground in the Łomża district I found a mention of one Maksym Jonkajtys of Szczuczyn, “head master of a grammar school, selfless patriot, one of the first partisans during both the Soviet and German occupation, shot in 1943.” However, I didn't immediately realize this must have been the same school head Jonkajtys who, according to the testimony of Basia Kacper from Szczuczyn, led the pogrom in his native town.

I had read Kacper's testimony at the Jewish Historical Institute at the very beginning of the road that led me to write this book. I remember being struck even then by the phrase she used: the pogroms were organized by “decent Polish kids and hooligans.” But a long time passed before I became fully aware of the horror of this phrase, and, at the same time, its precision. I had to go through the testimonies of Holocaust survivors a second time to realize that I'd had the knowledge underlying Kacper's formulation at hand the whole time.

The local teacher, postmaster, policeman, medic—the testimonies at the Jewish Historical Institute from Stawiski, Jasionówka, and other places in the Łomża area where Jews were killed show that the representatives of these professions, prestigious in the prewar Polish provinces, not only incited people to the atrocities but took part in them themselves. The role of the local political elites in the ominous events of the summer of 1941 is even more obvious.

(Photograph © Krzysztof Miller / Agencja Gazeta)

2.

As a rule the town elites in this part of Poland were made up of prewar National Party members. Many of them were in prison during the Soviet occupation, or went into hiding for fear of being arrested, taking part in the anti-Soviet partisan movement.

After the Soviets left and the Germans invaded, it was these people who tended to set the tone in the towns, organized civilian guards, and were in theory there to preserve the peace but in practice carried out acts of revenge, in the first place against Communists, both Jewish and Polish, but immediately afterward, against their Jewish neighbors. These makeshift civilian guards and police squads—units that had existed for just a few weeks (until the German authorities had installed themselves—and the Germans employed some of their members in the auxiliary police, or
Hilfspolizei
)—led the majority of pogroms and massacres.

In Radziłów people remembered Henryk Dziekoński and Feliks Godlewski committing their atrocities wearing the white-and-red armbands of the civilian guard. After the war Henryk Dziekoński tried to convince the court that the killing of Jews had been prompted by ideas; he stubbornly repeated during the investigation and at the trial that he had called upon the locals to refrain from looting, and simply to burn Jewish property. He didn't want anything to sully this act of patriotism.

Only after the political elite of Radziłów had become active did the lowlifes and criminals of the town join in.

In Jedwabne, National Party members included Bronisław Śleszyński, who gave his barn for the burning of the Jews, and Czesław Laudański, father of the brothers Jerzy and Kazimierz, convicted for their part in the crime.

In many towns, particularly smaller ones, the auxiliary police formed on the basis of the civilian guards was the only force representing the German occupation. (However, many of those Poles participating in the atrocity, who were at one with the Germans on the Jews, quickly ceased to collaborate with them, and some of them went to the partisans; other Poles remaining in the auxiliary police assisted the partisan underground.)

Of the eight men accused of taking part in the murder of Jews in Radziłów—and I know from witnesses that all of them in fact played a leading role in it—six were in the resistance during the Soviet occupation and joined the Home Army during the German occupation, and some of the eight were active in the Polish underground after the war. One of the killers, Feliks Godlewski, is described as follows in a book dedicated to local Home Army heroes: “In the underground resistance from 1939. In Kedyw (Special Forces) from 1944. Fought with 3rd squadron 9th mounted rifles in Grzędy. Determined and courageous. Condemned to many years in prison after the war.”

The only thing is, Godlewski was convicted in the trial on the murder of Jews in Radziłów. But in local memory this sentence is just another item in his heroic biography (in the course of the investigation he was additionally charged with beating individuals collaborating with the Soviet authorities).

It is also known of other participants in the Radziłów atrocity that they fought with the Home Army. And so we read in Chaja Finkelsztejn's diary the following remark about Zygmunt Mazurek: “He was among those killing Jews, but he was one of the more intelligent murderers.” The Mazurek family belonged to the local intelligentsia; Zygmunt's father, Jan, a medic, was a decent man who looked after Jews who'd been beaten up. “The son makes sure his father has enough to keep him busy,” Chaja commented. Zygmunt Mazurek, code name “Kuba,” who worked as a teacher (he became a doctor after the war), was the person in Radziłów with the highest rank in the Home Army. After the war he was the legendary deputy leader of the regional hero “Bruzda” in the most famous underground operation in the region—the taking of the secret police, militia, and Soviet command buildings in Grajewo in May 1945.

Several of the men accused in the 1949 trial of killing Jews in Jedwabne were later active in the underground. Bolesław Ramotowski, Roman Górski, and Franciszek Łojewski were Home Army soldiers (they left the underground in 1947). After the war, National Armed Forces meetings took place in the house of one of the leaders of the massacre, Józef Sobuta (who had taken part in demolishing Jewish shops before the war).

However, in Jedwabne, in contrast to Radziłów, murderers taking part in the partisan movement and underground operations was more the exception than the rule. Karol Bardoń played an important role in the town council in Jedwabne: he had come to the area from Silesia in the thirties (he worked as a mechanic, first in Radziłów, in Chaja Finkelsztejn's mill, then in Jedwabne, in Hirsz Zdrojewicz's mill). In Soviet times he had a post in the Soviet administration and was head of the Jedwabne municipal supplies department. Maybe he was a German agent and he was dealt with as a representative of the Germans? In late June, early July of 1941, the town was under the rule of mayor Marian Karolak. And it was he who led the operation to round up Jews. Why did everyone submit to him? Was it because, as the son-in-law of the long-serving prewar mayor Walenty Grądzki, he had the support of the town elite?

The Wąsosz massacre was headed up by nine men, as was established in the 1951 investigation. All nine murderers were prewar members of the National Party. Marian Rydzewski, the leader, was in the National Party, in the Home Army during the war, and after the war, in one of the armed underground organizations. Townspeople remembered him years later in an article in the local weekly
Kontakty
: “The worst animal was one guy who later joined the Home Army. People remember that he marked each victim on his rifle with notches.”

3.

Bielsk Podlaski, Choroszcz, Czyżew, Goniądz, Grajewo, Jasionówka, Jedwabne, Kleszczele, Knyszyn, Kolno, Kuźnica, Narewka, Piątnica, Radziłów, Rajgród, Sokoły, Stawiski, Suchowola, Szczuczyn, Trzciane, Tykocin, Wasilków, Wąsosz, Wizna: the postwar court documents record acts committed against Jewish neighbors in several dozen towns in the area. In many of them the Germans were the initiators and executors and the Poles joined in, helping them to drive the Jews into market squares, beat them and humiliate them, and sometimes kill them. Elsewhere, Poles were the immediate culprits, and Germans served as instigators and co-organizers. But in Kolno, Rutki, Grajewo, and Szczuczyn it seems that the anti-Jewish incidents were not provoked by the Germans at all, but had the character of grassroots initiatives provoked by the Polish population, according to the Institute of National Remembrance. Why in this region did pogroms and killings reach a level unequaled in other parts of Poland? And how is it possible that people whose hands are stained with the blood of innocent victims quickly appear—as members of the Home Army—in the guise of national heroes? From a certain point onward these questions accompanied me in my writing of this book. I returned to them again and again in the course of my various conversations.

Professor Adam Dobroński, a historian from Białystok and a specialist in the history of the region, had no intention of replying to such awkward questions. He diverted me as best he could by lecturing me on the region's history, which was in itself a kind of indirect response.

“Jedwabne, historically it belonged to the Łomża
gubernia
. A nursery of Polish national identity and Catholicism; that's how the area was described in the nineteenth century. It was a realm of petty nobles. If we're talking about participation in popular uprisings, the Łomża area was in the forefront.” These lands stood out for their systematic supply of nationalist MPs. In 1905, at a time when the territories belonged to the Russian partition, the National Party won all the mandates in the elections for the Russian parliament. “The petty aristocracy absorbed nationalist ideology like a sponge,” Dobroński continues. “It was felt that this was a patriotic Catholic area with an alien element, the Jews. Add to that the shifting of the borders after World War One, which resulted in the Łomża district becoming a periphery, and the economic crisis of the thirties, which deepened the stagnation in life here. These were towns without a future, without any impulse to progress. The local population suffered a cultural degradation, it was characterized by primitivism, and the war exacerbated that state of affairs, at the same time preserving the memory of forebears who had fought to defend faith and fatherland.”