The Crime and the Silence (78 page)

“Why is there talk of the number sixteen hundred, despite the exhumation?” I listen on. “We Christians wish to reconstruct the facts. For the Jews, the facts have no significance. We express sympathy, but their answer comes down to this: how much can we get out of this? Germany paid a hundred billion marks to Israel. When that source dried up, they started to look elsewhere. We didn't know about a lot of these accusations, they were turned into moral categories, but then they were translated into sixty-five billion in financial compensation. They tried to do it through Auschwitz, through the business of the cross built in Warsaw. When that didn't work, they switched to Jedwabne, preparing three years for it. We warned the offices of the president and prime minister that they should not allow the government to apologize to the Jews. Because after that money would have to follow.”

Father Chrostowski, the former vice president of the Council of Christians and Jews, is the primate's expert on the Christian-Jewish dialogue.

APRIL 4, 2003

In the
Republic
, Father Stanisław Musiał, with the same vigor with which he denounced anti-Semitism in the Church, takes on the war in Iraq. He writes of crime and lies, and attacks Catholic bishops in the United States who supported sending U.S. soldiers to Iraq. I don't like this war either, I'm proud of my daughter Ola, who goes to antiwar demonstrations in New York after school. It only exacerbates my feeling of alienation, because the majority of the people I know in Poland are in favor of the war, and my newspaper is, too.

APRIL 29, 2003

The funeral of Father Orłowski, who played a crucial role in the denial of Poles' responsibility for the massacre. Two bishops went all the way to Jedwabne for it.

MAY 1, 2003

A conversation with the sociologist Ireneusz Krzemiński, who has just finished a study of anti-Semitic attitudes. He repeated the same questions he posed ten years ago, in 1992.

Only 14 percent of Poles think that in Auschwitz, where 90 percent of the victims were Jews, they killed mostly Jews. The fact that the Jews suffered more than Poles during the war is accepted by fewer Poles than before—barely 38 percent.

“The results leave no room for doubt,” he says. “After the Jedwabne affair flared up, the number of anti-Semites in Poland increased significantly. Why? Jedwabne sharpened our sense of competitive suffering.”

MAY 4, 2003

I'm preparing captions for photographs from Jedwabne.

The experience of wresting information from oblivion is familiar to me from my work on the album
I Still See Their Faces
. I remember the moment when I saw hundreds of pictures of Jews on the floor and at once realized I didn't want to write the text I'd been commissioned to write on former Jewish shtetls. Instead, I should write captions for these photos, resurrect as much as possible of a lost world, reconstruct not just the fate of those in the photographs but the wanderings of the photos themselves.

From the beginning it seemed to me that most of the photographs sent in to the contest were caught up in others' lives, hanging on for dear life in the family albums of Polish neighbors, in the chests of drawers of distant acquaintances. It happened that someone had kept for half a century a photo found next to the railway tracks leading to the camp in Brzezinka, even though the people in the picture were strangers to the finder. But sometimes it seemed that this strangeness had been strictly self-imposed. In the third, fifth, tenth meeting or phone conversation, people would reveal to me that those were in fact family photos. Their Jewish relatives.

And so it was that a woman who told me various details from the biography of a man in a Polish Army uniform—that he'd been in the Polish Socialist Party, that he'd been murdered at Katyń—burst into tears and admitted he was her father. “From the time our neighbors betrayed us during the war and we survived only by a miracle,” she explained, “my mother and I decided not to admit we were Jewish.” Her children know nothing of their origins. The next time I saw her she once again referred to the man in the photo as “that gentleman.”

Similarly, a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology who comes from a prominent Jewish family gave me priceless information about her ancestors. She knew virtually everything about them, and felt deeply connected to the Jewish community. However, she never mentioned her background to anyone: “For obvious reasons it would be inappropriate.”

JUNE 15, 2003

According to the results of the recently conducted national census, Poland now has eleven hundred Jews.

I remember last year's visit from the census taker. The census had a question on nationality. But to indicate another nationality you first had to answer no when asked if your nationality was Polish. So I have no right to feel both Polish and Jewish! In any case the Polish language itself forces me to define myself in a certain way. The language has no expression that would allow me to call myself equally a Pole and a Jew.

We had a discussion at home. Maniuszka said she feels Jewish, at least one-quarter, after her grandmother, but on the other hand she doesn't really understand what it means to be Jewish if you're not religious. So she chooses the Polish nationality. Ola has no doubt that it is wrong to put her in a position where she has to make an exclusive choice, and so if she has to, she would choose the Jewish nationality. Me, too.

The census taker filled in the checks in the appropriate sections without batting an eye. On her way out at the door she said casually, “I did a two-week course to get this job. They taught us not to be surprised at anything.”

JUNE 24, 2003

I interview Imre Kertész for the
Gazeta
. The fact that this long-awaited Nobel for Hungarian literature had to fall to a writer not very well-known in his own country, who made the Holocaust the chief subject of his prose, prompted mixed emotions in Hungary. The Holocaust is a dark and painful topic that has been consigned to oblivion because of the participation of the Hungarians in the destruction of their Jews.

Besides his subject, the fact that Kertész is a Jew does not sit well with many Hungarians. I tell him about the late, great Polish writer and essayist Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, whom I tried to get to talk about his Jewish origins in an interview I once did for the
Gazeta
. He was furious that I touched on the subject at all, and had me cut it out altogether when he authorized the interview before publication. He behaved as if having Jewish ancestors was something odious excluding him from the company of Polish writers. The saddest thing is that there's something to that. Herling-Grudziński is not an isolated case; I know other Polish writers who passed over their Jewish origins in silence, sometimes even to the extent of lying about their childhood in autobiographical writings. This is a terrible testimony to present-day Polish anti-Semitism. It wouldn't occur to a writer with French ancestors to hide them from anyone, and no one would look upon such a writer with suspicion, as if he were some kind of frog eater, not one of us Poles.

One of the most devastating stories related to this subject was told by Alina Margolis-Edelman, Marek Edelman's wife, who was in hiding during the war with a patriotic family of renowned Warsaw architects (they were told she was the daughter of a murdered Polish officer). When the ghetto was in flames in April 1943, her host said, “Pity Tuwimer isn't frying in there with them.” It was offensive to a Polish patriot that a great Polish poet, Julian Tuwim, was also a Jew.

Before Jedwabne it seemed to me this pretense of “racial purity” was connected to the trauma of the war. However, from the time I experienced alienation due to my own background, I think those writers or poets didn't have the strength to confront the suspicion of their readers, to undergo manifestations of hostility and exclusion just because they had a bit of “foreign blood.”

I tell Kertész how comforting I found his
Guardian
essay “The Language of Exile,” in which he explained why he, a Hungarian and a Jew living a large part of the year in Berlin and feeling at home there, feels in Hungary as if he were just visiting, a bit of an interloper. I tell him that it was only in the course of writing this book that I realized that to many of my fellow Poles I'm a “stranger.” And that I return to Poland from my increasingly frequent trips to New York concerned about what I'll hear next. His essay helped me understand the obvious: that the sense of alienation doesn't bother you when you're abroad, because there's no reason you would feel you belonged. It only hurts in your own country.

“It's best to be somewhere in between, somewhere on the road,” Kertész advises.

JULY 10, 2003

Jedwabne. My daughter Maniucha and I lay rocks on the monument.

AUGUST 7, 2003

Jedwabne. I'm trying to get authorizations for statements for my book. Henryk Bagiński agrees to reveal it is he who systematically cleans up the Jewish cemetery. On the other hand, there's a person in my diary I feel close to who asks to remain anonymous, even on statements made publicly.

JANUARY 19, 2004

With complete self-sacrifice, Jacek Kuroń has struggled through the first version of my manuscript between dialysis sessions and intensive sessions in the hospital.

“I don't know how many people will read this,” he worries. “Theoretically I was prepared for the whole thing, you'd already told me so much about it, but even so I had to stop reading every several dozen pages, so hard did I find it.”

I also sent my manuscript to a close friend in Paris, whose family was driven from Poland by the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968. “I'm afraid,” she wrote me, “not many people will like your book. Quite apart from anti-Semites and other ‘patriots,' a book like this will make decent and honest people feel bad, and no one likes that. I think my father will lose the little faith he still has in Poles and in being seen as Polish by anyone but himself (though he will certainly value the book). So the hardest is still to come, but I'm sure you know that.”

APRIL 9, 2004

Marek Edelman, reading the manuscript of my book, keeps putting it aside, moaning, “Who's going to read this? Who's going to be able to read it?” And that the reading inflicts an almost physical pain on him. “For me the hardest thing to bear is not that Jews were massacred in Jedwabne and the area,” he says, “but that it was done with such cruelty and that the killing gave so much joy.” After reading the first twenty or thirty pages, Edelman lets me know that he has been drawn into the book.

APRIL 29, 2004

Marianna Ramotowska has died.

This occasion has brought home to me the meaning of the word “expired.” Stanisław suffered and strugged with his illness, but Marianna left the world quietly, gently. With every visit her bed seemed larger to me—she was always small and thin, but she got smaller and thinner, and her skin was like parchment.

The doctor assures me she didn't suffer.

APRIL 30, 2004

The historian Dariusz Stola, whom I asked to read my book, has given me an array of comments beyond factual ones. He says I react neurotically when someone approaches the matter differently from me, that I, too, often take an accusatory tone, that it's clear there's too much bitterness in me. He also draws to my attention how much of what is happening now in Jedwabne is being played out in the theater of the imagination.

“The people you talk to live in constant fear that someone's going to burn their house down, kidnap their children, knock them down in a dark alley. But no one has been physically hurt, right?” he asks to make sure.

Fair enough. Apart from one older lady who was beaten by family members, people annoyed by nocturnal phone calls, isolated incidents of bullying like pushing someone in a shop so they drop their groceries, idle threats—not one of my interlocutors has been hurt. It's just that here are respected members of the community who had relatives, friends, acquaintances, a position, and who suddenly felt cast out of the circle as they were surrounded by hostility and condemned to ostracism, often by their own families. Is that so trivial? I spend the night reading through my book and deleting sentences written bitterly, neurotically, in an accusatory tone.

JUNE 15, 2004

I've been poring over the map of prewar Jedwabne based on postwar aerial maps, and two local surveys. I add the information I've gathered, giving specific people specific addresses.

The
List of Post-German and Post-Jewish Real Estate Abandoned in the Town of Jedwabne
, which I found in the Łomża City Archive, is an inestimable help to me. It is from 1946, but it includes the surnames and addresses of prewar owners of some houses and properties. Luckily the list also contains data on the size of the houses. That makes it easier to reconstruct which family might have lived in which of the little blocks drawn on the map. I have at my disposal a list drawn up by Tzipora Rothchild (who emigrated to Palestine before the war) for the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
in the seventies. I have information from so-called notification reports of people who perished in the Holocaust, from Yad Vashem. Unfortunately, they contain dozens of ambiguities that derive from the fact that they are filled in and sent to the institute not only by the families of victims but also by their friends and acquaintances, so the same person may figure in several places and then the birth dates, names, or number of children typically do not correspond.

The greatest help to me is the extraordinarily precise memory of Meir Ronen. When I met him in May 2001 in Jerusalem, he told me—street by street, house by house, neighbor by neighbor—about people alive only in his memory. He gave their names, often their addresses as well, and I took it all down, so that the abstract space of prewar Jedwabne began to fill with details.