The Crime and the Silence (10 page)

Ten or fifteen years ago, when Strzembosz was doing his research in the area, many more perpetrators and witnesses of the Jedwabne massacre were still alive than are today. How many of them did he interview? Just think of the invaluable material he had at hand. It seems unlikely to me that he never came across the subject of the killings of Jews in the course of his research. On the other hand, it's possible he wasn't paying attention. He was studying the fate of the partisans of Kobielno, denounced and killed on the spot by the NKVD or deported to Russia, so he didn't want to hear anything else. To the question of why he never touched on the theme of the crime committed against the Jews before, Strzembosz replies that Polish-Jewish relations was never his field. Which doesn't prevent him from suddenly becoming an expert on the subject after the publication of Gross's book.

FEBRUARY 2, 2001

In the
Republic
, Adam Cyra, an employee of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, delivers a homily to Jerzy Laudański, a prisoner of Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. Regarding the crime in Jedwabne, Cyra has nothing more to say than that his hero was tortured and tried in a Stalinist court for participation in the crime. “Kazimierz, Jerzy Laudański's eldest brother, defends him with zeal, believing in the just verdict of history,” Cyra says, bemoaning the Laudańskis' fate.

The
Republic
published this piece without a word of commentary. Or rather, with a visual commentary: camp photographs of Jerzy Laudański. The connotation is obvious: the striped prisoner's uniform of Auschwitz is probably the clearest symbol of victimhood in twentieth-century Europe. Photographs like that also play a polemical role: Jews reserve to themselves the right to be the worst victims of Auschwitz, and here you have a Pole, and one slandered by Jews, to boot. The text leaves no doubt: a righteous man, a hero, is being attacked. As if only decent people were deported to Auschwitz.

In the hospital with the Ramotowskis. Marianna doesn't get out of bed, but Stanisław has made himself at home in the hospital; he knows everyone around him and has a lively social life (the chief doctor complains to me that he spends the whole day on his feet). When I arrive, he pulls me out of the ward, we find a spot where he can smoke, and sitting on hard chairs we talk for hours.

Stanisław went drinking with the killers many times, to get from them details of the crime. He had no children. He had no one he could tell the truth. But he wanted to know. Now I am getting that knowledge out of him.

FEBRUARY 4, 2001

In Radziłów with Jan Skrodzki. We begin by visiting a childhood friend of his, Marysia Korycińska, and find her sister, brother-in-law, and husband. Jan Skrodzki recalls the Jewish cemetery, some two kilometers from town, where after the war he saw only a tombstone here and there.

“They took those stones away for sharpening axes,” Marysia's husband, Józef Koryciński, says, taking up the subject. “I don't think there was a farmer in Radziłów who didn't have whetstones made of burial stones. They cut down all the tall pines that grew there for firewood. I remember them, because during the war we went there to gather crows' eggs, and a crow isn't like a raven, it doesn't build its nest on a low branch.”

“When people started rebuilding, they took gravel in wheelbarrows and plastered their walls with Jews,” Marysia's brother-in-law Józef K. chortles. “And the new authorities used whatever the country folk hadn't stolen in the night to build some road. Sorrel grew wild on the graves, it stood tall, and you always earned those few extra zlotys.”

“What are you going on about?” his wife interrupts. “Sorrel like that would be foamy, there was a lot of fat in that ground. Who would eat sorrel like that from a cemetery?”

“But it fetched a good price.”

Jan and I are staying with his family in Radziłów. We talk with his cousin Piotr Kosmaczewski. After the war Piotr drove people who were being interrogated “about the Jews” to the railway station, and waited all day at a farm near the station to pick them up and take them home. He drove Jan's father, Zygmunt Skrodzki. He also remembers another trial that involved charges “about the Jews.” In his view it was no more than a pretext for interrogating people connected to the anti-Communist underground, but still, this means there was more than one trial on Jedwabne. This is a big discovery.

FEBRUARY 5, 2001

We visit Jan Skrodzki's old friends one by one. One of the people we talk to pulls out a book about Home Army operations in the region by Jan Orzechowski, whose underground name was “Strzała” (Arrow). It has photographs of Home Army members from Radziłów. I know three of their names from Menachem Finkelsztejn's testimony. From the pages of a book on Polish patriots the faces of three murderers gaze out at me.

FEBRUARY 6, 2001

Back in Warsaw, where Adam Michnik has arranged for me to talk to the film director Jerzy Skolimowski. Adam is urging him to make a film about Jedwabne. He thinks there is bound to be a film and, fearing it will be anti-Polish, he wants to get ahead of the curve. I'm supposed to supply heroic figures. A friend of mine who's helping me take care of the Ramotowskis thinks they are the perfect heroes for a movie: a Jewish woman and a Pole, a great peril, a great love that lasted sixty years: in other words, all the ingredients of a good screenplay. However, I dampen Skolimowski's enthusiasm, which in any case is only moderate. I explain to him that Jedwabne doesn't provide the best material for a pro-Polish film.

 

2

I Wanted to Save Her Life—Love Came Later

or, The Story of Rachela Finkelsztejn and Stanis
ł
aw Ramotowski

Stanisław Ramotowski was on his way from Kramarzewo to Radziłów when he saw the first German tank on the road. It must have been June 23, 1941, because he remembers the Russians had fled Radziłów the day before. Antoni Kosmaczewski was sitting on the tank, and as soon as he saw Ramotowski he yelled, “Take your hands out of your pockets!” Ramotowski thought, He's already feeling like a big shot, in a position to lecture people on how to behave toward the new authorities. He couldn't have known that two weeks later Kosmaczewski would participate in the murder of Radziłów's Jews.

“In the Kramarzewo I knew,” Ramotowski tells me, “people lived quietly, nobody looted or went around killing Jews. Until one day I met my friend Malinowski from Czerwonki and he says to me: some people are getting together from the villages in the area to do the same job they did the day before in Wąsosz. And what had they done in Wąsosz? The farmers drove by Jewish houses in wagons and murdered the men, women, and children with axes. The streets were drenched in blood. I ran to warn the Finkelsztejn family right away.”

The Finkelsztejns had a mill in Dziewięcin, right next to Kramarzewo; their garden bordered the Ramotowskis'. One of their daughters was already married; their other daughter—Rachela—had long been a favorite of Ramotowski's.

Marianna Ramotowska, formerly Rachela Finkelsztejn, and her husband, Stanisław. Dziewięcin, near Radziłów, 1950s.
(Author's private collection)

Marianna and Stanisław Ramotowski in an Evangelical nursing home near Warsaw toward the end of their lives, 2001.
(Photograph © Krzysztof Miller / Agencja Gazeta)

“She was delicate, with two little braids. She'd worn glasses since she was a child,” he says, looking at his wife with tenderness and pride.

Sixty years after Rachela first stole shy glances at him, Ramotowski himself is still a handsome man, tall and fair with a noble profile and big blue eyes with a perpetual twinkle. And Rachela? I look at old pictures of her and see a modest girl, skinny, alert, and bespectacled.

“What did your parents say?” I ask.

“They weren't crazy about the idea. Before the war, my wife's mother once pursued us so hotly when we were going to hide in the corn that Marianna lost a shoe.”

“But back then you called her Rachela. Do you still sometimes call her that?”

“As soon as we had her baptized, I switched to Marianna.”

“Why Marianna, exactly?” I asked Mrs. Ramotowski later.

“I took the name they gave me.”

“They thought they were safe,” Ramotowski goes on. “They didn't believe me and I had to spend quite a while persuading them before they agreed to come onto our land. It was still night when people started to drive to Radziłów in wagons to settle scores with the Jews. Dziewięcin was on their way, so they stopped to smash the windows at the mill and loot what they could. Not much, because that evening I had gone with my brother-in-law and packed up the Finkelsztejns' things in sacks and thrown them up in the attic. There were some supplies there; a crate of vodka, a crate of soap.”

“Where were they coming from?”

“From Wąsosz, from Å»ebry. All of Orlikowo must have been there. The same with the folks from Słucz. I don't think any one of us in Kramarzewo or from Czerwonki nearby took part. I promised the Finkelsztejns I'd go and see what was going on in town … They were dragging Jews out of their homes and driving them into the square. I saw little Jewish kids hugging one another and bowing their heads. I didn't see the barn burning, I wanted to get back and find a good way to hide the Finkelsztejns, but I had a good look around. Poles were guarding the streets so that Jews couldn't get away. They were already looting Jewish homes when the Jews were on the way to the barn.”

“Did you see Germans?”

“One policeman. He was standing on a balcony taking pictures. There were about four policemen for all of Radziłów at that time. No German joined in the killing, either in Wąsosz or in Radziłów, or in Jedwabne. Poles were the ones hunting down and rounding up the Jews. And right away they went to Jewish homes to take what they could find. Had they lost all sense of decency? People went crazy, they went into homes, ripped open quilts, feathers were flying around, the wind blew them in all directions, and they went home with a bundle on their backs, only to come straight back with an empty sack.”

“Men?”

“Mostly, but I saw women, too, only fewer of them.”

“What about children?”

“Those who could carry things were eager enough. There were crowds of people lining up for it, I just don't know where God was at that moment.”

When I ask Stanisław Ramotowski why he thinks it all ended in an atrocity, his wife breaks in: “That's not for us to know.”

From our first encounters, Marianna Ramotowska has kept a distance, hiding behind feigned memory loss, trying to keep us from talking about the atrocity or about anything Jewish. When I wished her a happy Hanukkah or Rosh Hashanah, she would start to say a rosary. Asked what she remembered of Hanukkah in her parents' home, she answered with a question: “Hanukkah is the Festival of the Harvest, right?” How can she not remember? Hanukkah is a holiday virtually invented for children: they get presents, the table is covered with sweets.

But Ramotowski takes up the subject: “Some people probably did it for the killing itself, we had such backward Christians here that for them the life of a Jew wasn't worth anything. But most of them did it for the looting and because the Germans gave permission.”

“Did you have the feeling you were the only just man in Radziłów?”

“Oh no, there were plenty of decent folk in Radziłów! The problem is, there were more of the other kind.”

“And where did you get the idea to help Jews?”

“My whole family were decent people. Stealing or killing, my God, it was unthinkable. I was well brought up. And I was smart enough, I suppose, I wasn't afraid of anything, a scared man probably wouldn't have done it. But also, for as long as I can remember, I played with Jewish girls and boys, went to their dances, listened to their fiddles.”