The Crime and the Silence (11 page)

“Were you alone in this?”

“It was probably just me. I always liked being around them.”

Izaak Finkelsztejn's family had been settled in the area for centuries. Besides the mill they had eight hectares of farmland; they kept cattle, horses, chickens, ducks, and turkeys.

“At our mill,” Marianna Ramotowska explains to me, “we had modern machines we bought for dollars. A Francis water turbine, Hungarian Ganz rollers, shorter and longer ones for rye, a German Seck press for wheat. After the war, when they were looting everything, they couldn't drag the turbine out of the water, and that's how we managed to rebuild the mill.”

The family of her mother, Sara Jankielewska, was from Kielce in central Poland. Her mother knew German and Russian as well as Yiddish and Hebrew. And her Polish was so good the neighbors came to dictate letters to her. Rachela remembered her mother always bent over the same heading: “Praised be the Lord Jesus Christ.”

“Grandfather Jankielewski always said that he would never let a daughter of his marry in the village, as he could afford a better dowry,” she says. “Mama had brothers who had office jobs. One was the director of a steel mine in Kądzielnia, another lived in Kielce and was managing director of mines that belonged to the Warsaw branch of the family, another built bridges, my mother's sister married a doctor. There was also a professor in our family who lived in Berlin.”

Her father died when Rachela was a small child, and her oldest brother became the head of the household. In 1930 she finished school in Radziłów and was sent to her uncle in Kielce, in whose household—in contrast with her own—Polish was spoken. There she got a junior high school certificate and went to work as a cashier at a German company that sold Chevrolet cars. Whenever she went home to Radziłów, she sent a Polish farmhand with a note to Ramotowski telling him she was home—a sign of affection to her neighbor across the way.

Ramotowski went to see the wedding of Rachela's sister, Matylda. Rachela had told him about it, but she didn't dare go up to him or invite him as a wedding guest.

“The wedding took place in front of their house. A rabbi came, the couple stood under a canopy, the groom broke a glass. I was the only Pole there. I stood off to one side. Though Marianna's cousin invited me inside I didn't go in the house because I knew Rachela's sister wasn't expecting any Poles.”

“If there hadn't been a war, Rachela's mother probably wouldn't have let her daughter marry you?”

“Never.”

“And if she'd agreed on the condition that you convert to Judaism?”

“I would have said yes, without even asking for time to think it over. I never had any Polish girlfriend I can remember.”

The war ended Rachela's career in the city. In September 1939, she was on holiday at her mother's in Radziłów and didn't go back to Kielce.

She: “As soon as the Soviets came they took over our mill.”

A Pole was appointed by the new authorities as manager of the Finkelsztejns' mill, but they, the Finkelsztejn family, were permitted to live and work in the mill as hired labor.

He: “Under the Soviets our life here in Kramarzewo went on as normal. There were twenty-six households and not one family was deported. Only a farmer who got up at a meeting and made a critical comment about poverty in the Soviet Union—‘There are more pigs at our fair than in that whole Russia of yours.' They came and took him away the next day.”

I ask Ramotowski if he remembers how Rachela's family behaved at that time.

“God forbid they'd ever take a liking to the Communists!”

“But the people in Radziłów say it was Jews who supported the new regime.”

“The poorest Poles went to work in some capacity for the Soviets right away, but I didn't see any Jews do that. At least not in Radziłów.”

To say that Stanisław has no prejudices against Jews is an understatement. When I remind him that someone from Rachela's family was said to have collaborated with the Soviet authorities, he breaks out: “What are you talking about? It's true Rachela's brother-in-law Lejbko Czerwiński was a Communist, and under the Russians he strutted around with a machine gun, but he was a black sheep in the family, they didn't like him, no, not one bit.”

Ramotowski doesn't remember the Soviet occupation changing anything in relations between Jews and Poles. No one had any particular complaints about Jews in Kramarzewo, and Rachela's mother looked askance at him, the same as before.

Until the Germans and July 7 arrived. After making sure that the Finkelsztejns were safely hidden in the grain and bringing them food, Stanisław went to see what was going on at their mill. It was already late in the evening.

“There were looters there, behaving as if they owned the place. We all drank four bottles of vodka that I'd brought from upstairs. When they had all drunk a bit, my brother-in-law and I threw the Finkelsztejns' things, the things we'd hidden the day before, on our horse-drawn cart. It would give them something to live on later.”

“Where did you hide them?”

“In the rye.”

She: “We heard screaming and saw smoke from there. We were four kilometers from Radziłów.”

He: “They lay in the grain for two days and two nights. They were thirsty, it was very hot. In the morning I chased the geese around with a bucket in my hand to show it was water for the geese. I was afraid of the neighbors. At my mother's house I walled off a hiding place for Rachela with planks between the stove and the wall, and another hiding place nearby for her family—her mother, Sara; her brother, Szabsa; her sister, Matylda, and her two children: Icchak, who had a paralyzed leg, and Hewel, the younger boy. I moved them in at night. Mama didn't say anything to the neighbors, but she went to Mazurek for advice—he was a friend, a paramedic, respected in the village. His idea was to baptize Marianna—then Rachela—and to have us marry. Mazurek, a good man, a little boorish, was very religious, you could call him a pietist. He wanted to bring Rachela into the faith. He persuaded me that as soon as she was baptized, we would be left in peace. ‘You get married,' he said, ‘and she will be registered with you.' And so it was. I didn't marry for love, that came later. I just liked her. I wanted to save a life.”

She: “On All Saints' Day I always brought a candle to Mazurek's grave.”

Kramarzewo belonged to the parish of Wąsosz, so Ramotowski went there to arrange the baptism and the wedding.

He: “I went to the presbytery—a big table, five stove burners, each with a goose prepared for roasting. The priest asked, ‘How are you going to pay me? Cash isn't worth anything these days.' I said, ‘We don't have anything, Father.' He replied, ‘It can be rings, earrings, any gold.' I told him the Finkelsztejns' house in Dziewięcin had been completely plundered, there was nothing there, just broken windows and gaping holes. The priest said, ‘I'll give you an example. We had Chaim around here, a poor Jew with a bundle, but when they laid a scythe to his throat, it turned out he had dollars
and
gold.' I started to shake, as if a flame was shooting from my head to my heels.

“He told me to go out to the entrance hall and wait. He didn't ask me back in, he just handed a piece of paper to me over the threshold and told me to take it to the priest in Radziłów, to get married there. On the way back I opened the message, and it said not to marry us at any cost. I crumpled it up and threw it away.

“That priest must have been given Jewish gold by the Wąsosz killers. He probably said he'd grant them absolution and some dumb farmer went to get him something for his trouble.

“After the war when my mother died, my brother went to him, and the priest told him he would bury my mother for less, just as long as I didn't come. And fool that I was, I didn't go to my own mother's funeral.

“I went to Radziłów; I had to talk to Father Dołęgowski fast, before he got together with the Wąsosz priest. I found him playing cards with his neighbor. He was a good man, only for starters he wanted six meters of rye. I said that the Germans took less than that for forged papers and in the end he came down to three. When I went with my brother-in-law to unload it in his barn, I saw the presbytery, it was long and wide, and there was grain stored there that no one would get any use from, it was eaten away by weevils. A store that would keep us going until spring would last weevils three hours.”

Earlier, when Ramotowski was a boy and his father died, the former priest in Wąsosz demanded three hundred zlotys from his mother for the funeral.

“All my mother's savings came to one hundred fifty zlotys, our neighbor stood us the other one hundred fifty. Later my mother couldn't pay it off and we were hounded by a collector. If a priest in these parts had no mercy on a Christian woman, why would he take pity on Jews?” Stanisław muses.

The Radziłów parish chronicle shows that Rachela was baptized on July 17, 1941, in the presence of two witnesses: Józefa Burgrafowa, seventy-seven years of age, and Jan Mazurek, fifty-five years of age.

Ramotowski remembers taking her to the baptism.

“I drove her to the church, and we had to cross a little bridge near the Finkelsztejns' mill. The thugs who had occupied the mill were standing there, but they only watched us, they didn't do anything. I didn't see the baptism; Rachela went into the church with Mazurek and Burgrafowa, his close friend whom he'd asked to be Rachela's godmother. I waited outside. Feliks Mordasiewicz came up to me then and yelled, ‘I know you have a Jewess living with you.' I said, ‘Now she's been baptized, just you try to hurt her.' And he said, ‘If it wasn't you I sure would.'”

The wedding took place two months later, on September 9, 1941, at eight in the morning, in the presence of two Polish witnesses.

He: “We were married by the curate—it was a quiet, modest wedding. There were maybe ten people present. My mom was still against it, but she wasn't saying anything anymore. At the wedding reception there was a lot of moonshine vodka. One of my friends, Feliks Godlewski, got drunk and shot at the windows. He was very warm toward us throughout; it's hard for me to believe that he had a hand in the killing, too.”

“Were the bride's family at the wedding?”

“Her mother sat at a separate table, not at the main table, because the food wasn't kosher. In the beginning my Marianna hardly ate anything; she couldn't. I argued with her: ‘You'll die of hunger, kiddo, is that what your God wants?'”

She: “When we got back from the church, my mother took off her ring, put it on my finger, and said, ‘You're the only one who will survive.'”

He: “It was her fate to survive, and I was sent to make sure.”

Ramotowski goes on: “I didn't know what I was getting into with that wedding. I was deluded; I was clever enough for any situation, but in this case I listened to people stupider than me. Somebody reported on the wedding, and they started to look for me, too. From that time on I was marked, and we both had to go into hiding. A couple of times policemen came to the house, but we took turns watching the farmyard through a gap in the beams and we'd duck right behind the stove. Once I saw Henryk Dziekoński asking my brother's little children about us, with a German policeman standing nearby. He didn't get anywhere on that occasion. But in the end a spy turned up who sent Marianna's family to their deaths. The Finkelsztejns were taken away and later Dziekoński came for Marianna, saying her family had been taken and that he knew Marianna was with us. There was nothing we could do. Marianna came out of the hiding place. She knelt down in front of him, but it wasn't any use. I could have killed him, but my family would have died.”

“Who was the spy?”

“I have my idea who it was, but I'm not sure. There was only one person in our neighborhood who looked for Jews everywhere, sniffed them out. Stanisław Å»elechowski from Czerwonki. He informed on a grain trader in Wąsosz who had managed to escape from the roundup in the square and run to farmers he knew. Å»elechowski tracked him down there, locked him in the pigsty, made him drink a whole bucket of water in one go, just to make him suffer, and then he handed him over to the police. Later he told the story himself with laughter. They gave him two kilos of sugar for it. The Germans weren't that generous but it was enough for some.”

“How did you save Marianna?”

“The Germans were keeping several families in the shul who had escaped on the day of the massacre. I followed Marianna and Dziekoński and realized that's where she was being taken. I waited until it was evening, and the moment a policeman turned away, I ran inside. I lit a lantern, saw Marianna hunched up in a corner, gave her a hand up, and we ran out. I couldn't get the whole family out, but at least I got her out.”

She: “The militia officer guarding us was Łasiewicz. He knew I was Stasinek's wife and he brought me a pillow that night.”

It was too risky at home behind the shelf, so they found a hiding place at one of the neighbors'. In 1942 they had a child.

“The woman who delivered the child said it died right away,” says Marianna, in tears. “Why was that? It was healthy when it was born.”

“It died within a few hours, and it was for the best,” Stanisław explains gently. “The three of us would never have been able to stay hidden.”

She often returned to this, crying, and once she said to me that she was sure the child had been smothered with a pillow. A little while later she got pregnant again.

“My wife was pregnant, pretty far on, but she began to miscarry and she needed a doctor or she wouldn't survive. I took her all the way to Jedwabne, it was winter, I carried her in from the sled. The doctor was a
Volksdeutscher
, not from here.”

“Did your wife look Jewish?”

“Not really. She spoke good Polish. But he got some help from a woman from near Jedwabne who recognized us. I carried my wife back to the sled, went back in to thank the doctor, and heard her saying, ‘You just had a Jewess in here.' I left without saying thank you and drove the sled as fast as it would go. I always carried a gun. If they caught us, they wouldn't make us suffer; first I would slug them and then I would kill us both.”