The Crime and the Silence (17 page)

Despite this kind of censorship, anti-Semitism comes through in most of the testimonies. When Tadeusz Nitkiewicz, a pharmacist from Wizna, describes how Jews “welcomed the arriving Red Army by brutalizing our soldiers and population mercilessly,” one must take his nonsense with a grain of salt.

In the
Gazeta
archive I read the
Catholic News Agency Bulletin
: “Gross based his whole book and the verdict it contains on the testimony of Szmul Wasersztejn, an employee of the Security Service; this was what Professor Tomasz Strzembosz—who has long studied this period of Polish history—concluded on the basis of testimonies by two reliable witnesses interrogated by Wasersztejn in the postwar period.”

I know from the Dziedzices that Wasersztejn left Poland immediately after the war.

As reconstructed by the Catholic News Agency, the massacre looks like this: “German policemen surrounded Jedwabne. They used dogs to force Poles to take part in the massacre. The Jews did not try to defend themselves or escape, but passively obeyed orders.” The
Bulletin
refers to the words of John Paul II, who calls for the truth to be fully uncovered. The Catholic News Agency is seconded by Kazimierz Laudański. He has sent me a copy of a letter he sent to Adam Cyra at the Auschwitz Museum (dated February 24): “Szmul Wasersztejn was an able officer of the Security Services up to 1968, which is why Professor Gross, as a sophisticated and experienced historian, put his trust in him. He went everywhere, he saw and heard everything. Another Sherlock Holmes in an invisibility cape. He saw the Jewess Ibram raped and killed, beards burned, infants murdered at their mothers' breasts to the strains of an orchestra. Didn't he see and hear a little too much for one little boy?”

I think the Laudański brothers could indeed provide much more reliable information than a hunted man, whose perspective was necessarily limited. How frustrating it must be for them: knowing details from their own observation that would undermine Wasersztejn's testimony, but not being able to put facts straight without giving themselves away.

MARCH 2, 2001

My article on the Laudańskis is to run next Saturday. I'm making some additions. Adam Michnik, returning the latest version of the article to me, has urged me to try to grasp the mentality of the townspeople in that particular area at that time by talking to regional historians and sociologists. I've had several such conversations, but I didn't get much out of them. The subject of Jedwabne sets people on edge. Today a well-known sociology professor simply hung up on me.

In the evening, a meeting with the playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek, who plans to write a play, a novel, maybe a story; in any case it will be set in Jedwabne. In his view the situation is falsified by the dichotomy “Jews vs. Poles.” We should instead talk about Jews and Catholics, because both are fully legitimate Polish citizens, differing only in religion. There's something to be said for that view.

MARCH 3, 2001

An evening phone call to Jedwabne. Consternation in the town after President Aleksander Kwaśniewski's statement in the Israeli newspaper the
Yediot Akhronoth
: “It was a genocide carried out by the Poles of Jedwabne against their Jewish neighbors. We must therefore bow our heads and ask forgiveness. After this, Poles may become better as a people.” The president has announced that on the sixtieth anniversary of the Jedwabne massacre he will apologize to the Jewish people in the name of all Poles.

Jacek Kuroń's birthday party. I spend it talking to Marek Edelman. I say I hadn't fully realized the scope and intensity of anti-Semitism in the years before the war broke out.

“Before the war,” Edelman remembers, “I was beaten up more often than under the Germans; right before September 1939 it was easy to run into nationalist paramilitary squads—hunting Jews. I also remember the feeling of fear mixed with shame when I went in the first months after the war to register at some office with dozens of people standing there and I had to say my surname aloud.”

I tell him about the shoemaker from Radziłów named Dorogoj, who managed to survive the war with his son. Both of them were butchered with axes when they came out of hiding in 1945.

“I went to Kielce immediately after the pogrom there and at every station I saw a few corpses; they were Jews dragged off the trains and killed. There is information collected by the Jewish Committee after the war showing that fifteen hundred Jews were killed in the ‘railroad operation.'”

I tell him about Stanisław Ramotowski, who saved a whole Jewish family on the day of the massacre and hid them with his mother, who received no payment.

“What does it matter?” Edelman counters. “In Warsaw probably about a hundred thousand Poles took part in rescuing Jews; they did it for various reasons—to spite the Germans, but for money, too. It's true it was hard to go into hiding without money. I know examples of people who took money, and how! They asked more every time, but when the ghetto was cut off, and later when the ghetto was gone and they saw they wouldn't get anything out of it, they went on hiding Jews with complete devotion.”

I go on to tell him that of the Finkelsztejn family, only one person survived the war: Rachela, now Marianna Ramotowska. There's another Jewish woman who lives in Jedwabne, who survived the slaughter and also married a Pole. The two women never visited each other; they wanted to blend into the local population, no doubt hoping their sin of being Jewish would be forgotten.

Edelman tells me about the mother of Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, the great Polish poet who was killed in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Edelman found her in Warsaw after the war; she was living in poverty and he had money for her from the Joint Distribution Committee. She wouldn't take it. “That's nothing to do with me,” she said. She was afraid her Jewish background would tarnish her son's posthumous glory as a Home Army soldier who fell in an uprising of Poles.

MARCH 4, 2001

In the liberal Catholic monthly
Więź
(Bond), an article by Archbishop Józef Å»yciński: “It would be insane to suggest there could be any justification for a mass burning of human beings in a barn. Therefore, let us not look for imaginary historical documents that might turn the Jedwabne tragedy into a trivial episode. There can be no such documents, because you can't reduce the deaths of innocent people to an episode. Today we need to pray for the victims of the massacre, showing the solidarity of spirit that was lacking at the hour they passed away from the land of their fathers where they lived.”

Meanwhile, a representative of the Popular Christian Alliance of Łomża arrived to meet with Jedwabne residents. He read them an open letter he'd brought them: “In response to the vicious worldwide campaign to slander Poland itself, the undersigned state that the atrocity in their town was committed by Germans.” A Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne has been set up, with Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski at its head.

Of course, some politicians were bound to take advantage of the mood in Jedwabne. I wasn't surprised that a committee had been formed. But why was the mayor heading it and not the priest? I happen to be in the editorial offices when our correspondent sends in a short interview with Godlewski. I read it and can't believe my eyes. He speaks the language, albeit somewhat tempered, of the anti-Semitic sector of the local population, using the expression “Jewish interests.” This is now the main tendency of the Jedwabne deniers, to say that the whole story was dreamed up by Jews who want to demand billions of dollars in damages from Poland. In the course of several visits to Jedwabne, I've come to know and like him, though I suspected he might have a problem standing firmly on one side or the other. He didn't fit the part of the lonely sheriff. On the contrary, he's a cheerful, sympathetic fellow, the kind of person who doesn't want to offend anybody. Not because he's timid, but because he's convinced something can always be done to make everyone happy.

I call him. He tells me how someone stood up in the town hall and said in a menacing tone, “The mayor has a chance to rehabilitate himself; he should head the committee.” He talks to me by turns in two different discourses. First he explains that if he hadn't joined the committee, they would have collected signatures for a letter written in hateful language, which would have compromised both the town and the country. Then he explains that the residents of Jedwabne rightly feel indignant, because only a handful participated in the massacre—the dregs of society—and now all local Poles are being accused, which might become a basis for financial claims. Then he is furious with the president for having no doubt about who is guilty of the crime, and at the press for reaching a verdict while the investigation is still under way. I repeat that he knows as well as I do that the committee's aim is to airbrush the truth. After a conversation of almost an hour, Godlewski asks me to read back to him what he said to the
Gazeta
, so he can cut the unfortunate phrases.

MARCH 5, 2001

I call Godlewski. His voice is somber. The members of the committee are demanding that the letter be tougher. I quote him what Primate Glemp said yesterday on the Catholic radio station Józef: “The massacre, perpetrated by burning alive the Jewish population after forcing them into a barn, cannot be denied … To recognize our generational responsibility is to ask God for forgiveness for the sins of our ancestors and ask forgiveness from the descendants of those who were wronged.” Finally, a proposal for Poles and Jews to join together in prayer.

Godlewski's voice changes at once: “After what the primate said, I'll convince the committee to formulate its letter differently.”

In fact, I read Godlewski only the fragments of Glemp's interview that offered a glimmer of hope. The piece as a whole doesn't sound promising. The primate disassociated himself from the idea that the Church should participate in the ceremony of July 10 in Jedwabne: “This is not about any rash, hysterical atonement.” He hinted at some kind of Jewish conspiracy: “Brothers and Sisters! A year ago an important Jew informed me that the matter of Jedwabne would soon be given publicity.” In other words, the Jews had a plan ready for Jedwabne.

The primate, referring to a letter about the Jedwabne commemoration from the rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, with an invitation to communal prayer, recalled that the rabbi invoked a text from scripture. The
Gazeta
editors ask me to check from which book of the Bible the quotation is taken. I call Schudrich on his cell phone. He happens to be in New York. I hear his inimitable Polish: “Jedwabne is important, but other things are very, very important. I was just going to call you.” It turns out he has his daughter Arianna on his other cell phone: she's calling from a store in Brooklyn to say they only have napkins with the words “bar mitzvah,” not “bat mitzvah.” But they are lovely napkins with a golden Star of David. What kind should they bring to Ola's party? Before I hang up I remind him of the quotation and note down the reference: Deuteronomy 21:1–9.

Ola's bat mitzvah is such a huge, emotionally charged project for our family that I talk about it nonstop. Before long I realize how confused people in Jedwabne are by my decision not to keep my Jewishness a secret. One of them assured me, “I give you my word of honor. I won't tell anyone about your background.” It wasn't until someone at the Institute of National Remembrance swore not to breathe a word about it at work, that I was really dumbstruck. I knew many people with a Jewish background were afraid their origins would come to light, but I had seen in that more a sign of trauma, their own or one inherited from their parents, which made them see a threat where none existed. Only now do I realize how many Poles see something intrinsically wrong with being Jewish.

MARCH 6, 2001

In the morning a conversation with Krzysztof Godlewski (his tone is determined): “I'm going to propose my own version of the letter, in accordance with the primate's message. We must accept the truth, even the most painful truth. I'm considering a spectacular gesture, getting a group of people to pray at the site of the massacre, kneeling there together.”

This sounds like an exercise in positive thinking. I ask if it wouldn't be better to give up on the committee and form a new one, in support of the ceremony on the sixtieth anniversary of the crime. This seems to bring him back to reality. He sighs. “For now I can't see anyone volunteering for that.”

In the evening another talk with Godlewski (his tone now downcast): “I'm hearing a completely different interpretation of the primate's sermon in town: we should stand up against the Jews' persecution of Poland. Either the committee accepts a statement in accordance with my understanding of the primate's message, or I resign. I can only hope the bishop will come out with an unambiguous sermon.”

The bishop of Łomża is to deliver a homily in Jedwabne on Sunday, March 11. Members of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, like Godlewski, are expecting a sermon providing moral clarity. It's just that each side expects something different.

MARCH 7, 2001

I call Godlewski, who has resigned from the committee.

“I went into it in the hope that we could work out a consensus,” he says. “I wanted to temper those who, instead of covering their head with ashes during Lent, have perpetuated the town's bad reputation. You can defend its good name by admitting guilt. I didn't want to abandon people here and leave them to the mercy of hysterics. But I can't fight them all by myself.”

At the same time, the Jedwabne affair is obviously accelerating; not a day goes by without an article or pronouncement of some kind in the press. Prime Minister Buzek declared that “the participation of Poles in the crime in Jedwabne is beyond any doubt.” Edward Moskal, the president of the American Polish Congress, who lives in Chicago and enjoys great popularity in Jedwabne, denounced the accusations leveled at Poles, explaining that “the Jews decided that Poland should not be Poland but a suburb of Israel,” and the president of the Institute of National Remembrance, Leon Kieres, is working for “lackeys with a strange sympathy for Jewish demands … All they want is to quell their own insatiable appetites.”