The Crime and the Silence (18 page)

Baffled by contradictory statements, the residents of Jedwabne are waiting tensely for their bishop to speak. Meanwhile the town has adopted a catchphrase for the ceremony announced by the president: “Jew is coming to apologize to Jew.”

In Warsaw, there's already a rumor going around about why the primate first disassociated himself from the ceremony and shortly afterward announced he would participate in the Mass given for the victims. People are saying he was admonished by the pope.

MARCH 8, 2001

A visit to the Ramotowskis. At times Marianna speaks fluent Polish, carrying on a conversation with me about the latest skirmishes in the government, then she falls into dialect: “I gone,” “I throws.” She must have spoken that way with the locals in order to fit in. I ask her for the names of relatives, but she doesn't hear my questions. She doesn't hear well generally, but her hearing is also highly selective. When we talk about what's going on in politics and the world, Marianna, who listens to the radio all day, hears me pretty well, but when I ask about the crime in Radziłów, her hearing worsens dramatically. When in turn I speak of the crime with Stanisław, Marianna's hearing comes back and she reminds her husband not to say too much.

MARCH 9, 2001

My friend Nawojka is bringing agar from Munich to replace nonkosher gelatin for gefilte fish. Her plane is delayed and Shabbat, when we are not allowed to cook, is about to begin. By this time the fish is done, it just has to be covered with aspic. I should call around to find out if anyone can lend me some emergency agar. But I'm at the editorial offices of the
Gazeta
, where my four-column article on the Laudański brothers, “We of Jedwabne,” is being set. It contains some passages on contemporary Jedwabne. Because more has gone on there this week than in the last sixty years, I'm constantly adding and authorizing things. Now I have to choose: either I look for gelatin, or I phone Godlewski to find out if the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne has announced its members. Luckily, it turns out the paper's first edition closes twenty minutes after Shabbat begins. I manage to call Jedwabne and check all the facts.

MARCH 10, 2001

Ola's bat mitzvah. The synagogue is full. Among our guests, Bożena and Jan Skrodzki, who came from Gdańsk, and Stanisław Ramotowski. Several hundred people, including almost all of Ola's class, and many children came with their parents, no doubt participating in synagogue services for the first time.

Ola presents her commentary on the Torah and tells us why she has chosen Lea, my mother's name before the war, as her Jewish name: “In choosing it, I wasn't thinking of the biblical Leah but of my grandmother. My grandmother, who died three years ago, wished to hide from us the fact she was Jewish. She was afraid that it might make our lives as difficult as hers had been. In fact, this was a great sacrifice on my grandmother's part: breaking off with her family, starting a new life. I loved my grandmother and I still love her very much, and this time not flowers or stories about her will perpetuate her memory, but my new name, Lea.”

In accordance with tradition, candy—kosher candy, of course—is thrown at Ola.

Now it's my turn to speak. I talk about a Passover Seder at my friends Małgosia and Kostek Gebert's house. As the youngest child, Ola, then four years old, asked the questions, “Why was that night different from all other nights?” “Why do we eat bitter herbs tonight?” The Geberts' daughter, Zosia, then eleven and the oldest child at the table, answered, “We eat bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of our life in Egyptian servitude for forty years.” Falling asleep later that night, Ola whispered, “Remember, Mama, when we were walking forty years in the desert in Egypt and I was crying so terribly, terribly hard?” I remember the feeling of relief that Ola would be able to draw strength from some tradition, whereas I, whose mother never told me about my origins, about her life before the war, but who also never had me baptized, had always felt somehow without an anchor.

Stanisław Ramotowski is delighted with the ceremony, the synagogue, Rabbi Schudrich.

 

3

We Suffered Under the Soviets, the Germans, and People's Poland

or, The Story of the Three Brothers Lauda
ń
ski

Of the ten men convicted in the 1949 trial for the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne, Zygmunt and Jerzy Laudański are the only ones still alive. They live in Pisz, eighty kilometers north of Jedwabne, as does their older brother, Kazimierz Laudański, the unquestioned head of the family. Whether he was in Jedwabne on that July day in 1941, we don't know; the accounts are contradictory. He himself claims that he arrived three days later to find out what happened to his brothers. But there is a witness who insists that Kazimierz Laudański went to Jedwabne with him the day before the massacre and remembers details of their trip together. In any case, it was Kazimierz who got his brothers out of Jedwabne after the atrocity, and after the war he found them jobs and places to live. “They're always with me,” he says. “I give them advice, and they listen to me.”

In the case files from 1949, one can find basic information about the accused on a yellowed form where the blanks have been filled out in an uncertain hand, under the heading “Dossier on Suspects of a Crime Against the State,” furnished by the county security service in Łomża:

Name and Surname: Zygmunt Laudański

Date of Birth: January 12, 1919

Relatives Employed in State Institutions: Brother Kazimierz Laudański, County Council Secretary for Pisz

Professional Schooling: Mason

Education and Knowledge of Languages: Five grades elementary school

Habits and Addictions: Doesn't smoke

Suspected of: Killing Jews in the Town of Jedwabne, Łomża County

Membership: Polish Communist Party (PZPR) in Pisz

Posture: Straight

Eyes: Blue

Teeth: All healthy

Speech: Pure Polish

Etka Rochla Prawda (née Sztabińska) and her husband, Chaim Józef Prawda. They were killed by Poles on July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne with their children, Welwel and Bari.
(Courtesy of Jose Gutstein,
www.radzilow.com
)

Daughters of Abraham Aaron Ibram, owner of a fancy-goods shop in the New Market in Jedwabne. Left to right: Rywka, Loczke, and Judes. Jedwabne, 1930s. Judes managed to survive on July 10, 1941, but after the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942, Poles found her hiding place, raped her, and killed her.
(Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

The 1949 case files also have a dossier on his brother Jerzy, who was born three years later and completed seven grades of school. Under “profession” is given “shoemaker.” He has “particularly important contacts” with the “German Police in Jedwabne”; his speech, besides being “pure Polish,” is also “loud.”

Despite their years, the brothers still have erect postures and loud voices.

From Zygmunt's testimony of January 16, 1949: “Yes, I took part in the murder of Jews in Jedwabne … Some guy from Jedwabne came and told me the mayor of Jedwabne was calling on me to go and round up the Jews in the marketplace. When I got there, the Polish population had already rounded up about a thousand five hundred persons of Jewish nationality in the marketplace. Then Mayor Karolak told me to make sure no Jews escaped from the marketplace. The Jews were carrying the Lenin statue around the market. Later, we herded all the Jews with the statue out of town to Bronisław Śleszyński's barn, where they were burned.”

From Jerzy's testimony of January 16, 1949: “At that time I took part in driving the Jews into the marketplace. Eugeniusz Kalinowski and I … made about eight persons of Jewish nationality go into the marketplace. When we got back there from driving them all out of their houses, Jews were already carrying the Lenin statue around the market singing a song, ‘The war's our fault.' Who ordered them to sing it I don't know, but we Poles made sure the Jews didn't run away. I stress that there were Germans around, too. Later Marian Karolak, the mayor of Jedwabne, gave us the command to herd all the Jews in the market to Bronisław Śleszyński's barn, which we did. We drove the Jews to the barn and told them to go in, and they were forced to go in, and after they were all in there, the barn was locked and set alight. Who set the fire I don't know. After the fire I went home and the Jews were burned. There were more than a thousand of them.”

Not only the Laudańskis' own testimonies were incriminating; there was also the testimony of other witnesses and fellow suspects.

Czesław Lipiński, suspect: “Eugeniusz Kalinowski, Jerzy Laudański, and a German came to me and we took a Jew and two little Jewish women to the marketplace. When we were rounding up the aforementioned Jews with the Germans, I found a stick on the way and I picked it up.”

Julia Sokołowska, witness: “Jerzy Laudański participated in the murder of Jews with a rubber truncheon. He chased them into the marketplace; he beat them and drove them to the barn, where the previously mentioned Jews were burned. I stress that Laudański was the head
Schutzmann
[policeman] in Jedwabne. I saw the aforementioned beating a Jewish woman in a pigsty.”

Bronisława Kalinowska, witness: “The townspeople started killing Jews. The way they tortured Jews, you couldn't bear to look. I was standing on Przytulska Street and Jerzy Laudański, who lived in Jedwabne, came running down the street and said he'd already killed two or three Jews. He was very worked up and he went on running.”

Stanisław Sielawa, witness: “Jerzy Laudański, Jerzy Kalinowski, and a Russian beat the Jew Eluń after the burning. They threw him down, beat him with sticks, and when I started questioning them they told me it's coming to you, too, just like the Jews. I stress that after the beating the previously mentioned Jew couldn't get up for two weeks. I saw the previously mentioned fact with my own eyes.”

Zygmunt Laudański was sentenced to twelve years in prison, of which he served six; Jerzy Laudański was sentenced to fifteen, and he served eight.

In the accounts, both direct and secondhand, that I heard from present or former residents of Jedwabne, the name Laudański was almost always mentioned among examples of particularly active participants in the crime.

They were even mentioned by those who insistently denied that the Poles had committed the atrocity. Like Jadwiga Kordas, an eyewitness: “Maybe that Jerzy Laudański was getting his revenge,” she said to Father Eugeniusz Marciniak in the book
Jedwabne in the Eyes of Witnesses
. “Professor Strzembosz asked me about him and I said: ‘Because his father was arrested, and they came to take his mother to Siberia, but she escaped.' And the professor says: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And probably that's the way it could have happened.'” She added that Jerzy Laudański “had a whip, but he didn't use it on anyone. I didn't see him thrashing anyone. He just drove them out of their houses and kept the order.”

Kazimierz Laudański, outraged: “The court case came seven and a half years after the crime. The secret police roughed people up, but no one talked then about little Yids, small kids being thrown into the burning barn. And now after sixty years people are saying these things. When none of us are alive anymore, people will say the Jews had their eyes put out.”

Zygmunt Laudański: “There was nothing as horrible as all that. People are making it up now in revenge. It's nonsense that my brother and I killed over a thousand Jews. Our family was and is honest. Our honesty can't be drowned out by this tragedy.”

Kazimierz lashes out at him: “It's me who's talking now. You shut up, Zygmunt. You'll talk when I tell you.” He goes on: “We're from a truly patriotic Polish family. Our family has suffered enormous losses, fallen and martyred. It's no accident all three of us are alive. We don't smoke, we don't drink vodka. How can they call my brothers thugs? What we did, we did out of patriotism: from time immemorial not one of us ever associated with an enemy of the nation.”