The Crime and the Silence (2 page)

On July 7, 1941, he was a small boy and watched from behind the curtains as Jews were driven to their deaths. He saw no Germans. He tells me, “I feel responsible for Jedwabne, for Radziłów, for everything that may still come out.” We agree I'll go to see him in Gdańsk.

NOVEMBER 23, 2000

At the Jewish Historical Institute I read Menachem Finkelsztejn's testimony on the burning of the Jewish community in Radziłów. And there—he testifies—the perpetrators were Poles. I struggle through horrific scenes of rape, beatings, children thrown into the burning barn, a Jewish girl's head hacked off with a saw, and I want to believe that the horror itself made survivors exaggerate and overstate the facts.

In an attempt to understand the outburst of barbarity, Finkelsztejn writes, “The grain of hatred fell on fertile soil, expertly primed by the clergy over many years. The desire to get hold of Jewish business and Jewish riches further whetted the locals' appetites.”

NOVEMBER 24, 2000

A colloquium of historians discusses Gross's book at the Polish Academy of Sciences. From the threshold one feels an emotional charge rare at scholarly gatherings in Poland.

Tomasz Szarota presents the current state of knowledge on Jedwabne. He cites a number of publications authenticating the claim that the Białystok commando unit led by Birkner was operating in Jedwabne. But there is just one source, namely prosecutor Monkiewicz, who repeated this over and over, at every opportunity, as he did at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jedwabne's town charter.

Gross introduces a different tone. He speaks sharply, frankly, ironically. He reminds Szarota of a meeting in May, at which Monkiewicz declared that Poles had not killed Jews in the Białystok district in July 1941, nor aided in their killing, and that there had been just one instance in which Germans forced Poles to join hands, and that was to form a chain to prevent Jews from escaping.

“I realized we could dismiss the prosecutor,” says Gross. “It's a sad state of affairs when an academic authority like Tomasz Szarota lends credence to a muddled version of the tragedy in Jedwabne by bringing Monkiewicz's views into wide circulation. We talked about this, Tomasz,” he addresses Szarota directly, “and I told you Birkner being in Jedwabne was an invention and you should forget about Monkiewicz.”

After several people have drawn attention to the scholarly shortcomings of Gross's book, Marek Edelman steps up to the microphone. “Everybody here would like to find some proof that Gross is a shoddy historian, that he made a mistake and Mr. So-and-So was killed earlier and Mrs. Such-and-Such later. But that's not what this is about,” says the last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “Jedwabne was not the first case, nor was it an isolated one. In Poland at that time the mood was ripe for killing Jews. And it wasn't all about looting. There's something in man that makes him like killing.”

Professor Jerzy Jedlicki, who is moderating the discussion, speaks: “Hatred toward Jews, contempt and mockery of Jews, are part of twentieth-century Central European culture, and that includes Poland. By that I don't mean to say everybody would have been prepared to commit atrocities. But the destruction of the Jews was watched with amusement by a significant part of the local Polish population. That amusement, the laughter that accompanied the Holocaust—I remember it, because at that time I was on the other, Aryan side of the wall. Until today, our stance, and I include myself in this, has been a flight from the subject, a cowardly fear of the darkness lurking in our collective history. With his books, Gross rouses us from our torpor. And that's the most important thing.”

The colloquium lasts almost five hours, and at times it's like a group therapy session. A young Polish staff member of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., speaking of the tide of hatred toward Jews that she's encountered during the year she's been in Poland reading archival materials, bursts into tears.

NOVEMBER 25, 2000

There wouldn't have been so many people in Jedwabne prepared to kill if they hadn't felt the support of like-minded others and of the authorities. A psychology professor writing this in the
Gazeta
refers to studies showing that Poles treat their own national suffering as a kind of special contribution or investment for which the world is more in debt to them than it is to others. “We see ourselves as exceptional, ascribe to ourselves moral achievements, a unique contribution to world history. Studies show that people who think this way more readily accept the killing of innocents.”

At Jacek Kuroń's. I tell him about the conference of historians. Jacek's memory accords with Edelman's: a social climate permitting harassment of Jews. In Lvov he saw with his own eyes how young people threw stones into the ghetto. It didn't shock anyone, and he heard the same refrain all around him: “Hitler's doing the job for us.”

“Even the Holocaust didn't change that,” says Jacek. And he tells me about living in Kraków in the summer of 1945 with his parents, grandparents, and younger brother, Felek. One day on a walk his grandfather tugged Felek's hand and the child began to cry. Right away a crowd started to gather, yanking the elderly man back and challenging him. They thought he was a Jew and the boy a Polish child who was going to be turned into matzo. Just because Felek was blond and his grandfather wore a cap. Not long after there was a pogrom in Kraków.

“Hatred,” Jacek goes on, “comes from a person having a subconscious feeling of guilt. At some level he knows a whole people was destroyed here, and he benefited from it, because he's got a house or at least a pillow that belonged to a Jew. He won't face up to it and hatred takes root in him.”

He quotes a passage from a text published in the
Gazeta
by Jacek Å»akowski, a prominent political commentator: “Jan Gross speaks for himself, and I for myself. None of us has the right to reproach another for what happened to his compatriots or ancestors.” “Nothing good ever came of people not feeling responsible,” Jacek comments.

DECEMBER 5, 2000

A letter to Adam Michnik from Kazimierz Laudański. The older brother of Jerzy and Zygmunt Laudański, who were sentenced to fifteen and twelve years in prison respectively, for the killing of Jews in Jedwabne, presents his version of events. In it, the Germans are the main protagonists, actors, whereas the Jewish Communists “together with the NKVD drew up lists of Polish families for deportation to Siberia.”

One can't help asking: if we accept that the crime was committed by the Germans, what can it have to do with Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD?

Protesting the vilification of his brothers, Kazimierz Laudański praises his family's patriotism.

Jan Gross, who read the documents in the case conducted against the Jedwabne murderers after the war, found among them a letter from Zygmunt Laudański to the Communist authorities, describing how he had been an NKVD informant during the Soviet occupation and had joined the Polish Workers Party after the war. “It is on shoulders like these that our labor system can be built,” he wrote. Gross was struck by “the relentless conformism of a man who tries to anticipate the expectations of each successive regime in an age of gas ovens and engages himself to the hilt each time—first as an NKVD informant, then as a Jew-killer, finally by joining the Polish Workers Party.”

Kazimierz concludes his letter to Michnik with the words “We were and are always prepared to serve our country
pro publico bono
.”

This is apparently too much for Adam. The embargo is lifted. I phone Laudański to arrange an interview for the
Gazeta
.

DECEMBER 9, 2000

Pisz, a hundred kilometers north of Jedwabne. Kazimierz Laudański is waiting for me at the turnoff to the little road leading to his house. Before we even reach the house he has asked me where my parents are from and what my mother's surname was. There was nothing wrong with my mother's maiden name, and her first name was also just as it should be. At least after a Pole who was in love with her got her Aryan papers and a baptism certificate, and married her. That's how Lea Horowicz disappeared in Lvov in 1942. She disappeared so completely that I only learned of my origins as an adult by accident, standing in the street.

My mother didn't keep in touch with her family; no uncle or cousin ever visited our house. I accepted that my mother, an independent-minded, rebellious person, found family ties and gatherings a boring, middle-class obligation that she didn't feel like fulfilling. Only when I was fully grown and graduated from college did I meet a man in his fifties at our dacha outside Warsaw, whom my mother introduced as the son of her beloved sister murdered in the Soviet Union in 1937, at the time of the Great Purge. I was with friends, so I just said hello to him and ran on to the river. A few years passed before I saw him again. I told him he was the only relative I knew on my mother's side—perhaps he knew something about our family? “Our grandfather Hirsz Horowicz…,” my cousin Oleś Wołyński began.

I systematically called all the friends and acquaintances in my address book from
A
to
Z
. “I'm Jewish,” I announced. Somehow the fact didn't make much of an impression on anyone but me, though a Solidarity advisor I knew suggested we not take any more people of Jewish origin on at the editorial office of the
Tygodnik Masowsze
(Masowsze Weekly), Solidarity's underground paper, which I had cofounded. (“There are so many of you already, and if you get caught, it might hurt the cause,” he said—but in good faith and with genuine concern, not hostility.) The biggest surprise was that most of my friends already “knew.” If only because the mother of one of them had been in the same class as my mother at a renowned Jewish gymnasium, or high school, before the war.

“Why did no one tell me?” I asked them. One of them was convinced I knew but had decided to pass for a hundred percent Polish (I'd often asked him what it was like being Jewish). Another friend thought it was up to my mother to reveal my origins (he apparently accepted the supposition—to him self-evident—that Jewishness was something shameful that had to be “revealed”). A third concluded that if I didn't know, I was better off.

Kazimierz Laudański invites me into the house. A well-kept villa in the center of town, elegant china on the table. He's prepared for me a map of the town as it was in 1941, drawn on graph paper. The street names, churches, cemeteries are marked in blue pen, the synagogue and barn in red. Of the massacre in Jedwabne, he says it resulted from German orders. When I ask how many Germans were there, I'm told there was a uniformed German on every corner. I ask him to point out on the map where they stood. He draws four little crosses. Four Germans.

“The Jews in Jedwabne, whether they were burned that day or not, their fate was sealed,” Kazimierz Laudański says. “The Germans would have killed them sooner or later. Such a small thing and they slap it on the Poles, on my brothers of all people. We forgave the Gestapo, we forgave the NKVD, and here we have a little quarrel between Jews and Poles and no one can forgive?” Laudański goes on: “It's not about defending my brothers. They were tried, rightly or wrongly, and you can't convict them again for the same thing. I'm meeting you so you can tell Mr. Michnik that we shouldn't be reopening old wounds. It's not right to make our people out to be criminals. It's wicked to accuse Poles of such things. And it's not the time to launch a campaign to teach the Poles what's right, when Jewish finance is attacking Poland.”

I persuade Kazimierz Laudański that to write a piece for the paper I need to meet his brothers, too. We agree that I'll come back.

DECEMBER 10, 2000

Kazimierz Mocarski, a retired school director who before the war lived in Nadbory, a village ten kilometers from Jedwabne, wrote a letter to the editor of the
Gazeta
. I visit him in his little town on the Baltic Sea.

In his letter he described prewar Jedwabne: “Times were hard, we counted every penny. The richer Jewish shops could afford lower prices. The Poles reacted by knocking down stalls and smashing windows. Poisonous anti-Semitism, myths about Jews killing Christ, drove some of the people crazy with hatred.”

He was fourteen at the time. He remembers that two days before the massacre a group of Jews passed by his house. “My mother was baking rye bread and gave them two loaves. She warned them, ‘Run as far away as you can,' because we already knew the Jews had been burned in Radziłów the day before.”

He knows from his mother that some of the peasants in their village saddled their horses and went to Jedwabne in the hope of looting Jewish stores and workshops, while a few people who didn't want to take part in the pogrom fled from Jedwabne to relatives in the surrounding villages. A few days after the burning he was invited by a friend bragging about having moved with his family into a house that had belonged to Jews. He heard about the Jews having been beaten, rounded up, forced to say Christian prayers.

“I go to Jedwabne sometimes,” he continues, “it's an unhappy place, backward, without infrastructure. There are no jobs, people are crushed, they feel they're victims. One of the slogans of the National Party before the war was that Jews were the cause of poverty. Now there are no Jews, but the poverty is the same.”

I return to Warsaw by a circuitous route—via Jedwabne. I want to visit Leon Dziedzic, a farmer from near Jedwabne who has given several press interviews. This is rare in Jedwabne; generally the residents refuse to talk to journalists. From Dziedzic's account it emerges that Poles not only carried out but also initiated the killing. “They say that the next day the German police station commandant flew into a rage at the Poles who'd led the pogrom: ‘You said you'd clean up the Jews, but you don't know how to clean up a damn thing.' He meant they hadn't buried the remains and he was afraid of infection spreading, because it was hot and the dogs were already getting to them,” Dziedzic explained.