The Crime and the Silence (26 page)

Another person I talk to: “I thought what a different perspective you have if you're from Jedwabne and you know what we know. Those were all civil suits, they were about recognizing the homeowners as deceased so their real estate could be sold. And who was it sold to? Poles. So the transaction was already agreed on and it was just a matter of rubber-stamping it. Polish citizens of Jewish origin testified that the Germans had been the killers. If people are still receiving threats now, after sixty years, what must the atmosphere have been like a few years after the war, when gangs roamed the countryside, when not a month went by without a murder? No one in their right mind would have said the Poles had done the killing. Why would they? Poland hadn't even come out of the shock of the war, there wasn't a single family that hadn't lost someone. The atmosphere was anti-German, the Fascists were blamed for all the evil perpetrated. Neither the authorities at the time nor the people cared about revealing the truth. And now those lies are coming back like a boomerang.”

I remember that in one of the issues of
Karta
, in a collection of documents on secret police activity in those Borderland territories, there was a description of houses being sold under false pretenses with the involvement of secret policemen from Białystok. The procedure is described by Eliasz Grądowski of Jedwabne, who survived because he was deported during the Soviet occupation, and after he came back, he got into shady dealings in formerly Jewish homes. Papers were sold to people who already had the property. Some of them must have taken part in the massacre, hence they had the loot. In court they said the Germans did the killing, and now their version is becoming objective truth, confirmed and buttressed by real documents.

I learn from my calls to Jedwabne that councilman Janczyk, the man who participated in the gang rape, since my interview with him has not wanted to make statements in the name of the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, but has filed a suit against the
Gazeta
for a million dollars in damages. At least that is what he says. I reminded one of the people I talked to that to file a suit, Janczyk would have had to pay a deposit of about a hundred thousand dollars.

MARCH 28, 2001

Jan Skrodzki has come from Gdańsk; we're driving to Radziłów tomorrow. In the evening I take Jan to a Ministry of Justice training center near Serock. I want to introduce him to Ignatiew, who is there on a professional training course. In the middle of Skrodzki's tale about the massacre in Radziłów, Ignatiew suddenly turns to me: “This was your people being killed. It must be hard for you to hear these things.”

Ignatiew's concern is particularly touching because he doesn't seem the type of person who readily comes out from under the shell of his official persona.

I try to understand what really happened during the Soviet occupation.

The historian Dariusz Stola brought to my notice how the fact that the Germans were present in this area in the first weeks of September 1939 permits us to compare the behavior of the locals toward Jews in 1939 and 1941. (In 1939 the Germans appeared in a gentler guise, but the differences were not dramatic enough to explain the events of late June and early July 1941.) In September 1939, when Jews were returning to the homes they had left empty for the time it took the German army to pass through, they found them looted by their Polish neighbors. In June 1941, even before the German troops arrived, pogroms, lootings, and killings took place. In September 1939, a large part of the population felt alienated from and hostile to Jews. In June 1941, an explosion of hatred followed. Alternative: the hostility erupted into violence. What happened in those two years of Soviet occupation to make neighbors hate each other so much?

There aren't many good witnesses on the subject here. Although I would bridle when people started bringing up Jewish collaboration with the Soviets in the context of Jedwabne (absolving oneself of guilt by blaming the victims is a dirty tactic), in the end I became convinced that, beyond prewar anti-Semitism, the key to figuring out what happened on July 10 was the Soviet occupation. That was the fuse.

 

4

You Didn't See That Grief in Jews

or, Polish and Jewish Memory of the Soviet Occupation

It is New Year's Eve 1940, a Saturday, and a dance is about to start in the former Catholic House, which has been turned into a House of Culture. More than a year has passed since the Red Army invaded the town. The town is no longer in Poland but in western Belorussia. The inhabitants themselves voted for this and took Soviet passports. What else could they do, since refusing to vote could mean deportation? Besides fear and forced taxes, the Soviet authorities also brought some lures with them: Saturday dances, film screenings, various festivities that may have been tedious but sometimes involved free beer. Besides, it gave them something to do. Russian women brought to town by representatives of the new political order dress up to go out. Their Polish neighbors, watching from a next-door window, laugh at them for putting on nightgowns and mistaking them for ball gowns. Jewish girls dress up while their mothers chide them that it's still Shabbat. Many young people are going to tonight's party, most of them Jewish, but not all. It is not until later that Poles will say only Jews went to these events.

Nowadays the residents of Radziłów and Jedwabne like to say that it was the Jews above all who joined the NKVD, who informed on others and pointed guns at Poles being deported to Siberia. From their stories you might think that in reality it was the local Jews who established the Soviet occupation. They recall how Jews jeered: “You wanted Poland without Jews, now you have Jews without Poland.”

Jewish Tarbut School. Radziłów, 1930s. The school was closed during the Soviet occupation.
(Courtesy of Jose Gutstein)

Halutz youth organization. Jedwabne, 1930. Approximately fifteen of them managed to get to Palestine before the war. The organization was disbanded during the Soviet occupation.
(Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

This is seen differently by Jews. They count on the fingers of one hand the Jewish collaborators they knew, and explain that the clear majority of the religious community of merchants and craftsmen could not possibly be happy with the Soviet system, which was atheistic and deprived them of their private property. And in fact, although the Holocaust came later, the Soviet occupation had already destroyed the entire fabric of social life built up over centuries: the Jewish municipal government was liquidated, Hebrew schools were closed, Yom Kippur became a normal workday, political parties were dissolved, and Zionist activists and Bundists were put on deportation lists.

1.

“In September 1939 many Jewish homes were looted,” Menachem Turek testified about the town of Tykocin to the District Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok in 1945. “It soon felt as if everything had become ownerless, not just the material property people had accumulated but even human life. The day before Yom Kippur, when the Kol Nidre was being said, when the Jews gathered in the synagogue and asked God for mercy, five trucks drove into town carrying German soldiers from the nearby main road who were retreating in accordance with the treaty with Soviet Russia, and they hacked open the locked doors of Jewish shops with axes, loaded everything onto cars, and left town, happy with the loot they'd managed to grab.”

“The Germans didn't have time to commit many murders,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote in her memoir, having loaded her family and possessions on a wagon upon hearing news of the war. They set off in the direction of the nineteenth-century fort town Osowiec in the hope that Polish forces would stop the German army there. When she returned to Radziłów on September 16, she found her house looted by neighbors. “On Yom Kippur the Germans went to the synagogue, threw out the men praying there, ordered them to take off their coats and give them to Poles.” The date was September 23, 1939.

2.

The Jews and the Poles of Jedwabne and its environs did not share the same fate and do not share the same memory.

For Jews the invasion of Poland by the German army on September 1, 1939, was a nightmare scenario made real. Terrifying reports had already reached them from the Reich, and these were confirmed by the conduct of the Wehrmacht, which deliberately humiliated Jews and egged on the local populations to do the same. For most Jews the Soviet occupation also meant hard times, but it offered some hope of survival, and also a certain thinly disguised satisfaction that the Poles were now as badly off as they were themselves.

For the Poles, the Soviet occupation meant the loss of independence. It's true that the German army marched eastward in early September 1939, but there was a powerful belief that the Germans would soon be defeated, as had been proclaimed by prewar propaganda. People had been told to be more afraid of Soviet Russia than of Hitler. It was only with the Stalin-Hitler pact that the inhabitants of the area realized they were captives. Added to this were fear of deportation and the inevitable deterioration of living conditions caused by the taxes imposed by the Soviets.

The Red Army entered the Jedwabne area on September 29, following the agreement on the withdrawal of German troops. The NKVD was the army's advance guard, giving the local Communists their instructions; hence the identical scenario for all places of welcome: in a marketplace decorated with posters and red flags, the Soviets were greeted with flowers presented by delegations of local residents waiting, in accordance with ancient Polish custom, with bread and salt, at tables covered with red cloth.

The barn owner's daughter, Janina Biedrzycka, remembers that the Soviets were welcomed to Jedwabne by two Jewish couples, Socher Lewinowicz and his wife, and the Chilewskis. But when I question her further, it turns out she also remembers two Polish Communists and a word of welcome pronounced by a Pole. But besides the “official” hosts of the welcome ceremony a sizable group of rubbernecks, children, and young people gathered. Many of the testimonies of Poles deported to the USSR preserved at the Hoover Institution repeat that Jews were in the majority. A locksmith from Grajewo described “individual Jews and a paltry number of Communist sympathizers welcoming the Red Army with bread and salt and a red banner reading: ‘With Stalin into France and Great Britain.' Because these imperialist states provoked the war and Comrade Stalin would liberate us without war.”

It's hard to say if the majority of those welcoming the Russians were really Jews. The event was momentous enough for many residents of the town to want to have a look (after all, Janina Biedrzycka remembers the welcoming of the Red Army because she was there, too). But among the cheering crowd, apart from a few Polish Communists—the Communist movement was weak in these parts—Jews were no doubt in the majority, because they had reason to feel a sense of relief. In Jewish accounts it looks like this:

“The Jews breathed a little more freely, but not entirely, because various marauders turned up in town, as well as some reactionary elements who sympathized with the Germans fleeing the approaching Red Army,” said Menachem Turek of the situation in Tykocin. “Those people spread crazy rumors, such as we were already familiar with, for example that Jews in Grodno and other towns had poured boiling water on the heads of Polish soldiers, and they said all Jews should be killed. This inflammatory behavior had no effect, because on the first day of Yom Kippur, Soviet tanks thundered into town and for quite a while their noise silenced or muffled the voice of poisonous anti-Semitism—the anti-Semitism nourished by the right-wing nationalist regime dominant here in the last few years before the war. The Jews of Tykocin received and saluted the Red Army with special sympathy, they felt free, breathed fresh air, and gratefully and respectfully offered their services to the Soviet authorities, who began to introduce an order based on the principles of love for humanity and nations, equal rights, freedom and equality.”