The Crime and the Silence (31 page)

“There's no point in debating Anna Bikont's vile insinuations,” one of the panelists cries out. “Nothing happened in Jedwabne to justify one of Adam Michnik's hacks leveling base accusations at the National Party. We'll defend ourselves and unmask the lies of Jewish chauvinists.”

The assembled decided to convene a Committee to Defend the Honor and Dignity of the Polish Nation, and wound up the gathering by singing the patriotic song “Rota” (Oath).

APRIL 9, 2001

In the Washington-based weekly
The New Republic
, Leon Wieseltier's response to an article by Adam Michnik: “My friend has produced a contorted moral calculation … Michnik begins by reminding his readers that the Poles were also victims … And Michnik repairs also to the Poles who rescued Jews during the war … ‘Do the murderers deserve more recognition than the righteous?' Michnik asks. Well, yes, they do, because there were many more of them (I write this as the grateful son of a Jewish woman who was saved by Poles) … I am puzzled by the haggling tone of his reckoning with Jedwabne.”

APRIL 10, 2001

In the
Gazeta
editorial offices I read letters sent to me after my piece today on Jedwabne: “Woman, what's keeping you in Poland? May you be consumed by hellfire for your perversity and lies. Poland for the Poles”; “Miss Bikont, Jewess possessed by crazy anti-Polonism, we'll be meeting soon. A kamikaze has already been assigned to you”; “You've managed to ignite a Polish-Jewish war in your newspaper. A few more such stories in your pages, and I'll become an anti-Semite, I already associate Jews with lying and swindling.”

One letter is written in a radically different tone, and it is the only one signed: “After your report I howl and cry. Enough hatred toward other nationalities. When I was five years old I lost my mother, and I was the fifth child in our family. It wasn't the priest who came to our aid in that difficult situation but Icek Borensztajn—that's a name I'll never forget. I'm letting you know that I'll be in Jedwabne on July 10. Anna Mazurkiewicz, Wrocław.”

APRIL 12, 2001

Father Henryk Jankowski of the Church of St. Brigid—where in the time of Solidarity and martial law, the Lord's Tomb was used to convey bold political statements—has joined in the discussion on Jedwabne, not for the first time, and given full rein to his anti-Semitism, presenting a partially burned miniature barn as the Lord's Tomb with a skeleton rising from it and the inscriptions:
The Jews killed Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us, too
and
Poles, rescue Poland
.

APRIL 13, 2001

I'm on my way to Gdańsk, where Jan Skrodzki and I have arranged to meet Antoni Olszewski from Radziłów. He knows a lot. Olszewski keeps saying as we talk, “This wickedness happened in a Christian country.” We find out from him that Klimaszewski, the man who set fire to the Radziłów barn and whom we looked for in Ełk, is dead.

APRIL 18, 2001

Jedwabne. A little right-wing publication left in the church prints letters sent to Father Orłowski: “During the two years of Soviet-Jewish power the Jews of Jedwabne systematically deported hundreds of Polish families, and not one Jewish family. The lists were drawn up in the temple under supervision of the rabbi.” The witness goes on to write that his family hid a Jew on July 10.

This is classic. It's almost impossible to find an anti-Semite in Jedwabne who doesn't maintain that his family hid a Jew. The people who really hid Jews at that time are still too scared to speak about it.

I've tried to meet with Jerzy Ramotowski several times since I read his remarks in the weekly
Contacts
: “From July 10, 1941, on, the names of the perpetrators were an open secret.” It's from him that Tocki, the chief editor of
Contacts
, heard of the grim secret of Jedwabne back in the eighties.

This local history teacher, now retired, is the one person who was always interested in the crime committed so many years ago and who collected accounts. He met with Gross. From then on he sometimes came home from the Relax bar roughed up. Because Jerzy Ramotowski knows a lot and drinks a lot. I've heard that after he was beaten up by his bar buddies, he started speaking with the voice of the Jedwabne deniers. I'm still determined to meet with him. I've made several appointments to see him, waited in the agreed-upon place, but he never shows up. He doesn't this time, either.

I drop by Godlewski, who is very tense. For some time negotiations have been going on with Henryk Biedrzycki, the heir of Bronisław Śleszyński, owner of the barn and the surrounding land. In the sixties, when the authorities came to build a monument, the parcel of land was purchased by the treasury. Surveys have shown that the Jews' mass grave extends beyond the terrain indicated at that time, and an additional piece of land must be acquired. The provincial governor's office has assessed the land to be worth thirty thousand zlotys. Meanwhile, the anti-Semitic publisher Leszek Bubel has offered a hundred thousand dollars. Obviously Biedrzycki preferred Bubel, both in terms of the price and the political views they share. However, he has proposed to the government that he'll sell them the land for a hundred thousand, naturally, because why would he sell at a loss? And he will do it under the condition that in a year's time, the groundskeeping be handed over to the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne. The plan is to erect an adjacent monument to the memory of Poles killed by Jews. Bubel has no doubt this plan will be readily accepted by the town council.

The same things are constantly repeated in Jedwabne: it's all about money; Gross and journalists, false witnesses and world Jewry are enriching themselves at the expense of the townspeople. Meanwhile, it seems that the only person who has a chance of getting rich is the grandson of the farmer who made his barn available for the burning of Jews.

I manage to cross Janina Biedrzycka's threshold to ask her about the Germans rebuilding her father's barn. But I get nowhere.

“That's nonsense. The Germans did the burning, and the Jews denounced Poles to the Soviets. I saw it with my own eyes. I'm so upset about all this, because I simply hate lies.”

Not only did Biedrzycka see Jews writing nonexistent denunciations with her own eyes, she also heard nonexistent Germans addressing the Jews through a megaphone in the market square on the morning of July 10, 1941. She was told what they were saying by a Jewish friend whom she'd taken into hiding in her attic: that the Jews were to be put on a labor transport and should form groups of four. She saw them obediently forming groups.

I learn that my interview with Przechodzki is having an entirely different effect than I'd hoped. Slander has been spreading about his father, how he took part in looting and got rich on Jewish gold. Exactly the same as the Dziedzices. When it got around that Leszek was talking to journalists about the massacre, people started to say that his father had dug up gold teeth out of the ashes. As soon as anyone lifts the veil of secrecy an inch, he or his family is immediately accused of participating in the crime.

An acquaintance tells me about a conversation with Krystyna N., who said no one was going to go to the ceremony because the whole thing was just about money. When I spoke to her in March she claimed the town was split into two camps, but there were more who felt sorry for the murder victims. It looks like she's stopped feeling sorry.

On the way back to Warsaw I stop off at Przestrzele.

“We've finally decided to leave Poland,” says Leszek Dziedzic. “We'll stay to go to the ceremony. It's not just about the attacks on us, but the whole atmosphere.”

I'm not surprised. The other target of the smear campaign is the mayor, who is also thinking more and more of emigrating.

APRIL 19, 2001

With my daughters Ola and Maniucha and some friends I've set off for a few days in the Tatra Mountains, in the Five Lakes Valley. We're just coming up to the last stretch before the shelter when my cell phone, which isn't even supposed to have reception here, rings. It's Stanisław Ramotowski, who's feeling very poorly. I don't know by what miracle I manage to get my sister, Marysia Kruczkowska, on the phone, but she promises to go to see him immediately.

APRIL 22, 2001

Back in Warsaw. At the hospital where my sister has brought Ramotowski, I hear Stanisław has had a heart attack. Even worse, his X-ray showed a spot indicating lung cancer. Two months ago the film showed nothing.

APRIL 24, 2001

In the room at the Jewish Historical Institute that houses the files on the Righteous Among the Nations, I search for documents on the Wyrzykowskis of Janczewko, who sheltered seven Jews. I find a 1963 letter from Mosze Olszewicz about awarding the Wyrzykowskis the medal of the Righteous Among the Nations. There is also a letter from Antonina Wyrzykowska: “I hid seven people for 28 months under the manure in our pigsty. I emphasize they didn't have a penny. For me it wasn't about money, but about saving human lives, it wasn't about religion, just about people. After the liberation I was beaten more than once and they, too, were under threat, so I had to leave the area where I was born.”

There's correspondence from the Lewins of Wizna related to the recognition of the Dobkowskis of Zanklewo. The whole family is registered at Yad Vashem, the Dobkowskis' parents and their three sons, among them the Zanklewo farmer I visited in December last year and his brothers. They received medals; their parents had already died. There's a letter from the brothers: “In May 1945, our family was subject to an act of revenge carried out by unidentified partisan units for having sheltered the Lewin family. The action consisted of beating and abusing our father and taking away all our possessions and leaving the family without means to live.”

I found the address of one of the brothers, Wincenty Dobkowski, in the correspondence. In the evening I call him in Ełk. “Such filth, such lies are being spouted now. And why?” Dobkowski says nervously. “So there were some thugs in Jedwabne. They put twelve men on trial, the ones the Germans sent out and forced to stand guard over the Jews. I respect Israelis, but then you also have to say what the Jews did under the Soviet occupation. How can they say the Polish people did it? Our peoples should be reconciled, anti-Semitism shouldn't be stirred up again.”

I tell him I'm going to Israel, where I'm visiting the Lewin siblings, whose address I got from his brother in Zanklewo. As soon as he starts to speak of Izaak and Ida—or Janek and Tereska, as they were called when they were in hiding—Wincenty Dobkowski's voice softens.

“You have to meet each of them separately, because they don't speak to each other. They quarreled over their mother's inheritance. Such a pity, there's just the two of them in the world and they went through such hard times together.”

APRIL 25, 2001

In an anti-Semitic rag with the telling name
Nasza Polska
(Our Poland), I read an interview with a woman from Jedwabne who now lives in Toronto. “My brothers and sisters and I were lying on the floor at home, throwing up,” she says of the time right after the burning of the Jews. “There was a nauseating smoke spreading across all of Jedwabne, carried by the wind, penetrating into houses, poisoning everything.” She was ten years old at the time, living on Przytulska Street. At 3:00 p.m. she had gone out with her mother to visit an aunt who lived on Cmentarna Street, and they saw the procession of Jews with the rabbi at the front, carrying his hat on a stick.

Why did they go out at precisely that moment to see the aunt who lived on the route of the Jews' march? Evidently they wanted to get a look. This is the umpteenth time I hear of parents letting their children watch the scene of the Jews being rounded up in the market square. This is the ludic dimension of the massacre.

MAY 4, 2001

“For Our Sins and Yours”—the front-page headline of the
Gazeta
conveys perfectly the meaning of the primate's speech at Jasna Góra. Józef Glemp announced that a formal apology for Jedwabne will be made in Warsaw on May 27. At the ceremony, the Episcopal Convention will pray—he stressed—not only for the Jewish victims in Jedwabne but also “for the evil visited upon Polish citizens of the Catholic faith, in which Poles of the Jewish faith took part … The Poles,” the primate continued, “were also wronged … suffered from evil perpetrated by Jews, including during the period when Communism was introduced in Poland. I expect the Jewish side to make a reckoning with its conscience and bring itself to apologize to the Poles for those crimes.”

MAY 9, 2001

At Jacek Kuroń's. When I last visited him in the hospital we talked about the interview given to the
Gazeta
by the éminence grise of the National Party movement in the new Poland, the current justice minister, Wiesław Chrzanowski. To the question of whether the deaths of Jews who lived in Jedwabne should weigh on the conscience of the interwar nationalist movement, Chrzanowski replied, “Why that again? Why would it weigh on our conscience? There weren't even any National Party members there.” This part of the conversation enraged Jacek. He showed me a passage where Chrzanowski says the bastion of the nationalist movement before World War I and between the wars was the Podlasie region.

“But that's exactly where Jedwabne and Radziłów are,” Jacek fumes. “He says it was there that the activities of educational institutions created by the National Party had their greatest results. And he doesn't see what those results were!” He reads me the article he has prepared for the
Gazeta
against Chrzanowski's theses “on the beneficial influence of the educational work of the National Party”: “The Institute of National Remembrance is currently conducting an investigation into the massacre in Jedwabne and trying to determine what role the German occupying forces played in it. They certainly had a role, but that is a marginal factor in the face of the century-long educational campaign of Polish national hatred.”