The Crime and the Silence (33 page)

I soon understood this tactic would get us invaluable information that I would never have gotten by myself. It was exactly this kind of conversation, this small talk about old times, that gave us that chance.

“You remember there was a guy, his nickname was Dupek [Ass],” Józef K. related. “You know, the guy who set the barn on fire, the widow's son, Józef Klimas.”

When we talked to anyone over seventy it was hard not to wonder if he or she had taken part in the atrocity. And so when we visited Franciszek Ekstowicz, a tailor trained by Jan's father, and I looked into this quiet man's noble, chiseled face, I thought: No, not him, I'm sure.

Franciszek Ekstowicz had been herding cows that day and only got back to town in the early evening. I asked him if his friends who were looting abandoned houses hadn't called on him to join them.

“I went into one house; Kozioł, the son-in-law of the Jewish woman who lived there, was an educated man and he had a lot of books. My friends took out the chairs, the table, but I took the Jew's books. They laughed at me later: ‘Stupid guy, he took the paper.'”

When I asked him what the books were, he was quick to withdraw, as if I'd demanded restitution. A minute later, perhaps not by accident, he quoted the poets Adam Mickiewicz and Adam Asnyk. But I didn't dare to ask him directly if those were the “post-Jewish books” that he took from Kozioł's house.

The second day of our visit we realized Jan's cousin must have looked in the rooms where we had slept. Remarks she made to Jan showed she had read his notes, where under the heading “probable murderers of July 7, 1941,” he had written her uncle's name in his clear handwriting, if with a question mark. From the looks she cast in my direction I inferred she had also familiarized herself with my appointment book, in which I'd written “Call Mr. Skrodzki” several times.

We left Radziłów in the late afternoon, it was already dark, and it would have been more sensible to leave early the next day, but the atmosphere where we were staying was tense—to put it mildly. I drove on icy roads with snowdrifts. The drive to Warsaw, which usually took me three hours, this time took seven and a half.

Not long after our expedition to Radziłów, Skrodzki received a letter from his family commenting on his bringing me there: “The devil must have gotten into you, Jan.”

He sent back the copy I had given him of the historian Szymon Datner's text “The Holocaust in Radziłów” with corrections, giving the proper spelling of names often extremely distorted in the article. There were a few ambiguous fragments in the text. The following sentence, for instance: “The first victim fell, a tailor named Skondzki, and Antoni Kostaszewski committed the bestial murder of a seventeen-year-old girl and Komsomol member, Fruma Dorogoj, saying she wasn't worth a bullet. They cut her head off in the forest near the Kopańska settlement and threw her body in the swamp.” Reading this again, it occurred to me that the text was badly edited, that the tailor wasn't the first victim but a perpetrator of the atrocity, along with Kosmaczewski (I already knew that was the real name. I also knew the murdered girl was in fact called Szyma, not Fruma). When Skrodzki told me his father was a tailor I wondered if there hadn't been another confusion of names; it's not hard to turn Skrodzki into Skondzki.

Janek must have had the same thought, because when he returned Finkelsztejn's testimony to me with corrections, he had crossed out Skondzki and written in Skrodzki in pencil, with a question mark. Then I proposed that if he was worried about that tailor being his father, I would take him to see Stanisław Ramotowski, who is the walking memory of the massacre.

Earlier when I told Ramotowski I had visited Zygmunt Skrodzki's son in Gdańsk and that we were planning to go to Radziłów together, he protested vehemently: “Miss Ania, you don't want that kind of friends.” But when I came back from Radziłów and asked him directly if Skrodzki's father was one of the killers, he clammed up. He said he hadn't been at the barn, and how was he to know who had been there? He only knew what he saw with his own eyes, that before the war when the vicar Kamiński headed a nationalist attack squad that broke Jews' windows, Zygmunt Skrodzki was right behind him.

“He was the best man in town for those things.” And he added: “He was an enemy of Jews.”

But when I visited him with Jan Skrodzki, he didn't want to remember any of it.

“No, no, we're not talking about your father, it might have been Eugeniusz Skomski, a tailor who lived across the street from the depot, he was involved,” he explained, and changed the subject to the beautifully tailored black leather jacket he still wears, and which was made for him half a century ago by Zygmunt Skrodzki.

After we left, Jan took back my copy of Finkelsztejn's testimony with his corrections for a moment and with relief changed Skondzki to Skomski, in pen this time.

In Warsaw we visited a cousin of his, a retired seamstress living in the Praga district. The fragile seventy-three-year-old Halina Zalewska, tottering around the house, elicited sympathy from the first glance. It didn't last, unfortunately. She knows a thing or two about Jews; she listens to the anti-Semitic ultra-right-wing Catholic Radio Maryja all day long.

She saw her Polish friends driving her Jewish friends, some pushing prams, to their deaths. She pitied the victims and railed against the killers, but at the same time she spiked her account with phrases like “dirty Jews,” “that damn parade of Soviet flunkies,” “those Jewish beggars, now they want their property back,” and blithely laid blame for the atrocity on the victims.

“Eight hundred head from Radziłów were burned. There were so many because Jews multiplied like rabbits. The Jew lorded it over us. They spread out, supported their own. Jews stopped at nothing in their efforts to impoverish Poland and keep it from developing. We put up with it for many years. There wasn't any prejudice against Jews, Poles were just angry about what the Jews had done under Soviet rule. Jews joined the NKVD, drew up deportation lists. I remember under the Soviets how they stood at the bed at night, pointing guns: ‘
Ublyudok
[motherfucker], tell me where your father is hiding.'”

“Local Jews swore in Russian?” I asked to make sure.

“No, no, those were the ones who'd come from Russia. But there were plenty of locals in the police force, routine Communists and traitors to the Polish nation, the Jews Lejzor Gryngas, Nagórka, Piechota, and there was our maid Halinka's brother-in-law, no matter what his name was—he was a Pole, not a Jew. Holy Scripture tells us the Jews are a tribe of vipers, perverts, they're untrustworthy and faithless. They played tricks on the Lord himself, and He had to send down plagues on them. He made them wander in the wilderness for thirty years. It's no accident He punished them the way He did. I've known about that from before the war, from religious studies. I remember everything, I'm seventy-three and I've still no sclerosis at all, though I don't eat margarine, only butter, because it's Jewish companies that make margarine.”

Skrodzki tried to intervene: “The Old Testament, the source of our faith, we share with the Jews, and Jesus was a Jew.”

“What are you saying, he was God's son, that tribe has nothing to do with him. He didn't speak much Hebrew and no Yiddish at all.”

Janek quoted her Finkelsztejn's testimony on the tailor Skondzki, who, with Kosmaczewski, committed the bestial murder of a young girl.

“Ah, that was the daughter of the shoemaker Dorogoj, who lived near the depot. Dark hair, she wore it short,” Zalewska immediately remembered. “She threw a rock at the cross and blasphemed. I don't say I approve of them killing her in the swamp and cutting her head off, but it should be said she was a member of the Komsomol.”

Janek asked her if his father might have been involved.

“I want to know the truth, even the worst,” he prodded. “As his son I have a right to know if my father took part in an atrocity.”

“It was a shock, but on the memory of your mother and mine, I swear no one knows what really happened. Your father was a young man and game for a fight,” his cousin said nervously. “Your father was a nationalist, it's an honor to remind you of it. Strong young men would knock over the Jews' barrels of herring, knock down their stalls, tell Poles not to buy from Jews. The Yids remembered your dad was an activist, that's why they put him down for deportation.”

During our visit with Halina Zalewska I whispered for him to question her about each of the people we'd talked to in Radziłów.

“Waldek K. wasn't involved, was he, just his brother?” Jan asked. Waldek K. was father-in-law to Jan's cousin, the one who welcomed us on our first visit and later. “Oh, no, how could you say that, he had God in his heart. He might have done some looting, whoever was strong and happened to be around took advantage. In the marketplace that day, Father met an artisan he employed who'd come to town to take a bed from a Jewish house, because his family were so poor they slept on the floor. The only Polish people who took part in the killing all had seen members of their family deported by the Soviets.”

“So Józef K. didn't join in?” I wanted to make sure about the brother-in-law of the friend of Jan's we'd met in Radziłów, none of whose family had been deported; I knew that for a certainty. He was an open, sympathetic person, but I had grown suspicious when he broke into a nervous giggle a third time; each time he'd done it we had been talking about killing and raping.

“Józef took part in those pogroms of Jews, they went by houses at night. His family hadn't been deported, he just did it for the company.”

In Otwock, just outside Warsaw, we went to see Bolesław Ciszewski, who had been Jan's father's tailoring assistant. He was fifteen at the time. He saw Jews driven into the marketplace and infants thrown into the burning barn. He spoke of it without compassion. Jan asked him directly whether his father had taken part.

“Your father was a tough guy and let's not forget what the Jews had done. How many Polish families did they send to Siberia? People had reason to bear a grudge against the Jews, and now I don't know what the Jews bear a grudge about.”

When we went back to Radziłów, we didn't go to see Jan's cousins again. Jan understood from their letter that relations had been severed. Instead, we headed for his childhood friend Eugenia K. and her husband. When we had been with his family the situation had been tense, but now we were met with warmth, implored to stay the night, beds had already been made up for us. And then our host started to talk: “I met your cousin in the market. He said you'd come to see him with a Jewish girl. I just shrugged and said, ‘I don't believe Jan would soil his own nest.' And turned my back on him.”

When we got back to the hotel I gave Jan documents to read from the 1945 trial of one of the Radziłów killers, Leon Kosmaczewski. I'd only just received them and hadn't yet managed to look them over. My favorite detective series,
Columbo
, was on TV. During the commercials, Jan read me excerpts from the investigation.

Columbo said, “Now I can tell you who's the killer.” Commercial break. Jan started reading the record of Menachem's father Izrael Finkelsztejn's interrogation on December 3, 1945: “Kosmaczewski got several people together in a gang and started demolishing Jewish homes. They dragged people out of their homes and beat them until they lost consciousness. They also raped a lot of young girls, special note should be taken of their rape of the Borozowieckis, mother and daughter, whom they later killed. Those night rampages went on for two weeks, until July 7, 1941.” He listed the gang members: “Skrodzki, tailor, was also one of the leaders.”

“Somehow I knew that,” Jan said. His voice was calm, but his fingers were nervously paging through the records.

With this new and bitter knowledge, he continued the search with me.

“This was a decent family,” said Jan, leading me to another house in Radziłów. “They lived on Piękna Street. Aleksander is still alive, he must have seen a lot.”

Aleksander Bargłowski was not happy to see us. He didn't know what happened during the war, and he didn't remember the period before the war. But when Jan began to talk about the National Party's activities, he involuntarily began humming a song he remembered from his childhood, sung to the tune of a Kościuszko-era peasant recruits' song:

Onward, boys, make haste,

A harvest now awaits us.

Let's take back all trade,

Seize the Jews' big gains.

I didn't manage to get the second verse, he was singing it softly under his breath. When I asked him to repeat it, he seemed to realize how inappropriate it was in the context of what had happened later. He grew flustered, fell silent, and no longer remembered anything at all. Jan put a blunt question to him: “Who did it?”

“I didn't see anything. I know it was the Germans.”

“I'll tell you who did it: my father was one of them. Poles did it.”

A silence fell, but our interlocutor couldn't bear it in the end. Softly, under his breath, he swore: “Fuck, you're right, it was a foul thing that happened.”

And he started to talk.

“The day before, Jews had already hidden in the grain. They found them there and dragged them off to the barn. That day I was digging peat near Okrasin. I heard the screams, saw the smoke. The wife of the Jew Lejzor, the ragman, whose son had a big family, hid in our chicken coop. I saw her and said, ‘You just sit tight, woman.' But later she got herself together and left. That day the postman came by, Adam Kamiński, who was in Russia during the revolution. He said, ‘Don't go there, don't go looting.' Nobody from our family went, none of us laid hands on anything that didn't belong to us. People were running over there out of curiosity. I would have been ashamed to go there, or take anything. I'd gone to school with Szlapak's boy, his dad had a shop. And I was supposed to steal from them, from my friends? Anyway, Mother made me clothes on her loom, my aunt in America sent me things, I didn't have to pounce on their old stuff. It was those shits from the villages, from Wąsosz and Lisy, who arrived in droves. That scum did it, and they gave all of Poland a bad name.”