The Crime and the Silence (38 page)

I ask him if he knew before Gross's book who committed the massacre in Jedwabne.

“I didn't know. We treat the testimonies of survivors with reserve; usually they could only have seen part of the events they describe, the rest they add from hearsay. I relied on Szymon Datner's article of 1966, where I read that the Germans committed the crime on those lands in the summer of 1941, with the collaboration of local thugs. When I read the same text again recently, I saw you could easily read the truth between the lines. We made a mistake, and I feel guilty. I didn't believe the people of a small town could be capable of a crime like that. I thought the indifference, the willingness to denounce Jews, was specific to larger cities,” continues Gutman, who during the war was in the Warsaw Ghetto and then in Auschwitz. “I thought none of that applied to little towns where Jankiel and Mosze were neighbors you knew well. It turns out it was precisely in little towns like that that the anti-Semitism instilled before the war reached its most extreme form.”

In the Yad Vashem café I meet with Professor Aron Wein, chief editor of
Pinkas Hakehillot
, a commemorative book of Jewish communities in many volumes. I ask Wein why his encyclopedia doesn't say what really happened in Jedwabne and other towns.

“From the testimonies I read it was clear that the local population had a part in killing Jews in June and July 1941. When I was editing I wrote ‘mob,' because I didn't know exactly if there were also Belorussians or Lithuanians in that part of Poland, and I didn't want to insult the Polish people.”

I hear there's a former resident of Jedwabne, who left during the Soviet occupation, now living in the kibbutz named Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters, near Haifa.

Szmulek phones the kibbutz. Sadly, Meir Paparle died two years ago, and his daughter knows nothing of her father's native town. But Szmulek has a four-volume book of recollections of the founders of the kibbutz and promises to find me Paparle's story.

MAY 31, 2001

In Yehud I visit first Kochaw and then Jakow Cofen vel Geva, who lives one street away in a lovely house with a garden. His name was Jakub Pecynowicz, but like many Polish Jews he changed it to a Hebrew name after arriving in Israel. The Pecynowiczes owned a mill in Jedwabne, and it was they who hosted Kochaw's family after they had been thrown out of Wizna. He speaks Polish hesitantly, searching for words.

On September 1, 1939, the Pecynowiczes fled town before the advancing German army. They had made it to Zawady in the direction of Tykocin when the Germans crossed the Narew River and surrounded the town. They drove the refugees—among them many Poles from Jedwabne as well as from Wizna, Radziłów, Szczyczyn, Grajewo—into the church. The Germans abused the Jews, pulled their beards, made them clean up excrement with their hands, threw chocolate into the rubbish and then made them eat it under threat of being shot. They chased all of them out into a fenced field. The Jews were to build a shelter, but only the Poles were allowed to stand under it. The Jews stood all night—they weren't allowed to sit, it was raining. Toward morning the Germans ordered the Poles to carry out a pogrom. Pecynowicz, frozen to the bone, went up to some Poles he knew for a moment, to warm up. He heard one of them arguing they should hold back from the pogrom, with others still undecided gathering around him.

“But some other Poles went to work, grabbing our arms, legs, stripping off our shoes and pants, and then the undecided ones joined in, too. One Jew resisted his coat being taken off, and a German helped a Pole undress him, jabbing the Jew with a knife.”

When he got home, the neighbors had already managed to carry off all his belongings.

“That crippled guy Stanisław Sielawa took most of what we had. My brother went to him: ‘Just give me back two pots so we can make ourselves something to eat.' And then the Soviets came.”

In the first weeks before the mill was taken from them they paid the representatives of the new authorities in millet, barley, and buckwheat. Jakow Geva thinks that's why they weren't put on the deportation list. But how could they imagine it could save all their lives?

“I was the only one who survived, and I had a sister who had ten children. They took me into the army and that's how I stayed alive. In Russia I got a letter from home saying everything was fine with them. I went with the Soviet army as far as Georgia, Azerbaijan. There were nineteen Poles in the company apart from me. They got packages and shared them among themselves, but they never treated me.”

When he returned to Poland in 1945 on a Russian repatriation train, there were Jews at the stations warning him not to go home because Poles would kill him. And telling him they had to stick together, because when anyone found a Jew on his own, they'd throw him off the train and shoot him.

“I was afraid to look around in Jedwabne. I was afraid to separate from my friends. We arrived at the seaside, in Szczecin. When we got off the train, stones were thrown at us, but a delegation from a kibbutz showed up right away and told us we could join them and emigrate to Palestine.”

He made his way by a circuitous route across half of Europe and was almost in Palestine when the British caught him just off the coast. He was sent to a camp on Cyprus, where he spent two years. While there he heard what had happened in Jedwabne. He worked maintaining the gardens. Eventually he moved to the settlement where he lives to this day: Kiryat Białystok. The settlement was built for Jews from the Białystok region who arrived after the Holocaust, by Jews from the Białystok region who emigrated before the war.

JUNE 1, 2001

Yehud. My last meeting with Kochaw. Every meeting takes the same course. Kochaw talks until his wife interrupts us. Again and again, always with slightly different details, he tells me about the Jews of Wizna, how they were massacred, partly in Wizna, partly in Jedwabne, and how he passed for a Pole in order to survive. Listening to him I feel as if he has recorded his recollections on a memory loop, played back to himself hundreds of times, and is now reading back to me a text already fixed in his head. He speaks under such strain that I don't dare interrupt him with questions. Only when he stops do you see how exhausted he is.

Once again Szmulek and I call a bunch of Finkelsztejns. Finally we find Menachem Finkelsztejn's widow. She speaks good Polish. I learn that her husband graduated from the Technion here and was a construction engineer. No, she can't tell me anything about his experiences during the war. When I press her, she cuts me off:

“I know nothing. Do you think I'm stupid? I survived the war in Poland, too, hiding in bunkers, forests; I saw things. We never told each other about it. We never spoke a word of Polish to each other. Neither our son nor our two daughters know anything, because my husband never talked to them about it.”

I hear that her sister-in-law Chana, Chaja's youngest daughter, is alive, but the two women aren't in touch.

I tell Szmulek about my Jerusalem encounters with Meir Ronen, how vividly he remembers Jedwabne, though he never visited it after the war, and the Polish language, which he never used after the war.

“I remember Skryhiczyn only too well,” says Szmulek. “I'd like to forget it but I can't. I had family there, friends—Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian. I didn't want to go when our cousin Pinio organized a trip in the eighties. Somebody might think I'd come to take his land away. In recent years a lot of Poles have started coming to Israel. They work illegally here, you hear Polish spoken in the street, and I feel close to them somehow, I like to hear them talk, though their Polish is a bit different from the language I knew. When a person lives far from where he was born, he always feels like a branch grafted onto another tree. Even when the graft was successful.”

 

6

If I'd Been in Jedwabne Then

or, The Story of Meir Ronen, Exiled to Kazakhstan

“I, Meir Ronen, born in Jedwabne on February 20, 1926, left the town for good in April 1941. I attended an elementary school named for Adam Mickiewicz, the great Polish poet, who wrote, ‘Many played the cymbals / But none dared play before Jankiel.' We had a wooden house on Przytulska Street. Forests all around and the rivers Narew and Biebrza. The landscapes were beautiful, but they were the only good thing …

“Our family lived there for generations. I remember a lot of family stories about the time before World War I. Jedwabne had a developed textile industry then, and two of my uncles were smugglers; they'd cross the border at Kolno, smuggling gloves and hats.

“My father, Symcha Grajewski, graduated from the gymnasium before World War I. He had excellent Polish, as well as Russian, Hebrew, German. He was in the Polish Legions, and in the war of 1920 he fought for Polish independence against the Bolsheviks. He had an iron shop and a writing service. He also gave lessons to children in whatever subject they needed. He helped organize the Union of Reservists' parade in Jedwabne and went on picnics in the woods with them. There was dancing, singing, marching exercises, the fire brigade orchestra played, conducted by an organ player who was also the sexton.

“Father wrote letters for people, all kinds of applications to the courts and authorities. Wasilewski, who later became an assistant to Mayor Karolak under the Germans, opened an office to compete with him. He hung out a sign:
POLISH LETTER-WRITING BUREAU
. In Kajetanów, Mierzejewski and Górski were on trial, and Wasilewski wrote to the Stawiski court on their behalf. The defendant and the plaintiff came to court with the same letters. The same ink, the same style, almost the same contents, just the one thing in which they differed—their names—was different. The court rejected them outright and laughed at them. Then they went back to my father. They had spent a lot of money on lawsuits, so Mierzejewski's daughter came to us and asked my father to reconcile them. Father met with Górski and asked him how much he would cede to Mierzejewski. He said, nothing. Then he asked Mierzejewski the same thing. He was told, not a button. They paid my father five zlotys, but who could advise them? The Mierzejewskis lost everything in those court cases, and they owed a lot to Abram Zajdensztadt, who had loaned them money.

Elementary school class. Jedwabne, 1933. The school was attended by Polish and Jewish children. Meir Grajewski (later Meir Ronen), first row, third from right; his elder sister Fajga behind him in a polka-dot dress. In the back row, three boys who survived the war in hiding with Antonina and Aleksander Wyrzykowski: second from left, Szmul Wasersztejn; third, Mosze Olszewicz; fourth, Jankiel Kubrzański. Also in the photo: Butcher Nornberg's daughter, in the second row, fourth from left. Meir Stryjakowski, grandson of Jedwabne rabbi Awigdor Białostocki, is standing in the back row second from right. The photo also shows children from the Zajdensztat, Zimny, Jedwabiński, and Kamionowicz families.
(Courtesy of Meir Ronen)

“Before the war a lot of Poles owed Jews money and so they made sure they didn't have to pay off their debts.

“In the middle of the marketplace there were the town hall, two wells, and a few chestnut trees. In May we used to go catch mayflies. First the school was on Sadowa Street, then it moved. They built a new school building behind the mill, all modern, with central heating and a parquet floor. People came to Jedwabne in trucks from Warsaw and Königsberg to buy farm produce, and there were also two squares for selling livestock. On Wednesday, market day, it was hard to get through, so many people were out trading.

“On Tuesday toward evening, people started chasing geese and pigs out to the marketplace. A lot of Jews traded grain, selling it all the way to East Prussia. Białystok Jews came for flour. Shoemakers, coopers, wheelwrights were all Jews, but among blacksmiths you had Poles as well.

“We didn't have any Hasids at all. Only the rabbi wore sidelocks, and no one wore a tallit. In that region the Lithuanian Jews were very pious, they wore beards and hats, but I don't remember any of them ever settling in Jedwabne. During Jewish holidays you felt a celebratory atmosphere in town, whole families—at that time six children wasn't a lot—walked across the market square to the synagogue, which was on Szkolna. There was an eternal Babel in the market, Polish and Yiddish mixed together, and on Yom Kippur, it was quiet as the grave. And when the Catholic holidays came, Jews tried not to show themselves in the street, because a lot of people came into town from the villages then, often drunk.

“The state holiday of November 11 was celebrated by both Poles and Jews; there was a special Mass in church and prayers in the synagogue. On the birthday of Marshal Piłsudski, the first chief of state in independent Poland, schoolchildren gathered in the marketplace and Mayor Walenty Grądzki spoke from a podium. We went to temple with little flags to pray for the marshal, and I remember the mayor and police commander Bielecki participating in the synagogue prayers.