The Crime and the Silence (41 page)

I drive to Jedwabne, where I've arranged to talk to two schoolteachers. A teacher from the gymnasium told me that in class, when they were working on a nineteenth-century novel that includes the character of a poor Jew, the children said it would be a good idea to stone him. And when a friend of hers once asked them how they imagined other peoples, it was simply shameful what the children wrote about Jews.

“The only accepted life model here is to put money in the tray on Sunday and then drink all week, beat your wife, and moan about the Jews,” says a high school teacher. “You should hear the things that are said in the teachers' lounge. The atmosphere is so tense that arguments don't get through to people. And the kids at school are constantly telling Jewish jokes. They even get up in class and ask why there are so many Jews in Poland. Once, I tried to turn the subject around, I said they felt threatened because they didn't know anything about Jews, about their history, their culture, that they need knowledge, because it'll make their lives easier, upon which one pupil got up and said, ‘Why should I study if the Jews are in charge anyway.' Where my family comes from I don't hear this constant griping about Jews. And it has always been like this here, even before Gross published his book. Probably because the Poles killed them here and enriched themselves on their Jewish property?”

She herself is not from Jedwabne. When she came here in the sixties, she would hear people say, “The Poles did it,” but she only found out what had happened here when she made friends with a colleague, a woman born in Jedwabne. During the war, this woman lived on the little square where the Lenin monument stood. She told her what she saw through the window: Jews falling down carrying big chunks of the smashed Lenin, and Poles finishing them off on the spot. The woman's mother, who hid a Jew in the attic that day, often returned in memory to the crime, even gave details, but was afraid to mention names, apart from one: Kubrzyniecki, who had long since died. Her father told her how one day a local guy who had worked for them for years came to the house. In a new coat, with a signet ring on his finger, he declared he wouldn't be coming to work anymore, because he and his wife were “taken care of.” Her father told him, “I don't go around in a dress coat every day, just a worn shirt, but mine doesn't stink.”

This woman, Miss Z., still lives in the same house as she did then; I can try to visit her. “But she's probably quite queer in the head by now, she only listens to Radio Maryja and keeps saying she saw a bunch of Germans in navy blue uniforms.” I try to protest: “But your mother never mentioned them.”

The teacher also tells me about an elderly Miss B., who lived on Cmentarna Street at the time of the massacre.

“She was about to look out the window, because she heard cries and screams, but her mother closed the curtains and shoved her under a quilt. She didn't go out until late in the evening, when she and her friends recognized the charred remains of children they knew in the barn. A neighbor boasted that he'd just gone to get instruments from the houses—he knew which Jews played music, because they were classmates of his and had invited him to play with them. He buried them in the garden because there were rumors going around that the Germans were making people give back what they'd looted. When he later dug up the accordion, it was ruined.”

I go right away to see Miss Z., the retired teacher, and Miss B. of Cmentarna Street. Miss Z. doesn't know anything, didn't see anything, she's ill. Miss B. won't talk to me at all.

I look into the church. A bunch of anti-Semitic pamphlets are distributed in the pews, and they all include interviews with Father Orłowski. He is really good at pushing himself into the foreground and dealing with the media. The people around him don't do nearly so well. The Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne seems to have dissolved after a few meetings, at least I don't hear anything about it anymore. The priest's idea to organize a counter-ceremony on July 10—dedicating a foundation stone for a monument to honor the Poles deported to Siberia after “Jewish denunciations”—was appreciated but did not find anyone prepared to carry it out despite the promises of the Chicago Polish community that they were prepared to finance the whole thing. They even sent the priest a proposal for the inscription:
In honor of Poles who gave their lives to defend Jews, and of those Compatriots who were victims of Jewish collaboration with the Red Army and NKVD as well as the German occupying forces, as a result of which they were deported to Siberia and tortured there or perished in Nazi death camps.

I learn in town that the dentist Łucja Przystupa, the local negotiator, tells people that bones were brought to the barn before the exhumation, and that the Mossad tried to poison her dog. Among the active deniers are people from the educated town elite: a doctor, a dentist, a teacher.

I go by Przestrzele. It turns out Leon Dziedzic went once to the doctor, once to the neighbors, and heard enough to decide to return to America without waiting for the ceremony of July 10. Ewa and Leszek are sitting as if on hot coals; Ewa keeps going up to the window to check that no one is hanging around the house.

“Our friends have completely dropped us,” says Leszek. “No one calls us, as if we were strangers.”

“And how are your women friends or acquaintances behaving?” I ask Ewa.

“I have no friends anymore. I lost them all. If my husband weren't a hunter who keeps a gun in the house, I wouldn't get a single night's sleep. I wake up at night and cry. The priest slanders us, saying Leszek isn't a Catholic anymore since he says the things he does. People call us: ‘Hello, is that Israel?'; ‘Hello, is that the rabbi?' It's awful to walk down the street and hear ‘Jewish lackeys.' And in shops my neighbors turn away from me as if I were a leper. In town, wherever I go, whether it's the pharmacy or a store, I feel hostile eyes glaring at me. I go into the teachers' lounge and the silence is deafening. Our children are constantly getting their fingers rapped. Piotrek had his confirmation, and Tomek was sitting in a church pew; the other parents didn't know he was our son and said terrible things about us. We stopped going to church, someone might throw us out of the service. In general, we avoid everything, we try not to go out. I had a friend whose son used to come to see my children, but his classmates told him, ‘You hang out with those Jewish lackeys.' He hasn't been back.”

The Dziedzices' son Piotrek tells me about school: “A boy in class said Poles had made a mistake; they should have killed all the Jews. The teacher didn't say anything. A boy in my class has written a little ditty on his folder:

“Where are the Jews of yesteryear?

They all went up the chimney here.

“Everybody thinks it's funny. And everybody tells stupid jokes about Jews all the time. In Tomek's class the English teacher asked, ‘Who likes Jews?' Only Tomek said he did. The teacher asked him why, and Tomek answered, ‘Because we all descend from Adam and Eve.' And the class just laughed.”

Leszek announces to me, “We've decided to leave for America on June 14. We can't take it any longer. It's hard to make sure the boys don't let anything slip about us going. When they go out we worry.”

I ask Piotrek and Tomek, “Do you have friends you're sorry to leave?”

They both shake their heads no.

JUNE 7, 2001

An evening at the Godlewskis', a conversation about the exhumation.

“So I'm sitting in the dentist's waiting room,” Krzysztof recounts, “and an educated man comes in, college graduate, and he says to me resentfully, ‘You're sitting here and they're out there trucking in the bones.'”

They were supposedly trucking bones in so that “as many Jews would have died as Gross wanted there to be.” It's unclear whether the priest came up with the idea himself, or repeated it after hearing it from someone else, but it's spread like wildfire that the Jews organized the exhumation in order to remove the fragments of the Lenin monument from the barn and cover up the fact that they died as Communists.

Godlewski tries to convince me that the inscription proposed for the monument is a sensible compromise, that it's a miracle that the council accepted the inscription—after his own efforts and those of Michałowski, along with their visits to the council members' houses in the evenings to collect a sufficient number of votes.

I admire the heroic attempts Godlewski has made to retain faith in people. He once told me about two aunts of a friend who live somewhere near Pisz, who on July 10, 1941, made fritters all day, brought them to the pond behind the manor house—an overgrown, abandoned place, perfectly designed for hiding. They wanted to do something for the Jews who managed to escape the massacre. The fritters disappeared.

“I want to persuade her to get her aunts to tell the story publicly, so it's clear there were people in Jedwabne who felt compassion for Jews.”

But there's no way they'll speak of it to journalists.

Until recently, Godlewski said, the council members insisted, “No Jews, no temple, no graves; we'll lay a road right through it.” But “something gave at the last session.” It turns out that at the last session, on June 4, the council declared that it would “distance itself from the memorial ceremony, and will not agree to the council chairman and the mayor making statements and expressing views on behalf of the town council.” It's not enough that the whole effort of organizing the ceremony on the side of the town fell onto his shoulders, but now the council is forbidding him to deal with any of it during work hours.

The town is due to receive guests on July 10, but nothing has been done, because the council members put up resistance to every move. Godlewski managed to get more money from “high up” to restore the marketplace and the roads to the cemetery. (I had a hand in this as I asked Adam Michnik to inform those at the top levels of government that the ceremony might not take place at all because there will be no way to get to the site, and the council won't pay one zloty to build roads “for the Jews.”) In the end, there's enough left over for the athletic hall, which has been under construction for about twenty years. But the problems have piled up, and every step of the way it's been like pulling teeth. The land development plan needed to be changed—a formality, but without it no monument could be erected. At the June 4 council session the resolution passed by a miracle, or rather by accident. Sixteen members abstained from the vote; no one voted against. They only realized after the fact that the proposal was passed because one and only one person voted for it—Stanisław Michałowski—and in these circumstances one vote was enough.

The conversation continues until two in the morning. Godlewski sighs as we part, telling me about the next issue on which the council voted: “I'll tell you what the council vote was on organizing a ceremony in Jedwabne. Two to seventeen. The two are me and Michałowski. We lost that vote. We're completely alone. What I'd like most would be to get on a train and go anywhere else. I'm not staying in this town anyway.”

JUNE 8, 2001

Jedwabne. I try to meet with Józef, son of Helena Chrzanowska, the one Jewish woman living in Jedwabne with her Polish husband, but Józef's in a state of such terror he's even afraid to talk to me on the phone. When I get to Przestrzele, Leszek Dziedzic tells me he passed Chrzanowski in the marketplace: “One word with me and he was gone. He's being hounded the same way we are, but he can't escape to America and he's afraid that if people see us together they'll give him an even rougher time.”

This visit I didn't manage to contact Halina Popiołek either; her niece still won't let her leave the house. But two people burst into tears when they were talking to me, saying they couldn't bear the relentless taunting and the late-night phone calls: “dirty Jew.”

I return to Warsaw, just in time to attend the launch of the book
Jedwabne in the Eyes of Witnesses
, published by the Agricultural Chaplaincy (printed “with the permission of the church authorities and edited by Father Eugeniusz Marciniak”). In it I read, “Wasersztejn joined the secret police and wrote pure libel. A Polish family risked their lives for him, and in return we were subjected to a smear campaign.”

The event is held in a hall in the All Saints' Church in Warsaw—the same church where recently the penitential service was held. It's here the notorious patriotic bookstore Antyk is situated, where you can get any anti-Semitic publication you want. I had no idea this meant hundreds of books and pamphlets. Waiting for the event to begin, I looked through the book being launched. Janina Biedrzycka offers proof that the Germans were guilty of the crime—otherwise her father would never have given over his barn: “Because if some Pole had come to my father and said, ‘Give us your barn,' my father would have got up from his sickbed and said, ‘Burn them in your own barn!'”

The hall is packed, there's the excited atmosphere of a rally. The event moderator, Father Eugeniusz Marciniak, introduces the guests, beginning with the priest of Jedwabne: “This is our brave Father Orłowski” (a storm of applause). “Here is Janina Biedrzycka, daughter of the man in whose barn the Jews were burned” (an even greater storm of applause). Father Marciniak: “Wasersztejn was an officer of the secret police in Łomża. Later he fled to Warsaw, where he was head of trade unions until 1956, there are documents to prove it.” Guest of honor Father Orłowski: “How can we deepen our ties with Judaism if there are documents like the ones on Szmul Wasersztejn?”

Until recently I thought 1945 was a turning point in the life of the Catholic Church—of course before the war the Church was largely xenophobic, but after the war that faded into the background, and the Church became the bastion defending society against Sovietization. I saw the patriotic bookstore Antyk as pretty anomalous. Of course there was Radio Maryja to consider. But it wasn't until now that the example of the parish of Jedwabne brought home to me how the Church—at least in that area—tirelessly sustains its prewar anti-Semitism.