The Crime and the Silence (50 page)

AUGUST 30, 2001

Ramotowski asks me to bring him a pot and pan.

“They feed us well here, but I want to scramble some eggs in the frying pan, and the pot's for some broth. Who's going to make me scrambled eggs on the other side?

He tells me a long story—though talking is painful for him—about a Jewish girl he liked before Marianna.

“She was from Wąsosz. Her family, the Skroblackis, had a cloth shop; I rode my bicycle all the way there to see her. I'd arrange to meet her on a bridge and take her for a little ride, she sat on the crossbar. Once, she took me to the shop and I saw her cut me a length of cloth from a bale, for a suit, because mine had completely threadbare sleeves. Her father, Wolf Skroblacki, was there and didn't protest. It was the summer of 1941 when I saw her again. I was on my bicycle on the way to Szczuczyn, she was walking toward Wąsosz. She told me that while she'd been in Szczuczyn visiting family, Poles had murdered her parents with axes, and she was going home to let them kill her, too. She didn't want to live without her parents. I tried to stop her, I argued with her: ‘I'm already hiding one person, I can hide another; together you two will feel more at ease.' She refused, it was ‘no no no.' And so we parted ways. I liked my Marianna before the war, but I'd liked that other girl more.”

I ask the girl's name.

“That's the worst part. Every day I regret not saving her. At night, I lie awake and can't remember her name.”

The next story is about he and his wife keeping kosher and observing Shabbat in the first years of the war.

“There were separate dishes for milk and meat. Marianna explained it to me, and I was happy to go along with it. Friday with us was different than with others. We lit candles and put on good clothes. We didn't work on Saturdays. But later she neglected it, we got a girl in to help with the housework and we couldn't keep it up. Marianna wouldn't have pork in the house, but she made sure no one noticed her refusing it when we were visiting other people.”

I saw him about a hundred times this year and it seemed he'd told me everything. Why did he only tell me this story when he knew he was dying?

“Did your wife make you swear you wouldn't tell anybody?” I ask.

Ramotowski smiles and I see that I hit the nail on the head.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

I'm in London for a few weeks when I receive the news about the terrorist attacks in America.

In a suburb I visit Rafael Scharf, one of the founders of the Institute of Polish-Jewish Studies at Oxford. He attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Kraków and left for England before the war. I tell him I'm unable to understand why Rachela Finkelsztejn, by then Marianna Ramotowska, wouldn't leave Poland after the war. She had relatives in America and Palestine. Maybe she felt her Jewish family would never accept her goyish husband, an uneducated man, in the bargain?

“After the war wasn't a good time for mixed marriages,” says Scharf, who tells me his story: He dreamed of Palestine. But the war broke out, and he spent it in England. His English wife knew when she married him that as soon as possible, they'd leave for Eretz Israel. After the war she said, “Let's go.” But he understood that he couldn't do it to her, that she would always be an alien there, that his friends would lower their voices when she came into the room. They stayed in England. They only visited Israel.

In Poland, Scharf belonged to a student branch of Jabotyński's Zionist-Revisionist party; he was under Jabotyński's spell and so in Israel he directed his first steps to King George Street in Tel Aviv, where the party was based (by this time Jabotyński had died). A moment after he arrived, Menachem Begin came in—a fellow party member from student days, and a friend. But he wouldn't shake Scharf's hand. He said to no one in particular, “Well, look, Felek Scharf is here as a tourist.” And then he spat. The old gentleman tells me this with such an expression of pain on his face; it was as if the conversation had taken place yesterday.

“I've lived more than sixty years in London,” he says, “and I still feel like a stranger here. Israel is always my point of reference, when I read the paper I start with the news from Israel, that is my world. But I couldn't condemn my wife, who is not Jewish, to that move.”

OCTOBER 1, 2001

Back in Warsaw. I go to Konstancin immediately. Ramotowski is feeling lousy. He has no strength to entertain me and asks me to tell him a story he has already heard from me several times, about a Ukrainian boy who was a friend of my aunt's. Every time I tell it I embellish it with new details.

In Skryhiczyn my family lived among Poles and Ukrainians, I tell him, but only one boy, Włodek Kuluk, who played the balalaika, was admitted to the inner circle of my future aunts and uncles. When in the thirties my aunt Ida Merżan sent a story about Skryhiczyn called “My Goat and I” to Janusz Korczak's
Mały Przegląd
(Little Review), Korczak proposed she go to work in the Orphans' Home on Krochmalna Street, and before long she brought Włodek to Warsaw. He worked in an orphanage in Otwock for handicapped children (Aunt Ida, a renowned Korczak scholar after the war, told me that when the children saw a dog, they asked if it was Jewish or Aryan, as they were unable to grasp that the whole world wasn't subject to a dichotomy of race).

Early on September 1, 1939, one of the first bombs dropped on Warsaw hit the Otwock orphanage. Włodek Kuluk brought a large number of the children with him to Warsaw and moved with them into the outbuilding of a friendly guard. It wasn't a great idea to keep a crowd of children who spoke only Yiddish in occupied Warsaw, so Kuluk took them to Białystok, which was already under Soviet occupation (like most of the employees of childrens' homes, and to the vexation of Dr. Korczak, he had Communist sympathies). The children got into a childrens' home and he was conscripted into the army. A tall, handsome blond fellow, he was transferred to Moscow, to an honor guard. One of my aunts, Ita Kowalska, a Communist and before the war a political prisoner, recognized him as he stood guard in front of the office of the newly established Union of Polish Patriots. After the war my aunt worked to introduce Communism to Poland, and as soon as it was established she brought Kuluk in from the USSR. He in turn, as soon as he got back, set about looking for Jewish children, in the framework of the Bricha—an illegal organization that sought to send Jewish survivors to Palestine. He was to travel with them as their guardian.

Aunt Ita found out three days after the train departed that at the station, when documents were checked, it had been discovered that he was not a Jew, which seemed suspicious, so he was sent to the secret police on Szucha Avenue. She went to intervene on his behalf with some vice minister. “How can it be,” she asked, “that when a Jew thinks he's a Pole, he can become a minister, but when a Pole thinks he's a Jew, you arrest him?” They let him go. But that was 1948, and the train he missed was one of the last trains leaving Poland with Jews.

It wasn't until after 1956 that my uncle Pinio Rottenberg brought Kuluk to Israel. Pinio had no doubt that Israel was the only proper place for Jews, and he extended the principle to Kuluk. It entered family legend that Kuluk cofounded the zoo in Tel Aviv. In any case, he worked there. Until the Six-Day War, when two gentlemen from the Mossad turned up at his house and gave him forty-eight hours to leave Israel.

I keep that part of the story from Stanisław, who identifies with Kuluk and hears the tale of his Israeli life as his own alternative and desired fate. The Mossad no doubt suspected a non-Jew who wanted to live in Israel of being a Soviet spy. At least that's what Kuluk told one of my aunts, who bumped into him by accident in the Warsaw Zoo in the seventies, leading a group of schoolchildren on a field trip. After returning to Poland he gave no indication that he was back to anyone in our family, and he never wrote to Pinio, which remained a source of sadness to my uncle twenty years later when he told me about it.

OCTOBER 5, 2001

Conversations with friends about the extent to which the Jedwabne affair had an influence on the parliamentary election results: Unia Wolności (Freedom Union), the only post-Solidarity party that had members present at the Jedwabne ceremony on July 10, did not make it into the parliament; while for the first time two parties whose members openly voice anti-Semitic views—the LPR (League of Polish Families), the party of Father Rydzyk and Radio Maryja, and the populist Samoobrona (Self-Defense)—did get in. A prominent right-wing politician, when asked about this in the
Gazeta
, replies that the Jedwabne affair had an indirect influence on the League's popularity: “A conviction grew among the masses that strangers—politicians, journalists, historians, and finally forces abroad—had decided to make murderers out of us.”

OCTOBER 7, 2001

Jedwabne. I've come to attend the October session of the town council. As Krzysztof Godlewski was forced to resign, a new mayor must be elected. There are two candidates, a farmer and a veterinarian. In the corridors I hear that the farmer has a good chance, because he's supported by the parish priest. But the vet also has a strong position. It is he who puts the “stamp of purity” on milk containers and gives permission for artificial inseminations, so no farmer will vote against him.

I begin to chat with one of the councilwomen.

“Godlewski was a good mayor; you can't say anything against him,” she says. “He was the first decent one; before he came in we always had swindlers, abuses, manipulations. It all went wrong for him because of the Jews, because he let them in.”

“Should he have kept them out?”

“There was no good solution. I'll tell you, privately, what I think: Jews are human beings, too. And those Polish families shouldn't have joined in when the Germans were out killing. Only please, miss, don't mention my name.”

Janusz Å»yluk is in the hall. I jotted down a conversation I had with him half a year ago at the residents' meeting with Ignatiew. He came up very close to me and addressed me in such an aggressive tone that I recoiled. “Are you going to write more of your lies?” “I can also write your truth, sir, and have you authorize the statement,” I answered politely, but he only snarled back, “I'm not going to talk to you.” Leszek Dziedzic, whom I told about the incident, identified him as Janusz Å»yluk. He hasn't lived in Jedwabne for years, but he comes back often, and his father took part in the massacre.

He came up to me again at the next council session: “My father was arrested after the war. When he got out of prison, his back was black and blue from beatings, and he died soon after. You visit me in dreams like a bad omen. Why do you hate Poles so much?” And during the next break: “I know Poles took part in it, too. It hurts when people say that everyone murdered, because there were three groups: the ones who wanted to, the ones who were forced to, and the ones who watched.” When I told Dziedzic this, he said Janusz Å»yluk was one of the few tormented by his conscience; he doesn't know how to handle it, and if anyone covers his head in ashes around here, it's him. When I leave the council meeting, Janusz Å»yluk turns to me: “Would you be able to get me a Talmud?”

Stanisław Michałowski is not at the session; he's in the hospital. I visit him in Cardiology. He's badly affected by the witch hunt whipped up by Bubel, or rather the fact that so many people want to believe in Bubel's misdeeds. Michałowski's family lived here for generations, his grandparents had a restaurant on the market square, they were a well-known, respected family. Just as he was: after having built a construction company, he now manages a market ground. Before he got involved with the monument to the massacre he was the most successful and respected citizen in Jedwabne. No one had previously questioned his position.

OCTOBER 9, 2001

I call Janusz Żyluk to tell him there is no Polish translation of the sixty-four volumes of the Talmud, but a friend of mine has four volumes of an English edition and can lend them to him.

“I see. There are some things they don't want others to know,” Å»yluk replies.

He must have read quite a bit about the Talmud. Those are key words in anti-Semitic publications. In the prewar Catholic press they wrote, “The Hebrew faith is a mere fiction, intended to confuse naive persons of other faiths, while the real Jewish religion is based on the Talmud and other so-called ‘holy books' about which prosecutors would doubtless have a great deal more to say than professors.”

Żyluk is obviously torn between what he hears around him and reads on anti-Semitic websites, and what gnaws at him and worries him—a consciousness of the crime committed.

“There's no one here,” he says to me, “who could look at his own family and say he has nothing on his conscience. Maybe it was because of the toxic air blowing from the marshes, maybe the Church's influence. When they put up a monument in the sixties that said
Place of Execution of Jews. Gestapo and Nazi Police Burned 1,600 Jews Alive
, people came to hack off
Place of Execution
of
from the inscription, for fun, to make it look like it said
Jews' Gestapo
. It's a stupid town. They don't even realize that they're doomed. I don't know any people here anymore, everyone moved away. I went to the cemetery. I said kaddish in my own way, laid a pebble. I asked my mother about the whole thing just once, but she was scared. She's dead now. No one wants to tell me what my father did. You've read the case documents. Is there anything there about my father? If you find anything, please let me know.”

OCTOBER 26, 2001

I try to re-create a map of the town before the war; the Jewish accounts I have are contradictory and I know the reconstruction will be impossible without drawing on Polish memory, too. I find Jan Górski, born in 1909, who has lived in Jedwabne since before the war.