The Crime and the Silence (69 page)

MAY 29, 2002

The foundation of the president's wife, Jolanta Kwaśniewska, has invited me to Jedwabne for a meeting she's having with high school students. Twenty gymnasium high school students are traveling to America on a trip organized by an American organization, the Jan Karski Educational Foundation, with the support of Kwaśniewska's foundation. I had heard about this trip before. Already in the fall the school was buzzing with talk about whose child would get to go to America. The main attraction is a trip to Disneyland. Early registration was conducted by Jolanta Karwowska, the teacher who went on the trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

“The children worship her like an icon and accept everything she says,” a teacher friend told me. “And she says she's going to America to sound out the Jews. But also that she won't be taken in by them. She goes around the school with a photo of the lady she met on her trip to the Holocaust Museum, whose foundation has now invited her to come to America with the children. She shows it around: ‘This is Miss Kaya, there's a piano in the background and over it the Virgin Mary. She's a Catholic. I wouldn't go on a Jew's invitation.'”

I intervened with the president's office to prevent them from sending the children to America in the care of the school's chief anti-Semite. Whether it's a result of that intervention or independent of it, it's a relief that she's not the one going.

On the road to Jedwabne I talk to women working for Kwaśniewska's foundation. They gave the students selected for the trip some homework assignments that we will now see. The students had to prepare projects on some religion or nationality present in the region. I ask how a school where anti-Semitic remarks are the order of the day deals with the Jewish people. Yes, it was a problem. The themes of Jews and Judaism were taken up only after several interventions by the foundation.

I share my skepticism with the ladies of the foundation. They tell me they have the task of rooting out racial prejudice. “To root out anti-Semitism would take considerable systematic work with the children,” I say. “Shouldn't they be given some more doable task, like re-creating prewar Jewish Jedwabne with the children, or cleaning up the cemetery? Maybe then it might make sense to reward them with a trip to Disneyland?” But the ladies from the foundation argue that they are proposing an excellent educational program: building a bridge of understanding has been shown to work in childrens' camps in the former Yugoslavia.

We arrive at the school, the auditorium has been decorated, the students are dressed up. Kasia Czerwińska (council chairman Stanisław Michałowski's daughter) and Joanna Godlewska (Krzysztof Godlewski's wife) greet me with kisses on the cheek. I'm aware this has a heroic dimension here. The third teacher I know says to me in passing, “Of course we have to pretend we don't know each other.”

The young people are supposed to tell us about their projects. About the Lithuanians we learn how deeply rooted they were in this area, about the Tatars that they live in Gdańsk, and you can see their mosque there. The Jews sound like creatures from another planet.

There are tables set up: “Jedwabne yesterday” (two historical projects by students on their town, one of which doesn't even mention the word “Jew,” even though at the end of the nineteenth century Jews accounted for over 80 percent of the town's population, and after that, a still considerable part of it; the other has a photo of the old monument and of “Jedwabne today.” There is a color photograph of all the most important events in Jedwabne in recent years, like the bishop blessing the school, and one black-and-white photo downloaded from the Internet. It shows President Kwaśniewski laying a wreath at the monument. The shot was taken from above, so that the yarmulke he's wearing is in the foreground. (Mayor Godlewski told me after the ceremony, “The president wore a yarmulke, and I knew I should wear a yarmulke because it was a religious ceremony, but I admit I chickened out—I was afraid they'd burn my house down.”) The yarmulke is a symbol of what the residents think of the ceremony of July 10: that it was a Jewish holiday. I go up to the little girl sitting at the table and ask her if she knows what happened in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.

“A crime was committed,” she recites quickly. “We don't know who did it but we don't feel any aversion to Jews, either.”

“What does that Jewish cow want from our kids?” I hear one teacher say to another.

I learn that the school organized a meeting with the parish priest for the children going on the American trip and their parents. He told them that the Jews were trying to get to the young. He talked about Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD, about Jews wanting to cast guilt on the Poles to demand compensation, whereas on July 10, 1941, hundreds of Germans and 2,500 Mazurites came to town. The school's history teacher sat next to the priest and said nothing. The school head assured people the trip was for purposes of tourism and “had nothing to do with any ceremony or Jews.” Now every parent parrots this when attacked by those whose children weren't lucky enough to be selected for the trip: “Our child is going for purposes of tourism.”

JUNE 3, 2002

A phone conversation with the school head in Jedwabne, Krzysztof Moenke, who is accompanying the children to America. I ask about the meeting with the priest.

“The father didn't want the young people to go unprepared. And it's going to be a tourist trip.”

I ask why no one ever thought of inviting Antonina Wyrzykowska, the heroine of Jedwabne, who saved seven Jews, to the school.

“Before the affair flared up I'd never heard Wyrzykowska's name,” the principal replies, somewhat off point. He has lived in Jedwabne since his birth and his parents were here during the war.

“But once you
had
heard of her?”

“I wouldn't want to drag children into that subject. Jedwabne lived in peace. And what is Israel getting up to with the Palestinians?”

JUNE 14, 2002

I'm going to Radziłów with Jan and Bożena Skrodzki. I was invited along with them to the wedding of the grandson of a farmer from Trzaski who hid Jan during the Soviet occupation. I've just given Jan the documents from another trial discovered by the Institute of National Remembrance. The accused is Antoni Kosmaczewski, Leon Kosmaczewski's brother. He testified that he killed seventeen-year-old Dora Dorogoj in revenge for her collaboration with the NKVD, and that he did it together with Zygmunt Skrodzki. They committed the crime in June 1941 in broad daylight, a hundred and fifty meters from inhabited buildings.

“I felt hatred toward Dora Dorogoj,” Kosmaczewski stated during his interrogation, and explained why. On April 13, 1940, she was on the NKVD truck that came to his house to take him away. He was released after four days in jail.

“When the German forces entered our region in 1941,” Kosmaczewski continued, “and the Red Army retreated, I started looking for Dora Dorogoj to take revenge on her. I found out she sometimes came to the Kopańczyks at their settlement in Słucz … I then asked Kopańczyk: ‘Don't take pity on her, but when she comes to you, send someone to let me know—me, Antoni Kosmaczewski, that is—that she's with you.' About two days later a messenger from Kopańczyk came to me in Radziłów, I don't know his name, to tell me Dora Dorogoj was in their house. At that time I went straight to Zygmunt Skrodzki, the tailor who lived in Radziłów, who had also been looking for Dora Dorogoj. We set off for the Kopańczyks, where Dora Dorogoj was peeling potatoes. When we went into the house, Dora Dorogoj recognized us and was very frightened. Skrodzki told her to collect her things and come out into the yard. When we went out into the yard Skrodzki gave her a beating with a stick right there in the yard because she was stubborn and refused to go. Skrodzki found a shovel in the yard and gave it to Dora to carry. She began to beg and say: ‘I know where I'm going.' Skrodzki replied: ‘You should know.' We walked a hundred and fifty meters from the Kopańczyks' buildings—I think it was one of the Kopańczyks' fields—and Skrodzki and I ordered her to dig a hole. When she had dug a hole about 60 centimeters deep, 80 by 50, we started to beat Dora Dorogoj. Zygmunt Skrodzki beat her with a stick, like the swipple on a flail. I, Antoni Kosmaczewski, struck her with a rock I held in my hand. And so we both beat her until she was dead and we buried her in that hole right after we killed her.”

No search of the area was conducted for the remains of the murdered girl. When Kosmaczewski retracted his testimony at the same trial and Skrodzki never admitted guilt, the court exonerated them for lack of evidence.

“They killed her in the swamp and cut off her head,” Halina Zalewska told me. Menachem Finkelsztejn testified: “The killers concluded a girl wasn't worth the bullet, that's why they cut off her head.”

A few days after Dora was killed, the Dorogoj family was burned in the barn in Radziłów. Her father, Mosze, and one son, Akiwa, escaped. Chaja Finkelsztejn remembers in her memoir that after July 7, 1941, the Germans let them live in their own home, where Dorogoj had his workshop, because they needed a shoemaker. “They asked the priest to baptize them,” she wrote, “but the priest refused.”

When the Germans deported the remaining Jews from Radziłów, the Dorogoj father and son fled.

“I knew the Dorogojs from before the war,” Stanisław Ramotowski had told me. “They lived in a redbrick house on Nadstawna Street. He was a shoemaker, but one of the poorest. I knew they were in hiding, because the elder Dorogoj once crept out to my mother's house, trying to find me, but by then I was already in hiding myself. They hid, but a few people knew about them.”

They managed to take the basic shoemaker's tools with them and supported themselves by making shoes, which someone from the village collected and sold.

“I had a look at the cellar where they survived the war,” Andrzej R. told me. “It was a bunker dug out of the ground, covered with rocks that the farmer had cleared from the field and thrown into a heap. In the spring of 1945 there was still a pile of scraps from a shoemaker's workshop there.”

In the same trial Antoni Kosmaczewski confessed to killing both Dorogojs after the war. Every older inhabitant of Radziłów knows the brothers Kosmaczewski took part in that crime.

In Kosmaczewski's account, in February 1945 he supposedly heard from farmers in Słucz that the Dorogojs had come out of hiding, moved to a farm there, and were threatening that when the Red Army arrived and the hour of retribution with it, they were going to shoot Kosmaczewski with their seven-shooter number 9. Kosmaczewski testified how he killed them: “The evening of the next day I took a wagon of my brother's, Józef Gabriel Kosmaczewski, and Józef and I drove to Walewski. I told him that the Russians were coming close and the Jew Dorogoj was threatening to kill me and Zygmunt Skrodzki in revenge for the death of his daughter, Dora Dorogoj, whom we had killed together. I hinted to Walewski that I had a liter of vodka in my pocket and I was going to apologize to those Jews in order to be reconciled with them and ask their forgiveness for killing the daughter. Walewski listened and believed me when I said I had vodka and was really going to apologize. He went to Samołki, where the Jews were, and brought them back to his own yard … I was standing in the hallway with an axe, hidden behind the curtain … The old Dorogoj on entering the hallway was struck by me on the head with the blunt end of the axe and he fell without even a squeak. Seeing this the younger Dorogoj began to run away screaming. I caught up with him and tripped him so he landed on the ground, and in a second I hit him on the head twice with the axe, the blunt side, and killed him dead … After killing those Jews I called my brother Józef, who was about 10 meters away, and Feliks Mordasiewicz, resident of Radziłów, but present in Słucz at that time. When they arrived we loaded the Jews onto a sled and drove them into the forest at Słucz and threw them down on the snow, leaving them aboveground. There I searched them for arms, but found none.”

JUNE 15, 2002

Trzaski. The mood at the bridegroom's house is festive, but Jan Skrodzki announces, “I want you as my friends to know why Anna and I are going to Radziłów and what I found out about my father.” And disregarding the excitement of the wedding he reads them the description I just handed to him: “Zygmunt Skrodzki beat her with a stick, like the swipple on a flail…” He only stops reading when the ceremony of leading the bridegroom to his wedding begins.

We drive to the church in a cavalcade of cars, and afterward attend the wedding feast in a Jedwabne restaurant. I briefly drop in on friends. They can't get over the fact that someone from the area had the courage to invite me to such an event: “In Jedwabne everyone would be scared he'd get his cottage burned down.”

JUNE 16, 2002

With the Skrodzkis I go to see Franciszek Ekstowicz, the man who was once a journeyman with Skrodzki. Jan reads him Kosmaczewski's testimonies.

“That was not your father who did the killing,” Ekstowicz protests. “I swear to you. Kosmaczewski had a falling-out with your father and that's why he pointed the finger at him.”

“I know he's not telling the truth,” Jan says to me after we leave.

I ask his wife, Bożena, how Jan, given the chance to accept the “easier truth,” doesn't take advantage of it.

“You saw yourself how Franciszek wasn't really paying attention, he was moving around the kitchen, but when the name Dorogoj was dropped he froze. He knows it is the truth and Jan knows it. In some sense Jan always knew, but it's only now that he's engaged in this research that he has finally admitted it to himself. His mother once said to his father in anger, ‘What kind of life have I had, I was alone—you went to jail for killing a Jewish girl.' And why did his father cut himself off from the family toward the end of his life? And before that never wanted to meet anyone from Radziłów, even a former journeyman, who lived in Otwock, not far away? He was running away from his own memory.”