The Crime and the Silence (81 page)

Many witnesses say the locals who drove Jews into the square were accompanied by some uniformed Germans, apart from those from the police station. It was certainly a small group, not a powerful unit. The Germans had too many towns to guard, locations where they wanted to “clean up the Jews.” We have German reports of that time that express alarm: ‘We don't have anyone to man the posts.' Suddenly, the police in nearby Szczuczyn, five men, were supposed to keep order in seventy-four towns. The rapid advance into the Soviet Union meant that units of Einsatzgruppe B in the zone of army unit “Środek” were operating farther and farther east. They left behind them lands where they hadn't used the opportunity to “clean up.” To take care of this, the Germans organized a few small operational groups toward the end of June and beginning of July to take over the tasks of Einsatzgruppe B in the area of former Soviet borderlands.

I can state that the perpetrators of the atrocity were Polish residents of Jedwabne and its surroundings, at least forty men. There is no proof that the townspeople in general were the perpetrators. To claim that there was a company of Germans in Jedwabne is as implausible as maintaining the whole town went crazy. Most people behaved passively. I can't judge where that passivity came from. Maybe some people felt compassion for the victims but were terrified by the brutality of the killers. Others, though they may have had anti-Semitic views, were not people quick to take an active part in actions of this kind.

A few hundred burned in the barn, forty killers—that's a lot fewer than Gross wrote.

Those are our findings. The number of victims and culprits indicated emerges from analysis of the evidence. We were unable to come to a fuller count; in the trial documents from 1949, for example, there are the names of a significantly larger number of people connected to the committing of the crime. Only that information was not checked at the time. Now, after so much time has passed, it was impossible for my team to verify it.

You were born in Białystok; you live not far from there in
Łapy. Jewish life used to flourish in the towns in your area. Did you know about that before you got involved in the Jedwabne case?

No, I was never interested.

Jews were like aborigines to you?

The concept was just as remote. From the time I worked on the investigation into Jedwabne I read a lot of material, books on the history and relations of Poles and Jews. But even so I don't always know how to behave. I met Rabbi Schudrich and another rabbi from London at the Jewish cemetery in Jedwabne. When they said kaddish for the dead, I was going to say the Catholic prayer Eternal Rest, but on reflection I just said goodbye.

Before I began working on Jedwabne, I had the feeling anti-Semitism was a marginal phenomenon. Since I've been involved with Jedwabne, I meet it every day. You, too?

I believe— I'm convinced it's not a universal sentiment. But I have to say in the course of the investigation I encountered blatant expressions of anti-Semitism.

What was for you the most difficult moment in the investigation?

When I saw the tooth buds of infants during the exhumations and imagined for a moment what I would feel if someone from my family had died that way, if those had been my children.

 

Notes

1. Lord, Rid Poland of the Jews: or, On Polish-Jewish Relations in Jedwabne in the Thirties

2. I Wanted to Save Her Life—Love Came Later: or, The Story of Rachela Finkelsztejn and Stanisław Ramotowski

3. We Suffered Under the Soviets, the Germans, and People's Poland: or, The Story of the Three Brothers Laudański