The Crime and the Silence (9 page)

Szymon Datner, a renowned historian who worked at the Jewish Historical Institute and with the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, took down witness statements and edited some of the testimonies for the Jewish Historical Commission in the Białystok district after the war. He wrote about Wąsosz: “This quiet little town was the first to fall victim to bloodthirsty instincts. The police and local hooligans went to the houses of Jews in town and carried out a “sacred task” after the example of the slaughter in Kishinev, he wrote, referring to the most famous Russian pogrom, which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. There was killing in homes and on the street. Women were raped and had their breasts cut off. If children were found with their parents at home the children were killed first. They were smashed against the walls.”

I should add the massacre in Wąsosz to my book.

From Radziłów there is a series of testimonies, one by Menachem Finkelsztejn, one by Chana Finkelsztejn, and a collective testimony edited by Datner, about one family that got away in Radziłów: the Finkelsztejns, husband, wife, and four children. Menachem and Chana must be siblings. Chana describes not only the massacre but their time in hiding. “The peasants, supported by the village head, wanted to tie us up and take us to the Gestapo. We escaped, each in a different direction, I with my younger brother … We suffered hunger, cold, filthy conditions. Death stared us in the eye every day. During this time we changed hiding places fifty-two times.”

Datner writes that in 1945, right after the liberation, peasants murdered two Jews from Radziłów, Mosze Dorogoj and his son Akiwa, immediately after they came out of hiding, because they were inconvenient witnesses to the massacre. At that news the Finkelsztejns fled to Białystok, which was their salvation. What became of them later? Can they still be alive? How can I find them?

JANUARY 19, 2001

My thoughts keep returning to the marketplace in Jedwabne. Did the Jews know they were going to their deaths? Or did they delude themselves into thinking they would survive, up until the moment when the flames erupted?

In Menachem Turek's testimony, which I read at the Jewish Historical Institute, there is a story about Jews from Tykocin, a little town in the Białystok region, who were taken out of town and killed by Germans on August 25. This came after a whole series of killings, both German and Polish, but the Jews did not give up hope. “It was announced that all Jews were to assemble in the marketplace the next day at 6:00 a.m., men, women, and children, with the exception of invalids. Many of the women were in hysterics. There was weeping and confusion, they began running to visit each other. Wringing their hands, raising their eyes to heaven, they asked: What's happening, what are we to do? There was a spontaneous gathering at the rabbi's. Some thought they should run away, others maintained nothing terrible would happen, and if part of the community fled, firstly they would be caught, because the whole area was hostile to Jews, and secondly, the Jews who stayed behind might suffer because of the ones who fled. They tried to get some information, but the Poles kept quiet. After a long discussion they decided they would all go to the marketplace together. It was a long night, nobody got any sleep.”

JANUARY 20, 2001

In today's
Gazeta
, an interview with the chairman of the Institute of National Remembrance Council, Sławomir Radoń. He comes to one conclusion: Gross is damaging Poland. At a press conference in December he was already saying
Neighbors
was a dishonest, unreliable book, that the pogrom was organized by the German authorities, and that the Germans provided the fuel to set the barn on fire. Is this going to be the Institute of National Remembrance's official position?

In his 1946 study, historian Szymon Datner writes, “For virtually the entire population of the Łomża and Szczuczyn districts, who were under the spell of the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic ideology of the National Party movement, the occasion arose to rid themselves—under the highest German protection—of their centuries-old neighbors and competitors, those alien and accursed Jews.”

Menachem Turek remembers, “To the sounds of savage threats, cries of revenge, and curses, a mob drunk on looting, led by nationalists who were experienced in boycotting Jewish shops, dragged everything that fell into their hands from Jewish homes. This was a heavy blow not only because family possessions gathered and preserved for generations disappeared overnight and the next day not a single pot was left for a family to cook its dinner in, but because it was all done by inhabitants of the same town.”

Basia Kacper of Szczuczyn testifies that the pogroms were organized by “decent Polish youth and hooligans.” She mentions “Jonkajtys the school head” as their organizer.

I look through a later text by Datner from the Jewish Historical Institute newsletter of 1967,
The Destruction of the Jewish Population in the Białystok Region
. It was cited at the session at the History Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences as proof that the July 1941 pogroms were the work of the Germans.

“The invasion of German troops was accompanied by the cruel and bloody slaughter of the Jewish population,” Datner wrote. The town of Wąsosz “fell victim first”; in Radziłów “people were burned alive”; in Jedwabne they “perished in cruel conditions.” Only an attentive reader will notice the impersonal construction, mentioning no perpetrators, and the subsequent sentence: “However, the greater part of the slaughter in these first months of occupation the Germans carried out on their own.”

JANUARY 21, 2001

A conversation with Helena Datner-Śpiewak, Szymon Datner's daughter. We've been friends for years; I visited her while her father was still alive and living with her.

Helena tells me she has known about Jedwabne for a long time, from her father, but only now has she realized the scale of the crime. I ask her why her father wrote a piece in 1967 that refused to say straight out that the pogroms were the work of the local populations, which he knew because he had taken the testimonies of survivors. In 1946 he wrote about pogroms carried out by locals. Was it that this book, which he wrote in Yiddish, wasn't destined for a Polish readership? And if not, what happened during those twenty years to make him reluctant or unable to repeat the truth he revealed right after the war? Did he think only a text that airbrushed the truth could pass the censors? Did he fear a wave of Communist Party–orchestrated anti-Semitism would destroy the Jewish Historical Institute and that its archive would end up in the trash? Perhaps he was terrified, in a state of mind not unknown to many Jewish Historical Institute employees, and not without reason.

Helena says that the existence of the institute was indeed under threat at that time, but her father only became its director in 1969, and remained so only briefly. He was not a timid man, it seems to her. At the height of Stalinism he was fired from the institute because he protested when some insult to the Joint Distribution Committee was added to a text of his—in accordance with the mandatory party line. Until 1956 he did various jobs, was a mason's assistant, taught literacy classes. “In the Stalinist period it was much more dangerous to behave decently,” says Helena, “and my father paid a high price for it. But later, during the anti-Semitic campaign, he joined Kazimierz Kąkol, the editor in chief of the then disgraceful weekly
Prawo i
Życie
(Law and Life) and the author of vile texts, and in 1968 my father's book
A Forest of Righteous Men
appeared, about Poles who rescued Jews.” Datner's joining with Kąkol makes one realize what fear must have been caused by the renewed hatred toward Jews. Publishing a book like that at that time meant taking the official line—one of the leitmotifs of the anti-Semitic campaign was the theme of ingratitude: Jews slander Poland, though so many Poles risked their lives for them. The book, as Datner wrote in the introduction, was to “illustrate the stance taken by the Polish people in the face of the Jewish people being cut off at the root in full view of the world.”

“My father always stressed that he hadn't written a single word in the book that was untrue,” says Helena. “And whenever anyone started speaking badly of the Poles he would say he wouldn't have survived without the help of Polish peasants after his escape from the ghetto.” Datner described how his hosts in the village of Dworzysko near Sokołka in the Białystok region provided the partisan division he had joined with food and once warned them against the Germans. Once, he told Helena they were Belorussians, not Polish peasants.

In a chapter on Poles in the Białystok region who had saved Jews I find the name of Antonina Wyrzykowska of Janczewko near Jedwabne and the names of those she sheltered: Izrael (Srul) Grądowski (he must be the same man whose trial testimony I read); Jankiel Kubrzański (later he will become Jack Kubran); Berek, Elke, and Mojżesz (Mosze) Olszewicz; Lea Sosnowska (later, Lea Kubrzańska or Kubran), Szmul Wasersztejn.

JANUARY 25, 2001

Marianna Ramotowska in the hospital on Szaserów. Ramotowski spends hours sitting in her room. He tells me that his wife testified in some trials (I
must
find information on the trials and her testimony), and he was interrogated many years later by the prosecutor and asked how he'd saved his wife. He told the prosecutor that the Poles had committed the atrocity. “He started screaming at me that it was the Germans. I got upset, grabbed my cap, and said: ‘If you know better, there's nothing for us to talk about,' and left.”

Was the prosecutor who interrogated him Waldemar Monkiewicz? And did he see trucks full of Germans in Radziłów as well?

JANUARY 27, 2001

In the
Rzeczpospolita
(Republic), a piece by a well-known historian, Professor Tomasz Strzembosz, “Collaboration Passed Over in Silence.” The author cites stories about Jews in the Jedwabne area who killed Poles and also collaborated with and made denunciations to the Soviet authorities, and concludes: “The Jewish population, and especially the youth and urban poor, took part en masse in welcoming Soviet troops. Weapons in hand.”

Where are those masses of Jews supposed to have gotten their arms from? It's ridiculous.

The professor, as he wrote in 1991 in the journal
Karta
, researched the anti-Soviet partisan groups in the Białystok district, concentrating on the Kobielno wilderness area, the marshes along the banks of the Biebrza river that are almost inaccessible for the greater part of the year. Several dozen partisans were in hiding there, at times several hundred camped out, mainly those who were in hiding from the Soviets. Now Strzembosz refers to people he interviewed years ago and with whom he carried on a correspondence regarding Kobielno. As proof of the Jews' collaboration, Strzembosz quotes a letter by a local resident, Kazimierz Odyniec, who wrote that “the corpses of Polish partisans who had fought in Kobielno were carted off by a neighbor of my uncle Władek Łojewski, the Jew Całko.” But what does that prove? Polish peasants were regularly forced to transport Jews to the ghettos and sites of execution, but it would be nonsense to treat this as collaboration.

Strzembosz cites several witnesses from Jedwabne. One of them was Łucja Chojnowska, a relative of the Laudańskis': “In Jedwabne, where the majority of the population was Jewish, there were only three homes that didn't fly the red flag when the Russians came. Our house was among the three.” But Jedwabne was only about 40 percent Jewish. The statement that only three houses didn't fly a flag means that almost all Polish homes welcomed the Russians with red flags.

Another local, Jerzy Tarnacki of Jedwabne, described how they came to arrest him: “A patrol made up of the Polish citizen Kurpiewski and a Jew named Czapnik came for me and my brother Antek.” So: one Pole and one Jew.

After citing testimonies like this, Strzembosz takes the moral high ground: “Even if the Jews didn't see Poland as their fatherland, they didn't have to treat it like the occupying forces did and work with Poland's mortal enemy to kill Polish soldiers and murder Polish civilians fleeing eastward. Nor did they have to take part in selecting their neighbors for deportation, those terrible acts of collective responsibility.”

“Deportation” is a word with an overwhelming emotional charge; whole families, mothers, children, elderly people fell victim to deportations, and the truth about them was suppressed for years. Just like the murder of Jews in Jedwabne. But the professor must know what most readers don't know: that along with all the Poles, thousands of Jews were also deported from Poland (according to the historical estimates, Poles made up 50 percent of deportees, Jews 20 to 30 percent, though they constituted no more than 10 percent of the population). The special role of deportations in Polish martyrology is a separate matter. Compared to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the deportation of Jews into the interior of Russia, even to Siberia, offered what later turned out to be the greatest chance of survival.

Strzembosz reproaches Gross for basing his work on “security police materials gathered from the brutal investigations of 1949 and 1953, at a time when Polish bishops were condemned for treason against the Polish nation and spying for ‘imperialists.'” Had he cast an eye over the trial documents he would have noticed that although the Jedwabne killers were tried at a time when there were show trials of priests and bishops, the trial on Jedwabne was an ordinary criminal trial. Writing about collaboration and treason by Jews who welcomed the Red Army, the author seems unaware that the alternative to the Soviets wasn't a free Poland but a Nazi regime. Use of the term “treason” has another built-in trap. The same terms should be used for the Polish population that welcomed the German troops to the area with flowers and triumphal gates in June 1941. After all, they did so for analogous reasons—they weren't glad that Poland was under foreign occupation, they were glad the hated Soviets had gone.