The Crime and the Silence

 

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Journal

AUGUST 28, 2000

“It's a lie that Poles killed the Jews in Jedwabne,” says Tadeusz Ś., a retired doctor from Warsaw and an eyewitness to the events of July 10, 1941.

My boss, Adam Michnik, the editor in chief of the
Gazeta Wyborcza
, receives this visitor in his office. When Adam informed me that according to Tadeusz Ś., who was referred to him by a friend, the crime committed in Jedwabne could not be blamed on the Poles, I heard in his voice both excitement and relief. I knew he hadn't been able to come to terms with the facts revealed by Jan Tomasz Gross in
Neighbors
. We'd talked about it many times. Before Gross's book appeared in May 2000, I'd said in a
Gazeta
editorial meeting that we should report on the little town confronting the crime from its wartime past.

Gross reconstructs events on the basis of three different sources: postwar testimony given by Szmul Wasersztejn, court papers from the postwar trial in which the defendants were charged with collaborating with the occupation forces, and the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
, recollections of Jewish emigrants from Jedwabne recorded in the United States. He draws tough conclusions and formulates even tougher hypotheses. In Jedwabne, Poles burned all the town's Jews in a barn, a total of sixteen hundred people. “It was a collective murder in both senses of the word,” writes Gross, “in terms of the number of victims and of their persecutors.”

Adam rejected all my proposals to go to Jedwabne. Nor did he want to publish excerpts from Gross's book before it was released. Now he wants me to hear for myself what really happened. He has insisted that I be present at this meeting, although Tadeusz Ś. wanted to meet with him alone. Our visitor doesn't allow us to record the conversation or print his surname. Reluctantly he agrees to let me take notes. In 1941 he was fifteen. He happened to be in Jedwabne on July 10. He says he was on his way to the dentist.

“In the morning two Germans in black Gestapo uniforms rode into the market square on motorcycles. From a balcony I watched them ordering the Jews to assemble. They put the rabbi's black hat on a stick to mock him. I followed the Jews all the way to the barn.”

“How many Germans did you see at the barn?” asked Adam.

“Three. Germans like to do things properly, so they had the barn owner brought out to open it with a key, though they could have just lifted the doors out.”

“And that was all done by three Germans?”

“There were probably more of them in plainclothes. There were three in uniform, with handguns. I saw the Jews go into the barn of their own accord, as if they were under hypnosis.”

“And they didn't try to escape when it was on fire?”

“No, they didn't. It's horrible.”

“Did any Poles take part in this crime?”

“No, none.”

“In every society there's some criminal element. Pick up any newspaper, you'll find plenty of reports on rapes, murders. During the occupation there were
szmalcowniks
, people who blackmailed Jews in hiding.”

“Only in big cities. You don't know the provinces. It's native-born Poles, the impoverished gentry, who live there. They wouldn't think to take revenge on the Jews for betraying Poles to the Soviets. At the barn they were shouting: ‘Get yourselves out of there, Yids!' There were just three Germans standing there with sawed-off shotguns, not even rifles. The older people who were there thought it was wrong. They talked about it at church the week after.”

“They thought they themselves had been wrong?”

“No, the Jews. Not one of them had it in him to turn on the Germans.”

“The Poles thought the victims were in the wrong?”

“For not defending themselves.”

“But if someone is being murdered in front of me, I should come to his aid, right? And if I don't, because I'm scared, or stunned, because the situation is too much for me, I'd blame myself, not the victims.”

“Poles would have helped them if they'd fought back against the Germans. When the Jews grabbed rifles and went around town under the Soviets, they were real tough guys, but when the Germans took them to the barn, what did they do? Folks get offended if you get them caught up in something like that. The Jews should have defended themselves. People called them cowards because they waited for the Poles to defend them and didn't do anything for themselves. But saying that there were sixteen hundred people in there is a lie and a joke.”

“And how many of them do you think there were?” I interject.

“A thousand, no more,” Tadeusz Ś. replies. I look at Adam and see his face go pale.

At the end Ś. warns us again: “Please don't mention my name. I don't want those Jewish vultures to lie in wait for me at my house.”

SEPTEMBER 1, 2000

The Institute of National Remembrance announces it is launching an investigation into the Jedwabne massacre. When I run into Adam Michnik in the hallway at the
Gazeta Wyborcza
, he tells me that the conversation with Tadeusz Ś. haunts him. He suggests I use it as the basis for a short story set in the town of J. during the war. But I don't write fiction.

I decide to put in a request for a year's unpaid leave and go to Jedwabne for myself, if I can't do it for the
Gazeta
. There must be a memory of the atrocity in the town, there must be some witnesses. I will try to reconstruct the facts, but also what happened to the memory of those events over the last sixty years.

SEPTEMBER 5, 2000

The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. I hold five little pages written in a sprawling hand, with certain words crossed out. It's Szmul Wasersztejn's Jedwabne testimony, translated from the Yiddish. “Infants were murdered at their mothers' breasts, people were brutally beaten and forced to sing and dance. Bloodied and maimed, they were all herded into the barn. Then gas was poured on the barn and it was set afire. Afterward thugs went by Jewish homes, looking for the sick and the children left behind. The sick they carried to the barn themselves, children they hung in pairs by their little legs and dragged them there on their backs, then lifted them with pitchforks and heaved them into the hot furnace of the barn.”

SEPTEMBER 6, 2000

The
Jedwabne Book of Memory
was edited by two rabbis, the brothers Julius and Jacob Baker, who emigrated from Jedwabne to America before the war; for twenty years only a hundred copies existed. Today I read it on the Internet. In the book I find testimonies about 15 Tamuz 5701—or July 10, 1941—recorded by Rivka Vogel (“Goys cut off the head of Gitele, Judka Nadolnik's daughter, and kicked it around like a soccer ball”), Itzchok Newmark (“With a song on their lips, the Poles poured gas on the barn crammed with Jews”), Awigdor Kochaw (“A gang of boys beat me mercilessly and dragged me into the market square; they hounded and savagely beat the tortured, hungry, and thirsty people who were fainting from standing all day in the burning sun”), and Herschel, the third Baker brother from Goniądz, about forty kilometers northeast of Jedwabne (“Completely exhausted, my mother reached Goniądz on July 14; fleeing from the massacre, she ran from Jedwabne through the fields and forests … She was beside herself after what she'd seen, Poles destroying all the Jews.”)

SEPTEMBER 28, 2000

On a trip to Wilno with a group of friends, Irena Grudzińska Gross among them. She says that a few years ago Jan Gross wanted to include Szmul Wasersztejn's testimony in a Polish edition of his essay collection
The Ghostly Decade.
Irena read it and advised him to leave it out. How can you believe something as monstrous as that on the basis of a single testimony?

NOVEMBER 17, 2000

An interview with the historian Tomasz Szarota in the
Gazeta Wyborcza
. He accuses Gross of not even attempting to explain why “fifteen hundred persons in the prime of life, led to their deaths by fewer than a hundred men armed only with sticks, didn't try to defend themselves or at the very least to escape.”

It's hard to understand how Szarota, author of an excellent book on pogroms in Nazi-occupied Europe, could bring himself to utter those words. There were elderly people in that crowd, women with infants, toddlers holding on to their mothers' skirts (Jewish families were often large), whereas young men were scarce—from Wasersztejn's testimony it emerges that they had been killed earlier that day. How many examples does Szarota know of a crowd of people led to slaughter rebelling and attacking its executioners?

In the investigation conducted in the late sixties and early seventies, prosecutor Waldemar Monkiewicz of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes claimed a unit of 232 Germans led by Wolfgang Birkner had arrived in Jedwabne that day, July 10. Referring to this claim, Szarota reproaches Gross for not having studied the role of the Germans in the atrocity: “I doubt that the prosecutor plucked those 232 Germans out of the air, or the trucks for that matter, or the figure of Wolfgang Birkner. In any case it can't be right that the name Birkner isn't mentioned once in Gross's book.”

Personally, I would approach any investigation conducted in the late 1960s, at the time of an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by the state, with extreme caution. Gross had testimonies from the 1949 trial at hand. How is it that not one of the witnesses noticed a convoy of trucks? I don't know how many Germans were there by the barn in Jedwabne, but Tadeusz Ś., who was trying to convince Adam Michnik that the Poles were innocent, saw three of them.

NOVEMBER 21, 2000

I'm told a man phoned the
Gazeta
saying he was prepared to talk about Radziłów. I call him back. Jan Skrodzki now lives in Gdańsk, but is originally from Radziłów, eighteen kilometers from Jedwabne. Three days before the massacre in Jedwabne, the whole Jewish population of Radziłów was rounded up and burned.