The Crime and the Silence (14 page)

I go by her house, but Helena Chrzanowska, as I have learned her full name is, asks me in a low voice not to disturb her and her husband. He is very sick; they need peace and quiet.

Another Jedwabne resident, Henryka Adamczykowa, told a journalist, “I can still hear the screaming of people being led to their deaths. I can smell the burning.”

She lives in an apartment building; I talk to her through the door. After the unpleasantness that followed the publication of the article I read, she doesn't want to talk to any more journalists. The next name I try is Halina Popiołek. She remembered that her father, Józef Bukowski, said on July 9, 1941, that the townspeople were plotting against the Jews. She saw Jews being herded and beaten with sticks. She saw “our folks” making young Jews carry a statue of Lenin.

She lets me in but is reluctant to talk about the atrocity.

“For years I went to light a candle on the anniversary of the massacre, and on All Saints',” she explains. “This year, when I turned up with candles on July 10, there were journalists there, photographers, some TV cameras, and my picture was in the local paper. The priest bawled me out, my neighbors turned their backs on me. I hear everywhere that I was paid off by the Jews. I won't ever say anything again.”

I express my regret that Helena Chrzanowska won't talk to me, either.

“You have to understand her. How many times have people insulted her for being Jewish. I would never call a person names like that,” she assures me.

I visit Alina Żukowska; I know from Zygmunt Laudański, one of the killers, that she was in Jedwabne on that day, July 10, 1941. I find her chopping wood. She lives in a crumbling communal apartment without central heating. For twenty-eight years she darned stockings. She doesn't stop working for a minute during the whole two hours of our conversation. The cold is so biting it's hard to take notes because my hands are freezing.

“Did Zygmunt Laudański tell you then that he fled into the fields because he didn't want to participate in hounding Jews?”

“Nothing of the sort,” says Alina Å»ukowska, who seems to have forgotten she testified on behalf of several of the accused, including Zygmunt Laudański, at the trial in 1949. “I've already given testimony to prosecutor Ignatiew. He didn't get in touch with me before, so what does he want from me now? I was in Pisz last year, they had already started writing about Jedwabne then. I met Jerzy Laudański, asked him, ‘Have you read it?' And he said he hadn't. He was lying. Everybody's lying.”

Å»ukowska ridicules what Gross quoted from the trial of Karol Bardoń, one of the men convicted, who died in prison. “I read in Gross that Bardoń told the court he didn't round up Jews, because he was a mechanic at the police station and he was repairing cars all day. What cars? They didn't have as much as a motorcycle, or even a bicycle. When they wanted to go somewhere they had a local hitch up a cart. Bardoń was sentenced to death, then pardoned, and he ate our Polish bread in prison. Even though he was from Silesia, he was a German stooge, not a mechanic. And there's a Jew in Gross's book who's lying, Icek Neumark, who says he escaped from the barn, but he wasn't even there. I saw him go into hiding the day before. That rotten Jew Wasersztejn left the country and passed sentence on Jedwabne.

“That night, after the burning of the Jews, I met the Laudańskis' neighbor, Genek Kalinowski. He said the mayor had ordered everyone to stand guard at the cottages overnight because the Jews might take revenge. I sat with the Laudańskis in front of our sheds. Now the Laudańskis are playing grandees, their pictures in the paper, they want to whitewash themselves, make out they're so clean. So why were they convicted? I didn't see them at it. But you could hear the screaming two kilometers away.”

“Did you ever hear someone say afterward, ‘It's a pity they're gone'?”

“Until the Gross book came out, no one mentioned the Jews.”

One of the people I talked to yesterday has introduced me to a woman who witnessed the atrocity. She agrees to talk to me, but won't allow me to print her initials. She was ten years old at the time.

“I saw the Smułek family being driven out. It was all people they knew doing it, Poles. There weren't any Germans there. The Choneks, for whom my mother had worked before the war, said to her when they were on their way to the market square: ‘Our hour has come.' That's how indifferent they were, how resigned, their children weren't even crying. Bielecki, on horseback, chased a young Jewish woman, Miss Kiwajkowa. When he was in prison under the Soviets, she'd taken care of his children.”

I check the name on my laptop. There it is. Władysław Bielecki, who chased Jews on horseback, is mentioned by Antoni Niebrzydowski, one of the suspects in the trial of 1949.

“It was scorching hot,” the woman continues. “A Jew, well on in years, wanted to go to the well in the market square to draw water, and a boy who couldn't have been more than twelve hit him and pushed him away. The Poles were holding sticks, pieces of tire, and they were furious. They must have cut up those tires earlier, right? I followed the Jews when they were put into rows. There were young girls and women, such pretty ones, some pregnant and some with children in baby blankets. I saw boys of twelve hounding Jews; a lot of those taking part were in their late teens. Some were herding their own schoolmates. How could they look them in the eye, killing them? I was afraid to go near the barn in case they forced me in, too. They poured gasoline from a can at the barn's four corners. It caught fire immediately. I can't sleep at night. I see it as if it were yesterday. There were many more participants in the crime than were later convicted. It was an inferno of hatred. That terrifying scream that probably didn't last for more than two minutes, it's still inside me. This morning I woke up at four again because it came back to me. Why I went there, a little girl, I don't know. Maybe so that I could be a witness to the truth now.”

Before the war her parents worked for Jews, and her mother always spoke well of them. She remembers the names of her Jewish neighbors: the Powroźniks, who had a grocery, the Prawdziweks had a granary, the Kiwajeks had a farm, the Fiszmans a sawmill.

At the Dziedzices' home in the evening, Leszek tells me about Helena Chrzanowska.

“You can't talk to her about what she went through; she can't bear to remember it. She keeps saying, ‘May God forgive them, it's not for me to judge.' Once a woman from the neighborhood told her to get her son Józek to run for town council. She replied, ‘God forbid, he can't run, if anything goes wrong, they'll say it's the Jew's fault.' When I tried to persuade her that it probably wouldn't be that bad, she confessed that a neighbor of hers, an older man, had threatened her across the fence: ‘We're not done yet, we can still finish what we started.' I know him, his family took part in the killing. He can barely stand, but he could still manage to do someone in. And recently, I went to the pharmacy. Miss Helena was just buying something. A neighbor comes in, sees her, and starts yammering about Jews, just like that, on purpose.”

In the midst of the conversation, Dziedzic interjects: “Because in your religion…” It was clear to the participants in yesterday's meeting with Ignatiew that I must be Jewish, since I work for the “Kosher Times,” as they call the
Gazeta Wyborcza
here, and don't yet use their code phrases “Soviet collaboration,” “Jewish conspiracy,” and “Gross's lies.” But why does Leszek Dziedzic decide I'm Jewish? He probably can't imagine that someone who's not herself a Jew would wish to discover the truth or feel for those who were murdered. Experience tells him it doesn't happen. He has always been completely isolated in his compassion for the victims.

FEBRUARY 9, 2001

Łomża. In the state archive I look for minutes of prewar meetings of the town council, which had to be made up of a mixture of Poles and Jews. The archivist explains that the documents could just as well have made their way east with the Red Army, in which case they might be in Mińsk or Grodno, as west with the German army, in which case they might be in Gdańsk, for example. Or they could have wound up elsewhere by accident. Probably they were destroyed. It transpires that the archivist herself is from Jedwabne. I ask if she knows what's being said in the town.

“This week I was at my mother's. The priest warned people in his sermon not to reveal to strangers anything that might damage Poland.”

She pulls out an invaluable item: “List of Post-German and Post-Jewish Real Estate Abandoned in the Jedwabne Area,” drawn up on September 3, 1946. It includes dozens of names of former Jewish owners of houses and lands.

I drive to Jedwabne to find my next subject, but he won't let me print his name, either. “In the sixties, when I was no more than ten, I overheard drunken neighbors quarreling about it. Who got the most gold, who raped a Jewish woman. One guy screamed, ‘You asshole, I know where you got that fur-lined coat.' And another replied: ‘And you thrashed that Jewish girl behind the mill and cut her throat.' I remember who it was, but I don't want to give any names, I'm just telling
you.
Another time I heard adults talking about a couple of thugs who went into a Jewish home, and one of them hit a child with an iron rod—so his brain splattered the man's clothes, and he made the mother clean it up. Another time, a friend's mother told a story in my presence, not seeing me there, about locals going to Polish homes to rustle up a gang to ‘get the Jews.' This woman wrapped her husband's head in bandages to make it look like he was sick and couldn't get up. Sure, the Germans incited the Poles, but some of the locals were already on the same page with the Germans. It wasn't all imposed. All the older people in town know that. No Pole was ever harassed by Germans for
not
burning Jews. On the other hand, Poles went from house to house, made others join them, and sometimes they really came down on someone if he wouldn't go with them.”

Back to Łomża for a visit with Jan Cytrynowicz. He was baptized before the war, and after it ended he lived in Jedwabne, where he ran a leather workshop until his retirement. He lives in a tidy little house in the center of Łomża. He, his wife, and a small dog on the ground floor, their son on the floor above them.

I read him my notes from the 1949 trial documents. Cytrynowicz demonstrates extensive knowledge of the subject. His wife, Pelagia, keeps raising her voice: “What is all this nonsense he's telling you? We are always arguing about it. Would a Pole have done such a thing if a German wasn't standing behind him with a rifle?”

I ask Cytrynowicz, who survived the war in Russia, when he first heard about the atrocity.

“Right after the war. I tanned sheepskins for coats, and they paid me in grain and salt pork. I was a bachelor, I liked to drink. My drinking buddies didn't know about my background at first, I wasn't from Jedwabne, after all, so after a few glasses of vodka they would boast: ‘I chased him all over town,' ‘I stabbed him hard.' They were happy they'd killed a couple of Jews. But sober, they didn't say anything. Just that the Jews had gone to the burning of their own accord, because their religion told them to. Peasants wore spencers, those short homemade jackets. If someone went to church in a fur-lined coat, you knew it had belonged to a Jew.”

“And when your friends found out you were Jewish, did their attitude change?”

“I was baptized as a boy, and so as a Catholic I was considered a Pole. Girls cuddled me, none of them called me a Jew-boy. But I felt a strangeness. If I'd met any Jew at that time I would have left Poland, as did many Jews after the war, but I didn't have any contact at all. Where were you going to find a Jew after the war? Even if there was one he'd be afraid to admit it.”

Once in Przasnysz a man came up to Jan and whispered, “You a Jew by any chance?” He denied it, but the man didn't believe him and said if he went to such and such a place, he could arrange to emigrate. That was after 1956, when for a short time Jews were legally permitted to emigrate. But by then he had a Catholic wife.

I return to Jedwabne on an ice-covered road. Krzysztof Godlewski invited me for the evening. A nice big villa, his sweet wife (a teacher), three children. He was born in 1955. He's not from Jedwabne itself but from the area. He became mayor in 1992, he's in his third term. Immediately after reading Gross's
Neighbors
, he laid a wreath at the monument on July 10 with the chairman of the town council, Stanisław Michałowski. At the next council meeting, the councilman Stanisław Janczyk proposed buying yarmulkes for Mayor Godlewski and Chairman Michałowski to portray them as “serving Jewish interests.”

FEBRUARY 10, 2001

I start the day in Łomża, where I ferret around in local libraries. I look in on the reading rooms of the Wagów Society, the public library, and the Northern Mazovia District Museum. I read issues of
Wolna
Łomża
(Free Łomża), a paper from the time of the Soviet occupation. “Everyone should unmask the lordly minions who—in wholesale and speciality stores—sold out the interests of the masses in Poland before the war.” In the same issue there's a piece by Chaim Katz, a shoemaker: “The liberation has come for me, I'll be able to work in a co-op, I won't have to live in poverty anymore. I would have been able to accept that penniless existence if it weren't for the Poles' attitude toward me.” Texts like this in an occupation paper couldn't have aroused sympathy for Jews.

Following the trail of names mentioned in the 1949 court trial documents, and also deciphering initials that have already been published in the press, I look for witnesses in Jedwabne and its environs.

I've found a strategy for talking to people. The chief principle: don't ask about the massacre. Those questions send people into a panic. Instead, I open my laptop. I say, “Were you at the meeting with the prosecutor? That was quite a drama. Shall I read you my notes?” Or, “I found testimonies from the 1949 investigation in the archive. Do you remember that both the Laudańskis were convicted? I'll read you what they said.”