The Crime and the Silence (22 page)

The brick house at number 1 Przytulska Street is empty, garbage piling up in the yard. Once, there was a boarding school here. At number 3 an older lady comes to the door. I am told the house used to belong to Germans, and she came here from Wizna in the sixties: “Once, Father went to Wąsosz for grain, it was 1941 but the Germans hadn't come yet, and he met two little Jews. They showed him cherry leaves, and that summer they were brown and twisted, a sign that the Lord Jesus had decreed that ‘blood will flow onto you and onto your children.' They read it in the Talmud that God had decreed that they would perish, and they accepted it.”

In a friendly tone, without any of the anger I usually encounter, she tells me how it really was. Listening to anti-Semitic ravings from seemingly sweet elderly ladies is probably even more disturbing than listening to an openly anti-Semitic and unsympathetic priest.

At number 5, a man: “I was born in 1931, but I came here after the war. Gross writes a pack of lies. When I came here a lot of people were still alive who told me how the Germans rounded up the Jews.”

At number 7, a well-dressed man in his thirties, the owner of a business, speaks to me across a fence: “Jews have positions in government and the Church. Why are you digging it all up? Because it's a gold mine. Now the Jews want to get money out of us. Those journalists who come here, they're Jewish citizens. Gross looks like a bum. The Jews behave as if this were their home, but when I'm in a foreign country I can't do whatever I like. It was wrong of the Jedwabne authorities to let journalists in to dig up Jewish truth. It's not our truth.”

Polish truth, Jewish truth. It's obvious to many residents that there are two separate truths here.

At number 9, a leather workshop. A man in his forties leans out. Like the previous man, he talks to me without opening the gate. “I don't comment on political matters,” he says coldly, and closes the house door behind him. So that's what the Cytrynowiczes' son-in-law (and son of one of the participants in the massacre) looks like.

I go no farther. Janina Biedrzycka lives in the next house. I'm already acquainted with her nasty views.

Perhaps going around Jedwabne with maps showing what used to be Jewish property wasn't the greatest idea. I put the papers in my backpack. I stop residents in the former Old Market to ask them where the temple stood before the war, and they tell me quite politely they don't know, though you might expect them to be tired of the hundreds of questions put to them by journalists visiting the town recently. Radio reporters run around the market, sticking out microphones to anyone they meet, cameras shoot footage, Western TV crews park their cars outside city hall.

In the evening, after returning to the hotel, I read in the
Gazeta
about the electoral convention of the SLD (Union of the Democratic Left) in Łódź on Sunday. “In the matter of Jedwabne we can never express our pain sufficiently or use the word ‘sorry' often enough,” the party leader Leszek Miller said. Asked at the press conference how he knew what had really happened in Jedwabne, he replied that he recommended that everyone read Anna Bikont's piece in the
Gazeta
.

MARCH 14, 2001

At the hotel I read the morning papers. Father Stanisław Musiał, a Kraków Jesuit, comments on Bishop Stefanek's sermon for the
Gazeta
. He says he read it “with sadness and astonishment.” “It's hard to find a more despicable or cruel crime in human history,” he says. “Jedwabne reveals to us and to the world a new truth about our people (after all, the Jedwabne killers were members of our Church). I would expect priests of the Catholic Church not to waste time looking for circumstances that mitigate the scale and significance of the crime in Jedwabne, but to help Polish Catholics whose compatriots soaked their hands in the blood of innocent Jews to find a path to God, to civil society, and to peace with themselves. Unfortunately the Church in Poland didn't undertake this pastoral task immediately after the war, nor did it do so later.”

No one points to anti-Semitism as a sin of the Polish Church as clearly as Father Musiał. I know he has suffered various kinds of trouble and chicanery from Church authorities because of it. I talked to him once and thanked him for what he wrote. He asked me if I knew of a derelict synagogue that, if rebuilt, would be used for prayer by Polish Jews. He wanted to hold a collection among his parishioners for such a reconstruction. Later I heard how much hostility he encountered among his parishioners for his stance in the Jedwabne affair. I doubt that he could raise that money.

Jedwabne. A shop on Przytulska Street with a sign saying
WESTERN CLOTHES
and a sign on the door reading
50% DISCOUNT
. It was closed yesterday.

“I'm not from here,” the nice older saleswoman tells me. “But I heard the house was built after the war.”

I ask how sales are going.

“Badly. Only people with money come in.”

I am witness to the purchase of a necktie—before, it cost one zloty, with the discount it's fifty groszy.

A traveling salesman comes into the grocery store on the market square—once upon a time he would have been Jewish—and displays a little dressing case: a measuring tape, scissors, a sewing kit, twelve colors, eight zlotys for the lot. The woman shopkeeper turns the box around, interested. “If you come back tomorrow I'll have the money ready and buy it off you.”

A visit to city hall.

“We had our budget cut this year,” say the social security center workers. “The money we had last year for temporary benefits would have been our salvation. We could have helped the neediest clear their debts.”

From their stories a picture emerges of a town in decay, one that hasn't managed to find its place in the new reality. Once, there was a knitwear factory where ladies' panties and bras were assembled, but it collapsed at the beginning of the post-Communist period. There used to be an agricultural co-op, but only the building is left. You can look for jobs with the Cooperative Bank, the city, in schools. There are shops, doctor's offices, a veterinarian's practice, two hair salons, a post office, and that's it. There are a few private firms, but they don't employ many people: Kruszywa supplies gravel, Polbruk produces paving blocks, Sonarol fits windows, Viga is a company trading in anything and everything. Last year the furniture manufacturer Ital-Polfin closed down after being in business only two years.

“People probably go on living here from pure habit,” say my interlocutors. “And also if you wanted to leave, it's hard to sell your home, a lot of houses stand empty.”

My
Gazeta
piece on the Laudańskis has an unexpected effect. One of the women at the municipal offices says: “Everybody knows that Laudański scum did it all, and afterward got out as fast as they could. Is the town to blame for that?”

I look in on the mayor.

“We have about forty percent unemployment in this town,” says Godlewski. “Add to that the hidden unemployment in the countryside, where several adults work a few hectares. People feel they're worse off than before 1989. Poverty is spreading. Under the Communists you couldn't squeeze into the morning bus to Łomża; the cotton factories employed three and a half thousand people. There was a lot of fake employment, too, like at the state stores where there was never anything for sale, but you could always make a living. Maybe that's why part of the population in Jedwabne reacts aggressively. They're down on their luck, and it's hard to expect noble feelings from people to whom life is brutal.”

A visit to the next office. “Only God forbid you tell anybody who you talked to”; “It's best if you put your notebook away, we'll be honest with you.”

“Are you ladies from here?”

“I am, unfortunately.”

“My parents came here after the war, in 1951, or as they'd say now, on the tenth anniversary of the burning of the Jews.”

“I came here in 1974, so my parents couldn't have rounded up any Jews.”

“If only Adam Małysz, the ski jumper, came from Jedwabne!” the first lady says, and sighs.

“My friend and I were trying to work out how to change the birth records here, because you're ashamed to admit you're from here. I might ask to have Kossaki put down as my birthplace, that's where I grew up. It's part of the Jedwabne municipality, but you wouldn't see that right away.”

“My daughter defended her master's thesis,” another lady responds. “They lowered her grade after asking her if she was from Jedwabne. People in town are already talking about new troubles with getting a visa.”

“Our children are embarrassed,” says a third. “My son had a pen with the company name
Sonarol—Jedwabne
on it. I called him in Białystok and he told me he'd hidden it. He's twenty-four, a student, and he's ashamed of his pen because it says ‘Jedwabne.' Nowadays no one would get it into their head to kill a neighbor for having a different religion.”

The husband of one of the women comes in: “Gross heard from three drunks in a bar what was supposed to have happened here, and the more beers he bought them, the more had happened.”

“Are you sure that's how it went?” I ask. “Gross met with a bunch of drunks, and then the prime minister, the president, and the primate came out and spoke about the participation of Poles in the massacre?”

“Did the Jews apologize for denouncing Poles to the NKVD?”

“Franek, you'd better go.” His wife soothes him.

I wanted to bring Halina Popiołek—the one person in Jedwabne who for years has been going to the place where the Jews were burned to light a candle on the anniversary of the atrocity—a copy of the
Gazeta
with my piece on the Laudańskis. Her niece opens the door.

When she sees me she starts shrieking: “She's not here. Do you know how old my aunt is? And the lies she tells? Please don't come back here!”

I try to protest politely that I'm not there to get any information, just to give her my piece.

“Leave at once, please. I'm not letting journalists onto my property, I'll have to deal with the consequences later.”

A man in his thirties calls to me from the other side of the street and invites me in.

As it turns out he's a relative of Ms. Popiołek, Henryk Bagiński. It is he who drives her to the site of the massacre.

“My wife is unemployed, I'm unemployed, but around here they say we get paid well for lighting a candle from time to time, that we're living on Jewish money. People call my aunt to say they're going to burn her. Now, would it be so hard to pour gasoline in the window at night, and who would ever trace the person who did it?”

I'm in the habit of driving to Przestrzele to see the Dziedzic family between visits to Jedwabne, even though it's quite a long drive. I know several people in Jedwabne who have the same sensitivity as Leszek Dziedzic, but I don't know anyone whose voice sounds as clear: Yes is yes, no is no, regardless of whether he's talking to me or his own neighbor. As a result, he doesn't have an easy life. He tells me how people are constantly sniping at him.

“I don't know what they have in store for us. I don't think they'd burn our house down, but they can make our lives miserable, it's enough for a neighbor to put something in a container of milk so it won't meet requirements—and what will we live on then?”

I ask him if he hasn't considered emigrating to America for good, since his whole family is already there.

“My brothers and my mother, all of them can manage, but I'm not one for living anywhere but on my own piece of land. I'm crazy about farming. Whatever I earn in America I put into my land, and every year I hope the land gives it back, though for that I'll have to wait for the economy to pick up. My land is here and no one's going to chase me away or forbid me to say whatever I want to say.”

Late evening at Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski's house. Delightedly he quotes me excerpts from an interview given to a Polish journalist by Rabbi Jacob Baker, who emigrated from Jedwabne to America as a young boy: “I could give many examples of Jews and Poles living peacefully together in Jedwabne. We trusted each other.” “I grew up with Poles, had them as friends, we were like one family.” “You are decent as a people. But unfortunately some Poles succumbed to Hitler's propaganda.” Particularly important in Godlewski's view are Rabbi Baker's words to the effect that the majority of residents of Jedwabne did not participate in the atrocity, just “a group of degenerates and thugs from surrounding villages, driven by an urge to loot Jewish property.”

“What a fine person, how I'd like to shake his hand,” says Godlewski. “Now people will understand that the Jews aren't accusing everybody, just a few criminals. A couple of no-goods joined with the Germans and we have to bow our heads for them, but it wasn't the community that did it. I respect Gross, but in this case he exaggerated.

“But is there any hope at all,” he asks me anxiously after a moment, “that on July 10 Rabbi Baker, of a massacred people, and our bishop, who speaks of the ‘Shoah business,' will stand side by side?”

I have with me a printout of the Internet text of the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
, edited by two rabbis, Jacob Baker and his brother, Julius, but I don't dare quote it to Godlewski, in case it dashes his illusions. In it, Rabbi Jacob Baker expresses himself quite differently: “After a series of shameful cruelties on the part of their Christian neighbors, who acted with the permission of the Nazi authorities, the brutalized Jewish community of Jedwabne, 1,440 persons in total, were burned alive. It's obvious to us that the Jews of Jedwabne must have lived for centuries among similarly cruel and inhuman neighbors. And here the question arises: how did they survive so long?”

The vision of Polish-Jewish relations in Jedwabne as a centuries-long nightmare amid cruel neighbors may be exaggerated, though it's easy to imagine a man most of whose family was murdered by Poles seeing it that way. In the whole book there are only a few episodes indicating relations were sometimes good, like the description that Gross cites of a priest walking arm in arm with a rabbi.