The Crime and the Silence (25 page)

The chairman of the World Association of Polish Home Army Soldiers: “The call for a nationwide apology to the Jews for the massacre in Jedwabne is, to say the least, premature and wildly exaggerated.”

The Parliament of Student Self-Government of the Catholic University in Warsaw in an open letter to Bishop Stefanek: “We express our support for his Excellency's position regarding the massacre in Jedwabne.” And they go on about the profits the Jews are after by slandering the Polish people.

The National Board of the SLD (Union of the Democratic Left)—the post-Communist party: “Almost the whole Jewish population of the town perished at the hands of their Polish neighbors. The Jedwabne massacre is cause for pain and shame.”

It's cause for pain and shame that only the post-Communists can bring themselves to say these words.

MARCH 24, 2001

Jedwabne. I've heard that the main power player in town besides the priest is Wojciech Kubrak, a doctor by profession, and at present district head of Łomża. He published “A Declaration by the Łomża District Board on the Jewish Pogrom in Jedwabne,” in which the board distances itself from the ceremony: “Although the Institute of National Remembrance investigation is still in progress, the verdict has already been pronounced.”

Jedwabne lives a mirrored life. Journalists and politicians feed on statements made by the town's residents, but the reverse process is far more powerful. The residents speak of what happened in their town in the language of journalists, historians, and politicians. And so from the time Tomasz Szarota gave his interview to the
Gazeta
, people in Jedwabne speak of the “Białystok Commando” as an obvious and irrefutable part of the story. Similarly, the phrase “truckloads of Germans” has entered into general currency.

When I was conducting my first interviews, several members of the younger generation were surprised to discover that there had been an investigation into the Jedwabne affair in 1949, and that there were convictions. They told me, “They were tried for being in the partisan underground, not for the Jews.” Forgotten facts can easily reenter the current of memory. Now the Stalinist investigation belongs to the body of information known to everyone. “We know there was a trial, they found the guilty ones and convicted them. Since they were already tried once, why do it a second time?” It must mean the Jews want money.

Crossing the market square, I suddenly make a simple connection: the same people who say that Jews deported Polish patriots to Siberia also say they saw—or their families saw—lots of Germans on July 10. Others just saw lone Germans in the market square, a policeman taking pictures, but only in the square, not on the road to the barn. I call Ignatiew to share this observation with him. He offers no comment. I know he won't reveal to me the results of his investigation, but if I were mistaken he'd probably contradict me, saying my attitude to the case is too emotional. I've heard this response from him several times already and it was hard to deny it.

I visit Leszek Dziedzic.

“What they're most afraid of,” he says, “is that the Jews will take away what was stolen from them. People keep saying, angrily, ‘The Jews will come to get their things.' Not ‘our things,' but ‘their things.' If things are ‘theirs,' they should be returned.”

I explain to him that connecting the recovery of memory to the recovery of former Jewish property only serves to spread fear among the townspeople, and I'm sure no descendant of Jews from Jedwabne will turn up to get some ramshackle cottage back.

“But they should come and get them back,” he insists.

The truth is that Jews left their property here, and Poles of Jedwabne, Radziłów, and the surrounding areas took advantage of it. There are testimonies to this effect from surviving Jews from nearby towns in the Białystok region. “The Poles' slogan was ‘Wasilków without Jews.'” Paintings and photographs were slashed, down quilts were ripped up. During the pogrom the leaders shouted: “Don't break anything, don't tear anything up. It all belongs to us anyway” (testimony of Mendel Mielnicki, 1945).

“Poles from Zaręby Kościelne, wishing to take over Jewish property, sent requests to the German authorities in Łomża to liquidate the Zaręby Jews as well. Prominent residents signed these requests, Dr. Jan Gauze among them” (testimony of Rachela Olszak and Mindel Olszak, 1945).

“Someone in hiding heard Christians talking after Jews had been taken away. One guy was saying what he'd seen was terrible, one woman told him: ‘Don't worry, we'll get used to it, we'll be better off without them.' Then she looked at the buildings nearby, which she'd long dreamed of owning. Every Pole furnished his home with stuff they took from Jews. They felt they were the bosses now, their hour had struck” (testimony of Pesia Szuster-Rozenblum on the liquidation of the Jasionówka ghetto, 1945).

Dziedzic speaks calmly, determinedly, but as soon as his children disappear from his field of vision he gets up, looks for them in the yard, calls after them. I read him back what he has said, which I would like to insert in my
Gazeta
piece on Jedwabne today—making sure he wouldn't prefer to remain anonymous, but he agrees to the publication of everything he's said under his own name. He is the only such example among the people I talk to.

For the situation in town is deteriorating. People who just a few weeks ago talked to me without withholding their names (talking not about the crime, but about the current situation in Jedwabne) now say when I ask them to authorize quotes, “We already have so much trouble. I'm sorry, but I'd like you to leave my name out.” The part of the Jedwabne population that shouts the loudest that the Jews are to blame for everything, though they form a minority, is nevertheless in ascendance in this town. They feel powerful. They have Father Orłowski's support. They have their own scholarly authority—even the least sober-minded of my interlocutors, whom no one would suspect of reading history books, has invoked Professor Strzembosz.

Before, they were frustrated people, living in a town without prospects or hope. Now, prominent people—politicians, MPs, senators—devote their time to them. They are also visited by personalities such as the film director Bohdan Poręba. The fact that he is known not only from films but also for belonging to an anti-Semitic Communist organization in the eighties called Grunwald doesn't bother anybody here. They don't like Communists unless they're anti-Semites. And when people from this area emigrate to America—remittances from relatives who work in the United States are one of the main sources of income in these parts—they are sure of being embraced by the Chicago Polish community as Polish victims unjustly accused by Jews, and of being helped to find work.

Thinking of all this, I have the absurd sense that history is repeating itself. Before the war, too, the local parish priest organized the community around hatred toward Jews. National Party activists from the greater world—Łomża, even Warsaw—began visiting settlements far from the main roads, and small-town life took on a new glamour.

The most aggressive deniers of the Poles' responsibility for the massacre are among people in their forties, usually from families who lived here during the war. Now a second generation stands guard over a falsified memory.

In the evening I read the Catholic paper
Our Daily
at the hotel; it includes a report from Jedwabne—people were talking about it in town today—involving an event with the historian Tomasz Strzembosz. It was held in the parish house. Janina Biedrzycka, whose father gave his barn for the burning of the Jews, treated the gathering as her own throne room. She recalled the German atrocities in Łomża: “They killed the only true Poles.” She hasn't noticed that the Germans wiped out all Jews there, one-third of the city population. And she summed up: “Because we Poles have no one to remember us. This is not our country anymore.”

MARCH 25, 2001

Leszek Bubel, publisher of a whole array of anti-Semitic periodicals and books along the line of “Know Your Jews,” has convinced some of the town council members that Edward Moskal should be made an honorary citizen of Jedwabne. Moskal is president of the Polish American Congress and has just published a statement expressing outrage at the accusation that Poles committed the Jedwabne massacre.

Bubel, a completely marginal figure in Poland, has already grown to be a local hero and a permanent fixture in Jedwabne. He participates in council sessions, has dinner with the parish priest, visits council members.

“He called me about that honorary citizenship,” Godlewski tells me when I visit him at home. “He said: ‘If you say what people want to hear, you can make a career. You have a chance to be somebody, to shine, make history.'”

Bubel's initiative would probably have been carried through if it hadn't been for Stanisław Michałowski, as council chairman, asking Bubel to leave the session.

I keep having the same conversation with Godlewski. I recount to him the anti-Semitic views voiced by one of his council members, and he says that it's hard to talk to me because for me everything is black-and-white.

“The residents of Jedwabne have come under attack. They are accused of crimes, although the people who live here now didn't commit them. That's why it's hard for them to accept that the killers were from here. They have to mature to be able to carry the burden. That takes time, but I see a gradual transformation.”

But it is hard to see any transformation. The council doesn't like anything that's going on, least of all the mayor receiving Western journalists and film crews—Jews, in other words—in his office. Godlewski tried to persuade the council members to place a marker where the synagogue once stood, and perhaps to sell that parcel of land back to the Jewish community. He didn't dare suggest it be given to the community as a gift. Nevertheless, he was told he was trying to give all of Jedwabne back to the Jews. The vice chairman of the council, Piotr Narewski, said, “The mayor is educated, that's why he thinks differently from us.”

I look through letters the mayor has received recently. On top, a letter from one Andrzej Kamieński of Warsaw, who proposes that Jedwabne institute a stipend for study in Poland for a high school senior from Israel orphaned by a terrorist attack. Other letters are written in a completely different tone. “Idiot Mayor, get that Jewish scum out of town. You have no Honor or National Pride. You were paid off by Jews, you're an enemy of Poland.” Letters of support come from people who still associate him with the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne: “We stand with you. The Jedwabne affair is a case of Goebbels propaganda, Jewish-style.” “Don't let any kind of cemetery be established here. Even the Gospels say the Jews are a tribe of serpents. Make sure the minority doesn't become the majority. Group for the Open Integration of Polish Patriotic Organizations.”

I drop by to see a man who has been very nice to me but who refuses to appear under his own name. “I get calls: ‘You son of a bitch, you Jewish lackey, we know how to deal with you.'”

The close-knit, aggressive group of the killers' families and people who live in formerly Jewish homes dominate everyone else. Those whose families participated in the massacre and the looting feel they have to defend themselves. The killers' families are the ones who intimidate others, for fear the truth about the crime will be revealed. The war brutalized people, and when there were no more Jews to kill, Poles started killing one another.

Even Leszek Dziedzic has lost the optimism he showed in our first meetings, when he believed the confrontation with truth would bring about a catharsis, at least for some of the locals.

“Most of all people are outraged that the president announced he will come here and apologize. They'd like to bar him from entering the town. No one here plans to attend the ceremony. They keep saying no local should dare show his face, and that curtains should be shut in every window. But I'm certainly going to be there with my family. The word ‘sorry' must be spoken. And if those who did the killing don't want to apologize, I'm prepared to apologize for them, for the fact that the land on which I was born produced such bloodthirsty monsters.”

MARCH 26, 2001

A press conference at the state archive in Warsaw called by director Dr. Daria Nałęcz. Files from the municipal court of Łomża are presented. They are documents from 1947 civil cases in which Jewish heirs of houses in Jedwabne sought a declaration of the deaths of the prewar owners, so that they could sell the houses. The heirs testified that the Jews died at the hands of the Germans. It seems obvious they couldn't have said anything else if they wanted to live in peace in the town. Why hasn't this person, who is surely trained to read documents critically, understood that? I don't suspect her of any bad faith beyond a desire for media attention, but I can already imagine how much empty fuss will be made over this.

MARCH 27, 2001

For two days Stanisław Ramotowski has been coughing up blood and feeling too weak to get out of bed. Through the writer Tadeusz Konwicki, who is friendly with a prominent vascular surgeon, Dr. Wojciech Noszczyk, I've arranged a personal consultation with the doctor, to whose hospital I have brought Ramotowski. It turns out his condition was very bad, and he survived only because Noszczyk intervened immediately.

The newspaper headlines after Daria Nałęcz's press conference show it got results: “Germans Did the Burning…” (
Życie
, Life), “Witnesses Accused the Germans” (
Życie Warszawy
, Warsaw Life), “No Part Played by Poles” (
Our Daily
).

I call acquaintances in Jedwabne and Łomża. Town council chairman Stanisław Michałowski tells me that after the war, intermediaries went around previously Jewish towns looking for Poles living in Jewish homes and offering them legalization of any sales transaction for a small fee. They found citizens of Jewish origin who, to make a little money promised to them by the intermediaries, declared their families had lived in Jedwabne, on Przytulska Street number such-and-such, and that they were the only heirs.