The Crime and the Silence (3 page)

But Leon Dziedzic has left Poland. From the time an article about him appeared, for which he'd allowed himself to be photographed, whenever he rode his bike to a store, someone would puncture his tires. He went to the States, where his wife and four sons had lived for many years.

I find Leszek Dziedzic, the fifth son, who stayed on the farm. This fall he was visiting his family in the States while his wife stayed in Poland with their children, ten-year-old Tomek and fourteen-year-old Piotrek. “I came back earlier than I'd planned because I was worried for my wife and children after what my dad had said. And on the street people were saying: ‘Don't think you can get away, we're ready for you.' We fear for our kids. We take them to school and pick them up.”

I go to see Janina Biedrzycka, the daughter of Śleszynski, the man who owned the barn in which the Jews were burned. I already know how she's received previous uninvited guests. First she refused to let a film director in, and the next time she told her, “I thought you were a Jewess but the priest told me you were Evangelical. There were decent Evangelicals among the Germans.” She met a local reporter with the words “Do you have any ID? You don't have a Polish name. I don't care either way because they all listen to the Jews anyway, nobody wants to know the truth.”

“There are houses that belonged to the Jews in Jedwabne, but I live in my own,” she begins the conversation with me. “I didn't get anything out of it. I know how vengeful the Yids are.”

She can't say the word “Jew” in anything under a shriek. Of the atrocity, she says it was the work of the Germans.

DECEMBER 15, 2000

I visit my cousin Oleś Wołyński. Gross's book didn't shock Oleś. The idea of Jews being murdered by their neighbors was a plausible scenario.

Before the war, Oleś's mother and father were active in the Communist International and Oleś spent the first years of his life in Moscow. When his parents fell victim to the Great Purge—both were shot in 1937—he was put in an orphanage, and from there he went to the Lubyanka prison and then to the Gulag.

“In Siberia I didn't encounter any anti-Semitism,” he says. “I first heard anti-Semitic talk in 1954 in Mińsk, still in the Soviet Union. In the hospital where I wound up, the nurses were talking over my head about a friend of theirs who was marrying a Jew. ‘I would throw up if I had to go to bed with a Jew,' I heard one of them say. After repatriation to Poland in 1958, I went to a holiday guesthouse for police in Zakopane, in the mountains, for my TB. There I found the same primal, passionate, visceral anti-Semitism. People repeated an idiotic story about the head of the Polish Radio Orchestra, who had emigrated from Poland: he had wanted to smuggle valuables out of the country, so he had a pan cast of gold, but it was too shiny, so he fried an egg in it and packed it unwashed. The customs officer found the filthy pan suspect. That story had everything: Jews have gold, are arrogant and slovenly.”

Oleś, who has a habit of carrying on conversations by means of books, fishes out of his vast library Zygmunt Klukowski's
Diary of the Occupation
. The author, a doctor and social activist who headed a hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, took daily notes during the war. He described the behavior of Poles during a liquidation raid on Jews on November 22, 1942: “They took part eagerly, hunted down Jews, drove them to the magistrate or police station, beat them, kicked them. Boys chased little Jewish kids, who were killed by policemen right in front of everyone. I still see before me Jews beaten up, groups of Jews led off to their deaths and corpses thrown any which way onto wagons, bruised and bloodied. Many of the city dwellers looted and stole what they could, without the least shame.”

DECEMBER 16, 2000

I drive to Pisz, this time to meet all three brothers Laudański. I take a slightly longer route, via Łomża, to pass through Jedwabne by daylight for the first time. Great stretches of open space, here and there scant clumps of trees. The flat Mazowsze landscape makes me realize how small the hope would have been that you could hide from persecutors here. But it's winter now, while then it was July, and there were unharvested crops in the fields.

When you enter the town from the Łomża side, you see the remains of the Jewish shtetl. Its atmosphere can best be felt in an alley off the Old Market, with its narrow passageway between houses, its broken cobblestones. Little wooden houses huddled to the ground, low windows, everything is tiny but the large puddles of melting snow. You'd only have to hang mezuzahs on doorways with excerpts from Deuteronomy to ward off the powers of evil, and you could shoot a film here about the events of sixty years ago.

I walk across the market square, now John Paul II Square, where the Jews were driven together that July day. With the map I was given by Kazimierz Laudański I drive to the site of the crime. A fenced-off plot of ground with a stone inscribed:
Place of Execution of Jewish Population. Gestapo and Hitler's Police Burned 1,600 People Alive. July 10, 1941.
Thick shrubbery on the far side, but my map says those are the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. I go in deeper and see broken gravestones protruding from the snow.

In Pisz the Laudański brothers are waiting for me. We sit across from each other, drinking tea, eating homemade gingerbread. Kazimierz Laudański and his brothers are well-known as beekeepers in the area, and customers come all the way from Germany for their honey. The brothers—poised, calm—present well, they speak their parts like a well-learned lesson.

We've been talking for more than three hours and I'm on something like my third piece of gingerbread before we come to the events of July 1941.

The youngest of the brothers, Jerzy, is the least talkative. A smile plays around the corners of his mouth.

From Szmul Wasersztejn's testimony: “The Germans gave the order to destroy all the Jews, but Polish thugs took it and carried it out in the most horrible ways. At the time of the first pogroms and during the slaughter the following scum distinguished themselves by their cruelty:…” Jerzy Laudański is among the few dozen names given here.

“I was at the barn,” says Jerzy Laudański, “but at a distance of about thirty meters. There were a lot of people in front of me.”

I wonder how many such people there could have been near the barn. And how many of them limited themselves to watching.

Toward the end Jerzy Laudański tells a story. How Karol Bardoń (one of the men charged in the postwar trial with killing Jews in Jedwabne) went to the prison authorities, saying he wanted to give testimony about who took part in burning the Jews. “I heard it from a prison orderly,” says Laudański. “Bardoń threatened to put a hundred men behind bars, but when they gave him paper to make a list, his hands were paralyzed and he couldn't speak, and that's how he died in prison. ‘A miracle happened,' was the orderly's comment.” Does that mean, I wonder, that Bardoń could have given the names and surnames of a hundred perpetrators? But I ask no provocative questions.

“We don't have any problem with Jews, but you've got to stop reopening the wounds,” Kazimierz Laudański warns me in parting. “What were Jews doing in the secret police after the war? What can I say? It's a disgrace, so why should we reproach each other?”

I listen to them and can't avoid the impression that scenes from 1941 are being replayed under their eyelids. I have a hotel booked in Pisz, but I decide to make my way home by night. I drive on a road completely deserted and covered with ice, just to get as far away from the Laudańskis as I can.

DECEMBER 17, 2000

Gdańsk. Jan Skrodzki, who was born in Radziłów, meets me at the station and takes me to a tidy apartment in a block on an embankment at the edge of a wood, where I'm greeted by a shaggy dog called Cha-Cha and given homemade brandy.

“It wasn't the Germans who did it, it was our people,” he starts.

I give him the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, which I photocopied at the Jewish Historical Institute. The scenes described in it are so horrifying it is hard to imagine Polish memory finding a place for them. But to Skrodzki nothing comes as a surprise—on the contrary, he adds specifics, fills in the details. I read him a description of Poles from the start joining in German operations brutalizing Jews. People bound to wagons were driven to the muddy river near the town. “Germans beat them, Poles beat them. The Jews cry in anguish, but they, the Germans and Poles, rejoice.”

“He's talking about the Matlak, a narrow, shallow stream,” he explains. “There was a meadow alongside the Matlak where farmers kept geese and ducks, and between the stream and the buildings on Nadstawna Street there was peat land and ditches where peat was cut. That's where they drove the Jews.”

He's prepared to talk about the massacre and to be quoted in the
Gazeta
. We talk for nine hours, but I don't dare ask him the obvious question: Where was your father on July 7, 1941?

DECEMBER 19, 2000

Pisz. I have a meeting at the local museum with its retired director, Mieczysław Kulęgowski. I was led to him by a chain of people, each referring me on. He is supposed to tell me about the Laudański brothers—apparently he could say a lot about them, he's from Jedwabne himself—but when we meet he is so frightened it's hard for me to get anything out of him. I'm not surprised. At the museum, a granddaughter of one of the Laudańskis is waiting for us, as if by coincidence. How did she find out about this meeting? It's obvious one of the people in my chain of communication informed the brothers. Mieczysław Kulęgowski explains why he doesn't want to talk to me: “Maybe I carried the fear with me from there, but today friends warned me about talking to you: ‘You'd better not get involved.'”

He only recalls that in the summer of 1941 he went by Jewish homes with his pals: “They were all occupied and looted, but I was looking for the plates that hung on the doorposts. I liked unrolling what was inside, there were Hebrew words written on hide, sheep's hide I think. After the war, when they founded a museum in Pisz, I gave those mezuzahs to the museum.”

DECEMBER 20, 2000

In the evening I'm back in Pisz. Unannounced, I knock on the door of the little house on the edge of town where Mieczysław Kulęgowski lives. Maybe I'll get something out of him now? Finally, after three cups of tea, he reluctantly begins to talk: “In 1941 I was twelve years old. Some mothers didn't let their children outside that day, July 10, but I was always sticking my nose into everything. When Poles were going from house to house chasing Jews into the market square, you heard screams and weeping everywhere because they were taking the children and elders, too. Poles used clubs to force the Jews into rows, and they didn't put up any resistance. There weren't sixteen hundred of them, a thousand at most. I was at the barn. There wasn't a big crowd outside, just some men, maybe fifty of them. I was standing a little off to the side with my friends. The fear was that they'd take you for a Jewish child and throw you into the flames. It was a hot summer, it took only a little gas and some matches. When they set the barn on fire, the screaming went on until the roof caved in. Józef Kobrzyniecki threw children into the burning barn. I saw it with my own eyes. I heard that Kobrzyniecki led the mob and that he beat them the worst, and that he even went by the houses to stab people hiding in attics with a bayonet. Other murderers were named, too: Karolak, the Laudański brothers, Zejer. When I grew up I left the town right away and since that time I haven't wanted anything to do with it.”

He cautions me, “Please don't mention my name, the Laudański brothers are still alive, I buy my groceries in Pisz, I met one of them in the street once and it sent a shiver down my spine. I really don't need that.”

DECEMBER 21, 2000

Mieczysław Kulęgowski told me he had an uncle in Zanklewo, not far from Jedwabne, a wealthy farmer who sheltered a Jewish family from the neighboring town of Wizna, in return for which his farm was set on fire by Polish neighbors after the war. He gave me the name: the uncle is no longer alive, but his children are, and they were old enough at the time to remember. I drive there.

Zanklewo, a backwoods village on the road from Jedwabne to Wizna. A well-kept, prosperous farm, a warm welcome. Yes, that's right, says the uncle's son, his parents hid a tailor from Wizna, Izrael Lewin, with his wife and two children. He was a teenager at the time and remembers it well.

“They were hidden under the floor, near the stove. No one knew about it, it only got out after the war.” He speaks of the postwar anti-Communist partisans: “In 1945 partisans took our clothes, cattle, pigs, and burned the farm buildings. We were left with nothing. That was the time when if someone was a little better off, gangs stole from him, so they must have thought we had Jewish gold. Those were impoverished times. Under the Polish partisans there was just as much fear as under the Russians or Germans, or worse.”

That fear must persist, because as we say goodbye my interlocutor asks me never to mention his name.

DECEMBER 22, 2000

I decide to begin work on my book with Radziłów, before the atrocity committed there becomes as widely known as the one in Jedwabne. It will be easier to talk to people there.

I drive to Kramarzewo near Radziłów to look up Marianna Ramotowska, née Finkelsztejn, who was rescued by Stanisław Ramotowski. I reach a wooden cottage hunched over a stream. On the threshold Ramotowski announces he's not going to talk, but I somehow manage to get inside.

It's bone cold in the house. His wife sits wrapped in several sweaters. She's slight, frail, and wears thick glasses. She's even less willing to talk than her husband. She's hard of hearing, unable to walk. It's Ramotowski who makes me a cup of tea. We begin to talk, but he keeps drawing back.