The Crime and the Silence (34 page)

When back in Warsaw, I brought Stanisław Ramotowski the documents from the trial against Leon Kosmaczewski; Ramotowski admitted seeing Zygmunt Skrodzki on the day of the massacre, standing in front of his house, and said he had to have taken part. Ramotowski hadn't wanted to say it when he was talking to me and Jan Skrodzki, because he didn't want to make me uncomfortable.

The next time Jan and I went to Radziłów, we tried to find Antoni O., who was mentioned in the
Dziennik Bałtycki
(Baltic Daily). He had witnessed Polish residents armed with sticks and clubs rounding up Jews. It turns out there is such a person, the initials fit; he lived in Radziłów throughout the war. Jan Skrodzki even remembers him a little from old times. We spoke to him in the courtyard, because even though it was cold, he didn't ask us in. He emphatically denied he had told any journalist anything.

Evidently we were looking for a different Antoni O. This man told us, “Jews denounced Poles to the NKVD en masse. I wouldn't say that if I hadn't heard it with my own ears just a few days ago on the radio.”

His father-in-law hid a Jewish woman in Wąsosz (this checked out—I heard about Władysław Ładziński from Stanisław Ramotowski), and “when later [their] daughter Sabina worked for Jews in America and revealed this to them, they just worshipped her.” When I asked for further details as someone happened to be walking down the little street, Antoni instantly changed the subject.

Soon we managed to find the right Antoni O.

He was Antoni Olszewski of Gdańsk; Olszewski's mother, Aleksandra, hid two Jewish children on the day of the massacre. She quickly moved them on, fearing retribution from her neighbors, but in the 1980s the children she saved found her and invited her to Israel with her son.

“After the war kids were sometimes told, ‘Go get some sand from the grave,' because there was good yellow sand there for plastering. I took it from there, too,” he continued, adding that there were stones from the burned barn in the foundation of their house. “Everybody took them. Once I found a bone and threw it out in a rage, and a friend of mine threw a skull into the river. It's so shameful when I think about it now, but then we didn't have the imagination to realize.”

He remembered going from village to village with the volunteer firefighters orchestra to give concerts. Sometimes they heard, “You're from Radziłów, where you burned the Jews.” No one talked about it back in Radziłów.

“Though when you bought a half liter of vodka from Strzelecka or from Bronia Pachucka, who sold vodka back then, tongues would wag. Later I knew a lot about it, because in our house it was spoken of freely. Jews had been driven into the swamps near the mill and drowned, and Mother always said, ‘Don't go there, people were drowned there.' When women from the neighborhood came over Mama brewed them beer, and they always ended up talking about that same thing. I remember my mother raging about one of the killers: ‘I don't know how that shameless son of a bitch has the gall to carry the canopy in the procession.' The mothers of those killers were hardest hit. Olek Drozdowski's mother would come by to have a cry: ‘My dears, what could I do? He was a grown man, he once threatened to split my chest open, too.'”

Whether due to fear, complicity, or a need to forget, the killers melted back into the community.

Antoni Olszewski's mother didn't hesitate to send him to apprentice with one of them, Feliks Mordasiewicz.

“He taught me blacksmithing—he was a good craftsman and my dad had to sell a cow to afford to pay him,” Olszewski recalled. “A group of thugs would gather at his place to reminisce. They'd chase me away: ‘Get lost, you little shit.' My aunt had let something slip once, I hadn't realized what it was about at the time, so I repeated what she'd said: ‘Master, don't those Jews ever come to you in your sleep?' He said, ‘You son of a bitch,' and threw a hammer at me.”

I remembered Ramotowski telling me that he went to Mordasiewicz because there wasn't another smith who shod horses as well as he did. “But I wouldn't look at him, or he at me; he kept his head down,” said Stanisław. It turned out Olszewski remembered those occasions: “Mordasiewicz made him blades for his mill. Ramotowski's wife always came to town with him, but she refused to set foot in the smithy. Whenever she passed by she would stiffen and quicken her step.”

In the course of our research Skrodzki and I went back to Radziłów and its environs more than once, as well as visiting the Mazury, Kaszuby, Pomorze, and Mazowsze regions—anywhere Jan managed to find a lead. He never failed to astonish me with his skill in conducting interviews. He patiently waited for the moment when his subject had said everything he could get out of him, and then, all of a sudden, he would confront him with the truth: “Poles did it. There weren't any Germans there.”

“But they could have been there in plainclothes!” they'd protest.

“There were none,” Skrodzki countered. “The Germans came and went. They figured out they could trust the Poles to do their work for them.”

“So that's what happened,” said his cousin Piotr Kosmaczewski, who thought the Jews themselves were to blame.

In Grajewo we went to see Jan Jabłoński, the brother of one of Skrodzki's childhood friends. He was ten years old in 1941, and remembered pasturing cows on the other side of the Matlak river that day. He seemed wary about speaking with us.

“The Germans did it,” he claimed.

“Did you see them?” I asked.

“It had to have been the Germans, it was during their time.”

Toward the end of our visit, in the heat of conversation, Jan Jabłoński remembered that he had been at the barn after all. There were Germans there, in blue uniforms, helmets, SS insignia. Dozens of machine guns were pointed at the barn. The Germans had blocked the gates with wheels so no one could open them, and they ordered Józef Klimaszewski at gunpoint to set fire to the barn. Then they brought chlorine or quicklime and sprinkled it around to prevent infection.

Skrodzki interrupted him: “You should tell the truth, not spout this kind of crap. If we don't get to the truth, it will go on until it falls on the generation of our children and grandchildren.”

Jan Jabłoński admitted there were several killers. He also remembered the Poles looting. “When they came from Wąsosz, our people said,
‘Pashol von,'
Russian for ‘get out of here'—‘you're not going to steal from our Jews.' It's twenty-five kilometers from Radziłów to Wąsosz. But if looters came from five miles away, they weren't turned back.”

Jan and I tried to build a picture of what life was like in the town after the massacre. The people we talked to told us:

“They said the Germans would show their gratitude for our welcoming them and doing away with the Jews by leaving us in peace.”

“But later it was even worse than under the Soviets,” said Andrzej R.

And after the war?

“After the war everything was normal. As if there had never been any Jews,” said Jan C.

“In church there was never any mention of the massacre of the Jews. It happened and that was that,” said Bolesław Ciszewski.

“The brothers Dominik and Aleksander Drozdowski, who had both been very active in the killings, went out in the marketplace right after the liberation and set out the goods they'd looted. It was a big event, and everybody bought from them,” said Andrzej R.

We asked why nobody pointed a finger at the killers after the war.

“They were scared.”

“Why do you think, to keep the peace.”

“I'm telling you, they were scared,” Marysia Korycińska said, supporting the first speaker. “When Feliks Godlewski was drunk once, he got up and made a gesture of cutting someone's head off with a scythe, saying, ‘A man to me is nothing more than a whistling of the air.'”

“I have to get at the truth to atone for what my father did,” Jan Skrodzki said the next time we set out in search of witnesses, this time in Pomorze and Kaszuby. He found no understanding. One subject, Andrzej R., brought a form for a contribution to the High Divinity Seminary. “Why spend all that money driving around Poland? Pay for a Mass to be said for your father and your conscience will be clear.”

In Ełk we found Leon Kosmaczewski's family. A spacious villa on a slope right on the lake where Kosmaczewski's daughter and twenty-year-old granddaughter live; he himself died two years before, at the age of eighty-eight. He was in good health to the end. They had no intention of talking to us, but Skrodzki gave them no chance to throw us out, saying his mother's maiden name was Kosmaczewska, so that as a child he had called all Kosmaczewskis “Uncle.”

“They accused him of raping a Jewish woman in the marketplace, but he saved a Jewish woman,” his daughter shrieked. “A German asked him, pointing at the woman, ‘Jude?' and he said no, and allowed her to escape. A few years later a Jewish woman turned up in town asking about him, I'm sure it was the one he saved, wanting to thank him. We know Father stood trial, but that trial was started by a vicious rumor. He had been denounced because of a deal gone wrong, a woman from the neighborhood had a feud with Father.”

The granddaughter chimed in, “Granny said Grandfather saved a Jewish woman from Kramarzewo, and now they just write anything. There's one historian you can take seriously, Professor Strzembosz. We're not going to listen to any nonsense from anybody else.”

Skrodzki and I both knew the Jewish woman from Kramarzewo could only have been Marianna Ramotowska. We also knew she had given false evidence in his defense in court because she feared for her life.

Skrodzki tried to cut her off, but he is a mild man, and the woman kept raising her angry voice. Finally, he got up from his chair.

“I'm not going to listen to this. The responsibility falls on us, their children. If you can't acknowledge it, so much the worse for you. Anna, let's go!”

And we left.

Janek seems like a content person. He has made a success of his life, was the only one of six siblings to get a higher education. He became a recognized professional engineer. He sent his two daughters to medical school. When he had to join the Communist Party in the sixties, he joined, and as soon as he could leave after 1980, he left. He greeted Solidarity with relief, as did many party members. He sang in the Solidarity choir at the Church of St. Brigid in Gdańsk. He values order and discipline. He likes getting to the train station early and planning his time so that he never has to rush. He thinks punishment is a necessary part of raising children. He loves talking about his dog, about sailing. He likes to tell jokes. I would like to understand why he of all people, an “ordinary Pole,” decided to carry the burden of memory throughout his life.

 

Journal

MAY 13, 2001

I'm off to Israel in a week. I want to talk to the witness to the massacre whom Gross cited in
Neighbors
. I've already called Awigdor Kochaw several times, trying to arrange a meeting, but I always get the same reply: he's not well, he doesn't feel like talking. I felt he was hostile toward me. I was afraid seeing someone from Poland might be traumatic for him. So I sent my uncle Szmul Horowitz to see him—Szmul is the founder and director emeritus of a home for the elderly in Tel Aviv, and one of the warmest people I've ever met. It helped. Szmul is supposed to call him again when I'm in town. Kochaw promised him he would receive us.

A long piece by Tomasz Strzembosz in the newspaper the
Republic
: “Satan's Entry or Arrival of the Gestapo?” (a reference to my
Gazeta
interview with Stanisław Przechodzki, which had as its title a quote from Przechodzki: “Satan Entered into Jedwabne”). Adopting the ironic style of the brothers Laudański, killers of Jedwabne (who mocked Wasersztejn: “Didn't he see and hear a little too much for a teenager?”), the respected history professor comments on the testimony of Awigdor Kochaw, who fled from outside the barn where his family perished: “Would he go back to the barn to listen in on murderers' conversations?”

Strzembosz refers to two witnesses to prove the Germans committed the crime in Jedwabne. The first is Stefan Boczkowski, who lived in Grądy Małe in 1941; he wrote the professor a letter: “We both walked along with many other locals at some distance behind the tail end of the column of Jews. When they had all been forced into the barn a military truck carrying troops drove up at great speed, and some of the soldiers jumped off the truck while the remaining soldiers quickly started handing the ones on the ground canisters of gasoline, and they started pouring the gasoline in the corners of the barn, also at lightning speed.” An army truck, soldiers jumping off, an operation at lightning speed, these are the images that I see, too, after watching so many movies about the war.

Strzembosz doesn't go into why “many other locals” followed the column of Jews and what Stefan Boczkowski, a fifteen-year-old boy from Grądy Małe, was doing in Jedwabne that day. Grądy Małe is four kilometers from Jedwabne; it's one of the villages from which wagons with peasants armed with clubs and sticks set off on the morning of July 10.

The second witness is Apolinary Domitrz from the village Rostki, quoted in an interview for
Życie Warszawy
(Warsaw Life). Domitrz now resides in Greenpoint, the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He says he was grazing cows with two friends in the meadows between Rostki and Jedwabne, about half a kilometer from the barn. When the flames blazed up, they ran to Jedwabne right away. “We rushed across the marketplace. It was quiet, everything was shut down, no one was on the street. And the barn was on fire. So we headed to Cmentarna Street. The Germans were retreating from the heat.”

“And the others?”

“What others? There were only Germans. We didn't see a single Pole there. Just us.”