The Crime and the Silence (46 page)

Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees!

The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!

Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame,

So sanctified My name!

It was the flight of mice they fled,

The scurrying of roaches was their flight;

They died like dogs, and they were dead!

.….….….….….….….……

Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you

Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;

Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.

What says the Shekinah? In the clouds it hides

In shame, in agony alone abides …
1

Many years later Kochaw met one of his teachers in Haifa; she had emigrated to Palestine before the war. Her husband, a senior official in the Histadrut labor union, asked him how he had survived. He replied that he didn't want to earn the scorn that in Bialik's poem even God feels toward the victims.

“That Zionist education,” he repeated to me, “gave me strength not to become a sheep led meekly to slaughter.” He said, “When I was in the army in Israel, they put pressure on you to change your name to a Hebrew one. After all, if I was in a unit with a Moroccan Jew, he'll never be able to pronouce the name Nieławicki. I had family, so I decided to settle on a name together with them. My cousin, who later died in the Six-Day War in 1967, chose the name Bnaja. I didn't like it and went my own way. I found some relatives of my mother whose name was Stern, or ‘star'; in Hebrew, Kochaw. They had become the Kochawi family, because at that time it was a fashion to add a Polish ending. I didn't want the ending.”

According to family legend the surname Nieławicki, used by Awigdor's family in Poland, came from his great-great-grandfather's briefly owning land in Nieławice. Those were the days of the Duchy of Warsaw and the Napoleonic Code, which allowed Jews to own land. After the property was sold he moved to Wizna, where he built a large, sturdy house.

“Once, my parents were doing work on the house,” he remembered, “and under the paint they found an inscription:
1812, Nieławicki
. I brought my whole class over to show them how long the house had been in our family.”

That's where Awigdor was born, and that is where he lived with his parents and his grandfather Meir Hersz Nieławicki for the first years of his life. The grandfather, who did well for himself selling miscellaneous supplies to the tsarist army, bought land in Przestrzele near Jedwabne. Awigdor's father, Icchak Nieławicki, was one of thirteen children; during the war against the Bolsheviks in 1920 he was an infantry soldier and fought to defend Warsaw. His sister Menucha Perel died before her nephew Awigdor was born. One day she encountered some drunken Polish boys. One of them said, “I have to kill a Jew,” and stabbed her to death with a knife. The next day they got their draft cards and that's how they avoided the law.

After the 1936 pogrom in Przytyk in central Poland, when Jews trained in self-defense (they even had firearms) put up a fight against the peasants, one of Awigdor's paternal uncles, Joszua, called Szyjek, decided to prepare the Wizna Jews to defend themselves and hoarded knives and axes. He thought they should fight, that pogroms should not be known only for Jewish deaths. Listening to him talk, little Awigdor decided to stop studying Polish, because he was going to Palestine anyway. He didn't do his homework, and refused to answer in Polish at the blackboard. His mother persuaded him that a knowledge of languages can never hurt, and anyway a Hebrew school without Polish wouldn't be recognized.

At home they spoke Yiddish, but his parents also knew Polish, Hebrew, German, and French.

“Mama corrected me when I was speaking Polish to the farmers from the neighborhood: ‘Don't wag your hands, that's how Jews talk.' That saved me later when I was pretending to be a Pole,” Kochaw remembered.

“In 1929 the parliament passed the agrarian reform requiring Jews to sell their land,” he said, “and my grandfather sold his property and lent money to landowners in Janczewo, Krzewo, Bronów, and Bożejewo. They needed funding because with the reform came an order to improve the soil. Soon they started letting their dogs off the chain when my grandfather came to collect his loan payments. Only the landowner Trener, a German from Bożejewo, paid his loan off in regular installments.”

All the Jews he knew wanted to go to Palestine. Even his uncle Becalel, who had served with the
uhlans
, or Polish light cavalry, a traditional subject of patriotic songs, and—when his grandfather still had his land—drove a horse-drawn carriage among the farmhands. His father laughed about his brother going to Palestine, joking that there his work would also be driving around in a carriage like a lord.

“Our whole family was waiting to emigrate, but I was the most eager,” said Kochaw, who was a woodworking apprentice with a neighbor after he finished the seventh grade. They didn't go, because they couldn't get any money from their debtors. To emigrate to Palestine you had to show you had the sum of a thousand pounds sterling each in the bank and have another thousand for the journey.

Grandfather Stern, owner of a mill, bought a large property for his daughter Dina's dowry, in Chudnie near Nowogród. His son-in-law leased it to a certain Podgórski. “They paid him back in the beginning, but when people started saying the Jews were to blame for all the evil in the world, they stopped,” Kochaw remembered. “Father took the matter to court. A lease contract was valid for many years, so we couldn't sell the property before the court ruled on it. Just before the war we won the case in the Supreme Court, but we didn't get our money back anyway.”

Of the Soviet occupation, Kochaw remembers most clearly that suddenly everybody became very poor. His father went to see Trener, who as a half German was about to go to the Reich with his wife in accordance with Soviet-German agreements. Trener gave Kochaw's father two cows and had him load up his wagon with food. “If we survive,” he said in parting, “we'll meet and figure out how much I still owe you.”

Kochaw's birthplace, Wizna, was bombed on the second day of the Stalin-Hitler war. The target of the attack was the floating bridge the Soviets were preparing to throw across the Narew. The market square was burned, but Grandfather Nieławicki's house survived. The residents of the town scattered into the surrounding fields, and Awigdor's father loaded some possessions onto a wagon—they were going to hide in the country for a while.

“We looked around and saw prisoners released from Soviet jail, drunk, looking for Jews to beat up,” Kochaw related. “The marauders caught up with us. They beat us with poles, took the horse and wagon. Our relative Fejbusz Lejman was with us, he was old and sick, and died two days later from the beating. We saw a niece of Izrael Meir Dymnicki, the smith, raped in a field. He himself, a sturdy peasant over seventy, had said, when other Jews had fled, ‘I'm not afraid, I know everybody in this town,' and stayed put. He was sitting on his porch when the rabble came. ‘Get the Jew!' they yelled. When they found a Jew they'd beat him to death.”

They went back to Wizna, where Jewish homes were being occupied by residents whose houses had been bombed. The Jews crowded into the few buildings left to them. The Nieławickis hid in Awigdor's grandfather's attic. The town was run by “partisans,” as Kochaw calls them, who had been in jail or in hiding during the Soviet occupation. Now they beat Jews in the street and warned Poles not to sell food to Jews or keep them in their homes.

“The Germans used them as helpers,” Kochaw continued. “I remember a boy from the National Party, his name was Brzozowiak. He would chase Jews, yelling ‘
Juden arbeiten!'
(Jews to work!). My grandfather Nieławicki was among the ones he chased. The Germans drove all the Jews Brzozowiak caught out of town and shot them. The next day the Germans appeared on Srebrowska Street, where many Jews were hiding with the blacksmith Monko. They ordered the men to dig holes in the yard and shot them, too. The Germans didn't touch the women. But when they killed the Goldmans, father and son, the wife and mother begged them: ‘Kill me, too.' And they did. It was the same when they shot Kron; his wife, Chana, asked them to kill her, which they did.”

When the village head of Wizna declared after the air raid and the fire that there was no room for the Jews in the town, a number of them went to Łomża, others to Białystok, but most went to Jedwabne. Awigdor's parents, Icchak and Dina Nieławicki, and their children took refuge at the house of their relative Eli Pecynowicz, who had a mill just outside Jedwabne, on the road to Radziłów. On Tuesday, July 8, 1941, Icchak decided to go back to Wizna to get some of his belongings from a Polish friend, and his wife decided to go with him. They were to be back in two days. On Wednesday night, a school friend of cousin Dewora Pecynowicz's ran over to warn them: “Tomorrow they're going to finish off the Jews, you've got to run away.” A family council was called, but the elders underestimated the threat from the Polish side.

Just in case, Awigdor decided to spend the night in the field, and two of his cousins joined him, Josef Lejb and Beniamin Pecynowicz. The rest of the family slept at home. It was a chilly night, and the mosquitoes were biting so no one got any sleep and the cousins were frantic. It was still dark when the cousins set off for the German police station—they worked there grooming horses and chopping wood for the kitchen stove, and they had to turn up at dawn. Awigdor was awoken early in the morning by the rattling of wagons. This gave him pause, because it wasn't a market day. Then he heard the sound of windows being smashed and women screaming. He knew at once it was a pogrom, and he made for Wizna to warn his parents to stay away. A couple of teenagers started chasing him. Dressed in three pairs of pants and shirts so as not to freeze in his sleep, he couldn't outrun them. They began beating him and one said, “Why take him to the marketplace, let's do him in on the way.” But then they passed an older woman, who said, “You caught a Jew, now take him to the others and get rid of them all in one go!”

And so it was that Awigdor Nieławicki found himself in the market square in Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, in a crowd being sent to slaughter. When he got there the Jews were weeding between the cobblestones, singing, “The war's the fault of us Jews.” The Poles had stanchions, poles, clubs, knives. He saw a familiar face—a carter from Wizna, Chonek Kubrzański.

“He refused to carry the statue of Lenin and he was putting up a fight. They hit him with iron bars until he collapsed,” Kochaw told me.

They were ordered to line up in fours and march down a road leading out of town; the barn was just on the outskirts of Jedwabne. Awigdor tried to stay on the inside, to avoid getting hit. Because everyone was trying to protect themselves the same way, the procession swelled, filling the whole road.

“We had already left Jedwabne behind,” he continued, “when I thought, They'll kill me anyway. But I'll try to escape.”

He got away and made it to the Łomża ghetto.

One day a friendly farmer from near Wizna, Pieńkowski, arrived in search of the Nieławicki family. He had brought butter and eggs. Awigdor had urged his family to store their property with him, because it would be safe only with a Pole.

“Pieńkowski had resisted, saying he didn't know when he could return it to us, and he would be ashamed to buy anything, to take advantage of the situation,” said Kochaw, to whom it was important to rescue from oblivion the name of one of the few Poles known to him who actually helped Jews. “This was a time when people drove their wagons up to Jewish homes and took everything for a song. When they were setting up the Łomża ghetto there were rumors that you could only bring twenty kilos of luggage with you. The day before we moved into the ghetto I took all our family's things to Pieńkowski. On the way to the ghetto people stood by the side of the road, grabbing bundles and jeering. The Jews comforted themselves: ‘We'll have peace in the ghetto, we'll survive somehow.'”

Not until the Łomża ghetto, where the few surviving Jews from Jedwabne found themselves, did it sink in what had really happened. Then Awigdor realized that the noise that had reached him when he was lying in the grain was the sound of a communal prayer said before death,
Shma Israel, Adonai elohenu, Adonai echad
(“Hear O Israel…”). Jewish martyrs throughout history had died with this profession of faith on their lips.

Together with his cousins Josef and Beniamin—who had survived because they had spent the day at the police station—Awigdor began to assess the losses in his family. A Pole told them he had seen Eli Pecynowicz and his wife and daughters in the barn. Awigdor understood that this meant he would never see his sisters, Cypora and Chaja, again—they had spent the night at their uncle's. He put out feelers around the area and asked everyone he met about his parents. The family they had in Zambrów had no news of them. Nor had Jews from Piątnica who came to the Łomża ghetto seen Icchak or Dina Nieławicki.

In the beginning, he and his relatives were squeezed into one room with thirty people, but the Germans began selecting people for deportation and soon there were barely ten of them left. The
Judenrat
organized work assignments. They would go out on Monday, work on construction, sleep somewhere side by side, and return to the ghetto at the end of the week. They were not paid anything, and fed only once a day. No one guarded them very closely. The Germans knew that the Jews saw the ghetto as a relatively safe place and that they had very little hope of surviving outside it.

When Kochaw was working between Drozdów and Wizna, he got away briefly to see Pieńkowski, who was moved to tears. He suggested to Awigdor that he come to sleep at their house after work, and promised to ask the police if he himself might not hire the boy to work on the farm. Pieńkowski's wife and son both kept saying, “You don't look like a Jew at all, and you speak Polish just like any of us.” It was they who gave him the idea of surviving as a Pole. Pieńkowski seized on the plan right away: “We'll tell everyone you're from Wizna, because I have family there. You can help us harvest potatoes until the war's over.” They thought at that time that the Germans would lose and the Russians were about to come back.