The Crime and the Silence (5 page)

Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów described in her memoir how, toward the end of the thirties, customers would come into Jewish shops by the back door, as they were too afraid to be seen coming through the front entrance.

Jan Cytrynowicz remembers an acquaintance of his father telling a story with great hilarity about a Jew who came to his native village selling things door-to-door, and the local peasants forcing a nonkosher sausage into his mouth, while he fought so hard blood was spilled.

Professor Adam Dobroński, a historian specializing in the Białystok region, of which the Łomża area (including Jedwabne and Radziłów) was a part, cited an anecdote to me about the National Party announcing a contest in one of the villages in the area: a sheep for the brave fellow who kicked a Jew.

Szmul Wasersztejn, in the memoirs he dictated in Costa Rica not long before his death, said how hard it was for him to live in a country where “half of the population thinks you're a poor Jew, a rat, and tells you to bugger off to Palestine, insults you and throws rocks through your windows,” a country where “gangs of thugs give Jewish children a thrashing under any pretext, make them kneel and take off their caps.” And he told how humiliated he was to be taught by his father that, as a Jew, he should always step down from the sidewalk when a priest or a soldier was passing by.

When I asked him about Polish-Jewish relations before the war, Jan Sokołowski of Jedwabne offered me his point of view: “Well, what do you think it was like, when the Jews made Poles do all the heavy jobs, like carpentry and bricklaying, and they themselves only made hats or ran mills or were in some kind of trade? A bun cost five groszy at a Pole's and two groszy at a Jew's, so how can you talk about competition here? You took your horse whip into church on a Sunday because it might get stolen, that's how poor people were. And when you were poor, you went to a Jew. You could get money on credit, the Jew would write it into his book and then he had the Pole in his power. A farmer would have to sell a cow sometimes to give the Jew his money back.”

3.

Several people I interviewed used the word “revolution” in connection with a pogrom that took place in Radziłów on March 23, 1933; they all used the word with a positive connotation, with the notion that it was a revolution of nationalists, a prelude to their takeover of power.

Halina Zalewska remembered the event that swept up the whole town: “‘A revolution,' they said. Shooting, windows broken, shutters closed, women shrieking, running home.”

Another person told me, “A cousin of my father's driving earthenware pots to market was injured in that revolution. He was lying on the foldout bed, that was what we had for a sofa bed in those days: by day it was a bench, at night you folded it out and there was a straw mattress inside. The medic Jan Mazurek tried to help him, but he died anyway.”

“In the market square, windows were broken and tubs of herring knocked over,” another witness recalled. “Four peasants were shot, and a lot of people went to jail. They were held in the Czerwoniak in Łomża, the old tsarist prison, then they were taken to the bishop to do unpaid work.”

Only Stanisław Ramotowski, a Pole who saved a Jewish family during the war, unambiguously called it a pogrom: “I saw a gang out breaking Jews' windows. And policemen killing a man who'd knocked down a Jew's tub of herring. The nationalists weren't boys, they were grown men, the same ones standing in the marketplace with crowbars, in front of Jewish shops. I saw a few of them again later on in the attacks.”

These were members of the Camp for a Greater Poland, the outgrowth of an alliance between peasants and the middle class that had its own action squads. Peasants from small villages led by middle-class Łomża youths drove from town to town in trucks instigating anti-Jewish brawls. The height of the camp's activity fell in March 1933. Hitler's accession to power in January of that year opened up new perspectives: it turned out that anti-Jewish slogans, which until then had been bandied around in Germany and Poland by a single group—the Nazis—had a chance of becoming the basis for an official state ideology. The camp organized campaigns in different parts of Poland, but the worst pogrom in this area took place in Radziłów.

Years afterward, Mosze Rozenbaum also remembered this pogrom. First he described the weekly market, which took place on Thursdays. The Jewish merchants of the surrounding villages brought in sheepskin coats, knee boots, pickled herring. Polish peasants sold wheat, rye, buckwheat, and oats. Small Jewish merchants bought up all the grain and sold it on to Germany. That day, when school had let out, Mosze saw the devastated marketplace, after the “peasants from the nearby villages had invaded Radziłów armed with iron crowbars and wooden cudgels, attacking Jews.” Chaja Finkelsztejn remembered carts headed for the market just as they did every week. But that time they weren't loaded with produce. There were peasants sitting on them armed with poles and clubs. Not one window was left intact in any Jewish home after the pogrom.

The
Przegląd
Łomżynski
(Łomża Record), the official weekly of the ruling party, which engaged the nationalists in a heated debate, reported on the incidents and informed its readers in the next issue that “Chana Sosnowska has died, a victim of crimes committed by the Camp for a Greater Poland.”

She was the wife of a shoemaker from Jedwabne who lived next door to the Wasersztejn family, a friend of Szmul's mother. Meir Ronen, then Meir Grajewski, who lived in Jedwabne before the war, remembers her: “On the way home from school, I saw a truck with a woman lying on it, covered in blood. It was Chana Sosnowska from Przytulska Street, who went to market in Radziłów every Thursday to sell shoes.” Rabbi Jacob Baker of Jedwabne also remembers her. He ordered shoes from her several times, and after the pogrom he visited her in the hospital. He was a yeshiva student in Łomża at the time, so he was asked to visit her. He remembers fanning her in the hospital that exceptionally hot April. Soon after he took part in her funeral. He also recalled an earlier victim of anti-Semitism in Jedwabne: “This was in 1932. We heard a cry, and we found Mosze Lasko in a ditch. They found the people who did it, and they admitted they'd done it for a laugh. Mosze was going somewhere on business and instead of a business deal he got his own funeral.”

The exact course of the Radziłów pogrom is known to us from a report drawn up by the Interior Ministry branch in Białystok. The police put members of the Camp for a Greater Poland in jail in Radziłów as a preventive measure. But a mob broke into the jail and set them free. As a result, Jewish stalls were demolished, Jews were beaten up. Shots were fired from within the mob, and the police, under attack, used its weapons. Two participants in the pogrom died on the spot and two more died later from injuries sustained.
1

Seventeen participants received suspended sentences from three months to two and a half years. Józef Przybyszewski, the editor in chief of the attack squad's paper
Camp for a Greater Poland Youth
, published in Łomża, was designated the moral instigator of the Radziłów pogrom and sentenced to two years in prison, but the appeals court in Warsaw overturned the verdict and declared him not guilty.

The Białystok office of the Interior Ministry reported to Warsaw, commenting on events in Radziłów (with an emphatic “confidential and very urgent”): “The Camp for a Greater Poland is an extreme threat to public order and safety. It enjoys the wholehearted support of the clergy. In the Białystok area the Camp for a Greater Poland is an integral part of the National Party, carrying National Party ID cards, etc., and is the ideological avant-garde of the National Party.”

The minister of the interior dissolved the organization. But it didn't help much. Administrative decisions in faraway Warsaw could at most thwart the nationalists' movements a little; in the region, they held sway. The youth activists of the Camp for a Greater Poland strengthened the ranks of the National Party, turning their officially dissolved cells into sections of the National Party Youth and causing a further radicalization of the National Party in the sphere of “a solution to the Jewish question.”
2

It was the youth section of the National Party that inspired the so-called school strikes in many towns in the environs of Łomża in the autumn of 1934, according to regional historian Henryk Majewski. These were a boycott by children of classes taught by Jewish teachers, combined with protest meetings by parents in front of school buildings.

In the following years words increasingly led to actions. Other towns repeated the scenario that was played out in Wysokie Mazowieckie, sixty-five kilometers north of Jedwabne, in September 1936: “At the local market, Jewish merchants were beaten and slashed with knives. Many fled, leaving their wares unsupervised, and wares were looted.”

In Radziłów every Thursday, on market day, attack squads knocked down stalls and beat up Jews.

Here are some typical Interior Ministry reports from the Białystok area in 1936: “At a fair in Długosiodła 51 windows were broken, 15 stalls knocked down, five Jews beaten up”; “In Wyszonki-Kościelne 474 windows were broken at night, 17 doors hacked with axes, two shops destroyed, wares ransacked, and two persons lightly injured with stones”; “At a National Party meeting in Łomża, a delegate from Warsaw ordered the creation of special squads that, after special training, would be used exclusively for fighting Jews.”

“The village youth,” a report ran, “whipped up by the slogan ‘Beat the Jew' propagated everywhere and at every step by the National Party as well as from the pulpit, have fallen into a dangerous psychosis that threatens public safety. More and more frequently we see spontaneous and autonomous actions against Jews.”

Every month the Interior Ministry office in Białystok put together this kind of report, called a “report on Polish political movements and the sociopolitical life of national minorities”—they can be found in the state archive in Białystok. These reports are worthy of any sociologist, offering an excellent picture of the changing moods in the region. They show the state authorities' hostile attitude not only toward the Camp for a Greater Poland but toward the nationalist movement as a whole. The state was bothered not only by nationalists' attitude toward their Jewish fellow citizens but also by the opposition party's sharp criticism of every move by the government, every resolution of parliament. The reports prove incontrovertibly that the Polish state felt responsible for its Jewish citizens, that it tried to protect them, and that it arrested and sentenced members of the attack squads. The reports emphasize that the Jews tried to show their loyalty to the Polish state.

4.

One can gain a sense of the depth and scope of anti-Semitism in the region from reading the local press, especially the Łomża diocese weekly
Życie i Praca
(Life and Work), which was aimed at farmers. Its editor in chief was Father Antoni Roszkowski. When the weekly was closed by the authorities in 1935, it reappeared almost immediately under the same church banner and with the same editor in chief, only under a new title:
The Catholic Cause
. The paper was printed by the diocesan press, under the bishop's wing, which for the most part protected it from confiscation. Along with advice on battling weeds and vermin, an important theme was “unceasingly reminding our brothers of the Jewish menace.”

Here are some front-page headlines: “Jews Take Liberties,” “Take Land from the Jews,” “Polish Youth Suffers for Jewish Wrongs,” “How Poland Became Jewified.” “The Polish people have matured and come to see that they have to break off relations with the Jews, not in a year or two, but now,” we read in an editorial titled “Let's Break with the Jews.” “No people would suffer what we have suffered from the Jews for many years. Jews have grabbed control of our trades and crafts. The horrible specter of a Jewish Poland hovers before our eyes. We do not wish to repay evil with evil, our response must be worthy of a Christian and cultured people. We will break off relations with the Jews. Jews are not suitable friends for young Poles, friendly relations with Jews do not befit a Christian and must be broken off. We should sound the alarm. The Jews are obstructing the Poles' path to greatness. Reason and conscience demand that we cease to consort with Jews.”

The Germans are held up as an example. They have found “a good way to deal with the excess of Jews.” “The National Socialist plan to throw the Jews out of Germany would truly be a heavy blow to Jewry,” runs a commentary on the Nazi program. A text called “A Warning to Jews” reads: “The Jews have it too easy in Poland if they dare to criticize Poles.” They write: “Such a massive Jewish population no country can stomach or sustain.” “No delaying,” urges an editorial, arguing that there should be no Jews in Poland.

Jews are told to be reasonable: “Poland is the way it is, but it's for us to put things in order, and I'd like Jews to get that into their heads!” “Jews should make every effort not to pester our people needlessly. It will be good when Jews understand that it is for their own benefit to curb their appetite for Polish land, for buildings, business, and work in our cities.” But no great faith is put in Jews' reasonableness or curbing of appetites, and more in action by local Poles. The appeal goes out: “When a little child goes out for a bun or a candy, a pencil or a notebook, or the head of the household goes to buy goods, the path should lead only to a Polish shop. Poles buy from Poles!” They paint the vision of a “Jewish Poland” where “Yids squeezed out of trade” buy up land and “the Polish people, immemorial custodians of that land, are condemned to a life of misery and wandering among strangers,” for “every Jewish farm is a thorn in the side of the Polish farmer.” “It seems the time has come for Jews to understand that Poles are the boss in Poland.”