The Crime and the Silence (54 page)

I examine the sketch of the town that opens the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
. It has extraordinary charm: apple trees designate gardens, fir trees the surrounding forests. The street names are in Hebrew; only Nowa Street, where no Jews lived, is also indicated in Polish. The church is much smaller than the synagogue, though in reality it was the other way around. Although the drawing represents prewar Jedwabne, there is also a burning barn.

According to Goldberg-Mulkiewicz, books of memory often reflect the perspective of the particular donors. Thus, we often see some things blown out of porportion, special weight given to certain themes. That's why the Jedwabne book devotes so much attention to kosher butchering—that's what its authors, both Rabbis Baker, spent most of their lives doing.

Rabbi Baker tells me about the butcher Mendel Nornberg, who was his teacher. “It's difficult work. Kosher butchering geese is easier, but chickens and ducks, there's a lot to learn. I heard a knife was found in the barn, I'm curious if it was his. I'd recognize it right away. Nornberg always held his knife between his teeth, so there must have been marks on it.”

DECEMBER 4, 2001

I left Poland with the phone numbers of some former Jedwabnian Poles now living in or near Chicago. I called them ahead of time from Warsaw, and was prepared to go there if an eyewitness agreed to talk to me.

“My mother-in-law said no after all,” I'm told by a relative of one of them. “She says that the fear never left her. At the time she was a girl of eleven. Her family went into the fields at five in the morning to avoid participating in the killing and she was ordered to stay home and not go out. But she ran off with some girlfriends to see what was going on. She saw boys attack a Jewish boy with a harrow; they caught him when he tried to run away and they jumped him. She heard a young Jew screaming in the fields as he was being stabbed with a knife, begging, ‘Kill me.' ‘They didn't kill him,' she said. ‘They left him with a drop of life in him to suffer a while longer.'”

A map of Jedwabne drawn from memory by Rabbi Julius Baker after the war, when he was already living in America. Translation from the Hebrew of places marked by Rabbi Baker: (a) road to Łomża; (b) pond; (c) Przytulska Street; (d) road to Radziłów; (e) Old Market; (f) bank; (g) Beit Midrash; (h) passageway; (i) New Market; (j) sawmill; (k) horse market; (l) Przestrzelska Street; (m) road to Kajetanów; (n) Jewish cemetery; (o) square where the burning took place.
(Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

DECEMBER 5, 2001

San José, Costa Rica. Happily, Szmul Wasersztejn's son Izaak is home; he's given me the diary his father published at his own expense. I'm reading it day and night, marking passages, which Anna Husarska, a journalist and translator from Poland, has promised to translate for me professionally. She's here for a conference on human rights.

Describing the roundup of the Jews in the marketplace, Szmul quotes the various slurs flung at them by Poles. What's interesting is that no one called them Communists! But they did call them “war profiteers.” Evidently the locals still had in their heads the Soviet propaganda they'd been fed for half a year.

DECEMBER 6, 2001

I set off to visit volcanoes in the company of Anna Husarska and Professor Wiktor Osiatyński, who is here for the same conference. We go in a rented car with a driver, Osiatyński in front; I sit in back with Anna, who translates excerpts from Wasersztejn's diary for me viva voce. We crawl across tall hills whose slopes are violet and red with flowers, monkeys dart about here and there, and Anna reads the naturalistic details of the massacre, “children hacked into pieces, dying in their mothers' arms,” “heads crushed to a bloody pulp of flesh and bone.” “He must have taken that from the Old Testament,” Osiatyński tries to joke, and I feel I'm going too far, inflicting this kind of material on him in his time off. So I choose some more pleasant fragments for translation. Of which there are many.

Wasersztejn said that this book was his testament; it is intended to remind subsequent generations of the destruction of the Jews of Jedwabne, but he also included in it many stories about his trade.

He devoted half his life to dealing in selling shoes, and owed his prosperity in Cuba to the profit he made on sneakers. He tells an unverifiable story about some Ukrainian Jew who had two and a half million pairs of army sneakers in storage when the war ended. There was probably not a single person in Cuba whom Szmul didn't urge at one time or another to buy sneakers at a discount. His book is full of practical tips for the footwear merchant. For example, it doesn't pay to sell shoes on credit to persons employed on banana plantations, because they are transient and it's hard to chase them down for the second payment.

I give Anna a section to translate where Szmul tells what he did on the Shabbat after he got to Costa Rica:

“One of our clothing stores was in a neighborhood where prostitutes did business with their drunken clients at night; on Friday nights it had the busiest traffic. It occurred to me I could set up a stand there with women's underwear. As you'd say nowadays, I conducted marketing research. The clientele in the neighborhood favored red and black lingerie. In a fellow countryman's store I bought six pairs of red and black panties and six bras in each color. I put the articles on display on Friday night. At 10:00 p.m. the first woman came by with her man of the moment. Stroking his head, she asked him to make her happy with red panties and a frilly bra. He got out his money and the girl assumed ownership of the items. The news spread like wildfire around San José's red-light district. By 1:00 a.m. when I closed up shop, I only had two pairs of panties and two bras left. We managed to keep that nighttime clientele going for a long time.”

This excerpt gives me some hope that the Wasersztejn family will agree to meet me on Shabbat, which begins tomorrow, and will let me take notes, too, which religious Jews usually don't allow on the Sabbath.

It's not easy in the diary to distinguish truth from what is made up or embellished. Did the following cinematic scene really happen? Before Wasersztejn leaves for Cuba in 1946, he has to get out of military service. In Warsaw he somehow gets through security and past the secretary to the most senior general and declares, “You may have had problems in your life, but they were small problems. Mine is enormous. Poles killed my whole family. The earth of Jedwabne is like a sponge saturated with Jewish blood. You can shoot me on the spot, but I'm not joining the Polish army.” And he is exempted.

I've arranged to meet his widow in the afternoon. Behind a six-foot fence, the residence where the solitary widow lives is guarded by two small stout security men armed with clubs. In the anteroom is a chaise longue with a cushion in the shape of a Torah scroll. We tread on a carpet so thick and fluffy our shoes vanish into it. In the living room there is an abundance of knickknacks carefully arranged in display cases, ornate mirrors in gold frames, elaborate crystal chandeliers, a porcelain poodle with porcelain puppies, tall statuettes of elegantly dressed Viennese ladies. Next to one of them, coyly pulling back the edge of his robe to reveal a porcelain foot on which two doves have alighted, stands Moses holding the Ten Commandments.

Szmul met Rachela back in Poland, in Bielsk Podlaski, when he was buying a house for the woman who hid him during the war, Antonina Wyrzykowska. He remembered noticing Rachela's attractive figure right away. Rachela tells us, “I fell in love with him immediately. It's easy to fall in love when you're fourteen years old.”

After he got to Cuba he found out by accident that Rachela was in New York, and he contacted her at once. “My brother didn't like it,” Szmul wrote in his book. “He tried to find me a better match behind my back; he argued that I could daydream of Rachela because it was a beautiful dream, but a Holocaust survivor should act pragmatically. He thought I should marry a Cuban Jewish woman, beautiful, intelligent, and with capital. He gave details about me to Jewish businessmen, who suggested he might introduce me, his younger brother, to their appetizing daughters.” But Szmul dug in his heels. He brought Rachela to Cuba and they were soon married.

Rachela belongs to a category of Jews who have a fierce aversion to Poland and no nostalgia whatsoever. She survived the Holocaust in a family of Polish peasants who hid them for money. “Every month we paid them in gold coins to live in a pigsty; the man didn't know where we hid the money, that's how we survived. After the war Poles killed Jews returning home. They killed my mother's brother.”

Like many survivors, they never exchanged a word of Polish. They spoke Yiddish and sometimes Spanish. Rachela speaks to me in Spanish, though I know from Wyrzykowska she can get by in Polish. When I ask about a few unclear passages in her husband's diary, she can't help me.

I read about Wasersztejn's Cuban adventures until deep into the night. He describes how in the fifties many Jewish businessmen cautiously began to support Fidel Castro, because they didn't like Batista's repression. Szmul didn't like Batista, either. After the revolution he thought they should sit it out, put all business on hold. He believed a more liberal regime had to come, but things got worse and worse. “Homes and stores were taken over by the government. Fidel hit the middle class. I saw the lines for meat. I began to look around for a way to get out fast. Rachela didn't understand. She fell into a depression, cried a lot. She thought it would all pass.”

First they sent a son out of Cuba, the same one I'd talked to on the phone—Izaak, so he “wouldn't be brainwashed.” He arrived as an eleven-year-old boy in the care of a Jewish family in Philadelphia.

Many children left Cuba at that time as part of the CIA Operation Peter Pan, whose goal was to protect young minds from Communist indoctrination. These children, now adults who have battled with the trauma of sudden separation from their parents—some for a few years, others for their whole lives—now have books written about them.

DECEMBER 7, 2001

I've arranged to meet Izaak. We talk in a narrow cubbyhole with boxes stacked up to the ceiling: Izaak's firm sells medications. I have a lot of questions concerning various aspects of Szmul's memoir, but he can't answer any of them. His father was constantly telling him about Jedwabne; he remembered the suffering and nothing more.

On the way back I tell the cab driver I came from Poland because there's a lot of controversy at home about a Jew from Costa Rica. He nods proudly, as if we are talking about natural resources: “Oh yes, we have a lot of well-known Jews here: the transport minister, the minister of culture, and a candidate for vice president.”

I learn that Jews here are called “Polacos.” The verb
polaquair
is also used for traveling salesmen, introduced here by Eastern European Jews.

I find a sentence in Wasersztejn's diary: “In business they called me ‘Polacos,' but it wasn't good or bad, because in Costa Rica they really don't care who you are.”

DECEMBER 9, 2001

I've been invited to a Hanukkah party at Rachela's. Her sons Izaak and Saul are there, with two grandchildren and Rachela's friend Maria Wiernik. The Colombian servants, two dark women of considerable volume dressed in white lace aprons, bring in food—potato latkes, doughnuts, and blintzes with sour cream, the same things Rachela and Szmul ate in their family homes at Hanukkah—at least the same to look at, because they taste simply horrible. Above all, they're extremely sweet.

I can finally deliver my gift—the photography album to which I wrote the text,
I Still See Their Faces: Photographs of Polish Jews
. Happily this morning, the last day of my stay, my suitcase caught up with me after being unloaded in Nicaragua by mistake.

“He didn't go to synagogue,” Wiernik says of Szmul, “but when any repairs were needed, who was the first to pull a check out of his pocket? Szmul. The rabbis, the lawyers, the doctors, all of them knew him well and respected him.”

Izaak drives me home. Driving down Avenida Central, San José's main thoroughfare, we pass Szmul's shoe stores, now run by his son. Each of them has a different name: Pompile, Zapatos, Fantasia. No chain, just dozens of small businesses.

“I have one question for you,” says Izaak. “How can a Jew live in Poland?”

I try to explain, probably not very well, because Izaak goes on to say: “When I was in Warsaw, I went to the synagogue to ask Jews the same question and none of them could tell me.”

I remember my conversation with Ramotowski about the only Jew in Jedwabne, Helena Chrzanowska, living as a Catholic in the middle of town. “How can anyone live like that?” Stanisław wondered. “It's quite different with us, we live on the outskirts, and when I go out I see my little creek, not the faces of killers.”

For myself, I am unable to fathom why either Helena Chrzanowska or the Ramotowskis were willing to go on living amid murderers. From Izaak Wasersztejn's point of view there's no difference between Jedwabne, Kramarzewo, and Warsaw—all of Poland is a graveyard.