The Crime and the Silence (57 page)

“Who did it I don't know to this day; after all, I wasn't there.”

“Did people mention the names of any of the killers?”

“How would I know things like that?”

“Miss Antonina, you know very well…”

“My child, would you like some more tea, or a piece of gingerbread, maybe?”

We spoke many times, and she was always very careful about what she said. She tried to give the impression that she didn't know anything, didn't remember anything. Only occasionally, especially when I wasn't taking notes, she would let something slip.

Izrael Grądowski (Józef Grądowski after the war). Next to him his wife, Fajga, and their sons: Abram Aaron, Reuwen, and Emanuel. Jedwabne, 1930s. Izrael, one of the Jews saved by Antonina Wyrzykowska, was the only one of the family to survive the war.
(Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

Jankiel Kubrzański (Jack Kubran after the war), one of the Jews saved by Antonina Wyrzykowska. He is the small boy standing on a stool; his mother, Brosze Kubrzańska, is holding him. Next to them his great-grandmother is holding his sister, Giteł (right), and cousin Judes. His aunt Atłasowicz, Judes's mother, is holding her other daughter, Małka. Jedwabne, 1920s.
(Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

“You could see smoke and hear screams, and it was five kilometers from Janczewko to Jedwabne. Soon we knew what had happened. I cried, my mother cried, and one of our neighbors did, too. There were a lot of people in Janczewko who didn't cry, because they saw the Jews as enemies. Czesia Wądołowska was rushing back and forth to Jedwabne with sacks. She brought back furs, till she hurt herself with all that lugging and died soon after.”

On another occasion she sighed, and said: “Before the war I did the day's work my father owed the church, which was under construction, and I should have felt at home there. But when I saw women come to church after the war in fur coats that had belonged to Jews, I didn't feel at home there anymore.”

Another time she confessed: “You feared neighbors more than anyone else. If anyone had guessed we were hiding Jews none of us would be alive today. And there's still fear, because of the men who beat me up after the war for hiding Jews—three are still alive.”

“And who were they?”

“How would I remember after all these years?”

She was born in 1916 and lived in Janczewko, a settlement near Jedwabne—not more than a dozen cottages from the road. Her father, Franciszek Karwowski, spent his time working, praying, and helping others. He never swore. He never missed Sunday Mass. When one of his neighbors stole from him he prayed for the Lord to forgive him because he knew not what he did. Antonina's mother, Józefa, scolded him, “You fool, pray louder, so they can take everything we have.” Antonina left school after second grade. Her father “bribed” the Jedwabne principal to let his daughter leave school before the mandatory grade, because she was needed to work.

“At least I can sign my name,” says Antonina.

At sixteen, she was married off by her parents to a neighbor from the house across the road, Aleksander Wyrzykowski.

There were no Jews in Janczewko. Antonina went to market in Jedwabne and sometimes ran into Szmul there when she brought cloth to his mother, and she sometimes had her bicycle fixed by Jakub Kubrzański, who worked in his father's workshop. Later she saved both of their lives.

“Some time after the Jews were burned in the barn,” Wyrzykowska recounted, “my husband saw Szmulek sitting on the steps of his house. He asked him if he wanted to come and work with us; at that time Poles could employ Jews and pay the Germans for the labor. Szmul jumped on the wagon right away and they drove to Janczewko. From that time onward he helped us in the fields.”

He was there officially—Antonina's husband managed to arrange with the German-appointed mayor, Marian Karolak, for Szmul not to have to report to the police station in Jedwabne every week. But they didn't let a lot of people know that Szmul was working with them. The Wyrzykowskis and Wasersztejn together, trading with the ghetto, earned what was required to pay the Germans for the right to employ a Jew. They'd go to the ghetto on Sunday, when traffic was heaviest, because Jews who worked on farms during the week would be going back. There were many people then trading with the ghetto, mostly buying up anything of any value at low prices, a loaf of bread for a ring. The Wyrzykowskis and Szmul were exceptions in that regard—they had to make a little money, but mainly they were trying to get food to the hungry.

“I'd be all weighed down carrying bundles of butter, the flat kind, but big chunks,” Wyrzykowska told me. “We had a designated hole, and sometimes Szmul arranged for us to be let through the gate with a wagon, and we'd bring in flour and bread. Only you had to put on a badge that said
‘Jude'
as soon as you came through the gate. I had one and so I could move around the ghetto without risk,” she said in a tone implying this was the most ordinary thing in the world.

“The first time I saw Antonina she was handing us potatoes and beets through the barbed wire,” said Lea Kubran, formerly Kubrzańska, who survived the war at the Wyrzykowskis', when I met her in the United States. “Once, I ran into her again in the ghetto; she had a yellow badge pinned on. I never heard of any other Pole going around with a badge like that. If they'd caught her, she would have been shot on the spot.”

Szmul soon came to be part of the Wyrzykowski family. He slept in the children's room.

“He got used to us calling him Staszek,” said Wyrzykowska. “He went with us to May services, I remember. He sang our Polish songs, church songs. With fine, pure pronunciation, even though when he talked he didn't pronounce things as well.”

“Franciszek, the finest man under the sun, made it his life's goal to save not only my life but my soul,” Szmul Wasersztejn remembered of Antonina's father many years later. “He wept over my being a Jew; Jews didn't go to heaven. Every night he'd lecture me about Jesus.” Wasersztejn agreed to be baptized. “I didn't see any particular problem with it, we believed in the same God, and it made Franciszek happy that I was going to be saved.”

Wyrzykowska remembers her father sprinkling Szmul with holy water and that no one outside the family attended the christening.

When in the autumn of 1942 the Nazis carried out the liquidation of the ghettos and rounded up Jews living outside them, Wasersztejn managed to avoid the roundup. But the Wyrzykowski house became the least secure place in the area, because the Germans knew he lived and worked there. So the Wyrzykowskis asked Antoni Karwowski, Antonina's brother, to hide him for a few weeks, until they'd made a good hiding place for him at home. Then Mosze Olszewicz and his brother Berek turned up.

“In 1941 my brother and I fled from a pogrom to the Łomża ghetto, and later our parents and sister joined us there,” Mosze Olszewicz wrote in 1975 from Buenos Aires in a letter to the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Studies. “We were in the ghetto for a year. At the time of the liquidation the Gestapo surrounded the ghetto and we understood this was the end. We crawled through the barbed-wire fence and wandered around the area in blizzards and bitter cold until we felt we couldn't hold out anymore. Then I remembered a Christian woman. We went to her and asked for a crust of bread. Her husband gave us not only bread but hot milk and more. I can't even begin to describe their goodness. We were there all night and in the morning when we should have taken off, he said, ‘Don't go, you're someone's children, too, if we have something to eat so will you. What comes to us will come to you. We can't let you fall into the hands of murderers.' His wife agreed with his every word.”

“Olszewicz was the builder of the hideout; he figured it all out as if he had an engineering degree,” Wyrzykowska said of him with great respect. “My husband said he was going to the market in Jedwabne and when he came back the Jews had to be hidden so well that he couldn't find them. Then they could stay. My husband came back and couldn't find them; he shouted loudly, on purpose, ‘To hell with you, you're not staying here.'”

When the hideout was ready, they moved Szmul in. Then Mosze, with their permission, brought in his fiancée, Elke, as well. Next Srul Grądowski turned up; Szmul had met him after the massacre and given him the Wyrzykowskis' address. The last to come was Jankiel Kubrzański.

“Kubrzański turned up after the Łomża ghetto ended,” Wyrzykowska related. “It was cold, and he, poor fellow, was wearing the kind of light coat that's lined with air. ‘Mrs. Wyrzykowski, have you seen any of my people?' So I showed him the hideout. ‘Hop right in.' I told my husband that Kubrzański had been to the house asking about other Jews. He was interested in what I told him, but I could tell from his face that he didn't want to take in any more Jews. Didn't want to because of food; it wasn't easy to feed five people. They ate nothing apart from what we gave them. So I didn't tell him I'd already moved Jakub Kubrzański into the hideout.”

The Wyrzykowskis could have no illusions about what might happen to their family if Jews were found to be living with them. They had two small children; Helenka was seven, Antoś was two.

“Only I knew there were seven of them,” said Wyrzykowska, “because those two—Kubrzański moved his fiancée in right away—they were there at my own risk, the whole time. My husband thought we were hiding five. When the hiding was over, Kubrzański turned up at the house immediately, pretending to drop by, because we'd known him before the war. My husband said, ‘Why didn't you come to me, I would have hidden you.' I'm sure it's true my husband would have agreed, but why give him more to worry about?”

One day another Jew turned up, a relative of Srul Grądowski's.

“He was a young boy who had escaped from a camp,” Antonina remembers. “I gave him better food than I ate myself, and every kind of medicine we had in the house, but he only lived a few days. My husband took him out beyond Kownaty. It was hard to dig a grave in the frozen ground. I don't know what his name was. I didn't know the others' surnames either, only Szmul's and Kubrzański's.”

The two couples, the Kubrzańskis and the Olszewiczes, shared a hideout under the pigsty, and Szmul, Grądowski, and Berek were under the chicken house. They could be in contact at night, when they'd go out to get some fresh air; the buildings were connected by a roof. But they rarely did make contact, because it was best for safety reasons that only one person left the shelter at a time.

Wyrzykowska remembers that the greatest problem was feeding seven extra mouths for two and a half years. At that time everything went by ration cards. Each member of the family got a card allowing them to grind twenty kilograms of grain into flour for their own use. This wasn't enough to make bread for everyone, so Wyrzykowska's father ground wheat using two stones.

“One neighbor asked me why we baked so much bread, and Mother explained it was for rusks. The war might get worse and you had to have food stored. Another neighbor asked why we cooked so many potatoes. ‘Darn it,' said Mother, ‘that's the kind of pigs we've got. They won't eat anything but potatoes, potatoes, and imagine, they have to be peeled.'”

“We were hungry all the time, though Antonina tried so hard,” said Lea Kubran. “The Germans took a quota of food, and the family itself didn't have too much to eat. But we never suffered from the cold because the shelter was so small that the steam from a few mouths could heat it.”

Two Germans sent from the police station in Jedwabne to guard Janczewko lived in the same courtyard, about a hundred meters from the pigsty.

“We had an indoor cellar that was clean, walled, and the Germans requistioned it,” Wyrzykowska told me. “They slept in one part and had a pantry in the other where they smoked meat and kept stores for the whole police force in Jedwabne. Because of that our Jews couldn't go anywhere, even at night. The pigsty was walled off, with a roof made of boards. They cut a tiny peephole with a knife and when they saw the Germans had gone off somewhere they'd go upstairs. They got some air, stretched their legs, relieved themselves in a can that I'd remove later, and that was the whole adventure. As it was they didn't have enough room for each one to lie down. They spent their time sitting up, and then one person would put his legs over the other's chest. I often looked in on the chicken house, and I brought Szmul, Berek, and Grądowski the same food we ate. Once a day I'd bring potatoes or kasha to the pigsty, pretending it was for the pigs, and then I'd throw in some bread in the evening.”