The Crime and the Silence (58 page)

“Antonina couldn't bring us food; she carried a pot for the pigs so no one would see it was for people,” Lea Kubran told me. “And she'd have to choose the right moment to hand us the pot. Many evenings we'd say, ‘It isn't worth all this trouble,' but a new day would rise.”

In the winter of 1942 a rumor went around that the Germans were going to form the Poles into an army to deploy against the Soviets. Wyrzykowski found out he was on the draft list and went into hiding in a neighbor's shed. One day Wyrzykowska's brother ran over to his hideout with the news that the Germans had come to their property with dogs to hunt down Jews. He ran home, feeling he couldn't leave his wife alone in a situation like that.

“One man in the village,” said Stanisław Karwowski, Wyrzykowska's nephew, “who went from house to house selling moonshine, they called him Walenty, noticed a Jew at my aunt's house once and told someone whose daughter worked at the police station. She brought the police over immediately. Four of them turned up on horseback with dogs.”

“The policemen put me up against the wall, one of them held his gun on me and they told us to hand over the Jews,” Wyrzykowski wrote in his Yad Vashem testimony. “They said if I handed them over, nothing would happen to me; they'd only shoot the Jews. I told them there weren't any. I knelt down and cried a lot and prayed God to let me keep my life and save my family and those people.”

Wyrzykowski showed great presence of mind. When the Germans saw straw trampled in the barn he explained he slept there because their house was cramped. When they were about to burn the straw to test his words, he begged them not to, because the fire would engulf the whole farm.

“I don't know who told me, because I wasn't smart enough to figure it out on my own,” said Wyrzykowska, “but I had sprinkled gas around the pigsty every day. The Germans searched for Jews with dogs, but where there's gas a dog loses its sense of smell. The Lord came to our aid, too, and he's still helping, because four of them are still alive.”

“When the police came,” Lea Kubran related, “we were all prepared to commit suicide; we had razor blades ready to cut our veins. When they left, we were sure our hosts would tell us to go, because they might not get away with it the next time. Wyrzykowski knocked on the door, embraced my husband, and said, ‘My dears, if they didn't find you this time they'll never find you—you stay with us until the war's over.'”

Wyrzykowska saved not just seven Jews but a German in the bargain.

“Once one of the policemen staying across the street from us was left alone. He got sick and I found him lying on the ground writhing in pain. I gave him soda and vinegar, which we always used as a medicine, but it didn't help. I went to my people hiding in the pigsty and asked them how to say in German, ‘Your comrade is sick.' I harnessed a wagon, went to the police station, and said, ‘
Kamrad krank
.'”

Luckily no one at the police station realized Wyrzykowska had spoken to them not so much in broken German as in perfect Yiddish.

“They came for him right away. When he was better and when the other German wasn't looking, or anybody else, he helped me with the threshing. There were other good Germans here, they gave the children candy and when the end of the war was near they said, ‘Hitler kaput.'”

When the front moved and they had to evacuate Janczewko, the Wyrzykowskis prepared a hiding place in a potato field, because they were afraid a fire might break out on the front line and burn everyone in the pigsty alive—at night they carried poles and planks out and dug up earth for a hideout. Once the Russians arrived on January 23, 1945, the Jews came out of hiding.

“It was still night when we were liberated from the pigsty,” Mosze Olszewicz wrote in his letter to Yad Vashem, “and we came out into the bright world, full of air and light. We were weak, sick, physically and mentally broken. They looked at our pale faces, our emaciated arms and legs, our blinded eyes, and they brought us back to life with warm words, bringing us the best things they had to eat.”

“The first day of freedom no one could stand on their own legs,” Lea Kubran remembers.

The Kubrzańskis and Olszewiczes soon moved to Łomża. Srul Grądowski had himself baptized and remained in Jedwabne. Szmul went on living with the Wyrzykowskis.

One day Antonina's brother came to Janczewko in despair to warn them he had heard six Poles plotting to kill Wasersztejn. The two men went into hiding right away, leaving Antonina alone with her two children and elderly parents.

“My brother was at the gathering of the plotters,” Wyrzykowska said. “He came to our house immediately: ‘I decided to tell you, because it would be a pity, they went through so many months of suffering and you suffered so much with them.'”

Leon Dziedzic, whose brother was also at the plotters' meeting, is sure it was a gathering of the local unit of the Home Army.

Wyrzykowski hid in the hope that this was just “guys settling scores” and that as a woman, Antonina would be safe. But the attackers had no pity for women, either.

“At night,” Wyrzykowski described, “the partisans came for the Jew; they wanted him to be handed over so they could kill him and then they wouldn't bother us anymore. My wife told them he'd left. They beat her so badly there wasn't any white skin left on her, she was all black and blue.”

“She was a devout Christian, I thought they wouldn't harm her,” Szmul Wasersztejn recalled. “At midnight six men turned up who had taken part in the pogrom in Jedwabne. They beat old Franciszek and Antonina, threw them on the floor, kicked them, beat them, trying to find out where I was. They stole whatever caught their eye. They forced that brave woman to hitch up the horses and drive them to Jedwabne with the spoils of their looting. She just asked them to leave her sick father in peace. When she got back it was light, she got down from the cart and passed out. She had wounds on her face and the traces of beatings on her back. The children saw it all.”

“They ordered me to lie down on the floor and they beat me with clubs,” Wyrzykowska recounts. “They beat me so that there wasn't a spot on my body that wasn't black and blue. They screamed, ‘You Jewish lackeys, you hid Jews, and they crucified Jesus. Tell us where you're keeping the Jew.' I said, ‘The Jew left a long time ago.' They had all left by then, except Szmul was still there, hiding in a hollow in a neighbor's potato field. They mauled my father. They took all our best things. I held out. I even hitched up the horses to drive them home.”

Next day the Wyrzykowskis joined the Olszewiczes and Kubrzańskis, who were staying somewhere on the outskirts of Łomża. Wyrzykowska remembers a nocturnal expedition to Janczewko—to get a cow for milk to stave off their constant hunger—as the most harrowing moment in her life. It was a time when many gangs roamed the countryside and they wouldn't have been able to take a cow safely in the daytime; if they met any thugs at night it meant certain death.

Later they moved to Białystok. They slept side by side on the floor. There was nothing to eat.

The incident of Wyrzykowska's beating ended up in court. “On the night of March 13 to 14, 1945, ten armed Home Army terrorists beat up citizen Wyrzykowska, resident of the village Janczewko in the Łomża district, for hiding Jews during the German occupation and presently maintaining good relations with them,” one reads in the Białystok security service report, under the heading “Typical Acts of Terror by AKO Gangs in the Report Period.” (The AK, or Home Army, in the area had transformed itself by that time into the AKO, or Citizens' Home Army.) The documents show that Antonina Wyrzykowska testified to the security service in Łomża on April 9 that she had been beaten up by a gang. She said, “I can't live here, they'll kill me.” She gave names. Most of them belonged to the armed forces based in the forest and didn't answer the summons, but we know that at least one of them, Antoni Wądołowski, was convicted.

Wyrzykowska decided to escape across the “green border”—to leave the country by sneaking across borders—with Szmul and the Kubrzańskis and Olszewiczes. The Olszewiczes found their way via Budapest to Italy. The others found themselves by late spring near Linz, in an Austrian refugee camp. “We walked more than we rode,” Lea Kubran told me.

“There were only Jews there, I was the only Pole. I had left my children and whenever I saw a child in the street I felt such pain I couldn't bear it,” Wyrzykowska relates. “After a few weeks I went home.”

In the first testimony he gave to the Jewish Historical Commission, Szmul claimed that he “had married the woman who saved him.” Wyrzykowska doesn't want to talk about that; certainly there was no official wedding.

When did they fall in love? Was it when they drove to the ghetto together, before Szmul was in hiding? Or was it during the period in hiding? Right after? What was the Wyrzykowskis' marriage like after she came back from the refugee camp in Austria? Of Wyrzykowski I only know he was a noble person, a handsome man, and that after the war he became a drunk.

“I talked about it with Szmul many times,” I hear from Chaim Sroszko of Jedwabne, who now lives in Israel. He met Szmul in 1945 in Białystok, and was in constant touch with him until his death. “He told me at a certain point he realized he had no right to a woman who had left her children for him. He decided to go back to Poland with Antonina to help ensure her safe return to her family.”

The Kubrzańskis lived for almost four more years in a displaced persons camp in Austria before obtaining visas for the United States in 1949.

When Antonina had returned to her husband and children, the family moved to Bielsk Podlaski. Wasersztejn bought them a house and farm there with money sent to him by a brother in Cuba. They knew nothing of what happened to the other Jews they had saved. Before she'd parted from them Antonina had agreed with all of them that they would somehow communicate that they had survived at the first opportunity, but God forbid they should write. She was afraid of getting letters from Jews, and indeed, Stalinist times soon came in Poland, when it was bad to receive any letters from abroad.

It sometimes happened that Wyrzykowska would run into her persecutors in Bielsk, which is not far from Jedwabne. They threatened her, taunted her. She lived in constant fear. Her husband, Aleksander, began to drink, so that in the end nothing was left of the farm Szmul Wasersztejn had bought them. At the start of the 1960s they moved from Bielsk to Milanówek. In this move they were helped by Szymon Datner, as Antonina remembered. From there, Antonina commuted to Warsaw, where she worked as a janitor in Warsaw schools. Aleksander died soon after their move.

Antonina helped her daughter, Helena, and her son, Antoni, financially. Helena started to work in a shop; Antoni found a job with the local government.

“You said your children knew nothing about your hiding Jews. But when they grew up did you talk about it all with them?”

“Why would I? There wasn't any time to tell them about those things. I worked hard, the worst was clearing snow in winter. I took on extra cleaning. Even on the Sabbath I went to people's houses to wash windows.”

“Every single day, for years and years, Mama left Milanówek on the 4:05 a.m. train and got home at 10:03 p.m.,” said Antoni.

In the seventies Wyrzykowska traveled to America for the first time, invited by the Kubrzański family, who by then went by Kubran. They were waiting for her at the airport in Miami with the Olszewiczes, who had come from Argentina for the occasion (the Kubrans spent the summer months in Florida). They took her to the synagogue, where they had ordered a Service of Thanksgiving for her. Wasersztejn came to visit them there from Costa Rica.

“I hadn't seen Szmulek for a long time. Almost thirty years had passed.”

“The first time she came to see us for three months, then a year,” Lea Kubran remembers. “There are a lot of Jews and Poles in New London. Antonina has her gossip network here, they take walks by the shore. Our town has a Polish week once a year, when they prepare Polish dishes and play Polish songs. While my husband was alive he spent many an evening dancing polkas with Antonina.”

The next time Wyrzykowska spent time in the United States she married a Polish American.

“After the wedding my husband said to me, ‘Now we'll go to court and claim that money from the Jews you hid, who ruined your health.' So I told the old coot to go to hell.”

She married a third time, again in the States, again an American of Polish origin.

“He was a widower, a stingy, cunning man. He'd buy the fattest chicken in the store, because in America the fatter something is, the cheaper. He was older than me, so once I said to him, ‘Staszek, shouldn't you make a will in the event of your death, so your children don't throw me out of the house?' He went with me to a lawyer, they wrote it in English, I was supposed to sign. I once gave it to a friend to read. She read it to me: when I died he would get everything I owned, and my children were disinherited. I packed my bags, went to stay with a granddaughter in Chicago, and sued for divorce. I pray for the Jews they burned in the barn every day and sometimes for my third husband's first wife. I never met her, but when I think she spent twenty-seven years with him!”

Szmul Wasersztejn began to invite her to Costa Rica every winter.

“I liked being there in winter for two or three months, it was wonderfully warm. His sons still invite me, but there's no one to talk to. I don't know their languages.”

Wyrzykowska went for the last time in the winter of 1999–2000.

“Szmul was deaf, almost completely,” she told me. “He watched television, because he could read lips pretty well, and when I spoke right in his ear he could hear me. We often recalled how good his hearing used to be, he'd hear the creaking of a gate and would be in the hideout before the policeman was at the door. That day his wife, Rachel, had gone to Miami to see their daughter. She asked whether she should stay, because Szmul felt weak, but he told her to go. Staszek and I—I always called him by his Polish name—watched a tape of my trip to the Holy Land. In the afternoon he told me to go upstairs, because he wanted to take a nap. I was reading my prayer book when I heard a cry. He was sitting in his chair, dead. I saved his life as long as I could, but now I couldn't help him.”