The Crime and the Silence (59 page)

Antonina liked spending time at prayer.

“I have a booklet with Saint Anthony's prayers, I say them every day. When a school where I worked as a janitor was haunted, I'd bring my icon of Saint Anthony and some holy water. I'd light a candle and the ghosts would disappear.”

She divided her time between Poland and the United States, where her granddaughter lives. She had no room of her own anywhere. When she was in Poland she stayed with her son and daughter-in-law, who gave her their tiny little bedroom and slept in the living room. When I visited her, we sat on the sofa bed—there was no room for a chair—and talked about how the Jews she rescued spoke Polish.

“Lea spoke best, and Mietek Olszewicz knew a lot of Polish jokes,” she said, using Mosze's wartime Polish name. Suddenly she made a sign for us to be quiet. Someone had just come to see her son and he might hear what we were talking about.

“I keep my things in the sofa bed and in my suitcase; the closets are full of their things. I hide my photographs. Who would want to look at them?” she said, taking her pictures from America out from under the quilt.

I asked to see the letters she received from Wasersztejn, from the Kubrans, the Olszewiczes.

“I don't have a single one. Once I read them, I rip them up. Mietek Olszewicz wrote me that there were Polish clubs in Buenos Aires, that they played soccer, but he didn't go in for it because he couldn't stand the sight of Poles anymore.” She appreciated that Mosze Olszewicz took care that no one would suspect her of having Jewish contacts: “He never wrote ‘Mosze' on the back of the envelope, always ‘Mieczysław.'”

I drove Antonina and her son home after she was honored in the synagogue with a menorah. The whole way I listened to her son's diatribes.

“The Jews get money from the Germans for having survived. But I ask you, miss, who helped them survive? Wasn't it my mother, who risked her own life and her children's? They get five hundred dollars a month, that's two thousand zlotys, right in your face, you just multiply that by seven people and twelve months. It adds up to a pretty penny, right? And I have a twenty-year-old Fiat that's all fucked up. You can't deny my mother saved those people, it's a fact. I'm happy with my mother. But my sister thinks it's better not to admit it, because we'll all get our throats cut. I have to say my sister has a negative attitude. In the city office where I worked they fired the oldest workers because they knew too much. They fired me, too, and I would never have said anything, it's not my style. I just turn my back and don't see anything. I always say to my mother, ‘Don't be afraid, you aren't giving any names, and you didn't see what happened because you weren't there at the barn.' Here a Yid bought a grocery store in Milanówek. I was talking about it with my friends. They're worried that Jews are going to move into our little town. And I tell them, ‘That Yid gets up at dawn and does everything that needs to be done, and they even help each other. And what do Poles do? Do they help? Make an effort? They get drunk and envy others. In the end Yids will own half of Milanówek,' I tell them, ‘and we will clean their shoes.'

“My sister is an anti-Semite. I don't have anything against Jews. If she found out my mother had been in a synagogue she'd raise hell. You can hardly blame her. She's sick, she can't afford to buy medicine, and she knows how much the Yids owe Mama.”

I turned to Antonina. “They invited you many times, surely they help?”

Her son: “But none of them has ever thought to hand over the cash directly.”

Antonina protested gently: “When I needed medicine, Szmul gave me money.”

Another time when I visited Antonina she was worried she'd catch hell from her daughter again.

“I don't know where Helenka read that I went to visit the president. ‘What the hell did you go there for?' she yelled, and hung up on me. I can't be too surprised, the whole thing makes trouble for my children. When my son's wife goes to the office they say, ‘What? You're still working here? You must have plenty of money if your mother-in-law hid seven Jews!'”

I asked Wyrzykowska how many people she had told in the course of her life that she had hidden Jews.

“I could have told people I trusted, but generally you didn't boast about it because you were scared. The guys who beat me up aren't scared. I had the pleasure of saving Jewish lives. But people look at you askance for it. Maybe if I'd hid blacks they'd see it differently. You know the country you live in, so you tell me how many people would be happy to hear I hid Jews? One in ten, and that's giving them the benefit of the doubt. Honestly, if you have a Jew for a friend, the Poles are your enemies. Why that is, I don't know. When I got the distinction, that Righteous Among the Nations medal, my Helenka threw it right in the trash. And it's better that way, because who would I show it to anyway? I told a priest in Chicago I had rescued Jews and that I prayed for them every day. He didn't tell me that was wrong, so apparently it's not a sin. I would never tell a priest in Poland things like that. No, not for the world.”

 

11

I, Szmul Wasersztejn, Warn You

or, The Road from Jedwabne to Costa Rica

Wasersztejn told his children, born in the other hemisphere, that he had to rescue from oblivion the atrocity committed in his native country as a warning to future generations. Toward the end of his life he hired a local journalist and told him the story of his life. His hearing and sight were already quite poor, and he wasn't able to read what he dictated. He wanted to commemorate the victims and brand the killers, but the Spanish-speaking journalist got the Jewish and Polish names so mangled that there's no way of figuring out who was whom. Only a knowledge of Szmul's life makes it possible to guess that the “Viashilikowski” family were Antonina and Aleksander Wyrzykowski. Szmul remembered the landscape of his childhood with nostalgia, and the journalist who was his audience threw in orange groves on top of fields of rye. The result was a book of more than four hundred pages,
La Denuncia: 10 de Julio de 1941
(Denunciation: July 10, 1941), which Szmul's son Izaak published at his own expense in 2000, after his father's death.

The same year saw the publication of Jan Gross's
Neighbors
, which drew on Wasersztejn's testimony. And so it was that his testimony, stored in the archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, began to circulate publicly. His words prompted horror and disbelief. But he died before his testimony set into motion a veritable avalanche of events, provoking a wave of denials and anti-Semitic attacks on the one hand, and on the other a courageous reckoning with the truth.

Szmul Wasersztejn and Antonina Wyrzykowska, 1945.
(Author's private collection)

From left, seated: Antonina Wyrzykowska, Szmul Wasersztejn, Lea Kubrzańska. Standing in back: Jankiel Kubrzański and Mosze Lasko, also from Jedwabne. The Kubrzańskis, Szmul, and Antonina had met Lasko by accident. Displaced persons camp, Linz, Austria, 1945.
(Courtesy of Jose Gutstein,
www.radzilow.com
)

What we read in Wasersztejn's diary bears a closer resemblance to the apocalyptic visions of Hieronymus Bosch than to the actual crime. In the marketplace Wasersztejn sees “old Jewish women, their faces smeared with blood,” “naked women trying to hide their shame with scraps of cloth, their thighs slashed with razors. Blood, curses, death.” On Cmentarna Street he sees a “heap of corpses,” “two young women, their bellies ripped open by a knife, their intestines hanging out,” “a beautiful six-year-old girl, whose throat had been slit with a razor.” This whole cacophony of rape, killing, screaming must have grown and got jumbled up in his head.

In the book, which is completely unedited, horrifying descriptions of the atrocity sit side by side with lofty reflections on the nature of the universe and exaggerated accounts of Wasersztejn's own exploits. I find it appalling, and only after a while do I realize the absurdity of my own expectations of Wasersztejn: that he be a wise and noble figure. The more I immerse myself in his story, the more moved I am by the reminiscences of Szmul, who was never meant to be a tragic hero.

“The hot summer of 1941 fell on Poland like a plague,” Szmul begins his recollections. “Jedwabne was raging like a furnace. The earth was arid, the plants had withered, the ponds were dry, it was all like kindling—it only took a spark and a gust of wind for a fire to break out and start a conflagration.”

Then he moves back in time, describes his birth and his mother's labor in childbirth: “Was the fever that burned her temples not an anticipation of the flames of the pyre on which she was burned, murdered by Christian Poles of Jedwabne? Was the hand she saw in her delirium trying to wrest me from her arms not the same hand of death that tried to wipe me from the face of the earth? The cat that leaped at the window with its claws out, shattering the window as my mother was giving birth to me—was it not a foreshadowing of the moment when the project of revenge leaped up in my mind, a revenge that would smash to pieces the Church and the pious Pharisees who praised God after killing my mother, brother, and other Jews of the town?”

The whole story is written in this style. Florid descriptions sit next to reflections full of pathos (shocked by the denial of the Holocaust and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries, he writes, “I, Szmul Wasersztejn, bear witness from Costa Rica and warn you: there is a worldwide conspiracy against Jews”), from which only a tenacious reader may fish out any meaningful details of the Jedwabne tragedy and compare them with the account Szmul gave after the war.

In 1945 he testified that on June 25, 1941, Poles had stoned Jakub Kac to death with bricks and stabbed Eliasz Krawiecki with knives—“they put out his eyes, cut out his tongue, he suffered agonizing pain for twelve hours before giving up the ghost”—and two young women, Chaja Kubrzańska and Basia Binsztejn went to a pond, “choosing to drown themselves with their children rather than fall into the hands of thugs.” After drowning the children, “Basia Binsztejn jumped, going right to the bottom, while Chaja Kubrzańska struggled for several hours. The thugs who had gathered round made a spectacle of it.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” he said. But in his recollections of half a century later it looks slightly different. On July 2 he saw a group of thugs torturing Jakub Kac: “They shoved him, abused him, struck his face, kicked him. One guy hit him on the head with a thick pole. The brain of the old man, who'd been a friend of my parents, spattered onto the pavement.” The thugs went on to the house where Kubrzańska and Binsztejn lived. “They resisted, but their children were taken away from them. No one cared that they were herding women stripped of their clothes, because they were all cowards and just stood there looking without seeing, listening without hearing. The women were taken to a place out in the country where there were clay pits that filled with water in the rainy season. They ordered the women to drown their own children. They refused. Then they took the children and stuck their heads into the stinking swamp. The earth swallowed them up. Now it was the turn of the beaten and crazed women. One of the thugs brought heavy rocks, which they tied to the girls' necks. They buckled down, the mud rose up to their lips, to their nostrils, and they drowned.”

The stoning of Kac, Krawiecki being tortured to death, the drowning of two mothers and their babies for the entertainment of assembled company—these facts are confirmed by other witnesses (a woman from Jedwabne told me, “My mother's sister saw two Jewish women being forced to drown themselves and their children. She came home in tears”). Chaja Kubrzańska and Basia Binsztejn were sisters whose husbands collaborated with the Soviets. The summer of 1941 was indeed dry and hot, and there was more mud than water in the ponds along the Łomża road to Jedwabne, so they couldn't drown themselves quickly.