The Crime and the Silence (13 page)

“Mieczysław Strzelecki was one of the killers, he was a thug and a swine; Leon Paszkowski, Wincenty Piotrowski. I saw Jan Szymanowski and Jan Kreska driving their wagons from Å»ebry to go killing in Radziłów. Szymanowski was one of the first to kill in Wąsosz, but it still wasn't enough for him. And from Wąsosz there was also Karwowski who came; he later became their boss in the National Armed Forces. From Konopki there was Jagódko, he was terrible, and then Wiśniewski from Mściski, who had married a girl in Radziłów. I think of each of them from time to time.

“There were a lot of people like Felek Siedlecki, who didn't exactly join in but who watched and egged on the others. Or Bolek Siedlecki—you couldn't say he rounded people up, though he was in the square at the time. But there were plenty of people who were doing the killing. God forbid you ever meet any of them”—he looks at me anxiously, speaking of murderers who have been dead for years.

“Feliks and Mietek were real butchers,” he says of the Mordasiewiczes. “There was a third brother, Jan, no better than they were. Professional thugs. But those who killed didn't have an easy death themselves later. A friend of mine who was in the hospital next to Feliks Mordasiewicz told me he was calling out the names of the Jews he'd killed. Death was nearing and it was all coming back to haunt him. The family tried to shut him up, but he was shouting in his hospital bed, ‘There are a lot of them in the grain, out with them.'”

I brought Ramotowski all the newspaper articles I had on Jedwabne and Radziłów. He started reading them on the spot, before I left. (Marianna told me he had borrowed every book in the Radziłów public library five times.) One time we were looking at a Radziłów paper from the sixties, at pictures of an orchestra at a funeral.

“Lovely shot,” he commented. “Look, he's a killer, and there's another killer. That guy's son once asked me if my wife would forgive him for his father's behavior. Another time Jan Chrostowski was sick in bed. He and his wife sold moonshine vodka. I went to get some vodka. He ordered a chair to be brought for me and confessed to me what he had done to the Jews. ‘If you would only take a tiny part of the burden off me, you and your wife,' he said. I said to him, ‘Man, we don't have anything against you, but for forgiveness you'll have to look somewhere else.'”

In the sixties, the villagers stopped bringing grain to the mill, and the Ramotowskis had to live off their farm. It is located in an impoverished area, the earth is miserable there, but I've rarely seen the kind of poverty and desolation that I did on their farm. The house was sunk on its dilapidated foundation, wind howled in gaps between the beams, the toilet was in the yard, its doors fallen off and never put back on their hinges. I don't know why it was so bad. Was it because Marianna spent most of her life perched nervously on a stool and didn't know how to make a home? Stanisław told me that she didn't like cleaning and cooking and wasn't good at it, and so he did it. Not perfectly, I suppose. Was it because Stanisław was a drinker? He had half-destroyed hands with frostbitten fingers; they'd had to be thawed once after he fell asleep in the snow on his cart. The horse brought him home, saving his life.

But it seemed to me the main reason for their poverty was Marianna's belief that she had to keep paying off Stanisław's family in order to be accepted by them. When I met them, they were supporting two families—couples of working age with children—on the modest sum Stanisław received from Yad Vashem after he was recognized in Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations: a Gentile who had helped to save Jewish lives. Once I told Ramotowski my hypothesis.

“That you see these things.” He looked at me in admiration. “I thought of so many hiding places in the house, but no matter how well I hid the money, my wife would always find it in time for the next family visit.”

No one from Radziłów ever made the slightest effort to help these two ailing old people. But as soon as the Jedwabne affair flared up, the name Ramotowski was on everybody's lips.

“He got himself a short little Jewish girl. Pretty, though. He was after the mill.”

“When the Germans were hunting Jews, people in Radziłów wanted to help. Like that Ramotowski, who married a Jewish woman. She converted to our faith. She wasn't shunned; everyone talked to her.”

You heard this all the time. That she was beautiful and rich. Whereas it was Stanisław who was the looker in that marriage, and the Finkelsztejn home was pretty well cleaned out, plundered, the mill reduced to its foundation, and the locals must have known that. Evidently they somehow had to explain to themselves why one of them took a Jewish woman as a wife.

“When the war was over,” says Ramotowski, “I said to my wife: ‘Now, my sweetheart, you're free; go where you will.' She said she wasn't going anywhere. ‘Well,' I said, ‘if that's the way it is, we'll be together ever after.' And that's how it has been.”

For the next sixty years they didn't part, even for a split second. When I saw them the first time, they looked as if they were posing for a portrait. He was sitting near her, holding her hand. Later I saw that this was how they spent most of the day. “Stasinek,” the nearsighted Marianna called whenever he moved away for a moment. “I'm coming, Marianna,” he answered with no sign of impatience.

“Didn't you ever think of leaving Poland?” I ask.

He: “I was ready to go to America, her cousins were always inviting us, but Marianna wouldn't go for the world. I told her again and again: ‘Kiddo, let's leave this rotten place.'”

She: “I was attached to the place where I was born, my ancestors lived here for three centuries.”

He: “She was afraid I'd be attracted to other women over there. But even if I had been, I would never leave her, not for long anyway. I was always lucky with the ladies, but I liked the one I had and I wasn't such a bad guy. If ever I came home late, I kissed her, showed her some affection, and somehow it passed. There isn't and there could never be anyone like her in Radziłów. The others couldn't hold a candle to her.”

 

Journal

FEBRUARY 7, 2001

I set off for Jedwabne at dawn to attend a meeting of residents who are to be informed by prosecutor Ignatiew of the principles on which his investigation will be conducted. A vandalized manor house where in Communist times there was a cultural center and movie theater. At the entrance I introduce myself to a small group of men as a journalist from the
Gazeta Wyborcza
. A chorus of voices responds:

“Heard about the deportations? And you know who was behind all that?”

“Your people, the Jews. When the Soviets were here, the Jews wanted to put a movie theater and toilets in our church.”

I try to interject that synagogues were turned into movie theaters and storehouses, too.

“Sixteen hundred people in one barn? You must be kidding.”

I ask why no one questioned the inscription on the monument earlier—it gave precisely that number as having been burned by the Gestapo.

“You spat on us and our children. We're not going to talk to you.”

Father Edward Orłowski, the parish priest, enters the hall with Janina Biedrzycka (the woman whose father gave his barn for the burning of the Jews) and sits down at the table on the stage. There are maybe two hundred people in the hall, the majority men between thirty and fifty years old. When the prosecutor counters anti-Semitic remarks, he is met with a menacing growl. Voices speaking of Jews denouncing people to the NKVD are rewarded with applause.

“It's lies they're writing. Even if you packed them in like herrings in a barrel you couldn't get sixteen hundred Jews in there.”

“We're not anti-Semites. I played with Jewish kids. But it has to be said: when Poles were taken off to Siberia, there were two Jews standing guard at the door.”

“Who's accusing the people of Jedwabne? We don't even have to ask: we know that money rules.”

“Let the institute put Gross on trial for his lies.”

One of the men in the hall tells me later, without giving his name, “That guy on the right who was yelling loudest that the Jews got Polish patriots deported, he knows very well that his father denounced my father, and even joined the NKVD when they came to arrest him. Later he got down on his knees, pleading with my father to keep it a secret.”

For the first time I see Father Orłowski in action. Jovial, sturdy, energetic, with a powerful voice and a round face made even rounder by his bald head. After the meeting he steps off the stage, stands before the camera—Channel 2 is shooting a report on Jedwabne—straightens his cassock, and declaims: “They want to make us believe we're murderers. The peaceful coexistence of Poles and Jews was violated by the Jews during the Soviet occupation. When Poland was conquered in 1939, no town was as quick to organize a resistance movement as Jedwabne. Poles died in Auschwitz. What they're saying is not just slander against Jedwabne, but against the Polish people. We have to defend ourselves.”

I go with the prosecutor to the town hall, and introduce myself to Mayor Krzysztof Godlewski, who invites us to tea.

“It's beneath human dignity to be a bean counter in a matter like this,” the mayor says. “Maybe there weren't sixteen hundred victims, but thirteen hundred or fewer. What does it matter? We have to come to terms with the fact of this crime—with Christian humility. The Jewish citizens of Jedwabne were cruelly murdered. It's good that this has been brought to light. The whole thing about Jews collaborating with the NKVD is just a red herring—we should be talking about changing the inscription on the monument.”

I ask how he intends to do this in a town where the priest is calling on parishioners to defend themselves against the truth.

“A handful of people took part in the crime. The townspeople are outraged that the condemnation has fallen on the whole community. Many of them are convinced the Germans carried out the atrocity. That's what they used to hear and it's hard to change their minds. Perhaps it could be shown that in 1949 some innocent man was convicted, that would show people that the Institute of National Remembrance wants to get to the truth. The townspeople have been put in an extraordinarily difficult situation. They need time to digest it. It's natural to choose the easier truth. But I see from the town council how the more difficult truth is gradually sinking in.”

At this moment one of the councilmen comes in.

“Even if you quartered sixteen hundred Jews, you couldn't fit them in that barn. I was born in 1950, but I know from my parents and neighbors that the Jews were destroyed by Hitler. Whoever says it was Poles was paid to say that. Poles rounded them up, for fun or under duress, I don't know, but a German was standing there with a gun.”

I interrupt him to ask what he thinks the monument's inscription should say.

“
Sixteen hundred Jews were not burned here.
That lie has to be rectified.”

Godlewski—a tall man with a handlebar mustache, a talented actor—stands behind him and makes desperate faces at me, covers his eyes, his ears, lifts his hands to the heavens.

I visit the priest at the presbytery, and open the conversation politely: “A lot of your parishioners came to the meeting with the prosecutor, which I know you organized.”

“I announced it in church. I told people to go and they responded to my call,” he says with satisfaction. “Everyone agrees that the Polish and Jewish communities lived in perfect concord, like a loving family. It went wrong with the Russians' invasion of Poland, when many Jews joined the NKVD and friendships with Poles were broken off. We have to look at Gross closely. Jedwabne is the tip of the iceberg.”

“What are you saying?”

“If the Jedwabne affair is dealt with in the way Gross would like, it'll be like knocking a hole in the hull of a ship and waiting for it to sink. The truth is that the Germans did the killing, not the Poles. But Jews do things that way.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“When we had Bible class the priest told us, ‘A Jew will put a cap on a stick and tell you: “Watch out, there are two of us.”' That's what the Jewish character is like. In New York I met a Jewish multimillionaire who bragged about the huge factory he sold to the Germans during the war: ‘They gave us a lot of gold and drove us to Hamburg, and from there we sailed to America.' Here his whole people was perishing and he did that—the ultimate swindle.”

“Do you ever hear anti-Semitic remarks in your parish?”

“We don't have the problem of anti-Semitism here.”

“What do you think the inscription on the monument should say?”

“
Here the Jews were destroyed by the Nazis.
That's a compromise that should placate both the Jews and the Poles. Otherwise the town will have to defend itself.”

“How do you see that?”

“Maybe we'll have to get organized, we have a lot of patriots here. I'm considering setting up a committee to defend the town's good name.”

I'd looked for Leszek Dziedzic in vain at the meeting with the prosecutor, so I go by his house in Przestrzele, about three kilometers from Jedwabne.

“I don't go to the priest's parties,” he says, “but you tell me what happened.”

He listens to my account without moving from his chair, and comments, “Same priest, same people. Their only problem is, there aren't any Jews left to kill.”

FEBRUARY 8, 2001

From articles on Jedwabne, of which there have been several in the press, I found a few names and got the addresses from the phone book.

Above all, I want to meet a Jewish woman who lives here, identified in the press as Helena Ch. She was baptized during the war and married a Pole. I read about her: “Black bushy eyebrows, lively blue eyes, hair covered with a flowery scarf. The
Tygodnik Katolicki Niedziela
[Sunday Catholic Weekly] lay open on the kitchen table. ‘Don't give my name, why would you? That name is gone, those people are gone. It was God's will they should all perish in the barn. I don't bear any grudge. Poles gave me life. It's been quiet for so many years, why revisit it all? Don't give my name. I'm not worried about myself but about my children. When my son was studying in Białystok he let his beard grow. I had to ask him to shave it off or people might have a bad association. Later he wanted to name my grandson David, but I explained to him people might get angry. I don't want to hurt anyone. I want to die in peace. Quietly, peacefully.'”