The Crime and the Silence (43 page)

“The truth will never be buried entirely. A time will come when even stones will speak. I often think, It would be enough if in Jedwabne and in every village in the area there were one person with the courage to tell the story to his children. And if the next generation had at least one child who passed it on when it grew up. And so the truth will live.

“If a Pole does something good we praise ourselves to the sky, but when it's bad, he's no longer one of ours. We can't change the fact that we have this legacy from the past. The Germans are partly responsible, but the point is not to lay our own blame on someone else, the Germans have enough on their conscience as it is.

“I can't get my head around the fact that Śleszyński's grandson is haggling over the price he wants on the land for the monument. His grandfather voluntarily gave his barn to burn the Jews and now they're paying his grandson for that land? I wonder if he'll realize on his deathbed what he took money for. That land belongs to the people that lie there. Some partisans were killed on our piece of land. A man came to us asking if he could buy a corner of our land and put up a gravestone for his father-in-law. I told him, ‘It's yours, it was sanctified with their blood.'

“I have an ongoing argument with my neighbors. In shops, at the dump, at the gas station, in church, wherever it is, I speak my mind, wherever it gets me. I met a friend in church with whom I sing in the choir. He gave me a flyer saying the Jews brought the Holocaust on themselves, and told me to pass it on. I told him what I thought about it, that his father was a decent man who was in the Home Army and he took no part in the massacre. Another guy told me the government's full of Jews. I said, ‘When Jews were reading books, I was playing soccer—and what have you done to get a government job?' ‘That's true,' he admitted, ‘I didn't get much schooling.'

“A man who has blood on his hands won't tell you what he did. But he'll talk about others killing. The thugs had a problem afterward: how to divvy up the hide they took off the Jews. There were so many feuds and denunciations. In every quarrel neighbors would remind one another: and you killed that Jew, and you stole from that Jew. Before Gross's book it wasn't a secret to anyone who had been the killers, even though no one spoke of it out loud. It was only after the book came out that people kept quiet and it turned out suddenly nobody knew anything.

“I'm trying on my own to reconstruct what happened here in Przestrzele. In two families out of eight there were people who participated in the killing. Later they remembered they happened to have been in Jedwabne that day. Two guys from Przestrzele killed Helena Chrzanowska's uncle and cousin. It was like this: Four Jews were in hiding together, spending the night in a haystack. German police were driving by as one of the Jews was walking in the field, and they saw the grain move. They shot him, and then his father came toward them, he didn't care anymore, he screamed at them to kill him, too. Later they found the other two in the hay. The Germans had the farmers dig a hole, where they threw the bodies, and they told them they could kill the other two with spades and bury them with the others, or bring them in to the police station. The Jews tried to persuade them to let them go, saying, ‘You don't think the Germans are going to check how many people are in the hole, do you?' They had let them go when the neighbor came from across the street to tell them they had to catch those Jews, because if the Germans found out they'd burn the whole village down. Two of them, Domitrz and Edek Kotyński, caught up with them on horseback and brought them to the police station.

“‘A patriot wouldn't talk that way,' they tell me. I reply that I'm not a murderer's patriot, but a patriot of my country, and I'm not betraying my homeland, only the murderers.

“Once, an acquaintance of my dad's met me with the words, ‘You Jewish lackey, if I had a gun I'd shoot people like you. Let your father come back from America, they'll find his head in the Przestrzelak.' And I told him, ‘Just make sure you bury it properly, I don't want it to be like the time you killed that Jewish girl and dogs tore her body to pieces.' And I added, ‘People like you gave us 1941, and you'd go on doing the same thing.' He disappeared. He knew what I was talking about, because it was his brother-in-law who raped, murdered, and buried a Jewish woman. It was like this: The brother of that killer Mierzejewski was hiding a Jewish woman in his house in Kajetanów. She was supposed to be moved to another place, when two guys from Przestrzele caught her, raped her, killed her, and buried her, not very well, on the bank of the stream. She surfaced in the spring.

“They don't stop short of slander. They ask me, ‘How much money did your father get from the Jews for giving an interview?' I said to one, ‘What did your father get for killing Jews?' He turned redder than a beet. The blood on the fathers' hands burns the children. I heard from one guy that my father dug around in the ashes for gold teeth, and now what a defender of Jews he is. I came back, ‘Right, right, and then he and your dad melted it down in your basement.' Someone was sneering that they hadn't found sixteen hundred bodies when they did the exhumation; he said, ‘Now let the Jews tell us where they're buried.' I said, ‘They can't tell you because you killed them all.' I can't help but react to that bullshit they go around spouting, but how many times can you swing at them?

“Well, and what if there were fewer than sixteen hundred Jews? They killed the whole people. If there had been three times as many Jews, they would have killed three times as many; apparently there weren't. Does a smaller number make the guilt smaller? No, it's the same. It's hard to imagine this massacre. The burning itself meant terrible pain, and then there was the suffocation. And those people hadn't done anything to anybody. When I think about it I see a father going into the fire with a child. The child trusts his father to save him, but he can't do anything.

“Once, it happened that some vague acquaintance came up to me in the marketplace and shook my hand. And once Stanisław Michałowski congratulated me out loud in a shop. All the decent people in Jedwabne are frightened. Sixty years ago the Jews who lived in Jedwabne and were Polish just like us were robbed of their lives by their own neighbors. And now the killers' descendants harass us for speaking the truth.

“Someone jibed at me once that I don't have a Polish surname because it doesn't end in ‘ski.' My uncle Klemens's son called me a rabbi's son, asked me why I don't wear a yarmulke. Apparently he thinks that's an insult. My attitude is that I've never been scared of anyone. At the disco I'd say, ‘Don't start up with me or you'll get hurt.' One punch for me was usually enough. But lately my mind has been so affected by all this chatter that I instinctively turn my back to the wall when I go into a store, so no one can hit me from behind. They threaten to burn us. I think they'd be too scared to do anything to us, but I go out to the porch and shoot in front of the house to make a point. My wife and I are most concerned about the children.

“I won't leave any friends here. When I most needed them they turned out to be false friends. What will I say when my American grandson asks me about my memories of my homeland? That Jedwabne was no place to live?”

 

Journal

JUNE 18, 2001

I've brought Ramotowski to my house. Today Marek Edelman, who promised to examine him, is coming from Łódź. I give them lunch. Edelman says he finds him in pretty good shape.

“The main thing is for him not to get short of breath,” Edelman says.

I press him to tell me the prognosis.

“He could go on like this for a few months, half a year, even longer.”

In the
Republic
an interview with Professor Feliks Tych, the director of the Jewish Historical Institute and author of
The Long Shadow of the Holocaust
. Based on a reading of hundreds of diaries (most of them unpublished), he claims that at least 10 percent of Polish society was—sporadically or for a substantial period of time—engaged in activities to help Jews, a majority regarded the Holocaust with indifference, and at least 20 to 30 percent thought the Germans were helping the Poles deal with their Jewish problem. “It's a bitter conclusion, but as a historian I cannot shy away from saying it publicly, even though for many years I didn't even want to say it to myself.”

Until recently such an interview would have had no chance of appearing in a mainstream newspaper. I remember the reactions to Jan Błoński's article “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” in the
Tygodnik Powszechny
(General Weekly) in 1987, which spoke of the sin of indifference. It provoked a storm of protest, and I'm not talking about nationalist and anti-Semitic circles but liberal Catholics. Gross's book has opened up an entirely new level of discussion.

Tych recalls a truth self-evident elsewhere in the world and difficult to accept in Poland. There was no common fate for Jews and Poles in wartime. Every Jew was sentenced to death, even children. Of those who found themselves under German occupation, 5 to 7 percent of ethnic Poles were killed, as opposed to 98 percent of Polish Jews.

In the evening I summarize the Tych interview for Jacek Kuroń and he tells me of his first day at school in Lvov during the war. His family had just moved, so he knew nobody in the class. The teacher said, “Good thing the Jews are gone.” The children in the class responded with laughter, and he didn't dare react.

“My guilt for not speaking up then made me speak up for the rest of my life,” says Kuroń.

JUNE 20, 2001

The same unpleasant thing happens to me for the umpteenth time. It surprises me, or I should really say it hurts, when some of my friends and acquaintances say directly or at least suggest to me that I'm “not objective,” because of my background. I have the feeling I'm in the hot seat all the time. (I'm repeating the experience of generations of assimilated Jews, though my ancestors already went through this process.) At the same time—if you don't believe the nonsense about the Jedwabne affair being stirred up so Jews can demand billions in compensation from Poland—it's not quite clear to me why I supposedly prefer Poles to have killed Jews in Jedwabne, rather than Germans. The same friends and acquaintances see nothing subjective in the fact that the matter of Polish guilt is being investigated by Poles at the Institute of National Remembrance without questionable blood in their lineage, like Kieres or Ignatiew. (To be clear, I don't accuse them of prejudice, I'm just pointing out a certain lack of balance in the matter.)

JUNE 25, 2001

Białystok. I've come for several days to look at pre- and postwar documents. In the town archive, I run into employees of the local branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, which is right next door. One of them starts to say, “As prosecutor Ignatiew probably told you…,” suggesting with insidious hostility that Ignatiew favors one journalist—from the
Gazeta
, to boot—over others.

I'm tempted in these situations to say bluntly, “You want to know to what extent my articles come from leaks by the prosecutor? Here I have to disappoint you, but I work hard enough not to need the prosecutor to establish facts for me, not to mention that Ignatiew is an exemplary official who does not reveal confidential information about an investigation. If anyone is helping anyone here it's I who am helping him, by offering him access to witnesses I've found. On the other hand, the prosecutor is a support to me, something like a therapist.”

Because both of us are clearly obsessed with Jedwabne, because we think about it morning, noon, and night. I can always call him, relate to him a recent conversation, and let off steam. I've managed finally to get through Ignatiew's stiffness, his habit of calling me
pani redaktor
(“Miss Editor”), which makes me cringe. We're on first-name terms now, I can even say we're friends. At times I permit myself to exclaim that I can't take it anymore, I've had enough, I'm emigrating. Ignatiew listens and calms me down: “But you know they're not all like that, look how screwed up his life has been because of all this. You were talking to an unhappy, sick person—hatred is a disease.”

JUNE 28, 2001

Jedwabne. Stanisław Michałowski called an extraordinary session of the council, because the matter of the memorial ceremony now hangs by a thread. A country road leads to the site of the massacre and the Jewish cemetery across from it, a road that turns to mud when it rains. A construction company was supposed to lay asphalt on the last stretch of it, but Bubel, the anti-Semitic publisher, persuaded “his” council members not to allow the work to be done on the last section of road, which means guests won't be able to get to the monument.

“The town administration stopped bidding for the asphalt paving of the little road leading to the monument,” Godlewski tells me. “No one is bothered that firms have already been hired to do all the work. The governor sent a telex saying that they're going to take away our funding, and then we'd have to pay out of our own pockets for the construction that's already been done on the market square. The town would never be able to afford that. The majority reason as follows: ‘Give us money; we'll take it and do with it what we like. We'll repair the market square but not the road to the cemetery.' One council member was shouting, ‘We won't agree to a road for Jews,' and another, that the town should demand compensation for the ceremony. They wanted at any price to leave the construction undone so that it would be a physical impossibility to get to the monument. I proposed that I would resign in exchange for the completion of the road. I said, ‘I think I made a mistake, and I'll offer my resignation, but let's finish what we started, because the town is going to have to pay for it.' And Councilman Dmoch says, ‘Resign now, what are you waiting for?'”