The Crime and the Silence (70 page)

JUNE 17, 2002

More people I've heard of before are turning up in the pages of Chaja Finkelsztejn's memoir.

There's Lejzor Zandler, who bossed everyone around under the Soviets as the manager of the Finkelsztejns' nationalized mill, and gave propaganda speeches against the former owners, or “vampires.” I know the rest of his story from Ramotowski, who met him during the German occupation, when he was intending to find his way to the Soviet Union and join the Communist partisans there.

There's the medic Mazurek, described by Chaja as one of the most important people in the village after the Germans arrived, next to the priest and the village head: he is the same older gentleman who was a friend of Ramotowski's mother. It was at his urging that Rachela got herself baptized, and Mazurek himself became her godfather and a witness at her church wedding to Stanisław Ramotowski.

There's Marian Kozikowski of Konopki, who took part in the atrocity but also got the Finkelsztejns out of the market square. His name appears several times in the trials of the Radziłów killers. Józef Ekstowicz testified that Marian Kozikowski was in the auxiliary police and gave him the order to set the barn on fire. If Kozikowski was in the auxiliary police, the Finkelsztejns could have left the market square with his permission. He was lord and master in town that day. He must have saved the Finkelsztejns for money.

There's Wolf Szlapak, a family friend of the Finkelsztejns and a Zionist activist who traveled around Poland collecting money to buy land in Palestine. He was supposed to go to America, but he didn't make it before the war broke out. Stanisław Ramotowski remembered Szlapak from before the war, when he used to see him in his iron shop on the market: “Tall, handsome, he looked as distinguished as if he were some kind of leader.”

Chaja describes how before the war the Zionists invited emissaries from Eretz Israel to the town. They spoke about Palestine in a crowded synagogue. The Communists tried to break up the meeting and Wolf Szlapak called the police. Chaja emphasizes that he didn't mention that the people disturbing the peace were Communists.

That must have been the same gathering I read about in the Interior Ministry reports: “On May 2, 1932, at the Municipal Court in Szczuczyn, the trial took place against Abram Strzałka and 12 other Jews, Communist members of the Perec Jewish Library Association in Radziłów, accused of disturbing the public peace in the town synagogue. The court sentenced each of the accused men to pay a fine of thirty zlotys or go to jail for seven days.”

Wolf Szlapak was murdered on July 7 before his fellow Jews perished in the barn. Halina Zalewska told me about it: “Mieczysław Strzelecki first took Szlapak's valuables and then shot him in his own bed.”

When I was in Radziłów with Jan Skrodzki this time, we looked over Szlapak's old house on the Radziłów marketplace. Made of logs, it stands unaltered to this day, slightly sagging, and not so grand for a wealthy merchant.

It is occupied by Stanisław Mordasiewicz. This is the man whom Stanisław Ramotowski kept telling me I shouldn't confuse with the family of the killers Mordasiewicz, because he's such a decent guy. He must have distinguished himself among the local population before the war, because when Wolf Szlapak's brother turned up in town after 1945 (he survived because he had been deported to the Soviet Union) he offered Mordasiewicz the purchase of Wolf's house at a knockdown price.

Stanisław Mordasiewicz knew Szlapak's killers had buried him in his own yard. He dug up the remains. He wrapped them in a sheet, laid them on his wagon, and buried them in the Jewish cemetery. He told no one about it, because he wouldn't have survived in the town.

 

13

The Dreams of Chaja Finkelsztejn

or, The Survival of a Radzi
łó
w Miller's Family

The Polish residents of Radziłów and the Germans are rounding up the Jews, forming them into a double column that stretches the entire length of the street from the Beit Midrasz to the church. They beat them with poles and the butts of rifles. The Finkelsztejn family—Chaja; her husband, Izrael; and their children, Menaszka, Szlomko, Szejne, and Chana—quietly leave their house to hide from their persecutors. They slip away as if they were invisible. But they see the Germans and Poles yanking out the beards of Jews, laughing till their sides split. The family steals past walls of houses plastered with caricatures of Jews from
Der Stürmer
. But the houses end and the fleeing family can no longer take refuge behind walls. They stand by the fence of the churchyard. In desperation they decide to hide there. Chaja unlatches the iron gate and … wakes up.

This is the first of the prophetic dreams that would accompany Chaja Finkelsztejn until the end of the war, guiding her steps, giving her strength and raising her spirits.

The Finkelsztejns were among the wealthiest families in town. Chaja's husband was a miller. They knew the local peasants, who brought them their grain for milling. They took care to maintain neighborly relations; Izrael added flour to the scale, threw in little presents for the peasants' children.

Wedding photograph of Chaja and Izrael Finkelsztejn. Radziłów, 1921.
(Courtesy of Jose Gutstein,
www.radzilow.com
)

Chana, the fourth and youngest child of Chaja and Izrael Finkelsztejn. Radziłów, 1937 or 1938.
(Courtesy of Jose Gutstein,
www.radzilow.com
)

Their mill stood by the road leading out of Radziłów toward Jedwabne. When the Soviets arrived, they requisitioned the mill and shortly after they threw the owners out. “A compassionate Christian,” as Chaja recalled in the memoir she wrote right after the war, rented them a place to live. With heavy hearts they burned their archive of Zionist activity, dating from 1917. The Soviets took repressive action against Chaja and Izrael on two counts: because they were seen as “bourgeois elements” and as Zionists. Izrael was repeatedly brought in for interrogation. Every night they trembled in fear of deportation. Chaja prepared for that eventuality, buying reams of cloth in the knowledge that money might lose its value from one day to the next, but cloth would always be ready currency. They managed to avoid deportation thanks to Chaja's efficiency in bribing Soviet officials. They got their house back, albeit with a policeman as a lodger. They watched through the windows how the new managers of the mill settled in, among them the tailor Lejzor Zandler, a Communist sympathizer before the war, and the Pole Malinowicz.

When Chaja proposed that a Jewish refugee from Krynki tutor her children, the man exclaimed, “Am I dreaming? So there are still Jews who feel the need to learn Hebrew and the Talmud?” They studied in secret, with the shutters closed.

On Yom Kippur 1940 her husband, employed as a manual laborer at what used to be his own mill, moved the hands of the clock forward two hours and in that way made it to evening prayers. The Jews prayed in the Beit Midrasz, because the Soviets had turned the synagogue into a storehouse. In January 1941, on the anniversary of the mill's nationalization, it held a celebration called “A Year Without Property Owners.” “After that a few old Christian workers of ours came to us,” Chaja wrote. “They told us it had started with long speeches about what happiness the Communists had brought the workers by getting rid of the proprietors, who were drinking their blood. They had cursed us. Lejzor Zandler had spouted all kinds of slander and filth about us. Someone from our own family had joined in. We'd brought him up, taught him his trade, and he chose a new path following false prophets. I pointed out to him once that he should remember his past, that he had been an instructor preparing Jews for departure to Palestine, and that he was wrong about Communism, that Communism wasn't going to liberate the Jews, that as soon as the wind turned the Russians themselves, our old
pogromchiks
, would spill Jewish blood. ‘A state of Israel is our only hope,' I explained to him. And he joked, ‘Maybe you want a blue-and-white flag with a star on it? If you don't shut up, you'll end up in the Gulag in Arkhangelsk.'”

In June 1941 they were warned that a deportation was imminent and that they were on the list. But that very night the Russian-German war broke out.

Franciszek Rogowski, a wealthy peasant from Trzaski, four kilometers from Radziłów, came to see them immediately. “He belonged to the gentry, his brother a doctor, another a priest, the three others were still students. He managed the farm with his father and one of his brothers. He wanted to show his sympathy. We asked him to hide our belongings. First he was scared, then he agreed. He suggested he could take our cow, too. If the need arose, we could hide with him. But he'd only hide our family, and he'd only do it in such a way that none of the neighbors saw us arrive.”

They transported to Trzaski the baskets and suitcases they'd already packed, which took up an entire shed at the farm. But when they went to the Rogowskis after the German invasion to sit out the first days of the German occupation, they were not welcome: “We read from their faces that they were more interested in our belongings. Their eldest son, with feigned kindness, invited us to sit down and told his mother to give us bread and milk. That woman, who once had been as friendly to us as the rest of the family, had changed her attitude. She hardly said anything. She frostily invited us to the table. We were not overwhelmed by the honor. I told the children to eat something. But they felt the chill, too. Our little boy fell asleep, exhausted, and when he woke up he started to cry for us to leave because they were going to kill us. He saw in them a readiness to kill in order to have our things.”

The next day Chaja decided to go home, because she was worried about the ducks and geese left on the farm. She put on her shoes, tied a scarf around her head, and, pretending to be a village woman, set off for the town. She stood amid the crowd of onlookers when the inhabitants of Radziłów enthusiastically greeted the invading Germans. “I remembered how they'd entered Radziłów in 1915,” she later wrote. “The same pride, the same heads held high. But how did they look in 1918 as prisoners of war? They were beaten by peasants armed with poles. I prayed for the day when they would be on the run again. I was sure it would come, but would we live to see it?”

When she was reunited with her family, it turned out her worried husband had gone looking for her. He returned shaken. He had barely escaped a peasant who had come at him with a knife crying, “It's because of you Jews they're going to send me to Siberia.” He owed his escape to a ruse: he had intentionally dropped his jacket, knowing the peasant would stop to pick it up to see if there was any money in it …

They heard the Poles had given the order that no goods were to be sold to Jews, and no one was to give them shelter. And that everything had calmed down in town, so the Finkelsztejns could go home. Their house was already occupied by German officers, but the Germans gave back part of the house. In
Der Stürmer
, the German rag they found lying about the house, they read that Britain had proposed to create two states in the territory of Palestine: Israel for the Jews, and Arabia for the Arabs. For a moment they felt happy.

On June 27, the Germans stationed at the Finkelsztejns' left Radziłów along with the rest of the troops. Chaja writes: “I realized that it was almost Shabbat and I needed to get something ready for Saturday. I had a goose hidden away, the rest of the poultry had been stolen. I brought it to the
shokhet
through the back lanes. He was sick in bed, he hadn't recovered from the profanation of the holy books from the temple. His own place had been looted and trashed by Christians he knew. His daughter, who was a friend of mine, told me in tears that she'd tried to resist them but they'd hit her, yelling: ‘Stupid Jewish cow, what's the difference, who's going to keep it safe for you?'”