The Crime and the Silence (79 page)

In the work of deciphering the addresses, family connections, and assets of the inhabitants of Jedwabne I am also helped by Chaim Sroszko from Holon near Tel Aviv, with whom I'm in constant phone contact. Years ago, just for himself, Sroszko reconstucted over two hundred names and all the shops in Jedwabne, but sadly he can't find the papers. It turns out he is the one who dictated the list to Tzipora Rothchild that appeared in the
Jedwabne Book of Memory.
Now he labors for the third time, for me. Adding his remarks and corrections, I see not everything adds up. Sometimes I have to choose between his memory and Meir Ronen's. I have the sense there's no way of avoiding some errors, that some doubts cannot be resolved, that in many cases question marks will remain.

I also have individual names and addresses of Jedwabne Jews that I jotted down from various documents, such as the case documents on transfers of post-Jewish houses to new owners, “1939 data on fire insurance,” and an excerpt from a directory published in 1929 by the International Advertising Association, in which there may be no addresses but the owners of shops and businesses are given.

A different problem I struggle with is the spelling of names and surnames. Most of them were translated from Yiddish to Hebrew, from Hebrew to English, and then I translated them into Polish (in Hebrew there were already various versions of some of them). The word “guess” is sometimes more appropriate than “reconstruct.” On Tzipora Rothchild's list there's the surname Skocznadel. It seemed so implausible to me that I didn't know whether to put it in, when a friend of friend made me realize that the name literally means “leap-needle,” and so this was probably a tailor's family.

JULY 1, 2004

I read the prosecutor's findings. I now have the opportunity to compare what the same witnesses told me and what they told the prosecutor.

We come to similar conclusions, but here and there mine go further, because I'm not inhibited by the rigors of a legal investigation. Ignatiew's findings are a shock to me for reasons I didn't anticipate: they show how universal the tendency to lie is in this case.

Ignatiew must have disqualified many eyewitnesses as unreliable. I'm not talking about inaccuracies related to some, even essential, details—even a person with an excellent memory can make a mistake—but fabrication, lies.

My anti-Semitic interlocutors did a lot of shouting about kosher newspapers and Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD, but seldom did they bother to tell clearly fabricated stories. In the testimonies for the prosecution about July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne, they tell bald-faced lies. In these stories, the streets of Jedwabne were seething with Germans.

According to Halina Czarzasta of Kajetanów there was talk before July 10 of a petition that the Jews made to the police requesting guns so they could settle scores with the Poles. On the day of the massacre she herself set off for Jedwabne, where she saw a group of Jews carrying the bust of Lenin on the road to the cemetery, followed by a dark green military car escorted by German soldiers on foot and a few Polish civilians to the side, one with a stick. She heard many single shots.

According to Stefan Boczkowski from near Jedwabne (who told the same story in many interviews), when the Jews were herded to the barn two or three military trucks filled with uniformed Germans pulled up. They unloaded metal containers from the trucks and set the barn on fire.

According to Teodor Lusiński of Jedwabne (who also put on a good show for the press) a jeep drove into town at 4:00 a.m. along with eight trucks covered with tarpaulins, each carrying uniformed Germans with guns. At 4:00 p.m. this witness heard orders given in German through a megaphone that the Jews were to stand in rows of four. He saw men carrying the Lenin bust enter the cemetery, where at a German command the Jews lay down side by side, lifted their top garments to bare their chests, and proceeded to kill one another using bayonets that were handed to them. At night he heard a sequence of shots. Later he learned that the surviving Jews had tried to pray at the burnt barn and the German guard fired at them.

According to Jadwiga Kordas from near Jedwabne, two trucks drove slowly across the marketplace at about noon with armed policemen from a special unit—a “death squad.” The Germans shot at Jews fleeing the market and later from the burning barn. The next day when the witness returned to Jedwabne, it was already being said that only Jews who had collaborated with the Soviets and their families had been killed. The Jewish doctor who treated the witness declared that the burned Jewish Communists deserved what they got because under the Soviet occupation they'd used the Jewish temple as a toilet.

Tadeusz Święszkowski from Grądy Małe saw two military trucks with tarps coming. He wasn't at the barn. In the afternoon he went to Kajetanów to visit his uncle, so he only saw the smoke from a distance. Later he heard that three hundred Jews had been rounded up in the marketplace of whom half escaped, thanks to the help of Poles among others.

Tadeusz Święszkowski is my Tadeusz Ś., the retired Warsaw doctor whom Adam Michnik and I met in August 2000 and who refused to have his name printed. In the version he gave us, he saw two Gestapo officers on motorcycles coming into town. He himself followed behind the Jews and saw three Germans driving about a thousand Jews into the barn.

Ignatiew summarizes the reliability of witnesses in a few sentences. He counts among the unreliable witnesses those referred to by Strzembosz, including Tadeusz Święszkowski.

I read a list of objects retrieved from the ashes during the exhumation: keys, hundreds of kopeck coins used under the Soviet occupation, silver coins and gold coins, one with Piłsudski's profile, dental bridges and crowns, seventeen gold wedding bands, three seals, earrings, medallions, brooches, plastic and metal buttons, rings, a bracelet, necklaces, watches, a gold-colored pendant in the shape of an open book with Hebrew writing, a tallit pin, bent spoons (used to weed grass in the marketplace), metal shoe caps and rubber soles, cape hooks, a zipper tab, a safety pin, trouser buckles and suspender clasps, snaps, eyeglasses, a metal box with shoemaker's nails, a sewing machine drum, a thimble.

JULY 10, 2004

I lay a rock on the monument to the murdered. A bus came from the Jewish community in Warsaw and kaddish was said. I don't think anyone from Jedwabne came.

 

15

Strictly Speaking, Poles Did It

or, A Conversation with Prosecutor Rados
ł
aw Ignatiew

You wrote in your ruling, summing up the results of the investigation into the crime of July 10, 1941: “At dawn inhabitants of the surrounding villages began to arrive in Jedwabne with the intention of carrying out the plan made earlier to kill the Jewish inhabitants…” That first sentence is really enough, you could leave it there. I don't think I'd dare to formulate it so categorically. What is it that makes you so sure?

At the time of the exhumation many valuable objects were found in the graves: watches, jewelry, gold rubles. It would have been no problem to take them from the Jews standing in the market square and leave town. In Jedwabne the looting didn't start until the barn was set on fire. That's why I assume people came to town to kill.

You say, “The perpetrators of the crime, strictly speaking, were the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and its surroundings—a group of at least forty men … They actively participated in committing the crime, armed with sticks, crow bars, and other tools.” Let us try to trace how you came to the description you gave of the atrocity in your final findings. You read Gross's book …

It was the very beginning of our tenure at the prosecutor's office of the Białystok Institute of National Remembrance. I was the prosecutor, clerk, storekeeper, chauffeur, and even the cleaner; I went around dusting after hours so that the two rooms we'd been assigned would look decent. It was my first case at the Institute of National Remembrance. Gross's book did not make for easy reading, it aroused opposition, denial. I was raised in a patriotic tradition. I'd heard of the wartime blackmailers of Jews,
szmalcowniks,
but I felt an inner resistance to believing that Poles had murdered Jews. Yet it didn't take me long to realize that a prosecutor is above all an investigative officer who should rely on the established evidence, setting aside his own convictions.

Anna Bikont and the prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew of the Institute of National Remembrance. In front of Stanisław Ramotowski's house in Dziewięcin, near Radziłów, 2001.
(Photograph © Krzysztof Miller / Agencja Gazeta)

When did you first realize that the story Gross told had really happened?

That wasn't the goal of my investigation. I wasn't concerned with whether Gross's book was good or bad, true or false, though I was often asked questions like that.

All right. Professor Strzembosz read the trial documents from 1949 and saw in them a manipulated Stalinist investigation in the course of which many innocent people were convicted. And you, did you see something different?

It was immediately clear to me that the proceedings of 1949 were conducted improperly.

But the conclusions you drew were different from those of Strzembosz.

They hadn't even tried to determine the personal details and number of victims, the precise course of events. Witnesses gave the names of many of the perpetrators, but the court wasn't interested. In that trial, twenty-two locals were accused of having participated in bringing Jews to the marketplace and then leading them in a procession to the barn, on the Germans' initiative. That was it. Despite the fact that it was obvious from witness statements that some of the perpetrators had participated directly in acts of murder. It was terrifying, what you could learn from the trial evidence—how carefully the crime was organized: one group drove the victims from their homes, others blocked off the roads leading out of town, a third group guarded those gathered in the market square.

Those were Stalinist times, young Home Army soldiers were being condemned to death, and here were obvious killers being cleared. You can't tell from the case documents why some were convicted and others were released. Do you think they released the ones who agreed to collaborate with the secret police?

More people were arrested than were later charged in the trial. In the monitoring and investigative documents of the Łomża secret police, you can find information about a person being charged, and then that person is not mentioned in the accusation either as a defendant or as a witness. In the case of one of the men suspected of participating in the atrocity, we found evidence of his having signed an agreement to collaborate with the secret police.

Historians and journalists liked to refer to prosecutor Monkiewicz's findings from the 1970s.

I don't want to comment on that investigation. It makes me uncomfortable.

Please try, it's very important. Monkiewicz stated that a unit of 232 Germans led by Wolfgang Birkner arrived in Jedwabne on trucks on July 10, 1941.

There is no indication that the operational group led by Birkner, which was then near Białystok, retreated eighty kilometers. Especially in a situation when the Germans had so many unsecured areas in front of them. It's a supposition produced out of thin air, without the support of any data. The prosecutor assumed the perpetrators of the crime were Germans. But if it was the Germans, which Germans? Apart from Birkner's command, there were local policemen there, of course. In the conclusion, he indicated the surnames of policemen from Jedwabne remembered by witnesses. That conclusion about Birkner and the policemen was passed on to the German authorities for criminal prosecution, to help them find the culprits. What Monkiewicz sent to the German investigators returned to Poland like a boomerang: people here could say the Germans did it, because it's in the German files.

Monkiewicz himself now speaks about the guidelines he'd received from the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, that he was to prosecute only German criminals. Was the investigation set in motion with the express purpose of erasing traces of Polish participation in the crime?

What I can say for sure is that the investigation was badly conducted. The 1949 trial fulfilled the basic principle of an honest trial, because no one was convicted who wasn't guilty, though not all the men accused of participating had charges brought against them.

The second investigation led by Monkiewicz took almost eight years, from 1967 to 1974. In all that time nothing was done beyond the interrogation of sixteen witnesses. They didn't re-create the course of events, there are no indications at all that any use was made of the criminal trials of 1949 and 1953.

At the same time, Monkiewicz conducted a parallel investigation into the crimes committed by the police in Jedwabne. During those proceedings someone gave testimony that on the day that people were burned one of the residents of the village Korytki was very active in herding the Jewish population into the Jedwabne market square. The man accused was summoned and interrogated as a witness. But they only asked him about the circumstances of the killing of members of his family in 1943 by the Germans!