The Crime and the Silence (80 page)

Reading those documents I thought that as an official in the employ of the Polish state and in view of the memory of those murdered I would do everything within my power to conduct the next investigation properly. Unfortunately, we didn't manage to determine if there were living perpetrators of the crime who had not yet stood trial. That meant criminal proceedings were dismissed. But Institute of National Remembrance prosecution investigations also have the goal of revealing the fullest possible truth about the circumstances of the crimes being studied. I really put enormous effort into finding as much information about the crime committed in Jedwabne as possible. It was important to me to determine the names of the murder victims, so that they wouldn't remain anonymous. Sadly, I only managed to find some of those names.

During the time you were conducting the case, there were several false alarms sounded in the press—ammunition shells being found in the barn, so the Germans had done it …

After the press had been told that shells had been found near the site of the crime, witnesses started testifying that they'd heard shots. Before that I'd only found one such statement.

In March 2001 you launched the next investigation, into Radziłów. I knew from interviews with witnesses that after the war there had also been trials “for the Jews” there. I gave you the names of the defendants, the only way to find the cases and the place where the trials took place—Ełk. Before that no one suspected there had been trials anywhere but Jedwabne.

A portion of the documents from the postwar trial survived thanks to the director of the state archive in Ełk, a born archivist. He told me that in the early sixties an order was conveyed to him to lose, which is to say destroy, all archival documents on cases related to the August decree (“on the punishments of Fascist and Nazi criminals … and traitors to the Polish Nation”), leaving only a select few. The man described how he'd gone to the prosecutors he knew, saying to them, “I'll give you a stamp to confirm you destroyed them, and you put away those documents on some high shelf.” He phoned people outside of Ełk, but they didn't know him or trust him, and they destroyed the documents. A few years later a new decision gave them permission to preserve those documents. We don't know what percentage of documents relating to criminal cases was destroyed. Questions of the culpability of certain persons were switched to separate proceedings, but we didn't find the documents for those cases. Trial procedure dictates that we give the suspects the benefit of the doubt, and so we had to assume that although we were unable to find the documents, the people who were charged at the time had been tried.

The witnesses, Father Orłowski among them, speak of German units, motorcycles, trucks, shooting. This is openly mocking the murdered, isn't it? What do you feel, when you listen to that kind of nonsense?

I never assume that witnesses are mocking or consciously giving false testimony.

Sure, because then you'd have to call a whole lot of witnesses to account for giving false testimony. Father Orłowski above all.

I don't think Father Orłowski or other interviewees consciously gave false testimony. If witnesses, having heard something about cartridge cases being found, tell me about shooting, that may mean that they put together new information from the media with the foggy image of the events that took place sixty years ago, and they're truly convinced they heard that shooting.

Every testimony, even from a person who has preserved a distorted image of the events, contributes something, especially if you follow up with questions about concrete details. For example, it may help us to exclude certain scenarios. I questioned the interviewees about how the Germans they saw on the day of the crime looked. Black service uniforms and saddle-shaped caps, khaki field uniforms with helmets, SA uniforms, air force uniforms, pistols in holsters or the aimed barrels of machine guns—I got a cross section of every army unit, including ones seen in movies. I heard about single shots, multiple shots, barrages from machine guns. Some saw uniformed Germans at the barn and only them, not a single Pole, because they were all hiding in terror. Or they saw Germans jumping off trucks. I heard that people were only killed in those Jewish families whose family members were accused of actively supporting the Communist system, and that the German commander who refused to burn Poles, Jews, and Russians together in the barn was shot by the SS. Others saw only Poles committing crimes.

I rely on the existing knowledge but also, to a great extent, on intuition. I pay attention to unconscious digressions, in other contexts, which often say more than a whole long conversation about a particular subject. How do you eliminate unreliable witnesses?

I ask a lot of questions that may seem to have no connection with the case or to be off subject. They best allow one to judge the reliability of a witness, at least whether he really was where he says he was and could have seen everything he testified to seeing. One of the witnesses, when asked about how the Jews were killed, stated that he was hiding by the market square and heard German soldiers shooting. In a neutral context I asked him about any sounds he might have heard that day. He hadn't heard any. I also checked what texts about Jedwabne the interviewees had read. In a sixty-year-old case, that sort of pollution of memory by reading is very significant. It was evident that some of the witness accounts dealt in information derived from the media, which presented various views on the subject of the course of the crime and the culprits. For example, a witness tells me he saw seventy-five Jews carrying the Lenin monument. I ask him how he knows there were seventy-five. Because he heard them being counted one by one. But that's a number Gross cited from Wasersztejn, and no one confirms it. I felt it was manna from heaven whenever I met a witness who hadn't read Gross's book or any other publication.

The witness accounts are so different from one another that there was no way of verifying one account only with the aid of other accounts. I also verified them by relying on so-called material evidence, that is, facts determined by exhumations, documents and materials from archives, examination of the terrain, study of cartridge cases. Material evidence doesn't lie, so if a witness's claims are contradicted by it, I had to assume the person didn't remember or was mistaken.

And what about the reliability of Jewish witness accounts? What do you think of Szmul Wasersztejn's testimony?

Wasersztejn reconstructed the course of events of the atrocity, but in some places his testimony is also unreliable. I think some of the scenes described in Jewish memoirs, both Wasersztejn's and in the
Jedwabne Book of Memory
—killers using saws, casting children into the fire with forks, using a girl's head as a football—did not actually take place. Maybe someone kicked a head, I can't exclude that possibility, but the scene of a soccer match with a victim's head doesn't seem plausible to me. These events were so terrible that their description by the victims' families often takes on a mythologized form.

So let's reconstruct what can be known.

From the early hours of the morning, Jews were driven from their homes out into the market square. They were ordered to pull up the grass from between the paving stones. The residents of Jedwabne and its surroundings were armed with sticks, crow bars, and other weapons. A large group of men was forced to smash the Lenin monument, which was in a little square off the market. Around noon they were ordered to carry a piece of the smashed monument to the market square, and then to the barn a few hundred meters away. They carried it on two wooden poles. The rabbi was among them. Victims were killed and their bodies were thrown into a grave dug inside the barn. Pieces of the Lenin monument were flung on top of the corpses. The grave was probably not covered, because at the time of the exhumation they found burn marks on some of the pieces of the monument. The second, larger group of Jews was brought out to the market square later. It included women, children, old people. They were led to the thatched wooden barn. The building had gas poured on it, probably gas from the former Soviet storehouse in Jedwabne. In the case documents from 1949, Antoni Niebrzydowski stated that he gave out eight liters of gas from that storehouse. That quantity was enough to set the barn on fire.

Does that mean that the people in the second group saw the massacred bodies of their fathers, brothers, and sons before meeting their own deaths?

It's possible.

Did you ascertain what the last walk of the Jews of Jedwabne was like? Did they know they were going to their deaths?

Quotidian objects were found with the remains, like a box with shoemaker's nails, tailor's thimbles, spoons, gold coins, and a surprising number of keys: to gates, houses, padlocks, cabinets. As if they had the illusory hope that they were setting off on a path from which they'd return one day.

How many Jews were killed on July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne? You write that not fewer than 340 people were murdered. Didn't more than that die?

Not more than a few hundred. The number of sixteen hundred victims or something near that appears improbable. I asked all the witnesses about it and one of them had a convincing answer: “After the war I served in a unit, we had a roll call of about five or six hundred soldiers—and I associate that visually with the number of Jews I saw when they were led out of the market.” There were forty or fifty in the group carrying fragments of the Lenin monument; in the second group—several hundred, we can say no fewer than three hundred. That is the approximate number of victims found in the two open graves. But no work has been done at the Jewish cemetery. There are reasons to believe there might be another grave there. If someone killed a man in his basement or garden, he wouldn't have buried him in his own backyard, by his own well. Rather, as there was a Jewish cemetery, they had to have organized transportation of the bodies and have buried them there. I can't exclude the possibility that there are single graves somewhere. We probably didn't find all the places where victims were buried. But even with earlier killings in other places, it's hard to imagine there were more people killed separately than there were burned later in the barn.

There's also no way to accurately estimate the number of victims, because on the day of the atrocity there were Jews from surrounding villages—Wizna, Kolno—hiding in Jedwabne. Some Jews, perhaps several dozen, survived. The majority of them later lived in the ghetto in Jedwabne, a place separated off from the Old Market. From there they went to the Łomża ghetto, but not all of them. One of the witnesses said he'd seen a group of Jews from Jedwabne passing by Jerziorko, outside Łomża, after the atrocity. That witness's father, a farmer, had a Jewish intermediary in the grain trade, in Jedwabne. And that man turned up at the witness's house with his twelve-year-old daughter to ask him to hide them. The girl said Christian prayers to prove she could pass for Polish. The witness's family had to refuse for fear of being denounced by a neighbor.

In Jedwabne and its surroundings I looked for an example of a Pole punished by the Germans for not having taken part in the killing—it would be proof that some had acted under duress. I didn't find any.

I don't know of any such example, either.

So can you speak of an order, if there was no sanction for not carrying it out?

There was no need for any sanction, because there were people who eagerly set about hunting Jews. It could have been a vague order, that you're to do something with the Jews, which is not an order as I understand it. Such orders might have been given in accordance with SS general and Nazi police chief Reinhard Heydrich's directive as formulated in two documents toward the end of June and the beginning of July 1941. In an appendix added at the end of June 1941, Heydrich stated that anti-Communist and anti-Jewish actions should be provoked on newly occupied lands, but in a way that would leave no trace of German involvement. On the other hand, an order given to the leaders of operational groups on July 1, 1941, concerned the principles for carrying out “cleansing actions” meant to “pacify” the areas occupied by the Germans. It speaks of not including Polish groups with an anti-Communist or anti-Jewish bent in those actions. Or not to harm them, because they could be used to harm others in the future.

In other words, the Germans' role was to egg on the local population?

What does egging on mean? If there hadn't been conditions for the perpetration of a crime like that, no amount of egging on would have had any effect. We know of German reports from areas farther north expressing dissatisfaction that the local population couldn't be incited to anti-Jewish excesses. It's undeniable that there had been actions against Jews in the Łomża district before the war, and it seems to me that the Germans took advantage of the strong anti-Semitic feeling that already existed there.

But can we determine whether the Germans put forward the idea “to clean up the Jews like they did in Radziłów,” or merely accepted and supported the tendencies of the locals, expressed by the town authorities?

I wasn't able to determine that. As a prosecutor I'm not going to enter into the realm of speculation. I have too little information, and for that reason some circumstances were never clarified. The crime in Jedwabne was committed at the instigation of the Germans. It's not possible that an action on that scale happened without German acceptance. You have to keep in mind that Jedwabne was just behind the front line, in an area under German military administration. In the event of unexpected sui generis unrest in the town, the occupation forces would have reacted immediately. The presence, even passive, of German policemen from the station in Jedwabne, as well as other uniformed Germans—if we accept they were there—is in the eye of the law equivalent to permission to commit the crime. So the Germans should be ascribed criminal responsibility in the broader sense.