Journal

AUGUST 28, 2000

“It’s a lie that Poles killed the Jews in Jedwabne,” says Tadeusz Ś., a retired doctor from Warsaw and an eyewitness to the events of July 10, 1941.

My boss, Adam Michnik, the editor in chief of the Gazeta Wyborcza, receives this visitor in his office. When Adam informed me that according to Tadeusz Ś., who was referred to him by a friend, the crime committed in Jedwabne could not be blamed on the Poles, I heard in his voice both excitement and relief. I knew he hadn’t been able to come to terms with the facts revealed by Jan Tomasz Gross in Neighbors. We’d talked about it many times. Before Gross’s book appeared in May 2000, I’d said in a Gazeta editorial meeting that we should report on the little town confronting the crime from its wartime past.

Gross reconstructs events on the basis of three different sources: postwar testimony given by Szmul Wasersztejn, court papers from the postwar trial in which the defendants were charged with collaborating with the occupation forces, and the Jedwabne Book of Memory, recollections of Jewish emigrants from Jedwabne recorded in the United States. He draws tough conclusions and formulates even tougher hypotheses. In Jedwabne, Poles burned all the town’s Jews in a barn, a total of sixteen hundred people. “It was a collective murder in both senses of the word,” writes Gross, “in terms of the number of victims and of their persecutors.”

Adam rejected all my proposals to go to Jedwabne. Nor did he want to publish excerpts from Gross’s book before it was released. Now he wants me to hear for myself what really happened. He has insisted that I be present at this meeting, although Tadeusz Ś. wanted to meet with him alone. Our visitor doesn’t allow us to record the conversation or print his surname. Reluctantly he agrees to let me take notes. In 1941 he was fifteen. He happened to be in Jedwabne on July 10. He says he was on his way to the dentist.

“In the morning two Germans in black Gestapo uniforms rode into the market square on motorcycles. From a balcony I watched them ordering the Jews to assemble. They put the rabbi’s black hat on a stick to mock him. I followed the Jews all the way to the barn.”

“How many Germans did you see at the barn?” asked Adam.

“Three. Germans like to do things properly, so they had the barn owner brought out to open it with a key, though they could have just lifted the doors out.”

“And that was all done by three Germans?”

“There were probably more of them in plainclothes. There were three in uniform, with handguns. I saw the Jews go into the barn of their own accord, as if they were under hypnosis.”

“And they didn’t try to escape when it was on fire?”

“No, they didn’t. It’s horrible.”

“Did any Poles take part in this crime?”

“No, none.”

“In every society there’s some criminal element. Pick up any newspaper, you’ll find plenty of reports on rapes, murders. During the occupation there were szmalcowniks, people who blackmailed Jews in hiding.”

“Only in big cities. You don’t know the provinces. It’s native-born Poles, the impoverished gentry, who live there. They wouldn’t think to take revenge on the Jews for betraying Poles to the Soviets. At the barn they were shouting: ‘Get yourselves out of there, Yids!’ There were just three Germans standing there with sawed-off shotguns, not even rifles. The older people who were there thought it was wrong. They talked about it at church the week after.”

“They thought they themselves had been wrong?”

“No, the Jews. Not one of them had it in him to turn on the Germans.”

“The Poles thought the victims were in the wrong?”

“For not defending themselves.”

“But if someone is being murdered in front of me, I should come to his aid, right? And if I don’t, because I’m scared, or stunned, because the situation is too much for me, I’d blame myself, not the victims.”

“Poles would have helped them if they’d fought back against the Germans. When the Jews grabbed rifles and went around town under the Soviets, they were real tough guys, but when the Germans took them to the barn, what did they do? Folks get offended if you get them caught up in something like that. The Jews should have defended themselves. People called them cowards because they waited for the Poles to defend them and didn’t do anything for themselves. But saying that there were sixteen hundred people in there is a lie and a joke.”

“And how many of them do you think there were?” I interject.

“A thousand, no more,” Tadeusz Ś. replies. I look at Adam and see his face go pale.

At the end Ś. warns us again: “Please don’t mention my name. I don’t want those Jewish vultures to lie in wait for me at my house.”

SEPTEMBER 1, 2000

The Institute of National Remembrance announces it is launching an investigation into the Jedwabne massacre. When I run into Adam Michnik in the hallway at the Gazeta Wyborcza, he tells me that the conversation with Tadeusz Ś. haunts him. He suggests I use it as the basis for a short story set in the town of J. during the war. But I don’t write fiction.

I decide to put in a request for a year’s unpaid leave and go to Jedwabne for myself, if I can’t do it for the Gazeta. There must be a memory of the atrocity in the town, there must be some witnesses. I will try to reconstruct the facts, but also what happened to the memory of those events over the last sixty years.

SEPTEMBER 5, 2000

The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. I hold five little pages written in a sprawling hand, with certain words crossed out. It’s Szmul Wasersztejn’s Jedwabne testimony, translated from the Yiddish. “Infants were murdered at their mothers’ breasts, people were brutally beaten and forced to sing and dance. Bloodied and maimed, they were all herded into the barn. Then gas was poured on the barn and it was set afire. Afterward thugs went by Jewish homes, looking for the sick and the children left behind. The sick they carried to the barn themselves, children they hung in pairs by their little legs and dragged them there on their backs, then lifted them with pitchforks and heaved them into the hot furnace of the barn.”

SEPTEMBER 6, 2000

The Jedwabne Book of Memory was edited by two rabbis, the brothers Julius and Jacob Baker, who emigrated from Jedwabne to America before the war; for twenty years only a hundred copies existed. Today I read it on the Internet. In the book I find testimonies about 15 Tamuz 5701—or July 10, 1941—recorded by Rivka Vogel (“Goys cut off the head of Gitele, Judka Nadolnik’s daughter, and kicked it around like a soccer ball”), Itzchok Newmark (“With a song on their lips, the Poles poured gas on the barn crammed with Jews”), Awigdor Kochaw (“A gang of boys beat me mercilessly and dragged me into the market square; they hounded and savagely beat the tortured, hungry, and thirsty people who were fainting from standing all day in the burning sun”), and Herschel, the third Baker brother from Goniądz, about forty kilometers northeast of Jedwabne (“Completely exhausted, my mother reached Goniądz on July 14; fleeing from the massacre, she ran from Jedwabne through the fields and forests … She was beside herself after what she’d seen, Poles destroying all the Jews.”)

SEPTEMBER 28, 2000

On a trip to Wilno with a group of friends, Irena Grudzińska Gross among them. She says that a few years ago Jan Gross wanted to include Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony in a Polish edition of his essay collection The Ghostly Decade. Irena read it and advised him to leave it out. How can you believe something as monstrous as that on the basis of a single testimony?

NOVEMBER 17, 2000

An interview with the historian Tomasz Szarota in the Gazeta Wyborcza. He accuses Gross of not even attempting to explain why “fifteen hundred persons in the prime of life, led to their deaths by fewer than a hundred men armed only with sticks, didn’t try to defend themselves or at the very least to escape.”

It’s hard to understand how Szarota, author of an excellent book on pogroms in Nazi-occupied Europe, could bring himself to utter those words. There were elderly people in that crowd, women with infants, toddlers holding on to their mothers’ skirts (Jewish families were often large), whereas young men were scarce—from Wasersztejn’s testimony it emerges that they had been killed earlier that day. How many examples does Szarota know of a crowd of people led to slaughter rebelling and attacking its executioners?

In the investigation conducted in the late sixties and early seventies, prosecutor Waldemar Monkiewicz of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes claimed a unit of 232 Germans led by Wolfgang Birkner had arrived in Jedwabne that day, July 10. Referring to this claim, Szarota reproaches Gross for not having studied the role of the Germans in the atrocity: “I doubt that the prosecutor plucked those 232 Germans out of the air, or the trucks for that matter, or the figure of Wolfgang Birkner. In any case it can’t be right that the name Birkner isn’t mentioned once in Gross’s book.”

Personally, I would approach any investigation conducted in the late 1960s, at the time of an anti-Semitic campaign orchestrated by the state, with extreme caution. Gross had testimonies from the 1949 trial at hand. How is it that not one of the witnesses noticed a convoy of trucks? I don’t know how many Germans were there by the barn in Jedwabne, but Tadeusz Ś., who was trying to convince Adam Michnik that the Poles were innocent, saw three of them.

NOVEMBER 21, 2000

I’m told a man phoned the Gazeta saying he was prepared to talk about Radziłów. I call him back. Jan Skrodzki now lives in Gdańsk, but is originally from Radziłów, eighteen kilometers from Jedwabne. Three days before the massacre in Jedwabne, the whole Jewish population of Radziłów was rounded up and burned.

On July 7, 1941, he was a small boy and watched from behind the curtains as Jews were driven to their deaths. He saw no Germans. He tells me, “I feel responsible for Jedwabne, for Radziłów, for everything that may still come out.” We agree I’ll go to see him in Gdańsk.

NOVEMBER 23, 2000

At the Jewish Historical Institute I read Menachem Finkelsztejn’s testimony on the burning of the Jewish community in Radziłów. And there—he testifies—the perpetrators were Poles. I struggle through horrific scenes of rape, beatings, children thrown into the burning barn, a Jewish girl’s head hacked off with a saw, and I want to believe that the horror itself made survivors exaggerate and overstate the facts.

In an attempt to understand the outburst of barbarity, Finkelsztejn writes, “The grain of hatred fell on fertile soil, expertly primed by the clergy over many years. The desire to get hold of Jewish business and Jewish riches further whetted the locals’ appetites.”

NOVEMBER 24, 2000

A colloquium of historians discusses Gross’s book at the Polish Academy of Sciences. From the threshold one feels an emotional charge rare at scholarly gatherings in Poland.

Tomasz Szarota presents the current state of knowledge on Jedwabne. He cites a number of publications authenticating the claim that the Białystok commando unit led by Birkner was operating in Jedwabne. But there is just one source, namely prosecutor Monkiewicz, who repeated this over and over, at every opportunity, as he did at the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jedwabne’s town charter.

Gross introduces a different tone. He speaks sharply, frankly, ironically. He reminds Szarota of a meeting in May, at which Monkiewicz declared that Poles had not killed Jews in the Białystok district in July 1941, nor aided in their killing, and that there had been just one instance in which Germans forced Poles to join hands, and that was to form a chain to prevent Jews from escaping.

“I realized we could dismiss the prosecutor,” says Gross. “It’s a sad state of affairs when an academic authority like Tomasz Szarota lends credence to a muddled version of the tragedy in Jedwabne by bringing Monkiewicz’s views into wide circulation. We talked about this, Tomasz,” he addresses Szarota directly, “and I told you Birkner being in Jedwabne was an invention and you should forget about Monkiewicz.”

After several people have drawn attention to the scholarly shortcomings of Gross’s book, Marek Edelman steps up to the microphone. “Everybody here would like to find some proof that Gross is a shoddy historian, that he made a mistake and Mr. So-and-So was killed earlier and Mrs. Such-and-Such later. But that’s not what this is about,” says the last living leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. “Jedwabne was not the first case, nor was it an isolated one. In Poland at that time the mood was ripe for killing Jews. And it wasn’t all about looting. There’s something in man that makes him like killing.”

Professor Jerzy Jedlicki, who is moderating the discussion, speaks: “Hatred toward Jews, contempt and mockery of Jews, are part of twentieth-century Central European culture, and that includes Poland. By that I don’t mean to say everybody would have been prepared to commit atrocities. But the destruction of the Jews was watched with amusement by a significant part of the local Polish population. That amusement, the laughter that accompanied the Holocaust—I remember it, because at that time I was on the other, Aryan side of the wall. Until today, our stance, and I include myself in this, has been a flight from the subject, a cowardly fear of the darkness lurking in our collective history. With his books, Gross rouses us from our torpor. And that’s the most important thing.”

The colloquium lasts almost five hours, and at times it’s like a group therapy session. A young Polish staff member of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., speaking of the tide of hatred toward Jews that she’s encountered during the year she’s been in Poland reading archival materials, bursts into tears.

NOVEMBER 25, 2000

There wouldn’t have been so many people in Jedwabne prepared to kill if they hadn’t felt the support of like-minded others and of the authorities. A psychology professor writing this in the Gazeta refers to studies showing that Poles treat their own national suffering as a kind of special contribution or investment for which the world is more in debt to them than it is to others. “We see ourselves as exceptional, ascribe to ourselves moral achievements, a unique contribution to world history. Studies show that people who think this way more readily accept the killing of innocents.”

At Jacek Kuroń’s. I tell him about the conference of historians. Jacek’s memory accords with Edelman’s: a social climate permitting harassment of Jews. In Lvov he saw with his own eyes how young people threw stones into the ghetto. It didn’t shock anyone, and he heard the same refrain all around him: “Hitler’s doing the job for us.”

“Even the Holocaust didn’t change that,” says Jacek. And he tells me about living in Kraków in the summer of 1945 with his parents, grandparents, and younger brother, Felek. One day on a walk his grandfather tugged Felek’s hand and the child began to cry. Right away a crowd started to gather, yanking the elderly man back and challenging him. They thought he was a Jew and the boy a Polish child who was going to be turned into matzo. Just because Felek was blond and his grandfather wore a cap. Not long after there was a pogrom in Kraków.

“Hatred,” Jacek goes on, “comes from a person having a subconscious feeling of guilt. At some level he knows a whole people was destroyed here, and he benefited from it, because he’s got a house or at least a pillow that belonged to a Jew. He won’t face up to it and hatred takes root in him.”

He quotes a passage from a text published in the Gazeta by Jacek Żakowski, a prominent political commentator: “Jan Gross speaks for himself, and I for myself. None of us has the right to reproach another for what happened to his compatriots or ancestors.” “Nothing good ever came of people not feeling responsible,” Jacek comments.

DECEMBER 5, 2000

A letter to Adam Michnik from Kazimierz Laudański. The older brother of Jerzy and Zygmunt Laudański, who were sentenced to fifteen and twelve years in prison respectively, for the killing of Jews in Jedwabne, presents his version of events. In it, the Germans are the main protagonists, actors, whereas the Jewish Communists “together with the NKVD drew up lists of Polish families for deportation to Siberia.”

One can’t help asking: if we accept that the crime was committed by the Germans, what can it have to do with Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD?

Protesting the vilification of his brothers, Kazimierz Laudański praises his family’s patriotism.

Jan Gross, who read the documents in the case conducted against the Jedwabne murderers after the war, found among them a letter from Zygmunt Laudański to the Communist authorities, describing how he had been an NKVD informant during the Soviet occupation and had joined the Polish Workers Party after the war. “It is on shoulders like these that our labor system can be built,” he wrote. Gross was struck by “the relentless conformism of a man who tries to anticipate the expectations of each successive regime in an age of gas ovens and engages himself to the hilt each time—first as an NKVD informant, then as a Jew-killer, finally by joining the Polish Workers Party.”

Kazimierz concludes his letter to Michnik with the words “We were and are always prepared to serve our country pro publico bono.”

This is apparently too much for Adam. The embargo is lifted. I phone Laudański to arrange an interview for the Gazeta.

DECEMBER 9, 2000

Pisz, a hundred kilometers north of Jedwabne. Kazimierz Laudański is waiting for me at the turnoff to the little road leading to his house. Before we even reach the house he has asked me where my parents are from and what my mother’s surname was. There was nothing wrong with my mother’s maiden name, and her first name was also just as it should be. At least after a Pole who was in love with her got her Aryan papers and a baptism certificate, and married her. That’s how Lea Horowicz disappeared in Lvov in 1942. She disappeared so completely that I only learned of my origins as an adult by accident, standing in the street.

My mother didn’t keep in touch with her family; no uncle or cousin ever visited our house. I accepted that my mother, an independent-minded, rebellious person, found family ties and gatherings a boring, middle-class obligation that she didn’t feel like fulfilling. Only when I was fully grown and graduated from college did I meet a man in his fifties at our dacha outside Warsaw, whom my mother introduced as the son of her beloved sister murdered in the Soviet Union in 1937, at the time of the Great Purge. I was with friends, so I just said hello to him and ran on to the river. A few years passed before I saw him again. I told him he was the only relative I knew on my mother’s side—perhaps he knew something about our family? “Our grandfather Hirsz Horowicz…,” my cousin Oleś Wołyński began.

I systematically called all the friends and acquaintances in my address book from A to Z. “I’m Jewish,” I announced. Somehow the fact didn’t make much of an impression on anyone but me, though a Solidarity advisor I knew suggested we not take any more people of Jewish origin on at the editorial office of the Tygodnik Masowsze (Masowsze Weekly), Solidarity’s underground paper, which I had cofounded. (“There are so many of you already, and if you get caught, it might hurt the cause,” he said—but in good faith and with genuine concern, not hostility.) The biggest surprise was that most of my friends already “knew.” If only because the mother of one of them had been in the same class as my mother at a renowned Jewish gymnasium, or high school, before the war.

“Why did no one tell me?” I asked them. One of them was convinced I knew but had decided to pass for a hundred percent Polish (I’d often asked him what it was like being Jewish). Another friend thought it was up to my mother to reveal my origins (he apparently accepted the supposition—to him self-evident—that Jewishness was something shameful that had to be “revealed”). A third concluded that if I didn’t know, I was better off.

Kazimierz Laudański invites me into the house. A well-kept villa in the center of town, elegant china on the table. He’s prepared for me a map of the town as it was in 1941, drawn on graph paper. The street names, churches, cemeteries are marked in blue pen, the synagogue and barn in red. Of the massacre in Jedwabne, he says it resulted from German orders. When I ask how many Germans were there, I’m told there was a uniformed German on every corner. I ask him to point out on the map where they stood. He draws four little crosses. Four Germans.

“The Jews in Jedwabne, whether they were burned that day or not, their fate was sealed,” Kazimierz Laudański says. “The Germans would have killed them sooner or later. Such a small thing and they slap it on the Poles, on my brothers of all people. We forgave the Gestapo, we forgave the NKVD, and here we have a little quarrel between Jews and Poles and no one can forgive?” Laudański goes on: “It’s not about defending my brothers. They were tried, rightly or wrongly, and you can’t convict them again for the same thing. I’m meeting you so you can tell Mr. Michnik that we shouldn’t be reopening old wounds. It’s not right to make our people out to be criminals. It’s wicked to accuse Poles of such things. And it’s not the time to launch a campaign to teach the Poles what’s right, when Jewish finance is attacking Poland.”

I persuade Kazimierz Laudański that to write a piece for the paper I need to meet his brothers, too. We agree that I’ll come back.

DECEMBER 10, 2000

Kazimierz Mocarski, a retired school director who before the war lived in Nadbory, a village ten kilometers from Jedwabne, wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazeta. I visit him in his little town on the Baltic Sea.

In his letter he described prewar Jedwabne: “Times were hard, we counted every penny. The richer Jewish shops could afford lower prices. The Poles reacted by knocking down stalls and smashing windows. Poisonous anti-Semitism, myths about Jews killing Christ, drove some of the people crazy with hatred.”

He was fourteen at the time. He remembers that two days before the massacre a group of Jews passed by his house. “My mother was baking rye bread and gave them two loaves. She warned them, ‘Run as far away as you can,’ because we already knew the Jews had been burned in Radziłów the day before.”

He knows from his mother that some of the peasants in their village saddled their horses and went to Jedwabne in the hope of looting Jewish stores and workshops, while a few people who didn’t want to take part in the pogrom fled from Jedwabne to relatives in the surrounding villages. A few days after the burning he was invited by a friend bragging about having moved with his family into a house that had belonged to Jews. He heard about the Jews having been beaten, rounded up, forced to say Christian prayers.

“I go to Jedwabne sometimes,” he continues, “it’s an unhappy place, backward, without infrastructure. There are no jobs, people are crushed, they feel they’re victims. One of the slogans of the National Party before the war was that Jews were the cause of poverty. Now there are no Jews, but the poverty is the same.”

I return to Warsaw by a circuitous route—via Jedwabne. I want to visit Leon Dziedzic, a farmer from near Jedwabne who has given several press interviews. This is rare in Jedwabne; generally the residents refuse to talk to journalists. From Dziedzic’s account it emerges that Poles not only carried out but also initiated the killing. “They say that the next day the German police station commandant flew into a rage at the Poles who’d led the pogrom: ‘You said you’d clean up the Jews, but you don’t know how to clean up a damn thing.’ He meant they hadn’t buried the remains and he was afraid of infection spreading, because it was hot and the dogs were already getting to them,” Dziedzic explained.

But Leon Dziedzic has left Poland. From the time an article about him appeared, for which he’d allowed himself to be photographed, whenever he rode his bike to a store, someone would puncture his tires. He went to the States, where his wife and four sons had lived for many years.

I find Leszek Dziedzic, the fifth son, who stayed on the farm. This fall he was visiting his family in the States while his wife stayed in Poland with their children, ten-year-old Tomek and fourteen-year-old Piotrek. “I came back earlier than I’d planned because I was worried for my wife and children after what my dad had said. And on the street people were saying: ‘Don’t think you can get away, we’re ready for you.’ We fear for our kids. We take them to school and pick them up.”

I go to see Janina Biedrzycka, the daughter of Śleszynski, the man who owned the barn in which the Jews were burned. I already know how she’s received previous uninvited guests. First she refused to let a film director in, and the next time she told her, “I thought you were a Jewess but the priest told me you were Evangelical. There were decent Evangelicals among the Germans.” She met a local reporter with the words “Do you have any ID? You don’t have a Polish name. I don’t care either way because they all listen to the Jews anyway, nobody wants to know the truth.”

“There are houses that belonged to the Jews in Jedwabne, but I live in my own,” she begins the conversation with me. “I didn’t get anything out of it. I know how vengeful the Yids are.”

She can’t say the word “Jew” in anything under a shriek. Of the atrocity, she says it was the work of the Germans.

DECEMBER 15, 2000

I visit my cousin Oleś Wołyński. Gross’s book didn’t shock Oleś. The idea of Jews being murdered by their neighbors was a plausible scenario.

Before the war, Oleś’s mother and father were active in the Communist International and Oleś spent the first years of his life in Moscow. When his parents fell victim to the Great Purge—both were shot in 1937—he was put in an orphanage, and from there he went to the Lubyanka prison and then to the Gulag.

“In Siberia I didn’t encounter any anti-Semitism,” he says. “I first heard anti-Semitic talk in 1954 in Mińsk, still in the Soviet Union. In the hospital where I wound up, the nurses were talking over my head about a friend of theirs who was marrying a Jew. ‘I would throw up if I had to go to bed with a Jew,’ I heard one of them say. After repatriation to Poland in 1958, I went to a holiday guesthouse for police in Zakopane, in the mountains, for my TB. There I found the same primal, passionate, visceral anti-Semitism. People repeated an idiotic story about the head of the Polish Radio Orchestra, who had emigrated from Poland: he had wanted to smuggle valuables out of the country, so he had a pan cast of gold, but it was too shiny, so he fried an egg in it and packed it unwashed. The customs officer found the filthy pan suspect. That story had everything: Jews have gold, are arrogant and slovenly.”

Oleś, who has a habit of carrying on conversations by means of books, fishes out of his vast library Zygmunt Klukowski’s Diary of the Occupation. The author, a doctor and social activist who headed a hospital in Szczebrzeszyn, took daily notes during the war. He described the behavior of Poles during a liquidation raid on Jews on November 22, 1942: “They took part eagerly, hunted down Jews, drove them to the magistrate or police station, beat them, kicked them. Boys chased little Jewish kids, who were killed by policemen right in front of everyone. I still see before me Jews beaten up, groups of Jews led off to their deaths and corpses thrown any which way onto wagons, bruised and bloodied. Many of the city dwellers looted and stole what they could, without the least shame.”

DECEMBER 16, 2000

I drive to Pisz, this time to meet all three brothers Laudański. I take a slightly longer route, via Łomża, to pass through Jedwabne by daylight for the first time. Great stretches of open space, here and there scant clumps of trees. The flat Mazowsze landscape makes me realize how small the hope would have been that you could hide from persecutors here. But it’s winter now, while then it was July, and there were unharvested crops in the fields.

When you enter the town from the Łomża side, you see the remains of the Jewish shtetl. Its atmosphere can best be felt in an alley off the Old Market, with its narrow passageway between houses, its broken cobblestones. Little wooden houses huddled to the ground, low windows, everything is tiny but the large puddles of melting snow. You’d only have to hang mezuzahs on doorways with excerpts from Deuteronomy to ward off the powers of evil, and you could shoot a film here about the events of sixty years ago.

I walk across the market square, now John Paul II Square, where the Jews were driven together that July day. With the map I was given by Kazimierz Laudański I drive to the site of the crime. A fenced-off plot of ground with a stone inscribed: Place of Execution of Jewish Population. Gestapo and Hitler’s Police Burned 1,600 People Alive. July 10, 1941. Thick shrubbery on the far side, but my map says those are the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. I go in deeper and see broken gravestones protruding from the snow.

In Pisz the Laudański brothers are waiting for me. We sit across from each other, drinking tea, eating homemade gingerbread. Kazimierz Laudański and his brothers are well-known as beekeepers in the area, and customers come all the way from Germany for their honey. The brothers—poised, calm—present well, they speak their parts like a well-learned lesson.

We’ve been talking for more than three hours and I’m on something like my third piece of gingerbread before we come to the events of July 1941.

The youngest of the brothers, Jerzy, is the least talkative. A smile plays around the corners of his mouth.

From Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony: “The Germans gave the order to destroy all the Jews, but Polish thugs took it and carried it out in the most horrible ways. At the time of the first pogroms and during the slaughter the following scum distinguished themselves by their cruelty:…” Jerzy Laudański is among the few dozen names given here.

“I was at the barn,” says Jerzy Laudański, “but at a distance of about thirty meters. There were a lot of people in front of me.”

I wonder how many such people there could have been near the barn. And how many of them limited themselves to watching.

Toward the end Jerzy Laudański tells a story. How Karol Bardoń (one of the men charged in the postwar trial with killing Jews in Jedwabne) went to the prison authorities, saying he wanted to give testimony about who took part in burning the Jews. “I heard it from a prison orderly,” says Laudański. “Bardoń threatened to put a hundred men behind bars, but when they gave him paper to make a list, his hands were paralyzed and he couldn’t speak, and that’s how he died in prison. ‘A miracle happened,’ was the orderly’s comment.” Does that mean, I wonder, that Bardoń could have given the names and surnames of a hundred perpetrators? But I ask no provocative questions.

“We don’t have any problem with Jews, but you’ve got to stop reopening the wounds,” Kazimierz Laudański warns me in parting. “What were Jews doing in the secret police after the war? What can I say? It’s a disgrace, so why should we reproach each other?”

I listen to them and can’t avoid the impression that scenes from 1941 are being replayed under their eyelids. I have a hotel booked in Pisz, but I decide to make my way home by night. I drive on a road completely deserted and covered with ice, just to get as far away from the Laudańskis as I can.

DECEMBER 17, 2000

Gdańsk. Jan Skrodzki, who was born in Radziłów, meets me at the station and takes me to a tidy apartment in a block on an embankment at the edge of a wood, where I’m greeted by a shaggy dog called Cha-Cha and given homemade brandy.

“It wasn’t the Germans who did it, it was our people,” he starts.

I give him the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, which I photocopied at the Jewish Historical Institute. The scenes described in it are so horrifying it is hard to imagine Polish memory finding a place for them. But to Skrodzki nothing comes as a surprise—on the contrary, he adds specifics, fills in the details. I read him a description of Poles from the start joining in German operations brutalizing Jews. People bound to wagons were driven to the muddy river near the town. “Germans beat them, Poles beat them. The Jews cry in anguish, but they, the Germans and Poles, rejoice.”

“He’s talking about the Matlak, a narrow, shallow stream,” he explains. “There was a meadow alongside the Matlak where farmers kept geese and ducks, and between the stream and the buildings on Nadstawna Street there was peat land and ditches where peat was cut. That’s where they drove the Jews.”

He’s prepared to talk about the massacre and to be quoted in the Gazeta. We talk for nine hours, but I don’t dare ask him the obvious question: Where was your father on July 7, 1941?

DECEMBER 19, 2000

Pisz. I have a meeting at the local museum with its retired director, Mieczysław Kulęgowski. I was led to him by a chain of people, each referring me on. He is supposed to tell me about the Laudański brothers—apparently he could say a lot about them, he’s from Jedwabne himself—but when we meet he is so frightened it’s hard for me to get anything out of him. I’m not surprised. At the museum, a granddaughter of one of the Laudańskis is waiting for us, as if by coincidence. How did she find out about this meeting? It’s obvious one of the people in my chain of communication informed the brothers. Mieczysław Kulęgowski explains why he doesn’t want to talk to me: “Maybe I carried the fear with me from there, but today friends warned me about talking to you: ‘You’d better not get involved.’”

He only recalls that in the summer of 1941 he went by Jewish homes with his pals: “They were all occupied and looted, but I was looking for the plates that hung on the doorposts. I liked unrolling what was inside, there were Hebrew words written on hide, sheep’s hide I think. After the war, when they founded a museum in Pisz, I gave those mezuzahs to the museum.”

DECEMBER 20, 2000

In the evening I’m back in Pisz. Unannounced, I knock on the door of the little house on the edge of town where Mieczysław Kulęgowski lives. Maybe I’ll get something out of him now? Finally, after three cups of tea, he reluctantly begins to talk: “In 1941 I was twelve years old. Some mothers didn’t let their children outside that day, July 10, but I was always sticking my nose into everything. When Poles were going from house to house chasing Jews into the market square, you heard screams and weeping everywhere because they were taking the children and elders, too. Poles used clubs to force the Jews into rows, and they didn’t put up any resistance. There weren’t sixteen hundred of them, a thousand at most. I was at the barn. There wasn’t a big crowd outside, just some men, maybe fifty of them. I was standing a little off to the side with my friends. The fear was that they’d take you for a Jewish child and throw you into the flames. It was a hot summer, it took only a little gas and some matches. When they set the barn on fire, the screaming went on until the roof caved in. Józef Kobrzyniecki threw children into the burning barn. I saw it with my own eyes. I heard that Kobrzyniecki led the mob and that he beat them the worst, and that he even went by the houses to stab people hiding in attics with a bayonet. Other murderers were named, too: Karolak, the Laudański brothers, Zejer. When I grew up I left the town right away and since that time I haven’t wanted anything to do with it.”

He cautions me, “Please don’t mention my name, the Laudański brothers are still alive, I buy my groceries in Pisz, I met one of them in the street once and it sent a shiver down my spine. I really don’t need that.”

DECEMBER 21, 2000

Mieczysław Kulęgowski told me he had an uncle in Zanklewo, not far from Jedwabne, a wealthy farmer who sheltered a Jewish family from the neighboring town of Wizna, in return for which his farm was set on fire by Polish neighbors after the war. He gave me the name: the uncle is no longer alive, but his children are, and they were old enough at the time to remember. I drive there.

Zanklewo, a backwoods village on the road from Jedwabne to Wizna. A well-kept, prosperous farm, a warm welcome. Yes, that’s right, says the uncle’s son, his parents hid a tailor from Wizna, Izrael Lewin, with his wife and two children. He was a teenager at the time and remembers it well.

“They were hidden under the floor, near the stove. No one knew about it, it only got out after the war.” He speaks of the postwar anti-Communist partisans: “In 1945 partisans took our clothes, cattle, pigs, and burned the farm buildings. We were left with nothing. That was the time when if someone was a little better off, gangs stole from him, so they must have thought we had Jewish gold. Those were impoverished times. Under the Polish partisans there was just as much fear as under the Russians or Germans, or worse.”

That fear must persist, because as we say goodbye my interlocutor asks me never to mention his name.

DECEMBER 22, 2000

I decide to begin work on my book with Radziłów, before the atrocity committed there becomes as widely known as the one in Jedwabne. It will be easier to talk to people there.

I drive to Kramarzewo near Radziłów to look up Marianna Ramotowska, née Finkelsztejn, who was rescued by Stanisław Ramotowski. I reach a wooden cottage hunched over a stream. On the threshold Ramotowski announces he’s not going to talk, but I somehow manage to get inside.

It’s bone cold in the house. His wife sits wrapped in several sweaters. She’s slight, frail, and wears thick glasses. She’s even less willing to talk than her husband. She’s hard of hearing, unable to walk. It’s Ramotowski who makes me a cup of tea. We begin to talk, but he keeps drawing back.

“The Jews were driven out by Poles. Even if I knew who, I wouldn’t tell you for the world. I can’t. We have to live here.”

Or: “I won’t tell you how I arranged with the priest to get married in wartime, when I wanted to marry a Jewish girl. A thousand horses couldn’t drag it out of me, those are religious matters.”

“Don’t say anything, Stasinek, God forbid,” his wife pleads, holding his arm. She calls him by his tender diminutive, Stasinek for Stanisław.

I tell her that at the Jewish Historical Institute I read the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, and I ask if he was a relative of hers. Though they have the same surname, Mrs. Ramotowski claims she has no idea who he is. It doesn’t sound convincing; I have the impression she’s terrified of everything that reminds her of her Jewish origins.

Ramotowski, too, stubbornly refuses to answer my questions, “because I live here among these people and they might come for me.” But when I tell them I’ll come back to see them in the New Year, he’s clearly pleased. He seems to feel isolated. When I ask him directly, he says he had friends in Wąsosz, sixteen kilometers from Jedwabne, a Jewish woman and her Polish husband, they married during the war but they have since died. He mentions in passing that in Wąsosz the Poles did the same with the Jews as they did in Radziłów and Jedwabne.

DECEMBER 28, 2000

In the library I read the Sprawa Katolicka (The Catholic Cause), a regional diocesan weekly of the thirties. The subject of Jews as the greatest threat to Poland is raised obsessively. The contempt, and the deep satisfaction in the fact that Jews were starving in some village because of the economic boycott—it’s astonishing. I knew the prewar Catholic Church was in large part anti-Semitic, but it’s another thing entirely to read these hateful texts in the context of the atrocity to come.