MAY 13, 2001
I’m off to Israel in a week. I want to talk to the witness to the massacre whom Gross cited in Neighbors. I’ve already called Awigdor Kochaw several times, trying to arrange a meeting, but I always get the same reply: he’s not well, he doesn’t feel like talking. I felt he was hostile toward me. I was afraid seeing someone from Poland might be traumatic for him. So I sent my uncle Szmul Horowitz to see him—Szmul is the founder and director emeritus of a home for the elderly in Tel Aviv, and one of the warmest people I’ve ever met. It helped. Szmul is supposed to call him again when I’m in town. Kochaw promised him he would receive us.
A long piece by Tomasz Strzembosz in the newspaper the Republic: “Satan’s Entry or Arrival of the Gestapo?” (a reference to my Gazeta interview with Stanisław Przechodzki, which had as its title a quote from Przechodzki: “Satan Entered into Jedwabne”). Adopting the ironic style of the brothers Laudański, killers of Jedwabne (who mocked Wasersztejn: “Didn’t he see and hear a little too much for a teenager?”), the respected history professor comments on the testimony of Awigdor Kochaw, who fled from outside the barn where his family perished: “Would he go back to the barn to listen in on murderers’ conversations?”
Strzembosz refers to two witnesses to prove the Germans committed the crime in Jedwabne. The first is Stefan Boczkowski, who lived in Grądy Małe in 1941; he wrote the professor a letter: “We both walked along with many other locals at some distance behind the tail end of the column of Jews. When they had all been forced into the barn a military truck carrying troops drove up at great speed, and some of the soldiers jumped off the truck while the remaining soldiers quickly started handing the ones on the ground canisters of gasoline, and they started pouring the gasoline in the corners of the barn, also at lightning speed.” An army truck, soldiers jumping off, an operation at lightning speed, these are the images that I see, too, after watching so many movies about the war.
Strzembosz doesn’t go into why “many other locals” followed the column of Jews and what Stefan Boczkowski, a fifteen-year-old boy from Grądy Małe, was doing in Jedwabne that day. Grądy Małe is four kilometers from Jedwabne; it’s one of the villages from which wagons with peasants armed with clubs and sticks set off on the morning of July 10.
The second witness is Apolinary Domitrz from the village Rostki, quoted in an interview for Życie Warszawy (Warsaw Life). Domitrz now resides in Greenpoint, the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He says he was grazing cows with two friends in the meadows between Rostki and Jedwabne, about half a kilometer from the barn. When the flames blazed up, they ran to Jedwabne right away. “We rushed across the marketplace. It was quiet, everything was shut down, no one was on the street. And the barn was on fire. So we headed to Cmentarna Street. The Germans were retreating from the heat.”
“And the others?”
“What others? There were only Germans. We didn’t see a single Pole there. Just us.”
Of Gross’s book he says: “All one big lie, sir. How could he make all of that up? When a friend and I read it we couldn’t believe how anyone could tell lies like that.”
The Warsaw Life journalist who interviewed Domitrz counters that President Kwaśniewski does not question the guilt of the Poles.
“So was Kwaśniewski there or what? I was there, not him, and I saw what happened.”
Strzembosz finds all of this very believable, ignoring the fact that the two accounts contradict each other. If, as Domitrz says, there were “only Germans” at the barn while the Jews were being burned—which in his view, by the way, was their punishment for giving Christ to be put to death, and the only Poles were Apolinary himself with his two friends, then Stefan Boczkowski couldn’t have seen what he saw, because he wouldn’t have been there. Not to mention that you only have to look at the map to see that Domitrz’s tale is topographically implausible. Rostki is two kilometers south of Jedwabne, and the barn was situated on the northeast side of town, about half a kilometer from the market as the crow flies. By now, the accumulated idiocy and unjust accusations flung at Gross have overrun all bounds.
Professor Tomasz Strzembosz is a recognized historian, whose books on the armed underground in Warsaw during World War II are very popular, and he is a social activist. He feels compelled to defend the Poland of the Home Army and the Polish people. “The Jedwabne affair awoke a demon in this traditional Polish patriot,” a historian friend of his explains.
That is precisely why all Strzembosz’s absurd statements pain me so much. Jerzy Robert Nowak, the prolific anti-Semite who is now writing a book on the “lies of Gross,” doesn’t bother me as much—I’m prepared to accept that in any case like this there will be a lunatic fringe. Anyway, according to the probability theory of Gauss (who invented the bell curve), without Jerzy Robert Nowak, we wouldn’t have on the opposite side of the curve those Polish Catholics who from a profound need of their own, undertook to clean up Jewish graves in the seventies. Still, historians who know Strzembosz say he is not an anti-Semite, and his life’s achievements inspire respect and recognition. He is to me the embodiment of what a decent Pole is capable of saying about Jews when the image of his fatherland and his compatriots is at stake.
MAY 14, 2001
Konstancin. Stanisław Ramotowski’s birthday. He keeps saying, “God forbid anybody finds out where we are.” But at the same time he’s a sociable person and he’s glad when I bring guests along. He particularly likes my sister, Marysia. This time I’ve brought my friend Helena Datner-Śpiewak, which turns out to have been a great idea. After a few minutes they’re talking like old friends. Helena tells Ramotowski about her father, Szymon Datner. How he fled from the Białystok ghetto to fight the Germans. He managed to join a Russian Jewish partisan group, but had to run away after he and a friend shot two guards. To the end of his life it pained him that he had killed. Soon after the liberation of Białystok, he became chairman of the District Jewish Committee, as well as, briefly, a member of the Communist town council. He put forward a bill to ban the teaching of German in schools permanently, and the council passed it. But he didn’t intend to stay in Poland. He left for Palestine. He came back because he was in love and Helena’s future mother didn’t want to leave Poland. “Just like my wife—she wouldn’t leave, either,” Stanisław says, nodding in sympathy.
MAY 15, 2001
A shocking interview with Primate Glemp for the Catholic Information Agency. The primate says that for a long time now the Church has been subjected to a smear campaign aimed at making it apologize for crimes against Jews; Gross’s book was clearly written on commission and the massacre in Jedwabne had no religious subtext whatsoever. After which he pulls out a full array of anti-Semitic clichés, including pearls like this: “The Jews were smarter and knew how to exploit the Poles,” and “Jews were disliked for their strange folklore.” And of course: “Shouldn’t the Jews admit that they’re guilty toward the Poles, especially for the period of collaboration with the Bolsheviks, their collaboration in the deportations to Siberia, the way they sent Poles to prison?” At the end, the primate says anti-Semitism doesn’t exist; however, anti-Polishness does. A commentary the Gazeta added to the interview reminds the primate that the Church’s anti-Semitism isn’t an invention of Gross’s, since the pope has previously apologized to Jews for it.
MAY 17, 2001
A phone call from Leszek Dziedzic asking me if I can stop by, because his father, Leon, has come from America for the memorial ceremony. I jump in the car and three hours later I’m in Jedwabne.
Leon Dziedzic—small, slight, shy—sits in the kitchen in a peaked army cap turned back to front. He was fourteen when he was selected to bury the remains of Jews burned in the barn. He knows a great deal about the crime, but it’s not easy to talk to him about it. His voice breaks, he tries to hide his tears. I ask him how he explains the crime to himself.
“They needed underwear so they took it from Jews.”
Leszek interrupts: “Tell her, Dad, like you told me: they went out killing for a shitty Jewish nightshirt.”
Leon Dziedzic says the lust for pillage compounded the anti-Semitism instilled in them in religion class at school: “There were those who were pillars of the church, who carried the banners in religious processions, and then went and ripped open the bellies of Jews. I reminded a neighbor who, no matter what the topic is, always sticks in something nasty about the Jews: ‘You yourself pray to a Jew and his Jewish mother.’ The neighbor replied, ‘Leon, you’re an idiot.’ And his brother, a priest who happened to be visiting, backed him up. Don’t I know Jesus wasn’t baptized till he was thirty, and the apostles were Jews? But people around here don’t know any religion at all. Before the war I’d eat the matzos my friends brought with them to school. People said there was Christian blood in that matzo, and after the war I got up the nerve to ask Helena Chrzanowska about it. And she said it was all a lot of nonsense.”
Leon Dziedzic continues: “Miss Helena had a difficult life here after the war even though she’d been baptized and married a Pole. And yet she never complained, though she did burst into tears once, and said that if she’d known how strong the prejudices were she would never have married, so she wouldn’t have children.”
I wonder how I might get back in touch with Helena Chrzanowska. Leszek Dziedzic suggests he pay her a visit and try to persuade her to talk to me. If she agrees he’ll come back for me.
I ask Leon Dziedzic how he was chosen to remove the bodies after July 10.
“A few days after the massacre they ordered one person from each street in town and from the outskirts to report for duty. They picked young people like me. We tried to figure out who was who, the charred bodies were on top, and toward the bottom they were only slightly singed. When the murderers set the barn on fire, people had all rushed to one air shaft on the east side. They were all piled up. It was impossible to say how many there were, because we’d take out an arm and then a head separately, with pitchforks. We buried them in pieces. Three policemen stood guard over us. There was a lightly singed shoe box, someone picked it up and gold coins fell out. A lot of people started gathering them, but a policeman ordered the money be returned; only one guy, who stuck a coin in his boot, kept it. I picked up a watch and threw it into the grave, because it wasn’t mine.”
Leon Dziedzic saw freshly shoveled earth across the road from the barn, on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery—a sign that Jews had been buried there, the ones who had been killed separately, not in the group.
He had helped Szmul Wasersztejn twice, the first time toward the end of June 1941, before the massacre: “The Russians had left, the Germans hadn’t taken over yet, and the thugs were already gearing up for pogroms. Jews were getting their belongings out and burying them somewhere or leaving them for safekeeping with farmers they knew. Szmul hid his things in a field, in a potato cellar. After a few days it looked as if the situation was calming down and he’d be able to go bring them home safely. I knew Szmul well, so he asked me for help. We went in a wagon and were stopped by three guys in the market square. They hit Szmul, started looking through the clothes, unharnessed the horse and lashed it with the whip, and I got a few lashes, too. Those three later took part in herding the Jews into the marketplace.”
Leszek, with some difficulty, gets his father to give me their names: Bolesław Ramotowski, Napoleon Piechocki, and Jerzy Tarnacki.
The second time the Dziedzices helped Szmul was after the massacre.
“I went to the barn to put down straw for the horses and almost stuck him with the pitchfork. I heard a voice: ‘Leon, forgive me, it’s me, Szmul.’ I said, ‘Quiet!’ because the walls had ears. The lady next door lived with a German and would come over to steal our chickens … When dusk fell my mother put on an extra layer of clothes over her regular clothes, to bring to Szmul without anyone noticing, he didn’t have anything warm to wear. She said she was going out to feed the dogs; there were eight kids and one of us might let something slip. Later Uncle Klemens brought him to Janczewko, to the Wyrzykowskis.”
When Szmul Wasersztejn moved to Białystok immediately after the war, he sent a letter to Leon’s mother, asking her to visit him there. He gave her shoe leather for her five sons, and cloth to make dresses for her daughters.
As Leon Dziedzic remembers it, they hid Szmul Wasersztejn right after July 10, 1941, but as I reconstructed his life it became clear to me that Szmul hid with them after the hunt for Jews that took place in the autumn of 1942, and thus a whole year later. Ramotowski in turn insists that Rachela’s family were taken to the Radziłów ghetto in 1943, whereas it must have happened much earlier, because by 1943 there was no longer any ghetto in Radziłów. As far as dates and numbers go, you can’t rely on anyone.
Leon is hurt because his sister-in-law, wife of the late Klemens, greeted him on this visit with the words “Got a lot of those teeth you took from the Jews?” She knew very well the locals made a practice of searching the bodies of murdered Jews for gold teeth. It’s always the same: whenever someone felt compassion for Jews, immediately others sniped that he or she loved Jews because of their riches.
“I gave it to her straight about what my brother-in-law Klemens did back then, because I saw it with my own eyes,” continues Leon Dziedzic. “He didn’t kill anybody, but he did do some looting. Just before the Germans came, a Jewish family was fleeing on a cart with everything they owned, and he and a friend forced them to get down and they took it all away from them. The Jews continued on foot, in tears.”
Leon Dziedzic tells me that some were troubled by the crime committed by their compatriots: “Janek Kalinowski, who had a smithy near the cemetery, was keeping an anvil and tongs there for Szmuił, a smith from Przestrzelska Street. Janek had nothing to do with the Kalinowski who killed Jews. Janek was told by the local killers to take over the workshop equipment. They came to Kalinowski to run a smithy, because the Germans had said the Poles could kill all the Jews as long as all the workshops were manned afterward. I was a guard across the street at a meat co-op, and Janek Kalinowski brought up the story of that equipment many times.”
Leszek comes back empty-handed. Miss Helena is sorry but she’s very ill.
“She’s scared, you’ve got to understand that,” says Leszek. “My dad, too, since they showed him on TV, he’s worried they’ll burn our house down. I reassured him: ‘Dad, if someone’s stupid enough to throw money at me, let them go ahead, I’m insured.’ I’m not sorry for anything, at least I don’t have any illusions about where I live.”
MAY 18, 2001
News from Jedwabne. After long negotiations, Biedrzycki agreed to sell the land under the monument back to the government for half the price offered him by Bubel. For fifty thousand zlotys, that is.
A call to Ignatiew. I look through my notes from the Jedwabne trial proceedings again and am unable to figure out why some are convicted and others cleared, though everything points to them all being guilty. Did some of them agree to collaborate with the secret police—there was still a kind of civil war going on in these parts—and so their murder of Jews was swept under the carpet? Ignatiew replies that a journalist can posit any hypothesis, whereas a prosecutor has to have proof. But I hear a note of acknowledgment in his voice.
MAY 22, 2001
Tel Aviv. I ask Uncle Szmulek to help me find the Finkelsztejns of Haifa in the phone book. They lived there in the seventies, when someone was sent by Yad Vashem to record their testimony. Chaja and Izrael were by then already elderly, but perhaps their children are still living? There are several dozen Finkelsztejns in the phone book. Szmulek patiently phones them one by one, engages them in some kind of conversation, but each time he indicates that it is not them. Eventually, after about seven calls, we give up.
MAY 23, 2001
Jerusalem. I cross an empty city from which tourists have vanished because of terrorist attacks. I’m going to see Meir Ronen, who lived in Jedwabne before the war. I got Ronen’s contact information from Morgan Ty Rogers, a young New York lawyer who prepared the Internet version of the Jedwabne Book of Memory. Ronen is a distant relative of his.
Meir is a delicate, frail man of great elegance, startled by my visit. He hasn’t spoken Polish in the last sixty years; he suggests that his son-in-law, who lives nearby, translate from Hebrew to English for him. But it took only a quarter of an hour for him to return to the language that had seemed buried irretrievably in the remotest corners of his memory. I never heard such beautiful Polish spoken in Jedwabne. He has preserved in his memory the names of all the Polish kings and of all the children in his class. And many bitter recollections, such as how toward the end of the thirties, the teacher made Jewish children move to the back rows of the classroom and Polish children stopped speaking to them. I don’t have to ask him many questions. For many hours he tells me about his Jedwabne. I listen and see the shtetl that survives only in his memory. He remembers being quite small and his still-living great-grandfather, Nachum Radzik (who is the ancestor he shares with Ty Rogers), telling him his own great-great-grandfather was in the delegation that set out to Catherine the Great with a petition to grant Jedwabne the status of a city. (In fact, the rights of the city were granted in 1736, but maybe this great-great-grandfather had been in some other delegation to the tsarist court and family legend preserved the story of him helping to found the city with the participation of Catherine the Great herself. In parting he says: “Good night, madam.”
MAY 24, 2001
I look on the Internet in the morning and read an article in the Gazeta about the preparations for the exhumation.
I remember Ignatiew asking my opinion before I left about whether exhumation was permissible for Jews. I said it wasn’t really, but that there are exceptions to the rule. And that if he sought a rabbi who would support an exhumation and be prepared to participate in it, he would surely find one, because in this matter as in most, rabbis have differing views.
Yad Vashem. In the archives I find the memoir of Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów, and also testimonies from nearby Wizna about what happened in Jedwabne, by Izrael Lewin and Awigdor Kochaw. Unfortunately there’s nothing from Wąsosz, the village where Poles killed all their Jewish neighbors five days earlier than in Jedwabne.
I spend all day searching for material and making photocopies. Using the archive is expensive, but the worst thing is having to do it myself. Technical tasks were always the bane of my life. And here the photocopier gets stuck every thirty pages or so. It’s stuffy, I get pages from different files mixed up, and they’re often unnumbered. I try to ask in Russian—the language the young women working in the archive speak with one another—what is written in the last line of one page and the first line of another, to check if they correspond. But they can’t help me—they don’t know Yiddish.
Chaja Finkelsztejn’s testimony and the memoir she deposited have been lying unread in the Yad Vashem archive in Jerusalem, just like her son Menachem’s testimony at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Not many Polish historians know Yiddish, and perhaps not many contemporary Israeli historians know Yiddish, either. The testimonies of the Holocaust are written in a language that also perished in the Holocaust.
In the evening Uncle Szmulek translates the testimony of Izrael Lewin of Wizna for me; Lewin survived the war in hiding with his wife and two children. In December of last year I was in Zanklewo to look at the buildings where they hid. In Ełk I visited Witek Dobkowski, the son of the farmer who hid them. I’ve arranged to meet Izrael’s children here in Israel; he is no longer alive.
Lewin describes the first days in Wizna after the Soviets left. Józef Gawrychowski, brother of the Wizna village head, who had heard about the pogrom being planned, came to them with the intention of taking them home with him. “He was a good friend of mine,” Izrael Lewin wrote. “The Soviets were going to send him to the polar bears in Siberia unless he paid sixty thousand rubles. He came to us in the middle of the night, weeping. I was the kind of Jew who always had money. I went to the cupboard, took out the money, didn’t ask for a receipt.”
When the Germans came, Wizna was bombed and people slept out on the street. “The village head ordered the Jews of Wizna to move to Jedwabne,” Lewin wrote. “The Poles knew that Jews from the small towns were gathering in Jedwabne. One day, on a Wednesday in Tamuz, the day before the massacre, goyim came to Wizna from Jedwabne carrying sticks and went from house to house saying: ‘You have two children, send one to Jedwabne with a good stick.’” But Gawrychowski warned the Lewins not to go to Jedwabne and drove them to Łomża. When the Lewin family had moved into the ghetto there, they heard stories about Jews, including many from Wizna, Radziłów, and Stawiski, being burned in the barn in Jedwabne.
“Some got away,” he continued, “among them a woman from our town, Rywka Leja Suraski, who went to the doctor’s house in Jedwabne and begged the doctor’s wife: ‘Save me.’ The doctor’s wife hid her in the stable, threw a pile of straw over her, and covered it with a rag, and Rywka lay there till morning. Her husband was burned with their children. One day Rywka showed up in the ghetto where we were. ‘I have my children here,’ she said, taking out white bones from her blouse. ‘This is Jankiel and Mosze.’ Risking her life, she’d gone to the barn and taken the little bones. She was in hiding somewhere, but she would come to the ghetto and show everybody the bones.”
The Lewins ended up in the ghetto and before it was liquidated they tried to find a hiding place. Izrael Lewin knocked on the doors of Poles he knew before the war. One of the houses belonged to the Dobkowskis.
“‘If you can’t do it,’ I told Dobkowski, ‘I won’t blame you. And I’ll give you all my property, because the end is coming for us, and I don’t want the Germans to get it all.’ I gave him several gold rings, a few gems, a gold needle, a gold watch, a couple of lengths of fabric. I kissed his hand. The goy made us a shelter in the cellar, disguised it. That goy was taking a big risk, because this was right in the center of town. After a few weeks he thought we should get some air, and he introduced us to the dogs—they were frightening dogs, but they learned not to bark at us … He wouldn’t keep Jews for free. He exploited us terribly. My wife looked after the child that had just been born to them, I sewed, they made us do all the kitchen work, including preparing slop for the pigs. We did it all at night.”
Once, they were almost thrown out after the Germans came after Sunday Mass to scare the local population.
“They said: ‘We came to your country to rid you of Jews. When you needed a quart of gasoline, they took one of your chickens. Things are beginning to change now. But there are still a lot of Jews in the parish. You’re sheltering your own enemies. When we find a Jew, we will burn the property and shoot everybody, so any farmer who hides Jews will rot in a grave with them.’ The lady who was sheltering us came back and yelled at her husband: ‘You bastard, as soon as we laid eyes on them I said, Shut the door and put the chain on it!’ and she hit him. We heard every word. The children understood everything and cried. Then his mother came in, saying: ‘It was settled when you took them in.’ She said there was hope because the front was coming closer. She always acted as our advocate. She’d say: ‘If you let them go, the Germans will catch them and they’ll have to say where they were hiding, and we’ll all be lost.’ If there’s a life after death, may his mother be held in reverence there.”
In 1944 the front line moved closer to Wizna and the village was evacuated. Each member of the family set off alone to look for some work on a farm in the area, pretending not to be Jewish. Izrael grew a handlebar mustache and went to farms offering his services as a tailor. The Russians were already on the far banks of the Narew and Lewin knew it was a matter of a week—if he could last that long, he knew he’d get through it. He was taken on at another farm. “The woman brought out her fabric. I told her I’d cut everything first and then start sewing. I was thinking: if she starts to suspect I’m Jewish but all the cloth is already cut, she might think it’d be a pity to throw me out. There was enough sewing for a month. And when I finished and she had a shirt for her husband and a vest for herself, she didn’t think about whether I was Jewish, but about what a good job I’d done.”
Izrael’s wife, Chaszka Fejga, also took part in the interview at Yad Vashem. She recounted how they returned to their home when the war had ended. “I went by to see a non-Jewish woman I knew, to ask her for a frying pan. Her husband was in the Home Army. She said to me: ‘If you want to live, run away, they’re coming for you.’ My husband wanted to stay in Wizna, but I said: ‘No way. We’ve been through so much, we kept ourselves alive, and now we’re going to let a Home Army soldier come and take it all away from us?’ So we left.”
MAY 25, 2001
I read on the Internet that the grounds surrounding the barn site in Jedwabne have been covered with green netting and put under police guard. It is forbidden to go near or take pictures. Archaeologists, prosecutor Ignatiew, and Rabbi Schudrich are on the spot. The rabbi’s comments are quoted: “Exhumation is forbidden in Judaism, but I understand this decision.” His openness is impressive; I know he is among the opponents of the exhumation.
In the section for the Righteous Among the Nations, I look for testimonies from Jedwabne, Radziłów, Wąsosz. Once again there is nothing from Wąsosz.
An afternoon in Tel Aviv, where I arranged to meet Izrael Lewin’s daughter, formerly Tereska. Ida Sarna is now a retired bank director.
She tells me about her escape from the ghetto. “Father didn’t want to go. He said, ‘May what comes to everyone come to me, too.’ Mother thought you couldn’t go off into the unknown with a sick child (I suffered from chronic arthritis). But I tugged my parents’ sleeves, begged them, swore I’d be strong enough. I was the one in our family who wanted to live. I don’t remember thinking even once during the war that I was going to die.”
She tells me about her time in hiding: “As soon as we crossed the threshold at Bolesław Dobkowski’s house you could tell right away it was a decent house, because there weren’t any things stolen from Jews in it. I doubt I’d have the courage he had to hide us. Their children didn’t know we were Jewish, they thought we were American cousins, and they couldn’t let anyone find out about us because America had declared war on Germany. Lent came and from the attic I heard people from the whole village gathering near the Dobkowski house, singing, ‘Jesus crucified by the Jews, Jesus sold for thirty silver pieces, Jesus betrayed by the traitor Judas.’ You heard it everywhere before the war: ‘They killed God and then made sure they lived better than the Poles.’ Father kept track of when Pesach was, and Yom Kippur, and observed the holidays. I didn’t want to. I was furious that I was Jewish.”
Ida Sarna Lewin goes on: “In 1944 the front line came close, the village was evacuated, and from then on we had to manage on our own, without a hiding place. I went to work for the Germans. I wore a shawl on my head like a Polish peasant woman, because my hair was red. But at least my eyes were blue. The Germans didn’t think there were any Jews left, so they weren’t suspicious, and we didn’t know about Auschwitz or Treblinka, so we weren’t so terribly afraid.”
Of the period after the war: “Father went on working as a tailor in Łódź, at 27 Wschodnia Street. We left in 1950. We were scared to live in Poland under Soviet occupation. We already knew what the Russians were like from spending two years with them in Wizna at the start of the war.”
Ida Sarna Lewin has never gone back to visit Poland, because she was always afraid of what might happen to her there.
“I go to an exercise class for stress reduction, and when we are instructed to imagine something very pleasant, I imagine the view from the attic at Dobkowski’s, where we were sometimes allowed to climb and breathe fresh air—the fields, greenery, lake, sky. I’d like so much to see that view again, but I’m still scared. My grandma was killed in a pogrom in Wizna. There was no Gestapo or SS there, just a few Wehrmacht soldiers and Poles who’d been given vodka by the Germans. And how many Jews did the Poles kill after the war?”
Members of my own family, from Skryhiczyn, a village situated on the Bug in southeastern Poland, have told me many times of the affection and longing they feel for the Polish landscape.
My uncle Monio, or Mosze Anaf, who right before the war spent four years in kibbutzes in Kielce and Warsaw preparing to emigrate to Palestine, visited Skryhiczyn many times and encouraged his cousins to emigrate.
They kept telling him: Look at our Bug River, look at our forests, in Palestine there’s nothing but sand, swamps, and mountains. “If it hadn’t been for their fondness for Skryhiczyn, they would have survived,” Monio said to me sadly, years later. When he settled in Rosh Pina, a little town in the Galilee hills, he brought raspberry shoots, wild strawberries, and lilies of the valley back from Poland for his garden, where the branches of fig, mandarin, orange, avocado, and every kind of olive intertwined.
Uncle Avinoa Hadasz from the Kinneret kibbutz once took me to the bank of the Jordan, a place where pilgrims poured out of buses pulled up to the side of the road and washed their feet under three-hundred-meter-tall eucalyptus trees. “This land belongs to the kibbutz,” Avinoa told me. “Here we sell bottles of Jordan water, because the Christians believe Christ was baptized here. Father always took me here when I was little. We came to swim, catch fish, have important conversations. My father planted these trees, and I helped him. Father chose this river bend because it reminded him of a bend in the Bug near Skryhiczyn.”
MAY 26, 2001
I’ve arranged to meet Ida Sarna Lewin’s brother Izaak Lewin, a retired army driver.
He tells me Witek Dobkowski, son of the farmer who hid him, is now his best friend. “He spends several months a year here with me. I visit them. In Israel, Witek sometimes comes to the synagogue with me, and when I’m in Poland, I go to church with him.”
I ask Izaak how he can bear hearing his close friend saying Germans killed the Jews in Jedwabne, and that Jews denounced Poles to the Soviets.
“I’m ashamed to tell him it was the Poles who did it. It would hurt him, and after all, without his parents, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”
He tells me how he stumbled on a meeting in Jedwabne on February 17, 1945.
“I was headed for Wizna on foot. People were gathering for a meeting, because they were about to elect a village head. They were shouting at each other, ‘Not him, he collaborated with the Germans!’; ‘Not him, he collaborated with the Soviets!’ They were at each other’s throats. No one stood up, no one said a terrible tragedy had taken place here. I thought, Not my cart, not my horse, and took off as fast as I could go.”
After the war the Lewin family moved to Łódź. On a tram Izaak heard someone say: “Damn, there are still so many Jews around.” The next day a military Jeep pulled up next to him; they were questioning the passersby about something. He suddenly realized these Polish-speaking soldiers in British uniform must be Jews from the Palestine brigades. He ran up to them. They were organizing the Bricha—the underground effort that facilitated the illegal emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to Palestine. By 1946 he made it there.
Like most survivors, he didn’t talk about what he’d been through in Poland. “We were happy being in this country. I didn’t tell my children anything, so they would be healthy and normal. Until Witek came to visit I didn’t know I could still speak Polish. It was only when I took the children to Poland, and by that time they were grown up, that I told them how I’d survived.”
For six years he has come to Jedwabne every July 10.
“When I went back to Wizna for the first time, I stood on the spot where the old temple had been. There’s a house there now. Its owner came out: ‘I bought it, I can show you the papers.’ He thought I wasn’t there to look but to take it away from him. When I go to Jedwabne I remove the weeds at the monument, I bring paint and repaint the fence in the colors of the State of Israel—blue and white—and I say a prayer, though I’m not religious.”
The way the Lewin siblings tell the story of their time in hiding differs in essential details.
Izaak says he was friends with Witek and played with him. Ida says they didn’t play with anyone, just sat quietly in the dark with their legs pulled up. When they went into any of the rooms, it was only to do some kind of housework, not to play, and it was always at night, when the Dobkowski children were asleep.
In Izaak’s version, the priest knew where they were hiding. He knew their father, who had sewn him his cassock before the war. When Bolesław Dobkowski went to confession, the priest told him: “Those people must survive,” and each time he passed on his greetings to them. In Ida’s version the priest reminded his flock in his sermons not to hide Jews, because the Germans would not only kill the whole family in retribution but burn down the village, too. Dobkowski’s wife returned from church in tears and shaken.
Ida claims Izaak, who is several years her junior, was too young, he doesn’t have his own memories, he erased everything from his memory when he came to Israel. He’s spent a lot of time with Witek and only knows what Witek told him. It seems that Ida preserves Jewish memory and Izaak acquired Polish memory.
In the afternoon Szmulek and I drive to Yehud to meet Awigdor Kochaw. He greets us with a rant against my boss for his article in The New York Times (the same one that appeared in the Gazeta). He speaks pretty good Polish, sometimes interjecting English words.
“I read on the Internet that Mr. Michnik called Poland a heroic nation and praised the Poles for how they helped the Jews. Is that all he has to say about Jedwabne?”
I try to protest that that is not the only thing Michnik or the Gazeta have to say about Jedwabne, but Kochaw doesn’t let me finish.
“I wouldn’t have agreed to see you. We’re only talking because I didn’t want to offend your uncle.”
After two hours Kochaw’s gracious wife asks us firmly to stop. Kochaw has throat cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy, he’s between the first and second sessions of radiation. To the pain of remembering is added the physical pain of speech.
MAY 27, 2001
Back to see Kochaw in Yehud. This time I went alone. Szmulek gave me directions for a shortcut and told me to follow the signs. However, at one fork in the road the place names were only in Hebrew and Arabic. I was late, which is something I really can’t stand.
Kochaw returns several times to a story about Chonek Kubrzański, who stood up against his tormenters in the marketplace on July 10. He refused to carry the statue of Lenin and they beat him with sticks until he collapsed.
“Not everybody went like sheep, as people say,” he comments. He tells me of his wartime life with pride and spirit, but also as if he were answering some kind of unspoken reproach, as if the victims should be ashamed of their defenselessness. This is a problem many Jews struggled with after the Holocaust. I myself remember discussions with my Haifa uncle, Pinio, or Pinchas Rottenberg, who left for Palestine before the war. I was furious that he could consider it unworthy that people go to their deaths without resisting, holding their mother or child in an embrace.
I tell him that exhumations are under way in Jedwabne, but that when I called there I heard they may be called off as a result of rabbis protesting.
“Why would those Moshki decide about the exhumation?” Kochaw rages. “I call rabbis Moshki because of the Zionist upbringing I received in Poland, at a secular Zionist school in Wizna. Moshki was a derogatory word Poles used for Jews, and I use it for the rabbis.”
In the evening, Szmulek and I start calling the next Finkelsztejns in the phone book. Again in vain.
“Here the ‘blacks’ are always protesting against exhumations,” I’m told by Szmulek, who like Kochaw does not attempt to hide his dislike of Orthodox Jews. “We couldn’t build a single highway in this country if we listened to them.”
MAY 28, 2001
Five-thirty in the morning. I’m leaving with Izaak Lewin to celebrate Shavuot at a farm cooperative with which he has friendly relations.
“Look.” He proudly points out the Bank Leumi building we pass on the way. “My mother, when she went to synagogue in Radziłów, put a kopeck into the blue tin for the purchase of land in Palestine. That money built this bank.”
He tells me about his mother. From the time the Germans took his two brothers from the Łomża ghetto to be shot, she kept saying there was no God, but she still kept kosher. When they fled the ghetto, they went to see a friendly farmer in Kramkowo. The farmer didn’t want to keep them there, but he changed his mind when his mother showed him a gold ring. Just one night; the next morning he told them to move on. “What, a fat ring like that for one night?” his mother raged. When he refused to give it back, she smacked him in the face and took it away from him. In November 1944, when the front shifted, she was commandeered as a Pole to cook for the frontline troops. A Ukrainian realized she was Jewish. She warned him, “If you denounce me I’ll tell them we know each other because you had a Jewish woman as a lover, and they’ll kill us both.” After that he stayed well away from her. At the very end of 1944, she made it to Królewiec with the retreating German army. She got her hands on a sled, loaded it with clothes, down quilts, and food, and made her way to Wizna on foot, pulling the sled for more than a hundred kilometers through the snow.
We pass Haifa and soon reach our destination, a moshav, or farm cooperative. The loudspeakers blast Israeli disco music. Everybody is dressed up, even the tractors are decorated: they do a “dance of the tractors” in front of the stage. “In the course of the past year,” we hear over the microphone, “our moshav delivered eleven million liters of milk from eleven hundred cows, and one million four hundred and fifty thousand eggs.”
Izaak: “Our agriculture holds first place in the world for productivity per hectare, and we have a space program, too. Many people in Poland can’t imagine how well we live here. Look at how healthy our young people are! Jewish children never looked like that before the war. Before the war what were we? Nobody. And now we’re creating a healthy, purebred people.”
I can’t muster much enthusiasm for any form of nationalism, but Lewin has so much optimism and warmth that I can’t bring myself to object.
On the way back I tell Izaak about my meetings with Kochaw.
“Awigdor doesn’t like Poland,” Izaak comments. “When I talk about Poland I say some critical things, so people here won’t take me for a traitor, but mostly I say good things. My friends wonder why I go there. I explain to them that I love the river there, the forest, the river path, the houses where Jews used to live. I tell them about the symbolic monument in the forest at Giełczyn dedicated to the memory of three thousand murdered Jews from the Łomża ghetto, two of my elder brothers among them, and the sixteen thousand Poles who perished in wartime in that area. They don’t believe it. ‘But the Poles helped the Germans kill Jews, what did the Germans have against the Poles?’ they ask me. My heart is torn. I feel for Poland, she hurts me and yet I long for her. We lived alongside Poles, my childhood was spent there. I knew some good Poles: Gawrychowski, the village head before the war, to him my dad was a citizen just like any other. If there had been more like him, a few more Jewish children would have lived, and look how many children came from those children! I have seventeen children and grandchildren. But I also saw what the Poles did. I grew up playing with Poles, but in 1941 our good neighbor Parnas came looking for our father to kill him and take over the other half of the house. When a Jew was wandering in the forest, Poles would catch him and take him to the Gestapo or kill him themselves. Papa gave lengths of cloth to his best Polish acquaintance, you could say friend, for safekeeping. One day when we were in hiding we got on Dobkowski’s cart to go get those linens and bring them back with us. Instinct saved us—he was taking a bit too long to get the stuff so we drove the horse off at the last minute, when we were already being surrounded by people trying to catch us.”
Izaak tells me about his visit to Wizna a few years ago.
“Every single person there says to me, ‘We hid Jews,’ ‘We helped,’ ‘We gave food,’ and I just think to myself, But no one survived, so where are those people you saved? I don’t want to think about it and people shouldn’t write about it.”
In the afternoon, Ruta, my cousin Igal Bursztyn’s wife, takes me along for a meeting with a friend, an older lady from New York. Ann Kellerman remembers the school she attended in Vienna in the thirties. One day they made the Jewish girls move to the back rows. At first their friends kept turning around to them from the front rows. They were reprimanded severely. When that didn’t help, the teachers rapped their knuckles with a ruler, and they left a row of empty desks between the Jewish and Austrian girls. After three days the Austrian girls stopped noticing their Jewish friends. When they knocked into one of the Jewish girls running during recess, they didn’t say sorry; they didn’t speak to them when they ran into them on the street.
“We ceased to exist for them.”
I tell her that I heard a similar story a few days ago in Jerusalem, about being moved to the back rows and a feeling of alienation from former friends. It was about a school in Jedwabne.
MAY 29, 2001
Off to Jerusalem to meet Meir Ronen.
“After your visit I couldn’t sleep for three nights, because everything came back to me,” he says in greeting. He spent those days at the computer, where he tried to make an Excel sheet for me of who died in Jedwabne and where they lived. It is titled “List of Jewish Families Burned by Neighbors in Jedwabne.” The list starts in the New Market with Abram Ibram, who lived on the front side with his daughter and son-in-law. On Łomżyńska Street there was Chawa Alenberg, on Przytulska, Szolem Atłasowicz. Altogether there are more than a hundred names preserved in Ronen’s memory.
“You’re surprised I remember so many people?” Ronen says. “I remember every stone in Jedwabne.”
MAY 30, 2001
I phone Stanisław Ramotowski in the morning to hear how he is feeling. He tells me about a kaddish said for the Jews of Jedwabne on Sunday, three days ago, in the Warsaw Church of All Saints on Grzybowski Square. He watched the reports on TV and must have been moved, because he complains that if I’d been in Poland, we would have gone there together. When I proposed to him before my departure that a friend of mine could take him, he snorted that he’d been in enough churches in his life.
I only saw a report on the Internet, but I can easily imagine the impression made by the sight of fifty bishops, led by Primate Glemp, clad in penitential purple. And the words spoken by Bishop Gądecki, as an introduction to the liturgy of penance: “As pastors of the Church in Poland we wish to stand in truth before God and His people, and especially before our Jewish brothers and sisters, regarding with sorrow and remorse the crime that took place in July 1941 in Jedwabne and elsewhere. Its victims were Jews, and among the perpetrators were Poles and Catholics, persons who had been baptized. In Jedwabne, and wherever any man inflicted cruel violence on another, it was God who was most grievously wronged.”
Back at Yad Vashem. In the corridors I meet Professor Szewach Weiss, the current Israeli ambassador to Poland, for many years chairman of the board of the Yad Vashem museum. We talk about the inscription on the monument in Jedwabne, which has just been made public: In memory of the Jews of Jedwabne and surroundings, men, women, children, fellow stewards of this land, murdered and burned alive in this place on July 10, 1941. A warning to posterity that the sin of hatred incited by German Nazism should never again turn the residents of this land against one another.
Weiss expresses his opposition to the inscription sharply: “What does that mean, ‘against one another’? It means the victim is guilty, too. I’m also appalled by the content of the inscription—it leaves out who committed the atrocity, which may make sense, given that the Institute of National Remembrance hasn’t yet completed its investigation, but the second sentence sounds extremely evasive.”
I look in on Professor Izrael Gutman, who heads the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. I tell him about my conversation with Kochaw, and how tormented he seemed by memories.
“I saw a picture of him in the newspaper,” he tells me, “in his living room, with an old photo of a synagogue somewhere in eastern Poland on the wall. I would never hang a photograph like that in my house. For some Israelis the shadow of the past presses on every moment of their lives. For others, working to build the country was therapeutic, and they manage to be happy despite their memories. I am a good example of this. For twenty years I was a member of a kibbutz and felt and lived the life of my country to the hilt. That gives me strength.”
I ask him if he knew before Gross’s book who committed the massacre in Jedwabne.
“I didn’t know. We treat the testimonies of survivors with reserve; usually they could only have seen part of the events they describe, the rest they add from hearsay. I relied on Szymon Datner’s article of 1966, where I read that the Germans committed the crime on those lands in the summer of 1941, with the collaboration of local thugs. When I read the same text again recently, I saw you could easily read the truth between the lines. We made a mistake, and I feel guilty. I didn’t believe the people of a small town could be capable of a crime like that. I thought the indifference, the willingness to denounce Jews, was specific to larger cities,” continues Gutman, who during the war was in the Warsaw Ghetto and then in Auschwitz. “I thought none of that applied to little towns where Jankiel and Mosze were neighbors you knew well. It turns out it was precisely in little towns like that that the anti-Semitism instilled before the war reached its most extreme form.”
In the Yad Vashem café I meet with Professor Aron Wein, chief editor of Pinkas Hakehillot, a commemorative book of Jewish communities in many volumes. I ask Wein why his encyclopedia doesn’t say what really happened in Jedwabne and other towns.
“From the testimonies I read it was clear that the local population had a part in killing Jews in June and July 1941. When I was editing I wrote ‘mob,’ because I didn’t know exactly if there were also Belorussians or Lithuanians in that part of Poland, and I didn’t want to insult the Polish people.”
I hear there’s a former resident of Jedwabne, who left during the Soviet occupation, now living in the kibbutz named Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters, near Haifa.
Szmulek phones the kibbutz. Sadly, Meir Paparle died two years ago, and his daughter knows nothing of her father’s native town. But Szmulek has a four-volume book of recollections of the founders of the kibbutz and promises to find me Paparle’s story.
MAY 31, 2001
In Yehud I visit first Kochaw and then Jakow Cofen vel Geva, who lives one street away in a lovely house with a garden. His name was Jakub Pecynowicz, but like many Polish Jews he changed it to a Hebrew name after arriving in Israel. The Pecynowiczes owned a mill in Jedwabne, and it was they who hosted Kochaw’s family after they had been thrown out of Wizna. He speaks Polish hesitantly, searching for words.
On September 1, 1939, the Pecynowiczes fled town before the advancing German army. They had made it to Zawady in the direction of Tykocin when the Germans crossed the Narew River and surrounded the town. They drove the refugees—among them many Poles from Jedwabne as well as from Wizna, Radziłów, Szczyczyn, Grajewo—into the church. The Germans abused the Jews, pulled their beards, made them clean up excrement with their hands, threw chocolate into the rubbish and then made them eat it under threat of being shot. They chased all of them out into a fenced field. The Jews were to build a shelter, but only the Poles were allowed to stand under it. The Jews stood all night—they weren’t allowed to sit, it was raining. Toward morning the Germans ordered the Poles to carry out a pogrom. Pecynowicz, frozen to the bone, went up to some Poles he knew for a moment, to warm up. He heard one of them arguing they should hold back from the pogrom, with others still undecided gathering around him.
“But some other Poles went to work, grabbing our arms, legs, stripping off our shoes and pants, and then the undecided ones joined in, too. One Jew resisted his coat being taken off, and a German helped a Pole undress him, jabbing the Jew with a knife.”
When he got home, the neighbors had already managed to carry off all his belongings.
“That crippled guy Stanisław Sielawa took most of what we had. My brother went to him: ‘Just give me back two pots so we can make ourselves something to eat.’ And then the Soviets came.”
In the first weeks before the mill was taken from them they paid the representatives of the new authorities in millet, barley, and buckwheat. Jakow Geva thinks that’s why they weren’t put on the deportation list. But how could they imagine it could save all their lives?
“I was the only one who survived, and I had a sister who had ten children. They took me into the army and that’s how I stayed alive. In Russia I got a letter from home saying everything was fine with them. I went with the Soviet army as far as Georgia, Azerbaijan. There were nineteen Poles in the company apart from me. They got packages and shared them among themselves, but they never treated me.”
When he returned to Poland in 1945 on a Russian repatriation train, there were Jews at the stations warning him not to go home because Poles would kill him. And telling him they had to stick together, because when anyone found a Jew on his own, they’d throw him off the train and shoot him.
“I was afraid to look around in Jedwabne. I was afraid to separate from my friends. We arrived at the seaside, in Szczecin. When we got off the train, stones were thrown at us, but a delegation from a kibbutz showed up right away and told us we could join them and emigrate to Palestine.”
He made his way by a circuitous route across half of Europe and was almost in Palestine when the British caught him just off the coast. He was sent to a camp on Cyprus, where he spent two years. While there he heard what had happened in Jedwabne. He worked maintaining the gardens. Eventually he moved to the settlement where he lives to this day: Kiryat Białystok. The settlement was built for Jews from the Białystok region who arrived after the Holocaust, by Jews from the Białystok region who emigrated before the war.
JUNE 1, 2001
Yehud. My last meeting with Kochaw. Every meeting takes the same course. Kochaw talks until his wife interrupts us. Again and again, always with slightly different details, he tells me about the Jews of Wizna, how they were massacred, partly in Wizna, partly in Jedwabne, and how he passed for a Pole in order to survive. Listening to him I feel as if he has recorded his recollections on a memory loop, played back to himself hundreds of times, and is now reading back to me a text already fixed in his head. He speaks under such strain that I don’t dare interrupt him with questions. Only when he stops do you see how exhausted he is.
Once again Szmulek and I call a bunch of Finkelsztejns. Finally we find Menachem Finkelsztejn’s widow. She speaks good Polish. I learn that her husband graduated from the Technion here and was a construction engineer. No, she can’t tell me anything about his experiences during the war. When I press her, she cuts me off:
“I know nothing. Do you think I’m stupid? I survived the war in Poland, too, hiding in bunkers, forests; I saw things. We never told each other about it. We never spoke a word of Polish to each other. Neither our son nor our two daughters know anything, because my husband never talked to them about it.”
I hear that her sister-in-law Chana, Chaja’s youngest daughter, is alive, but the two women aren’t in touch.
I tell Szmulek about my Jerusalem encounters with Meir Ronen, how vividly he remembers Jedwabne, though he never visited it after the war, and the Polish language, which he never used after the war.
“I remember Skryhiczyn only too well,” says Szmulek. “I’d like to forget it but I can’t. I had family there, friends—Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian. I didn’t want to go when our cousin Pinio organized a trip in the eighties. Somebody might think I’d come to take his land away. In recent years a lot of Poles have started coming to Israel. They work illegally here, you hear Polish spoken in the street, and I feel close to them somehow, I like to hear them talk, though their Polish is a bit different from the language I knew. When a person lives far from where he was born, he always feels like a branch grafted onto another tree. Even when the graft was successful.”