JANUARY 1, 2002
In Łódź at Marek Edelman’s birthday party. I talk to his daughter-in-law, the painter Zofia Lipecka, about her installation on Jedwabne. The Warsaw Center for Contemporary Art at Zamek Ujazdowski was to have shown it, everything was on track, when something went wrong. Her e-mails remained unanswered, and in the end, it turned out there was no money for the installation.
Marek Edelman was active in the Bund, a party that said the place for Jews was in Poland and that they should fight for social justice for all, not emigrate to Palestine in search of the Promised Land. He has remained faithful to that view his whole life. (After the war, the Bundists would go to train stations to try to halt the flood of Jews fleeing Poland.) But when in 1968 anti-Semitism received government endorsement and his children, Ania and Aleksander, would come home from school in tears, he thought it best for them to emigrate to France with their mother. Alina Margolis-Edelman invited a school friend of Ania’s, Zofia Lipecka, over for Easter, and Zofia stayed with them and finished school in France. Alina, a pediatrician, now travels with the humanitarian missions of Doctors Without Borders. She was in Vietnam to help the boat people fleeing a Communist hell, in El Salvador, Chad, Bosnia. Ania became a chemist, Aleksander a biophysicist, and Zofia Lipecka a painter and Aleksander’s wife.
Zofia’s installation shows close-ups on several monitors of the faces of people listening to Szmul Wasersztejn’s testimony. There are public figures like Jan Gross, friends, acquaintances, and also completely random people, seventy-five of them in all. “Some of them are listening intently, others weeping,” says Zofia, who read to them and recorded their reactions. “I cried over it like a baby many times,” Zofia tells me. “There are Poles, Jews, French people, as well as a Chinese woman, an Algerian woman, a Vietnamese woman who was reminded of the Vietnam War by the descriptions of the cruelty inflicted, or the black cleaning lady in the cultural center where I work, who later tried to console me by saying as a Pole I really don’t have to feel so guilty.”
JANUARY 3, 2002
I extend my leave from the Gazeta, because I’m only half done with my book.
I’m trying to reconstruct the life of Józef, formerly Izrael or Srul, Grądowski, one of the seven Jews rescued by Antonina Wyrzykowska. I saw a prewar photo of him in the Jedwabne Book of Memory. An elegant man in pince-nez with his handsome wife, Fajga, in a low-cut dress and with three robust boys, Abram Aaron, Reuwen, and the youngest, Emanuel. A bucolic scene, photographed in the open air, a rarity in those times. I found out about him in Jedwabne; I’d read about him in trial documents and in Wasersztejn’s diary. I talked about him a lot in America with the brothers Jacob and Herschel Baker and with Lea Kubran, in Israel with Jakow Geva, and recently with Antonina Wyrzykowska.
I’m able to reconstruct what happened to him on July 10, 1941. In the morning three Poles armed with clubs forced their way into his home; he knew them—Feliks Żyluk, who lived in the same building, best of all. They dragged the whole family out to the market square. They were led away from the square by a Pole from Szczuczyn, where Fajga came from. Grądowski never revealed his name.
He and his wife and two of their sons moved into the provisional ghetto in Jedwabne. When in the fall of 1942 the Germans ordered all Jews to report to the police station, Grądowski was worried that they hadn’t been told to bring any tools. He thought they weren’t being summoned for work and they should run away. He managed to get to the Wyrzykowskis in Janczewko, where he hid until the end of the war.
What happened to the rest of his family is unknown. Grądowski said his wife and children were caught by policemen and taken to the ghetto in Zambrów. However, Leon Dziedzic claims two of Grądowski’s sons were killed in Przestrzele near Jedwabne. They were hiding in a haystack in a field belonging to a neighbor of the Dziedzices. It was November, it was freezing, and before they had time to look around for a better shelter the woman saw them and reported them to the village head. He passed it on to the police, who came for them and shot them on the spot.
After the war was over Srul Grądowski went to Szczuczyn in the hope that someone in the family had survived there. Szmul Wasersztejn accompanied him; the roads were perilous and it seemed safer for the two of them to navigate them together. They found no one. Srul, who was nearly sixty, almost two generations older than the other six saved by Wyrzykowska, didn’t have the strength to go with them to try to sneak across the border. He found his old home in Jedwabne. He had himself baptized. He married a Polish woman who had worked in their household before the war. He wanted to melt into the surroundings, and so he changed his name to a Polish one. He didn’t seek contact with surviving Jews, didn’t report to the District Jewish Historical Commission to give any testimony. He was some kind of middleman in takeovers of formerly Jewish houses, giving false testimony about alleged relatives.
Rabbi Baker, then Jakub Piekarz, a student at the Łomża yeshiva, knew Izaak from before the war. He’d taught Grądowski’s sons Hebrew, which paid for a pair of shoes that lasted him the whole school year. “At that time he was one of the nicest people in Jedwabne,” Baker recalled. “But later Izrael became Józef and they granted him his life on the condition he give up the lives of others. That can’t be forgiven.”
The rabbi relied on the account of Rywka Fogiel in the Jedwabne Book of Memory: “At that time of misfortune Izrael Grądowski profaned the name of God. On the day the Jews were burned he and his family ran to the church, fell at the priest’s feet, and asked him to baptize him. In this way he saved his own life. It was that man who turned against his own brothers. About 125 Jews managed to go into hiding and escape the burning. The newly converted Christian betrayed their hiding places to the Poles.”
I know this isn’t true. Grądowski was baptized in August 1945 (this is confirmed by an entry in the Jedwabne parish record book). There wasn’t even anyone for him to betray the surviving Jews to. They themselves had left their hiding places to move into the ghetto, which seemed to them the safest place—after what the Polish population had done—because it was guarded by the Germans.
On the other hand, what Jakow Geva told me is true: after the war Grądowski tried to trick Jedwabne families who’d emigrated to the States and Palestine, telling them their relatives had survived and attempting to get money out of them.
Lea Kubran remembered that Grądowski wrote to them after the war—she was then with her husband in a displaced persons camp in Austria—asking them to send him a Jewish calendar. Later they found out that he wrote in letters to Jedwabne Jews on the other side of the ocean that he still felt himself to be a Jew, witness the Jewish calendar on his wall. Then he would ask them for money.
Herschel Baker also told me about this. Right after the war he’d visited Grądowski. “His wife opened the door and said, ‘He’s not talking to any Jews.’ I said, ‘Please call him.’ She slammed the door in my face. He was at home and must have heard us talking, because I recognized his voice when he asked her, ‘Who was that?’ When I left Poland I made contact with my brothers by mail from a transit camp. They wrote that Mama and other Jedwabne Jews had survived, they’d heard about it from Izrael Grądowski, and they’d sent money for him to pass on to them. But I already knew very well they were dead. He wasn’t an honest man.”
As if that sin of taking money for people he knew to be dead weren’t enough, the Jedwabne Book of Memory adds a much more terrible one to it, that of betraying his fellow Jews. So as to exclude him once and for all from the community of pious Jews.
In 1947, Całka Migdał from Uruguay mentioned him in a letter to the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (the letter that sparked the Jedwabne trial): “The one man who remained alive was Srul Grądowski. We don’t want to ask him too much, because he is alone among so many non-Jews that he may be afraid of speaking the truth. Please find out if Srul Grądowski is worthy of our aid. He used to be our neighbor. We cannot understand how a single Jew could have survived among so many who helped to destroy all the Jews of the town, how he can look them in the face.”
In fact, he managed to live there because, like Marianna and Stanisław Ramotowski of Radziłów, he testified on behalf of the murderers. Called as a witness, he kept saying the Germans carried out the massacre, and he declared the accused men innocent.
Of Józef Żyluk, who herded him and his family out to the market: “I owe my life to Żyluk.”
Of Aleksander Janowski: “I doubt he participated in the burning of the Jews because he’s an honest man with an excellent reputation.”
Of Roman Górski: “He came to us when we were in the marketplace, wanting to hide my family, but his daughter called him because his wife had taken ill.”
Of Władysław Miciura: “That day I was taken to the police station, and Miciura and I did some carpentry work there … I never saw Miciura leave the police station.”
The court wasn’t interested in the fact that these testimonies were mutually contradictory, because according to the needs of the accused men, Grądowski was either in the market square, in the magistrate’s office, or at the police station.
Józef Grądowski signed letters along with other townspeople stating that the convicted men were upstanding citizens. In his request for an appeal of the trial, Zygmunt Laudański referred to Grądowski as someone who could testify to his innocence.
The time came, however, when he decided to tell the truth. “At the time the Jews were rounded up I was a Jew,” he declared in the trial of Józef Sobuta on December 11, 1953, in the courtroom of the District Courthouse in Białystok. “I knew Sobuta and saw him in the market square when he chased Jews with a club in his hand.” But at the next trial against Sobuta in 1954 he said, “He shouldn’t be condemned because it won’t bring back those people who died. I didn’t speak of Sobuta’s part in the massacre during the investigation because I was afraid, knowing the police wouldn’t protect me in Jedwabne, but at the trial I am saying what happened, because I’ve made a pledge to tell the truth, come what may.”
Grądowski told the court: “During the burning of the Jews a Jewish child squirmed out of a shed and a Pole saw the child, caught him, and threw him onto the fire; he was a bad man. I took a Polish orphan in instead and I’m raising him as my own without regard for the harm done me by Poles.”
The court ruled that his testimony was unreliable. However, it did listen to the testimony of Sobuta’s wife about Grądowski having demanded two hundred zlotys to testify on his behalf and not getting the money. In an investigation launched in 1967, Grądowski was interrogated again, and told what really happened, but then retracted it.
“About eight in the morning Feliks Żyluk, Antoni Surowiecki, and [Antoni] Grzymała came to me … They were carrying iron and wooden cudgels.” He held to his story in a confrontation with Antoni Grzymała, but six months later, at a subsequent interrogation, he reversed his position and said that these three hid him and his family in Żyluk’s house, and that the Jews were driven into the market by “men I didn’t know, dressed in civilian clothes, wearing masks, who spoke to us in Polish.”
Grądowski died in 1971 at the age of eighty-two. More than a decade later, the Łomża periodical Contacts interviewed his wife, and she agreed to talk under the condition no names were used, neither hers nor anyone else’s. But it’s easy to decipher who she was talking about. After the war Feliks Żyluk was once again Grądowski’s neighbor: “My husband never reproached him with taking part in the pogrom and dragging him from the house to the square by force … My husband was very pious and it’s probably only for that reason that he bore various insults.”
It seems that he became less submissive toward the end of his life. Leszek Dziedzic remembered that when someone started speaking ill of Jews or harassing him, Grądowski had a saying: “So why do you kiss that Jew’s feet in church?”
Mrs. Grądowski continues: “Feliks Ż. built his children a house in Ełk. During some visit to his native parts he heard of the death of my husband. He came to me indignant that I hadn’t let him know of the burial. I couldn’t hold it back then: ‘My husband would turn in his grave if I had invited you.’ And now Feliks is in the graveyard as well, and my time is coming, and no one will remember the old injustices and hardships.”
His wife survived him by a quarter of a century, dying in 1996. In Jedwabne I heard the same story several times, how Grądowski took in a boy to raise him, but God punished him for an insincere conversion and his adopted son, Jerzy, turned into a bum and finally drank himself to death. Jerzy’s widow told me these are slanderous stories—he died of a grave illness, she said.
Antonina Wyrzykowska still cherished fond memories of Srul, later Józef Grądowski. When she moved from Janczewko, she seldom went home, but when she did she always went to see him.
“He had a funeral parlor,” she tells me. “There was another undertaker in Jedwabne, and when the owner heard of anyone’s death he’d go to the family to say, ‘I hope you’re not going to the Jew?’ But what kind of Jew was Grądowski, since he’d converted a long time ago and had a Catholic wife? When they took in the boy, he wasn’t a Jew at all and still people would pester him about being Jewish. Józek kept his Yiddish accent until the end of his life and when he saw me he’d say, ‘Mrs. Wyrzykowski, I haven’t forgotten what you did for me. When your father dies I’ll give him a coffin for free.’ Grądowski died, and my father lived another ten years, to his ninety-fifth birthday.”
JANUARY 5, 2002
Whenever I have a free moment, I go to see my aunt Hania Lanota in the countryside. She’s translating for me the memoir of Chaja Finkelsztejn of Radziłów. It is written in Yiddish, with fragments in Hebrew and occasionally a sentence in German. It makes no difference to Hania. She translates aloud as fluently as if she were reading me a book written in Polish.
JANUARY 27, 2002
I spend another day with my aunt, translating Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir. Her description of the massacre is a masterpiece of reportage. Chaja is observant, penetrating, with great feeling for narrative, tone, use of detail.
And so on the morning of July 7 she saw a Gestapo officer and the council secretary Stanisław Grzymkowski looking through the broken windows into the Beit Midrasz. After the Radziłów Jews had been burned, Chaja realized that she’d witnessed the search for a place of execution, and that they’d probably rejected the synagogue in the center of town out of fear that the fire would spread to buildings nearby. It was probably Grzymkowski who had suggested the unused barn standing at a safe distance from town; in Chaja’s version its owner had left for Argentina, so he couldn’t protest.
The problem is the absence of names; Chaja either doesn’t give them at all or gives only first names. Her account is so solid and precise, it would be good to fit the right surnames to the acts she describes.
FEBRUARY 9, 2002
Professor Strzembosz, who lent credence to all those who denied the guilt of the Poles, has been named Person of the Year 2001 by the Tygodnik Solidarność (Solidarity Weekly): “While the liberal left seeks ‘a terrible knowledge about the grandfathers and fathers of contemporary Poles’ in order to buttress their smug theories about the moral impoverishment of ‘this nation,’ while certain media outlets endlessly seek to outdo each other in spitting on Poland and abusing her, Tomasz Strzembosz seeks the truth about her.”
FEBRUARY 10, 2002
Jedwabne. A meeting of residents in the religious education hall. The priest gives the lecture I already know so well on the Jews killing themselves and each other on their own initiative. Many older people, some of whom must have been witnesses to the events of that time, nod along with the priest when he speaks of the integrated German forces.
I ask the priest to comment on the Institute of National Remembrance’s statement that the bullets that came from the cartridges found in the barn were not fired in 1941, and so there is no evidence for the Germans having been present. “The truth will come out,” he answers calmly. “The townspeople have other cartridges they keep in their houses.”
FEBRUARY 19, 2002
Hania Lanota translates a further section of Chaja’s memoirs for me.
When Jews could still live outside the ghetto, with farmers who paid the Germans for Jewish labor, the Finkelsztejns lived in a village near Radziłów. “Father bundled straw for the first time in his life,” Chaja says sadly. “My niece and I ploughed the fields and Menachem, who only knew how to carry a bag of books, had bleeding hands from the farmwork.”
Hania comments sharply that this part of the martyrology could have happened to any city dweller unused to village life. She herself was raised in Warsaw, but spent a lot of time before the war in Skryhiczyn with our family, working in the fields. And those Jews who worked the land, among them many of my aunts and uncles, turned out to be fantastic workers later on the kibbutzim in Israel. Evidently Hania doesn’t like Chaja much, she finds her too severe. It’s true her judgments of people are razor-sharp. But in her defense I must say she is often equally tough on Jews.
In the fall of 1942, when the Germans demanded that Jews return to the ghetto, the Finkelsztejns went into hiding. Hania Lanota, who herself escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and hid on the Aryan side, reading to me how the murderers come to the village demanding that Chaja’s family be handed over, keeps saying, “It’s monstrous! In Warsaw people feared blackmailers but I could walk down the street, I had friends from before the war whose houses I visited. This woman lived in a kind of zoo where wild animals had been let out of their cages.”
The family who hid Chaja told her that in front of the Łomża ghetto wagons had stopped that were supposed to take Jews on their last journey, and peasant women had grabbed bundles from the Jewish women and stripped them down to their underwear. Did anything like that happen in Skryhiczyn, the village from which my family was transported to the ghetto? One day the Skryhiczyn peasants were ordered to drive their wagons to the ghetto and drop the Jews off at the train, which transported them straight to a death camp. They were driven by peasants they’d known for years. How did those forced helpers of death behave? Did they talk to them? Were they silent? Did they say goodbye? Maybe they took their belongings because “they wouldn’t need them anymore”?
FEBRUARY 20, 2002
Every child in Jedwabne “knows” that it was Jews who did the interrogating, convicting, and sentencing in the Jedwabne trial. At the same time, as becomes clear from the legal documents from 1949—which the Institute of National Remembrance is analyzing—the investigation was conducted by an ethnic Pole, and the interrogations of the accused men were conducted by eight ethnic Poles and three Belorussians (just as in the 1953 trial, a Pole conducted the investigation, and interrogations were led by four Poles and one Belorussian).
I try to find the prosecutors of that time.
Paweł Tarasewicz, who in 1950 rose to become the head of the secret police in Ełk, now lives in Białystok: “I don’t know, I didn’t see anything, I wasn’t in charge at that time, I don’t remember the case.”
Włodzimierz Wołkowycki, a young clerk at the time, now lives in Bielsk Podlaski: “I went to Jedwabne many times, interviewed a lot of people, I’d like to help you but I don’t remember anything.”
Stefan Kulik, who now lives in Warsaw, claims from the start that it’s a mistake. When I read him his personal data from the court papers, he remembers something, but when I ask a further question on beatings during the investigation he once again remembers nothing. “I have inner ear trouble, I was in the hospital for it, and that makes it harder to remember things.”
FEBRUARY 24, 2002
I read the documents of court cases conducted after the war concerning crimes committed against Jews by locals in towns in the vicinity of Jedwabne and Radziłów.
The employees of the Institute of National Remembrance are now tracing them, and there were quite a few. In virtually every town there were instances of Jews being killed. There are a few cases that tell us of massacres committed after the great wave of pogroms in late June and early July 1941, killings from late summer or autumn 1941, when the Jews were in ghettos and only left them occasionally when they were hired by the Germans to do unpaid labor for Polish farmers.
Stanisław Zalewski pleaded guilty to murders committed in August 1941 (he was sentenced to death in 1950). The victims were twenty Jewish women, fifteen to thirty years old, hired from the Szczuczyn ghetto for garden work on the Bzura estate, not far from Szczuczyn. “We rode there on bikes,” Zalewski said. “Earlier we’d gone to the estate smithy and fit the ends of poles with steel to make them better for killing. An hour later two hay carts arrived from the Bzura estate, one of them driven by Krygiel, and the other by Henryk Modzelewski. When the carts drove up to the house we chased the Jewish girls from the cellar and told them to get on the carts. We drove them to the Boczkowski forest, where a pit had been dug. There we ordered the Jewish girls to strip down to their slips and panties, only two young Jewish girls who had old clothes were not forced to undress. We began leading them one at a time to the pit and beating them to death with poles. Tkacz killed four Jewish girls. Before they killed one of the girls five men raped her. After raping the girl I took Tkacz’s wooden pole and personally killed her, hitting her three times on the head with the pole, and she fell into the pit. I took slippers and a dress from the murdered Jewish women. Three days later the German police came to the village head and on their command I showed them the site of the massacre. One policeman asked me what we’d used to kill them, and I said poles. When I spoke these words I was struck with a truncheon by a German policeman, who said: ‘Why didn’t you bring them back to the ghetto?’ Then they told me to bury them better.”
One of the witnesses said of the participants in the massacre, “We were all in the National Party.”
Not much later a Jew named Magik was tortured in the environs of Szczuczyn. “In the autumn of 1941,” one of the witnesses testified, “my mother Kazimiera and I were returning on the road from the village Skaje to Szczuczyn where we’d harvested potatoes, and I saw clearly how Konopko Franciszek, holding a birch stick as broad as a hand, with Domiziak Aleksander of Szczuczyn, who was holding the same kind of birch stick, drove the Jew Magik, whom I knew and who manufactured candy in Szczuczyn up to 1939, toward the Jewish graves. When the above-mentioned men chasing the Jew reached us I heard Magik plead with Domiziak, ‘Let me go, Olek. I fed your children, I gave you so much candy for free, I have a gold watch I’ll give to you.’ I saw Konopko kick the Jew Magik from behind with the tip of his shoe and say: ‘Go to hell, you motherfucking Jew.’”
FEBRUARY 25, 2002
I’m reading court documents from the Radziłów trials and Chaja Finkelsztejn’s memoir by turns, trying to reconstruct the atmosphere in the town after the July massacre.
Apparently, life took on a certain glow. People enjoyed their new cottage, their new down quilt, their new bucket. They bustled around repairing the newly won houses, and since most of them had been looted earlier, windows were put in, stoves were fixed, walls were whitewashed. Although we learn from Chaja’s memoir the satisfaction was perhaps not as strong as the envy felt toward those who’d gotten their hands on more loot.
The 1949 and 1953 testimonies of Helena Klimaszewska cast light on the skirmishes over the houses claimed. Klimaszewska was mother-in-law to Józef Ekstowicz (called Klimas or Klimaszewski, after his grandmother), the youth who set the barn on fire in Radziłów. In August 1941 she came from Goniądz to Radziłów with his grandmother, as she’d heard that “there were empty houses there after the liquidation of the Jews” and that “Godlewski was in charge of the formerly Jewish homes.” She asked him “to release one formerly Jewish home.”
“Don’t you dare,” said Feliks Godlewski, standing on the threshold of the house he’d taken from the murdered Zandler.
Klimaszewska pointed out to him that he already disposed of four houses himself.
“A shitload that’s got to do with you. My brother’s coming from Russia, where the Soviets sent him, and he’s got to have a house.”
Klimaszewska persisted in asking about a house.
“When we had to liquidate the Jews, none of you were to be seen, and now you want houses,” Godlewski said angrily, and he sent his children to the police nearby to get Henryk Dziekoński (one of the leaders of the massacre who went to work for the Germans), so that he, as a representative of the authorities, could talk sense into the woman.
“If the gentleman won’t give it to you, you’d better leave,” instructed Dziekoński.
Helena Klimaszewska also remembered that when she was talking to Godlewski, Józef Ekstowicz’s grandmother kept babbling to him about her grandson being sent out to set the barn on fire when they needed him, and now they wouldn’t even give him a house.
In Radziłów the market still took place on Thursdays, only there were no Jewish stalls, and the trade was mostly barter. Since the ruble had lost its value, no one trusted the deutsche mark, either. The Jews who’d survived the pogrom lived crammed into one room near the synagogue. There were about thirty of them, including two refugee families from Kolno. Chaja Finkelsztejn’s nephew was there, too. He told her the police had taken them under its protection, so they no longer needed to fear death at the hands of Poles, but they had to do pointless hard labor for the Germans, like removing stones from the river, and they were guarded by a Pole who made sure they didn’t take a moment’s rest.
Thanks to Chaja’s memoir I can reconstruct the course the massacre in Radziłów took much more fully than I did in the Gazeta. At this point, I think I could describe the events hour by hour.
The theme of stolen things returns again and again in the memoir. We read of women rushing to plunder her house while the men escort the Jews to the barn. Chaja describes being in hiding and looking through gaps in the sheathing of a barn on Sundays at farmers’ children going to church dressed in clothes stolen from her own children. Moving from one household to another, everywhere they found Jewish clothing or furniture, because even those who didn’t pillage were given such things in payment for butter or honey. What Chaja describes in her memoir I already read once in the form of a poem by Sara Ginsburg, known by her pen name, Zuzanna Ginczanka:
Non omnis moriar—my proud possessions,
tablecloth meadows, staunch fortress shelves,
my billowing sheets and precious bedclothes,
my dresses, my bright dresses will outlive me.
I leave no heirs behind when I depart,
so may your hand dig out all Jewish things,
Chominowa of Lvov, brave snitch’s wife,
prompt informer, Volksdeutscher’s mother.
May they serve you and yours, for why
should they serve strangers. My neighbors—
what I leave is neither lute nor empty name.
I remember you, as you, the Schupo near,
remembered me. Reminded them of me.
May my friends sit and raise their glasses,
drink to my grave and to their own gains:
carpets and tapestries, china, candlesticks—
may they drink all night and at dawn
start the search for gems and gold
under sofas, mattresses, quilts, and rugs.
O how the work will burn in their hands,
the tangles of horsehair and tufts of wool,
blizzards of burst pillows, clouds of eiderdown
stick to their hands and turn them into wings;
my blood will glue oakum and fresh feathers
transforming birds of prey into sudden angels.
Ginczanka was in hiding on the Aryan side, first in Lvov, then in Kraków. She wasn’t as lucky as the Finkelsztejns. Someone denounced her. We don’t even know when and in what circumstances she died. And by what miracle the sheet of paper survived with the prophetic poem, an adaptation of Słowacki’s famous “Testament,” which she wrote just before her death.