They Had Vodka, Guns, and Hatred
The massacre in Radziłów is exceptionally well documented, thanks in large part to the testimonies of the Finkelsztejn family. They are extraordinary witnesses: both parents and children were in the marketplace that day, and when they hid in dozens of places after the massacre they heard stories from the people who hid them and on that basis reconstructed the course of events day by day, hour by hour, in the belief that the day would come when they would bear witness. The eldest son, Menachem Finkelsztejn, gave testimony in 1945 to the District Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok. The father, Izrael Finkelsztejn, testified in 1945 in the first investigation into the participation of Poles in the massacre. The mother, Chaja Finkelsztejn, gave a detailed account of the killings and the events that preceded them in the memoir she wrote in 1946. In April 2002, in Kansas City, I talked to the youngest daughter and the only living Jewish witness of the massacre. In 1941, she was seven years old.
Much information is provided by the testimonies from the trials that were held between 1945 and 1958. The men accused of participation in the murder of Jews were: Henryk Dziekoński, Józef Ekstowicz, Feliks Godlewski, Antoni Kosmaczewski, Leon Kosmaczewski, Ludwik Kosmaczewski, Henryk Statkiewicz, and Zygmunt Skrodzki.
I spoke to several dozen eyewitnesses to the massacre—and some of them, I have to assume, were not only witnesses but, as underage boys, also minor accomplices to the killing.
Sara, daughter of Pesza and Izrael Gutsztejn, and her husband, Jakob Zimnowicz. Radziłów. They were killed by Poles on July 7, 1941, together with their eight-year-old daughter, Szulamit. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)
Pesza Gutsztejn of Radziłów. She was seventy-one years old when she was killed by Poles on July 7, 1941. Her great-grandson Jose Gutstein in Miami created the virtual Radziłów shtetl: www.radzilow.com. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)
1.
When the Russians fled Radziłów on the night of June 22–23, many Jews left their homes to wait out the first days of the German invasion elsewhere. The Polish inhabitants of the town—whether a majority or only a segment of them is hard to establish now—watched the arrival of the Germans with relief; after the hated Soviet occupation any change seemed to them for the better. A few Poles joined forces to prepare a triumphal gate; someone dragged from the attic a dusty portrait of the Führer that had been displayed at city hall for a few days in September of 1939.
Menachem Finkelsztejn described the deafening cannon fire that woke the residents of Radziłów in the early-morning hours of June 22. “The eight hundred Jewish inhabitants of the town understood the gravity of the situation right away.” Some decided to flee to the east, but on the roads they met “well-armed Polish Fascist gangs” who stopped Jewish refugees and robbed and beat them. They tried to hide in the surrounding villages, in the fields, to avoid the moment when the army would enter the town. But the peasants didn’t allow them into their yards. “Having no alternative, they all began to return to their homes. The Poles in the area watched the terrified Jews with scorn and pointed to their own throats, saying: ‘Now it’s going to be—cut the Jew’s throat.’”
Chaja Finkelsztejn saw young people putting up the triumphal gate, cleaning it, festooning it with greenery and flowers. Menachem testified that they hung a swastika on it, with a portrait of Hitler and a banner with a Polish slogan, Long live those who freed us from the Jewish Communists! The subjects I interviewed remembered the same thing. Franciszek Ekstowicz saw poles being driven into the ground, entwined with flowers, and some banner hung between them. Andrzej R. is prepared to swear that the inscription was short: Welcome and another word he doesn’t remember, and that green branches were woven around the poles.
The army came in on tanks. Eugenia K., then seven years old, watched the townspeople throw flowers on the tanks, which passed through Radziłów and continued on. Chaja Finkelsztejn, who was standing at the gate dressed as a Polish peasant woman, remembered what some people were saying: “The Christians welcomed them with enthusiasm, shouts of ‘You are our saviors! You’ve saved us from the Soviets!’ ‘Look how handsome they are, how the smell of perfume wafts around them,’ one Christian woman gushed.” Chaja was moved by the sight of wounded Russian prisoners of war led through the town, while the locals threw stones at them.
A few daredevils jumped up on the tanks to help track down Red Army marauders. “The Russians were fleeing across the Biebrza river,” a witness told me, “and there were Poles sitting on the tanks showing them where to cross to catch the Russians.” A temporary authority was made up of Polish residents. Henryk Dziekoński, who was part of it, testified at his own trial: “With friends I started to organize a municipal authority to keep the order,” and he gave the names of the other eight members of this self-appointed authority. Of nine of them I heard from witnesses that they participated in the massacre. They paraded around with rifles left by the Soviets and with red-and-white armbands.
Chaja Finkelsztejn described the town in those first days as follows: “Christians sat on benches in front of their homes, in holiday dress and a festive mood. They were all people we knew. Seeing how happy they were I had no desire to greet them. Very small Christian children pointed out Jews in the street to the Germans, crying: ‘Jude, Jude.’ They set their dogs on Jews, shouting: ‘Get the Jew!’”
Scores were settled with Communists and traitors—as several people told me, those are the rules of war. That part of history is not covered over in silence.
Halina Zalewska told me, “Just before the Germans came there was a big deportation, the women and children had already been sent away, and the men were kept for interrogation and then freed by the Germans when they disarmed the old Osowiec fortress the Soviets had been using as a base. So those farmers came home enraged and ready for a brawl.”
Andrzej R. told me, “The deportation just before the Germans arrived was later called Black Thursday. They not only deported people but told the remaining relatives to come to a meeting, where it was explained to them why the deportations were right. A local Jew came out and said, ‘All you ravens who squawk are going to Siberia.’ Poles found that guy right after the Russkies left. That was the afternoon of June 23. First they tortured him in the marketplace. They tied a big flat stone to his neck with string and made him look into the sun. When he closed his eyes they beat his head with a stick. There were two men standing next to him, one smacking him on the head with a stanchion from one side, the other from the other side. Meanwhile, the Poles were asking him where the Kapelański family was. Kapelański was an organist who had been deported with his family. They led him down Łomżynska Road to the bridge and threw him off. The water was shallow. I watched what they were doing to him until it was over.”
Halina Zalewska remembers the victim was blinded by the sun before he died.
Chaja Finkelsztejn met a Jewish girl, a school friend of her son’s, who had spoken warmly of the Soviets at a ceremony at the gymnasium. “Her lips were black and blue, she’d been beaten up by Polish friends overnight.”
On the same day the Russians left, the locals flung themselves at the military store in the temple on Gęsia Street that stocked clothes, food supplies, and rifles. They started with Soviet stores, but bands of locals also broke into Jewish homes—many Jews had left town for those first few days and were hiding with people they knew in the countryside or sleeping in the nearby fields.
Radziłów was on a drunk. That was because of the distillery that was taken over.
Czesław C. told me, “As soon as the Russkies left, our boys went to the Słucz distillery. It was full to the brim. Poles were thirsty for vodka, and some of them held a grudge against the Jews, and that grudge was well-founded.”
Mieczysław Kulęgowski told me, “They brought buckets of vodka back from the Słucz distillery, and some of them died in the process because a storehouse caught fire. They had vodka, guns, and hatred.”
The German tanks were followed by the arrival of a group of Wehrmacht soldiers in Radziłów. They savaged Jews, and were keen for Poles to participate. They cut off old men’s beards, mutilating them with scissors and beating them. On June 25 they put on a display of what Poles were allowed to do to Jews. That some of the locals happily participated in this, we know from both Jewish and Polish witnesses.
Menachem Finkelsztejn described the Germans ordering Jewish men to gather at the synagogue, and the Poles standing guard at the exit roads and turning people on their way out of town back by force. Germans ordered Jews to take their holy books from the synagogue and burn them. Later “they harnessed Jews to wagons, got on the wagons themselves and whipped them with terrible force, driving down every street.” Jews were driven to the muddy river, told to undress completely and go into the water.
Andrzej R. has a detailed memory of this scene. “They harnessed Jews, drove them on with a whip. There was a barrel on the wagon and the Germans sat on the barrel in their swimming trunks, because that June was hot. We stood and watched. Kids were laughing; after all, no one knew how it would end, so in those first days there was a lot of laughter.”
Chaja Finkelsztejn: “The peasants wouldn’t sell any food to Jews and took their cows away from them. Those who rented rooms to Jews told them to move out, because they were having their windows broken.”
On June 27, the German command left Radziłów, but the violence only grew. The spontaneously formed city authority was in charge, but groups of Germans would come by the town every now and then. From Chaja Finkelsztejn’s testimony it emerges that on the same day the Wehrmacht left town, a large group arrived late in the evening—they are described as “Hitler’s dogs”—in khaki clothing, on wagons with camouflage tarpaulins drawn by four horses. They forced their way into her home, beating everyone there badly, including the children, and ransacking the house. There were locals around, and the previously mentioned Henryk Dziekoński “showed them around” the house. The next day the peasants took the Jews’ cows, herded them into the marketplace, and when the Germans came by again—with trucks this time—they were taken away. A sign that even if there was no German unit stationed in town, there must have been a post somewhere nearby. Because Jews could no longer buy food, the removal of their cows meant condemning them to starvation.
The scenes of homes being invaded, residents being beaten, dwellings being destroyed and looted took place every night. Numerous accounts allow us to reconstruct who belonged to those gangs.1
Antoni Olszewski told me, “Thugs tied Jews to the bottom of Czesio Bagiński’s wagon and hitched up his horses. He told me this himself once when I brought a sick horse to him. He said no one asked Bagiński for permission, he was a young man, they just pushed him off the wagon and did as they liked with the Jews. There wasn’t a lot of water, just a muddy pool, but it was enough to drown them. I never heard of any German being there.”
Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, “The nights were terrible. Poles young and old were running around. They dragged clothes, linen, quilts, pillows out of our neighbors’ homes. They took sheepskins from our neighbor, a furrier, and we heard the smashing of windows and wild cries. Every night we heard terrible screams and pleas for help. Jews hid in attic hideouts and in cellars, in rooms where you could move a wardrobe and hide a door. From many houses they took the fathers, beat them until they lost consciousness, brought them round and beat them again, dropping them off back home covered in blood. When women wept to see their husbands beaten like that, they said: ‘Shut up or we’ll do the same to you.’ That torture went on for two weeks.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “There was something going on every night. My mother said to the thugs, ‘Get it over now, one way or the other, I can’t sleep with all this screaming and howling all the time.’”
Menachem and his father, Izrael Finkelsztejn, testified that the pillaging was frequently accompanied by rape. When Jan Skrodzki quoted an excerpt from Menachem’s testimony about Jewish women being raped to his cousin Halina Zalewska, she protested vigorously, without noticing that she was actually confirming the testimony: “Those Jewish cows. What man would want them. Only the Kosmaczewski brothers raped, Leon and Antoni, and the Mordasiewicz from the other side of the garden plots. Kaziuk Mordasiewicz took Estera, the tailor Szymon’s wife who did our laundry, and did with her what he liked. He led her into the muddy bank of the Matlak river, took her behind the weir and made her roll around. She begged us to intervene on her behalf. My father was even going to, but the thugs banged on the door and shouted: ‘If you speak up for Jews you’ll be the first to be burned.’ Well, they burned Estera with the rest of them.”
On Sunday, July 6, the horrifying news came that Poles had killed all the Jews in nearby Wąsosz. At noon, as described by Menachem Finkelsztejn, a lot of Poles from Wąsosz came to Radziłów. The locals didn’t let them in, but they also didn’t allow the Jews out.
“There were a lot of peasants, men and women, at all the roads leading out of town, watching every move made by the Jews,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote. “We heard peasants shout that they were trampling the grain so no wretch could hide in it.” Chaja’s brother went to Father Dołęgowski to ask him to intercede: “My brother pleaded and wept and the priest did nothing but chide and scold.”
2.
On July 7 trucks drove into Radziłów from early morning carrying men from the surrounding villages armed with poles.
Stanisław Ramotowski: “It was still dark, in the night of July 6 to 7, when they started coming into Radziłów on trucks to crack down on the Jews.”
At about 7:00 a.m. two or three cars appeared in the marketplace. This was surely a group of officials from the security police and the security service led by Hermann Schaper, one of the small German units that aided in the “pacification” of these areas, and that were involved in (among other things) the local populations’ “cleansing themselves” of Jews. Schaper was a Gestapo officer from Ciechanów. The Institute of National Remembrance managed to find the ninety-one-year-old Schaper, and prosecutor Ignatiew tried to interrogate him in April 2002. But he wouldn’t say anything, offering his poor health as an excuse.
When was the murder of the Radziłów Jews planned? And who planned it? That they were gearing up for a pogrom that day was known beforehand. We can assume that the arrangements were made the day before between Schaper and the temporary authorities in Radziłów, though none of the witnesses remembers any meeting or earlier visit from the Germans. Of course, it’s possible that no one remembered a visit of one or two Germans in a private car. We don’t know how the deals were made. Did Schaper order the killing of the Jews, did he encourage it, or did he merely express his consent?
At dawn, when the peasants were heading for the pogrom, individual murders were already taking place. Mojżesz Perkal was beaten to death. One of Perkal’s daughters, sixteen, half-alive, squatted down beside her dead father’s body. The peasants dug a grave and threw her into it along with her father. Chaja Finkelsztejn heard about it at 7:00 a.m. from their former driver. “He was very upset,” she said. “He cursed the murderers: ‘Sons of bitches! To bury a girl alive!’”
Andrzej R. told me, “Three Germans arrived in an open car. I was standing nearby. They said, ‘It stinks of Jews here. When we come back in a few days make sure it doesn’t smell like this.’ They pointed to Feliks Mordasiewicz, who was standing nearby—it was his responsibility. ‘How am I supposed to do that?’ he asked. Then they got five rifles out of the car, the long ones with a single shot.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “Four Germans arrived in the marketplace in two Jeeps, they wore caps with skulls on them, they’d brought rifles to be handed out. The young people especially went to listen to the Germans. The Germans told them, ‘You have Jews here whose fault it is that your families are freezing to death in Russia. Gather them all in the marketplace under the pretext of weeding the pavement.’”
Antoni K. told me, “There were five Germans and a driver. White caps, white gloves. A lot of people gathered there, I was there, too. A German got out and said, ‘Take all the Jews first to weed the grass in the marketplace. We’re going to the market in Jedwabne, then we’ll come back to see what you’ve done. If you don’t you’re finished.’”
Antoni K., when asked how the people gathered there knew what the German was saying, answered after a pause that he’d spoken Polish. That may be right—we know Schaper knew Polish. The herding of Jews into the marketplace—an action probably coordinated by the self-appointed authorities according to the instructions of the visiting Gestapo—was well organized. All adults and youth were rounded up. A part of the Polish population was tasked with guarding the roads so the Jews didn’t escape. Stanisław Ramotowski saw a German on a balcony over the marketplace, taking photographs of the roundup of Jews.
Halina Zalewska told me, “They went by the cottages saying, ‘Jews, our Polish marketplace is very overgrown, go and weed it.’ Oy, oy, they went happily, the Jews, they brought scrapers, it could have been worse. And in the market our people selected the worst Communists. When someone had a grudge against anyone, he found his man in the market and settled scores with him. The Jews were hiding in the chimneys, and the Poles pulled them out. One, a Communist, was so scared of dying that he cut his own throat with tailor’s scissors.”
Henryk Dziekoński (1953 interrogation): “We began to drive all the Jews residing in the Radziłów municipal area into the marketplace regardless of sex and age, and I took active part in this. One of the Gestapo officers appointed me the head of a group that was tasked with liquidating Jews and specified that we were allowed to cut Jews up with knives and do them in them with axes. One of our group who also took part in the slaughter of Jews said that this would lead to a reciprocal shedding of blood, and then one of the Gestapo officers told Aleksander Godlewski (who is now in prison): ‘You’ve got a barn, you can burn them all.’ After the Gestapo officers had spoken the aforementioned words, I started to gather the Jews into groups of four with all my friends. When we’d formed them into ranks I stood at the head of the column and led them from the market toward the barn.”
It took several hours to round up all the Jews. They were beaten into singing the Soviet song “My Moscow.”
Chaja Finkelsztejn describes how Jan Walewski, nicknamed “the American” (because he’d returned from America after many years), beat a Jew standing near her son until he collapsed with blood pouring from his throat and ears. She saw a woman friend of hers holding a three-month-old infant naked in her arms—someone had torn away the blanket it had been wrapped in. The Gestapo took wine and snacks from their cars. After enjoying a meal in view of the rounded-up crowd they set about beating Jews. A German tied a stone around one Jew’s neck, beat him with a stick, and made him run around in a circle. At some point the Gestapo left. Then the Poles ordered the Jews to move down Piękna Street. By the time they were driven to the barn there were no Germans around.
Andrzej R. told me, “I ran home to tell my mother something was going on. I fed the rabbits, ate lunch, and when I got back to the marketplace the Jews were forming a column. I saw friends from school playing in the courtyard.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “They were driven down Piękna Street, past our windows, and a Jewish woman who was our neighbor said, ‘Mr. Zalewski, you are such a respected, decent person, please take our things and save us.’ But the young people had switchblades in their hands. The Jewish woman was carrying her little son, another was hanging on to her legs, and one of the Poles—he must have come in from another town because I never saw him before or after—drove her on, lashed her with a stick, and the child’s head was split open. Daddy just watched from behind the curtains and cried.”
Henryk Dziekoński (1949 interrogation): “The Jews didn’t try to escape, at least I didn’t see them try. They went like sheep. One Jew started to run away. Feliks Mordasiewicz caught up with him, hit him on the head with a pole he had in his hand, hard enough to draw blood, and the Jew turned back toward the barn.”
3.
The walls were made of stone, the doors of wood. To keep the Jews from escaping, poles were propped against the doors and boulders were dragged up to the barn to hold them shut.
Janina Staniurska, Jan Skrodzki’s cousin, who lives in Gdynia: “I was twelve years old at that time. A few people were hiding in the grain and vicious thugs were searching the fields with sticks. I was coming back from the meadows on the other side of the Matlak, I’d brought food to a boy who was grazing our cow there. It was late afternoon. I looked and saw a man running toward me with a stick, yelling, ‘You’re a Jewess.’ He took me to the barn. And there, O Lord, they were burning people alive, they were trying to escape, climbing onto the roof, jumping. Two neighbors who lived near us stuck up for me: ‘She’s not Jewish. What do you want from the chauffeur’s girl?’ They called me that because my father was a driver. Then they explained that peasants had come in from Wąsosz, that’s why they didn’t know us. After that I was always afraid of passing by that place.”
We know beyond any doubt who set fire to the barn: Józef Ekstowicz (or Klimas or Klimaszewski). Many witnesses remember it. Tin canisters of gas were most certainly used. Those who tried to escape were shot at.
Halina Zalewska told me, “Józef Klimas was fat, short, so his friends had to give him a leg up.”
Andrzej R. told me, “I saw with my own eyes how Józef poured gas on the barn. Then he chased a girl who’d managed to jump out of the barn. He caught her and killed her.”
Józef Ekstowicz, a.k.a. Klimaszewski (1948 interrogation): “The initiators and main executors of the atrocity were: Dziekoński, Godlewski, and the Kosmaczewski brothers. They were armed with rifles and made me pour gas on the barn. They gave us a leg up—the other arsonist was a boy who’d come in from the nearby village of Karwowo—we climbed onto the roof and we poured the gas all over the roof.”
Henryk Dziekoński (1949 interrogation): “It is not true that Klimaszewski, then a minor, was forced to set fire to the barn, as he did it of his own free will. When gas had been poured on the roof and lit with a match the roof caught fire like a lightning flash. A moment later some man fell out from under the burning thatch with his clothes on fire. Mieczysław Strzelecki, who was standing near me, shot at him with his rifle. When the shots were fired the man threw himself down or jumped, in convulsions.”
There were many people at the barn—killers and gawkers.
Bolesław Ciszewski told me, “I saw them being herded there, I saw the fire being lit. What a wail! Most of them were small children and old people. The babies were thrown on top.”
“Why did you go there?”
“I was curious. A whole lot of people came from curiosity, mostly young people, some women. Some of them had weapons, poles and sticks they were. One Jew-boy ran away across the peat bog. One guy, drunk as a skunk, who had a Mauser, aimed at him and you won’t believe it, miss, drunk as he was, he got him.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “I snuck out of the house and saw them being burned. I heard about Rachela Wasersztejn—she was the most beautiful girl in the village next to my sister Zosia—that her baby was thrown in over the top. I’d seen her a minute before. She had recently given birth, and they took her and her baby from the bed where she had given birth. She passed by our windows. She was walking along with her baby and crying.”
Rachela’s husband, Berek Wasersztejn of Radziłów, who was not in Radziłów that day, got to Białystok and managed to survive until the end of the war, joining a group of Soviet partisans. He testified at the trial that a Polish woman he knew had told him about the death of his wife, Rachela: “My wife was hiding. When they found her, they took her to the barn. Leon Kosmaczewski told her to go in with her child and because the flames were so high they set a ladder up for her. My wife began to beg them to at least take the baby, who was ten days old. Kosmaczewski took the child by its legs and threw it over the roof and he stabbed my wife with a bayonet and threw her in as well.”
Wolf Szlapak, who had been beaten up, lay at home, unable to move, with his small son and sick mother.
Halina Zalewska told me, “Mieczysław Strzelecki first took all of Szlapak’s jewelry from him, and then shot him in his own bed.”
Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, “Szlapak and his seven-year-old son were murdered in their beds by Mieczysław Strzelecki, who worked for Szlapak as a driver.”
Finkelsztejn heard about a number of cases of old people who hadn’t been able to make it to the marketplace—one of them had returned from America in his old age because he wanted to be buried in the country of his birth—being killed in their beds. Also about neighbors who agreed to hide a family but who, after having robbed them, gave them up to the killers or even killed them themselves.
Those who escaped from the column and hid in the grain were hunted down.
Andrzej R. told me, “By nightfall there wasn’t a single Jewish house unoccupied. So much running around there was, so many quarrels about who would take what. There wasn’t so much stuff in the houses anymore because the Jews had given their goods to neighbors they trusted, for safekeeping. Sawicki, the butcher, who had a cheap slaughterhouse on Kościelna Street, had loaded all his most valuable things on a hay cart in June and removed them, and later I saw him driven to the barn with his wife and eldest daughter.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “The Germans came at sunset, bringing more ammunition, and ordered them to check if the most important sheep had been taken. They meant the rabbi.”
Other witnesses did not remember the German commando unit coming that same day. Chaja Finkelsztejn claims they only appeared three days later.
4.
Many Jews hid in cellars and attics when they heard about the roundup in the marketplace. Thugs dragged them out and killed them on the spot or took them to the ice pit. This was an elongated pit on the way to the barn, a few meters deep, where ice chopped from the river in winter was kept. There they shot them, felled them with axes, or threw them alive into the pit, which was filled with corpses. They drove in barrels of lime and sprinkled it on each layer of victims.
The hunt for survivors and the act of killing them on the spot or at the ice pit went on for the next three days, till July 10. Both Jewish and Polish witness accounts confirm this.
Izrael Finkelsztejn (1945 trial witness): “The manhunt went on after that and whoever was caught was killed. When they ran out of rifle ammunition they started to kill them with spades and things like that.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “Those they didn’t burn they killed and threw into pits for butter and cream cheese near the dairy and covered them with lime. I went there once at twilight, the earth was moving, half-dead people were crawling out, reviving, but the lime finished them off.”
Andrzej R. told me, “I saw the Drozdowskis and both Dziekoński brothers, Jan and Henryk, and Władysław Dudziński, shooting Jews at the ice pit. There were lots of people around eager to shoot. When they ran out of bullets they threw them into the pit alive. The earth went on moving for three days. I saw Antoni Kosmaczewski and Heniek Dziekoński taking a whole family to the ice pit—the owner of a coal and ironworks, his wife and two children, who had sat out the burning in a hideout in their own attic.”
Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, “The Gestapo gave the Poles a free hand for three days. They searched every nook and cranny, every place where a Jew might hide. When on the third day the Gestapo drove up to the pit where those Jews who hid had been killed, an eight-year-old boy emerged from among the corpses. They wouldn’t allow him to be killed and he lived on till the liquidation of the rest of the Jews. Then his terrible suffering ended.”
In the testimony of Menachem Finkelsztejn, in the testimonies of the accused and witnesses of former trials, in the conversations I conducted, the same names of the main culprits in the massacre are confirmed: the brothers Jan and Henryk Dziekoński; the brothers Aleksander and Feliks Godlewski; Edmund Korsak; Antoni, Józef, and Leon Kosmaczewski; Mieczysław Strzelecki.
Andrzej R. says that one Jew who hid in a house on the outskirts of town was found by thugs and brought to Radziłów from near Racibór. They tied him to a wagon plank and cut off his head with a tree saw. “I didn’t see the act of sawing myself,” he says, “but I saw the headless body in a ditch.”
Antoni Olszewski was three and a half years old at the time. He claims that he has fixed in his memory like a photograph an image of himself stamping on earth covering the body of a Jewish boy not much older than himself, murdered by neighbors. “Some time after the burning I saw a bloody cap in our cabbage patch. They had dragged out a child who was hiding nearby and beaten him to death. Mama screamed at them to bury him deep, otherwise our pigs would pull him out. The elders covered him with earth and I and Józek Szymonów stamped on it to make it firmer. I remember that stamping to this day, I could show you where it was.”
Halina Zalewska told me, “The stench and the fatty smoke—it was human fat—hung in the house for weeks.”
Andrzej R. told me, “Jan Ekstowicz, a World War I veteran who’d lost both his arms, took two children in, he had them baptized right away. But soon someone denounced him and the police took the kids away.”2
5.
How many Jews were burned in the barn in Radziłów? Menachem Finkelsztejn gave a figure of seventeen hundred Jews driven into the marketplace, and another time he said one thousand. But Jewish testimonies usually give an exaggerated number of victims. In the files on the trials the number most often given is six hundred. How many were murdered in the ice pit or wherever they were caught in town is even harder to say; the number three hundred is repeated, but given the fact that Radziłów probably had no more than six hundred Jews, this number must be too high. It seems plausible that about five hundred people were burned in the barn and about a hundred, maybe two hundred, fell victim to individual murders.
How many killers were there? Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote that “almost all the Christian townspeople” gathered at the marketplace, forming a dense mass. “If one of the Jews, realizing what was coming, tried to escape and was lucky enough to get through the crowd,” wrote Menachem Finkelsztejn, “Polish women and children standing around as if at some kind of show stopped him and sent him back.” “All of Radziłów took part in the roundup of Jews and there were also people watching,” Józef Ekstowicz testified (as a witness in 1951). “Almost the whole population participated in rounding up Jews. There were men, women, and children,” testified Henryk Dziekoński (in his 1949 interrogation).
“Can you say how many of us Poles of Radziłów took part in it?” Jan Skrodzki asked Jan R.
“Ask me who wasn’t there, it would be easier to count. But people took part in different ways. Some were active, others semiactive, others just gawked. I remember one woman following behind the Jews, weeping.”