We Suffered Under the Soviets, the Germans, and People’s Poland
or, The Story of the Three Brothers Laudański
Of the ten men convicted in the 1949 trial for the murder of the Jews of Jedwabne, Zygmunt and Jerzy Laudański are the only ones still alive. They live in Pisz, eighty kilometers north of Jedwabne, as does their older brother, Kazimierz Laudański, the unquestioned head of the family. Whether he was in Jedwabne on that July day in 1941, we don’t know; the accounts are contradictory. He himself claims that he arrived three days later to find out what happened to his brothers. But there is a witness who insists that Kazimierz Laudański went to Jedwabne with him the day before the massacre and remembers details of their trip together. In any case, it was Kazimierz who got his brothers out of Jedwabne after the atrocity, and after the war he found them jobs and places to live. “They’re always with me,” he says. “I give them advice, and they listen to me.”
In the case files from 1949, one can find basic information about the accused on a yellowed form where the blanks have been filled out in an uncertain hand, under the heading “Dossier on Suspects of a Crime Against the State,” furnished by the county security service in Łomża:
Name and Surname: Zygmunt Laudański
Date of Birth: January 12, 1919
Relatives Employed in State Institutions: Brother Kazimierz Laudański, County Council Secretary for Pisz
Professional Schooling: Mason
Education and Knowledge of Languages: Five grades elementary school
Habits and Addictions: Doesn’t smoke
Suspected of: Killing Jews in the Town of Jedwabne, Łomża County
Membership: Polish Communist Party (PZPR) in Pisz
Posture: Straight
Eyes: Blue
Teeth: All healthy
Speech: Pure Polish
Etka Rochla Prawda (née Sztabińska) and her husband, Chaim Józef Prawda. They were killed by Poles on July 10, 1941, in Jedwabne with their children, Welwel and Bari. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein, www.radzilow.com)
Daughters of Abraham Aaron Ibram, owner of a fancy-goods shop in the New Market in Jedwabne. Left to right: Rywka, Loczke, and Judes. Jedwabne, 1930s. Judes managed to survive on July 10, 1941, but after the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942, Poles found her hiding place, raped her, and killed her. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)
The 1949 case files also have a dossier on his brother Jerzy, who was born three years later and completed seven grades of school. Under “profession” is given “shoemaker.” He has “particularly important contacts” with the “German Police in Jedwabne”; his speech, besides being “pure Polish,” is also “loud.”
Despite their years, the brothers still have erect postures and loud voices.
From Zygmunt’s testimony of January 16, 1949: “Yes, I took part in the murder of Jews in Jedwabne … Some guy from Jedwabne came and told me the mayor of Jedwabne was calling on me to go and round up the Jews in the marketplace. When I got there, the Polish population had already rounded up about a thousand five hundred persons of Jewish nationality in the marketplace. Then Mayor Karolak told me to make sure no Jews escaped from the marketplace. The Jews were carrying the Lenin statue around the market. Later, we herded all the Jews with the statue out of town to Bronisław Śleszyński’s barn, where they were burned.”
From Jerzy’s testimony of January 16, 1949: “At that time I took part in driving the Jews into the marketplace. Eugeniusz Kalinowski and I … made about eight persons of Jewish nationality go into the marketplace. When we got back there from driving them all out of their houses, Jews were already carrying the Lenin statue around the market singing a song, ‘The war’s our fault.’ Who ordered them to sing it I don’t know, but we Poles made sure the Jews didn’t run away. I stress that there were Germans around, too. Later Marian Karolak, the mayor of Jedwabne, gave us the command to herd all the Jews in the market to Bronisław Śleszyński’s barn, which we did. We drove the Jews to the barn and told them to go in, and they were forced to go in, and after they were all in there, the barn was locked and set alight. Who set the fire I don’t know. After the fire I went home and the Jews were burned. There were more than a thousand of them.”
Not only the Laudańskis’ own testimonies were incriminating; there was also the testimony of other witnesses and fellow suspects.
Czesław Lipiński, suspect: “Eugeniusz Kalinowski, Jerzy Laudański, and a German came to me and we took a Jew and two little Jewish women to the marketplace. When we were rounding up the aforementioned Jews with the Germans, I found a stick on the way and I picked it up.”
Julia Sokołowska, witness: “Jerzy Laudański participated in the murder of Jews with a rubber truncheon. He chased them into the marketplace; he beat them and drove them to the barn, where the previously mentioned Jews were burned. I stress that Laudański was the head Schutzmann [policeman] in Jedwabne. I saw the aforementioned beating a Jewish woman in a pigsty.”
Bronisława Kalinowska, witness: “The townspeople started killing Jews. The way they tortured Jews, you couldn’t bear to look. I was standing on Przytulska Street and Jerzy Laudański, who lived in Jedwabne, came running down the street and said he’d already killed two or three Jews. He was very worked up and he went on running.”
Stanisław Sielawa, witness: “Jerzy Laudański, Jerzy Kalinowski, and a Russian beat the Jew Eluń after the burning. They threw him down, beat him with sticks, and when I started questioning them they told me it’s coming to you, too, just like the Jews. I stress that after the beating the previously mentioned Jew couldn’t get up for two weeks. I saw the previously mentioned fact with my own eyes.”
Zygmunt Laudański was sentenced to twelve years in prison, of which he served six; Jerzy Laudański was sentenced to fifteen, and he served eight.
In the accounts, both direct and secondhand, that I heard from present or former residents of Jedwabne, the name Laudański was almost always mentioned among examples of particularly active participants in the crime.
They were even mentioned by those who insistently denied that the Poles had committed the atrocity. Like Jadwiga Kordas, an eyewitness: “Maybe that Jerzy Laudański was getting his revenge,” she said to Father Eugeniusz Marciniak in the book Jedwabne in the Eyes of Witnesses. “Professor Strzembosz asked me about him and I said: ‘Because his father was arrested, and they came to take his mother to Siberia, but she escaped.’ And the professor says: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And probably that’s the way it could have happened.’” She added that Jerzy Laudański “had a whip, but he didn’t use it on anyone. I didn’t see him thrashing anyone. He just drove them out of their houses and kept the order.”
Kazimierz Laudański, outraged: “The court case came seven and a half years after the crime. The secret police roughed people up, but no one talked then about little Yids, small kids being thrown into the burning barn. And now after sixty years people are saying these things. When none of us are alive anymore, people will say the Jews had their eyes put out.”
Zygmunt Laudański: “There was nothing as horrible as all that. People are making it up now in revenge. It’s nonsense that my brother and I killed over a thousand Jews. Our family was and is honest. Our honesty can’t be drowned out by this tragedy.”
Kazimierz lashes out at him: “It’s me who’s talking now. You shut up, Zygmunt. You’ll talk when I tell you.” He goes on: “We’re from a truly patriotic Polish family. Our family has suffered enormous losses, fallen and martyred. It’s no accident all three of us are alive. We don’t smoke, we don’t drink vodka. How can they call my brothers thugs? What we did, we did out of patriotism: from time immemorial not one of us ever associated with an enemy of the nation.”
In a letter to Adam Michnik, Kazimierz wrote about himself and his brothers: “Like all of the Polish people, we suffered under the Soviets, under the Germans, and under People’s Poland.”
“Our people organized the roundup of Jews, but didn’t take part in the burning. They behaved as peaceful people,” says Kazimierz Laudański, who supposedly wasn’t in Jedwabne that day. “There was fear, there was compassion, and there was a terrible stench within a radius of three hundred meters. The shocked Poles kept saying, ‘It’s God’s punishment.’ It was a diabolical stunt organized by the Germans. The Germans directed it, and used the Poles like actors in the theater. But Poles wanting to burn Jews, there was nothing like that.”
We talk about prewar times. Jews leased garden plots from peasants in the summer, so Kazimierz Laudański says he decided to get in their way by doing the same thing. The chemist Michał Jałoszewski, a local National Party activist, gave him five hundred zlotys to start his business.
“I invested in apples and in the traveling cloth trade. Poles always bought from Jews because they sold cheaper. Why? Because Jews had capital. They had mines, warehouses, they controlled everything. And I was getting annoyed that I didn’t have work.”
In his letter to Michnik, Laudański went on to say, “President Mościcki personally recommended me to the Łomża district head for employment in the administration of independent Poland.” When I ask him how Ignacy Mościcki, president of Poland between the wars, knew of his existence, he tells me he’d written him a letter because he was afraid that as a nationalist in Piłsudski’s time he would have trouble finding a government job. “I opened with: ‘You, Father, are the safekeeper of the Polish nation…’ And later: ‘Despite the fact that we’re nationalists and our forefathers fell fighting for Poland in the uprisings, we are now at a disadvantage…’ I was always lucky, but you have to give luck a hand. I left trade to my brothers and parents, and thanks to President Mościcki I became a clerk’s aid. When the war broke out I was making 176 zlotys—more than a schoolteacher.”
Kazimierz Laudański tells me about his father: “He was active on the church construction committee; he was close to the priests, which made him hated by the Communist cell.”
The Laudańskis’ father, Czesław, a local National Party activist, led a boycott against a Jewish teacher in Jedwabne. People I talked to remember that children walked out of class when Miss Hackerowa came in, until the board of directors finally succumbed and fired her.
The Laudańskis’ favorite subject is the Soviet occupation.
Kazimierz Laudański: “The Soviets came and threw Father in prison. My mother and my two brothers fled into the woods to hide. Everyone knew who was the indirect cause of the deportations: Jewish Communists. When they came to take away families at night there would be one NKVD officer, one Polish Communist, and two Jews. The NKVD didn’t know us, but the Jews were our neighbors.”
“And who came for your father?”
Zygmunt butts in: “I wasn’t home at the time, but Granny said it was two Russians and a Pole.”
“To prove to you it was the work of Jewish Communists,” Kazimierz cuts in, no doubt realizing the Jew is missing from the account, “I’ll tell you that there were a lot of rich Jews in Jedwabne; none of them were deported or had their shops taken away. Only the Jew Jakub Cytrynowicz was deported; the Jews got back at him for having converted to Catholicism.”
However, the truth—of which Kazimierz cannot be ignorant—is that shops were taken from everyone, and that Cytrynowicz was not even remotely the only deported Jew.
I ask what hiding during the Soviet occupation was like.
“You moved from place to place in the area, and five months went by that way,” says Zygmunt Laudański. “I was a stonemason and I would sleep where I was working. I had a girl in a village where I’d worked, and in another place I’d know someone else. My cousins would put me up, and my uncle did, too. He had a big wooden house, and he built a double-layered roof, where my mother would sometimes sleep with me and my brother. But it wasn’t a very nice place to hide: my uncle believed in dreams and he’d wake me at midnight, saying, ‘Go jump on your bike! I had a dream about a black dog being run over!’ It was a dog’s life. I preferred to write to Stalin. If it had been the other way around, I’d have written to Hitler and praised Hitler. That much is clear. With the letter it was like this: While I was still in hiding, I found out the Russians were organizing meetings where they would explain their purpose was to liberate us, and they handed out the Stalinist constitution. I borrowed a copy, examined it, and I saw the fourth paragraph said that in the Soviet Union no one is responsible for anyone else, neither the father for the son, nor the son for the father. At night I went to the priest to get writing paper and I wrote to Stalin. I wrote straight out that Stalin had liberated us from the capitalists and the Fascists, and I was taking up not arms but the pen, standing on the ground of the constitution. I started like this: ‘The Polish people are very grateful to the Red Army for liberating them from Fascism and capitalism, and for wealth which will be communal…’ You don’t write to the devil with a holy pencil, miss. And I went on to say that I had to hide because my father had been arrested and they could come for me to punish me in his place. ‘If that happened,’ I declared bravely, ‘half the population will take to the woods.’”
Zygmunt Laudański wrote about this letter in July 1949 from Ostrołęka prison in an application to the interior minister:
“At that time I did not join the gangs then being formed in our parts, but sent a request to Generalissimus Stalin that was forwarded by the Moscow procurator’s office at 15 Pushkin Street to the NKVD in Jedwabne with the order to study it carefully. After they questioned me and carried out a local investigation, they found I had been unjustly damaged and I was freed from hiding from deportation, and given compensation. After studying my views, the Jedwabne NKVD allowed me to join the work of liquidating anti-Soviet evil. At that time I made contact with the NKVD in Jedwabne (I will not give my code name in writing). At the time of the contact my superiors ordered me to take an anti-Soviet position to make me more effective and not betray me to the reactionaries.”
“They sent my letter from Moscow to the NKVD in Jedwabne,” Zygmunt Laudański tells me. “A month went by and they told my cousin to tell me that if I reported in I’d be vindicated or declared innocent. I wrote an application in my father’s name to the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, Mikhail Kalinin. I had taken a Russian language course for army conscripts, and the next letter I wrote to Stalin, on my father’s behalf, was in Russian. There was a Russian officer quartered with us, and he corrected it for me. In May 1941, I reported to the NKVD to get them to pass on the letter for my father’s signature. I get there and the boss says, ‘Bandits killed a good man of ours.’ They had just killed the deputy head of the NKVD in Jedwabne, Shevelyov. I say, ‘Zhalka’ [Too bad]. And he says, ‘If you want you can help us find the bandit.’ I ask him, ‘How?’ He says, ‘You know people. When you see new faces around town, let us know.’ ‘How?’ I ask. He says, ‘We have a mailbox at the station. Leave a note there and sign it, but not with your surname, sign yourself Popov.’ I say, ‘Kharasho’—Russian for ‘fine’—‘I’m sure I’ll be in touch.’ He just asked, it wasn’t a commitment. That trick came off well for me. I got a reply from Stalin that my father should be freed or tried, because they couldn’t keep him so long under investigation, and that I would be informed. But then the war broke out. The partisans came and knocked down the wooden monument erected where Shevelyov had been buried, and I think they dragged him out of his grave, too.”
Kazimierz Laudański wrote about Shevelyov’s killing in a letter to Adam Michnik—but not to explain how his brother became an NKVD agent. On the contrary, killing Shevelyov was an act in line with the patriotic traditions of the Laudański family and other Jedwabnians: “Now, patriotism … The very existence of the partisans, the death of our aunt in the fight against the Soviets and the death of so many other Poles speaks for itself. Just as in Warsaw Poles killed Kutschera, so they killed Shevelyov, who was the same kind of torturer, in Jedwabne.”
The German-Soviet war found Kazimierz Laudański about eighty kilometers south of Jedwabne, in Ostrów Mazowiecka: “When the Germans came in,” he says, “they burned down the Jewish quarter, rounded up Jews, chased them down the road, made them dig a hole, and killed them there. A friend of mine was there and he had to watch the Germans shoot them. He came back pale as a sheet, trembling. That was a Pole’s fate.”
“You said Jews joyfully greeted the invading Red Army,” I say. “But when the Germans arrived, didn’t some locals ever go out to greet them?”
“Before war broke out between Germany and Russia, the Poles were in a terrible situation—constant arrests, deportations to Siberia. The population prayed to God: ‘May Lucifer come, if only this devil goes.’”
“So Poles were glad when the Germans arrived?”
“When the Germans attacked the Russians, the prison doors opened. There was euphoria. Thousands of people who’d been hiding out in the forest came home. Everyone was happy: that the head of the school had come back, or a neighbor, a son who’d been hiding in the forest. How could my brothers not be glad that Father came home from prison and Mother from the forest?”
From the joy prompted by the German invasion we proceed to the heart of the matter.
“Why,” I ask each Laudański, “were the Jews of Jedwabne burned in the barn?”
“It was the Germans’ revenge,” each brother answers in turn.
They refer to an event that took place in the winter of 1940 to 1941.
Before the war there were about fifteen German families living in Jedwabne, of whom the majority moved to the Reich in the period of the Soviet occupation, in accordance with the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939, which divided future control over Polish territory between Soviet Russia and Germany. At that time a commission came from Germany to evaluate the value of the property left behind in order to make restitution.
“Officers in shining coats stepped out of two black cars,” Jerzy Laudański tells me, “and Jews crowded around those cars, throwing wet snow into them and being so provocative that the Germans had to call the Soviet militia to their aid.”
Jerzy Laudański heard about this in the prison yard from Karol Bardoń, who had been sentenced in the same trial as he had. Bardoń supposedly told him that one of the Germans who came to Jedwabne in July 1941 was from that team and that he had threatened: “They gave us a hard time, we’ll teach them a lesson.”
“That’s probably why,” Zygmunt Laudański comments. “The Jews were wrong to do it, why throw snow?”
Kazimierz Laudański admits that right after the Soviets left, Jews were punished by mobs.
“There was a lot of revenge,” says Kazimierz. “But who did they kill? It was the Communists and snitches who were tried by mobs and lynched. They were the ones who got it. The Jewish community is one thing, Communist gangs another. Our guys acted in self-defense, just like in all the other uprisings, which we’re not ashamed of. But when you make an omelette you’ve got to break some eggs. And since there were some uneducated people there, they might have caused the deaths of a lot of innocent people. But Polish and Jewish Communists were wrong to collaborate with the NKVD. Traitors get their throats cut.” He makes a throat-cutting gesture.
Karol Bardoń, the man who got the heaviest sentence for the massacre in Jedwabne, described in his testimony this settling of scores on the first day after the entry of the German army: “There were some people in civilian clothes holding poles as thick as tow bars standing in front of the Germans, and the Germans were yelling at them: ‘Don’t kill them right away!’ ‘Give it to them slowly, let them suffer.’ Of the six people beaten and later shot by the Germans in the woods nearby, three were Polish and three Jewish. Bardoń named Jerzy Laudański as one of the participants in the beatings.
On July 9, 1941, word spread in town and in the surrounding area that the next day they were going to get rid of the Jews in Jedwabne. This is repeated in many accounts. Peasants in the area got their tools ready for the day: stanchions, sticks, poles; they cut themselves what were called truncheons, or lengths of thick electric cable. On the morning of July 10, a group of uniformed Germans appeared in Jedwabne in one or two cars. The mayor sent messengers to Polish houses to tell the men to report to the magistrate’s office. There they were given the order to drive the Jews out into the marketplace, and they were probably told which houses or neighborhoods to go to.
Stanisław Danowski, witness in the 1953 trial, an offshoot of the first Jedwabne trial in 1949: “Karolak summoned people, gave them vodka, and then he got those who were willing—and there were plenty of them—to rout the Jewish population from their homes.”
They were driven out under the pretext that they had to pull up the weeds from between the cobblestones in the marketplace, to clean it up. The Germans who had come to town were there when the Jews were driven into the marketplace. Stanisław Zejer, a suspect, testified that Jerzy Laudański and Bolesław Rogalski, a postal worker, “having got themselves poles … went to drive six families into the market square, they were Kosacki Mendel (family of four); Szymborski Abram (family of six); Gutko Josel (family of four)—I, Zejer, don’t remember the names of the other families.”
A crowd of people from Jedwabne and the surrounding area stood around the throng of Jews. This is repeated in almost all the testimonies, that “the rounded-up Jews were surrounded by a mob of people.” There were also a few Germans, in uniform, with weapons. Among those who organized the chasing of Jews from their homes, the names return again and again: Bardoń, Wasilewski, Sobuta, Eugeniusz Kalinowski, and Jerzy Laudański.
The locals split off a group of a few dozen men and led them to a little square fewer than a hundred meters from the market, where there was a statue of Lenin. They forced the Jews to smash it, and then they were made to carry pieces of Lenin’s torso on wooden poles and to sing. A rabbi, the elderly Awigdor Białostocki, was put at the head of the procession. They made him carry a red flag in one hand, and in the other a pole with his hat on it. Noon was approaching as the group carrying Lenin circled the marketplace. They were humiliated in various ways, beaten, ordered to sing and do squats (“I saw Wasilewski and Sobuta picking out a few dozen Jews there and making them do a funny kind of gymnastics,” said Roman Górski, a suspect in the investigation of 1949).
The marketplace was loud with cries and weeping. First a large group of men was led out of the marketplace, and in the next stage the women, young people, and children were driven into the barn.
Testimonies from 1949 and 1953: “They were driving out Jews. I didn’t see any Germans in the crowd” (Wincenty Gościcki, suspect). “We Poles stood on one side and the Jews on the other, grouped in fours, so they wouldn’t run away. I had no order from the Germans to chase Jews” (Józef Chrzanowski, suspect). “The police helped hunt down the Jews in town, but at the barn there were mostly Poles” (Stanisław Sokołowski, witness). “I was ordered to go and get gas to pour on the barn for Eugeniusz Kalinowski and Józef Niebrzydowski. They took the gas, eight liters of it, and poured it on the barn when the barn was filled with Jews” (Antoni Niebrzydowski, suspect).
All three brothers maintain that no one in town really expected the Jews to be burned. Is it possible, I ask, that news of the burning of Jews in nearby Radziłów three days previously didn’t reach Jedwabne? “I didn’t hear anything of the kind back then,” says Jerzy Laudański.
Kazimierz Laudański presents his version: “When I got to Jedwabne you could still smell the hideous stench of burned flesh. I worked out what had happened. The Germans found a barn beyond the bridge, on the Łomża side. They wanted to requisition it from Józef Chrzanowski, who was serving in the German army, and he begged them in German not to. They found another barn near the Jewish cemetery. ‘We’ll burn down the barn,’ said the Germans, ‘and build a new one in its place.’”
Zygmunt Laudański: “On the critical day we were crossing the marketplace. We looked and there were Jews weeding it with spoons. It was overgrown with grass. They were doing it quietly, as if it was nothing. Poles were watching. Karolak, whose house was on the market square, told me to come and do repairs on his kitchen. His wife said, ‘Mr. Laudański, I’m sorry to ask you on a day like this’—because it was the day the Jews were rounded up, maybe she knew what was going to happen to them, and she was a decent woman—‘but my husband the mayor has to receive some Germans, and we can’t make tea here because the stove isn’t working.’ I cleaned the stove, carried out the ashes, covered the ashes with clay. When I had finished I headed toward Przytulska Street, but there was a German on guard saying, ‘Zurück’ [Back]. I went toward Łomża, but there was a German there, too, telling me the same thing; I went toward Wizna—same thing. So I went through a backyard in the direction of November 11 Street, where my friend Borawski lived. We had a chat. No one had any idea of the horror going on. I went on, went to sit in a cornfield, and when I got back to my own yard I saw smoke.”
Zygmunt Laudański gave this version of events in 1949, when he appealed his guilty verdict from prison. However, at that time he added a detail that testified to the fact that someone was aware of the horror. With a Gestapo officer, Mayor Karolak was leading a Jew from a courtyard: “a tailor, whom I had given some trousers to alter a few days earlier while the Soviets were still in power; when he saw me he called me over and gave them back to me, unfinished, explaining he didn’t know if he’d be back.”
It’s hard to imagine a Jewish tailor, driven out of his home by the Gestapo and conscious that he might not return, taking a piece of unfinished work with him on his last journey. Nor is it clear why Laudański went to “sit in a cornfield” in a situation where “no one had any idea of the horror going on.”
Jerzy Laudański: “The mayor gave directions, but the initiative was German. I was standing near the bakery and mixed with the crowd.”
“How did you come to be there?”
“Curiosity. When your car crashes, you know how many people are going to stand around gawking. Something was going on, the Germans were rounding up Jews, making them carry the statue of Lenin. No Pole was sorry they were carrying Lenin, unless they were fans of his.”
“Were the Poles beating up Jews at that time?”
“There were Poles in the marketplace, but I didn’t see any Jews beaten up. The Jews were talking quietly, quietly weeding the earth between the stones. Germans like order, so the Jews were made to weed the marketplace. And then they all went on their own steam, it looked spontaneous.”
“What do you mean, ‘spontaneous’?”
“The Jews obeyed and went spontaneously, the Poles followed them spontaneously, because nobody expected a tragedy like that. If people say it was the Poles who killed them, it would be a disgrace for Poland. It’s not true.”
“How did the Poles react?” I ask Jerzy Laudański.
“Some liked what was going on. Others didn’t, but everyone was curious. People joked that not long before, under the Soviets, Jews wouldn’t have been cleaning up the marketplace.”
“And you?”
“I was near the barn, but about thirty meters away. There were a lot of people in front of me.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“I was talking to friends.”
“Did no one try to help the Jews?”
“Who could have helped them?”
Jerzy Laudański invokes the figure of Maksymilian Kolbe, a Polish Catholic saint, who as a prisoner in Auschwitz chose to starve himself to death in the place of a condemned fellow prisoner, also a Pole. “There was one great hero, Father Kolbe, but he knew he had TB and wasn’t going to get out of the camp alive. But he was a hero anyway, because many a man might know the end was near but wouldn’t give his life for another.”
“And the Germans?”
“I think the Germans were at the back taking pictures.”
In the course of a few hours of conversation I hear the same thing from Jerzy: the Jews went in front, then the Poles, then the Germans.
“What were their uniforms like?” I ask.
“I couldn’t tell you.”
Zygmunt Laudański changes the subject from German uniforms to German guilt.
“The Germans did it on purpose using Polish hands.”
“But what did those Polish hands do?”
But he doesn’t respond to that question. Instead he spins me a yarn about many Jews escaping and ending up in the Łomża ghetto. He suddenly becomes more animated, remembering the business he did there, buying up clothes and shoes.
I ask Zygmunt Laudański what he knows of the looting and by what principle Jewish homes were occupied by Poles.
“People took over homes because some of them lived in basements. They spontaneously moved into the homes and the magistrate didn’t throw them out. Some people say things were looted. Where the police didn’t manage to take everything away, maybe someone would drag something out, bedsheets or clothes. But it was the Germans who sold things at auction: they’d hold up the rags and say such and such a price—in rubles, because at the beginning of the war there weren’t any deutsche marks.”
“A German sold Jewish clothing for rubles?”
“He wanted to make enough for a beer.”
“Do you remember the screaming?” I ask Jerzy Laudański.
“When they were locked into the barn, they yelled something in Yiddish. I don’t know what. It was a spontaneous shout, maybe to open the doors, or maybe that’s how they prayed. Then they were stifled by the smoke. When they fell silent, it was till the end of the world.”
“Did the memory of that screaming ever wake you up in the middle of the night?” I ask Zygmunt Laudański.
“A young person doesn’t react that way. It never kept me awake at night.”
“And what did you think about it all?”
“What could I think? It happened, that’s all.”
“Do you regret anything in your life?”
“Ask anybody: I don’t have a single enemy, and nobody ever said anything bad about me at work, either.”
“I understand you fulfilled your obligations, but do you regret anything you ever did?”
“Nothing whatsoever.”
A moment later Zygmunt Laudański adds that he couldn’t hear the screaming anyway, because he was more than two hundred meters away.
After the Germans arrived and a German police station was set up, Jerzy Laudański went to work there. At the trial in 1949, he admitted this and charged his brother Zygmunt with having told him to work there. Jerzy Laudański now says that he never worked at the police station; he only went by a few times because the mayor had him take the policemen’s shoes to his brother-in-law, who was a shoemaker. In Jedwabne I was told that Jerzy was in the first auxiliary police force, and then he became a guard. In any case, the police did not use messengers or runners at first but had Jews do the jobs required.
“I came to get my brother Jerzy, to tell him to run away,” Kazimierz Laudański explains to me.
“Why was he supposed to run away?”
“Because the Germans needed young men like him for the police. We’d already run away from the Russians; now he had to run away from the Germans.”
It’s not clear why Kazimierz Laudański thought at that time that there was anything wrong in working at the German police station, considering that he also worked for the Germans. He was a clerk working in the administrative machine designed for the destruction of the Jews in Poręba nad Bugiem, which was part of the General Government.
Frequently in my later conversations with the inhabitants of Jedwabne, I encountered eruptions of hatred toward Jews. The Laudański brothers display no such emotion. They are calm and self-assured. After a monotonous recitation of their own version of the events of July 1941, the brothers energetically move on to other subjects.
Kazimierz Laudański claims that in Poręba he belonged to the Home Army and distributed underground publications. But at the same time he tells me without embarrassment that he was an official in the German administration working inside the Holocaust machine, and that he was interrogated after the war “about Jews from Poręba on the Bug River.” (Unfortunately I couldn’t find the court records for this case to determine what the charges were.) He himself tells me of the order that arrived in Poręba on February 10, 1942, saying the Jews were to be sent to Treblinka. (Given the early date this was probably the labor camp Treblinka I, not the death camp, which was established later.) He was told to make a list of all Jews, and the ones who didn’t leave within the set time period were to pay a fifty-zloty fine. This is his account of the Holocaust: “In May another order came and then all of them went to Treblinka. Well, not all, because one of them survived and became the secret police chief in Ostrów.”
He also tells me about his brother’s life during the occupation: “I think Jerzy was a hero. He spent three years in German camps and never betrayed anyone. Here’s a photograph of him in the camp. Jurek, show the lady.”
Holding out a camp picture of himself, Jerzy Laudański says: “I was a member of the Home Army. They entrusted me with the distribution of underground newsletters. There was a massive manhunt across the county of Ostrów, and a few dozen of us were picked up in the woods. I was held for four months for interrogation in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. Twice they took me off to the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue. I was a concentration camp prisoner.”
When I ask Jerzy Laudański if he could give me the name of any person in the Home Army he worked with, he tells me he didn’t know any names, they all used pseudonyms. Which is odd, because when I talked to other Home Army members from the region they said it was a small community where everybody knew everybody else. In Jedwabne I had also heard Jerzy Laudański was caught smuggling Jewish gold. Not that I’m inclined to believe that right away, since the theme of enriching oneself with “Jewish gold” is one of the constant themes in local conversation and mythology.
I called the Auschwitz Museum. They referred me to Warsaw, to the Pawiak Prison Museum. If Jerzy Laudański had been transported from there, that’s where his documents should be. But the files from that period were burned. The only thing we have to go on is Laudański’s own testimony—given in the nineties—that he was picked up in a raid while in the woods with a Home Army detachment. There is no evidence to confirm this.
After the war, the brothers set out to help build the new order of the Communist Party with great zeal. Kazimierz was active in various wings of the party. Zygmunt Laudański: “We had two partisan groups in Jedwabne, the Home Army and the National Armed Forces. Some thought I was in the Home Army, others that I was in the National Armed Forces, but I never belonged to either. After the war they were tried in military court in Jedwabne and the new authorities announced we had to go to the trial. A peasant told them how his last cow had been taken away and beaten so that its ear bled, to that day it had an abcess and it was deaf. And I left Jedwabne right then in 1947 to stay out of that whole mess. After People’s Poland was established and my brother became secretary for the municipality in Biała Piska, he got me a job in a shop there. That was the shop where they later came to arrest me.”
Many times, in prison, he gave an account of his life after the war: “I went to the remote town of Biała in order to work for the good of the state and support my family, free from the reactionary gangs operating in our area.” He wrote to the Office of Public Security in Warsaw on July 4, 1949, proposing himself as an informant: “As a former member of the Polish United Workers’ Party and party cell supervisor until my last days in my former place of residence, one who at meetings sounded the call for social justice such as we enjoy today, I now seek that justice for myself and I would like to experience it and to open the eyes of reactionaries who are glad whenever a worker cooperates with the system and is thrown in jail” (sentence review application to the Supreme Court in Warsaw, November 8, 1949).
Jerzy Laudański’s brother got him a job as controller of material benefits in the office of the district authorities. “The farmers had to deliver grain quota and we went to check how much each municipality delivered. We made sure they gave the right amount, because they were resistant. There was a rumor the Russians were taking grain to Russia by plane.” In the documents there is mention of Jerzy Laudański being sentenced in 1947 to nine months of camp labor in Mielęcin.
“How shall I put it? In trade, you could be off by a certain percentage, and I took that permissible margin,” he explains to me. “Then I worked for National Agricultural Properties; then for a collective farm in Kaliszki, in the storehouse. They removed me from that job. They arrested me at work.”
Kazimierz Laudański’s professional and political careers were not affected by his brother’s arrest. He went on working as municipal secretary and was politically active.
“On the anniversary of Stalin’s death a crowd gathered in Biała. And I get up and praise the great Stalin.”
He gets up from his chair and his voice sounds younger and stronger as he repeats the speech from all those years ago:
“‘Great Stalin was a leader. The victorious Polish people will never forget it. He did not die without heirs. He urged us to be critical and self-critical. If Stalin asked you today what you did for the Polish nation, how would you look him in the eye?’ And I pointed: this is a mess and that is a mess. I showed my fist. The secret police and the party applauded me, but the crowd was with me, too, because they saw I was putting on a parody. I always had guts.”
Zygmunt Laudański also offered his services to the authorities: “I wish to testify to the secret police about very important evidence that remains. I urgently request this, and it will clear up the case” (letter sent to the president from Ostrołęka prison, June 4, 1949). But the authorities did not respond.
The Laudańskis tell me about being beaten during their interrogation. They had spoken of it at their trial, retracting their testimony, and they wrote about it from prison, appealing their sentence. They say they confessed because they were beaten. Their father, Czesław Laudański, was also arrested, but he didn’t confess and was released.
“Why did they let your father go?” I ask.
“Well, they found no proof against him.”
“And why were you found guilty?”
“We were suspect, because we had been in hiding during the Soviet occupation.”
The suggestion that their father, who was imprisoned during the Soviet occupation, was not an easy target for the new Polish Communist regime, but Zygmunt, who collaborated with the NKVD, was, makes little sense. But generally the brothers Laudański are impressively prepared for their conversations with me. They have a ready answer to every question.
Zygmunt Laudański got out of prison in 1955.
“How did people treat you after you got out?” I ask.
“Very well. The director of the dairy in Biała came to me and said, ‘Come work for us.’ They knew they could rely on me.”
In 1956, Jerzy Laudański wrote to the minister of justice from Sieradz prison, four pages of graph paper covered in even, controlled writing: “I fell victim to the legacy of prewar politics at such a young age, because at that time, young people were educated solely in a nationalist spirit. All the more so as I came of age and was shaped as a citizen of the Fatherland at a time when the most ferocious anti-Jewish battles were raging. People, young people, were raised on all sorts of anti-Jewish slogans … After our Liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, I did not go the way of those who despised their ruined Fatherland and indulged in a luxurious existence in the West, only to return later as spies or subversives. Without a moment’s hesitation, I returned to my ravaged Homeland, to the People for whom I had sacrificed my youth before I was twenty years of age … I am a laborer and the son and grandson of laborers, and I have met with nothing good in my life; I am broken by fate. Presently, having learned this much from life, I have perfect proof of who made me, a young man, suffer so terribly: it was Fascism, capitalism, the prewar government ideology, these are what condemned me to languish so long in prison.”
A last opinion on “holding the prisoner Laudański” was put forward at Sieradz prison in 1956: “General observation and interviews have not revealed hostility to People’s Poland. He considers his sentence just, but excessively harsh.”
Jerzy Laudański was set free in 1957.
These days the brothers meet often, talk politics, share the same preoccupations. “We brothers are nationalists, we’re on the right,” says Kazimierz Laudański. “As they say: there must be order, Ordnung muss sein.”