The Crime and the Silence

or, Polish and Jewish Memory of the Soviet Occupation

It is New Year’s Eve 1940, a Saturday, and a dance is about to start in the former Catholic House, which has been turned into a House of Culture. More than a year has passed since the Red Army invaded the town. The town is no longer in Poland but in western Belorussia. The inhabitants themselves voted for this and took Soviet passports. What else could they do, since refusing to vote could mean deportation? Besides fear and forced taxes, the Soviet authorities also brought some lures with them: Saturday dances, film screenings, various festivities that may have been tedious but sometimes involved free beer. Besides, it gave them something to do. Russian women brought to town by representatives of the new political order dress up to go out. Their Polish neighbors, watching from a next-door window, laugh at them for putting on nightgowns and mistaking them for ball gowns. Jewish girls dress up while their mothers chide them that it’s still Shabbat. Many young people are going to tonight’s party, most of them Jewish, but not all. It is not until later that Poles will say only Jews went to these events.

Nowadays the residents of Radziłów and Jedwabne like to say that it was the Jews above all who joined the NKVD, who informed on others and pointed guns at Poles being deported to Siberia. From their stories you might think that in reality it was the local Jews who established the Soviet occupation. They recall how Jews jeered: “You wanted Poland without Jews, now you have Jews without Poland.”

Jewish Tarbut School. Radziłów, 1930s. The school was closed during the Soviet occupation. (Courtesy of Jose Gutstein)

Halutz youth organization. Jedwabne, 1930. Approximately fifteen of them managed to get to Palestine before the war. The organization was disbanded during the Soviet occupation. (Courtesy of Rabbi Jacob Baker)

This is seen differently by Jews. They count on the fingers of one hand the Jewish collaborators they knew, and explain that the clear majority of the religious community of merchants and craftsmen could not possibly be happy with the Soviet system, which was atheistic and deprived them of their private property. And in fact, although the Holocaust came later, the Soviet occupation had already destroyed the entire fabric of social life built up over centuries: the Jewish municipal government was liquidated, Hebrew schools were closed, Yom Kippur became a normal workday, political parties were dissolved, and Zionist activists and Bundists were put on deportation lists.

“In September 1939 many Jewish homes were looted,” Menachem Turek testified about the town of Tykocin to the District Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok in 1945. “It soon felt as if everything had become ownerless, not just the material property people had accumulated but even human life. The day before Yom Kippur, when the Kol Nidre was being said, when the Jews gathered in the synagogue and asked God for mercy, five trucks drove into town carrying German soldiers from the nearby main road who were retreating in accordance with the treaty with Soviet Russia, and they hacked open the locked doors of Jewish shops with axes, loaded everything onto cars, and left town, happy with the loot they’d managed to grab.”

“The Germans didn’t have time to commit many murders,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote in her memoir, having loaded her family and possessions on a wagon upon hearing news of the war. They set off in the direction of the nineteenth-century fort town Osowiec in the hope that Polish forces would stop the German army there. When she returned to Radziłów on September 16, she found her house looted by neighbors. “On Yom Kippur the Germans went to the synagogue, threw out the men praying there, ordered them to take off their coats and give them to Poles.” The date was September 23, 1939.

The Jews and the Poles of Jedwabne and its environs did not share the same fate and do not share the same memory.

For Jews the invasion of Poland by the German army on September 1, 1939, was a nightmare scenario made real. Terrifying reports had already reached them from the Reich, and these were confirmed by the conduct of the Wehrmacht, which deliberately humiliated Jews and egged on the local populations to do the same. For most Jews the Soviet occupation also meant hard times, but it offered some hope of survival, and also a certain thinly disguised satisfaction that the Poles were now as badly off as they were themselves.

For the Poles, the Soviet occupation meant the loss of independence. It’s true that the German army marched eastward in early September 1939, but there was a powerful belief that the Germans would soon be defeated, as had been proclaimed by prewar propaganda. People had been told to be more afraid of Soviet Russia than of Hitler. It was only with the Stalin-Hitler pact that the inhabitants of the area realized they were captives. Added to this were fear of deportation and the inevitable deterioration of living conditions caused by the taxes imposed by the Soviets.

The Red Army entered the Jedwabne area on September 29, following the agreement on the withdrawal of German troops. The NKVD was the army’s advance guard, giving the local Communists their instructions; hence the identical scenario for all places of welcome: in a marketplace decorated with posters and red flags, the Soviets were greeted with flowers presented by delegations of local residents waiting, in accordance with ancient Polish custom, with bread and salt, at tables covered with red cloth.

The barn owner’s daughter, Janina Biedrzycka, remembers that the Soviets were welcomed to Jedwabne by two Jewish couples, Socher Lewinowicz and his wife, and the Chilewskis. But when I question her further, it turns out she also remembers two Polish Communists and a word of welcome pronounced by a Pole. But besides the “official” hosts of the welcome ceremony a sizable group of rubbernecks, children, and young people gathered. Many of the testimonies of Poles deported to the USSR preserved at the Hoover Institution repeat that Jews were in the majority. A locksmith from Grajewo described “individual Jews and a paltry number of Communist sympathizers welcoming the Red Army with bread and salt and a red banner reading: ‘With Stalin into France and Great Britain.’ Because these imperialist states provoked the war and Comrade Stalin would liberate us without war.”

It’s hard to say if the majority of those welcoming the Russians were really Jews. The event was momentous enough for many residents of the town to want to have a look (after all, Janina Biedrzycka remembers the welcoming of the Red Army because she was there, too). But among the cheering crowd, apart from a few Polish Communists—the Communist movement was weak in these parts—Jews were no doubt in the majority, because they had reason to feel a sense of relief. In Jewish accounts it looks like this:

“The Jews breathed a little more freely, but not entirely, because various marauders turned up in town, as well as some reactionary elements who sympathized with the Germans fleeing the approaching Red Army,” said Menachem Turek of the situation in Tykocin. “Those people spread crazy rumors, such as we were already familiar with, for example that Jews in Grodno and other towns had poured boiling water on the heads of Polish soldiers, and they said all Jews should be killed. This inflammatory behavior had no effect, because on the first day of Yom Kippur, Soviet tanks thundered into town and for quite a while their noise silenced or muffled the voice of poisonous anti-Semitism—the anti-Semitism nourished by the right-wing nationalist regime dominant here in the last few years before the war. The Jews of Tykocin received and saluted the Red Army with special sympathy, they felt free, breathed fresh air, and gratefully and respectfully offered their services to the Soviet authorities, who began to introduce an order based on the principles of love for humanity and nations, equal rights, freedom and equality.”

In a book of memory at the Israeli kibbutz named after the Ghetto Fighters, Meir Paparle remembered, “When the Russians came we were very happy, my brother Wolf Ber was simply beyond himself with joy. Russian soldiers came and asked him for something and he wouldn’t even take money from them, he was so happy. The whole town was delighted with the Russian troops.” In 1941, Paparle was fifteen years old, lived in Jedwabne, and was called Jedwabiński.

Turek, a graduate of Batory University in Vilnius, already had Communist sympathies before the war. Meir Jedwabiński’s three older brothers were also Communists (in Jedwabne there was another such family, where four of five sons were Communists—the Catholic Krystowczyk family). But even Jews who felt very remote from Communism felt relief at the entry of the Red Army. Like Chaja Finkelsztejn, wife of a Zionist activist, from one of the wealthiest families in Radziłów, and whose memoir shows that she had no love for Communists at all. “We heard on the radio that our area was passing into Soviet hands, and we thought maybe we would survive,” she wrote. “Many hoped that when the Soviets arrived they’d make the Poles return the things they’d looted from us.”

Before Soviet administration was established, many towns organized civilian guards. The Soviets renamed them auxiliary militia divisions. Polish accounts repeated that they were made up of Jews. The Jews themselves talk about Jews who made themselves of service to the Soviets in this first period, but they emphasize that they were the exception rather than the rule.

Meir Ronen of Jedwabne, who was deported to Kazakhstan and left for Palestine after the war, told me, “There were five Jews, ruffians, lording it around Jedwabne. They ran the town in the first weeks before the Soviet authorities got set up. And a Pole, Krystowczyk, a Communist.”

“In Radziłów, Jewish Communists put themselves at their disposal, there were some bootlickers, plenty of them, and they provoked all the misfortune,” remembered Chaja Finkelsztejn, who complained many times of the “Jewish devils,” or those who eagerly collaborated with the new authorities. The hostility between Zionists and Communists before the war now found an outlet: Jewish collaborators were only looking for ways to cheat her family.

“In Wizna maybe five Jews followed the Communists,” Izaak Lewin told me in Israel, remembering what his father had told him, “among them one old tailor, who said, ‘I’ve been going to the synagogue for twenty years to pray for the Communists to come.’ Everyone laughed at him. The other one was Awigdor Czapnicki. When he emigrated to Israel he tried to meet up with my father, who said, ‘I don’t want to know him.’ How few Wizna Jews survived, and yet my father didn’t want to know him. That must say something about how Jewish Communists were disliked among Jews.”

One Pole deported by the Soviets, Lucjan Grabowski, wrote of such zealots in recollections preserved by the Hoover Institution: “Three Jews armed with rifles and red armbands came to Kapice from Tykocin. They no longer said dobry dzien [“good day” in Polish] in greeting, but zdrastvuyte [Russian]. When I took a good look at them I recognized one of them, it was Fiska, the ragman’s son. His father often came to Kapice to buy rags. During the National Party’s boycott of Jews we more than once drove him out of the village with stones.”

It’s easy to imagine those young Jews who only dreamed of getting back at their recent persecutors. The humiliated, when they can take revenge, rarely show their most sympathetic face. Swaggering around town with rifles must have seemed pretty impressive to them. They wouldn’t have hesitated to give the Soviet authorities names of National Party activists, who were both enemies of Communists and persecutors of Jews.

In those earliest days Jews turned to the new authorities for help recovering their lost property, looted from Jewish houses and shops by their Polish neighbors right after the Germans had arrived. “A number of house searches were carried out, as a result of Jewish merchants accusing Poles of stealing various goods from them while they were away. There were a lot of arrests of people against whom local Jewish Communists had claims,” said Marian Łojewski, a locksmith from Jedwabne, in an account preserved by the Hoover Institution.

“When the Soviets marched in, there was an outbreak of joy among Jews,” remembered Mieczysław K., a former resident of Jedwabne. “Some of the youth started wearing red armbands and joined the police. It didn’t last very long, the Soviets kicked them out; they preferred to deal with things themselves. The poorer Jews went on swaggering around a bit: from their point of view the Soviets were bringing liberation. The slightly wealthier ones felt just as much under threat of deportation as the Poles.”

In the fall of 1939, Soviet authorities began to organize a referendum on adding the territory they had occupied in eastern Poland to western Belorussia, and elections of parliamentary representatives.

Their propaganda machine was excellent. A witness from Downary, about fifty kilometers from Jedwabne, described the preelection campaign: “They made a little boy brought in by his father say, ‘God, give me candy.’ Then he had to say, ‘Comrade Stalin, give me candy,’ and a soldier went over to him and handed the boy a fistful of candy.” A farmer from the village of Słucz near Radziłów remembered that after voting, you were allowed to buy two hundred grams of candy, two packets of cigarettes, and two boxes of matches.

The candidates for the western Belorussian parliament chosen were Czesław Krystowczyk, the Polish Communist from Jedwabne, and, as Tadeusz Kiełczewski of Jedwabne put it, “an illiterate floozy from the village of Pieńki-Borowe.”

The Soviet authorities didn’t appoint Jews to local office in greater numbers than others, least of all in the municipal administration, probably thinking Jews were already more sympathetic to them than Poles, and Polish candidates would command more respect. Evidence of this is the case of Chaim Wołek, examined at a session of the Regional Party Committee in Jedwabne. Wołek was selected to represent the nearby village of Łoje-Awissa at the Regional Council of Delegates, but at a preelection meeting in the village he was “mocked as a Jew,” and withdrew his candidacy.

Karwowski of Jedwabne remembers a story told about a local Jew who came with his rifle to arrest a certain Polkowski. “Polkowski asked him to let him go, but the Jew says: ‘Do you know who you’re talking to? I’m the government.’ Polkowski gave him a punch and ran away. Later everyone joked that Polkowski had overthrown the government.”

“Jews only acted as militiamen at the very beginning,” Kazimierz Mocarski from near Jedwabne related. “The Soviet authorities understood they’d made a mistake, because they weren’t suited for the role. The village environment was anti-Semitic and Jews couldn’t get people to obey them. Once, three Jewish policemen turned up in my village, Nadbory, because someone had informed them that one inhabitant (unrelated to the above-mentioned witness) owned a gun, and they were ordered to take it away from him. His brother hid the double-barrel shotgun under his coat. They searched the house but didn’t have the nerve to do a body search and left empty-handed.”

From October 1939, when western Belorussia was created, the provisional militia was replaced by the Workers and Peasants Militia. Not many locals, neither Poles nor Jews, were given jobs in the Soviet militia or administration. The Soviets brought their own cadres from eastern Belorussia—the so-called vostochniks (easterners). This is confirmed unanimously by Soviet sources and by archives in the Hoover Institution, which cover a longer period than the first few months.

What did an ordinary day under Soviet occupation look like? In the testimonials at the Hoover Institution, the Soviet occupation is portrayed as an invasion of barbarians. The new authorities carried out a census and an inventory, to be used as instruments of pillage. They appropriated household equipment and livestock; they felled forests. A visit in the night could mean deportation, but also the looting of jewelry and clothing. Apart from the pillaging and deportations, the people I talked to emphasized another theme: the poverty and coarseness of the occupying forces. They like to recount how the Soviet officers picked rotten cabbage left in the fields, how they slaughtered pigs and cooked the meat right there in the marketplace.

Chaja Finkelsztejn described daily life under the Soviets in her memoir: “The Soviet Army arrived in our town with its whole propaganda machine. They said they wouldn’t let workers go on foot, they’d drive cars. There were lines everywhere for bread and everything else. They formed in front of shops even before anyone knew what was going to be for sale. We took everything they gave us. That’s what it was called: dayoot [Russian for “they’re giving”]. When the Soviets came, at first Christians kept their distance and didn’t participate in the holidays we were told to celebrate. But they soon accepted the situation and joined in everything. The Soviets formed a sielsowiet, a village council with both Jews and Poles. They were much easier on the Christians than on the Jews. The life of a modest Jewish merchant was impossible, and that meant most Jews. Christians could have two and a half acres of land and sell produce on the street, and even meat, while Jews were forbidden to. So Jews entered into partnerships with Christians and sold things through them.” She described how even the workshops of poor Jews were requisitioned and turned into cooperatives, how cheders and Hebrew schools were shut down, how children had to go to school on Saturdays.

Herschel Baker, who lives in Florida but is originally from Jedwabne, told me, “Communism literally invaded our house: a few Russians broke in and took our shoes. Those may have been the good times, but only for a person who had nothing to lose and didn’t want to buy anything. We had to work for them, not for ourselves, and we barely had enough money for bread. But we felt safer, because the local hooligans were scared. I have to admit the Russians treated everyone the same, and that was a good thing; but they took away everything you had, and of course that was bad. I already lived with my own family in Goniądz. There were a few Jews in the police force there, and they probably liked it. I remember we Jews were unhappy with the Soviets, and the Poles were unhappy, too. Everyone was impoverished, including the rich Jews, so we were all on the same level as the Poles, who had been poorer before the war. It’s hard to say Jews rose higher, it was more like we were all reduced to the same level of poverty. I myself had to hide because I was an ‘exploiter’—I had employed thirty people before the war—and they were about to deport me.”

“I can do without that kind of liberation, I hope it was the last one.” These words of Mendel Srul, a milkman from Łuck, are quoted by Irena Grudzińska Gross and Jan Gross in the book In Nineteen-Forty, Sweet Mother of God, They Sent Us to Siberia. Many of the older generation must have thought the same thing, at least those who had managed to build something for themselves. It was different for the young.

They were not as fed up by the worsening living conditions, nor was keeping the Sabbath their greatest worry. It seemed to them that in western Belorussia they’d finally be able to feel at home, that a Jew was no worse off than anyone else, and they often remarked that among the Soviets, Jews even got to be generals. Soviet teachers didn’t distinguish between Jewish pupils and others, and didn’t make Jewish children sit in the back rows. Not long ago Jews had had no chance of continuing their education beyond grade school, and now they were encouraged to go back to school, and more than that, they were invited to continue their studies in the many schools attached to factories in Soviet Russia. This was the dream of a large part of Zionist youth, because that kind of education would come in handy when they were building a new state in Palestine.

Meir Paparle’s father, who was a shoemaker in Jedwabne, became night watchman in a hospital under the Soviets. He would probably have preferred to have his own workshop, even if it kept him in poverty, so as not to be forced to work on Shabbat. But for his sons, the Soviet occupation was the chance of a lifetime to move up in society. “My brother Wolf Ber went to the Russian forces,” Paparle wrote. “He served in Jedwabne, patrolled the streets there. My other brother Ruwen also joined the Russian forces. I signed up with some other Jewish and Polish boys to go to Sverdlovsk in the Urals and work in a factory.”

Age was an important determinant of attitudes toward the Soviet occupation, and not only in the case of Jews. Film screenings and dancing were also attractive to some of the local Polish youth. Jan Cytrynowicz, the Jedwabne Jew who was baptized before the war, remembered that in Wizna, Poles ran the beer and wine taverns, where there was cheap wine and beer in pints, so the youth, both Polish and Jewish, liked gathering there.

“When the Russians came,” a former resident of Radziłów told me, “the film screen was set up in the marketplace, for everyone, and who had ever seen any movies in Radziłów? I remember films about the revolution, with Orlova, a famous actress. And events organized at the ice house.”

I asked how relations between Polish and Jewish children at school changed with the arrival of the Soviets. “The Jews were confident in class, they liked to show off,” I heard from a man who had grown up in Radziłów. “They felt confident because as they liked to say, Stalin’s wife was ‘one of theirs.’ Oh, they were no saints. They made fun of us in front of the Soviets. There were Polish boys who carried red flags, too, but not as many. Of all the members of the Communist youth organization Komsomol there was one Jewish girl who had the most arrogant attitude toward the Poles; we called her Fat Sara. She called the Poles ‘Polack dogs,’ and Polish kids for her were ‘Polack puppies.’ I had a Russian teacher named Marusya who made me sit in the first row next to that Jewish girl. She moved away, saying she wouldn’t sit next to a ‘Polack puppy.’ At school and on the street you had to make way for the Jews.”

“Make way how?”

“A Jewish kid would be standing there, taunting, ‘Your government is gone, your government is done.’”

“We got along fine with them,” another man from Radziłów remembered. “Right after the Russians arrived they proudly said, ‘Our comrades are here,’ but they sobered up pretty quickly. A teacher tried to get them to join the Soviet scout group, the pioneers, but they didn’t want to join, at least not the ones I remember.”

“Soviet education ruined kids,” Chaja Finkelsztejn recounted. “There were holidays, posters with thundering slogans, dancing, singing; it all drew kids like a magnet. For the older kids there was the Komsomol; the younger ones had the pioneers. They got red scarves, so they were happy. My kids said thanks but didn’t wear the scarves, although the Polish teachers made it clear this might get them into trouble. I didn’t want my kids to go on those field trips, but the teachers found us and dragged them off to the Soviet authorities in Jedwabne. My older son suffered a lot, he was called a Jewish nationalist because he didn’t join the Komsomol. At school somebody wrote an illicit slogan on the wall: ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning,’ and the Jewish director sent from the Białystok NKVD suspected Menachem Finkelsztejn of having done it.”

So Jews welcomed the Soviets more often and more warmly, but the Soviets made their lives a misery anyway. Jews may have collaborated with the Soviets more frequently, but do we know that for a fact? Though Jews did not play a dominant role in the Soviet power structure or the Soviet system of repression, Poles were convinced that the Jews were responsible for the persecution of Poles. What made the idea of Jews being solely responsible for all evil endure in the memory of so many of their neighbors?

Chaja Finkelsztejn: “Quarrels and fights often broke out between Jews and Christians in queues. There were plenty of Jews who said, ‘Your two decades of being the boss are over.’ The Poles remembered that.”

In fact, it wasn’t so much about those few Jews in every small town who showed special zeal in their service to the Soviet authorities, who informed on others and intimidated them. There were Poles doing the same thing, and everyone knew it, even if they later erased it from their collective memory. It was about the remarks like “Your time is over,” which Jews hurled at their recent nationalist persecutors with relish.

In the underground archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, called the Ringelblum Archive, there is a description of a school in Rutki where Polish teachers had taught for a long time; two Jewish teachers arrived, refugees from the General Government (or German-occupied zone). The local doctor and veterinarian also employed Jewish refugees in their practices. The refugees were in a difficult predicament, sleeping in strangers’ houses, unsure whether the next day would bring new decrees as to where they could or could not reside. From their point of view they were vulnerable, uncertain of their future; from the point of view of the Polish residents, the new Jewish teachers, doctor, and vet were in an excellent position—they had usurped the place of Polish locals deported to Siberia.

A large portion of school time was dedicated to propaganda, anniversaries, and poems about friendship with the USSR. Polish and Jewish teachers did the same things in class. But according to Chaja Finkelsztejn, Polish teachers “organized splendid festivities to mask their true sympathies and play the part of loyal subjects of the new authorities.” Polish teachers who prepared celebrations in honor of the October Revolution at school may well have packed lunches after school for anti-Soviet partisans hiding in the marshes by the Biebrza river.

Bolesław Juszkowski remembered that when he had to go vote, he found Soviet soldiers in the election hall “dancing with Jewish girls” to the sound of a band (Hoover Institution testimony).

It caused bad blood, the Jewish girls dancing with Russian soldiers when Poles were obliged to turn up to vote for the loss of their fatherland.

Another Ringelblum Archive testimony tells of how things were in Wasilków: “It was quiet and cheerful; there were movies and a Jewish theater that had frequent concerts and plays; there was a wind orchestra, a mandolin orchestra. Jews felt good, very free. They could walk down any street, even the ones where they had formerly been pelted with stones. You didn’t hear anyone say ‘dirty Jew.’”

Poles were irritated by the happy Jewish boys unafraid to go out on the street.

“The Poles were grief-stricken after losing to the invaders, and you didn’t see that grief in Jews,” wrote Chaja Finkelsztejn. “You could even see most Jews were glad. ‘Jews are in charge,’ said the Poles. Most young Jews were living it up, there were a lot of weddings, under the Soviets you could get married for three rubles. You saw a lot of freshly minted married couples, feeling content and happy, and a lot of babies were being born, couples sat with their prams in parks where until then only the Polish intelligentsia spent time.”

The Soviet occupation imposed on almost everyone—except those in hiding and in armed resistance units—the necessity of some degree of collaboration. If they wanted to avoid arrest or deportation, residents of Radziłów or Jedwabne had to participate in numerous meetings, decorate their barns with portraits of Lenin and Stalin and red flags, take part in the electoral farce, and accept Soviet citizenship. It must have been a humiliation of the kind that afterward is consigned to the most profound oblivion. How much easier to replace reality with a stereotype like “the Jews collaborated,” all the more so if you know those who might have corrected this misconception had perished. And the cognitive dissonance must have been particularly hard to bear for the nationalists, who by definition considered themselves exceptionally patriotic. The strange new situation in which the “kikes” were given relative equality in civil law must have been a provocation to those neighbors raised on prewar anti-Semitism.

“If the Jews had kept quiet under the Soviets like they did before the war, things wouldn’t have ended the way they did,” claims Janina Biedrzycka, the Jedwabne barn owner’s daughter. To prove this she tells me of neighbors who greeted her family courteously before the war but stopped doing so under the Soviets. Biedrzycka’s father had organized anti-Jewish actions before the war, but even so his Jewish neighbors had been afraid not to greet him politely. Now they were no longer afraid. And suddenly here are all these Jewish officials, Jewish policemen, Jewish teachers. It must have been a shock to most of the Radziłów and Jedwabne population, and one that exacerbated their sense of vulnerability and frustration.

When the current residents of Jedwabne say—as many do—that Jews were the ones who determined who was deported from Polish territory to the Soviet Union, they are wrong. It wasn’t local Jews who dictated repression tactics to Soviet Russia. In the first great deportation, on the night from February 9 to 10, 1940, it was military and civilian osadniks1 and foresters who were taken away. No Jewish denunciations were required for that.

“The Russians wanted to deport the tailor Lewin and my dad just for having fought for Polish independence toward the end of the First World War,” Tadeusz Dobkowski of Zanklewo, a village between Jedwabne and Wizna, told me.

“At first they deported people who belonged to some category designated for deportation, like foresters or teachers, or because they’d committed some act of hooliganism,” Jan Cytrynowicz explains to me. “A friend of mine from Wizna was deported for getting drunk at a Communist meeting and pissing in a jug.”

“Young Jews were happy. They went around smiling, I saw that,” says his wife, Pelagia, who spent the occupation in Grajewo. “They felt an aversion to Poles. They felt they’d been oppressed, and now under the Russians they’d cast off their chains. But we don’t know that someone who was happy that way really went and put in a complaint against Poles.”

The second wave of deportations, in April 1940, targeted the families of those previously arrested: police officers, senior officials, leaders of political parties, the local intelligentsia. The third wave, in June 1940, involved “refugees”—persons who had fled from the General Government. Jews formed over 80 percent of this wave of deportation (and a substantial number of them expressed a desire to return to the General Government, so not all Jews were so thrilled with the Soviets).

Zionist activists were also deported. The head of the NKVD reported (on September 16, 1940): “The region is known for being riddled with insurrectionary elements as well as various Polish and Jewish parties and anti-Soviet organizations: the National Party, the Jewish Bund, Zionists.”

For Jews, June 1940 went down in history as the time of great deportations, while Poles remember it as the time of the NKVD raid on the Kobielno wilderness area on the Biebrza river, where partisans and people evading imprisonment or selection for deportation were hiding in inaccessible swampy terrain. The raid was accompanied by many arrests. Some of those arrested were sent to Jedwabne, which under the Soviets was promoted to the regional capital; a temporary jail had been set up in a basement under a pharmacy.2

But the jails and prisons in the region were also crowded with Jews who had tried to conduct some kind of economic activity, in other words, to buy or sell something outside the official state economy; they were put behind bars as speculators.3

The last wave of deportations, in June 1941, was intended to cut off at the root the partisan independence movement, which was strong in this region. Polish Catholic informers were a hundred times more useful than Polish Jews for this purpose. Since Jews were never accepted into Polish underground organizations in the Jedwabne region, it would be hard to count on them for intelligence.

In the early morning of June 22, 1941, a Sunday, trucks pulled up to many homes in Jedwabne and the surrounding villages, and the NKVD rounded up the relatives of earlier deportees. “Poles railed against Jews and clearly showed their hostility,” Chaja Finkelsztejn wrote, describing the mood created by that last June deportation. “I saw with my own eyes how very early in the morning several trucks stopped by a large group of arrestees and NKVD officers. A few older Jews happened to be walking to the synagogue for morning prayers. They stopped to see what was happening. Suddenly we heard the bitter cry of a Polish woman: ‘Jews, you see them sending our people to Siberia! A curse on you!’ But what had the Jews done wrong? Didn’t the Soviets send Jews off to Siberia by the thousands? But we heard this all the time and more and more often. We felt storm clouds gathering.”

The Soviets had evacuation plans ready in the event of war against the Germans. Those prisoners kept in Łomża were to be transported to the Gulag. But they didn’t manage to move them. When troops entered the town on the first day of the Soviet–German war, June 22, more than two thousand freed prisoners returned to their homes. Meanwhile, trains had left for the east with their wives, parents, and children, who had all been arrested.

Pogroms took place in dozens of villages in the region at the end of June and beginning of July 1941. Most testimonies say that the newly freed prisoners—activists of the prewar National Party—took part in them.