The Crime and the Silence Read Free

began to cry. Right away a crowd started to gather, yanking the elderly man back and challenging him. They thought he was a Jew and the boy a Polish child who was going to be turned into matzo. Just because Felek was blond and his grandfather wore a cap. Not long after there was a pogrom in Kraków.
    â€œHatred,” Jacek goes on, “comes from a person having a subconscious feeling of guilt. At some level he knows a whole people was destroyed here, and he benefited from it, because he’s got a house or at least a pillow that belonged to a Jew. He won’t face up to it and hatred takes root in him.”
    He quotes a passage from a text published in the Gazeta by Jacek Å»akowski, a prominent political commentator: “Jan Gross speaks for himself, and I for myself. None of us has the right to reproach another for what happened to his compatriots or ancestors.” “Nothing good ever came of people not feeling responsible,” Jacek comments.
    DECEMBER 5, 2000
    A letter to Adam Michnik from Kazimierz Laudański. The older brother of Jerzy and Zygmunt Laudański, who were sentenced to fifteen and twelve years in prison respectively, for the killing of Jews in Jedwabne, presents his version of events. In it, the Germans are the main protagonists, actors, whereas the Jewish Communists “together with the NKVD drew up lists of Polish families for deportation to Siberia.”
    One can’t help asking: if we accept that the crime was committed by the Germans, what can it have to do with Jews denouncing Poles to the NKVD?
    Protesting the vilification of his brothers, Kazimierz Laudański praises his family’s patriotism.
    Jan Gross, who read the documents in the case conducted against the Jedwabne murderers after the war, found among them a letter from Zygmunt Laudański to the Communist authorities, describing how he had been an NKVD informant during the Soviet occupation and had joined the Polish Workers Party after the war. “It is on shoulders like these that our labor system can be built,” he wrote. Gross was struck by “the relentless conformism of a man who tries to anticipate the expectations of each successive regime in an age of gas ovens and engages himself to the hilt each time—first as an NKVD informant, then as a Jew-killer, finally by joining the Polish Workers Party.”
    Kazimierz concludes his letter to Michnik with the words “We were and are always prepared to serve our country pro publico bono .”
    This is apparently too much for Adam. The embargo is lifted. I phone Laudański to arrange an interview for the Gazeta .
    DECEMBER 9, 2000
    Pisz, a hundred kilometers north of Jedwabne. Kazimierz Laudański is waiting for me at the turnoff to the little road leading to his house. Before we even reach the house he has asked me where my parents are from and what my mother’s surname was. There was nothing wrong with my mother’s maiden name, and her first name was also just as it should be. At least after a Pole who was in love with her got her Aryan papers and a baptism certificate, and married her. That’s how Lea Horowicz disappeared in Lvov in 1942. She disappeared so completely that I only learned of my origins as an adult by accident, standing in the street.
    My mother didn’t keep in touch with her family; no uncle or cousin ever visited our house. I accepted that my mother, an independent-minded, rebellious person, found family ties and gatherings a boring, middle-class obligation that she didn’t feel like fulfilling. Only when I was fully grown and graduated from college did I meet a man in his fifties at our dacha outside Warsaw, whom my mother introduced as the son of her beloved sister murdered in the Soviet Union in 1937, at the time of the Great Purge. I was with friends, so I just said hello to him and ran on to the river. A few years passed before I saw him again. I told him he was the only relative I knew