The Crime and the Silence Read Free Page A

on my mother’s side—perhaps he knew something about our family? “Our grandfather Hirsz Horowicz…,” my cousin Oleś Wołyński began.
    I systematically called all the friends and acquaintances in my address book from A to Z . “I’m Jewish,” I announced. Somehow the fact didn’t make much of an impression on anyone but me, though a Solidarity advisor I knew suggested we not take any more people of Jewish origin on at the editorial office of the Tygodnik Masowsze (Masowsze Weekly), Solidarity’s underground paper, which I had cofounded. (“There are so many of you already, and if you get caught, it might hurt the cause,” he said—but in good faith and with genuine concern, not hostility.) The biggest surprise was that most of my friends already “knew.” If only because the mother of one of them had been in the same class as my mother at a renowned Jewish gymnasium, or high school, before the war.
    â€œWhy did no one tell me?” I asked them. One of them was convinced I knew but had decided to pass for a hundred percent Polish (I’d often asked him what it was like being Jewish). Another friend thought it was up to my mother to reveal my origins (he apparently accepted the supposition—to him self-evident—that Jewishness was something shameful that had to be “revealed”). A third concluded that if I didn’t know, I was better off.
    Kazimierz Laudański invites me into the house. A well-kept villa in the center of town, elegant china on the table. He’s prepared for me a map of the town as it was in 1941, drawn on graph paper. The street names, churches, cemeteries are marked in blue pen, the synagogue and barn in red. Of the massacre in Jedwabne, he says it resulted from German orders. When I ask how many Germans were there, I’m told there was a uniformed German on every corner. I ask him to point out on the map where they stood. He draws four little crosses. Four Germans.
    â€œThe Jews in Jedwabne, whether they were burned that day or not, their fate was sealed,” Kazimierz Laudański says. “The Germans would have killed them sooner or later. Such a small thing and they slap it on the Poles, on my brothers of all people. We forgave the Gestapo, we forgave the NKVD, and here we have a little quarrel between Jews and Poles and no one can forgive?” Laudański goes on: “It’s not about defending my brothers. They were tried, rightly or wrongly, and you can’t convict them again for the same thing. I’m meeting you so you can tell Mr. Michnik that we shouldn’t be reopening old wounds. It’s not right to make our people out to be criminals. It’s wicked to accuse Poles of such things. And it’s not the time to launch a campaign to teach the Poles what’s right, when Jewish finance is attacking Poland.”
    I persuade Kazimierz Laudański that to write a piece for the paper I need to meet his brothers, too. We agree that I’ll come back.
    DECEMBER 10, 2000
    Kazimierz Mocarski, a retired school director who before the war lived in Nadbory, a village ten kilometers from Jedwabne, wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazeta . I visit him in his little town on the Baltic Sea.
    In his letter he described prewar Jedwabne: “Times were hard, we counted every penny. The richer Jewish shops could afford lower prices. The Poles reacted by knocking down stalls and smashing windows. Poisonous anti-Semitism, myths about Jews killing Christ, drove some of the people crazy with hatred.”
    He was fourteen at the time. He remembers that two days before the massacre a group of Jews passed by his house. “My mother was baking rye bread and gave them two loaves. She warned them, ‘Run as far away as you can,’ because we already knew the Jews had been burned in Radziłów the day before.”
    He knows from his mother that some of the peasants in their