The Crime and the Silence Read Free Page B

village saddled their horses and went to Jedwabne in the hope of looting Jewish stores and workshops, while a few people who didn’t want to take part in the pogrom fled from Jedwabne to relatives in the surrounding villages. A few days after the burning he was invited by a friend bragging about having moved with his family into a house that had belonged to Jews. He heard about the Jews having been beaten, rounded up, forced to say Christian prayers.
    â€œI go to Jedwabne sometimes,” he continues, “it’s an unhappy place, backward, without infrastructure. There are no jobs, people are crushed, they feel they’re victims. One of the slogans of the National Party before the war was that Jews were the cause of poverty. Now there are no Jews, but the poverty is the same.”
    I return to Warsaw by a circuitous route—via Jedwabne. I want to visit Leon Dziedzic, a farmer from near Jedwabne who has given several press interviews. This is rare in Jedwabne; generally the residents refuse to talk to journalists. From Dziedzic’s account it emerges that Poles not only carried out but also initiated the killing. “They say that the next day the German police station commandant flew into a rage at the Poles who’d led the pogrom: ‘You said you’d clean up the Jews, but you don’t know how to clean up a damn thing.’ He meant they hadn’t buried the remains and he was afraid of infection spreading, because it was hot and the dogs were already getting to them,” Dziedzic explained.
    But Leon Dziedzic has left Poland. From the time an article about him appeared, for which he’d allowed himself to be photographed, whenever he rode his bike to a store, someone would puncture his tires. He went to the States, where his wife and four sons had lived for many years.
    I find Leszek Dziedzic, the fifth son, who stayed on the farm. This fall he was visiting his family in the States while his wife stayed in Poland with their children, ten-year-old Tomek and fourteen-year-old Piotrek. “I came back earlier than I’d planned because I was worried for my wife and children after what my dad had said. And on the street people were saying: ‘Don’t think you can get away, we’re ready for you.’ We fear for our kids. We take them to school and pick them up.”
    I go to see Janina Biedrzycka, the daughter of Śleszynski, the man who owned the barn in which the Jews were burned. I already know how she’s received previous uninvited guests. First she refused to let a film director in, and the next time she told her, “I thought you were a Jewess but the priest told me you were Evangelical. There were decent Evangelicals among the Germans.” She met a local reporter with the words “Do you have any ID? You don’t have a Polish name. I don’t care either way because they all listen to the Jews anyway, nobody wants to know the truth.”
    â€œThere are houses that belonged to the Jews in Jedwabne, but I live in my own,” she begins the conversation with me. “I didn’t get anything out of it. I know how vengeful the Yids are.”
    She can’t say the word “Jew” in anything under a shriek. Of the atrocity, she says it was the work of the Germans.
    DECEMBER 15, 2000
    I visit my cousin Oleś Wołyński. Gross’s book didn’t shock Oleś. The idea of Jews being murdered by their neighbors was a plausible scenario.
    Before the war, Oleś’s mother and father were active in the Communist International and Oleś spent the first years of his life in Moscow. When his parents fell victim to the Great Purge—both were shot in 1937—he was put in an orphanage, and from there he went to the Lubyanka prison and then to the Gulag.
    â€œIn Siberia I didn’t encounter any anti-Semitism,” he says. “I first heard anti-Semitic talk in 1954 in Mińsk, still in the Soviet Union. In