I had not intended to lend my voice to the discussion that ensued after the appearance
of Professor Jan T. Gross's book Neighbors, pertaining to the murder of Jews
carried out in July 1941 in the little town of Jedwabne in the Podlasie region.
Mainly because the discussion conducted to date, whilst raising many essential themes, had
ignored the most crucial fact: what had occurred in Jedwabne after the German army had
entered the area, i.e. who committed the mass murder of the Jewish population of Jedwabne,
when, and under what circumstances.
That is what should be written about first and foremost, the more so since Gross's theses,
in the light of certain sources, do not appear entirely true. On the other hand, the
documentation in my possession still does not authorize me to speak out publicly on
precisely that key issue.
Nevertheless, both in Gross's book as well as in Andrzej Żbikowski's article recently
published in Rzeczpospolita (January 4, 2001), such shocking statements were
articulated that they cannot be passed over in silence. They concern both the attitudes of
the Polish and Jewish population in the lands first occupied and subsequently annexed by
the Soviet Union, as well as the evaluation of those attitudes.
Before I address the subject proper, I feel I must clearly state several things at the
very outset. Murders carried out on any group of civilians cannot be justified. Nothing
justifies the killing of men, women or children simply because they represent some social
class, nation [i.e., ethnic group - ed.] or religion, because the meting-out of justice
must be done on an individual basis. Such crimes cannot be justified by one's own
convictions, nor by the orders of one's superior, nor "historical necessity" nor
the welfare of some other nation, class, religion or social group, nor the good of any
organization, military or civilian, overt or clandestine.
I should like those who read this text to be aware of the fact that such is my basic
position. I am also fundamentally opposed to murdering the soldiers of any military or
police formation simply because they are serving therein, especially when they are unarmed
or surrender. Whoever carries out such a murder, regardless of whom he represents, is to
me nothing more than a murderer.
Before evaluating the attitudes and behavior of different social and national groups in
the lands occupied by the Red Worker-Peasant Army (RWPA), one should recall some basic
facts, for without an awareness of the realities of that period it would be impossible to
understand the people living there and those swept in by the storm of war.
The German incursion into Podlasie horrified the general population, which received the
German forces with easily discernible hostility. The locals supported units of the Polish
Army that were being driven to the east. With regard to unmobilized reservists and youth
of pre-conscription age, many of them traveled eastward in search of a unit willing to
accept and arm them. Hence, a number of men from that region (including unmobilized ones)
ended up taking part in the defense of Grodno and the Sopoćkinie region-against the Red
Army.
The population of Podlasie, especially after the Battle of Andrzejów fought by the 18th
Polish Infantry Division, supported the small partisan detachments emerging in the area of
Czerwony Bór and the Biebrza Marshes, which saved them from destruction. The anti-German
attitudes of the locals were uniform and resolute.
The period following the incursion of the Red Army into the eastern regions of the
Republic of Poland may be broken down into three sub-periods. The first, referred to by
Prof. Ryszard Szawłowski (and not only by him!) as the Polish-Soviet war, lasted two
weeks, up till the start of October 1939, when organized resistance by larger combat units
of the Polish Army ceased, although individual subunits continued partisan-type actions.
The second was the conquest of the area, combined with a socio-political and economic
"revolution," pre-planned and carried out with the aid of the Soviet troops and
special services. That is why I have chosen to call it "a marionette
revolution". That was when the first arrests took place. This period ended in
November 1939 with the incorporation of the north-eastern lands of the Republic of Poland
into the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and of the south-eastern lands into the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In actuality, that
period lasted another two months, when the Soviet administrative system (republic, oblast',
raion) was finally introduced in the annexed areas. The third sub-period, early
1940 to June 1941, was marked on the one hand by unification with the USSR's
socio-economic system (forced collectivization of agriculture, strengthening of state farms,
completion of the nationalization of industry, trade, the banking system and the like). On
the other hand, it witnessed a violent increase in reprisals, especially in the first half
of 1940, in the form of mass arrests and deportations, which in the area of so-call
Western Belorussia lasted to the end and involved some 150,000 people. I wish to dwell a
bit on the latter development. Many do not realize that those actions were carried out in
accordance with the principle of collective responsibility.
The first deportation on February 9-10, 1940 encompassed military and civilian settlers
and foresters together with their families. The second, on 13 April 1940, involved those
whose family members (heads of households, brothers, sons) had been captured as Polish
soldiers, policemen and the like, or had fled abroad, gone into hiding or been arrested as
conspirators or "enemies of the people," i.e. as a socially dangerous element
(SOE). The third, carried out on June 29, 1940, mainly involved towns and encompassed so
called bezhency, including many Jews,
notably those who had registered to return to the part of Poland under German occupation.
That fact partially explodes the myth of Polish Jews joyfully welcoming the Red Army
solely due to their fear of the Germans. The last deportation began on June 14, 1941 in
the Wilno region (taken over when the Republic of Lithuania was liquidated in June 1940),
and in the lands of the Belorussian Republic on June 20. It was interrupted when the
Germans launched their aggression.
As we can see, all these acts of violence were undertaken on the basis of collective
responsibility. An entire family was held responsible for a father who had been a soldier,
for a brother who had fled. All those who had lived in a forester's house were considered
guilty. Blows were struck at the "nest". In Warsaw, for instance, the Germans
retaliated for armed street attacks by shooting all the inhabitants of the nearest
building, although they had no links to the resistance fighters, or by killing prisoners
in Pawiak prison, or the people of a village near which a military train had been blown
up. That collective responsibility encompassed children, women and the elderly. It was the
weakest who paid with their lives during transport or exile - in Siberia or "the
starvation steppes" of Kazakhstan.
Who carried out the terror? The NKVD and in the early period
also the RWPA, which had under its command Chekha-type
operational groups that followed the army "to clear the area," just as Einsatzgruppen
followed the Wehrmacht. What about the militia (police)? Few people know that, in
the years from 1939 to 1941, there were three different kinds of militia.
The first were the various emerging "red guards" and "red militias,"
consisting of locals armed with clubs, sawed-off shotguns, axes and revolvers, though
sometimes also machine guns, who backed up the RWPA in its "liberation march"
and implemented the "class anger" of social groups oppressed by "feudal
Poland." They generally appeared shortly after September 17, 1939 (or on the that
very day - a rather telling fact), and most often acted with bloodthirsty savagery, not
only behind the lines of the Polish Army but also after the incursion of the Red Army,
which gave local "revolutionary elements" several days of grace to settle past
scores and exercise class revenge.
Later, those "militias" were replaced by the Workers' Guard, set up in the
occupied territories in accordance with an order issued by the commander of the
Belorussian Front on September 16,1939, and by the Citizens' Militia, established on the
strength of a similar order of September 21,1939. Subsequently, after Western Belorussia
had been incorporated into the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, they were replaced
by the NKVD-linked Worker-Peasant Militia (WPM), initially comprising only newcomers
(so-called "easterners") [i.e., from the Soviet Union proper - ed.], later
supplemented by locals.
Apart from a small group of communists in the towns and even smaller ones in the
countryside, the Polish population responded to the USSR's aggression and the Soviet
system being created there the same way it had reacted to the German aggression. There are
thousands of diverse testimonies attesting to this. Participation by Polish peasants in
what were called selsovets (rural and
commune soviets) was no indication of anything, because those were bodies of only a
decorative nature. The executive committees and-even more important - the party and police
apparatuses controlling them were what mattered. It was the latter
who were frequently involved in the looting of the gentry manor houses and palaces left
behind by their owners.
By contrast, the Jewish population, especially youths and the town-dwelling poor, staged a
mass welcome for the invading army and took part in introducing the new order, some with
weapons in hand. This, too has been attested to by thousands of Polish, Jewish and Soviet
testimonies. There were also the reports of the chief commander of the Armed Combat Union, Gen.
Stefan Grot-Rowecki, there was the report of the emissary Jan Karski, and
there were accounts written down both during the war as well as years later. This has also
been reported in the works of Jan T. Gross himself who-while citing Polish accounts above
all, of which thousands are found in the archives of the Hoover Institution in the
US-arrived at conclusions which he expressed clearly and unequivocally.
The Soviet army was enthusiastically welcomed not only in areas formerly occupied by the Wehrmacht,
but also in border areas that the Germans had never entered. Moreover, those
"guards" and "militias," spouting up like mushrooms after a rainfall
in the wake of the Soviet aggression, consisted largely of Jews. And not only that. Jews
launched acts of rebellion against the Polish state by occupying localities, setting up
revolutionary committees there, arresting and executing representatives of Polish state
authorities, and attacking smaller and even quite large units of the Polish Army (as in
Grodno).
Dr Marek Wierzbicki, who has been for several years researching Polish-Belorussian
relations in what was called Western Belarus in 1939-1941, has also taken note of
Polish-Jewish relations. In a lengthy, as-yet-unpublished article, he writes about the
three-day battle between Jewish rebels in Grodno and the Polish Army and police (September
18, before the arrival of RWPA units), two-day clashes over nearby Skidel, and Jewish
revolts in Jeziory, Łunna, Wiercieliszki, Wielka Brzostowica, Ostryń, Dubno, Dereczyn,
Zelwa, Motol, Wołpa, Janów Poleski, Wołkowysk, Horodec and Drohiczyn Poleski. Not a
single German had been seen in any of those localities - the revolts were directed against
the Polish state.
This was armed collaboration, siding with the enemy, treason committed during days of
defeat. How large was the group of people who took part in it? We shall most likely never
be able to present any figures. At any rate, that phenomenon encompassed the entire area
in which the Belorussian Front of the RWPA was deployed.
Another matter was co-operation with organs of repression, above all the NKVD. First the
"militias," "red guards" and revolutionary committees, and later the
workers' guards and citizens' militias undertook such co-operation. In towns, they
consisted mainly of Polish Jews. Subsequently, when the Worker-Peasant Militias took
control of the situation, Jews - as Soviet documents have indicated - were considerably
over-represented in them. Polish Jews in civilian dress, wearing red arm-bands and armed
with rifles, were numerous participants in the arrests and deportations. That was the most
extreme example, but for Polish society the most glaring thing was the large number of
Jews in all Soviet public offices and institutions. The more so since Poles had been the
dominant group there before the war!
On September 20, 1940, at a conference in Minsk, the capital of the Belorussian Soviet
Socialist Republic, the head of the municipal NKVD office in Łomża stated: "Such a
practice has taken root here. The Jews have supported us and only they were always
visible. It has become fashionable for the director of every institution to boast that he
no longer has even a single Pole working for him. Many of us were simply afraid of the
Poles." At the same time, at party meetings in Białystok oblast',
"complaints" multiplied that one heard only Russian and Yiddish spoken in Soviet
offices, that Poles felt discriminated against, and that a cleaning woman in one
Białystok office was harshly rebuked for singing Polish songs while she worked. That was
in accordance with the truth and the then obligatory "party line," for at that
time at the top Soviet leadership level a "new policy" towards Poles had been
agreed.
In the afore-mentioned article, Marek Wierzbicki thus synthetically presented the
situation of that period: "The bloated Soviet administrative structures gave masses
of unemployed Jews an opportunity to find jobs. That was of no mean importance to them,
since the industrially impoverished towns of the eastern borderlands had provided few job
opportunities. Being considerably better educated than the Belorussian community, the
Jewish population provided numerous clerks, teachers and functionaries of the security
apparatus. That undoubtedly influenced Polish-Jewish relations, since Jews most frequently
took the place of previous clerks and teachers of Polish nationality.... Moreover, between
September and December 1939, there were many arrests of representatives of the Polish
community who had held more senior posts in the administration and political authorities
of the Polish state before the war or had been engaged in public affairs. Local Jews -
members of the interim administration or militia - were very helpful to the Soviet
authorities in tracking down and detaining them."
He continued, this time citing none other than Jan T. Gross: "It also occurred that
representatives of the Jewish population ridiculed Poles, emphasizing the sudden change of
fate that had befallen both communities. Often directed to Poles were such malicious
remarks as ' You wanted a Poland
without Jews, now you have Jews without Poland' or ' Your times have
ended.'"
Hence the participation of Jews in the Soviet apparatus, including the militia, is
documented in Polish accounts (especially in those on which Jan T. Gross has been basing
his books and articles for a quarter of a century), accounts written down during the war
and preserved at the Hoover Institution in the USA, as well as in documents of the Soviet
and party authorities of the former USSR that are now being analyzed, and in (Polish) Armed Combat Union reports
published long ago in the work "Armia Krajowa w dokumentach" [The Home Army in Documents] (vol.
I, London 1970).
Professor Gross therefore lacks justification when he states in Neighbors that,
"To put it simply,
enthusiastic Jewish response to entering Red Army units was not a widespread phenomenon at
all, and it is impossible to identify some innate, unique characteristics of Jewish
collaboration with the Soviets during the period 1939-1941."
The second part of that statement, this time pertaining to Poles, runs as follows:
"On the other
hand, it is manifest that the local non-Jewish population enthusiastically greeted
entering Wehrmacht units in 1941 and broadly engaged in collaboration with the Germans, up
to and including participation in the extermination campaign against the Jews. The
testimony by Finkelsztajn concerning how Radziłów's local Polish population received the
Germans reads like a mirror image of widely circulating stories about Galician Jews
receiving the Bolsheviks in 1939."
Without going into the merits of the issue, I should first like to call attention to the
methods. Hundreds of surviving accounts, the reports of Underground Poland, including that
of Jan Karski, who was favorably
disposed towards the Jews, do not justify such generalizations. And perhaps rightly so.
One must study the situation in various localities rather than relying on even the most
widespread general opinions. And yet Finkelsztajn's account and several accounts by
peasants from surrounding villages have justified passing judgment not on the attitude of
individual people, but on the entire local population (with the exception of Jews). The
same is the case with the thesis that the Polish population of the several-thousand-strong
town of Jedwabne murdered their Jewish neighbors, based on the testimony of Jews who had
escaped and managed to survive, as well as on UB materials, obtained as a
result of (undoubtedly cruel) interrogations in 1949 and 1953, at a time when Polish
bishops were being sentenced for betraying the Polish nation and spying for "the
imperialists".
I shall now move on to what has been referred to as Polish collaboration. Andrzej
Żbikowski has presented it more extensively than Prof. Gross has. It supposedly involved
the murder of Jews by Polish "gangs," composed primarily of people recently
released by the Germans from Soviet jails, as well as attacks on "retreating smaller
Soviet army groups," also carried out by such gangs. A plain and simple equation:
1939 equals 1941.
But, in the name of God, joyfully greeting Germans who arrive right in the middle of a
horrible deportation and thereby make it possible for hundreds of people to leave their
grim places of torture-the jails of places like Brześć, Łomża, Białystok and
Jedwabne-is one thing, attacking Red Army soldiers who had been occupation troops only the
day before is another, and killing soldiers of the Polish Army is something else again.
Indeed, Jews may not have had things too good in pre-war Poland, and there was undoubtedly
" a balance-sheet of wrongs,"
to quote Broniewski's poem. However, Jews were not deported to Siberia, they were not shot
or sent to concentration camps, they were not killed through starvation and hard labor. If
they did not regard Poland as their homeland, they did not have to treat it as an
occupation regime and join its mortal enemy in killing Polish soldiers and murdering
Polish civilians feeling to the east. They also did not have to take part in fingering
their neighbors for deportations, those heinous acts of collective responsibility.
Let us now move from general matters to the situation in the town of Jedwabne and the
surrounding rural community. Jan Gross is right in saying there were not many testimonies
regarding the town itself, but they are not that few. In fact, there are considerably more
than those on which he based his account of the burning of Jews on July 10, 1941. The
"New approach to sources" which he is promoting with regards to Jewish accounts
could be applied in this particular case. These, after all, were accounts provided by
persecuted individuals who were saved from annihilation only thanks to the Sikorski-Maisky agreement of
July 1941. These are the voices of eyewitness survivors of a crime. In their accounts,
they touch on "the Jewish problem" spontaneously and "from the heart,"
even though no one encouraged them to do.
Did Jedwabne Jews, like others, cordially welcome the Red Army incursion? The accounts
recorded during the war as well as those I obtained at the start of the 1990s indicate
that this was indeed the case.
First, accounts submitted to the army of Gen. Anders and archived in the
Hoover Institution, and now also available at the Eastern Archives in Warsaw.
Account No. 8356, recorded by cart maker Józef Rybicki from the town of Jedwabne: "
The Red Army was received by Jews who built arches. They removed the old authorities and
introduced new ones from amongst the local population (Jews and communists). The police
and teachers were arrested..."
Account No. 10708, recorded by a municipal government employee in Jedwabne, Tadeusz
Kiełczewski: "Right after the encroachment by the Soviet Army, a municipal
committee was spontaneously set up, composed of Polish communists (the chairman was the
Pole, Czesław Krytowczyk, and the members were Jews). The militia also consisted of
communist Jews. At first there were no reprisals, because they did not know the
population. The arrests started only after local communists had provided the necessary
information. Local militiamen searched the homes of people they felt were concealing
weapons. The main arrests by the Soviet authorities only started after the first
elections."
Account No. 8455, recorded by a locksmith-mechanic from Jedwabne, Marian Łojewski: "
Following the
incursion of the red army, first an order was issued for all the weapons owned by the
local population to be turned in. Anyone who held back would face the death penalty. Next,
searches were conducted in various houses, and that as a result of accusation by Jewish
shopkeepers who accused Poles of stealing different goods from them in their absence.
The arrests took place of many people against whom local Jews had held grudges over having
been prosecuted by the Polish State and over their persecution."
Account No. 2675, recorded by wood sorter Aleksander Kotowski of Jedwabne: "I was
not present when the red army entered. Admitted to the authorities were Jews and Polish
communists who had done time in prison for communist activities. They led the NKVD to apartments and houses
and the denounced patriotic Polish citizens."
And finally, the account given by Łucja Chojnowska, née Chołowińska, on May 9, 1991.
Mrs. Chołowińska, the sister of Jadwiga, whose married name was Laudańska, found
herself in the spring of 1940 in a partisan camp at the Kobielno forest range, situated
amidst the Biebrza Marshes. During a battle between Polish partisans and the Soviet army
on June 23, 1940, she was captured. Our conversation, which took place in Jedwabne,
pertained to that battle, not the situation in the town both women had formerly lived in.
Nevertheless, in the course of the conversation, Łucja Chołowińska-Chojnowska said:
"In Jedwabne, inhabited mostly by Jews, there were only three houses that had not
displayed red flags when the Russians marched in. Our house was among them. Before the
first deportation, a Jewish woman, a neighbor lady (we had got along with the Jews very
well) ran over and warned us we were on the deportation list. Then my sister Jadwiga, her
child (a four-year-old girl), and I fled to Orlików, taking along only some
clothing." Let us note that the Jewish neighbor lady knew who was on the deportation
list, even though that was the most closely guarded of secrets. So much for starters.
Here are more questions. Who made up the militia in Jedwabne and what was their
attitude towards townsfolk regarded as being too closely linked to the Polish state, as
unfavorably disposed towards the new system, or as enemies? Did terror also take place in
Jedwabne? If so, how did it come about, and was it implemented only through the agency of
the Soviet citizens known as "easterners"? Or was it bolstered by
"former" Polish citizens, inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding
countryside? Let us look for the answers in what historians call "personal
documents" created during the war and later.
Account No. 1559 was given by Kazimierz Sokołowski, a worker from Jedwabne:
"Soviet authorities were set up a militia, mainly from communist Jews, and the
arrests of farmers and workers on whom the militia had informed began. They imposed heavy
taxes on the population, they imposed taxes on the churches and arrested a priest. Mass
searches began in the homes of unfavorably disposed people, enemies of the people. . . .
The local populace in the main avoided voting [on October 22, 1939 - T.S.]. All day, the
militia led them by force and at gunpoint to the polling station. Shortly after the vote,
they staged a night-time raid, arrested entire families and deported them to the
USSR."
Account No. 1394, written down by Jedwabne worker Stanisław Gruba: "Homes were
raided in search of weapons, anti-communist literature, etc. Suspects were immediately
arrested, as were the families of priests, and put in prison so an investigation could be
held."
Account No. 2589, recorded by a farmer from the rural Jedwabne area, Józef Karwowski: "In
October 1939, the NKVD ordered pre-election
meetings and rallies. People were forcibly herded to them by the NKVD and militia. Whoever
resisted was immediately arrested and never heard from again."
Account No. 2545 was provided by Józef Makowski, a farmer from the rural Jedwabne area: "They
arrested people, tied their hands, threw them into cellars and pig-sties, starved them,
didn't give them any water to drink, and brutally beat them to force them to confess to
belonging to Polish organizations. I myself was beaten unconscious during NKVD
interrogations in Jedwabne, Łomża and Minsk."
Account No. 8356 was written down by Józef Rybicki of Jedwabne (whom we have already
met): "Searches were conducted in the homes of better-off farmers, whose
furniture, clothing and valuables they took away. A few days later, they came at night and
arrested them. They took people to meetings by force. Anyone that resisted was called a vreditel
["wrecker" or "troublemaker" - tansl.] and arrested. The village
mayor drew up lists, going from house to house and writing down the names of many people
and the year they were born. The commission
comprised soldiers and Jews and local communists. Candidates to the assembly were imposed
from above - those were Jews who had come from the USSR and local communists."
Let us now move on to the post-war accounts I received while preparing a story on the
battle of the Kobielno forest range.
Jerzy Tarnacki, a partisan from Kobielno, wrote in a letter of October 24, 1991: "A
patrol comprising a Pole named Kurpiewski and a Jew called Czapnik came for me and my
brother Antek. During the arrests we managed to flee from our own back yard. I went into
hiding in the village of Kajtanowo [Kajetanowo - T.S.] at the place of a friend, Wacław
Mierzejewski. From him I learnt of the existence of a Polish partisan unit on the other
side of the River Biebrza. I was in hiding from January to mid-April 1940."
Stefan Boczkowski of Jedwabne wrote in his letter of January 14,1995: "The local
Jews of Jedwabne donned red arm-bands and helped the militia arrest 'enemies of the
people,' 'spies,' etc."
Dr. Kazimierz Odyniec, a physician, the son of sergeant Antoni Odyniec, who was killed in
action at Kobielno on June 23, 1940, wrote in his letter of June 20, 1991: "Towards
the end of April 1940, a local Jew came to our home in the uniform of a Russian militiaman
and told my father to report to the NKVD. . . . My father told us good-bye, but first had
my mother follow that militiaman and see where else he would go, because he had a
dozen-odd names on his list. As it later turned out, my father did not go to the NKVD. The
next day the NKVD arrested my mother, demanding that she tell them where my father had
hidden." In a letter written to me after Jan Gross's book came out, Dr Odyniec
noted: "Gross emphasizes the cruelty of the Polish side without saying a word
about the behavior of a sizeable group of Jews who openly co-operated with the Soviets and
were the people who showed the Soviets who should be arrested or deported. I can give you
an example close to home." Here he repeated the above account. "I also
remember that the corpses of Polish partisans after the fighting in Kobielno were
transported by the Jew Całko, my Uncle Władek Łojewski's neighbor" (Letter of
October 25, 2000).
Roman Sadowski, a Home Army officer, the husband of Kazimierz Odyniec's sister Halina, who
had been deported on June 20, 1941, into the depths of the USSR, wrote me on November 10,
2000: "During the Soviet occupation Jews were the 'masters' of this region. They
entirely co-operated with the Soviet authorities. According to the accounts of my wife's
cousins, it was Jews together with the NKVD that compiled lists of those to be interned
(deported)."
Although I had not conducted a systematic, nor sufficiently early search for documents
pertaining to the attitudes of Jews from Jedwabne and its environs, it can be seen that a
considerable number of spontaneous and unsolicited testimonies have accumulated. I cannot
say, as Gross did, that "I found only one statement providing specific
information about the kind of reception that the entering Soviet army received from the
population of Jedwabne in September 1939-as we know, this was the moment when the memory
of Jewish disloyalty was fixed for many Poles-and it is none too reliable, for it was
written more than fifty years after the events it describes" [Strzembosz is
quoting from the Polish edition of Neighbors; the corresponding passage in
the American edition breaks off after "in September 1939" - ed.]. Gross then
goes on to tell about the information obtained by Agnieszka Arnold during her work on a
film on the burning of Jews in Jedwabne.
Not being a specialist in those problems, I have cited the five accounts above, which were
mainly recorded before 1945 and concerning the attitudes of Jedwabne Jews towards the
Soviet authorities who were then in the process of installing themselves. I have also
quoted nine accounts on the activities of the militia, comprising mainly Jedwabne Jews,
although their commandant was a Pole, Czesław Kurpiewski, a well-known pre-war communist.
To that should be added an extremely characteristic piece of information, independently
repeated in two separate accounts: apart from Jewish militiamen, Jews in civilian
clothing, with red arm-bands and armed with rifles, also took part in the arrests.
The same documents from the archives of the Hoover Institution, which, after all, Jan
Gross was quite familiar with, provide a list of towns and smaller localities in which
Jews enthusiastically welcomed the Red Army and later manned militia posts. Those towns
are Zambrów, Łomża and Stawiski and the villages are Wizna, Szumowo (the militia
commander there was a Jew named Jabłonka), Rakowo-Boginie, Bredki, Zabiele, Wądołki
Stare, and Drozdowo.
Also known is a characteristic incident that occurred in the Jewish town of Trzcianne,
situated opposite Jedwabne across the River Biebrza. According to the account (of August
16, 1987) by Czesław Borowski, who lived in the village of Zubole adjacent to Trzcianne,
the incident occurred as follows: "Somewhere towards the end of September, perhaps
at the start of October 1939, the Germans had withdrawn from the area but the Russians
still hadn't arrived, so a kind of neutral zone arose. In Czerwony Bór there was still
fighting going on. In Trzcianne, Jews were preparing to welcome the encroaching Red Army.
Patrols of Jewish militia went out ahead as far as Okrągłe (a bend in the road and bus
stop) in the direction of Mońki. Seeing a cloud of dust in the distance and believing
that to be the Red Army, they moved back to the welcome arch built at the head of the
village [town - T.S.]. But those were not Soviet soldiers, but rather 10 to 15 Polish
uhlans [cavalrymen] moving through that neutral zone. There they saw the welcome arch and
a welcoming rabbi with bread and salt. The uhlans charged the crowd, destroyed the
triumphal arch, struck out with the flat of their sabres, smashed up a few Jewish shops
and wanted to burn down the town, but that did not occur. The rabbi's daughter died of a
heart attack. The uhlans rode off. The Jews of Trzcianne had weapons ...."
That account, recorded by me nearly 50 years after the event occurred, has been verified
by Russian sources. According to the latter, at the end of September 1939 "a band of
Polish soldiers" commanded by two landowners, Henryk Klimaszewski and Józef
Nieczecki, attacked the town, where they engaged in "plunder and a pogrom of the
Jewish population". During that action, Henryk Klimaszewski was said to have called
for settling scores with the Bolsheviks and Jews, saying: "Beat the Jews for Grodno
and Skidel, the time to settle accounts has come, down with communists; we'll butcher
every last Jew".
Apart from the Hoover Institution collection, with which Prof. Gross is familiar, and
aside from the accounts I obtained, there are other testimonies to the behavior of Jews
from Jedwabne in 1939-1941. In their article "To Survive" (published by Kontakty
on July 19, 1988), Danuta and Aleksander Wroniszewski noted the account of a Jedwabne
inhabitant: "I remember how the Russians loaded the Poles onto carriages to be taken
to Siberia. On top of each carriage was a Jew armed with a rifle. Mothers, wives and
children knelt before the carriages, begging for mercy and help. The last time this
happened was June 20, 1941."
Did the Polish inhabitants of Jedwabne and the surrounding villages enthusiastically
welcome the Germans as saviors? Yes, they did! If someone pulls me out of a blazing house
in which I could burn to a crisp in seconds, I will embrace and thank that person. Even if
the next day I regard him as yet another mortal enemy. At that time, the Germans rescued
hundreds of local villagers (perhaps also Jedwabne residents?) who had for days been
hiding in the fields or the brush-covered slopes of the Biebrza. They saved them from
being sent to their death in the wastelands of Kazakhstan or the Siberian taiga. Everyone
already knew by then what such exile meant: letters and other signals from the spetsposoleks had been
getting through. The deportations were accompanied by a simultaneous wave of arrests,
often not identified by historians, of suspects who ended up in prison camps or in the
prisons for long sentences that they often failed to survive.
Let us not wonder at their joy nor at those "bands," as Andrzej Żbikowski calls
them, for attacking groups of Soviet soldiers leaving the area. Until only yesterday their
persecutors represented one of the cruelest systems known to mankind.
Not long ago, a very specific and very credible source was published: The Chronicle
of the Benedictine Sisters of Holy Trinity Abbey in Łomża (1939-1954). Published in
Łomża in 1995, it was compiled by Sister Alojza Piesiewiczówna. Let us quote the
fragments dealing with the June 20-22, 1941:
"June 20. The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A horrible day for Poles under
Soviet subjugation. Massive deportations to Russia. From early morning carts full of
Polish families rolled through town to the railway station. Better-off Polish families,
the families of nationalists, Polish patriots, the intelligentsia, and the families of
those in Soviet prisons were taken away. It was difficult even to comprehend what
categories of people were being deported. In Polish souls there was weeping, moaning and
terrible despair. But the Jews and Soviets, on the other hand, were triumphant. It is
impossible to describe what Poles are going through. A hopeless situation. But the Jews
and Soviets are demonstratively overjoyed, threatening soon to deport every last Pole. And
that could well have been expected because on June 20 and on the following day, the
twenty-first, they carted people to the station without interruption. . . . And God truly
saw our tears and blood.
June 22. In the early morning there was the droning sound of airplanes and every so often
the blast of bombs exploding over the town. . . . Several German bombs fell on the more
important Soviet outposts. An incredible panic broke out among the Soviets. They began
fleeing in disarray. Poles were very happy. The sound of each exploding bomb filled their
souls with inexpressible joy. Within a few hours there wasn't a single Soviet left in
town, and the Jews were hiding somewhere in basements and cellars. Before noon, prisoners
left their jail cells. People on the streets embraced one another and wept for joy. The
Soviets had withdrawn without their weapons, and they did not fire a single shot in
response to the approaching Germans.
That evening there wasn't a single Soviet in Łomża. But the situation remained unclear -
the Soviets had fled, but the Germans had not entered. The next day, June 23, the town was
just as empty. The civilian population began looting. All Soviet stores, bases and shops
were smashed and robbed. In the evening of June 23, several Germans entered the town - the
people breathed a sigh of relief".
During those days there could have been no other reaction. Several weeks later the Armed Combat Union hastily
rebuilt the underground network broken up by the Soviets. Weapons left by the fleeing
Russians were extensively gathered up and the "interregnum" was used to prepare
for a struggle against the next occupation regime. There are also numerous testimonies to
that, as well as to such facts as robberies, retaliation and pogroms. As usual, the
reality is far more complex than we are able to imagine.