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In the summer of 1941, after Nazi Germany had attacked the USSR, a wave of pogroms
against Jews passed through, from Lithuania to Bessarabia, along the frontlines.
Inhabitants of the territories which were occupied by the Soviets after 1939
(Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Romanians) took part in these pogroms. In the Lomza
District and in the Bialystok Region, Polish people were also among the
perpetrators of the crimes against the Jews. The best known [Polish] crimes
against Jews, those in Jedwabne and in nearby Radzilow, were not the only ones,
though the number of their victims was the greatest.
On the borderline of Mazovia and Podlasie, the anti-Jewish
acts of violence occurred in more than 20 localities. The intensity of these
events attests that they had not been isolated incidents, but rather fragments
of a more common phenomenon.
The historians who began to investigate the murder in Jedwabne after the publishing
of "Neighbors" by Jan T. Gross had been surprised by finding out that in the
first years after the end of the 2nd World War, in Bialystok, Lomza and Elk,
more than 60 trials had been conducted against Poles accused of the
participation in the crimes against Jews, committed during the first
weeks of the German occupation of those territories. The research conducted by
Dr. Andrzej Zbikowski revealed that more than one hundred persons had been
brought to the courts, indicted for various violent acts of aggression against
Jews. The defendants were accused not only of robbery and denunciation, of
beatings and single homicides, but also of the participation in mass
murders. For many decades the court files, unknown to the researchers, remained
in the Archives of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in
Poland. It is likely that other documents, unknown to the historians,
are still waiting to be discovered in the local States Archives.
"A Fragment of an Uninvestigated Problem"
In the largest and the best known case, that of the Jedwabne mass murder, in the trial
of May 1949, 22 men were accused and 10 of them had been legally sentenced. The
perpetrators of the crimes in other localities were judged, in the most of
the cases, individually. For example, in the case of [a mass murder of Jews by
Poles] in Radzilow there had been eight separate trials. In Suchowola, 15
persons were accused of the participation in the pogrom against Jews, in
Goniadz, 9 men were judged for that crime. But in most of the
cases, only individual perpetrators had been tried for these crimes.
The evidence collected in the legal proceedings indicates that only a small and
haphazardly selected part of the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish actions had
been brought to the court. During the investigation into the crime in Jedwabne,
the witnesses and the suspects alike had mentioned several dozen of the alleged
participants of the pogrom. But not a single one of them has been even
questioned. The same had happened during other trials. It also occurred that
some of the culprits testified as the witnesses of the defense, on behalf of the
accused.
The solidarity of the local communities, protecting their members, was very
symptomatic. In the files of the trials, one may find collective petitions and
"Affidavits of the Loyalty," signed by several dozens of local people. Although
in court many people defended the accused in question as "non guilty," nobody
denied that the anti-Jewish actions involving Poles effectively took place, and
that other culprits (often mentioned by their names) had taken part in them.
Very seldom the victimized Jews themselves were witnesses in these trials. The great
majority of them had been killed in the Holocaust, organized by the Nazi murder
machine. Those few who had survived and testified in the first phase of the
legal proceedings, left Poland before the beginning of the trial and their
testimonies were not considered by the court.
The documents found until then show that 27 Poles had been legally sentenced for
their participation in the crimes against Jews, committed in the summer of 1941
in the Lomza District and in the Bialystok Region. The courts sentenced them to
prison terms from 2-and-a-half years to life-imprisonment. An exceptional
commutation of punishment was often practiced by the courts. A death sentence
had been ruled upon in four cases. But only one death sentence had ever been
implemented: in the case of Wladyslaw Grodzki, the commander of the so-called
Citizens' Guard, and the chief organizer of the pogrom in Jasionowka.
All these trials were but a fragment of a much larger, and until then,
unexplored problem of the post-war accounting for those who collaborated with the Nazi's. Not many
people know that tens of thousands of culprits had been brought to court by
virtue of the Decree of 31st August 1944: "About the Punishment of the
Fascist-Nazi Criminals Responsible for Murders and Persecution of the Civil
Population and P.O.W.'s, and of the Traitors of the Polish Nation." According to
the statistics of the Ministry of Justice, about 18,000 of these culprits were
sentenced to punishment during the years from 1944 until 1960.
One quarter of them constituted German war criminals, but the majority were Polish
citizens. In spite of the fact that during the "Stalinist" period [from 1944
until 1956] the "August Decree" had been very often misused as a legal tool to
fight the anti-communist Underground Forces, at least several thousands of the
convicts were authentic [Nazi] collaborators. [By the power of this Decree, a Communist
court in Poland sentenced to death, among others, General Emil Fieldorf, nom de guerre "Nil," one of the best known Polish guerilla soldiers, the
war-time commander of the Diversion HQ of the Polish underground Home Army, AK].
The Hate, the Revenge, the Plunder
Today, after 60 years, it's difficult to judge the participation of particular persons
in the anti-Jewish actions. But the court files are helpful to learn about the
mechanism of these events. For a historian of today, one of the most important
sources is the testimony of the Jewish survivors, presented to the Jewish
Historical Commissions just after the end of the war. Among the most valuable
testimonies, there is an outstanding account made by the members of a 6-person
Finkielsztejn
family from Radzilow, the family who, in full force, had survived
the war and the Holocaust. It seems that they owe their survival to
the fact that two weeks after the pogrom they had accepted the Baptism in a
local [Catholic] church and, as Christians, they were less endangered by
denunciation. For the next few years they were hiding in the households of some
local farmers, in a village near to their native town of Radzilow.
The outbreak of the anti-Jewish violence caused by local Poles happened at an
exceptional time and place. Due to a lack of the administrative power after the withdrawal
of the Soviet forces, in many [Polish] towns and villages, people had organized
temporary Polish authorities and so called Citizens' Guards, sometimes armed. In
the first weeks of a new, German occupation, these local authorities were
tolerated by the German Military Administration. Members of the
[Polish] Citizens' Guards often initiated or performed the anti-Jewish pogroms.
A good pretext to start them usually took the form of revenge against the real
or presumed Soviet collaborators. And all Jews were treated as such. In many
cases, the perpetrators of the pogroms were people that had been just released
from Soviet prisons. For example, in Goniadz, members of the local Citizens'
Guard arrested 40 "Communists," all of them Jews. After three days of tortures,
they murdered all the captives in a local Jewish graveyard and, after that, they
plundered their property. The perpetrators intended to burn alive the Jews in a
Jewish school at the town's center, but they resigned after some protests of the
neighbors, who were afraid of fire. It's interesting that Germans executed some
of the [Polish] plunderers, a few days later. The plunder of the Jewish property
had been, seemingly, the main reason for the aggression against local Jews,
apart from a purported "revenge for the Soviet occupation." In many testimonies
about the mass murders of Jews, including those from Jedwabne, Jasionowka, Kolno
or Suchowola, there is to be found information about peasants, who had been
coming to these towns from the nearby villages, in order to plunder the property
of the [Jewish] victims. Such participation of the villagers [in the pogroms of
Jews] was observed as typical also before the war, in that part of Poland.
During a pogrom in Radzilow, in the year 1933, four perpetrators, who had been
killed by the rifle shots of the State Police, came from outside of town.
Not Always the Same Scenario
It was the District of Lomza, which occupied a special place on a "map" of the
anti-Jewish excesses in Poland, in the second half of the 1930's. This fact
should be linked to a high popularity of the National Party ["Stronnictwo
Narodowe"]. and its ideology, exposing strong anti-Semitism. In the year 1930,
in the communities of Wasosz and Jedwabne, over 70 percent of the voters cast
their votes for the National Party. It is interesting to recall that
the national leader and the chief ideologist of that party, Roman Dmowski, spent
the last years of his life in Drozdowo, just about 10 miles from Jedwabne. The
attitude of the local population toward the Jews had been formed by the
widespread anti-Semitism [of the National Party]. But the anti-Jewish actions,
organized in the summer of 1941, probably could fall short of genocidal murder
if not for the permission, instigation or example shown by the Germans. Since
the first day of their occupation, the Germans were indicating that the Jews
were not protected by any law. The [Polish-organized] pogroms of the Jews were
parallel to the executions of Jews, performed by the Germans. In a series of the
orders, issued between the 29th of June and the 2nd of July in 1941, the Head of
the Chief Security Office of the German "Reich," Reinhard Heydrich, ordered to
the commanders of the Special Operations Units of the Security Police: "Make no
obstacle to any self-purge activity by anti-communist or anti-Jewish circles on
the new occupied territories. On the contrary: instigate this activity, without
leaving any traces, and if necessary intensify them and push them into a proper
direction." But the events in the Lomza District and in the Bialystok Region
could not be reduced to a single scenario. In some localities, Polish
inhabitants took part in the anti-Jewish actions that had been started by
Germans. In Suchowola, [Poles] drowned Jews in a pond, and burned alive a group
of the [Jewish] victims in one of the Jewish houses. In Rajgrod, Gestapo men
[members of the Nazi Secret Police] instigated the Polish escorts to execute the
Jews by allowing one of them to shoot at the Jews. Then, the mass murders [of
Jews] in both Radzilow and Jedwabne was probably initiated by the same Special Unit of the Security Police, commanded by Hermann Schaper.
In Wasosz, the Germans acted with even more discretion. It is known that before
the pogrom, some members of Gestapo had come to the village, together with a
Polish interpreter, but the murder of the Jews was committed by local [Polish]
"activists" on the night of 5/6 July 1941 [without the German participation].
There were also some cases of spontaneous pogroms, such as in Grajewo, Wasilkow
or Rutki, where the arrival of a German military unit resulted in stopping of
the violence. One of probably the bloodiest pogroms, that in
Szczuczyn, was carried out [by Poles themselves] on the night of 27th June
[1941], before Heydrich issued the above quoted orders. That pogrom, taking 300
victims [according to similar German and Jewish records], was organized in the
absence of the Germans. Some of the mass murders had a purely criminal origin.
One of the cruelest ones occurred in a village of Bzury, where some [Polish] men
who had arrived from Szczuczyn murdered 20 Jewish women in a local forest. The
Jewish women worked in a nearby farm. The bandits had raped some women, before
killing them, and after that, robbed their garments.
The Truth and the Remembrance
The truth about the participation of Poles in the anti-Jewish actions in the Lomza
District and in the Bialystok Region had been for a long time forgotten, and
only the recent discussion about "the case of Jedwabne" brought it back to the
Polish national conscience, in a very painful way. But nobody can run away from
the truth. The remembrance of these [tragic] events is going to face the present
inhabitants of Jedwabne, but not only in that town, also in other localities,
where Jews were murdered [by Poles] in the summer of 1941. For instance, in
Radzilow. There, a mass murder of Jews on the 7th of July 1941 had been
performed, on German initiative, by members of the local Citizens' Guard, with
an active participation of a group of the inhabitants of the town and the nearby
villages. This mass murder [of Jews] has been very well documented. But a
commemorating plate on the obelisk erected to the victims of the mass murder [of
Jews in Radzilow] still gives a falsified testimony. The inscription on the
plate does not properly identify the perpetrators or even the time of the crime. The
text reads like this: "In August 1941, the fascists murdered here 800 people of
the Jewish nationality, and 500 of them were burned alive in a barn. Peace to
their memory."
A note about the author:
Krzysztof Persak (born in 1968) - Historian and research
fellow at the Office for Public Education of the Institute of National
Remembrance (IPN) and of the Institute of the Political Studies of the Polish
Academy of Science (PAN) in Warsaw, Poland. He is co-editor (together with Pawel Machcewicz)
of a two-volume study book, entitled "Wokol Jedwabnego" [All Around Jedwabne].
IPN: About Jedwabne
The study book "Wokol Jedwabnego" [All Around Jedwabne], edited and published by the
Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), first sold in Poland in November 2002,
is composed of two volumes (about 1,600 pages in all). The first volume
("Studies") contains articles by 9 historians from the IPN and other academic
centers, presenting the problem of the crimes committed in Jedwabne and in other
localities as a part of the history of this region of Poland: from the
description of the Polish-Jewish relations there before the 2nd World War, to
the description of the German policy of the extermination of the Jews and the
anti-Jewish acts of the local Polish population during wartime, until a legal
analysis of the post-war legal investigations and trials. The second volume
("Documents") contains 440 documents from the state archives of Poland, Germany,
Belarus and Israel. Among these documents, there are reports of the NKVD (Soviet
Secret Police) about the situation in Jedwabne and its vicinity, testimonies of Poles deported to the Soviet
Union during the war, intelligence reports of the Polish underground Home Army
(AK) and the Delegation of the Polish Government in Exile, as well as reports of
German military and police units, testimonies of Jews who had survived the
mass murders (mainly translated from Yiddish) and the files of the
investigations and trials, concerning the crimes committed in Jedwabne and
Radzilow. |
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