Free The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont

documents from the Jedwabne trials. In the first trial in 1949, when twenty-two persons were charged with perpetrating the crime, eleven received prison sentences from eight to fifteen years; Karol Bardoń was sentenced to death but the sentence was subsequently commuted to a fifteen-year prison term.
    Hundreds of pages of court reports in an awkward hand, with spelling errors. The years in which the interrogations were conducted make me regard them skeptically. I got my first impression of a Stalinist investigation from reading testimonies in Soviet trials and from Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon . But here no one is trying to link the accused to any subversive organization.
    Gross wrote that the investigation was extraordinarily slipshod and that the whole thing bore little resemblance to a political trial. True, yet the testimonies sound authentic.
    The suspect Władysław Miciura named these men as having taken part in the Jew-hunting: Eugeniusz Śliwecki, Franciszek Łojewski, Józef Sobuta, Franciszek Lusiński. “And there were also a lot of peasants from the countryside whom I didn’t know. Most of them were young, they enjoyed the hunt and were cruel to the Jewish population.”
    The suspect Antoni Niebrzydowski: “There were a lot of people standing guard. I stress that when we stood guard over the Jews so they couldn’t escape, they wept bitterly.”
    In the discussion in the press about Jedwabne one keeps hearing the argument that we can’t believe the testimony of the accused men because it was extracted under duress. They spoke of beatings during the investigation and there’s no reason not to believe them. The suspects may well have been beaten, people in police custody were “routinely” beaten at that time. It’s strange that no use was made of the “forced” testimonies, in fact they were openly made light of. No attempt was made to reconstruct events, only routine questions were asked, and when the accused gave the names of additional killers, nothing—at least in the court documents—indicates that anyone took the trouble to locate them.
    What’s more, the witnesses said the same things as the suspects.
    Roman Zawadzki: “Józef Å»yluk came with a truncheon and took away a Jew who was hiding in the mill before the killings, but Józef Å»yluk found him and took him away, another Jew was also taken … and Józef Å»yluk herded the aforementioned Jews into the marketplace and later all the Jews were burned.”
    Julia Sokołowska: “Marian Karolak was the leader of the action I mentioned, he had a truncheon and he was whipping up all the Poles to kill Jews. I saw with my own eyes how Karolak brutalized Jews in the market square with his truncheon and drove Jews from their homes into the square and beat them so badly with his truncheon it was a terrible sight, all that killing.”
    Aleksandra Karwowska: “Józef Kubrzyniecki, residing in Jedwabne, stabbed eighteen Jews with a knife, he told me this at my house when he was putting in our stove.”
    Józef Grądowski, who escaped the pogrom but who was in the square that day, saw two Gestapo officers dragging Jews into the square, and only Poles apart from that: “I was sitting in the middle of the square, weeding grass … Many people were standing guard at that time, for each Jew there must have been five people standing guard. There weren’t any people who were just onlookers; those who were there were helping round up the Jews. Polish children were wandering around the square. I heard two Polish women walking along the street, saying: ‘Got to make sure there aren’t any witnesses left.’”
    In none of these trials did the investigating officers or the court take the slightest interest in establishing the personal details of the victims. The surnames of the victims appear only incidentally. And so