Free The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont Page B

influenced by “political elements,” but the prosecutor doesn’t give the impression of a man who can be steered, particularly when it comes to the truth in a legal case.
    JANUARY 6, 2001
    I drive Stanisław Ramotowski from his miserable provincial hospital to Warsaw for a consultation.
    JANUARY 7, 2001
    An e-mail from my friend the poet Ewa Lipska in Vienna, who asked me if anything more could be written about Jedwabne after Gross’s book. I replied that this was a strange question coming from a poet, and I told her about my research so far. “My dear, you’re right,” she replied. “I wasn’t taking into account that life can’t be reduced to a string of historical facts. A few months ago, before the whole discussion about Jedwabne, a woman from Łomża wrote to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. She’d read Wiesenthal’s book Justice Not Vengeance , and described to him the history of her family, her town, the neighbors who stoned a Jew in 1941. At the end she asked him for a photograph. I replied to that letter in his name, I was deeply moved. It’s a good thing people in Poland are beginning to talk about all this.”
    JANUARY 10, 2001
    Visit to Ramotowski in the Warsaw hospital where, miraculously, he was admitted. We don’t talk about Radziłów, because whenever I ask him any question about the killing of Jews he looks nervously down the hallway in case someone is listening.
    JANUARY 12, 2001
    Conversation with the theater director Erwin Axer at a dinner. He’s skeptical about publicizing the Jedwabne affair. He tells me his late cousin Otto Axer, a graphic artist (and a friend of my father’s), heard what happened to his father in the war only a few years before he died. I know what he’s talking about. I read the beautiful story in the press. On the day Jews were told to report for “transport to the labor camps,” Paul Axer, an elderly music teacher from Przemyśl, took off his yellow armband, gathered up his cat and fold-up chair, and set out on foot, ultimately reaching the banks of the San River. There he unfolded his chair and sat until dark, gazing at the river’s depths. He was found by a couple of shepherds, brother and sister, who took him home, where they had room for him after their grandfather’s recent death. He didn’t make it till the end of the war, but he died among people who took him into their family. Erwin Axer corrects me: it wasn’t a chair and a cat, it was a stool and a balalaika.
    â€œHis whole life, Otto loathed the peasants for their anti-Semitism. He was always saying they denounced Jews during the war. And then it turned out it was peasants who’d saved his father and the whole village knew about it. Besides, Jews denounced Jews, too,” Erwin Axer concludes pointedly.
    JANUARY 13, 2001
    I visit Stanisław Ramotowski in the hospital as I’ve been doing every day. This time only briefly. “I’m in a rush,” I explain, “because I have to take my daughter Ola to the synagogue. Ola is preparing for her bat mitzvah, a ceremony for a girl turning thirteen. A ceremony your wife wouldn’t have had because in her time they only held bar mitzvahs, for boys. Ola has Hebrew lessons and meets with a rabbi to work on her own commentary on an excerpt from the Torah, which she has to present during the ceremony at the synagogue.”
    â€œYou really are a brave woman to tell me these things,” Ramotowski comments. “Because you really don’t look Jewish at all.”
    JANUARY 15, 2001
    In the hospital, a talk with the attending doctor. They can’t amputate Ramotowski’s leg on account of his age, eighty-seven, and his heart condition. He’ll have to undergo many months of treatment.
    Meanwhile his wife, whose osteoporosis makes her unable to walk and who is almost completely blind, has remained behind in Radziłów, in the cottage where