They murdered their neighbors in cold blood. To this day, little is said about it [FRAGMENT KSI¡¯KI]

ABOUT THE BANNER WITH A BACKGROUND OF DWARFS

In June 2020, on the national road 61 between Łomża and Augustów, a few kilometers from Szczuczyn, a banner placed at the height of buildings several dozen meters from the asphalt caught the eye. White letters on black material. Garden gnomes, plaster swans and geese with red beaks were snoozing nearby. Against this background, the content of the banner read abstractly: “Act 447 threatens Poland’s independence.”

A year earlier, slogans about American Act 447 threatening Poland were shouted in the center of Warsaw during a demonstration organized by a strange political entity – the Confederation of KORWiN Braun Liroy Nationalists. Several thousand throats were cut, shouting slogans about vile Jewish claims. The echo echoed throughout the country. It arrived in Podlasie in the form of a banner with dwarfs in the background.

The lights of nearby Szczuczyn smoldered in the falling darkness. Anywhere, but in such a place the threat of claims to Jewish property sounded ominous. It was like the growl of a beast waking up.

THE BLOOD WAS WASHED FROM THE STOVES AND HANDS

The last time the beast woke up in Szczuczyn was in June 1941, right after the outbreak of the war between the Reich and the USSR and the occupation of the town by German troops. On June 27, about three hundred Jews were killed, and the murders were committed by Polish neighbors. On July 13, the Germans, with the participation of the Polish auxiliary police, killed about a hundred people (according to another version: at the local cemetery, it was the Poles who killed them while the Germans were passive). In August, six hundred Jews were killed in executions by the SS and Gestapo.

The rest were placed in the ghetto, and after its liquidation, they were sent to the Treblinka death camp. Before the outbreak of World War II, Jews constituted over half of the community in Szczuczyn. It was estimated that over three thousand of them lived here. Only a few survived who managed to escape from the city or hide in the forests or with Polish families in the area. When the war ended, Szczuczyn was completely Polish and the Jewish community disappeared. It was erased not only from life, but also from memory.

A similar thing happened along the entire so-called Death Trail – in over twenty cities and towns in eastern Mazovia and today’s Podlaskie Voivodeship, where in 1941 there was a massacre of inhabitants, the Jewish ones by the Polish ones. Jews had lived there for several centuries in their own rhythm. And then the Polish neighbors grabbed clubs and pitchforks. They chased their Jews through the streets, raped women, tore off dresses, sweaters and shoes so that nothing was wasted.

This phrase “so that nothing goes to waste” comes back like a refrain. “I took chairs and buckets. Was it supposed to go to waste?” – explained a peasant from a village near Grajewo. “I took the shoes off the corpse. They were good, it would be a shame if they went to waste,” a resident of Białystok from Szczuczyn quoted his grandfather’s words spoken many years ago. Grandpa died in the 1980s, his shoes were lost somewhere. – Maybe they were worn out, or my grandfather sold them – my interlocutor wondered.

The perpetrators locked the victims in barns, sometimes in sheds, and set fire to them. They burnt down living people and the entire past. And when it was all over, they washed the blood from the pavement and their own hands and buried the remains of the victims without marking the graves.

And what happened to Jewish houses, furniture, workshops, tools, clothes, and eiderdowns? Threads of robbery appear in the testimonies from post-war trials of the perpetrators of the crimes. Someone stole shoes, ten pairs at once. The peasants came in carts to pick up Jewish furniture. The perpetrator, mentioned by name, shot a Jewish miller and took over his house, opening a beerhouse there. In the town of Rutki, the Germans gave houses, cattle and land to Poles helping them in dealing with the Jews. In Tykocin, the crowd stripped Jewish houses of everything. In Radzilow, the Jewish houses were managed by one of the participants of the murder. A woman asked him to allocate such a house. He refused, declaring that “when Jews had to be liquidated, no one was there, and now you want an apartment.”

The crime was accompanied by robbery. Greed reigned supreme, people took more valuable goods out of their hands. They covered themselves with eiderdowns still warm from the previous owners, put on captured shoes, and dressed themselves in the furs of wealthier Jewish women. Armchairs and tables that did not match the coarse interiors appeared in rural cottages.

Jewish half of the towns, squares, houses, shops and workshops suddenly lost their owners. Abandoned properties, mostly in the centers, near the main markets, and attractively located, were quickly taken over by Poles. Arbitrarily or on the basis of lease obtained from local authorities (first German, then Polish), sometimes on the basis of purchase deeds written on the knee, and after the war confirmed by a notary, but in strange circumstances, because the sellers were no longer in the world. There was a common belief that what was left of the Jews was heirless property and no one would claim the property.

At the beginning of 2021, specifically in February, exactly one year before the Russian attack on Ukraine, I set out on my first journey through the land of heirless property. I visited former shtetls in eastern Masovia and Podlasie. I looked at former Jewish houses, now exclusively Polish, and asked about the memory of people who lived here for several centuries and then suddenly disappeared. There was almost no memory, rather oblivion, so as not to think about the Jewish neighbors of my grandparents and great-grandparents. And fears that someone will reach out for inheritance. Some descendant, heir, or maybe an impostor. In none of the places I was, no one reached out, no one wanted to get anything back. Well, maybe apart from the memory of your ancestors.

NOBODY HAS SEEN JEWS HERE

Janusz is twenty-two years old, he studies at a private university in Białystok, he came to his home town of Rajgród for a moment to get a pension from his parents. He was born here, but he has no intention of returning permanently. Maybe Białystok, maybe Warsaw or London – he hasn’t decided yet. Politically undecided, but rather Confederation than PiS, because they are closer to human affairs.

– What matters? – I’m asking.

– Freedom – he replies. – And patriotic.

Because Janusz is a libertarian and a patriot. He would give his life for his country.

– In London? – I’ll clarify.

Wonders. And finds the answer:

– And why not?

We talk by chance, on a street in Rajgród.

– Would you give your life for Rajgród?

– For Rajgród too. This is my little homeland.

I ask if he knows what happened in his little homeland in 1941? Does he know where the Chojniki forest is?

– Everyone knows. But there’s no point in going there, it’s full of wormy mushrooms.

What does he know about the Jews who lived here and for whom Rajgród was a small homeland?

He seems surprised.

– There are no Jews here. At least I don’t know anything about it, he replies.

– But they used to be. In the mid-nineteenth century, they constituted almost ninety percent of the population.

– Impossible, Rajgród was not Jewish. It’s a Polish city, he says, slightly aggressively. – And you are talking about some Jews. Nobody saw them here.

And didn’t his grandparents and parents tell him about the Jews, about the Chojniki forest, where they were killed? About where they lived and how they lived? About their names?

– We never talked about it – Janusz insists. They didn’t say, he didn’t ask. They didn’t teach about Jewish matters at school. And that’s a good thing, because a Polish school is supposed to teach about Polish issues, not Jewish ones.

BROKEN HEART OF THE CLOCK

Mordechai Canin, a journalist living in Palestine at the time and writing reports in Yiddish, made several trips to Poland in 1945–1947. He came from Sokołów Podlaski, his surname was Cukierman, but he adopted the pen name Canin. In Kosów, Lacki, pretending to be an English journalist, entered houses and apartments, knowing that they were “post-Jewish”, because the entire Kosów was “post-Jewish”. In one of the apartments he noticed an old clock with weights hanging on the wall.

“The clock is also Jewish,” Canin said. – “An old Jewish clock which, on long nights, accompanied a pious Jew in studying the cards of the Gemara (…). The clock stands, the small weights on the chain hang like dead hands suspended in the void. A small short pendulum hangs like a hanged man’s tongue. The hands on the dead dial point at a quarter to twelve. Life stopped at a quarter to twelve. Who knows, maybe the clock stopped just when the Jews were being taken out of Kosovo in the summer of 1942? Maybe the heart of the clock broke then?

A Polish woman, a resident of a former Jewish house, explains to Canin that there is no one to repair the clock, because there is no watchmaker in Kosovo and the surrounding towns. The watchmakers were Jews, but the Germans murdered them. I thought that the person who hung out a black banner with white letters near Szczuczyn to shout to drivers speeding along National Road 61 that Poland’s independence was in danger because of Jewish claims, might be living in a house that once belonged to a Jewish family.

Maybe he has an antique clock with weights on his wall. He inherited the house from his father, who inherited it from his father, who took it over in the fall of 1941, when the previous owners disappeared from this world. And the author of the words on the banner actually knows perfectly well that it is not the independence of his homeland that is at stake, but his peace and quiet. He is afraid not for Poland, but for himself, because he does not know what to answer when someone comes and asks about this clock and this house.

The trail of Jewish deaths in eastern Mazovia, Podlasie, Podkarpacie and Lesser Poland, where the perpetrators were not only Germans, but also, and sometimes primarily, Poles, was described in many historical and reportage books. We know who killed and how. The details were recreated and the crimes were documented indisputably. But generally no focus was placed on the issue of so-called post-Jewish property. Specific houses, mills or shops that were taken over from Jews by their Polish neighbors were sometimes mentioned, but without going into details. There is a well-known principle in criminology that the perpetrator of a crime is usually the one who benefits. Who benefited by participating in the massacre of Jews carried out by Polish hands?

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