The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont Page A

sack.”
    â€œMen?”
    â€œMostly, but I saw women, too, only fewer of them.”
    â€œWhat about children?”
    â€œThose who could carry things were eager enough. There were crowds of people lining up for it, I just don’t know where God was at that moment.”
    When I ask Stanisław Ramotowski why he thinks it all ended in an atrocity, his wife breaks in: “That’s not for us to know.”
    From our first encounters, Marianna Ramotowska has kept a distance, hiding behind feigned memory loss, trying to keep us from talking about the atrocity or about anything Jewish. When I wished her a happy Hanukkah or Rosh Hashanah, she would start to say a rosary. Asked what she remembered of Hanukkah in her parents’ home, she answered with a question: “Hanukkah is the Festival of the Harvest, right?” How can she not remember? Hanukkah is a holiday virtually invented for children: they get presents, the table is covered with sweets.
    But Ramotowski takes up the subject: “Some people probably did it for the killing itself, we had such backward Christians here that for them the life of a Jew wasn’t worth anything. But most of them did it for the looting and because the Germans gave permission.”
    â€œDid you have the feeling you were the only just man in Radziłów?”
    â€œOh no, there were plenty of decent folk in Radziłów! The problem is, there were more of the other kind.”
    â€œAnd where did you get the idea to help Jews?”
    â€œMy whole family were decent people. Stealing or killing, my God, it was unthinkable. I was well brought up. And I was smart enough, I suppose, I wasn’t afraid of anything, a scared man probably wouldn’t have done it. But also, for as long as I can remember, I played with Jewish girls and boys, went to their dances, listened to their fiddles.”
    â€œWere you alone in this?”
    â€œIt was probably just me. I always liked being around them.”
    Izaak Finkelsztejn’s family had been settled in the area for centuries. Besides the mill they had eight hectares of farmland; they kept cattle, horses, chickens, ducks, and turkeys.
    â€œAt our mill,” Marianna Ramotowska explains to me, “we had modern machines we bought for dollars. A Francis water turbine, Hungarian Ganz rollers, shorter and longer ones for rye, a German Seck press for wheat. After the war, when they were looting everything, they couldn’t drag the turbine out of the water, and that’s how we managed to rebuild the mill.”
    The family of her mother, Sara Jankielewska, was from Kielce in central Poland. Her mother knew German and Russian as well as Yiddish and Hebrew. And her Polish was so good the neighbors came to dictate letters to her. Rachela remembered her mother always bent over the same heading: “Praised be the Lord Jesus Christ.”
    â€œGrandfather Jankielewski always said that he would never let a daughter of his marry in the village, as he could afford a better dowry,” she says. “Mama had brothers who had office jobs. One was the director of a steel mine in Kądzielnia, another lived in Kielce and was managing director of mines that belonged to the Warsaw branch of the family, another built bridges, my mother’s sister married a doctor. There was also a professor in our family who lived in Berlin.”
    Her father died when Rachela was a small child, and her oldest brother became the head of the household. In 1930 she finished school in Radziłów and was sent to her uncle in Kielce, in whose household—in contrast with her own—Polish was spoken. There she got a junior high school certificate and went to work as a cashier at a German company that sold Chevrolet cars. Whenever she went home to Radziłów, she sent a Polish farmhand with a note to Ramotowski telling him she was home—a sign of affection to her neighbor across the way.
    Ramotowski went to see