Anna Bikont’s classic work of investigation first appeared in Polish in 2004, and was deemed by her fellow countryman and writer, Ryszard Kapuscinski as one of the most important and dramatic books of the last decade. It has just been published in English.
A winner of the European Book Prize and indeed the Polish Polityka award, The Crime and The Silence investigates a terrible crime, a knot of collective hatred unloosened in the Polish town of Jedwabne in July 1941. In this horrific incident, hundreds of Jewish men, women and children were ordered to leave their homes and marched into the town square. Most of those ordered to the square were massacred, and despite the overwhelming scale of the slaughter, the affair was shrouded in secrecy during subsequent decades. The details of the massacre were tracked with painstaking care and attention 13 years ago by the endlessly persistent and resourceful Polish journalist, Anna Bikont.
In similar fashion, but on film, Claude Lanzmann’s deeply resonant nine-and-a-half-hour documentary, Shoah, also confronted ordinary Poles with their varying levels of complicity in crimes committed during the Nazi occupation of their country.
The British writer Julian Barnes has championed the work in its welcome translation into English by Alissa Valles, deeming it to be it `an astonishing act of investigation and documentation . . a terrifying and necessary book, unsparing in its detail, but deeply heartening as an act of historical reclamation.'
Some of the incidents will prove difficult to read for many potential readers. A local man who had returned from America beat a Jew until he collapsed with blood pouring from ears and throat. The same day, the Gestapo enjoyed food and wine which they had stored in their cars. Once they had eaten their repast, they set about beating Jews. One man had a stone tied around his neck, and he was beaten with a stick while running around in a circle. Some of the victims were ordered to weed the marketplace with spoons, forced to destroyed a statue of Lenin and to run around the marketplace carrying pieces of the statue while chatining “the war’s our fault.”
Many were shot in a barn, and thrown into a pit, while the remaining Jews were then driven into the barn, which was set on fire. The final death count is the subject of much discusson, from a maximum of 1,500 victims or, if the prosecutor appointed by the Institute of National Remembrance in 2000 is right, “not fewer than 340.”
The author tells the story partly in journal, or diary format, with various entries for dates in 2002, as she researched the book, spoke to eye-witnesses and patiently processed the letters that came her way, as the web of intrigue and secrecy came to light at last.
Bikont’s story is unflinching in its conclusions, profoundly brave and perhaps most importantly, accessible to the general reader .
Paddy Kehoe
