Thanks to him, the crime in Jedwabne was revealed. It is true that he is not its most reliable witness: he mixes what he himself saw with what he heard from others and with what he imagined. It is not true that he cooperated with the NKVD or was in the UB. He was an unhappy man, tormented his whole life by the crime committed on July 10, 1941, against his family and fellow townspeople, unable to forget it — article by Anna Bikont.
He told his children, born on the opposite side of the world, many times that he wanted to leave behind a description of the crime as a warning to future generations. Near the end of his life, he hired a journalist and told him his story. His hearing and sight were already weak; he could not proofread what he dictated. He wanted to stigmatize the criminals and commemorate the victims, but the Spanish-speaking journalist distorted Jewish and Polish names so badly that it is impossible to guess their proper form. He spoke of the landscapes of his childhood, which he longed for, but the journalist, on his own, added orange groves to the fields of grain and potato plots. Szmul Wasersztajn’s 400-page memoirs were recently published in Costa Rica at his son Izaak’s expense.
There is in these memories a description of Szmul’s birth and his mother’s postpartum fever:
“Was the fever burning her temples not a foretaste of the fire of the stake in which she would burn, murdered by the Poles, the Christians of Jedwabne? Was the hand tormenting her in her hallucinations, trying to tear me from her arms, not the same hand of death that years later would try to wipe me from the surface of the earth? And the cat that leapt at the windowpane with its claws, shattering the glass at the moment of my birth — was it not announcing the moment when the clear plan of revenge would spring from my mind, and its execution would shatter into pieces the church and the pious Pharisees praising God after murdering my mother, my brother, and the other Jews of the town? Only God knows the answers to these questions.”
The whole narrative is written in this style. We find in it Old Testament cruelty, which Jewish boys must have read about in cheder, and a Young Poland literary manner that must have dominated Polish classes when Szmul went to school.
“I, Szmul Wasersztajn, testify from Costa Rica and warn. A worldwide conspiracy against the Jews is underway,” he wrote about the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust denial.
We became trash to them
Szmul’s father was a butcher and had a slaughterhouse. After finishing a few grades of school, Szmul apprenticed as a blacksmith. When the Soviets entered in 1939, he was not yet 17. Boys a year younger were being indoctrinated in Soviet schools, those a year older were being drafted into the Red Army and attending courses in Russian and Marxism-Leninism. Meanwhile, Szmul traveled to farms buying meat and selling it illegally.
Meir Ronen, born in Jedwabne, deported with his family to Kazakhstan in 1941, told me in Jerusalem:
— Under the Soviets there were five Jewish scoundrels who lorded it over others. Abram Dawid Kubrzański, Chaim Kosacki, Mechajkał Wajnsztajn, Szajn Binsztejn, and Eliasz Krawiecki. Binsztejn had served three years before the war for raping a disabled girl, a real thug. They were all about 30 or older. It’s true that they denounced people (Poles and Jews) to the Soviets. And our Polish neighbors blamed all Jews. Szmul, whom I knew from school, never hung around with them. He was a young boy responsible for supporting his mother and younger brother; his father was already dead. And that’s what he did.
After June 22, 1941, when the Germans entered Jedwabne, Szmul witnessed the townspeople abusing the Jews. He himself was robbed. Leon Dziedzic from nearby Przestrzel told me this story. Before the war he was friends with Szmul; once he even took him to church, and Szmul took him to the synagogue, though friends warned him that you have to step on a cross at the entrance.
— Right after the Germans came, thugs were preparing for pogroms, so Szmul hid the family’s things in a potato cellar in a distant field. After a few days the situation seemed calmer, and we thought we could bring the things back safely. We were driving by cart when four men stopped us, beat Szmul, rummaged through the clothes, unhitched the horse, and whipped it. I also got hit.
“We were like shadows sneaking around,” Wasersztajn recalled about the time between June 22 and July 10. “Pogroms were happening in different places. Murders, thefts, rapes, destruction of Jewish property.” And he added: “We analyzed the situation. We hoped it would pass.”
“July 10, 1941,” he wrote, “the neighbors came. We had played with their children as children. We had shown them kindness, given them potato peels for their pigs. Now their voices were hard: ‘All Jewish residents must report to the market immediately.’ We had become trash to them since the Germans came. Mother looked for the Torah. A neighbor grabbed her roughly by the arm and pushed her out of the house, shouting: ‘Don’t play games with me, my patience is running out!’ Neighbors armed with clubs and pitchforks ran through the streets. We tried to walk with dignity, but some pushed sharp poles into our backs, cursing: ‘Jewish dog,’ ‘Son of a bitch,’ ‘Speculator,’ ‘Christ-killer.’” (Interesting that they did not shout “communists,” but “speculators”; Soviet propaganda apparently still lingered.)
That was the last time he saw his mother and younger brother. He is one of the few who were there that day and managed to escape and survive.
With his own eyes
Jan Tomasz Gross’s book “Neighbors”, which quotes Wasersztajn’s testimony given after the war to the Jewish Historical Commission in Białystok and is dedicated to him, was published in spring 2000, a few months after his death. That testimony, dated April 5, 1945, consists of five pages of loosely written, crossed-out manuscript. It lay for years in the archives along with dozens of other accounts from that area documenting murders, rapes, and robberies committed by Polish residents against their Jewish neighbors in the first weeks after the Soviets left.
When I began traveling to Jedwabne and throughout Poland to look for witnesses and when I reviewed the testimonies from the 1949 investigation, it turned out that most facts cited by Wasersztajn were confirmed. Only after reading his memoir, where the descriptions are much more detailed, did I realize he could not have been an eyewitness to many of the events he describes.
He knew about the humiliations and murders from conversations with others hiding in the fields just as he was. But he did witness the burning of the barn — the central event.
He was captured and driven, along with several dozen men, to a shed. The women, children, and the elderly were driven to the market square. The Germans filmed the scene. Seven or eight German soldiers appeared at the market square already at a moment when the crowd of Jews had been gathered by residents of the town. A few hours passed. Suddenly, as if struck by lightning, he understood what was happening. He wrote:
“They will burn us alive.”
He fainted. And that saved his life. Someone shouted:
“He’s dead, throw him out!”
The Jews being led to their deaths saw him thrown out of the shed. They began to escape — it is unknown how many. Szmul hid in a rye field; he saw the barn surrounded from all sides. He wrote:
“The neighbors seized the Jews and herded them to the barn, shouting: ‘Into the barn, someone has to give birth to lice.’ ‘Faster, you red dogs, because in Auschwitz and Treblinka they will greet you with machine guns.’ Terrified children cried for water. The neighbors lit torches and set the roof on fire. The screams and cries continued for a long time. The barn burned for two hours. Then, through the still-glowing embers, the neighbors ran to search for gold and valuables.”
After the pogrom, Szmul hid on nearby farms, but Polish acquaintances — those who helped him on July 10 — stopped wanting his company. Only when the news spread that he had escaped the barn did someone allow him to stay longer in a shed under the straw. That person had bought things from him in Soviet times at prices set by the Soviet market administration. After the pogrom, the new order took hold:
“The Jews had become trash to their neighbors.”
When night fell, Szmul wandered the meadows and fields strewn with the remains of the murdered: torn clothes, shoes, and melted puddles of wax — the remains of yahrzeit candles.
He found his mother’s hairpin.
— She must have been undressing, because the barn was so hot — he later told Leon Dziedzic.
With the frost approaching, Szmul returned to Jedwabne. He understood that even under the Germans it was safer to hide in town than in the fields. A sympathetic neighbor hid him for a few days, then helped him meet a Polish woman who agreed to shelter him. She also hid a tuberculosis-stricken railway worker. It was supposed to be just for a night. Szmul stayed with her for two and a half years.
After the war
After the Germans retreated and the Soviets returned, Szmul became the head of the investigation department of the Security Office (UB) in Łomża. He was only twenty or twenty-one. Most of his subordinates were former partisans, rough and unsympathetic to Jews. They called him “the kid.” He lasted six months and left the UB.
He testified in the Jedwabne investigation in 1949. The court did not consider his testimony decisive; the judges emphasized that he did not witness much of what he described firsthand. But they did not doubt his sincerity.
For the rest of his life, Wasersztajn lived the crime of Jedwabne. He could not sleep. He had nightmares. Ultimately, he emigrated to Israel, then to Costa Rica. He ran a workshop. He had a wife and children. He told them about the pogrom many times — always in a flood of words, always passionately, always as a warning.
One of his sons recalls:
“He would suddenly stop, clench his fists, and his voice would change. He talked about it not as memory, but as if he were still there.”
At the end of his life he dictated his 400-page memoir to a journalist. He intended it to be a testament. He wanted to warn. He wanted to name the guilty. He wanted someone to remember.
He could not proofread the text; his eyesight was already gone. His Spanish amanuensis distorted names, places, and Polish details. But not the essence.
This is how he wrote:
“I, Szmul Wasersztajn, testify from Costa Rica and warn: a worldwide conspiracy against the Jews is underway.”
He died before the world learned of Neighbors. He never knew that, thanks to his testimony, the crime at Jedwabne would be revealed, discussed, and investigated — that the silence would be broken.
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Only after reading his memoirs — with their detailed and dramatic scenes — did I understand that he could not have been an eyewitness to everything he described. He had a great need to tell all of the truth, not only what he personally saw but everything he learned from others. That was his weakness as a witness. And his strength as a human being.
He wrote about crimes he knew from other survivors, from conversations during the occupation, and from the post-war investigation files that he had access to while working in the UB. In his memoir he described the murder of Jews in Radziłów and of Jews hiding near Przytuły. Those events truly happened — but he could not have witnessed them.
His account is not a document of historical precision; it is a document of trauma, memory, and a lifelong attempt to bear witness.
It took me time to understand that what Szmul Wasersztajn left to us was not a historian’s chronicle, but the testimony of someone who survived when he should not have.
He wrote:
“My language is a torch, and I want to set fire to the conscience of the world.”
When I first went to Jedwabne in 2000, residents often told me:
“Everything was done by Germans. The Jew from Costa Rica lied. He was in the UB. He was avenging himself.”
But Wasersztajn was not in the UB long enough to persecute anyone. He worked there briefly, and left. He never returned to Jedwabne. He did not seek revenge. He did not denounce people for personal gain. He testified because he believed that the dead required a voice.
One of the investigators from the post-war trial told me:
“He did not hate the Poles. He hated the crime.”
And that is the difference.
At the end of his life, dictating his memories, blind, exhausted, he said he wanted his book to be a warning. But he did not know that his five-page handwritten testimony from 1945 — forgotten in an archive for half a century — would change the understanding of an entire nation’s history.
He died not knowing that.
He died convinced his voice would disappear.
Instead, his voice opened a wound, and a conversation, that could no longer be silenced.
