The Crime and the Silence by Anna Bikont

curate Jan Rogowski of Piątnica, a village located between Jedwabne and Łomża, would ask residents when he went Christmas caroling if they were members of the National Party, and if they weren’t he threatened not to hear their Easter confessions or bless their Easter dishes. Father Marian Wądołowski urged the population in the nearby village of Mosty to join the Catholic Action club, “because it is a second pulpit—what can’t be said from the pulpit can be freely said there.”
    Any pretext sufficed to prompt an anti-Jewish statement: the building of a Christian bakery or a Catholic house, Easter or the harvest festival, the Feast of the Assumption or the blessing of National Party pennants.
    A notice in The Catholic Cause : “After the service on May 3, 1936, a procession took place in the town of Jedwabne with the participation of about 1,500 members and sympathizers of the National Party, accompanied by an orchestra and bicyclists carrying flags. There were two speeches, and during the procession there were cries of ‘Long live the Great Polish Nation,’ ‘Long live Polish national trade,’ ‘Down with Jewish Communism.’ Said procession was a success and made a great impression in Jedwabne and its environs.”
    The alarm was sounded: “Reports are growing of religious celebrations at which parish priests call on people to ‘rid the country’s trade and industry of Jews,’ and which end with cries of ‘Beat the Jews,’ ‘Jews out.’” 6 A Father Cyprian Łozowski of Jasionówka in the Białystok region, who “propagates anti-Jewish acts at a May 3 Academy and has his church choir sing ‘Lord, Rid Poland of the Jews,’” 7 appears in one Interior Ministry report.
    The Church taught Poles hostility and contempt for Jews from childhood. Younger children participated in the Eucharistic Crusade called the Knighthood of Jesus; the elder children joined the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Catholic Associations, where they performed plays—the title “The Jewish Matchmaker” leaves little to the imagination; the adults attended lectures such as “On the Urgency and Means of Battling Jewish Communism.” When a school hired a Jewish teacher, protest signatures were collected in the parish. In the Parish Chronicle of Łapy near Białystok a priest proudly describes a successful 1934 campaign to remove a Jewish teacher from a school.
    Jan Cytrynowicz said: “In church it was constantly emphasized that Jews had killed Christ, there could be no sermon without that theme. Father Rogalski of Wizna was forever calling on people not to buy from Jews, not to visit Jews. He held it against my father, who had converted, that he did business with Jews, and as a punishment he kicked me out of religion class. That’s why my education stopped after elementary school. With an F for religion you couldn’t pass to the next grade.”
    Judging by the amount of space the Interior Ministry reports devoted to the priests of Wąsosz and Radziłów, the towns where Catholics murdered almost all Jews in 1941, they were particularly active supporters of anti-Jewish campaigns.
    Father Piotr Krysiak of Wąsosz was an important figure in the National Party not only on the local level; he often visited Drozdowo, where the founder of the National Party, Roman Dmowski, moved toward the end of his life. It was under the intellectual leadership of Father Krysiak, the Interior Ministry reports stress, that a circle of National Party supporters came into existence, and it was the priest himself who organized National Party member meetings and called for picketing Jewish shops. Even on his way out, in September 1937, at a ceremonial farewell to the priest, who was retiring, he urged his parishioners to organize a picket in neighboring Szczuczyn as well.
    Mosze Rozenbaum had Polish