Leokadia Blajszczak, maiden name Lusinska, daughter of Franciszek and Zofia, born on November 24, 1930 in Jedwabne, a liaison of the National Armed Forces during the Soviet and German occupation, an economist by education. She and her husband have lived in Warsaw for the past 50 years. However, she still remembers the small town in which she was born and raised, the town, which holds her mother's grave. She was eleven when the Germans murdered the Jews in Jedwabne. She volunteered to tell her story after reading the appalling lies contained in Gross' book because, as she herself said: "I will not let anyone shame Jedwabne!". I had the opportunity to talk to Mrs. Blajszczak about this Nazi war crime, one of many such crimes. I told her how I heard prof. Tomasz Gross claim that half of Jedwabne, the Poles, had murdered the other half of Jedwabne, the Jews. Mrs. Blajszczak strongly disagreed with this statement. First, the Jews were murdered by Germans not Poles - she says. Second, the majority of statements and statistics quoted by Gross are false. Poles did not differentiate between Jews and themselves - back then Jedwabne was a little town with 12 streets and two market squares. The majority of its citizens were Polish. My street, the November 11 Street, now renamed Sadowa, was a medium size one which harbored eighteen families, 72 people altogether. Taking about two times the amount for every street, that is 144, multiplied by 14, we come to 2016 inhabitants - 65% Poles (1310 people) and 34% Jews (685 people), 1% other. Most of them were artisans of various professions and shopkeepers. The intelligence consisted of priests, pharmacists, hospital attendants, the school superintendent, a few teachers and a midwife. Poles and Jews were not in conflict with each other. Nobody really saw the difference. Sunday was a holy day for Poles and Saturday was a holy one for Jews. Polish and Jewish children played and went to school together. My father made horseshoes. He learned his profession in the 5th Uhlan Regiment. His other occupations included artistic blacksmithing and providing medical care to horses, which he had always favored. He was good at what he did which is why he and his brother made weapons for the NSZ partisan soldiers during the German and Russian invasion. In front of our house there was a square with lime and birch trees. Polish and Jewish children played hide-and-seek there and climbed the trees. After the Germans invaded Jedwabne, the majority of men and boys fled from Jedwabne. Jews started panicking. Soon the Russians arrived after having signed the traitorous Ribbentrop - Molotow pact with the Germans and the Jews greeted them as saviors. They decorated a street with banners and flags, put red tablecloth on a table and greeted them with bread and salt. The Russians drank a lot and sang revolutionary songs while the Jews waited on them. When Polish men returned to Jedwabne they were captured by merely worse invaders - Jews wearing red hand bands took over control from the police and local administration offices. They gained control in the NKVD by bringing in their Russian families, wives and children. At that time there was a severe winter in Russia, as well as in Poland, temperatures exceeded minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees F). The Jewish Russian families arrived starved, dirty, carrying louses. They were to live with Poles in their houses. Masza, a Jewish girl, was stationed with us. Our mother bought her anti-louse treatment and gave her a separate, clean and nice room.

"What can one do, this is war, we must help each other" she said. When a Russian school was opened, Masza taught in it. Before the Jewish families arrived from Russia, Jews were already occupying many Polish houses so when more Jews arrived there was lack of space to accommodate them. The Jews came with a solution, they began to make lists of "public enemies" and handed them to Russians. Among those listed were former policemen, soldiers, the wealthiest and educated people of the town. They were either sent to camps or killed immediately. Jews could then take over their houses. As a gesture of gratitude, they built the Russians a cement monument on the town square. It represented Lenin and its back was facing Mrs. Leokadia's home. They surrounded the monument with fencing leaving the children no place to play. Those who were on lists were captured at dawn, in their homes, by two men with guns - one Jewish, one Russian. "Dress up, but quickly, quickly!" - they said, leaving only 15 minutes for one to get ready. Sleighs waited outside the house ready to take them 20 kilometers away, to the Lomza train station where they were loaded onto cattle wagons. Many of them died from cold, disease and starvation before reaching the destination point. The Soviet-German friendship ended quickly after the Germans invaded Russia. The Red Army and many Jewish communists fled Jedwabne, and Germans took their posts. Two NKVD soldiers' wives drowned their children and committed suicide in fear of being tortured by Germans, although Poles tried to help them. Karol Bardon, a man familiar with the German volksdeutsch, began to make alliances with the military policemen in one of the Jedwabne's sentries. He worked as a windmill mechanic in Jedwabne since 1935. He was the one who introduced Mrs. Leokadia's father as a great blacksmith to the German military policemen. One day he came to Mrs. Leokadia's house and told her father to prepare some horseshoes for them for the next day. Her father had drank a little and he joked to Karol Bardon that no horseshoes will be needed for the next day because Hitler will be dead by then. Half an hour later the military police came for Frank, Mrs. Leokadia's father, and took him to the sentry. First he was hit in the face by Bardon, then the others beat him so badly that he was all black and blue. Unable to move and covered with blood, he was thrown to the potato storage cellar. Mrs. Leokadia and her mother went looking for him the next morning. They found him crawling towards the house. He was spitting blood for the next three weeks. He was lucky, nevertheless, the military police didn't know about the additional occupation he had with his eldest son, an NSZ member alias "Rydz Smigly". Behind the smithy there was an annex and a shed for tools where the carpenter made wooden parts for the weapons. During the Soviet and German invasion, NSZ partisans brought him metal and wooden parts, from the woods or houses, from which he and his son made guns. The whole family was engaged in anti-German conspiracy. Mrs. Leokadia ("Jagna") and her mother Zofia had also pledged to the NSZ. They prepared packages containing food, medication and bandages, which they ordered at a trusted pharmacist Mr Jalowszewski. The packages were made for partisans hiding in the woods. Many people put their lives in danger, but..."there was no other way". Leokadia picked up medication from the pharmacist or, as a liaison, either rode her bike or walked to the cemetery carrying a bucket, brush and cloth, as if to clean graves. She transported leaflets, commands and letters and hid them between graves. Until now she does not know exactly what she was carrying under her shirt, neither does she know who brought and received them. At 6:00AM, the Gestapo arrived in trucks. We both went to church every morning at 6:00 AM, my mother and I. After church we went to the bakery to buy bread and then headed home where my mother did her housekeeping with our fathers' help. We used to go to a secret school where Edmund Przestrzelski and our priest Kebinski taught. None of us knew at that time what was about to happen when on July 10 1941, during our walk to the church, we saw two trucks loaded with soldiers arrive at the sentry. A big group of Germans wearing uniforms and holding rifles jumped out of them. My mother grabbed my arm and told me that the Gestapo came and that they are going to capture people. We starting running towards the house and when we got there my mother told my father to take Franek (my brother, named after my father, age 16, the younger Teodor, 13 year old, stayed home) and flee because the Gestapo will take him. My father and brother then went to my mother's family's house in a nearby village. At the same time many adult Polish men fled the town and hid in the woods or in other villages. About an hour after my father and brother left we heard someone knocking strongly at the door. It was Bardon with another military policeman. "Where are the boys?" he asked. Terrified, my mother replied that they went to the field to repair machines. "What's wrong?" she asked, since she knew Bardon before the war started, when he was still a "normal" person. "Today," Bardon replied, "is Lenin's funeral". The Jews will put him in the Jewish cemetery. The Jews must therefore clean the streets and square while the Poles must make sure everyone is notified about that and that they work properly. A Pole that disagrees to cooperate will be shot. Along with my younger brother and other kids we went to see the "funeral". The Germans gathered Polish boys on the square. They were holding withes in their hands and they were definitely not the "blood-thirsty degenerates" described by Gross in his "work". Gross did not try to look for the truth. These boys were defenseless and terrified and were forced by the Germans to "keep watch". Some were sent to fetch two blacksmith's hammers to destroy the monument. From the square I headed towards the marketplace where the Jews were raking, sweeping and weeding the cobblestones. "Bring me some water" - asked a woman I knew, but when I tried to hand it to her a German man in civilian clothing (since he did not understand Polish) told me to leave. I acted as if I didn't understand but he hit with his whip on the back. Then the Germans had a procession - four Jews carried the remainders, pieces of the head and breast, of Lenin's monument on their shoulders. They walked calmly because they believed that they would return home. No one was beating them and no one was hurting them. The Germans made them sing: "for us the war, by us the war". They weren't more than 400 together escorted by Germans in uniforms and civilian clothing, some carrying whips. The procession stopped in front of the barn which was conveniently located in an open and uninhabited place away from the town and right next to the Jewish cemetery.

Bronislaw Sleszynski owned this barn but he had no say in what was happening. He was ordered to hand over the key and that was all I saw as the Germans sent the children away. I came home. My mother and neighbors were appalled, some were saying that the same will happen to us too. That night the barn burned down with the people inside and no one in Jedwabne could sleep - everyone was shocked and upset by the Nazis' cruelty. Mrs. Blajszczak stresses that it Gross lies saying that Poles looted Jewish property. The penalty to enter the houses of those murdered was death and the Nazis already took everything to their storage. Also, it is only Gross' and his "informer's" Mr. Szmul's degenerate imagination that Poles cut Jews' tongues and gouged their eyes out - live burning was the Germans' specialty. Moreover, Germans also burned towns where there were no Jewish inhabitants like, for example, Dobki in the Wysokie Mazowieckie region, Boruski, situated next to Cmielow. They poured fuel over houses and made sure that no one got out and those that did were shot. In Bialystok on June 27, 1941, the Germans started murdering Jews in the early morning with machine guns and grenades. They poured fuel over the synagogue and threw grenades into Jewish homes. After a few hours the synagogue was burning like a torch, the whole Jewish quarter was in flames. Jews who tried to escape were forced into the burning synagogue. The Germans also made the Jews put each other into the flames. On that day, around 1000 Jews died in the synagogue. The few that survived owe their lives to a Pole, the custodian of the synagogue, who opened a little window in the back wall. He saved lives, but did not survive himself. Mrs. Blajszczak is shocked by the fact that Szmul Wasersztajn, who worked for the UB (communist secret service) for a long time and who owes his life to the Wyrzykowski family, accused and persecuted innocent Polish citizens for the account of "participating in the massacre and murders of Jews". What more, he left Poland in 1968 and went to Israel without taking any responsibility for the torture of Polish patriots. This was the fate of 19 year old Jurek Laudanski - a great man, a great patriot, who came from a respected family, a soldier of the underground army ZWZ/AK, a prisoner of Pawiak, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, who did not betray his friends even under torture - Jurek Laudanski was arrested in 1949 upon his return to Poland and tortured in the prisons of the secret service.

The same fate awaited his father Czeslaw and his brother Zygmunt who were imprisoned for "murdering Jews" in Lomza but never admitted to false accusations, even after being cruelly tortured. Many other citizens of Jedwabne were sentenced to long-term prison without shred of evidence. Jan Gross is not worthy to even compare to a great hero and martyr as Jurek Laudanski, and much more not entitled to defame his and many other generous Polish names in his tabloid book. I also haven't heard him want to apologize for what he wrote. Is this the free and democratic Poland, the patron of honor and respect to its citizens, the Poland that the underground army's soldiers and the best men of Solidarnosc, the greatest patriots fought and died for?