1946, the Kielce pogrom in Poland -As if Auschwitz weren't enough

As if Auschwitz weren't enough (Ha-Aretz)

By Sara Bender

On July 1, 1946, an 8-year-old Polish boy, Henryk Blaszczyk, disappeared in the southern Polish town of Kielce. The worried parents began searching for their son and when they were unable to find him, they informed the police. Two days later, Henryk returned home. He related that he had been abducted by a Jew who put him in a cellar, and that thanks to someone who passed him a chair, he was able to escape through the window.

On the morning of July 4, 1946, the elder Blaszczyk went with his son to give testimony at the local police station. En route, an acquaintance joined them, and when the three passed a house on 7 Planty Street, the acquaintance pointed to it and told the boy to tell the police that was where he was held. When the boy was asked whether he would recognize the man who locked him up in the cellar, Henryk pointed to a short man wearing a green hat who was standing next to the house at the time.

At the police station, about 200 meters from the house on Planty street, the boy's report was believed, and the commander of the station gave orders to arrest the man with the green hat. Six policemen accompanied by Blaszczyk and his son went to look for the "suspect." They arrested Kalman Singer, a religious Jew who had survived the concentration camps, brought him to the police station and beat him. Simultaneously, the policemen spread rumors that the boy had been kidnapped by Jews and held in the cellar.

Anti-Semitism again

At that time there were some 240,000 Jews living in Poland, most of them refugees who had returned from the Soviet Union following the "repatriation" agreements signed by Poland the Soviet government. Most of the returnees were sent to a few central cities in Poland, and some of them went to Kielce. In May 1946, there were 163 Jews living in Kielce. Forty of them lived in the building on 7 Planty Street (known as the "Jewish house") and were members of the Akiva Union of Zionist Youth, affiliated with the Noar Hatsioni (Zionist Youth) movement; they were Holocaust survivors who had gathered in Kielce to participate in an agricultural course to prepare for life in Palestine. This building also housed the local Jewish Committee, headed by Dr. Seweryn Kahane .

There had been a grenade attack on the house in December 1945. Even though no one was hurt, a delegation from the Jewish Committee approached the district bishop, Katchmark, and asked him to help curb anti-Semitic activity. Katchmark told the Jewish representatives then that it would be a good idea for the Jews to return to their traditional occupations, because their influence on the new administration in Poland and the positions they had taken in the public administration were angering the Poles.

There were new reasons compounding the traditional Polish anti-Semitism, which had not disappeared during the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. Many Poles were openly opposed to the return of the Jews from the Soviet Union and refused to allow them to return to their jobs or to give them back their property. In addition, many Poles contended that the Jews were the mainstay of the new Communist regime there and that they were running Poland according to dictates from the Soviet Union, and held senior positions in the party and administration. This approach - that the Jews were taking over Poland at the behest of the Soviets - found a strong resonance among the church leadership and the Right. It was substantiated by the fact that the Jews had filled clerical and other senior positions in Poland after the war, something that had been inconceivable before that.

At the head of the violent struggle against the Jews stood the Polish Underground organizations, which had decided to take on the new regime under the Soviets. These groups included radical rightists and nationalist-fascist groups that considered the Soviets an even worse enemy than the Germans. These groups assumed that there would soon be a war between the West and the Soviet Union, and believed it was necessary to employ violence and terror in order to hasten both this confrontation and the intervention of outside parties to overthrow the new regime.

Knives and stones

On the morning of July 4, 1946, Blaszczyk's story spread through Kielce like wildfire. In a short while, a crowd of angry Poles had gathered outside the Jewish house in the belief that more than a dozen Christian children were being held captive there to use their blood for making matzot, according to the ancient story - or, according to a newer belief, for infusions for wounded Soviet soldiers. To this plot was added another rumor - the Christian children being held captive there were no longer alive.

Among the first to gather outside the Jewish house were groups of women who began chanting anti-Semitic slogans and inciting those who joined them. About an hour later, at around 11 A.M., two army vehicles pulled up outside the building and soldiers with automatic weapons jumped out. In just a few minutes more, the shriek of bullets could be heard being fired directly through the windows into the building. Police forces also came to the site, broke into the building and ordered the Jews to turn over the weapons they held for self defense. Then the police started destroying the apartments inside.

Anyone who tried to put up a fight was murdered. Jews were tossed through the windows and into the streets, and the mob broke into the building and went wild. Among those killed was Kahane, who had tried to call the district commander. The behavior of the policemen merely egged on the crowd, and they began stoning the building and shouting that the Jews were murdering Polish children. The Jews trapped inside were left to the mercy of the mob and beaten with planks and iron rods. Those who were pulled outside were dragged to a nearby square and killed.

The police and army were able to push back the mob for a short while, and to take the dead and wounded to the municipal hospital. Despite the impression that the situation had calmed down, crowds in other parts of the city continued to beat and kill Jews, and the outbursts of hatred worsened. At around 12:30 P.M., when there was a lunch break at the Ludwikow steel mill not far from the Jewish house, about 500 workers broke through the factory gate and headed for Planty Street. The workers, who were armed with knives, wooden sticks and iron bars, were easily able to make their way through the crowds and enter the Jewish house. The pogrom, which had started dying down, was set aflame again and another 20 Jews lost their lives. That same day, attackers beat Jews on a train. The engineer slowed the train intentionally, and all the Jews were pulled out of the coaches and beaten to death. The attackers left with the victims' watches, clothes, shoes and money.

That afternoon, army units from Warsaw arrived in Kielce and dispersed the mobs. The Jewish dead and wounded were taken to St. Alexandra Hospital and the survivors were sent to the local sports stadium and the offices of the security forces. That day, at least 50 Jews, including women and children, lost their lives in Kielce, and more than 50 others were injured.

A belated apology

Even after the pogrom was over, the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Kielce did not dissipate, and the hunt for Jews continued. Poles who looked Jewish were also attacked, degraded and beaten cruelly. The pogrom atmosphere gradually spread to the suburbs, and Poles who met Jews on trains would beat them and throw them out of the coaches. The district police commander, who consulted the national council in the city, continued to claim the authorities had information on the murder of Polish children by Jews.

The day after the pogrom, various local leaders met. This included the various political factions and the deputy head of the district, and they condemned the bishops' bureau for its apathy during the events. The meeting decided to publish a manifesto to calm the atmosphere. The Central Committee of Polish Jews in Warsaw sent Dr. Avraham (Adolph) Berman and Yitzhak Zuckerman to Kielce to bring food and clothing to the Jews there. The authorities mandated an evening curfew and the police declared a state of emergency.

The funerals were held four days later, on the afternoon of July 8. The pogrom victims were buried in Kielce's old Jewish cemetery. The funeral procession was two kilometers long. The residents of the town lined the streets, and some 10,000 people attended the funerals, including many Poles who had been ordered by the authorities to participate. A delegation from the Ludwikow steel mill marched at the head of the funeral procession, which was led by a special army unit for state funerals and ceremonies. More than 40 coffins were buried, side by side, in a mass grave 60 meters long. Later, a red clay obelisk was erected at the site.

The trial of the accused murderers began the following day, July 9, 1946. The trial was heard by a supreme military tribunal that came to Kielce specially for this purpose. Of the 12 Poles who were put on trial, nine were sentenced to death and executed on July 12, 1946. Further trials were held between September and December 1946, and another 30 suspects, among them policemen and soldiers, were charged; various senior officers were also arrested. The Jewish survivors, those hospitalized at the local hospital, were transferred from Kielce to Lodz in a special Red Cross train.

This pogrom had a traumatic effect on the Jews of Poland and on the entire world, and evoked many responses. The anti-Jewish incidents in Poland after World War II, including the Kielce pogrom, can be explained as a grudge, suspicion or mutual recrimination between the Jewish and Polish publics. These feelings were based on parallel stereotypes that blocked mutual understanding between the two peoples.

The negative feelings of the Jews stemmed from their belief that the Poles had abandoned them during the Holocaust and had expressed joy over the Jews' fate. The Poles held a grudge against the Jews for not supporting their national aspirations and for assisting the Soviets when they annexed the eastern sections of Poland at the start of the war, as well as for cooperating with the Stalinist regime after Poland was liberated.

The Polish church, perhaps the most important body that might have been able to calm the atmosphere after the war, did not react in a unified fashion. For the most part, church officials refrained from commenting on the grounds that the anti-Jewish incidents did not have a religious nature. Even the Vatican's official organ justified the Polish church's blind eye to the plight of the Jews by saying the incidents were not within the realm of the church's activity.

The pogrom in Kielce sowed distress and panic among the survivors, and created a growing feeling of existential danger. A wave of attacks on Jews throughout Poland made the situation even worse. Even those survivors who had hoped to rehabilitate their lives in Poland were proven wrong, and the result was a mass exodus. Within three months after the Kielce pogrom, some 60,000 Jews fled the country. Fifty years later, in 1996, at a memorial ceremony held in the town, the Kielce Mayor Boguslaw Ciesielski asked the Jews for forgiveness. Speaking in front of a large crowd that included Israeli citizens, some of whom survived the pogrom, Ciesielski said it could not be ignored that people in Kielce took up iron bars, stones and planks and murdered Jews. Ciesielski said the request for forgiveness was a basic gesture that must be made to the victims.

(The writer is a lecturer in Jewish history at the University of Haifa. )