Kielce pogrom - WikiHQ

The Kielce pogrom was an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence that took place on 4 July 1946 in the city of Kielce, Poland. Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians attacked a building at 7 Planty Street that housed around 150–160 Jewish Holocaust survivors, killing 42 Jews and wounding more than 40. The violence was sparked by a false accusation of child kidnapping, a revival of the antisemitic blood libel myth. Despite the rapid collapse of the kidnapping claim, rumors were circulated by state forces, prompting the gathering of a hostile crowd and the subsequent assault on the building and its inhabitants. Several Jews not residing at Planty Street were also killed elsewhere in the city that day, and at least two Jews were later murdered in transit through Kielce's train station.

The pogrom occurred less than a year after the end of World War II and is considered the deadliest act of violence against Jews in postwar Poland. It had a profound impact on the Jewish community, prompting a mass exodus of Holocaust survivors from the country. The incident also drew international condemnation and remains a subject of historical investigation and public debate. In the immediate aftermath, the Polish authorities held a series of trials, resulting in multiple death sentences and prison terms.

During the German occupation of Poland, Kielce and the villages around it were completely ethnically cleansed by the Nazis of its pre-war Jewish community, most of whom perished in The Holocaust. By the summer of 1946, some 200 Jews, many of them former residents of Kielce, had returned from the Nazi concentration camps or refuge in the Soviet Union. About 150–160 of them were quartered in a single building administered by the Jewish Committee of Kielce Voivodeship at Planty, Henryk Błaszczyk remained publicly silent about the events until 1998, when, in an interview to a Polish journalist he admitted he was never kidnapped but was living with an "unknown family" in a nearby village and was treated well. He perceived his disappearance as happening with his father's awareness and concerted by the communist security service. After returning home he was categorically commanded by his father not to discuss anything that happened and reaffirm only the story of "Jewish abduction" if ever asked. He was threatened to keep quiet long after 1946, which he did out of fear until the end of communist rule in Poland.

The Citizens' Militia publicised the rumours of the kidnapping and further announced that they were planning to search for the bodies of non-Jewish Polish children supposedly ritually murdered and kept in the house, resulting in the gathering of civilian spectators. The United States Memorial Museum states "the mass violence of the Kielce pogrom drew on an entrenched local history of antisemitism—especially false allegations accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes (a charge known as a “blood libel”)—with the intent of discouraging the return of Jewish Holocaust survivors to Poland."

Reaction of the Communist government

One immediate reaction of the Communist government of Poland was to attempt to blame the pogrom on Polish independence underground, alleging that uniformed members of anti-communist formations backing the Polish government-in-exile were egging the mob on. At the funeral of the Jewish victims, the Minister of Public Security, Stanisław Radkiewicz, stated that the pogrom was "a deed committed by the emissaries of the Polish government in the West and General Anders, with the approval of Home Army soldiers." Other early official statements at the time followed this line.

After these initial attempts to blame the pogrom on "reactionary elements" opposed to the Communist regime, the Communist Party changed its policy. Party memoranda and internal reports pointed out that the local population felt no sympathy for the victims and was unwilling to publicly condemn the perpetrators. The July 1946 report of the Radom Department of Information and Propaganda noted that "the Jewish pogrom in Kielce met with the moral approval of many groups in our society". According to Gross, the Communist Party decided not to publicly condemn the pogrom because at the time it was "deeply committed to the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Polish population". In July 1946, the Secretariat of the Central Committee did not place on the agenda the issue of the pogrom, and documents submitted by high party officials and other internal reports described the pogrom as an explosion of popular anger against the "parasitic elements" of society. Gross concludes that in post-war Poland, "while Jews were literally running away from Communism" and leaving for Israel, "the Communists were politically running away from the Jews", in an effort to expand their consensus base in Polish society.

Additional investigation into the circumstances of the massacre was opposed by the communist regime until the era of Solidarity, when in December 1981 an article was published in the Solidarity newspaper Tygodnik Solidarność. However, the return of repressive government meant that files could not be accessed for research until after the fall of Communism in 1989, by which time many eyewitnesses had died. It was then discovered that many of the documents relating to the pogrom had been allegedly destroyed by fire or deliberately by military authorities.

Trials

Between 9 and 11 July 1946, twelve civilians were tried by the Supreme Military Court for participating in the pogrom. Nine were sentenced to death and executed the following day by firing squad on the orders of Bolesław Bierut. The remaining three received prison terms of 7 years, 10 years, and life. Overall, 10 trials were held, resulting in 39 convictions. The trials of militiamen and UB officers suspected of participating in the riots took place in September and October. As a result, several defendants were sentenced to prison and several were demoted. On 18 November, 15 civilian were tried, of whom nine were found guilty. One was sentenced to life in prison and the others received prison terms ranging from two to 15 years. On 3 December, another 7 soldiers were tried and received prison terms. On 13 December, the trial of the UB commandant in Kielce, Władysław Spychaj-Sobczyński, and two militia commanders, Kuźnicki and Gwiazdowicz, started. Of them, only Kuźnicki (who died in 1947) was found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison.

Aside from Kielce Voivodeship's Citizens' Militia commandant, Major Wiktor Kuźnicki, who was sentenced to one year for "failing to stop the crowd", only one high-ranking militia officer was punished—for the theft of shoes from a dead body. Mazur's explanation regarding his killing of the Fisz family was accepted. Meanwhile, the regional UBP chief, Colonel Władysław Sobczyński, and his men were cleared of any wrongdoing. The official reaction to the pogrom was described by Anita J. Prazmowska in Cold War History, Vol. 2, No. 2:

<blockquote>"Clearly, during the period when the first investigations were launched and the trial, a most likely politically motivated decision had been made not to proceed with disciplinary action. This was in spite of very disturbing evidence that emerged during the pre-trial interviews. It is entirely feasible that instructions not to punish the MO and UBP commanders had been given because of the politically sensitive nature of the evidence. Evidence heard by the military prosecutor revealed major organisational and ideological weaknesses within these two security services." In August 1946 the number of emigrants increased to thirty thousand. In September 1946, twelve thousand Jews left Poland. Britain demanded that Poland halt the Jewish exodus, but their pressure was largely unsuccessful.

Reaction of the Catholic Church

Six months before the Kielce pogrom, during the celebration of Hanukkah, a hand grenade had been thrown into the headquarters of the local Jewish community. The Jewish Community Council had approached the Bishop of Kielce, , requesting that he admonish the Polish people to refrain from attacking the Jews. The bishop refused, replying that "as long as the Jews concentrated upon their private business Poland was interested in them, but at the point when Jews began to interfere in Polish politics and public life, they insulted the Poles' national sensibilities".

Łukasz Kamiński detailed that workers went on strike to protest the release of the condemned. The strike was ignited when newspapers, on July 10th 1946, went to ask workers to sign a condemnation of the Kielce pogrom. These were reluctantly signed and then published. Workers at Łódź Thread Factory, Scheibler and Grohman struck, demanding the retraction of the workers' signatures. These strikes spread to factories such as Buhle, Zimmerman, Warta, Tempo Rasik, etc.

Commemoration

Following the fall of communism, several commemorative plaques were unveiled in Kielce. In 1990 the first plaque was unveiled following the involvement of then Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. A monument by New York City-based artist Jack Sal entitled White/Wash II commemorating the victims was dedicated on 4 July 2006, in Kielce, on the 60th anniversary of the pogrom. At the dedication ceremony, a statement from the President of the Republic of Poland Lech Kaczyński condemned the events as a "crime and a great shame for the Poles and tragedy for the Polish Jews". The presidential statement asserted that in today's democratic Poland there is "no room for antisemitism" and brushed off any generalizations of the antisemitic image of the Polish nation as a stereotype. Another monument intended to be a representative grave for the victims, was unveiled in the city in 2010.

References

Sources

External links

Case Study: The Pogrom in Kielce, The London School of Economics and Political Science by Anita J. Prazmowska
Postwar Pogrom, The New York Times, 23 July 2006