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Kielce pogrom
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The Kielce pogrom refers to the events that occurred on July 4, 1946, in the Polish town of Kielce. The outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, sparked by allegations of blood libel, resulted in 37 Polish Jews being murdered out of about 200 Holocaust survivors who had returned home after World War II. Two more Jews in trains passing through Kielce also lost their lives. Two or three Gentile Poles were killed by the Jews defending themselves, while nine were later sentenced to death.
While far from the deadliest pogrom against the Jews, the incident was especially significant in post-war Jewish history, as the attack took place more than a year after the end of World War II in Europe, shocking both the Jews in Poland and the international community.
ng the German occupation of Poland, Kielce was entirely ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population.
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The Kielce pogrom refers to the events that occurred on July 4, 1946, in the Polish town of Kielce. The outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, sparked by allegations of blood libel, resulted in 37 Polish Jews being murdered out of about 200 Holocaust survivors who had returned home after World War II. Two more Jews in trains passing through Kielce also lost their lives. Two or three Gentile Poles were killed by the Jews defending themselves, while nine were later sentenced to death.
While far from the deadliest pogrom against the Jews, the incident was especially significant in post-war Jewish history, as the attack took place more than a year after the end of World War II in Europe, shocking both the Jews in Poland and the international community.
The pogrom
Background
During the German occupation of Poland, Kielce was entirely ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population. By the summer of 1946, some two hundred Jews, many of them former residents of Kielce, were living there after returning from the Nazi concentration camps and from their hiding places. About 160 of them were quartered in a single building administered by the Jewish Committee of Kielce Voivodeship at 7 Planty Street. Among them were former prisoners of concentration camps as well as some relatively wealthy Soviet Jews on their way to Palestine.
Planty was a small street in the center of the town, and it ran perpendicular to the main streets, where the regional headquarters of the Milicja Obywatelska (MO) and the armed forces were located. In the same building, but with a different entry door, also lived the local officers of the Polish secret police known as UBP (the local office of the Ministry of Public Security).
Blood libel
On July 1, 1946, an eight-year-old Polish boy, Henryk Blaszczyk, was reported missing by his father Walenty, a man allegedly with connections to the secret police. Two days later, the boy, his father and one of their neighbors went to a local police station where Henryk falsely claimed that he had been kidnapped by Jews (years later, shortly before his death in 1990s, he said he was told to lie by his father and the men from the secret police). Henryk accused the Jews of killing children for their blood and keeping the bodies in the cellar of the kibbutz (Jewish socialist collective community) on Planty Street, among other alleged horrors.
A patrol of 14 uniformed and plainclothed MO officers was dispatched on foot to the Jewish house by the station's new police chief Edmund Zagórski. On their way, they were spreading rumours regarding the alleged kidnapping, and were joined by several groups of about 100 servicemen from various units and formations: Polish People's Army (LWP), Internal Security Corps and Main Directorate of Information, and some more policemen. The false news of the Jewish religious atrocities spread among the non-Jewish civilians in Kielce, and resulted in a gathering of some 120 people outside the Jewish residence in anticipation of a search for bodies of Christian children.
By 9:00 a.m., uniformed policemen and soldiers, as well as several mostly plainclothed officers of the UBP, broke down the doors and entered the building. They began to disarm the inhabitants, who had permits from the authorities to bear arms for self defense. One Jewish man, described by Henryk, was arrested and beaten by the police, while Dr. Seweryn Kahane, head of the local Jewish Committee, tried to convince them of their mistake, pointing out that the building had no basement. At this point, the house was surrounded by security forces, with the civilian crowd standing about 100 meters (approximately 328 feet) away, towards Piotrkowska street.
Killings
By 10:00 a.m., the first shot was fired; it is unclear by whom: a policeman, a soldier, or one of the Jews. Violence broke out and the security forces began killing Jews; Dr. Kahane was among the first to be killed (survivors testified that he was shot in the back of the head by an officer of the Army's Main Directorate of Information while he was trying to call the authorities for help). At least two and possibly three Poles, including a police officer, were killed as the Jews tried to defend themselves (according to the official version at the time, the policeman was killed while trying to defend the Jews). After the attack inside the building, more Jews were then forced outside by the troops and attacked by civilians on the street. Some of the victims were thrown out of windows, including one reportedly thrown onto the bayonets raised by the soldiers.
By noon, the arrival of an estimated 600 to 1,000 workers from the nearby Ludwików steel mill, led by members of the ORMO reserve police and activists of the Polish Workers' Party's (PPR, Poland's ruling communist party) militia, marked the beginning of the next phase of the pogrom, during which about 20 Jews were killed, mostly with steelworks tools. Neither the military and secret police commanders, nor the local political leaders from the PPR did anything to stop the workers from attacking the Jews, while a unit of police cadets joined in the looting and murdering of the Jews, which continued inside and outside the building.
The killing of the Jews at Planty Street was stopped with the arrival of a new unit of security forces from a nearby Public Security academy sent by Colonel Stanislaw Kupsza and additional troops from Warsaw at approximately 6:00 p.m. After firing a few warning shots in the air on the order of Major Kazimierz Konieczny, the new troops quickly restored order, posted guards, and removed all the Jewish survivors from the building.
The violence in Kielce, however, did not stop immediately. Wounded Jews, while being transported to the hospital, were beaten and robbed by soldiers. Trains passing through Kielce's main railway station were searched for Jews by civilians and railway guards, resulting in two passengers being thrown out of the trains and killed. Later, a civilian crowd approached the hospital and demanded that the wounded Jews be handed over to them. The civil disorder ended some nine hours after it started.
The aftermath
Official reaction of the government and resulting trials
Between July 9 and July 11, 1946, 12 of the alleged civilian perpetrators of the pogrom, one of them apparently mentally challenged, were arrested by MBP officers led by Adam Humer. They were tried by the Supreme Military Court. Nine of them were sentenced to death and executed by firing squad the very next day on the orders of the Polish communist leader Boleslaw Bierut. The remaining three received prison terms ranging from seven years to life.
Other than the city's MO commandant Wiktor Kuznicki, who was sentenced to one year for "failing to stop the crowd" (he died in 1947), one police officer was punished—for the theft of shoes from a dead body. Meanwhile, the regional UBP chief Wladyslaw Sobczynski and his men were all cleared of any wrongdoing.
The official reaction to the pogrom was described by Anita J. Prazmowska in Cold War History, Vol. 2, No. 2:
- "Nine participants in the pogrom were sentenced to death; three were given lengthy prison sentences. Policemen, military men, and functionaries of the UBP were tried separately and then unexpectedly all, with the exception of Wiktor Kuznicki, Commander of the MO, who was sentenced to one year in prison, were found not guilty of "having taken no action to stop the crowd from committing crimes." 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 organizational and ideological weaknesses within these two security services..."
Effects on Jewish emigration from Poland
The brutality of the Kielce pogrom put an end to the hopes of many Jews that they would be able to resettle in Poland after the end of the Nazi Germany occupation and precipitated a mass exodus of Polish Jewry. In the words of Bozena Szaynok, a historian at Wroclaw University:
- "Until 4 July 1946, Polish Jews cited the past as their main reason for emigration. After the Kielce pogrom, the situation changed drastically. Both Jewish and Polish reports spoke of an atmosphere of panic among Jewish society in the summer of 1946. Jews no longer believed that they could be safe in Poland. Despite the large militia and army presence in the town of Kielce, Jews had been murdered there in cold blood, in public, and for a period of more than five hours. The news that the militia and the army had taken part in the pogrom spread as well. From July 1945 until June 1946, about fifty thousand Jews passed the Polish border illegally. In July 1946, almost twenty thousand decided to leave Poland. In August 1946 the number increased to thirty thousand. In September 1946, twelve thousand Jews left Poland."
Many of these Jews were smuggled out illegally by the Berihah (Escape) organization.
Reaction of the Catholic Church
Six months prior to the Kielce pogrom, during the Hanukkah celebration, a hand grenade had been thrown into the local Jewish community headquarters. The Jewish Community Council had approached the Bishop of Kielce, Czeslaw Kaczmarek, requesting him to admonish the Polish population to refrain from attacking the Jews. The Bishop refused this request, 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". Therefore, according to the Bishop, it was not surprising that the local population had acted violently.
Similar comments were made by the Bishop of Lublin, Stefan Wyszynski, when he was approached by a Jewish delegation. Wyszynski stated that the popular hatred of Jews was caused by Jewish support for communism, which had also been the reason why "the Germans murdered the Jewish nation". Wyszynski also gave some credence to blood libel rumours commenting that the question of the use of Christian blood was never completely clarified.
The controversial stance of the Polish Catholic Church towards violence against Jews was the subject of criticism by American, British, and Italian ambassadors to Poland.
Reports of the Kielce pogrom caused a major sensation in the United States, leading the American ambassador to Poland to insist that Cardinal August Hlond hold a press conference and explain the position of the church. In the conference held on July 11, 1946, Cardinal Hlond condemned the murders, but attributed them not to racial causes but to rumours concerning the killing of Polish children by Jews. Hlond also put the blame for the deterioration in Polish-Jewish relations on the Jews "occupying leading positions in Poland in state life". This position was echoed by Cardinal Adam Stefan Sapieha, who was reported to have said that the Jews had brought it on themselves, and by Polish rural clergy.
On September 14, 1946, Pope Pius XII gave an audience to Rabbi Phillip Bernstein, the advisor on Jewish affairs to the U.S. European theater of operations. Bernstein asked the Pope to condemn the pogroms, but the Pope claimed that it was difficult to communicate with the Church in Poland because of the Iron Curtain.
Speculations over Soviet involvement
The Kielce pogrom has been a difficult subject in Polish history for many years, and there is still confusion over who to blame. While it is beyond doubt that a mob (consisting of the gentile inhabitants of Kielce including members of the communist militsiya police and army), carried out the pogrom, there has been considerable controversy over possible outside inspiration for the events. The hypothesis that the event was provoked, or inspired, by Soviet intelligence has been put forward, and a number of similar scenarios are still offered.
In writings of sociologist Tadeusz Piotrowski, logician Abel Kainer (Stanislaw Krajewski), and sociologist Jan Sledzianowski, allegations are made that the events were part of a much wider action organized by Soviet intelligence in countries controlled by the Soviet Union (a very similar pogrom took place in Hungary), and that Soviet-dominated agencies like the UBP were used in the preparation of the Kielce pogrom. The presence in the city of Polish communist and Soviet commanders (e.g. the "advisor" Natan Shpilevoi and a high-ranking GRU officer for special actions Mikhail Diomin) during the pogrom was confirmed by witnesses. It was also uncommon behavior that numerous troops from security formations were present at the place and did not prevent the "mob" from gathering, at a time when even a gathering of five people was considered suspicious and immediately controlled.
Michael Checinski, a former Polish Military Counter-Intelligence officer, emigrated to United States after the 1968 Polish political crisis where he published his book in which asserts that the events of Kielce pogrom were a well planned action of the Soviet intelligence in Poland, with the main role in planning and controlling the events being played by Mikhail Diomin, and with the murders carried out by Poles, including Polish policemen and military officers.
On July 19, 1946, former Chief Military Prosecutor Henryk Holder wrote in the letter to the deputy chief of LWP Gen. Marian Spychalski that "we know that the pogrom wasn't only a fault of Militia and Army guarding the people in and around the city of Kielce but also a people from official government who took a role in it."
One line of argument that implies external inspiration goes as follows: The 1946 referendum showed that the communist plans met with little support, with less than a third of the Polish population, and only vote rigging won them a majority in the carefully controlled poll. Hence, it has been alleged that the UBP organized the pogrom to distract the Western world media's attention from the fabricated referendum. Another argument for the incident's use as distraction was the upcoming ruling on the Katyn massacre in the Nuremberg Trials, which the communists tried to turn international attention away from, placing the Poles in an unfavorable spotlight (the pogrom happened on July 4—the same day the Katyn case started in Nuremberg).
Historian Jan T. Gross attribues the massacre to Polish hostility to the Jews. Gross' book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, offers a somewhat different and more nuanced interpretation. Gross, while agreeing that the crime was initiated not by a mob, but by the police, and that it involved people from every walk of life except the highest level of government officials in the city, claims that "the complicity of gentile Poles in the Holocaust" combined with demands for the return of Jewish property confiscated during World War II created a climate of "fear" that pushed Poles to commit violence against Jews. He thus argues against any notion that it was a Soviet provocation, or that the alleged cooperation of Jews with communism, an enduring and powerful stereotype of antisemitism in the Central Europe and particularly in Poland (popularly known in Polish as Zydokomuna, or "Judeocommunism"), caused the violent antisemitism that exploded in Poland after 1945. At the same time, Polish communist structures had already been in great part "cleansed" of Jews, even before the war, by the same people who later participated in the antisemitic events in Kielce (Wladyslaw Sobczynski) and in the antisemitic purges of 1968 (Mieczyslaw Moczar).
The opinion that the Soviets arranged the massacre in order to discredit the Poles in the eyes of the world remains common in Poland to this day, despite a thorough investigation that did not discover any evidence in support of this version and the formal apology for the massacre that was issued by the Polish government. The stance that maintains foreign responsibility for such a disturbing event (similar to the version that the Germans rather than the Poles were responsible for the war-time Jedwabne pogrom) is ill regarded by some Jewish groups who view it as evidence of the lack of determination in Polish society to confront and address antisemitism in Poland.
Recent events
IPN investigation
In recent years, the Kielce pogrom and the role of Poles in the massacre have been openly discussed in Poland. A formal investigation of the pogrom conducted by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) since 1990 finished inconclusively in 2004, as it did not find sufficient evidence to charge any specific living individual with crimes committed during the pogrom. However, the timeline of events on that fateful day is well established. In the course of the investigation, the IPN dismissed the theory of Soviet inspiration because of "lack of direct evidence and lack of obvious Soviet interest in provoking the events".
Pogrom monument
A monument by New York-based artist Jack Sal entitled White/Wash II commemorating the victims was dedicated on July 4, 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 Kaczynski condemned the events as a "crime and a great shame and tragedy for the Poles and the Jews". The presidential statement asserted that in today's democratic Poland there is "no room for racism" and brushed off any generalizations of the antisemitic image of the Polish nation as a "stereotype".
See also
Further reading
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External links
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