Kielce 1946

The Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946 was the largest single act of violence against Jewish survivors in postwar Europe. Around 200 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust had returned to the Polish town of Kielce in the months after liberation, mostly because they had nowhere else to go. On that day their Polish neighbours, including police and soldiers, beat and shot 42 of them to death. The pogrom ended whatever remaining hope most Polish Jews had of rebuilding their lives in Poland.

What happened

The pretext was a blood libel. On 1 July 1946, a nine-year-old Polish boy, Henryk Błaszczyk, went missing for two days. On his return he told his father and then the police that he had been kidnapped and held in the cellar of a building at 7 Planty Street, where approximately 180 Jewish survivors were living in a Jewish committee hostel. He claimed to have seen other children held there. The story was a version of the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes. It was entirely false. The building at 7 Planty Street had no cellar. Błaszczyk later admitted he had simply gone to stay with relatives in a nearby village and had invented the story, apparently coached by adults.

On the morning of 4 July, a crowd gathered outside 7 Planty Street. Polish police and soldiers arrived. Rather than protecting the building’s residents, the security forces participated in the violence. Residents were dragged out and beaten; some were shot. The violence continued for several hours. Forty-two Jews were killed and around forty more seriously injured. The victims included a pregnant woman and a young child.

The context

Kielce did not occur in a vacuum. Between the liberation in January 1945 and the pogrom in July 1946, approximately 1,500 Jews had been killed in Poland in scattered incidents of violence. The patterns of antisemitism in postwar Poland were complex: some Poles had rescued Jews at great personal risk during the occupation; others had denounced Jews to the Germans, murdered Jews themselves, or seized Jewish property. The returning survivors were, for many Poles, an unwanted reminder and, in some cases, a threat to property that had changed hands during the occupation.

The Communist Polish government that had taken power in 1945 condemned the pogrom and arrested and executed nine perpetrators. But its response was limited and its analysis was politically constrained: attributing the pogrom to antisemitism raised uncomfortable questions about the social base of the new regime. The role of Polish security forces in the violence was not fully investigated.

The consequences

The immediate consequence of Kielce was a mass flight of Polish Jews. In the months following the pogrom, approximately 90,000 Jews left Poland, most of them heading for the displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany and eventually for Palestine or emigration to the West. Of the approximately 380,000 Jews who had survived the war in Poland (including those who had been in the Soviet Union), the vast majority had left by 1948. Poland’s Jewish community, once the largest in Europe, was effectively gone.

The historical memory of Kielce in Poland has been contested for decades. Full scholarly engagement with the events, including the role of Polish citizens and security forces, became possible only after the end of Communist rule in 1989, and has continued to be politically sensitive. Jan Tomasz Gross’s 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz provoked a major public controversy in Poland when it addressed not only Kielce but the broader pattern of postwar anti-Jewish violence.

See also

Sources

  • Jan Tomasz Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Random House, 2006
  • David Engel, Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944-1946, Yad Vashem Studies, 1998
  • Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pod klątwą: Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego, Czarna Owca, 2018
  • Bożena Szaynok, Pogrom Żydów w Kielcach 4 lipca 1946, Bellona, 1992
  • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kielce Pogrom, encyclopedia.ushmm.org