The Kielce Pogrom
(July 4, 1946)
by Bozena Szaynok
For many years, the anti-Jewish pogrom in Kielce
on July 4, 1946, was one of the many taboo topics in modern Polish
history. At the end of the 1980s, the great political changes in Poland meant that historians could begin to research the history of Poland
using secret archives and records which had not previously been
available to them. These new research opportunities also applied to
the history of Jews in Poland after 1945 -- my field of
specialization. I became the first historian to gain access to
materials on the Kielce pogrom contained in the archives of the
Polish Ministry of the Interior in Warsaw and in the local archive in
the town of Kielce itself.
Based on my research, I would like to present what
we know about the Jewish pogrom for certain.
The pogrom in Kielce took place on July 4, 1946,
but some events which are very strongly connected with that pogrom
started a few days before. On July 1, a nine-year-old boy, Henryk
Blaszczyk, left home without informing his parents. Little Henryk set
out to visit friends of his parents in the village of Bielaki, almost
25 kilometers from Kielce. Henryk's visit took place during summer
vacation, and it was not the boy's first visit there. During the war,
his family had lived in the village for some time as well. In Kielce,
Henryk's father, Walenty Blaszczyk, troubled by his son's absence,
began searching for him. When searches and inquires brought no
results, Henryk was reported missing to the police at midnight. On
July 3, Henryk decided to return home, and that evening he came back
to Kielce.
His family and neighbors asked him where he had
been. In response, he told a story about an unknown gentlemen whom he
had met in Kielce. He asked him to deliver a parcel to some house and
after that he put the boy in a cellar. With the help of another boy
who was also there, Henry escaped on July 3. Obviously, the story was
told by the boy to avoid punishment, but the neighbors and the boy's
parents believed it. But two neighbors who were at the Blaszczyks'
home when Henryk came back had questions. One asked the boy whether
the gentleman he described was a Gypsy or a Jew, and the boy replied
that the unknown gentleman did not speak Polish and that he therefore
had to be a Jew. However, in response to a similar question asked by
another neighbor, the boy merely replied that he was put in a cellar
by a man without giving any information about his nationality. In
other words, two persons suggested to little Henryk that Jews could
have been the perpetrators of his abduction, and this information was
reported to the police station on the evening of July 3.
On the next day, July 4, at about 8 a.m., Walenty
Blaszczyk (the boy's father) set out for the police station with his
son and one of the neighbors. On the way, they passed the house where
Jewish families lived in Kielce, the so-called Jewish house.
According to the testimony given by the father and
the neighbor, they asked the boy if he had been kept at the Jewish
home. Henryk not only stated that he had been held there, but he also
pointed to one short man standing near the Jewish house and said that
this man had put him in a cellar.
At the police station, Henryk's story was treated
as a truthful. In a short time, three police patrols were dispatched
to Planty Street, where the Jewish house was located. Planty street
was a small street in the center of the town, and it ran
perpendicular to the main streets in which the regular police, the
Security (political, secret police ), and the army had their
headquarters.
The policemen from the first patrol arrested the
young Jewish male pointed out by the boy, and the next patrol started
searching for the place where the boy had been held. Each of the
three patrols had about ten policemen. They walked with Henryk and
obviously attracted the attention of the residents of Kielce. When
the policemen were questioned about what had happened, they spread
false reports about Jews holding a Polish boy, and they also talked
about searching for murdered Polish children in a Jewish home. All of
this took place in the center of Kielce.
People started to gather very quickly along the
way and to congregate in front of the so-called Jewish house. The
behavior of the policemen and the people who were gathering near
Planty Street made the Jewish families living there apprehensive.
Severyn Kahane, the chairman of the Jewish Committee in Kielce and an
inhabitant of the Jewish house, went to the police station to get
some explanations. The police promised to release Singer Kalaman, the
young Jewish male who had been arrested, but they did not keep their
promise. The initial search of the house by the policemen convinced
the crowd that the rumor about Polish children being kept there was,
in fact, true, although, at the beginning, most of the people in the
crowd behaved passively. They simply watched the police conduct their
search.
Between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., some of the main
representatives of state authority in Kielce found out about Henryk's
story and its consequences. Among them were the chief of police and
his deputy. In addition, two of the most important people in Kielce
at that time, the chief of the Department of Public Security (the
secret, political police) Wladyslaw Sobczynski, and his Soviet
advisor also learned of the events unfolding on Planty Street.
At about 10 a.m., the police patrols and a group
of functionaries from the political police were joined by an army
contingent on Planty Street. According to the testimony of the deputy
commander of the army division to which the soldiers belonged, about
one hundred soldiers and five officers were dispatched to Planty
Street. The newly arrived troops had not been told anything about the
events, and they came to believe that Jews had kidnaped and murdered
Polish children in the house on Planty Street. The soldiers got their
information from the people gathered on the street. With the arrival
of the troops, tensions rose very quickly.
The soldiers and the policemen then went into the
building. Jews were told to surrender their weapons, but not all of
the residents obeyed the order. The entry of the policemen and the
soldiers into the Jewish house marked the beginning of the pogrom.
Excerpts from testimony supplied by people who witnessed the outbreak
of the pogrom describe what followed.
Ewa Szuchman, resident of the house on Planty
Street, said:
After the police took away the weapons, the
crowd broke into the Kibutz ( on the second floor) and policemen
started shooting at the Jews first. They killed one and wounded
several others.
Albert Grynbaum, another inhabitant of the Jewish
house who was on the first floor, said:
The soldiers went up to the second floor.
Several minutes later two Jews came to me and told me that the
soldiers were killing Jews and looting their property. It was then
that I heard shots. After the shooting on the second floor, shots
were heard from the street and inside the building.
This is how the Kielce pogrom began. The behavior
of the policemen and the soldiers, influenced by the crowd outside,
provoked it into action. After the attack inside the building, the
Jews were led outside where the people killed them in a cruel
fashion. Other eye-witness accounts given by Jews and Poles confirm
these events.
Baruch Dorfman (Jew, resident of the Jewish
house):
Uniformed soldiers and a number of civilians
forced their way into the building. I had already been wounded.
They told us to get out and form a line. Civilians, including
women, were on the stairs. The soldiers hit us with their rifle
butts. Civilians, men and women, also hit us.
Ryszard Salapa (one of the policemen) recalled:
The military led Jews out of apartments and
people began hitting them with everything they could. The armed
soldiers did not react. Some returned to the building to lead other
Jews outside.
At about 11 a.m. Seweryn Kahane, the chairman of
the Jewish Committee in Kielce, was shot by soldiers. He was killed
while calling for help. Within the first hour of the pogrom,
representatives of such key institutions in Warsaw as the Ministry of
Public Security (secret police) and the Chief Commander of the Police
found out about the pogrom from their subordinates in Kielce, who
called Warsaw at about 11 a.m.
Major Sobczynski, the local secret police
commander, and his Soviet advisor Szpilevoy, were on Planty Street at
that time, as were other local officials and army commanders. During
the first phase of the pogrom, the monsignor of the cathedral parish
in Kielce went to Planty Street with another priest. They were going
to check on what had happened and to talk with people gathered there.
Officers stopped them. The priests were told that the situation was
under control, and that civilians were prohibited from entering
Planty Street.
Until noon, all attempts to stop the pogrom
brought no results. At that time, the pogrom spilled over into the
city itself as well. One resident of Kielce recalled:
At 11:30 some eight young people coming from the
direction of the railroad station on Sienkiewicz Street ran a man
down in the middle of the road. He was hit with fists in the face
and head. From his face I could tell he was a Semite. I would like
to mention that as a former prisoner of concentration camps I had
not gone through an experience like this. I have seen very little
sadism and bestiality of this scale.
At about 12 o'clock, the army managed to push the
crowd back from the square facing the Jewish house. However, the
crowd did not disperse. The temporary calm was interrupted by the
arrival of workers from the Ludwikow steel mill. The arrival of the
workers marked the beginning of the next phase of the pogrom, during
which about 20 Jews lost their lives. According to eye-witness
accounts, once the workers arrived nothing could be done for the Jews
inside the building or on the square. Neither the military and secret
police commanders, nor the local political leaders from the Polish
Workers' Party did anything to stop the workers from attacking Jews.
The pogrom lasted until 2-3 p.m. New units of soldiers from a nearby
school run by the Interior Ministry and from Warsaw finally succeeded
in restoring order. Also, around 2 p.m. an official from the Kielce
court placed a call to the Curia requesting that the Church intervene
on Planty Street. Five priests went to Planty, where they tried to
convince people gathering there to return home. The priests warned
the mob that the soldiers would use their weapons. However, one of
the soldiers standing nearby said that the Polish army would never
shoot at Poles.
Meanwhile, wounded Jews were brought to the
hospital. While being transported, they were beaten and robbed by
soldiers. The anti-Jewish mood did not end with the pogrom. In the
afternoon, a large, anti-Jewish demonstration took place on Planty
Street. In addition, a crowd approached the hospital and demanded
that the wounded Jews be handed over to them. The pogrom in Kielce
began about 10 a.m. and ended in the afternoon. Anti-Jewish events
took place not only at Planty Street but all over town. In Kielce, a
Jewish mother and baby were carried out of their house and killed.
Anti-Jewish actions also occured on trains passing through Kielce
that day.
Over forty people were killed in the pogrom (some
of them died later in the hospital), including two Poles. Who were
the victims of the Kielce pogrom?
* The Chairman of the Jewish Community in Kielce,
Severyn Kahane.
* Young Zionists who wanted to leave Poland for
Palestine.
* Jewish soldiers and former prisoners of
concentration camps were among the victims.
* Estera Proszowska, killed because she helped wounded Jews.
On July 8, 1946, the victims of the pogrom were
buried at the Jewish cemetery in Kielce. Several trials grew out of
the Kielce pogrom. During the first such trial, nine people were
sentenced to death. By September and October, other trials were being
held in Kielce in which the accused were not only civilians, but also
soldiers and policemen. Among those charged was the commander of the
Kielce Office of the Security Service and the Chief of Police, both
of whom were acquitted. Most of the people put on trial were arrested
at random, and the trials themselves were far from clean. Some of the
people arrested were not even at the place where the pogrom took
place. Security officers could arrest anyone they wished to. During
interrogation, some of the arrested were beaten and tortured.
Witnesses called to testify on behalf of the accused were not
questioned at all. Nor were the Soviet advisors who were in Kielce at
that time questioned.
It is not possible to tell exactly how many trials
took place in conjunction with the Kielce pogrom, because some of the
relevant files were destroyed in 1989. While we are now able to
reconstruct the events of July 4, 1946, some aspects of the pogrom do
remain unexplained. For example:
1) Dygnarowicz and Pasowski, the neighbors of the
Blaszczyk family who originally suggested that little Blaszczyk had
been kept by Jews, went unpunished. Pasowski did not stand trial, and
Dygnarowicz was acquitted. This fact can be used in support of a
provocation theory. But, on the other hand, one must note that little
Blaszczyk, after his return home, originally gave a version of events
that did not incriminate Jews. It is therefore unlikely that Pasowski
and Dygnarowicz were, in such a short time, trained by anyone to play
the role of provocateurs. Moreover, Pasowski's question to Blaszczyk,
"who was the man who kidnaped you, a Jew or a Gypsy ?" was
a typical manifestation of the stereotypes existing among certain
social groups at the time. In April 1946, three months before the
pogrom in Kielce, the Jewish Press Agency had written that
"untrue stories about ritual murders committed by Jews on Polish
children, or, for a change, by Gypsies are meant to provoke unrest
and pogroms."
2) The reactions by the police and security forces
did indeed look like a provocation but, on the other hand, these
forces were incapable of acting jointly because of a conflict between
the provincial commander of the police and the head of security
forces, Major Sobczynski.
3) There is no question that the actions by the
police enabled the pogrom to spread. This may have been the result of
anti-Jewish sentiments prevalent in the Kielce police. For example:
* The dispatch of police patrols to Planty Street
lent credence to the Blaszczyk rumor.
* The Deputy Police Chief participated in the
anti-Jewish rally.
* On July 4, the Chief of Police in Kielce stated
in a meeting by of the provincial council that Jews had killed some
Polish children.
One should also take note of the widespread
perception in Poland after 1945 that Jews were responsible for the
new, communist regime in the country.
4) We do not know who was responsible for giving
the order to use live ammunition against the Jewish residents inside
the building and to seize weapons from the Jews.
5) We do not know who fired first. Did the Jews
fire in self-defense, or were the soldiers the first to open fire?
6) The actions of the head of the Provincial
Bureau for Public Security, Major Sobczynski, were, without doubt,
designed to escalate the pogrom. Sobczynski had been in Rzeszow
during an attempted pogrom there in June 1945. He understood
perfectly well how people and soldiers behave during a pogrom. The
reasons for Major Sobczynski's actions are not known. One can only
state that he had an interest in seeing the pogrom spread.
7) We do not know whether the orders dictating the
actions of the security service, the military, and the police came
from commanders in Kielce. During the pogrom, some people in Kielce
contacted highly placed officials in the Ministry of the Interior and
the National Police Headquarters in Warsaw.
8) One must place the Kielce pogrom in the broader
political context that existed in Poland in the second half of 1946.
The pogrom offered an opportunity to discredit the anti-communist
Polish Peasant Party as well as the underground opposition. The
pogrom also diverted public opinion within Poland and in the West
away from the national referendum that the Communists had staged and
rigged in June 1946 as a dry run for parliamentary elections.
9) We do not know what instructions the officers
from the security police received before the post-pogrom
interrogations, when they beat some of the suspects unconscious.
10) We do not know why the commanders of the army,
police and security service present in front of the building did not
undertake any actions to prevent the second stage of pogrom from
occurring.
11) We do not why the firing squad that executed
the nine people condemned to death in the trials was already in
Kielce on July 8th. Is it possible that the court verdict was ready
before the start of court proceedings?
12) How does one explain that the inaction during
the pogrom of some officers of the police, the army, and the security
services helped their careers?
13) And, finally, to what degree was the Kielce
tragedy used by the secret police to break the structures of the
anti-communist underground in the Kielce district and in Kielce
itself ? Since so many of the circumstances and events connected with
the pogrom remain unexplained, several interpretations of the Kielce
events have been put forward. The literature on the Kielce pogrom
contains a few theories that try to explain its causes and to
identify people responsible for the pogrom. One of the first theories
asserted that the pogrom had been provoked by the underground
opposition tied to the London-based Polish government-in-exile and to
the Polish Peasant Party, or PSL, the main legal anti-communist force
in Poland at the time. Proponents of this theory, communist leaders
such as Wladyslaw Gomulka and Jakub Berman, argued that soldiers from
the pro-London army of General Anders took part in the pogrom.
However, the ensuing investigation proved this thesis inaccurate.
When it turned out that the Kielce pogrom could not be used against
the anti-communist opposition, it was quickly hushed up.
According to members of the anti-communist
opposition, the pogrom was prepared by Polish or Soviet security
services. They wanted to change Western opinion about Polish society
and to counteract the impression that the results of the June
referendum had been falsified. This opinion was repeated by modern
historians and researchers.
Let me briefly discuss the political situation in
Poland at the time in order to shed additional light on the
provocation thesis. In 1946, a very intense political struggle was
underway in Poland. The magnitude of violence and repression in
Poland was larger than anywhere else in East Central Europe, and
Poland from 1945 to 1947/48 experienced what can accurately be termed
a civil war. Two main political orientations confronted one another.
The aim of the first was to put Poland under Soviet influence. The
Polish communists gradually tried to increase their influence by
resorting to more severe methods to strangle the anti-communist
resistance. On the other side, there was the pro-Western political
groups that wanted to conduct the free and democratic elections in
Poland guaranteed by Churchill , Roosevelt and Stalin in the Yalta
Accords of February 1945.
Both sides understood perfectly well that Polish
society was dominated by strong anti-communist sentiments. For this
reason, the Polish communists wanted to delay the elections. But
there was also a problem for the Polish Peasant Party. How could it
ensure that free elections would indeed be held when the country was
occupied by the Red Army?
The referendum of June 1946 represented the first
attempt to measure public opinion in Poland. It was kind of a test.
Both the communists and the opposition were interested in the
referendum's outcome. The results were important for both the West
and for Stalin. There is no question that the communists falsified
the results of the referendum. Despite the fact that the communists
claimed victory in the referendum, everyone in Poland knew that
referendum had been a great defeat for the Polish Workers' Party.
The Kielce pogrom took place just as the results
of the referendum were made public. What I have outlined here is, of
course, only a general description of the overall political context.
Some historians, however, have interpreted the political situation in
Poland at the time as a priori proof that the pogrom did in fact grow
out of a premeditated act of political provocation. A further
provocation theory was put forward by the leaders of the
anti-communist Polish Peasant Party, Stefan Korbonski and Stanislaw
Mikolajczyk. Korbonski and Mikolajczyk contended that the pogrom had
been organized by the head of the Kielce Security Bureau, Major
Sobczynski, with the aim of discrediting Polish society in the eyes
of Western Europe. Korbonski and Mikolajczyk pointed to the
unexplained role of the neighbors of the Blaszczyk family, the ones
who suggested to little Henry that Jews had kept him. Korbonski and
Mikolajczyk also emphasized the manner in which the pogrom unfolded
and its proximity to the national referendum.
One historian has recently argued that Major
Sobczynski organized anti-Jewish incidents in Rzeszow in 1945. There
is no question that the provocation theory enjoyed popularity in
Polish society. Public protests against the death penalties carried
out after the first Kielce trial and workers' refusal to condemn the
pogrom should not be dismissed merely as displays of anti-Semitism.
The causes were more complex.
One anonymous author of a letter sent to the
Provincial Bureau for Public Security in Kielce stated that
"society and foreign opinion keep asking where were the security
forces, the police, and the army? Why didn't they, in the span of 9
hours, intervene and disperse an unarmed crowd? The authorities are
at fault, not some stupid and backward individuals."
Arthur Bliss-Lane, the US ambassador to Poland at
the time, wrote that "I did not have a final proof for the
Government's participation in the instigation of the Kielce pogrom,
but, because of the incredible inefficiency demonstrated by the
police and Security Bureau, I started to consider whether the
Government willingly used that occasion to condemn its main
critics."
The most sophisticated provocation theory is the
one presented by Michal Checinski in his book, Poland, Communism,
Nationalism, Anti-Semitism. Mr. Checinski thinks that the pogrom
was prepared by Soviet advisers present in Kielce. He argues that the
Soviet Union had the most to gain and that "the political
opposition suffered by gaining a bad reputation abroad [...] the
attention of Western media was turned away from the rigging of an
important national referendum by the Polish authorities. The Soviet
Union achieved an important political goal when mass-emigrating
Polish Jews overflowed the Displaced Persons camps in the western
zones of Germany and Austria and, at the same time, undermined
British rule in Palestine." Mr. Checinski supports his thesis by
noting that Soviet advisers took part in the interrogations of people
arrested during and after the pogrom.
Archival documents that I found do confirm the
presence of Soviet advisers in Kielce in general. In particular, they
also prove the presence of a high-ranking Soviet officer on Planty
Street and in the office of Major Sobczynski. The version of events
presented by Mr. Checinski is another attempt to answer the question:
who is responsible for the Kielce pogrom?
In 1992, a new investigation of the pogrom got
underway. It was conducted by the Main Commission for the
Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation. The Commission has
been charged with collecting all existing reports and documents on
the Kielce pogrom as well as political and historical literature on
the subject. The members of the Commission made a list of living
witnesses of the pogrom, and over 130 people were interviewed.
The Commission acquired some new documents on the
Kielce pogrom from the Soviet archives and the Archive of the Polish
Ministry of Interior. Some files, however, were destroyed at the end
of the 1980's. The most important of these destroyed sources were
army reports.
The Commission's investigations have yielded some
important new elements. The Commission received two reports sent on
the day of the pogrom by Soviet advisors present in Kielce. These
reports were addressed to the main Soviet advisor attached to the
Polish Ministry of Public Security - Davidov. According to these
reports, the Soviet advisors were completely surprised by the pogrom.
The Commission also confirmed that little Blaszczyk had, in fact,
been in the village outside of Kielce where his family had spent some
time. However, the Commission refused to state definitively whether
the boy's disappearance had or had not been prepared in advance.
The Commission reaffirmed that the local
authorities in Kielce failed to undertake decisive steps against the
pogrom. In the first phase of the pogrom, between 11 a.m. and 12
a.m., when the events unfolded with the speed of lighting, no
officials counteracted them. The Commission concluded that the Chief
of Kielce Security, Wladyslaw Sobczynski, should have coordinated all
actions in defense of the Jews. And, as we know, he behaved
passively. The Commission's investigation has been handed over to the
District Prosecutor's Office in Kielce. And it will be continued.
The Kielce pogrom touches many problems. The most
painful and traumatic of these problems is the existence of anti-Semitism in Poland after World War II. Poles were clearly willing to
participate in an act of anti-Jewish violence. Some anti-Semitic
attitudes present in Polish society after 1945 had roots in the
period before the war. And others were connected to specific post-war
developments, including what has been called the "heritage of
the war." Edmund Osmanczyk, a Polish writer and journalist, has
written about "the generation infected by death". This
first post-war generation knew death intimately--death was something
tangible and real. It was easy to kill or to allow someone to be
killed. Osmanczyk also highlights a corresponding weakness of
morality and values.
One of the articles on Polish-Jewish relations
from 1944 to 1947 identifies another consequence of the war. Its
author writes that:
During the occupation, Jews, cut off from the
rest of the population, became something distant and alien.
Attitudes towards them were not those of people reacting to other
people, but to a concept. It is easy for any propaganda machine to
manipulate a concept with its own aims in mind.
An additional psychological factor that should be
mentioned is the Poles' memory of the behavior of some Jews on the
Polish territories seized by the Soviet Union in September 1939.
Disputes over property were motivating factors in their
anti-Semitism. For example, 13 Jews were killed in the Kielce region
in June 1945. Ten of them were killed because of property disputes.
From June 1945 to December 1945 there were about thirty attacks on
Jews in all of Poland. Eleven attacks involved robbery, and five were
caused by property disputes.
The political situation in Poland after World War
II also cast a dark shadow on Polish- Jewish relations. Some groups
of Jews did support the communist regime; several prominent
communists were either Jews or seen by Polish society as Jews. Also,
the communist authorities used the Jewish issue in their struggle
against the opposition by, for example, identifying all expressions
of anti-communism as "reactionary" and therefore
potentially anti-Semitic.
The pogrom in Kielce was a turning point in the
post-war history of Jews in Poland. After the pogrom, the majority of
the Jews remaining in Poland decided to leave. Until July 1946, some
groups of Jews had wanted to stay in Poland in spite of dominant
influence exerted by Zionism. Before
the pogrom, an average of one thousand Jews crossed the Polish border
illegally each month. In July, August, and September 1946, over sixty
thousand Jews left Poland.
Until July 4, 1946, Polish Jews cited the past as
their main reason for emigration. In this respect, the Shoah was the decisive turning-point in the history of Polish Jewry. For
them, it was impossible to live on a cemetery. A memorandum prepared
by Polish Jews in February 1946 for the Anglo-American Committee of
Inquiry stressed that anti-Semitism was one of the reasons for
emigration, but not the main one. The representatives of the Central
Jewish Committee wrote that:
The cardinal reasons for Jewish emigration are
deeper, objective, idealistic and psychological.
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.
What I have presented here is a brief overview of
the historical and political aspects of an incident in which over
forty innocent people were murdered. From a historian's point of
view, it is an event in modern Polish history which, like many others
from the same period, can now be discussed openly and, with some
limitations, authoritatively.
Sources: Intermarium,
Vol. 1, No. 3. |