Kielce: The Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over
Kielce: The Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over
After World War II, Jewish refugees found they could never return to their native land—a sentiment that some echo today
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kielce-post-holocaust-pogrom-poland-still-fighting-over-180967681/
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Women grieving over the coffins of those killed in the Kielce pogrom as they are transported to the burial site in the Jewish cemetery. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Leah Lahav)
By Rachel E. Gross
smithsonianmag.com
January 8, 2018
The massacre started with a blood libel. That wouldn’t be unusual, except this wasn’t the Middle Ages or even Nazi Germany—it was 1946, a year after the end of World War II.
A few days earlier, an 8-year-old Polish boy named Henryk Błaszczyk had gone missing from his home in Kielce, Poland, a city of 50,000 in southeastern Poland. When Henryk reappeared two days later, he told his family he had been held by a man in a basement. As his father walked him to the police station to recount his story, the boy pointed at a man who was walking near the large corner building at 7 Planty Street.
He did it, Henryk said.
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On the morning of July 4, a small group of state militia and local police approached the building to investigate the alleged kidnapping. As rumors of misdeeds spread, a version of the centuries-old “blood libel” that Jews were kidnapping Christian children for ritual sacrifice, a mob began to assemble. But it was the police and military who started the violence, recounts Polish historian Jan T. Gross in his 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. Though they were ostensibly there to protect civilians and keep the peace, officers instead opened fire and began dragging Jews into the courtyard, where the townspeople savagely attacked the Jewish residents.
That day, Jewish men and women were stoned, robbed, beaten with rifles, stabbed with bayonets, and hurled into a river that flowed nearby. Yet while other Kielce residents walked by, none did anything to stop it. It wasn’t until noon that another group of soldiers was sent in to break up the crowd and evacuate the wounded and dead. In the afternoon, a group of metal workers ran toward the building, armed with iron bars and other weapons. The residents of 7 Planty were relieved; they thought these men had come to help. Instead, the metal workers began brutally attacking and killing those still alive inside the building.
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All told, 42 Jews were killed that day at 7 Planty and around the city, including a newborn baby and a woman who was six months pregnant. Another 40 were injured. Yet beyond the horror of those physical facts, the event would take on a larger historical significance. After the Holocaust, many Jews had dreamed of returning to their native lands. Kielce shattered that dream; for Jews, Poland could never again be home.
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Group portrait of Polish Jewish survivors in Kielce taken in 1945. Many were killed one year later, in the 1946 pogrom. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Eva Reis)
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Funeral procession for the victims of the Kielce pogrom. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Leah Lahav)
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