The victims included over 40 Jews, that were massacred and 80 wounded. There were also killed 2 non-Jewish Poles. On July 3, Henryk decided to return home, and that evening he came back to Kielce.
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2 Events 3 The attempts to stop pogrom 4 Trials 5 Unanswered Questions 6 Background 7 Explanations 8 External links |
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.
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.
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:
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.
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. Prequisites
Events
The attempts to stop pogrom
Trials
Unanswered Questions
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.Background