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Article Excerpt
While Americans were celebrating their first fourth of July in 1946 after the end of World War II with parades and hamburgers and hot dogs, forty-two Jews in the Polish city of Kielce met their deaths as the victims of the last pogrom in Europe. This startling massacre, which claimed the front page of The New York Times for several days, was triggered by a blood libel charge, an eight-year old boy's story that he had escaped from "the Jews" after being kidnapped and held for three days. The boy, Henryk Baszczyk, reportedly said that the Jews had taken him to the basement of their apartment building where he saw fifteen dead Christian children. (1) In fact, as the facts were later established, he had hitched a ride out of town to a nearby village to visit relatives and returned on the evening of July 3. (2) Henryk's father, who had filed a missing-person report with the police, took Henryk to the police station that night to cancel the report, but was told to return the next morning. When they returned at about 8:00 am, the police escorted father and son to 7 Planty, the supposed site of the kidnapping, and Henryk identified a Jewish man walking by as the kidnapper. The man was arrested, and the police told curious passersby what had happened, giving the age-old blood libel new life. As the rumor spread, a crowd gathered in front of the building. The stage was set for a day of terror and actual blood-letting in which the crowd, the local police, the security police, the militia, the army, steel mill workers, and Soviet advisors would all be involved. Within a week of the pogrom, in a parody of justice, twelve people from the crowd would be tried and nine executed.
In Poland this pogrom, as well as other murders of Jews in the Kielce region, sent the Jewish population into a panic and precipitated a massive exodus of those who had hoped to reestablish their lives and their communities in the new socialist state. Even the Central Committee of Polish Jews, which in the face of earlier but smaller and seemingly more random attacks on Jews, insisted upon the passing nature of such violence, now began to facilitate emigration for the many who wanted to leave. The Communist authorities at first blamed the Kielce violence on the antiCommunist underground then engaged with them in a virtual civil war. The prominent role of individuals of Jewish origin in the ruling Communist party served as a lightning rod attracting the resentment and hatred of antiCommunist Poles to Jews, who were seen as agents of or sympathizers with the hated Soviets. No proof, though, was ever put forward to link the underground directly to the pogrom. The Polish government in exile and its nationalist supporters, on the other hand, saw in the attack a "Stalinist provocation," an effort to draw attention away from a national referendum a few days earlier, the results of which the Communist authorities had falsified. By staging the pogrom, the Communists aimed to depict Poles to the West as irredeemably antisemitic and thus incapable and undeserving of governing the new Poland. (3)
Stalinist provocation or not, the pogrom had the effect that the nationalists predicted. Jews fled to the Czechoslovak and German borders, the Communists solidified their hold on power, and the memory of a distinctive "Polish antisemitism" was reinforced for the exiles and Jews everywhere. The Kielce pogrom itself, however, faded from view. Despite the fact that nearly 250,000 Jews returned to or remained in Poland after the war and that Jewish institutions of all kinds--schools, hospitals, synagogues, orphanages, welfare organizations--were quickly reestablished, the fairly rapid decline of the community in the two years after Kielce made it seem as if Polish Jewry never had a chance. Subsequent eruptions of antisemitism in Poland, in 1956 and 1968, directed against "Stalinist" Jews and "Zionist" Jews, respectively, entered Jewish collective memory as chapters of a seemingly inevitable process. Within Poland itself, Kielce dropped from public discourse. Already by December of 1946, subsequent trials of officials accused in the massacre received little attention. Though individuals, especially in Kielce, certainly remembered the pogrom, their memories were not publicly expressed; Kielce had no more Jews, and the pogrom was officially forgotten in Poland.
Officially forgotten, perhaps, but witnesses remained both inside and outside of Poland. Like so much that was repressed during the Communist years, the memory of the Kielce massacre emerged at a number of times and places to express Jews' and Poles' images of each other. For Jews, the pogrom came to be seen...
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