After World War II, Jewish refugees found they could never return to their native land—a sentiment that some echo today
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.
The building, which was owned by the Jewish Committee and housed many Jewish institutions, was home to up to 180 Jews. It did not have a basement. Most of the residents were refugees, having survived the horrors of the death camps that decimated more than 90 percent of the Polish Jewish population. After the war, they had returned to their homeland with the hope that they could leave the past behind them. They had no idea they were about to become the target of anti-Semitic aggression once again—this time from the Polish neighbors they lived alongside.
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.
Continue reading .... smithsonianmag
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
smithsonian.comJanuary 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.
The building, which was owned by the Jewish Committee and housed many Jewish institutions, was home to up to 180 Jews. It did not have a basement. Most of the residents were refugees, having survived the horrors of the death camps that decimated more than 90 percent of the Polish Jewish population. After the war, they had returned to their homeland with the hope that they could leave the past behind them. They had no idea they were about to become the target of anti-Semitic aggression once again—this time from the Polish neighbors they lived alongside.
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.
Continue reading .... smithsonianmag
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