On 4 July 1946, the deadliest pogrom against Jews after the Second World War took place in the Polish city of Kielce.
Antisemitism was widespread in Poland and did not stop even after the horrors of the Holocaust had been made public. Pogroms broke out occasionally after the war. According to archive data, 351 Jews were murdered between November 1944 and December 1945. Most of the murders took place in the regions of Kielce and Lublin; the victims were those who were returning from concentration camps or former partisans.
The pogroms followed a pattern: in Lublin, Tarnow and Rzeszow the starting point was to begin spreading the rumour that “a Polish child has been murdered by Jews".
The Krakow pogrom of 11 August 1945 was stopped by the Polish and Soviet Armies. But in Kielce, 99 percent of whose Jewish population had been slaughtered, there was no such restraint. Before the was the region had a Jewish population of about 20,000 but by the end of the war only 200 were left. Most of those who had returned had been released from concentration camps.
On 1 July, an eight-year-old non-Jewish Polish boy, Henryk Błaszczyk, was said to have been killed by the Jews. On 3 July, he came back and said that he had been stolen by a Jewish family who had wanted to kill him. It later transpired that he had lived comfortably with another family outside the city at his father’s behest and his father had taught him what to say to explain his disappearance. His father's reason for slandering this Jewish family was so that he could get his hands on Jewish property and money.
On 4 July at 10 o'clock, more than 2,000 people started a pogrom and laid siege to the building housing most of the remaining Jews; police sergeant Vladislav Blahut disarmed the Jews who were preparing to resist, and said: "The Germans did not finish you off, but we will". With that, he let the Polish thugs into the building. As a result, 42 Jews were killed, including a pregnant woman and a mother with an infant; about 30 more were killed at the railway station and on the tracks and another 80 in Kielce were wounded.
The nine instigators of the pogrom were sentenced to death and refused a pardon. The pogroms caused a mass exodus of Jews from Poland; already 3,500 had left in May 1946 and another 8,000 in June but after the pogroms, 19,000 left in July and 35,000 in August.
In 2006, on the 60th anniversary of the pogrom, Polish President Lech Kaczynski described the events “an eternal shame on the Poles and a tragedy for the Jews”.
Source: Tadeusz Piotrowski, “Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947”, McFarland & Company, 1997
