The pogroms after the Holocaust

Politicians and community leaders gathered recently in the Polish city of Kielce to commemorate one of the seminal moments in postwar European history. In July 1946, the city witnessed a wave of antisemitic violence that had not been seen since the war. Many of the victims were survivors of the Nazi concentration camps: they had returned home believing the Holocaust was over, only to find themselves under attack once more. As community leaders recently laid flowers at the site where this massacre took place, there was much soul-searching. Europe is again experiencing a surge in antisemitic violence. The lessons of Kielce are as relevant now as they were 80 years ago.

The story begins with an eight-year-old boy named Henryk Błaszczyk, who went missing at the beginning of July 1946. Unbeknown to his parents, Henryk had hitched a lift to a village some 25km away. A few months earlier the family had been living in this village, and Henryk missed his playmates. He spent a couple of days with relatives, playing with friends and picking cherries from the trees grown by one of his old neighbours.

When he came back to Kielce, he was afraid that his parents would be angry with him, so he spun a yarn about how he had been abducted by some Jews and imprisoned in their basement. He claimed he had been kept there the whole time and had only just managed to escape.

His distraught father, Walenty Błaszczyk, immediately took his son to the local militia station to report the crime. On the way, Henryk tried to give his story a bit more credibility by pointing out the building where he had allegedly been held: it was the house at 7 Planty Street where about 150 Jewish survivors were living. This house was the headquarters of the local Jewish Committee and a Zionist group that was preparing emigrants for a new life in Palestine.

When the Polish militia heard Henryk’s story of being abducted, they formed a patrol to go to the house on Planty Street to investigate the so-called dungeon in its basement. Emotions were running high. Rather than waiting to see what they found there, various militiamen began telling people along the way that they were going there to look for abducted children. Rumours quickly spread throughout the community that the Jews had ‘killed a Christian child’, and that they were using his blood to help revive fellow Jews still weak from their experiences in the concentration camps. This was a variation of the ancient ‘blood libel’ – the myth that Jews used Christian blood in their rituals.

When, an hour later, the militia finally arrived at the building, they discovered that it did not contain any Christian children – it did not even have a basement. They told the boy off for lying and sent him home, but the damage had already been done. By now a large crowd had gathered outside the building, which began to throw stones at the windows. Shortly afterwards more than a hundred soldiers arrived, supposedly to re-establish order – but after a gun was fired (it is unclear by whom), these soldiers joined policemen in storming the building, grabbing hold of the men and women they found there, and forcing them out into the jaws of the baying mob outside.

Baruch Dorfman was on the third floor of the building, where he and a group of 20 others had barricaded themselves in a room. ‘They started shooting at us through the door,’ he remembered years later:

‘They broke in. These were soldiers in uniform and a few civilians. I was wounded then. They ordered us to go outside. They formed a double row. In the staircase there were already civilians and also women. Soldiers hit us with rifle butts. Civilians, men and women, also beat us. I was wearing a uniform-like vest, perhaps that’s why they did not hit me then. We came down to the square. Others who were brought out with me were stabbed with bayonets and shot at. We were pelted with stones. Even then nothing happened to me. I moved across the square to an exit, but I must have had such a facial expression that they recognised that I was a Jew who’d been taken out of the building, because one civilian screamed, “A Jew!” And only then did they attack me. Stones flew at me, I was hit with rifle butts, I fell and lost consciousness. Periodically I regained consciousness; then they hit me again with stones and rifle butts. One wanted to shoot me when I was lying on the ground but I heard somebody else say, “Don’t shoot, he’ll croak anyway.” I fainted again. When I came to, somebody was pulling me by the legs and threw me onto a truck. This was some other military, because I woke up in a hospital in Kielce.’

Some witnesses remember Jews being thrown from the windows into the street below. The head of the Jewish Committee was shot in the back while he was phoning for help. Later, when 600 workers from the Ludwików foundry arrived shortly after midday, some 15 or 20 Jews were beaten to death with iron bars. Others were stoned or shot by policemen or soldiers. The list of dead included three Jewish soldiers who had won the highest combat decorations fighting for Poland, as well as two ordinary Poles who had apparently been mistaken for Jews. Also killed were a pregnant mother, and a woman who had been shot along with her newborn baby. According to the Polin Museum in Warsaw, at least 40 Jews were killed at Kielce that day, and around 80 others severely injured. The violence quickly spread to the railways and to some of the villages in the surrounding area, where several others were also killed.

The striking thing about this massacre was the fact that the entire community had taken part, not only men but also women; not only civilians but also policemen, militiamen and soldiers – the very people who were supposed to be keeping law and order. The Polish government was appalled. They condemned the local administration, calling it chaotic and incompetent, and rounded up a random selection of suspects. In the following weeks several dozen people were sent to prison for their part in the pogrom, and nine were sentenced to death. It was knee-jerk justice, but in a war-shattered country where law and order had still not been fully re-established, it was probably the best that could be done.

Meanwhile, all kinds of conspiracy theories began to develop about who was responsible for the massacre. The Polish government tried to claim that it had been deliberately provoked by anti-Communist dissidents. The Resistance made similar claims about the Communists. Almost inevitably some people even blamed the Jews themselves: they claimed that the Zionists had deliberately fomented trouble in order to encourage their fellow Jews to emigrate to Palestine. No evidence for any of these theories has ever been found. The truth is, the massacre was simply the result of hysteria, fuelled by years of Nazi propaganda and centuries of prejudice.

The Kielce pogrom was the most violent instance of antisemitism in postwar Poland, but it was far from the only one. In Rzeszów a similar riot had broken out only a few weeks earlier during which several Jews were beaten up. Jewish properties were looted, and one or two also killed. As in Kielce, the ancient calumny of blood libel had been the spark – in this instance the supposed murder of a nine-year-old girl named Bronisława Mendoń by ‘Jews who needed blood after returning from the camps’. In August 1945, a full-blown pogrom broke out in Kraków after rumours circulated that a Christian child had been killed inside a synagogue. At least one Jew was killed – a 56-year-old Auschwitz survivor named Róża Berger.

Nor was Poland the only country to see such violence. Pogroms also took place in Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary after the war. According to historian Peter Kenez, anti-Jewish demonstrations and attacks took place in at least a dozen places in Hungary in 1946, including Miskolc and Kunmadaras: once again the spark was a rumour that returning Jews were killing children and using their blood – in this instance, apparently, to make sausages.

The reaction to all of this antisemitic violence was dramatic. In 1945 and 1946, Jews from all over central and eastern Europe began to flee westwards because they no longer felt safe in the places they had once called home. In the opening months of 1946 thousands left, but after the Kielce pogrom their numbers rapidly increased. According to Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, between 90,000 and 95,000 Jews fled eastern Europe in July, August and September 1946 alone. The total number that fled antisemitic persecution in the five years after the war was around 300,000. This is, if anything, a slightly conservative estimate.

As a result of these processes, the areas of Europe that had once been home to large populations of Jews were irrevocably changed. Poland in particular was almost unrecognisable from the cultural and ethnic melting-pot it had been before the war and, to a certain degree, the same was true of the whole of eastern Europe. The great irony is that even Hitler had not managed to make these regions ‘Judenfrei’: in many areas that task was only finally completed by local people in the years after the Holocaust was supposed to be over.

As politicians and community leaders lit candles for the victims of the Kielce pogrom, they had much to reflect upon. Antisemitism is once more on the increase, not only in Poland but all over Europe. As in 1946, Jews are being scapegoated for events that have little or nothing to do with them.

According to the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), after Israel went to war in Gaza antisemitic incidents in Poland increased eight-fold. The same report shows that the number of violent attacks on Jews rocketed all over Europe in the months after 7 October 2023.

A similar increase happened in March this year after Israel and the US went to war against Iran. According to the US-based Combat Anti-Semitism Movement, there was a 34 per cent increase in global antisemitism in that week alone.

In the past four months, makeshift bombs have been set off in Jewish schools, restaurants and synagogues in Liège, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Munich. In London, a series of arson attacks were the precursor to the stabbing of two Jewish men at the end of April.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., a group of activists staged a street performance near the White House last March that had clear antisemitic overtones. They depicted Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Jeffrey Epstein tearing apart an infant and drinking its blood from wine glasses. The performance was a deliberate invocation of ‘blood libel’ – the same ancient, antisemitic myth that led to the Kielce pogrom 80 years ago.

Today, as in 1946, many Jews are beginning to wonder whether they are still safe in the communities where they were born. In the most recent survey of Jewish people in Europe carried out by the FRA, 45 per cent of respondents confessed to having considered emigrating – in some countries, such as Germany, the number is over 50 per cent. To many of these people, regardless of the current turmoil in the Middle East, Israel is beginning to look like a safer option than staying in Europe.

There are similar feelings in Britain, too. Despite the war in Gaza, Jewish emigration from Britain to Israel doubled in the year after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. According to a survey carried out the following June, only a third of British Jews believed that there was a long-term future for Jews in their country. Half had already considered leaving.

In the last 80 years we have not seen any kind of attack on Jews in Europe that compares with the scale of the events in Kielce in 1946. We live in a world today where law and order is much more robust, and institutions are quick to step in to prevent events from escalating. Modern Europe is a world away from the devastated landscape of Poland after the Second World War. But even now, violence lurks just beneath the surface.

Commemorating events like the Kielce pogrom is a reminder that ancient prejudices do not die easily. In times of turmoil, such prejudices rise to the surface. When they do, sometimes all it takes to spark a tragedy is an emotive story from an eight-year-old boy.