Pallbearers carrying pogrom victims. Pallbearers carrying the victims of the Kielce pogrom transport the coffins from trucks to the burial site in the Jewish cemetery. In the course of the three months following the pogrom, 77,000 Jews streamed out of Poland on Bricha routes to Germany and Italy.

Mourners and local residents watch the burial. Mourners and local residents watch as pallbearers place the coffins of the Kielce pogrom victims in a mass grave at the Jewish cemetery three days after the pogrom. The government ordered Polish military units and local residents to attend the funeral.

Anti-Semitism and Communist power
The study of the circumstances surrounding the Kielce pogrom throws light on relations between Christian and Jewish communities in Poland. This subject is one that has rightly preoccupied historians because of its complexity, but also because the persecution of Jews in postwar Poland took place when the Soviet-sponsored government in which the Communists played a pivotal role assumed power. The pogrom, which took place on 4 June 1946, has variously been described as an event stage-managed by the Communists and the outcome of old religious hostilities exacerbated by the war and the participation of Jews in the postwar Communist-dominated administration. The coincidence of the popular manifestation of anti-Semitism with the progressive eradication of all forms of political pluralism has raised questions as to whether these two developments were connected.

Two authors of books dealing with anti-Semitism in Poland have extended the debate into the discussion of the relationship between Communism and anti-Semitism. The historian Krystyna Kersten has traced the historic as well as the immediate roots of anti-Semitism in postwar Poland. While she recognized that it might not have been stage-managed by the Communist authorities, she concludes that it was particularly useful to them, as Stalin was thus able to discredit those who opposed Communism, namely the Church and nationalist groups. More recently, the debate has been widened by the publication of the groundbreaking work by Jan Gross. In The Neighbours he analyses the destruction of a Jewish community by their Christian neighbours in the little town of Jedwabne in 1941. The author has also asked why the response of the Communist prosecutors was so mild during the trials of the perpetrators of the crime in 1949. Both historians go beyond the obvious enquiry as to why Christian Poles viewed Jews with such deep hostility and relate both the tragedies in Jedwabne and Kielce to the nature of the Soviet Union. Most authors concede that the high proportion of Jews among the Communist leadership fanned prejudices, old and new.

The Kielce tragedy was viewed by the Communist leadership in Warsaw as a direct attack upon its own position in the provisional government and led to a process of reassessment. Although the new administration had done all in its power to establish control over the Kielce district even before its liberation, two years after the entry of Soviet troops into Polish territories and 18 months after the freeing of the town of Kielce, the Communists had very little control over the area.

I would argue that even the security services and the Communist party apparatus were dependent on those who had only recently joined, and as a result were unreliable, badly trained and succumbed to corruption. I will show that, in spite of the progressing Communist domination of political organizations, individual Communists retained the prejudices and values of the society in which they lived. In this particular case, I will show that anti-Semitism was not eradicated or even successfully challenged by the Communist ideology. It was therefore the superficial nature of Communist control of Poland, which allowed for the pogrom to develop and for similar outrages to take place in the district and other areas.

Anti-Semitism in Poland and Kielce
It was noted that the surviving Jewish population and those returning to Poland from the Soviet Union faced difficulties caused by religious and ethnic rivalries. Their situation was an outcome of very complex considerations. The Kielce pogrom, far from being unusual, was a relatively predictable event, although compared with other anti-Semitic outrages, more tragic in its outcome. The fact that the police, army and the security services were frequently in agreement with the general anti-Semitic sentiments prevailing in the community was not unusual either. Jewish organisations continuously reported to the leadership of the PPS and to the PPR incidents of overt and covert anti-Semitism. They drew attention to the attacks and atrocities committed against Jews in most parts of Poland, which were apparent to foreign correspondents and Soviet observers. Lavrenty Beria, the Soviet Commissar for Internal Affairs, was aware of the situation in Poland. In an official NKVD report written for the benefit of the top leadership of the Soviet Union on 20 October 1945, Beria painted a disturbing picture of the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Poland. He noted that the security services and the military units took part or at least turned a blind eye to outrages that were taking place.

In the town of Kielce, anti-Semitic attacks were magnified by the deliberate passivity of the law enforcement agencies and exacerbated further by conflicts between the MO and the UBP. Rivalry between the two had been apparent before the pogrom took place, but as the events of 4 July 1946 unfolded outside the Jewish hostel and, indeed gained momentum, relations between the two became a major factor in transforming an unpleasant incident into a full scale pogrom. The responses of the leadership of the two security organs and the behaviour of the policemen, the security men and the soldiers directly led to the murder of 43 Jews.

Background to the pogrom
Even if the background to the pogrom is complex, the events leading up to it were chillingly simple. Early on 4 July 1946 a crowd gathered in Kielce outside No. 7 Planty Street. Earlier a 9-year-old boy who had been reported missing to the police returned home. He was questioned by his father and uncle and told them that unknown people in a cellar had held him captive. The MO functionaries at the headquarters where his father had taken the boy concluded from his confused responses to aggressive questioning that a Jew had kidnapped him and that he had some knowledge of ritual killings of Christian children. From the interrogation, all involved concluded that the boy could point out a cellar containing children's bodies from which blood had been drained, allegedly for the production of Passover bread. A policeman then took the child to try to identify the person who had kidnapped him. The police officer proceeded to No. 7 Planty Street, the location of a Jewish hostel, in order to search the premises. On the way there the police officer told a number of curious people why he and the child were going there and consequently by 9 o'clock a crowd had gathered outside the house in anticipation of a search for bodies of Christian children.

Slawomir Popiel

A plan of the relevant area of Kielce where the action of the pogrom unfolded. Glossary: 1. Planty No. 7 Building 2. HQ of the City Police (MO) 3. HQ of the Security Service (UBP) 4. Special unit of the MO No. 7 Planty street was the hub of the pogrom where it was thought that Christian children were being tortured and sacrificed.

At 9.30 Wladyslaw Sobcynski, the Commander of the district UBP, phoned the deputy commander of the MO, Kazimerz Gwiazdowicz, who was in charge of the case, to request that the matter be handed over to the security services. He justified his request by claiming the matter had political undertones and was very likely to be a provocation. The Soviet adviser to the UBP supported Sobcynski and telephoned Gwiazdowicz with the same order. Both orders were ignored. In principle this amounted to insubordination, as the UBP and the Soviet adviser had higher authority and the head of the MO should have treated their requests as orders and obeyed instantly. By 10 o'clock the situation was out of control. Policemen and soldiers who had initially only come to search the premises now took matters into their own hands and entered the building. The entry of the MO functionaries and soldiers into the building started the pogrom. They disarmed the Jews, who had permits to bear arms. In the fighting that raged throughout the building, the MO and soldiers either threw Jews out through the windows to their deaths or delivered them to the crowd, which proceeded to murder them. Between 11.30 and 12.00 Gwiazdowicz sent a unit of cadets from the nearby MO cadet school to contain the disturbances. Some of the new arrivals joined in the looting and murdering of the Jews, which continued inside and outside the building. By 12.00 the pogrom was given further impetus by the arrival of workers from the nearby steelworks. The next wave of killings was finally contained by the arrival of cadets from the UBP academy six kilometres outside Kielce and further military units.

Fighting and killing of Jews in No. 7 Planty Street continued until approximately 6 o'clock in the evening, when all wounded and still living were removed from the building. Although the pogrom was contained, it would appear that it had unleashed further killings in the town and in particular on trains leaving and arriving in Kielce. The Jewish Committee was able to provide eyewitness accounts of killings that had taken place during the days following the Kielce pogrom. In most cases the crucial participation of the railway guards, the police and soldiers in the atrocities committed against Jews was confirmed.

The Communist regime and Kielce
The government's response to the pogrom was initially decisive. Special investigators were despatched to the town on the same day and military tribunals assumed responsibility for the prosecutions that followed. Under investigation were not only those who had directly participated in the pogrom. The local administration as well as the responses of the MO and the UBP were scrutinized. The heads of the MO and the UBP were both arrested and questioned. Nine participants in the pogrom were sentenced to death; three were given lengthy prison sentences. Policemen, military men, and functionaries of the UBP were tried separately and then unexpectedly all, with the exception of Wiktor Kuznicki, Commander of the MO, who was sentenced to one year in prison, were found not guilty of "having taken no action to stop the crowd from committing crimes." Clearly, during the period when the first investigations were launched and the trial, a most likely politically motivated decision had been made not to proceed with disciplinary action. This was in spite of very disturbing evidence that emerged during the pre-trial interviews. It is entirely feasible that instructions not to punish the MO and UBP commanders had been given because of the politically sensitive nature of the evidence. Evidence heard by the military prosecutor revealed major organizational and ideological weaknesses within these two security services.

On 7 August 1946, Sobczynski was asked by the prosecutor what he had done when news of the crowds gathering outside the house on Planty Street had reached him. The Commander of the UBP explained that he had sent six functionaries to persuade the MO to leave and to allow the UBP to take over. He also confirmed that he had ordered Gwiazdowicz to hand over the matter to the UBP. Relations between the two services had been very strained and the fate of the Jews seems not to have been the object of the quarrel. The real issue seemed to have been longstanding rivalries and conflict over spheres of competence. During his interview with the military procurator, Sobcyinski clearly stated that political differences lay at the root of the conflict. He pointed out that the district administrator had decided on a division of responsibilities between the two left-wing parties. The UBP was to be controlled by the Communists and the MO by the Socialists. Both the head of the UBP and the MO were cited as having frequently made anti-Semitic comments and expressed hostility to Jews and the presence of Jews in Poland. The Commander of the UBP in particular came under suspicion for having shown great interest in settling scores with the MO while showing no interest in the ongoing pogrom at Planty Street.

Notwithstanding some compelling evidence, the case was finally dropped. Documents relating to the Kielce pogrom remain fragmentary and do not allow for a debate of the reasons for this decision. Nevertheless, reports analysing the PPR's response following the pogrom suggest the gravity with which the case was treated. An immediate attempt was made to deal with the shortcomings of the PPR structure.

Despite the authorities' inadequate response to the pogrom and their failure to punish the leaders of the security services for their shortcomings, there can be no doubt that the PPR and the political sections of the military establishment were fully aware of the dangerous implications of the Kielce incident, which they perceived to be much more than just an anti-Semitic outrage. The pogrom had exposed the full extent of the Communists' weaknesses and their superficial influence in a society that was hostile to them. The alarming fact was that the Communists were in a minority and could not trust even the security services and army to protect the Jewish population. While concern was expressed about the general mistreatment of the Polish Jewish population and the rise of reactionary nationalist sentiments, Communist commentators recognized their own weakness in broader terms.

	Thinking Point
	Do you think there is an inevitable relationship between Communism and anti-Semitism in Poland?

The PPR's response to the events in Kielce was swift. Already on 4 July, a PPR delegation of instructors visited the town in an attempt to re-establish the Party's authority and to prevent any further anti-Semitic incidents taking place. A wide-ranging report covering action taken during the period 4-15 June 1946 was submitted to the Central Committee. It provided a detailed analysis of the socio-economic background of the pogrom and detailed initiatives taken by the party instructors to establish the PPRs authority in the Kielce district. The author explained that anti-Semitic sentiments were entrenched in the petty bourgeois community of shopkeepers, traders and house owners, but at the same time he admitted that the working class shared these attitudes. Hostile propaganda had been successful in focusing workers' anger about food shortages and housing difficulties on the small Jewish population because as he reported it was believed that the Jews enjoyed a relatively better standard of living. Among the workers, railway workers and rail guards in particular seemed to have been active in disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda. They had been responsible for identifying Jews travelling on trains and then encouraged passengers to kill them. Within the rural communities anti-Semitic sentiments seemed to be weaker, but the report warned that the government's failure to address the peasants concerns about security, in particular fear of marauding bands would increase anti-government feelings.

Government action
The instructors' report addressed the relationship between the party and the Jews. It was admitted that members of the PPR shared anti-Semitic views. The rank and file was too willing to believe that the Central Committee turned a blind eye to the shortcomings of Jewish party members. Because party membership was seen as a career move, an unhealthy rivalry between Jewish and non-Jewish party members had developed and some party members focused unduly on the shortcomings of Jewish party members. During and immediately after the pogrom, the local party leadership had lost its head and succumbed to panic. The instructors reported that on arrival in Kielce they had been forced to stop the PPR leadership from abandoning the town. Instead, by focusing on the workers and the ideological shortcomings of the working class community, the instructors took the initiative in going to the factories and industrial plants, to all workers' meetings to deal with issues which had been raised by the pogroms. The report stated that the Kielce party leadership, fearful for their own and the visitors' safety, tried to dissuade the visiting instructors from going to the steelworks whose workers had participated in the pogrom. Nevertheless, the visitors persisted. They gathered the PPR and PPS activists and called a meeting, which was attended by 1,000 workers. The author of the report believed this resulted in some workers expressing a degree of contrition about having participated in the pogrom. On the second day of the inspection a workers' delegation submitted to the factory cell of the PPR a list naming those who had taken part in the pogrom. Action was also taken to show that the government was not indecisive in dealing with black-market dealing and speculation.

Any hopes raised by the party inspection that took place immediately after the pogrom were dispelled by a report submitted following a later inspection which took place in September. Reporting on 20 September 1946, Jozef Banak, head of the Propaganda Section of the PPR, admitted that the party structure in the Kielce district continued to be weak. It was ultimately the failure of the party to integrate and establish authority in the regions after the war that enabled deeply entrenched fears and prejudices to develop into a pogrom: striking fear into the heart of the Polish Jewish community.

This is an adapted version of "The Kielce Pogrom 1946 and the Emergence of Communist Power in Poland" by Anita J. Prazmowska, originally published in Cold War History, Vol. 2, No. 2 (January 2002), pp.101-124.