CHAPTER 13

Provincial Governor Wiślicz-Iwańczyk and His People

The Kobyle Marsh and the Kotyska River

While Władysław Żbik-Kołaciński’s unit of the National Armed Forces (NSZ) was hunting Jewish escapees from the Starachowice work camp, these same fugitives were being killed by soldiers from “Świt,” the first unit of the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa, AL) in the Kielce region.

Some of these escapees were difficult to find. In the summer of 1942, a one-hundred-person Jewish family camp under the command of Chil Brawerman settled in the Klamocha marshes in the Iłża Forest. The Germans didn’t break it up until the Radom Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) replaced Brawerman with an AL partisan whom we have already met: Stanisław Olczyk-Garbaty. In the wilderness that stretched from Skarżysko to Ostrowiec, the Klamocha and Kobyle marshes had yet to be drained, and the waters flowing from the wetlands of Skrzydłowiny and Wierzbieczka, which merged in the Wilczy Dół sinkhole, cut the escapees off from the world.

Two years later, another wave of Jewish castaways made it to the forest, this time from the Starachowice work camp. Five years after the pogrom, the Special Department of the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) arrested arrested the commander of the AL unit “Świt,” Tadeusz Maj (pseud. Łokietek), on the charge of shooting from eleven to sixteen of them.1 When the crime was committed, the unit was subordinate to Eugeniusz Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, the chief of staff of the Third District of the AL, who would later become the Kielce provincial governor (wojewoda), and to Mieczysław Moczar, its commander and the mastermind-to-be of the 1968 purge of Jews. Władysław Sobczyński was the head of security for the district.

After his arrest, Maj did not deny that in August 1944 on the Kotyska River, he and his people executed Jews by shooting, but he said he was only following the order given by Wiślicz and “Władek” Sobczyński, the supervisor of “Świt” on behalf of the NKVD: “Wiślicz underscored that among them were Jews from Iłża, who knew people from his unit and who could inform on [them]. . . . As he left, Sobczyński emphasized that the entire group should absolutely be eliminated.”2

Tadeusz Maj’s deputy in “Świt” was Tadeusz Orkan-Łęcki, who also had other crimes against Jews on his conscience. In 1942 he informed on the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ) underground movement from Wierzbnik and Mirzec to the Gestapo. After the war Łęcki became an important figure, serving as head of the information board in the Internal Security Corps (KBW). He gathered around him buddies from his unit, including Józef Bugajski (pseud. Azja) and Kazimierz Karwacki (both of whom had participated in the executions on the Kotyska), and Władysław Sobczyński, who fell out of favor after the pogrom.

Though persistent rumors circulated about the massacre on the Kotyska, an investigation into the case was only launched in 1949, when the position of Mieczysław Moczar—who as head of an AL district had collected money and valuables taken from Jews—had weakened.3 After it was revealed that Sobczyński had participated in the executions, he was let go from his position as the director of the passport office and dismissed from the Ministry of Public Security (MBP).

Meanwhile, the investigation kept bypassing Tadeusz Orkan-Łęcki. An MBP note dated July 1951 indicated that he had died, but when it came to light that he was in fact alive, he was offered leniency in exchange for information on Wiślicz-Iwańczyk. This meant allowing his crime to pass into oblivion, which in turn enabled him to make a career in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW) at Mieczysław Moczar’s side all the way until 1972.

Jagdhaus Marcule

Meanwhile, twenty years earlier, Mrs. Franciszka Maj, hoping to help her husband, writes a letter to the authorities citing Maj-Łokietek’s service during the Kielce pogrom, when as the head of the Special Commission, he organized a transport for the wounded. She points out that by accusing Sobczyński and Wiślicz, her husband was suggesting that “the roots of the Kielce pogrom could be traced back to the times of German occupation.” In May 1944 Maj had carried out an execution under orders from Sobczyński and Wiślicz. Mrs. Maj writes that “the pogrom [organized] . . . under [Sobczyński’s] watchful eye” demonstrated Sobczyński’s antisemitism, while Wiślicz’s antisemitic attitude was shown by a shooting in 1943 of three members of the People’s Guard (GL) in his home. Nothing happened to Wiślicz at the time, but he hid the fact from the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KC PPR) for three years.4

The fact was that in December 1942, when Wiślicz was still in the Union of Armed Struggle (ZWZ-AK), the German gendarmerie shot three envoys from the Radom party cell at his home in Jasieniec Iłżecki. They had been sent to investigate why the aforementioned Jewish unit had been killed on the Klamocha marshes. Wiślicz explained that he had survived because of his friendship with Anton Krüger of the SiPo (Sicherheitspolizei, the German security police), who was serving as game warden in the Starachowice forests. At the same time he explained this troublesome familiarity with Krüger speciously, saying that by befriending such a big fish, he intimidated his enemies, who could accuse him in front of the Germans of working for the underground. After the war, however, anticipating accusations of treason, he asked his former superior from the ZWZ, Henryk Lewoński, to provide a fictitious signed statement showing his contact with Krüger had been ordered by the organization.

In 1950, after determining that the Home Army (AK) had also suspected Wiślicz of working on behalf of the Gestapo (a death sentence was even issued against him), the investigators assigned to his case began to suspect that “the formation of the Świt organization at the end of 1943 and beginning of 1944 in the Kielce region . . . could have been inspired . . . by the Gestapo.”5 The matter was all the more troublesome because Wiślicz’s people, who were members of the AL color guard in the Kielce region, had filled important positions in local and regional state and Communist party organs.

The atmosphere of “spy-mania” during the 1950s no doubt influenced the suspicions concerning Wiślicz, but his group’s genealogy had already raised doubts earlier. The AL unit “Świt” was initially a formation of the ZWZ, but then it moved as a unit to the AL. Almost all of its members also completed Heda’s (pseud. Szary’s) AK cadet school. Since “Świt” played an emblematic role in the history of People’s Poland, its actual genealogy gradually faded away; the date that the unit was created was moved back; and its size and achievements grew. And Wiślicz’s achievements also grew over time. As a rule, particularly in his memoirs from the 1960s, he takes credit for other people’s feats, and at one point he even awards himself the Cross of Valor medal.

“As in perhaps every society, there are always a certain number of people who will pretend to believe in the rightness of promoted theories and will carry out the dirtiest of work, if only they see personal gain in it,”6 quips Marian Langer, Wiślicz’s colleague from the ZWZ.

The Provincial Administration in Kielce and the “świt” Construction Corps

Langer recalls that in a speech Wiślicz gave from a balcony at the first rally held after Soviet troops entered Iłża, Wiślicz warned that he would deal with members of the AK. He fulfilled this promise right after the war.

In the Kielce provincial administration, Wiślicz adopted the same principle that Kuźnicki had adopted in the MO: he bet on continuity. “He hired various doctors, people with master’s degrees, and other declared enemies of People’s Poland,” Tadeusz Maj testified during the investigation. “All the heads of departments were precisely this type of person. The management personnel in the construction corps usually consisted of soldiers, officers, or noncommissioned officers from Piłsudski’s Sanacja era. . . . [Wiślicz] nominated [a compatriot], a certain Bełdowski, a teacher by profession who was in the National Armed Forces (NSZ) during the occupation, as his deputy for the Kielce area. . . . [Wiślicz] put him on the executive board of the Provincial Committee of the PPR in Kielce, although Bełdowski was not [even] a member of the PPR.”7 Some, however, got the impression that this corps was actually a holding unit for young people who could be pushed into action at the right moment. This was, in fact, the justification for dissolving the corps in 1949.

Wiślicz—who before the war jumped from party to party, managed to be a peasant activist and a Christian Democrat, as well as a member of the Riflemen’s Association (Związek Strzelecki), the Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem, BBWR), and the Camp of National Unity (Obóz Zjednoczenia Narodowego, ONZ)—did not become less vigilant after the war. At the moment, the Communists ruled, but there was constant talk about another war breaking out. In church records, masses offered for the immediate outbreak of this war were coded as intentio dantis (the intention of the donor). “Today, the world is like a volcano that will explode like a military storm,”8 priests foretold from the pulpit. And in school children copied a “divine letter” heralding an imminent war, strong thunder, earth soaked with blood, and the extermination of half of humankind.

In his 1997 memoir about the life of a Home Army partisan in the postwar period, Andrzej Ropelewski wrote: “Sometime around the beginning of the 1960s, one of my younger AK officer-colleagues from the Kielce region told me that the first postwar Kielce provincial governor, Eugeniusz Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, had belonged to the underground organization WiN [Freedom and Independence].”9 After 1989 Ropelewski decided to ask Wiślicz about this. Wiślicz answered in his typical way. Regarding putting together a command staff for the “Świt” corps, Wiślicz wrote, “I mainly relied on former AK officers or those who were returning from the West. . . . I trusted Polish officers who had been raised in such a way that they preferred death over losing their honor.”10

The Kielce provincial governor based his power in the region on a system of guarantees that also helped him dodge prison for having killed a guardsman in Jasieniec and executed Jews on the Kotyska River. In Russia such an institution of guarantees was called “krugovaya poruka,” meaning collective or mutual responsibility. Wiślicz’s effectiveness was underpinned by a readiness to share that which belonged to others, or in other words, to give a chosen few access to state resources. In addition to the Union of Participants in Armed Struggle (Związek Uczestników Walki Zbrojnej), which preceded the creation of the Society of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy (Związek Bojowników o Wolność i Demokrację, ZBoWiD) which was already distributing stipends in Kielce in 1946, his lifetime achievement became the aforementioned “Świt” construction corps. As Tadeusz Maj, the wartime commander of “Świt”, would say, the corps constituted a great udder to which Wiślicz’s people provided access.

At a time of widespread poverty, the corps, which at a key moment employed 3,960 “Świt” troops, was a lucrative enterprise for which the Council of State earmarked a significant amount of funds: thirty million złotys just for the “reconstruction of bridgehead areas” around Baranów Sandomierski. Wiślicz pumped a significant portion of these resources into rebuilding his hometown, the village of Jasieniec Iłżecki.

Though his memoirs are filled with phrases about “the thorny road of the party in the march toward communism, which will spread throughout the world,” he also had excellent arrangements with the Church. In 1945, at the request of the Pauline Fathers in Częstochowa, he successfully intervened with Roman Zambrowski, a leader of the PPR who would become a Politburo member in 1948, to obtain a quarter million złotys to renovate the roof on the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa. He also maintained relatively good relations with Bishop Kaczmarek: “I recall the Corpus Christi holiday, during which before the war the provincial governor would walk next to the bishop. For the celebration of Corpus Christi in 1945 [in Kielce], I—and the apparatus subordinate to me—received an invitation. I called my colleagues and asked them for their opinion. Sobczyński said, ‘There’s no other way, the provincial governor and head of the UB will walk together behind the canopy.’ And that’s what happened.”

Something that Vasily Grossman wrote about National Socialism describes the Kielce atmosphere of Wiślicz’s time well. Grossman wrote that National Socialism didn’t separate itself from the simple folk but lived with them as with its brothers: “Rather than peering haughtily at the common people through a monocle, it talked and joked in their own language. It was down-to-earth and plebeian. And it had an excellent knowledge of the mind, language and soul of those it deprived of freedom.”11

Because of Wiślicz’s political savvy, he was called “a little Tito at the provincial level.” This epithet was accurate insofar as his reign in Kielce ended more or less at the same time that the “Tito matter” exploded. But the Kielce case was about something entirely different.

Mafia Clientelism

How did it happen that a windbag and a mythomaniac, who was neither a talented leader nor exactly a brave man, managed to build a network of connections from 1944 to 1948, thanks to which he dominated Sobczyński, the head of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP); Kuźnicki, the head of the Provincial Headquarters of the Citizens’ Militia (KW MO); and even Józef Kalinowski, the secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KW PPR)?

The answer to this question is similar to Luigi Barzini’s thoughts about Sicily. Writing about the context that made Mafia rule possible on the island, the scholar comes to the conclusion that traditionally its residents didn’t trust the authorities and had long ago learned to neutralize any written law, especially foreign laws. The Mafia governed in Sicily in its own way, as if official institutions didn’t exist at all, which didn’t help the general population.

This system is highly unsatisfactory (the inhabitants themselves endlessly lament their fate), because it cures no ills, in fact it makes them worse, promotes injustice and tyranny, leaves crimes unpunished, does not make use of Sicilians’ best qualities, and has kept the country stagnant and backward in almost every way. It consists of a technique, or art, which is second nature to all Sicilians, both the decent, hard-working, honorable Sicilians, and the criminal minority, which includes the Mafia, that of building up one’s personal power, and of acquiring enough power to intimidate or frighten one’s competitors, rivals, or enemies, in order to defend one’s honor and welfare at all times.12

If we combine this inveterate distrust of the state with the use of “private, unlicensed violence” as a means of controlling society,13 which is the differentia specifica of the Mafia, then we can imagine the social culture of Sicily. At the same time, we will also have an approximation of the postwar atmosphere in Kielce.

It is tempting to make at least the most superficial comparison between the situation on the island at the start of the nineteenth century and Poland in 1945–1946. The Mafia appeared in Sicily when the Sicilian Bourbons tried to limit the power of the traditional landholders and supported the emancipation of the peasantry. Feudal laws were abolished and a radical redistribution of land was announced. Recruiting from the peasantry, the Mafia filled the gap created between an oppressive state, the landowners who were defending themselves, and the rebelling peasantry. Its task was to provide armed protection for threatened landed estates.14

In the reality of Kielce around the time of the pogrom, the initial circumstances were similar in terms of the overthrow of landownership and the emancipation of the peasantry. But the “police/security service/military” Mafia that filled the local gap had been brought to life by an illegal state whose authority was rejected by supporters of the old order. Only those people who were forced to, those who had nothing to lose or who were naive, could trust the Communists. And indeed, some peasants, enticed by the promise of land, did trust them. The remainder oriented themselves toward one of the centers of diffused power that used “private, unlicensed violence,”—whether it was the lawlessness of the police (MO), the security service (UB), the Soviets, or the underground.

FIGURE 46. Coffins for the victims of the Kielce pogrom are laid out in a courtyard. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Julia Pirotte.

From the moment the Soviets entered, Kielce became divided into roughly two spheres of influence. One was governed by the security service, while the other belonged to the police and was subordinate to the deputy provincial governor, Urbanowicz. And Provincial Governor Wiślicz, with his chameleon-like abilities, rose above them both.

It is telling that it was Urbanowicz, not Wiślicz, who received threats after the pogrom:

Mr. Deputy Provincial Governor! If those being detained are shot, then you should know, Mr. [Deputy] Provincial Governor Urbanowicz, sir, that the existence of those appearing in the poster [those officials who signed the public notification of the sentence] . . . Mr. Urbanowicz, Mr. Winiarski, and the like [will be threatened]. . . . It is impossible to call the Polish nation NSZ [National Armed Forces], they are true-born Poles. There had to be [some] truth [in the rumor about the Jews]. You can’t punish people with death sentences like this, just with a sharp reprimand or a lenient sentence. . . . But for whom, for a jew [sic]? You do everything through terror. Oh, this is not how it is going to be. We, the AK organization, will blow everything up in the air. [Signature:] General of the AK. [Note added at the bottom:] Jewish lackeys, Jewish Security Service.15

All sorts of dangers somehow bypassed the provincial governor. Wiślicz even once managed to escape when his tire blew in the wilderness and his car was attacked by “Wilk’s” group.16 The two people accompanying him weren’t so lucky.

Wiślicz and the Jews

Wiślicz’s strategy invariably depended on maneuvering between the law that he nominally represented and the lawlessness that he practiced in reality; between Communism, which he was helping to install, and the prewar Poland that he imitated.

His concept of security was based on a system of multifaceted precautionary measures. And Jews constituted one of these facets. During times of peace, his antisemitism took on an ironically patronizing tone: “We are in Kielce Anno Domini 1946. It seemed to me that the Jews who gathered here felt secure. . . . They had their fellow tribesmen here in the Provincial Committee of the Party. The position of first secretary of the [Provincial] Committee [of the Polish Workers’ Party] was filled by comrade Józef Kalinowski, who—even though he presented his children for holy baptism in the Catholic Church (this was the case when he was invited to this rite by the president of the city of Kielce, Marian Słoń)—he did not really conceal his Jewish background, which everyone knew about.”17

Similarly, Wiślicz’s attitude changed toward the first head of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), Adam Kornecki (aka Dawid Kornhändler). As soon as the Soviets arrived and Kornecki became WUBP head, Wiślicz moved into Kornecki’s allocated accommodations and they lived together for a while. In 1962, when Kornecki was still being invited to the Department of Party History, Wiślicz remembered him downright impishly: “One day . . . comrades Kornecki and Sobczyński came from Kielce . . ., we were spinning various plots. . . . We wanted to create a new and beautiful life in the Kielce region. Adam Kornecki took me to his house and had some trouble with me. If before I wasn’t guilty of having an appetite, after contracting typhus I ate as if for hire, and things weren’t the easiest when it came to provisions.”

Wiślicz will evoke Kornecki’s last name in a completely different tone in 1968, when Kornecki is preparing to emigrate. He will lament that in Kielce, “the small Jewish community became very visible, since it lived materially at a much higher level than the Polish community, which was pauperized during the war of many years. Expensive suits, gold wedding bands on their fingers, an abundance of money, and a visible aversion to undertaking work unprofitable at the time could not go unnoticed. . . . Within a year and a half, a dangerous envy grew, frequently aroused by the provocative violation of law and order by Major Adam Kornecki.”18 In 1968 Wiślicz fought on behalf of strengthening law and order. In the 1990s he will be in the vanguard of Polish patriots seeking to commemorate the Katyń Massacre of April–May 1940, during which the Soviet NKVD murdered some twenty-two thousand Polish military officers and members of the Polish intelligentsia.

On the day of the pogrom, however, the provincial governor made a gesture that no one expected. Father Henryk Peszko, chancellor of the curia of the Kielce diocese, related: “At around 9:00 a.m. I was informed that there were anti-Jewish riots. I went to Sienkiewicza and saw that the street, from the Bristol hotel toward Planty Street, was filled with a crowd of people. I did not attempt to approach the site of the incidents. So I returned to the parish office on Wesoła Street. Along the way, I met policemen running with weapons, who were saying that Jews had attacked Poles. A Jew whom I knew also came to me, a tailor who was preparing for baptism, and he asked that I issue him a certificate affirming that he was a Christian. He received such a certificate and this saved him from the pogrom.”19

In reality, however, it wasn’t the certificate from Father Peszko that saved this tailor, but Wiślicz, who at a critical moment decided to send a car for him. The rescued man was Szlama Koński, a tailor who made clothes of English wool for the entire Kielce establishment. The provincial governor took him to his home at 15 Focha Street and didn’t let him go until he finished sewing a suit with a vest. “I myself sent a car for those whom I knew, for Koński, where I had my suits sewn, and for the president of the [Jewish] community, [Pinchas] Ajzenberg. I ordered my adjutant to bring them to the safest place I knew, that is, to my apartment. Later, when the decision to move all the Jews from Kielce to Łódź was made, Koński asked me to let him stay, since he was not guilty.”20

And one more thing about Wiślicz, who always got his way: After the pogrom, the building on Planty Street—now emptied of Jews and taken from the owners—was transferred to the “Świt” work corps.21

Authorities Secular and Religious, Continued

“During the incidents Sobczyński completely lost his head,” Wiślicz spins a yarn in the Department of Party History in 1962. “He calls me at 2:00 p.m. and says, ‘Do something, because we can’t handle it.’ At the time I was lying in bed with my leg in a cast. . . . And even though Sobczyński . . . had [sent] the school [of functionaries from the Provincial Office of Public Security],—because he had called it in from a distance of eight kilometers,—[it had to wait to enter into action] for about three hours. Sobczyński said that only the Kielce bishops could defuse the situation, because the factory crews were also starting to take part in the incidents. The incidents were transforming into open riots against the people’s authorities and a counterrevolution.”

Wiślicz’s phrase about the school for the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) is strange. It is blurred on the recording or censored during editing and without the bracketed clarifications added above, the entire sentence would be incomprehensible. Sobczyński’s phone call, and the actual arrival of the school, had occurred at least two hours earlier. And in his memoirs, Wiślicz openly lied without limit. “The police were unable to stand up to the enraged masses. [Neither] the army nor the KBW [Internal Security Corps] . . . managed to react.”22 However, the entire problem rests on the fact that they did manage to react, only they did so in a completely different way than expected.

In 1995 Wiślicz told a Kielce journalist, Jerzy Daniel, that the call came earlier than the time he had suggested in his story from 1962. “The first news about Planty reached me before 10:30. . . . I answered the call from Sobczyński at home. . . . He said only that in front of the building on Planty . . . a crowd had gathered and they were laying siege to the building. ‘But we will take control of the situation,’ he said. ‘A few people will be sent out.’ There wasn’t any anxiety in his words.”23 In another testimony, he will say that he spoke with Sobczyński at 10:15 a.m. and that he himself made the call.

Wiślicz doesn’t always pay attention to the details, but he always remembers to highlight his own position. He operates something akin to a headquarters out of his flat. Headquarters have to be fortified, so it comes as no surprise that at 15 Focha Street, on the other side of a wall that is shared with the WUBP, there is “a whole arsenal of weapons. There was a Bergmann-type machine gun, automatics, and a whole box of grenades [an indication of how safe the occupants felt here]. There were three faithful friends from protection here with ‘Kazik’ [Vsevolod Mikhailovich Artëmev] at the helm.”24

The provincial governor was well aware of the situation in the city, because he also had two sergeants close at hand, Józef Tutak and Wacław Gieracha, who were bringing him reports.

The Proclamation That Never Was

The idea to turn to the Church for help was born after Ludwików workers entered Planty Street. In Bishop Kaczmarek’s report we read that at 2:30 p.m. the assistant prosecutor from the Kielce court called Father Zelek to ask him to intervene before the army used weapons. “When a modus operandi was established, the Kielce provincial governor, Major Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, drove up in front of the building. Since he had a broken leg and couldn’t walk, both aforementioned priests [Zelek and Danilewicz] went out to the car. During the conversation, the provincial governor requested an intervention, giving the same reasons as the assistant prosecutor from the court. In response to the provincial governor’s proposal to go with him by car to the location of the incidents, the priests—for tactical reasons—stated that they themselves would go in the company of three other priests to the place, which they indeed immediately did. At the place of the incidents, it turned out that an intervention was superfluous, since there were no longer any crowds, [and] small groups of people, conversing at great length in areas further away from the location of the incidents, were behaving calmly.”25

Provincial Governor Wiślicz presents this event differently. “They wanted to bring the auxiliary bishop to me. Together with him, ignoring the fact that my leg was in a cast, we were supposed to go to the yard and urge the crowds there to disperse. This aim, however, was not achieved.” And without a word he moves on to the next day: “The bishop’s representative put forward far-reaching demands: signing a proclamation that collided with our political line and our principles. The bishop’s representative brought me a copy of this proclamation. The next day, Zenon Kliszko arrived and ordered us to shove this proclamation into the bishop’s face.”26

The documents mentioned above can be found in the files of Bishop Kaczmarek’s case from the 1950s, in the section labeled “physical evidence.” This section contains materials found during the search of the cathedral. We have, thus, the original invitation dated July 5, that Wiślicz dispatched to the pastor, Father Zelek. The provincial governor requests that, because of his state of health, Zelek visit him at 15 Focha Street at 4:00 p.m. with the goal of “discussing yesterday’s incidents.” A few pages later there is another letter to the same addressee, with the same date, on the provincial governor’s letterhead: “Reverend Father, I kindly request that you obtain from within the curia a signature from a responsible representative of the bishop on the proclamation to the people edited by me.”27 Next, there are two drafts of the proclamation. The first is Wiślicz’s, the second—the Church’s.

The curia’s report gives a detailed account of the negotiations. We read that on July 5, the provincial governor invited the canon priest Zelek, among others, with the goal of obtaining information about the general mood and advice about “what should be done to calm agitated minds.” Those gathered agreed that the events “demand[ed] to be elucidated in the spirit of truth” and underscored that the proclamation by political factions to the people of Kielce (falsified by the security service) explained the events tendentiously when it placed the blame on so-called reactionary elements. This was in reference to the formulation that “mercenaries of the Polish szlachta [noble class] committed the massacre.” Wiślicz was therefore now advised “to publish a proclamation signed by representatives of the curia and the provincial governor” with the goal of “calming minds.” Father Zelek suggested withdrawing the earlier draft of the proclamation and writing a new one, ensuring that an investigation would be conducted with the participation of both the curia and state administration and that “the guilty [would] be punished regardless of their racial or religious background.” A draft of this proclamation was prepared and approved by the provincial governor. He stated, however, that he had to get the approval of his superiors. “He did not receive approval and the proclamation did not come out.”28

As much as the content of the proclamation proposed by Wiślicz was an apologia of the authorities’ conduct, the draft proposed by the curia was a reminder of the disproportion between the authority of the Communists and that of the Church. The former could not consent to include the latter in the supervision of the investigation. Moreover, they correctly interpreted the formulation “regardless of their racial or religious background” as alluding to the alleged privileging of Jews.

FIGURE 47. A woman weeps over the coffins of Jews killed during the Kielce pogrom, July 6,1946. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Julia Pirotte.

The greatest flaw in the text proposed by the curia, however, was that it was not an official repudiation of the idea of Jewish ritual murders, an area in which the curia was, after all, the expert. As we have seen, it is true that the Częstochowa bishop Teodor Kubina mustered the courage to do so.29 But in Kielce no one intended to follow in his footsteps.

In any case, this was the traditional policy of the Polish Church. From a note found in the Freedom and Independence (WiN) archive, it appears that after the Kraków pogrom, “the PPR [Polish Workers’ Party] turned to Archbishop Jałbrzykowski [the Vilnius metropolitan] with a request to condemn the Kraków riots, to which it received a reply that the curia knows the matter from a one-sided interpretation and therefore cannot take any position.”30 Cardinal Hlond reacted the same way when Ambassador Bliss Lane asked him to comment on “the events.”31 We should add to this list Cardinal Sapieha’s failure to respond to a letter from the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP). In this letter the CKŻP requested that the Church make a public statement “regarding the bestial murders of the defenseless remnants of the Jewish people committed by armed bands.”32

Echoes

In a report from the 4th Infantry Regiment of the Internal Security Corps (KBW) written by Lieutenant J. Kruk for July 1–15, we read that “the bestial anti-Jewish incidents on the 4th of this month reverberated widely among soldiers, who with sharp words condemned the crime staged by bands under the banners of the NSZ and WiN.”

Another report from the 4th Regiment cites questions posed during political discussions: “Why is it not possible to learn from the trial who killed two Poles?”; “Why in one newspaper, Kurier Codzienny [the Daily Courier], is the reason for the Kielce incidents described as a child of one widow who was supporting herself by begging, while the newspaper Robotnik [the Worker] reports that the aforementioned child came to the station of the MO with his father?”33

Two days after the pogrom, a rally of the entire regiment was organized in the unit on the topic of antisemitism, as were subsequent “chats and discussions.” However, in the entire report there is more information on the topic of an excess of herring in the diet than there are traces of the crisis connected with the participation of members of the 4th (known as “Czwartaks”) in the pogrom. Reports by Major Konieczny of the 2nd Infantry Division provide information about the prevailing attitude toward the pogrom in the area during the first two weeks of July 1946. In the first one we read that the countryside doesn’t know anything, but that the cities are buzzing: “Persistently circulating versions of ritual or also other murder of Polish children by Jews created a particularly tense atmosphere.”34 This is confirmed by reports from propaganda departments in Sandomierz, Jędrzejów, Pińczów, Radom, and Skarżysko-Kamienna. It was also noted in reports from the entire region, all the way to Częstochowa: “The event in Kielce. The entire population followed these incidents and trials with outrage; it wouldn’t yield to explanations that this is not true. There was intense resentment in the entire county, even among a minority of party people.”35 Freedom and Independence (WiN) also noted similar feelings in Kraków: “Constantly visible everywhere is the same great hatred toward the Soviets, Communists, and Jews (newly reawakened after the Kielce events).”36 A measure of hysteria that was triggered is the fantastical rumor about “Jewish bands” hiding in the forests.37

When UB functionary Wacław Ziółek is questioned during the second Kielce investigation and recalls the rumors that were started by the pogrom in the countryside, he exposes the most archaic image from the history of blood libels: in the basement of the building on Planty Street a child was hanging by its feet, “and blood flowed from [the child] into a tin barrel.”38 This image corresponds with Freedom and Independence (WiN) reports from 1945–1946, where the role of the child is played by a Polish girl flayed by a Jewish shochet (kosher butcher). She becomes an emblem of the genocidal paranoia that contributed to the pogrom.

We can find similarly apocalyptic images in flyers smuggled into the country even before the end of the war: “The life of European peoples will, so to speak, flow from them in streams of putrid blood out of their mouths and eyes, through their skin. In Russia only infants and illiterates will be saved—the rest will create an enormous cemetery in Moscow and Petrograd. The future avenger will make Poland and Ukraine a howling wilderness, and everywhere women in these countries, before they die, will be defiled. Putrid blood will gush from the docks in Gdańsk.”39

Perhaps Provincial Governor Wiślicz was an exception to the rule and didn’t believe the toxic rumor, but his deputy, Henryk Urbanowicz—who on the day of the pogrom sent a compromising telegram to Warsaw—believed it. In a letter dated July 30, 1946, addressed to one Herman, a member of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, Urbanowicz will lament that he, like some of Kielce society, believed “the provocative version, . . . that Jews murdered Polish children.”40 He defends himself as does everyone else in postwar Kielce: he says he is no antisemite, and that during the war he saved many Jews.

Notes

1. See the chapter “The Trial of Tadeusz Maj: The History of AL Unit ‘Świt’ in the Kielce Region,” in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2019).

2. AIPN BU_703_1132, k. 70.

3. AIPN BU_703_1132, k. 135.

4. AIPN BU_703_1132, k. 122.

5. AIPN BU_00945_170, k. 14.

6. Marian Langer, Lasy i ludzie. Wspomnienia z lasów starachowickich 1939– 1945 (Warsaw: self-pub., 1993), 421.

7. AIPN BU_703_1132, k. 1131.

8. AIPN Ki_0_14_155, t. 2, cz. 2, k. 153.

9. Andrzej Ropelewski, Z życia akowców w Polsce Ludowej (Gdynia: Marpress, 1997), 120.

10. See Eugeniusz Wiślicz-Iwańczyk’s letter dated January 12, 1990, as cited in Ropelewski, Z życia akowców, 121. Józef Światło also mentions the group of AK members that were around Wiślicz in 1945. See Zbigniew Błażyński, Mówi Józef Światło: Zakulisami bezpieki i partii 1940–1955 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo LTW, 2012), 130. I am indebted to Professor Andrzej Ropelewski for an extensive correspondence on the views of the provincial governor, Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, and his relations with WiN.

11. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), 23.

12. Luigi Barzini, From Caesar to the Mafia (New York: Routledge, 2017), 75–76.

13. Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Enterpreneurs (New York: Waveland, 1988), 6.

14. Blok, Mafia, 10–11.

15. GFHA, Catalog No. 005957, k. 13. Wiślicz’s deputy, Urbanowicz, got in trouble with the people of Kielce on the day of the pogrom when he took a megaphone and appealed to the crowd to remain peaceful, warning them that the acts of violence would be investigated. The crowd responded with such cries as “Away with the Jewish provincial governor!” (GFHA, Catalog No. 005957, p. 17). The text of the appeal is preserved in AIPN Ki_0418_2671, k. 26.

16. See the special report dated April 23, 1946 (AIPN BU_00_294_45, t. 44, k. 34).

17. See Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, “Wspomnienia” in Stanisław Meducki, ed., Antyżydowskie wydarzenia kieleckie 4 lipca 1946 roku. Dokumenty i materiały (Kielce: Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1994), 2:81. See also Wiślicz’s personnel file in AAN, sygn. 8500, k. 443–68.

18. Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, “Wspomnienia.”

19. See also Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: IPN, 2006), 1:210. Peszko also wrote about providing Szlama Koński with a baptismal certificate in his book Sprawy i ludzie na tle jednego mojego życia. Wspomnienia kieleckiego duchownego z lat 1910–1946 (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego, 2016), 79.

20. See J. S. Mac, “Jak to się stało?” Kontrasty 7, in AIPN Ki_53_4754, cz. 1, k. 27. Szlama Koński was not the only Jew to hide that day in the apartment of the provincial governor. Zofia Gałuszko, a friend of the Wiślicz family from Szczecin, was said to have stayed there, as was Estera Langerowa, who was rumored to have been rescued by the Wiślicz family during the war. However these names do not appear on the CKŻP’s registry for Kielce in 1945–1946. Wiślicz repeats them in his testimony in the second Kielce investigation on June 22, 1995; Zofia’s last name appears there as “Gołuszko.” Wokół 1: 272.

21. Krzysztof Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi (Kielce: Małopolska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1993), 222.

22. Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, Wspomnienia, 83.

23. Jerzy Daniel, Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu: Rzecz o kieleckim pogromie 4 lipca 1946 (Kielce: Scriptum, 1996), 75.

24. Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, Wspomnienia, 84–85. According to Jerzy Daniel, Artëmev had served in the Soviet partisans and supposedly saved Wiślicz’s life during the war. See Daniel, Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu, 76.

25. SL 1.2.

26. See Wiślicz-Iwańczyk’s unpublished manuscript, “Organizowanie władzy ludowej” (Organizing the people’s authorities) (AAN, sygn. 8500, k. 57). See also Wspomnienia, 86–87.

27. AIPN BU_944_548, k. 13.

28. SL 1.3.

29. SL 10.2.

30. ANKr, WiN 42, k. 231.

31. See Wokół 1: 166.

32. Anna Cichopek tried in vain to find the cardinal’s response to this letter. See Anna Cichopek, Pogrom Żydów w Krakowie, 11 sierpnia 1945 (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2000), 29–30.

33. See “Sprawozdania i meldunki zastępców dowódców jednostek 2WDP ds. polityczno-wychowawczych dotyczące akcji propagandowej w terenie i walki ze zbrojnym podziemiem, 1/5–6/9/1946,” filed in CAW (WBH), sygn. IV.521.2.97, k. 308, 312.

34. CAW (WBH), sygn. IV.521.2.97, k. 1–2.

35. See the report on the Kielce region filed as “Kieleckie: Sytuacja polityczna terenu w okresie sprawozdawczym” (AIPN Ki_53_4743, k. 155, 156).

36. ANKr, WiN 4, 415.

37. AIPN Ki_53_4743, k. 154.

38. AG-PK, t. 4, k. 125.

39. AIPN Ki_0_15_2, t. 39, k. 404–9.

40. See GFHA, Catalog No. 005957, 13, 16–18.