Henio and Others
Janek Binkowski, Age Nine
Janek Binkowski is from a street called Starowarszawskie Przedmieście, often referred to as the “goose pasture.” He’s a pupil in the third grade at the primary school located in the Pocieszka neighborhood of Kielce, and he runs away from home on June 4, 1946, exactly one month before the pogrom. At home the family lives hand to mouth. There is never enough money to buy Janek notebooks for school, so he is constantly being scolded by his schoolteacher. His father, a worker in the carpentry shop at the Henryków sawmill, was in jail. His mother goes from house to house and launders people’s linens. In addition to Janek, she supports two other children, so the eldest son has to manage on his own. He isn’t managing at all, and all his mother does is yell. When the boy is found two weeks after the pogrom, he complains to the officer questioning him that he ran away because he was afraid he would land in jail for playing hooky. Janek’s long story about his month of wandering around Pocieszka is the story of a neglected child, a story very similar to that of Henio Błaszczyk, whose disappearance ignited the pogrom.1
Arriving at school at 11:00 a.m. on June 4, 1946, I was thrown out of class by my teacher for not having any notebooks, Janek later explained when interviewed by the UB. Having returned home at 3:00 p.m., I ate dinner, and after dinner I went out on the street and walked around the city until evening. Being on the street at dusk, I stopped a lady who was passing by, and asked her to put me up for the night. This woman took me to her house, where I slept the entire night. The next day, that is, on June 5, 1946, I went to a shoemaker, asking if he would hire me; however, he said that if he had a cow, he would hire me as a cowherd, but he doesn’t have a cow, so he doesn’t need me. While I was at this shoemaker’s, he asked me lots of questions about where I was from and if I had parents. I answered that I don’t have a daddy or a mommy, because daddy was taken to prison, and mommy had died on me. On the third day and the fourth I wandered around the city. I spent two nights on Radomska Street. On the Saturday before Pentecost, I went up to a man in Pocieszka, asked if he’d hire me, and said that I would pasture his cows for him. However, since this man didn’t have any cows, only a goat, he didn’t want to hire me. I was at his place through Pentecost. On the first day after the holiday, he took me and led me over to Szydłówek, a Kielce neighborhood, to a farmer who was looking for a boy to pasture his cows. I pastured his cows in Szydłówek for two weeks and since he was poor, he didn’t give me much to eat; however, he ordered me to throw out the manure and bed down the cows every day. After two weeks I ran away from Sztaniec Józef and went to Piaski (another Kielce neighborhood) to stay with some old grandma, where I pastured three cows. I was with this grandma for a week and decided to also leave her, and after leaving I went to a farmer whose name was Jagielski Karol, who lived in Piaski. On Tuesday, that is on July 16, 1946, Jagielski ordered his son Bogdan to take me back home to Kielce.
Mothers and Fathers
Less than a month before the pogrom, Janek’s mom, a forty-year-old illiterate Kielce resident, filed a report about the disappearance of her son and then waited for his return for a month without any response. When asked what she was doing on the day of the pogrom on Planty Street, where she was arrested, she said that some neighbor women came over in the morning with the news that there was a lot of commotion on the square in front of the Jewish building. They said that she should go check to see if her son was there. They say that the Jews murdered Polish children. Maybe they also murdered her Janek?
When I found out about the incident that was happening, says Binkowska, I went to the Jewish building where the murdered children were supposed to be. It was hard to push through, so I proceeded to the police. I asked whether they knew what children had been murdered. Maybe I could take a walk over there accompanied by policemen to check the basement? But they told me they’d let me know if they found my son there. So I left the police station and proceeded to Sienkiewicza Street. On the corner of Sienkiewicza and Planty, I started to cry, I shouted that Jews murdered my son. All of a sudden a soldier came up to me and told me to calm down. “If he’s found, Ma’am, you’ll find out.” And he walked away. I didn’t calm down, instead I cried and kept saying that Jews murdered my son. A second soldier came up to me and I was arrested.
The author of an anonymous account recalled that Binkowska “was despairing in front of the Jewish building. This author claims that when she was standing in the crowd on Planty at 10:00 a.m., she heard the voice of a crying woman, but she couldn’t see her because of the throng (thus we don’t know if, as Szmulek Nester recalled, this crying woman was dressed in a light-colored dress with her hair combed up).
“My dearest little child . . . he was murdered here,” she lamented. The building was already surrounded by the police (Citizens’ Militia, MO) and a crowd. The author of the above account found a way to get up to the gate of the besieged building. “A major from the MO came through the gate and turned to the people. ‘Quiet down, it’s not true, nothing was found, it’s all a provocation.’ In response I said loudly: ‘Is that woman who’s crying for her son also a provocation?’ When the crowd heard my words, they shouted: ‘Away with him, let us civilians through! We’ll search, because the police and the army are Jewish defenders.’ In response, the major quickly withdrew from the crowd. The crowd kept shouting: ‘Let us through, away with the Jews, hand over the Jews!’”
As we can see from this description, the crowd on Planty Street, including this anonymous woman, stormed the committee building believing that they were helping bereaved mothers. Many more such parents were in front of the Jewish communal building that day.
Antonina Biskupska
“Biskupska, she was shouting everywhere, that it was the Jews, beat the Jews, and so on,” says an older man in thick glasses, a worker at the Iskra factory, the author of what is called the Dzikowski report.2 “And so, that’s most likely how it was, because all around town it was everywhere, that all the Jews need to be killed off. This was the general, maybe not the general, but the prevalent attitude among Kielce residents. At the trial, she said she did it out of stupidity.”
These were, indeed, the words of Antonina Biskupska, age thirty-six, without a profession or education, the mother of a five-year-old child. In addition to mitigating circumstances in the form of epilepsy and hyperthyroidism, her remorse probably contributed to a reduced sentence. It’s interesting that her maiden name was the same as the last name of a policeman in the first police patrol sent to Planty Street, Stanisław Krowa.3 If they were related, then their encounter in front of the Jewish Committee may have strengthened the animus of the pogrom.
Biskupska heard the biggest news of the day earlier, through the window, as she was making the bed in her apartment on the corner of Sienkiewicza and Focha streets. A woman passing by the window lamented that Jews had murdered four Polish children “for blood” and that their bodies were lying on Planty Street. “Oh dear! Oh! Our Polish children have been murdered,” she called out, and curious people followed her. Biskupska also went with them, leaving her five-year-old child in the courtyard. On Planty Street they were saying that “one child ran away from the Jews and reported it to police”; that there are other children in the basement, “still warm”; and that the remaining fourteen had already been covered “with lime, so that there wouldn’t be any traces.” Then she started to yell, “Away with the Jews! They’re murdering our children! We don’t need them!” When the crowd was throwing stones at the windows, Biskupska also threw them. She didn’t leave until around noon, when some older man said, “Stupid woman! I’ve been observing you for a while now—go home!”4 By the time she cooled off, her child was no longer in the courtyard. She looked for the child on the street and in the park. In the end, someone brought the kid back home.
JUDGE ŁUKASIK [AT THE JULY 12, 1946, TRIAL]: What illness does the accused suffer from?
BISKUPSKA: A thyroid condition. When I become upset, I can’t control myself.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: Did the accused verify this rumor about the murder of children? Did you investigate whether it was true?
BISKUPSKA: I asked and people spoke—apparently it’s true.5
Beginning in October 1946, Biskupska, who was sentenced to ten years in prison for instigation and incitement to murder, submitted appeals for a pardon. Her husband, Stanisław, “a zealous member of the PPR [Polish Workers’ Party],” is at work all day and there’s no one to take care of the child. In subsequent pleas she mentions not one, but two children, a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. The second is a stepchild, who supposedly disappeared from home the same morning that the pogrom took place, and that’s why Biskupska went to Planty Street (someone will jot down in blue pencil in the margins of the appeal, “That’s new!”). Elsewhere, in this same letter the number of children increases to three—no doubt the convicted criminal was including her husband’s adult daughter from his first marriage, who worked in Ludwików.
Biskupska will write about herself as follows:
Being the child of poor parents, I was raised by strangers from the time I was seven years old, working to support myself. I do not have any education, other than one grade in primary school, since I worked hard during that time in a child’s life that is meant for school. My entire life was a struggle for survival. I had neither a childhood nor a youth. In addition to difficult material circumstances I am burdened with the serious illness of epilepsy, as well as an enlarged thyroid. . . . The combination of these two illnesses during a period when an attack is about to occur deprive me of the ability to think normally, and I am not responsible for my acts during [an episode of] insane distress.6
Pustuła and His Children
Ludwik Pustuła, age thirty-six, was similarly agitated that day. He was a police officer with the County Headquarters of the MO, and—according to the opinion of some of his superiors—“a good Pole and a democrat.” According to others, however, he was a noisy drunkard and a carouser.7 Corporal Pustuła had a large family that consisted of thirteen-year-old Zenon, ten-year-old Leokadia, nine-year-old Henryk, seven-year-old Alfred, and five-year-old Teresa. Another child will be born in the fall.
At 8:00 a.m. he reported for duty at the police headquarters on Wesoła Street. The head of the administrative office sent him immediately to the warehouse to pick up some canned goods. Along the way Pustuła stopped at home for breakfast, and then, heading toward Zagórska Street, he stopped in a store to get some cigarettes. The owner, Kwiatkowski, “poured vodka into shot glasses for all of us and we drank around a half liter.”
A moment later Pustuła’s wife, distressed, caught up with him to tell him that his daughter had vanished. Carrying an MP 40 submachine gun, Pustuła set off toward Planty, in the same direction that everyone was rushing. “Running to Planty Street—this was around 10:00 a.m.—I started to shout in the crowd that Jews killed my child. Hearing this, people started to shout, ‘This is the one whose child went missing.’”8
At least three witnesses saw Pustuła in this role. The first was Marian Antonkiewicz, a police officer from the MO training school, later accused of stealing from the wounded in the hospital. “It was maybe around 10:30 a.m. when I stood at my post. . . . Some individual, who was unknown to me, dressed in American clothes, no cap, in a drunken state, started to shout that ‘Jews murdered my child, let me through.’ In response to a comment by Warrant Officer Biczysko, who told him to go home and stop yelling, two civilians whom I didn’t know immediately took him by the arms and left with him.”9
Andrzej Drożdżeński, a passerby who was looking for buttermilk in nearby shops, also tells of a drunkard who, “staggering, walked along the wall of house no. 7 and mumbled something about his daughter being abducted by Jews. From time to time he pounded on the closed doors of the building. He kept stumbling and falling asleep. Gawkers made a laughingstock of him. They kept waking him up and urging him to go defend his child.”10
The third witness to Pustuła’s exploits was a functionary in the UB, Henryk Rybak, who remembered a policeman yelling that “his child had gone missing and was in that building.”11
In the afternoon it will turn out that while Pustuła was despairing on Planty, his daughter Leokadia was selling lemonade at the train station, perhaps hawking the most important news of the day.
A Childless Woman
Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum, the deputy head of the County Office of Public Security (PUBP) in Kielce who found himself by chance at 7 Planty Street, and who would organize a defense of the Jewish Committee building during the first several hours of the pogrom, says that inside he saw soldiers escorting a woman and boy around. With Jan Rokicki, a functionary of the County UB, next to me, I blocked their path, telling them, “Don’t cause a provocation, get her out of here.” Then one of the soldiers pointed a PPSh at me, saying, “Shut up, or I’ll shoot you like a dog.”12 Could this woman with a boy be Henio Błaszczyk’s mother, who is missing from all the investigation documents, even though we know that she was imprisoned along with her sons on Focha Street?
Witnesses also saw a young teenage boy running along the river toward the station; people said that he had “escaped from that basement, from that building.”13 The theme of a boy at the river will return in the nineties during the second Kielce investigation, when Antoni Frankowski, who was a colonel in 1946, recounts that a woman stood on the bridge over the Silnica River and was holding the hand of a boy who was about four years old, asking him loudly where he had been. “This boy answered that he was in that building in the basement—pointing to the Jewish community building—and that there he saw the little heads of murdered children lying on the coal.”14 This scene looks like Henio Błaszczyk’s confessional reflex on Podwalna Street, to which we shall return in a moment.
As police officer Karol Świątek will later testify, there was another woman on Planty Street, childless, who shouted every bit as loudly that her child had been killed by Jews. Reportedly her name was Zofia Prokop. “Later she was detained by us, that is, by my colleagues from the UB. . . . When she was questioned, it turned out that she didn’t have any children at all.”15 Świątek’s testimony will be confirmed by Corporal Maks Erlbaum of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division of the Polish Army (2DP WP): “Near Planty Street, where I arrived around 11:30 a.m., I met Lieutenant Kumak of the WUBP [Provincial Office of Public Security] in Kielce among the crowd; together we detained a woman who was inciting the gathered crowd to kill Jews. She was shouting, ‘We shed blood [for our Fatherland], and now Jews are murdering our children.’ ‘They killed my child, avenge yourselves.’ When she was brought to the UB, it turned out that she was unmarried and didn’t have any children at all.”16
This was the atmosphere on the streets of Kielce, an atmosphere that developed on the foundation of the blood libel, the legend of innocents murdered by Jews. Miriam Rozenkranc’s testimony shows that the hysteria also spread to educated people. And Officer Karol Świątek’s testimony shows that it spread even to those who didn’t have any children at all.
“This myth tells us something about women’s fear,” writes the historian Marcin Zaremba.17 But as Pustuła’s story demonstrates, it also concerned men’s fears. The example of Pustuła shows that, regardless of gender, the people most likely to succumb to panic were those who themselves neglected their own children and who could be criminally charged for it.
Scholars of ethnic violence argue that the image of the Other often serves as a “vessel” for those aspects of ourselves that we would prefer to disown, and that guilt is most easily relieved through aggression. This is a principle well known from early modern blood libels. The protagonists of these legends are usually children who are forgotten until they are lost.
Henio Błaszczyk, Age Eight
Henio’s story could begin as follows: one day a boy was born to a poor family in the village of Trupień (today Strawczynek) near Kielce.18 No one was waiting for him, other than his twelve-year-old brother Tadeusz, who from birth was not of sound mind, and his half-brother Jan, who was born in 1919 and who will hang himself in 1954.
Eight-year-old Henio peers from a photograph. He is a worried child in a sailor’s uniform with shorts and a head that’s just a little too big. Henio’s father, Walenty, who always wears a hat in photographs and has a mustache, was a shoemaker and a drinker who beat Henio’s mother, Józefa. We know nothing about Józefa except that she was Walenty’s second wife and went around begging.19 And ineffectively at that. Her children were regularly hungry and the family was the subject of neighbors’ idle talk.
The Błaszczyks lived at 6 Podwalna Street in Głęboczka, near the railroad tracks and the Herbski Bridge. It is precisely on this bridge that Henio will dream up an imaginary Jewish benefactor “with a large nose and black hair,” who promises him a whole twenty złotys for delivering a package.20
As far as the reasons for running away from home are concerned, he and Janek Binkowski would certainly understand one another without saying a word. Disappearing children were a seasonal phenomenon, very popular in Kielce during the summer. In the raw footage for Marcel Łoziński’s 1988 film Świadkowie (Witnesses), interviewees describe this phenomenon using the slang verb stlenić się, which is based on the noun tlen (oxygen) and means something like “to take off” or “to vanish.” And it is in this context that they list the names of their friends: “Later I go to school and suddenly find out: ‘Did you hear? Did you hear? Antek Wawszczyk, he was taken for matzo. . . . Janek Binkowski, he was taken for matzo . . .’”21 Fearing the paternal belt, the boys placed the blame on contemporary “body snatchers,” that is, on Jews. And it worked. We already know the surname Binkowski, and the surname Wawszczyk will appear again later in chapter 9.
Families like the Błaszczyks or the Binkowskis were—as one of Marcel Łoziński’s interviewees says—people from an “attic room.” Such people usually inhabited “dark hovels with low ceilings and rotten floors . . . or outbuildings made of wooden planks, without light, where nothing fit but a storage bed, or they lived in cold garrets that leaked. There were several such little residential pigsties on Domaszowska Street,” writes Jan Pazdur in his Historia Kielc (History of Kielce). And he quotes the prewar Gazeta Kielecka (Kielce Gazette), which describes these as “damp dwellings sunken into the ground on Polna and Niska Streets that spread tuberculosis and rickets. The high price of lime for whitewashing, and of replacement straw for the shabby storage beds, contributes to the slovenliness, and what follows is the spread of disease. For lack of clothing and shoes, children simply become stunted from spending entire days curled up on rotten straw.” Pazdur adds that these people had no right to demand anything from the owners of the buildings in which they lived. Before the war there was a long-practiced privilege called “midsummer eviction” (rumacja świętojańska, from the Latin rumatio), which authorized a landlord to evict tenants on the Feast of St. John (June 24) without explanation or justification.22
FIGURE 22. Henio Błaszczyk, the boy who started the Kielce pogrom. Estera Mappen Archive/Michał Jaskulski.
FIGURE 23. Walenty Błaszczyk, Henio and Tadeusz’s father. AIPN Ki_0_13_2827_t1.
What could have changed in their lives after the war, especially from the children’s point of view? Kids like Janek Binkowski ran away to the countryside not only to get away from school but also, like Henio, to escape hunger. “The lack of window panes, the lack of fuel for heating, and the lack of provisions all contribute to the fact that the Kielce citizen has become nervous,” wrote the postwar Gazeta Kielecka.23 Beginning in April 1946, rationed cooking fats and oils were replaced by white cheese; instead of meat there was herring.24 Also, letters intercepted by wartime and postwar military censors were filled with complaints by Kielce residents about difficulties obtaining provisions:
There is nothing here but rallies, meetings, and they are not doing anything else. If things continue like this, life won’t be normal in a year. We get a quarter-loaf of bread per person for two days and nothing else. It will be difficult to make ends meet. Trade is at a complete standstill. . . . The conditions here are horrible. There is nothing else, but rations of bread and meat. . . . You can get food, but only in exchange for some kind of goods, and vice versa, goods for food, but only in exchange, because money does not matter whatsoever.25
At least in the countryside there were sour cherries. When it got hot outside, Henio ran away to Pielaki, a village near the town of Końskie, not far from Strawczynek, where he was born. He missed the countryside where he had lived with his mother after the Germans took his father to a Stalag, a POW camp. He ran away to join his childhood friends Józek and Czesiek Bartosiński, to drive the cows out into the meadow, and to sleep in the barn. In Pielaki he was received with surprise, but hospitably.26 There was plenty of food—potatoes, milk, bread, and sour cherries. One day he helped pasture the cows on a hill, the second day he worked with the goats, and only on the third day did he start to think about returning home.
The Dygnarowiczes and Pasowski
Władysław Dygnarowicz was a metalworker in the Ludwików steelworks and one of three brothers who lived on Podwalna Steet. He was the Błaszczyks’ neighbor. They shared a wall. There were very few houses on that street. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were still ponds and marshes in this area, a fact preserved in the name of the Kielce neighborhood “Głęboczka” (from głęboki, or deep). A “Polish road” led to Podwalna Street—a road without a hard surface that turned into a bog every spring and over which horse-drawn wagons couldn’t travel.
The war has ended, but electricity hasn’t been installed in much of the area, and there’s no sewage system. In the 1980s, Jerzy Mac—the author of one of the best newspaper articles about the pogrom—wanders into this thicket of little streets with such homey sounding names as “Miła” (pleasant), “Hoża” (which usually refers to a girl and means robust, lively, attractive; in the flower of health), and “Herbska” (coat of arms). There, Mac finds “miserable, chimneyless huts” standing in soggy mud, as if they were taken straight out of the epoch of shoes made of bast.27 Henio’s single-story building with seven apartments has wooden ceilings, dilapidated steps, and a primitive, foul-smelling toilet in a dark corner. Life in the backyards takes place under a crooked lilac bush, where the adults play a card game called thousand schnapsen.
Antoni Pasowski is co-owner of one of the “post-Jewish” (pożydowskie) buildings on this street (6 Podwalna Street). According to the prewar registry of building residents, it seems that Antoni Pasowski first lived here in apartment no. 4. After the war he moved to 8 Podwalna Street, apt. 1, but he remained the custodian of 6 Podwalna Street. Perhaps the Błaszczyks, who are not registered anywhere, list their address as 6 Podwalna Street in 1946 because Pasowski is the custodian there.28 During Pasowski’s questioning an extraordinary phrase appears: “successor house” (meaning precisely “post-Jewish”).29 The co-owner of the other house is, in turn, Antoni’s wife, Julia, who is the sister of Władysław, Wacław, and Zygmunt Dygnarowicz—with whom she co-owns 8 Podwalna Street. The oldest Dygnarowicz—Jan, called the “inheritor of the annex”—also owns a share of the building at 6 Podwalna Street.
Antoni Pasowski worked his entire life as an electrical engineer at the sawmill located at 3 Stolarska Street, on the corner of Zagnańska Street where Sender Liebfeld’s factory, Posadzka, was located.30 During the war the border of the ghetto ran through there, and the factory itself was adjacent to the fence with Jewish shacks. Food was supposedly smuggled into the ghetto this way (something that can’t be verified since witnesses are long dead). The custodian of the building—called an “administrator” in the new communist-era lingo—is just as poor as the tenants. He differs from the others only because, thanks to his more or less formal seizure of Jewish property, he became the custodian here.31 He has been officially registered at this address since before the war, while the Błaszczyk family is not registered even in 1946.
The tenants are dirt poor. Some of them, like Henio’s family, moved to Kielce from the countryside after the war, searching for a better life. But they didn’t find one. Henio’s father resoles shoes; his mother cooks “stone soup.” Henio has a married brother, Jan, who moved to Jasna Street and works in the Ludwików steelworks. He has another brother, twelve-year-old Tadeusz, who is disabled. There is also a half-sister, Krystyna, who is being raised in an orphanage.
Seeing that Józefa Błaszczyk is not very resourceful, the neighbor women occasionally drop off some potatoes for her. Other women on Podwalna Street earn money doing laundry by going all the way “to Chechły,” a neighborhood in downtown Kielce on the low bank of the Silnica River. Some of them also bleach linens and underclothing in the courtyard. On warm days they bring out the washtubs and washboards, and the air fills with the acrid smell of chlorine and soap suds. The laundry hangs to dry, and red pillows air out on ropes stretched out between the windows.
In Głęboczka, far from the center of authority, live people who have been described as being everywhere, but belonging nowhere.32 They see themselves as the eternal category of the destitute, outcasts, wretches, and don’t consider themselves proletarians. Their daily bread comes from the streets, “from the market, the innumerable petty ways, legal or non-legal, in which poor families kept body and soul together, only some of which were in any real sense wage-work.”33 It is not trade unions or the party, but the neighborhood community, family, the Church and compatriots who make up the network in which they are caught.
They are poor, and poverty is unpleasant, ugly, messy, sickly, uneducated, aggressive, and criminogenic. That’s why no one wants anything to do with the people from Podwalna Street. The state remembers them when it’s time to go to war, the Church—when it collects donations. The Germans aren’t interested in them, and the Communists rarely look in on them. The men work in the sawmill, the brickyard, and in the Ludwików steelworks.
Władysław Dygnarowicz, a thirty-five-year-old worker in the Ludwików steelworks who moonlights as a shoemaker working out of his home in the afternoons, is one of these men. On July 1, after returning from work, he eats dinner at his ground-floor neighbor’s place, at Józefa Olszewska’s, after which he sits down to repair shoes. Next, he drinks an entire bottle of vodka with his pal Feliks Gałczyński and his sister-in-law, Jan’s wife (who just today was released from prison). At around 9:00 p.m., Dygnarowicz—who is again at Olszewska’s place—hears Walenty Błaszczyk talking on the other side of the wall about how he’s going to the police to report the disappearance of his son Henio. It’s hot out. The windows are open. And it’s difficult to hide anything from the neighbors.
Three days later, his buddy Gałczyński will tell him that, as he was standing outside the window, he heard the story of the Błaszczyk boy who was kidnapped by Jews. When Władysław Dygnarowicz shows up at work the next morning, he’ll immediately complain about the Jews to Stanisław Umofer, a metalworker. Umofer and his crew will show up on Planty Street at noon.
The youngest of the Dygnarowicz brothers, Wacław, a barber who works at the shop on Piotrkowska Street, lives on Podwalna Street in building number 8. The buildings are close to one another, so the man often chats with Walenty Błaszczyk through the window. At the beginning of July, Błaszczyk confides in him that he can’t find Henio anywhere. He checked everywhere he could, “maybe he went to swim in the brook on Nowy Świat [Street]”; “maybe he stayed at the airport”; “maybe he went to the countryside”; or to the Kielce neighborhood called Karczkówka. He’s afraid that his son may have been abducted “because that boy was foolish.”
The following morning Wacław Dygnarowicz will talk about this matter with customers who stop by his shop on Piotrkowska Street. Around noon a barber’s apprentice will also come by with the news that “there are some anti-Jewish riots on Planty Street and the army is dispersing it all.”34
Jan Dygnarowicz, the Błaszczyks’ Godfather
In Kielce the relationship between parents and godparents is almost like that of blood relatives. So nobody is surprised by Jan Dygnarowicz’s behavior when Henio goes missing. Jan goes to Walenty’s house every day after the boy disappears. And on the morning of July 4, he will initiate a private inspection of the crime scene on Planty Street. He was also the one who advised Walenty to report Henio’s disappearance to the Citizens’ Militia and who listened every day to the father telling him where he had searched for his son. And he was the one who inquired at the train station police depot on Żelazna Street, posted flyers on telegraph poles, and let the church in Karczkówka know.35 When the boy was found, Jan was disturbed by his story. “I asked him if he could recognize the guy he delivered the parcel for, and he said he could. And he described how he sat in the basement. . . . And I asked him if, by chance, it was a Jew.”36
The next day the three of them went to look for the building where Henio was held. “As we were walking along Planty Street near the building where the Jews lived, I told him to point out the building he had been in. The boy pointed to the Jewish building, that this was where he had been. And we proceeded to the police on Sienkiewicza Street. Along the way, I told Błaszczyk that we should report to the police that his son had turned up, and that actually he had been caught by Jews and had been held in a basement. When we arrived at the station, Błaszczyk reported that his son had turned up, that he recognized one of the kikes from Planty. They took Błaszczyk’s son and the father into the station, and they ordered me to leave the station with everyone else.
“After a half hour, some policemen walked out of the station together with [Walenty] Błaszczyk and his son Henryk, and they headed toward Planty. Along the way they ordered Błaszczyk to go away, and they went with just his son. As I walked with Błaszczyk, who was crying along the way, people started to ask me why this guy was crying. I answered that this was the father of that boy who disappeared, and who has turned up, and that the boy had been caught by Jews from Planty. In response, people immediately began to gather in front of the building where the Jews lived, shouting ‘Beat the Jews!’
“On Planty, the boy recognized the alleged fellow, the Jew who supposedly locked him up, and the police took this kike to the station, and Błaszczyk also made his way there. Whereas I stayed on the street, informing people that this was the boy who had been caught by Jews and who had been found. And that this Jew has already been arrested and taken to the police. Some people were starting to make their way toward Planty, and others toward the police station on Sienkiewicza Street when I heard policemen saying that this Jew had a lot of money on him, and that this was the Jew who had locked the youngster in the basement.”
With these clarifications, it seemed there was nothing left to explain. The officer of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) who is questioning the witness comes up with only one question: Why, as he was walking by other buildings, didn’t Dygnarowicz check to see whether Henio recognized them? Dygnarowicz’s answer: There was no point in asking, since Jews didn’t live there.37 In other words, we knew from the start that Jews were the ones who kidnapped Henio, so we looked for them in places where you could find Jews.
The Scale Holding His Fate Falls Violently to the Ground
Before “the scale holding his fate falls violently to the ground,” as the poet Zbigniew Herbert writes, there is a moment in this story when everything could still turn around.38 On the night of July 3–4, a happy and slightly tipsy Walenty Błaszczyk goes to the police station and says that Henio has been found. But the sleepy officer on duty orders him to come back in the morning.
When the Błaszczyks return the next day, the chance to stop fate will be even greater. Not only are the drowsy policemen at the police station, but there is also a purebred intellectual, the director of the Criminal Investigation Unit of the MO, Stefan Sędek. He’s not just some pencil pusher who has been promoted. He is a noble Kielce citizen from a family of Endeks—National Democrats39—who completed two law courses at the University of Warsaw. The president of Kielce himself—the lawyer Roman Cichowski, who had known Sędek for many years—had written him a recommendation to the Citizens’ Militia (MO; police). In the recommendation, Cichowski stated that he had never noticed any “transgressions against honesty and ethics” in Sędek’s behavior.40
Unfortunately, the scale of fate fell quickly. In a moment the first, second, and third patrols will go to Planty Street, sent out by none other than Stefan Sędek, and they will spread the word about the whole affair. The machinery of the pogrom is now in motion.
Private Stanisław Krowa, who was present in the police station, saw the Błaszczyks giving their statements to Sędek. Next, the director went down to the squad room, where—in addition to Krowa and Hińcza (a member of the Volunteer Reserve of the Citizens’ Militia)—he chose six more of “the most talented scouts”: Rogoziński, Godek, Wacław Sapa, Roman Kasprzycki, Franciszek Furman, and Leon Szeląg. They were assigned the task of determining “the place where the boy who was supposed to have been caught by a Jew on July 1, 1946, and who stayed there in one of the flats, was detained. And which apartment? The boy himself will point it out.”41
There’s no hesitation in Sędek’s order, which was approved by Commander Zagórski. The child announces that he was kidnapped by Jews, and the police will immediately confirm this. That is all according to social expectations. Jews are not untouchable—especially since everyone knows what they do to children.
Even though Sędek will deny this at the trial, two witnesses will testify that he personally went to Planty Street. While the first testimony—an interjection to this effect by Franciszek Furman—may be considered an error introduced by a court reporter during the September 1946 trial, the second account, by photographer Zygmunt Sikora, was recorded many years later for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. On the day of the pogrom, Sikora observed the scenes taking place on the banks of the Silnica River from the balcony of his home, while hiding one of his workers, a Jew. “I knew that man from the police,” says Sikora. “Was he a police commissioner? His name was Sędek, he was the director of some investigation department. I even saw him going [to Planty].”42
Pasowski’s Storyline
For now we’re avoiding as much as possible the labyrinth of conspiracy theories. We are leaving behind the pathetic motif of “a conspiracy by reactionary forces” presented by prosecutor Golczewski as established fact at the July trial. Nor will we speak of the men supposedly dressed as “Anders’s Army men”—opponents of the “democratic” (read, Communist) regime—who allegedly were placed at the scene by the authorities. However, we cannot leave without commenting on the theme of framing Antoni Pasowski, the administrator of the building at 6 Podwalna Street, for plotting to provoke a pogrom.
In his statement dated July 5, 1946, Pasowski recounts Henio’s triumphal evening return. Henio was welcomed by all of Podwalna Street, and he—the building custodian—was unable to force the neighbors to leave the boy’s flat. He retells Henio’s story about a man and a woman, who lure the youngster into an “empty building,” where there was only “an older woman, shabby and dirty” and a “small boy, dirty and shabby, [who] had curly black hair, who brought a chair to the basement so that [Henio] could get outside and run away.”43
In a subsequent statement, Pasowski says more about his conversation with Henio. He admits that in order to determine the identity of the “snatchers,” he asked the boy questions, but he attributes the key question to Walenty: Were they Gypsies, Polaks, or Yids?44 Pasowski knows that he has been designated a scapegoat, so he does what he can to deflect suspicion from himself.
If we are to rely on the sources, then the official version—which casts Pasowski in the role of the initiator of the plot—appears as early as the day of the pogrom or perhaps the following day, in a telegram delivered by phone sent by Jan Mucha of the Kielce Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) to the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) at 10:15 p.m. and personally received by Julia Brystigerowa. Pasowski supposedly took Henio to his place, gave him candy, held him for three days, and taught him fairy tales about Jews.
Next, Pasowski’s role will be further enhanced, especially in Walenty Błaszczyk’s statement dated July 7, where reference will be made to mysterious “unknown persons in the flat”: “After greeting my son, my building’s custodian, Antoni Pasowski, sent away all the children and older people, with the exception of five people I didn’t know, who stayed in the apartment. Then Pasowski asked where my son had been.”45 And the tale continues with a man who gave Henio a package on the Herb-ski Bridge, which the boy delivered to the place indicated. He received money for this but then was imprisoned in a “dark little basement” until “a small dark boy” helped him escape through a window with the help of a stool or chair.
We do not know whether Błaszczyk himself initially accused Pasowski of crafting a plot aimed at triggering a pogrom, or if his questioners suggested this to him. Regardless, although there is no evidence whatsoever of his alleged plotting, Antoni Pasowski appears in these interviews as the implausible mastermind of the Kielce pogrom.
The version of events presented as a plot was evidently meant to strengthen the theory that reactionary forces were guilty of instigating the pogrom. This version was mentioned, for example, in the daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita (The Republic) on July 5, 1946. There we read that Pasowski supposedly hid Henio in his apartment in collusion with reactionary forces. “As the boy stated, during these two days he was taught to say that the Jews who lived at 7 Planty Street had held him for two days in the basement with the intention of murdering him, but that, miraculously, he had managed to escape.”
Prosecutor Golczewski repeated this theory at the July trial, though he did not bother to support it with evidence or proof. Deputy Minister of Security Henryk Wachowicz referred to it once again on July 19, and then it was gradually forgotten.46 Pasowski, who was imprisoned in the Provincial Office of Public Security in Kielce for six months, was never charged with any crime. His son, who was also imprisoned by the UB for a short time and questioned not only then but also five decades later, will not add any new information to the case.47
No less strange is the version about Pasowski in which—in addition to all else—his last name is confused with that of Henio’s father. This version was spread through official channels by Colonel Włodzimierz Dembowski, the commander of the Internal Security Troops (WBW), in an “emergency report” dated July 5. There he wrote that “the boy was detained on July 1, 1946 by one Błaszczyk Walenty [sic], who—having bribed him with sweets during the period dated July 1–4, 1946—taught him what he should do on July 4, 1946. This boy, following the instructions given to him by Błaszczyk, went to the Jewish building on July 4, 1946, and then ran out of the house screaming, ‘The Jews want to murder me’ and ran home. Next, he went to the police with his father, and the entire MO was put on alert based on his statement. . . . Błaszczyk Walenty was not apprehended.”48
Ventriloquism
Following this interruption, let’s return to the story of the Błaszczyk family.
Henio’s stories—told by him, as well as by witnesses who first heard these stories on Podwalna Street and later on Focha Street—speak about fear of a world in which adults are devious and a full belly is unattainable.
These stories also feature shabby, disheveled, and dirty Jews, living in empty, out-of-the-way buildings as phantom owners. Furthermore, they are dangerous: “Mr. Pasowski Antoni from Podwalna, our neighbor, told me about this, that Jews murder Polish children, that they put them in a barrel with nails pounded in all over, and that they roll this barrel until they murder the child.”49 But Pasowski wasn’t the only one in Kielce who knew this story. Henio is a ventriloquist. A society that has been taught for centuries to fear Jews speaks through his dreams.
Let’s imagine a scene on Podwalna Street on the evening of July 3, when Henio returns. People from the entire neighborhood are crowded into the apartment and the courtyard. His parents, with tears in their eyes, ask him where he’s been. The child—neglected and craving attention—suddenly finds himself in the spotlight. Can he disappoint the adults? If he tells the truth, the neighbors will disperse and his father will give him a severe beating right there and then. Maybe he should tell an untruth after all? The one that everyone is waiting for and the one that has been told to them since they were children. Henio says that he was kidnapped by Jews—and snap!—he becomes the hero of the courtyard. This is the point of no return: the child has told a fairy tale that will channel the emotions of the adults, since the adults have been living in this fairy tale for a long time.
Fantasy makes life in an unbearable world easier, but it comes at the price of losing touch with reality. A man steeped in fantasy doesn’t have pangs of conscience when he robs or hurts someone because he says that he doesn’t “take from the poor.” He calls a shelter for shattered remnants a “boardinghouse,” and the chairman of the Jewish Committee a “rabbi”50 because he can’t imagine that people gather around differences that don’t have to do with religion or that someone deserves sympathy more than he himself. The image of Ubeks, or security service operatives living on Planty Street,51 NKVD agents,52 and surreptitiously placed PPR members from the Ludwików steelworks, who initiated the pogrom—all associated in his mind with Judeo-Communism—effectively protects him from shame and from disturbing his positive self-perception.
In addition to the Jews, the other important motif in Henio’s stories is hunger. Here is his description of the morning he ran away from home: “After saying prayers before breakfast, Mommy warmed up some kasha from the previous day and, having poured milk over it, told me to eat it. . . . After eating the kasha, I went out into the courtyard. . . . I went back inside to see if breakfast was being made.”53 Even in the fantastical parts of his narration he talks about hunger: he complains that the Jews starved him. The fact that the child is hungry is also acknowledged by the made-up gentleman in Henio’s story, the one who suggests Henio deliver the package. Henio “started to cry, and in response this guy said, ‘Let’s go, you’ll get something to eat.’”54
Henio lives in an imaginary world, and since he is hungry, he literally feeds on fantasy. When he reaches Pielaki, he deceives Maria Bartosińska, telling her that he came with his older brother Tadeusz. Upon his return to Kielce, he’ll tell a lie, saying that Jews kidnapped him. After the pogrom, he will state that Antoni Pasowski forced him to lie. After 1989 he will accuse security operatives of the same. And during the second Kielce investigation he will shift the blame to his father. Like Antoni Pasowski, he himself will be deemed an agent who had a long career in the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR).55 The legend about his father as an Ubek who used the pseudonym Przelot (fly-by, or flight) will be taken up by reputable historians, writers, and filmmakers.
Little Henio lied because of hunger and fear. However, the adult Henryk Błaszczyk, however—a canary enthusiast, a watchman at the school on 16 Leśna Street that borders the courtyard of 7 Planty Street, and the guardian of the scenes of the crime until the end of his life—is still the same child. The versions of his story are in constant motion because the truth, like the adult Henio himself, is too poorly defined and does not support him. This is how people from the subordinate classes react to a dominant interlocutor; they tell him what he wants to hear.56
Thus, Henryk Błaszczyk will first produce a version of the pogrom for his family and neighbors, then for the UB and the prosecutor’s office, then for the American journalist Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, then for Father Jan Śledzianowski, Jerzy Daniel, Artur Sandauer, Krzysztof Kąkolewski, and Andrzej Miłosz, and finally for the prosecutors of the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) during the second Kielce investigation.57 He will begin each of these versions with the formulation, “Now I’ll tell you, Sir, something I’ve never told anyone else.”
Notes
1. Sources for Janek’s story are: SL 2.11; SL 2.12; SL 2.2.12; and SL 1.5.
2. Based on transcripts of raw and unused footage for Marcel Łoziński’s documentary Świadkowie (Video-Nova, 1988).
3. SL 3.7.
4. SL 5.1.
5. See AŻIH, uncatalogued document from Kielce entitled “Sprawozdanie stenograficzne z procesu kieleckiego [pierwszy dzień procesu],” dated 1946; henceforth referred to as “AŻIH, ‘Sprawozdanie stenograficzne.’”
6. AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2, k. 345. Biskupska’s requests were partially effective; after all, her prison sentence was cut in half. Biskupska was released from a prison in Grudziądz on July 6, 1951. See AIPN BU_0_1_1453_4, t. 2, k. 363.
7. AIPN Ki_41_2043, k. 69–70.
8. SL 5.13A.
9. SL 5.9A.
10. AIPN Ki_54_4745, cz. 1, k. 260–262. It is unclear whether this refers to Pustuła.
11. SL 4.11A.
12. SL 1.8.
13. Łoziński (raw footage).
14. SL 3.26.
15. AG-PK, t. 11, 235–37.
16. SL 5.24E.
17. Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Znak i ISP PAN, 2012), 638; English-language edition Entangled in Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944–1947, trans. Maya Latynski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022).
18. Jan Śledzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Jedność, 1998), 13.
19. SL1.14. See also Śledzianowski, Pytania 13, 26.
20. SL 2.2.3A.
21. Łoziński (raw footage).
22. Jan Pazdur, Dzieje Kielc, 1864–1939 (Wrocław-Gdańsk: Ossolineum, 1971), 119–20.
23. Bronisław Bełczewski, Pierwsze dni (Warsaw: Wydawn. Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1964), 306.
24. Krzysztof Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi (Kielce: Małopolska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1993), 195.
25. AIPN MBP 3378, kk. 44–46.
26. See Jan and Maria Bartosiński’s testimonies, AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 1, k. 68–69 and AIPN Ki_0_13_2870, k. 11–14.
27. Jerzy Sławomir Mac, “Kto to zrobił,” Kontrasty, no. 11 (1986): 6.
28. AG-PK, t. 3, k. 81. See also AIPN Ki_0031 and all of Walenty Błaszczyk’s and Henio’s interrogations.
29. SL 2.2.5C, in particular k. 16. See also SL 2.4.7.
30. Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi, 85.
31. Custodians were usually people who, lacking a deed, could not appropriate “Jewish property” and thus instead served as custodians of these properties. The Communist state did not interfere with their serving in this role under the condition that they agreed to serve formally as dozorcy, or building caretakers, which included such responsibilities as keeping the building clean, collecting rent, and often informing on residents to the authorities.
32. Paraphrase of Siegfried Kracauer, based on the epigraph in Stefan Jonsson, Crowds and Democracy: The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
33. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage, 1989), 140.
34. SL 2.2.10B.
35. Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi, 196.
36. See SL 2.2.7A.
37. See SL 2.2.7A–B.
38. The original reads: “Szala z jego losem gwałtownie opada ku ziemi.” Zbigniew Herbert, “Nike która się waha,” in Wiersze zebrane, ed. R. Krynicki (Kraków: Wydawn. a5, 2008), 65–66. Poem available online at https://fundacjaherberta.com/biblioteka-herberta/wiersze/nike-ktora-sie-waha/.
39. A reference to the Narodowa Demokracja (ND, National Democracy) movement, founded in the nineteenth century with the stated mission of pursuing Polish independence. The movement became increasingly hostile to non-Polish minorities during the interwar period.
40. AIPN Ki_6_3960.
41. SL 3.6.
42. Zygmunt Sikora, interview by Nathan Beyrak, November 15, 1998, 1998.A.0300.68, RG-50.488*0068, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn510389). See also Jerzy Morawski and Piotr Pytlakowski, “Mroczne stany,” Przegląd Tygodniowy 228, no. 32 (1986); and SL 3.5B, in particular k. 15.
43. SL 2.2.5A.
44. SL 2.2.5C.
45. SL 2.2.2.
46. See Dziennik Polski, July 19, 1946.
47. SL 2.2.6, and AIPN Ki_53_4278.
48. AG-PK, t. 12 and SL 1.27.
49. SL 2.2.3A.
50. See Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Polska zgwałcona (date and publisher unknown), 202–3. Mikołajczyk’s description is based on erroneous information and misrepresentations: “In Kielce, Major Sobczyński . . . ordered the workers from the iron foundry to come at the designated time for a meeting, which was supposed to take place on the town square. . . . The communists, however, forgot to remove the telephone from the boardinghouse. Having information that the crowd was being provoked to attack the building, some rabbi called the headquarters of the army asking for help. Soon a unit of the army arrived under the command of a Russki colonel.”
51. See, for example, the testimony of witness Stefanowski, given during the second Kielce investigation, about two UB officers living at the building on Planty Street (AIPN Ki_53_4744, k. 274). No one who lived on Planty Street confirms his testimony.
52. See Mikołajczyk, Polska zgwałcona, 203. It is clear that Prime Minister Mikołajczyk was poorly informed since he asserts that Majors Sobczyński and Gwiazdowicz “were never tried in court” (Polska zgwałcona, 204). In fact, both were tried in the fall of 1946 and acquitted.
53. SL 2.2.3C.
54. Jan Dygnarowicz cites Henio’s story. See SL 2.2.6A.
55. Krzysztof Kąkolewski, Myśl Polska, June 30, 1996. Cited according to AIPN Ki_53_4754, k. 223. Others will confuse him with his nephew from the Ludwików steelworks or with employees of the security service who have the same last name.
56. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
57. Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, Between Fear and Hope (New York: Arco, 1947), 94; Śledzianowski, Pytania, 23; Jerzy Daniel, Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu: Rzecz o kieleckim pogromie 4 lipca 1946 (Kielce: Scriptum, 1996), 22–26; Artur Sandauer, O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1982), 64; Krzysztof Kąkolewski, Umarły cmentarz: Wstęp do studiów nad wyjaśnieniem przyczyn i przebiegu morderstwa na Żydach w Kielcach dnia 4 lipca 1946 roku (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo von Borowiecky, 1996), 95–105; “‘Ja byłem dziecko niewinne’: Wywiad z Henrykiem Błaszczykiem,” Gazeta Wyborcza, July 4, 1997. See also Andrzej Miłosz’s deposition, dated December 3, 2001, in Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamię ci Narodowej, 2006), 1: 432–34. Finally, see the documentary film by Andrzej Miłosz and Piotr Weychert, Henio (1999), available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXNwcR-GoBo&feature=youtu.be; SL 2.2.3C, dated November 19, 1993; and the interrogation dated August 25, 1994 in Wokół 1, 286.