CHAPTER 15

The Boogeyman

The Story We Tell Ourselves

Why have I decided to refer to this book as “a social portrait”? Because the primary source materials are insufficient to establish the course of events beyond a doubt. But when we delve into the social background—that is, into the biographies of those who participated in the events—and if we look not just at individual biographies but at these biographies arranged in a series,1 it is easier to reach a conclusion as to what was plausible and what was not, thereby excluding certain scenarios. Given the abundance of conspiracy theories within the historiography of the Kielce pogrom, this seemingly unremarkable process—the process of eliminating nonsense—is no small achievement.

The eminent German historian Fritz Stern writes that the cause of great catastrophes is the combination of several independent processes that, when they collide, create mutual displacement and reinforcement. In physics such a process is called a “chaotic reaction,” and it occurs in complex systems. One example of such a system is the weather. Weather reports inevitably let us down because even small changes in the mixture of vapors and liquid can lead to unpredictable consequences.

The Kielce pogrom can be described as the chemical reaction of a mixture that consisted of the antisemitic police (MO), a demoralized army (WP), and a security service (UB) that lacked legitimacy. These institutions, adrift at the time, not only did not take control of the outbreak of an anti-Jewish panic, but even added fuel to the fire. To quote Władysław Dzikowski, the source of this panic was not, however, the Jews themselves but rather “how we saw them.” It was the story that Henio Błaszczyk, who became the membrane of society, told himself. But who had told this story to society in the first place?

The Kielce pogrom started because of a rumor that children had been kidnapped by Jews “for transfusions.” Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, authors of the book Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip, write that rumor can be considered a type of social witchcraft. At its source rests the guilt felt by a community that gossips about someone, attributing to him their own transgressions. Why can’t a group see that it is accusing someone of its own sins? Because it is a hostage to a “moral imagination” reflected in social relations and local power structures.2 The everyday becomes normative, and normativity blinds us to the everyday.

Every group has its own form of the boogeyman, the figure that scares children. It has manifested itself over the centuries as a hobgoblin, a monster under the bed, the Big Bad Wolf, “black monster-man,” “the Indian,” “the Gypsy,” or “the Jew.” Frightened children grow up, but the fairytales that shape them don’t grow and change along with them. It’s still the same, scary story that one day may explode.

In Krystyna Kersten’s view the social dynamite that exploded in Kielce was made up of many flammable substances. It was a mixture of “a prewar and wartime past, a past that overlapped with the present, giving currency to old anti-Jewish phobias and resentments. Everything was mixed together: the aggressive prewar antisemitism of the national camp, stereotypes that mushroomed on the grounds of economic competition, the motif of ‘Judeo-Communism’ [żydokomuna], and certain themes of the Christian tradition. . . . The detonator of the provocation—assuming that the pogrom was provoked—could work because there existed a readily available explosive, a social dynamite.”3

Provocation

Provocation was the theme used most often to explain the Kielce pogrom, regardless of whether the driving force of the supposed provocation was identified as the NKVD, the underground, or—as in Bishop Kaczmarek’s report—Zionists.

Immediately after the pogrom, “provocation” appears in many internal Freedom and Independence (WiN) documents, sometimes, however, arousing the disbelief of officers reading the field reports. “Where did you get this description of the Kielce incidents from? To what degree can they be believed?” someone from the leadership asks in the “Comments on the Report,” dated September 3, 1946.4 These doubts, however, will quickly dissipate. A report entitled “The Policies of the PPR [Polish Workers’ Party] toward Nationalities,” based on reports from the Intelligence Brigades5 regarding Bronia Mendoń who was, allegedly murdered by Jews in Rzeszów, formulates a theory concerning the causes of the pogrom in a tone of absolute certainty: “At present we possess precise information that the ‘pogrom’ in Kielce was also the work of Judeo-Communism itself.”6

Later, the thesis of provocation appears regularly in WiN reports and position papers. In one of them, we read that “the Soviets, wanting to mobilize the Jews against the Poles even more, organized an entire series of provocative anti-Jewish operations (Rzeszów, Kraków, Łódź, Silesia). As the documents show, all the operations mentioned were conducted by the NKVD and the UB.”7

News coming in from around the world enables WiN officers to decode this provocation mechanism in its own way: “The USA knows that there was a PPR provocation in Kielce, and recent events in Palestine and Jewish attacks also helped us.”8 The idea that communists use the mechanism of provocation returns in the context of reports on lynching in the American South. The author does not deny the fact that the crowd murdered Black people; however, he is convinced that the lynching was provoked by communists: “While in Poland communists are organizing pogroms of Jews . . . in America they offer pogroms of Negroes.”9 The goal of this strategy is explained in the screed “Communist Tactics in Capitalist Countries”: “Jews, who take advantage of the so-called Jewish pogroms organized by the Comintern, not only find a pretext for going abroad, but when they encounter there great compassion and pity from a naïve Western society that doesn’t know the true state of affairs, they use this very skillfully to assimilate into a new environment.”10

Among the articles published in the underground press on the theme of provocation, the most aggressive is the news item “Paid Russian Lackeys of the PPR.” We saw this article in connection with the story of the custodian Stanisław Niewiarski, who was assigned the role of assisting the Jews in murdering Polish children for “transfusion” (chapter 8). Written in a simple, primitive language, it repeats the legend of Henio as a “lad” who “miraculously broke free from Satanic-communist Jewish hands.”11

This is in contrast to the neutral style of the anonymously written “Kielce Incidents.” Suspicion toward the genesis of the violence is indicated minimally here by quotation marks around the phrase “Jewish pogrom.” In response to the question “Who could have had a reason to inspire Błaszczyk and set into motion rumors that incited the crowd?” the author answers that—in the eyes of foreign countries—it is the Communist regime that will decidedly benefit. He predicts that the government will harshly settle accounts with antisemites, whom they will certainly search for in the nationalist and anti-Communist underground, in accordance with their own political interests. This is also supported by the fiasco and embarrassment caused by the police and troops on Planty Street: “Such horrendous and utter incompetence cannot be explained in any other way than by deliberate action.”12 The presumption, it is clear, is that the Communist government, represented by the UB, provoked the violence.

In the WiN periodical Orzeł Biały (White Eagle) dated August 1946, there is mention of another provocation: the kidnapping of children by the UB and the NKVD, who supposedly took them to German territories as a means of urging desperate parents to start a pogrom against the Jews.13

In addition, several hundred copies of a flyer titled “Bandit Radkiewicz [Minister of Public Security] Prepared the Kielce Provocation,” were found when the commander of the inspectorate of the WiN was arrested.14 The flyer is based on the assumption that the authorities are mighty and powerful, and therefore, if they didn’t intervene in the pogrom they must have organized it themselves. “The authorities not only tolerated the pogrom exploits of the population and police but clearly participated in the pogrom since they had at their disposal various and numerous ‘security’ formations such as the MO, UB, KBW, and school of the UB and so could easily have shut down the excesses of the population against the Jews or nipped them in the bud.”15 Similar suggestions were put forward in the first issue of the WiN publication White Eagle in reference to the Kraków pogrom.16

Perhaps the only text in which the word “provocation” is not mentioned is the article “Incidents in Kielce—A Kielce Tragedy,” published in another WiN publication, Polska Walcząca (Fighting Poland). But ironically, the point of view presented in this article would satisfy theorists of a radically leftist moral economy: “The incidents were not an antisemitic pogrom and did not have an antisemitic character. Antisemitism was not at the source of the hatred demonstrated toward the victims by the crowd; it was not hatred felt toward people because of the revolutionary impulse of a crowd against the current regime of terror and class privilege.”17

As far as contemporary politicians were concerned, the American ambassador in Warsaw, Arthur Bliss Lane, was a proponent of the provocation hypothesis. He based his opinion on Bishop Kaczmarek’s report.18

Even Deputy Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, formerly prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, devoted a lot of time to the idea of a provocation, suggesting that it was the head of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), Sobczyński, who “ordered the workers from the foundry to arrive at a designated time for a meeting . . . on the town square.”19 He probably relied on information whose traces can be found in a report held in an archival collection on “the PSL [Polish Peasant Party] in exile.” This report discusses “Major Sobczyński of the UB,” who “issued weapons to the Jewish building, counting on the building to defend itself while the crowds gathered, and on the assumption that the army would be let loose on this gathered crowd. In the meantime, when the police, having tried since morning to gather a crowd, approached the building, shots were fired from the Jewish building. Three thousand workers from the Ludwików steelworks were summoned and gathered on the square under the pretext that Jews were murdering their children. In the meantime, however, a call was placed from the Jewish building requesting troops (they forgot to disconnect the phone). The army arrived at the square even before the crowd was gathered and started to take over the building. One officer and two soldiers were killed. The army murdered all the residents of the building; it started to go mad along with the crowd. It was no longer possible to calm things down and the excesses went on all day.”20

Although the majority of researchers abandoned the provocation hypothesis after the UB archives were opened in the 1990s,21 some remained faithful to it. During the second Kielce investigation, even some politicians who were known for their attachment to conspiracy theories admitted that they simply had not conducted research on this topic.22

Jewish “Domination”

The goal of this book has been to show that a provocation was not at all necessary. By the second year after the war, Kielce institutions had become strongholds of a homegrown communism, and its base was a newly rising middle class that had taken ownership of Jewish property after the Holocaust. As early as February 1945, a government delegate in occupied Poland informed the Polish government in exile that elites from across the country were starting to increasingly support a postwar communist government.23 This is visible in the example of the Kielce MO, which consisted of prewar officers who had settled in nicely and felt right at home. The enmity toward Jews that was common within this milieu could be described—to use Charles Tilly’s categorization—as a social resource that can easily be activated.24 This would be the first of four ingredients in the explosive mixture that erupted on Planty Street.

The second ingredient was the fact that neither the local Church, nor even the moderate WiN underground, excluded the possibility that Jews really could have had a hand in kidnapping Polish children.

The third was the fact that the custodians who had taken over the kamienice were afraid that Jewish owners might submit claims for the return of their property.

But the most important factor predisposing the crowd in Kielce to violence was something commonly called in Polish panoszenie się Żydów, or Jewish domination.

What does this expression—which conceals the social dynamite—refer to? Though he does not use the phrase, the observations of one witness testifying in the second Kielce investigation in the nineties capture the essence perfectly: “In the months of April–May 1945 as I was returning home from work at the Kielce office of the ZWM [Union of Youth Struggle], I walked along Planty Street where the Jews lived. These Jews were behaving very arrogantly, even provocatively; they blocked the intersection and the sidewalk to such a degree that, I remember, I once had to shove the Jews blocking the crosswalk with force, just so that I could get to Starowarszawskie Przedmieście Street where my parents lived.”25

The term panoszyć can be rendered in English as “to dominate,” “to be arrogant,” “to act above one’s station,” “to put on airs,” “to lord it over,” or “to throw one’s weight around.” It is on the tip of the tongue of one interviewee from Klimontów, who recalls the murder of Jews there in April 1944.

[Interviewee:] Later I remember this scene. After they already expelled those Jews, after they already took them from here, well, and the Germans had already left, the Germans had left. Only Poles remained. The front moved farther . . . and those Jews come from somewhere, several families, even from Sandomierska Street, they came from somewhere. Well, and, and they started to fight—yes!!—[They said] that it’s theirs! That ‘we’re gonna show what, what we’re capable of,’ yeah. I remember this one Jewish woman was pregnant and they killed her too on the roof. On the roof, there, at someone’s place. . . . Yeah, it wasn’t necessary to do it so much like that, they might have survived. There were maybe four or five families. And so. They killed them . . . Poles. Poles.

[Interviewer:] But after the war?

[Interviewee:] After the war. Because those others really started . . . that it’s all theirs, that! That they will now show ’em! They started to threaten. In any case, the devil knows what it was like. Maybe they harbored some kind of grudge against them there? In any case, several families remained, they had been hidden somewhere, but they came boldly, as soon as the Germans left, and they perished. Perished.

FIGURE 50. Mourners grieve at the funeral of the victims of the pogrom. Pictured fourth from the right is Chana (Hanka) Alpert. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Leah Lahav.

Forty years after the pogrom, a Kielce teacher will call things as she sees them: “Pogroms were the reaction of Poles to Jews who were lording it over us.” Earlier, the National Armed Forces (NSZ) publication Szczerbiec used this same term to describe the “hajdamak parasite”—in other words, Ukrainians from the village of Wierzchowiny who were murdered by the NSZ.26

Someone who is supposed to be invisible “acts above his station” when he makes himself known because he is not entitled to full rights. Mariusz Bechta states this expressis verbis when he writes about the causes of the pogrom in Parczew: “Poles perceived the pride and arrogance of armed Jews as a problem they couldn’t handle. . . . They had the structure of a totalitarian state against them, a structure that stood on the side of a handful of its followers who came from national minorities. . . . Hence, what remained for the Polish residents of Parczew was to wait for the armed underground to put the Jews, who were putting on airs, in their place.”27 Here, Bechta, an employee in the public education office of the Institute of National Remembrance, boldly continues the thought expressed a hundred years earlier by Teodor Jeske-Choiński: “Only when the Jew finally begins to understand that if he lives in someone else’s house he should learn to be a tolerable guest, [and that] he does not have the right to try to usurp the host’s authority or to harm their interests, then antisemitism will cease on its own as an unnecessary reflex.”28

Scholars of pogroms identify upward mobility as one of the causes for attacking minorities who are trying to get beyond the ghetto. This upward mobility is expressed in the drive to become educated, use public spaces, buy real estate in the best neighborhoods, and enter into mixed marriages.29

The increase in the visibility of people of color in city centers, and the social perception of this as “annoying,” has been viewed as the cause of some American pogroms and lynchings. Roberta Senechal de la Roche writes of the 1908 race riots in Springfield, Illinois, as follows: “The violence of Springfield may also be understood partly as a reaction to a special form of deviant behavior—black progress—a visible violation of a previously inferior place in the social order.” Some Black residents of Springfield broke free from their subordinate status, attaining a small measure of material success. Many purchased homes or started businesses. In Senechal’s view, the fact that these people were the first target of the rioters’ attacks supports the view that such progress was seen as an unacceptable deviation.30

It wasn’t only white residents of the lower classes who felt threatened by the social mobility of blacks. The middle class—inclined to seeing Black people invariably in the cotton fields or in servants’ livery—had similar feelings. In Poland the popular talisman called “little Jew with a coin” can be seen as an expression of a similar nostalgic feeling. Here, the Jew is presented as a usurer or merchant dressed in traditional attire.31 While not as drastic as the numerus clausus in college admissions in prewar Poland, for example, the talisman points to the place of this minority group within a society, indicating who the members of this group can and should be.

This attitude corresponds to Bishop Kaczmarek’s views regarding the activities that Jews should engage in after the war: “Jews are gifted merchants, gifted doctors, gifted lawyers—Poland is destroyed, it needs manpower—why don’t Jews engage in those things that they are talented in, why do they engage in politics? Can you imagine, sir, what it looks like when some priest comes to a government ministry and a Jewish woman is sitting there, not even a Polish Jew, but a Jew from God-knows-where, and behaves haughtily, insolently, toward our clergy? What impression does that make?”32

Rebuking Jews for failing to engage in the activities they “should” be engaging in was merely a distraction from Poles’ opportunism and the growing acceptance of the “people’s authority.” A dozen Jews working in positions in Kielce from 1945 to 1946 were the focus of all the hatred that in this way bypassed the multitude of Polish policemen, soldiers, and security service operatives; Wiślicz’s, Sobczyński’s, and Olszański’s “yes men”; those who were engineering and stabilizing the people’s authority; as well as regular people who “simply wanted to live.” As the analysis of the careers of these functionaries shows, they were not some aliens from a far-off galaxy; rather, they were prewar lawyers, policemen, bureaucrats, teachers, shop assistants, railwaymen, officers or privates, workers, and sons of peasants. Against this backdrop Jewish Communists constituted “an oppressive minority.” There is not a single such person in Provincial Governor Wiślicz’s circle or around Tadeusz MajŁokietek, or around Olczyk-Garbaty, not to mention Tadeusz Sońta-Ośka’s unit from the Peasants’ Battalions (BCh). After all, a cadre from these units was selected to fill the posts of the Citizens’ Militia (MO), government offices, and the security service in the Kielce region. These were the people who divvied up coal and bacon, allocated dwellings, and decided who would go to jail. Warsaw made decisions about the most important matters, but as we can see from correspondence between Commander Kuźnicki and Rossner, it was possible to ignore Warsaw’s orders even for a year.

It was much easier to blame communism on those disturbing “Others”—the addressees of a “Pole’s” letter to Adolf Berman and Rabbi Dawid Kahane—than to condemn the local clique and make note of one general’s gentry background; the political about-face of numerous figures including provincial governors, state ministers, generals, prewar Polish state police inspectors, lawyers, and each and every one of the judges presiding over the Kielce trial. Easier, too, than noticing the undeniable Polishness of the head of the Kielce Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), Sobczyński, and the policemen Kuźnicki, Olszański, and Latosiński. Pointing out Jews’ supposed otherness also helped put to rest pangs of conscience caused by an unprecedentedly bloody fratricidal war, in which new victims were killed on both sides every day.

As on Planty Street, where parents who had neglected their children turned out to be the most active, here too the image of the Other served as a smoke screen, concealing aspects of the group that the group did not want to admit about itself.

The Spark and the Tinder

The mechanism of pogrom control over “deviants,” which distracts the group from its own sins, was activated repeatedly both before and after the pogrom in Kielce. Scholars call the after-effects of the Kielce pogrom a “ripple effect,” indicating that the rumor of violence that has already been perpetrated triggers a stronger effect than the rumor which first initiated the violence.

The rumor appeared almost immediately in Ostrowiec, Częstochowa, Otwock and Ostrów Mazowiecki, Kalisz, Łódź, and Rzeszów. In Sandomierz and Ostrowiec it became the reason for ordering the evacuation of Jewish residents from cities.

Two dangerous events also took place in Wrocław some two weeks after the pogrom. The first was on the night of July 11–12, 1946, at the summer camp of the State Rail Car factory on Grabiszyńska Street in Wrocław, when “a group that consisted of around twenty people in army uniforms raised the cry: ‘Long live the AK, away with the Jews!’ and scattered a number of handwritten flyers with the following content: ‘The Jews living in Poland are the reactionary element. We want Polish unity.’”33

The second event occurred on July 15, 1946, at 11:00 p.m., when “the WUBP was notified by telephone that at no. 11 Krasowskiego Street . . . which belongs to the center for the productivization of Jewish youth, a group of women and men were demanding that the doors be open under the pretext that a child has disappeared. . . . Immediately, two cars of WUBP functionaries were sent, and after their arrival, the group dispersed. The functionaries conducted a search of the entire building. The detained individual, Zurak Włodzimierz, who provoked passersby with the words ‘Jews are murdering Polish women,’ was handed over to the disposition of the investigation department.”34

In the evening of August 19, 1946, in Lublin, two officers in Polish Army uniforms and holding pistols shouted, “Hooray for the Jews!” while beating several of them. The MO intervened. The attackers turned out to be two Internal Security Corps (KBW) officers. “The detainees declared that they had to do what was done in Kielce.”35 That same month a rumor about the ritual murder of a child whose body was found in Legnica led to riots that were dispersed by the MO. This rumor also circulated in Strzegom.36

In September, and on October 17, 1946, an analogous rumor surfaced in Tarnów; another surfaced on October 18 in Lublin; then one on October 19 in Kraków; and one on October 24 in Mielec. On December 7 in Bielawa, a Pole was arrested; he had been spreading rumors that his child had been kidnapped by Jews. A rumor was noted on December 26, 1946, in Szczecin. In May 1947 during the Easter holidays, “an antisemitic disturbance took place against the background of an alleged ritual murder in Bytom.”37

One of the last instances in which the blood libel caused anxiety on a broader scale took place in Włoszczowa three years later. In order no. 15, dated March 11, 1948, Julia Brystigerowa warned that in connection with the forthcoming Easter holiday, “hostile elements are trying to wreak havoc within Polish society by promoting a rumor about children kidnapped by Jews and about ‘ritual murder.’”38 Nonetheless, as late as 1956, when a seven-month-old child who had been left at the health center in Legnica died, “local society talked about this as supposedly having been carried out by Jews, because their holiday, that is judgment day [Yom Kippur], fell on that day.”39

All these events, which according to Paul R. Brass’s pogrom theory are “pogrom sparks,” should not, however, draw attention away from the true cause of the explosion, namely the pogrom tinder.40 Contrary to what authors of books with the word “fear” in the title write—I am referring here, above all, to Marcin Zaremba’s Entangled in Fear41—it is not at all the spark, but rather the tinder that determines the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence.42 And it is precisely this tinder that constitutes the “social dynamite” about which Krystyna Kersten wrote.43 This tinder consists of four ingredients: traditional antisemitism, with blood libel at its core; a supply of easy-to-mobilize social experiences, i.e., the widespread wartime murder of Jews; as well as two sources of fear, namely the fear that owners of “post-Jewish” kamienice would return and the outrage associated with “Jews acting above their station.”

In order not to err in evaluating these last two factors, we have to look closely at how fear functions as a justification for anti-Jewish violence. Scholars of genocide underscore that the elites who initiate the genocide almost always feel weak, almost on the verge of annihilation. Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones remind us that “even in the case of the Nazi Holocaust—the case that is often cited as exhibiting the ‘essential defenselessness’ of victims in the starkest terms” and the widest possible power gap between killers and their victims—Nazi leaders apparently fervently believed that Jews constituted an all-powerful and all-pervading threat.”44 Paranoia is an indispensable part of genocide, and that is why fear should be approached critically.

In recent decades explanations for collective violence have more and more often moved away from social-strain theory, which seeks to identify the causes of attacks on minorities in objective difficulties or threats that are felt by the majority. It has been abandoned in exchange for a more dynamic conceptualization in which the cause of violence is indicated by a subjective perception of these threats. This reconceptualization was connected with a new reading of the traditional definition of fear in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in which he defined fear as “a painful or troubled feeling caused by the impression of an imminent evil that causes destruction or pain.”45

After the affective turn in the humanities, scholars read the meaning of the verb “to cause” in Aristotle’s definition in a new way. They have come to the conclusion that fear does not work on the basis of an automatic stimulus-response but is filtered by a historically changing combination of overlearned cognitive habits that interpret signals of threat according to a system of expectations inculcated by the culture.46 Since the same thing can sometimes be interpreted as threatening, and at other times as neutral or attractive, the focus has turned away from the threats themselves to how they are perceived.

While in a democratic society the aspirations of minorities and their upward mobility should—at least theoretically—be a reason for celebration, in a traditional society they will be seen as a breach of the social contract. This was the situation in postwar Poland, when Jews received equal rights and for the first time were allowed to hold prominent managerial positions.

In light of these facts, conceptualizing the pogrom spark within the category of fear can be misleading because it underestimates the perverse mechanism of the pogrom. A rumor of an attack on all that a group held sacred—such as “children” (in Kielce), “a girl” (in Częstochowa in 1946), or “a Polish officer” (in Kielce during the pogrom on November 11, 1918, and during the attack on Planty in 1946)—was not, paradoxically, the cause of violence; rather, the rumor was the result of accumulated aggression, providing a convenient pretext for discharging it. Rumors became the alibi for an inevitable, fast-approaching finale. This is the basis for the conclusion that the key role was played not by the spark, but rather by the “tinder,” the accumulation of a four-part residue of resentment that one day, as the result of a coincidence, exploded.

In the spirit of inconvenient history, on which this book is founded, instead of a spark we should speak perhaps of the detonator located in the figure of the enemy. Father Walczak, the author of a 1949 homily analyzed by Marcin Zaremba, had no problem pointing him out: “Jews are ruling the country, they are throwing religion out of schools. Jews crucified Christ, and today Jews are forbidding us to teach religion. Let us be prepared for the greatest torment.”47

Fear is not only reactive but also proactive, that is, it increases the initiative of the subject, and as such, it can be a powerful weapon. As the medievalist Anthony Bale writes, texts and images that we describe as antisemitic are equipped with their own rhetoric and aesthetic of violence, independent of actual circumstances. Though Jews were expelled from England at the end of the thirteenth century, such texts continued to deeply affect readers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, who were convinced that the supposed Jewish threat continued. These texts allowed their readers to fantasize about suffering and, as befit Christians, prepare for martyrdom. After all, according to the Second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy, “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (Timothy 3:12).

Contrary to appearances, the rhetoric and aesthetics of fear are not always connected with the experience of helplessness and decline. On the contrary, they often reverse the dynamic of domination, allowing the alleged victim to take control of the eventual aggressor. Identifying with the martyr, on the basis of vengeful fantasies, was one of the most effective modes of achieving subjectivity in medieval culture. The popularity of this mechanism in recent Polish history can be explained in the same way.48

Michał Chęciński and His Archive

Dr. Michał Chęciński played an important role in the history of research on the pogrom.49 Chęciński was born in 1924 in Łódź. Despite being in the Łódź ghetto and from there being transported to a subcamp of Auschwitz in Gliwice, he survived the war. After escaping from a death march, he first volunteered for the Red Army; then on August 17, 1946, he joined the Polish Army (WP). He worked in counterintelligence until 1959. Chęciński completed the officer information school of the Polish Army and served in the army for twenty years. Expelled from Poland as part of the crackdown on the “students’ march” of 1968, which was accompanied by a targeting and purging of Jews in positions of authority, he emigrated to Israel and Germany. As a Sovietologist, he collaborated with, among others, Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Harvard University in the United States. His 1982 book Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism synthesizes the main themes of his research.50 Chęciński died in Haifa in 2011.

In his book Chęciński writes about the weakness of the communist authorities as a system “in which the ruling party has no power and the official ideology has no truth.”51 This statement echoes my answer to Bishop Kaczmarek’s question about what led to the Kielce pogrom. The system did not respond because it was too weak. Its strength originated solely from external sources, and the system collapsed when there wasn’t enough of it.52

Chęciński devoted many years of research to the events of July 4, 1946, but most of the materials that he collected concern the Polish communists who thought that after establishing the system they had dreamed of, they would never again have to be Jews—that is, members of an oppressed minority. However, when—having encountered Communist antisemitism—they again became Jews, there was ample food for thought. Chęciński decided to document these reconsiderations. The result was many hours of conversation with significant figures such as Politburo member Roman Zambrowski, leaders of the postwar Jewish community such as Dawid Sfard, Grzegorz (Hersz) Smolar, longtime Soviet spy Leopold Trepper, Colonel Wilhelm Strasser, former chairman of the Central Committee, Adolf Berman, and others. These conversations are tremendously interesting for those who know how to read between the lines. Grappling with internationalist slogans, the Polish version of communism used these men for its own purposes, forcing them to abandon their Jewishness (an order to change their surnames to Polish ones was obligatory, and few resisted it). And when they were no longer needed, they were recognized in 1968, as persona non grata. This included Chęciński.

I met Michał Chęciński shortly before he died in 2011. A year later his family asked me to look through his archive and recordings. I did not find among these materials evidence of a Kielce provocation, any copies of archival documents, or any secret memos. Rather than a main story line, the pogrom appeared as a subplot in his archive.

The pogrom becomes the main storyline only in recorded conversations with the following three people: first head of the Kielce UB, Adam Kornecki (recorded on July 4 and 5, 1974, in Frankfurt am Main); secretary to Zygmunt Majewski (head of the department for functionaries of the WUBP), Edwarda (Edka) Ajzenman-Lewkowicz, with whom Chęciński met in Tel Aviv in September 1973; and Adolf Berman, with whom he spoke in March of that year.

Edwarda Ajzenman repeats a circulating theory about a conspiracy of the reactionary element; however, she does not provide any evidence for this. Of the Soviets she says, “Russian officers didn’t get involved at all. The entire time, they didn’t want to get involved, this is the order they received from Moscow, not to take part in the pogrom.” She speaks similarly about Sobczyński: “Actually, leaving everything else aside, Sobczyński was not to blame.”53 However, it is precisely from these types of evaluations that the hypothesis about a demonic Soviet advisor has been spun. He is referred to as “Diomin,” and he allegedly steered the NKVD conspiracy in Kielce.54 Searches in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and the Central Military Archive (CAW-WBH) do not confirm the existence of such a person.55 The prosecutors of the second Kielce investigation who corresponded with institutions of the Russian Federation likewise did not find such a person.56 We know his name and patronymic solely from Edka Ajzenman’s testimonies and Michał Chęciński’s speculations.

Indeed, the only person questioned during the second Kielce investigation who remembers someone named Diomin among the Soviet advisors is Edmund Kwasek; but he doesn’t know whether “Diomin” was a first or last name. “Advisor D[i]omin was around twenty-something years old, average height, slim build, a blond with short hair, didn’t speak Polish at all, only performed support functions: he typed on the typewriter, prepared meals for Shpilevoi.”57 Edka Ajzenman remembered him differently: “A tall, handsome man, blond, he spoke perfect French and German, fairly correct Polish. . . . And such a fine gentleman.”58

Edka Ajzenman recalled that this Diomin, as a Soviet advisor in Kielce, questioned Henio’s mother, who completely “vanished” from the investigation files.59 Further in the transcription of the interview, however, there is not a single detail other than a parenthetical comment by Chęciński stating that Ajzenman supposedly recognized Diomin in photographs of Soviet diplomats in Israel. Even if this indeed were the case, it would still be necessary to prove a connection between the Diomin in Poland and the one in Israel, as well as the “provocation” that he may have created. Meanwhile, the following conclusion appears in Ajzenman’s statement rather all of a sudden: “I had the impression that it was a well-organized operation. The pogrom was very well organized.”

Because Ajzenman has a rather poor grasp of historical and personal details, she might not be a particularly credible witness. For example, she says that the Kraków pogrom occurred two weeks before the pogrom in Kielce, while it actually occurred in August 1945. Contrary to her assertion, Major Konieczny was not Jewish, and Colonel Frankowski was not the head of information for the 2nd Infantry Division. As far as I am aware, there was no Major Sokorski who worked in the Kielce WUBP and who prepared the Kielce trial. Not all of the people tried in the July 1946 trial were sentenced to death; three of the twelve received prison sentences. Lieutenant Colonel Czesław Szpądrowski was not “a Russian advisor for military information,” but rather a prewar Polish lawyer who had been working as a prosecutor since 1929. Albert Grynbaum could not have been in prison for communism for “almost sixteen years,” because he was born in 1918 and by 1937 he had left for the war in Spain. And so on.

Like most people who lack knowledge, Edka Ajzenman tries to compensate with conspiracy theories. There is no reason to devote more attention to her account of events than it deserves.

The same goes for the first head of the WUBP, Adam Kornecki, who—after many years—is confused about the facts and the people involved. He claims that Walenty Błaszczyk (pseud. Przelot), decided to kidnap his own child, either on order from the underground or for fear of having to return his apartment building to Jews. This hypothesis is incorrect, since the Błaszczyks were not even registered as residents of this building (which according to other sources belonged to its caretaker, Pasowski).

Regarding the first speculation, as I was considering the premises put forth by Adam Kornecki, who connects Henio’s father with the underground, I hit upon the trace of a completely different Błaszczyk. His name was Stanisław, and he was the owner of a restaurant at 46 Sienkiewicza Street that has already been mentioned several times. This restaurant was located directly across from the police station. As a former member of the National Armed Forces (NSZ), he had more opportunities there “to infiltrate NSZ circles” than Walenty, the eternally tipsy shoemaker.

As for Kornecki’s suggestion that “the Soviet advisers and the MBP [Ministry of Public Security] tried to attribute the pogrom to the right-wing underground,”60 this is not, as Chęciński interprets it, an actual attempt by the authorities to organize a pogrom but rather their hypocrisy on the following day, when they ascribed it to the NSZ and “mercenaries of the Polish aristocracy.”

We can add one more thing used as a justification for such conspiracy theories. People who are not researchers or scholars often think about conspiracies when they encounter something that we could call “an irresistible sense of intuition.” In his book on the Rwandan genocide, Philip Gourevitch writes about this intuition as follows: “But mass violence, too, must be organised; it does not occur aimlessly. Even mobs and riots have a design, and great and sustained destruction requires great ambition.”61 Here, Gourevitch does not have in mind a conspiracy but rather an internal logic of events.

Though Chęciński was a supporter of the provocation hypothesis, he became the protagonist of the second Kielce investigation rather against his will. He relied solely on the accounts of witnesses such as Ajzenman, Kornecki, and a handful of Israeli emigrants, and he was not always capable of subjecting them to rigorous scholarly verification.

Though his conclusion about a Soviet conspiracy, which fascinated so many, is based on a more-than-fragile set of facts, it does have a clear psychological provenance. As 1946 receded further and further into the past, for many of the survivors of the pogrom it became less and less imaginable that the pogrom could have broken out spontaneously a mere two hundred meters away from an UB stronghold. “We couldn’t comprehend how this was possible, and that is why we believed that it was a provocation. But it was hard to believe that the provocation was on the part of the communists. Why? After all, they wanted the Jews to stay in Poland and take part in the reconstruction,” says Rafael Blumenfeld. “That it was organized, I have no doubt. Because such a crowd doesn’t come suddenly, it can’t be organized just like that, spontaneously. It was organized, but by whom, I can’t say. Because at one time I thought it was the NSZ, as the official sources wanted to present it. But then I saw that it wasn’t so simple.”62 Mieczysław Kwaśniewski has almost identical doubts; he first admits that the pogrom “could have been provoked at a higher level,” but then he says, “However, now I don’t know.”63

Though the theory of the mysterious Soviet advisor Diomin, whose beginnings can be traced back to the conversation with Edka Ajzenman, has no credence, it was met with great interest—above all among Poles.

Crowds of Polish intellectuals worked toward proving this over the years, spinning yarns about Jewish conspiracies.64 A prewar article by one such intellectual can be found in the WiN archive. It is written by Wincenty Rzymowski, a minister of culture in the government of the wartime Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) and a minister of foreign affairs in the early postwar provisional government. It presents a genealogy of “Judeo-Communism” (żydokomuna), a portrait of almighty Russian Jews who “learned to sip hatred in drops, like a precious, infallible poison.” Expelled from politics, they squeezed their way back into it through the “cracks of conspiracies,” instilling in Soviet ideologues “the lethal venom of the dialectic of the Talmud.” Through bribery, they peddled party platforms, bought off factions, took control of “secret archives and secret treasure houses.” Embodying contradictions, they were—within one and the same person—a capitalist and a revolutionary; a militarist and a pacifist. They armed the pensioner, as well as the worker. This future postwar minister of culture and foreign affairs concluded with horror, “Their face is a mask, and the number on the mask is their only name.”65

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Diomin fits this portrait exactly.

Demonic Diomin is the last boogeyman in our story, coming after the Jews from Planty Street and the Others who installed Communism in Kielce. He is the last of three images of the Other, an image that absorbs those characteristics of the group, which the group itself does not want to admit about themselves.

Pogrom as a Foreign Word

Based on the entry “pogrom” in a contemporary English-Polish dictionary in which there is mention of pogroms against Palestinians and Armenians but not against Jews, Jerzy Jarniewicz describes how in the contemporary Polish language the meaning of the word “pogrom”—whose original reference has been erased—is undergoing a process of deformation.66 An analogous phenomenon occurred in the language of Kielce doctors, prosecutors, investigators, priests, and ordinary people beginning on the very first day after the events in Kielce on July 4, 1946.

On July 5, 1946, Dr. Latałło of the City Hospital in Kielce sent a message to the military prosecutor’s office, stating that “in connection with the occurrence of a disturbance on July 4, 1946, in Kielce on 7 Planty Street,” around forty wounded and more than forty corpses were brought to the hospital.

A telegram delivered by phone and received by Julia Brystigerowa in the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) on the evening of July 4 partially restores the true proportion to this “disturbance” by naming the events “anti-Jewish riots.” For a while, the edits made here shape the language of MBP documents. Variations emerge: “antisemitic outbreaks”; “antisemitic incidents”; “anti-Jewish events”; “anti-Jewish disturbances”; “anti-Jewish excesses”; “demonstrations against Jews.”

But rank-and-file officers of the UB and the MO don’t give up, and they create their own terms. Here, ineptitude comes up against revisionism: “reacting to Jews”; “the incident with the Jews”; “Jewish events”; “the Jewish matter”; “Jewish riots.”

Only a few individual users of the language tried to call it by its name: “a pogrom against Jews” or “the murders of Jewish citizens.” Though others resorted to such diminutives as “the little tumult” or to augmentatives such as “battle” or “brawl with the Jews.”

But an overwhelming majority choose euphemisms: “victims of reactionary elements”; “Kielce events”; “Kielce incidents”; “Kielce occurrences”; “the Kielce matter”; and sometimes the adjectival use of “Kielce” was simply omitted: “the July 4, 1946, incidents”; “disturbances”; “unrest”; “mess”; “brawls”; “the riot.”

FIGURE 51. Survivors of the Kielce pogrom in the WUBP courtyard in Kielce after the event. Yad Vashem (item 27239).

The latest gesture of this type is the quotation marks that some historians place around the phrase “Kielce pogrom,” as if they are trying to erase Kielce itself from the history of the pogrom.67

Notes

1. On this methodology, see “Appendix: The Everyday and the Arranging in Series” in Paul Veyne, Writing History. Essays in Methodology, trans. M. Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press 1984), 173–75.

2. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29.

3. Krystyna Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm—anatomia półprawd (Warsaw: Nowa, 1992), 130.

4. ANKr, WiN19, k. 11.

5. Skarbimir Socha, Czerwona śmierć, czyli narodziny PRL (Stalowa Wola: Światowy Związek Żołnierzy Armii Krajowej. Koło Miejskie w Stalowej Woli, 2000), 325–26. The Intelligence Brigades were an underground group under the umbrella of the AK. They eventually joined with the WiN and continued to fight for Poland’s independence after the war.

6. University of Warsaw Library, Microfilm Reading Room, sygn. mf 8614, k. 6–8.

7. ANKr, WiN 6, 1336. A text published in August 1946 in the periodical Honor i Ojczyzna, (Honor and Fatherland) expresses an analogous view. It begins with the words, “An anti-Jewish pogrom. Neither the first instance, nor an isolated one.” Quoted in Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm, 91–93.

8. ANKr, WiN 16, k. 667. The events referred to in this quote pertain to the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Zionist organization Irgun on July 22, 1946.

9. See Przegląd polityczny, 1–15/8/1946 (ANKr, WiN 6, 302).

10. ANKr, WiN 39, k. 311.

11. SL 1.17.

12. SL 1.17.

13. ANKr, WiN 43, k. 124. See also “Z ostatniej chwili,” Orzeł Biały, no. 7 (June–July 1946).

14. See Ryszard Śmietanka-Kruszelnicki, “Nieznany document do dziejów ‘pogromu kieleckiego,’” Zeszyty Historyczne WiN-u, no. 4 (1993): 126–29.

15. SL 1.21.

16. See Orzeł Biały, no. 1 (March 1946): 9 filed in AIPN Kr_0_74_199_1, k. 206.

17. SL 1.18.

18. Arthur Bliss-Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1948), 247.

19. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Polska zgwałcona (date and publisher unknown), 202–3.

20. AIPN Ki_53_4750, k. 297–98.

21. Marcin Zaremba wrote most consistently about this. See his article on the theme of ritual murder as a “pogrom spark.” See more recently Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Znak i ISP PAN, 2012), 589–90 (English-language edition Entangledin Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944–1947, trans. Maya Latynski (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 2022).

22. See testimony of Antoni Macierewicz, dated May 6, 1996: “I cannot be considered a researcher on this topic. I have never conducted independent source research” (AG-PK, t. 6, k. 1133). The same politician remarked on April 4, 1996, in Gazeta Polska that “it is known that this was a crime committed by the [Communist] special services.”

23. See Jan Stanisław Jankowski’s report in Armia Krajowa w dokumentach 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Ossolineum, 1991), 5: 282.

24. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).

25. AG-PK, t.1, k. 194.

26. See the issue of Szczerbiec dated June 23, 1945, filed in AIPN BU_0131_152, k.229–330. See the related discussion in Krzysztof Komorowski, Polityka i walka: Konspiracja zbrojna ruchu narodowego 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Rytm, 2000), 512–15. Haydamaks were groups, many of them Cossack, fighting for Ukrainian independence, first from the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and later from the Russian empire. Their raids often devolved into violence and plunder. The term in Polish (“hajdamak” or “hajdamacki”) became a pejorative reference to Ukrainians in the mid- to late forties.

27. Mariusz Bechta, Pogrom czy odwet? Akcja zbrojna Zrzeszenia “Wolność i Niezawisłość” w Parczewie 5 lutego 1946 r. (Poznań: Zysk i S-ka, 2014), 241.

28. Teodor Jeske-Choiński, Poznaj Żyda! (Warsaw: Kronika Rodzinna, 1913), 238–39. I am grateful to Konrad Matyjaszek for bringing this quote to my attention.

29. See Paul R. Brass, Theft of the Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Riots and Pogroms, ed. Paul R. Brass (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

30. Roberta Senechal de la Roche, In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riots in Springfield, Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 151, 195.

31. See the remarks of Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the film Act of Killing and child of Holocaust survivors, on the Polish folkloric figure of “the Jew with money”: “When I arrived in Warsaw I was looking at these souvenirs on the Old Town Market Square. Landscapes, still lifes, and among them Jews counting money. In a country where three million Jews perished, including [Polish] citizens, the victims have returned in the most grotesque stereotype—a charm bringing good luck in business,” http://wyborcza.pl/1,75475,19675011,joshua-oppenheimer-i-jego-film-scena-ciszy-poczuj-strach.html#ixzz41DJL3IkY.

32. According to Jechiel Alpert’s report of a conversation with the bishop in 1946 (SL 1.1.1.2B). See also Pinchas Cytron, ed., Sefer Kielts: Toldot Kehilat Kielts (Tel Aviv: Organization of Kielce Immigrants, 1957).

33. See the telegram delivered by phone from the Wrocław WUBP dated July 13, 1946 (AIPN BU_1572_733, k. 39).

34. See the telegram delivered by phone to the MBP dated July 17, 1946 (17/7/1946, AIPN BU_1572_733, k. 40).

35. See informational bulletins of the MBP from dated October 26, 1946(AIPN Ki_53_4754, cz. 1, k. 45.).

36. Alina Cała, Ochrona bezpieczeństwa fizycznego Żydów w Polsce powojennej: Komisje specjalne przy Centralnym Komitecie Żydów w Polsce (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2014), 122.

37. AAN, sygn. PPR, 295/VII-149, k. 37.

38. AIPN Ki_0_16_4, k. 136. Marcin Zaremba provides further examples of incidents from 1949 (see Wielka trwoga, 614).

39. See the memo of the Wrocław WUBP dated October 2, 1956 (AIPN BU_1572_733, k. 60). Other incidents are described there as well. There is also a copy of a flyer that was distributed with the following text: “We don’t want Jews from Russia. Jews must leave our country. We want to work for ourselves . . . and for the good of our people’s fatherland” (ibid., k. 62–63, 66).

40. See Riots and Pogroms.

41. The word “fear” also appears in the title of Jan Tomasz Gross’s work, but his thesis evidently refers to the “tinder” and not, as in Marcin Zaremba’s work, the “sparks.” See Gross’s Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (New York, Random House, 2007).

42. This point of view is discussed in detail in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “The Polish Underground Organization Wolność i Niezawisłość and Anti-Jewish Pogroms, 1945–6,” Patterns of Prejudice no. 2 (2017): 111–36. Łukasz Krzyżanowski and Marcin Zaremba put forward the thesis that the cause of the postwar pogroms was Jewish organizations’ removal of Jewish children from Polish homes where they had been hidden during the war. In the context of the interpretation presented above, this would be an additional example of emphasizing the spark, rather than the tinder. Without the church legends about Jews’ using Christian blood, the pogrom sparks would not have caused any harm. Even if we detect child panic in the background of some postwar pogroms, it is an alibi for previously accumulated aggression, rather than its cause. Moreover, it should be noted that in the series of Eastern European pogroms (Slovakia: Topoľčany, Bratislava, Komárno, and Nové Zámky in 1945; Ukraine: Lviv in 1945; Hungary: Kunmadaras and Miskolc in 1946), no children were forcibly removed from Christian families, but pogroms broke out nevertheless. See Joanna Tokarski-Bakir’s “Postwar Violence against Jews in Central and Eastern Europe” in Our Courage—Jews in Europe 1945–48, eds. Kata Bohus, et. al. (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), 64–81.

43. Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm, 130.

44. Adam Jones and Nicholas A. Robins, “Introduction,” in Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice, ed. Robins and Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 10.

45. Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, translated by J. H. Freese. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), book 2, chapter 5, section 1.

46. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

47. Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 505. This statement is notable for synthesizing traditional and modern antisemitism. Surprisingly, Zaremba considers it “irrevelant” that in his homily Walczak referred to “the traditional stereotype of the Jew.” He sees this only as a “fear of the world being off balance.” It is difficult to agree with his conclusion.

48. For more on this topic, see Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “‘The Present Causes of Past Effects’: The Background Beliefs of the Kielce Pogrom (4 July 1946),” in The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism: Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, ed. Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Hess (London: Routledge, 2018).

49. See Michał Chęciński’s testimony of November 22, 1996, in the second Kielce investigation. See also his autobiography, Jedenaste przykazanie: nie zapomnij (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2004).

50. Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism.

51. Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, jacket copy.

52. According to the minutes from a meeting of the Central Committee of the PPR (dated October 9, 1944), Żymierski reported that “Comrade Stalin said, ‘If not for the Red Army, you would all be gone within a week.” See Protokoły posiedzeń Biura Politycznego KC PPR, ed. Aleksander Kochański, et.al. (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN Pracownia Najnowszej Historii Politycznej), 16–29.

53. SL 12.1.

54. Michał Chęciński constructs this scenario in his Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (25–34), as well as in his testimony dated November 22, 1996, during the second Kielce investigation.

55. There is, however, a record of a different Michał Diomin, who died on April 27, 1945, in Koenigswarthe (CAW [WBH] sygn. 672/321/52).

56. See Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamię ci Narodowej, 2006), 1: 134n11.

57. See Wokół 1, 385. The name of one Diomin, a telegraph operator, is mentioned by Colonel Nikolai Shpilevoi to Colonel Semyon Davidov, informing him of the sentence in the first trial in Kielce on July 11, 1946. See Wokół 1: 489.

58. SL 12.1.

59. Józefa Ciołek or Ciołak was Walenty Błaszczyk’s second wife, with whom he had two children, Tadeusz and Henryk. See Jan Sĺedzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Jedność, 1998), 13, 26.

60. This suggestion appears many times in the Polish version of the recorded interview, but it is difficult to identify precisely the section from which the question and answer appearing on p. 26 of Chęciński’s book were taken.

61. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1999), 17.

62. See Miłosz (raw footage). Even rabbi Dawid Kahane was a supporter of the idea of conspiracy, albeit attributed to reactionary forces. See Arieh Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 174. Not everyone succumbed to conspiracy theories, however. See Niusia Borensztajn’s statement: “Who organized it, I don’t know. But . . . it wasn’t the work of Russians . . . . Perhaps they didn’t help, true—they didn’t like to mix in—but I can’t imagine that they would organize that whole business, or make it happen. I say it’s entirely Polish.”

63. SL 4.12.

64. See Małgorzata Domagalska, Zatrute ziarno. Proza antysemicka na łamach “Roli” (1883–1912) (Warsaw: Neriton, 2016).

65. See Wincenty Rzymowski, “Twarze i maski,” Tygodnik Ilustrowany no. 3 (January 17, 1925) filed in ANKr, WiN, t. 2, 182.

66. See J. Jarniewicz, “‘Pogrom’ jako słowo obce,” Literatura na Świecie nos. 11–12 (2007): 396–98.

67. See Śmietanka-Kruszelnicki, Nieznany dokument, 126–29. See also Śmietanka-Kruszelnicki’s Podziemie poakowskie na Kielecczyźnie w latach 1945–1948 (Kraków: IPN, 2002), 206. And see, for example, the name recorded in an electronic document in the AIPN, “Akta śledztwa w spr. p-ko Antoniemu Kunderze (Kundera), podejrzanemu o udział w tzw. ‘pogromie kieleckim’ w dniu 4/7/1946” (AIPN Ki_013_2535).