A Moveable Feast
The Mob
In his seminal 1959 work Primitive Rebels, the preeminent British scholar of mass phenomena, Eric J. Hobsbawm, asserted, “The mob may be defined as the movement of all classes of the urban poor for the achievement of economic or political changes by direct action—that is by riot or rebellion—but as a movement which [is] as yet inspired by no specific ideology.” Although it is prone to stand up against unemployment and price hikes, it does not operate according to political ideas. In modern times, he believed, the mob as a social phenomenon was disappearing, giving way to the industrial working class. 1
If, according to Hobsbawm, the mob is a prepolitical and anarchic phenomenon, I wonder what he would call the workers from the Kielce factories who marched on Planty Street on July 4, 1946? Isn’t the notion of a Jewish kidnapper a political idea—and a very captivating one at that? Yes, it is based on a hallucination. But unlike any other idea of its time, it was capable of uniting a fragmented society. After World War II the aversion to the “Jew-bloodsucker”—a character type understood by all addressees, be they Catholic, nationalist, or communist—became the glue that bound the Polish “imagined community.” 2 This aversion was one of the few emotions that could unite a zealous Catholic, a nationalist from the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ), a fighter in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), and a member of the Communist People’s Guard (Gwardia Ludowa, GL) under the new postwar conditions and on the basis of a patriotism understood in a specific way. The novelty here was that it also quickly became legible for some communists who connected nationalist rhetoric with a leftist critique of Jewish “capital.”3
This was possible, because—as Shulamit Volkov writes—antisemitism is not a direct reaction to real circumstances. Rather, “they [the followers of antisemitic cultural codes] build an interpretation of their lived experience of the world and only react to the conception of reality that they themselves have created, not to reality itself. . . . More often than not, it has an even stronger effect when it is false, in whole or in part.”4
Anthropologist Mary Douglas reaches similar conclusions in writing about the persecution of witches and lepers in the twelfth century: “The reality or unreality of the cause of harm makes no difference: it is enough that the people believe in it.” She also stipulates that “there has to be consensus. There has to be an imputation of immorality. . . . The accusation can be completely outrageous; it will be credible essentially if the political system which it backs is accepted. The process of formally accusing, testifying, verifying and remedying plays a crucial part in entrenching the system.”5
Such a formal process emerged in Kielce: the blood libel—that is, the repetition of rumors about kidnapped children (accusation); and the reaction of police officer Stefan Sędek to Walenty Błaszczyk’s report, namely, sending the patrol to Planty Street (verification). These elements focused on imagining Jews as kidnappers-deviants. Prevention, or to use Douglas’s language, remedying, came in the form of the Kielce pogrom.
American scholar Roberta Senechal de la Roche observes that the key issue for the identity of every group is how that group defines the deviation it considers most repulsive. Identity is most effectively described through negation—“we don’t behave that way”—rather than through positive assertions. The stigmatized deviation does not have to be a behavior that an outside observer would consider strange or abnormal. It can be a trivial activity, harmless or innocent, which nonetheless is considered for some reason undesirable or threatening.6 In order to curtail it, the group might turn to collective violence, which is sometimes called “popular justice.” In truth, it is contrary to justice, but it nonetheless serves a defined system of values for which its adherents are prepared to make great sacrifices.
Among theories of collective violence, only one considers the particular type of situation that evolved on Planty Street. It defines “pogrom” as an act of social control through which a society under threat takes justice into its own hands.7 From this perspective the Kielce pogrom would have been an act of self-help carried out by Kielce society, after it was abandoned by the state to the mercy of “Jewish deviants.” Considering that Jews fled Poland in panic because of it, the pogrom should be acknowledged as a more effective form of social control than all other forms of pressure introduced by the Communist authorities after the Second World War.
Ten Cigarettes
In ethnology, a state of communitas is a situation in which norms are suspended and statuses equalized within a rebelling crowd. This state establishes radical equality and renewal. It is the opposite of societas, or hierarchy, which operates according to rigorous codes of behavior and status.
Festive communitas celebrates. Mournful communitas weeps. But there exists also a communitas of violence, typical for pogroms, that is simultaneously both festive and mournful.8
We see this on Planty Street, where money is thrown about and then collected; where clothing is tried on;9 where there is eating and idle chatter; where lemonade is sipped at Janiszewska’s; and where beer is poured at the Kieres family’s bottling center. Witnesses claim that the majority of gawkers were in a joyful mood, and “there was drinking on this occasion and in every possible place.”10 Maurycy Gardyński, who observed the pogrom from a balcony, claims that applause accompanied the dragging of Jews from their home.11 A bit farther away, by the train station, an enthusiastic cigarette salesman, born in 1891, bestowed his merchandise upon a railwayman-killer. He promises that even though he is poor, “for every Jew killed, he’ll give the killer . . . ten cigarettes and he won’t regret [the expense] at all.”12
The mood even infects a Soviet advisor, Colonel Andrei Kuprii, who brought his wife—dressed in an elegant blue suit—to the little bridge over the Silnica River.13 The old Kielce intelligentsia speaks about the pogrom in a light tone. Attorney Grzywaczewski testifies that when he ran into the functionary Stanisław Przygoda on Wesoła Street that afternoon, he asked him jokingly, “What’s that I hear, you’re shooting at Jews?” He heard in response, “Well, yeah, we’re shooting at them, and they’re shooting at us.”14 And then each continued on his way along Wesoła Street.
Scholars describe pogrom communitas as a spontaneous, short-term collective, consisting of local representatives of the middle and lower classes who engage in violent actions that they otherwise would never risk engaging in as individuals.15 A condition of such behavior is the feeling that they are supported by the group and the economic interests of those they represent. Another condition is reward, both in the form of loot and in the destruction of enemies’ visibility. Yet another contributing circumstance is consciousness of the fact that, from the start, law enforcement either shares the point of view of the communitas, or is simply unable to resist it.
Provocations
Historians who subscribed to the thesis that a Communist conspiracy was at the root of the Kielce pogrom often wrote that the uniformed services behaved provocatively that day on Planty Street. They repeated this from the brochures of the underground, which, like the Church, was unable to acknowledge its own participation in the creation of a pogrom atmosphere. But provocation is comprised of at least two sides—the provocateurs and the provoked—and these roles can be reversed. Let’s look at how the crowd provoked those in uniform.
The firefighter Stefan Maj, who before noon led an unsuccessful operation to disperse the crowd, says, “I saw soldiers set their bayonets and, moving forward, try to drive back the crowd. But then hostile shouts started to come from the crowd with respect to the army. People shouted, ‘You want to murder Poles for the Jews? Aren’t you Poles?’16 and others puffed out their chests and said, ‘Push if you’re such a hero.’17 That’s when the soldiers folded their bayonets and hung their rifles on their shoulders.”18
Witnesses asserted that shouts of “long live our army” and “the army is with us”19 could be heard before the troops had even mixed in with the crowd. Seeing that this cheering didn’t bring the expected result, the crowd changed its tactic and started to insult the army, calling the soldiers “Jewish lackeys.” This proved to be far more effective. More and more soldiers attacked Jews, which was rewarded with ovations. Leopold Arendarski writes in his report, “I saw an officer of the Polish Army shoot one of the Jews with a pistol; later, the crowd lifted this officer up on their shoulders and shouted ‘Long live the Polish Army’ and that every soldier deserves a liter of vodka for such a deed.”20 One of the witnesses says that these cries caused widespread fraternization—women began to throw their arms around the servicemen.
Another example of fraternization between civilians and servicemen came about when a prison guard attacked a teenage girl who was hiding in a shed near 7 Planty Street. “At around 11:00 a.m. I noticed a soldier . . . trying to get into a shed built up against the building where the Jews lived. The door was torn off the shed, and a Jewish girl around sixteen years old ran out; a soldier . . . started to beat her. When the said little Jewish girl fainted, civilian people raised the soldier up on their shoulders to the cries of ‘Long may he live!’”21
And yet another, similar description: “Between the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., in the schoolyard, I noticed a crowd running through the yard in a southeasterly direction from which I heard the shout: ‘A Jewess, a Jewess, hold her!’ Among the people running ahead I saw a Polish soldier, who was first to run after the fleeing woman. I also ran with the thought of defending the fleeing woman. I thought that the soldier was also going to help her. But I was greatly disappointed seeing that this soldier was hitting the fleeing woman over the head and kicking her. . . . At this time, the crowd turned its attention away from the woman lying on the ground, ran up to the soldier, . . . grabbed him, and tossed him up in the air, shouting, ‘Long live the Polish Army.’”22
These situations signal the appearance of communitas, in which the differences between those in uniform and those not in uniform cease to apply. A literal expression of this is the mixing of civilians and soldiers as described in all the reports from Planty Street (a situation that all commanders warn against). Another is the aggression toward physical borders, including the windows and doors of the Jewish Committee building.
A trace of this is preserved in a photograph by Julia Pirotte. It shows a breach created by a grenade next to an entrance to the committee building. It is possible that this aggression was not at all caused, as has been assumed, by locked doors; maybe it was caused by the barred window located to the left of the stairwell through which it was impossible to enter. So the opening was enlarged. In the photograph the breach reaches halfway up to the first floor.
Escalation
Victor Turner, a student of communitas, underscores that revolution and other violent social movements cause acceleration, which is experienced as movement toward an “unavoidable” finale. Violence is passed on to subsequent groups. The longer the desire for communitas has been suppressed, writes Turner, the more fanatical the form it takes as it materializes.23 Paraphrasing the title of David Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence, we may call the resulting phenomenon a “communitas of violence.”24 The communitas of violence spreads easily, as evidenced in the behavior of police officer Błachut, who initially removed civilians from the Jewish building; but when he saw soldiers beating Jews, he, too, started to beat them. “I go down and ask, ‘What are you beating him for?’ They answer: ‘What’s it to you? The son-of-a-bitch was hiding.’ I went up and kicked him.”25
Stanisław Rurarz explains his behavior as follows: “If everyone else was beating [’em], why shouldn’t I?”26
Julian Pokrzywiński similarly describes how he joined the people beating the Jews: “I came near the place where a kike was only just pushed out and people started to beat him. They shouted: ‘Beat the Jew!’ Excited by these cries, I found a stick and hit him [that is, the Jew], I didn’t even look where.”27
Forty-year-old Edward Jurkowski, a musician, who was heading out to visit his wife in the hospital, describes a similar phenomenon when he mixes in with the crowd of workers from Ludwików. “On the street I hear shouts to murder Jews, because the Jews murdered children. I ate and drank another portion. . . . I took lemonade and rusks for my wife . . . and I go to see my wife. But people keep shouting. So I—my blood begins to boil—and I start calling out the same way: ‘Men! Beat the Jews, beat the Jews!’ I don’t remember everything, because the vodka was messing with my head, but I ran around furious, like a madman.”28
In Adolf Berman’s report there are notes about shouts heard from the crowd before it forced its way into the Jewish Committee building: “They murdered twelve of our children there!” “You mangy kikes, you led Jesus Christ to Golgotha, now we’ll teach you!”29 These two shouts created something along the lines of an abbreviated syllogism because in accordance with the blood libel, the means of inflicting death on the kidnapped children was a reenactment of Christ’s Passion. This impression is deepened by such exclamations as “Did you like the taste of Christ’s blood?”30 and “Blood for the blood of our children.”31 And according to Chil Alpert’s testimony, “A young girl stood there and shouted: ‘It serves you right, you killed Christ, now you’ll pay. You’ve drunk enough of our blood!’”32
Turner writes that in social dramas, people unconsciously take on roles dictated by cultural scripts. These roles pave the way for a finale that corresponds to an imagined climax in accordance with the myth of a hero’s death or victory, according to the cult that the participants have been raised in. In other words, “collective representations” replace “individual representations.”
The intrusion of religious symbolism announces the approach of the pogrom’s climax and lays bare the most archaic version of this antagonism, the dichotomy of “Jews-Christians.” At this moment in the pogrom, thus, there is a return to the “primal scene” of Christianity—to borrow a term from Sigmund Freud. For the Catholics who found themselves in the crowd, the script was, without a doubt, the Passion of Christ. The Jews had clearly assigned roles in this Passion play that could not even be changed by the fact that now they were the victims. The crowd does defend the youngest, however. In fact, the crowd is defending Christ as the patron of Christian children kidnapped “for blood.”
In the emerging communitas of the Passion, asymmetrical relations become egalitarian (the crowd merges with those in uniform), while egalitarian relations become asymmetrical (the Office of Public Security [UB] enters into conflict with the Citizen’s Militia [MO] and the Polish Army [WP]). Examples of this included WP soldiers who threatened the UB officer Albert Grynbaum33 with a PPSh or who called Gajewski and Arendarski “Jewish lackeys.”34 There is also the example of Maks Erlbaum, who until 11:00 a.m. was calmly eating breakfast in the officer’s canteen buildings of the Internal Security Corps (KBW) located in Bukówka, a neighborhood in southeast Kielce. When he arrived on Planty Street after 12:00 p.m., he was treated as a stranger, even as an enemy, by his brothers-in-arms.35
Nominally, communitas emerges on the basis of ethnicity, but in this case it was sometimes difficult to determine who was a Jew. This made it possible for a number of people to save themselves, as described earlier. Luba Librowitz36 saved herself by showing a cross hanging on her neck. Józef Krauze slipped away from Planty Street by presenting himself to a policeman as a Pole who did business with Jews.37 Marysia Machtynger survived because she reversed the accusation.
Sometimes, however, it was difficult to determine who was a Pole. Stories about ethnic Poles who were mistaken for Jews testify to this, as for example, the saleswoman in a shop on Kilińskiego Street who appeared in the documentary Świadkowie (Witnesses) or the butcher Pardoła, who was forced to drop his pants.38 In the second Kielce investigation, the witness Gutowski recalled the story of a Yugoslav woman who was mistaken for a Jewish woman.39 Others recount an incident with Cecylia Dubisz40 who lived on Planty Street. Klara Stanisławska herself recalls how her life was threatened when, in the afternoon, she went out for a walk with her two children to the Bazary neighborhood: “I saw a lot of people on Freedom Square [Plac Wolności], when some woman . . . said to me: ‘Run, ma’am, because they might beat you up, because you look Jewish.’”41
Since it is difficult to distinguish a Jew from a non-Jew, a pragmatic criterion is applied: “a Jew” is anyone who “defends Jews.” Where a Jew is the enemy, the enemy becomes a Jew.
Having determined the corporeal boundaries, attention moves to the walls. During pogroms in Belarus, Christians marked the walls of buildings with chalk. Józef Mackiewicz recalls that white crosses were drawn on Christian homes during the pogrom in Brześć Litewski—ironically reminiscent of the signs marking the doors of Jewish homes in Egypt, homes which were to be spared the Lord’s wrath in the biblical story of Passover.
Similar marks can also appear in a different way. A Polish tenant from the building on Planty Street 7, where a pastry shop was located on the ground floor, recalls, “It was already later when my sister ran here from the shop. . . . And she had on a white apron from the shop, so they shouted that this was a nurse [who] came out [of here]. So I shouted: ‘Stop throwing things, because Poles live here.’”42 That was enough.
“Excesses”
Stanley J. Tambiah writes that the mechanism of destruction during the pogroms against Muslims and Hindus on the Indian subcontinent constituted the opposite of a potlatch: one involves giving, the other taking. Destroying the life and property of the Other also comes with appropriating the Other’s status and wealth as well as their skills. In the eyes of the pogromszczycy, their behavior is a just act and serves to “level” the disproportion interpreted as wrong or unfair. But on a deeper sociopsychological level, something more is hidden behind it. Tambiah writes that the robbery and rape of victims are brutal acts that both incorporate and destroy the Other.43
While some of the postmortem reports may raise doubts, the violence against the victims in Kielce was not, at its foundation, sexual in nature. It is difficult to ignore, however, that the bodies often had injuries located in the area of the abdomen, belly, and haunches.44
FIGURE 30. Frunia Siniarowska, a pogrom survivor. AIPN BU_1540_1931_0001.
From the external examination of Nela Fiszel: “Five contusions to the head in the area of the crown and the occipital. . . . Bleeding from the left labium. . . . The above injuries were the result of blows from a blunt instrument.”
FRUNIA SINIAROWSKA: “Very large bruises in the area of both haunches.”
ANNA BAŃSZCZYK: “Cut wound in the area of the left buttock.”
It is difficult to read the documents cited in chapter 2 concerning the injuries suffered by pregnant women.
Men were similarly attacked.
LEJZOR LATASZ: “Gunshot wounds . . ., one at the top of the right buttock.”
SZMUL KARP: “Injuries from a bayonet to the thorax and buttock.”
MOSZEK MORAWIEC: “In the area of the right groin, a 1.6 x 2 cm wound, with a safety pin wire stuck in it.”
MIKUŁOWSKI: “Numerous skin abrasions in the area of the navel, the size of the palm of a hand.”
JOHN DOE 5: “To the left of the navel, a round wound the size of a 20-grosz coin, intestines are protruding.”
Tambiah shows that the lack of respect for the mutilated body of the enemy suggests that—before a phase of violence—there was a closeness that connected both, a closeness now violently negated.45 In the case of Kielce, the assailants and the victims had once been neighbors. They lived in the same city; most had been born there. Numerous social transactions connected them. But the closer the peaceful coexistence, the more lethal the “poison” of secondarily imposed boundaries and divisions, claims Tambiah. We need only look at such examples as Serbs and Bosnian Muslims; Armenians and Azeris; Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir; Sinhalese soldiers and Tamil insurrectionists in Sri Lanka; Tutsi and Hutu. Tambiah asks, “Can we say that is because that component of ‘sameness’ that the ethnic enemy shares with you, and because your enemy is already a part of you, that you must forcibly expel him or her from yourself, objectify him or her as the total other? Accordingly, that component of ‘difference’ from you . . . is so exaggerated and magnified that this stereotyped ‘other’ must be degraded, dehumanized, and compulsively obliterated?”46
Tambiah mentions one more tendency in ethnonationalist conflicts. Numerous mutually exclusive interests stand in the way of achieving the imagined homogeneity of the collective. These conflicts lead the participants to select a scapegoat who is ritually murdered in order to confirm the uncertain unity of the group. We return once more to the observation that an enemy who is “a neighbor from across the way” has too much in common with the aggressor for his expulsion and destruction not to be an expulsion and destruction from within the aggressor himself.47
Maks Erlbaum
Maks Erlbaum from Krosno, in the WP since 1943, served as a gunner corporal in the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division. Antonina Biskupska saw him “as the crowd pulled and tugged him by his uniform, tore off his hat, and beat him. They were saying he was a Jew. I saw that he had blood on his face, and I heard him call out, ‘I was a partisan fighter, leave me alone.’ But there were shouts from the crowd: ‘Give him the stick, beat him good.’”48
Erlbaum himself describes this event:
A bunch of people started screaming that the one in the Polish uniform was a Jew, so I started to move away quickly. . . . I noticed a woman running out of the crowd whose name I was able to establish—her name is Manecka Jadwiga, Kielce, Młynarska Street no. 85. She ran up to me, grabbed me by my left arm where I had my watch. The enraged woman demanded my documents to determine who I was, a Pole or a Jew. I took my documents out, I wanted to hand them to her, but in the meantime some lieutenant came up to us. I turned to the lieutenant, handing him my service papers. After looking through my documents, the lieutenant returned them to me with an energetic movement of the hand, saying loudly, “No religion” and mov[ed] away from me in the direction of the building where the Jews resided. I grabbed him by his uniform belt, asked him for help. This lieutenant pushed my hand away and kept walking. Then the crowd started to shout, “The Jew has a weapon,” wanting to take it away from me. In the meantime, a sergeant I knew well from the 4th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Division, Bugajski Ryszard, walked up. I handed over my weapon to him, and also asked him for help. Reaching my hands out, I shouted, “This is our sergeant,” to which he didn’t react, leaving me at the mercy of the unruly people, who started to hit me hard, pulling down my pants, examining my member. During this time, I lost my watch and holster with a small spare magazine where there were three bullets, and my pants belt. In the meantime, they started to beat me even harder with stones, so that I got all bloody. I was stunned. During this beating some civilian ran up, pulling me out of the crowd, saying that he would take me to headquarters. When we were near the division, I jumped to the gate where my division is located; I was driven to the military hospital from the division. After getting out of the hospital, I established the last name of the civilian who helped me by taking me from the crowd of unruly people. It was Sergeant Sobański Stanisław of the WUBP in Kielce.49
All those elements already familiar to us appear in this description: in the face of danger, not only civilians, but also brothers-in-arms separate themselves according to ethnic criteria. They try feverishly to cleanse themselves of what was once their own, but is now suddenly considered foreign. But Maks Erlbaum wasn’t a foreigner. He must have looked a lot like the assailants, since they needed to unzip his fly to identify the difference.
FIGURE 31. Jadwiga Manecka, a pogromszczyk. Available in AIPN (no catalog no.).
The Gender of Murder
The woman who initiated the “examination” of Erlbaum was thirty-year-old Jadwiga Manecka, a member of the Volunteer Fire Brigade in Kielce. She arrived on Planty Street with the brigade that had been summoned by Wiślicz, the provincial governor (wojewojda). The brigade’s water wagon was not used because (as we read in the report) “there was a lack of decisiveness as regards the use of the fire hose.”50 Like the policemen and the soldiers, the fire brigade did not want to risk falling out of favor with the crowd.
In a way, Jadwiga Manecka was on Planty Street in an official capacity, and this surely emboldened her to perform a classical act of social control. Added to this was the incitement of the crowd, which enthusiastically took the initiative to pull down Erlbaum’s pants and examine his member.51
Under conditions of loosened prohibitions, women and young people took an active part in the events. Stanisław Kowal, a shoemaker’s son, testified that “women shouted that Jews’ obrzyny [circumcised penises] should be cut off.”52 Wacław Ziółek, Sobczyński’s adjutant, recounts that when he told a woman who was spreading rumors about Jewish body-snatchers that “she was talking nonsense worthy of lunatics, she replied outraged, ‘And your pants should also be pulled down, sir, to see who you are since you’re defending Jews so heatedly.’”53
Witold Całka, who was questioned during the second Kielce investigation in the nineties and who was in ninth grade at the time of the pogrom, saw a group of hysterical women as he walked past Planty Street. They were saying that “Jews arriving from the Soviet Union were physically exhausted and were abducting Polish children in order to perform blood transfusions.”54 It is interesting that precisely these two factors—the influx of Russian Jews and the kidnapping of children “for blood”—appeared in a Vatican memorandum about the genesis of the Kielce pogrom. The document described the genesis of the pogrom as “a coincidence between the influx of Russian Jews to Poland and the mysterious disappearances of Christian children,”55 as if the repatriation was an invasion of the body snatchers. Kielce women surely succumbed to this suggestion, but also, in the moment, they had to have felt social consent to show aggression.
“The hags [baby] were especially brutal,” says a shocked Jakub Aleksandrowicz, using a pejorative term for women. Women bludgeoned Jews with canes and umbrellas, crushed them with suitcases, trampled them. “Never in my life, nowhere, nowhere, had I seen such cruelty. More the women than the men.”56 Herszel Joskowicz had a similar recollection: “I didn’t see any guys as furious as these hags. Today, I still see their eyes, murderous, inflamed, the desire to murder. When they grabbed whatever was close at hand, a stick, an axe, a crowbar, stone—just to bash heads. For as long as it took to kill and then leave, running off to look for another one.”57
Some, like Andrzej Drożdżeński, go so far as to say that hysterical women of Kielce caused the pogrom. Such an assessment, however, ignores the way that gender functions in society.58 At the time of the pogrom, there was a much stronger cultural prohibition against female aggression than there is today. This prohibition disappeared in the pogrom communitas, which—in relation to the blurring of differences—even permitted children to participate in the killing. Thus, women became equal to men, but since this violated the norms dictating that women customarily withdraw from violence, they were perceived as being more brutal than the men.
In Entangled in Fear, Marcin Zaremba analyzes cultural gender as a factor predisposing one to believe in the blood libel, noting that we cannot know whether the violence would have reached such proportions without the participation of women.59 Let’s turn this matter around and consider what would have been the extent of pogrom violence without men’s participation.
For purely practical reasons, a specific “division of labor” developed between genders, which helped organize the violence. Symbolically, it corresponds to the relationship between the people and the police, as expressed in the phrase: “We’ll start, you’ll finish.”60 We can see such a division of labor in numerous other cases of collective violence, for example in Rwanda, where usually women denounced (“pointed fingers at”) victims, while men killed.61 This was also the case during the pogrom in Rzeszów in June 1945: “We’re leading them, because that’s our order, and you do your thing.”62
As we know from studies on witchcraft, the cruelty of women and children is often an effective means of gaining control over the environment. As an example, we can consider the seventeenth-century Scandinavian witch hunts that were based on children’s accusations and that resulted in the depopulation of entire settlements.63 Similar phenomena provoked the infamous Salem witch hysteria in 1692.64
Based on the testimonies of witnesses, it would appear that not only female custodians or factory workers committed acts of aggression toward Jews during the pogrom. Witnesses also speak of a certain twenty-year-old female teacher, who—like Jadwiga Manecka, from a family of office workers—“took part along with her girlfriend in checking if the people who were trying to get away from Planty were Jews.”65
The community will forgive them for these acts, reserving excommunication only for those who turn out to be snitches (kapusie). In informing the authorities about the course of events, this group distanced itself from the community’s preferred form of transgression, and this—by definition—is a much graver sin than the transgression itself.66
Children on Planty
Let us look now at the photograph taken by Julia Pirotte of some boys laughing during the funeral of the Jewish victims of the pogrom.67 In the next frame the children are already serious because the policeman, whose profile is visible, has intervened. These children would not have made faces at a Polish funeral, because they would have been reprimanded by their parents. But here, other than the man in the police cap, we see no one who might take them to task.
Laughter at the funeral of Jews murdered during the pogrom has nothing to do with subversive mockery of the system. Rather, it constitutes a sign of uncertainty as to whether society exists at all.
We have at our disposal many testimonies about the participation of young people in the pogrom.
On the Kielce-Skarżysko train route, middle school pupil Kazio Redliński68 sought out victims, while fourteen-year-old Czesław Nowak
FIGURE 32. Polish children, laughing, along the route of the funeral cortege, July 8, 1946. Used with the permission of ŻIH.
FIGURE 33. Children watching the funeral procession of the pogrom victims. Photograph by Julia Pirotte. Used with the permission of ŻIH.
“who was traveling with lemonade by train in the direction of Piekoszów, saw a railwayman together with civilians beat and murder Jews.”69 Eugeniusz Krawczyk, a fifteen-year-old police messenger boy, a weakling only about 143 cm tall, was bustling about the Bazary neighborhood “I took things from the Jewish building, since I saw everyone was doing it, the police, the army, and civilians, and I assumed that it was legal, but I beat [them] because something incomprehensible possessed me.”70 His peers were also active on Planty Street: “In the crowd I saw a young, probably sixteen-year-old boy, the son of the shop owner from Piotrkowska Street, Klamkowa [Mrs. Klamka],” said Marysia Machtynger when she was questioned by the UB. “The son’s name was Bogdan [Bogumił]. I saw him rush through the corridor. His mother is a decent woman, but I know that her son knows many of the attackers.”71
The testimony of Bogumił Klamka, raised by the widow Klamkowa, residing at 3 Leśna Street, facing Planty: “On July 4, 1946, at around 9:00 a.m. I went for breakfast to the shop we own on Piotrkowska Street at number 15. As I finished eating, mommy told me to go get lemonade at the bottling center on Leśna. Stopping at the bottling center, I bought fifteen bottles of lemonade and returned to the store. When I was in the store, people came in and were saying that large crowds of people were throwing stones at the Jewish building on Planty Street and that something had happened. So I, wanting to run to see what’s there, asked mommy if she would let me go, but mommy didn’t let me. Going out in front of the store, I watched to see what was happening. . . . Reacting to shots fired, mommy ordered me to close the shutters. . . . In the meantime some women were walking by; they were telling one another that Jews had captured and killed eleven children. . . . Other than that, I didn’t go anywhere all day.”72
The next time he testifies, the boy changes his account somewhat; but on July 27 he is nevertheless released because of a lack of evidence.
The presence of children on Planty Street is confirmed by the proclamation of Father Dudziec, who laments that scenes of violence were played out “right in front of youth and underage children.”73 Jakub Aleksandrowicz also noted that among the crowd that was making its way toward the Silnica River, there were “a couple of scouts with canes.” If we are to believe Zenon Jamczyk, a member of the 1st Kielce Scouting Troop, one of the scouts stood up for the soldier, Maks Erlbaum, who was being beaten on Planty Street.74 Also, a Kielce journalist, quoted here using his own distinctive language, recalled: “There were a few scouts there, some boys, people, a little tumult.”75
But the most shocking description of actions taken by youth was given by Borys Wajntraub, who observed the attack on Gienia Samborska through a window. “I clearly saw scouts. I couldn’t understand it, how seventeen-year-old, sixteen-year-old boys could take a knife, and [stick it] into a woman! . . . I saw it clearly through the window: a woman lying there and a lot of scouts. . . . Scouts, Polish scouts!”76
The mention of a scouting uniform is itself a contrast to sadism. According to scouting principles, a scout should “see a neighbor in every person.” We can’t forget, however, that Polish scouting was never free of politics or antisemitism. At the general assembly of the Polish Scouting and Guiding Association (Związek Harcerstwa Polskiego, ZHP) in 1939, there were motions to deny membership to Jewish youth, to discontinue cooperation with Jewish scouting organizations, and to prohibit Jewish organizations from using the term “scouting” in reference to themselves.
After the war the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe, SN) and the National Armed Forces (NSZ) displayed an interest in influencing youth. This sowing of hate must have yielded a crop; for example, while Jewish scouting troops marched in during the Scout jamboree in Szczecin in 1946, “masses of thousands of scouts began to whistle.”77 If we are to believe the reports of the Communist authorities, scouting youth “actively participated in antisemitic brawls” during the Kraków pogrom,78 while during the “antisemitic incidents in Sosnowiec” they made a list of homes where Jews resided.79 Scouts were also active, it seems, in the ongoing civil war. In early 1946, scouts were collecting weapons; the deputy director of Department IV of the Ministry of Public Security (MBP) wrote: “It’s not good if the security organs have to arrest fifteen-year-old boys, and lately, such instances are occurring more and more often.”80
Fathers and Children
According to various accounts, children also participated in the pogrom. Let’s look at the case of Józef Pokrzywiński, a father of four, who was accompanied to Planty Street by his oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Krystyna. Around two o’clock in the afternoon, Sergeant Julian Szpurek noticed them. He describes Pokrzywiński as
an individual dressed in a brown jacket, and a black, round cap, who had a bike with him. When people started to beat the Jews, this individual parked his bike by the fence leaving it under the supervision of a small girl, while he himself actively participated in murdering Jews, beating them with a stick. I could best see this particular individual while he was murdering a certain Jewish woman, who was seriously beaten by people, but was still alive, you could see that she was breathing, and the individual jumped onto the chest of this dying Jewish woman and started to trample her. Along with a small boy, who was beating this Jewish woman in the head with an iron bar, they finished her off with this trampling. During this entire period of time cit. Rybak and I observed him. Not knowing the last name of this individual, we wrote down the registration number of the bike, [and] established at town hall that he was Pokrzywiński Józef, res. of Kielce, 133 Piotrkowska Street.81
Sergeant Rybak now testifies: I noticed “an individual dressed in a brown jacket, a black, round cap, with a bike, which during the time when Jews were being murdered he gave to a certain girl to keep, while he himself actively participated in the murder of Jews by means of beating with a stick and kicking. I did not know the last name of the above mentioned, so I jotted down the number of the bike, registration no. 1899 Kielce.” Based on this registration number, the identity of the owner was easily established.82
Pokrzywiński at first denied everything, saying that he didn’t have the bike on Planty Street, because his daughter had ridden it into town. After several days, however, he changed his mind: “What I said in previous testimonies, that my daughter went by bike from home to town and that I was home the entire morning, that was an untruth.”83
Following is a transcript of a conversation between Pokrzywiński, the prosecutor, and one of the judges on the first day of the July 1946 trial:
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: Will the defendant please explain how he stepped on this woman. Pleases describe it in detail.
POKRZYWIŃSKI, THE DEFENDANT: I was running in the direction of the fence where my bike was standing. . . . I ran from that Jew that I hit, and thought to myself that my bike was surely already gone. The crowd pushed me. My cap fell. I caught my cap. The crowd kept pushing me and I stepped on this woman.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: In what way did the defendant step? Did you stumble, did you step with one or two feet?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: I was looking to see how far the fence was. The shooting was horrible. I don’t know what happened. While running to the bike, I noticed that I stepped on something.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: But how did the defendant step?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: I wanted to stumble with one leg, and so I slipped.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: So, was it with one or two feet?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: Two feet, somewhere to the side.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: But why did the defendant—if the crowd was pushing—not fall down?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: I don’t know. When I stumbled, I looked around, I saw that it was a woman.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: If the crowd was very dense, then how could the defendant look around?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: There wasn’t anyone by the bike anymore.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: Just a moment ago, the defendant said that the crowd was pushing him, and now he says that there wasn’t anyone by the bike?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: There wasn’t anyone by the bike. I hung a can on the handlers,84 I turned around, I look, a woman is lying there.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: So who pushed the defendant if it was not the crowd? Was the crowd such that the defendant couldn’t resist?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: The crowd pushed me up to the place where this woman was.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: So, to where did the crowd finally push the defendant?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: To the Jewish woman.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: Only to this place, no further?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: Yes, I completely didn’t notice the woman lying there.
PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: And the defendant jumped on her with both feet?
POKRZYWIŃSKI: I jumped with one, because I wanted to stumble.
PRESIDING JUDGE: A moment ago you said that you stood with two feet.
POKRZYWIŃSKI: First I stood with one foot. When I stumbled, I wanted to fall, I stood with the other foot. I stepped on something, I turned around, I look: a woman. I took the bike and rode off.85
The little girl watching the bike, thirteen-year-old Krysia Pokrzywińska who was a pupil at Father Piramowicz Elementary School, which Henio Błaszczyk also attended, made a vain attempt to defend her father during the investigation.86 We do not know the identity of the boy who was beating the victim with an iron rod. In a moment, though, we will hear about yet another family who together murdered Jews in the Bazary neighborhood.
Stanisław Rurarz
René Girard believes that children (and drunkards) reveal the patterns of persecution in a society. This thesis can be expanded to include dysfunctional adults. An example of such a person on Planty Street is the developmentally delayed twenty-year-old Stanisław Rurarz, a collector of rags and waste paper and the son of a female custodian and a stonemason.
“Citizen Stanisław Rurarz is employed by the City Committee for Social Services at 15 Sienkiewicza Street as a messenger boy. . . . Cit. Rurarz is illiterate, chronically ill from tuberculosis, and gives the impression of being intellectually underdeveloped,” we read in a certified statement issued five days after the pogrom at the request of Rurarz’s mother.87 In all likelihood, it is because of this statement that the twenty-year-old was not sentenced to death during the first July trial.
This certified statement also undermined Rurarz’s testimony regarding the barber, Tadeusz Szcześniak, whom Rurarz identified as being present on Planty Street and as “the same one who on July 4, 1946, beat with a stone and iron tube that same Jew that I was also beating.”88 Rurarz swore that he was telling the truth; he described Szcześniak’s tool as a “heating pipe used in flats,” thick “like a man’s fist.” But the court did not believe him.
Rurarz’s testimony:
Before this whole brawl, people were saying that some kid, a Pole, jumped off a balcony of the Jewish building, from the first floor, onto a pile of manure, he was blindfolded, while his hands were all cut up and bloody. Stories were told that Jews were supposedly taking blood from Polish children to inject themselves with, and that’s why the crowds gathered and threw themselves at the Jewish building. Before the police gathered, people knocked down the building’s fence and gathered in that yard and around the building and created a “ruckus.” When I arrived, the fence was already knocked down and one Jew was already lying there killed. I saw the army carrying out the wounded Jews and transporting the wounded Jews by vehicle to the hospital on św. Aleksandra Street. They transported the Jews individually, because they were yelling that it hurt. The military Red Cross applied wound dressings to Jews on the spot, also wounded Poles received wound dressings.
. . . I went to Planty Street out of curiosity, to see the children supposedly killed by Jews. . . . I recall that as I stood on Planty Street, the crowd pushed away the army like “a gang of hooligans” and people from the crowd entered the Jewish building and went to the attic, and from the attic they dragged down Jews. I saw how they dragged down a young Jew from the attic of the Jewish building into the courtyard, into the yard. He was dressed in a jacket and pants all one brown color. I can’t specify his age, but he was very young. They pulled him by the jacket and threw him on the ground, as this Jew was falling on the ground, he was hit on the back of the head or in the neck, or in the head with a wooden picket. Some worker from the factory hit this Jew with a picket; I don’t know this worker. This Jew fell, but he was moving on the ground, he was lying on his back. These same people hit the [Jew] lying on the ground with sticks. How many people beat him, I don’t know, but a lot of people beat him. That those from the factory were beating, I know only because people present at the scene told me; I don’t know their last names.
Szcześniak, I don’t know about his first name, beat this same Jew. Szcześniak threw a palm-sized stone at this Jew once. What part of his body the stone hit, this I don’t know, but supposedly in the head, that’s what I was told. And later Szcześniak took an iron [pipe] and with this iron pipe he beat this Jew again. I saw that he hit him twice on his body with this pipe. I watched this between people’s heads. I hit this same Jew once with a palm-sized stone in his left leg. I recall that I hit this Jew three times with a stone in the chest, in the right leg, and—other than that—I hit him in the head with a tiny stone. Altogether it comes out to four times. I didn’t hit this Jew any more times and I walked away. . . . The blood on my clothes came from the fact that it was splashing on me from this Jew. I washed the blood stains off my pants on the spot on Planty Street, but I couldn’t wash them off my clothes, because my jacket is made of paper. This Jew while being beaten at first moved his whole body from side to side and moved his head, but he didn’t get up, and then later he stopped moving. This Jew had a large sum of paper money in the lining [of his clothing], how much, I don’t know, but he had hundred-złoty banknotes and [five hundred-]złoty banknotes, [thousand-]złoty banknotes. During the beating his clothing came unstitched and this money scattered. Some soldier threw it about, and people collected it. I didn’t take any money.
After I washed my pants and was standing on Planty Street, I saw how they dragged another Jew down the stairs of the Jewish building. Both of the double doors to this building were wide open. Two of them were dragging this Jew by the arms and legs like a calf, those dragging him were young people, one was thin, he had dark hair, short stature, while the other was shorter, with light colored hair. I don’t know these people. They beat this Jew in the same way with sticks and later with iron pipes. At first this Jew moved a little and screamed, but they hit him in the mouth and he stopped screaming. The first Jew, the one I hit, didn’t scream in front of me.
I didn’t go into the Jewish building, in fear that a Jew might throw a grenade. To clarify, from the street-side balcony of this building grenades were thrown, how many, I don’t know, and even the army was running away from this. Later I saw how they dragged a third and fourth Jew out. One Jew was young, the other was older. They beat them the same way, with stones, clubs, and iron. Did Szcześniak beat the second, third, and fourth Jew? This I didn’t see, because it got crowded. After the fourth Jew was killed, Jews came out of the Jewish building, themselves in large numbers, men and women, and with bundles, and they surrendered themselves to the army, and the army loaded them onto a truck, sat around them and drove the vehicle full of Jews in some direction.
. . . I know that creating a ruckus on the street isn’t allowed, I was taught that at home, and the priest said it in a sermon, but always here, when something happens, then everyone comes running. I ran to Planty Street because I saw a bunch of people and I heard shouts both in the Polish language and in the Yiddish language. From the Polish shouts, I understood that it was about removing the Jews, because there were shouts: “Beat the Jews!”89
If all the people were beating them, then I did too, because they were calling for beating the Jews.90
In comparison to others, Rurarz speaks willingly; his testimonies are in-depth, even too detailed. The lack of self-censorship exhibits the social consent for violence against Jews. Like the sancta simplicitas, who according to legend adds wood to the fire as Jan Hus burns at the stake, Rurarz unmasks the crowd’s animus. He does not lie, because he does not know that he is supposed to. And it is probably this fact that most strongly convinced the judges that he was crazy.
And when it comes to Tadeusz Szcześniak’s guilt, there really isn’t any evidence to support it. He was working in his brother’s barber shop at 32 Sienkiewicza Street, located in the old Hotel Polski, the hotel which Izaak Prajs never managed to inherit. Prajs was murdered at 72 Sienkiewcza Street, not far from the barber shop.
Szymkiewicz
The Latin term acephalus, meaning “without a head,” refers more or less to bedlam, but the pogrom crowd can’t be described this way. Though the majority of the people in this crowd are just followers, among them are also those being followed. A flaw of the 1946 investigation is that so few of these leaders were ever exposed.
Henryk Szymkiewicz, a metalworker by trade, was definitely one of the pogrom leaders. After the pogrom he was sentenced to life in prison, but later the sentence was changed to fifteen years. A handsome, blue-eyed blonde who—according to the court psychologist—had a psychopathic personality, Szymkiewicz became the author of endless supplications, requests, and threats addressed to the prosecutor, the courts, and the central authorities during his long stretch on the inside.
Szymkiewicz was commander of the guard of the Provincial Committee of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS). His subordinate, Bronisław Tchórz, described Szymkiewicz’s exploits on Planty Street:
I noticed our guard commander, Szymkiewicz Henryk, as he pulled some Jew out of the Jewish building, and started, with other people . . . to beat him in the yard with some kind of object held in his hand. I don’t exactly recall if it was a stick or a stone, and next, he led this battered Jew to me and ordered me to guard him. So I, standing in this yard, guarded this Jew, whose mouth was gushing blood. After some five or so minutes, this Jew jumped up and ran about six meters and fell, and a certain individual ran up to him with a piece of round block, about a meter-and-a-half long, and hit him in the neck, killing him on the spot.
Next, I saw how, along with the people, Szymkiewicz beat another Jew, fat, older, bald, and later Szymkiewicz walked up to me saying that if I gave him my PPSh, he’d shoot him. When I refused, he started to grab it, but I didn’t let him take it from me.
Next, I went with Szymkiewicz to the street, and there was a Jewish woman lying there, half sitting, a little bit battered, and people started shouting that she killed a Polish officer, so Szymkiewicz went up to her and said, “You whore, you killed a Polish officer” and he kicked her. . . . And he kicked her a second time in the face, and next a soldier came up and took her to the yard. What happened to her, I don’t know. I also saw standing at the wall an old Jewish woman with a child, whom Szymkiewicz ordered me to shoot. When I refused, he wanted to take my PPSh. When I refused, he repeated the order for me to shoot three times, and when this didn’t work, he said to me that I am not a Pole because I don’t want to shoot at Jews.91
Szymkiewicz already had assaults and robberies on his record in 1937. “This man was a thief, he stole five [turkeys] from me,” said one of the witnesses. “He was a first-rate thief,” says another. “He stole a horse harness and sheepskin coats, for which the police were looking for him.” After a year on the inside in a prison in Kielce, he ran away to Germany, where he learned enough German that when he came to Jędrzejów in 1939 with the Germans, he worked for them as an interpreter. He not only became an informer for the gendarmerie—they say he filed over a hundred denunciations—but “he walked around in a German uniform with a swastika” and wore “a signet ring with a Death’s head [Totenkopf, skull and cross bones].” He also had German medals.
Father Szymon Zaporowski, the pastor of the parish in Cierno (Jędrzejów County) testified, “I can say that during the German occupation, Szymkiewicz cooperated with the Germans.”92 Szymkiewicz supposedly participated in an attack on this priest’s flat. In Złotniki he pointed out to the German police two people who were keeping Polish military horses. They were both arrested. The murder of a Polish officer, Pietraszewski, who was hiding out in the parish, is also ascribed to him. His wife, whom he abandoned to marry another woman, also gave detailed testimony.
The testimony of Szymkiewicz’s fellow prisoner, Herman Łatas, suggests two paths of inquiry that have not been followed until now. First, Łatas heard Szymkiewicz’s story about how he shot a Jewish woman during the Kielce pogrom and “took from her a larger amount of gold,” while during the investigation, he admitted to killing her with a stake.93
FIGURE 34. Pallbearers carrying the coffins of the Kielce pogrom victims. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leah Lahav.
Second, Szymkiewicz could have had something in common with the man in battle dress, whom witnesses of the railway action describe as a pogromszczyk active on the Częstochowa-Kielce route: “Szymkiewicz used to say that in 1946 he was returning from the West by train in the direction of Kielce and met a functionary from the WUBP [Provincial Office of Public Security] in the compartment. After exchanging a couple of words with him, Szymkiewicz and his brother-in-law threw him off the train, . . . [and he] got himself killed. This incident occurred on the Częstochowa-Kielce route.”94
Rescue
In the historiography of the pogrom, opposition to anti-Jewish violence is not often emphasized. But when this motif does appear, it is constructed according to the wartime narrative about the Righteous Among the Nations.
Jakub Aleksandrowicz speaks: “Then I saw one righteous man, a young man, blonde, a railwayman, who came out to the crowd and said . . : ‘What more do you want from these poor people? How many of them are left?’ The crowd started to shout: ‘Hand over this treasonous slave of the Jews to us. Let’s show him.’ The frightened kid ran away into the railway booth.”95 According to Bruno Piątek’s account, his reaction, as well as that of engineer Elżanowski, were similar. They happen to find themselves near the station by chance. They both shouted, “People, what are you doing? Aren’t you afraid of God?” The crowd answered their question by calling them “Jewish lackeys.”
Most observers speak of the pogrom with horror, including those like Jadwiga Lipińska, a cook at the police station at 45 Sienkiewicza Street, who saw the little messenger boy Krawczyk beating a barely standing Jew with a stake;96 PPS member Edward Abramowicz, who observed the pogrom from a window at 51A Sienkiewicza Street;97 or Professor Matej, former prisoner of a concentration camp, who was on his way to the Land Office on Sienkiewicza before noon when he witnessed the stoning of Izaak Prajs.98
Others, like Stanisław Pińkowski, who confided in Father Śledzianowski, underscore their own sensitivity: “At some point a young Jewish girl broke free from those thugs! Oh, what a beautiful young girl! She jumped into the little river and tried to get across to the other side. They started to hit her with stones. She staggered and fell. Blood flowed along with the current of the Silnica. I am sensitive, I suddenly felt sick. I walked away, because I couldn’t watch what they were doing to those Jews any more.”99
Several rescue stories appear in Jerzy Daniel’s book. The first was told by one Frania Kahn, who is otherwise not identified in the book and about whom nothing else is known. According to her story, Kahn was in the kibbutz and was chased out into the yard along with the others. She was on the ground, having been hit by a stick when one of the pogromszczycy came up to her. She was friends with his sister. His family had recently taken over a “post-Jewish” apartment in the Herszkowicz family apartment building on Sienkiewicza Street. He started to move the wounded girl on her side with his feet, in the direction of the lavatory. “He shoved me into a corner and says, ‘Don’t move, because they’ll kill you.’”100
Another story recorded by Daniel concerns the Kielce mortgage registry office. On the day of the pogrom, the author writes, “Ludwik Kutrzeba, who resided in the office, had the presence of mind to close its doors. . . . He was up against a pack in a brave mood, but faced them, while behind him were a dozen or so clients paler than the [pages of] the land and mortgage registers.”101
Ida Gerstman, who was there that day, presents the events at the mortgage registry office completely differently:
At 9:00 in the morning [on July 4] in the mortgage registry office, I heard from a Jew with whom I was acquainted that a crowd had surrounded the building on 7 Planty, where the Jewish Committee and Kibbutz were located and where the repatriates returning from Russia lived. In this same office, Poles were saying that Jews were throwing grenades at the people to defend themselves. A clerk more than once tried to chase me away and a few other Jews, among them was Marek Kauner (Kraków, 48 Wybickiego Street, apt. 3; presently seriously wounded in the hospital; as a result of the excesses in Kielce in the hospital in Łódź). I asked him to let me hide under a bench, but it was in vain, since they claimed they were closing for the day and that we have to leave. But they could have, in good faith, locked us in the office and in this way saved many Jews. Entreaties didn’t help. At 2:30 p.m. the director drove us out, because someone could see us there. I was very afraid to go into the street, since I had heard that they were attacking and murdering Jews. But I didn’t have a choice.102
The Rozenkranc couple had a different experience. Miriam Rozenkranc saw the pogrom from the window of a building on Sienkiewicza Street. She was afraid that her husband would leave work and share the fate of those being murdered.
Later I learned that my husband really did want to come home at noon, she relates. But along the way he ran into Mrs. Maria Zamoyska, the daughter of the director. She grabbed him and turned him around; she said they are killing Jews and . . . that he should return to the factory. My husband asked her what happened, and she said, “They’re killing Polish children in the basement of 7 Planty.”
When my husband heard there was talk about a basement at 7 Planty, he said to her father, the director of the factory, “We built stoves there, sir. Did you see any basement there?” The director answered, “No. A river flows there and there is no basement.” He told his daughter this, but she says to my husband, “You, sir, are different. You wouldn’t kill anyone. But Jews killed a Polish child.”
Miriam Rozenkranc’s commentary: “I thought about this a lot. After all, we are speaking about a noble woman who saved my husband’s life. If he had come home, he would have been killed. I wondered how such a woman, who belonged to the elites, could think this way. Maybe she thought that you don’t kill people free of sin. If they are killed, then it is a sign that they deserved it.”
And she gives an example from wartime, when both she and her husband were put in a German labor camp.
My husband had a close friend. He was the director of a power plant. He was a very close friend. . . . When he found out that we were working in the labor camp, he snuck into the camp and found us. I was very moved, and he said, “My wife dreamt that the Rozenkranc family was hungry. I came to help you.” I was moved to tears.
When my husband returned to Kielce after the war, he didn’t know where to go. His first steps took him to Mr. Bolesław Szyja. He was in prison clothing, had lice, was in worn-out shoes. When Mr. Szyja saw him, he took him in like a brother. He drew him a hot bath, gave him pajamas. He made breakfast for him and gave him a bed so he could rest.
But during the pogrom in Kielce, Mr. Szyja didn’t come to us. After a few days he came and said, “I have come to you to ask for forgiveness, because what happened is beyond comprehension.”
In the neighborhood where he lived, all the women had run outside and shouted “Where are our children?”
He said, “Just imagine, to our misfortune, our younger daughter, Wanda, was out of the house. My wife and I were terrified and we also went to look [for her]. But the little girl was sitting outside and laughing. I am very sorry that I didn’t come.”103
Notes
1. Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 110.
2. See Benedict Anderson’s seminal work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
3. See Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s “The Figure of the Bloodsucker in Polish Religious, National and Left-Wing Discourse, 1945–1946,” in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 173–220.
4. Shulamit Volkov, “Antysemityzm jako kod kulturowy,” in Ze sobą, obok siebie, przeciwko sobie: Polacy, Żydzi, Austriacy, Niemcy w XIX i na początku XX w., ed. Barbara Breysach et al. (Kraków: Znak, 1995), 26.
5. Mary Douglas, “Witchcraft and Leprosy: Two Strategies of Exclusion,” Man: New Series 26, no. 4 (1991): 723, 726.
6. Roberta Senechal de La Roche, “Collective Violence as Social Control,” Sociological Forum 11, no. 1 (1996): 97–98.
7. Werner Bergman, “Ethnic Riots in Situations of Loss of Control: Revolution, Civil War, and Regime Change as Opportunity Structures for Anti-Jewish Violence in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe,” in Control of Violence: Historical and International Perspectives on Violence in Modern Societies, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer et al. (New York: Springer, 2011), 488.
8. On the dramatic structure of communitas, see “Communitas of Violence. The Kielce Pogrom as a Social Drama” in Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries, 247–78.
9. Władysław Czerwiński testified that he heard a woman say to Stanisław Rurarz, “Why does Rurarz walk around in such pants? Why don’t you pull the worsted ones off the Jew [that is, pants sewn of high-quality wool yarn], and toss those,” (AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 1).
10. SL 9.11.
11. While being interrogated on July 7, 1946, Gardziński said: “When they dragged out the Jew, they clapped their hands and shouted, but I didn’t hear what they were shouting” (AIPN Ki_0_13_2491, k. 8).
12. SL 5.26.
13. SL 9.11.
14. From Stefan Grzywaczewski’s testimony during the second Kielce investigation, February 19, 1992 (APIN Ki_53_4_45, cz.1, k. 231).
15. Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 269. The remainder of this chapter is inspired by Tambiah’s reflections in chapter 10, “Entering a Dark Continent.”
16. See 5.28E (Dobroszek), SL 5.30 (Świtek), and 5.22C (Tchórz).
17. SL 5.31A.
18. A similar situation is described in SL 8.13: “The women . . . did not allow these soldiers to enter the building, even though the first row of these soldiers had their rifles with bayonets aimed at [them. The] soldiers, seeing the women’s attitude, retreated.”
19. See SL 4.11B (Henryk Rybak) and SL 5.5 (Grynbaum’s report).
20. SL 1.12.
21. SL 3.32.
22. SL 5.27B.
23. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Actions in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1974), 111.
24. David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecutions of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
25. SL 5.4.
26. SL 13, in particular k. 61.
27. SL 13, in particular k. 49. See Mojżesz Cukier’s testimony in SL 2.1.1.6.
28. SL 13, in particular k. 23.
29. Arnon Rubin, The Kielce Pogrom: Spontaneity, Provocation or a Country-Wide Scheme?, Vol. 6, Facts and Fictions about the Rescue of the Polish Jewry during the Holocaust (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2004), 310–13. See also SL 1.26.
30. See J. Alpert in D. Shtokfish, ed. About Our House Which Was Devastated: Memorial Book of Kielce (Tel Aviv: Kielce Societies in Israel and in the Diaspora, 1981).
31. See Antoni Frankowski’s testimony (SL 3.25).
32. According to testimony of Jechiel Alpert in Pinchas Cytron, ed., Sefer Kielts: Toldot Kehilat Kielts (Tel Aviv: Organization of Kielce Immigrants, 1957). See also SL 2.1.1.2B.
33. See Jechiel Alpert’s testimony (SL 2.1.1.2).
34. See Adolf Berman’s report (SL 1.26).
35. See SL 5.24E.
36. Luba Librowitz (neé Belzberg) was born May 8, 1920, in Grójec. See Luba Librowitz, Interview 34921, USC Shoah (November 2, 1997).
37. Józef Krauze, Interview 44246, USC Shoah (July 22, 1998).
38. SL 8.11.
39. See Gutowski’s interrogation dated August 9, 1996 (AG-PK, t. 6, k. 1170–74). See also Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006), 1:387.
40. Circumstantial evidence points to Cecilia Dubisz, about whom Rafael Blumenfeld spoke in 1996: “One Polish woman lived there. I said that on the same day she came out and shouted, defending [us] from the pogromists. She saved Jews during the Holocaust and married one of them. She lived with her husband in that building. I don’t remember her name.” (See Miłosz (raw footage).). See also SL 2.1.1.32B.
41. AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 1, k. 66.
42. See raw and unused footage for Marcel Łoziński’s Świadkowie (Video-Nova, 1988). The same person, introduced as Cecylia Ostrowska, is Jerzy Daniel’s interlocutor in Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu: Rzecz o kieleckim pogromie 4 lipca 1946 (Kielce: Scriptum, 1996), 86. See also Jerzy Morawski and Piotr Pytlakowski, “Mroczne stany,” Przegląd Tygodniowy 228, no. 32 (1986).
43. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds, 275–76.
44. A number of examples are described in AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1_4_2.
45. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds, 276. Tambiah references Georg Simmel.
46. Tambiah, 276.
47. Tambiah, 277.
48. See Dlaczego Kielce [Why Kielce], uncatalogued manuscript that is an extended version of Józef Różański’s report (listed as SL 1.14) (AIPN BU_1572_4051, k. 60).
49. Quotation from SL5.24C.
50. See SL 1:26 and SL 7: Firefighters.
51. SL 5.24C.
52. SL 8.12.
53. SL 4.13.
54. SL 8.13.
55. Arieh Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 181.
56. See Jakub Aleksandrowicz’s testimony in Miłosz (raw footage).
57. Herszel Joskowicz, Interview 17467, USC Shoah (July 16, 1996).
58. Andrzej Drożdżeński, “Kielce 4/7/1946,” Polityka 1990.
59. Marcin Zaremba, Entangled in Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944–47, trans. Maya Latynski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022). Citations throughout refer to the Polish edition, Wielka trwoga. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys. Polska 1944–1947 (Kraków: ISPAN and ZNAK, 2012).
60. See “Division of Labor: The Murder of Prajs” in chapter 9.
61. Klaus Theweleit, Śmiech morderców. Breivik i inni. Psychogram przyjemności zabijania, trans. Piotr Stronciwilk (Warsaw: PWN, 2016), 60.
62. See Captain Zygmunt Braude’s account in Krzysztof Kaczmarski, Pogrom, którego nie było (Rzeszów: IPN, 2011), 135.
63. Bengt Ankarloo, “Sweden: The Mass Burnings (1668–1676),” in Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 295.
64. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974).
65. AIPN Ki_53_4744, k. 279.
66. See Slavoj Žižek, Przekleństwo fantazji, trans. Adam Chmielewski (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2001), 108.
67. Photograph by Julia Pirotte, skan: _MGL1783.Dzieci. See chapter 2 (“Funeral”) where the rabbi, Colonel Dawid Kahane, is quoted about the “crooked smile” that accompanied the funeral procession to the cemetery.
68. See SL 9.7A.
69. SL 9.10B, also SL 5.8A.
70. Eugeniusz Krawczyk’s testimony (AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 1, 41).
71. SL 2.1.1.28A. Bogusław (Bogumił) Klamka was born March 3, 1931, in Busk Zdrój, son of Jan and Adela neé Kaczmarek.
72. AIPN Ki_0_13_2588, k. 7.
73. SL 11.6.
74. SL 5.24K.
75. See “Children on Planty” above.
76. See “A Men’s Shoe Store” in chapter 1. This account cannot be verified because the investigation materials do not include an interview with Gienia Samborska, who was taken to a Łódź hospital immediately after the operation to remove the dead fetus. Confirmation of the incidents with the scouts can be found in Sprawozdanie brygady instruktorów KC PPR z pobytu w województwie kieleckim w czasie od 4–15 lipca 1946 (AAN, KC PPR, 295/IX-19); reprinted in Bożena Szaynok and Zenon Wrona, “Pogrom kielecki w dokumentach,” Dzieje Najnowsze 33, no. 3 (1991): 85. There we read: “A scout was seen drowning his scout knife in the body of a murdered Jew.”
77. AIPN BU_00231_137_2, k. 90, 92.
78. AIPN BU_00231_137_4, k. 97.
79. See the report to the director of Department V of the MBP on the situation in the ZHP, dated January 1946 (AIPN BU_00231_137_2, k. 89–92).
80. See the report to the director of Department V of the MBP on the situation in the ZHP, dated January 1946 (AIPN BU_00231_137_2, k. 93).
81. Quotation from SL 5.6D.
82. SL 5.6E and 5.6F.
83. SL 5.6A.
84. Here the deponent means “handlebars.” He is confusing the words kierownica (steering wheel or handlebars) with kierownik (director).
85. SL 13, in particular k. 34.
86. SL 5.6G.
87. AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2.
88. AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2, k. 19.
89. SL 5.3B.
90. SL 13, in particular k. 54.
91. See SL 5.22C. Szymkiewicz’s exploits were also witnessed by Sylwester Klimczak, who arrested him.
92. AIPN Ki_127_373, k. 12.
93. SL 5.22J, in particular k. 53.
94. SL 5.22I, in particular k. 7. An astonishing ineptitude was shown by the investigating authorities, who were unable to verify this report. We read: “No report has been received about a man killed by falling out or being thrown from a train on the Częstochowa-Kielce line” (k. 117). This is not only proof of the lack of professionalism on the part of the investigating authorities but also proof of the effective erasure of events from the recent past. Compare the description of at least six murders on the train from Lublin to Wroclaw on the Kielce-Częstochowa route in a report to the CKŻP (SL 9.7J).
95. SL 2.1.1.33.
96. AIPN Ki_41–520, t. 1, cz. 1, k.13. See also SL 5.18E.
97. SL 8.1.
98. SL 8.2.
99. Stanisław Pińkowski, born July 11, 1925. According to Jan Śledzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Jedność, 1998), 60.
100. Daniel, Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu, 9.
101. Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu, 91.
102. Quotation from SL 9.2.
103. Miriam Rozenkranc’s testimony as presented here is a combination of paraphrasing and direct quote of SL 2.1.1.30.