The Custodians of Freedom Square
The Store versus the “Chop Shop”
The social network that Kielce folk talk about during post-pogrom interrogations is made up of streets where people meet; the stores, barber shops, and salons where they hear the latest gossip; and the restaurants where they enter into contracts and celebrate. Under certain conditions, however, the functions of these places and activities change just as decisively as Kielce changed at the moment of the pogrom.
Accounts from the shops of Kielce on the day of the pogrom reveal that the rumor about transfusions was the big news of the day. Tadeusz Seweryński said, “While buying nails at the store, I started to rush the shop assistant to hurry up and give me the nails. The shop assistant told me that I should leave her alone: ‘Don’t you see, sir, what’s going on? Jews murdered eleven children. . . . I have to close the store.’”1
Ignacy Herman: “Bootmakers, shoemakers, and, of course, customers came to this [men’s shoe] store. I couldn’t see any of them, but I heard them say, with blood boiling and through gritted teeth, that the Jews needed to be completely finished off, something Hitler didn’t do.”2
Jakub Aleksandrowicz is at the hosiery shop on Sienkiewicza Street. The shop owner says, “What are you doing here, sir? Don’t you know what’s going on with the Jews? They killed our children.”3
The pogromszczyk Józef Pokrzywiński, convicted in the July trial: “Yesterday, around 11:00 a.m., dairy-women coming from the city were in front of my little house, or in front of my wife’s store, saying that something was going on in the city; that children had been murdered by Jews. Some women said there were eleven children, others said fourteen.”4
When a hunt begins, everyday activities like a chat on the street, or a visit to the barber, to the store or a restaurant, cease to be what they were before. Instead, they become a chance to “tip someone off,” “unload loot,” celebrate a holdup with a drink. The places where these activities take place also change their names, borrowing from criminal jargon: chop shop, dive, den, job.
Under what conditions does a regular shop become a “chop shop”? It happens when Apajewski, a soldier in the training company of the Internal Security Troops (WBW), sells tea and soap stolen from Planty to a shopkeeper, and when Chojnacki and Kanas exchange canned goods and marmalade for cigarettes.5 Or when policeman Krawczyk sells all his spoils there, namely his “rice in a little sack; tea, small, Russian, five cans; some nuts; some figs; two shirts; two towels; one pair of men’s undershorts; a blanket; and a shaver with two razors.”
Someone will say that at that time, after the war, everything in the stores came from looting. That’s true, but only “post-Jewish” things went unquestioned: “Two ladies were there behind the counter. I offered to sell them rice and figs, as well as tea. The women asked if the merchandise came from the Jews, to which I answered ‘yes.’ There were 6 kg of rice, I got 12,000 złotys for it, that is, 200 złotys per 1 kg. I got 50 złotys for the figs, and I also got 50 złotys for the tea. After they paid me, they told me that when I have more merchandise, I should bring it to them and they’ll buy it.”6
Stefan Franczak, a brown-haired man with a pockmarked face, who was tried for incitement, has a lot to say on the topic of what else you can do in a store. After leaving his job at the city sanitation services during work hours, he ran into the two Dąbrowski brothers, tailors by profession, and went with them to the shop on First of May Street. “There we drank around a liter of vodka, of which I drank over half a liter.”7 Only when “fortified” in this way does Franczak go to Planty Street.
The custom of drinking in stores had to have been common in Kielce, because a different pogromszczyk, namely policeman Pustuła, whom we’ve already met, also reported this.8 He stopped in a store for cigarettes but didn’t refuse the refreshment offered to him. “Present in the shop: [the owner] Kwiatkowski; Rysielewski, the printer from the Office of Public Security (UBP); and a girl from our parts, named Nowak Stanisława. [At] the counter, Kwiatkowski poured us all some vodka into shot glasses and we drank about half a liter.”
At Błaszczyk’s Restaurant
The pogromszczycy also drink in restaurants. In one restaurant on the day of the pogrom, Szymkiewicz, the guard from the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) who was later sentenced to life in prison, ordered 100 ml of vodka to go. In a subsequent testimony, this 100 ml will increase, because in 1946 intoxication is considered a mitigating circumstance.
The pogromszczyk Edward Jurkowski admits that he drank a little more than usual, but that’s because his wife was in the hospital, and he wanted “to visit her in a good mood.”9 Internal Security Corps (KBW) soldier Jan Pompa will also stop off at a restaurant to calm his nerves before returning to the police barracks; he’ll drink three glasses. After spending a short time on Planty Street, where people are beating Jews, Zdzisław Świtek, a butcher, will go “for vodka with his brother and two guys from the Łaszcz family.” A liter of vodka later, they will return to Planty Street.
The pogromszczycy also quench their thirst in Stanisław Błaszczyk’s restaurant (it is probably a coincidence that the owner of this restaurant has the same last name as the kidnapped Henio). The restaurant is located across from the police station where the patrols that set off to Planty Street are based. This restaurant is truly an exceptional establishment. We may recall that its owner, formerly of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ), offered his buddy Sierant from the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa, AL), an exchange of services depending on who won the war. This exchange is in full swing today: supplies for the establishment come from looting that takes place under the watchful eye of the County Office of Public Security (PUBP).
Kielce is hungry and thirsty. In the fall of 1946, there are not only nineteen restaurants in the city, but also ten bars, six beerhouses, two snack bars, two teahouses (with liquor licenses), six pastry shops, and sixteen eateries.10 At the time, bandits like Władysław Dziewiór (pseud. Skazaniec) opened cheap bars here. Dziewiór is presently in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and once robbed estates and presbyteries as a member of the “Barabasz” group. Two death sentences hung over his head: one issued by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), and another by the National Armed Forces (NSZ). Before he became an usher in the Żeromski Theater, business dealings connected him with one Konstanty Korniłow, the owner of a restaurant beyond Planty Street at the corner of a street called Starowarszawskie Przedmieście. Next to it, Dziewiór first opened a kiosk at 50 First of May Street, and then a fruit shop, “where he engaged in the illegal sale of alcohol products.”11
Policemen and Ubeks (UB functionaries) sold information there and smuggled secret messages from inmates of the prison on Zamkowa Street. Another dive bar, located near the Bazary neighborhood, belonged to Franciszek Niewiadomski. On market days tradesmen and merchants pop in. Officer Sędek’s brother-in-law, Bernard Urbański from Bodzentyńska Street, delivers the cold cuts. But the most popular beverages are the vodka “with the red label” (for 290 złotys a liter) and the cheaper one “with the gray label” (for 235 złotys).
However, only two establishments count when it comes to the logistics of the pogrom: Stanisław Błaszczyk’s bar across from the police station on Sienkiewicza Street and Piotr Adamczyk’s bar located at 17 Aleksandra Street, where four Kielce residents will plan and then raise their glasses to the attack on Rywka Fisz’s apartment.
For now, we are at Błaszczyk’s restaurant, where the pogromszczycy from Planty are quenching their thirst. This dive is famous for its good service. It has a family-like atmosphere and the owner often sits down with his patrons. On the table are “mom and pop,” or in other words, spirits mixed with honey, head cheese, blood sausage, and bread. The better patrons spend a fortune here; during recent gatherings attended by employees of the County Office of Public Security (PUBP), the bills ran as high as 100,000 złotys.12
Józef Dawiec, a construction foreman, is a regular at this bar, which is sometimes called “the deli.” Instructor Przeździecki of the provincial committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR) will testify that on the day of the pogrom he saw Dawiec as he “urged soldiers to take part in the action against the Jews, saying, ‘We’ll start, and you’ll finish.’” Then he treated them to vodka.13 “I stress,” says Przeździecki, “that cit. Dawiec often repeated these little get-togethers with the soldiers, constantly urging them to go drinking with him. . . . I saw it with my own eyes . . . when the crowd beat the aforementioned [Jewish man, woman, and small child], that’s when I saw Dawiec, who stood at the corner of Sienkiewicza and Planty, inciting the crowd and the soldiers to murder Jews.”14
Once arrested, Dawiec effectively defends himself by saying things that his interrogators would prefer not to hear: he drops the names of his vodka-drinking companions from the Office of Public Security (UBP). Could it be that this name-dropping is an act of subtle blackmail, threatening to expose misappropriations of detainees’ personal effects by members of the UB? One way or another, it turns out that while Lieutenant Grynbaum was risking his neck on Planty Street, his colleagues from the UB were ordering another beer at Błaszczyk’s restaurant. Dawiec says, “The three of us, that is, me, Szlefarski, and Roman, the administrator from the County Office of Public Security (PUBP) [the bureau’s bookkeeper], went to Błaszczyk’s, the owner of the deli, for a beer. After drinking a 250 ml bottle of vodka and three bottles of beer, we went out into the street, where, meanwhile, a soldier came up to us asking where he could get a drink of water, so I—taking him to Błaszczyk’s—treated him to a bottle of beer. Going out into the street a second time, I noticed a lieutenant from the WUBP from Kielce . . . and with him and Szlefarski, I stepped into Błaszczyk’s a third time for a beer. After drinking three bottles of beer, we left the deli, each going our own way.”
One of the soldiers whom Dawiec treated to a drink was Zenobiusz Kołpacki, accused of stabbing a gravely wounded Jewish man with a bayonet. According to trial records, it appears that “[Kołpacki] went to drink some water and ran into a few other friends of friends [t]here. One of them, Tkaczyk Adam, noticed that the blade of the ac[cus] ed’s bayonet was bloodied to a length of 5 to 6 cm, and he asked the ac[cus]ed Kołpacki why his bayonet was red, and the ac[cus]ed Kołpacki responded, ‘I don’t know, I was in the yard, where there was a job to do.’ And when Tkaczyk reprimanded him and reminded him of his accountability for such behavior, the accused explained that the Jew was lying there, alive, suffering terribly, and ‘my conscience is such that I couldn’t watch him suffering, and I killed him off with the bayonet.’”15
Division of Labor: The Murder of Prajs
Dawiec spent a long time in custody, until the end of November 1946. The reason could have been that he was suspected of participating in a robbery between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. as the excesses were spreading across the city.
“We’ll start, and you’ll finish” could have been the basic formula for the attack in which the crowd and the police participated. The division of labor during the pogrom relied on the crowd pointing out where Jews lived and a man in uniform going to conduct a search, also called a “job” (robota). Or the opposite: “The army dragged Jews from the apartment block into the hands of the animal-like population, which murdered them in a bestial way. The people shouted, ‘Long live the Polish Army,’ . . . [and] then you could see satisfaction among the soldiers and a greater enthusiasm for dragging out Jews.”16
Society does not create a pogrom on its own. A pogrom also creates society. Society says to the authorities, “Major, sir, if you were a really cool guy and didn’t say anything, then we could finish them off on our own.”17 It is difficult for the people’s authorities to refuse such a request, since the authorities place such an emphasis on serving society.
Jechiel Alpert says, “They went from house to house. Usually it was the police. The crowd would not have taken the liberty, they would have been afraid. There was this incident, a young man, [Icek] Prajs, had arrived in Kielce a week before the events—they dragged him out of an apartment and killed him.”18
On July 4 at least five such attacks were recorded in Kielce. Later, we will hear about Rywka Fisz and the attacks that occurred in the Bazary neighborhood. For now, let’s hear more about Prajs and the Kersz couple.
The wife of photographer Zygmunt Sikora says Izaak Prajs was staying with her friend Mrs. Pogorzelska (née Frejzingier) at the time: “He came here to her place and was murdered at the gate. And that’s not all, the poor things blocked themselves in with a wardrobe, because there was such a ruckus at the gate, such shouting, because they knew she was a Jew.”19 The last name of the victim appears in yet another account: “Prajs, who returned after seven years from Russia with the rank of Lieutenant, was staying at the apartment of a certain family, the Pogorzelskis (converted Jews), at 72 Sienkiewicza Street, and they dragged him out of there onto the street, and he was bludgeoned with rods and bats so much so that his face transformed into a chunk of meat.”20
Dora Dajbog describes the same attack. As we recall, she was the one who survived the pogrom thanks to a ruse: she had initially been led away from Planty Street by Andrzej Markiewicz, an employee of Department IV of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP). “He led me to Sienkiewicza Street and ordered me to go by myself, that I was now safe. When this man walked away from me, crowds of people followed me. Some said that I was a Jew, whereas others denied it, saying that I was a Pole. Walking along Sienkiewicza, I met a guard standing in front of the station near Focha Street. I wanted him to let me in, since I thought he could save my life there, however, this guard immediately asked me if I was a Jew. I answered that I was a Pole, but that my identity papers were at home on Sienkiewicza Street no. 72. This guard went with me in order to check my papers. I entered the aforementioned apartment with this soldier. A Polish woman lived there, my acquaintance [Mrs. Pogorzelska], so she showed her papers, and I said that the soldier who led me [Markiewicz] had taken my papers and, in the crowd, hadn’t returned them to me. This Polish acquaintance didn’t say anything to me or to this military officer about me being a Jew, and that’s why I survived. A Jewish man lived in this same stairwell, and the military officer took him out with him and crowds of people bludgeoned him in the head. At one point more military men came and asked if there were any men in the apartment; we answered that there weren’t any, and they left.”21
The testimony of Adam Bugajski, the custodian at 69 Sienkiewicza Street, undoubtedly refers to this same situation. At 2:00 p.m. he was standing out front with his wife and their neighbor, Józefa Bilawska, who lived in building no. 71. “At that moment two soldiers were walking by, talking about how there were also Jews living in the building at 71 Sienkiewicza and that sometimes they might have weapons. Hearing this, I turned to them and said that there were only Jewish women and they didn’t have any weapons.”22 The person conducting the interrogation, however, has a different opinion on the topic of the custodian’s behavior, suggesting that he was trying to persuade the soldiers to intervene: “Why did you point out to the soldiers that Jewish women lived in building no. 71 and that they needed to be driven out?” Bugajski strongly denies this.23
At about the same time Miriam Rozenkranc, who lived in building no. 71, was looking out the window:
My acquaintance, Mrs. Dajbog, was walking by with a child in her arms. She was a Jew. The whole crowd started to run after her and scream, “A Jew with a child!” She started to yell, to explain, “I am not a Jew, leave me alone.” Suddenly, I heard a voice on the street saying in Polish: “Leave her alone. She’s not a Jew. Don’t you see that the child has light-colored hair?” They left her alone, and she—wanting to hide—went to building 73 [actually, no. 72]. She showed common sense, because Mrs. Pogorzelska lived there; she was a Jew, but had converted even before the war. She went in there, and the crowd went after her to see where she was going. I heard the sound of footsteps and the stomping of feet, as if a thousand people were walking by. My entire body trembled. After fifteen minutes, I heard the sounds of footsteps turning around and going down the stairs.
I was wondering what happened, and I went up to the window, and through the thin curtain I looked outside to see what was happening in the street. I saw Mr. Prajs—the son of the Hotel Polski owner—walking out in front. He had returned from Russia a few days before. I myself had spoken with him that morning. At first he went slowly, normally. When he turned his head around and saw the crowd, he started to run away. When he started to run away, they ran after him and threw him on the ground. And it is difficult to describe what my eyes saw. Never in my life will I forget what I saw. They beat him with clubs, stones; anything they had in their hands, they threw at his head. I heard his screams. I felt the pain. I heard his moans and I moaned along with him. When silence fell, I understood that he was no longer alive. I saw a man bend over. I think he was from the police, he had a uniform on. I saw him take something out of Prajs’s hand. It seems that it was a watch. I couldn’t see, because I saw him from the back. Then I saw that they were bending over and pulling something off his feet. Then I saw that they were searching through his pockets.24
It is possible that the account given by middle-school teacher Edward Matej also refers to Prajs’s murder. At 11:30 a.m. Matej was walking down Sienkiewicza Street. He saw that from the direction of the railway station, several young people were chasing a man along the middle of the street and hitting him with their fists in the face and head, as well as kicking him. The man who was being beaten was covered in blood and was running in the direction of the center of town. Suddenly, from the direction of the railway station, a man around thirty years old came up: “Based on his clothes, I can say that he was a metalworker or railway blacksmith. He was holding an adjustable wrench that was around 40 cm long, and with this wrench he hit the Semite who was running away in the back of the head with full force. Under these blows, the persecuted man fell on the cobblestones, and then the whole bunch of inhuman creatures threw themselves at the man lying there and started to beat him with bats and canes, and to yell: ‘Kill the Jew!’ The man lying on the ground jumped up and started to run in the direction of the Provincial National Council, and behind him rushed a raging group made up of a variety of elements, including plenty of old women armed with all kinds of clubs, beating the unfortunate man as he staggered along the sidewalk. Unable to stand the sight, I turned my head. . . . I should mention that I, a former prisoner of concentration camps . . . had rarely seen . . . such sadism and bestiality.”25
The Kersz Murders
The target of another attack was Adam Stajman’s apartment, where his sister and brother-in-law, Mania and Herszel Kersz, were murdered. Because of changes in Kielce street names, this location variously appears in documents as either Piotrkowska Street or 71 First of May Street.
Here is the account given by Helena Kozieł, the landlady of the people who were murdered:
Beginning in January 1946, Stajman Abram lived as a subtenant at my place. In the middle of June 1946, Stajman’s sister moved in, also as a subtenant. On July 4, 1946, at four o’clock in the morning I left for Jędrzejów by train to the market. Left at home were Stajman Abram, his sister Maria, and Kersz Hersz, who often came to my apartment as he was Stajman’s sister’s fiancé.
I returned from Jędrzejów that same day at 7:00 p.m. and saw that the building where I lived was surrounded by the army, the police, and the civilian population. When I came closer, the people started to shout, “Kill her, ’cause she’s harboring a Jew-lady.” At the same time, a police lieutenant started to check my identity papers and they searched my suitcase. . . . After searching my suitcase, I was ordered to stand to the side and all the policemen walked away from me.
After a while the police lieutenant returned to me with a major whose last name I don’t know [deputy commander of the provincial headquarters of the Kielce police, Gwiazdowicz]. This major asked me if I had my ID and who in the courtyard knew me, how long I had lived in this building. Next, I asked him if I could be allowed to enter the apartment and take clothes for my child. The major asked me if I had already been in the apartment. I answered that I had not yet been in, at which point he ordered me to go to the apartment, check it out, and report back to him.
Upon entering the apartment I saw Stajman’s sister, Maria, and her fiancé, Kersz Hersz, dead. Next, I noticed that things were missing, namely: three men’s suits, two men’s spring coats, and their entire wardrobe and four pairs of shoes, also three suitcases and [other] things. Whether these were things people had stolen or things the owners carried up into the attic before the murder, I can’t say, since I didn’t check right away, and the apartment was officially sealed. I’ll mention that some of my things are missing, like a pair of knee-high women’s boots, a blazer from a women’s suit, a women’s spring coat, and I haven’t yet checked what else. I did not recognize anyone from the crowd that took part directly in the robbery of property or in the murder of Jewish people.26
The second witness in the matter of this murder is Lieutenant Tadeusz Szeląg from the school for noncommissioned officers of the MO, whose individual testimony has survived in Hiding Place no. 2 (which we encountered in chapter 6). He recounts that at 2:20 p.m. he received an order from Commander Gwiazdowicz to go to Piotrkowska Street to disperse the crowd that had attacked the Jews who lived there.
After getting the situation under control, more or less a half hour [later], Major Gwiazdowicz left Piotrkowska Street, instructing me to keep order. Within the next hour and a half, I sent a liaison officer to Major Gwiazdowicz. At one moment, I stopped a young woman with two suitcases, who had been accosted by the people gathered. I tried to check her identity documents, but since she did not have the documents on her, I suggested that she wait for the arrival of Major Gwiazdowicz. . . . After talking to her and gathering information from neighbors, Major Gwiazdowicz determined that the aforementioned is named Kozieł Helena, res. of First of May Street, no. 71, apt. 14, that is, in the same apartment where, as it later turned out, the murdered Jewish family was located. After establishing the fact of the murders, Kozieł Helena reported to Major Gwiazdowicz that her co-tenants were dead. Most likely the above-mentioned married couple was murdered a couple of hours before we arrived, since the young murdered woman was in her nightgown, which would indicate that she was killed in the morning hours. Then Major Gwiazdowicz told me to hold back some of the police and to send the majority to the police battalion; I myself stayed where I was. Soon a truck approached, which took the corpses. A commission consisting of Lieutenant Martyński, Kielan, and Piecuch arrived in this vehicle and sealed off the apartment, at the same time transferring supervision to the Kielce police station. . . . With regard to Kozieł Helena, I checked the contents of her suitcases in her presence and that of witnesses, and found that in the suitcases there were around seven suits, two light-colored women’s coats, and one or two women’s dresses.27
Thanks to a letter that Maria Sztajman (Stajman) sent to the Katowice branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) in the 1990s, we know that the Mania Kersz who was killed on First of May Street was the sister of Maria’s father, Adam (Abram) Sztajman. Like her brother, Mania had also been in Auschwitz. The engaged couple perished, while Ms. Sztajman’s father and mother “miraculously survived.”28 There are no details in the letter pertaining to her family or to the circumstances under which her parents survived.
Social Networks of 1946
During the Kielce pogrom, shops and restaurants function as social networks through which flow vodka, murder, and robbery. We can learn about how one such network functions by studying a murder committed in Skarżysko in the fall of 1945, when the commander of the local police station, together with a shopkeeper, organized an attack on Jews who had previously owned a restaurant that was now being paid off by its new owners. To construct a network, you need a shop, a restaurant, and a policeman. The saleswoman knows who has money and where these people live. She will get her “share,” so she “sets them up.” The restaurateurs arrange for “entry” into the apartment. The policeman provides the “guards” and covers up the tracks.
It’s not so much a matter of individual holdups as it is about the systemic change taking place after the war. For example, the restaurateurs from Skarżysko are, in fact, already in possession of Jewish property but, like many, are still paying it off. Murdering the creditors eliminates this inconvenience. The saleswoman, Kazimiera Gzymek, talks about this: “Mr. and Mrs. Jedynak [the restaurateurs], who have a beer cellar in a building that had belonged to a Jewish family, made it easy for [the bandits] to enter into the surviving family members’ apartment. He [Jedynak] told [the bandits] that they should say that a little Jew from the East had arrived and wanted to stay the night. In my apartment the bandits were saying that Jedynak would be pleased because he would no longer have to pay arrears from the shop to the Jews.”29
In documents from the investigation, we find a precise explanation of the transformation of Jewish property into “post-Jewish” property. Police officer Tomaszewski explains, “This is precisely post-Jewish, because the five [Jews] were killed.”30 The condition for the transfer of property is thus the death of the owner.
But even earlier, already in 1942, Józef Mackiewicz noted a situation in which death was not necessary:
Right in the street, along the sidewalk, an old Jewish woman trudged along, hunched over under the weight of a bag on her back, dragging behind her with her left hand a long cabinet clock that chimed once in a while on the unevenness of the cobblestone. . . . Suddenly from out of the crowd, from the sidewalk into the street, a level-headed man with the stature and features of a Christian craftsman (he could have been, for example, a master carpenter), a man with a mustache, walked up to the Jewish woman and with a nod of the head gave the impression that he wants to help. The old woman stopped, and with a deep sigh placed the bag on the ground and lifted her eyes to the man - full of perhaps only feigned admiration. . . . The man easily threw the bag over his shoulder, took the clock with his other hand and . . . quickly walked away with this loot, disappearing into a side street.31
Jewish
According to a list published in 1938, twenty percent of Kielce properties (1,600 out of over 8,000) belonged to Jews.32 Some of these properties were built by affluent owners. This was the case, for example, of the Teatr Ludwika, as well as the nineteenth century Rottenberg kamienica (a type of residential tenement building common in Central European cities). They were usually located in the center of town on such streets as Sienkiewicza, Duża, Mała, and the Rynek (the main square).
Of the twelve adult residents who lived at 30 Sienkiewicza Street in 1936–1938, there were five people with Jewish names. The proportion was similar at 72 Sienkiewicza, evenly divided. The percentage of Jewish residents increases significantly in the kamienice located at numbers 52, 54, and 68 Sienkiewicza, where—respectively—60, 73, and 85 percent of the residents are Jewish.
But numbers and percentages do not speak to the imagination. They don’t really move us. What the wartime extermination of the Kielce Jews did to the fabric of the city only becomes clear when we consider that all the apartments or establishments from which Jews were displaced became occupied by non-Jewish Poles.
Let’s try to reconstruct the prewar Jewish presence on Kielce’s main street before the outbreak of World War II. This is not just a question of ownership but also of cultural contributions.
1 Sienkiewicza: Dr. U. Ajzenberg’s dental practice is located here.
4 Sienkiewicza: Herszkowicz’s construction supplies, as well as Fiszel’s coal and coke yard; the industrialist Janas Manela and his wife Estera, a dentist, also live here.
8 Sienkiewicza: Szmul Sender Kaner, a jeweler, lives here; his shop is located in apartment no. 22.
9 Sienkiewicza: Office of Doctor I. Lewin.
11 Sienkiewicza: Jewelry store, Uszer Kaner, a watchmaker.
12 Sienkiewicza: The kamienica of Gimpel Moszkowicz, a banker.
13 Sienkiewicza: Haberdashery, Joel Kopel.
14–16 Sienkiewicza: Mojżesz Rottenberg’s kamienica.
15 Sienkiewicza: Office of Dr. K. Zylbersztajn; J. Chrojen’s porcelain shop.
16 Sienkiewicza: Szyja Oksenhendler’s fabric store; Doba Rapaport’s sugar trade; Moszkowicz’s flour storehouse; Mauber’s currency exchange.
19 Sienkiewicza: Society of Jewish Merchants; Frajda Minc—confectionary.
20 Sienkiewicza: Singer Sewing Machine Company.
22 Sienkiewicza: Haberdashery, Pesla Gold; jewelry store, Sender Kaner.
23 Sienkiewicza: Dawid Rozenberg’s Banking House.
25 Sienkiewicza: “Pocztówka” (the Postcard), a stationery shop, bookstore, and print shop owned by Gustaw and Eleonora Gold-wasser; Pinkus Rodal’s haberdashery; the kamienica is owned by Szmul and Szymon Leśniewski.
27 Sienkiewicza: Sender and Josek Strosberg’s tobacco salon; also, producers of cigarette tubes.
28 Sienkiewicza: Kamienica of Aron Moszkowicz, director of the commercial bank.
29 Sienkiewicza: Broadcasting station “Radjo”—owned by Majloch Najmiller and Abram Wajncwajg.
30 Sienkiewicza, at the corner of Mała Street: “Gallux,” a ready-to-wear clothing warehouse located in a private home, that is, in the Kłodawskis’ kamienica (on the corner of Kilińskiego Street), run by Rachela Kestenberg (last name Wallich from her second marriage); the car company “Auto-Commerce”—which belongs to the Kahane brothers, Herman, Ignacy, and Maks—is located in the same building before the war; after the war it is located at no. 53/55.
32 Sienkiewicza: Teatr Ludwika and Hotel Polski, constructed in 1878–1879 by the entrepreneurs Ludwik Sztumpf, the Engemans (husband and wife from Szydłowiec), and the actor Józef Texel. Before the war, Szlomo Zelinger bought some shares from the Winnicki family. Zelinger was a Zionist and in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) during the war. He died in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, and his twenty-year-old daughter Danusia was killed by “Barabasz’s” partisans in the spring of 1944.33 But the history of the hotel doesn’t end here. The remaining shares belonged to the Prajs family, who perished in 1942 in the Kielce ghetto. Their son, Izaak Prajs—as we already know—was killed during the pogrom not far from here, at 72 Sienkiewicza Street.
32 Sienkiewicza (cont.): “Renard,” I. Wygodny, furs; Joel Ostrowicz, photography equipment.
35 Sienkiewicza: Dental office of Dr. Benjan Serwetnik; auto parts, A. Lewi.
36 Sienkiewicza: Mordka Fiszman’s travel agency, “Orbis.”
37 Sienkiewicza: Chaim Wakszlak’s, goldsmith workshop; Izrael Zilberman’s haberdashery; Emanuel Ellencweig (who studied in Germany) lived here.
38 Sienkiewicza: Benjamin Dawid Grünberg’s Hotel Victoria; Majer Opatowski’s lottery sales counter; the J. Wittlin law firm; B. Reich’s sheep skins.
39 Sienkiewicza: Szymon and Tobiasz Baum’s uniform sewing company, later bought out by Icek Frydman; after the war, under the ownership of Berek Frydman who was killed in the pogrom.
40 Sienkiewicza: United Lime Industry of Kielce, Moszek Sercarz and Leon Lewiński; dental office of Dr. O. Serwetnik; office of Dr. G.G.K. Harkawi.
41 Sienkiewicza: Constructed in 1903 by an Orthodox Jewish merchant from Chęciny, Mojżesz Garfinkel.
44 Sienkiewicza: “Rembrandt,” a photographer’s shop owned by Leib Mieczysław Goldfarb; Icek Albirt’s harberdashery.
45 Sienkiewicza: Wines, vodkas, liqueurs, Fajgla Pasymian; the kamienica belonged to Dawid Zylbersztajn.
49 Sienkiewicza: A. Weisenfreund law firm; D. Zylberman’s pharmacy.
50 Sienkiewicza: Coal trader C. M. Sztarkman.
51 Sienkiewicza: Dental office of B. Hirszon; the building was constructed by the abovementioned dentist Oskar Serwetnik;
52 Sienkiewicza: “Moderne,” a photographer’s shop belonging to Kopel Gringras; the kamienica was built on a parcel purchased from Natan Hassenbein, the property of Dawid Jasny, who sold it to Estera Kestenberg; located here were a school run by the Israeli Society for Assistance to the Poor, as well as the office of the Przedbórz steam sawmill.
53 and part of 54 Sienkiewicza: Property of Icek (Izydor) Kahane.
54 Sienkiewicza: Berek Rutman’s rental apartment building; fruit shop of H. Goldsztajn; auto parts, P. Goldberg; Łaja Rutman, sieves.
57 Sienkiewicza: Jakub Szetz’s three-story brick building.
58 Sienkiewicza: M. Sztosberg’s grocery store; Aron Pińczewski’s haberdashery.
60 Sienkiewicza: “Karpaty,” fuel trader M. Złoto.
61 Sienkiewicza: Moszek Zajfman, merchant.
65 Sienkiewicza: Office of the Zagórze limestone plants.
68 Sienkiewicza: Miriam Machtynger’s brothers live here, including Berek (clerk) and Szyja (barrel producer); also, a part of the building at 7 Planty Street belongs to their family.
71 Sienkiewicza: 75 percent of the kamienica is owned by Frajda Kahane and Fajwel Korona.
72 Sienkiewicza: Part of the kamienica belongs to Paula and Rajzla Bugajer.
74 Sienkiewicza: Half the lot belongs to Chaskiel Klajman.
77 Sienkiewicza: Sura Rajzla Zylbersztajn’s kamienica.
Post-Jewish
The acquisition of Jewish property by non-Jewish Kielce residents didn’t start after the war; it happened gradually, beginning as early as November 1939. Even before the Germans locked the Jews in the ghetto,34 they took away their property on Złota, Żytnia, Równa, Wspólna, Sienkiewicza, and other streets. Germans occupied some of the buildings, Poles others. Small Jewish shops and workshops operated until the beginning of 1941. Beginning in early 1941, businesses on Sienkiewicza, Wesoła, Ewangelicka, Kilińskiego, Duża, Szeroka, and other streets, as well as on Freedom Square (Plac Wolności), were closed down. They belonged to, among others, Juda Gutman, Chaim Bugajer, Perla Goldberg, Estera Rozenbaum, Henoch Strosberg, Chana Kajzer, Hersz Goldfarb, Szlama Rotsztajn, Hilel Weltman, and Jakub Apfelbaum. They were first taken over by German “trustees” (Treuhändler), but then, gradually, Poles started to take them over from the Germans. Eventually, Poles completely took over Jewish properties after the Germans left. The majority of Jewish stores, workshops, and apartments went into their hands.
According to Ryszard Miernik’s testimony, walls were knocked down in Jewish attics, chimneys were searched, and basements were dug up, all in hopes of finding gold. “They had buried a lot of sundry valuables: rings, gold, they liked gold. So when they were buying up this real estate, people found a lot. There was some one who had nothing and suddenly opened a restaurant. He probably found a can in a shed.”35
Not everyone, however, was so lucky. Most often, those Poles who appropriated “Jewish” property hit only on parchment “Talmuds,” as they called prayer scrolls. They used them to make tobacco pouches, shoe insoles, or booming drums for folk groups, instruments that fascinate musicologists to this day.36 Parchment was also used as a replacement for toilet paper.37
After the war Polish butchers and deli-meat producers no longer have any competition in the slaughterhouses on the main square that were built by Chaskiel Landau in 1871. On Bodzentyńska, Mała, Duża, and other streets stores and small shops sell the remnants of Jewish goods. In one shop, there are rope and twine, woodcutting saws, axes. In another, there are small, sophisticated handmade lace and fancy goods: buttons, hooks and eyes, snaps. In a third, shoemaker’s lasts, wagon parts, horse collars, wooden scythe handles.
As Ryszard Miernik writes, numerous Jewish items were on display in shopwindows that protruded low over the sidewalks: piles of cheap jewelry and buttons; broken eyeglasses; Havdalah spice boxes; yads, or pointers for reading the Torah; dented kiddush cups; a rabbi’s kittel or ceremonial robe with a sign “material for a costume”; a broken scale; a short jacket; pants; kippahs; candlesticks; barbershop and tailor tools. “In a word, there was everything that the Jews, [whom the Germans] used as dog-bait, didn’t manage to take with them.”38
Trade in other people’s property triggered what the literary historian and critic Kazimierz Wyka called a disconnected economy—morally disconnected, and disconnected from the community. It wasn’t so much about trade, wrote Wyka, as it was about carrying out “pouncing on loot, with satiated purring in between.”39 The Polish third estate, the petite bourgeoisie, came into being as the result of an inertial entry into the space vacated by the Jews. As Wyka writes: “The baptized, in place of the unbaptized” and “The guilt and the crime are on the Germans, the keys and the cash are for us.”40
A conversation between a judge and one of the murderers of Rywka Fisz and her son, recorded in a court transcript from the July trial, illustrates this state of affairs.
JUDGE ŁUKASIK: What were the defendant’s assets before the war?
DEFENDANT NOWAKOWSKI: It wasn’t mine, it was my parents’.
JUDGE ŁUKASIK: So how did you come by all that you have?
DEFENDANT NOWAKOWSKI: I received a payment for the house.
JUDGE ŁUKASIK: But wasn’t that left behind by other citizens?
DEFENDANT NOWAKOWSKI: It was post-German. I received it from the Polish government.
JUDGE ŁUKASIK: And whose was it before that?
DEFENDANT NOWAKOWSKI: German.
JUDGE ŁUKASIK: And before it was German?
DEFENDANT NOWAKOWSKI: Jewish.41
The Custodians’ Uprising
A trap was set for the freshly minted kamienicznicy, or residential tenement owners. The law regarding abandoned property formally made them only administrators of the acquired property, its custodians. Already during the winter of 1945–1946, they find out exactly what this means. When it snows, they have to get up at night to shovel. They have to manage to whitewash the gutters before May 1. Year round they are supposed to sweep the courtyard, clear the septic tank and remove the trash, open the gate for tenants coming home late at night, and force other tenants to fork over the rent.
Many of those who are interrogated after the pogrom own either shops or residential buildings, but not everyone is completely certain of this. Antoni Pasowski, for example, has two buildings, but he hides this information during the first interrogation.42 He lives at 8 Podwalna Street, but he is also the custodian of the building at no. 6, which he owns together with Jan Dygnarowicz. He even cares about this role and responsibility: when neighbors come to look at the miraculously redis-covered Henio, Pasowski asks them to “leave the courtyard, because he is responsible for keeping order here.”43
Kazimierz Wyka wrote of a “new wartime petite bourgeoisie, propagated on the ruins of Polish Jewry, speculators, middlemen between the Germans and a conquered people.”44 Everyone is terrified of Jewish owners returning. “I will give you a concrete example,” wrote a Polish worker in a letter to the general secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), Władysław Gomułka, trying to explain the reasons for postwar antisemitism. “A Pole who was friends with my father for 25 years . . . was never an antisemite. Today he is an active member of the PSL [Polish People’s Party] and an even more active antisemite. I understand this man. Before the liquidation of the ghetto, he was an honest workman; however, after the liquidation of the ghetto, he made a fortune on Jewish properties, which are worth hundreds of thousands of złotys. Today, when he knows he is really living, he is afraid that it might be taken away. These are the reasons for his antisemitism, as well as that of thousands of others who were in the same boat during the German occupation.”45
In Kielce, where fraudulent property dealings flourish, somebody can demand restitution at any moment. And such a person won’t be welcomed with open arms. Zelik Tajtelbaum found this out for himself when he was attacked with an axe on the threshold of his family home at 10/13 Targowa Street (across from the synagogue where a state archive was located at some point after the war until the 1990s).
His cousin, sixteen-year-old Naftali, will die on Planty Street. The same is true of Chil Sokołowski, Szlama Rajzman, Naftali Płótno, Lejzor Morawiec, and Mendel Mikułowski, who recovered their Kielce fortunes or made an effort to do so.
FIGURE 35. Mourners and local residents watch as pallbearers place the coffins of the victims of the Kielce pogrom in a mass grave at the Jewish cemetery. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Leah Lahav.
Some of the custodians of other people’s property have minor wartime sins on their consciences. One pogromszczyk with such a past, for example, is Jan Soboń, the custodian of the building at 74 Zagnańska Street. Soboń said that Jews were murdering children, (falsely) ascribing this information to his daughter, who was a cleaning lady at the Jewish Committee. In this way he spread rumors among the workers of Sawmill no. 1, who happened to be walking by. A resident of the building speaks about him as follows:
During the occupation Soboń was a minion of the Germans. He always spent time in the company of the Blue Police [the Polish police forces subordinated to the German Occupation authorities] and cooperated with them. He harassed tradesmen, taking their merchandise from them with the Blue Police. He was particularly zealous in harassing Jews and people who wanted to pass things into the ghetto. He even changed his last name, calling himself the more German-sounding Sobonisz. He often said that he would do as he pleased, giving his listeners to understand that . . . because he cooperates with the Blue Police, they hold him in high regard and trust him. When he was drunk, he would say that he was an intelligence agent for the police. He conducted his questioning mainly in the area around the ghetto. He often threatened me, saying, “You communist, you will be lying in the trash along with your family.” He often saw people visiting me, however; I worked for the underground and maybe he suspected me. I was constantly in fear of being arrested by Soboń.46
Józef Bedla was another custodian who called for the Jews to be put in their places. According to Józefa Kasprzyk, a resident of the building at 6 Pierackiego Street, Bedla was a bit tipsy on the day of the pogrom, and between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m., while gesticulating, he kept loudly shouting out against the Jews. His wife also added that the military man from upstairs, Maks Erlbaum, also still had to be killed. The soldier who was at their house, Sergeant Stefan Kabała, made philosophical assurances that “everyone will have their turn and their time.”47
The pogromszczycy from Planty aren’t penniless paupers but rather citizens working their way up. Among those property owners detained after the pogrom are Józef Dawiec, a construction foreman, and Józef Kukliński, a paver. Pokrzywiński has two wooden houses and a plot of land. Kazimierz Redliński’s father has a three-story building in Skarżysko and a post-Jewish bakery.
The wives of Wacław Radomski, a shoemaker, and Józef Pokrzywiński, a carpenter, have shops; the former runs her business out of 12 Duża Street. The barbershop on Planty belongs to Marceli Gardyński, who, by the way, is the owner of a building at 20 Zagnańska Street. The building with a garden at 12 Poznańska Street belongs to Antoni Pruszkowski, a participant in the attack on Rywka Fisz.
FIGURE 36. Jan Soboń, a pogromszczyk. AIPN BU_0_582_258_0068.
Adamczyk’s Restaurant: The Attack on the Fiszes
In turn, the instigator of the attack on the Fisz family, Kazimierz Nowakowski—age twenty-six, from “a miller’s background”—owns a building on First of May Street and another at 3 Bartosza Głowackiego Street. At this second location he has a profitable “post-Jewish bakery,” which brings in quite a large monthly income, especially from orders placed by—among others—the security service. It’s precisely from this bakery, located near the barracks of the Operational Company of the MO, that Nowakowski knows police officer Mazur. The entire neighborhood comes here to buy bread. It’s easy to know who lives where and whether they have money.
That morning, the Fiszes’ servant overhears the regulars at Piotr Adamczyk’s restaurant, or those in Górecki’s restaurant at 15 Leonarda Street, discussing the idea for the attack. As in Skarżysko and on Sienkiewicza Street here too the restaurant and bakery will become elements of a robber’s network that will be joined, one after the next, by the aforementioned Officer Stefan Mazur, age twenty-two; the shoemaker, Józef Śliwa, age thirty-nine; and Antoni Pruszkowski, age forty-five, a doorman, employed by the city at 4 Leonarda Street. Thus, at around 1:00 p.m. between Leonarda and Głowackiego streets, a second trap has been set for Jews. The Bazary neighborhood completely crowded, is located at the center of this trap.
Not far from here, on the main square, next to the town hall, the baker Nowakowski has already met up with police officer Mazur, informed him in a jargon understandable to both that he “has a job” (ma robótkę) and that it will be necessary “to lock up, move out, and do” the Fiszes’ nearby apartment.48 Having heard in Adamczyk’s restaurant that “it could be bad” on Leonarda today, the servant has already warned her employer; but Rywka Fisz, in her fourth week of confinement, doesn’t want to risk an escape. Just a moment ago, under the pretext of searching for weapons and grenades, some policemen have already visited her. Abram Moszkowicz, who was present in the apartment at the time, will later recall that as they left, they recommended that the door be securely bolted. But at around 1:30 p.m., someone again starts to bang at the door. And then come four more, among them a policeman with an automatic weapon.49
At 1:30 p.m. Officer Stefan Mazur was supposed be somewhere else altogether because on that day he was the commander of the guard in the Citizens’ Militia (MO) barracks located on Zagórska Street (the task was assigned to him by someone we already know, Antoni Jarosz, a murderer of Jews). But shortly thereafter he abandoned the guard-room and went to 7 Planty Street, where “he stood alongside the army.” There he was noticed by Lieutenant Ziółek. Staff Sergeant Siemieniuch of the MO training company will report to Ziółek that Mazur tried to persuade him to kill the wealthy Jewish family.50 Mazur supposedly also proposed this to other policemen, but in the end he made do with the doorman and the shoemaker.
The armed men ordered Mrs. Fisz and Moszkowicz, whom they took for her husband, to pack up the newborn in a “baby wrap” and leave the apartment. The female custodian remembered that Mrs. Fisz was very pale.51
Along the way Mrs. Fisz even suggested to Nowakowski that she would give him 150,000 złotys if they let her go, “and that she would never again return to Kielce.”52 But the attackers didn’t believe her. They took them away, in a truck commandeered on the street, to the forest near Cedzyna where the police officer killed the mother and child. His explanation about whether he felt sorry for the baby has become part of lore: “Naturally, but even if I did feel sorry, what can you do if the mother’s already gone? What can you do, let the child cry?”53
Abram Moszkowicz managed to escape.
Afterwards the bandits returned to Kielce to drink at Adamczyk’s restaurant and split up the loot. They ordered meat to eat. “Then there was silence, we didn’t talk at all. We only drank a half liter of vodka.”54
“The driver also went with us,” relates Mazur.
Nowakowski took the things from the murdered Jewish woman . . . seventeen dollars and three rings. In the restaurant the driver got a ring. To clarify, the Jewish woman gave the rings and the money to Nowakowski, and when we were looking at the rings there in the forest, Nowakowski took the money, and the shoemaker took the rings. Nowakowski told me that I should stop by one day and we’ll have a drink. That same evening I was at Nowakowski’s, and he told me that the shoemaker and that old civilian sold the rings for 3,000 złotys, but that’s cheap, so he ordered them to take them back and then he himself will sell them, and when the rings are sold, then we’ll divvy up everything. The next morning I went to the female custodian on Leonarda Street and there was one other policeman with me. And I opened up the apartment, from which—as the female custodian told me—some things had already been stolen overnight. The custodian was also with us and someone from another apartment. When the female custodian said, “Who will pay her for all this?” then I said, “Everything is okay, you can take things, because the Jews will never again return.”55
“We’ll start, you’ll finish,” said the construction foreman Józef Dawiec to the soldiers on Planty Street, thus setting up a double act of uniform and mob. When the policemen push the Jews on Planty out of the building, the crowd murders them. At 72 Sienkiewicza Street, the uniformed men limit themselves to luring Prajs onto the street. Civilians will kill him. There is also a crowd at 72 Piotrkowska and 15 Leonarda, but it’s as if they are playing the role of a chorus accompanying a crime: “A group of people also followed us,” says Officer Stefan Mazur. “They were watching.”56
Prosecutor Szpądrowski asks Nowakowski, “Did you know those Jews personally?” “No.” “So how did you know that they live there?” “Because everyone was talking about it.57 . . . Because people were saying in front of the gate, that they’ll take them.”58 The caretakers who are present are not perpetrators of the crime, only the audience or “facilitators,” to use Raul Hilberg’s terminology. Like assistants to a rape, gawking, they encourage and legalize violence through their inertia.
A woman interviewed in Marcel Łóziński’s film, a worker, recalls, “One gal came here, she had this brush . . . she was a custodian. I was even saying that she came to beat the Jews with a brush.”59 In the social hierarchy people like Mrs. Bujak or Mrs. Nowak, custodians who sign their names with an X, are below enterprising robbers. Yet, encouraged by example, they too get involved in the action.
On Bartosza Głowackiego Street, in a Shop, around 4:00 p.m.
My name is Wawszczyk Stanisław, the son of Józef and Franciszka from Kozibiały, no nickname. I was born forty years ago in Wola Bokrzycka (Busko Zdrój County). Religion: Roman Catholic. Nationality: Polish. A janitor by profession. Education: two grades in elementary school. Marital status: married. Assets: none. Military service: none. Regarding the matter of the murder of Jews, I know the following: on July 4, 1946, at around 4:00 p.m., some guys in military uniforms, I am not exactly sure if it was the police or the army, but there were four of them, led an individual unknown to me all bandaged up, who I think was a citizen of Jewish nationality along Głowackiego Street, in the direction of Sienkiewicza Street through the Bazary neighborhood. Only a couple of people walked behind him, but many popped out of the gates, and this turned into a crowd. I state that this crowd poured out from both sides of the street, and triggered a brawl, and they beat the citizen who was being led and guarded by soldiers unknown to me. During the brawl Piwowarski, who is a butcher by trade and has a butcher shop on Leonarda Street, was in my shop with his wife. Piwowarski stated that I should close up the shop, since we were all standing in the door. I obeyed him and closed the door, and we stayed inside the shop. I didn’t see the rest of the brawl. When the brawl began and they started to beat the citizen unknown to me, an older woman, around forty, short, a rather stout blonde, dressed in a floral-patterned dress, did most of the beating. I don’t know the woman and I won’t recognize her. But before closing the shop, I saw how the [female] custodian of the building at no. 1 Głowackiego Street, named Syncerz Maria, walked away from the brawl and went in the direction of the apartment house.60
Maria Syncerz is the custodian at 1 Freedom Square.
Her husband is the caretaker of the building next door, 1 Głowackiego Street.
Stanisław Wawszczyk, also a custodian, has a store on the ground floor of 3 Głowackiego Street, whose owner is Nowakowski the baker—whom we already know, and who is currently performing “a little job” on the Fiszes. When Nowakowski is no longer of this world (he is sentenced to death in the July 1946 trial), Wawszczyk will open up a teahouse here.
FIGURE 37. Maria Syncerz, a pogromszczyk. AIPN BU_0_582_258_0062.
Stanisław Wawszczyk is Maria Syncerz’s brother.
In the footage for Marcel Łoziński’s film, the last name “Wawszczyk” is mentioned in the context of boys cutting school: “Later I go to school and suddenly find out: ‘Did you hear? Did you hear? Antek Wawszczyk, he was taken for matzo. . . . Janek Binkowski, he was taken for matzo.’”61 Afraid of the paternal belt, the boys who are returning from being “at large” place the blame on Jews, contemporary manifestations of body snatchers. And they do so effectively: that’s probably why Antek Wawszczyk’s father and his aunt Maria Syncerz found themselves among those who were interrogated in association with the pogrom. When Maria Syncerz finally admits to having thrown a stone at a Jew, she will make excuses, just like all the others: “because of being strongly agitated due to the false information being spread that Jews murdered a Catholic child.”62 She will also use the excuse that, having been beaten by her husband, she drank a glass of moonshine for the pain.
At 4:00 p.m., while Nowakowski the baker is absent—busy at the Fiszes’—the custodians Wawszczyk and the Syncerz couple are in charge of Głowackiego Street. They have the policemen from the nearby barracks to help them. The police, however, behave just like the Communist authorities toward the Jews. They nominally defend them, but in reality they are “setting them up.” In a subsequent testimony Wawszczyk describes it: “The policemen who were watching started to shoot, but these shots had no effect. People didn’t pay attention to them at all, they beat the Jew badly, after which they dispersed, and the policemen, taking the beaten-up Jew with them, went in the direction of the marketplace.”63
Harmony prevails between the crowd and the police. This harmony will be destroyed only by the motorized patrol from the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), most likely sent by Sobczyński. When the patrol arrives, people will begin to shout: “Why are you defending the Jews?!”64
The Police Infirmary
A typical situation takes place at the police infirmary, located at this same address: 3 Głowackiego Street. This is also the location of the garrison jail for the city of Kielce.
At 3:30 p.m. fifteen-year-old police messenger Eugeniusz Krawczyk, almost a child, was not far from there. On Leonarda Street he noticed two policemen from the operational battalion of the MO leading some Jew along the street. “I ran up closer, grabbed a stone and hit him in the elbow,” says Krawczyk. “They were taking this Jew to the main office for the training school of the MO, 1 Zagórska St. In this main office I hit this Jew again several times with a rod.”65 “From the gate of the battalion all the way to the gate of the barracks, policemen beat him. Among them I recognized one, who excelled in beating, a certain Mojecki Józef. As the Jew was being led to the main office, I was the one who beat him with a little willow rod. Mojecki was kicking this Jew again in the corridor. From the main office this Jew was again taken to the infirmary.”66
Having done his job, Krawczyk leaves the barracks and goes to the market (possibly in order to cash in some loot), and after a moment he again runs into the same Jew, now being led from the infirmary of the MO training school with his wounds dressed. What does Krawczyk the messenger boy do? He grabs a wooden picket from a friend standing next to him and hits the wounded man with it several times. This time the police will take him to St. Aleksander Hospital.
But before that, others also want to hit the same Jew. Some woman (no doubt it was precisely Maria Syncerz; Krawczyk says that she was arrested) hits him “with a stone in the belly.” Activists from the Union of Youth Struggle located on Mickiewicza Street also want to take part in the pogrom: “They jumped out of this establishment and yelled: ‘Beat the Jew!’”
The Jew fell over and fainted on the corner of Wesoła and Mickiewicza streets.67
Entire families join those doing the beating. This is also the case at the Bazary neighborhood. Kazimierz Jonkisz gave the last names of four witnesses who saw the Jewish man being led away. “Local people pounced on him; among others, there was Sówka Kazimierz’s son, resident of 3 Kościuszki Street, who was doing the beating while the father—egging on his son—said, “Kill the son-of-a-bitch.’”
The testimony of a Kielce sociologist: “On the corner of Śniadeckich Street and Obrońców Stalingradu Square, at that time a bazaar, a kind of vegetable market, [my father] saw through the windows that some people were dragging a Jew, he thought, behind them and shouting out various slogans—not slogans, rallying cries. He heard these cries, these cries, it’s true—I could trust what my father [said]: ‘And put up a golden monument to Hitler, because he taught us to beat Jews!’ Somebody raised such a cry.”68
The synchronization of activities in various locations throughout Kielce is amazing. In two dive bars, aka “headquarters,” bandits are conferring, but no one is in charge of the rest of the people. Nonetheless, they behave like “a school of fish, which will swerve, simultaneously and apparently without leadership.”69 They understand one another without words, and those words, which they shout out and address to their object of hate, even more clearly express their intentions: “Beat the Jew”; “Kill her, she is hiding a Jewess”; “Why are you defending Jews?”
When Abram Moszkowicz comes to in the grain field where he hides after escaping, it will be around 4:00 p.m.
I decided to go to the police and file a report. I went through the rye. Some people started to observe me. I noticed that one was following me. I sat down, the one walking behind me also sat down. And I started to walk again. I almost got to Kielce, someone passed me by on a bike and shouted “Jew” at me.
Not far from the hospital on Aleksandra Street, a crowd of young people, holding stones, sticks, and irons in their hands, was waiting for me. Somebody came up to me and said, “Give me your documents.” He looked at the documents I showed him and said, “Beat him—a Jew,” and they started to beat me with whatever they could. I fell on the cobblestone unconscious. When I woke up, the crowd was not nearby, someone returned my documents and took me to a policeman, and he took me to the hospital. The crowd stood along the sides.70
This was happening in Nowakowski’s and the Zagórska Street policemen’s “territory.” The crowd that was beating Moszkowicz near the hospital had drifted here from Planty as the reinforced law enforcement units arrived. According to Mieczysław Kwaśniewski of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), there were still around two hundred people threatening the wounded at 6:00 p.m. The crowd dispersed only at the sight of a “unit of shock troops” summoned by Kwaśniewski.
On the day Nowakowski, having been sentenced to death during the July trial, was executed by shooting, the prosecutor of the regional court in Kielce received a letter from Miss Antonina Cieślówna, a childcare worker for orphans from Katowice. She asked that he send her a photograph of Nowakowski, since during the war she had known an individual of the same name, who “during the occupation was a German confidant in Katowice. The railroad engineer Józef Rzesznik from Kraków died because of him.” When Miss Cieślówna returned from a camp in Germany, she ran into Nowakowski on the street and turned him over to a police officer who was walking by; the officer jotted down his address, after which he let him go.71
Two Theories
There are two theories in studies on acts of collective violence regarding the composition of pogrom crowds. The first is called “riffraff theory” and is based on the idea that the social class made up of “the poorest elements of society, the unskilled laborers, the unemployed, criminals, vagrants, and hoodlums of all types” is the starting point of pogroms.72 Whether or not they are supported by the police, their actions do not go beyond robbery and killing.
Pogromszczycy behave completely differently, however, according to the hypothesis of a cross-section of society, which traces pogroms to groups of respected citizens who are striving for change through violence. According to this rival theory, the composition of groups participating in riots typically does not differ from the composition of the population. The pogromszczycy are average people, like those sentenced in the first Kielce trial—a baker, a carpenter, a paver, a barber, a messenger, a musician, a housewife, a metalworker, a shoemaker, a janitor, and two police officers. It’s just that they are more active than the rest, “better informed,” “committed to the cause,” “protectors of the faith,” and so on.
At first glance, it seems that the social composition of the Kielce crowd rather confirms the riffraff theory, or in other words, looks like “urban rabble” in action. This is understandable: it is difficult for us to consider respected citizens as killers. But we should rely on definitional precision. Riffraff theory speaks of homeless people without jobs, while only one person detained after the pogrom was unemployed,73 and none were homeless, because—thanks to the takeover of Jewish property—the assets of the majority of Kielce residents had improved significantly after the war.
In fact, through these assets, their standard of living was constantly improving. One of the pogromszczycy from the Ludwików steelworks, who was “without a coat, sweaty, with traces of blood on his face and shirt,” boasted to an acquaintance during the pogrom, “Boy, did I make good money on these damned Jews.”74 Seventy złotys were found on another, who was proclaimed innocent in a grotesque trial in the regional court.75 There was a third, a paymaster from the Ludwików steelworks, who claimed that the 100,000 złotys found on him were from wages for workers at the steelworks.
The personal data of the people questioned also leaves no doubt as to the presence of “respected citizens” on Planty Street: agitated mothers and fathers, teachers and firefighters, clerks, craftsmen, and maybe even such protectresses of the faith as the woman whose account of the July 4 events was recorded by the Kielce curia in “The Account of an Eyewitness.”76
It is also difficult to consider the workers of the largest Kielce factory as “rabble” or “riffraff.” Among them were, for example, Jan Jeszke (Jeszka),77 a paymaster who was decorated with military honors; “the most talented intelligence agents” of the MO,78 who were commanded by former soldiers of the Union of Armed Struggle (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ) (later the Home Army);79 and those soldiers of the Polish Army and Internal Security Corps (KBW), who were sent to the school yard under the command of officers, who had earned their epaulettes during the (interwar) Second Polish Republic. Among them was Second Lieutenant Piotr Jędrzejczyk, a graduate of the philosophy department at the Jagiellonian University and a journalist for the Kurier Ilustrowany (Illustrated Courier), who supposedly took weapons away from the Jews at a critical moment.80 And as we may remember, another prewar university graduate, police officer Stefan Sędek, sent the first police patrol to Planty Street.
Thus, even if the rabble—with its “specific bazaar-like exchanges of ideas”81 and its “tendency toward mythical thinking”82—appeared on Planty that day, why did it so easily take the Kielce elite under its control? Judging from the conversations that its representatives had around the sites of the massacre, the pogrom didn’t make a huge impression on them. Life next door followed its regular course. The priests of the Salesian order took children to the photographer through Planty Street for their communion pictures. Young ladies from the pedagogical school on Leśna Street set out for the scouting camp. The faithful made their way to the cathedral for a mass being said for the repose of General Sikorski’s soul.83
It is also not true that this pogrom crowd didn’t set any goals for itself other than murder and robbery. Such slogans as “Banish the Jews!” “Jews to Palestine!” “Away with the Jews!” “Down with the Jews!” “Beat the Jew, we have a Jewish-Russian government, not a Polish one!” “Away with the Jewish peril!” were well known from the past. They were backed by concrete political programs, not just a “folk” necessity for murder and robbery.
Contrary to assertions about the terror that was supposed to have seized Kielce after the pogrom, on the morning of the following day, women were still shouting anti-Jewish slogans. As appears from the trial of Helena Zającowa, the wife of an intern for the prosecutor general, people shouted at the sight of Jews traveling in a horse-drawn cab under escort: “What kind of Jewish regime is this, instead of murdering Jews, they’re protecting them and taking them from their burrows. This isn’t the Polish army, they’re Jewish lackeys.” This was happening in front of the building at 18 Focha Street and thus less than a few doors down from the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) and the Russian commander’s office.
In the face of this evidence, the theory of a cross-section of society should gain precedence in descriptions of the crowd on Planty Street that day. Antisemitism and the belief in Jewish ritual murder was the ideology that turned Kielce residents against Jews, regardless of the social class to which they belonged. This belief united those absent with those present; the underground officers who were hiding with policemen and soldiers of “Żymierski’s army” (the Communist, anti-nationalist security service),84 who had come to Planty; as well as priests who on the day of the pogrom were not in Kielce with their flock as it gathered there, a flock that—at least for this moment—had turned into a pack of wolves.
Notes
1. SL 4.17.
2. SL 2.1.1.36.
3. SL 2.1.1.33.
4. SL 5.6A.
5. SL 5.15.
6. Quotation from Eugeniusz Krawczyk’s testimony (SL 5.18B).
7. SL 5.23A.
8. See SL 5.11; SL 5.12; and SL 5.13A-C.
9. See AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2, k. 192nn and SL 5.2.
10. See a list of privately-owned food establishments in the Kielce region for 1945–1946 in APK, 305 UWK II.
11. AIPN Ki_0_13_368, cz. 3, k. 31.
12. For more about the revelries of the PUBP clerk Tomasz Korus, see the report regarding the situation in the Zagański region in Kielce County, dated January 17, 1952 (AIPNBU_0_703_1025).
13. This will be followed by repressions that will affect many restaurateurs in Kielce. At a meeting on July 15, 1946, the Municipal National Council will limit the number of establishments in Kielce, justifying it by the fact that “a large number of restaurateurs invited the police, paid for vodka, and incited excesses.” See APK, Akta m. Kielce, sygn. 2676, k. 73.
14. SL 3.31A.
15. See Szpądrowski’s report (SL 1.1). The following sentence from Jan Jurkowski and Henryk Gutowski’s report probably refers to Kołpacki: “A group of soldiers who were inside the building, having heard the shots, started shooting at the Jews, and one of the soldiers in front of the building pierced one of the Jews with a bayonet right in front of the people” (SL 1.8).
16. See policeman Ryszard Sałapa’s testimony, dated July 25, 1946 (AIPN Ki_41_267, k. 22).
17. SL 5.31A.
18. SL 2.1.1.2B.
19. RG-50.488.0068, Oral history interview with Zygmunt Sikora, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.
20. SL 10.6.
21. SL 2.1.1.23.
22. AIPN Ki_0_13_3181, k. 8.
23. AIPN Ki_0_13_3181, k. 10.
24. Quotation from SL 2.1.1.30.
25. Quotation from SL 8.2.
26. Quotation from SL 2.1.2.2.1.
27. Quotation from SL 2.1.2.2.2.
28. See the letter in AIPN Ld_3623 dated September 14, 2001.
29. See “The Kersz Murders” in this chapter.
30. AIPN Ki_0_16_4, k. 39. Regarding legal regulations concerning “abandoned property,” see Krzysztof Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi (Kielce: Małopolska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1993), 181–85.
31. Józef Mackiewicz, “Gdybym był chanem,” Kultura 6, no. 128 (1958). Cited according to Włodzimierz Bolecki, Ptasznik z Wilna: O Józefie Mackiewiczu (Zarys monograficzny) (Kraków: Arcana, 2007), 661.
32. See “Gazeta Kielecka,” no. 96 and 98 (1938), cited according to Krzysztof Urbański and Rafael Blumenfeld, Słownik historii kieleckich Żydów (Kielce: Wyd. KTN, 1995), 107.
33. Alina Skibińska and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “Barabasz i Żydzi,” in Okrzyki pogromowe: Szkice do antropologii historycznej Polski 1939–1946 (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2012), 177–219. The electoral rolls for 1938 show that they were all still living here together: Solomon Zelinger, clerk, born December 24, 1903; Rozalia Zelinger, housewife, born June 9, 1905; and Zofia Zelinger, Salomon’s sister. Only Rozalia and her son Henryk will survive the war. See voter registration lists for the 1938 Sejm elections, Electoral District no. 24, Precinct no. 15 (APK, 122 Akta m. Kielce, sygn. 2443).
34. The large ghetto (approximately 27,000 people from Poland, Germany, Austria, and Czech lands) existed from July 1, 1940, to August 20, 1942. It was located between the following streets: Bodzentyńska, Warszawska, Piotrkowska, Zagnańska, and Jasna. The small ghetto, which existed from August 30, 1942, to April 1, 1942, was marked by Stolarska Street and part of Jasna Street.
35. See Archiwum Etnograficzne [Ethnographic Archive] in Sandomierz in 2005. Interview by Magdalena Szleszyńska on January 28, 2005, back office of the bakery in Rozwadów.
36. According to Andrzej Bieńkowski, “drums from Torahs often appeared in the Radom and Opoczno regions. The Torah would be taken from destroyed synagogues. Since it was made of leather, it was well suited [to be turned into] drums.” See Sprzedana muzyka (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2007), 57, 161.
37. Ryszard Miernik writes, “Catholics used them for heating stoves, made tobacco bags out of them, or cut them into small rectangles and hung them in outhouses.” See Ciosanie (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1965), 27.
38. Miernik.
39. See Kazimierz Wyka, “Gospodarka wyłączona,” in Życie na niby: Pamiętnik po klęsce (Kraków: Wyd. Literackie, 1984), 138–75, 280, 295.
40. Wyka, 292, 293. This topic was highlighted in the monograph by Jan Grabowski, ed., Klucze i kasa: O mieniu żydowskim w Polsce w czasie okupacji hitlerowskiej i we wczesnych latach powojennych 1939–1950 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2014).
41. SL 13, in particular k. 111–12. While searching through indexes to notorial deeds from Kielce during the postwar period, Jarosław Dulewicz, who conducted research for me in the APK Kielce, found many entries, among others, related to: Menasze Tajtelbaum, Chil Rozenkranc, Ewa (Chawa) Mappen, Pola Gutwurcel, Szlama Rajzman, Icek Baum (sale of house located at 9 Planty Street on October 17, 1946, APK, 715 Notary Public Records of Tadeusz Żeńczykowski, sygn. 12, nr 521), Pola and Rajzla Bugajer. In other words, these were people who (except for Rozenkranc) were among the victims of the pogrom. In an email to me, Dulewicz wrote, “These are most often deeds of sale. What is interesting is that after ordering the appropriate registry books, I did not find any of the deeds mentioned in the index (in some of these cases the pages were simply cut out; in others, deeds may have been executed only in one copy that was received by the purchasing party).”
42. SL 2.2.5.
43. SL 2.2.5.
44. Kazimierz Wyka, “Dwie jesienie,” in Życie na niby (Kraków: Universitas, 2010), 264. As regards propaganda against speculators, see Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga: Polska 1944–1947: Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Kraków: Znak i ISP PAN, 2012), 247–62; English-language edition: Entangled in Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944–1947, trans. Maya Latynski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
45. See the letter dated August 25, 1946 (AAN, PPR, 295/VII-149, k. 348).
46. Quotation from SL 5.21C. A research query concerning Soboń shows that in 1945 he also worked in the Kielce police for a short time (see AIPN BU_01179_616).
47. AIPN BU_0_13_3316, k. 7–8.
48. SL 2.1.2.1.6. See also the language of policeman Stefan Mazur who uses the wartime phrase “zrobić Żydów” (literally, “to make Jews,” “to do the Jews”) as a euphemism for robbing or killing: “either we will do them right away on the spot, or we will close up the apartment and take them somewhere” (SL 13, in particular k. 89).
49. SL 2.1.2.1.1.
50. SL 4.13.
51. SL 2.1.2.1.7.
52. SL 13, in particular k. 92. Moszkowicz promised the attackers the same thing: “[Nowakowski] said, ‘Gentlemen, come on, we will run away into the woods and no one will watch us in Kielce,’” (SL 13, in particular k. 108).
53. SL 13, in particular k. 95.
54. SL 13, in particular k. 95.
55. Quotation from SL 2.1.2.1.3.
56. SL 13, in particular k. 91.
57. SL 13, in particular k. 104.
58. SL 13, in particular k. 140.
59. Based on transcript of raw and unused footage for Marcel Łoziński’s Świadkowie (Video-Nova, 1988).
60. SL 5.28A.
61. Łoziński (raw footage).
62. SL 5.20B.
63. SL 5.29B.
64. SL 5.28.
65. SL 5.18A.
66. SL 5.18B.
67. AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 1, k. 40–41.
68. Łoziński (raw footage).
69. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Norton, 1994), xxxii.
70. Quotation from SL 2.1.2.1.1. In the margins of Edmund Kućmierowski’s interrogation (SL 5.26A), someone wrote in pencil “Moszkowicz?” (AIPN Ki_0_13_2428, k. 11). Kućmierowski was a forest worker suspected of beating Jews.
71. AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 2, k. 266.
72. Paul R. Brass, “Introduction: Discourses of Ethnicity, Communalism and Violence,” in Riots and Pogroms, ed. Paul R. Brass (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 16. A proponent of the first theory discussed is, for example, Richard Weinberg. See “Anti-Jewish Violence and Revolution in Late Imperial Russia: Odessa, 1905,” in Brass, Riots and Pogroms, 56–88. A proponent of the second theory is Natalie Zemon Davis. See “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 61 (1973): 80–81. Based on studies of the behavior of Catholic and Protestant crowds in sixteenth-century France, Davis believes that the poorest actors need encouragement from better-off groups. See Davis, “Rites of Violence,” 50. The authors of Bishop Kaczmarek’s report supported the thesis that at least one-third of the wounds inflicted during the pogrom were inflicted by the “mob” on Planty Street. See SL 1.2.
73. This person was Julian Chorążak (SL 5.7A). As Marcin Zaremba writes, in accordance with the July economic report of the National Bank of Poland, the increase in employment at the Ludwików steelworks between February and July 1946 had already solved the city’s unemployment problem by October of that year. See Wielka trwoga, 237.
74. Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi, 221.
75. See the records pertaining to the case of Gustaw Działak, son of Maksymilian and Stanisława neé Słabiszewski, born January 31, 1912 (APK, 1040 Sąd Okręgowy w Kielcach, sygn.1871).
76. See SL 1.5.
77. Jan Jeszka (Jeszke) was the son of Leon and Leokadia neé Smoczyński, born on March 27, 1907, in Łódź (APK, 1040 Sąd Okręgowy w Kielcach, sygn.1872).
78. Stanisław Meducki and Zenon Wrona, eds., Antyżydowskie wydarzenia kieleckie 4 lipca 1946 roku. Dokumenty i materiały (Kielce: Urząd Miasta Kielce and Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1992), 1: 234.
79. This is in reference to Lieutenant Tadeusz Kosela, who, according to the testimony of Roman Olszański-Przybyłowski, was the officer on duty that day in the provincial headquarters of the Citizens’ Militia (KW MO). He may have been the one who ordered the coal that was kept in the Jewish Committee’s warehouse on Planty Street to be removed in search of children who were hidden under it. See the testimony of police officer Ludwik Pustuła during the trial before the higher regional court in Kielce on September 26, 1946 (AIPN Ki_41_2043, k. 64). As regards “the head of children on the coal,” see the interrogation of Antoni Frankowski (SL 3.25).
80. See “Władysław Dzikowski and His Report” (chapter 7). See also “The Second Confiscation of Weapons: Rypyst and Jędrzejczyk” (chapter 14).
81. In Wielka Trwoga (Entangled in Fear), Marcin Zaremba refers to “a causal link between the psychosocial condition of this profiteering microcosm and the fact that at least two antisemitic excesses and a pogrom took place in the Bazary neighborhood.” He goes on to say that “another factor may have been the specific bazaar-like exchanges of ideas, reduced to communiqués, devoid of criticism. Immersed in this type of thinking, it was not difficult to ignite even the most senseless gossip, for example, about Jews who were returning from the camps and regenerating themselves with children’s blood.” See Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 250–60.
82. Zaremba, “Oni mordują nasze dzieci! Mit mordu rytualnego w powojennej Polsce. Część 2: Hipotezy,” Więź nos. 11–12 (2007): 128.
83. Jan Śledzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Jedność, 1998), 97.
84. Lejbuś Rosenblatt, in his August 14, 1946, testimony, reports that a UB lieutenant in Ostrowiec told him that “he had heard from an eyewitness that the corpses of eight children had been found in Kielce in the Jews’ building, and that they were still looking for four children” (SL 11.1.3, in particular k. 17).