CHAPTER 4

The Authorities

The Silnica

The building at 7/9 Planty Street is located on the Silnica River, which no longer looks like it did on the day of the pogrom. “The old river flows no more,” writes the author of a thesis on the topography of Kielce.1

Water powerfully permeates the history of Kielce. It is present in the names of streets like Grobla (levee, embankment), Mokra (wet), Mostowa (bridge), Kryniczna (spring), Zdrojowa (spa), Źródłowa (well), Kąpielowa (bath or bathing), and Siedem Źródeł (seven springs). Water also flows through entire neighborhoods. Ponikwa, for example, is a strip of land along the Silnica from Kadzielnia to the Zalew Kielecki (Kielce Reservoir) in Piaski. The name means “a river that disappears into the ground and gushes forth further down.”2 Głęboczka, meaning “a source of water from the depths,” is an area where there were still marshes at the beginning of the twentieth century and where Henio Błaszczyk later lived on Podwalna Street. Bugaj—in other words a low bank flooded with water—is a small area of downtown Kielce where the Silnica once flowed into the Dąbrówka. This is where the building that housed the Jewish Committee was located, and this is where—because of the water level—the basement everyone was looking for never existed.

Linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt has written that place names are enduring historical memorials through which people long-since departed tell their history.3 This can be tested on the example of the city name, Kielce. For the linguist Aleksander Brückner, Kielce was supposed to denote a settlement built on a muddy, boggy, slimy terrain that lent itself to the sprouting of plants. Others heard in the name “Kielce” a connection to “Celts,” or the Latin for limestone (calx, calcis), or to settlements surrounded by “the fangs of a palisade,” teeth and fangs, and even to a skeleton of an antediluvian animal. Each person hears what they want to hear in a name.

However, the name Silnica unambiguously connotes the Polish word for strength, siła, and implies that the river has the power to give and to take away. According to legend, Mieszko, the son of Bolesław the Bold, was supposed to have revived himself with water from the Silnica. Unfortunately, in the nineteenth century, the river—transformed into a foul-smelling sewer into which the waste of the entire area was drained—stopped being a source of any strength for the residents. The plan to fill it in, which arose in the 1920s, was carried out a decade after the Second World War.4

FIGURE 24. The building at 7/9 Planty Street after the pogrom, Silnica River in the foreground, left. Ghetto Fighters’ House Archive/Michał Jaskulski.

Only after the old Silnica was canalized did the new and improved Silnica emerge. Today near the church of St. Wojciech, the river is so clean that supposedly it has become home to the Gammarus pulex, a small crustacean that lives under stones and decomposing pieces of wood and that feeds on carrion and decayed remnants of plants. Eels that look like exotic snakes with orange-brown stripes along their bodies can also be found there. How these eels unfailingly sense an oncoming summer storm remains a scientific riddle. The fish swims out of its daytime hiding places and anxiously circles just under the surface of the water.5

The Space

On July 4, 1946, final preparations were being made for Fourth of July festivities in the United States. About a month earlier, the English had celebrated victory and the end of World War II with a military parade. That Thursday in Kielce, however, began like any other day. It was crystal clear and didn’t differ much from any of the previous days. It was the 535th day after what some called liberation—a label hated by those whom the Soviets had just thrown into prison. In turn, it was a label loved by those who had just been set free. It was the 535th day since the Red Army entered Kielce.

In Kielce the Red Army had just two official bridgeheads. The office of the commander of the Soviet troops (with jurisdiction over 7 Planty Street) was located at 47 Focha Street. And the headquarters of the Soviet security service—the successor of the NKVD—was located in building number 24. But the presence of a new order could be felt everywhere: in the new, coarsely cut military uniforms, in the image on the caps that was derisively called “a laying hen instead of the eagle,”6 in the name and conduct of the newly founded Citizens’ Militia (Milicja Obywatelska, MO) appointed to replace the prewar State Police (Policja Państwowa), in the titles of new newspapers, and in the new content of old ones. It also encroached onto the topography of the city, where traditional street names such as Piotrkowska (the Piotrków road) or Mała (Small) had just been given communist names such as First of May Street and Kilińskiego,7 respectively. Soon, Duża (Big, High) Street will be named after General Karol Świerczewski, a Pole who served as a general in the Red Army; and, of course, Focha will be renamed for the Communist activist Marian Buczek. The appearance of a street named Armia Czerwona—Red Army—is just a matter of time.

While the Soviets still care about the appearance of law and order, two Poles who don’t particularly care how things look are shaking up Kielce on their behalf. Both have on their consciences Jews shot dead per their orders in July 1944. Their orders, which were not uncovered until 1949, were part of a secret execution conducted on the banks of the Kotyska River by Tadeusz Maj’s unit in the Soviet-backed Polish People’s Army in which Władysław Sobczyński was the head of security affairs.8 Their contributions to the Polish version of communism are so great, however, that even when their wartime crimes come to light at the height of Stalinism, they will get away with them.

The first of the two is the prewar secretary of the prewar populist agrarian People’s Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe), Eugeniusz Wiślicz-Iwańczyk, who during the war was first a platoon commander in the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), then a confidant of the Gestapo. And when it became clear who was winning the war, he founded the first partisan unit of the communist People’s Army (Armia Ludowa, AL) in the Kielce region. The second is Colonel Władysław Sobczyński-Spychaj, a prewar member of the Communist Party of Poland (Komunistyczna Partia Polski, KPP) from Ostrowiec, an NKVD paratrooper during the war who was dropped behind the frontlines in the Polesie region.

Wiślicz, born in 1911, is the provincial governor (wojewoda) of Kielce and resides in the most important building of the city—the early-baroque Palace of the Kraków Bishops, located on the hill opposite the cathedral (1 Katedralny Square). Sobczyński, born in 1904, a lathe turner by training and an NKVD employee (Enkawudzista), is in charge of the Provincial Office of Public Security, located in a more humble, but no less centrally situated headquarters on 10/13 Focha Street. The symbol of his authority is the infamous Kielce prison on Zamkowa Street, which was once a tsarist prison, then a Polish one, and—until recently—a German one.

A year earlier, in August 1945, this prison—where soldiers of the underground were being held—was attacked by a partisan unit and breached after a fight that lasted almost two hours.9 Stanisław Bembiński, who participated in this operation, recalls the nighttime triumph as follows: “The Russian army pulled out their machine guns. . . . However, I advised one of the noncommissioned officers to speak to them in Russian and say that we don’t want anything from them, [and] that as long as they don’t fire, we’ll leave them in peace. So we managed without exchanging fire.” He continued, “After getting the prisoners out, we walked along Żeromskiego Street. . . . We went through the entire city, one next to the other five meters apart . . . along streets that were surrounded by machine guns [so that] the army or the security service could have attacked us.”10

But they did not attack. Blamed for this fiasco was the first post-war head of the WUBP in Kielce, Adam Kornecki, a Soviet paratrooper trained by the NKVD in Kuybyshev, whose Polish-sounding last name (bestowed on him with foresight while he was still in Russia) did not manage to protect him. Adherents of what historian Jerzy Jedlicki called “detectivist antisemitism” made sure that his Jewish name—Dawid Kornhändler—was not forgotten.11

In keeping with Stalin’s “Slavic path that excludes Jews,”12 the authorities replaced Kornecki in the Kielce Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) in October 1945 with his rival, Sobczyński. In Kielce, only two things were known about Sobczyński with absolute certainty, and these were based on his performance in a similar office in Rzeszów: (1) he definitely was not a Jew; and (2) he did not tread lightly. He owed his fame to the fear he struck in both his enemies and his allies. He never lost faith in the sacred right of the revolution to destroy both.

From the moment that Sobczyński joined Wiślicz, a turf war began in the symbolic heart of Kielce. You can see it in the addresses of their headquarters. Wiślicz and his office are located at 1 Cathedral Square, Sobczyński and the prison of the UB—at 1/3 Zamkowa Street. But that doesn’t matter anyway, because the most important address in the area is the seat of the Bishop’s curia on Bandurskiego Street. Cathedral Hill (Wzgórze Katedralne; today Wzgórze Zamkowe [Palace Hill]) and the adjacent square where the basilica was located formed the core of a fictional incarnation of Kielce called “Kleryków” (“Clergytown”) in Stefan Żeromski’s 1897 novel Syzyfowe prace (Sisyphean Labors). According to Żeromski, the city was built not only “by priests on a bed of bigotry,”13 but—above all—on a massive expanse of Church property.

This Church property can be encountered in old descriptions of the Silnica River’s flow, descriptions that seem to be about the river but are actually about relationships in Kielce. Moving along the riverbank, the author recites a long list of Church property: “two bishops’ mills,” “three bishops’ ponds,” a field near St. Wojciech’s church with a pond and meadows that belong to the prelate’s custodian, meadows belonging to a home for priests, a small pond belonging to the organist and teacher at the school located on Virgin Mary Square (Plac Marii Panny).14

The local bishops had always had an axe to grind with the Jews. Although the city never had the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis (permission granted by the sovereign to forbid Jews from residing in a town or region), Jews were not allowed to settle there on the grounds that the property owners—the Kraków bishops—did not permit it.15 Jews traded here, but every evening after the stores closed, they would leave the city on long, horse-drawn carts and spend the night in Chęcin.16 The first Kielce synagogue district was formed in 1868 but not because the attitude of the bishops had changed. It was only possible thanks to reforms carried out under Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s.17

“The position of Jews in the city, and Jewish professional and economic successes, were generally seen as panoszenie się [lording over others or putting on airs] that needed to be stopped,” writes a contemporary Kielce historian. “The fact that doctors, prosecutors, and judges in Kielce were mostly people of Jewish descent was annoying.” He goes on to say that the situation was additionally fueled by a so-called “Jewish propaganda of success,” according to which Jews were supposed to have declared to Poles, “The streets are yours, the buildings are ours” (wasze ulice, nasze kamienice); the Kielce version of the slogan was “St. Wojciech’s Church on a side street, our synagogue on the main square” (święty Wojciech w kącie, a nasza bóżnica na froncie).18 This “Jewish propaganda of success” was, of course, a Polish antisemitic slogan.

Calls to boycott Jewish businesses and handicrafts appeared as early as 1912. Gazeta Kielecka (the Kielce Gazette) led the way, describing Jews as hyenas, swindlers, and heathens, and calling for the establishment of a system for effectively segregating them.19 Nationalists appealed to the Society for Polish Culture to eliminate Jews from their ranks based on the conviction that “there is no rationale for Jewish culture under a Polish guise in Kielce.”

The first pogrom against Jews in Kielce took place the moment independence was restored. This is no metaphor. On November 11, 1918—the birthday of the Second Polish Republic—the Jews in Kielce organized a rally in the Teatr Ludwika (today the Teatr im. S. Żeromskiego). The meeting began with a prayer of thanks for the restoration of independence. Later, a lawyer by the name of Frajzynger, who was related to a survivor of the 1946 pogrom20 and who didn’t speak Yiddish, addressed the rally in Polish. The room demanded that he speak Yiddish, however. So, news spread throughout the city that “the Jews don’t want Poland.”21 At the same time, a rumor spread that a Polish soldier who had been in the Polish Legions during World War I had been injured in front of the theater. When a crowd burst into the theater, a seventeen-year-old scout, Chaim Jeger, was killed in the brawl. Szmul Owsiany was murdered in front of the theater. In the city the crowd robbed Jewish-owned shops and smashed windows. Four Jews were killed in the pogrom and one hundred were injured. The Polish authorities of the time were not keen on clarifying what had happened, and only in 1922 were five people sentenced to a few months in jail. The “Morgenthau Commission,” tasked by the US government to investigate what had happened, concluded that the pogroms took place in the context of political chaos after Austrian troops left the city and before the Polish authorities had established themselves; however, the Jews of Kielce sensed that life in a city where such violence had occurred would not be easy.22

The Shepherd

According to the annual report on the state of the diocese in 1945, the Church in Kielce numbered 240 parishes comprised of 841,116 souls. That year, 9,292 church weddings were performed and 309 “illegal” (that is, civil) marriages were recorded. In addition, 19,842 children were born, of which 710 births were described as “unlawful” (we don’t know if this referred to children born out of wedlock or only those who were not baptized). Among the more than 800,000 members of the diocese, there were only 153 “infidels” and 504 “heretics.” The report doesn’t go into much detail, but we can presume that the first category consisted of, among others, Protestants, and the second—Jehovah’s Witnesses and communists. It is not known how Jews were counted, if at all.23

Two years after the war, the Church in Kielce was weakened by the effects of agricultural reform and slowly encroaching nationalization. As of 1945 the Communist authorities no longer recognized the existing concordat, and so diocesan priests lost the pensions they had been receiving before the war. The Church’s power was not, however, limited to material wealth. Bishop Czesław Kaczmarek, a doctor of theology, had been the steward of the curia for eight years.

Although for the time being he was losing the battle against the prevailing forces of communism, within the trio “Wiślicz-Sobczyński-Kaczmarek,” he alone possessed actual authority. His popularity is described in an anonymously written text that UB functionaries found in the attic of the Kielce cathedral in the 1950s: “Violating issued instructions regarding a humble scope of outdoor celebrations, the people—despite an unofficial ban by the authorities and the most diverse and suitable harassments—spontaneously transformed the bishop’s visitation into a truly royal procession. A mounted escort with hundreds of horses that accompanied the bishop on the entire route of his visitation; widespread participation of the population in visitation celebrations; richly decorated houses and streets; and finally, sincere speeches by representatives of individual parishes in which the speakers expressed their commitment to stand by their Church and their Shepherd. This is but a faint portrait of the everyday reality during the bishop’s visitation.”24

The bishop’s relations with the new authorities were strained from the beginning, almost as they had been during the German occupation. If, however, Kaczmarek’s relations with the Germans could be more or less peaceful after he wrote a conciliatory pastoral letter in June 1940—a letter for which he was persecuted after the war25—there was no such possibility in his relations with the communists. Deputy Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk26—quietly called “Nicodemus” by the hierarchs—was becoming the Church’s only hope. Mentioned only in the Gospel of John, Nicodemus was a prominent Jew, a Pharisee and member of the Great Sanhedrin; he was also a clandestine student of Christ, who came to Christ secretly out of fear of the other Pharisees, in the same way that Prime Minister Mikołajczyk supposedly came to see Primate Hlond.27

The growing tension was reflected more and more strongly in the Kielce landscape, where the rivalry with Provincial Governor Wiślicz’s office, located across from the cathedral, was joined by other localities. In the late 1940s two important Kielce Catholic churches will undergo a change of address. St. Wojciech’s parish will suddenly find itself located on Red Army Street (Armii Czerwonej), and Holy Cross parish will be on First of May Street, renamed for International Workers’ Day. The curia itself will find itself on Świerczewskiego Street, renamed for an ethnic Pole who, as a general in the Red Army and then the Polish Army, helped put down the Polish independence movement until his death at the hands of Ukrainian partisans in 1947. Even if these changes were coincidental, they certainly did not go unnoticed.

The rivalry with the Church can be seen in reports by policemen assigned to respond to reports of miracles, which were common in the Kielce region after the war. In Częstochowa a story was told about a stranger who appeared at the Jasna Góra Monastery bringing a candle with him. Every time the candle was lit, the cry of a child could be heard coming from it.28

Merchants from Staszów traveling to the market in Klimontów met a man along the way. He was dressed in white and gave them money to buy clothing and food for themselves. The merchants fulfilled his request, but notified the MO when the opportunity presented itself. The stranger scolded them for being people of little faith; he predicted a harvest with no one to gather it because of a great war and bloodshed. In a police report we read that “the people consider this person an apparition of a divine nature. An inquiry is in progress.”29

In the 1940s a weeping Mother of God appeared to people in wells and on trees in the forest, and seeing her caused people to fall asleep immediately. This dramatic effect led to demonstrations of religious ecstasy—the faithful in repose could not be awakened. An uninterrupted stream of pilgrims flowed to this place even though the closing of crossings over the Wisła made it difficult to reach. One report described a participant in a similar pilgrimage, a certain “citizen Pieczonka, resident of Beszowa (Busko County),” who upon returning from having supposedly witnessed the miracle “spread propaganda that there really was a miracle and that she saw a lot of people fall asleep near this miracle, but that the security service and police had been bribed by the Russians and weren’t letting anyone view the miracle.” Furthermore, citizen Pieczonka maintained that one afternoon before sunset, “the sun broke into two parts and a crucifix came out from the middle, and there were many people all around it.”30 The authorities tried in vain to counter this communal, devotional ecstasy with mass communist rallies.

The bishop of Kielce was surveilled all the more vigilantly. Every mass he said was visited by a skeptical emissary of the security service: “During all three masses there were homilies persuading that God exists and that he can be seen in everything that surrounds us.”31 If we are to believe the reports of the Freedom and Independence Union (Zrzeszenie Wolność i Niezawisłość, WiN), the UB generally used Jews to monitor homilies in churches. A UB agent with a trained eye reported that “they can be seen among the crowd of the faithful during all church services.”32

Monitoring of the bishop’s correspondence with his inner circle (which intensified after the pogrom, and in particular just prior to his arrest in 1952) yielded interesting results. It turned out that he wrote about communism as an “ideological invasion by a foreign doctrine” and “devilry.” He ordered Catholics to vote solely for “such persons, lists, and electoral programs that do not conflict with Catholic teaching and morality.” He threatened to excommunicate those who engaged in the politics of the ruling camp, and he branded the Six-Year Plan introduced in 1950 as a “systematic militarization of life.” According to intercepted reports to the Vatican, he was most afraid of “paganization,” or in other words, the progressing atheization of the country, and actively countered it. He forbade the faithful to join the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the Polish Peasant Party’s “Wici” Union of Rural Youth, which he called “satanic organizations.” He condemned participation in state- or party-sponsored youth rallies and festivities; civil weddings; and sending children to schools that were more and more secularized and where, in contrast to education before and even immediately after the war, the role of the Catholic Church was being progressively diminished. He even condemned the purchase of new textbooks for schools, especially those proclaiming that “man descends from apes.” He warned against raising children without the crucifix and traditional patriotic-religious hymns. He suggested a boycott of the Communist authorities’ 1944 agrarian reform, which included drastic changes in land ownership, and later of production cooperatives and “productivization” of labor based on Soviet models, which he considered manifestations of a new type of serfdom. He told stories about unfortunate accidents that befell the unfaithful and threatened punishment for supporting “the constitution of Barabbas,” as he called the draft constitution proposed by the Communists.33 In all of these activities, he quoted the July 1949 decree of the Vatican’s Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office regarding communism and the excommunication of its proponents.34

A thorn in the authorities’ side was Kaczmarek’s supposed mentorship of the Kielce branch of the anticommunist National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne, NSZ), which continued its battle after the war. Supposedly he personally appointed its chaplains, and curial priests performed weddings for its soldiers. After the war the bishop apparently took care of brigadiers’ families who had remained in Poland.35 But the real casus belli in the war the Communists waged against the bishop was Kaczmarek’s position regarding the Kielce pogrom.

On July 4, 1946, he was not even in Kielce. He had just left for a vacation in the spa town of Polanica Zdrój, leaving behind, among others, Roman Zelek, a canon of the Kielce cathedral and a prewar senator in the Sejm (Polish parliament); the priests Henryk Peszko and Piotr Dudziec; and canon Jan Danilewicz. Upon his return from the spa town that same month, and according to the wishes of Cardinal Hlond, the hierarch commissioned Father Professor Mieczysław Żywczyński from the Catholic University of Lublin (Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, KUL) and, as some contend, Reverend Professor Władysław Mąkowski of Płock, as well as the prosecutor Jan Wrzeszcz, a confidant of the curia, to prepare reports on the course of events.

According to his own words, the memorandum was to be sent to Rome and passed on to the American ambassador, Arthur Bliss Lane, who had visited the bishop several times in Kielce. Per a note found in the investigation files and confirmed in the report, Kaczmarek “gave Bliss Lane information about the Jewish pogrom in Kielce, stating that it was the government’s doing, so that later, presenting the Jews as martyrs, they could send them out as agents to various countries.”36

A week after the pogrom, the conflict between Kaczmarek and the Communists reached its apogee when Provincial Governor Wiślicz failed to persuade Church authorities to sign a reassuring statement from both the church and government authorities to the people (see chapter 13). The following formulation in the statement drafted by the authorities was meant to play a key role in preventing future pogroms: “According to the materials already in the possession of the investigating authorities, no Polish children were ever murdered by Jews.”37 The Church in Kielce, represented by Father Danilewicz during the bishop’s absence, would not sign this statement.

Instead, they wanted to replace it with a text that expressed a different meaning, and in which there was a completely different assertion: “The true perpetrators, regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation, will be properly punished.”38 The Communist authorities took this as a camouflaged confirmation of the rumor that Jews kidnapped children for matzo. They reproached Wiślicz for agreeing to it and the bishop for remaining idle in the face of the danger of another pogrom. Canon Danilewicz agreed with this last opinion only under the pressure of interrogation, when he was imprisoned in 1951. “The authorities of the UB ordered that I issue a statement to the nation,” he said. “I issued one, but it was official, cold, meaningless.”39

It is hard to know what to think about the following statement given by Father Danilewicz: “In July 1946, during the time of the antisemitic riots in Kielce, Cardinal Hlond, who was going to Kraków, was in Kielce. Bishop Kaczmarek was not in Kielce at that time, he was in Polanica Zdrój. Hlond was staying at Bishop Sonik’s, and I was summoned there to brief Hlond on the matter of the antisemitic riots.”40

On the other hand, according to Father Widłak’s statements, which are probably too sensational in nature to be credible, it appears that these matters were discussed in the curia long before the pogrom: “I learned about the alleged kidnapping of Aryan children by Jews for the first time in March 1946 from prefects Czeluśniak Władysław, Nawrot, and Wróbel. . . . Father Czeluśniak mentioned that an anti-Jewish propaganda cell already existed and was active in the area of Kielce, reconstituted by nationalists after the liberation. In addition, he noted that he was in contact with this cell and that he had received propaganda material against Jews from them. . . . This cell spread a rumor about the kidnapping of an underage girl from Domaszowskie Przedmieście in Kielce.”41 Research to date has not confirmed the veracity of his words.

Explosion in the Cathedral

Sobczyński and Wiślicz will have left the city long before January 1951, when the authorities decide to settle the score with Czesław Kaczmarek. During the trial, which will begin two years later, they will not, however, accuse Kaczmarek of being co-responsible for the pogrom. They won’t even use such sensational revelations as the difficult-to-believe, though surprisingly well-documented, information contained in the statements of curia priests about storing weapons; or about a broadcasting station on the grounds of the cathedral; or the cooperation of curia priests with the press of the NSZ; or the alleged molestation of nuns by the bishop.42 Rather, in accordance with the spirit of the era, they will focus on accusing him of espionage based on the bishop’s contacts with US ambassador Bliss Lane.

On January 21, 1951, functionaries of the Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego-MBP), entered the headquarters of the bishop, who had been arrested a day earlier on the charge of “incorporating fascism into daily life, collaborating with the Nazis, and conducting espionage on behalf of the USA.”43 The first search did not yield the expected results. Other than jars filled with valuables and currency that were buried at the rectory in Baranówek, only a small amount of compromising literature was uncovered, including—among other works—Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (similar books survived the war in many Polish libraries). However, the pogrom reports themselves were not found. Fathers Danilewicz and Widłak, arrested in August and September, were interrogated numerous times before they revealed where the reports were hidden. They diligently created drawings that were archived in the official records. These drawings show a cross-section of the cathedral indicating a bundle containing the reports hidden in the attic on the castle side of the cathedral, between the sheet metal of the first-story roof and the planks.44

On January 12, 1952, functionaries of the MBP, Lieutenant Colonels Humer and Więckowski conducted a search in the cathedral in the company of Captains Morawski, Kędzior, and Opara, as well as witnesses Father Roman Zelek (a canon of the Kielce cathedral) and Jan Brożek (the cathedral’s sacristan). Based on the official record of the search,45 three texts were found in the attic: “a lengthy disquisition titled ‘Remarks and Observations on the Topic of the Kielce Incidents of July 4, 1946,’”46 “a document entitled ‘Report on the Incidents in Kielce,’”47 and “a study entitled ‘Account of an Eyewitness.’”48 Other documents found in this hiding place included correspondence; copies of pastoral letters signed by Father Jan Danilewicz, Provincial Governor Wiślicz, and Father Piotr Dudziec; and a document titled “Remarks of Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, to American Journalists in Warsaw on November 11, 1946.”49

An expert report commissioned by the security service (UB) found that all of these texts could have been written on a particular Remington typewriter owned by the curia.50 While there are many reasons why the documents are worth studying, the fact that Church archives continue to be poorly accessible to researchers makes them a particularly valuable source for understanding the mentality of church circles at the time.

Reports from the Cathedral

The world of the Kielce curia’s experts is constructed coherently, along tribal divisions. A Pole can’t kill a Pole. You need a Jew for that: “During the incidents, a couple of Poles were killed, . . . who—after all—did not fall at the hands of Poles, and thus had to have been . . . killed by Jews.”51 Even so, based on the evidence presented in chapter 2, we know that the two Polish victims of the pogrom, Jan Jaworski and Stanisław Niewiarski/Niewiarowski, did fall at the hands of their fellow ethnic Poles. Janina Kulpa, professor at the teacher training school (Pedagogium), describes the circumstances surrounding the death of the former.52 The latter was most likely killed by Julian Chorążak of Czarnolas.53

The authors of the reports from the cathedral unanimously agree that the anger of the Kielce parents, who were worried about the fate of their lost children, was justified and that only the form the anger took—a form caused by the resistance of the Jewish residents at 7 Planty Street who wouldn’t surrender to a search by the people—was too drastic. They treat seriously both “The Account of an Eyewitness,” as well as the story referred to in prosecutor Jan Wrzeszcz’s report, commissioned by the bishop, on the trials and tribulations of Henio Błaszczyk. The report found that the boy “was hired out by some man to deliver a suitcase to the house on Planty Street no. 7,” where “he got some kind of drink, after which he fell asleep and woke up in the evening on July 3 in a basement.” What’s more, they authenticate this story by mentioning similar incidents in Kraków from August 1945, when a rumor about children’s corpses in the Kupa Synagogue sparked a pogrom.

In the text of the report there is only one sentence that can be seen as distancing itself from the blood libel. The sentence begins: “As a result of false and exaggerated reports of Jews allegedly murdering Polish children, the workers . . .” However, it is not clear what the words “false” or “exaggerated” exactly refer to—the existence of ritual murder, or only to the number of children who were harmed?54

The report overflows with empathy for parents who were led to extremes. There is a long description of an “expedition” to Planty Street by Canon Roman Zelek, who was turned back by Polish Army troops at 11:00 a.m.55 Many years later, a witness will come forward and give a statement to the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN). The witness, now a professor, describes it as follows: “The crowd became smaller after about an hour, or an hour and a half, from the time I came to Planty Street. A priest came in his cassock. The corpses of those three people [Jews who had been killed] were lying there, perhaps there were more bodies. The priest was passive and watched, and didn’t say anything. Perhaps he was afraid of the crowd.”56

“Perhaps I surrendered to the order of the authorities a bit too easily,” says an unidentified priest from Kielce in an interview with a journalist forty years later. “Maybe if I had torn through the police cordon, walked into the crowd and said, ‘Stone me,’ giving my life as a sacrifice, I would have saved those innocent people.”57

A delegation under the leadership of Canon Zelek went to Planty Street again at 2:30 p.m., when there was a moment of calm, only to determine that there was nothing for them to do there. Until evening, even though Jews were being attacked in other parts of Kielce as well (on Sienkiewicza, Piotrkowska, Głowackiego, and Leonarda Streets, and at the market in the Bazary neighborhood), no further actions were taken. The pogrom took place a few blocks from the buildings of the curia and lasted eight hours. During this time there was, among others, a mass said for the soul of General Sikorski. At least a call for reasoned reflection could have been woven into the homily. The reason for the break in communication between the Church and its faithful is not known.

The authors of these reports treat the rumors circulating throughout Kielce about Jewish brutality toward children just as irresolutely. They write that during the war, what was now the Jewish Committee building on Planty Street supposedly had been “a meat processing factory” that was fitted with “cold stores and storerooms for the purpose of conserving meat.” This information, provided in passing (and otherwise contradicting the assertion that SS barracks, or at the very least barracks of the German gendarmerie, were located there), gives the fantasy of “body snatchers” a real shape.

The theme of lime pits located behind 7 Planty Street appears in these reports. In Wrzeszcz’s report we read, “It was said that the murdered children were kept in cement pits, and only later burned. Even now, policemen themselves (it is possible to establish their last names) claim that during the fighting, they saw a pit in the courtyard of the building where, supposedly, human corpses were covered with lime.” Indeed, as Master Sergeant Rybak states in his report, “one of the soldiers yelled that he saw four corpses of children in the lime.”58

How widely the above fantasy, perhaps colored by the horrors of war, spread through Kielce can be seen in the official transcripts of interrogations of Polish Army officers (for example, that of Antoni Frankowski59) or of such pogromszczycy (perpetrators of the pogrom) as Antonina Biskupska, who stated, “I heard that one child was still warm and that there were murdered children in the basement; later, that they were on the square, and still later that they were covered with lime so as not to leave a trace.”60 Jan Soboń gave a similar statement, relying (falsely) on the authority of his daughter, who worked at 7 Planty as a cleaning lady: “I told them [passersby] that there were a lot of people gathered on Planty, that there was shooting, because they took fourteen Polish children from a lime pit, and the outraged people were beating Jews. They asked me if this was true. I answered: ‘It’s true, and if you don’t believe it, you can go to Planty, and in any case, you can hear, they are shooting at the Jewish building.’”61

Behind the Jewish Committee building on Planty Street, there was indeed a lime pit where food scraps were thrown.62 It attracted attention in the same way that the paneless, boarded-up windows on the courtyard side of the building provoked rumors that Jews indeed had something to hide. But these windows were secured like this because of an order the MO had issued after a grenade was thrown into the premises on October 18, 1945.63 The author of the report, however, explains this differently: “The windows are constantly boarded up, which provides grounds for suspecting that these criminal experiments were performed there. The people justify their suspicions with the fact that, at present, it is easy to get rationed glass, which is especially possible with Jewish influences. Therefore, in these times, leaving part of a window without panes justifies suspicions.”

The curia’s report does not provide critical commentary on these delusions, unless we acknowledge as such the theory that Jews will benefit from the pogrom: “The fact is that European Jews desire to put pressure on the government of Great Britain to hand over undivided control over Palestine to them. . . . Second, in order to make it easier to leave for Palestine, European Jews are trying to prove that they are persecuted in some European countries. Among those countries is Poland, which Jews—especially Russian Jews—don’t like, in particular, because it doesn’t want to willingly accept the communist system being imposed on it. On account of the aforementioned phenomenon, we cannot rule out the possibility that one of the Jews could have prompted Henryk Błaszczyk to tell the above-cited story with the expectation that it would incline a crowd that is already wound up against the Jews to excesses, which could then be extensively exploited.”

In other words, “certain Jewish communist agents, in collusion with the UB, which they themselves control,” decided to exploit the cases of missing children “in order to trigger a pogrom.” This would provide the Communist authorities three benefits: “evidence that Jews need to emigrate to their own country, . . . evidence that Polish society is controlled by antisemitism and fascism, and finally . . . evidence of the reactionary nature of the Church to which the murderers belonged.”64

Both Kaczmarek’s report, as well as the treatises found in the cathedral, are clearly unsympathetic to the Jews. The victims become guilty of their own fate.65 Jews are collectively and uniformly blamed for the pogrom, including “those in power” who carelessly search for the lost children; “Russian Jews” and Palestinian Jews, who—it is insinuated—profit from the pogrom; as well as those living at 7 Planty Street who neglected to install window panes, liquidate the lime pit, or let the people conduct a search in a timely manner (even though the Jews did in fact yield to this demand).

“The facts described here,” we read in a key sentence of Kaczmarek’s report about the cases of missing children, “were reported to the police, which nevertheless showed complete indifference toward them, neither conducting an investigation nor contradicting the information received. This inactivity on the part of the police authorities strengthened the conviction of the broad masses that Jews in Poland are permitted to do anything, that they can do anything with impunity.”66

The Blood Libel and Transfusions

The authors of the report nevertheless avoid the question of who created the association between Jews and the disappearance of children. The institution that, over the centuries, had maintained the cult of child-martyrs, demonized Jews, and represented them as cannibals and vampires, does not acknowledge its own entanglement in the pogrom.

The authors of the book Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip write that, in order for a rumor to become harmful to someone, its words have to be spoken in an appropriate context, and so this context, rather than the words themselves, is responsible for the consequences of that rumor.67 The context of the rumor that caused the Kielce pogrom is a church legend about Jewish ritual murders that had circulated around Europe since at least the twelfth century. Over the centuries it led to the destruction of a number of Western European Jewish communities. The legend was especially willingly embraced in cities that stood to benefit from expelling its Jews because its residents were in their debt. It also constituted a handy tool for managing competition in trade, even from a distance. It was enough, for example, to force someone who was arrested in Trent to confess under torture that he sent matzo mixed with child’s blood to, say, Frankfurt, in order to bring down any Jewish merchant or banker.

Henio Błaszczyk’s story about being enticed with goodies might remind the contemporary reader of the Grimms’ fairytale featuring Hansel and Gretel being fattened up. But here it actually refers to a different story. Henio says, “When we reached that big apartment building, [the Jew] said to me, ‘Come here, and I’ll give you something good, you’ll eat.’ I followed the Jew, and he took me by the hand and pushed me into the woodshed.”68 Let us now compare his words with the story of little Simon of Trent, which was included in Żywoty Świętych (The Lives of the Saints) compiled by the Polish Jesuit and hagiographer Piotr Skarga (1536–1612). In this story little Simon is martyred by Jews: “[The Jew Tobias] handed him money and berries, and other sweets for children, so that the child would be silent, until he arrived at Samuel’s door and pushed him inside.”69

Skarga’s The Lives of the Saints was the most popular Polish book after the Bible, a pillar of Jesuit pedagogy, the first primary textbook for studying religion, which remained on the list of required reading in homes until at least the Second World War. It also reached the illiterate. In the memoirs of ethnographer Franciszek Bujak, we find a description of the book being read out loud: “I sat for hours at our old neighbor lady’s, tending to my younger siblings and listening to the lives of the saints as compiled by Skarga, which she read out loud. This reading made an extremely strong impression on me. It became the foundation of my mindset toward faith, morality, and knowledge. My later development came from this foundation. Until this day, when I sometimes read certain lives [of the saints], I wonder why as a five- and six-year-old child I absorbed this reading so greedily and tried to understand it, especially its moralizing content. The names of the brutal Roman emperors became deeply engraved in my memory: Nero, Domitian, Diocletian, and others. And when I was sick in the winter, I would hallucinate that they were taking me to be tortured, like those Christian martyrs.”70 The Lives of the Saints also engraved into their memories the names of children murdered by Jews. This was one of the channels through which these brutal fantasies reached the pogrom-szczycy in Kielce.

Undoubtedly there is also a connection between the Catholic cults of innocents and the rumors about transfusions that were circulating in Kielce. These rumors were a modernization of the legend about wringing out blood to be used for making matzo.71 The traditional tool of torture—a barrel with nails pounded in all over—was transformed into syringes and tubes that drained off blood used by Jews (weakened by the war) to become stronger. In his notes from 1946, Hugo Steinhaus writes that he heard from an acquaintance, a professor who had returned from Kraków, that even members of the Kraków intelligentsia believed in this modernized form of ritual murder.72

Bishops Bieniek and Wyszyński and Father Józef Kruszyński

In his analysis of the Vatican’s position regarding the Kielce pogrom, Arieh Kochavi has shown that the belief in the abduction of children by Jews was not limited to Catholicism in Poland but reached all the way to the Holy See.73 These beliefs were most likely framed by the “anti-Masonic obsession” that was—as Andrzej Friszke writes—one of the pillars of the antimodernistic world view of some Catholic circles. It had to have been a powerful stimulus, since it led Bishop Stefan Wyszyński to spend many thousands of złotys by 1948 on the creation and operation of an “anti-Masonic intelligence service,” all during a time when the Church was in dire financial straits.74

In the Biuletyn informacyjny dla duchowieństwa (Informational Bulletin for the Clergy), printed by Freedom and Independence (WiN), we find the following interpretation of postwar Masonic tactics: “A few years before the war, Freemasonry came to an understanding with communism about the imminent danger of the growing forces of nationalism. They had already then decided to destroy all nationalisms and fascisms in the entire world. This was a declaration of war. Now, this alliance has the task of destroying all traces of fascism, which is primarily understood as nationalism and antisemitism. . . . Freemasonry fears communism’s victory, that’s why it advances against communism its own brand of Catholicism, which it wants to subjugate to itself.”75 The following discovery can also be found among the conclusions in political reports from WiN dated December 1946: “Kraków Jews admitted to the existence of international Masonic associations and declared that their activity [was] far stronger than it was before the war.”76

Kielce clergy members were also fascinated by this topic. Father Józef Dąbrowski, who belonged to the bishop’s immediate circle, complained that the UB took the book Masoneria w Polsce współczesnej (Freemasonry in Contemporary Poland) from his apartment during a search in 1951; and the bishop himself, when arrested, had on him a booklet entitled Okultyzm i magia (Occultism and Magic).77

In 1929, thanks to the initiative of Bishop Radoński, Father Józef Kruszyński was appointed prelate priest. Kruszyński was an important person in the intellectual and spiritual development of Stefan Wyszyński, whom he already knew from Włocławek.78 Kruszyński’s presence in the circle of the newly anointed bishop shows a toxic lineage in the Polish Church.79 Kruszyński, a “Jew expert,” a bible scholar, an erudite man, and an ardent supporter of the numerus clausus, who was quoted by subsequent generations of antisemites, owed his own intellectual and spiritual development to Father Justyn Pranajtis, an expert witness in the 1913 trial of Menachem Beilis.80 They both fell victim to the allure of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Kruszyński considered “a first-rate document for learning about Judaism”—at least according to his entry on the topic in the Encyklopedia Kościelna (Church Encyclopedia), published in Włocławek in 1933.81

Undoubtedly the reservations that Bishop Wyszyński expressed when he was asked by a Jewish delegation to evaluate the causes of the Kielce pogrom can be traced back to this line of transmitted tradition. At the time he mentioned “old and new Jewish books” collected during the Beilis trial “in which the matter of blood has not yet been definitively settled.”

Only the bishop of Częstochowa, Teodor Kubina, understood the danger that arose from the Church’s silence regarding rumors about the pogrom—rumors rooted in the Church legend about blood.82 On July 7, 1946, he personally read a pastoral letter at Jasna Góra calling on the faithful “not to believe any stories of ritual murder” and to act against all antisemitic “excesses.” He was repaid for his denial of the rumors of blood crimes with a thinly veiled condemnation by the Episcopal Conference of Poland. The conference obligated priests “to refrain from taking an individual position regarding all events in the country, without exception, and not to create a situation such as the one that occurred during the events in Kielce, . . . when an ordinary in one of the dioceses participates in issuing proclamations whose content and intentions had already been acknowledged by other ordinaries of the dioceses as impossible to accept based on fundamental intellectual and canonical principles of the Catholic Church.”83 Although it is rather difficult to have any doubts, Polish historians today continue to debate which principles were being referred to here.

This was quickly understood, however, by British diplomats, who—like the British ambassador to Poland, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck—informed their colleagues about the startling views of Polish hierarchs. He reported that Bishop Bieniek, the auxiliary bishop of Upper Silesia, had surprised him by asserting that there was proof that the child whose allegations provoked the Kielce pogrom was in fact tortured by Jews and that Jews had supposedly taken blood from him. “If a bishop is ready to believe this,” he remarked, “then it is not surprising that uneducated Poles also believe it.”84 Bentinck formed his opinion of the Polish clergy’s attitudes during a meeting in Kraków attended by Bieniek as well as by Cardinal Adam Sapieha’s coadjutor. When the British ambassador asked these men to condemn antisemitism, or at least racism, in a pastoral letter that was to be published following the episcopal conference planned for September 5, 1946, their response led him to conclude that the bishops were afraid that condemning antisemitism would undermine the Church’s influence.85

We do not know whether Bishop Kaczmarek believed in the blood libel, but even if he did not, he did not intend to use the authority of the Church to protect the Jews. The chairman of the Zionist “Ichud” movement in Kielce, Jechiel Alpert, describes his visit to the Kielce curia as follows:

We sat at his place for an hour. I said that I had come to ask him to influence his clergy and that the clergy influence Polish society, so they would understand that this small handful of remaining Jews should not be persecuted any longer. He smiled and said: “It is strange that you, Sir, have come to me with this, you must read the papers and know that we have no influence. How can I influence my little souls, when I have no say. . . .” He said this with such irony. Then he said, “You know, Sir, Jews are gifted merchants, gifted doctors, gifted lawyers—Poland is destroyed, it needs manpower—why don’t Jews engage in those things that they are talented in, why do they engage in politics? Imagine what it looks like when some priest comes to a government ministry and a Jewish woman is sitting there, not even a Polish Jew, but a Jew from God-knows-where, and behaves haughtily, insolently, toward our clergy? What impression does that make?”86

Members of the All-Poland League for the Fight against Racism, established on March 30, 1946, tried to have a similar audience with Primate August Hlond after the pogrom. They were not received. They left a letter with a request that the episcopate speak out regarding the malicious slander about the kidnapping of Christian children by Jews. There was no response to this letter.87

Although the investigation materials from the Ministry of Public Security present Bishop Kaczmarek as “a resolute antisemite,”88 as a supporter of the prewar Nonpartisan Bloc for Cooperation with the Government (Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem, BBWR), he gives the impression of being a moderate in contrast to priests who sympathized with the National Party. It seems that during the war he hid a Jewish sculptor, Mieczysław Lubelski, in a building of the curia.89 Individual reflexes of the conscience, however, do not constitute a sufficient counterweight to the devastation that was caused by the antisemitism of the prewar Church in the collective consciousness. Before the war even the Labor Party—to which young Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, belonged—postulated a systematic and mass emigration of Jews because their morality, which was “formed according to the Talmud, works destructively on a society saturated by the Jewish element.”90

Bishop Kaczmarek also interpreted the Holocaust in a way typical for contemporary Catholics: “Divine providence worked through Hitler and sent this scourge and punishment upon Jews.”91 This view was consistent with the contemporary teachings of the Church and the views of the clergymen who surrounded the bishop in Kielce. We need look no further than, for example, Father Zygmunt Pilch, a specialist in the field of homiletics who authored a booklet titled Odrzucenie Mesjasza jako następstwo grzechów narodu żydowskiego (The Rejection of the Messiah as a Consequence of the Sins of the Jewish Nation).92

Before the pogrom Bishop Kaczmarek contended that the source of the animosity toward Jews was their participation in the ranks of the Communist authorities.93 Afterwards, if we are to believe the reports of the UB (which appear to be based on the report of the curia), he presented the pogrom as an “act of Judeo-Communism [żydokomuna].”94 He also did not break free of “racial” labels while in prison. In letters intercepted by the UB, he spoke about Major Józef Różański, a Jewish communist who served first in the NKVD and then the UB, only as żydowin (“Hebe” or “Yid”).95 Of the (female) dentist and prosthodontics technician who treated his bleeding gums while he was in prison, he sneered in another secret letter, “All Jews!” “All of these Kikes, samoyeds,96 and Polish scoundrels wanted to learn about the Church from the inside.”97 Only under the pressure of an investigation, or perhaps in anticipation of an amnesty on the tenth anniversary of People’s Poland, would the bishop formulate a moderate self-criticism: “The atmosphere of political antisemitism in Kielce that was generated and upheld by me and the priests who were subordinate to me encouraged the outbreak of antisemitic incidents, which took place during my stay in Polanica Zdrój in the summer of 1946.”98

One might see this statement as a confession forced out of a man broken by an investigation lasting many months. Yet, one gets the impression that the experience broke, above all, the bishop’s subordinates Fathers Widłak and Danilewicz. Czesław Kaczmarek, however, was generally treated well.99 A chapel was set up for him in the prison on Rakowiecka Street in Warsaw, and he was provided a personalized diet and granted longer daily walks.100 The official record of interrogations leaves a less-than-heroic impression of the clergyman’s self-criticism. These documents present an image of compromise—one in which Kaczmarek’s public expression of remorse was the price he paid to get the MBP to refrain from charging him with involvement in the pogrom and to withdraw the charges of hiding weapons and a broadcasting station.101

In a secret prison letter intercepted by the authorities, the bishop wrote of these negotiations without losing heart:

At 1:00 a.m. two ministerial dignitaries suddenly appeared to give me an official speech. The chief rabbi (tall, dark like every Jew, around fifty years old) announced to me in a European, disguised tone, “You, Bishop, have found yourself here because of a conflict with the state, because of politics, because of earthly matters. We rarely make arrests, and never because of purely Church matters. We do not touch questions of a spiritual nature or beliefs. I ask that you quickly and sincerely settle your score with us, that is, with the state. . . . One must say everything and say it sincerely. Otherwise we will fight at trial, which you, Bishop, will lose, because we have a lot of evidence against you and the state is ready to reconcile and turn a blind eye to past transgressions.”102

The “Freedom and Independence” Union on the Jews

During the funeral of the victims of the Kielce pogrom, Julia Pirotte created a symbolic portrait of 1946 Kielce. Technically imperfect, the photograph is nonetheless beautiful, resembling a tableau vivant. Both in the foreground and the background, you can see mostly young children and teenagers. A lone woman in a headscarf appears on the right side; in the depth of the image is a man in a cap whose face we cannot see. The dominant figure in the photograph is a girl in a white blouse, standing high up on a cemetery wall with the ruins of a gravestone as the backdrop. Where have all the adults gone? They clearly did not want to appear in this photograph. The arrival of the Soviets meant that men who wore officer’s boots and britches, and to whom the city had previously belonged, suddenly desired to be invisible. With the exception of the clergy, it is they who could have stopped the pogrom. The question is whether or not they wanted to.

Although the Kielce network of the Freedom and Independence Union (Zrzeszenie “Wolność i Niezawisłość,” WiN) ended operations in March 1946, it remained—as in the entire country—the most important underground organization in the region. Thanks to the WiN materials maintained in their original condition and housed in the Archiwum Narodowe (National Archive) in Kraków, it is possible to learn how its members perceived Jews.103 This archive documents attitudes of those in the southern part of the country above all, but we can assume that in the Kielce region Jews were thought about in a similar way.

Let’s begin with a trifle: an illustrated pocket calendar for the year 1944, which can be found in folder no. 36 of the WiN archive in the National Archive in Kraków.104 We do not know who published it; however, the fact that this object (used intensely in the second half of 1944) is a part of this collection at all is, in and of itself, telling.105 The dozen or so illustrations in the calendar are a warning against the pernicious influence of Jews. The images present Jews as deviants, liars, and thieves, who strive to gain power over the world through capitalist exploitation, usury, or communism.

The first image (p. 5) exposes the essence of this plan: it is a coin divided into two unequal parts. The larger part is occupied by an obese Jew smoking a cigar, the smaller—by an emaciated Pole. The caption reads, “The Jew wandered to this country as a beggar: groveling and whimpering, feigning humility. A few generations later, up to 83 percent of national wealth was in his possession.”

Other images present the following:

• – A Jew in a yarmulke greets a person in a hat; the Jew slyly lowers his hand into the person’s pocket. The caption reads, “According to even the most decent Jew, theft committed against a non-Jew is a deed pleasing to God” (p. 7).
• – An obese Jew in tailcoats pushes away a woman who is groveling at his feet. The caption reads, “The Jew is an embodiment of selfishness, overflowing with brutal cruelty and a thirst for domination. He mercilessly throws old and sick workers out onto the street” (p. 11).
• – A woman sits in the ruins of her house, next to her husband, who has been stabbed. Behind her stands the perpetrator of her misfortunes. The caption reads, “The Jew pretends to be an honest merchant, and yet he sows discord, instigates treacherous murders, ignites fires, terror, revolution, and fratricidal wars” (p. 13).
• – Inducing the nation (naród) to drink and communizing the nation are illustrated by an emaciated figure, blindfolded and leaning up against a banner that reads, “Long live May 1.” The figure is being plied with alcohol by a group of Jews dancing around him. The caption reads, “The Jew is able to masterfully provoke the nation (naród) and unleash a fratricidal war. By demoralizing the lower strata of society, he turns them into a submissive tool for his own surreptitious goals” (p. 15).

The remaining caricatures present various steps toward accomplishing the goals described above, which occurs “with the help of Marxists, Communists, and Jewish Freemasons” who swear “on the Talmud and the Kabala, that only one goal exists for us: world domination by Jews.”106 The WiN archive is replete with these themes, as represented by fragments from a Polish-language version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion found in folder no. 42.107

An anonymous disquisition titled Imperializm światowy narodu żydowskiego (Global Imperialism of the Jewish Nation) that pertains to the years 1914–1939 and even to the recently concluded war develops similar ideas. According to the author’s opinion, the war was “a battle between blocs of states where Jews [were] the controlling class, versus a bloc of nations in which Jews [had] been removed from influence and even instinctively persecuted. The Polish nation was a blind tool in this battle, used in the service of Jewish nationalism, and having served, was left to its own fate.”108 The author of this text describes Jews as “the most powerful sect in the world.” One is tempted to add that the Jews were very versatile, considering they were able to “reconcile” Freemasons with both Hasidic Jews and the Communist International! In a WiN report from June 1947, we read of a multifaceted “Jewish World Government” that strove to take over the globe.109

The conviction that “Jews—all Jews everywhere—form some kind of secret society, whose goal is to take control over the rest of humanity constitutes the most dangerous form of antisemitism, the kind that leads to massacres and genocide,” writes Norman Cohn.110 There is no doubt that in the Kraków district of WiN, there were people who shared precisely this view of Jews.

Two Images of Jews

The WiN Union, founded on September 2, 1945, was designed to serve as a platform for cooperation among political forces that questioned the usefulness of armed action. It emphasized a negative attitude toward the NSZ, which it called a “fascistizing” organization,111 and recalled that its activities had been condemned by the commander-in-chief. “The methods practiced by the NSZ in relation to its opponents, as well as its behavior toward the population, raised reservations. . . . The NSZ placed operations against the Germans on a back burner.”112 Underscored were the dishonest intentions of this organization, which during the war avoided anti-German operations and after the war attempted to become “the only representative of the nation.” Meanwhile, in a WiN report dated June 6, 1946, we read that the “senseless diversionary operation” unleashed by the NSZ after the war contributed not only to the loss of public sympathy but also became grist in the mill for the Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR), which then ricocheted and struck the WiN.113

In September 1946, the WiN publication Niezawisłość (Independence) declared that units of the NSZ conducting armed operations were being directed by security service agents: “Any manifestations of armed battle should at present be treated as provocation—do not believe, do not cooperate; condemn and unmask them. The Nation should be made aware as broadly as possible and warned that the NKVD, the UB, and the PPR are conducting sabotage in Poland under the names AK, NSZ and WiN, Anders, and PSL [Polish Peasant Party]; that its goal is the planned destruction of the Polish Nation, the justification and provocation of arrests and pacifications, postponing elections, provoking an uprising, and justifying the invasion of the Red Army in Poland.”114 According to the opinion of WiN leadership, based on the situation at the time, armed battle was not allowed. It was necessary to “camouflage” and infiltrate all institutions of the new state, including the security service and the military.115

What stands out most about the language used to describe Jewish Poles in the WiN reports is that it is bereft of civic categories. It constitutes the antithesis of the phrases “citizens-Jews” or “Polish citizens of Jewish descent” that appear in the documents of “Lublin Poland” (the Communist-led regime and its affiliates).116 In the WiN documentation, the use of a disjunctive, dichotomous terminology—that is, Poles versus Jews—is obligatory.

The WiN declared a position according to which “the Polish state will guarantee equal civil rights for national minorities” but only on the condition that they display “a loyal attitude toward the state,” as well as atonement for transgressions: “However, all organizations, entities, or national groups that operated to the detriment of the Polish Nation [Naród Polski] must suffer just punishment.”117 In the context of this announced collective responsibility, the conditions set for Jews to enter into “Polishness” (polskość) may have been difficult to satisfy.

Some WiN reports express clearly conciliatory center and left positions. A report dated September 18, 1945, discusses university students belonging to the PPR, stating that “except for Jews and women [sic!], they are people who profess ideas of true Polishness from the point of view of the left, but not communism.” The report also sympathetically assesses the head of the newly formed Academic Union of Democratic Youth (Związek Akademicki Młodzieży Demokratycznej) as a leftist and a patriot. Even Major Gruda, the provincial commander of the MO in Kraków, receives a complimentary evaluation in 1945: “As a person, he is beyond reproach. An excellent officer and commander of the MO.”118 The author states that recently an idea has emerged “to turn the MO into a genuine organ of public safety, and there is pressure for the MO to be able to become close with society. The English police are strongly highlighted as a model.”119 This is a unique point of view, demonstrating the hopes of the moment. By the following year it will be difficult to imagine it. An evaluation of this same police officer from July 1946 concerns his background exclusively: “Major Gruda, the provincial commander of the MO in Kraków, is of Jewish descent, from Bielsko. His real last name is Gluksman. He completed NKVD espionage school in Moscow.”120

Also, reports from the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947 manage difficult-to-achieve objectivity, appreciating, for instance, a gradual improvement in the way prisoners are treated by the security service or the cooling of relations between the Communist authorities and the Soviets. Moderation, however, disappears the moment Jews appear on the horizon: “Without exaggeration, it is possible to say that every Jew encountered, male or female, is a member of the NKGB or NKVD”;121 and, “The few instances of antisemitic antics during which several Jews lost their lives are a drop in the bucket in comparison to the losses inflicted by them on our society.”122 And in another report:

Jews have become the most hated element in Poland, hostile to Poland and Polishness. Russia has based the occupation of Poland on them, they have been entrusted with the mission of transforming our country into a Soviet province. They—Jews with Aryan last names—have taken over all the leading positions in the ministries, diplomatic posts, political parties, administration, courts, military, police, etc. These very Jews, who owe their lives to the Christian culture of Polish society and who today are being raised to usurpative power on Soviet bayonets, destroy Polishness in casemates of the UB and are driving the country into chaos. . . . We will not be deceived by [Polish] last names . . . under their noble caftans are hidden Judas’s kittels.”123

Racist caricatures, like the ones from the magazine Iskra (Spark) published in the fall of 1946 by the post-WiN organization “Młoda Polska” (Young Poland), illustrate these views.124 The following poem is used as a caption for three profiles—“Asian,” “Jewish,” and “Russki”: “Here are three pleasant faces/The wild, the mean, and the rude go hand in hand/Willingly with brother Jewry/To conquer the world.”125

The journal of Zygmunt Broński (codename “Uskok” [leap]), the commander of a post-WiN unit, is strewn with descriptions of Jewish physiognomy. The UB operatives who appear there are walking caricatures straight out of the pages of the vehemently antisemitic Nazi periodical Der Stürmer. They are described as “Beilises with red, festering eyes and a hooked nose,” or as having “a curly black head, with frog-like eyes, a hooked nose, and fleshy lips.”126

These hate-filled images are sometimes intertwined with evaluations of reality that concentrate not on Jews but on the conformism of society as a whole. They equally criticize members of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), as well as representatives of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), the People’s Party (SL), and the Democratic Party (SD), and even parties established by Poles who emigrated, such as the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe, SN), which was fighting for rząd dusz, or the mastery over souls in the country, from a safe distance. “These people, at the price of their position, dignity, the alleged achievements of their parties, become gravediggers of their own people [naród]. By fighting for their own freedom, they deny it to others. We often justify them by saying that they don’t know what they are doing, that they are misled by Russia. However, we demand greater political skill from politicians.”127

An analysis from August 1946, though generally unsympathetic to Jews, differentiates among several varieties of Jewish political activism. According to the author, Jews are the object of rivalry between the Soviet East and the European West, which “in the name of the USA influences [them] by sending large amounts of money in the form of subsidies, bringing in foreign Jews, and facilitating immigration to Palestine.” The West gradually gains an advantage here, as reflected in the way that Kraków Jews voted for the referendum: “The PPR determined that in Kraków, barely 40 percent of Jews voted ‘three times yes’ [in the 1946 national referendum]. . . . Jews, supporters of the West, explain that they have no intention of supporting a government that is not able to ensure their safety.”128

In sum, WiN opinions on Jews are mixed. Leaflets have a mobilizing propaganda value, while reports, which constitute instructions to be used internally, convey a more realistic picture of diversity among Jews.

Freedom and Independence (WiN) and the Blood Libel

A 1945 WiN leaflet titled Dość krętactw sowieckich (Enough Soviet Chicanery) pretends to be a report, but it is pure propaganda. Its danger lay in its use of the “transfusion murders” motif. Like the bishops of the Catholic Church, activists from WiN were unable to agree on a position. This did not prevent them, however, from spreading the libel.

This leaflet gives information about the discovery of “the corpse of nine-year-old Bronisława Mendoń” in Rzeszów, “who died as a result of blood being drawn for the purpose of a transfusion. The perpetrators were captured (four Jews who lived there but were not registered anywhere, unless perhaps in NKVD files), and released after a few days at the request of the NKVD.”129

Bronia had been raped and murdered, and her body was found in the basement of a building inhabited by, among others, Jews.130 The result was the first postwar pogrom, which took place on June 11–12, 1945, in Rzeszów. Other than the fact that the body of the girl was found on Tannenbauma Street, not a single element of the description in the leaflet corresponds to the truth. The text was reproduced, however, in subsequent WiN reports.131 Another report is further evidence of the impact of this legend; a shocking photograph of the victim is attached to it. In the description, the scene of the crime undergoes further narrative development: the perpetrator, a demonic Jewish shohet, appears next to the girl’s body and the number of victims increases to sixteen.

In the basement of a Jew rabbi on Tannenbauma Street in Rzeszów, a rabbi in a bloody kittel was found next to a dead girl hanging upside-down.132 In addition, the passing police patrol that had been called, identified human body parts belonging to sixteen people. When the screws were tightened, the rabbi broke down and admitted that these were the remains of sixteen children. He claimed, however, that these were not ritual murders, but that the Jewish people had suffered great losses and that many of their more eminent representatives have to be additionally supplemented with human blood attained in this way. Hearing news of the above incident, the population threw themselves at the Jews, carrying out a pogrom. In the meantime, the NKVD and UB got involved. The Jews were defended, barracked in one place, after which they were sent to the West under escort. The entire police patrol that had conducted the first investigation was arrested and all trace of them disappeared.133 Likewise, the people who were witnesses to the incidents in the basement were arrested. Articles accusing reactionary elements of a provocation appeared in the press. Attached is a photograph of the murdered girl that was taken in the basement in the initial moment (before the intervention of the UB and NKVD).134

Like the previous account, this one contains not only inaccuracies, but—above all—fantasy. Patriotic emotions roar under the surface. Bronia’s death, until now private and shameful, becomes a national concern.135 She herself becomes a heroine, an allegory of a Poland flayed by Jews like an animal for slaughter. The image of the girl tormented by “a rabbi in a bloody kittel” grows into a symbol of the “ritual slaughter” of a nation.

This is not the only “transfusion” communiqué in the WiN archive attesting to the naiveté of its reporters. In the same folder there is a report intercepted from the Bydgoszcz UB dated September 1945. It describes the shooting of Doctor Szperling and his wife, an incident that can be confirmed by other sources.136 Szperling was supposedly punished for conducting “transfusions.” The report, based on information provided by the owner of the apartment, describes the scene as if it were from a spy movie.

A car drives up to the building. An individual in a Polish Army uniform gets out. A loud conversation is heard through the wall, ending with the outcry, “You are not the ones who will judge me,” after which a series of shots from a PPSh (Soviet-made submachine gun) reverberates. There are steps on the stairs. The car drives away. The report ends with the following information: “Doctor Szperling is a Jew. In the area of Kraków, he secretly conducted blood transfusions from Polish children to Jewish ones. The Szperlings were shot by an automatic PPSh, firing eighteen shots, shooting them both dead on the spot.” The WiN reporter comments as follows: “From the letter cited, it follows that the Bolshevik provocation caught on because it had an entirely concrete backdrop, not the ‘ignorance of the common folk [lud]’ that the rags write so much about.”137 This sentence, written a month after the Kraków pogrom and kindled by the rumor that Jews murdered children, proves how easily the officers of WiN came to believe in the legends of the common folk (lud). Marcin Zaremba’s conclusion that “the myth of ritual murder took control of the folk consciousness” seems too weak in this context.138 It was not only the common folk who circulated this legend. Officers of WiN, as well as employees from the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), aristocrats, and bishops believed in the legend of the Jewish ritual murder of non-Jews.

Several centuries of Church propaganda, expressed in paintings representing ritual murder, were behind the blood libel.139 In 1946, on the demand of the Communist authorities, three such paintings were removed from churches. One was a painting in Łęczyca that was removed along with a small coffin that purportedly held the bones of murdered children. The painting and coffin were displayed together in the church and were a trace of what remained after Jews were accused of this crime in 1639. The second and third were paintings from churches in Skałka and Kalwaria Zebrzydowska. Judging by the number of exclamation points in one report summarizing a number of dispatches, the WiN Union considered the removal of these paintings and the coffin from places of worship as an outrageous act of war against the Church.140

Notes

1. Danuta Kopertowska, Kielce: Historia i wspólczesność w nazewnictwie (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Swiętokrzyskiej, 2001), 220.

2. Kopertowska, 192.

3. As cited in Elżbieta Michów, Legenda Kielc zamknięta w nazwie: studium etymologiczne i kulturowe (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Akademii Swiętokrzyskiej, 2008), 9.

4. “Niepoważna historia Kielc,” http://historiekieleckie.blox.pl/2007/10/NIEPOWAzNA-HISTORIA-KIELC-cz2.html.

5. See Maksymilian Przybylski, “Życie w Silnicy: Absurd czy prawda?” http://www.wici.info/News,zycie_w_silnicy_i8211_absurd_czy_%20prawda,12351.html.

6. See the article “Orzeł bez korony—symbolem kraju lennego” in the archive of the Freedom and Independence movement (WiN) (ANKr, WiN 42, k. 362). This description refers to clumsy, early designs for a new, crownless national coat of arms that was deemed more appropriate for a communist regime.

7. Jan Kiliński, a commander in the Kościuszko Uprising in 1794, became a popular hero in the Communist pantheon.

8. See also “The Provincial Governor Wiślicz-Iwańczyk and His People” in chapter 13. Kotyska is sometimes written as Kotyzka; however, in the materials from the trial of the “Świt” unit it always appears with an s. See chapter 2 in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 69–114.

9. See Antoni Heda-Szary, Wspomnienia “Szarego” (Warsaw: Oficyna Rytm, 2009). See also Leszek Bukowski, Andrzej Jankowski, and Jan Żaryn, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2008), 2: 65nn.

10. AIPN Ki_025_675, cz. 1, k. 16.

11. Jedlicki, Jerzy, “Organizowanie nienawiści,” in Marzec 1968, Zeszyty Naukowe, series Kolokwia, red. Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych, wyd. Nowa, 1981, 48.

12. Hugo Steinhaus, Wspomnienia i zapiski (London: Aneks, 1992), 340. See also p. 355: “They are removing people from posts because they are afraid of public opinion. This public opinion is [so antisemitic] that people who gave Jews their lives [that is, they provided Jews with shelter] during the occupation, don’t want anyone to talk about it today.” The head of the delegation from the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KC PPR), Śliwiński, submitted complaints against Kornecki in September 1945: “Kornecki is also a Jew. Tactless in relation to Poles. He alienates Polish society with his behavior” (AAN, MIiP, sygn. 79). At the October 13, 1945, meeting, the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KC PPR) “withdrew from Kielce Com. [Julian] Lewin” (1908–1995), the director of the Professional Department of the Provincial Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KW PPR) in Kielce. See Aleksander Kochański, ed. Protokoły posiedzeń sekretariatu KC PPR 1945–1946 (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2001).

13. Both quotes from Regina Wrońska-Gorzkowska and Edmund Gorzkowski, Album kielecki: Starówka (Kielce: Wydawnictwo Wizard, 1991), 3: 5, 8.

14. Jacek Pycia, Nad Silnicą (Kielce: Drukarnia Jana Łęskiego, 1938), 205.

15. Jan Leszek Adamczyk, ed. Kielce przez stulecia (Kielce: Muzeum Historii Kielc, Wydawnictwo Jedność, 2014), 195.

16. See Jerzy Jerzmanowski, W starych Kielcach (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Łódzkie, 1984), 27.

17. Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

18. Leszek Dziedzic, “Społeczność miasta i życie codzienne,” in Kielce przez stulecia, ed. Jan Leszek Adamczyk (Kielce: Muzeum Historii Kielc and Wydawnictwo Jedność, 2014), 386. The numerus clausus in interwar Poland, which limited the number of Jewish students who could attend universities, was a continuation of tsarist policies. See Teresa Torańska, Oni (London: Aneks, 1985), 241. Available in English as “They”: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York: Harper & Row, 1987).

19. See Gazeta Kielecka, nos. 6, 8, 9,12, 35, 70, 73–75. Cited according to Barbara Szabat, “Obóz narodowy w Kielcach przed I wojną światową,” in Kielce i kielczanie w XIX i XX wieku, ed. Urszula Oettingen (Kielce: Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 2005), 105.

20. See SL 9.6 and 2.1.1.30.

21. From Henryk Rotman’s account. Cited according to Jadwiga Karolczak, “Koncert na cztery epoki,” Przemiany, no. 1 (1989), in Krzysztof Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi (Kielce: Małopolska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1993), 80. See Marek Maciągowski, Przewodnik po żydowskich Kielcach: Śladami cieni (Kraków-Budapeszt: Austeria, 2008), 37–38. See also Gazeta Kielecka, nos. 151 and 172 (1918).

22. Przewodnik 38. On the Morgenthau Commission, see also Jan Pazdur, Dzieje Kielc, 1864–1939 (Wrocław-Gdańsk: Ossolineum, 1971), 34–35, 109.

23. The above data are contradicted by Danuta Blus-Węgrowska in her article “Atmosfera pogromowa,” in which she states that on July 1, 1945, there were 212 Jews in Kielce. See Danuta Blus-Węgrowska, “Atmosfera pogromowa,” Karta 18 (1996): 99. Marek Maciągowski, however, argues that the number of Jews in Kielce fluctuated significantly in 1945–1946. He writes that in May 1945 there were only 78 Jews in Kielce; 306 at the start of 1946; 201 in February 1946; and 163 in May 1946. See Maciągowski, Przewodnik, 79–80.

24. AIPN BU_0330_233_8, k. 179.

25. Kaczmarek’s letter (AIPN Ki_015_32_5, k. 40–41) called for obeying the occupation authorities in everything that did not conflict with Catholic conscience (AIPN BU_944_529, k. 35). Regarding the warning that the underground authorities sent to the bishop because of this letter, see AIPN BU_0259_88, t. 1, k. 216.

26. Stanisław Mikołajczyk (1901–1966) was the prime minister of the government of the Republic of Poland in exile until November 24, 1944. Later, he was deputy prime minister as well as minister of agriculture and agricultural reforms in the Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej, TRJN), which lasted from mid-1945 until February 1947. Following a decision on August 22, 1945, Mikołajczyk’s People’s Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe, SL) changed its name to the Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe).

27. AIPN BU_0330_233_10, k. 233.

28. AIPN BU_1572_321, k. 89.

29. AIPN BU_1572_321, k. 62.

30. AIPN Ki_014_155, t. 2, cz. 2, k. 68.

31. AIPN Ki_015_32, t. 4, 109.

32. ANKr, WiN 42, k. 221.

33. AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 320. For additional examples, see AIPN Ki_014_155, t. 2, cz. 1, k. 18; AIPN BU_0330_233_1, k. 144; AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 326; AIPN BU_0330_233_8, k. 281; AIPN BU_0330_233_8, k. 48; and AIPN BU_0330_233_8, 328.

34. AIPN BU_0330_233, k. 251–53. In practice, the excommunication of communists had been obligatory since 1937, beginning with Pope Pius XI’s anti-communist encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

35. AIPN Ki_015_32_5, k. 142–43; AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 116; AIPN BU_0330_233_10, k. 203–4.

36. See AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 109 and AIPN BU_0330_233_10, k. 274.

37. See AIPN BU_944_548, k. 14.

38. AIPN BU_944_548, k. 15. The document is signed by Father J. Danilewicz and Provincial Governor Wiślicz-Iwańczyk.

39. AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 10. See also “The Proclamation That Never Was” (chapter 13).

40. AIPN BU_0330_233_12, k. 359. If this is true, then it had to have taken place before July 19, 1946, when Father Danilewicz went to Wrocław to brief Bishop Kaczmarek on the events of the pogrom. Stefan Grajek describes how Dr. Josef Tenenbaum (the chairman of the Federation of Polish Jews in the United States) and Rabbi Dawid Kahane pleaded with the cardinal—albeit in vain—to defend the Jews by issuing a statement after the Kielce pogrom. See Stefan Grajek, Po wojnie i co dalej: Żydzi w Polsce w latach 1945–1949, trans. Alek-sander Klugman (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny), 93.

41. AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 9. This might refer to the incident described in Kaczmarek’s report as follows: “Among other concrete examples, a child (a girl) disappeared from the orphanage of the Dominican Sisters on Karczówkowska Avenue.”

42. Regarding a broadcasting station on the grounds of the cathedral, see AIPN BU_0330_233_1, k. 64 (interrogation of Father Widłak); AIPN BU_0330_233_12, k. 183, 124, 340 (testimony of Father Peszko); AIPN BU_0650_39_2, k. 4 (secret prison letter written by Kaczmarek to the Primate Wyszyński), also k. 326 and k. 29. On the well-documented and disturbing matter of Sister Domicella (Helena Gonat), who served in the bishop’s home in Kielce, see AIPN Ki_015_32, t. 4, k. 88–90; AIPN BU_0648_15, cz. 1, k. 9ff. See also the testimony of Sister Sydonia (Zofia Konracka), mother general of the Sister Servants of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, AIPN Ki_015_32, t. 4, k. 82–84. For interpretations of this matter, see Jan Śledzianowski, Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek: Biskup kielecki 1895–1963 (Kielce: Jedność, 2008), 341. The circumstances were described by Father Leonard Świderski in Zielony zeszyt (The Green Notebook), from which excerpts were published by a state-owned publishing house in 1960 as part of the authorities’ attempts to undermine the Church. See Leonard Świderski, Oglądały oczy moje, vols. 1–3 (Warsaw: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1963, 1966, 1968). Father Świderski’s work was a similarly drastic abuse of power as it was most likely based on information he learned during confession.

43. AIPN BU_0330_233_2, k. 53.

44. Interrogation of Father J. Danilewicz, January 5, 1952, AIPN BU_0330_233_12, k. 121.

45. See SL 1.3. See also AIPN BU_0330_233_2, k. 69.

46. SL 1.4.

47. SL 1.3.

48. SL 1.5.

49. SL 1.3.

50. AIPN BU_0330_133_1, k. 211–12.

51. See SL 1.2. for Kaczmarek’s report.

52. SL 8.6 and chapter 6.

53. SL 5.7A.

54. See “Hierarchia Kościoła katolickiego wobec relacji polsko-żydowskich w latach 1945–1947,” in Wokół pogromu kieleckiego, ed. Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006), 1:96.

55. At around eleven o’clock, the parish priest of the cathedral, “having learned about some incidents on Planty Street, . . . went on to the site of the events, but at the entrance to Planty Street from the Sienkiewicza Street side he was turned back by the army.” AIPN_0397_591, t. 1, Pismo Kieleckiej Kurii Diecezjalnej do wojewody kieleckiego, Kielce, 5/7/1946, k. 99. Also Śledzianowski, Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek, 103, and Jan Śledzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Jedność, 1998), 152–53.

56. See Professor Andrzej Morawiecki’s testimony dated February 28, 2002 (AG-PK, t. 12, 66). See also Henryk Peszko’s account: “The agitated crowd didn’t listen to the priests’ voices, and the throng around the building was so thick that it was impossible to come close to the very center of the bloody riots. The priests, seeing that neither the army nor the agitated people were listening to them, retreated and returned to the curia.” Finally, see Żaryn and Kamiński, Wokół 1: 210–11.

57. Jerzy Sławomir Mac, “Kto to zrobił,” Kontrasty, no. 11 (1986).

58. SL 4.11A.

59. SL 3.24.

60. SL 5.1.

61. SL 5.21A.

62. For a map of the school yard and surrounding area, see AIPN BU_01453, t. 1.

63. AŻIH, American Joint Distribution Committee (1945–1950), sygn. 350/54, k. 13.

64. SL 1.2.

65. Paul Brass writes of a similar phenomenon in Russia regarding blaming Jews for pogroms. See 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), 24. Compare the rhetorical strategy of General Grzegorz Korczyński during his trial for crimes against Jews in Ludmiłówka: “I state that Jews in Ludmiłówka created antisemitism themselves” (AAN, Materiały Waładysława Gomułki, sygn. 2935, t. V, k. 147).

66. SL 1.2.

67. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 30. According to the authors, such a context is created by recurring topics in conversations, recollections, a residue of superstition, and hidden assumptions, all of which serve to explain the world around us.

68. SL 2.2.3A.

69. Piotr Skarga, Żywoty Świętych Starego y Nowego Zakonu, na każdy dzień przez cały rok, 1st edition, 1579 ed. (1610), k. 262. The reading for March 30 (March 24) is entitled “Męczeństwo pacholęcia Szymona Trydenckiego od Żydów umęczonego pisane od Doktora Jana Macieja Tybaryna do Senatu Brygji” (The Martyrdom of the Lad Simon of Trent Martyred by Jews, Written from Doctor Jan Maciej Tybaryn to the Senate of Brygja).

70. Henryk Barycz, “Z dziejów jednej książki,” in Z epoki renesansu, reformacji i baroku: Prądy, idee, ludzie, książki (Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1971), 652.

71. In the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index of folklore motifs, the legend about children’s blood mixed into matzo is listed as V361, “Christian child killed to furnish blood for Jewish rite” (Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-Tales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliau, Jest-Books, and Local Legends (Helsinki: “FF Communications No. 106,” 1932–).

72. Steinhaus, Wspomnienia i zapiski, 355. Steinhaus writes, “Prof. Kowalczyk assured me that a part of the so-called intelligentsia believes in an improved ritual murder, which explains the Kielce events. As we know, the transfusion (invented by a Jew, Hirszfeld) of children’s blood is needed to rescue emaciated Jews from Russia.”

73. Arieh Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States, & Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 181. Kochavi writes, “The Vatican’s version of the causes of the Kielce pogrom reveals that there was little or no difference between Vatican antisemitism and that of the Polish bishops. A Vatican memorandum stated, among other things, that ‘the influx of Russian Jews [into Poland] coincided with the mysterious vanishing of Christian children].’ The Vatican totally accepted the fabrication that the child in Kielce had been kidnapped to draw his blood and expressed doubts only as to the number of Jewish victims in the pogrom. It was suggested that no more than eleven persons had been killed.”

74. Andrzej Friszke, Między wojną a więzieniem 1945–1953: Młoda inteligencja katolicka (Warsaw: Biblioteka Więzi, 2015), 296, 393.

75. ANKr, WiN 39, k. 15 (“Polityka partii wobec katolików” in Biuletyn no. 2, July 16, 1945); the language here is related to that of a report signed with the cryptonym “Pi,” dated June 1947, National Minorities department, ANKr, WiN 9, k. 72. Fragments of books about the masons constitute a large part of file no. 47. “Prawdy historyczne,” a chauvinistic and reactionary (czarnosecinna) treatise published in Głos Narodowy (Warsaw, 1944) deserves particular attention. It was written by T. Baryka and A. Jurand.

76. ANKr, WiN 7, k. 93. In July 1945 a flyer appeared on the school church on Długosza Street in Nowy Sącz; it announced the arrival of Polish and English troops that “[would] chase out communists and Freemasonry to the East.” See AIPN Kr_056_3, t. 4, k. 36.

77. AIPN BU_0330_233_2, k. 63.

78. Father Józef Kruszyński, born March 18, 1877, was the prewar president of the Catholic University of Lublin. He wrote numerous antisemitic tracts beginning in the 1920s. For more on Kruszyński, see Dariusz Libionka, “Obcy, wrodzy, niebezpieczni: Obraz Żydów i ‘kwestii żydowskiej’ w prasie inteligencji katolickiej lat trzydziestych w Polsce,” Kwartalnik Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 3, no. 203 (2002): 318–38.

79. Bishop Stefan Wyszyński’s consecration took place on May 5, 1946.

80. Father Kruszyński studied Hebrew with Father Pranajtis. At the end of September and early in October 1913, Father Pranajtis served as an expert witness in the Kyiv trial of Menachem Mendel Beilis. Beilis had been arrested in July 1911 on charges of kidnapping and murdering a boy. Pranajtis, who had been defrocked by then, argued that this was a typical “Jewish ritual murder.” The rabbi of Moscow, Jakub Mase, refuted his arguments by showing Pranajtis’s ignorance with regard to the Talmud; the trial ended with Beilis’s acquittal. On the Beilis trial, see Harriet Murav, “The Beilis Ritual Murder Trial and the Culture of Apocalypse,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 12, no. 2 (2000): 243–63.

81. Encyklopedia kościelna, vol. 33 (1933), 450–78. The publication was granted imprimatur and nihil obstat.

82. Teodor Kubina was born in 1889 in Świętochłowice. He was ordained in 1905 and served as bishop of Częstochowa starting in 1925. For a reference to Kubina, see AIPN BU_0648_25_1, k. 17.

83. Cited according to Zenon Wrona, “Kościół wobec Żydów w Kielcach 1946 roku,” in Pamiętnik Świętokrzyski. Studia z dziejów kultury chrześcijańskiej, ed. Longin Kaczanowski, Adam Massalski, Daniel Olszewski, Jerzy Szczepański (Kielce: Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1991), 299.

84. See Aryeh Josef Kochavi, “The Catholic Church and Anti-Semitism in Poland following World War II as Reflected in British Diplomatic Documents,” Gal-Ed on the History of the Jews in Poland 11 (1989): 123. British ambassador to Poland Victor Cavendish-Bentinck’s time in Kraków was noted in reports found in the WiN archive (ANKr, WiN 42, k. 249). Until March 1947 Cavendish-Bentinck was hosted by the Kraków aristocracy, including by Count Franciszek Potocki.

85. Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics, 180.

86. SL 2.1.1.2B.

87. Władysław Bartoszewski, “Powstanie Ligi do Walki z Rasizmem w 1946,” Więź, no. 4 (1990).

88. AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 104.

89. I am grateful to Marek Maciągowski for this information. For details, see Śledzianowski, Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek, 72.

90. Jacek Majchrowski, Geneza politycznych ugrupowań katolickich (Paris: Libella, 1984), 45–46. Following is a summary of the Labor Party’s views in this regard: “The Polish nation suffers acutely as the result of a numerical excess of Jews, their social distribution, and above all however their moral differences and political tendencies that are extremely harmful to the economic, cultural, and moral interests of Poland.”

91. AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 104.

92. See “Zygmunt Jan Pilch,” in Internetowy polski słownik biograficzny (http://www.ipsb.nina.gov.pl/a/biografia/zygmunt-jan-pilch).

93. SL 2.1.1.2B.

94. AIPN Ki_015/32, t. 5, k. 119.

95. Description based on a secret prison letter dated March 3, 1952, from Bishop Kaczmarek to the primate, and intercepted by the UB (AIPN BU_0650_39_2, k. 48).

96. Kaczmarek is most likely referring to the Samoyedic people living in northern Russia. Undoubtedly, he is using the term here as a derogatory epithet. It is worth noting that the Polish word “samojed” can be read as a play on words; “samo” + “jed” gives the connotation of “self-eating,” or implies “cannibalism” as a symbol of the most outrageous otherness.

97. AIPN BU_0650_39_2, k. 46.

98. AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 7.

99. Adam Humer’s testimony from the second Kielce investigation dated December 2, 1993: “I declare that Bishop Kaczmarek enjoyed special privileges, namely: he was not harassed in any way, he had the opportunity to say mass in the prison on Rakowiecka Street, etc. I do not know anything about testimonies and clarifications being forced out of him. Based on conversations with him, he was treated well by the officers interrogating him and by the prison staff.” Cited according to Bukowski, Jankowski, and Żaryn, Wokół 2: 227–28.

100. Bishop Kaczmarek’s secret prison letter (AIPN BU_0650_39_2, k. 13).

101. See the self-criticism filed by Julia Brystygierowa and Józef Różański after the fact. The criticism concerned “errors in the investigation” made during the investigation into the matter of Bishop Kaczmarek: “It was also an error to withdraw from making a final clarification on the matter of the weapons, the broadcasting station, and the documents” (AIPN BU_0330_233_7, k. 171). Since exploring the reasons for withdrawing these charges is beyond the scope of this book, I did not investigate whether the second search in the cathedral—this time in the cellars where the weapons were supposedly hidden—was ever actually carried out. In any case, Józef Różański turned to General Romkowski for permission to carry out this search in a letter dated February 1953. See AIPN BU_0330_232_9, k. 83–87. It is also worth noting Józef Światło’s suggestion that Różański fell out of favor after Kaczmarek’s trial. This may have been connected to ignoring some of the evidence as mentioned in the above-cited “self-criticism.” See Zbigniew Błażyński, Mówi Józef Światło: Za kulisami bezpieki i partii 1940–1955 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo LTW, 2012), 87–88.

102. AIPN BU_0650_39_2, k. 13 and 51.

103. The archive of the organization “Wolność i Niezawisłość” (WiN; Freedom and Independence) housed in the Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie (National Archive in Kraków) is referred throughout as ANKr, WiN, followed by folder and scan number according to author’s numeration or the pagination of the file.

104. ANKr, WiN 36, beginning of the folder, pages unnumbered. Other prewar, anti-Jewish caricatures are filed in folder 19, k. 56–64.

105. This calendar belonged to Dr. Julian Zabrzeski, born on May 15, 1903. He was a leading Freedom and Independence activist from Kraków and Lisia Góra near Tarnów. The motifs on which the antisemitic drawings in this publication are based come from Polish calendars published before the war by the Self-Defense of the Nation (Samoobrona Narodu). See, for example, the calendar from 1938 (https://fbc.pionier.net.pl/details/nnR5f39).

106. ANKr, WiN 36, k. 1–12, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28.

107. ANKr, WiN 42, k. 650–62, within the context of the typescript entitled Stan podboju świata od roku 1914 do dziś (The State of World Conquest from 1914 till today), beginning on p. 590.

108. ANKr, WiN 42, k. 601.

109. See the section “Mniejszości narodowe” (“national minorities”) in Światowy Rząd Żydowski (World Jewish Government), WiN report signed “Pi” dated June 1947 (ANKr, WiN 8, 72). On the theories circulating within WiN, Colonel Józef Czaplicki stated the following during a meeting in October 1947: “In the military theories of WiN, antisemitism is promoted particularly strongly; it is, in a certain sense, one of the main slogans of WiN. WiN adopts the Nazi theory of Jewishness, which allegedly cooperates at this moment with the Soviet Union and is interested in its victory.” See Aparat Bezpieczeństwa 1944–1956: Taktyka, strategia, metody, cz. 1: Lata 1945–1947 (Dokumenty do dziejów PRL), ed. Andrzej Paczkowski (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 1994), 1:140.

110. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 16.

111. Circular no. 3 dated June 8, 1946, ANKr, WiN 5, k. 41.

112. See the document Przegląd wewnętrznej sytuacji politycznej w czerwcu 1945 (Review of the Internal Political Situation in June 1945) (ANKr, WiN 6, k. 15).

113. ANKr, WiN 39, k. 54. The criticism of the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe, SN) and the National Armed Forces (NSZ) was even harsher in the second half of 1946, when the SN declared Prime Minister Mikołajczyk a traitor of the nation. See Orzeł Biały, no. 7, September-October 1946, ANKr, WiN 43, no pagination.

114. Niezawisłość no. 26, September 16, 1946; cited according to AIPN Kr_0_74_199_1, k. 20.

115. ANKr, WiN 6, k. 338. See also “Niezawisłość,” no. 26, September 26, 1946; cited according to AIPN Kr_0_74_199_1, k. 232.

116. In the 1944 manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), Jews were promised equal rights. See the correspondence between Ignacy Wrzos, government commissioner for productivizing the Jewish population in Poland, and Roman Zambrowski, secretary of the PPR, dated May 15, 1947, AAN, PPR, 295/VII-149, k. 223.

117. ANKr, WiN 10, k. 33.

118. ANKr, WiN 36, k. 149–50. See Gruda’s statement at the February meeting of directors of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) in Aparat Bezpieczeństwa 1944–1956, 1: 54.

119. ANKr, WiN 36, k. 148. These models did, however, inspire those who established the MO, as evidenced by the ban on organizing party cells in the institution. The ban was introduced by a resolution of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KC PPR) from November 1944, and was revoked on June 4, 1946. See Kochański, Protokoły posiedzeń sekretariatu KC PPR 1945–1946, 39.

120. ANKr, WiN 4, k. 433. For more on Konrad Gruda (Gliksman), see AIPN BU_2174_2138.

121. ANKr, WiN 5, k. 7.

122. ANKr, WiN 5, k. 347.

123. From a flyer or article in a WiN newsletter titled “Grünfarb—Górczyński,” (ANKr, WiN 40–41, k. 272).

124. Ryszard Śmietanka-Kruszelnicki, “Zrzeszenie WiN na Kielecczyźnie 1945–1948,” Zeszyty Historyczne WiN-u, no. 19–20 (2003): 189.

125. Rafał Wnuk et al., eds., Atlas polskiego podziemia niepodległościowego 1944–1956 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2007), 415. The Polish rhymes as follows:

“Oto trzy przyjemne twarze / Dzicz, podłość i chamstwo w parze / Chętnie się z żydostwem brata / By na podbój ruszyć świata.”

126. AIPN BU_0187_1_1, k. 11.

127. This statement dates to 1947. See ANKr, WiN 25, k. 33.

128. ANKr, WiN 4, k. 98. See n27 in chapter 1 for details on the 1946 Polish people’s referendum. A report by Freedom and Independence (WiN) identifies three groups of Jews: (1) those who assimilate by taking Polish last names and marrying Poles; (2) those who emigrate, having experienced “Soviet paradise” firsthand; and (3) communist activists. See ANKr, WiN 38, k. 364; also ANKr, WiN 16, k. 695–97, document entitled “Kwestia żydowska.” Confirmation of the dangers faced by Jews appear in many reports. See, for example, ANKr, WiN 42, k. 343 (Rzeszów region): “Jews are trying for the most part to emigrate. . . . The reasons are uncertain living conditions, difficulties repossessing property, and fear of antisemitic incidents.”

129. ANKr, WiN 42, k. 646 (the same flyer is also in AAN PPR, sygn. 295/VIII-206, k. 57). Linguistic similarities link the text with a WiN report signed by “informant 2” dated October 1945 and entitled “National Minorities—repatriation,” ANKr, WiN 7, k. 205. Most likely the flyer was created based on this document, evidenced by the repetition of the last names “reichsdeutsch Schutz” and “volksdeutsch Michniok,” as well as the description of communists as “red panderers.”

130. At least two Polish families lived in the apartment building on Tannenbauma Street, and it was precisely to this family, specifically to Otylia Aksamit, that Bronia Mendoń came for private tutoring. Marcin Zaremba established the details in his book Wielka trwoga. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys. Polska 1944–1947 (Kraków: ISPAN and ZNAK, 2012), 590 (available in English as Entangled in Fear: Everyday Terror in Poland, 1944–1947, trans. Maya Latynski [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022]).

131. See, for example, the WiN study titled “Polityka narodowościowa PPR” [Nationalities Policy of the PPR]: “The alerted police patrol discovered a rabbi in a bloody kittel, next to a girl, Bronisława Mendoń, who was hanging. In addition, there were body parts found belonging to 16 children. Under pressure, the rabbi broke down and admitted to everything.”

132. Polish Army field rabbi, Lejb Thorn, was the owner of the apartment where Landesman, who was accused of the murder of Bronia Mendoń, lived. See Jan T. Gross’s Strach: Antysemityzm w Polsce tuż po wojnie. Historia moralnej zapaści (Kraków: Instytut Wydawniczy Znak, 2007), 81–82nn (available in English as Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz). For more on Thorn, see Krzysztof Kaczmarski, Pogrom, którego nie było (Rzeszów: IPN, 2011), 78, n8. See also Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 588–94. Finally, see Leon Thorn, It Will Yet Be Heard: A Polish Rabbi’s Witness of the Shoah and Survival (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019).

133. This statement is not true; the composition of the patrol and its eventual fate are at least partially known. See Kaczmarski, Pogrom, 19.

134. ANKr, WiN 42, 29.

135. A study titled “The Jewish Question” maintains that Bronia was the child of a Polish worker, who “for three years hid Jews from Germans”; in this regard, the story expands to include the motif of “Jewish ingratitude” (ANKr, WiN 16, 695–87).

136. ANKr, WiN, t. 42, 208v. WiN report about Doctor Sperling from Bydgoszcz, killed by someone in a Polish officer’s uniform.

137. ANKr, WiN42, k. 218a.

138. Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 597.

139. The largest such painting is still on display in the cathedral in Sandomierz. See Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Legendy o krwi: Antropologia przesądu (Warsaw: WAB, 2008; French translation: Légendes du sang. Pour une anthropologie de l’antisémitisme chrétien, Paris: Albin Michel, 2015). After the debate spurred by Artur Żmijewski’s film Polak w szafie (Pole in a Closet, 2007), the painting was covered “for renovations.” Since 2014 it has once again been available for viewing with the description “The accusation of Sandomierz Jews for ritual murder in 1698 and 1710.”

140. “In the City Committee of the PPR in Kraków, a resolution was adopted, pursuant to which appropriated measures should be taken by the authorities, so that in the monastery in Kalwaria, as well as at the [church in] Skałka, paintings that present the murder of children by Jews should be confiscated and destroyed!!” See ANKr, WiN 4, k. 425. See also Jolanta Żyndul, Kłamstwo krwi. Legenda mordu rytualnego na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Cyklady, 2011), 261.