CHAPTER 7

Dog Days

Kielce from Above

If at noon on July 4, 1946, we had looked at Planty Street in Kielce from above, all that we would have seen would have been a dark green knot marked by a single cumulus cloud. The crowd would have been invisible under the cloud and the canopy of trees that grow along the Silnica River. In the center of town, we would have been able to see two intersecting streets. The first, Sienkiewicza, leads from the train station until it intersects with Focha (today Paderewskiego). That is where the Office of Public Security (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB), the Soviet commander’s office for the city, and the apartments of most of the security service functionaries were located at the time. And at noon, we might also have been able to see a train pulling into the station and passengers spilling out of it. Among them would have been Anszel Pinkusiewicz. But to hear Anszel’s story, we must wait a little longer.

Also at noon on that day, we would have been able to see a thick crowd streaming along Okrzei and First of May streets. This crowd is made up of workers from the Ludwików Metalworks Factory in Kielce, and its members are being joined by those who work at Sawmills no. 1 and 2, the Fosfat chemical plant, and the Granat manufacturing plant.

“Only a month after liberation, production started in Ludwików,” boasted engineer Bratkowski, one of the steelworks directors in 1945. “And since the staff is dedicated, we already reap the fruits of our labor. We produce not only castings for grates, small doors, baking sheets, but also for axes, scythes, pitchforks, and rakes.”1

The workers will take tools of all these types with them to Planty Street. The hallmark of Ludwików will be radiator pipes, hammers, rods, and adjustable wrenches, while the workers from Sawmill no. 1 will arm themselves with sticks and wooden pickets taken from a warehouse along the way. All these items were among the tools used for the crime and were presented as evidence at the first July trial in 1946.

Who Worked in the Ludwików Steelworks in 1946?

Eric Hobsbawm, a scholar of revolutionary movements, has observed that because the criminal underworld resides in the same areas as the working class, the authorities often treat rioters and insurgents as criminals.2 He has also noted that a criterion for revolutionism is the participation of an industrial working class.3 The extent to which this criterion was unreliable can be seen in the example of Ludwików, whose workers—numbering from 600 to 1,000 people, depending on the source—joined the pogrom.

Three decades earlier, before the bloody wave of pogroms in 1918–1919, Julian Marchlewski wrote with a similar degree of naiveté about workers: “The working class has turned away from the anti-Jewish affair with revulsion. . . . In the midst of the brutality that comes as a result of capitalism, the only carrier of truly humanitarian principles, universally human ideals, is the proletariat.”4

The proletariat from the Ludwików steelworks was not a carrier of these principles, nor was it a carrier of these ideals. It differed from Julian Marchlewski’s imaginings about workers in the same way that Kielce workers in 1946 differed from Western imaginings about the industrial working class. “Class” cannot explain the proletariat’s engagement in the Kielce pogrom because it had nothing to do with “social justice” and “exploitation,” and these are the factors that Western scholars place at the center of contentious politics, where political disputes resort to violence.5

Despite this, it might be productive to treat the workers’ cries on Planty Street literally and to ask what kind of “justice” and “exploitation” they might have been referring to. Such treatment would make it possible not only to add the word “pogrom” to dictionaries written by leftist historians (a word that is rarely encountered in such a lexicon), but also to see how much a nationalist ideology that defines Jews as deviants who devour such a country, its very children, has in common with the leftist definition of the enemy of the people as bloodsuckers.6

An analysis of the slogans that the workers shouted on Planty Street shows that, under certain social circumstances, justice and exploitation are redefined in a way that justifies attacking the weak. In a country where discrimination against Jews was legal before the war, postwar equality of rights for Jews becomes an injustice; the recovery of stolen property becomes exploitation; and taking advantage of civil rights becomes a privilege. The existence of a group defined as the Other triggers aggressive fantasies that attribute to it murderous intentions.

Proclaiming slogans about “the betrayal of Poland by national minorities,” Polish nationalists (narodowcy) did not anticipate granting civil rights to Jews after the war. In Szaniec (The Rampart), a publication of the underground nationalist movement National Armed Forces (NSZ) to which both brothers of the MO officer Stefan Sędek reportedly contributed, we read that “the only appropriate and powerful, non-false and non-cowardly solution is to give public rights solely to Poles.”7 One author thundered, “Precluding Jews from once again taking advantage of political rights and depriving them of the possibility to interfere in Polish matters will be the first stage on the road to healing political relations in Poland.”8 Also published in The Rampart were demands to organize camps for Jews after the war and a call to establish ghettos.9 Other nationalists, like the publishers of the brochure “Do Broni” (To Arms), dated March 1, 1943, declared, “We won’t let the Jews out of the ghetto, we won’t allow them to have access to trade again. We have to create a Poland without Jews. We call the entire merchant class to this battle against Germans, Bolsheviks, and Jews.”10

A poster of the National Camp (Obóz Narodowy),11 posted on the walls of Polish cities in 1943 during the pinnacle of the Holocaust, exhorted “Brothers!.. 23 years ago, hordes of Soviet ragamuffins reached the walls of Warsaw. Germany—‘democratic’ at the time—was crazy with joy; Jewry—ours and around the world—also rejoiced. . . . Today, this same enemy not only stands at the threshold of our cities and villages but has made inroads into them. They have nested in our homes like disgusting insects. . . . In order not to be recognized, this enemy takes on various forms. Sometimes it is the Polish Workers’ Party, meaning the PPR, the center and headquarters of Communism here; at other times it is the People’s Guard, which is the armed forces of our Communism; at other times it is the Workers’ Party of Polish Socialists, that is the RPPS [Robotnicza Partia Polskich Socjalistów], or the Uprising or Partisan Units [Oddziały Powstańcze lub Party-zanckie]. But all these are only the masks and tentacles of one dragon, a hundred-headed and hundred-stinger Hydra, which has been dropped off by Moscow in order to exterminate the Polish name. It sullies national slogans and the names of Polish national heroes who are holy to us. . . . Poles! Enough tolerance! The entire country is on fire and drips with blood! . . . Everyone—to the ranks of the NSZ!”12

As we shall see below, many of the workers from the Ludwików steel-works heeded this call.

Though their mentality was shaped by the Church’s prewar Catholic nationalism,13 the reasons that Kielce workers engaged en masse in the pogrom can be found, above all, in the Second World War and its characteristic method of “resource mobilization.”14 Charles Tilly, who proposed this concept, demonstrates that for any group to function effectively, it must have at its disposal a reservoir of attitudes and loyalty, rather than economic wealth.15 Prewar antisemitism, and then the war, which coincided with the youth of those born in the 1920s, shaped specific loyalties and habits. The Kielce pogrom showed that in 1946 Poland the resource that could most quickly be mobilized was animosity toward Jews.

The biographical experience of individual people is illustrated by the Bokwas from Kielce, a family of four brothers who were occasionally employed at the Ludwików steelworks as unskilled workers. The eldest, Zygmunt Bokwa, was a bricklayer born in 1916, who lived in the Kielce neighborhood of Pocieszka. His social views were not shaped by work but by his experience in the underground, specifically, by the way the underground treated Jews.

At first, Bokwa (pseud. Smutny) was a soldier in the NSZ. In statements made during an investigation in the 1950s, he described attacks that his group had made on church rectories and estates.16 In June 1943, threatened with a death sentence for similar acts, Bokwa decided to move to the Home Army (AK) “Wybranieccy” unit. He also made a similar proposal to his colleagues: “Let’s better move to some strong group, ’cause with them [the NSZ] things could end badly, ’cause they’re starting to kick us around.”

In the “Wybranieccy” unit Bokwa landed in a squad led by Edward Skrobot (pseud. Wierny), who in the 1950s was sentenced to several years in prison for, among other things, killing Jews.17 In the winter of 1944, Bokwa—along with this unit—took part in, among other things, the murder of Icek Grynbaum on the market square in Chęciny.18 He became accustomed to a specific way of treating Jews: first he and his cohorts would deceive Jews with the promise that they would be accepted into the underground; after the Jews showed them where their assets and possessions were hidden, the Jews were killed. In Skrobota’s squad, strict racial categories were applied. As part of this, they held what was called szwancparady, a term derived from a combination of the Polonized German word schwanz (prick) and the word for parade. Under the pretext of checking soldiers for venereal diseases, they sought out those who were circumcised.19

I, Ace Rifleman

Bokwa is not an exception. One of the workers from the Ludwików steelworks was also a soldier in a unit led by Mieczysław Tarchalski (pseud. Marcin), commander of the Home Army’s II subdistrict of the Włoszczowski district. Below is a fragment from this unit’s journal:20

“Today is September 3, 1943, 15:00. I, Ace Shooter, per command’s order, am supposed to continue writing the diary . . . in order to record the ups and downs of our life, in the camp and in battle. We ourselves will read these memoirs with our families after the war and when we return home. God is good and everyone should preserve life, fighting for the good cause that is the freedom of our beloved Fatherland. . . .

Sunday, September 5, 1943. We have guests today: Mrs. Stanisława Kmicicowa, the captain’s wife, and her brother, a priest-chaplain from Drochlin. A mass will be said, and before that the soldiers are going to confession. The altar is made of boxes covered with blankets, a true holiday atmosphere. . . .

September 10, 1943. . . . As we were returning to camp, along the way, in the village of Rudniki, we arrested a young Jewish girl, a communist, who—after having checked her out in the camp—we are eliminating as a destructive element to Polish society. We really have a lot of work, everyone is seriously exhausted, but still very merry. Soldiers are volunteering, raring to get to work. . . .

We are setting off as another group under the leadership of Lieutenant Orzeł to the village of Starzyny in search of bandits and communists. . . . We have all seven, including five Jews and two Poles, they all came to plunder. . . . Right away in the yard we shoot the five Jews dead, we are taking two back to camp to conduct an investigation. . . .

September 11, 1943, breakfast in the morning, slept till 14:00. Next, interrogations of those arrested using whips of justice; they divulged everything, their partners and the location of their bunker. In the evening we head out to eliminate them. At night we go to the forester’s lodge in Fołtyn. The forester shows us the bunker, we go capture it. After looking for the entrance, which was securely camouflaged, the shooter Orzeł goes in through the air ventilation duct. We don’t find anything except a bit of flour and some small objects. . . .

September 13, 1943, in the evening we head out on a job. A patrol goes with Lieutenant Kmicic and Chief Jurand to the village of Maluszyn for provisions, they bring back two pigs and some vodka. We go in a group of sixteen—including Lieutenant Ludwik and Orzeł, Corporal Dąb, Olcha, Grot—to the Ściernie forester’s lodge, we discover one Jewish married couple in a forest burrow. The forester there brings them food. We thought they were communists, they got 300 lashes each, they didn’t admit to anything.”21

The forester is punished, and the thirty-five-year old doctor, who—for a while—is used “for first aid purposes,” is shot dead along with his wife.

The same types of “boys from the forest” who ended up in the Citizens’ Militia (MO or police), the security service (UB), provincial institutions of authority, Internal Security Corps (KBW), and army, also ended up working in the Ludwików steelworks. A list of employees of the steelworks in 1946 reveals many last names that have already appeared in this book. In a moment, we will get to know a few more.

Morning at the Ludwików Steelworks

The Ludwików steelworks are not far from Podwalna Street, where the Błaszczyk family lives. Supposedly, first thing in the morning, some shoemaker from Podwalna came to the factory fence and “loudly called to people that Jews were murdering Polish children, while we here were working.”22 Even if this wasn’t the case, the steelworks would have been buzzing with this information. After all, Henio’s stepbrother Jan, his cousin (whose name is also Henryk), and his paternal uncle Andrzej (who is employed in the industrial guard), all worked there, as did their neighbor, Władysław Dygnarowicz, whom we already know and who worked in the foundry at the steelworks.

Henryk Konat, who at that time worked in the mechanical department of Ludwików, remembers a visit from someone who worked in the foundry, who—in turn—repeated the words of the shoemaker shouting at the factory fence. Waving about a foundryman’s trowel, he said, “They’re working here at the machines, while . . . Jews are murdering your children,” to which the workers in the department responded by interrupting their work and walking out to the gate.

A polisher, Jadwiga Szymańska, confirms this: “At one point someone . . . it was a man, started to tell the people in the cafeteria, ‘You’re working here, while Jews over there are murdering your children.’” That’s when people opened the gate by force and walked out of the factory.

Marian Nogaj, who worked in the seed drill department, also remembers a foundryman who urged action. He mentions the last name Kwiecień or Kwieciński: “[He] ran from department to department with a metal rod in his hands and called everyone out to the factory gate. He was saying that Jews wanted to kill a Polish boy for matzo, but he ran away from the Jews’ building. The workers went out to the gate at his prompting. . . . The [PPR] secretary of the factory, whose last name was Sikorski, stood near the gate with a weapon in his hand and tried to prevent the workers from leaving, but at some point the gate fell, and then the workers opened the gate and walked out onto the street and went in the direction of Planty. Because the rumor that the guy from the foundry was spreading was that this boy had run away from a building on Planty Street.”23

Tadeusz Kokosiński, a twenty-six-year-old production controller in the assembly department for agricultural machines, also observed the course of events. “That day, a rumor spread through the factory that . . . Jews had kidnapped the son of one of the foundry workers and had taken him to the building on Planty Street. This boy supposedly escaped from there through a window [and] told his father about it at home.”

The rumor whipped through the factory at the speed of lightning, and within an hour as many as a thousand people had gathered at the gate, armed with hammers and wrenches. Kokosiński didn’t go with his colleagues to Planty Street, but the next day he talked to them about the incidents. Workers didn’t hide the fact that they had killed Jews; they believed they were defending their children. They also maintained that they had been provoked by Jews who were shooting from inside the building.

People fell into a rage after the rumor started by a worker in the foundry spread throughout the steelworks, explains Wincenty Czwartosz, who at the time was a fifteen-year-old errand boy. “He started to tell the workers that his son was caught by the Jews and that the child had seen how the Jews took another boy and put him into a barrel and rolled the barrel, in this way rolling the blood out of him.” It’s no surprise, then, that the people in the factory started shouting, “Beat the Jew.”24

Maria Józefa Górska, who worked as a master’s assistant enameling metal products, recalls completely different shouts: “Everyone walked out in front of the building, and we saw that . . . the iron gate of the steelworks was open wide. We kept hearing the shouts: ‘They’re beating Poles.’ The older people kept working, but the younger ones, like me, rushed over—ran over to see what was going on.” Maria Górska stood far away, on the other side of the Silnica River. She only saw one of the Jewish women throwing money off a balcony. “I noticed my boyfriend, Janek, among the soldiers surrounding the building,” says Górska, quickly adding, “I don’t know his last name. That’s when I ran home from there.”25

At the time, the stepdaughter of Antonina Biskupska, already known to us as a driving force of the pogrom, worked as a secretary in the Ludwików steelworks. “In the Ludwików steelworks there were rumors that Jews murdered children of Polish ethnicity in order to obtain blood for matzo. These rumors caused a commotion among the workers in the steelworks. The workers . . . shared information with one another that murdered children had been found in the basement of a building located near the river. It was said that the murder was committed by Jews. People were horrified by this information and left their workstations. . . . After receiving this information, I got scared because my younger brother was under my care. I was afraid that something bad might happen to him, that he would be beaten up. The workers at the steelworks left the workplace in crowds. Everyone was passing this information back and forth, everyone was leaving their workstations. . . . I left the steelworks along with the crowd and went to the city center near the river. I was horrified, I looked for my brother. My brother was seven years old at the time and I was worried about him. I didn’t find my brother there. There was a crowd of people in the center of the city. People were shouting that Jews were throwing out money and running away. I [however, personally] didn’t see Jews throwing money out and running away.”26

Władysław Dygnarowicz, the Foundryman

Władysław Dygnarowicz, the Błaszczyk family’s neighbor in the apartment next door, was a foundryman at the Ludwików steelworks. Right after arriving at work in the foundry, he shared the news about Henio with his metalworker friend, Stanisław Umofer. “I told him that on July 1, 1946, Błaszczyk’s son had been caught by Jews and that yesterday, that is, on July 3, 1946, before evening, he escaped from the basement where he had been put by Jews. I don’t know if Umofer told anyone about this, but I don’t think so, since we were working together until noon and he didn’t go anywhere. At noon, during the lunch break, I went for lunch to the cafeteria in the steelworks and at 12:30 p.m. I returned to my work, where I saw small groups of workers in the courtyard. I went out to them since there wasn’t anyone on the shop floor. As I approached one of these groups, where workers from the security service were standing, I heard a blacksmith from the steelworks whose name was Dydak saying these words, that we are working here, but we have no idea what’s happening to our kids over there. When I approached a second group, I heard workers telling each other that there are some movements in the city, but I didn’t hear what exactly was going on. In the meantime, workers were going out onto the street; however, they were not coming back in.”

A technician from the steelworks, Stanisław Łagowski, later told Dygnarowicz that one of the Ludwików directors, Adam Sobol, was walking around the courtyard but wasn’t forcing the workers to go back to work. This must have been after he called Colonel Sobczyński in the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) to inform him about the unrest among the factory staff. We know from other sources that the head of the security service sent a few workers from the UB to the Ludwików plant, including Błażejewski and Andrzej Markiewicz, in order to restrain the workers “through persuasion.” He also called the first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KW PPR), Józef Kalinowski, and asked him to “go to the factory, organize a rally, influence the workers, and restrain them.”27 Kalinowski did not agree to go because—although he was a Jew—he didn’t want to be labeled a “Jewish uncle” (meaning, someone who defends Jews).

When Sobol shared the news about the phone call from the security service, which was calling for them to turn the workers away from Planty Street, Łagowski calmed him down: “The authorities are there and they aren’t able to handle it, so you too, sir, won’t be able to manage.”28

“Before 3:00 p.m. came around, I left the steelworks and went home just like I would after quitting time,” Władysław Dygnarowicz continues. “After I got home, I took my bike and went to the railway crossing at Piotrkowska Street. After being stopped by the policemen who were standing at the crossing, I came back because I didn’t have a bike registration card. Next, having a lot of work fixing shoes, I got down to work and didn’t go anywhere until late evening.”29

Dygnarowicz, whose brothers and neighbors had just landed in prison, carefully weighs every word that he utters during in this interrogation. He cannot deny that he started the rumor at work about Henio, but beyond the formulation “You’re working here, but what’s going on over there with your children?” he tries not to give any information that might incriminate someone. That’s why he omits key elements of the event—elements that appear in the statements of other participants. These elements include the initiative taken by the factory council, the situation in the cafeteria where the decision was made to go out, the situation at the steelworks gate, the actual departure from the steelworks, and the situation on Planty Street. We will address each of these in turn.

The Factory Council and the Theme of the “Polish Officer”

Stanisław Gajda, age forty, a foundryman in the Ludwików steelworks, married, four children, tells his interrogator in 1946:

Yes, I admit that on July 4 I spread anti-Jewish propaganda during the excesses against the Jews. . . . On that day, the factory council in our shop was in the director’s office in regards to matters related to work in our shop. Lasota Bolesław from the foundry, Kaczmarczyk Stanisław, Błoński Józef, and Wołowiec Józef were there. Coming back from the director’s office, they started telling me that extraordinary things were happening in town. It was 11:00 a.m.; every worker was finishing their work and getting ready for lunch, when we heard that the factory council was talking about something with excitement, so we all gathered around them.

They said that Jews caught a little boy, Błaszczyk’s son, and that they wanted to murder him and carry out a blood transfusion, but he ran away and he and his father notified the police.

The MO, along with the army, wanted to check whether Jews in fact were shooting at the civilians, had already killed a lieutenant of the Polish Army (WP), and were shooting at soldiers. They said that there were a whole bunch of people demonstrating on Planty. Hearing all this, the workers went off to lunch. Everyone was very upset, and they demanded that they be released because they wanted to see and be witnesses to all these incidents. All the workers went to lunch, and when they came back, they all gathered at the gate, demanding that the gate be opened. After a while, they opened the gate and everyone—shouting, ‘Let’s go beat up the Jews,’ ‘Away with the Jews,’—set out for town, going in the direction of Planty. The ones shouting were mostly young workers from the Ludwików steelworks.

I stayed back and slowly followed everyone from behind. As I went to Planty via First of May Street, I ran into a stranger whose head was bashed up. He was being led by a man [whom I didn’t know], so I joined them, bringing help to the wounded man. The two of us led him to a pharmacy; there they put on a temporary dressing, then we took a horse-drawn cab and went to the hospital. On the way to the hospital, we were stopped by people who were curious, so I told them that Jews were fighting the army on Planty, that they killed a lieutenant by shooting into the crowd of gathered people, because they murdered Polish children, and the crowd was demanding the truth. [Every] person who stopped me was given this information, and I was stopped often.30

Witold Całka,31 an eighteen-year-old scout in 1946, who was questioned during the second Kielce investigation, presents a similar account. In his account the description of the wounded man is different, but the theme of taking him by horse-drawn cab to the hospital returns.

On that day Całka was getting ready to leave for summer camp. As he was passing near Planty Street shortly after eight in the morning, some women standing on the street told him about a boy who had escaped from the Jewish building by sliding down a drainpipe, as well as about the “physically exhausted Jews” from the Soviet Union, who “abduct Polish children with the goal of carrying out transfusions.” A moment later he witnessed the army storming the building of the Jewish committee and heard shots being fired inside. “A moment after these shots, I noticed two soldiers carrying a second lieutenant out of the building, who had gone inside the building with them earlier. There were shouts in the crowd, ‘They shot him, they killed him.’”

Całka went immediately to the wounded man, who was propped up against the wall of the building. “I noticed that this second lieutenant was holding himself with his hands that were very bloody, in the area of his abdomen. Seeing a wounded soldier, I ran to Śliska Street for a horse-drawn cab, so I could transport the wounded man to the hospital.” Next, this second lieutenant was loaded into a horse-drawn cab and taken to the city hospital. On the way Całka heard the second lieutenant tell the corporal who was accompanying him about the circumstances under which he had been wounded. “The Yid was sitting in a closet and he shot me.” After coming back from scout camp, Całka learned from one of the workers in the hospital that the wounded man had died. The worker did not want to provide him with any additional information.32

A different version is presented in the “Testimony of an Eyewitness,” discovered in the attic of the Kielce cathedral. “We found the doors to the staircase locked; [in] response to the calls of the police we heard an answer from behind the door. ‘We won’t open up, we want the security service to come here. Get away from the door, or we’ll throw grenades.’ So the police and the people broke down the door, and from behind this broken-down door there came a series of shots from a machine gun, which wounded a couple of people and killed the lieutenant.”33

This event appears in the historiography of the Kielce pogrom as the theme of the “slain officer” or the “wounded lieutenant.” It was spread in trains on the Częstochowa-Kielce route. It also appeared in a Freedom and Independence (WiN) report, which—because the information was probably gathered from direct witnesses—should be quoted in its entirety:

For the crowd, the call to act was the outcry that Jews had dragged a Polish boy home to Planty Street (the only building completely occupied by Jews).34 A crowd from the suburbs started to gather, adopting a threatening attitude, throwing stones at the windows of the building. This was happening next to the MO station. The commander of the station, an officer, led his people out into the street in order to disperse the crowd and to prevent more serious excesses. Having received information from the crowd that there was a Polish child there, he pushed through the crowd in the direction of the building, ordering the Jews to give up the child if he was there—or that they conduct themselves in such a way that they calm down the crowd. In response, the Jews shot him from an automatic weapon. That’s when the policemen opened fire on the Jewish building. After a half hour, a company from the army arrived. Hearing about the murdered MO officer, officers from the WP also gave an order to open fire. The KBW [Internal Security Corps] did the same.35

This report, though it is based on such facts as the participation of the army and the police in the pogrom, is rather misleading. No functionary of the Kielce police was killed on Planty Street, and—other than the warning shots that hit the building instead of being fired into the air—the army only shot inside the building.

Appealing to the imagination, the motif of the “slain officer” appeared publicly for the first time during Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s press conference in Warsaw on July 13, 1946. In bulletin no.11, which was published afterwards, Ewa Szuchman, a resident of the building, was quoted as having expressed the view that “it was safe in the Jewish building until 2:00 p.m. when an officer was killed.”36 Repeating what was published in the foreign press, a bulletin of the Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe, PSL) stated that as many as four Poles were killed: an officer, a soldier, and two policemen. The motif of the slain officer returned again in September 1946 in a parliamentary question posed by PSL deputies to the government of the Republic of Poland: “Witnesses report that . . . among the unit of soldiers that arrived at the scene of the incidents, an officer and one soldier were killed.”37

Andrzej Drożdżeński presents his own version of this event. He heard “a quiet shot from somewhere upstairs, probably from the first floor. . . . From the open door some civilian ran out into the middle of the yard yelling at the top of his lungs: ‘Gentlemen! Jews killed a Polish officer.’ After a while another civilian appeared in the doorway of the building, leading out a soldier with a wounded arm.”38

In turn, Edward Izydor Łakomiec, who was also questioned during the second Kielce investigation in the nineties, claimed that he personally saw “the corpse of an officer in a Polish uniform who was shot.”39 Among the autopsy reports, however, there are no unidentified corpses of uncircumcised men with similar injuries.

Despite this, we cannot exclude the possibility that this Polish officer—whose murder was recounted on trains and in squares by people filled with indignation—was a Jew. Among the residents of 7 Planty Street, there were several men who had fought on the front lines, including Sergeant Szmul Karp, who—if we are to believe the external postmortem examinations—was clubbed to death. The cause of death of at least one person with an officer’s rank was a gunshot. Specifically, this refers to Second Lieutenant Abram Wajnryb, who was a kościuszkowiec; that is, he was in the 1st Polish Infantry Division “Tadeusz Kościuszko” (1 Polska Dywizja Piechoty im. Tadeusza Kościuszki) that was formed in the USSR in 1943. But in addition to Wajnryb, some lists of victims indicate that a Captain Wajntraub was also killed.40 Since the corpses in the morgue were without clothes, we do not know which Planty Street residents were wearing a uniform on the day of the pogrom.

In addition, the testimony of police officer Ludwik Pustuła supports the hypothesis that the “Polish officer” was Jewish. During Rogoziński’s trial in 1950, Pustuła says: “I was supposed to be in the group of soldiers where Lieutenant Sokołowski perished.”41 The judge does not ask him to clarify which Sokołowski he is talking about, so we don’t know whether he is thinking of Chil, Symcha,42 or maybe even a third officer by the same last name.

Yet another theory regarding the identity of the “slain officer” can be drawn from a short article that appeared in the New York Times the day after the pogrom. Its author, W. H. Lawrence, wrote that Jews and “a Polish officer, as well as one non-Jewish member of the Polish Workers’ Party”43 died in the pogrom. In accordance with this hypothesis, these would have been Jan Jaworski of the PPR guard and Stanisław Niewiarski, who was either a shoemaker or custodian. Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine whether the latter had served in the military.

One more hypothesis loosely connected to the theme of the “slain lieutenant” can be linked to the revelations made by Ryszard Sałapa, a policeman who told his colleague that while inside the building, he saw a certain lieutenant shoot two Jews. “The moment we opened the door, a shot was fired in our direction from behind the ceramic tile stove wounding . . . a [certain] civilian in the arm. A lieutenant, seeing that a civilian had been shot, jumped over him and ran in the direction of the shot. At that moment a Jew was running away from behind the ceramic tile stove. In the meantime, I took care of the wounded civilian, helping him go downstairs.” When he returned to the building after a moment and entered a flat on the second floor with a lieutenant, he found there “a Jewish woman and man lying in bed. . . . When the Jewish woman saw us, she pulled out a pistol from under the pillow and shot several times in our direction. The lieutenant’s reaction to the Jewish woman’s shots was to shoot from an automatic PPSh, hitting the Jewish woman and the Jewish man in the chest. Seeing this incident, I ran away from there.”44

Sałapa, known for “liking to get tipsy,”45 tells a story that sounds more like a dream; this is probably why no one was surprised that shortly thereafter he recanted his testimonies. “I have no idea why I said those things,” he explained at the trial.46

But someone else also had the same dream. Zbigniew Chodak, who later became a guide for the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society, was nineteen years old at the time. He claims that he and his friends slipped into the room behind the military men and he saw Jews (we don’t know of what gender) covered with a comforter and lying in a bed. “One of the soldiers or policemen . . . pulled the comforter off those lying in the bed. We saw that they were lying there with pistols and had grenades on them. This scared those military men. . . . One of them shouted, ‘Hands up!’ and fired.”47

At the Gate

Bolesław Stawiarski, the main character of the 2015 film Amnezja (Amnesia), became the face of the Ludwików steelworks during the Kielce pogrom. The thirty-year-old toolmaker, married with one child, admitted on questioning that on July 4, “during the demonstrations against Jews,” he was on Planty Street. Julia Pirotte immortalized his face and characteristic bulky silhouette in photographs of the funeral procession for the victims of the Kielce pogrom.

Stawiarski said that on the way to the factory cafeteria, he heard from Stanisław Struch, a metalworker at the steelworks, that “Jews who resided on Planty Street murdered thirteen Polish children.” When he and Struch went out into the factory yard, they saw a group of workers talking about this. When leaving the cafeteria after lunch, Stawiarski noticed that almost all the workers were standing in front of the gate, so he also went to join them. They wanted to go through the gate and see if the story was true. “However, the guard didn’t want to open the gate, explaining that the director himself would need to agree to open it.”

“Then I went up to this guard . . . and I say he should open the gate, because his opposition against so many workers won’t help anyway—they will sooner beat you, sir, when they storm it open. But the guard didn’t open the gate. The workers, in turn, shouted, and pushed open the gate by force and walked out, heading in the direction of Planty.”48

During a later interrogation, Stawiarski would add that the shouts of workers inspired him to act. “We are working here, while over there Jews were maybe murdering our children.” So, “feeling disgust toward the Jewish nation,” he ordered the guard to open the gate.49

Other than the altercation with the guard, Stawiarski will not admit to anything else. He will maintain that he was a passive observer on Planty Street, where he was between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. Other than a shabby old photograph that might have been shown to others who were being interrogated, there are no other materials in his file.

What Henryk Obara Had on His Shirt

During the second Kielce investigation, no exhaustive search was conducted in the state archive in Kielce regarding the victims of the pogrom, and above all of the records of their possessions, nor was a search conducted on the participation of the Ludwików workers in the massacre. The records of several trials held in the district court in Kielce in 1946 are therefore little known.

On October 4, 1946, the district court conducted a hearing in the case of Ludwików foundry worker Henryk Obara.50 On the day of the pogrom at around 1:00 p.m., Wojciech Cedro, an UB functionary and Obara’s former schoolmate, recognized him in front of the building on Planty Street. “The accused was sweaty and had a bit of blood on his shirt. He was saying ‘Damn it! Those Jews. I made money off of them.’”

During the October trial, Henryk Obara recanted the admission of guilt he had initially given to the UB—an admission that was repeated to the investigating judge. He explained that the first admission of guilt had been forced out of him and that he gave the second one in fear of being beaten when he returned to prison.

Obara worked in the Ludwików plant delivering raw materials to the blast furnace. His supervisor was Józef Wenus, a foundry master who was a member of the NSZ during the war and distributed the NSZ publication Szaniec (The Rampart). During the trial, Wenus suggested that German POWs employed in the Ludwików plant be called as witnesses for the defense. It’s easy to guess what the prisoners’ testimonies were like. At the next trial, on December 11, 1946, Obara was exonerated.

Testimonies of Ludwików Workers during the Second Kielce Investigation

The last piece of evidence that we will consider is from 1946. It is the testimony of the director of the factory yard at the Ludwików steelworks, Feliks Piątkowski, who admitted that, while on Planty Street that day, he told a group of several dozen people that “there was an incident similar to this one last year in Kraków with children murdered by Jews, but due to a lack of evidence, the case was dropped.” Other than this, we have no other testimony from Ludwików workers from this period, though it is difficult to believe that the staff was not questioned.

Can we rely on the statements these workers filed five decades later, during the second Kielce pogrom investigation conducted in the 1990s? It is difficult to ignore them, but we should vet them very carefully.

The main point of reference can be the aforementioned list of Ludwików employees from 1946. We know that it is incomplete. Director Adam Sobol, Dydak, a smith by profession, and the metalworkers Umofer and Struch are missing from the list. Based on the general number of employees (there are 677 names on the list), we can, however, estimate the number of people from the factory who could have gone to Planty Street. Let’s assume that three hundred people worked the day shift, or if there were three shifts, then perhaps two hundred people. This means that among the estimated six hundred people in the crowd, at most half could have been from the steelworks.

Another clarification comes from the testimony given by Zygmunt Kuruszczak, who in 1946 was a sixteen-year-old apprentice in the foundry department of the Ludwików steelworks. He firmly states that lunch at the factory was always at 11:00 a.m. He also remembers that the signal to leave the steelworks came not from the siren that sounded every day at midday but from the alarm siren that called everyone to the yard.

Sixteen-year-old Zygmunt Karbownik, at the time an employee in the seed drill department, explains the conditions under which the decision to walk out was made. In those days, workplaces provided meals. There was a large cafeteria near the entrance gate. Employees working the day shift ate meals by department, one after the other; the foundry workers coming to the cafeteria usually sent their wives to pick up the food. The women would come to the workplaces with lunch pails and pick up midday meals paid for with vouchers.

After their meal, workers would step out in front of the building to smoke cigarettes. “I also found myself near the cafeteria at that time,” says Karbownik. As the day-shift workers were smoking after lunch, the wives who came to pick up lunches for their husbands started saying things like “They’re here working, while Jews on Planty Street are torturing their children, draining their blood for matzo.” This rumor spread like wildfire through the entire workplace, one person repeating it to the next. Suddenly, a crowd gathered near the cafeteria and the gate. “I remember that at the time, the guard was a tall man with the last name Kudła, from the village of Gruchawka. He was already an older man. The workers knocked over the guard, since he wasn’t letting them leave, and then they opened the gate and went into town with the intention of proceeding to Planty. Along the way, they picked up workers from the sawmill,” where—as a matter of fact—there was a rumor circulating that a child of one of the employees there had suffered at the hands of a Jew.

Karbownik set out with a group of people who had left the steel-works and went to the Silnica River. Planty Street was already blocked off by troops, but the people quickly broke through the cordon, mixed in with the soldiers and went to the building where the Jews lived.

“I was standing on the other side of the river. I heard shouts that a lieutenant was lying dead on a balcony. I heard a series fired from a machine gun. The fire brigade was there, but their hoses were cut. I saw Jews being thrown out of the building onto a vehicle that drove up under the balcony. I saw the crowd beating Jews on the other side of the river. I saw a soldier hit a Jew with a weapon in such a way that the butt of his gun broke. People were beating another Jew with stones on the street. I saw them drag another Jew from the building and beat him. They also took a wad of money from this Jew, and then someone threw it in the air into the crowd, saying the words, ‘Fellow countrymen, this is ours.’ People started to collect the money. From my position as an observer I could see the crowd attacking the Jew, and when it dispersed, there’s just a dead Jew lying there on the spot. At around 1:00 p.m. the workers slowly started to leave from there and return to their work-places. As far as I know, they were recording at the factory who returned to work and who didn’t. I, however, didn’t return to work then; I just went home on my bike.”51

Władysław Dzikowski and His Report

“At the time, I was working in the Iskra factory,” says Władysław Dzikowski in the 1986 documentary film Świadkowie (Witnesses). Dzikowski, who was an engineer, a social worker, and the author of conspiracy theories, also happens to have discovered valuable sources on the participation of the Ludwików steelworks in the Kielce pogrom.

Dzikowski’s manuscript “Pogrom Żydów w Kielcach” (The Pogrom of the Jews in Kielce), written in 1985–1986 and wrapped in legend, can be found among the materials of the second Kielce investigation.52 This manuscript deserves our attention, even though it presents reality selectively, meaning that it presents reality according to the author’s point of view. As a member of a Catholic society called the Sodality of Our Lady, he is interested in the participants of the pogrom and their membership in the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR), but he is not interested in the behavior of workers with extreme right-wing views. That’s why there isn’t anything in his report about former members of the NSZ who distributed the antisemitic publication Szaniec (The Rampart) during the war and worked in the foundry and guardhouse of Ludwików. We also won’t learn anything about director Ludwik Otmar Kwieciński’s past in the National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR).53

Furthermore, the basic facts presented in the report raise doubts. According to the report, just after 7:00 a.m., Piotr Jędrzejczyk, the manager of the department of labor and payroll at Ludwików, supposedly “organized a mass rally in order to inform the workers about the Jewish crime54 and the necessity for revenge. The workers broke down the gate from the inside and with rods and crowbars set out for Planty Street. Engineer Adam Sobol, the director of the Kielce metalworks factory, couldn’t—of course—go out to the workers and prevent them from leaving the factory . . . since he was of Jewish background.”55 In Marcel Łoziński’s film, Witnesses, Dzikowski even cites a statement allegedly made by this Jędrzejczyk: “The Jews kidnapped a child for matzo, so we’ve got to go finish them off.” These views were then repeated following Dzikowski’s manuscript by such Kielce authorities as Father Jan Śledzianowski and Krzysztof Kąkolewski.56

However, based on an analysis of archival materials, it appears that these views are replete with distortions and inaccuracies. It turns out that Piotr Jędrzejczyk, a lieutenant assigned to the staff of the 2nd Infantry Division of the Polish Army in Kielce, does not appear on the July 1946 list of persons employed in the Ludwików steelworks. He was not employed there as a clerk until 1949. From his files in the Office for Military History, it appears that after being dismissed into the reserves in March 1947, he was employed in the provincial headquarters of the MO in Kielce as an inspector for the Volunteer Reserve of the Citizens’ Militia (ORMO).57 He became a member of the PPR that same year.58 In 1946 Jędrzejczyk could not have organized the march from the steelworks to Planty Street because at the time the march was taking place, this man was already at the site of the events in a completely different capacity. As a second lieutenant of the 2nd Infantry Division staff, he was taking weapons away from the Jews.

The second Kielce investigation in the nineties did, however, confirm a different last name mentioned by Dzikowski: “Commander Konat,” of the Industrial Guard of Ludwików, who reported to the Kielce Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP). “Kielce, July 5, 1946. On July 4, 1946, at 12:30 p.m. during the lunch break, workers numbering 600 people, having opened the gate by force, set out in the direction of town to Planty Street. I don’t know what was going on there. Signed: Commander Konat.”59 In truth, Henryk Konat, who testified in the 1990s, does not remember that he himself was a commander in the guard. But then, others who were interrogated also left many things unsaid.

Dzikowski’s text contains erroneous information and an inconsistent chronology of events. The author is not certain whether the pogrom occurred in June or in July. In Łoziński’s film he says that he found himself on Planty Street after 3:00 p.m. and did not see the earlier events; however, he speaks as if he himself observed them. He is unable to separate his own hypotheses and interpretations from information given by eyewitnesses such as Józef Kanas, a soldier of the Internal Security Corps (KBW), who was sentenced for participating in the pogrom.60 But it is precisely Kanas who must have stated that the 4th Company of the Operational Battalion of the KBW (the so-called “Zaporówka”,) had been called in. The company was under the command of Captain Chruścielewski,61 and was conducting exercises in Dobromyśl. In Dzikowski’s text we read, “The order was brought from the command by an errand boy. The company traveled by vehicle to the barracks at the stadium, and from there to the WUBP [Provincial Office of Public Security] on Focha Street. They were informed of the Jewish crime, and a column of 120 people, four abreast, was formed. These soldiers formed a cordon, preventing the convergence of people coming from all corners of the city to Planty.”62

The last names of other commanders in the KBW are also mentioned, but the information about their eventual sentences is imprecise. “The commander of the Operational Battalion ‘Zaporówka’ was Lieutenant Colonel Ruszkowski. The commander of the 4th company was Captain Chruścielewski, both from General Berling’s 1st Division. Second Lieutenant Schumacher was commander of the platoon from which two soldiers were sentenced to death.” But in fact, no soldier from the Polish Army was sentenced to death after the pogrom. Dzikowski adds that General Rola-Żymierski pardoned these two soldiers from “Zaporówka” because he concluded that “they acted under orders.”63 This information was likewise called into question, this time by Prosecutor Zbigniew Mielecki, who conducted the investigation in the 1990s. His note in the margins of Dzikowski’s report reads, “No record of this in the file ‘Pardons’ in the Central Archive of Modern Records.”

The following episodes also appear in the report. I list only those for which Dzikowski includes the last names of witnesses, allowing me to verify them using other sources.

Józef Wołowiec, a member of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) from the Ludwików steelworks, who is listed as a member of the factory council, saw soldiers of the Internal Security Corps (KBW) enter the building on Planty Street and throw Jews out a window.

Ryszard Miernik, a minor Polish poet and writer who wrote a novella about the pogrom in the 1960s,64 the head of the department of culture in the provincial office in Kielce, maintained that a Pole—an UB officer who “tried to get into the building at the very start of the pogrom”—was killed by a Jew with a shot from a pistol.

Zbigniew Chodak, the aforementioned tour guide for the Polish Tourist and Sightseeing Society and a collaborator with the UB, said that “there was a Jewish soup kitchen in the building next to the multi-story house. The crowd forced its way in there, beat up a Jewish woman and threw her into a pot of water. On the south side on the second floor, a Jew was lying under a comforter, he was probably an officer, next to him were a pistol and two grenades. . . . They dragged him downstairs and murdered him.”

After the Internal Security Corps (KBW) had arrived, a bullet shot from a pistol from the second floor of the Jewish building wounded someone in the crowd. “The wounded man was taken by horse-drawn cab to Kościuszki Street. Doctor Latałło [the director of St. Aleksander’s Hospital] pronounced that a corpse had been brought.”

Dzikowski’s firsthand observation: “In Białogon [a town near Kielce] some man was being chased when someone else shouted ‘Jew.’ A policeman from the Białogon station joined those who were doing the chasing. He hollered that he was the authority and only he had the right to shoot this Jew. One passerby stopped them and declared that the man was a Christian and gave them his address. And this man survived (before that he was seriously wounded).”

Bogdan Koziński, formerly a worker in the Kielce metalworks factory, saw how Izydor Kahane, a prewar Chevrolet representative and demobilized soldier who lived at 59 Sienkiewicza Street, reacted to the news about the pogrom. “He tried to convince people that the rumor about ritual murder is a lie. To no avail.” In fear for his own safety, he was forced to hide at home.

The same Koziński was supposedly friends with Major Andrei Kuprii, the commander of the Soviet garrison.65 Koziński heard from the major that in the morning, he had refused to help Chairman Kahane, who asked him to come to the rescue. Koziński connects this fact with Kuprii’s later demotion to the rank of private (which supposedly happened before the regimental court in Legnica). He also thinks that his mysterious death in Olsztyn was Jewish retaliation for refusing to help during the pogrom. These, however, are the same kinds of fabrications as his assertions that Andrei Kuprii and the commander of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division, Stanisław Kupsza, are one and the same person.66

Everywhere, Dzikowski defends the thesis that the pogrom was directed by the authorities, or in any event carried out by members of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). Similarly, he is able to explain other incidents of unrest, for example, “the pogroms in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and Kraków” as the result solely of “directives that came from the top, from the government and the KC PPR [Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party].” As we shall see below, he is aware of the extent of antisemitism in Kielce, but he is unable to connect it with the pogrom. He stubbornly searches elsewhere for the reasons why violence erupted.

That is also why, citing Franciszek Dziubiński, formerly a foundry-man at the steelworks, Dzikowski emphasizes the participation of a group of sixty or seventy members of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) who worked at the Ludwików steelworks. He describes the situation on Planty Street at the moment the “Zaporówka” arrives as follows:

In front of the building a crowd was teeming. The majority were workers from the KZWM [metalworks plant], party members. All the windows were already shattered. [People] forced themselves inside the dwelling through these windows. Earlier the Jews had run upstairs and barricaded the staircase. They were also shooting in order to prevent the barricade from being dismantled. They were also convinced of the justness of the pogrom, because—after all—they too knew about the kidnapping of the child. At one point officers and noncommissioned officers called out to the Jews that they were coming to defend them. After they removed the barricade, they went upstairs. Before long, they started to throw residents of the building through the shattered window, beginning with children and youth from the kibbutz center. . . . The crowd savagely murdered these Jews on the street (there couldn’t have been any wounded here). Upstairs, the soldiers brutally beat those they didn’t throw out the window.67

In the footage for Marcel Łoziński’s film, Władysław Dzikowski talks about his antisemitic upbringing with shocking candor. He remembers the moment when he learned about the pogrom:

At around noon in the factory cafeteria someone says, “There’s a pogrom of Jews in the city.” . . . We had always believed in ritual murders, so when that child disappeared, people went to defend him. Everyone believed that he had been kidnapped for matzo and that he ran away.

I still remember from my childhood, we pupils had the duty, when we saw a Jew—didn’t matter what kind—we had the duty to say, ‘You Jew, you heretic, your soul on a stake/You Jew, you horse dung, your soul on a wall. Phooey!’ It was a duty, I also did it. And so there was antisemitism in Poland not only then, but until today to a very high degree.

Jews before the war: what they were like, that isn’t important, it’s only important how we saw them. We saw Jews as complete scoundrels.

A Jew? Many people claim that Jews are not people. Well, they are people, but evil ones, because they killed Christ.

In the conclusion of his report, Dzikowski recalls a memory from the first Kielce pogrom, which happened three decades before the one that took place after the war. On November 11, 1918, still serving in a German battalion, he was present at the guardhouse on Młynarska Street. “As the person leading the guards, I found that one of my schoolmates was missing. When he arrived at the guardhouse, I asked him where he was. ‘At the pogrom,’ he answered. ‘What for?’ I asked. ‘Because I wanted to find out what it’s like to kill a man. I pierced a Jew with a bayonet.’”68

Even if Dzikowski remembered something incorrectly, what counts is the fact that many years after the war he talks about this without blinking an eye, without restraint or embarrassment.

Bruno Piątek

The 1946 list of Ludwików steelworks employees also includes Bruno Piątek, the author of a comprehensive account that was given to the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny) in Warsaw four decades later. He worked as a mechanical fitter. On that day in 1946, expecting the return of his wife from Wrocław and in the company of his brother-in-law and friend from work, engineer Mieczysław Elżanowski, Piątek rode his motorcycle to the Kielce Herbskie train station.

“Besides us, there were quite a few men on the platforms,” recalls Piątek.

At first I didn’t pay attention to them. Then, however, I noticed that something strange was going on. When the train came into the station, some people started to be pushed out of the train cars, and those who resisted were pulled out onto the platform. The train consisted of freight wagons adapted for transporting people, so it was easy to do. The ones who were pulled from the train began to be killed. Stones were thrown at them until they fell. Those lying there were killed using brake blocks.

Seeing this, engineer Elżanowski and I began to shout, “People, what are you doing? Aren’t you afraid of God?” But at that moment, the crowd turned to us with raised stones and menacingly shouted, “You Jewish lackeys, Jews murdered our children, and you’re still defending them?” The situation was all the more dangerous because one of the people being beaten to death, a young man, seeing that we were trying to defend them, embraced my knees. The perpetrators grabbed him and two of them started to pull him away. It seemed to me that just a moment longer and I would, without fail, collapse on the man who was lying on the ground, and I too would be beaten dead. Suddenly, the Jew who was reaching out to be rescued became weak and the grip of his hands loosened. The thugs pulled him to the side, and a third one, kneeling, crushed his head with a heavy brake block.

This entire time Elżanowski and I stood there without a word because we were surrounded by a growing gang of strapping men with stones and rods. Engineer Elżanowski was in a situation even worse than mine, because his appearance aroused suspicions. They started to examine him, interrogate him, check his identity papers. The individual who did this was in a railway man’s uniform. I tried the best I could to convince them that he wasn’t a Jew. The crowd was enraged and hysterically shouted, “Jews murdered innocent Polish children in basements, and took blood for matzo.” In the end, however, they left us alone.

While the murders were happening, I saw individuals in uniforms of Polish uniformed formations crushing the people lying there with blocks. One individual with a gun slung across his back demonstrated great persistence while murdering. Walking from one person to the next, he looked for any sign of life. He finished off those who were alive. I also heard single shots. I counted seven corpses on the premises of the train station.

Once I had gotten myself out of this trouble, I drove my motorcycle along the cobblestones of Częstochowska Street in the direction of the Ludwików steelworks. At the site I found that the majority of workers had left the factory. There remained only individual employees, ware-housemen, and functionaries. I went to the gatehouse. In addition to a few guards, I found Jan Sikorski there. At the time he was the chairman of the factory council. He was in a joyful mood. When I asked where the workers were, he said that they were at a demonstration in the city. Then I told him about the murders at the Kielce-Herby train station and about the fact that engineer Elżanowski found himself in danger. In response I heard, “Serves him right, Jew lover.”

I went to the office of the then-technical director, Engineer Adam Sobol. I found him sitting alone in a room in a deserted office. He was pale and terribly scared. I told him what I had seen at the train station. I warned that it will be difficult to expect any defense from the local authorities. After this warning, citizen Sobol, who was a Jew, left the factory.

Among those who were sentenced to death during the July 11 trial were two of our workers, metalworker Chorążak and the roofer Kukliński, both of whom I knew well.69

Julian Chorążak from Czarnolas

The second, bloodiest phase of the pogrom began with the arrival of the “factory folk” on Planty Street. When “a group with wooden bats” attacked the committee, no one was able to take control of the enraged people, says one of the policemen from the station located on Sienkiewicza Street.70 This is also confirmed by the commander of the police training course, Józef Dzik, who was knocked over and beaten up.71 And the pogromszczyk Stanisław Rurarz adds, “The crowd pushed the troops away with force and people from the crowd entered the Jewish building, and they went to the attic and from the attic they dragged Jews down.”72

Wacław Ziółek, an adjutant to Sobczyński (the head of the Provincial Office of Public Security) describes the arrival of Ludwików workers as follows:

I heard shouts of joy and cheers. When I looked in the direction of First of May Street, I saw a crowd of people, around 800–1,000 persons, in workers’ clothes, pushing like a battering ram. Some in the crowd were armed with heavy work tools and other objects. Some of them were a bit drunk. They went out for the morning break and with shouts like “If you believe in God, beat the Jews” or “Come with us” they crossed the river Silnica en masse onto Planty and to the apartment building at no. 7. Regardless of gender or age, they beat the people they encountered there with whatever they had, whatever they were holding in their hand, and threw them out of the window or down the stairs. The worst instincts were unleashed in some of the attackers. In addition to murdering people, they plundered the premises, robbed belongings: money, jewelry, and other valuable items. Under the influence of psychosis, they literally destroyed everything.73

These were the coworkers from Ludwików that the metalworker Julian Chorążak joined. Chorążak, twenty, the son of a foundryman, was the first of the workers to be sentenced to death in the July 1946 trial. Two days after the pogrom, he will tell the interrogator:

Yes, I admit to being guilty, that at around 12:30 p.m. I beat the caretaker of the building on Planty with a club, thinking that he was a Jew.74 And I clarify: when I was in Kielce on Duża Street at one Julia Lewicka’s, and this was at 9:00 in the morning, I learned that on Planty Jews had murdered Polish children on Planty. Hearing this, I went there and came upon a crowd of people made up of men and women who, however, were standing on the road not entering the building for the moment.

During lunch time workers from the Ludwików factory came, numbering around a thousand people. From the crowd came such shouts as: “Beat the Jews, because they are murdering our children.” Then the crowd charged the building where the Jews lived. I was standing at a window on the ground floor of this building and when the crowd pressed up [against me], I don’t know how I crawled through the window into the flat of the building custodian. Suddenly, this old man ran out. People yelled as one horde, “Jew, Jew, beat him!” I hit him once. I found a piece of wood or some other hard object in this flat, which I used to hit this custodian once over the head. The club was in the kitchenette, it was lying there. Everything [sic] was yelling, so I hit him. Some lieutenant started to call out that the custodian isn’t a Jew after all, and not to beat him. Then I stopped. Had I known, I wouldn’t have stuck it to him. Right after this fact I left there and didn’t beat anyone else. I was there until 1:00 p.m. I went out of curiosity.

And now for a dialogue quoted from the trial:

JUDGE BARANIUK: You thought that this man was a Jew. Did he look like a Jew?

THE ACCUSED, CHORĄŻAK: No, but people rushed in and everyone was agitated.

JUDGE BARANIUK: You say that at first you were there beyond the stream, and then you found yourself on the other side. How did you cross it?

CHORĄŻAK: I went along with other people, I crossed to the other side and stood there where the sidewalk is.

. . .

PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: If the accused had known that he was not a Jew, he wouldn’t have hit him?

CHORĄŻAK: I don’t know if I would have hit him or not. You have to be in the mood.

PROSECUTOR GOLCZEWSKI: And what mood was the accused in? Chorążak: Everyone was yelling: “Beat the Jew!” . . .

PROSECUTOR SZPĄDROWSKI: And if he had been a Turk, you would have also beat him?

CHORĄŻAK: At the time, everyone was agitated.75

The scene of Chorążak beating custodian Niewiarski is described in the report submitted by Officers Szott and Woźniak of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), who observed the crowd as it burst in:

A Polish custodian lived on the ground floor; he was seriously beaten by the civilian population and transported to the hospital on Aleksandra Street. Some of the troops burst in on the first floor, started shooting in the building, and said that the Jews used weapons against the army. In the flat on the ground floor, while the kikes were being beaten, we weren’t able to determine precisely who took an active part in the terror, since upon investigation we noticed six civilians and three military with PPSh and KBK weapons. It was dark in the flat, because the shutters were nailed shut; when the people standing in the yard heard shouts in the flat, they grabbed the shutters and tore off half a shutter. That’s when we were able to identify the perpetrators of terror, the last names were unknown to us. We told them not to beat the Jews, so they became outraged at us and said we were Jewish lackeys. We were forced to leave the flat because they recognized that we were from the UB [security service], so we returned to the office.76

Stefan Konarski, a functionary from the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP), saw a different “operation” by Chorążak:

At one point I noticed the individual who is being pointed out to me—I later learned that his name is Chorążak Julian—and I recognize him and firmly state that it was he—as he ran out with a stone to a Jew who had been pushed out and took a swing at him with his bare hand. I can’t say if he hit him or not, because I was standing at a distance of around five meters, and at the same time a larger number of people with stones and rods ran up to this Jew—and started to beat him until the moment they bludgeoned him to death. Chorążak only jumped at the Jew, directly after taking him out into the crowd, took a swing at him with his hand, and then disappeared from my sight. After a moment I saw him again, as he walked among the crowd and shouted, “Beat the Jews!” That’s when I went up to Chorążak and wanted to check his identity papers, but he threw himself at me with the words, “And who are you?” Since I was among the crowd—I let him walk away. On July 6, 1946, I and my colleague Pająk Józef ran into him on Piotrkowska Street and stopped him and turned him in to the PUBP [County Office of Public Security] in Kielce.77

Stanisław Niewiarski, the Custodian

In chapter 2 we discussed the problems associated with identifying the body of the “old Polish custodian,” as he is described in the indictment.78 The corpse of a man around thirty years old was identified as the custodian. On all the lists of the pogrom victims, he appears as “Niewiarski,” with no first name. Ewa Szuchman-Kestenbaum, Chairman Kahane’s secretary, will provide the name: “His name was Stach, I remember him well. He . . . spoke Yiddish. . . . He is not alive because he always liked Jews.”79

On the side of the building where the kibbutz was, there were no private flats, adds Niusia Borensztajn-Nester. Downstairs there lived a shoemaker, who wasn’t a Jew. We gave him shoes to repair.

Marysia Machtynger, who was running away down the stairs, met Stach Niewiarski at the bottom. He irritated her by repeating, “Jesus will save you.” He brandished a cross in order to hold back the pogromszczycy.

While testifying during the second Kielce investigation, Machtynger recalled, “Some soldier went up to our custodian and threatened him, saying that if he didn’t show him the basement, he would shatter his head with a rifle butt, that he wouldn’t take pity on his gray-haired noggin. The custodian naturally swore to him that there were no basements here.”80 Borys Dorfman, who will lose his eye in the pogrom, heard his cry: “A bunch of people on the other side of the river, they are throwing stones, yelling that a child is supposedly in the basement. Even the guard-custodian himself said, ‘There’s no basement here at all!’ I remember the shout.”81

The figure of Niewiarski the custodian is immortalized in an underground flyer titled “Paid Russian lackeys of the PPR.”82 It presents a particular interpretation of the pogrom, beginning with the assumption that Jews really drank blood. They also supposedly engaged in kidnapping children and collecting their vital fluids, afterwards keeping the children in basements until they became “dried out corpses.” No wonder that in accordance with this interpretation, the “Jewish lackey” Niewiarski was transformed from an elderly man with a cross into a demonic muscleman of the Polish Workers’ Party. The underground leaflet asserts:

The latest feat of the PPR: the Kielce crime. In the building at 7 Planty Street, around 150 Jews resided. The custodian of this building was a Pole. For a long time now in this city, underage children were disappearing without a trace. No one knew where or how, until July 3 of this year. A nine-year-old boy miraculously broke free from Satanic-communist Jewish hands. The kidnapped [child] disappeared on July 1, was starved for three days, and was supposed to be murdered on the day of his escape.

The custodian of this building, a Pole, knew precisely about this kidnapping and of the murder of children, he knew what was happening inside, he knew how many had already been kidnapped, nonetheless he didn’t tell anyone, he kept it secret, he murdered together with them.

The nine-year-old boy discovered the shed where the execution of innocent children takes place and reported it to the current authorities in the UB and the MO. The reaction was immediate. Some from the UB and the MO went to avenge the recently missing and murdered children. Some mothers recognized dried up corpses of their recently murdered children in the basement. Please imagine the moment of such a scene: there were 40 children’s skeletons found in this basement—the custodian knew about this.

Today, the PPR is the lord of life and death, it demands the condemnation of those who [went?] to avenge the innocent blood of murdered children, they have organized mass meetings, rallies for this purpose, it demands the signatures of bishops, priests, it demands that the Satanic tribe be buried in a holy place.

. . . The minion-custodian guards the Jew-Bierut of Ostrowiec, he watches over Minc from Końskie.83 In what way, traitor, are you different from this custodian from Planty?! Oh, woe unto you, traitor, the tears and blood of your fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and orphans will be avenged.

Honor to Hitler (when it comes to murdering Judeo-Communism [żydokomuna]). . . . We warn all PPR activists, dignitaries in official positions of the UB and MO and others who harm Poland and Poles, to turn back from the erroneous path while there is time, to throw aside serving as custodians. Death to the traitors of Poland! Death to the agents of the Bolshevik Gestapo!84

In this leaflet, Stanisław Niewiarski was associated with the second Polish victim of the pogrom, Jan Jaworski,85 a PPR guard who supposedly stood up in defense of the Jews being attacked. Janina Kulpa, a professor at the teacher training school (Pedagogium), saw the circumstances of his death: “I heard voices just outside my window—I leaned out and saw a young man lying under the window with a bloodied face. He was dressed in black pants and an army shirt. I heard them read from his identity papers that he was a guard, he didn’t have Semitic features. In my opinion he was moved to the spot under the window, presumably he was shot.”86

Józef Kukliński, the Paver

Master paver Józef Kukliński, twenty-nine, father of two children. During the war he was in Ignacy Robb-Narbutt’s unit of the People’s Guard (GL). He is “the inheritor of a wooden house in Kielce.”87 After Chorążak, he was the second Ludwików worker sentenced to death in the July 1946 trial.88 During the trial he confessed to the acts of which he was accused.

At around 7:00 a.m. I left for work at the factory, he says during the interrogation.89 In the morning, on the job, I drank a half liter of vodka with Master Sowiński. We drank this vodka without a snack even before 7:00 a.m. While on Planty, I felt tipsy, but not drunk. I’m in the habit of drinking vodka every morning.

At around 10:00 a.m., my wife came to me and told me to go with her to town to buy our son a scouting uniform, because my son was supposed to leave for scout camp. I went with my wife to the city, going in the direction of Sienkiewicza Street across Planty. Around a quarter to ten, I was on Planty, where I saw a lot of people; these people were standing in groups, there were shouts. As I was walking by I heard that Jews supposedly murdered Polish children, how many children, I don’t know, I know that the security service was at the Jewish building. I saw people in military uniforms all around. They were going in and out of the building using the staircase. I went to the yard of this building and I saw all of it, because the doors were wide open. There were a lot of people in the yard, but it was possible to squeeze through and I squeezed through to about three meters from the entrance. The army didn’t let anyone go further.

I can’t explain why I stopped in the crowd at the Jewish building, and why I didn’t go take care of my own business. There were shouts in the yard: “Beat the Jews!” and maybe that’s why I became interested and stayed on Planty.

Standing near the door, I observed a middle-aged Jew being pushed out of the stairwell by someone. This Jew was beaten up and bleeding heavily. I saw that on the left side of his skull, in the area around his eye and ear, he had a wound, like a fracture. Falling down, this Jew collapsed onto my chest and fell at my feet. I grabbed a cobblestone the full size of my palm that was lying nearby and hurled this cobblestone at this Jew. I don’t know what I hit, because people immediately yanked at him and pulled him into the crowd. I don’t know what happened to him next. I don’t exclude the possibility that I hit him with a stone in the face, I only know that I hit him.

People were saying that some kind of military men went upstairs to the Jewish home and that these soldiers were pushing Jews out. In this way, in my presence, altogether eight Jews—there were two or three women among this number—were thrown out at a fast pace from the stairwell. I clarify that when—immediately after the first one—the next Jew who was completely covered with blood on his coat and body was thrown out, this second Jew collapsed on the ground near me on my left. People threw themselves at this Jew and I also hurled a cobblestone at him. What part I hit, that I don’t know, because the crowd was so big that there must have been a thousand people pressing at the door. As far as the second Jew is concerned, I admit that my stone landed in the area of his chest. This second Jew was moving on the ground when I hit him with a stone and immediately people pulled him by the shoulders in the direction of the gate. I saw how he dragged his feet through the sand. What happened to him in the crowd, I don’t know.

My wife was on the sidewalk behind the fence and shouted at me to go into town. To clarify, eight Jews were thrown from the stairs before I hit the first one. After hitting both of the aforementioned Jews with a stone, I listened to my wife and with her headed to town through the yard because you couldn’t get out across the street. I exited onto Sienkiewicza Street and I was detained there at around 11:00 a.m.

It seems to me that I was in the Jewish yard for around forty minutes. I am unable to explain what prompted me to stone the Jews. Normally, I would never do such a thing, maybe it was the influence and effect of the crowd’s shouts. In any case, I left right away. The first Jew collapsed on me and smeared my jacket with blood. The ruined cotton jacket that has been shown to me, gray in color with stripes, is my property and I admit that the traces of blood on it are not mine, but the first Jew’s.90

Leopold Arendarski, an employee of the Provincial Office of Public Security, detained Kukliński. At the trial, he said, “I forced my way into the school yard and saw Jews being thrown from the stairwell into the crowd that was murdering them. I saw Kukliński beat a Jew lying at his feet with a stone held in his hand. I went up to him when this one tried to disappear from the crowd, and nudging him with the barrel of a pistol, I ordered him to move forward. I threatened to use my weapon if he tried to run away, and I ordered his wife, who was complaining ‘What have you done to yourself?!’ to go away. After taking him to the County Office of Public Security, I found out that this is the accused Kukliński, and I ascertained that his hands were smeared with blood like a butcher’s, both palms on the inside.”91

What the Ludwików Workers Saw

Ludwików workers who were eighteen years old at the time of the pogrom and interrogated during the second Kielce investigation in the nineties claim that the decision to leave the factory was made by the older workers. In turn, the older workers testified that it was mainly the youth who were eager to act.92

These same people maintain that after arriving on Planty Street, they stood somewhere in the back and didn’t see the scenes that were playing out in front of the Jewish committee building. Though they describe how the workers became enraged, they don’t say how this rage was defused. No last names are mentioned, especially those of friends; instead, there are descriptions of scenes that played themselves out near the bridge in the area of First of May Street, always with the caveat that people from Ludwików didn’t take part in them.

Henryk Konat says, “Despite the warnings of the older workers, I went near the building on Planty Street, though I was on the other side of the Silnica River, around 100 meters from the building. . . . I saw people dragging Jews out of this building and throwing them in the Silnica, and whoever was still alive was beaten to death by people with pickets torn from the fence. I also remembered this fact, that returning home from there, on this bridge near First of May Street, I saw a young Jewish girl lying there, she was around seventeen years old, and someone from the crowd was beating her. I think she was already dead, because she didn’t give any signs of life. This scene really terrified me, and I ran home where I told my mother about what was going on in the area of Planty Street.”

And then there is the testimony of Stanisław Adamczyk:

At the time I was a young employee and a rather timid person, and that is why, after arriving on Planty, I didn’t try to be close to the events. I remember that when the crew reached Planty Street, there were already a lot of people there, including soldiers. I stood near the military men, and at some point I heard that someone was asking the military men, why they aren’t dispersing the crowds. I remember the soldier’s comment that fighting an infuriated crowd is difficult. I also remember that shots were fired into the air, but it didn’t do anything, the crowd stood there. I saw that the braver ones entered the building in which the Jews resided and the yard of this building. I also saw some things being thrown out of the window of this building, feathers were flying, etc. This was still before the entire crowd of workers from the Ludwików steelworks got there.

I saw a man in tall boots, like officer’s boots, dressed well, running away from this building across the river. There in the middle of the river, a crowd caught up to him and beat him until they killed him, I think. Whether the man who was running away was a Jew, this I can’t say, I was standing rather far away, I didn’t see his facial features exactly. I remembered his outfit.

I also remembered the fact that while standing on Planty Street, I observed that on the bridge or near the bridge on First of May Street, a crowd was standing around something. I went there to see what was going on. There was a young woman lying on the ground, she was maybe seventeen years old, her nose was bleeding, she was lying flat on her back. A lot of people were standing around, someone said that she is a Jew; then I even asked people, how do we know that she is a Jew; no one answered me, and at that moment some man from this group went up to the young woman lying there and with the heel of his shoe he started to step on her head in the area of her temple, right after that blood started to come out of her ear. I couldn’t watch this and I walked away.

I was in this area around a half hour, maybe a little bit longer. Seeing what was going on, and afraid that I might even be taken for a Jew, I walked away. At the time, I had black hair, I was suntanned, so I might have looked like a Jew. The girl I saw being killed by the man using his foot was young, pretty, and well dressed. Of the incidents that I witnessed, these two events, the murder of the young man in the river and the young woman on First of May Street, I remember well, because it was very brutal.93

The Dog Days of Summer

The scene of the man being stoned in the Silnica River became an iconic image of the Kielce pogrom. It returns in the statement of a witness, a Kielce journalist, in footage for Marcel Łoziński’s film Witnesses.

“On Planty, not far from Sienkiewicza, I encountered this scene on a meadow by the Silnica, there was—at the time—this area that was rather meadow-like,” recalls a Kielce resident who was studying in Kraków in 1946.

This loose crowd, after a few hours of excesses, was standing around a young kike, a Jew, because he was a twenty-some-year-old man, already heavily bloodied. I remember that he was in some kind of vest and a white shirt, he stood, already kind of resigned—he neither shouted, nor moved, his head lowered, he stood in the middle of this little river, in the water, well, and around [him] stood this crowd, that was throwing stones. And, what’s more, they were throwing in a dispassionate way, that is: a stone flew, the crowd watched if he is falling over already, or not yet? Now then, if he still isn’t falling over, then in a couple of seconds someone again threw a stone. So there was kind of this atmosphere, like at a picnic, like after some great shock.

Well and the people there shared all sorts of comments, experiences—how one attacked a Jew there, and another somewhere else. And so this one craftsman took the lead, young, thirty-something, in a leather apron, who at that moment was expressing himself harshly against Jews: “We’ve finally caught them.” And so I don’t know exactly any more if that Jew fell over or not, in any case the most tragic thing of all was that this crowd was already doing this calmly, that there was no energy there whatsoever, no more excitement in any of this, because it was after a couple of hours of these events, everyone was already really tired, but despite this they lifted and threw stones, and it was in this calm manner, as if this had nothing to do with death, with killing a man. In any case, the scene was absolutely remarkable, and at the same time kind of ordinary, and the ordinariness of these conversations in contrast to this man in the river, who was most likely killed—that I didn’t see—was shocking. And so that’s when I left Kielce.

“The crowd could have, for example, gone to the party committee, but it didn’t,” notes the person conducting the interview with the above Kielce resident.

“Because apparently no one was preparing this crowd to go to the committee, the only phrase that was throw around was ‘he was a Jew,’ or ‘Beat the Jew!,’ right?. The Jew is guilty, that’s also what that worker was saying, actually not a worker, but that young, thirtysomething, craftsman . . .”

“The one in the butcher’s apron . . .”

“The one in the butcher’s apron. Because who knows, if he wasn’t later convicted during that trial . . .”

“And what else, sir? Did you hear what else these people said?”

“They rather shared with one another the course of events, shared with one another the course of hunting for Jews. The word ‘picnic’ slipped out earlier, which—let’s agree—is terrible to use for what happened there, but there was something like that in the atmosphere.”94

“We’ve finally caught them,” says the weary craftsman. Plebeian literature is full of fantasies about settling scores. But the situation described has nothing of the qualities of a picaresque fantasy. It is real, but nonetheless festive; macabre, but also idyllic. Whether it was caused by the heat (it was, after all, the height of summer, called the dog days, when the sun is in the constellation Canis Major) or some other reason, doesn’t matter. One way or the other, the alignment of the planets was definitely not favorable to the Jews.

We don’t know whose death the Kielce journalist was talking about. Was it Judka Mosze Ajzenberg, reportedly a tall man, whose corpse must have lain in water, because it was noted that on one of his palms he had what was called the skin of a washerwoman? Or was Herszel Joskowicz correct when he claimed that his friend, Dawid Fajnkuchen—whom he had given “six silver teaspoons to sell” a couple of days earlier—had perished of stab wounds in the Silnica River?95 Fajnkuchen’s corpse was not identified. It is possible that he is John Doe 9, whose face was unrecognizable. Miriam Machtynger heard his last words. “He lamented, ‘What did I do to you? What do you want from me?’ He was covered in blood. They kept beating him in the head from both sides. In the end, they killed Fajnkuchen.”96

FIGURE 29. Zdzisław Świtek, a pogromszczyk. AIPN, BU_0_582_258_0065.

Attempts to establish the identity of “the man in the butcher’s apron” during the investigation were unsuccessful. It is not known whether or not he was the son of Fugiński, the butcher, who hit Jechiel Alpert with the window frame97 (in addition to Alpert, both Chaim Latasz98 and Izrael Rozenkranc99 talked about him), or maybe it was the butcher Zdzisław Świtek, who—according to his own words—“urged people to take revenge on the Jews”100 and insulted the police, calling them “Jewish lackeys.”101 In any case, the leather apron didn’t have to be a butcher’s apron at all. It could have been an apron from the steel-works or that of a blacksmith. That would mean that the “butcher” was really a Ludwików worker and that Julia Pirotte could have captured his image in a memorable photograph from the funeral.

No Close-Ups

In one of the Kielce pogrom victims funeral photographs the Ludwików workers carry a banner with the message “In Sympathy with the Widows.” However, there is very little compassion on their faces. Pirotte writes, “Endless crowds were standing on the sidewalks, silent. Some woman with a scarf on her head leaned over to me: ‘Yesterday they were beating them, and today they have to walk in the funeral procession as punishment.’”102

In fact, it is the participation of workers from Kielce factories, and not the behavior of the uniformed units, that constitutes the most carefully guarded secret of the pogrom. And it has been guarded successfully. The pieces assembled from various sources give us a detailed image from the morning, but when we try to zoom in on the details at around 1:00 to 2:00 p.m., the image becomes blurred.

However, even Bishop Kaczmarek, who was sympathetic to the workers, did not have any doubts at the time regarding Ludwików’s participation in the pogrom. “When the Public Security units arrived, the workers from Ludwików, who were armed with iron tools, forced themselves into the building and murdered the rest of the Jews, numbering a dozen or so,” we read in the curia’s first report.103 Also in the second report, based on the statement of an anonymous woman, we encounter an unequivocal image:

I saw from afar a horrible crowd [made up] just of men, they were walking from Piotrkowska Street, they were walking with rods. People started calling out, “Ludwików and the state sawmill are coming.” You could hear calls coming from the crowd: “Away with the Jews!” Workers forced themselves into the yard and onto the stairwells, and from there they started to lead Jews out and in the yard the lynching [samosąd] began a second time, when Jews started to be killed. The schoolyard, which had been cleaned up, was once again covered with corpses. Among the crowd of workers from the Ludwików steelworks was the father of a missing child, who desperately called out: “For the innocent blood of my son!” and with a large adjustable wrench he split a Jew’s head open.104

And a final image. The testimony of Józefa Łabuda, who—when the workers came from the steelworks—saw through the gaps in the fence how “one climbed the wall and jabbered about something. He was probably drunk, because he wobbled. And right after that they knocked down the door and entered the building.”105

Ludwików, which was entangled in the pogrom, was one of only a few factories in the Kielce region that did not issue a resolution condemning the pogrom, contrary to the assurances of two instructors from the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (KC PPR) who came to the site, Hilary Chełchowski and Władysław Buczyński.106 We may doubt that the mass rally in the steelworks went as smoothly as these PPR emissaries reported. After all, the Polish Army participated in it. And the Army was called in for a reason. Earlier, “in the factories in Skarżysko, protest rallies against the pogrom had been organized, but the workers did not allow the speakers to say a word and they badly beat them.”107

Notes

1. Cited according to Bronisław Bełczewski, Pierwsze dni (Warsaw: Minis-terstwo Obrony Narodowej, 1964), 310–11. In Charakterystyka kontrwywiadowcza województwa kieleckiego, which was compiled based on data from 1945–1958, the director’s name is recorded as Brotkowski (AIPN BU_00231_149_2, k. 60).

2. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: New Press, 2000), 107.

3. Eric Hobsawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Norton Library, 1959), 110.

4. Julian Marchlewski, Antysemityzm a robotnicy (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie “KsiąŻka,” 1920), 100.

5. Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 10.

6. See Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s “The Figure of the Bloodsucker in Polish Religious, National and Left-Wing Discourse, 1945–1946,” in Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries: Essays on Polish-Jewish History, 1939–1946 (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 173–220.

7. Szaniec, no. 3 (77), January 31, 1942.

8. [L. Neyman?], Szaniec, no. 3 (77), January 31, 1942.

9. T. Baryka, Szaniec, no. 4 (95), February 25, 1943. All quotes and references in this paragraph cited according to Wojciech Muszyński, “Stosunek Narodowych Sił Zbrojnych i Stronnictwa Narodowego do Żydów wyrażony w prasie i innych publikacjach w latach 1940–1944,” typescript (AIPN Ki_53_4753, k. 121–53).

10. Photocopy in AIPN Ki_53_4753, k. 147.

11. The National Camp was a political group that included the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe, SN) and the prewar National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny, ONR).

12. Photocopy of the flyer from 1943 in AIPN Ki_53_4753, k. 147.

13. See Jan Tomasz Gross’s Strach: Antysemityzm w Polsce tuż po wojnie. Historia moralnej zapaści (Kraków: Instytut Wydawniczy Znak, 2007), 85n26. Available as Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2007).

14. See Charles Tilly, ed. The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 50.

15. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 12.

16. AIPN BU_ 0418_368, t. 3, k. 20. Also in AIPN Ki_0_13_368, k. 24.

17. Skrobot was sentenced on November 23, 1951, to five years in prison. He was released halfway through his sentence, in August 1953. See AIPN GK_306_48, k. 411.

18. Alina Skibińska and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “‘Barabasz’ and the Jews. Chapters from the History of the Home Army Unit Wybranieccy” in Tokarska-Bakir, Pogrom Cries, 279–352.

19. See Skibińska and Tokarska-Bakir,“‘Barabasz’ and the Jews.”

20. Manuscript within catalog number AIPN Ki_0_13_883 (alternately as sygn. 1108/III, k. 142nn). Also located in AIPN Wr_039_8559, k. 143–157.

21. AIPN Wr_039_8559, k. 143–157.

22. SL 6.4.

23. SL 6.6.

24. SL 6.11.

25. AG-PK, t. 12, k. 24.

26. AG-PK, t. 12, k. 80.

27. See Zenon Wrona, “Kalendarium tragedii,” in Antyżydowskie Wydarzenia Kieleckie 4 lipca 1946 roku: Dokumenty i Materiały, eds. Stanisław Meducki and Zenon Wrona. (Kielce: Urząd Miasta Kielce and Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1992), 1:57–70.

28. SL 2.2.8B.

29. SL 2.2.8B.

30. See SL 6.1B.

31. SL 8.13.

32. No such death was noted among the death certificates dated July 4, 1946, filed in the state archive in Kielce. Among the investigation documents concerning the wartime and postwar murders of Jews, I found mention of a man named Baran who was arrested for participating in the pogrom. He was wounded in the pogrom and was sent to the hospital under guard. Supposedly his brother, Stanisław Baran, intervened in the matter. Stanisław Baran allegedly held a high position among the security authorities in Opole. See Notatka służbowa dated March 4, 1965, Henryk Gawlik’s testimony (not recorded) (AIPN Ki_0_13_4657, t. 1, k. 108).

33. SL 1.5. The testimony of Jan Rokicki, who was Grynbaum’s adjutant, sounds similar: “The soldiers tried to break down the door, and while forcing the door open, two soldiers were killed” (SL 4.8). Is it possible to connect this testimony with the storming of the doors in the kibbutz on the second floor, a storming that resulted in the death of two Jews (Abram Wajnryb and one of the Sokołowski brothers), whom Rokicki may have known as either soldiers or partisans?

34. This was an error. Since the war, ethnic Poles had lived in the part of the building that formerly belonged to Jews. As a result, some of the establishments or apartments from the Planty Street side were not destroyed. This became a source of further conspiracy theories.

35. ANKr, WiN 4, k. 430.

36. AIPN_53_4753, k. 35–37. I have found no evidence that Ewa Szuchman said this, and it is not consistent with her other testimonies (see SL 1.1.4) or with the testimonies of other witnesses.

37. AIPN BU_1572_4051.

38. Andrzej Drożdżeński, “Kielce 4/7/1946,” Polityka, July 14, 1990.

39. AG-PK, t. 11, k. 82.

40. This could, of course, be a duplication based on multiple, cross-referenced lists used to identify the victims. On these lists there are a number of similar last names: Weinberg, Wajberg, Wajnberg, Weinrieb, Wajnrib, Wajnryb, Weintraub, Wajntraub. See rows 43–45 in the List of Victims (Appendix A), and row 108 on the list of Kielce survivors and witnesses (Appendix B).

41. AIPN Ki_41_2043.

42. Rafał Blumenfeld wrote that Symcha Sokołowski was in the underground. See SL 2.1.1.32A.

43. W. H. Lawrence, “Poles Kill 26 Jews in Kielce Pogrom,” New York Times, July 16, 1946. Lawrence also published a short article entitled “Poland Executes Nine Pogrom Killers” on July 16, 1946. Here he mentions, however, as many as four Polish victims of the pogrom.

44. AIPN Ki_41_267, k. 57.

45. Statement of Tadeusz Wróbel at Sałapa’s trial on November 11, 1946 (AIPN Ki_41_267, k. 58).

46. AIPN Ki_41_267, k. 12–13 and 26–27 and 16. See also SL 5.16. Among the reports from the external postmortem examinations, there are six John Does with gunshot wounds to the chest. Not a single woman, however, had such wounds; all the women died of wounds from stabbing or beating. Documentation from the external postmortem examinations, however, is inconclusive because complete autopsies, which would definitively determine the type of injuries sustained, were not performed.

47. Jan Śledzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Jedność, 1998), 94–96.

48. Śledzianowski, Pytania.

49. SL 6.2C.

50. See the files concerning Henryk Obara, accused under article 23 of the decree dated November 16, 1945 (APK, 1040 District Court in Kielce, sygn. 1840). All the statements quoted in this section come from this source. Krzysztof Urbański writes that the Provincial Public Library in Kielce, Pocieszka branch, archived Henryk Obara’s memoirs, (“Z długoletniej pracy w Zakładach Metalowych,” manuscript).

51. SL 6.3.

52. Fr. Śledzianowski writes that Władysław Dzikowski gave this report to Fr. Daniel Olszewski in 1986. AG-PK, t. 3, k. 400–412.

53. AIPN Kr_010_9304, t. 2, k. 12 and 44; AIPN Kr_00175_16 (269/K/16).

54. See Jan Śledzianowski, Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek: Biskup kielecki 1895–1963 (Kielce: Jedność, 2008), 102. See also Krzysztof Kąkolewski, Umarły cmentarz: Wstęp do studiów nad wyjaśnieniem przyczyn i przebiegu morderstwa na Żydach w Kielcach dnia 4 lipca 1946 roku (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo von Borowiecky, 1996), 166.

55. See Władysław Dzikowski’s report, AG-PK, t. 3, k. 400–412.

56. Śledzianowski repeats these views in both his books. See Pytania; see also Ksiądz Czesław Kaczmarek, 102. See also Kąkolewski, Umarły cmentarz, 143.

57. AIPN Ki_53_4744, k. 214.

58. CAW (WBH), sygn. 1570/75/461.

59. Dzikowski’s report (AG-PK, t. 3, k. 400–412.) cites this as follows: “Dokumenty Straży Przemysłowej z lat 1945 do 1954 w Izbie Pamięci KZWM”; he does not, however, include a copy from the archive.

60. See SL 5.15. Prosecutor Szpądrowski also mentions him (SL 1.1).

61. Chruścielewski’s last name can be confirmed in a report dated June 1946 (AIPN BU_0_296_28_5, k. 35–37).

62. See Władysław Dzikowski’s report, AG-PK, t. 3, k. 400–412.

63. See Władysław Dzikowski’s report, AG-PK, t. 3, k. 400–412.

64. Ryszard Miernik, Ciosanie (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1965).

65. Andrei Kuprii was seen by a witness in the company of his wife (in a blue suit) as he was watching the pogrom from the little bridge. See Bruno Piątek’s account (SL 9.11).

66. Śledzianowski repeats these assertions in Pytania, 72.

67. See Władysław Dzikowski’s report, AG-PK, t. 3, k. 400–412.

68. Fr. Śledzianowski, who quotes this fragment of Dzikowski’s report, didn’t understand that it referred to the 1918 Kielce pogrom, not to the 1946 Kielce pogrom. See Pytania 109–10.

69. Paraphrase of SL9.11.

70. SL 5.11A

71. SL 3.14A–C.

72. SL5.3B.

73. Quotation from SL 4.13.

74. Paraphrase of SL 5.7A.

75. Quotation from SL 13.

76. Quotation from SL 4.8.

77. Quotation from SL 5.7B.

78. SL 13.

79. Miłosz (raw footage).

80. SL 2.1.1.28B.

81. Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki_53_4749, k. 22.

82. See SL 1.19. Andrzej Paczkowski writes that Honor i Ojczyzna [Honor and Fatherland] was a periodical published by the Central Region of WiN in the years 1946–1946, edited by Kazimierz Czarnocki, with a circulation of one to two thousand copies. 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), 1:67n3.

83. These are references to Bolesław Bierut and Hilary Minc. Bierut was a top Communist leader in Poland, active before and during the war, who later occupied the country’s highest post as general secretary of the (Communist) Polish United Workers’ Party. Minc was the government’s top economist and later deputy prime minister of Poland. Bierut, unlike Minc, was not, Jewish.

84. AIPN BU_2207_1, k. 44.

85. According to death certificate no. 557/1946, Jan Jaworski was registered in Kielce, at 64 Sienkiewicza Street (the Provincial Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party [KW PPR]). His remains were identified by the head of the industrial department of the KW PPR, Aleksander Fiedotow (AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 2, k. 148).

86. SL 8.6.

87. SL 13.

88. Józef Kukliński was executed on July 12, 1946 (see his death certificate no. 748/1947 in AG-PK).

89. Paraphrase of SL 5.5B.

90. Paraphrase of SL 5.5.

91. AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2.

92. AG-PK, t. 11–12.

93. Quotation from SL 6.4.

94. Jerzy Morawski and Piotr Pytlakowski quote the same interviewee in their article “Mroczne stany,” Przegląd Tygodniowy 228, no. 32 (1986).

95. See Herszel Joskowicz, Interview 17467, USC Shoah (July 16, 1996). Joskowicz says: “That Fajnkuchen, that friend of mine, they threw him into that river, they killed him with a knife and threw him into that river.”

96. See Maria Machtynger’s testimony in Miłosz (raw footage). See also her earlier account where she says: “At one point I heard shouting, just terrible, it was . . . a Jew named Fajnkuchen. He shouted so terribly, ‘What do you want from me, why are you beating me, why are you murdering me, what have I done to you, what am I guilty of?’ It was then I understood that this was a pogrom. It’s no longer a robbery, rather it’s already a pogrom.” (SL 2.1.1.28B).

97. SL 2.1.1.2B.

98. SL 2.1.1.5A

99. SL 2.1.1.29. For more on Izrael Rozenkranc, see Appendix B: Kielce Survivors and Witnesses.

100. SL 5.30A–D.

101. SL 5.30C. Zdzisław Świtek was acquitted in the November 1946 trial.

102. Julia Pirotte, “Kielce 1946,” Polityka, June 22, 1991.

103. SL 1.2.

104. SL 1.1.5.

105. Morawski and Pytlakowski, “Mroczne stany.”

106. There is no such resolution filed in the collection of documents dated July 1946 (AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2, k. 133ff).

107. See the joint report filed by the American Joint Distribution Committee and the CKŻP (filed as Sprawozdanie z akcji pomocy ofiarom pogromu w Kielcach, przeprowadzonej przez przedstawiciela Jointu i CKŻP w okresie od 6/7/ do 14/7/1946, Archiwum ŻIH, American Joint Distribution Committee (1945– 1950), sygn. 350/54).