CHAPTER 6

Rashōmon

The Kyoto Gate

Rashōmon is the name of the main gate to the Japanese city of Kyoto, where unwanted children or corpses used to be left. It is also the title of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film. Told from the point of view of six different characters, the film is about the murder of a samurai, who is traveling through the forest with his wife. The bandit Tajōmaru bars their way. According to one version of the story, he craftily ties up the samurai and rapes his wife. The wife, unable to stand the scornful look of her husband, asks Tajōmaru to kill her husband, or she herself kills him.

In the film the bandit also gives his own version of the story. According to him, the wife of the samurai gave herself to him voluntarily, but he—shocked by her disloyalty to her husband—rejected her. The murdered samurai, whose spirit enters a female shaman, also speaks in the film: he claims that, humiliated, he committed an honorable suicide. The events are also furtively observed by a woodcutter. He claims that it was the wife of the samurai who provoked both men to a fight, a fight that the bandit won. Like everyone in this story, the woodcutter has something to hide: it turns out that he stole the expensive dagger that was used to stab the samurai in the chest.

We get the phrase “the Rashōmon effect” from Kurosawa’s film. It refers to a situation in which we are confronted with inconclusive, conflicting accounts about events or a series of events. The term perfectly describes the reconstruction of the Kielce pogrom events, which—despite the abundance of sources—continues to be unattainable. Representatives of all the uniformed services present at 7 Planty Street on that day—policemen (MO), security service (UB) functionaries, soldiers from the Internal Security Corps (KBW), and soldiers of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division of the Polish Army (2DPWP)—presented perspectives that were favorable solely to themselves. Their statements mutually contradict one another, and it is impossible to merge them into a cohesive narrative. While it is true that they establish the framework of the narrative, when we dig deeper, this framework tends to dissolve.

The pogrom was met with widespread condemnation in Poland, as we can see even in articles published in underground newspapers that were usually openly hostile to Jews.1 While according to some calculations, up to a quarter of all Kielce residents could have taken part in the pogrom,2 the response of the majority initially spoke about the pogrom using such terms as “burden,” “dishonor,” and “stigma.”3 With time, however, as the victims left the city and the pogrom investigations waned, even the pogromszczycy whose guilt had been proven learned to deny everything. After they served their time, they or their children lodged appeals requesting review of the sentences. Polish courts, however, rejected these appeals, with the exception of one case—that of Warrant Officer Józef Dobkowski, one of the commanders of the Kielce KBW.4

The trials after the pogrom were occasionally wrongly called “show trials.” A better description would be “Soviet justice,” in which the main concern was not discovering objective truth but rather ensuring that individuals who were threats to the system were rendered harmless. The blame did not always lie with the courts, however; more often than not it lay with a corrupt and inefficient police force and a sluggish UB. Suspects slipped away. They changed their last names or left for other provinces, where due to an ineffective system for sharing information, they became practically impossible to find. An incompetent military prosecutor’s office also added to this situation, as did the work of the grossly overrated information units, which—in particular—bordered on sabotage. As we read in the reports, these departments were staffed almost exclusively by amateurs.

The following report provides a sense of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division’s compliance with regimental detention procedures: “I inspected the regimental lockup, where there were ten people under arrest. For five of them . . . even though they were registered in the arrest log, I determined that there were no identity documents, which are the basis for arrest and registration in the log. . . . The acting head of detention, Private Mogaj, explained that he lost these documents because he didn’t have a room to himself or a place where they could be safely kept.”5 Equally ludicrous is the description of the regimental lockup itself. It is tight and dark; at night, the detainees, having befriended the guards, move into the main office of the city headquarters to sleep, and “two others have a dangerous knife in their cell, and more than enough food supplies, such as, for example, white bread and lard.”6

But even if the prison had been properly secured, one couldn’t, after all, lock up the entire population. Thus, dismissal from the MO on a mass scale became a form of reprisal against the police-pogromszczycy; but again, not everyone could be fired. From the list put together two days after the pogrom by Stanisław Biczysko, the commander for political-educational matters in the II Police Training Company, it appears that the authorities—aware of the climate among policemen—divided them into two categories: “those who supported terror” and those who were “outraged.” The names of seventeen cadets appear on the list—cadets who “turned out to be people who brought dishonor and shame upon the ranks of the MO.” The second list, more modest, consists of the last names of those who, exposing themselves to mockery, “try to make their colleagues aware that such behavior is criminal.”7

The report concludes with the information that there are two black sheep among the officers: Lieutenant Tadeusz Kosela, one of the commanders of the MO Training Company, a former member of the AK, who is “completely uninterested in his people,”8 and Master Sergeant Ignacy Siemieniuch, who turns out to be “an anti-Semite on a large scale.” Siemieniuch, the director of the investigation unit of the provincial headquarters of the MO, was arrested on the day of the pogrom by the provincial office of the UB. It is possible that this is the person Hanka Alpert saw wearing her husband, Chil’s, shirt.9 It is also possible that she was referring to Officer Cadet Józef Dzik, head of the external service of the Military Police Training Course, who mysteriously committed suicide on August 20, 1946. If we take into consideration the death of Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum of the County Office of Public Security, who was killed by Antoni Sobol-Dołęga’s anti-Communist underground group during a business trip to Warsaw, this was the second death of a witness to occur during the fall trials of uniformed servicemen.

Those accused during the first July trial had participated in the pogrom to various degrees, and it was not possible to prove everyone’s guilt. The court report from the first day of the trial shows the difficulties of evaluating the trial itself. Eight defendants, including three policemen, admitted their guilt, while four denied it. In subsequent trials the suspects more and more often claimed that they were innocent and withdrew explanations they had given during the investigation. Almost everyone spoke of being beaten, which indeed could have been the case during the first hours of the investigation. However, this was probably not the case later, when the government and party leadership from Warsaw, concerned about maintaining a pretense of the rule of law, arrived in Kielce.

Many of the perpetrators called upon more or less fictional Jewish witnesses who were supposed to issue certificates of morality for them. Jews, in turn, gladly took advantage of the opportunity to issue such false statements in the hope that this would prevent robbery and even expulsion.

FIGURE 26. Eugeniusz Krawczyk, a pogromszczyk. AIPN BU_0_582_258_0059.

“My attitude toward the Jewish population was never bad, and as evidence I state that during the occupation, I made it easier on several occasions for the Jewish population to hide from the Germans by giving them bread, and I also led them through the forest, bypassing German posts,”10 said Piotr Szyling, whose repeated claims of righteousness are belied by the fact that he was seen kicking a Jewish girl in the head.

FIGURE 27. Prison guard Piotr Szyling, a pogromszczyk. AIPN BU_0_582_258_0077.

“I feel no hatred toward the Jewish people, and the best evidence of this is that during the war, while in an underground unit, I protected two Jews, who were escaping from trenches, and helped them hide in the forest,” declared the fifteen-year-old police messenger Eugeniusz Krawczyk,11 who kicked a wounded Jew and beat him with a wooden fence post.

In his request for a pardon addressed to President Bierut, Józef Śliwa, who “assisted” Rywka Fisz on her final journey, writes that he is “not an enemy of the Jewish nationality.” He states that “during the Nazi occupation, I saved the life of a Jewish woman and her two children.” Furthermore, Śliwa claims that when bandits loaded Mrs. Fisz, her child, and Moszkowicz onto a truck, he only went with the Jews to help them, as he did during the war. “I figured that when they let them go, I’d take them along a side street into a field and take them to my house, and that later they’ll return to their apartment.”12

Because all of the trials, except for the first one, were classified, it became clear to the public that the authorities had lost interest in using the pogrom as a tool for public education.13 The policemen who were released after the pogrom became haughty. And like Władysław Surowiec, who was the commander of the training school at the provincial police headquarters and who joined in the pogrom, they demanded they receive their lost severance pay.14

Reaction to the Kielce verdicts by workers from other cities is exemplified by the case of Eugeniusz Wesołowski, a janitor who on July 24, 1946, forced his way up to the podium during a rally in Łódź. “He started to attack the court’s verdicts in the trial of the Kielce incidents, shouting: ‘Away with the Jews, we are in Poland, Jews must be thrown out of Poland, Jews murdered us, chopped our children to pieces, I can confirm this myself, since I witnessed it,’ and the people applauded him and shouted, ‘Away with the Jews.’”15 Wesołowski added that in 1939 he saw with his own eyes Jews murdering Poles, and he concluded that supporting the resolution that condemned the pogrom was unworthy of a Pole. Similar scenes played out at many rallies organized by the authorities.

Gradually, the Kielce pogrom moved from the realm of reality into that of fiction. Rumors circulated, such as the one recorded in the WiN archive in the fall of 1946, according to which a piece of paper had been thrown out of a train under Russian escort in the town of Grodzisk Mazowiecki with the message “Kielce incidents, sentenced to death, they are taking us to Russia.”16 When the provincial police commander Kuźnicki died a year after he was released from prison, and his deputy Kazimierz Gwiazdowicz drowned in the Mekong River in the early 1960s, people said those connected with the pogrom had been affected by something like “a curse of the pharaohs.” Added to this was the mysterious death of Warrant Officer Dzik, as well as the death of Warrant Officer Zygmunt Majewski two years later. In chapter 12 we will hear more about the story of Majewski’s attempts to purge the Kielce provincial police headquarters.

As the fifties progressed, more and more often there was a specific exchange of testimonies between the last people to be tried and their colleagues who had already been released. This exchange created an alternative reality of the pogrom portraying the perpetrators, who were equated with prisoners of Stalinism, as champions of the truth and as martyrs of an unnamed national cause. Władysław Dzikowski noticed this as early as the first trial: “Several [of those tried] said, ‘Actually, what are we being tried for, by what right? After all, we were acting in Poland’s interest.’”17

An analogous process of denial occurs with almost all acts of genocide. In his book on Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch notes that by the time he first began visiting the country, the perpetrators had already learned that admitting guilt was a tactical error; he never met anyone in the camps or prisons there who would acknowledge that there had been a genocide.18

Gourevitch spoke with the people responsible for the genocide in Rwanda many times. They all claimed that they were innocent. With their eyes cast down, they looked like schoolchildren and were just as unconvincing.19

Shame

In Kurosawa’s Rashōmon, everyone lies because they are ashamed. Tajōmaru is ashamed because he is a bandit; the wife of the samurai—because she succumbed to the bandit; the samurai—because he allowed himself to be defeated; and the woodcutter—because he reached out for the dagger.

Tajōmaru is a coward and a thief. The samurai is unable to defend his own wife. The wife of the samurai is unable to be loyal and die with dignity. But it is the woodcutter who rips off their masks, because he is most ashamed of himself; therefore, when his little sins are revealed, he avenges himself by bringing to light the other characters’ secrets.

This book argues that shame rests at the core of the riddle that is the Kielce pogrom.20 In the 1946 investigation the Communist authorities quickly concluded that no “external enemy” was behind the pogrom. The military prosecutor Czesław Szpądrowski,21 a lawyer before the war, writes about this clearly in his report; not a single time does he write about a “plot of reactionary forces.” Instead, we find numerous references to the ineffectiveness of military, security service, and police leadership, as well as to widespread depravity. But it was out of the question to reveal that wartime or postwar murderers of Jews worked in every single one of the uniformed services under the Communist regime—with the blessing of the Party authorities at that. That would have meant losing face and alienating the Communists from society even more. Thus, the authorities decided to use the narrative of “reactionary forces” first,22 then—as a fear-inducing example—punish several pogromszczycy severely,23 threaten the rest,24 gradually mitigate punishments, and, finally turn a blind eye to the mass emigration of Jews from Poland. The final stage, once the matter had settled, was to wrap the pogrom in silence for more than half a century.25

There was yet another reason for the Communists’ ambivalence in the face of the pogrom. As we can see from reports filed by comrades sent to Kielce on temporary assignments before and after the pogrom,26 there was a particular view spreading among party theoreticians, namely that the pogrom constituted an expression of the brutal but unavoidable “moral economy” of the working classes. Although we would have to wait several more decades for theoretical treatment of this concept by E. P. Thompson27 and Charles Tilly,28 many had already acknowledged by this time that workers’ antisemitic violence might be an immature but inevitable manifestation of class conflict.

The abundance of materials made available after 1989 do not solve the basic problem. There are so many mutually exclusive descriptions of the pogrom—and at the same time so many key pieces of evidence are missing—that every attempt to reconstruct the events on Planty Street is burdened not only with the risk of errors but with the downright guarantee of them.

In order to avoid this problem, and so as not fall into a relativism that treats all interpretations as equal, I have adopted the following two-pronged approach: First, I will not be “proving” theories so much as questioning those explanations that are most doubtful. Second, I have determined to point out circumstantial evidence that has been overlooked until now and to test its reliability against existing sources.29 We will use the first approach—which we already know well from the previous chapters of this book—in chapters 11–14, where I will analyze the careers of functionaries in the most important Kielce institutions. The same will hold true for chapter 15 in those sections dedicated to Michał Chęciński’s archive. The rest of the book will be subject to the second methodological approach.

However, in order for the entirety of the analysis to be comprehensible, we must now outline the most general and the least questioned timeline of the events that took place on July 4.

That Day on Planty Street

The sequence of events on Planty Street that day can be divided into fourteen parts that occurred between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.

1. The day begins with Walenty Błaszczyk and Henio filing a report at the police station at 45 Sienkiewicz Street, stating that the boy had been held for three days by Jews from 7 Planty Street (that is, in a building located approximately two hundred meters from the police station).
2. After the report is filed, the first police patrol is sent to Planty Street. They arrest Kalman Zinger, whom Henio points to as the perpetrator of the kidnapping.
3. Notified of this arrest, the chairman of the Provincial Jewish Committee, Seweryn Kahane, intercedes at the police station on behalf of Zinger, after which he returns to the Jewish Committee office located at 7/9 Planty Street. At this moment Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum of the County Office of Public Security (PUBP) is already on Planty Street. He will organize the defense of the building, remaining there until around 1:00 p.m.
4. Meanwhile, a second police patrol is sent to 7/9 Planty Street. This time, the patrol is tasked with finding the basement in which the boy supposedly was held (even though there is no basement at the building). Both police patrols and Henio’s circle spread the story of a thwarted Jewish crime, a story that causes the crowd on Planty Street to grow.
5. Seeing that they are surrounded, the Jews request assistance by alerting the UB, specifically the head of its provincial-level office, Władysław Sobczyński; Soviet advisors (Colonel Nikolai Shpilevoi); the provincial governor (wojewoda), Artur Wiślicz-Iwańczyk (who is ill); and the curia (the bishop of Kielce, Czesław Kaczmarek, is away on vacation).
6. The following units are sent to help: the Operational Battalion of the MO (with barracks located at 1 Zagórska Street approximately three hundred meters from Planty Street); the Police Training Company of the provincial police headquarters; soldiers of the 4th Regiment of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division, called czwartacy (members of the Fourth), with barracks in the village of Bukówka; the municipal military headquarters; and the 7th Regiment of the Internal Security Corps (with barracks located on Stadion Avenue, and including the 10th Independent Defense Battalion of the Internal Security Corps in Kielce). Sending these units to Planty Street turns out to be a mistake. The uniformed servicemen mix in with those who are surrounding 7 Planty Street and behave aggressively toward those who have been surrounded.
7. At least three officers from the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division of the Polish Army enter the building: Konieczny, Jędrzejczyk, and Repist. They demand that the Jews hand over their weapons.
8. Immediately after the disarming of the kibbutz on the second floor, where some of the Jews have barricaded themselves, the first shots are fired. Second Lieutenant Abram Wajnryb dies from a round shot from a PPSh, and Symcha Sokołowski, and possibly also Naftali Tajtelbaum, sustain serious wounds. Soldiers and policemen plunder the Jewish building. They also push several people from the balcony of the second floor.
9. Hearing shots coming from the kibbutz, Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum of the PUBP, who has been in the building since morning, gathers the Jews into a room on the first floor. Jechiel Alpert and his wife, Hanka, are among them.
10. Next, the room is stormed. This is when the process of leading the Jews out in front of the building begins. There they fall into the hands of the crowd. Several more people die; many are wounded.
11. noon things become relatively calm. The commanders of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division prepare to transport the wounded to the hospital. However, when functionaries of the UB try to take Chairman Kahane from the committee building, there is a clash with soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division or the KBW. Kahane dies. A moment earlier colleagues from the PUBP take Albert Grynbaum from Planty Street.
12. Workers from the Ludwików plant arrive on Planty Street after 12:00 p.m. They force their way into the building, and the second wave of the pogrom begins. It ends only with the intervention of Polish Army and Internal Security Corps forces under the command of the chief of staff of the division, Lieutenant Colonel Artur Pollak. It is difficult to establish precisely when these forces arrive. It is most likely around this time that the school for functionaries of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP) in Zagórsk arrives on Planty Street under the command of Tadeusz Seweryński—they have been waiting to march out from in front of the office located on Focha Street for about two hours because Sobczyński has not made a decision.
13. The third wave of the pogrom can be defined as the spread of violence onto other streets in Kielce: the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Kersz on Piotrkowska Street and of Lieutenant Prajs at 72 Sienkiewicza Street; the searches of apartments on Sienkiewicza Street; and the beating of Jews in Bazary neighborhood, on Leon-arda Street, and on Głowackiego and Zagórska Streets where the barracks of the MO are located. Police Officer Stefan Mazur, the murderer of Rywka Fisz and her son, will also emerge from these barracks. He and Nowakowski (a baker), along with two assistants—Pruszkowski and Śliwa—will all go to apartment no. 6 at 15 Leonarda Street. This third phase of the pogrom also includes what is called the “railway action,” that is, attacks on Jews traveling by train along the Skarżysko–Kielce–Częstochowa route.
14. After the army unit from Góra Kalwaria arrives and clears out the schoolyard, the crowd from Planty Street moves to St. Aleksander’s Hospital, where people have been gathering since noon.

Because later chapters in this book focus on how the Ludwików plant workers entered 7 Planty Street by force and the climax of the pogrom (see chapters 7 and 8), as well as the third wave of the pogrom (see chapters 9 and 10), let’s turn our attention for the moment to the events of that morning.

We will describe these events with the help of four newly discovered, subjective perspectives: the account of the first Jew who was detained, Kalman Zinger, accused of kidnapping Henio Błaszczyk; the demobilized soldier, Rachmil Tajtelbaum, who saw Zinger being arrested; and Gerszon Lewkowicz, who was in the Jewish Committee and who will tell about the aftermath of Zinger’s arrest. These three accounts will be summarized using recently discovered archival materials, specifically, notes taken by Adolf Berman, the chairman of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP), about the course of the entire day.

Hiding Place No. 2: Władysław Janowski Interrogates Kalman Zinger

The first three sources we will rely on can be found in two inconspicuous files in the archive of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). Because of the contrast between the high value of the materials found in these files and the low degree to which they have been used for research, I call similar collections of documents “hiding places.” The second hiding place contains materials that demonstrate not only that the police were involved in the pogrom but also that the head of the investigation department at the provincial headquarters of the police, Tadeusz Majewski-Laske, attempted to cover this up.30

Hiding Place no. 2 is labeled “Reports concerning the activity of the Investigation Department of Citizens’ Militia regional units in Kielce for 1946.” In addition to reports prepared by Majewski-Laske that whitewash the MO, this file contains reports about thefts committed on Planty Street by policemen from the training school.31 There are also handwritten notes that verify the classroom attendance of cadets from the school, as well as notes concerning mysterious amounts of money allocated among the “security service from Zagórska Street” and other policemen. In addition, we discover in these files rough transcriptions of interrogations of four policemen from the patrol sent to Planty Street in the morning: Kazimierz Hińcza, a commander in the Volunteer Reserve of the Citizens’ Militia (ORMO); Stanisław Krowa; Jan Rogoziński; and Marian Godek. All are dated July 4 and 5, and for the most part they are signed by Majewski-Laske.

Among all these documents there is something truly rare—a transcript of the morning interrogation of the person whom Henio Błaszczyk pointed to as his kidnapper, “the Jew in the green hat,” Kalman Zinger.32 In his testimony, Zinger’s voice breaks through the rigid stylistic formulations of the report.

I do not admit to being guilty of supposedly knowing about the detention of a little boy of Polish nationality by Jews living on Planty Street in Kielce.

As regards my stay in Kielce, I want to clarify that around June 23 of this year, I arrived in Kielce from Kraków, with the goal of selling land in Łączna (Suchedniów gmina, Kielce County). After a couple of days, Cit. Kabała, a farmer from the village of Zalezianka (Łączna) contacted me, and he stated that he wanted to buy the field from me, for which he gave me a deposit of 50,000 złotys. Since voting day for the referendum was approaching . . . I went to Kraków on June 28 in order to cast my vote there. After voting, that is on July 1, 1946, I went back to Kielce, in order to complete the transaction related to the aforementioned field. The next day, on Tuesday, my former neighbors from Łączna, who are currently leasing the field, came to see me. They announced that they want to buy this field, since they had first rights to it, and they agreed to return the deposit twofold, that is, 100,000 złotys to Kabała, to which I agreed. Farmers Kwiatkowski Franciszek and Obara Józef paid me in cash, a total of 145,000 złotys, that is 100,000 złotys in order to return Kabała his deposit, and 45,000 złotys as a deposit for purchasing the field. Because I have not yet returned Kabała’s deposit, that is why today, on the day I have been detained as suspected of murdering a child, I have a larger amount of cash on me.33

On the basis of the interrogation of civil servant Stefan Sędek, it appears that Tadeusz Laske-Majewski came by car specifically to pick up Kalman Zinger and take away the detainee “along with the deposit.”34

In chapter 12, we will hear more about the financial aspect of this detention, which is part of the widespread looting in the Kielce MO. For now, we will simply note that Władysław Janowski, the head of the homicide unit of the provincial headquarters, interrogated Zinger.35 In the investigation conducted in the 1990s, Janowski testified that on the morning of July 4, he left headquarters for the military prosecutor’s office located on Śliska Street. He then ran into policeman Jan Kuś, who was going to a notary with his brother-in-law to take care of “property matters.” They planned on celebrating the transaction with a drink at a restaurant located at 6 Leonarda Street,36 but along the way they ran into “women with children who were running and shouting, ‘Jews are murdering our children.’”

Seeing the commotion, Janowski and Kuś went upstairs in the teacher training school (Pedagogium) on Leśna Street that was located opposite 7 Planty Street. From there they could comfortably observe the crowd that was besieging the Jewish Committee. “The custodian of the school told us that next to the building on Planty where the Jews live, there had been unrest since the early morning hours.” At around 10:00 a.m., Janowski and Kuś leave the teacher training school and go to the Silnica River, where they learn from other policemen that Kazimierz Gwiazdowicz, the deputy provincial commander of the MO, is already on Planty Street. Because of the throng, however, they are unable to get to the committee building, and they calmly return to headquarters on Wesoła Street.

Władysław Janowski, however, forgot to admit to the prosecutors of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) that during the pogrom on July 4, he personally interrogated Kalman Zinger (his signature is at the bottom of the interrogation transcript). Also, he didn’t mention that five years later, on July 20, 1950, he was sentenced to life in prison for the March 1943 murder of several Jews, including “two underage children of Jewish nationality”—a sentence that ended his paradoxical career as the head of the homicide unit of the provincial headquarters of the MO on Wesoła Street.

There remains the matter of the policeman who accompanied Janowski. No one with the first name “Jan” appears on the list of functionaries in the provincial headquarters of the MO. There is a Franciszek Kuś, who was a policeman before the war, and then a “blue policeman” in Łuków township during the war. He was sentenced to eight years in prison by the district court (Sąd Okręgowy) in Siedlce for causing the death of around sixty Jews, and for personally shooting two Jewish children, a fourteen-year-old boy and a seventeen-year-old girl.37

Kociołkowski the Barber and Rachmil Tajtelbaum

Twenty-four-year-old Tadeusz Kociołkowski worked as a barber in a shop located at 13 Planty Street, less than one hundred meters from the building of the Jewish Committee. On July 4 he was standing in the doorway of the shop with a regular client and saw policemen escorting Zinger, who had been detained. He was told that Zinger had supposedly strangled someone. When a crowd gathered on Planty Street, Kociołkowski quickly closed his shop.

The moment of Zinger’s arrest was also observed by thirty-four-year-old Rachmil Tajtelbaum, a tailor and soldier who was demobilized in November 1945. When he arrived a few days earlier in Kielce in order to sell the inheritance he received from his parents in Nowa Słupia, he stayed with Zinger.

Just before 9:00 a.m. Tajtelbaum was going to breakfast at the Jewish Committee on Planty Street, where Zinger was standing in the foyer.

Around 9:00 a.m.—says Tajtelbaum38—I and several other people saw four policemen taking Zinger in the direction of Sienkiewicza Street. A young boy, between eleven and thirteen years old, was walking with the policemen. I wanted to find out where they were taking Zinger, so I followed them.

I walked into the foyer of the station on Sienkiewicza after them; there were policemen and three or four civilians standing there. The father of this little boy was standing among them, as one policeman explained to me. I wanted to follow Zinger; he also saw me and was calling me over. I opened the door to the station and saw how the policemen were carefully searching Zinger. They searched through the padding in his shoulders and collar. I barely managed to see this when a policeman dressed in an American uniform pushed me out of there.39 In the foyer a police master corporal told me that they were charging Zinger with holding that little boy for three days in a basement and that this boy somehow managed to escape from that basement. The father of this boy told me that I shouldn’t interfere in other people’s business and that I should leave.

I walked out of the police station and stood on the street. Then, a second police lieutenant ordered someone to bring me back to the station. The second lieutenant asked for my identity documents and then ordered me to go. Upon leaving, I saw this second lieutenant go up to three policemen who were returning to the station from the city and say, “You know, boys, we caught a Jew who held a Polish child in a basement for three days.” Civilians heard this as they were walking by and they started to gather. The policemen said to the officer, “The son of a bitch should be slaughtered.”

I ran to the Jewish Committee in order to tell the chairman of the committee, Dr. Kahane, about this incident. Dr. Kahane went with some other person to the police station. A few minutes later I saw Dr. Kahane returning to the committee with several policemen. And a few more minutes later, I saw policemen with weapons ready to fire running to the Jewish Committee from the direction of Sienkiewicz Street, and there were civilians behind them.

The three accounts cited above are the only sources of information about Kalman Zinger, son of Icek and Cejma thirty-nine years old at the time of the pogrom, born in Łączna (Suchedniów gmina), resident of Kraków, address 3 Przemyska Street, of Polish citizenship, of the Mosaic faith, an illiterate farmer, bachelor, who owned almost four hectares of land, had not served in the army, and—until now—had no criminal record.

In his report dated July 19, 1946, regarding Zinger, Prosecutor Szpądrowski writes that “the witness has not yet been examined,” which could mean that he had been detained at the disposition of the Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, MBP).40 But later, even though those who were interrogated and questioned during the second Kielce investigation claim that Zinger left for Israel, there is no trace of him.

Dina Szaroni, an Israeli witness during the second Kielce trial, had known Zinger before the war. The sawmill in Łączna belonged to his family rather than to him directly because Kalman had a reputation for being not quite sound of mind. He was mocked for his piety, and people joked that he even kept kosher while in a Nazi concentration camp.41 “I know only that he had a prayer book with him and that he said that this prayer book saved him,” recalls Dina. “He said it was a miracle.”

Gerszon Lewkowicz

Another frequent visitor to the Jewish Committee, Gerszon Lewkowicz, picks up the story where Tajtelbaum leaves off. Lewkowicz’s statement was found in Hiding Place no. 1.42 It, too, is a document that has never before been used to reconstruct the events of the pogrom.43

Lewkowicz, born in 1908, was a tailor who survived the Kielce ghetto and hid in the forests outside the city; he spent every free moment at the committee building. He also went there on July 4. Immediately upon arrival, he realized that nothing good would come of the rumor about Jews “holding a Polish boy for three days and nights.”

Everything started because a boy whom we had supposedly detained came with the police, who took a Jew who was standing in front of the committee, relates Lewkowicz. They took the detained man to the station on Sienkiewicza Street. Zinger, who was arrested, was seen by a demobilized soldier, that is by Rachmil Tajtelbaum, who went after him to the police station. There he heard him being beaten, and when he asked why, someone from the MO told him, after asking for his identity documents, that he shouldn’t interfere in the matter, that it would be better if he left. I heard all this from someone else, but who said it, I don’t remember, since I was very upset.

A witness to the further course of events at the station was Dr. Kahane himself, who came to find out about the fate of the detainee. Upon returning to Planty Street, he announced that the police were supposed to come and that the matter would be taken care of immediately. In a few minutes the police—along with the same boy—really did come, heavily armed, and surrounded the building. In response to people’s questions, they said that Jews had been holding a Polish child for three days and nights, which caused the gathering to grow larger and larger.

“One of the policemen,” says Lewkowicz, “took this boy and asked him if he would show him which basement he had been held in. Since there was no basement, he ordered him to point to the shed that he was held in. He opened them and asked, ‘Maybe in this one?’44 But I don’t know what it was all about.”

As the group of civilians outside the building grew, Chairman Kahane called the security service at which Captain Jan Mucha and the deputy head of the Kielce County UB (PUBP), Albert Grynbaum, had arrived. Realizing what was going on, Captain Mucha called the security service and the police for reinforcements; in the meantime, the crowd was getting bigger and bigger and the shouts were getting louder and louder. Captain Mucha turned to the police, asking them to disperse the crowd, but they didn’t want to intervene in the matter.

The first person killed was on the second floor, continues Lewkowicz. It was Abram Wajnryb. A woman who came down to us on the first floor told me about this.

Before the end, soldiers came into the building and declared that the situation was under control and that the Jewish persons had been taken in vehicles to another place; at the same time, they ordered us to go down to the vehicles. On the stairs and in the stairwell, and in front of the exit, there were servicemen standing as protection, and behind them were civilians. The moment they began to go down to the vehicles as they were told, the servicemen who were standing in the stairwell started to beat people with rifle butts, and civilians with clubs stood below and dealt deadly blows. Among those whom I don’t know, there was also the butcher Fugiński’s son, the younger one, around twenty years old.45

FIGURE 28. The staircase at 7/9 Planty Street as it looks today. Courtesy of Alina Skibińska.

Information for Adolf Berman’s Report

The most important source we will rely on to verify the accounts cited was discovered by Arnon Rubin in the Ghetto Fighters House Archive in Israel. It is titled “Information for the Report,” and it consists of a four-page handwritten text in Polish, constructed of shorthand sentences, containing a complete description of the pogrom from morning to afternoon.46 In his book Rubin printed this source without noting its author. However, by comparing this document with other documents from the collection in the Ghetto Fighters House Archive—for example, with his notes preparing to address a session of the Communist Homeland National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN) regarding the planned decree on antisemitism dated August 25, 1946—we can assume that Adolf Berman is the author of the document “Information for the Report.” Before the war Berman was an activist in the Zionist movement Poale Zion Left; during the war he was an activist in Żegota, the Polish underground state’s organization for aid to Jews. Beginning in 1944 he was a member of the KRN; and beginning in 1947 he was the chairman of the CKŻP. He emigrated to Israel in 1950.

As the brother of Jakub Berman, one of the most important communist ideologues and best-informed people in the country, Adolf Berman—who was present in Kielce on the day after the pogrom—must have had privileged access to the investigation. We do not know for whom he was preparing this report. His notes are persuasive, above all, because of the frankness of their evaluations, which are decidedly unfavorable to the Communist authorities. As witnesses assert, this is all the more striking because, when he arrived in Kielce soon after the pogrom, Adolf Berman repeated the (Communist) government version of events.47

The report begins with a conspiracy theory: Henio Błaszczyk was hidden away on purpose, and his father—a shoemaker—was bribed by someone. However, no evidence or statements are cited, nor does the name of Antoni Pasowski, the administrator of the building located at 6 Podwalna Street, who allegedly detained Henio, appear in the report.48

The next point mentions the detention of “the Jew in the green hat, Zynger [Zinger],” whom Henio identified as the one who locked him up in a shed.

“The psychosis grows,” writes Berman, a psychologist by training. “There is already talk in the city of three, ten, a dozen children.”

The following sentences precisely situate the events in time: “At 10:00 a.m. servicemen enter—a major and lieutenant from the 4th Regiment [of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division]—and disarm the Jews in the committee [building]. At 10:20 a.m. the MO surrounds the Jewish building located at 7 Planty Street. The Jewish Committee is located on the ground and first floors, the kibbutz and shelter for repatriates is located on the second floor.”

The thoroughness of the account is evident in later parts of the report as well. For example, the phrase “per the order of the deputy of the [provincial] commander of the MO [Kazimierz Gwiazdowicz]” is crossed out, corrected, and marked with an exclamation mark, “per the order of the head of the Investigation Dept. of the MO, [Stefan] Sędek from the MO station at 45 Sienkiewicza Street—he gave the order to look for children!”

Next, Berman notes two cries that are familiar to us from survivor accounts. The first, spoken by an unidentified captain, is: “What Hitler didn’t finish, we will finish.” The second surely repeats the words Chil Alpert reported: “Did you like the taste of Polish blood? Now you have it!”

Subsequent cries:—“The Jews are not permitting a search to be done”; “They murdered twelve of our children!”; “You lousy kikes, you all led Jesus Christ to Golgotha, now we’re gonna teach you a lesson!” These cries point to a mounting of emotions among the crowd, an escalation that revives archaic motifs.

The sixth note concerns efforts made by Chairman Kahane and Chil Alpert, who alert the UB and the MO: “The head of the UB, Major Sobczyński, calls the army, but it is not sufficiently active. The military commander of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division [Colonel Stanisław Kupsza] does not come. The UB itself does not have a unit.” And then there is a sentence out of context: “Don’t be afraid, the situation will be brought under control.” This can be attributed to Captain Jan Mucha, the head of Department III of the WUBP, who was present in the committee office during the initial phase of the pogrom.

Next, the events begin to gain momentum. “The UB summoned the army,” which enters at 11:30 a.m. The soldiers, however, don’t know where they are going or for what purpose. “The army mixes in with the crowd; there is a total lack of leadership.” This description corresponds to the report of Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum of the PUBP, who was in the committee building between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. (A measure of the degree of disorientation is an incident that does not appear in Berman’s report: “A woman walked up asking what the army would do, will they disperse the people, or seize the Jews?”)49

Between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. on Planty Street there is already “a massive crowd—4,000 people. The police and the army—weapons are aimed at the building. Shots are heard in the committee office: soldiers with PPShs are shooting. The army forces its way into the building; rapid shooting begins in the building. The army has transformed an act of hooliganism into a pogrom. The Jews have barricaded themselves on the inside. Behind the army, policemen and the crowd force their way in. A massacre. The crowd shouts: ‘Long live the army! Long live the police! Vivat the army!’”

Around noon, a car drives up in front of the building. Tadeusz Gajewski, the head of the PUBP, and [Leopold] Arendarski of the UB are in it. They have come to pick up Chairman Seweryn Kahane. However, their mission comes to nothing: “Two servicemen call out to Gajewski, ‘You Jewish lackey!’ They push both of them away, they force their way to Kahane, shots are fired, Kahane is killed.”

The shout that Berman then quotes—“Men! Come out with your hands up!”—appeared earlier in the accounts of Jews who were barricaded on the first floor of the committee and who were called on by the army and the police to surrender. When the Jews did as they were ordered, they were pushed into the yard in front of the building and handed over to the crowd. Berman describes this: “Those present were stoning, beating with irons, clubs, window frames. The soldiers were beating them terribly, finishing them off. Senior officers were present—complete buffoons. Lt. Col. Konieczny—fickle stance, first passive, he became disconcerted, then he defended [the Jews]. There was a major, a captain, completely passive, they watched.”

Then the report mentions Wiktor Kuźnicki, the provincial commander of the MO, and Zagórski, the station chief. The last name “Sędek” is crossed out. Next to “Kazimierz Gwiazdowicz” there is a reference to his answer to the head of the UB, Sobczyński, who was demanding that the investigation be handed over to him. “I myself will check how things are going,” says Gwiazdowicz.50

Now we approach 2:00 p.m., when according to Berman, the second wave of the pogrom begins. We read about Henio Błaszczyk’s brother, Andrzej, who works in the Ludwików steelworks. The staff of the steel-works becomes agitated when they hear that a “Polish officer” was murdered on Planty Street.

“Summoned by provocateurs,” the crowd of workers from the Ludwików steelworks came to Planty Street, and “several of them forced their way in [to the building].” Berman estimates that of the six hundred people who walked out of the steelworks, two hundred were members of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), while one hundred belonged to the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). He quotes a statement made by the head of the Provincial Committee of the PPR, Kalinowski: “They went individually and in groups.” Law enforcement and military personnel could have prevented them from entering Planty Street, but instead “the streets were not secured, were not closed! The UB did not man the streets!”

“The workers murdered and massacred.” Someone’s corpse was thrown out a window, and a serviceman who was present at the time “came up and crushed [his] face. The abdomen of a pregnant woman was torn apart. Soldiers took clothes off dead bodies and the wounded. Soldiers pillaged terribly.”51

Possibly the most important conclusion of the report appears at this moment: “Soldiers led the pogrom! Gangs were not needed here, it was the army. [Maybe there were some] cells of the NSZ [National Armed Forces], individual units from gangs, but many of the servicemen succumbed to the psychosis of the crowd! There were no massive ‘gangs’ who came from the outside.”

A comment in the margin: “The MO and the army—infected and corrupted!”

According to the author, there were three—not two—Poles among those killed: “Two comrades from the PPR—one from the army, and a personnel officer of the Provincial Committee of the PPR [Jan Jaworski]—stood up and defended the Jews.” He mentions a third victim, an unidentified “Polish woman from the crowd, [who] threw stones [and was] killed by a functionary of the UB.”52

According to Berman the situation on Planty calms down at around 2:30 p.m. That’s when the violence moves to other parts of the city. The last part of the notes refers to what can be called the third, dispersed wave of the pogrom.

We find out that “the crowds [from Planty Street] went to [St. Alek-sander’s] hospital” to the shouts of “beat these sons of bitches to death.” This time, the forces from the UB, the MO, and the Polish Army rose to the challenge.

“At the same time, in the entire district [Jews] were dragged out of trains and buses and immediately killed. Railwaymen were actively murdering, and servicemen and civilians [were joining in].” In Piekoszów seven people were dragged out of a train. Three or four people were [dragged out] at the Herby station in Kielce. There is also mention of “five Jews in Koniecpol,” where Dawid Gruszka and Szmul Rembak were from; we will hear more about Gruszka and Rembak in chapter 9. There is also mention of Chmielnik and of “stations on the Częstochowa-Kielce line.” The total number of victims amounted to “more than thirty Jewish corpses at [railway] stations.”

The Railway Action

Adolf Berman thinks that the action, which was later called the “train action” or “railway action” was “prepared with purpose.”53 It is difficult to comment on this opinion. According to Witold Kula’s testimony—and even without it—the situation for Jews traveling on Polish trains in 1945–1946 was unbearable. “I was traveling not long ago by train on the Łódź-Wrocław line. A Jewish family was sitting next to me. Honestly, I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said there was not a stretch of fifteen minutes during which I didn’t hear some comment about them from one corner or another: taunts, jokes, comments, rebukes, [and] mimicking of jargon or Jew-accented Polish. . . . I watched them as they got off the train at the station in Wałbrzych. I saw how the man straightened up and slowly wiped his brow with his hand. Nine hours. I wonder how many hours criminals were sentenced to the pillory in the Middle Ages?”54

These events can easily be attributed to the aforementioned principle that “the everyday becomes the norm.” It seems, however, that there was some coordination between railwaymen and the underground in places where numerous attacks were occurring, for example, in Kamińsk near Radomsko. We know of reports about WiN “railway actions” carried out in the area of Kielce and Radom,55 especially on the Dęblin-Radom route, even on July 5, 1946, at the station in Pionki. Attacks were also recorded in the environs of Terespol, Czyżów near Małkinia, on the Maków-Sucha route, Tarnów, Kraków-Płaszów, Biała Podlaska, Częstochowa, and Skarżysko.

This last incident, in Skarżysko, was described at the July 10, 1946, meeting of the CKŻP: “On the road near Skarżysko, Jews were dragged out of train cars and beaten; the speaker himself had his identity documents checked and was taken by soldiers. A lieutenant in the railway guard threatened them. In the end, they were handed over to the Soviet headquarters and, under their protection, made it to Łódź.”56

A quote from a report by the military prosecutor for the Łódź district: “On the territory of the [Łódź] voivodeship, there are frequent instances of trains being stopped by [underground] gangs, even during the day. On the night of May 13–14, a train was stopped on the Warsaw-Kraków route; after terrorizing those who were traveling, the bandits, dressed in Polish Army and Railway Guard uniforms, disarmed sixty servicemen, including the head of the financial services of the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division. Trains on the Radom-Dęblin-Warsaw line are stopped particularly frequently, especially around the station in Garbatka.”57

There also exists a vague report about “Szary’s” partisans, who were supposed to take part in murdering Jews traveling by train from Kielce to Wrocław. In addition, Adam Leszczyński, the author of a dissertation on the Solidarity movement, mentions something that could provide yet another trail of evidence for future research. While collecting materials in Częstochowa, he met a former soldier of the NSZ—a retired miner from the “Sosnowiec” coal mine and a participant in the 1981 strike. “He belonged to a group that took the red star off the mineshaft. I spoke with him in 2005. . . . He told me that after the war they ‘stopped trains and dragged Jews out of them.’ He didn’t say what happened to them after.”58 The materials are, however, too scant to be used as the basis for any sort of conclusion about railway actions.

We do not know whose accounts Adolf Berman relied on when he wrote his “Information for the Report.” Many years later, in March 1975, he will talk about it with Michał Chęciński, who was convinced that the Soviets triggered the pogrom. Berman will emphatically deny this: “The speculation about reactionary elements in the world, that the pogrom was organized by government agents—that’s all hog-wash. The government of People’s Poland (PRL) was surprised and shocked. The best evidence is that the first person under Bierut, Jakub Berman, was immediately sent to Kielce, and was authorized to arrest the guilty on the spot. In our presence he ordered that one of the policemen be arrested. The attempts of reactionary elements, including Jewish ones, to present the pogrom as organized or inspired by the government of the PRL or the PPR—that is simply an insinuation.”59

Notes

1. All the Freedom and Independence (WiN) flyers condemn the pogrom, though they attribute it to the NKVD. See SL 1.17–21 and the analysis of these flyers in chapter 15.

2. Witold Kula, “Nasza w tym rola,” in Uparta sprawa, ed. Marcin Kula (Kraków: Universitas, 2004), 161.

3. Based on transcripts of raw and unused footage for Marcel Łoziński’s Świadkowie (Video-Nova, 1988).

4. See, for example, the Supreme Court’s February 5, 1998, dismissal of an appeal to reverse the death sentences of Edward Jurkowski and Józef Kukliński (AIPN BU_0_1453_4, t. 2). On Dobkowski, see Szpądrowski report (SL 1.1) and chapter 14. See also the interview that Dobkowski gave Jacek Derek in 1996 (“Skazany ‘za Kielce,’” in Dziennik Zachodni, no. 179, 13–15/9/1996; copy available in AIPN Ki_53_778, k. 3).

5. The report was addressed to the commander of the 2DP WP. See Sprawozdanie z wyników kontroli w 5PP, 9/10/1946 (AIPN Ld_409_13, k. 42).

6. AIPN Ld_409_13, k. 44.

7. AIPN Ki_29_117, k. 46.

8. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any record of an interrogation of Lieutenant Tadeusz Kosela, even though Roman Olszański-Przybyłowski testified that Kosela was questioned after the pogrom. See SL 3.22B.

9. Hanka Alpert described this moment as follows: “One of the soldiers came into the Committee office and . . . asked me why I was in despair. I answered, ‘Isn’t it reason enough that I don’t know where my husband is, and add to that, all our things have been stolen,’ and I said to him ‘but, you, Sir, have my husband’s shirt on.’” See SL 2.1.1.3A.

10. SL 5.27A.

11. AIPN Ki_41_342, t. 1, cz. 1, k. 41.

12. SL 13.

13. There were eight trials total. The first was held on July 9–11, 1946, and the last on December 13–16 of that year. In addition, there were individual civil trials before the regional court in Kielce.

14. AIPN Ki_27_117, k. 23.

15. Minutes signed by Stefan Tomaszewski (AIPN Ld_PF_12_4110, k. 18). Eugeniusz Wesołowski was sentenced on December 3, 1946, by the district court in Łódź to six months with a three-year suspended sentence. See AIPN Ld_PF_12_4110, k. 19.

16. ANKr, WiN 19, 97.

17. Based on transcripts of raw and unused footage for Marcel Łoziński’s Świadkowie (Video-Nova, 1988).

18. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1999), 244. Klaus Theweleit writes about such incidents as “accomplished denial” (versierten Verleugnung), a false version of events that hides the real course of the crime. See Śmiech morderców. Breivik i inni. Psychogram przyjemności zabijania, trans. Piotr Stronciwilk (Warsaw: PWN, 2016).

19. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You, 248.

20. In a report from the provincial level of the propaganda office (Sprawozdanie Wojewódzkiego Urzędu Informacji i Propagandy w Kielcach za miesiąc lipiec 1946), we read about the funeral of the victims: “Sorrow and shame were visible on everyone’s faces” (APK, 319 Wojewódzki Urząd Informacji i Propagandy w Kielcach, sygn. 46).

21. See SL 1.1.

22. This narrative appears as early as July 5, 1946, in a letter from the minister of public security, Stanisław Radkiewicz, “To All Heads of Provincial and County Offices of Public Security, Commanders of the Citizens’ Militia, and Commanders of the Internal Security Corps”: “On 7/4/1946 a horrendous provocation took place in Kielce. . . . The reactionary provocateurs released a version about an alleged kidnapping of a Polish child by Jews. And this time an outrageous fact has repeated itself, that some elements in the MO, instead of tracking down the authors of these versions and rumors, instead of defending the victims of this provocation—Jews—they let themselves be used as a tool of reactionary forces in the murder of Jews” (AIPN BU_636_1802, k. 179, 180, 181).

23. At the July trial nine men were sentenced to death. Three other defendants received lesser sentences.

24. Several trials before the district court in Kielce took place in the fall of 1946. Krzysztof Urbański lists them in Kieleccy Żydzi (Kielce: Małopolska Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1993), 221.

25. The restriction written on the cover of Władysław Sobczyński’s trial records found in the state archive in Warsaw attests to this: “Kielce Pogrom, materials restricted by the [Security] Office management” (today filed in AIPN BU_01453_3; the cover has the note: “Investigation initiated on 9/20/1946, closed on 11/20/1947”). The main records of the July trial (syg. SN9/46) were also hidden; during the second Kielce investigation charges were considered against those responsible for trying to cover up the events of the pogrom. As late as 1988, despite renewed requests by journalists, the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not want to declassify materials related to the pogrom “for the sake of the political-social good” (decision dated 4/6/1988, AIPN BU_0397_591, t. 2, k. 170).

26. See Sprawozdanie Hilarego Chełchowskiego i Władysława Buczyńskiego, pracowników KC PPR, z wyjazdu do Kielc, 6/7/1946, as reprinted in Stanisław Meducki, ed., Antyżydowskie Wydarzenia Kieleckie 4 lipca 1946 roku: Dokumenty i Materiały (Kielce: Kieleckie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1994), 2:196–201. See also Sprawozdanie z wyjazdu służbowego ob. Śliwińskiego do woj. kieleckiego dla przeprowadzenia akcji informacyjno-propagandowej, mającej na celu zapobiezėnie ekscesom antysemickim od 7 bm do 12 bm (September 1946) (AAN, MIiP, sygn. 79).

27. See E. P. Thompson’s concept of moral economy in Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), chap. 5 and 6. On antisemitism as a “by-product” of capitalism and fascism, see also Moishe Poston, “National Socialism and Antisemitism,” in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, ed. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 302–14. An apt criticism of Thompson’s concept as it relates to ethnic conflicts is Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkley: University of California Press, 1996), 311–23.

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

29. In the social sciences the method I use is called “triangulation” and was developed by Norman K. Denzin. See The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods (Chicago: Aldine, 1970). Triangulation involves using multiple theoretical perspectives to interpret a single data set. See Krzysztof Konecki, Studia z metodologii badań jakościowych: Teoria ugruntowana (Warsaw: PWN, 2000), 95.

30. AIPN Ki_29_117. This is the archival collection that is referred to as “Hiding Place no. 2” throughout the book.

31. Interrogations of Józef Dzik, Wojciech Kopacz, Czesław Ostrowski, Stefan Ziomek, Józef Walkiewicz, Julian Nawara, Stanisław Skrzyniarz, Józef Pawlik, and others. See SL 3: The Police, the ORMO, and Soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division and the KBW.

32. This description was popularized by Jerzy Daniel’s book, Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu: Rzecz o kieleckim pogromie 4 lipca 1946 (Kielce: Scriptum, 1996), 20. The following two paragraphs are a paraphrase of Kalman Zinger’s testimony.

33. See SL 2.1.1.1.

34. See Stefan Sędek’s testimony, dated 8/2/1946 (AIPN BU_0_1453_3, k. 25).

35. Janowski’s signatures can be found on numerous reports of searches (and consequently of looting) commissioned by Dobraczyński. See, for example, AIPN Ki_41_1353, cz. 3, k. 7. Kalman Zinger may have been questioned a number of times.

36. This is presumably a mistake. According to available testimonies, there was no restaurant at the address 6 Leonarda Street; however, not far away Piotr Adamczyk had an establishment at 17 Aleksandra Street. Adamczyk played an important role in the third wave of the pogrom, which came from the eastern part of the city center. A person named Władysława Adamczyk, however, also ran an eatery located at 21 Leonarda Street. See a list of privately-owned food establishments for the Kielce region in 1945–1946 in APK, 305 UWK II.

37. On July 6, 1946, Kuś interrogated, among others, the director of the internal section of the Rank-and-File Training Course of the Citizens’ Militia (MO), Józef Dzik. See SL 3.13A.

38. Paraphrase. See SL 2.1.1.18.

39. On that day, for example, a police corporal, Eugeniusz Krawczyk, who was tried for robbing and beating Jews, was dressed in a green shirt, which could have been perceived as a kind of battle dress and which witnesses referred to as “American.” See Barabara Lipczyńska’s testimony at Krawczyk’s trial (SL 5.18F). See also Jan Rogoziński, Citizens’ Militia police officer, according to his own testimony at the trial on July 24, 1950 (AIPN Ki_41_2–43, k. 227).

40. SL 2.1.1.

41. SL 2.1.1.28A.

42. See 2.1.1.19, in particular k. 27–30.

43. Łukasz Krzyżanowski published Lewkowicz’s testimony in his article “Nieznane dokumenty do historii pogromu kieleckiego: Protokoły przesłuchań Henryka Błaszczyka i Gerszona Lewkowicza z lipca 1946 roku,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, no. 2 (2014): 388–85. I am indebted to Marcin Zaremba for calling my attention to this article.

44. This episode is corroborated by the testimony of the police officer Franciszek Furman: “Intelligence agents walked from apartment to apartment in this building with this boy, looking for a place where this boy could have been kept. Later they walked out of the apartment and started to look in nooks and crannies around the courtyard. This boy couldn’t determine the place of his detention. He said that they held him in a dog house, then another time that they held him in a pigsty. All this started to irritate us, because [it was] in vain . . . [and] fights broke out.” See SL 5.12A.

45. This is a paraphrase. For the entire statement, see SL 2: 1.1.19.

46. GFHA, Catalog No. 11248. Quote based on a copy included in Arnon Rubin, The Kielce Pogrom: Spontaneity, Provocation or a Country-Wide Scheme? Vol. 6, Facts and Fictions about the Rescue of the Polish Jewry During the Holocaust (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 2004), 310–13. See the complete report in SL 1.26.

47. “[Adolf] Berman then denied this, saying that it . . . wasn’t the Polish army, but rather Anders’s army, [and] that they came from the forest.” See Jechiel Alpert in Urbański, Kieleccy Żydzi, 208. Similarly, in testimony during the second Kielce investigation dated July 16, 1996: “[Several months after the pogrom Alpert was speaking with Dr. Karlebach when] some person came over, whose name was Dr. Berman. . . . He came up to us, interrupted our conversation, saying to Dr. Karlebach, ‘You know who started the pogrom? Anders.’ This was a few months [after the pogrom], when it was known that it wasn’t Anders.” See Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006), 1: 61.

48. See SL 1.26.

49. See the testimony of Józef Dzwonek, a worker who had been detained (AIPN BU_0_13_3234).

50. SL 4.3A.

51. See Grynbaum’s account: “I stress that a person was thrown to the street from the second floor. A soldier approached the corpse that was lying there and kicked him in the head in the presence of the entire crowd. Then the cries ‘Let’s not be afraid of the army, the army is with us’ were heard among the gathered crowd of people.” See SL 1.8.

52. There is no information about this person. The name of a worker, Maria Chyb, appears among the death certificates issued by the Civil Registry Office dated July 4, 1946. This name also appears in the electoral rolls for the 1938 Sejm elections (APK, 122 Akta m. Kielc, sygn. 2435) as having been born on April 17, 1905, residing at 12 Prosta Street. There is also information about “one infant of Polish ethnicity.” But it is not clear whether these deaths were connected to the pogrom. A woman of the same name appears on the list of workers at the Ludwików plant in 1946 (daughter of Antoni and Maria, born October 6, 1925, in Kielce), but further research indicates that she did not perish in the pogrom (see AIPN Ki_24_184).

53. Józef Adelson writes that “the railway action conducted by NSZ units . . . claimed around 200 victims.” See Józef Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej ludową,” in Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce w zarysie (do 1950 roku), ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993). Cited according to Danuta Blus-Węgrowska, “Atmosfera pogromowa,” Karta no. 18 (1996): 92. See also Ryszard Śmietanka-Kruszelnicki, Podziemie poakowskie na Kielecczyźnie w latach 1945–1948 (Kraków: IPN, 2002), 235.

54. See Kula, “Nasza w tym rola,” 162.

55. “Jakow Kojfman of Ziębice near Wrocław: he was traveling on that day (July 4) by train on the Wrocław-Radom line, which stops at 3:30 in the morning at the Kielce railway station. As soon as the train stopped, a gang of young hooligans aged 16–18 years old started to look for Jews in the train wagons. Jews who were found were beaten horribly. Jakow was also dragged onto the platform, but he was saved, as were another 5 Jews, by several soldiers from the same train. These soldiers accompanied those they saved all the way to Skarżysko. On the way to Skarżysko, you could hear calls to throw Jews from the train in retaliations for the murder of Kielce children.” See Szmerke Kaczerginski, “Di levaye fun di keltser kdushim [Pogrzeb kieleckich męczenników],” Dos Naje Lebn [Nowe Życie], no. 23, July 12, 1946.

56. Based on minutes from a plenary meeting of the CKŻP. See Protokół plenarnego posiedzenia CKŻP, 10/7/1946 (AŻIH, CKŻP, 301/3, s. 13).

57. AIPN Ld_409_9, k. 5–6.

58. Information from email correspondence between the author and Adam Leszczyński, dated November 28, 2016.

59. Per Adolf Berman in a conversation with Michał Chęciński on March 4, 1975, AMCh, interview no. 69, p. 6. See also Niusia Borensztajn’s statement: “As far as I know . . . no foreign institution was involved from the morning to the late hours, when they transferred us to the hospital.” See SL 2.1.1.16B for her entire statement.