PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

In a commentary on Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine, essayist Neal Ascherson compared Russia’s relations with her neighbors to those of a peculiar insect known as the ichneumon wasp. “The ichneumon wasp does not kill its caterpillar prey but injects a toxin, leaving it paralyzed and submissive. Russia has always been ichneumonic to its neighbors.”1

That comparison also applies to the postwar history of Poland, which after the Second World War found itself in the Soviet sphere of influence. The march of the victorious Red Army on its way to Berlin completely changed the country, enabling the installation of a Communist regime. Two issues—the external (meaning the geopolitical position of the country), and the internal (meaning the Communist authorities’ monopoly on power)—have determined Poland’s recent history.

Anti-Communist visions of this history emphasize the “alienness” of the Communist regime. And although they are true in part (the government was imposed), the choice of words reveals that these opinions result from a nationalist point of view. Labeling the former government “alien” overlooks the hope that communism inspired among Jewish Poles and others whom nationalists traditionally excluded from “Polishness” (polskość). While it is true that the decimated Polish Jewry2—in particular those who were religious—decidedly rejected communism, there was a relatively small group of secular Jews who supported it and who remained in the country. The Communist system seemed to guarantee them their longed-for civil equality and access to public institutions; it endowed them with essential agency. It soon disappointed them, however, and eventually drove out the majority following the student protests in 1968.

Although Polish Jews’ support for communism in the early postwar period was rooted in their experience of prewar exclusion, it was generally explained, in accordance with the stereotype of żydokomuna (Judeo-Communism), as a supposedly ingrained tendency of Jews toward communism. Not surprisingly, the anti-Soviet Polish majority reacted with animosity. The arrow of causality is reversed here because, after all, it was the hostility of their environment that required the Jews to seek help from soldiers of the Red Army and inclined some of them to join the organs of power—the security service and the police. Anyone familiar with the security situation of the Jews in Poland after World War II, as described recently by Julian Kwiek, would refrain from calling this decision one of free choice.3 Moreover, joining the UB (security service) or the MO (postwar police) provided Holocaust survivors with the same kind of agency that an incomparably greater number of non-Jewish Poles also enjoyed. Yet only Jews were blamed for repressive acts and stigmatized with the label Communist “collaborators.”4

Another stereotype influencing perceptions of the Kielce pogrom was the hypothesis that it was provoked by the NKVD or the Polish equivalent of the secret police, the UB or bezpieka. Many historians supported such conspiracy theories, including the distinguished, pioneering researcher Bożena Szaynok, the author of the first study of the Kielce pogrom after censorship was abolished.5 The authors of a study sponsored by the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) from the early 2000s summarizing the second investigation into the Kielce pogrom also included such theories.6 I would like to emphasize that after examining all available sources, including some newly discovered ones, I have found no evidence to support the hypothesis of an NKVD provocation. Yet, for years the Kielce pogrom—a milestone in the history of European Jewry—was treated in Poland as another wickedness on the part of the Soviets. And as such it did not burden the Polish collective conscience.

And yet, as Krystyna Kersten has observed, the worst thing that could happen to research on the history of Poland would be the replacement of Communist propaganda with anti-Communist propaganda. In this vein, in creating a social portrait of the pogrom, I have applied the methods of historical-anthropological discourse. Indeed, when we set aside the ideological interpretive framework and look at the postwar history of the Kielce region from up close and from below, an ambivalent and disturbing picture appears. Above all, the dichotomy “żydokomuna” versus “Polish nation,” so essential to this ideological framework, disappears. From the moment the new system was established after the war, representatives from all spheres of society, including ethnic Poles, emerged on the side of the Communists, serving in the party structure as well as in the organs of repression. In turn, there were more Jews on the anti-Communist side than expected; many of them had endured the German occupation in Soviet prison camps only to become victims of violence in their country of origin. From this new perspective the war of the “Polish nation” against “żydokomuna” is replaced by a brutal, fratricidal “Polish-Polish war.”

Familiarity with this context reveals that the Kielce pogrom occurred as a result of the weakness, not the strength, of the Communist authorities; in a certain sense it occurred due to the insufficient presence, not the excessive presence, of the Soviets and the UB that day on Planty Street. Suffering from drastic staff shortages, Communist institutions in Kielce attracted not only enthusiasts of uniforms and free cafeterias but above all people who had become accustomed to the idea that Jews were to be killed. It was these people—for the most part prewar officers, policemen, and lawyers, and not the scum of society or Communist provocateurs—who made the Kielce pogrom possible.

The first part of the book’s title refers to the curse that, according to legend, was placed on Kielce by Rabbi Dawid Kahane. The subtitle, A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom, represents my attempt to use the methods of historical anthropology—inquiry and critical microanalysis—to allow us to see the pogrom through the eyes of as many witnesses as possible. To accompany the text, I have included images of some of the actors involved in the events; as historical sources, photos are sometimes more eloquent than documents.

To facilitate the accessibility of the narrative, which was written with the broadest possible readership in mind, I sometimes abridge and paraphrase sources. For those interested in delving more deeply, I have provided a comprehensive list of the primary sources used.

Before 1989 archival documents from the first Kielce pogrom investigation in 1946 were dispersed; some of the sources were concealed, others were destroyed, and still others were lost. The research that I began in 2013, and which is still ongoing, revealed an extensive inventory of untapped information about the pogrom scattered across archival collections in the IPN, the Bureau of Military History, and local archives—collections whose content continues to be better known and understood with time.

The vast majority of the materials on which I base my research were created by Communist institutions of authority: the police, the security services, the prosecutors, and the courts. These sources must be treated with caution—but not more so than any others. I do not agree with those who assert that these are unreliable documents. Most were classified, and after all, no authority would, in the long run, blind itself. Even so, wherever possible, I confront these documents with other points of view—above all with the views of the underground, as preserved in the original archive of the Freedom and Independence Union (Wolność i Niezawisłość, WiN). One important collection I have relied on is the personal archive of Michał Chęciński, which was made available to me by his family. Materials that are just as extensive concern Kielce residents whose stories are among the unused footage for the film Świadkowie (Witnesses), made available to me by the director Marcel Łoziński.

Every piece of information I use, every detail concerning the topography and atmosphere in Kielce, finds support in the historical sources: transcripts of hearings; reports by authorities at various levels; autopsy reports; press reports and photos; letters and memoirs.

Even more important is the perspective of the Jewish victims of and witnesses to the pogrom, whose voices until now have been largely neglected. As a result of archival searches for this book, I found more than thirty such accounts, not only from 1946, but also from much later. The Jews who gave these accounts were present on Planty Street during the pogrom, and every one testifies that policemen and servicemen attacked the building. If we add to this the collection of statements from the second Kielce investigation in the nineties, when Prosecutor Zbigniew Mielecki interviewed witnesses in Israel,7 this number doubles. It will triple when we add to these the transcripts of conversations with survivors that were filed with the Institute of National Remembrance by the film director Andrzej Miłosz,8 as well as memoirs I was able to locate.

To write this book, I read hundreds, perhaps thousands, of personal documents written by Poles during the period 1939–1946. These were statements and CVs of soldiers, policemen, railroad workers, building custodians, laborers, secret agents of the security services, the Ministry of Public Security, the Polish Armed Services, officials of the new authorities and of the old, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, repatriated persons and future emigrants, openly identified and secret soldiers of the Home Army (AK), the People’s Army (AL), the Polish Peasants’ Battalions (BCh), the National Armed Forces (NSZ), and the Freedom and Independence Union (WiN). Some of the documents were written inaccurately, in a clichéd style, with mistakes. Others were skillfully written and fascinating. It is impossible to read such texts without being persuaded by them. All were about life and survival—and therefore about the values that heroic histories despise.

Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson

Notes

1. Neal Ascherson, “Foreigners are Fiends!” London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 9 (May 12, 2022).

2. It is estimated that 1–2 percent of Jewish Poles survived the Holocaust. Of these, the largest group was made up of those who had fled to the USSR when the war broke out. According to some estimates Jews had a greater chance of survival in a concentration camp than by hiding in the Polish countryside. See the CKŻP report titled Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Żydowskiego w Krakowie za 1945, AŻIH 303_II_75, k. 145.

3. Julian Kwiek, Nie chcemy Żydów u siebie. Wrogość wobec Żydów w latach 1944–1947 (Warsaw: Nieoczywiste, 2021).

4. See Christopher R. Browning, “A New Vision of the Holocaust. Review of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder,” New York Review of Books 62, no. 15 (October 8, 2015), 42. Quoting Snyder, Browning writes: “Psychologically, the Soviet occupation generated feelings of shame and resentment in Eastern Europeans. ‘Jews were never the majority of local collaborators’ with the Soviets. They had ‘never held real power’ in areas occupied by the Soviets, and in reality had ‘suffered as much or more than any other group under Soviet rule’ from disproportionate confiscations and deportations. Yet the Jews necessarily saw the Soviets as ‘the lesser evil’ and this made them ‘collectively vulnerable’ for acts of revenge.”

5. Bożena Szajnok, Pogrom Żydów w Kielcach 4 lipca 1946 (Warsaw: Bellona, 1992).

6. Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego, vol. 1 (Warsaw: IPN, 2006); Leszek Bukowski, Andrzej Jankowski, and Jan Żaryn, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego, vol. 2 (Warsaw: IPN, 2008).

7. See various materials concerning the matter of the Kielce pogrom in 1946 (S.3/92/NK); copies of interview transcripts of witnesses from Tel Aviv (AIPN Ki_53_4742).

8. AIPN Ki_53_4749, t. 8. Referred to throughout as “Miłosz (raw footage).”