CHAPTER 1

Voices

The Morning of July 4, 1946

Of all the protagonists on this day, Anczel Pinkusiewicz* is up and about the earliest.1 In order to catch the 2:30 a.m. train from Wrocław to Częstochowa, he has stayed up all night. He spent the war in Siberia and has only recently arrived in Poland.2 He left his wife, Lea, and three-year-old Izaak just outside of Głogów. Now he’s on his way to his hometown, Kielce, by himself. On the train, he sits next to the Polish Christian woman whose luggage he helped load through the train window. She’s also from Kielce. Before the war Pinkusiewicz worked as an administrator in the Teatr Polski. They soon discover that they have some acquaintances in common.

In addition to the two of them, there’s a Jewish family in the train car: two sisters and their husbands. The sisters only recently returned from the Soviet Union, and one of them is seven months pregnant. While most of their friends and acquaintances are seeking their fortunes in the West, they’re traveling against the current—to Chełm, to meet up with their father, who somehow managed to survive the war.

While Pinkusiewicz dozes on the train as it approaches Częstochowa, workers in Kielce who start their jobs at five in the morning are just waking up. They work at Sawmills no. 1 and 2, at the Fosfat chemical plant, at the brickyard and the tilery, at the Granat metal manufacturing plant, and the Kadzielnia Industrial Plants. The first shift at the Ludwików steelworks will start soon. The Błaszczyks—eight-year-old Henio’s uncle Andrzej and Henio’s brother Jan—will arrive at work. Henio finally turned up yesterday, after he’d gone missing for three days. Just yesterday evening Henio’s father, Walenty, went to the nearby police station to report to the police that he had returned.3 But since Walenty was not entirely sober, they told him to come back the following day.4 In a couple of hours, a meeting of the Factory Council will be called in the steelworks. Quite unexpectedly, the matter of Henio’s disappearance will come up during the meeting.

Commander Edmund Zagórski supposedly gets up at five thirty. During the war he was in the Home Army;5 today, he’s head of the police station located at 45 Sienkiewicza Street. At six o’clock he sets off on rounds with his deputy. Returning to the station by eight, he begins his lecture on hygiene.

It will be just before nine when Master Corporal (plutonowy) Stefan Kuźmiński will report to Zagórski that “the boy just came forward and reported the guy who supposedly held him for three days in a basement. The guy’s here.”6

Before all this transpires, mothers will be up at seven. So what if it’s summer vacation? You have to make breakfast for the kids regardless. Heading off to the market, one of the mothers will leave her six-year-old daughter playing in the courtyard. When she returns, the child will be gone. Also gone will be Antonina Biskupska’s five-year-old son, Staś, who ran off with his friends to the Silnica River; Ludwik Pustuła’s ten-year-old daughter, Leokadia, who went to the train station to sell lemonade; and Maria Binkowska’s eight-year-old, Janek, who disappeared in June but will be found two weeks from now, healthy and whole, on Pocieszka Street.7 These parents wouldn’t be so desperate if they hadn’t already heard about the Błaszczyk boy from Podwalna Street earlier that morning. It’s not that he disappeared. Rather, it’s about where he was found. Rumor has it that Jews from Planty Street held him in a basement for three days. This is why Zofia Prokop, Maria Binkowska, and Antonina Biskupska will go to the Jewish Committee building later today. And policeman Pustuła will also go there, in his official capacity, but only after tossing back a few drinks.

Around eight in the morning the city is already bustling with people. Shops, restaurants, hair salons and barbershops are opening up. Breakfast has just finished at the station at 45 Sienkiewicza Street, where Walenty Błaszczyk has just returned, this time with his son. The policemen from the night shift are punching out as those scheduled for the day shift start to show up.

Before fourteen-year-old Czesław Nowak gets on the train to Częstochowa, where he peddles lemonade and milk, he goes to the city park to catch a couple of fish.

Two scouts, brothers Feliks and Stanisław Kowal,* are in a hurry to get to church to attend a mass being said for the repose of General Sikorski’s soul.

Nineteen-year-old Niusia Borensztajn and Szmulek Nester,* who’s just a year older than she is, are taking a stroll together along Sienkiewicza Street for the first time.

Ignacy Herman* is eating breakfast at a café with a schoolmate.8

Marysia Machtynger,* who works for the Jewish Committee in the repatriation department, has already crossed the intersection of Sienkiewicza and Planty streets.

Twenty-two-year-old Borys Wajntraub, who lives in the kibbutz in the Jewish Committee building on Planty Street, has just stepped out for a newspaper. As he returns, he sees small groups of people along the Silnica River conversing in lowered voices.

A couple of minutes after eight, Władysław Sobczyński, head of the Provincial Office of Public Security, is getting his hair trimmed at the barbershop located on the corner of Sienkiewicza and Focha streets,9 when his adjutant and son-in-law, Roman Nowak, brings him the news that something is going on in front of the Jewish Committee building.10 It is this adjutant who will go back to the office and spread the rumor about “Jews who murdered Polish children.”11 He believes this rumor just as much as the other Kielce residents do.

A Men’s Shoe Store

While Ignacy Herman is finishing his breakfast in the café, raised voices can suddenly be heard coming from the street, and a crowd of agitated people appears outside the window.12 At the insistence of the proprietress, the customers of the café quickly leave the premises. A group of women, crying, stands near the Silnica River. I asked what happened, Herman recalls. They answered: “You don’t know?” And pointing to the Jewish Committee building on Planty Street, they added, “Over there, in the basement, lie the little heads of Christian children murdered by Jews for blood to make matzo.”

He and his friend go their separate ways, and Herman comes up with an idea: he’ll go to the officers’ mess located not far from here. But they don’t let him in. He sees that people are hunting for Jews on the street. How should I protect myself? First, he tries to get a room in a hotel, but three hotels turn him away. Finally, Mr. Woś, who was a tenant in his grandmother’s apartment building, comes to mind. Mr. Woś owns a men’s shoe store, and Herman goes there. The owner immediately recognizes him and sits him down behind the counter. He gives Herman a newspaper, so that he can hide his Semitic features. Bootmakers, shoemakers, and, of course, customers stop by the shop. I couldn’t see any of them, Herman recalls, but I heard them say through their gritted teeth that it was time to completely finish off the Jews and finish what Hitler had started.

That same morning, Jakub Aleksandrowicz,*13 a tailor from Łódź who has come to Kielce on business, is wandering around the city. He is staying at the Hotel Polski, just a few hundred meters from the Jewish shelter. When I woke up and looked out the window, I saw crowds making their way toward Planty, he recalls. I went out onto Sienkiewicza and asked what was going on. People said, “The Jews need to be beaten, they’re murdering our children, they’ve killed one or two” After an hour, they were already saying that ten had been killed. People in the crowd were carrying wooden posts, chains, canes, stones in their hands; boys were running along, and shop owners, and I saw a couple of scouts with canes. But the authorities—I saw neither government nor local authorities.

I kept walking with this crowd. I felt safe because in Kielce I wasn’t known as a Jew. But I was registered in the hotel as Aleksandrowicz, Jankiel Mendel, something the people at the reception desk understood full well. As I was leaving breakfast, I could feel them pointing fingers at me. I got scared, and since I knew what all this meant, I grabbed my suitcase and slipped out the back door.

On the main street I ran into an acquaintance of mine who owned a hosiery shop. We had business contacts in common. I went with her into her store. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Don’t you know what’s going on with the Jews? They killed our children” I asked her how many children they had killed. She said ten. Her words are burned into my memory.

I joined the crowd and went with them all the way to Planty, where several of my acquaintances lived. That was at about ten. There were a whole lot of people there already. They were all yelling, “Give up the Jews, drag them out, we need to kill them for what they did to us” There were shop owners, housewives, firemen, workmen—even priests in cassocks. Policemen were hanging around with smiles on their faces, as if encouraging the crowd. There were also members of the scouting movement in their uniforms. They had canes—called ciupagas—in their hands. Suddenly I heard screams. I went closer and saw clubs raised and lowered in beatings.

There’s also Dina Szaroni’s account.14 She was a resident of Kielce and the widow of Mr. Lemberg, whose first name we do not know. The building where she lived was located across the street from the Soviet headquarters on Focha Street, and in a moment Szmulek Nester will take shelter there. We arrived in Kielce in May, on the fourth or the fifth, Dina recalls. We first moved into an apartment on Czysta Street, later called Focha, building number 18/20, where there were a few apartments abandoned by fleeing Germans. The offices of the Municipal Jewish Committee were also located there. A lot of Jews lived there, the more religious kind also lived there, including my husband and me, my brother, and the Baums*. This was the other Jewish building in Kielce, just like the one on Planty, but Jews left for America from this one rather than for Palestine.

My husband ate breakfast and went out to take care of something. He came back after three minutes. I made a joke: I knew you would come back. But he wasn’t laughing. He asks, “Have you heard what’s going on? There’s a pogrom. People are walking around the streets looking for Jews. They’re saying that we want to take children to make matzo.” As it turned out, when my husband went out into the street he ran into a crowd of people who were walking around looking for Jews. They were looking for them because a father and son were looking for the Jew who had hidden a boy in a little shed to take his blood. So we immediately locked the doors and sat as quietly as mice.

Our neighbors across the hall were Russians. Russian officers. That’s why all those Poles around us didn’t have the courage to come in. They just yelled that those Jews need to be seized and that revenge should be taken on them. I had an aunt who lived on Planty, and she asked a good Russian officer from there to save her. But he told her she had no right to go anywhere that day, and that she had to stay home. There were always guards at the gate down below in front of the Russians’ building. On that day, the gate was sealed shut. There wasn’t a guard in sight.

Niusia and Samuel Take a Stroll

At seven thirty breakfast is also being eaten at the Ichud kibbutz in the building of the Jewish Committee located at 7 Planty Street.15 Calling it a kibbutz, though, is an overstatement. We’re talking about three rooms on the second floor with windows facing the courtyard.16 One room for the young girls and another for the boys. Ewa Szuchman, the secretary to the chairman of the Jewish Committee, lived on the other side of the stairwell, on the Planty Street side.17 The chairman of the committee was Seweryn Kahane,* a well-respected former partisan from Lwów. His deputy was the chairman of the kibbutz, Jechiel Alpert, who lived with his wife in a separate apartment on the second floor. The main office of the committee was located on the first floor.

Altogether there were thirty-eight mouths to feed in the kibbutz. Downstairs, in the soup kitchen funded by the [American Jewish] Joint Distribution Committee, there were just as many nonmembers’ mouths to feed. From 160 to 180 soups were served per day. According to a report by the Repatriation Department from the first half of 1946, these soups were “nutritious and tasty.”18 The overwhelming majority of those who ate there were young people who had survived the camps or returnees from the Soviet Union. Most, like Tania and Fania Szumacher, were born in the 1920s. Some were even younger, like seventeen-year-old Balka Gertner or Rachelka Sonberg (Zander), who was a bit younger than that. All four will perish in the pogrom. There were a few older Holocaust survivors there: Aron Binsztok, age seventy; Berl Frydman, “an old tinsmith from Kielce,” age fifty-two; Róża Rajzman, age fifty; Estera Proszowska, a nurse, age forty-three; Julian Bertinger, a demobilized soldier, age forty-eight; and forty-year-old Kalman Zinger, “the Jew in the green hat,” who will be arrested in just a moment.

After breakfast Borys Wajntraub is going back to 7 Planty Street with the newspaper he just bought when he sees a small crowd standing in front of the building. When he asks what is going on, the people answer that Jews murdered a boy, and there’s a pogrom. What do you mean, “a pogrom”? Wajntraub laughs. He is blond and doesn’t look Jewish.19 He wears a Soviet military overcoat. This overcoat will save his life.

Meanwhile, at that moment, Niusia Borensztajn and Szmulek Nester are strolling along Sienkiewicza Street.20 They are going for a walk for the first time as an engaged couple. A passing police patrol gives them a strange look. They don’t understand his look until a group of people appears from behind the patrol shouting that Jews murdered a Polish child that night. Among the group is a woman, more or less thirty-five years old, a tall brunette dressed in a light-colored dress, with her hair combed up. Niusia and Szmulek hear her saying that ten children have been found in the Jews’ basement.

FIGURE 1. Niusia Borensztajn and Szmulek Nester (her fiancé) on shipboard just before their arrival in Israel. Courtesy of Niusia Nestel and Chilik Weizman.

Szmulek, who survived the August pogrom in Kraków, does not want to wait for events to unfold.21 As he and Niusia head further down Sienkiewicza Street, passersby ask them what’s happening on Planty. They decide to take the side streets. Following a roundabout route, they reach the local headquarters of the Soviet troops, located on Focha Street. But today the heavy iron gate that is normally wide open and guarded by at least one sentry, is bolted shut. Even the guard is inside the gate. Szmulek remembers that a rabbi friend of his lives not far from there, at 18/20 Focha Street. They see that the rabbi’s gate is opening every few moments; someone enters, and then someone else enters. So others must be looking for shelter here too.

I said to my girlfriend, “Come on, let’s also go in,” recalls Nester.22 But she objected. “No. Let whatever happens to the kibbutz, also happen to us.” I repeated my suggestion, she repeated hers. “I’m going back.” And in a moment she was no longer beside me. She went back there, and I went into the rabbi’s. On the following day, when Szmulek gives a statement to an officer from the security service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB), he still won’t know what has happened to Niusia.23

Meanwhile, Niusia was pushing her way through the crowd that was besieging the building on Planty Street.24 I was heading back, she says, and along the way I saw that the entire city had flocked to this place, in front of this building. I saw that the entire city was standing there. The factories were at a standstill, people were coming—young, old, children, everyone—with posts taken from fences, clubs, iron bars pulled out of the ground, everyone was running in this direction. The entire city came out to beat the Jews. The schoolyard was enormous; there was a school next to our kibbutz, St. Kinga’s Middle School. I don’t know how I managed to get through this throng. They asked me. “Where are you going?” I said, “I live here.” They laughed in my face and said, “You’re going to die.”25

Rafael Blumenfeld Looks out the Window

After breakfast we were sitting in the kibbutz on plank beds, says one of the oldest kibbutzniks, twenty-five-year-old Rafael Blumenfeld.*26 We were getting ready to go to work—we were leasing a small plot of land outside Kielce, learning how to work the soil before leaving for Palestine—when suddenly our friend Niusia, very frightened, rushes in, telling us that crowds were moving along the streets shouting: “Death to the Jews, let’s go, let’s kill the Jews the same way they killed our children.” We started to laugh, thinking that the boys who were standing on the street had given her a scare. We said she was being hysterical, that she was imagining things, that it was not possible. And suddenly, maybe after a quarter of an hour, we start hearing some kind of disturbance downstairs in our building. We go up to the window and see that people are beginning to gather and shout, that they’re starting to throw stones at our windows.

We sat down on the beds and tried to figure out what to do. We took the girls to the last room—we had three rooms there on the second floor—and told them to lock themselves in from the inside, move the beds in front of the door and not open it for anyone. And we stood outside the door with weapons for which we had a permit, and wondered what to do next. Suddenly, our chairman, Chilek [Jechiel] Alpert, who also lived in this building, came over to us and tried to calm us down, saying that everything would be all right, because the police were here and they would look after us, and there was no reason to panic. It’s easy to say “don’t panic,” but how can you not if you’ve seen those crowds below and heard the shouting?

FIGURE 2. Pogrom survivor Niusia Borensztajn (center) with friends in prewar Kielce. Courtesy of Niusia Borenstein and Chilik Weizman.

I saw a few policemen standing in front of the door. I look again and see: the door has opened and a Jewish man has gone out into the street. Suddenly some woman cries out. She’s holding a young boy, and he shouts, “That’s the Jew!” We didn’t know what he meant by “the Jew.”

And a policeman grabbed the Jew, and together with yet another policeman took him away somewhere. They led him away through the crowd, even though that crowd charged at him and wanted to beat him. But they escorted him to the station. Chilek Alpert went up to the chairman of the Provincial Committee, Dr. Seweryn Kahane, and asked him to communicate with the security service (UB) and to ask them to detain that man and not let him leave, because people might kill him. And they detained him there. That Jew’s name is Kalman Zinger.* He is a resident of Kielce.

FIGURE 3. Pogrom survivor Rafael Blumenfeld in 1956. Courtesy of Itzhak Peled, Blumenfeld’s son.

I didn’t know that Błaszczyk at all, and I don’t know anything about his family because we were careful not to cross paths with any Poles. The atmosphere in Kielce was tense. They had just held the referendum.27 There was fighting between the underground—they were called the boys from the forest—and the authorities. There was fighting, so we were on our guard not to be out in the streets too much, not to get involved. From time to time we heard that here or there someone had been killed, so we avoided any contact.

They weren’t saying anything about kidnappings for matzo. The rumor was that Jews kidnapped the child because they were returning from the camps emaciated and that now they were giving themselves transfusions using the blood of Polish children. The mother of that Błaszczyk boy, she came with that child to look at the basement where they held him, only there’s no basement in this building at all. It took a bit of time, about an hour, to get those crowds going. That mother, that mother was shouting the entire time, as were others in the crowd. The boy was little, he stood with his mother, just playing the role of an extra. She was shouting, “Our children are here, a lot of children are still inside in the basement.”

We were barricaded in the kibbutz, but we made sure that Chilek Alpert, who was our liaison, could get in to tell us what was going on outside. Through the window I saw the crowd grow and grow. It started with individuals, then there were dozens, hundreds, and by the third series of shots, already thousands, maybe two thousand people. The policemen came along with this crowd. They marched at the head of the crowd. We saw how they entered our yard—we watched from the balcony. After nine o’clock, they started to come en masse, but they had been coming one by one since just after eight.

And we didn’t know what to do. Suddenly we saw that policemen and officers of the Polish Army were entering the building. The policemen were downstairs, and upstairs there were only soldiers. When they came inside, they started to take away our weapons. They ordered us to hand over our weapons. And when we handed over the weapons, at that moment the shots started, they started shooting at us. I don’t know where the shots came from—from downstairs, from upstairs, I don’t remember—I can’t say now where that first shot came from. I only remember that the soldiers disarmed us and right after disarming us they started shooting at us. They started to disarm [us] on the second floor, then they went down. Those in military uniforms—only they had weapons, our weapons were taken away. They started to shoot, and they started to shout that we should come down, those soldiers who came up to us, shouted that we should go down. At eleven, eleven thirty, around that time, they started to push us out of the building. Our weapons were taken away, I don’t know, at around ten, ten fifteen. And right away, after they took our weapons, the shooting began. We were terribly afraid.

We didn’t want to move, and then they were storming the doors that we had blocked. In the end, they ran to that last room where the girls were, they started to beat on [the door] with their rifle butts and kick [it down]. That’s when the girls opened up, and we started to hear screaming from there, because there were already some wounded. The panic began, a great panic.

Yes, I saw them shoot Symcha Sokołowski.* He was one of the members of our kibbutz. In the midst of this shooting, he suddenly grabbed his heart and shouted, “I took a bullet, I took a bullet.” He started to bleed and fell onto one of the bunk beds that was standing there. And the screaming started, the hysterical kind, especially from the girls, because he was barricaded in there, where the girls were. The screaming began, screaming that made an awful impression on me, because I felt I was responsible for them.

In the meantime, a different Sokołowski* was seriously wounded, and one of our female members fell out a window, but by then I was already downstairs. I knew they were throwing someone down, but I couldn’t make out who it was. I remember a girl screaming, and later I learned that it was Balka Gertner.* I knew that they were throwing girls off the balcony and that she was screaming, but I couldn’t think about it because I was getting hit with a stone here, a stone there, my pain drowned out her scream. I only heard the scream and saw someone falling from the balcony.

Because at the same time the soldiers started to push us out into the stairwell and down toward the exit. We resisted, we didn’t want to move, so they started to push us with rifle butts. And they pushed us toward the schoolyard. And when we got there, the crowd positioned itself on both sides of the exit and started to beat us with stones, and started to beat us with clubs, canes. The civilian population stood in two rows with stones, with iron [rods]. Everyone was holding something, was holding something in his hand, either an iron rod, or bricks, or stones, or some sort of stick. I took a blow to the head with a stone, from two sides they hit me in the head with rocks. When I walked out, I couldn’t even scream. I saw an enraged mob, I saw eyes that wanted to devour me, I don’t know. If they could have, they would have killed me with their eyes.

I saw women among those beating us, shouting hysterically, a lot of women, and they were also beating us with stones, beating, using whatever they could, but there was no shortage of men either. They shouted, “Death to the Jews, death to the Jews.” I saw they were beating us, but this beating wasn’t enough for them. “Kill the Jews that [sic] killed our children, kill the Jews!” It was a sort of mass hysteria, they were overcome by hysteria. I don’t know what it was: screaming, and shouting, and beating, and shouting, it was just awful.

I was covered in blood. I felt dizzy and lost consciousness. I fell on the stones, on the cobblestones. When I fell, I could still hear, as if through a fog, “This one is still alive.” I was afraid they would shoot me in order to finish me off, like they did to a man next to me.

I lay on the street for a few hours before they threw me into an ambulance. It was well after the midday meal—I don’t know—at 15:00, at 18:00, it seems, I can’t say, because I wasn’t completely conscious. But it was already darker than in the morning, the sun wasn’t as strong. Suddenly I felt they were coming up to me, that they were lifting me, throwing me into an ambulance and onto a pile of corpses that were lying in there, and they threw someone else on top of me. That’s when I began to vomit, yes. I began to vomit and that vomiting woke me up a bit. We were already moving by then, and there were still a bunch of corpses on top of me when the vehicle drove away. The vehicle drove away, and we went to the hospital. They took the corpses to the mortuary, and me, they took me to wash me up, to dress my wounds, to put me to bed.

Who pushed us out? There were only soldiers in the building. Soldiers, I don’t know where they were from, maybe from the Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, KBW) or wherever, but they were not policemen. The policemen were only downstairs, by the door, in front of the crowd. The policemen pushed us into the courtyard. There weren’t any civilians in the building. The civilians were standing just outside the doors, and when they opened the doors and pushed us out, the two rows were already standing there. Chilek Alpert knows what happened next because he was out there. I don’t know, I didn’t see.

Jechiel Alpert and His Wife, Hanka28

Both Jechiel and Hanka Alpert were from Kielce, and both survived the camps. They lived on the second floor of the building annex next to the kibbutz. Before the war, he completed a degree in mathematics and then taught math in the Jewish middle school in Kielce. She was just now beginning her studies. They had been married for a year.

The windows of the Jewish Committee and Seweryn Kahane’s office faced the courtyard, says Alpert. At around nine o’clock I went down to the office, and there I learned that one of our residents, Kalman Zinger, a religious Jew, had been standing on the street and was arrested by the police. He supposedly kidnapped a Polish child and held him in the basement for three days. I asked the head of the committee to immediately go to the police and free this Jew, because this could turn into a very unpleasant provocation. Kahane went. He returns after a few minutes. “Everything is taken care of,” he says. “They will release him right away.” I go up to the window and see that the police are surrounding the building. “What did you take care of?” I shout. Because, as it turns out, the policemen came to conduct a search, to look for those hidden children because apparently more than one child had been captured.

I call the UB and ask them to come. I remember one of them, Captain Mucha. They said they would get the situation under control right away, we can rest assured. But they couldn’t give any orders, because there were four officers, not even in uniform, but in civilian clothes, and they couldn’t influence the police. And the police treated us very boorishly. As a matter of fact, [they also treated the UB officers badly]. Mucha says to me, “Listen, everything is all right.” To that I answer, “What does ‘all right’ mean? Leave a guard here! Take a look, what’s it look like to you?” “Don’t worry,” he answered. And they left.

A thick crowd was already gathered on Planty Street. The police were standing in small groups and those policemen were probably saying that there’s a mortuary full of children here. An army captain, a Jew, wanted to check the identity papers of some policeman who had hit a Jew right in front of him, but the guy reacted to him very arrogantly, threw himself at him as if he wanted to kill him, murder him. That captain got scared and disappeared somewhere. Only one fellow from the UB, Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum, stayed with his sergeant, Jan Rokicki. He was with us until 13:00.

We were sitting. My wife, Hanka, didn’t even manage to get dressed; she came down in her nightgown, in her robe, she said that she was afraid of being alone in the room. It was ten thirty when the fire brigade arrived. They wanted to disperse this crowd using water, but supposedly someone cut their hoses. I call the commander of the Russian unit—his name was Shpilevoi—and I say to him “It’s not safe, something might happen, please send help.” He says that he can’t because he doesn’t have any units in Polish uniforms, he only has Russian uniforms, and then they could say that the Russians are murdering Poles—he can’t send anyone.

Anyway, the Polish Army arrived at eleven o’clock and surrounded the building. The army arrived, so we breathed a sigh of relief. I go out into the foyer, and there’s some young missy, a Pole, yelling at me: “You drank our blood! You killed Christ, we’ll show you!” I want to escort her out, but two soldiers are standing nearby, and they warn me: “You better watch it, sir!”

Then in the office I wanted to go over to the window, to see what was going on, when the shooting began. First, a bullet shot from the courtyard hit the tile stove. A major arrives; Kahane says to him, “Major, sir! They’re shooting! What is this?” He didn’t react, he left. And they started to shoot at our building. Suddenly, Ewa Szuchman, Kahane’s secretary, comes down from the second floor and shouts, “They’re murdering people in the kibbutz!” So I rush to the second floor. I rush upstairs together with Kahane, I go out onto the stairwell—the kibbutz was on the left side, on the right was the entrance to my apartment and a large foyer. I want to walk past, but there are soldiers there with PPSh [Soviet-made submachine guns]. Now they aren’t letting me go back—they want me to go down on the other side, into the schoolyard. I ran away from them, but I didn’t make it into the kibbutz. After a few minutes, they carried down from there the two who had been shot. One was Chil Sokołowski. They also killed Wajnryb* there.

That major comes back again after a while; he asks if we have weapons. I said there are weapons, but I won’t hand them over to him because we have a permit. He left. Then some young second lieutenant appears and says, “Well, thank God everything has settled down. But,” he says, “hand over those weapons.” I say to him, “I won’t hand them over.” And he says, “I advise you, sir, to hand them over, because this could turn into a provocation. And what do you need that for, sir? After all, everything is fine.” We had permits for three, four revolvers; I had one of them. Okay, then, we decided to hand them over. He also asks me if I have ammunition for the FN 9 mm. I say, “I do.” “Where?” “In the apartment on the second floor.” I, the idiot that I am, didn’t realize what danger I was exposing myself to. I went up to the second floor. He could have killed me along the way!

I enter the room and see that the wardrobe has been smashed; all of my clothes and my wife’s clothes have been taken. And I had a lot of money in the wardrobe. They, of course, also took that. But I had other things on my mind at the time! And I also had a parcel hidden somewhere else, which they didn’t find. It was Dr. Kahane’s money, $1,500.29 He worried about this money. He gave me this parcel because, he says, they will recognize him, that he is a Jew, while I can save it. But I was nineteen at the time, and I didn’t understand many things.30

I go downstairs again. We’re sitting next to the desk in the room, on the floor, so that the bullets don’t hit us, because they were shooting from the yard. Then we all went into the small room next to the chairman’s office. At that moment the phone rings. When the shots started, I moved the phone from the desk onto the floor and made calls lying down. I called Kaczmarek, the bishop, who knew me. They said he wasn’t in. I called Provincial Governor Wiślicz-Iwańczyk; he also wasn’t in. So now the telephone rings; Dr. Kahane flies to pick it up, maybe it’s the governor. . . . And he never came back again. They killed him.

At the same moment I hear a shout: “They broke in!” That means they forced the door on the first floor, the entrance to the office. So right away I closed the door to the small room where we were, and from one side I moved the wardrobe, from the other a table. They started to pound on the door with rifle butts. “If you don’t open, we’ll shoot.” In the end I had to open it. Then they say, “All the men, hands up and come out.” In the meantime, others started to come out, including my brother-in-law. My Hania moved closer to me then and said, “I’m begging you, don’t go out, stay.” But how could I not go when they were aiming at me? A double row of soldiers standing on each side, they’re searching everyone, taking watches, money, wedding rings, rings. They also search me. They found 3,000 złotys and took it. I go downstairs from the first floor using these narrow stairs. A Pole is standing on the stairs—he was a butcher—and he yells: “This one wanted to shoot at me!” And, bang, [he hits me] with a window frame. I didn’t react, I didn’t even feel it, I went downstairs.

There was a very narrow exit from this stairwell onto the schoolyard. I see there are so many people that the schoolyard is dark. Soldiers are standing in front of the crowd in a half-circle, and the moment someone walks out, they catch him and throw him into this crowd. Only my brother-in-law managed to go out before me. I saw that when he walked out, he was hit with a rifle butt across the back and was thrown into the crowd. He survived, but how he saved himself—I don’t know. Seeing this, I retreated, because I figured that if they shoot, they’ll injure me, but in the yard they’ll certainly kill me. I fled back to the stairs—but not to the office, rather to the attic. There were a lot of people hiding there.

And we wait for what will happen next. In the end I couldn’t stand it; I say to them, “I’m going to look around.” I enter a room on the first floor, and my wife is standing there, crying. Some lieutenant is cheering her up: “See, ma’am, your husband came back, he’s still alive.” And I see the soldiers, he among them, wearing my shirts. They put the clothes on in thick layers.31 When we were chased downstairs, my wife stayed upstairs the entire time, vulnerable, with her sister. They were also supposed to come down, but Świeczarczyk* came up from downstairs, all bloody, cut up, and in the end they didn’t come down at all.

When we finally all came down together, we were told that the first group of us had just been driven off to prison. They would be safe only in prison under the guard of the UB. The cars were supposed to be back right away to take the rest. It was already 15:30 or maybe 16:00. I suspect that a unit came from Warsaw. The commander of the unit that saved us didn’t speak Polish well. He was a Russian, he had a typically Russian accent.32 He was a lieutenant colonel in a Polish uniform, and he spoke with this accent. And he was taking everyone on a truck.

That’s strange—I think—that it’s taking so long; the prison is, after all, very close by. Then, for a moment, I started to doubt whether this really was the Polish Army. Maybe it’s Anders’s Army33 taking our people to the forest to kill them, and they’ll be right back to take us. Especially because when we were going to the vehicle, the soldiers were setting themselves up in two parallel rows, and one of them says to me, “Did you like the taste of Polish blood? It serves you right!” My cousin, whose room had not been looted, had his things on him, and this soldier took everything at that point. That’s why I was convinced—the ones who are standing here now, they’re simply Anders’s men. I walk out, the soldiers are standing in two rows. I walked through, they searched me, I had money for the tailor who was sewing clothes for me at the time. They took everything I had, down to the last penny.

As I stand there dazed, a guy from the UB, Majewski, comes up to me. I ask him, “Zygmunt, what’s going on here?” And he says, “Everything is all right, a unit came from the town of Góra Kalwaria and things have calmed down. Let’s go, I’ll take you home with me.”34 He had a jeep and I wanted to go with him, but that Russian, the lieutenant colonel, didn’t let us go. He said that he was responsible for us now, and that the crowd was still large. If I traveled in an open car, they could attack us. So I got on a truck. And what an army that was! I had a typewriter with me, I barely got in the vehicle—it disappeared immediately! My wife and I went to Okrzei Street to Warrant Officer Zygmunt Majewski’s apartment, and I stayed there.

Marysia Machtynger Cannot Work Today

Marysia Machtynger,35 who used the last name Pękalska during the German occupation of Poland, is twenty-five years old and works for the Jewish Committee in the repatriation department. Though she was born in the house located at 7 Planty Street—her father Berek and uncle Mordechai36 had a coopery there—she couldn’t go home after the war. The apartment on the first floor, taken over by a German Treuhänder (“trustee”) during the war, was immediately occupied by Poles, the Zielińskis, who ran a bakery on the ground floor.

Today, Marysia came to work as usual. Along the way she saw small groups of people in conversation, but she didn’t want to stop. Since morning, she had been bothered by a sense of foreboding, but she sees that everything is all right at the committee building. Julek Goldwaser, a demobilized soldier, is in the office at the moment. She says to him: “Mr. Julek, there’s a strange atmosphere on the street. You wouldn’t be willing to take a walk and see what’s going on, would you?” “Oh, Miss, you’re always overly sensitive,” he answers.

I was not being hypersensitive, I sensed something, says Marysia. In any case, I wasn’t able to work that day. I ran from window to window. At some point I see that people are gathering in front of the building. But I didn’t think it could be something against Jews. And suddenly I hear that Jews supposedly murdered a Polish child and took his blood for matzo. And that here, in this building, they were holding him in the basement. But there are no basements here, I know, because I was born in this building. There are bins in the yard for wood, for coal, but there are no basements! That’s when I knew the situation was very dangerous. And there was already shouting on the street: “Kill the Jews.” “Jews, Jews, Jews,” this word was repeated constantly.

I worked with a young person; she was from Lwów. I say to her, “Zosia, you know that in Łódź they threw a Jewish girl from the second floor, from the balcony. I’m afraid that when this crowd rushes in, they might throw us out too. I want to go downstairs.” And Zosia says, “No, I won’t go down. I’m afraid.” But I can already hear that strangers have stormed into the building and that there’s a terrible stir, and terrible screams, and shouts, and cries. I didn’t know what was going on, I couldn’t move from that spot. And I say, “No, I’m going down, because they’ll throw me off the balcony.” And I wanted to go down, but I couldn’t, because everyone was pushing in my direction. And I tried to go down against the current with my back against the wall. And somehow, in this way, this Zosia and I actually went down to the ground floor.

Down below, the Polish custodian, Stach Niewiarski, was standing with a crucifix in his hand. And I hear him yelling, “There are no basements here, Jews did not kill anyone here, for God’s sake, people, what do you want?!” But before I even got to him, as I was going down, I ran into that Mrs. Zielińska—the only Polish family who lived in this building and who occupied precisely the apartment we had lived in before the war.37 I will never forget her. I can still see her. Stout, heavyset. And she noticed me, and started screaming, at the top of her voice, “Kike, Jewish cow, take her!” And then I suddenly came around and I said to her, “You’re the kike, you live here, I don’t live here at all!” That’s when she got scared and ran away, and I, with my back, with my back against the wall, somehow made my way down.

And at that moment a soldier comes up to me, maybe a lieutenant or some officer—he had some bar indicating his rank—and says, “I would like to verify your identity, nonetheless, ma’am.” “And what gives you the right to check my papers, Sir?” I answer. “I can check your papers just the same.” And he took out his identity document and showed it to me, but I was so stunned, that after a moment I completely forgot his last name. “And now, ma’am, why don’t you show me your identity document.” So I also showed him my papers, but not my own, only a fake one, my ausweis from the occupation, with the name Pękalska, which I used to survive the war. He saluted, apologized, and walked away. Then a young guy, maybe eighteen, comes up to me and says, “You are definitely a Jew.” Right away he addresses me informally. I pretend that I don’t hear him. I stand there, don’t react. But next to him another boy says to him, “Listen, she was talking to that officer just a moment ago. And they know each other. She’s definitely not a Jew.” And they left me alone.

Only then could I take a look around, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Our food storehouses were downstairs—the Joint sent it all.38 People were filling their pockets with sugar, cocoa, coffee, peas, beans. I saw them dragging sacks. It was incredible, it looked like a kind of robbery. But at some point I heard awful screams. It was Fajnkuchen.A Jew whose last name was Fajnkuchen,39 who spoke Polish beautifully. He was screaming so terribly: “What do you want from me?! Why are you beating me, why are you murdering me?! What did I do to you, what am I guilty of?!” That’s when I understood that this is a pogrom. This is no longer a robbery, it’s already a pogrom.

I saw how every few moments they dragged someone else down the stairs. I saw how they dragged some woman, they held her by the hair and pulled her down. And I saw how they dragged Fajnkuchen. He was already wounded all over, but they kept hitting him with rods and axes, and I don’t know what else. Suddenly he fell quiet and they just pulled him by the hair, even though the poor man barely had any hair, and they dragged him outside like this.

At that point I was completely stunned. I stood by the building custodian and he kept repeating, “The Lord Jesus will help you, the Lord Jesus will help you.” He kept saying that to me every few moments. So I begged him, “Please stop, it just makes things worse. I’ll just stand here, please just don’t say anything.”

FIGURE 4. Pogrom survivor Maria (Miriam) Machtynger, left, in a photo taken before the war. Courtesy of Sharona Roffman, Miriam Machtynger’s daughter.

And suddenly I see them dragging a girl, a young woman, and you can hear the incredible screams, it was just horrible. After all, it’s unbelievable that they are beating, that they are murdering in this way. I saw how one woman yelled, “They knocked my teeth out, they knocked my teeth out!”40 It was just horrible. I stood there for a long time and it all dragged on, the yelling and screaming, actually everything that I saw, because downstairs there was just robbery. From upstairs they dragged people down along the stairs, but down here in the foyer they were just looting. They dragged those sacks, and there were peas and beans and sugar all over the floors; it was just horrible. And those people who were dragged from upstairs were rolled about in it, they were rolled about in that food, and onto the street, onto the street. And then I had no idea what was happening to me. Apparently, I blacked out while standing like that. I didn’t even hear the shots. There were shots, but I thought they were claps of thunder. And I asked, “Where is everyone, where is everyone?” That’s what I said to myself. Where is everyone, where did everyone disappear to? No one is taking an interest in me, I’m standing here alone and no one is coming to save me, and no one is taking an interest in me.

But that friend of mine, Zosia, ran out, because she was afraid that her fiancé would come to rescue her and die. And then in the crowd they broke her nose. They grabbed her, broke her nose, and mangled her entire head. And some guy, [Andrzej] Markiewicz, I think that’s what his name was, he worked in the security service,41 he took her in his arms and got her out of that crowd. Supposedly he wasn’t an antisemite at all. At the time he was already up there in years.

I got out of that pogrom because a young soldier was standing there—well, not a soldier, but some boy in a green uniform. And he says, “Why are you standing here so long, why don’t you get out of here?” I answered, “It’s just that they say that I look like a Jew, so they could kill me out there.” He says, “So I’ll walk you out.” And I say, “No, I am afraid to go even with you.” And he says, “Don’t be afraid, come out with me.” However, I waited patiently and kept standing there.42 And when I finally decided to go out, suddenly everything became quiet. Someone was yelling that the troops had arrived.

Gerszon Lewkowicz and Rózia Opolska

Gerszon Lewkowicz*, thirty-seven years old, came to 7 Planty Street every day because he supervised the serving of meals in the Ichud soup kitchen. As an organizer of the resistance movement in the Kielce ghetto,43 and as a partisan who managed to survive in the forests outside Kielce,44 he was a man of great authority. At the end of the war, he didn’t have a penny to his name: when he was getting married in December 1945, neither Jews nor Poles provided him with a shirt for his wedding. Rather he got one from orphans like himself, Roma.

He married Rózia Opolska, who was sixteen years younger. She was a vibrant Warsaw native whose smile has survived on photographs. In the summer of 1946, Rózia was several months pregnant, but when all hell broke loose at 7 Planty Street on July 4, she didn’t hesitate to look for Gerszon there. She felt safe, because her “Aryan” looks had saved her life more than once. She saw Jews being thrown out of windows. Her daughter, Renée, who was born soon after the pogrom, would struggle with post-traumatic stress her entire life.45

FIGURE 5. Renata Levkovitch (Renée Lewkowicz), born to pogrom survivor Rózia Opolska in September 1946, before leaving Poland. AIPN BU_1538_7568_0003.

Although Gerszon Lewkowicz gave an extensive statement about the course of events four days after the pogrom,46 he said nothing about how he saved himself. We only know that he was on the first floor, that he accused one of the policemen of being in collusion with the National Armed Forces,47 and that he had been brought down the stairs by soldiers. Thus, he had to have made it to the schoolyard where the massacre was taking place—the massacre that his wife was also observing.

Does the scene observed by Ryszard Sałapa, driver’s assistant at the police school, refer to Renée’s parents? “I saw soldiers leading a wounded civilian out of the building. As they were leading him out, a woman—she could have been about twenty-five years old—ran up to him, a dark-haired woman, slim, tall, shouting along the way, ‘Don’t beat him, he’s a Pole.’ When she reached him, she grabbed him under the right arm and held his left arm in the air, because his left arm was wounded, walking him in the direction of the fence that ran parallel to Planty Street. Then two scouts ran up to them, and I ran with them. The woman turned to those scouts and said, ‘Scouts, help me put a dressing on this man.’ She took a handkerchief out of her purse, and I took it from her hand and tied it around the wounded man’s left arm below the elbow, and the scouts tied a handkerchief above the elbow. After tying [the handkerchief] this woman took the man by the hand and ran with him through the yard in the direction of the school building; however, she didn’t go through the building, but between the building and the fence that was located on the right side.”

A Handsome Young Man

My name is Baruch Dorfman;*48 they used to call me Borys. I spent the war in Russia. First, I found myself in the Urals in an ore mine. It was horrible work; it was cold—I couldn’t manage. I escaped. I returned to Białystok through Minsk, Moscow, Kyiv, Lwów [Lviv]. But again, the Russians sent us to a gulag in the Komi Republic, “to the polar bears.” We worked very hard in the forests there, and if you didn’t make the quota, you only got three hundred grams of bread. I was imprisoned there for three years, until Sikorski’s agreement with the Russians.49 That’s when they let us go. I worked as a barber not far from Saratov, then they put me in a Sovkhoz.50 I was there until 1946.

In June I returned to Poland through Kielce. We arrived by train from Russia. The train stopped at the station, and people from the kibbutz came and said that in a month, maybe two, they were going to Israel. Then we, a couple of people, got out of the train and went to the kibbutz. The window of the room I lived in at 7 Planty Street faced a large courtyard. I was in the kibbutz barely two weeks when the pogrom happened.

They said that no one from my family was left in Poland, and I had three brothers, four sisters, a father and mother. Just in case, I still went to Sierpc to check and make sure that there wasn’t anyone there. I wanted to see what the house we lived in looked like. But it turned out that the house was no longer standing; the Germans had dismantled it, and the lot was cleared. I was there for a few days, right around Corpus Christi. I remember the procession going through the streets with church banners.

Fania Szumacher* came with me from Russia.51 She was an engineer-geologist, a beautiful, talented girl, tall and blonde. I also wasn’t bad looking, and she was my girlfriend. She sang, I played the guitar; we had a good time in the kibbutz. We were close friends, we were good together. And they also murdered this Fania.

A huge crowd gathered in the schoolyard on Planty, and that’s how my day started. At first I didn’t understand what was going on, but then I heard that supposedly some child had been killed. Then I remember that a police unit arrived in the schoolyard, and they ordered everyone to disperse, but the people didn’t want to. I remember, they shot into the air, but the crowd didn’t disperse. This lasted an hour or more. I remember that some soldiers—from the Polish armed forces or maybe soldiers from the Home Army, I don’t know—came into this kibbutz, up the stairs and into the kibbutz, and started to shoot.52

Earlier some officer had come into the kibbutz—he had a revolver, the sheath of the holster was open—and asked, “Where are your weapons, where are your grenades?” I had been there only two weeks, so I didn’t know what was what, but I wasn’t afraid and I went to show him those weapons. Nobody said that we don’t have any weapons, we had a permit. They were in the attic. He asks, “Where do you keep the key?” Nobody wanted to go with him. I take the key, the officer searches, searches. I didn’t see it, but supposedly he found a grenade. And he shouts, “Who were you saving this for, this grenade, this revolver?”

That’s when we hid in the last room of the kibbutz. Since we didn’t open up right away, they started to shoot through the door and several people were injured. I know that one of them took a bullet in the back53 and later died. And then they ordered all of us to go down to the schoolyard and keep our hands up. Soldiers and civilians were standing on the stairs, and they started to beat us. By chance I got down the stairs without a single blow. Because at the time I was dressed like a military man, so they didn’t know who I was. And I saw how they were beating, shooting, throwing things from the windows—pillows, blankets—and they were throwing down people. Blood was flowing, screams, noises. There was a stream nearby. There were also a lot of people standing on the other side, they were throwing stones. Shouting and noise. And supposedly there was a child in the basement. Even that watchman-custodian said, “There’s no basement here.” I remember the shouting.

I got a little way out of that crowd—but it wasn’t as fast as I’m saying it—and I reached the gate. It was a kind of entrance into the yard. I was just, just about to go into the street when someone shouted, “Jew!” He could tell, I don’t know how. Maybe I was frightened or pale, I don’t know. He was yelling, “Jew,” and immediately hit me with a stone in the face or head, I don’t remember. I fell. After that one shouted, “Jew,” they started to bludgeon me with rocks.

FIGURE 6. Borys (Baruch) Dorfman, a survivor who lost one eye in the pogrom. AIPN BU_1540_1931_0001.

I lay quietly. I couldn’t speak or yell. Then one of them wanted to shoot at me, but another said, “No need, he’ll croak either way.” Then he hit me with a rifle butt, and I lost consciousness. And another one came, and another, I don’t know. At moments I regained consciousness and then lost it again. And I lay there like that, lay there, and women were also hitting me. In the end, I remember, some people came—it turned out it was the Army—and they dragged me by the legs, face to the ground, and threw me onto a vehicle.

I woke up in the hospital, in Kielce. It took a long time before a certain Miss Frania* recognized me. I lost all my teeth in the pogrom. It’s hard for me to talk. I have a hole in my chin, because my teeth pierced through my jaw. When I drank, water would pour out from below. Well, and my eyes. One was poked out, the other damaged. So, on that day, my life changed completely.

The Story of Borys Wajnryb in a Russian Soldier’s Overcoat

I fought in the Red Army.54 After the war, in 1946, I came to Skarżysko to search for my loved ones. I didn’t find anyone. They said my brother was here, in the kibbutz. Sure enough, Lieutenant Abram Wajnryb didn’t die until the pogrom. They got him by shooting through the door.

I was in the kibbutz about two or three weeks; we were supposed to go to Palestine soon. In the early morning we didn’t sense anything yet. I went out to buy a newspaper, but when I came back to Planty, I already saw a lot of people. In the kibbutz they said, “Take a look at what’s happening here!” I said, “We have about three grenades hidden in the tile stove. They’ve been there for a while, maybe I should take them out?” But they didn’t let me; they said, “Wait, wait, there’s no need.” And then it started, little by little.

Not far from Kielce, there was a spa town, Busko, a place where you could rest, recuperate a bit. They said that three or four of our girls had been murdered at the station in Kielce, and that’s how this pogrom started. Young girls, one was sixteen years old, survived the camps; she was in Auschwitz for four years and she survived. And they sent her to that spa in Busko so she would gain some weight. They called her from our place, so she wouldn’t come, because there’s a pogrom. But she didn’t listen, she got on a train. And they murdered her at the train station, in Kielce at the station.

I witnessed the shooting of Kahane. They came in and immediately shot him. He was head of the Jewish Committee. He called the authorities, said it was dangerous, they want to kill us, they’re starting a pogrom. They said they already sent the army. So he says, “It’s not helping, send someone from the security service.” We all thought that the security service was most important.

The pogrom started and the entire time, the entire time, Kahane was calling the police to get them to send help. The more they sent, the worse it got, the more they murdered. They sent the police; it didn’t help at all. They sent the army, and they came in and started to take watches and shoot. You could say that the army created this entire pogrom. And they forced the doors and immediately shot him, Kahane. That I know.

They shot him and then one of those two—maybe there were three of them, I don’t know for certain—one went up to the window and yelled to the crowd that was standing in the yard, “We killed that chairman,” or something like that. “Now you can start murdering.” That’s what he said through the window. People—a lot of people—heard it, and the pogrom proper started.

And then we fled to the end of the hallway, past the office, and hid there for a bit. Then those others came, and they said: “Come down, all of you, we’ll walk you out.” We went downstairs, but I knew what was happening over there in the yard, that they were murdering people. So I stopped. There were a couple other Jews there with me. I survived because I was wearing a Russian soldier’s overcoat. I walked around like that because I didn’t have any other clothes, and it saved my life. “You Jew, you Jew,” they said to me. I’m not much of a tough guy, but I plucked up my courage, started to swear in Russian, “What are you thinking?!” And along with Chilek Alpert, whom I shielded somewhat, and with one other guy, we escaped back upstairs. Because I knew that death was waiting for us in that courtyard. And then we fled again from one room to another. And this lasted the entire day.

A tragic image is engraved in my memory: from the window I saw Polish scouts sticking knives into a woman. A woman who was escaping, a Jew, I don’t know who it was, but I clearly saw scouts. I couldn’t understand it, how seventeen-, sixteen-year-old boys can take a knife, and stab a woman! I just couldn’t believe it. I, who had been at the front, hadn’t seen such things. And I had gone through a lot.

I saw it clearly through the window: a woman lying there and a bunch of scouts. I couldn’t even look, I fled to the attic. I say, “Scouts? Scouts, Polish scouts!” A lot of things have stayed in my head, but the time has come, generally speaking today it all seems like something that you yourself can no longer believe. They killed, killed using everything: rods, clubs—awful, awful.

At 17:00, I think it was at 17:00—maybe it was 18:00, Russian army troops arrived. They started to announce through speakers, “We’re the Russian army, you can come out.” And they said, “Get ready, we’re going to the barracks.” We were a little bit afraid, because the Polish army had come earlier and they slaughtered us all. The majority perished because of how the Polish army behaved.

We were afraid that it would start up again, but they said, “No, this is the Soviet army. We’re taking you to the barracks.” We started to go down. There was this major there, it was really something wonderful. I don’t know, maybe he was a Jew.55 He said, “Before I take you, gather all your things”—because things were scattered everywhere. We bustled around for another fifteen minutes or so. I remember I took a suit, and we got into the car and left. Then I asked, “Why didn’t you come sooner?” So he said that he called Warsaw and asked if they should come and put an end to it all. And they told him, “No, don’t interfere, don’t show yourselves on the street.” Not a single Russian soldier was to be seen, so they wouldn’t be able to say the Russians did it.

In the barracks there was one Jew; he worked in the security service. No, I made a mistake: he was a Pole. Only his wife was a Jew, Lubcia Blum. I don’t know where he knew me from, but he said, “Come home with me.” I stayed with them on Okrzei Street for a couple of days and we waited for the funeral, until the case was in court. But we didn’t wait for the trial, we only waited for the funeral.

About forty-five people died, I don’t remember exactly. A girl who came from Russia, just like me. I remember her well. She was an engineer-geologist.56 She came from Saratov. A young girl, beautiful. They chopped her into pieces.

There was a boy, Symcha Sokołowski was his name. He sold a house in Kielce, he had more than one house here. He sold it, and he still had all that money, and by chance he took a bullet that went through the door. He was laid up in the hospital for a month, and then he died.

At some point I thought about writing a book about all of this. I started, but no, I’m not capable.

Józef Fajngold*: It Was a Thursday, an Unbelievably Beautiful Day

I was born in 1923 in Warsaw, at 29A Gęsia Street, in the neighborhood later located at the very heart of the Warsaw Ghetto.57 But at the time, none of us knew this word yet. The apartment house that we lived in—four stories with a gate that was closed at night and a yard paved with cobblestones and a pump in the middle—seemed to me for many years to be a paradise. Poor people lived here—families so large that they ate meals in shifts, but I was never as happy as when I was there.

In the 1930s we moved to Kielce. My father, Aron Szlojme, born in Zawichost, a lathe turner by profession, made heels for shoes. He earned a decent living, and we had a nice apartment located at 51 Sienkiewicza Street. My father chaired the [Jewish Labor] Bund in Kielce. My mom, Rochele, had a beautiful voice and—thanks to her—I started playing the violin as a child. I adored Henryk Sienkiewicz; my favorite books were his In Desert and Wilderness and Quo Vadis.58 I was a good student, so I was accepted into the Polish middle school named in honor of the Śniadecki family in Kielce, from which I graduated summa cum laude.

And right after that, in 1934, my mom won a bit of money in the lottery and an architect we knew designed a tiny but beautiful house for us at 18 Aleksandra Street.

When the war broke out, the Germans immediately imprisoned my father as a socialist. They let him out after a week, but we knew this wasn’t the end of it. My parents decided to separate: mom and my brothers—ten-year-old Heniuś and fifteen-year-old Aleksander—stayed in Kielce, while my dad and I forced our way across the Bug River to Lwów.

There I again went to a Polish middle school, and dad found work as a lathe turner in Donbas. One morning in 1940 we were stopped by the NKVD. They put us on a train and sent us off to Khabarovsk. We spent eight weeks in the rail car. The only thing we had to eat was cabbage. They made one stop for us in Ufa in the Urals. When the fresh air enfolded me, I almost fainted. “He’ll get used to it or croak,” one Russian woman decreed.

FIGURE 7. Henio, Aleksander, and Józio Fajngold in Kielce. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Feingold papers.

In Khabarovsk that year snow fell in September. Both my father and I were put in labor camps at gold mines. Until then I had played the violin, but now I was supposed to work as a hammerman, an assistant to a blacksmith. Until this day I don’t understand how I managed to get through it. I had neither those felt winter boots nor a quilted work jacket; my shoes fell apart, and someone stole my spare pair. I walked around with rags wrapped around my feet.

We were allowed to write home once a month. I finally received a long-awaited letter from my mom. She sent me a poem. It was “Solveig’s Song” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt, her favorite aria. This is how I received an inner sign that I would survive.59

FIGURE 8. Sketch of the Fajngold house, which no longer exists, at 18 Aleksandra Street in Kielce. Sketch by Józef Fajngold, 2017, in the author’s possession.

I remember May 1946 and the steppes illuminated by the evening sun. The train we took back to Poland traveled across them. We were traveling on a freight train, but I found a crack in the wall of the car and used it to look out for the Polish border. We had a patriotic mindset and while crossing the border, everyone together, Poles and Jews, sang Maria Konopnicka’s “Oath.”

The atmosphere was friendly. But just as the train started to approach the Polish border, something strange happened nonetheless. People started to change their seats, which transformed the mixed compartments into “Polish” or “Jewish” ones. Suddenly they were marked with pictures of the Madonna or with a cross drawn on the door. On the Polish side the train stopped for longer, so my father and I went on foot to nearby Białystok. The people greeted us with hostility. We heard “Hitler hasn’t finished you off yet?” They threw stones at us.

In Łódź, father’s friend, Mr. Szmulewicz,* didn’t mince words: “Don’t you understand that none of them are alive?” He said that, in July 1942, mom and Heniuś were taken from the Kielce ghetto to the Treblinka death camp. Only my other brother, Aleksander, survived. In Auschwitz.

I couldn’t come to terms with my mom’s and brother’s deaths. I set off for Kielce before sunrise on July 4 to search for traces of them. Wolf Zylbersztajn* accompanied me. We had occasionally played chess in middle school. We arrived at 7 Planty Street at dawn; it was too early to register at the committee so we went into town. I visited my middle school; we wandered around the town square and the Bazary neighborhood. It was Thursday, an incredibly beautiful day.

When we returned to Planty Street, a small group of agitated people were standing in the yard. Policemen were guarding the entrance to the Jewish Committee. I didn’t know what was going on. “Go inside and nothing will happen to you,” they said. We went inside.

There were more and more people in the schoolyard, and stones flew at the windows. Then events unfolded with lightning speed. People forced themselves into the building—it was hard to understand whether they were civilians or police—and they started to push us downstairs, into the schoolyard. We came down with our hands up. Then I lowered them right away, trying to mix in with the crowd, but one guy noticed me and shouted: “Jew!” “I am not a Jew,” I lied. “You fuckin’ Jew, I saw you walking down the stairs!” The last thing I remember is that I was lying on the ground and blood was dripping from my eye. I didn’t know what happened to Wolf.

I woke up in St. Aleksander’s Hospital. There was a nurse there, and I asked her for something to drink, but she also shouted that I killed Polish children. I lost consciousness.

When I was transferred to Łódź, I was unable to speak. This lasted over a month. My face was so changed that my father—who ran like a madman from one room of the former Protestant hospital to the next—was unable to recognize me.

We couldn’t stay in Poland after something like this. First, we went to be with my brother, who was staying in a camp for DPs60 in Zeilsheim near Frankfurt-am-Main. And then in 1948 we sailed to America on the Marine Swallow.

Średni, the Youngest

My name is Jakow Średni.*61 I was twelve years old when this pogrom broke out. I think I was the youngest in the kibbutz, not counting Izia Dajbog, who was three years old—but she didn’t belong to the kibbutz.

I was born in Wyszków nad Bugiem. When the Germans burned down our town in ’39, we crossed the Bug and stayed in Workowiesk62 with relatives, eight people. And from our relatives’ place, the Russians deported us to the far north. There was nothing there except cold. You had to build a house for yourself on your own. My parents and grandparents couldn’t hold on. Of the eight of us, only three survived: my older brother Eliasz, my sister Hinda, and I.

After the war we stopped in Kielce. We were accepted into the kibbutz a month before the pogrom. On July 4 we were eating breakfast; we didn’t expect that this day would differ in any way from the previous ones. And suddenly we hear a quiet murmur that is getting louder and louder. We didn’t know what it was, where the murmur was coming from, the commotion, the clamor, the shouts—because there were shouts already. We couldn’t hear clearly what they were shouting. A large crowd stood outside the building and that’s where the murmuring was coming from.

Someone who had been out on the street came in and said to us, “It’s no good, lock the doors quickly so that they can’t force their way in.” Right away we started to barricade ourselves in on the second floor, leaving only a sort of small access so that Jechiel Alpert could whisper to us what was happening over there with them.

I don’t remember how much time passed, maybe a half hour, maybe two, when suddenly we heard banging at the door. And something like negotiations started between people on the inside and people on the outside. It seemed that they were presenting themselves as military men or policemen. They demanded that we hand over all the weapons we had, and they vouched for our safety. We decided to surrender the weapons and opened the door for them.

Immediately after they took our weapons, maybe a few minutes after, terrible shooting began. Our friend Symcha Sokołowski fell dead on the spot. After the shooting a few more people forced their way in. Some of them were in military uniforms, some were civilians, and they started to shout at us to go downstairs. When we started to go down, they dragged us. They not only ordered us to go down, they dragged us down those stairs. And they started to beat us from all sides, and during this beating I received a heavy blow to the back, I don’t know, with some tool or rifle butt.

The most terrible image, the one I can’t forget, is of a man being dragged down the stairs. I don’t know if he was dead or still alive, but his head was hitting against those stairs like a ball, one step after the next. It seemed to me that it was Dr. Kahane, but I am not sure. I often see this image when I close my eyes.

I was in this kibbutz for only a month. During our stay there, we didn’t go out to see the city at all; we didn’t even get to know it. I knew only the building and the courtyard where we lived. There was a large crowd of people there.

We saw this crowd form two rows. They have stones, they have clubs, they have iron rods, they have these things in their hands, and they beat every person who walks out of the building. As a small boy I stood by myself off to the side and watched. I stood there for over an hour.

There was terrible confusion. There were policemen, there were soldiers, there were officers, there were a lot of men—young and old, but it was mostly women who got the crowd agitated—they shouted and fell into a panic because of the twelve children who were supposedly lying somewhere in our basement.

For many years I had dreams of horrible images—of corpses with shattered heads, with injured brains, open abdomens, and blood, lots of blood. And all of this, along with the violence and commotion, and the shouting, it made a completely hellish impression on me. I didn’t know if this was Gehenna, I didn’t know if this was reality, or some kind of nightmare. This was not something a twelve-year-old should see. These images haunted me for a long time. Those terrible atrocities, and so much blood, while they tortured these people.

And I saw one incident. This man was already almost pulp, but these boys, paperboys—that’s what they told me, that they were paperboys—kept dealing him death blows with huge stones; they crushed him completely.

They didn’t attack me because I was too small. I stuck around there because I was looking for my sister and brother. I had to find out what happened to them. I hung around there for quite a while. I didn’t know the city, so I didn’t know where I should go. I was looking for my brother and older sister so that they could help me.

I couldn’t find them and I had just decided to run away when suddenly I see my sister, Hinda, lying on the ground, with an open wound on her head, in blood. Next to her lay Niusia, Miss Niusia Borensztajn, also wounded. I bent over my sister; I wanted to see if she was breathing, and then someone hit me with a stick across my back. That’s when I decided to escape and run away from this crowd.

But I didn’t know the city. I started to walk down the street, to get away from this courtyard, from this square. But some boys started picking on me and started to hit me, and some women with stones, too. I was shouting, “Leave me alone, I’m not a Jew, I’m a Pole.” So they asked, “Then what were you doing there in the courtyard, on that square?” I didn’t speak Polish all that well yet; I answered in Russian. They said to me, “No, you’re a Jew.” I answered, “No, I’m a Pole; I was just in Russia with my family.” And then they started to beat me again.

So one of the women said, “Come on, let’s pull down his pants. We’ll see if he’s a Jew or a Pole.” And when they started to tear off my pants, a policeman63 approached and they stopped. “Leave him alone,” he said. “I’ll get even with him, you’ll see.” And he took his revolver out of its holster and, holding me at gunpoint, ordered me to move ahead. He took me to the police station in Kielce and left me there for more than an hour.

An hour and a half passes, and suddenly—I don’t know why—he comes back and again takes me out on the street. And he steers me with a pistol at my neck. He’s walking, walking, and then he hid his weapon in the holster, and that’s when I saw my brother Eliasz in one of the side streets. I wanted to run to him, but he signaled to me with his hand not to breathe a word. We went a bit further, I turn around and see that my brother is tracking our every step. Later he told me that he slipped out of the pogrom because, as a blond with blue eyes, he picked up a club and with this club they let him through, and he hid at the train station.

When we turned into a side street, this officer, the one who was leading me, suddenly turns around and, aiming his revolver at my brother, asks, “Who are you, you snot-nosed kid? Why are you dragging along behind us?” And he swore in Russian. So Eliasz grabbed this officer by the hand and pointing to me, says, “Because that’s my brother!” And this officer says to him, “I rescued your brother, and now you’ll both go home with me; my wife is a Jew.” It was that Lieutenant Majewski, Zygmunt, the brother-in-law or cousin of Mrs. Alpert. And he took us home. He said that he took me from the police because they kept deliberating about what to do with me. He was afraid they would quietly smash me to bits. His wife took us in for a few days and took care of us very nicely. She applied compresses to bring down the swelling from the hits I took to my back. But we were sad because we didn’t know what had happened to our sister. That major went to find out what had happened to her, and he came back and said, “Don’t be afraid; your sister is alive, she’s in the hospital in Łódź.”

Dora Dajbog and Her Daughter, Izia

In a group photograph taken at 7 Planty Street after the pogrom, Izia Dajbog* is sitting in the first row on her mother, Dora’s,* lap. Izia can hardly remember what happened since the war broke out, and—generally speaking—she would prefer not to remember what happened on Planty.

Her mother, who lost her little daughter Hania during the war, also remembered more from the time of the war than she would have liked. The NKVD deported them from Łuck to Siberia along with Uncle Srul, who soon died of typhus. They landed in the camp, where Izia was born in 1943. The Sikorski-Mayski agreement, which renewed diplomatic relations between Poland and the USSR, brought about their liberation from the camp. They were then resettled in Yampol, and from there they returned to Poland after the war.

Thanks to Dora’s statement, we know what happened to them that morning. When the uniformed servicemen surrounded the committee building, we didn’t know what was going on, she recounts.64 One of the military men said that they were conducting a search because supposedly some Polish children were to be found in our place. We laughed at this and said, “Please, go ahead!” But it didn’t help at all. First, we were surrounded by screaming crowds, next they started to shoot at us, and then two of ours—who were standing at the window—were killed. From that moment we hid, lying on the floor. Suddenly we hear voices asking if we are surrendering—because we had barricaded ourselves in. We said we were surrendering; the army entered and ordered us to come out. When I came out in front of the building, I saw a dozen or so people already killed. Then some man in civilian clothing came up to me and took me with him, clearing a path for himself through the crowd. He led me to Sienkiewicza Street and told me to go on alone.

Unfortunately, just as this man walked away, the crowd became interested in me again. They really wanted to know if I was a Jew. I didn’t admit it. Walking further along Sienkiewicza, I met a guard who was standing in front of the UB office near Focha Street. I wanted him to let me in, but he also asked me right away if I was a Jew. I answered that I wasn’t, and that my identity documents were at home at 72 Sienkiewicza Street. So he went there with me. We entered an apartment where a Pole, my acquaintance, Mrs. Pogorzelska, showed him her ID. Then I performed a comedic act: “Gosh! Why! That serviceman, who first escorted me, he took my identity papers,” I said. This acquaintance vouched for me, and that’s how I survived.

Estera Mappen

FIGURE 9. Estera Mappen in nurse’s uniform in Germany, right before emigrating to the US. Courtesy of her son, Steven Montag.

In May of 1945, seventeen-year-old Estusia (Estera) Mappen,*65 who had been in Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, came to Kielce right away with her mother to look for her father. At the station they met two of the Kahane boys,66 who owned a lamp store on Sienkiewicza Street. They came to the station every day, on the watch for anyone who might be coming back. One of the boys, Chomek, told them two things: that Mr. Mappen had died in Auschwitz, and that for their own safety they should take off their striped camp uniforms because stripes give people away as Jews. So they took them off and buried them behind the station, and then they went straight to 7 Planty Street.

At 7 Planty Street everyone was in a similar situation, so Estusia and her mom didn’t feel too bad there—even if the building was so overcrowded that they shared a bed on the second floor of the kibbutz. They had been waiting for an American visa for a year because they wanted to go be with Estusia’s uncle.

After eight in the morning on July 4, Estusia was awakened by a sound, as if a bird were knocking on the windowpane or someone was playing, throwing stones. It was already a bright summer day, but for some reason it grew dark. Finally, she looked out the window and saw that it wasn’t a cloud, but rather that a crowd had blocked the light from the square. Lots of people were standing in front of the building. She heard their shouts, something about children who had been killed and about beating Jews “as if the Gestapo had returned.” Then stones flew like hail.

Later, after the first injuries had occurred, nurse Estera Proszowska* asked her to hold up somebody’s head, because she wanted to get some bandages. Estusia and her mother sat the man down in a chair. His head was practically divided in half. And as Miss Proszowska was returning with that bandage, someone suddenly shot her. Estusia’s mom went to Miss Proszowska and checked to see if she was alive. Then she took the bandage from the nurse’s hand and dressed the wounded man’s head. And that man survived.67

It lasted a few hours—this running about from one corner to another, hiding in rooms, just to avoid going down to the square—from which there was no return. In the end they too were dragged down to where many of those killed were already lying. And then suddenly two soldiers appeared, a woman and a man in UB uniforms.68

So now they’re going to kill us, Estera said to herself, but the woman answered, “Nothing will happen to you, just do what we tell you to do.” They ordered us to get into some kind of vehicle. An American Willys, the station wagon type, the kind that security service operatives drove at the time. They shoved us inside, me, mom, and those three boys from the kibbutz with whom we were hiding, and they drove us out of this hell. They took us home to their place, I think it was on Focha. They washed us up, fed us. We were covered in blood, especially my mom, who was wounded in the leg.

FIGURE 10. Sylwester Klimczak, a WUBP officer, with his wife, Zofia Zylbersztajn. Together they rescued several people from 7 Planty Street. Courtesy of Estera Mappen Archive/Michał Jaskulski.

They were the Klimczaks—Sylwester* and Zofia,* née Zylbersztajn. This couple was out of this world. She was a Jew, a Communist who had been in the Treblinka death camp and escaped. He was a Pole, also a prewar Communist, from Częstochowa. And he was no angel: brutal, a drinker, but with the imagination of a daredevil (before the war he was, in fact, a cavalry officer). During the war he hid eight people, Jews, two entire families. I heard that it was for money, but so what? He rescued them, like he was rescuing us now. We were at their house until Monday, and after the funeral we left for Łódź.

Niusia Borensztajn’s Story Continued

When I broke through the crowd in front of our building, I understood: I just might die here today. I regretted that I hadn’t said goodbye to Szmulek, but I was glad I had dared to come back.69

I don’t know exactly what was happening on the other side of the kibbutz where the boys were sitting, but we girls were barricaded in the last room. One of our boys was sitting on the floor and had a revolver. And he says, “I will defend you.” There were these heavy doors, and we closed those doors. And one bunk—because there were bunks there—we moved this one bunk there. He sat across from the doors.

Suddenly we hear . . . they’re shouting for us to open the doors. But we didn’t want to, we were afraid, we started to cry. After a moment the shooting began. They shot at the lock to open the doors, and that boy, Abram Wajnberg—actually, he was already quite a mature man—he was a lieutenant in the Soviet army, and after the war he returned to Kielce—and they shot him in the head. It was just horrible, to see something like that.

And then they started to chase all of us down the staircase. Go down, leave, get out of here. And at one point, I turned around and saw that they were taking that little Balka Gertner and throwing her off the balcony. And then I heard that she fell onto bayonets. And then there was also another one, Fania Szumacher, a beautiful girl—tall, blonde, she came from Russia with Baruch Dorfman, who is still blind today. She was his girlfriend. She sang, he played the guitar, we had a good time in the kibbutz. And they also murdered this Fania. Meaning, they also threw her from the upper floor and later I heard that the two girls fell on bayonets. They were stabbed to death.

We went downstairs. I thought that they—the police and the army—had come to defend us, rescue us, but we could already see that something bad was happening here. Along the way, if they singled somebody out, they beat them. So we went down, and two soldiers or policemen with submachine guns were standing there near the door. They were also bashing heads with the guns. I think to myself, if I get hit in the head, then I’ll fall and won’t move, maybe I’ll survive. And that’s what I did. I took a hit to the head. I didn’t get up again in order to defend myself. But still I managed to say, “Didn’t you come to defend us, to rescue us?” I received a blow to the head, fell, and lay there. There were terrible screams, terrible cursing, there was a terrible, terrible commotion all around.

There were lots of people, like grains of sand on a beach. They closed the factories and everyone went to murder the Jews. As I was walking, I heard them say this along the way, but who would have taken that to heart? I heard them talking, swearing, threatening, “Jews to Palestine, Jews to Palestine.” That story about Christian children who were murdered to make matzo, it’s been circulating since the Middle Ages. Who’s to blame? Is it possible to say exactly who threw the stone that started these ripples? It’s not possible. I can’t imagine that the Russians were responsible. The Russians liberated me from the concentration camp.

My face was on the cobblestones, I wasn’t watching. I pretended that I was unconscious, that I wasn’t alive, I just peeked from time to time to see what was going on. I saw girls here and there try to get up and run away, only to get hit again and again. And again in the head, and again across the back. Then, near evening, things got quiet. I don’t know who got things under control there. I only know that ambulances arrived and took us to the hospital, and then they started to “take care” of us.

And the first thing they did was to shave our heads. My friend Hindzia,* Jakub and Eliasz Średni’s sister, had this long braid—blonde, beautiful hair that she had saved throughout the entire time she was in Russia. And they trimmed that head, shaved it completely. Me too. So the conditions in the hospital were not very friendly. You could feel it in the air, you could hear “it’s too bad they didn’t kill all of you, too bad you’re all still alive.” There were nuns in the hospital, there were nuns everywhere there, and nuns said these things. That’s not at all Christian, to say things like it’s too bad that people are still alive.

I said to one such sister, a Daughter of Charity: You don’t have to take care of me, ma’am, there isn’t anything wrong with me. I just got hit in the head. It hurts, but it will pass. I just need a little bit of iodine, I will help you take care of the wounded. And I started taking care of the wounded, feeding them. I stayed there until they came and took us to Łódź.

FIGURE 11. Group portrait of Polish Holocaust survivors in Kielce, 1945. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Eva Reis.

Notes

1. The names of individuals listed in appendix B (Kielce Survivors and Witnesses) are marked with an asterisk (*) at first instance.

This chapter is based largely on testimony, statements, depositions, and accounts by survivors of the Kielce pogrom. Most of the paraphrases or quotes are based on unordered transcripts of conversations conducted in Israel in the 1990s by film director Andrzej Miłosz, which were submitted in 1996 as evidence during the second Kielce investigation. These documents are preserved in two archival locations. One is the collection “Pogrom t. VIII” of the Archiwum Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej (AIPN), sygn. Ki_53_4749 (Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance, record group Ki_53_4749). The other is volume 8 of the twelve-volume record group S58/01/Zk in the archive Akta główne prokuratora w sprawie “pogromu kieleckiego” (AG-PK, Main Records of the Public Prosecutor regarding the “Kielce pogrom”). Henceforth, these unordered transcripts are cited as “Miłosz (raw footage).” For easier reading, some quotes are abbreviated. I also paraphrase at some points, always attempting to maintain each individual’s style of speaking or writing. I supplement the survivor statements with other sources, including witness statements collected in volume 2 of the Polish-language edition of this book (see Source List). These are the testimonies of victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of the Kielce pogrom that were filed during the first and second Kielce investigations (dated 1946 and 1996 respectively; see Source List, section 2, “Victims.”). Most of these testimonies can be located in the twelve volumes of AG-PK S58/01/Zk (henceforth, referred to as AG-PK plus volume [t.] and page [k.] number). The personal data of victims, survivors, perpetrators, and witnesses were verified through archival searches in the AIPN; the Wojskowe Biuro Historyczne (Office for Military History, WBH; formerly the Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, CAW); the Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute, AŻIH); the State Archive in Kielce (APK; particularly with regard to property ownership); the Arolsen Archives, International Center on Nazi Persecution; and the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation.

2. CKŻP, sygn. 303/V/705 (ziomkostwa [landsmanshaftn], k. 7; Anczel Pinkusiewicz’s account was translated by Sara Arm based on the original Yiddish version filed in the Yad Vashem Archives, RG (Record Group) 65_4065. See also Source List (SL) 9.6.

3. Here “police” refers to the Milicja Obywatelska (MO; lit. “Citizens’ Militia”), the postwar police established by the Communist authorities. Before the Communist period and since its end, the Polish police force was known, and continues to be known, as the Policja, which is equivalent to the term police in English.

4. See SL 2.2.1 and AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 2, k. 10–19. See also AG-PK, t. 5, k. 131 and t. 7, k. 106.

5. The Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) was the umbrella organization for numerous underground groups fighting for Poland’s independence under the German occupation during World War II. The AK was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile. The Warsaw uprising of August–September 1944 was its biggest operation, timed with the intent to head off the occupation of Warsaw by the Red Army.

6. AIPN BU_0_1413_2, k. 36.

7. See SL 3.24B; AG-PK, t. 12, k. 82; SL 5.13A–D; SL 2.2.11; and SL 2.2.12. See also Jan Śledzianowski, Pytania nad pogromem kieleckim (Kielce: Jedność, 1998), 97.

8. See SL 9.10A–C and chapter 9. See also, SL 5.24K; SL 2.1.1.16; SL 2.1.1.15; and SL 2.1.1.35.

9. Since renamed Paderewskiego Street.

10. Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2006), 1: 410–13.

11. SL 3.24.

12. Based on Ignacy Herman’s testimony (SL 2.1.1.35 and AG-PK, t. 10, k. 65).

13. Based on Jakub Aleksandrowicz’s testimony in SL 2.1.1.33 and Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki 53_4749, k. 44–52, 86–91.

14. Based on Dina Szaroni’s testimony (SL 2.1.1.37).

15. Zjednoczenie Syjonistów Demokratów “Ichud” (Union of Zionists-Democrats “Ichud”) was a Zionist party active in Poland from 1944 to 1950. It established kibbutzim focusing on training Jews to emigrate and supported plans for the creation of Israel. Eighty people who eventually left for Palestine went through the Ichud kibbutz in Kielce. Before the pogrom the kibbutz located at 7 Planty Street numbered around thirty-five members. See Michał Rudawski, “Der shrekleher pogrom in Kelts mit 40 yor tsurik,” Undzer Vort, July 2, 1986, excerpt translated by Sara Arm. The kibbutz was dissolved in July 1946. See Stefan Grajek, Po wojnie i co dalej: Żydzi w Polsce w latach 1945–1949, trans. Aleksander Klugman (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny), 111–18. See also Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950) (Warsaw: Centrum Badania i Nauczania Dziejów i Kultury Żydów w Polsce im. Mordechaja Anielewicza, Wydawnictwo Trio, 2002), 116, 28, 29.

16. In Poland, as in other European countries, “ground floor” refers to the main level, “first floor” refers to the second level, and so on; this would be the third floor in American usage.

17. SL 2.1.1.4A.

18. See AŻIH, CKŻP, 320/9, k. 35–36. Cited according to Danuta Blus-Węgrowska, “Atmosfera pogromowa,” Karta, no. 18 (1996): 100.

19. Such a person was called a “shaygetz,” a Yiddish descriptor from the Hebrew “sheketz” (aversion, abomination). It has several meanings, among others: “rascal”; “goy”; a Jew who does not observe tradition.

20. SL 2.1.1.15A-B.

21. As a result of the Kraków pogrom, which occurred on August 11–12, 1945, one person died and many were wounded. Also, the seventeenth-century Kupa synagogue in the historic Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz was set on fire.

22. SL 2.1.1.15A

23. SL 2.1.1.15A.

24. SL 2.1.1.16A-B.

25. AG-PK, t. 9, k. 246−59.

26. Based on the testimony of Rafael Blumenfeld in Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki_53_4749, k. 5–17. On the CKŻP lists of survivors, he appears as Chaim Blumenfeld (ŻIH, CKŻP, sygn. 303/V/434a, k. 13). These are verbatim quotes from witness statements maintaining the speakers’ characteristic idiolect. I have also included information from other sources for the reader’s deeper understanding of the context and narrative.

27. A national referendum held on June 30, 1946, posed three questions, asking voters to approve the abolition of the Senate, the nationalization of factories and redistribution of land, and the new border with Germany. See Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 44–47. The results of the referendum were falsified by the Communist authorities. See, for example, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, Polska zgwałcona (date and publisher unknown), 196–215. According to the official results the vast majority of citizens voted yes on all three issues; however, it is estimated that the majority voted no on the first two questions (71.3 and 58 percent respectively). Only in the case of the third question did the majority—66.9 percent—vote yes. See the statistical analysis of the results in the Kraków district in a Freedom and Independence (WiN) report. See Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie, “Wolność i Niezawisłość,” Zespół nr 1314 (henceforth “ANKr, WiN”), t. 4, k. 463. The falsified results of the referendum are in the minutes of the thirty-ninth meeting of the KRN Presidium, dated July 11, 1946. See Protokoły posiedzeń Prezydium KRN 1944–1947 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sejmowe, 1995), 202.

28. Based on Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki_53_4749, k. 25–26, as well as the testimonies of Hanka Alpert (SL 2.1.1.3A-B) and Jechiel Alpert (SL 2.1.1A-B).

29. The amount of money stolen was “increased” a number of times. See, for example, SL 4.12, where the amount is given as 10,000 USD.

30. This is probably an error in the transcript. Jechiel Alpert was thirty-six in 1946.

31. Hanka Alpert’s testimony about police officers from the Citizens’ Militia (MO) who dressed up as civilians and shot from the windows (see SL 2.1.1.3A) is usually cited as evidence that the pogrom was a provocation by the UB. Their dress can be explained simply as the result of plunder, however: “One from among the soldiers came into the committee and met me, he asked me why I was in despair, I answered, ‘Isn’t it enough that I don’t know where my husband is, and now all our things have been stolen,’ and I said to him, ‘You even have my husband’s shirt on.’”

32. This was most likely Colonel Artur Pollak from the 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division (2DP WP).

33. “Anders’s Army” (Armia Andersa) was the colloquial name for the Polish Armed Forces under the command of General Władysław Anders and subordinate to the Polish government-in-exile based in London. It was established in 1941 in the USSR as part of the Sikorski-Mayski agreement and evacuated through Iran and the Middle East to Italy in 1942.

34. This is in reference to Zygmunt Majewski, who rescued the Średni-Sarid brothers. Hanka Alpert says the following about Majewski: “Majewski took me and my sister to his house, because he was the cousin of my brother-in-law. He was a Pole, but he was his cousin.” See Miłosz (raw footage). See also SL 2.1.1.3B.

35. Based on the testimony of Maria Machtynger from Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPM Ki_53_4749, k. 109–21, as well as SL 2.1.1.28A-B.

36. For more on the Machtynger brothers, see Krzysztof Urbański and Rafael Blumenfeld, Słownik historii kieleckich Żydów (Kielce: Wyd. KTN, 1995), 88. About Maria’s other uncles, see Krzysztof Urbański, Zagłada Żydów w Dystrykcie Radomskim (Kraków: Wydawn. Naukowe Akademii Pedagogicznej, 2004), 232. Maria Machtynger was the oldest of three daughters. Her sisters, Sara and Eta, perished in Treblinka, while Maria was hidden by Poles around Daleszyce, where she was born. Her grandfather’s house and mill were taken over by a German Treuhänder or “trustee” by the name of Sobociński. I am indebted to Sharona Roffman, Maria Machtynger’s daughter, for information about her family and for providing photographs of her mother.

37. See Jerzy Daniel, Żyd w zielonym kapeluszu: Rzecz o kieleckim pogromie 4 lipca 1946 (Kielce: Scriptum, 1996), 86.

38. This refers to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

39. Fajnkuchen’s body was never identified and he remains among the John Does. See Appendix A: List of Victims.

40. This was most likely Balka Gertner. See AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 2, k. 89.

41. He was head of Department II of the Provincial Office of Public Security (II Wydział w WUBP).

42. See SL 2.1.1.28A for a different description of this situation during an interrogation conducted in 1946.

43. For Gerszon Lewkowicz’s account of his wartime trials and tribulations, see AŻIH 301/64 and 301/2760.

44. Bernard Zelinger, Into Harm’s Way (New York: Vantage Press, 2004), 160–61.

45. I am indebted to Ms. Renee Levkovitch (Renata), born September 8, 1946, in Łódź (see AIPN BU_1538_7568 for a passport application from 1949), for the account regarding both her parents and her childhood, which—after the family left Poland—was spent first in Israel, next in Belgium, and eventually in Canada. The following narration is based on this account, as well as on Gerszon Lewkowicz’s testimony (SL 2.1.1.19), two accounts that he filed in AŻIH, as well as identity documents of the entire family (AIPN BU_1538_7568). I would like to thank Łukasz Krzyżanowski for providing me with scans of these documents.

46. For the entirety of this interrogation, see chapter 6 and SL 2.1.1.19.

47. See SL 2.1.1.28A. The Narodowe Siły Zbrojne (NSZ) were a right-wing and antisemitic underground independence organization operating during and immediately after the war. Its legacy remains highly controversial in Poland today.

48. Based on the testimony of Baruch Dorfman from Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki_53-4749, k. 18, as well as SL 2.1.1.34B.

49. This is in reference to the July 30, 1941, Sikorski-Mayski agreement, which included an amnesty for Poles in Soviet prisons and gulags, and led to the establishment of the Polish Armed Forces in the USSR under the command of General Władysław Anders.

50. Typical for the agricultural economy of the USSR, a sovkhoz was a farm owned and operated by the state.

51. See AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, cz. 2, k. 104.

52. Armia Krajowa (Home Army, AK), the main underground armed resistance force in occupied Poland during WWII.

53. AIPN Ki_41_520, t. 1, z. 4, cz. 2, z. 2, k. 39.

54. Based on Borys Wajnryb’s testimony in Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki 53_4749, k. 27–33, as well as SL 2.1.34A. Borys Wajnryb (also, Weintraub and Inew) was born in 1924 in Budapest. By July 1946 the Red Army had been renamed, but it was not uncommon for former soldiers and others to continue to refer to it by its prewar and wartime name. Similarly, references to “Russian” soldiers technically meant Soviet soldiers, who could be of an ethnicity other than Russian.

55. This was Lieutenant Colonel Artur Pollak. See chapter 14.

56. This is in reference to Borys Dorfman’s fiancée, Fania Szumacher of Pińsk.

57. Joseph Feingold appears as Józef Wajngold on the list of those wounded during the pogrom and taken to the Lutheran hospital in Łódź on July 7, 1946. His account was recorded by Baruch and Julietta Berman on December 29, 2016, in New York, as were two conversations with the author conducted on December 31, 2016, and January 1, 2017. An additional source was provided by Feingold’s daughter, Ame Gilbert, in Józef Fajngold, “Autobiography” (unpublished typescript, 1986). Joseph Feingold passed away at age ninety-seven on April 15, 2020, from complications due to COVID-19. See his obituary in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/obituaries/joseph-feingold-dead-coronavirus.html?searchResultPosition=1).

58. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) is revered in Poland for his patriotic novels and essays written during the period of the Partitions, when the Polish state did not exist and Polish lands were divided between the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Fajngold’s adoration of Sienkiewicz reflects many Polish Jews’ sense of integration into Polish culture.

59. “Solveig’s Song” is a statement of faith in a beloved person’s return and reunion in this life or the next. Feingold talks about his time in Siberia and the letter from his mother in a documentary film entitled Joe’s Violin (2016) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MmR_PQNvn0).

60. “DPs” is shorthand for “Displaced Persons.”

61. Based on the testimonies of Jakub and Eliasz Średni (Sarid) in Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki 53_4749, k. 43–44, 53–57, 92–108. Jakub Średni and his brother, Eliasz, are in a group photo of residents of 7 Planty Street taken before the pogrom. Presumably they are sitting in the first row (nos. 2 and 3), dressed in scouting uniforms. Their sister Hinda (no. 11) is behind them, still pictured with the crown braid that will be cut off while she is in the Kielce hospital.

62. Vaukavysk, in what is now Belarus.

63. At the time of the pogrom, Zygmunt Majewski was not a police officer of the Citizens’ Militia (Milicja Obywatelska, MO). Rather, he was a functionary of the Provincial Office of Public Security (WUBP).

64. Paraphrase of Dora Dajbog’s testimony (SL 2.1.1.23).

65. Her full name is Estera Mappen-Montag.

66. Not related to Seweryn Kahane.

67. The name of this person is unknown. In an interview with Estera Mappen recorded by Michał Jaskulski for the film Planty 7/9, Mappen states that this man left for Israel, most likely on the ship Exodus.

68. Photograph from the private archive of Estera Mappen; henceforth “Mappen collection.”

69. Based on testimony of Niusia Nester (Nestl) in Miłosz (raw footage), specifically AIPN Ki_53_4749, k. 39–42.