| Poland marks 60th anniversary of Kielce pogrom against Jews
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The burial of the Kielce pogrom
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WARSAW (AFP/EJP)--- Poland on Tuesday marks the 60th anniversary of the biggest pogrom to take place after WWII, when more than 40 Jews were slaughtered in Kielce, prompting the flight into exile of those members of Poland's once-thriving Jewish community who survived the Holocaust.
At 4:00 pm, sirens will wail in the southern city, to commemorate those who were killed in a frenzy of violence 60 years ago, provoked by a false rumour that a Jewish family had abducted a Christian child and held him overnight.
"We will be in Kielce to mourn the tragic and unnecessary loss of human life in this horrific crime. We are not going there to blame anyone," Poland's chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, who will recite kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, at a ceremony in the city, told AFP.
The tragic events of Kielce followed a false rumour that a Jewish family had held a nine-year-old Christian boy in a cellar overnight.
The rumour, which quickly mushroomed out of all realistic proportion, said that the city's Jewish community, which was nearly wiped out in the war, needed to have blood transfusions from Christian children in order to continue to exist.
Some people said they had seen children's skulls and skeletons in the cellar of a Jewish family, and propagated the tale that the family had conducted ritual killings in order to get a drop of Christian blood, which rumour-mongers said was a necessary ingredient in making matzos, unleavened Jewish bread.
The father of the boy who was allegedly held hostage by the Jewish family overnight -- but who, it turned out, had slept at a friend's place in the country -- asked police to launch an inquiry.
Accompanied by his neighbours, he went with the police to Planty Street, home to many Jewish families. The crowd swelled as soldiers and members of a communist militia joined it.
A police officer ordered the Jews to hand over their weapons, and it was then that the first shots were fired. No one can say with certainty who opened fire on whom, but the resulting battle drew in soldiers, the police and civilians, who either shot the Jews or beat them to death. Some were thrown out of the windows of apartment blocks.
Thirty-seven Jews and three non-Jewish Poles were killed in the violence that day, which was followed by other attacks on Jews in the city several days later.
According to survivors in Israel , several days before the tragic events a Jewish delegation, feeling tension in the air, went to the local bishop, but were told that the church cannot intervene on behalf of the Jews, “because they brought communism upon Poland.”
Events at Kielce led to a massive wave of emigration of the tens of thousands of Poland's Jews who had survived the Nazi Holocaust.
"After the Kielce pogrom, the situation had inexorably changed," historian Bozena Szaynok of Wroclaw University said.
"Right after the war, many Jews emigrated to Palestine, because they saw Poland as a huge cemetery where they could no longer live.
"After the pogrom, there was a real atmosphere of panic among Jews. They no longer felt that Poland was safe for them," she said.
In the three months following the pogrom, around 70,000 Jews left Poland -- more than the 50,000 who had emigrated during the entire year before.
Before WWII, Poland housed Europe's biggest Jewish community, numbering around 3.5 million. Most of them were wiped out in the Holocaust.
Ripe atmosphere
The post-war atmosphere in Poland was ripe for the Kielce pogrom.
"The pogrom would never have happened if not for the climate of anti-Semitism in Poland at the time, where Jews were dehumanised, seen as having been 'punished' in the war, and the myth of the communist Jew, who brought the hated communists to power, was freely spread," said historian Andrzej Paczkowski.
"Poles feared that Jews who survived the war would return and demand that the homes they abandoned when they fled the Nazis be returned to them," he said.
Although the Kielce pogrom was the biggest post-war massacre of Jews in Poland, similar slaughters, often prompted by a row over property ownership, took place around the country.
Historians say that between 600 and 1,500 Jews were killed in attacks in Poland after the war.
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