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| Officials warn of rising anti-Semitism as victims of Polish pogrom remembered
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Polish chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich (L) and Polish Bishop Marian Florczyk (R) attend 4 July a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of an anti-Semitic massacre in which 42 people, mostly Jews, were killed by Poles in the southern Polish city of Kielce.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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KIELCE, Poland (AFP)--- Hundreds of people gathered in the southern Polish city of Kielce Tuesday to remember the victims of Poland's worst post-WWII pogrom, and were urged to stop any resurgence of anti-Semitism.
The wail of a siren cutting through the warm summer air signalled the start of a solemn ceremony in front of a white and grey stone monument to more than 40 Jews, who were mercilessly slaughtered here 60 years ago.
"The sound of the siren has reminded us of what happened here 60 years ago," Kielce mayor Wojciech Lubawski told a crowd of hundreds gathered for the ceremony to remember the massacre.
Kielce erupted in a frenzy of hatred after a rumour was spread that a Jewish family had held a Christian boy in a cellar overnight.
The rumour soon turned into anti-Semitic hysteria, with tales that Jews needed to have blood transfusions from Christian children to survive or used Christian blood to make matzos, unleavened Jewish bread.
At Tuesday's ceremony, Henryk Tkacz, 82, pointed to a two-storey building at 7 Planty Street, where most of the massacre took place in 1946.
"I saw terrible things, a Jewish woman thrown out of a window," he told AFP.
"She didn't die, so she was beaten to death," he added.
Tkacz, like many others in Kielce, had run to Planty Street when he heard that something was afoot 60 years ago.
"We couldn't understand what was going on, what the Jews had done that was so awful that the army and police were also against them," he told AFP.
But today, he understands what provoked the tragic events of that day.
"It was anti-Semitism, pure and simple, that pushed the mob on."
"Today we meet in a peaceful place and peaceful time for Poland but on this day 60 years ago, Kielce was not peaceful," said the head of the Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, Warren Miller.
Ethnic hatred still alive
"We note with sadness that the ethnic hatred seen 60 years ago in Kielce has new believers around the world. As anti-Semitism is embraced once again, so it must be confronted yet again and it must be defeated," Miller warned.
The Kielce pogrom happened a year after the end of WWII, in which six million Jews died in the Holocaust, more than half of them from the country's once vibrant Jewish community.
In the months following the massacre, up to the end of 1946, almost 150,000 Jews left Poland. Many of them went to Palestine to take part in building their new homeland. They knew that only a sovereign Jewish state can guarantee their safety," Israeli ambassador to Poland David Peleg said.
Polish President Lech Kaczynski called the Kielce pogrom an unjustifiable and shameful crime.
"This was a huge dishonour for Poles and a tragedy for the few Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust," he said in a message read out at the ceremony in his absence.
"Nothing can justify this crime.
"In a free, democratic Poland that upholds the law, there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, which are met with justified repulsion," he said.
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