1946: The Kielce Pogrom

The pogrom in Kielce, less than 200 kilometres south of Warsaw, has been reconstructed minute by minute, in order to highlight the role of the various actors. For twenty years, the “new Polish historiographical school” has contributed to shedding light on post-1945 anti-Semitism.

With Under the anathema. Social portrait of the Kielce pogromJoanna Tokarska-Bakir is part of the spirit of the “new Polish school of Holocaust history.” Her study Legends of Blood. For an Anthropology of Christian Anti-Semitism had mobilized cultural and historical anthropology over several centuries.

Here she offers an analysis of a specific moment, the pogrom of July 4, 1946 in Kielce, less than 200 kilometers south of Warsaw, in a region marked by German repression and strong resistance. Diverse sources, treated in a new way, set this book apart from previous ones, for example Marcin Zaremba’s work on the fear that gripped Poland between 1944 and 1947. This book and its reception in Poland highlight the challenges of working on post-1945 anti-Semitism in this country, a question that strongly mobilizes.

Historiographical turning point

Jan T. Gross had already drawn attention to the responsibility of a part of the Polish population in the Shoah, with Neighbors (2000), which analyzed the Jedwabne pogrom of 1941. A major turning point in the work on the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish citizens during the Holocaust and in the historical debate in Poland, it imposed the use of survivors’ accounts and showed the involvement of the non-Jewish Polish population in the killings. These neighbors may have collectively committed acts that, directly or indirectly, contributed to the deaths of their fellow citizens.

Almost twenty years later, micro-history and testimonies of participants around the main pogrom of the post-war period are enriched by a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the event, which highlights the role of the different actors. And the quasi-prosopographical approach shows how predators, victims or various authorities mobilized varied resources and multiple links, the participants interacting over decades.

Neither an isolated incident, nor the result of a political provocation, nor the effect of the social disorganization of Polish society at the end of the war (Marcin Zaremba’s post-occupation trauma thesis), the pogrom is here the bloody outcome of a social process with roots before 1939. A process that explains the punishment by their neighbors of the “Jews”, accused of causing shortages and the disappearance of a child. The rise of hatred leading to a savage killing (more than 40 dead on site, 30 in the surrounding area) seen as a moment of collective madness, is carefully restored. Along with the residents of a home set up on the city center promenade and organized as a kibbutz, two non-Jews who opposed the raging crowd died.

The actors’ gaze

In 1992, in one of the first studies on the Kielce pogrom, Krystyna Kersten defended the idea of ​​a provocation by the security services. To reject it, the present book proposes a “social portrait” mobilizing the analysis of life stories and crossed biographies of all the actors, but also the analysis of professions, positions occupied and access to various resources, socially registering opinions, political sympathies and other commitments. The restitution of the actors’ view leaves the reader the responsibility of formulating his or her own conclusions. The author borrows this process from Rashōmon Kurosawa’s method of exposition is less impressionistic than that of Timothy Snyder or Orlando Figes, but more sociologically anchored.

The trigger, the rumor of the disappearance of a Christian child – he was supposedly hidden in the (non-existent) cellars of the Jewish home building – is placed in the middle of an impressive chain of events which explains how the rumor spreads to several children who must be freed by killing the infanticidal Jews to protect the “Poles” (i.e. the Christians).

Actors often perceived as separated by unbridgeable political divisions cooperate: the army, whose soldiers (on the communist side) kill the director of the Jewish home who had asked them for protection, the police (equally loyal to the government) who, with the army, disarm the residents of the home (weapons were tolerated precisely to limit damage in the event of pogroms) and, on the other side, in principle opposed to the power in place, the crowd, reinforced by the workers of a nearby factory, who begin the “hunt for the Jews” abandoned by the army and the police.

The survivors were evacuated: they were led to believe that the Red Army was going to transport them (in fact it was the Polish army, even though it had been hostile a few hours earlier). Then the story continues, because there were trials, nine death sentences, heavy sentences quickly reduced, thus sparing soldiers and police officers. The opening of the security service archives in 1994 did not change anything in the understanding of the pogrom and, despite accusations of manipulation by the communists, no trial was reopened.

Anti-Semitism, a “social resource”

However, the debate is reopening. Alongside administrative, judicial, police and secret service documents, the author has used the interviews conducted by Marcel Łoziński for the production of a documentary film in 1988, Witnesses: Kielce 1987the hundreds of photographs taken by Julia Pirotte, a photojournalist of the Resistance who came from Warsaw the day after the pogrom (objects, places, actors), as well as the documentation of forensic medicine. The anonymity of the victims is lifted (nominal list in the appendix) and life stories compensate for the dehumanization of the bodies (autopsy).

The story is therefore supplemented by a sociological and anthropological perspective. The narrative is fluid, thanks to an organization in four parts: “Movement”, “Framing”, “Announcing Shocks”, “Aftershocks”. The description of the facts is followed by a double contextualization and a briefer opening on the echoes of the event up to the present day.

The author highlights several dimensions. The anti-Semitism of the Catholic Church and the supporters of the “National Democracy” (associated with the name of Roman Dmowski) is old and well established in the local intelligentsia. There is also the discreet action of actors who have hitherto been little-known, such as administrative executives and other participants in the chain of property transfer, which made the dispossession of Jews legal and encouraged their exclusion from prominent positions. A double result then emerges: the pogrom was not the work of a few underclassmen or provocateurs sent by the communists in power, and anti-Semitism functions as a “social resource” that uses the recourse to a black legend and its bogeyman embodying the unacknowledged transgressions of a society, as during witch hunts.

No conspiracy! These were interactions fueled by the work of transmitting strong symbols by the upper classes that weighed in Kielce. Groups including the extreme right benefited from support from the side of the (communist) power in the security forces. These were in competition and distrusted each other (especially military and civilian secret services).

An effective methodological tinkering and the use of completely different fields, such as the notion of middle ground invented by Richard White to account for the contradictory processes marking inter-ethnic relations during the creation of the United States (used here to identify the ethnicization of social relations), contributes to giving an analytical breath to the work.

This explains the courteous debates (see the author’s Academia page) with Marcin Zaremba, who remains in favor of an approach through fear (on the model of Georges Lefebvre’s The Great Fear) and retains the few moderate ecclesiastical statements regarding the Jews, compared to the mass of documents indicating the virulence of anti-Semitism.

The dynamism of the field

Under the anathema convinces with the richness of its sources and the ability to combine temporalities. The pogrom as an event is articulated with the processes of exclusion/inclusion of Jews in Poland. By giving voice to the aggressors, as well as to all the participants, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir allows us to understand all the actors. As early as 2018, a play entitled 1946 – inspired by the book and staged in the theatre where a (smaller) pogrom took place in 1918 in Kielce – confronted the local population with their history.

In this vein, a meeting organized by the artists with the descendants of the attacked and the attackers is planned for 2020. After the debates of twenty years ago on Jedwabne and the reality of collective anti-Semitic acts committed against Jewish fellow citizens during the war, this book feeds into those of today on the cohabitation of right-wing and left-wing anti-Semitism since 1944 and their cooperation or convergence.

The wide echo in Poland, confirmed by the Długosz Prize of Polish book professionals for the quality of popularization of science, and this despite the length and density of the argument, shows that not everyone accepts the theory of the innocent Polish lamb. Discerning anti-Semitic permanences in their social and ideological anchoring is an issue highlighted during the presentation of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize, on November 28, 2019. With Omer Bartov, the Polish laureate was awarded for her work. Dan Michman (director of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem) logically insisted on the “social portrait” aspect of her approach.

The announced publication of the book and that of Omer Bartov on Buczacz in French is a form of recognition of the approach of the February 2019 conference held at theEHESS and published in October 2019 on the new Polish school of Holocaust history.