Post World War 2 Pogroms in Eastern Europe – Conclusion

Soviet involvement in the Kielce pogrom was only the beginning of their adaptation of anti-Semitism as a political tool. The Polish Informacja, an independent arm of the Polish government and Communist Party that closely collaborated with Lavrentii Beria’s SMERSH (Death to Spies, Soviet counter-intelligence agency), had almost complete autonomy in the planning and execution of provocations within Poland. One of the many tasks that it was assigned by Soviet leadership was to turn anti-Soviet and anti-Communist attitudes into anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hatred.[1] This order coincided with a simultaneous increase in anti-Semitic policies by the Soviet government that had launched its own campaign against Zionism. Rather than being ideological in nature, Stalin’s attack on Zionism served as a pretext for the constriction of Jewish religious and culture life.

Similar steps were simultaneously taken in Poland with the same goal in mind as Poland itself underwent an accelerated process of Sovietization. By 1947, the short period of tolerance enjoyed by Jews in cultural and religious life unexpectedly expired and binding restrictions were implemented. The vast majority of Jewish institutions, including theatres, schools, co-ops, and theatres came under strict government control with the intention of curbing their freedom to operate.

The Soviet government took steps in limiting the freedom allowed to synagogues, Jewish worship and Jewish Holocaust memorial services as early as autumn 1946. A report sent by the Council of Religious Cult Affairs to the CC ACP(b) alleged that the losses suffered by the Jewish people during the war led to a significant growth of nationalistic feelings among the survivors which it termed “Soviet Zionism.” It further affirmed that the basis of nationalistic feelings was centered around the synagogue which was “the only place of national concentration and the only hearth of national culture.”[2] This type of national expression was in direct contradiction of Soviet ideology and therefore had to be eradicated.

As a result of this report, Soviet authorities launched a secret assault on synagogues throughout the country and attempted to severely restrict Jewish religious life. The Council of Religious Cults was assigned this task, and with its local representatives, it sought to establish control over every aspect of the Jewish community and its leadership in the rabbinate. The council spread the fight to Jewish customs and expressions of Jewish identity that it believed could “stir up nationalistic feelings.” These customs were basic Jewish rituals such as shehita (ritual slaughter of animals), consumption of kosher meat, the baking of matzoh, and the sale of places in the synagogue.[3]

The deprived state of Soviet Jewry in all aspects of life after the war allowed Stalin to be far more aggressive in his battle against “Soviet Zionism” than against the nationalism of other minority groups in the Soviet Union. Disregarding the Jewish wartime experience, the press began to subtlety reinvent old stereotypes, which implied that Jews were a foreign element with dual loyalties who would betray Russia in a time of crisis. Thousands of propaganda pieces were published between 1948-1953, some serious while others humorous. An examination of these articles revealed a grossly distorted image of the Jew that was reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. The Soviet press depicted Jews as lazy exploiters of the proletariat, as swindlers, eternal wanderers and parasites by nature. Consequently, images of the Jew stirred up feelings of resentment, anger and disgust.[4] Clearly influenced by the press, lower level administrative authorities used this information to deny housing, employment and government positions to Jews.

Faced with incontrovertible state-sponsored discrimination, thousands of Jews sent letters with their plight and appeals for help to the Jewish anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), which was the last Jewish organization left operating in the Soviet Union. In the course of the Stalin’s dubious investigation of the JAC, it was uncovered that in the summer of 1946, the chairman of the JAC, Shmuel Mikhoels had met with Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Foreign Minister Molotov. He told her about the letters the JAC had received letters from throughout the Soviet Union concerned with anti-Semitism and oppression by local communist authorities. He asked her who was the appropriate person to contact in the Soviet leadership to remedy this problem but to his dismay, Zhemchuzhina replied, “Zhdanov and Malenkov will not help you. All the power in this country is in Stalin’s hands alone and nobody can influence him. I do not advise you to write to Stalin. He has a negative attitude toward Jews and so will not support us.”[5] Shmuel Mikhoels soon realized Stalin’s attitude for Jews firsthand when on 13 January 1948 he was brutally murdered in a staged automobile collision by the MVD. Within a year, the JAC had ceased to exist and the remainder of its leadership was arrested. The dissolution of the JAC marked a peak in Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitism that would reach its zenith shortly before Stalin’s death in 1953.

On 13 January 1953, TASS and Pravda announced the exposure of a conspiracy among the Soviet medical elite of assassinating Zhdanov and Shcherbakov and conspiring to kill other vital Soviet figures. Nine Kremlin physicians were charged, six of whom had stereotypical Jewish last names such as Kogan, Feldman and Grinshtein.[6] The announcement led to a wave of overt, clearly distinguishable anti-Semitism in the Soviet press that labeled Jews as Zionists, agents of U.S. and British imperialism and referred to them as “rootless cosmopolitans.”[7] The event that became known as the Doctor’s Plot marked the culmination of Stalinist state-sponsored anti-Semitism that began in the mid-1940s following the Kielce pogrom and intensified with the establishment of the state of Israel, the disbanding of the JAC and the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Some historians have argued that the articles published by TASS and Pravda along with the Doctor’s Plot itself, were specifically fashioned to provoke a wave of pogroms that would allow Stalin to deport Soviet Jews to the proposed Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan “for their own safety.”[8] Stalin’s desire to deport Soviet Jewry was indicative of the anti-Semitic nature of Soviet leadership and the lengths to which they went in the effort to cleanse the Soviet Union of the Jewish presence. Fortunately, the pogroms never materialized and Soviet Jewry was never forcefully transferred because of Stalin’s death later in the year.

The degree to which the Soviet population accepted anti-Semitic propaganda from the Party was determined by a number of factors stemming from the Soviet experience of the 1940s. Aside from the impact of Nazi propaganda, many non-Jewish Soviet citizens interpreted the reasoning behind the German invasion of the Soviet Union as rooted in the desire to make Europe judenrein. This inevitably aroused feelings of resentment within the Soviet population as they held the Jews responsible for the deaths of their fathers, mothers, children and 27 million of their fellow citizens. Postwar experiences, on the other hand, were rooted in the economic situation, the lack of housing, and fierce competition for work.[9]

The long history and multi-faceted nature of anti-Semitism made it a difficult concept to dispose of—even after the unthinkable, inhumane cruelties that were committed during the Holocaust. As Jan Gross accurately noted:

Mental constructs, including stereotypes, have a great staying power. They linger long after people, events, or circumstances that inspired and brought them to life have left the stage of history and are no longer with us.[10]

Thus, it is unsurprising that in the xenophobic paranoid jungle of the Soviet leadership, traditional, firmly established anti-Semitism throughout Eastern Europe and Russia was used as a political tool to first divide and conquer Poland and later to unite Soviet citizens under the nation less banner of Communism.

Post World War 2 Pogroms in Eastern Europe – Kielce Pogrom

On 4 July 1946, a ferocious pogrom erupted in the city of Kielce in southern Poland. While it was not the first to take place in the post World War II era, it was the largest and had far reaching consequences. The majority of pogroms had similar characteristics and more often than not began with the medieval accusation of blood libel.

The Kielce pogrom embodied this characteristic and in such terms from being an unusual event. But compared to other anti-Semitic attacks and due to the large number of casualties and deaths, it had tragic consequences that went far beyond the scope of earlier anti-Semitic manifestations. The event effectively shattered the idea of Poland becoming a multi-national state that could be a safe home for Poles and Jews alike and led to a mass exodus of the Jewish population from the graveyard that was Poland to the safety and opportunity of the United States and to the Zionist hope in Palestine.

In the days preceding the pogrom, there was an increase in anti-Semitic displays in the districts of Czestochowa, Radom, and most notably, Kielce. Moreover, in the early days of July 1946 rumors about the murder of Christian children appeared not only Kielce, but also in the town of Kalisz, where it was claimed that a Ukrainian boy had been killed and his blood drunk by Jews.[1] In Kalisz and Czestochowa, however, the situation never became violent because of an effective stance taken by the clergy and city authorities. Kielce, however, was an entirely different situation. The city authorities were completely ineffective in governing the town and on the day of the pogrom they stumbled and were ultimately unable to recover.

The Communist authorities who ruled Poland following liberation were never able to gain a secure foothold in the governing of the province of Kielce and this shortcoming ultimately permitted the Kielce pogrom to take place specifically in this province rather than elsewhere. As early as one month before the liberation of Kielce in mid-January 1945, PPR representatives reported to their superiors in the Lublin administration that local PPR chapters were being inflated by ex-members of the Polish Home Army (AK—Armja Krajowa) who, although intrinsically hostile to Communism and the Soviets, joined for personal benefit. The reports that the Lublin administration received painted a picture of the Kielce province as being a bastion for right-wing elements and as a result, the Communists felt that they would have to do considerable work in establishing a coherent party structure.[2] But because of those right-wing elements and prevalent anti-Communist tendencies in the province, the PPR inevitably encountered a lack of reliable, loyal cadres whom they could recruit into the mechanism of the party organizion. They were left with the inexorable necessity of retaining potentially unreliable bureaucrats from the interwar period and recruiting military officials and former underground activists into the framework.[3]

While the party ranks swelled substantially because of its influence and prominence in the Lublin administration, the numerical growth was not always reflective of qualitative growth. Edmund Petruszewski, the government plenipotentiary for the province of Kielce, reported on 2 March 1945 that the PPR was experiencing ‘rapid growth’ but further elaborated that those joining it often did so for non-ideologically related reasons, namely to gain control of the thriving black market or to secure influence which could then be used to attain property.[4]

As a result, the PPR was unable to replace the existing political structure with their own administration. They severely lacked trained, similar-minded personnel to appoint to key posts in the government, specifically in the administrative offices, the police and the security services. Power in Kielce was, as a result, held by young, inexperienced, and easily corrupted individuals whose priorities were often different from the PPR leadership in Lublin. Further adding to the lack of common ideology, members of the Polish Peasant’s Party (PSL) took up employment in the lower levels of the town administration and police while simultaneously maintaining loyalty to the AK, the NSZ and the London government-in-exile.[5] The inevitable conflict of interest that resulted contributed to a tumultuous existence for the inhabitants of Kielce. Historian Anita J. Prazmowska perceptively recognized the failures of the PPR in Kielce writing:

The local party structure never assumed a leading role in the process of social transformation, which was envisaged by the Communist’s national leadership. Instead, the party and security apparatuses on which they had to depend became a mirror reflection of the prejudices and political conflicts, which prevailed, in the local community.[6]

The consequences of this proved disastrous in an area where anti-Semitic opposition groups maintained a strong presence. The Kielce province was one of the most dangerous areas for Jews in the postwar period. Between September 1944 and December 1946, 30% of all Jewish deaths in Poland were recorded in the Kielce province, compared with 14% in next most dangerous province of Krakow.[7] Anti-Semitic outbursts were further magnified by the intentional passivity of the leadership of the Militia Police—Komisariat Miejskiej Milicji Obywatelskej (MO) and its partner, the UB. The responses by the leaders of the two security agencies, Colonel Kuznicki and Major Sobczynski, respectively, along with the anti-Semitic behavior of the police officers, security officers and soldiers directly led to the murder of 40 Jews.[8]

On Monday, 1 July 1946, a nine-year-old boy named Henryk Blaszczyk, a resident of 6 Podwalna Street in Kielce disappeared. He was reported missing that night by his father, Walenty Blaszczyk, to the MO. The following day, the boy’s father and mother continued the search for their son in and around Kielce and information began to spread throughout the town concerning the boy’s mysterious disappearance. On Wednesday, 3 July 1946, Henryk Blaszczyk returned home when his parents were out of the house. He was asked by the landlord, an ethnic Pole named Antoni Pasowski, where he had been for the last two days. According to testimony provided by Henryk’s father, Walenty, the boy claimed that:

He was at Herbska Street where a man gave him a parcel and told him to carry it to a house, however, he did not tell him the address. This happened on 1 July 1946. The boy got 20 zlotys for his service. The man showed him the way. After he arrived at the destination, the parcel and the 20 zlotys were taken away from him and he was put into a cellar. No food was given to him.[9]

Pasowski then asked whether the people there had been Gypsies or Jews and the boy replied that they must have been Jews because they were not speaking Polish. Later that evening, Walenty Blaszczyk informed the MO that his son had returned home and that “he was allegedly locked in a cellar by Jews.”[10]

The Jewish residence at 7 Planty Street

On 4 July 1946, at around eight o’clock in the morning, Walenty Blaszczyk, his son Henryk, and the brother-in-law of Antoni Pasowski, an ethnic Pole named Jan Dygnarowicz, set out for the militia station. While walking along Planty Street and past the building that was known around the town as the Jewish hostel and headquarters of the Local Jewish Committee, Dygnarowicz asked the boy to point out the building where he had been held. The boy pointed to the Jewish building at 7 Planty Street and also at a Jew sitting outside the building. Dygnarowicz encouraged Walenty Blaszczyk to inform the militia who ended up believing the boy’s story and ordered the arrest of the Jew who had been sitting outside the building.

Stefan Kuzminski, a functionary of the MO, was dispatched along with Walenty Blaszczyk, his son and 4 militiamen to Planty Street to arrest the Jew Kalman Singer and bring him back to the Militia’s office. Once back at the Militia headquarters, the Chairman of the Local Jewish Committee, Dr. Seweryn Kahane, arrived at the office and asked for Singer’s release arguing, “The boy could not have been held in a cellar because there was no cellar in the building.”[11] In fact, the building stood on a riverbank and therefore could not have had a cellar at all.

Regardless of this fact, the Chief of the MO, Colonel Kuznicki ordered Stefan Sedek, Deputy Head of the Investigation department to send his best investigators along with the boy to Planty Street and verify his story. In addition, Sedek ordered 15-20 uniformed militiamen to accompany them in order to secure the house and cellar. When interrogated on the following day, Stefan Sedek clearly stated that “Yes, I realized that a presence of a greater number of militiamen may cause a gathering of a crowd,”[12] but made the order regardless. On the way, however, the militiamen were observed telling local bystanders that the boy had escaped from the Jewish cellar.[13] Upon arrival and the subsequent investigation, the boy was unable to identify where he had been held and unsurprisingly no cellar was found in the building. One of the militiamen sent to 7 Planty street later recalled that “Szelag—in charge of the patrol started to yell at the child wanting to know why he was misleading the authorities, but people began whispering that we were hushing up the crime.”[14] Perhaps fearing escalation or taking actions into their own hands, the militia surrounded the building and prohibited the inhabitants from leaving.

The situation that ensued could have been prevented had the Chief of the UB, Major Wladyslaw Sobczynski acted on information presented to him by a lower level functionary regarding the search of 7 Planty Street. Instead of sending a ‘crack-force’ to protect the residents as had been suggested, he turned down the request reasoning that there were enough army and police troops in Kielce.[15] The circumstances, however, merited a different response as more and more people began gathering in front of the Jewish building. Finally, by ten o’clock in the morning, Major Sobczynski ordered several units of troops to help with the crowd and more than one hundred soldiers and five information officers appeared at 7 Planty Street. This action, however, did not solve the problem, because the troops were not briefed prior to their dispatch. They were not aware that their intended purpose was to protect the Jewish inhabitants. On the contrary, they believed that they came to catch and arrest the Jewish perpetrators who were guilty of murdered Christian children.[16] Just past ten o’clock in the morning, the soldiers and militia entered the building, which marked the beginning of the pogrom.

While the arrival of the troops cooled down the heightened emotions of the crowd that had enlarged to 150 people, the passive attitude of the soldiers and crowd quickly changed into a hostile one once the soldiers entered the building. Women who did not participate in the incitement were called ‘bad mothers’ by their peers. Antonia Biskupska, a suspect in the pogrom, said in her interview, ‘Muchowa told me to go home, because I was very upset. She did not want any trouble. I paid no attention to her and some women who joined us told Muchowa that she wasn’t a good mother if that was her attitude.”[17] The majority of those present, however, participated in the incitement.

Despite having explicit permission from Polish authorities to bear arms for safety, the Jews were ordered to disarm and hand over their weapons. At eleven o’clock, three Lieutenants entered the office of Dr. Seweryn Kahane. They instructed him to be quiet and told him that soon everything will end. Moments later, while he was the phone with Polish officials trying to calm and resolve the situation, he was unexpectedly shot in the back by one of the officers becoming the first casualty of the pogrom. The testimony of Albert Grynbaum sheds light unto the first moments of the violence: “I gathered about 40 Jews in a room [on the first floor] and did not allow the soldiers to enter. I turned to [the soldiers] and told them that their task was to keep order in the street not to conduct searches… A few minutes later two Jews came to me and said that the soldiers were killing the Jews and robbing their belongings… the first victims were on the second floor to which only the soldiers had access.”[18] Once the first shots had been fired, chaos erupted. Soldiers began ransacking the house and shooting unarmed Jews while other soldiers threw hapless people from second story windows down to the crowd below where they were violently beaten to death. The atmosphere spread throughout the town and to the railway stations where Jews were sought after and beaten on the streets.

The pogrom escalated even further in the afternoon when word spread to the local steelwork factory in the city. The director of the factory informed Major Sobczynski that his workers are about to depart the factory with Planty Street being their destination. Instead of sending troops to stop the workers, Major Sobczynski, wavered and sent two UB functionaries to persuade the workers to stay on the job. Unsurprisingly, this tactic had absolutely no effect on the workers who were steadfast in joining the other pogromniks. Some 600 workers forced open the gate at their factory and headed toward Planty Street. Armed with sticks, bars and stones they shouted that the Jews had murdered children and the militia had fired into the crowd. The arrival of the workers initiated a new round of violence which resulted in the deaths of twenty Jews and countless wounded.

In the meantime, a meeting was held in the office of the local PPR Chief. It was attended by several high-ranking PPR officials and most importantly, by Major Sobczynski. The topic of discussion was who would go to Planty Street to speak to the crowd. After one and a half hours of discussion, no agreement was reached because none of the attendees wished to be portrayed as defenders of the Jews.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, a mass of troops arrived from Warsaw and the militia was called back to the station. Wounded Jews were transported to hospitals where during their transport they were beaten and robbed by Polish soldiers and civilians. By the end of the day, 42 people had perished in Kielce, among them 40 Jews and 2 Poles. In the surrounding pandemonium, another 10-15 Jews were killed in various train stations in the Kielce province by people who had heard of the blood libel claims that had materialized in Kielce.

Kielce mass grave

The magnitude of violence and significance of the event led to an immediate political reaction to the matter. The National Council of the Homeland issued a statement on 7 July 1946 in which they implicated the regimes primary enemies, the PSL and the two prime underground armies, the AK and the NSZ. The following statement by Vice-Premier Gomulka, the Secretary General of the Polish Worker’s Party denounced the underground armies as ‘fascists’ and alleged that the Nazi’s were their ‘masters’:

The policy of negation pursued by the PSL and the NSZ, is now tending to push the struggle into the abyss of civil war and anarchy. Evidence of this is the pogrom of the Jews in Kielce. The Polish Fascists who until now were so enthusiastic whenever they saw M. Mikolajczyk have now surpassed their masters, the Nazis, in spreading anti-Semitism in Poland.[19]

In addition to Gomulka’s statement, two other prominent members of the PPR issued their own statements to the American ambassador to Poland, Mr. Arthur Bliss Lane. For the most part, however, they mirrored the official statement of 7 July 1946. On 10 July 1946, Premier Osobka-Morawski told Lane that “underground bands” had been responsible for the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence and that “reactionary and clerical elements” had been infuriated by the results of the referendum that had taken place days earlier. In a conversation with Ambassador Lane the following day, Jakub Berman, claimed that “that the Kielce pogrom was part of a general plan on the part of the underground bands—specifically the NSZ and WiN—to create dissension against the government throughout the country; and that it was a direct result of dissatisfaction over the outcome of the referendum.”[20] This became the official line of the Polish government and that of the Soviet government as well.

The opposition, on the other hand, had a contrasting theory as to the reasons behind the pogrom in Kielce. Their interpretation of the events led them to conclude that the government staged the pogrom in order to discredit the PSL, the underground resistance movements and draw attention away from the falsified referendum. If the PSL were to lose credibility in the West, it would henceforth be deprived of Western assistance and in turn, the opposition PPR would gain support. They believed that the pogrom was intended to paint a picture of Polish society following the holocaust as repulsive, depraved and unable to control themselves with respect to the Jews. If the west were to accept this as truth, they would unquestionably cease their support for the Polish nation and impress upon the government to apply pressure to the underground thereby empowering the Communists in the subjugation of Poland. This same archetype was applied in Hungary, where anti-Jewish riots were used to strengthen the position of the Communist Party at the expense of their opposition, the centrists’ farmers’ alliance.[21]

Thus, the question of spontaneity or provocation must be addressed. Was the Kielce Pogrom a spontaneous event or a carefully organized provocation? In order to ascertain the answer to this question several factors must be realized, namely who stood to benefit from the end result of the pogrom?

For all intents and purposes, the underground insurgency did not benefit because their ability to operate in the open was severely limited afterwards. One of the unexpected outcomes of the Kielce pogrom was the almost complete cessation of anti-Semitic expression in Poland after 1946. The extensive worldwide attention that the incident received in the days and even weeks after the pogrom resulted in an international outcry that even the most stubborn of anti-Semites heard. Underground anti-Soviet movements that had been at the forefront of anti-Jewish violence reconsidered their position and decided on a policy of self-restraint. They based their decision on two factors. First, the scrutiny placed upon them directly as a result of the widespread media coverage. And second, they believed that further action against Jews would play into the hands of their enemies thereby providing the security services with a pretext for an even more brutal campaign against them.[22] This is precisely exemplified in an August 1946 publication by the WiN group, which explicitly stated to its supporters that:

At present moment it is not in our interest to fan the flames of anti-Semitism, since the “Jew-Communists” were trying to stir up the Jewish problem in Poland for the purpose of proving to the outside world that the presence of Russian security forces in an intolerant Poland is necessary in order to educate the Poles in the spirit of ‘democracy.’[23]

Thus, the government’s official position that the underground was at fault cannot be taken earnestly and it seems to deliberately draw attention away from their own involvement in the violence.

While the vast majority of documentation relating to the involvement of the Community Party in the Kielce Pogrom have either been destroyed or kept in locked archives, one document of importance has been recovered that directly implicated the security apparatus in Kielce. Military Procurator Major Czeslaw Szpadnowski prepared a report on his investigation regarding the involvement of the military, UB and MO in the anti-Jewish massacre. The report was sent to the Deputy Commander in Chief of the Polish Army and Minister of Defense Marian Spychalski, who was a member of the PPR. This report was kept extremely secret as the Chief Military Procurator, Colonel Henryk Holder, on an attached summary note wrote that the report was strictly secret and that it was the only copy. He told Spychalski that the security services in Kielce had not only been lethargic in their response but had also ‘participated and facilitated the pogrom.’[24]

Behind the security services, however, were the Soviets. The anti-Jewish outbursts throughout Poland and Kielce in particular served as a pretext for the Soviets to tighten their grip over Polish government and the security apparatus by demonstrating that the Polish population was unable to maintain law and order without Soviet intervention. What ensued as a direct consequence of the Kielce pogrom was the intensification of Soviet influence and control in Polish political matters and the mass exodus of Jews from Polish territory. Both of these factors were favorable to the Soviets who had political interest in Poland and a wide political agenda linked to the potential establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine.[25] The Kielce Pogrom demonstrated to many Jews that a future in Poland was nore longer possible. Zionist Representative Rozenburg accurately observed that:

In Polish society, we encounter a poisoned atmosphere. There is nothing enabling a psychological or actual stabilization. Jews are threatened everywhere. These people who survived six hard years cannot endure being tormented anymore.[26]

Yehuda Yedlinski, a survivor of the holocaust and witness to the Chinstohov pogrom recalled that only one Jew was killed there. For him, the event was not enough to frighten him out of Poland since it was not out of the ordinary in the post-war experience. After learning of the pogrom in Kielce, however, he said to his wife that there is no place in Poland for them anymore and fled to Palestine.[27] Communist Poles were predictably thrilled with this news as the Jewish exodus from Poland paved the way for the Communist goal of creating an ethnically and racially homogeneous state.

Much of the evidence supporting the thesis for provocation is circumstantial because the relevant archival documents remain a closely guarded secret. Despite this shortcoming, a discussion of the characters involved in the pogrom and outside events surrounding the incident sheds substantial light as to whether the pogrom was a provocation or spontaneous event.

The role of Walenty Blaszczyk, the father of the missing child, was brought into question during the course of the investigation, which followed. Colonel Adam Kornecki, former Chief of the UB in Kielce was reassigned to Kielce following the pogrom to investigate the activities of its local network of agents and informers before, during and after the pogrom. His investigation established that Walenty Blaszczyk had been employed as an informer by the Kielce UB Office.[28] Under the alias of ‘Przelot,’ Walenty Blaszczyk was afforded the task of infiltrating the local NSZ detachment. Colonel Kornecki claims that the boy was abducted by his father on orders from the NSZ in order to discredit the Jews. This brought about the possibility that the underground had organized the pogrom. While this is clearly untrue, it did provide the UB with an opportunity to turn the tide and discredit the NSZ. The UB along with their Soviet advisors could thus kill two birds with one stone by discrediting the underground movement and instilling fear in the Jewish population. Colonel Kornecki further claimed that Blaszczyk “did not want to kill the Jews or provoke a pogrom; it did not occur to him that such riots would result. That is what he maintained when I interrogated him in the Security Office in 1946 and that is what he repeated in 1961.”[29] Apparently his motives hinged on frightening the Jews from further returning to Kielce and reclaiming their property; a motive that was common in the underground. Walenty Blaszczyk was never put on trial for his alleged role in the Kielce pogrom.

Another person of importance is the head of the UB in Kielce, Major Wladyslaw Sobczynski who played a crucial role in the advancement of the pogrom throughout the day of 4 July. Before Sobczynski was appointed to the UB, he was employed as an NKVD agent up until 1942 and was well known for his notorious anti-Semitism. According to Polish underground sources uncovered by historian Joanna Michlic-Coren, Major Sobczynski had been responsible for the incitement of anti-Jewish events in Rzeszow and possibly Krakow as well in 1945 with the ostensible intention of dividing the population into confrontation.[30] Despite the bloody nature of the event, the Krakow pogrom failed to make the intended headlines because of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan.

Several weeks prior to the riot, the Chief of Public Security in Kielce, a man of Jewish origin was transferred to Poznan, and Major Sobczynski was appointed Chief in his place. No reason was provided for his reassignment. Major Sobczynski, throughout the course of the pogrom had ample time and resources to, at the very least, slow down the progress of the pogromniks and save lives. Sobczynski, however, time and time again failed to act accordingly, first by not sending a significant ‘crack-force’ to calm the crowd, followed by allowing more than 600 steel workers to walk out on their job and finally by refusing to address the crowd so as not to be seen as a defender of the Jews.

The investigation into Sobczynski’s responsibility for the Kielce pogrom was assigned to Major Jan Zabawski, who was known within the UB for his close ties to the Soviet security apparatus in Poland.[31] Zabawski unsurprisingly concluded that Sobczynski had acted in good faith and had done everything he could have to suppress the riots. This conclusion was shared by Soviet advisers who had been present in Poland and Kielce at the time of the pogrom. One such advisor was Semyon Davidov who was the Chief of all Soviet advisors in Poland. He concluded Sobczynski should not be arrested, as it would publicly exonerate the underground militia bands that the government and their Soviet backers had implicated.

Several months before the Kielce pogrom, a highly esteemed Soviet intelligence officer by the name of Mikhail Alexandrovich Dyomin was assigned to Kielce. He was a tall man with blond hair, had excellent command of both French and German and was described as having a touch of ‘western’ refinement around him.[32] Prior to the riot, the city had not been a hotbed of political activity like that of Krakow and Warsaw. What was the reasoning behind his appointment to a backwater town like Kielce then? According to historian Michael Checinski:

As a rule, Soviet intelligence officers were sent abroad if delicate political provocations were needed. Further it should be noted that the KGB did not usually shift its officers around and rather insisted on their specialization. Any officer sent to Poland might be assumed to be an expert on Polish or at least East European, affairs.[33]

Dyomin was neither, however. In an interview with Michael Checinski, Mrs. Eta Lewkowicz-Ajzenman, then the chief of the Secretariat of the District Public Security Office in Kielce recalled that:

When years later I found myself in Israel, a newspaper referred to a Mikhail Dyomin, the secretary of the commercial attaché at the Soviet embassy in Tel-Aviv. This aroused my curiousity, and I decided to go and have a look at him . . . it was undoubtedly the same Dyomin. Interesting, isn’t it? [34]

According to American Historian, John Barron, Dyomin was a high-ranking officer in the Main Intelligence Administration (GRU—Glavnoye Razvedovatel’noye Upravlenie) who worked in Israel between 1964 and 1967. Dyomin’s subsequent appointment in Israel suggests that he did indeed have a specialization as the KGB required; he was a specialist in Jewish affairs. Whether he had the same position 20 years earlier in Kielce, it is currently not possible to establish, but it is known that he was there for a specific reason since an officer of his rank would not be shifted from job to job after only a few months. Dyomin left Kielce two weeks after the pogrom. He was never tried or questioned as to his role in the affair. While his function remains inconclusive, his qualifications, credentials and mere presence in Kielce before, during and after the pogrom give rise to the question of Soviet provocation in the riots. Historian Marian Mushkat further substantiates this theory by arguing that various endemic tensions between Poles and Jews, such as the issue of Jewish property, was frequently exploited by ‘Soviet adviser-provocateurs’ such as Mikhail Alexandrovich Dyomin, Semyon Davidov, and Jan Zabawski to divert the frustration and anger of the people away from the government and security forces.[35]

Furthermore, 4 July 1946 was an eventful and newsworthy day around the world and offered several other diversions. Aside from the Kielce pogrom, other ostensibly unconnected events which occurred on the same day or in the days prior provide investigators of Kielce an argument in favor of Soviet provocation in the Kielce riots.

On 30 June 1946, a referendum was held in Poland that essentially asked the Polish public about the legitimacy of the Communist Government. It was a vote of confidence/no confidence which according to unofficial sources resulted in 70%-83% of the vote going against the PPR. In good Soviet fashion, the count was falsified to show the opposite.[36] After the fact, the PSL accused the UB of “organizing the pogrom with the full knowledge and consent of Moscow in order to compromise Poland in the international community and to draw attention away from the referendum.”[37] Just before the pogrom and official announcement of the results, the Internal Security Corps (KBW) that had been deployed in Kielce were withdrawn. Their task had been to maintain order during the referendum. Once they were ordered to withdraw, rumors of blood-libel, and missing children were circulated in Kielce.[38] One can reasonably infer that the pogrom was ordered with the intention of distracting the world and the Polish public from the falsified referendum and focus their attention on the postwar illogicality of anti-Semitism.

Word spread quickly throughout Poland of the magnitude and meaning of the Kielce pogrom and as a result, Jews began fleeing Poland in staggering numbers. John Russell of the British Embassy in Warsaw reported in a letter to Charles Baxter, Head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, that 99% of the 120,000 Jews in Poland wished to leave the country. He cited that conditions in Poland were insufferable for Jews and that the Kielce pogrom convinced those who had been hesitant about leaving prior. He described Jews as living “in a state of renewed terror since the recent pogrom” and estimated that Jews would begin leaving Poland at a rate of 1000 per day.[39]

Between July 1945 and December 1945, Jews fled Poland at average rate of 4,000 per month. In May 1946, 3,052 people emigrated, and in June 1946, some 8,000 Jews left the country. In July 1946, however, the number rose more than twofold to at least 19,000 and in the month after the pogrom, in August 1946, according to official calculation, 35,346 Jews left Poland. A staggering twenty-five percent of the post-war Jewish population of Poland left within a one-month period. It is estimated that between 90,000 and 95,000 Jewish refugees passed from Eastern Europe to the Displaced Person (DP) camps in Germany, Austria and Italy during July, August and September 1946. These data, however, are based on official numbers of the Polish Brichah organization. Not all Jews, however, escaped with the help of official Zionist outlets. Thousands of additional Jews solicited the assistance of private opportunists and professional smugglers throughout the eastern zones to facilitate their escape.[40]

The impact of Kielce was felt by Hungarian, Romanian and Slovakian Jewry, as well, who joined the mass exodus from Eastern Europe. The JDC reported that more than 14,000 Hungarian Jews passed through the Bratislava transit point in the three months following Kielce and 800 Romanian Jews passed through the Vienna Rothschild Hospital where their count was taken.[41] Thus, it would seem that the official estimate of 90,000 to 95,000 is rather conservative. Interestingly, this number does not include Soviet Jews since they were, for all intents and purposes, forbidden from emigrating from the Soviet Union. Why then, under Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, were Jews allowed to emigrate as part of Soviet policy?

Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli historian, argues that since the recently occupied countries in Eastern Europe were still building and developing their regimes, they were not yet ‘socialist’ countries and thus could admit that some national problems existed and had to be solved before they could move forward. In the Soviet Union, however, national strife officially did not exist because one of the basic tenets of Soviet Socialism was the notion that within the developed socialist framework there are no intrinsic national problems. Therefore, it was beyond consideration to allow Soviet Jewry to emigrate because, theoretically, the ‘Jewish Problem’ had been solved as a result of Socialism. In the occupied territories of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the Jewish problem was very much alive and as pertinent as it had been prior to the war. Bauer argues that Russian policy did not encourage Jews to emigrate but neither would they do anything severe to prevent them from leaving. The implication of this being that the endemic national strife between Jews and Poles, for example, could be solved through Jewish emigration, something the vast majority of remaining Jews desired anyways after Kielce.[42]

Post World War 2 Pogroms in Eastern Europe – Kiev Pogrom

With the liberation of Ukraine by the Soviet Red Army from German occupation (May 1943-August 1944), Jewish refugees began to filter back to their natives areas from throughout the Soviet Union. In areas where there were large concentrations of refugees, particularly in the east, Ukrainian authorities took on a policy of issuing permits (propuski) to limit and filter the amount of people that could return. Historian Mordechai Altshuler asserts that there exists some evidence that the Ukrainian authorities tried to limit the number of permits granted to Jews. He claims Ukrainian officials hinted that in practice, an unwritten policy was implemented that “one should be somewhat restrictive with regard to Jews who wish to return to the liberated areas.”[1] Unsurprisingly, Jewish refugees interpreted this as discrimination and anti-Semitism.

Those Jews that did manage to return were met with surprise and hostility. In September 1944, the prominent Jewish author Ilya Ehrenburg reported that the Chairman of the District of Kalinindorf told Jewish returnees: “Why did you return? Nobody needs you here, nobody called you here.”[2] Thus, the reappearance of Jews in the Ukrainian landscape was perceived as not only surprising but also threatening. This sentiment is reflected in the following testimony:

We returned to Kiev in July 1944. First we entered the courtyard where we had lived for some 15 years, the neighbors met us angrily, when she saw us, the girl Lidia screamed: “I’m going to tell the Germans that the Zhids have come.”[3]

This feeling was shared by many in the population and was magnified considerably as more Jews returned and began reorganizing their lives in all aspects of society. To the casual Ukrainian observer that saw Jews returning to their jobs, particularly in the cultural and government sectors, the Jewish returnees aroused feelings of contempt. Many Ukrainians were of the opinion that the authorities actually preferred Jews to Ukrainians, and even went so far as to make the bold claim that the authorities were ‘judaizing’ the Ukrainian SSR.[4] In response to such sentiments the Ukrainian authorities, who were sensitive to such opinions and accusations developed a policy of discrimination against Jews in employment. As Mordechai Altshuler points out:

Considerable segments of the Soviet apparatus, themselves tainted by such anti-Jewish attitudes, gave expression in both word and deed to the undeclared policy of limiting the Jews’ opportunities in finding jobs in the Ukraine. This created a kind of symbiosis between public opinion and the policy adopted by large segments of the Soviet apparatus.[5]

As this unwritten policy applied itself to the daily lives of Jewish citizens in Ukraine, their already poor quality of life further decreased as anti-Semitism within the population increased. In order to bring the matter to the attention of the Communist Party, an anonymous individual took it upon himself to draft a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine with an appeal for help:

In Kiev, one finds anti-Semitism on a large scale. The Fascists left behind agents to fan hatred against the Jews. Every negative phenomenon, no matter how small, is blown up out of proportion and attributed to the Jews. Evidently, many of the senior officials have forgotten that our great Communist Party educates its members in the spirit of internationalism, and that the founder of Marxim, Karl Marx, was of Jewish origin. This theory was realized by Comrade Lenin and is also being realized by our leader, Comrade Stalin.

I do not for a minute doubt that the Party is waging a campaign against the great evil of anti-Semitism. The Jews are the first victims of Fascism. Tens of thousands of the Jewish proletariat and workers’ families who were unable to be evacuated from Kiev were slaughtered down to the last one and thrown into Babi Yar.

I think that the struggle against anti-Semitism, that great evil, must engage every Party member. For this reason, I propose holding closed-door meetings of Party members in Kiev to discuss the fight against anti-Semitism since it is increasing rather than decreasing.[6]

The letter was a direct appeal to the leadership of the Communist Party to come to terms with, and take action against, the existing anti-Semitism that was ubiquitous in Ukraine. The document from which this letter was extracted consisted of a single page with no indication that it was passed on to the appropriate officials or even summarized for them.

It would seem that the Soviet leadership did not want to deal with the problem of returning Soviet Jews at all. Stalin himself would not even recognize the suffering that Jews endured during the war. After the war, Stalin emphatically declared, “The Soviet and German people had been the two main victims of the Second World War.”[7] He made absolutely no mention of Jewish victims. Despite Moscow’s detached attitude to the new Jewish problem, the news they received from liberated Ukraine on a daily basis was horrendous.

After an alarming increase of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, the upper echelons of the Communist Party finally decided to investigate the causes. In early August 1944, Gersonskii the deputy head of the Second Department of the Ukrainian NKGB drafted a memorandum on manifestations of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. The document was reviewed by the Chief of the Second Department of the NKGB, S. R. Savchenko, who then submitted it as an official memorandum to the General Secretary of Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev.[8]

The document was divided into three sections. In the first part of the assessment, the author explained what he believed led to the increase of anti-Semitism in Ukraine: (1) the influence of Nazi propaganda and of Ukrainian nationalist propaganda during and after the Nazi occupation; (2) “the very low percentage of Jews in the ranks of the Red Army,”—this was not entirely true and more likely represents the author’s readiness to accept anti-Semitic rumors;[9] (3) the Jews spread rumors that the leading positions on the Communist government apparatus will soon be occupied by Jews, and that the Ukrainians will be expelled and punished for their anti-Semitism; (4) and finally the Jews’ alleged evasion of conscription into the Red Army, and their refusal to enlist for work in the Donbas mines.[10]

The second part of the document analyzes these causes but does not go into great depth. Rather than searching for the root of the problem, the Party official who wrote this document understood Ukrainian anti-Semitism to be commonplace, something that can not be rooted out. Instead of confronting the lingering effects of German propaganda, the Communist apparatus looked for other reasons, namely Jewish Nationalism. The second part is short, only a few paragraphs, but the third part is several pages long and points to the assertion of Zionism as the cause of Ukrainian anti-Semitism.

The last section of the document dealt primarily with examples of Zionism or “Jewish Nationalism” which the author argued provoked the population to anti-Semitism. First, the author confronts the issue of Zionism by illustrating its manifestations and linking them as divergent from Communism. He argued that Zionists had conveyed false information that American Jewry lived better than their counterparts did in the Soviet Union, presumably thereby encouraging emigration. Secondly, he made several points, which ostensibly were not related to Zionism whatsoever. He claimed that the circulation of rumors that the Soviet authorities will provide the Jews a territory where they could pursue their own national aspirations would incite anti-Semitism. While it may have had that effect, it was not related to Zionism, which, as a nationalist ideology, specifically sought a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Finally, the author asserts that the appeal by Soviet Jews to the leaders of the Soviet Union to act against anti-Semitism would also increase anti-Semitism. How this would be so is unclear and he failed to mention that anti-Semitism was already quite prevalent in the Soviet Union. Zionism was a potential solution to that problem.

While some of the points made in the first section of the assessment seem sensible in explaining postwar anti-Semitism in Ukraine, the subsequent connection that the author creates between anti-Semitism and Jewish Nationalism is unconvincing, as it does not make sense that the Jewish desire to leave the USSR for Palestine would inflame anti-Semitism. [11] Rather it would seem that the author sought to distance the Communist Party from anti-Semitic issues and place responsibility on the Jews for their condition rather than the leadership.

Despite awareness of the Jewish plight at all levels of the Communist apparatus, the authorities still failed to act on the problem and let it linger. As more and more Jews found ways around the political obstructions that Ukrainian authorities prepared for them and returned to liberated areas in Ukraine, anti-Semitism inevitably kept increasing. Property restitution became a major obstacle for returning Jews as many of them found their previous homes and apartments occupied by Ukrainians who were unwilling to move. It was because of such circumstances and ethnic strife that a pogrom erupted in Kiev on 7 September 1945.

The roots of this pogrom stemmed from the murder of two Red Army soldiers, Ivan Grabar and Nikolai Melnik, who were on leave from their units in occupied Germany. The murderer was a Ukrainian NKVD officer of Jewish origin who had survived the war and lived with his wife in Kiev.[12] On 4 September 1945, the NKVD officer, Joseph Rosenstein stopped at a neighborhood store in order to purchase bread for himself and his wife. After departing from the bakery, Rosenstein walked down Bazarnaya Street on his way home when he observed two men in Red Army uniforms and visibly intoxicated, walking in his general direction. As they were about to pass, one of the soldiers deliberately shouldered Rosenstein and muttered several anti-Semitic remarks. Rosenstein immediately identified himself as an NKVD officer and questioned the intentions of the two soldiers. In the course of the conversation the two men showered Rosenstein with anti-Jewish insults such as ‘zhyd’, and accused him of being a ‘Tashkent rebel,’ presumably making fun of the thousands of Jews who fled the western Soviet Union for the east ahead of the Nazi invasion. Angry and irritated, Rosenstein defended himself by accusing the soldiers of being ‘German skins,’ a derogetory expression meaning collaborators with the German enemy. The fiery confrontation erupted into a fight and the two drunken thugs beat Rosenstein ruthlessly, ridiculing him with anti-Semitic slurs throughout the beating. Lying on the ground, embarrassed and battered, Rosenstein watched as the two soldiers escaped down the street and into the building at No. 14 Kitaevskaya Street.[13]

Free from the torment of Grabar and Melnik, Rosenstein returned to his apartment where he confided in two friends, Grigory Spector and his son, Boris Grigorovich, about what had just happened to him. Boris Grigorovich was an associate of Rosenstein who worked as a switchman in the camp system of the NKVD.[14] They encouraged him to seek vengeance and vindicate the beating he had just received. Rosenstein changed his clothing into official NKVD attire, took his pistol, and along with Spector and his son, Boris, began walking toward the apartment building where the two soldiers had entered. Rosenstein’s wife, worried for his safety, ran after him.[15]

According to a female witness who lived in the same apartment building, Rosenstein entered the courtyard and yelled at one of the residents: “Tell me, German dog, where did you hide those bandits?”[16] With the help of Boris Spector, Rosenstein located the whereabouts of Grabar and Melnik. He entered the apartment with his pistol drawn and yelled, “hands up.” Reports differ as to what exactly transpired next. One report alleges that Rosenstein demanded that the two soldiers follow him to the local police headquarters, but they refused stating that he had no jurisdiction over their arrest. The argument heated up and Rosenstein shot the two men in a fit of rage.[17] Upon hearing the gunfire, an ethnic Ukrainian police officer, Puznakov, who happened to be patrolling down Kitaevskaya Street, ran to the apartment building at No. 14 Kitaevskaya Street and tried to apprehend Rosenstein. In the course of the struggle between the two, Rosenstein tried to shoot Puznakov and flee the scene, but the war-hardened veteran responded by disarming and arresting Rosenstein.[18] A differing account claims that Rosenstein entered the apartment with his pistol drawn but did not demand that the soldiers follow him to the police station. After a brief, yet heated argument, Rosenstein shot the soldiers entirely unprovoked, first Grabar and then Melnik as he tried to escape.[19] Rosenstein tried to flee the scene but was immediately apprehended by waiting police officers outside the building.[20]

The two dead were Ivan Grabar and Nikolai Melnik. Both of the slain were residents of Kiev and active soldiers in the Red Army. Grabar was a Ukrainian national born in 1922, and had worked as an electrician in a factory prior to the outbreak of World War II. He was not a member of the Communist Party.[21] Grabar had spent the first part of the war in the Red Army, until his partisan unit was encircled and he made his way back to Kiev, where he lived with his mother; both had participated in underground activities. Following the liberation of Kiev on 6 November 1943, Grabar returned to active duty where from then on he participated in the assault on Prague, Dresden and Berlin. For this, he was awarded a medal for bravery.[22] Nikolai Melnik was a colleague of Grabar’s from the Red Army; both had been in the same unit. Grabar, in the weeks prior to his death, had petitioned his commanding officers for a temporary leave so that he could resolve a housing dispute his mother was fighting in Kiev. The commanders granted his request for leave and allowed Melnik to accompany him.[23]

During the German occupation of Ukraine, thousands of apartments were seized by ethnic Ukrainians after their Jewish neighbors had fled to the east or been killed. Some took Jewish apartments simply because they were more spacious while others occupied Jewish apartments because of necessity. Faced with daily bombardments and combat in urban areas, many residents were left homeless and the option of seizing vacated Jewish apartments was an acceptable solution.[24]

The apartment where Grabar and his mother lived during and after the war was in reality the apartment of the Jewish Ribchinski family, which had fled to Uzbekistan following the launch of Operation Barbarosa on the eastern front and the subsequent German occupation of Kiev. In 1943, the apartment of Grabar’s mother had been damaged in a mortar attack and so she moved into the vacated apartment of the Ribchinski family.[25] The family returned in February 1945 and immediately contacted the City Prosecutor’s Office in order to have their apartment returned to them.

Property restitution was a delicate issue in the post-war period, particularly in regards to returning Jews. The pervasive assumption among the Ukrainian population of Kiev was that all the Jews were either dead or not coming back if they were alive. Nevertheless, Jews did return and demanded their belongings and homes be returned to them. The decision process was long and tedious; sometimes property issues were never resolved and non-Jewish squatters remained in Jewish apartments. Grabar’s mother was part of these proceedings as she sought to defend her claim on the apartment of the Ribchinski family. Seeing as her son was a decorated Red Army soldier she wrote him asking for his assistance in the matter and it was under this circumstance that Grabar returned to Kiev from occupied Germany.[26]

Grabar took up the issue for his mother and had several meetings with the Prosecutor’s Office in Kiev. According to one conversation Grabar had with one of the prosecutor of the city of Kiev several days before his death, he said with regard to the apartment dispute, “we are fighting while our apartments are being occupied by zhydy (Jews).”[27] The inflammatory remarks Grabar had said that day on Bazarnaya Street directed at Rosenstein were clearly reflective of his prejudice and loathing for Jews. Once Grabar had identified Rosenstein as a Jew, a confrontation was inevitable.

Immediately following the murder of the two Red Army soldiers and the subsequent arrest of Rosenstein a crowd of people, small at first, but eventually growing to a thousand, began congregating around No. 14 Kitaevskaya Street. They shouted anti-Semitic slogans and physically assaulted Rosenstein’s wife, Grigory Spector and his son Boris.[28] Two other Jews walking by the scene were also beaten because of their Jewish appearance.[29] Many more people could have been beaten or killed had it not been for the arrival of several Communist Party officials. Secretary Gorkoma, Gorbaan, Davidov, Moskalech, and Secretary Kornichki from the Kaganovich raikom spoke to the mob and dispersed the crowd. In response to the anti-Semitic popular reaction following the murder, on the following day, 5 September 1945, the Kaganovich raikom Communist Party issued a statement condemning the riot.[30] The statement went unnoticed as two days later in the course of the funeral procession a pogrom broke out that left hundreds of casualties, all Jewish.

The procession took place on 7 September 1945, three days after the deaths of Grabar and Melnik. It was attended by over three hundred people, many of whom were related neither to Grabar nor to Melnik. Some participated simply as an expression of solidarity with the dead while others partook and instigated violence. The procession began at the morgue of the October Hospital in Kiev and progressed through the city to the Lukyanovskii Cemetary. The procession did not take the shortest, most efficient route to the cemetery; but rather, it took a route that passed through well-known Jewish neighborhoods. The procession also passed by the Galtiskii Market, where many Jews did their shopping. Clearly, the goal of the procession was to instill terror in the Jewish population.[31] According to the report prepared by the Kiev authorities, the following anti-Semitic actions took place. At the corner of Pushkinskaya Street and Savchenko Boulevard two mourners participating in the funeral beat two Jewish civilians walking in the opposite direction of the procession.[32] When the procession reached the Galitsky Market, a few mourners separated from the group and beat a Jewish worker in the market office. Minutes later on Dmitrievsky Street, people walking behind the coffins noticed a Jew looking through his window at the crowd; they proceeded to throw stones at the window. Soon after, a mixed group of soldiers and civilians beat a Jew who was walking by.[33] Altogether, in the course of the procession that lasted for several hours, over one hundred Jews were beaten, thirty-six were taken to the hospital as a result of their injuries and five Jews were killed. It was one of the largest anti-Jewish pogroms in postwar Ukraine.

There were many theories about the causes and reasoning behind the pogrom. The pogrom did not occur simply because Rosenstein, a Jew, murdered two Red Army soldiers. Events such as these do not occur spontaneously without outside ideological assistance. The murder of the two Red Army soldiers was simply the pretext for the pogrom to take place just as blood libel had been the pretext for the multitude of pogroms that had taken place in Eastern Europe both before and after the war. An internal review by Communist Party officials investigating the event on 5 September 1945 concluded in their assessment that the incident on Bazarnaya Street took place because of Grabar and Melnik’s anti-Semitic attitudes.[34] Although this particular review is dated 5 September 1945, two days before the pogrom, it can be inferred that the pogrom which followed the murders arose as a consequence of the unrestrained anti-Semitism that poisoned many Ukrainians and was ubiquitous in the Communist leadership of the Ukrainian SSR. One little spark was all it took to ignite the tragedy.[35]

The pogrom pointed out that denying the existence of national tensions in a socialist society where everyone was thought to be equal was an archaic notion. The government did not do its duty in taking steps to protect the Jewish population that was quite clearly lacking the ability to defend themselves. A group of loyal, Communist, demobilized soldiers from Kiev argued this point in a letter that was written to the very top of the Soviet government, Stalin and Beria:

We, the group, of demobilized Communist front line soldiers were despondent when we learned what happened in Kiev in the capital of Ukraine. To tell the truth we had not recognized our city, not only by its external look but also by the political situation, which currently exists there.

Here the influence of the Germans is felt very strongly. There is no struggle whatsoever with the consequences of their political wrecking. All kinds of nationalists threw aside all restraints, sometimes these nationalists are members of the Communist Party. The spirit of internationalism is not felt in Kiev.

Here yet unseen in our Soviet reality anti-Semitism rages. The word ‘kike’ or ‘beat the kikes’ the favorite logo of German fascists, Ukrainian nationalists is heard on the streets with deep vigor, in the trains, in the trolleys, in the shops, in the markets and even some Soviet organizations. In another more veiled form, it takes place in the party apparatus up to the central committee of the communist party of Ukraine. All of these in the end led to the pogrom, which recently took place in Kiev. Here in Kiev happened the first pogrom during Soviet times. As a result of unbridled anti-Semitism which rages in Kiev many Jews daily are subject to insults, beatings, and nobody from the government tries to protect them.

The pogrom happened because the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine did not provide the population with any political educational work in regards to the Jews, the nation which suffered the most at the hands of the Germans. But on the contrary the Central Committee placed itself at the head of arousing hatred against the Jews and national differences. The Central Committee led these shameful, disgraceful, anti-Semitic politics, which are alien to our party and Soviet government. And these politics brought about this pogrom. Our socialistic motherland was disgraced. That the heads of the Communist Party in Ukraine and this is them who established the special regime towards Jews, this is them who organized expulsion of the Jews from the Soviet and party apparatus. [36]

The letter touches upon subjects that tackle the ideological foundations of anti-Semitism in Ukraine in the postwar era. The authors mention the influence left behind by the Germans after two years of occupation. While Goebbels’ anti-Semitic propaganda may indeed have had a lasting effect on the population, it was not the sole factor in postwar anti-Semitism. Anti-Jewish attitudes among the Ukrainian population had not materialized solely, during and after the war but rather, Ukrainian anti-Semitism was already present to some degree in the population. Although it rarely led to violence, anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns of the 1920’s placed responsibility on Jews for the problems of the ethnic population.[37] These influences persisted throughout the interwar period and into the war as well. During the war, Ukrainian nationalists were some of the most ardent and brutal anti-Semites who took advantage of the German occupation for their own national aspirations while simultaneously taking a nefarious role in the execution of the Holocaust.

Confirming that Nazi propaganda had merely a minor influence on anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union is an event which took place thousands of kilometers from the front line in the town of Rubtsovsk which never fell under German occupation. Three months before the Kiev pogrom, a letter was sent to the chairman of the Council of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, N.M. Shvernik, from the town in the Altaí region. The letter described a number of anti-Semitic attacks, which took place during a soccer game at a local stadium on 8 July 1945. The author stated that the town’s authorities, including the local Party Committee’s, the militia, and the Prosecutor’s Office contributed a significant role in the provocation of the anti-Jewish turmoil.[38] The demobilized soldiers from Kiev argued the same point in their letter to Stalin and Beria claiming that the Kiev authorities were responsible for the pogrom due to their lack of action and inherently anti-Semitic policies. This confirms that many anti-Jewish manifestations that arose in post-war Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union occurred less as a result of German propaganda, but rather because of the entrenched anti-Semitic attitudes of the local authorities and the increasing influence and exploitation of anti-Semitism among the top levels of the government.

Post World War 2 Pogroms in Eastern Europe – Introduction

Anti-Semitism as an ideology has existed for thousands of years yet remains one of the most complex topics of historical research today. Its complicated nature stems from its wide range of causes and subsequent manifestations throughout history. In the medieval period, anti-Semitism was defined based on differing religious beliefs and was expressed primarily through claims of blood libel. Following the enlightenment period and scientific revolution, however, anti-Semitism was defined and redefined not religiously, but as a consequence of constantly changing ideological, economic, national and social factors.[1]

At different historical periods one such factor may have been the most prominent influence whereas in a contrasting historical period, another. Tsarist Russia’s experience of anti-Semitic expression was the result of social factors that perceived Jews as the ‘threatening other’, who refused to assimilate and part with their foreign customs. In contemporary times, anti-Semitism was, and still is, the result of national factors that stem from Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. During World War II, however, anti-Semitism was the result of different reasons in different areas. A Ukrainian’s anti-Semitism may have stemmed from economic considerations while a Pole’s was rooted in political factors. Even though historically deep enmity exited between Poles and Ukrainians, many found common ground in their loathing of the Jew.

In the Soviet Union and Poland, the end of the war did not signal an end to anti-Semitic feelings that were present to various degrees in the population and government. Rather, in certain areas, particularly in those that had been occupied by the Nazi’s, the end of the war brought about an intensification of such feelings. New factors emerged as a result of the occupation experience that replaced some existing stereotypes while reinforcing others.

The abrupt disappearance of Jews from villages, towns and cities throughout the extent of the German occupation zone led to new opportunities for the native populations at the expense of their former neighbors. Nazi collaborators were rewarded with abandoned Jewish property while the remainder was transferred to local municipalities. A special committee estimated their value and the residents paid the municipality if they desired the property.[2] Many ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians took advantage of this practice. After the war, however, they were confronted with the realization that not all the Jews had perished during the war. From then on they lived in trepidation that their Jew will return and demand his property be returned. Those who found better employment in positions vacated by Jews—especially in cultural institutions—also feared losing their newfound prominence and livelihoods. A smaller number of people who had collaborated with the Germans and denounced Jews to the Gestapo lived in constant fear that the returning Jews would in turn denounce them to the new authorities.

The Soviets were aware of the delicacy of the situation and its potential dangers. Soviet puppet governments in Eastern Europe and the Communist leadership of Ukraine feared that if they were identified with the return and reemergence of Jews they would lose the support of the population. But the identification of Jews with communism was already a well established phenomenon. The zydokommuna (judeo-communist) myth was firmly rooted in the memory of many Poles who could vividly recall Jews welcoming the Red Army warmly in 1939. Polish historian Krystyna Kersten shows that this connection, and the portrayal of Jews as hostile to Polish national goals, was a fundamental feature of Polish anti-Semitism from the beginning of the war until the late 1940s.[3] While abiding by a policy of distancing themselves from the Jewish returnees, the Soviet government disregarded the potential detrimental repercussions when it chose a policy of tolerating often times violent expressions of anti-Semitism.

Exploiting this failure in policy, underground movements in Poland and Ukraine made the most of anti-Semitism for their own nationalist aspirations as a challenge to their Soviet occupiers. On 25 March 1945, the central command of the Polish National Armed Forces (NSZ) issued an order recommending certain elements of the population for swift execution. They included all Jews and Jewesses, individuals in the employment of the Polish Worker’s Party (PPR) and Poles who had hid Jews during the Nazi occupation.[4] Another Polish underground movement, the Freedom and Independence (WiN), reported in October 1945 that all Jews are collaborators with the Security Services and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD—Narodnii Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del) as agents, confidence men, and informers.[5] With such sentiments running high and the palpable association of Jews with communists, circumstances inevitably led to gross manifestations of anti-Semitism. In the village of Poniatowka, near Chelm, NSZ gangs, together with police agents, murdered the Jewish Szczupak family a day after their return from a Nazi concentration camp.[6] On 25 June 1945, 21-year-old Abraham Berkowicz, who had just returned from the Thereseinstadt concentration camp and was the sole survivor of his family, was killed in his native village of Bolkow in the province of Lodz. He had come back in hopes of running his parents’ farm, despite being warned by a Jewish official in the province not to return to the village.[7] On 27 May 1945, in the small town of Przedborz situated 85 kilometers from Lodz, Wladysalw Kolacznski, the commander of an underground unit attacked the Jewish residents of the town but argued that his unit only shot ‘paid agents of Moscow’. The killings, however, appeared indiscriminate, much more akin to a pogrom than to a surgical strike against specific targets.[8] The attack resulted in the temporary liquidation of the entire Jewish community in the town and was significant enough to warrant a special session of the Polish provisional parliament on 21 July 1945.[9] While these smaller anti-Semitic incidents were a result of a mix of fear, prejudice and tensions with the Soviet authorities—larger scale manifestations exploited old anti-Semitic stereotypes in conjunction with contemporary myths.

The medieval myth of blood libel, which saw a great resurgence in Russia during the 1880s, experienced another revival in 1944. This myth of ritual murder reached its peak during the immediate post-war years in Poland and Ukraine, where it was the prime cause of large-scale anti-Semitic violence.[10] Rumors would be spread that Jews murdered a Christian child and sometimes a child would even be hidden away to support the accusations. Other times an already dead Pole or Ukrainian would be used to justify action and pave the way for anti-Jewish measures. In every case, the pogrom took place in the center of the city with a large crowd partaking. Jewish synagogues would be destroyed, homes looted, and businesses razed to the ground. The action would last between several hours to two days and would always result in casualties and often times, fatalities.[11]

Some pogroms, particularly those on the smaller side, broke out spontaneously when, for instance an ethnic Pole afraid of losing her comfortable apartment cried blood libel.[12] Others, however, especially the major and most notable, sprang up under enigmatic circumstances with traces of provocation. On 11 August 1945, Krakow was witness to a pogrom that foreshadowed the later, far more devastating riots in Kielce. Both pogroms shared similar characteristics in terms of the cause, the background of the participants and evident traces of provocation. On the Jewish Sabbath, members of the congregation caught several boys throwing stones at the synagogue on Miodowa Street 27. When several nearby women saw the Polish boys scuffling with the Jews they cried blood libel and the pogrom erupted in a flurry of beatings that spread throughout the district.[13] Usually, the participants were civilians who partook for anyone of the variety of reasons they had to detest Jews. In Krakow, however, soldiers, militiamen, railway workers and even health care personnel took an active role in the beatings and lootings. Some armed militia and soldiers extorted Jews demanding money in return for protection from their comrades. At least two Jews died, one 55-year-old woman was shot dead while another was beheaded. The synagogue on Miodowa Street was destroyed and its holy Torah scrolls burned.[14] After the scene had calmed, a Polish nurse was heard saying how much it angered her to have to save Jewish scum that murder children, while a nearby railroad worker commented, “it’s a scandal that a Pole does not have the civil courage to hit a defenseless Jew.”[15] The Krakow pogrom took place largely because of provocations made by a few select Poles with archaic anti-Semitic beliefs. Its expansion and spread throughout the city, however, was the result of the communist authorities’ unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the Jews. Historian Joanna Michlic-Coren has suggested that some archival evidence does exist claiming, Major Sobczynski was an ethnic Pole and member of the Public Security Office (UB) that planned the provocation in advance. If this was true then he definitely chose a favorable location. Krakow had been twice as dangerous for Jews as it had been for Poles at the time.[16]

It should be kept in mind while reading this article that it is fundamentally dangerous to generalize that an entire ethnic population is this or that, anti-Semitic or anti-Soviet and the like. All the while, however, history has recorded that Eastern Europe was the site of a violent series of pogroms in the 1880s and early 1900s; and it was the region ultimately chosen by Adolf Hitler for his extermination camps and mass graves for some six million murdered Jews. Milovan Djilas, a Yougslavian communist, wrote in 1952: “Anti-Semitism has already become routine in Eastern Europe. It is assuming monstrous forms which would be grotesque if they were not bloody and anti-social.”[17] While it is wrong in any case to generalize about an entire population, the history of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe cannot be denied. The eventual exploitation of anti-Semitism by the Soviet government in the occupied territories in the eastern zones further exemplifies the ubiquity and longevity of anti-Semitic feelings and beliefs there.

As the Red Army ‘liberated’ the eastern zones, NKVD detachments followed closely behind, often violently suppressing nationalist movements and any opposition to Soviet rule.[18] As their network of informants grew, the Soviet government realized by early 1946 the potential uses of anti-Semitism as official policy and implemented them. They used the shared anti-Semitic characteristic of the native non-Jewish populations to impose their rule on Poland and intimidate ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union from pursuing nationalistic goals.

The following case studies exhibit three unrelated anti-Semitic outbursts in L’viv, Kiev (Both in Ukraine) and in Kielce (Poland) on 14 June 1945, 4-7 September 1945 and 4 July 1946, respectively. They detail both the uniqueness of each individual event as well as shared characteristics of anti-Semitic expression in the Soviet Union and occupied eastern borderlands. Each incident and its ramifications are reflective of policy changes within the Soviet government that led to the appearance, implementation of and full-blown utilization of a Soviet state policy of anti-Semitism in the years after the war.

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