The Kielce Pogrom
Kielce has achieved notoriety in postwar Poland as the site of the infamous July 1946 pogrom . Inflamed by rumours of the attempted ritual murder of an eight-year-old Gentile Polish child, elements of the local populace attacked buildings occupied by Jewish survivors of the Nazi terror, killing 42 people and wounding another forty over a period of hours, with no sign of intervention from the local police. Following a summary trial conducted shortly afterwards by secret police under the leadership of Edmund Kwasek, a notorious Stalinist-era butcher, nine of the twelve people rounded up and tried were found guilty of the killings and executed by firing squad. In customary communist-era fashion all questions concerning, for example, the precise circumstances surrounding the pogrom or the security forces' failure to prosecute the local alcoholic whose claim that his son had been abducted sparked the killings - a story he himself later admitted to have fabricated - were met with a deafening silence. A defining moment in the development of postwar Polish-Jewish relations, the Kielce pogrom long constituted a blank spot in both local memory and official political discourse. In symbolic terms, this has now been partially remedied by the commemorative plaque to the victims placed at the actual site of the massacre along with a series of official apologies and acts of public contrition that took place on the fiftieth anniversary of the pogrom in July 1996. Politically, however, the issue continues to rankle. The report of the posthumous official commission of enquiry, released in 1997 after five years' sifting of the evidence, stopped short of pronouncing definitively on the question of ultimate responsibility for the killings. And while Kwasek has finally admitted that those brought to trial were simply picked up at random, many of the broader issues surrounding the pogrom remain unanswered. As a result, the conspiracy theories of various hues that have long formed the bedrock of public discussion of the event continue to hold sway. The official line during the communist era - still heard on occasion - suggests that the pogrom was the work of the armed anticommunist opposition still active in the surrounding region in 1946. By contrast, anticommunist-oriented public opinion tends toward the thesis that the Polish communist party instigated the killings in a bid to distract public opinion from the rigged summer 1946 referendum used to legitimize the party's subsequent assumption of political power, and held only a few days prior to the killings. Predictably, some more right-wing groups like to point the finger at "Zionist organizations" who are supposed to have engineered the whole thing with the intention of discrediting Poland in the outside world. On a more positive note, the commission did at least categorically reject one of the more outlandish theories, to the effect that events in Kielce were engineered by Soviet security forces as part of an attempt to encourage Holocaust survivors to emigrate to Palestine - at this stage the official Moscow line favoured the establishment of an independent Jewish state under Soviet influence. In addition, the commission asked local authorities to examine the evidence submitted to the commission with a view to prosecuting named local officials at the time for acts of gross negligence and incompetence - a valedictory admission that whatever the remaining uncertainties, the authorities come out of the whole affair pretty appallingly.
Your Tip for Kielce
Help other backpackers! Write your own guides and backpacking tips to Kielce - they will appear instantly on this page - Please only write a tip/guide to Kielce - visit the main Kielce forum to ask a question!
Please do not post links to your site here (they won't work) - please use the Kielce webguide section below! Thanks.
|
