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Anti-Jewish Violence In Poland, 1944–1946 refers to a series of violent incidents that immediately followed the end of the Second World War in Poland, peaking between March 1945 and July 1946. The number of Jewish victims is a subject of debate. It is estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 Polish citizens of Jewish ethnicity—returning home after the Holocaust and repatriated from the East—were murdered. The incidents ranged from individual attacks to pogroms. Reasons for increasing hostility towards Jews have been attributed to overall demoralization of the society by horrors of war, as well as combination of pre-war anti-Semitism, the targeting of Polish Jews as being responsible for the communist consolidation of power, and in some cases, concerns that returning Jews would reclaim their property. Among the Jewish victims of violence were also the Stalinist functionaries of the new regime, assassinated by anti-Communist underground without racial motives.

Background

After the war, Poles and Jews constituted two communities with two different but both tragic war experiences, however the relations between Polish and Jewish communities worsened after the Soviet takeover of Poland in 1945. Polish Jewish survivors of the Nazi Holocaust returning home were confronted with fears of being physically assaulted, robbed and even murdered by certain elements in Polish society. The situation was further complicated by the high rate of Jewish representation in the new Communist government and the fact that there were more Jewish survivors repatriated from the Soviet Union than those who managed to survive in occupied Poland, thus leading to stereotypes holding Jews responsible for the imposition of Communism in Poland. Anti-Semitic accusations came also from some high officials of the Polish Catholic Church. Pogroms spurred by blood libel charges, accusing Jews of kidnapping and ritual murder of Polish children, erupted in Krakow, Kielce and other Polish towns. Acts of anti-Jewish violence were also recorded in villages and small towns of central Poland, where the overwhelming majority of attacks occurred.Shortly after the Kielce pogrom, violence against Jews had ceased. and by the spring of 1947 the number of Jews in Poland declined from 240,000 to 90,000 due to mass migration.

Blood libel

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Religious antisemitism was one of the factors contributing to anti-Jewish violence. Blood libel myth remained powerful enough in postwar Poland to cause public anti-Jewish disturbances or riots in many Polish towns - Krakow, Kielce, Bytom, Bialystok, Bielawa, Czestochowa,Legnica, Otwock, Rzeszów, Sosnowiec, Szczecin, Tarnow

Kraków and Kielce pogroms

The Kraków pogrom of August 11, 1945, was the first anti-Jewish pogrom in postwar Poland. Direct cause of the pogrom were rumours of alleged attempt by Jewish woman to kidnap and murder Polish child and alleged discovery of thirteen or even eighty corpses of Christian children that supposedly had been found in Kupa Synagogue. During the riot, Jews were attacked in Kazimierz, and other parts of Krakow and Kupa Synagogue was set on fire.

Another pogrom directly caused by the ritual murder accusations erupted in Kielce on July 4, 1946. The rumour that Polish boy was kidnapped but managed to escape from Jewish captivity, and that other Polish children had been ritually murdered by the Jews ignited violent public reaction directed at the Kielce Jewish community. Pogrom in Kielce resulted in 37 people being murdered and many more injured.

Allegations of communism sympathies

Members of the former Communist Party of Poland (KPP) returned from the Soviet Union, was a small but highly visible number of Poles of Jewish origin, who became active in the new Polish Communist party and the Stalinist security apparatus. Their representation in the communist regime was considerably higher than their share in the general Polish population who in general had anti-Soviet and anti-communist sentiments. Sociologist Tadeusz Piotrowski, assumes that, Stalin had intentionally employed some of them in positions of repressive authority in order to put Poles and Jews "on a collision course." The underground anti-communist press held them responsible for the murder of Polish opponents of the new regime, thus fuelling the anti-Jewish sentiments among ordinary Poles and further strengthening mythology of "Żydokomuna" in Poland.

Number of victims

A number of historians, including Antony Polonsky and Jan T. Gross cite the figures of Dobroszycki's 1973 work, where he reported around 1500 Jews having been murdered during the postwar anti-Jewish violence in Poland. Dobroszycki wrote that "according to general estimates 1500 Jews lost their lives in Poland from liberation until the summer of 1947." David Engel of New York University stated that Dobroszycki "offered no reference for such 'general estimates'" which "have not been confirmed by any other investigator" and "no proof-text for this figure" exists, not even a smaller one of 1000 claimed by Gutman. Engel wrote that "both estimates seem high." Deak, Gross and Judt note that Dobroszycki "always paid meticulous attention to numerical statistics." Other estimates include those of Anna Cichopek claiming more than 1000 Jews murdered in Poland between 1944 and 1947 while Dr Lidiya Milyakova of Russian Academy of Sciences placed that number at 1500-1800. Similarly, according to a Jewish historian Stefan Grajek around 1000 Jews were murdered in the first half of year 1946 while Polish historian Tadeusz Piotrowski assumed 1500-2000 victims between the years 1944 and 1947, constituting 2 to 3 percent of the total number of victims of postwar violence in the country. A statistical compendium of "Jewish deaths by violence for which specific record is extant, by month and province" was compiled by the Yad Vashem Shoah Resource Center's International School for Holocaust Studies. The study used as a starting point a 1973 report by historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, who wrote that he had "analyzed records, reports, cables, protocols and press-cuttings of the period pertaining to anti-Jewish assaults and murders in 115 localities" in which approximately 300 Jewish deaths had been documented.

In the Yad Vashem Studies report, Holocaust scholar David Engel writes

" did not report the results of that analysis except in the most general terms, nor did he indicate the specific sources from which he had compiled his list of cases. Nevertheless, a separate, systematic examination of the relevant files in the archive of the Polish Ministry of Public Administration, supplemented by reports prepared by the United States embassy in Warsaw and by Jewish sources in Poland, as well as by bulletins published by the Central Committee of Polish Jews and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, has lent credibility to Dobroszycki's claim: it has turned up more or less detailed descriptions of 130 incidents in 102 locations between September 1944 and September 1946, in which 327 Jews lost their lives."

The data from the Yad Vashem study are reproduced in the table below.

Engel wrote that the compilation of cases is not exhaustive, suggesting that cases of anti-Jewish violence were selectively reported and recorded, and that there was no centralized, systematic effort record these cases. He cites numerous incidental reports of killings of Jews that for which no official reporting has survived. He concludes that these figures have "obvious weaknesses" and that the detailed records used to compile them are clearly deficient and lacking data from Białystok region. For example, Engel cites one source that shows a total of 108 Jewish deaths during March 1945, and another source that shows 351 deaths between November 1944 and December 1945.

See also

• Anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe, 1944–1946

Notes

1. ^ Template:Pl icon Stefan Grajek, Po wojnie i co dalej? Żydzi w Polsce, wlatach 1945−1949, translated by Aleksander Klugman, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warszawa 2003, ss. 240. Citation in Template:Lang-pl Page 254.
2. ^ Michael Bernhard, Henryk Szlajfer, From the Polish Underground, page 375 Published by Penn State Press, 2004, ISBN 0271025654, ISBN 9780271025650. 500 pages
3. ^ David S. Wyman, Charles H. Rosenzveig. The World Reacts to the Holocaust. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
4. Joanna B. Michlic. The Holocaust and Its Aftermath as Perceived in Poland: Voices of Polish Intellectuals, 1945-1947. In: David Bankier, ed. The Jews are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin After WW II. Berghahn Books, 2005.
5. Natalia Aleksiun. Jewish Responses to Antisemitism in Poland, 1944-1947. In: Joshua D. Zimmerman, ed. Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Rutgers University Press, 2003.
6. Daniel Blatamn. The Encounter between Jews and Poles in Lublin District after Liberation, 1944-1945. East European Politics & Societies. 2006, Vol. 20, No. 4, 598-621.
7. Manus I. Midlarsky. The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
8. Jan T. Gross. After Auschwitz. The reality and Meaning of Postwar antisemitism in Poland. In: Jonathan Frankel, ed. Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Oxford University Press US, 2005.
9. Bozena Szaynok. The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations. In: Robert Blobaum, ed. Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland. Cornell University Press, 2005.
10. Joanna B. Michlic. Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. University of Nebraska Press, 2006.
11. Dariusz Libionka, Antisemitism, Anti-Judaism, and the Polish Catholic Clergy during the Second World War, 1939-1945. In: Robert Blobaum, ed. Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland. Cornell University Press, 2005.
12. István Deák (2000). The politics of retribution in Europe : World War II and its aftermath. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. p. 111. ISBN 0691009538. OCLC 43840165. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
13. ^ Engel, David (1998). "Patterns Of Anti-Jewish Violence In Poland, 1944-1946". Yad Vashem Studies Vol. XXVI. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. {{cite book}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); |format= requires |url= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)p. 32
14. David Engel, "Patterns Of Anti-Jewish Violence In Poland, 1944-1946", p. 21 (second paragraph) Yad Vashem Studies Vol. XXVI. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. (PDF 198 KB file).
15. Aleksiun, Natalia (2003). "Jewish Responses to Antisemitism in Poland 1944-1947". In Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.). Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Rutgers University Press. p. 248.
16. Gross, Jan T. (2005). "After Auschwitz: The Reality and Meaning of Postwar Antisemitism in Poland". In Jonathan Frankel (ed.). Studies in Contemporary Jewry. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195182243.
17. ^ Tadeusz Piotrowski (sociologist) (1997). "Postwar years". Poland's Holocaust. McFarland & Company. p. 136. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help) Cite error: The named reference "Piotrowski" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
18. Michlic, p. 347.
19. ^ Template:Ru icon . Л.Б. Милякова Политика польских коммунистов в еврейском вопросе (1944-1947 гг.) (The politics of the Polish communists on the Jewish question in 1944-1947)
20. Cichopek, Anna (2003). "The Cracow pogrom of August 1945: A Narrative Reconstruction". In Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.). Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Rutgers University Press. p. 224.
21. ^ Robert B. Pynsent, ed. (2000). The Phoney Peace: Power and Culture in Central Europe, 1945-49. University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. ISBN 0903425017.
22. Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland's Holocaust, page 130, (ibidem) Published by McFarland, 1998.
23. Daniel Blatamn. The Encounter between Jews and Poles in Lublin District after Liberation, 1944-1945. East European Politics & Societies. 2006, Vol. 20, No. 4, 598-621. Pages 601-602.
24. Aleksander Hertz (1988). The Jews in Polish Culture. Northwestern University Press. p. 1.
25. István Deák (2000). The politics of retribution in Europe : World War II and its aftermath. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. pp. 106–107. ISBN 0691009538. OCLC 43840165. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
26. See, e.g., Antony Polanski. My Brother's Keeper? Routledge, 1989; Meyer Weinberg. Because They Were Jews: A History of Antisemitism. Greenwood Press, 1986; Jan Tomasz Gross. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton University Press, 2002; Natalia Aleksiun. Jewish Responses to Antisemitism in Poland, 1944-1947. In: Joshua D. Zimmerman, ed. Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Rutgers University Press, 2003.
27. Cited in Engel, 1998
28. Yisrael Gutman. The Jews in Poland after World War II (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1985).
29. Cichopek, The Cracow pogrom of August 1945, p. 221.
30. Template:Pl icon Stefan Grajek, Po wojnie i co dalej? Żydzi w Polsce, w latach 1945−1949, (translated from Hebrew by Aleksander Klugman), Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warszawa 2003, pg. 254
31. Lucjan Dobroszycki. "Restoring Jewish Life in Post-War Poland", Soviet Jewish Affairs 3 (1973), pp. 68-70. Cited in Engel 1998

• Blood libel
• Jewish Polish history
• Anti-Jewish pogroms
• History of Poland (1945–1989)
• World War II crimes in Poland