Authors: Matthew Brzezinski
By June 1946, Zivia Lubetkin had also left Poland forever. Isaac had mixed feelings about letting his pregnant wife undertake the perilous journey to Palestine by herself. But in the end he stayed in Poland to pursue his efforts on behalf of the wider Jewish community. Someone had to keep pushing the government, and Zuckerman was best positioned to fulfill that role.
On July 4, he was sitting in the office of Polish prime minister Edward Osobka-Morawski. He and Adolf Berman had come to talk to Poland’s unelected leader about Palestine and the mass arrests of Jewish activists that had taken place there a few days earlier in a security
sweep known as Black Saturday. Zuckerman and Berman wanted the Polish government to condemn Britain’s crackdown against paramilitary Zionist organizations such as the Haganah, the Palmach, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang, whom the British were accusing of terrorism.
The prime minister nodded sympathetically, doubtless aware that Berman’s brother outranked him in the regime’s opaque hierarchy. As the head of the Soviet-established secret police, Jacob Berman was said to be the second most powerful man in Poland. “
It was even said that he had a direct line to Stalin,” Zuckerman recalled. In Poland, Jacob Berman answered only to Soviet NKVD general Ivan Serov. Serov took his orders from the infamous Soviet secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, who in turn answered only to Stalin. Key decisions on Polish matters of state were thus conveyed from Stalin to Beria to Serov, who then relayed the instructions to Berman. The prime minister was even farther down the chain.
Anxious not to offend his well-connected guests, the prime minister suggested that Isaac draft a statement for the Foreign Ministry to look at, but he cautioned that there were larger issues at stake and that Poland’s situation vis-à-vis Britain was delicate. While the British had reluctantly recognized the new Provisional Government, they still held all of Poland’s gold reserves. In London, former officials from the government in exile, who had shipped the gold to England during the war, were lobbying hard for the bullion to remain in British safes. So Poland was effectively bankrupt, the prime minister reminded Isaac. Children in Warsaw were required to spend one school day each week clearing rubble and cleaning bricks because there was so little money for rebuilding. The country desperately needed its gold, and could ill afford to cross the British.
Isaac sighed and said he understood. He was growing increasingly frustrated by his inability to push mass emigration through diplomacy. His work was not bearing fruit. Maybe Kovner and some of the other critics were right; maybe he was just wasting time, “pissing in the wind,” as Mark Edelman once put it. After all, what did he have to show for eighteen months of slavish courtship of the Communists? For all those toasts to Stalin’s health? In some respects, the whole emigration plan was losing steam. Much of the early momentum had
been lost once the initial shock that accompanied the Allied discovery of death camps had waned in the West. To most Allied governments, the humanitarian crisis associated with the Holocaust was over. Now that Jews were no longer considered at risk in Eastern Europe, there was no great urgency to evacuate survivors. Priorities were shifting for Western policymakers: a new conflict, the Cold War, with a new menace, the Soviet Union, was becoming a more immediate concern.
The perception that Jews were now safe in Poland was, tragically, false. The defeat of Nazi Germany had done little to change the anti-Semitic views of the ONR, the Falanga, the Sword and the Plough, and the National Armed Forces. While these far-right groups had primarily turned to killing Communists—an estimated fifteen thousand in 1945 and 1946—they still murdered Jews when the opportunity arose. The greasers still robbed and raped, only now they were less disposed to leave witnesses. And a third, perhaps even more disturbing phenomenon also began to manifest itself: greed killings. During the early stages of the war, many Jews had left valuables with neighbors and acquaintances or arranged for Gentiles to assume nominal ownership of their businesses to prevent the Nazis from seizing them. After the Holocaust, many of the temporary custodians believed they were now entitled to the assets. When Jewish survivors began trickling home, they were not always welcomed.
“People were shocked,” Boruch Spiegel recalled. “ ‘Where are all these Jews coming from?’ they asked. ‘How could so many still be alive?’ ”
In some cases, particularly in small towns, peasants who had assumed control of Jewish mills or other small businesses opted to kill the returning owners rather than step back down to their previous status. What was most distressing was that the murderers were not hate-filled fascists motivated by warped ideology and nationalism, or career criminals like the greasers. They were outwardly ordinary citizens with no history of violence. This, more than any other indicator, showed how far the value of life—particularly Jewish life—had plunged in postwar Poland. It could be traded for a leg up on the socioeconomic ladder.
Since official records were not properly kept during this chaotic period, the total number of Jews murdered in 1945 and 1946 is not precisely known.
Estimates by American scholars range from a low of
five hundred to as many as fifteen hundred deaths. Historians and sociologists also struggle to explain the resergence in anti-Semitism in the immediate postwar period. The effects of five years of relentless Nazi propaganda are cited as one major contributor. Guilty consciences may also have played a role. For some Poles, the presence of Jewish survivors served as a reminder of their own less than honorable behavior during the war. They may have wanted the witnesses and victims of their shameless acts gone, out of sight and mind. Mark Edelman had a simpler explanation: In this Hobbesian period, the strong preyed on the weak—and Holocaust survivors were severely weakened. “
Most of the attacks were pure and simple banditry, crimes of opportunity,” he asserted. “They had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.”
Edelman would not dispute, however, that hateful ideology underpinned some of the crimes.
Jews were “victims of the atmosphere created by the National Armed Forces,” he explained. “You’d hear in those days how Hitler didn’t get a chance to finish his work because there were a few Jews left, and those Jews want to seize control of Poland.” He was referring to the high-profile role that a tiny percentage of Jews were playing in the Soviet takeover. Some Jews were among the Polish Communists who had spent the war in Moscow being trained by the NKVD. Their numbers were relatively small, almost certainly fewer than a thousand officials, a tiny fraction of the nearly three hundred thousand surviving Polish Jews.
Nonetheless, they occupied perhaps as much as half of the senior posts and almost all the top slots in the new Soviet-installed secret police agencies.
This was not accidental. Stalin had a policy of pitting ethnic groups against one another throughout his empire. In Lithuania, for instance, the Polish minority did much of the NKVD’s dirty work. In Poland, Jewish survivors were sometimes recruited right out of the death camps by this new security apparatus. Told they would hunt Nazis and Gestapo collaborators, many eagerly signed on, thirsting for revenge. And part of the ministry’s function was indeed to bring war criminals to justice; the SS general Jürgen Stroop, for instance, was in a Warsaw jail cell awaiting trial and execution for suppressing the Ghetto Uprising. The secret police, however, did not confine itself to hunting Nazis. Its primary role was to stamp out opposition to
Poland’s annexation into the Soviet bloc, and Jacob Berman’s agency rapidly became the country’s most hated institution.
“
It was already bad enough [for Jews after the war], but [Berman’s agency] made the situation worse,” Boruch Spiegel said. As Stalin possibly intended, his stratagem deflected popular anger away from the Soviet Union and channeled it internally toward an ethnic minority. Residual anti-Semitism stoked the political fires, and Jews with no role in the new regime were disproportionately targeted in Poland’s low-grade civil war. The killings attracted little or no attention outside Poland because they occurred sporadically and individually against a persistently violent backdrop. Political and ethnic strife was also claiming the lives of thousands of Germans, Ukrainians, and Polish Gentiles. The continuing murders of Jews had not produced newspaper headlines in America or England, altered public opinion, or swayed Western policymakers. But as Isaac sat in the prime minister’s office on July 4, 1946, discussing ways to pressure London into liberalizing Palestinian immigration, an event was unfolding that would change all that.
Their meeting was interrupted by the ringing of a telephone. “
Gentlemen—a great catastrophe,” the prime minister said after taking the call. “A pogrom in Kielce. A pogrom against Jews.”
That night Isaac raced to Kielce, about a hundred miles southwest of Warsaw. The roads were in bad shape, and he did not arrive until early morning, by which time the streets were empty. “
Kielce was a ghost town,” he found. Zuckerman instructed his driver to take him to Planty Street, the epicenter of the violence, where he encountered a scene all too familiar from the Warsaw Ghetto. Feathers from ripped bedding covered the street. Furniture and pots and pans lay strewn on the sidewalks. Shards of glass were everywhere, along with dark pools of coagulated blood. And then there were the bodies: dozens of them, some hastily covered by newspapers, leaving bruised and battered limbs exposed.
Soldiers and militiamen milled around. Isaac approached an officer, demanding to see the ranking Security Office commander,
who received him immediately and with great courtesy. It was obvious that
the local secret police chief, Major Wladyslaw Sobczynski, knew of Isaac’s impending arrival and had been instructed to cooperate.
Isaac started asking questions, trying to clarify details. The sequence of events was still murky, obscured by contradictory accounts. But Zuckerman quickly pieced together a rough picture of what had occurred. The trouble started when an eight-year-old Gentile boy failed to return home. He had gone to visit relatives in an outlying village without informing his parents, who notified the police that the boy was missing. Somehow a rumor spread that the child had been kidnapped by Jews and taken to Planty Street, where several hundred Jewish refugees were living in a large hostel. According to the rumor, the residents of the hostel were holding the boy in the basement and preparing to sacrifice him for a religious ritual. A crowd gathered on Planty Street, demanding the boy’s return. The police arrived and discovered that the building had no basement at all. But the revelation only whipped the mob into a greater frenzy, and it steadily grew, attracting onlookers, passersby, and residents from throughout the neighborhood. The police sealed the building, keeping Jewish residents inside. Uniformed officers swept the hostel for weapons, confiscating pistols and a few rifles that members of a Zionist youth group had been using for target practice.
What happened next was less clear. According to Major Sobczynski, he called the local police chief,
informed him that the kidnapping charges were nothing but a “provocation,” and instructed him to withdraw his officers. The Security Office and the uniformed militia had a long-standing rivalry in Kielce, according to the Princeton historian Jan Gross, which allegedly began because Sobczynski’s predecessor was Jewish. The militia had anti-Semitic members. After the call, Sobczynski dispatched one of his deputies, Albert Grynbaum, with two carloads of Security Office agents to remove the militia officers from Planty Street. A scuffle between the militiamen and the security agents broke out. By now the crowd was many hundred strong, and it sided with the militiamen. People started to hurl stones and insults at the Security Office men. Meanwhile, several truckloads of Polish soldiers showed up, and the mob began to shout for the military to search the hostel for the missing boy. Agent Grynbaum retreated inside the building.
“I assembled about forty Jews in one room and didn’t let the soldiers
in. I told [the soldiers] that their task was to restore order in the street rather than carry out the search,” he later testified. “A few minutes later two Jews came to tell me that the military were killing Jews and plundering their possessions. This was when I heard shots.”
An orgy of violence then erupted. “
Uniformed soldiers and a number of civilians forced their way into the building,” Boruch Dorfman, a resident of the Jewish refugee hostel, recalled. “They told us to get out and form a line. Civilians, including women, were on the stairs. The soldiers hit us with their rifle butts. Civilians, men and women, also beat us.… We came down to the square. Others who were brought out with me were stabbed with bayonets and shot at. We were pelted with stones.”
By the time the pogrom was over, more than forty Jews had been murdered, and many more were in critical condition. As Isaac listened to Major Sobczynski’s report, he was fairly certain that he wasn’t getting the full story. But his priority wasn’t apportioning blame. Polish courts could do that later. His immediate concern was looking after the wounded and evacuating the survivors to safety. Isaac called Adolf Berman to arrange for a Red Cross train to be sent from Krakow. He also telephoned Mark Edelman. Although the two had drifted apart, Isaac needed someone he could trust. Mark had just finished his first full year of medical school, training that could be useful. Edelman immediately agreed to come to Kielce with the hospital train.
While Zuckerman waited for medical help to arrive, he supervised the collection of the corpses. They were scattered in staircases, in the street, in the square—even as far afield as the train stations of neighboring towns, where Jews had been forcibly removed from railcars and bludgeoned to death. Some of the pogrom victims had been mutilated. One pregnant woman had had her uterus ripped out. Another had been chased by a mob to a riverbank, where she was stoned to death. Shockingly, the perpetrators had been ordinary Poles: bakers and seamstresses, white-collar workers and carpenters, God-fearing Catholics who went to church on Sundays. How, after the tragedy of the Holocaust, something like this could occur in a supposedly civilized society, Isaac could not understand.