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This chapter examines the Kielce pogrom. On July 4, 1946, the most horrifying outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland took place in Kielce. On that day, ordinary citizens of this central Polish town, together with soldiers and militiamen, murdered forty Polish Jews and injured more than a hundred. This was not an isolated act of anti-Jewish violence in this early post-war period, but one of many such events which took place between 1945 and 1947. Nevertheless, it was striking because of its dimensions, because of the brutality with which it was accompanied, and because of the participation of local forces representing the new communist authority. The Kielce pogrom was the most powerful indicator that Jews were not to be welcomed to restore their lives among the ethnic Polish population. The chapter then assesses the extent to which anti-Jewish attitudes were prevalent among Polish society during and after the Kielce pogrom.

This chapter discusses the Poles and Jews in the Kielce Region and Radom. The relations between Poles and Jews and the situation of the Jewish population directly after the end of the Second World War on Polish territory are topics which have only recently been addressed in Polish historiography. The Kielce region is particularly important in any discussion of this problem, because of the importance of the pogrom in Kielce on July 4, 1946 in any evaluation of Polish–Jewish relations at that time. The chapter presents documents which pre-date that event and come mostly from Jewish sources. They reveal the complexity of the political, economic, and social situation in post-war Poland, which determined Polish–Jewish relations, and shed light on the situation within the Jewish community, whose fate had been drastically transformed by the events of the war.

Poland’s era of independence between the two world wars was bookended by waves of pogroms. The first section of this chapter concerns the more than 130 pogroms of 1918–1921; many of them initiated by Polish military troops as they entered towns and cities of the new Poland. The second section concerns the pogroms of 1935–1937 instigated by right-wing nationalists, the most infamous being the Przytyk pogrom of March 9, 1936. Both pogrom waves should be conceived as a part of a larger construct of shifting economic and political relations rather than as isolated events or simple manifestations of antisemitism. The final section reveals the post–World War II pogroms (1945–1946) as adhering to a similar pattern, though exacerbated by prior Nazi occupation and genocide and the postwar communist takeover.