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This chapter explores the General Jewish Workers' Union, the Bund, which was established in Vilna in 1897. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Bund in the USSR was forcibly united with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In independent Poland, the Bund by the 1930s moved to a less revolutionary and more social-democratic position and established itself as one of the principal parties on the ‘Jewish street’. It retained its basic programme of establishing ‘national-cultural’ autonomy for the Jews in Poland, once a democratic socialist state had been achieved. After the Second World War, it was also active in countries other than Poland. Although the activists of Bund chapters outside Poland supported the Polish Bund with funds, the Polish Bund remained fully independent in its work in Poland. The Bund in post-war Poland began its activity in the autumn of 1944. Like other parties, the Bund started its work in Poland by searching for its pre-war members and taking care of Jewish youth regardless of orientation.

This chapter studies working-class nationalism and antisemitism in post-war Poland. It argues that in early post-war Poland, citizen–state relations expressed themselves in part through national identity. In this context, antisemitism took on new meaning in Poland because it became not only an expression of fears about national identity and cultural vulnerability, but also a means of defining the state and citizenship. Thus, national identity paradoxically sharpened as Poland approached homo-ethnicity. Before and during the war, Polish workers had expressed a strong national consciousness, and post-war reconstruction invoked national themes. The professed class nature of the new state, however, and the practical concerns of the workers eventually made allegiance to the state a central issue. That allegiance was potentially based not just upon prosperity or nationalism, but upon agreement with certain programmes and policies of the communist regime.

This chapter concentrates on the author Henryk Grynberg, who belongs to a group of contemporary Jewish authors who were children during the war and resumed life in Poland after it. It recounts Grynberg's childhood and how he survived the war by hiding with his mother in the Polish countryside. It also mentions Grynberg's training in journalism and experience as an actor in the post-war Yiddish theatre, where he began to write. The chapter talks about how Grynberg found refuge in the United States in 1947 after he went under official censorship of his work. It demonstrates how Grynberg established his literary reputation with lightly fictionalized autobiography, written in Polish in the 1960s and 1970s, first of the perils of life in hiding under the German occupation and then of coming of age in the complex environment of post-war Poland.

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 showcases the accounts of child survivors in Nazi-occupied Poland, as written in The Last Eyewitnesses. The accounts all follow a similar format, beginning with a discussion of pre-war family background, continuing with harrowing tales of wartime survival, and concluding with a section on the survivor’s experiences in post-war Poland. The consistent format makes the collection a particularly useful tool for scholarly analysis as well as for classroom use. The testimonies depict the life of Jewish children from all regions of inter-war Poland, both urban and rural, in a wide variety of settings in Nazi-occupied Poland: in hiding, in ghettos, in the camps, in the forests. In addition, a full range of family backgrounds is represented, from those who came from assimilated families and had been raised in a Polish milieu to those from Yiddish-speaking Orthodox backgrounds.

This chapter considers Ann Charney’s Dobryd, a memoir with a profound treatment of the aftermath of the Holocaust. Reported from a child’s point of view, the narrative provides a glimpse into the deepest workings of Charney’s psyche from the age of 3 until the age of 10. Though not a feminist fable, Dobryd is a story in which all the protagonists — Charney, her mother, and her aunt — are women who struggle and succeed on their own during the war and in the chaos of post-war Poland. Named after a Polish town near Lviv, the memoir encompasses the lives of members of three generations of a Jewish family as they and their community suffer through the horrors of the Holocaust. The story follows family members over a period of about forty years, penetrating deep into their inner world.

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.