Nieznane dokumenty do historii pogromu kieleckiego: Protokoły przesłuchań Henryka Błaszczyka i Gerszona Lewkowicza z lipca 1946 roku
Recently Discovered Documents Regarding the History of the Kielce Pogrom: the Statements of Henryk Błaszczyk and Gerszon Lewkowicz from July 1946

Summary/Abstract: The Kielce pogrom was one of the most important turning points in post-war history of Polish Jews. Over the last two decades, these events served as the subject of several important scientific works and were also present in the media and in the general consciousness of Poles, first of all thanks to Jan Tomasz Gross’s book Strach (“Fear”). Even so, we still lack full knowledge of the causes, course and consequences of the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Kielce. In these circumstances, the locating of all the existing source materials documenting the Kielce events is extremely important. The article analyses two documents not published so far, concerning the pogrom of the Jews in Kielce on 4 July 1946, which were discovered among the records of the Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance in Kielce. These are the minutes of interrogation of two persons directly connected with the developments in Kielce. The first document is the original version of the testimony by Henryk Błaszczyk, a nine-year old boy whose disappearance is regarded as the immediate cause of the outbreak of violence. The record of Błaszczyk’s testimony presented below probably served as the basis for producing the document which until now was regarded as the boy’s first account and which was published in 2006. The differences between the two versions of the document are reviewed in the introduction preceding the presentation of archive materials. The second document is the transcript of a deposition by Kielce Jew Gerszon Lewkowicz. This is one of just a few known accounts made back in July 1946 by a person who happened to stay in the Jewish Committee building at ul. Planty 7 during the pogrom. Lewkowicz’s testimony has not been published before. Likewise, it was not probably used in the course of the criminal trials held in the wake of the pogrom or served as source material in scientific research.

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