Cries of the Mob in the Pogroms in Rzeszów (June 1945), Cracow (August 1945), and Kielce (July 1946) as a Source for the State of Mind of the Participants
Cries of the Mob in the Pogroms in Rzeszów (June 1945), Cracow (August 1945), and Kielce (July 1946) as a Source for the State of Mind of the Participants

Summary/Abstract: Although the starting point for all the Polish postwar pogroms (save for one) was a blood libel, this particular motif did not attract the historians’ attention until recently. Theories on plots devised by “Soviet advisors” or “Zionists” enjoyed an incomparably greater popularity. This article, based upon the documentation of the Rzeszów and Kielce pogroms, the most recent ethnographic resources (2005–2009), the documentation used in Marcel Łoziński’s documentary Świadkowie (The Witnesses; made in 1980s), and an intensive search at the National Remembrance Institute (IPN), reveals a uniform social-mental formation of those partaking in the pogroms—the attackers and militiamen disciplining them, public prosecutors, and judges. All of them—including militiamen and Security Service officers—were subject to a blood libel suggestion. Traces of this thread have survived till this day in some segments of Polish society—not only in the countryside population, despite any appearances. This article aims at showing how an anti-Jewish alliance was getting formed in the first years after the liberation, on the grounds of a gradually strengthening “Polish national socialism,” and along with it, a synthesis of religious anti-Semitism (Jew as a “kidnapper/bloodsucker”) and a modern anti-Semitism (Jew as a “capitalist/bloodsucker” and “Judeo-communists” contaminating a sound national/party organism).

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