The house in Kielce where the 1946 pogrom took place. Photo: cc/Grzegorz Pietrzak
As many as 42 people perished in the massacre, and the crime prompted thousands of Jews who had survived the war to emigrate.
A March of Remembrance and Prayer is due to take place on Monday afternoon. Later this evening, honours will be handed out to figures active in building bridges been Poles and Jews.
The commendations are being made in the name of Jan Karski, the late resistance veteran who was instrumental in communicating details of Hitler’s holocaust of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The Kielce Pogrom itself was carried out by Poles on 4 July 1946, ten months after the official end of the Second World War.
A historian at the Jewish Historical Institute, Hanna Wegrzynek, has reminded that the pogrom was not the only such tragic event in Poland’s post-war history, carried out by Polish society, which in her opinion was demoralised by the wartime policies of Nazi Germany.
“For informing on Jews in hiding, you would be rewarded by receiving their property,” Wegrzynek told Polish Radio.
“The society was also well aware of the Holocaust during World War II, perhaps giving them a feeling of impunity. You could denounce Jews, you could take their possessions. They were pushed to the margin of society,” she continued.
The pogrom was sparked by false claims that a Polish Catholic boy named Henryk Blaszczyk had been kidnapped by Jews, thus raising the ancient spectre of ritual murder.
Police and soldiers, accompanied by an angry mob of hundreds of locals, surrounded a building occupied by members of the Jewish community. Waves of violence broke out shortly thereafter.
Some Jews were murdered within the building, whilst others were dragged out into the street and beaten by the mob. Nine death sentences were later handed down to some of those accused of taking part in the murders.
Historian Ewa Wegrzynek has added that the pogrom had a significant impact on post-war Polish-Jewish relations. The scale of it prompted the first major exodus of Jews from Poland after the war, estimated to have reached 100,000 people.
Some voices continue to cite the massacre as a crime instigated by the communist security services. Others, such as Polish-born US academic Jan Gross, have placed the emphasis on long-running currents of anti-Semitism in certain sections of Polish society, exacerbated by the ordeal of war.
World War II survivor Marian Kalbary remembers the atmosphere of those times in Poland. “Anti-Semitism was still very prevalent […]. You could say that a part of the society could not come to terms with the fact that some of the Jews survived the war,” he told Polish Radio reporter Kobi Weitzner.
“Killing the Jewish population was not out of the ordinary. Many of them were caught and murdered on trains on a regular basis. A group of alleged Polish patriots would get on a train, […] and take the Jews out to kill them. It was a time of lawlessness in Poland,” Kalbary adds.
Meanwhile, a 2004 investigation by the state-backed Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) concluded that Soviet instigation of the pogrom could not be upheld, owing to “lack of direct evidence and lack of obvious Soviet interest in provoking the events.” (nh/aba/jb)