Seventy years after dozens of Polish Holocaust survivors were bludgeoned to death in the Kielce Pogrom, psychologist Bogdan Bialek is intent on reconciling Poles and Jews. For years, the 61-year-old Catholic has organized annual memorial marches in Kielce, Poland, a city of about 200,000 people 150km south of the capital, Warsaw.
“Even if I were alone, I would walk to remember the dead. A man on his own, that’s already a huge crowd, it’s an entire city,” Bialek told reporters ahead of a weekend march.
On July 4, 1946, Kielce erupted in a frenzy of hatred after a rumor was spread that a Jewish family had held a Christian boy in a cellar overnight.
Before the war, Jews made up a quarter of Kielce’s 80,000 residents, only about 500 of whom are estimated by historians to have survived the Holocaust.
However, a year after the war ended, the town was whipped up into a new anti-Semitic frenzy, fueled by tales of Jews needing to have blood transfusions from Christian children to survive, or using Christians’ blood to make matzos (unleavened bread).
Soviet communist police, soldiers and workers from a nearby steelworks raided a house on 7/9 Planty St sheltering Holocaust survivors, including some from the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German death camp.
At least 42 Jews were killed and over 40 injured in the worst anti-Semitic attack in postwar Poland, according to the Washington-based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The pogrom went down as one of the darkest moments in the thousand-year-long history of Polish Jews.
A formal Polish inquiry put the Jewish death toll at 37, with other victims including three non-Jewish Poles and two people killed during a robbery.
After the pogrom, tens of thousands of Jews left the country for good.
Nine people were sentenced to death for their role in the killings, but the authorities of the time tried to blame regime opponents for the crime.
In time, a leaden silence came to shroud the case, with the Soviet communist regime preferring to keep it under wraps.
“When I arrived in Kielce in 1978, I was surprised by the silence; nobody wanted to talk about it,” Bialek said.
When communism fell in 1989, locals in Kielce held a memorial for the victims of the pogrom, but for Bialek it was too little and too official.
“There were many ceremonies, but they were attended by politicians or municipal leaders. That didn’t suit me as we had to follow the heart, not the head,” he said.
In 2000, he and a friend decided to organize the first March of Memory and Prayer.
On her first visit to Kielce in a half-century in 2004, Marek Edelman, then the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, found it to be “a completely different city.”
Several years ago, the son of one of the workers who took part in the pogrom attended the remembrance ceremony, where he delivered a short heart-rending speech and hugged one of the survivors.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not