Jewish pogroms in Poland after the war. It happened in Jedwabne

Poland started a new anti-Russian scandal. The head of the Foreign Ministry of this country (I just don’t want to call this scoundrel by name), speaking on Polish radio, raised the issue of inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin to Auschwitz - on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of this notorious concentration camp by the Red Army, which occurred on January 27, 1945 of the year. The minister directly hinted that Putin's arrival was not desirable. And not only for political reasons, but also for “historical” ones. As the minister himself said:

“It was the Ukrainian Front. The First Ukrainian Front and the Ukrainians liberated the concentration camp at Auschwitz, there were Ukrainian soldiers there on that January day, and they opened the gates of the camp, and they liberated the camp.”

Seriously, from a scientific point of view, I simply don’t want to comment on this outright nonsense from a person who seems to have a higher history education. For anyone who is at least a little familiar with the history of the war knows very well that the names of any Soviet fronts during the war were adopted not at all because of the national composition of certain military units, but purely according to the geographical direction of action. So, until 1943, the First Ukrainian Front was called Voronezh - because at that time the troops of this front formation were stationed precisely under this Russian city, and with the movement to the west, the front became “Ukrainian”...

No, this obvious provocateur with the rank of minister knew and knows everything perfectly well! And he deliberately went for this provocation. Just for political and historical purposes: the first ones are really directed against a possible visit of Russian officials (due to the sharp deterioration of bilateral relations), but the historical ones look much more interesting.

First of all, on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory, there is a clear desire of the Poles to once again belittle the role of the Soviet Union and Russia, as the legal successor of the USSR, in the defeat of Nazi Germany. And Poland really wants to get away from the topic of the massive participation of Poles in the terrible policy of extermination of Jews during the Second World War, including in Auschwitz - and not only during the war, but also after it.

This topic is very painful for Poland; it regularly arises on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which coincides with the liberation of Auschwitz. The Polish authorities, with the dexterity of experienced swindlers, every time try to sully the active participation of their country in this tragedy of the Jewish people. And today they are clearly acting proactively - they started an anti-Russian provocation in order to again avoid discussing the topic of Polish Nazism after the noise that was raised.

But we are not going to follow the lead of the provocateur minister. Our website publishes an excerpt from a large study “Poland and the Jews”, which, in theory, should make any Pole blush with shame. We took this historical material about Polish anti-Semitism from the portal page "Jewish Roots" http://j-roots.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=455&Itemid=455#_ftn1.

It would be interesting to know Mr. Minister's opinion on the facts presented here. However, one can imagine his reaction: he would probably explain everything as “the machinations of Putin’s propaganda” - Polish Russophobes usually simply don’t have enough sense for anything more...

How the Jews left Poland

During World War II, at least 2.8 million Polish Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

It was in Poland that the Nazis created factories for the extermination of Jews: Treblinka-2, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz-2), Sobibor, Belzec. These enterprises are usually called camps, but in fact they were not camps, since only a few hundred prisoners permanently lived in them, ensuring the functioning of the death factories. People doomed to death arrived at the place of extermination, were destroyed within a short time, after which the factory was ready to receive the next batch of doomed Jews. In the most “productive” death factory, Treblinka, located 80 kilometers northeast of Warsaw, 800 thousand Jews were exterminated. There is no place on earth where more people have been killed.

In camps such as Auschwitz 1 there was a permanent contingent of prisoners, they did at least some kind of work. In the death camps they only killed, and the prisoners provided this conveyor belt in order to eventually become its victims themselves.

After almost all Polish Jews were killed in the death camps, trains from other countries captured by the Nazis began to arrive there.

However, Polish Jews during the war died not only from the external enemy, but also from their Polish neighbors.

During World War II, Poles committed war crimes against Jews in at least 24 regions of the country. This conclusion was reached by a government commission that investigated events in Poland dating back to the beginning of World War II.

The commission's report occupies 1,500 pages and is called “Around Jedwabno.” Jedwabno is a small Polish town that became a symbol of the extermination of Jews by the Poles even before the start of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany. For a long time, the killing of Jews during the war in Poland was considered to be the work of the Nazis alone, but a government investigation carried out over two years proved that it was the Poles who were behind the ethnic massacre. According to an investigation by the Institute of National Memory, the number of Jews killed by Poles in Jedwabno alone is at least 1 thousand people. The exact number of Jews killed by Poles during the war is impossible to determine, but it is known that 60 investigations resulted in 93 Poles being charged with crimes against Jews in 23 regions of the country. As a result of trials held in Poland in the early post-war years, 17 people were sentenced to prison, and one was executed.

Today they prefer not to talk about this in Poland.

At the same time, during the war, many Poles were ready to sacrifice their lives to save Jews. During the war, the Nazis in Poland executed over 2 thousand people who saved or helped Jews. In Jerusalem, in the park of the Yad Vashem Museum, there is an “alley of the righteous”, on which the names of people who risked their lives to save Jews during the war are immortalized. Most of all on this alley, 3558 names, are the righteous from Poland. Among those who saved Jews during the war was the family of Pope John Paul II.

But there were many more people in Poland who hated Jews! In the fall of 1941, after the first mass extermination of Jews by the Poles, General Grot-Rowecki, the leader of the underground Home Army, wrote to the Polish government in exile in London:

“The pro-Jewish sympathies expressed in the statements of members of the London government make a very unfavorable impression in the country and greatly contribute to the success of Nazi propaganda. Please take into account that the overwhelming majority of the population is anti-Semitic. Even socialists are no exception to this, the only difference is in tactics. The need for emigration as a way to solve the Jewish question is as obvious to everyone as the need to expel the Germans. Anti-Semitism has become widespread."

In 1944, London government commissioner Kelt reported in his report on a trip to Poland: “According to local opinion, the London government is going overboard in expressing its sympathy for the Jews. Considering that Jews are not liked in the country, the statements of government members are perceived as too philo-Semitic.”

It is also striking that even those who actually helped the Jews remained active haters of them. In August 1942, writer Zofia Kossak, head of the influential underground Catholic organization Polish Revival Front, published a leaflet with the following content:

“We speak on behalf of the Poles. Our attitude towards Jews has not changed. We still consider them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we know that they hate us more than the Germans and consider us to be responsible for their troubles. But even this does not relieve us of the obligation to condemn the crime being committed.”

During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, members of the Polish Resistance tried to provide assistance to the rebels as secretly as possible, so as not to undermine the respect of Polish society for their cause. This attitude towards Poles helping Jews to escape was widespread. Thus, Antonina Wyzhikovskaya, a resident of Evdabno, who hid seven Jews from Polish massacres, had to hide from her fellow countrymen herself after they beat her for her compassion for the Jews.

From 1973 to 1985, French documentarian Claude Lanzmann produced a nine-hour documentary, Shoah, composed entirely of interviews with Jewish survivors, former concentration camp guards, and Poles who witnessed the Holocaust with their own eyes. The most powerful impression is made not by the stories of eyewitnesses who saw the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews, but by the grins of the Poles with which they recalled the trains carrying thousands of people. The Poles, talking about Jews doomed to death, habitually grinned and expressively ran the edge of their palm across their throats.

They also made this gesture when carriages filled with doomed people passed by them, heading to the death camp. In the film, they explained their gesture with the desire to inform those going to their death about the fate awaiting them, but from the joyful grin of these Polish peasants it is clear that they are quite happy with the fate of the Jews, just as they are happy with the fact that already during the war they occupied the empty houses of their Jewish neighbors.

In European countries occupied by Nazi Germany, the Nazis' mass extermination of Jews aroused compassion and gave rise to mass heroism. So in Denmark, almost all the Jews of the country, seven thousand people, were transported on fishing boats to neighboring Sweden and, thus, were saved from destruction.

In Poland, unlike all other European countries, the mass extermination of Jews did not evoke mass sympathy among the Poles for the persecuted people. The genocide of the Jews only caused the Poles to smile with satisfaction. And after the war, Jewish pogroms began in Poland...

On August 11, 1945, a major pogrom occurred in Krakow. The intervention of units of the Polish Army and the Soviet Army put an end to the pogrom, but there were killed and wounded among the Jews. A memo from the Polish authorities stated that from November 1944 to December 1945, according to available information, 351 Jews were killed.

In 1946 there were already more victims. The most famous pogrom took place in the city of Kielce, where about 20,000 Jews lived before the outbreak of World War II, accounting for a third of the city's population. After the end of the war, only 200 Jewish survivors, mostly former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, returned to Kielce. The reason for the start of the pogrom was the disappearance of an eight-year-old boy, who, after returning, said that Jews had kidnapped him and, having hidden him, intended to kill him. Later, during the investigation, it turned out that the boy was sent by his father to the village, where he was taught what he had to tell.

On the morning of July 4, 1946, a pogrom began; by noon, about two thousand people had gathered near the building of the Jewish Committee in Kielce. Among the slogans heard were: “Death to the Jews!”, “Death to the killers of our children!”, “Let’s finish Hitler’s work!” At noon, a group led by a Polish police sergeant arrived at the building and joined the pogromists. The crowd broke down the doors and shutters, the rioters entered the building and began to kill the people who had taken refuge there with logs, stones and prepared iron rods.

During the pogrom, from 40 to 47 Jews were killed, among them were children and pregnant women. Also, more than 50 people were injured. During the pogrom, two Poles were killed who tried to resist the pogromists.

Already on July 9, 1946, twelve people were in the dock before the participants in the visiting session of the Supreme Military Court, and on July 11, nine defendants were sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment, ten years and seven years in prison.

Despite the harsh sentences, the Kielce pogrom marked the beginning of the mass emigration of Jews from Poland.

If in May 1946 3,500 Jews left Poland, in June - 8,000, then after the pogrom in Kielce, 19,000 people left during July, and in August - already 35,000.

On September 24, 1946, the Soviet embassy in Warsaw reported to the USSR Foreign Ministry that over the course of several months, starting in June of this year, more than 70-80 thousand Jews had left the country. The official document assessed the reasons for the exodus of Jews from Poland as follows:

“The presence of anti-Semitic views in the country in the pre-war years and their intensified propaganda during the years of German occupation are still felt today. Difficulties arose in finding Jews for work, because... There were heads of enterprises who refused to hire Jews, fearing discontent from the staff of their enterprise. For enterprises where a significant number of Jews worked, obstacles were often created in the provision of raw materials, auxiliary materials, and transport.

More and more Jews were imbued with the idea of ​​leaving Poland and finding another place of residence, acquiring a homeland for themselves. ... After the events in the Kielce Voivodeship, panic and a mass movement to the west began.”

After the drama in Kielce, it became unsafe for Jews to travel by train; Jews were often thrown out of cars while the train was moving. Julian Tuwim, an outstanding Polish poet of Jewish origin, wrote to his friend J. Staudinger in July 1946: “...I wanted to go by train to Lodz. In connection with the events known to you, it is safer for me to postpone the trip to a more favorable time.”

Two years before these events, Julian Tuwim wrote a fiery manifesto “We are Polish Jews,” which contains the following words: "I am Polish. ... Pole - because I was born in Poland, grew up here, I was raised here, I studied here, because in Poland I was happy and unhappy; because I want to return from emigration to Poland, even if I were promised paradise in other places.”

At the end of the summer of 1953, Julian Tuwim and his wife decided that they would spend Christmas at a resort in Zakopane. But soon a stranger called him and said threateningly into the phone: “Don’t come to Zakopane, otherwise you may not leave alive”…

And, indeed, Tuwim did not leave Zakopane alive: on December 27, 1953, his heart stopped, and a heart attack overtook him at the age of 59. There is one less Jew in Poland...

By the mid-sixties, the number of Jews living in Poland was less than one percent of their pre-war number, that is, about 35 thousand people. But in 1968, the remaining Jews were expelled from the country...

After the war, a pro-Soviet regime was established in Poland, but there was no unity in the leadership of the Polish United Workers' Party (POPR), two groups of figures fought for power with varying success. One, openly pro-Soviet, was largely represented by Jews, the other was nationalistic and sought not to follow instructions from Moscow in everything, but to pursue an independent policy to a certain extent. Anti-Semitism was used in political struggles for power.

After Israel's six-day war in 1967, an anti-Semitic campaign began in all countries of the communist bloc under the guise of being anti-Zionist. In Poland, this campaign lay on well-prepared soil.

In March 1968, the first secretary of the PUWP, Władysław Gomulka, accused Jews of organizing student unrest. He declared that this was a “Zionist conspiracy” and actually ordered new persecution of Jews. Jews were faced with a choice: to emigrate, or to completely abandon their national, cultural and religious identity.

Since Poland, unlike the USSR and other socialist countries, allowed Jews to leave the country, the last Jews were forced to leave, and in 2002 in Poland only 1133 Jews were counted in the census...

"Jewish Roots"

During the Second World War, at least 2.8 million Polish Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. The Nazis created death factories in Poland: Treblinka 2, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz 2), Sobibor, Belzec.

After almost all Polish Jews were killed in the death camps, trains from other countries captured by the Nazis began to arrive there. However, Polish Jews during the war died not only from the external enemy, but also from their Polish neighbors.

During World War II, Poles committed war crimes against Jews in at least 24 regions of the country. This conclusion was reached by a government commission that investigated events in Poland dating back to the beginning of World War II. The commission’s report occupies 1,500 pages and is called “Around Jedwabno.” Jedwabno is a small Polish town that became a symbol of the extermination of Jews by the Poles even before the start of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany. For a long time, the killing of Jews during the war in Poland was considered to be the work of the Nazis alone, but a government investigation carried out over two years proved that it was the Poles who were behind the ethnic massacre. According to an investigation by the Institute of National Memory, the number of Jews killed by Poles in Jedwabno alone is at least 1 thousand people. The exact number of Jews killed by Poles during the war is impossible to determine, but it is known that 60 investigations resulted in 93 Poles being charged with crimes against Jews in 23 regions of the country.Today they prefer not to talk about this in Poland.

Pogrom in Jedwabne.

Mass murder of Jews in the village of Jedwabne in the Bialystok region of the BSSR (now Poland) during the Second World War, in July 1941. For a long time it was believed that the pogrom was carried out by German punitive forces, but it is now known that the bulk of the pogromists were Poles living in the surrounding areas areas. On July 10, 1941, a crowd of angry Poles attacked Jews, including a local rabbi. Most of the Jews were burned alive in a barn.

G group of Jewish children with teachers, Jedwabne, 1938.

Until 2000, it was believed that this massacre was carried out by the Germans. However, in 2001, the American historian Jan Tomasz Gross published the book “Sąsiedzi: Historia zagłady zydowskiego miasteczka”, in which he showed that the pogrom was carried out by local residents without German help. The basic facts seem undeniable. In July 1941, a large group of Poles living in Jedwabne took part in the brutal extermination of almost all the Jews there, who, by the way, made up the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the town. At first they were killed one by one - with sticks, stones, tortured, heads cut off, corpses desecrated. Then, on July 10, about one and a half thousand survivors were driven into a barn and burned alive. Some Poles did not agree with this assessment of events. An investigation carried out from 2000 to 2004 by the Polish "Institute of People's Memory" (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) ended with findings largely confirming Gross's version, except for the number of Jews who died at the hands of the Poles. IPN considered the number of dead to be 1,600 too high and published a figure of 340-350 people. According to prosecutor Radoslav Ignatiev, it is possible that “the murders were inspired by the Germans, and the very fact of the presence of German soldiers on the spot should be considered equivalent to their consent to the murder.”

Some Polish historians and the public still argue about the number of victims. They claim that the Poles are not to blame for all the victims, but that they are now being blamed on the German Nazis. You can, of course, look into the accuracy of the numbers. But the fact remains that the Poles contributed a lot to the genocide. And on a voluntary basis. And there is a lot of evidence of this from the Poles themselves. The Polish authorities, historians and journalists justify this by saying that the Jewish population of the “eastern countries” joyfully greeted the Red Army and the Soviet authorities in 1939. It’s a good excuse, there’s nothing to say. On this basis, it turns out that people can be killed because they collaborated or rejoiced at the arrival of Soviet power...

Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz, historian:

Before assessing the positions and behavior of various social and national groups in the territories occupied by the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army (RKKA), we should remember the fundamental facts, because without knowing the reality of that time, it is impossible to understand the people who lived there permanently or were brought there by a military storm. (...)

The Jewish population, especially the youth, massively welcomed the invading army and the introduction of new orders, including with arms in hand. (...)

The second issue is cooperation with repressive authorities, primarily with the NKVD. At first this was done by all sorts of “militia”, “red guards” and “revolutionary committees”, later by the “workers’ guard” and “civilian police”. In the cities they consisted almost entirely of Polish Jews. Later, when the RKM ["workers' and peasants' militia"] took control, Jews were still overrepresented in it. Polish Jews in civilian clothes, with red armbands, armed with rifles, also widely took part in arrests and deportations. This was the most terrible thing, but Polish society was also struck by the excessive number of Jews in all Soviet institutions. Moreover, before the war the Poles dominated here!

Cardinal Jozef Glemp, Primate of Poland:

"...Before the war, I had no contact with Jews: there were almost none where I lived. Polish-Jewish antagonism sometimes occurred, but against an economic background. The Jews were more dexterous and knew how to exploit the Poles - at least that’s how they were perceived. Another reason for hostility towards Jews was their sympathy for the Bolsheviks. This was one of the main reasons, but it did not arise from a religious context. Religion in pre-war Poland did not play a special role in hostility towards Jews. Jews were also disliked for their strange folklore. (...)".."...We are wondering: shouldn’t the Jews admit their guilt before the Poles, especially during the period of cooperation with the Bolsheviks, for complicity in deportations, for sending Poles to prison, for the humiliation of many of their fellow citizens, etc. .P. (...)"..."...I think that President Kwasniewski has no formal grounds to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the people, but I would prefer not to comment on this."

In the fall of 1941, after the first mass extermination of Jews by the Poles, General Grot-Rowecki, the leader of the underground Home Army, wrote to the Polish government in exile in London:

« Pro-Jewish sympathies expressed in statements by members of the London government make a very unfavorable impression in the country and greatly contribute to the success of Nazi propaganda. Please take into account that the overwhelming majority of the population is anti-Semitic. Even socialists are no exception to this, the only difference is in tactics. The need for emigration as a way to solve the Jewish question is as obvious to everyone as the need to expel the Germans. Anti-Semitism has become widespread».

In 1944, London government commissioner Kelt reported in his report on a trip to Poland: “According to local opinion, the London government is going overboard in expressing its sympathy for the Jews. Considering that Jews are not liked in the country, the statements of government members are perceived as too philo-Semitic.”

It is also striking that even those who actually helped the Jews remained active haters of them. In August 1942, writer Zofia Kossak, head of the influential underground Catholic organization Polish Revival Front, published a leaflet with the following content:

“We speak on behalf of the Poles. Our attitude towards Jews has not changed. We still consider them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we know that they hate us more than the Germans and consider us to be responsible for their troubles. But even this does not relieve us of the obligation to condemn the crime being committed.”

During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, members of the Polish Resistance tried to provide assistance to the rebels as secretly as possible, so as not to undermine the respect of Polish society for their cause. This attitude towards Poles helping Jews to escape was widespread. Thus, Antonina Wyzhikovskaya, a resident of Evdabno, who hid seven Jews from Polish massacres, had to hide from her fellow countrymen herself after they beat her for her compassion for the Jews.

From 1973 to 1985, French documentarian Claude Lanzmann produced a nine-hour documentary, Shoah, composed entirely of interviews with Jewish survivors, former concentration camp guards, and Poles who witnessed the Holocaust with their own eyes. The most powerful impression is made not by the stories of eyewitnesses who saw the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews, but by the grins of the Poles with which they recalled the trains carrying thousands of people. The Poles, talking about Jews doomed to death, habitually grinned and expressively ran the edge of their palm across their throats.

They also made this gesture when carriages filled with doomed people passed by them, heading to the death camp. In the film, they explained their gesture with the desire to inform those going to their death about the fate awaiting them, but from the joyful grin of these Polish peasants it is clear that they are quite happy with the fate of the Jews, just as they are happy with the fact that already during the war they occupied the empty houses of their Jewish neighbors.

In Poland, unlike all other European countries, the mass extermination of Jews did not evoke mass sympathy among the Poles for the persecuted people. The genocide of the Jews only caused the Poles to smile with satisfaction. And after the war, Jewish pogroms began in Poland...

On August 11, 1945, a major pogrom occurred in Krakow. The intervention of units of the Polish Army and the Soviet Army put an end to the pogrom, but there were killed and wounded among the Jews. A memo from the Polish authorities stated that from November 1944 to December 1945, according to available information, 351 Jews were killed.

In 1946 there were already more victims. The most famous, where about 20,000 Jews lived before the outbreak of World War II, accounting for a third of the city's population. After the end of the war, only 200 Jewish survivors, mostly former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, returned to Kielce. The reason for the start of the pogrom was the disappearance of an eight-year-old boy, who, after returning, said that Jews had kidnapped him and, having hidden him, intended to kill him. Later, during the investigation, it turned out that the boy was sent by his father to the village, where he was taught what he had to tell.

On the morning of July 4, 1946, a pogrom began; by noon, about two thousand people had gathered near the building of the Jewish Committee in Kielce. Among the slogans heard were: “Death to the Jews!”, “Death to the killers of our children!”, “Let’s finish Hitler’s work!” At noon, a group led by a Polish police sergeant arrived at the building and joined the pogromists. The crowd broke down the doors and shutters, the rioters entered the building and began to kill the people who had taken refuge there with logs, stones and prepared iron rods.

During the pogrom, from 40 to 47 Jews were killed, among them were children and pregnant women. Also, more than 50 people were injured. During the pogrom, two Poles were killed who tried to resist the pogromists.

Already on July 9, 1946, twelve people were in the dock before the participants in the visiting session of the Supreme Military Court, and on July 11, nine defendants were sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment, ten years and seven years in prison.

Despite the harsh sentences, the Kielce pogrom marked the beginning of the mass emigration of Jews from Poland.

If in May 1946 3,500 Jews left Poland, in June - 8,000, then after the pogrom in Kielce, 19,000 people left during July, and in August - already 35,000.

On September 24, 1946, the Soviet embassy in Warsaw reported to the USSR Foreign Ministry that over the course of several months, starting in June of this year, more than 70-80 thousand Jews had left the country. The official document assessed the reasons for the exodus of Jews from Poland as follows:

“The presence of anti-Semitic views in the country in the pre-war years and their intensified propaganda during the years of German occupation are still felt today. Difficulties arose in finding Jews for work, because... There were heads of enterprises who refused to hire Jews, fearing discontent from the staff of their enterprise. For enterprises where a significant number of Jews worked, obstacles were often created in the provision of raw materials, auxiliary materials, and transport.

More and more Jews were imbued with the idea of ​​leaving Poland and finding another place of residence, acquiring a homeland for themselves. ... After the events in the Kielce Voivodeship, panic and a mass movement to the west began.”

After the drama in Kielce, it became unsafe for Jews to travel by train; Jews were often thrown out of cars while the train was moving.

Home Army and Jews during the war.

Formally, the Home Army was the armed forces of the Polish government, which sought to help the Jews. There was a Jewish department at the Home Army headquarters. This was declared before the “civilized world” by the Polish government in London. But, as they say, London is far away... And how the AK “helped” the Jews in Poland and what kind of “brothers in arms” they were in the fight against the German Nazis.

In most cases, Home Army units were engaged in the murder of Jews who managed to avoid being caught by the German Nazis. They fought with Jewish partisans. To put it roughly, just as many Jews hiding in the forests died at the hands of the AK and its subordinate forces as at the hands of the Nazis. Occasionally, however, Jewish partisans managed to cooperate with AK. For example, the Jewish detachment in the Starzewski Forest near Minsk Mazowiecki enjoyed the support of the local AK detachment. According to some evidence, the commander of this detachment, Wozniak, simply did not carry out the order from above to destroy the Jewish detachment. In 1941-1942. The AK command urged the population not to help Jews who were trying to escape from the Nazis.

Order No. 116 of the new AK commander, General Bur-Komorowski, dated September 15, 1943, was interpreted by local commanders as an order to suppress Jewish units:

Well-armed gangs wander aimlessly through towns and villages, attacking estates, banks, commercial and industrial enterprises, houses and farms. The robberies are often accompanied by murders, which are carried out by Soviet partisans hiding in the forests, or simply by bandits. Men and women, especially Jewish women, take part in the attacks.<...>I have already issued an order to local commanders, if necessary, to use weapons against these robbers and revolutionary bandits.

Although during the preparation of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, a cooperation agreement was concluded between the leadership of the AK and the Jewish militant organization, which supposedly was supposed to protect the EBO detachments from attacks by the AK, it was often violated. The cooperation of the Home Army with the remnants of the Warsaw EBO became less close after arrest of AK commander Stefan Rowecki. His successor was General Komarovsky ("Boer"), an anti-Semite. “At the end of the fighting in the ghetto,” wrote EBO commander Yitzhak Zuckerman to Komarovsky, “we asked for help countless times to save the surviving soldiers. We were not given guides along the canals, we were denied apartments in Warsaw, and we were not given vehicles to take the fighters out of the city."

When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in 1944, surviving Jews everywhere took part in it. This is repeatedly noted by the authors of memoirs about the uprising - soldiers and officers of the AK and GL. On August 3, 1944, Zuckerman gave the order to all members of the EBO (only ten people remained alive) to immediately join the Polish rebels. However, a day later it became clear that the AK did not allow them into its ranks, and the EBO fighters joined the detachments of the Ludova Guard (GL).

The partisan detachment of Jews who fled from the Czestochowa ghetto under the command of Khanyz and Gevirtsman was subjected to constant attacks by the AK. In September, the commander sent a group - four Jews, a Russian and two Poles - to recapture the cattle surrendered by the peasants from the Germans. The group was attacked by AK members and the whole group was shot. The incident marked the beginning of the AK war against the detachment of Khanyz and Gevirtsman. At the end of 1943, when part of Gevirtsman’s group was in the house of a peasant friendly to the detachment, the house was surrounded by AK soldiers. They beat up the Jews and handed them over to the Germans.

In the work camp for Jews in the town of Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, in the east of the Kielce Voivodeship, there was also a Resistance organization. Having obtained 12 pistols, the organization arranged for a group of 17 people to escape with the task of joining the AK. The Poles gave the fugitives a dugout and taught them how to use weapons. However, in February 1943, when these seventeen were supposed to take the oath, the Poles, obeying orders from above, opened fire on them. Only two of the Jews escaped; the rest were killed.

In the Warsaw Voivodeship, Jewish partisan detachments arose in the forests around Wyszków. The most significant was the detachment named after. Mordechai Anielewicz, which consisted of former participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

The Wyszków forests were a long-standing AK base. And although a cooperation agreement was concluded between the leadership of the AK and the leadership of the EBO in Warsaw, it had little effect on the behavior of the AK detachments in relation to the Jewish partisans. First of all, the AK conducted anti-Jewish propaganda among the peasants, and this immediately affected the supply of them to the detachment. Mordechai Anelevich with food. In fact, a war on two fronts began for the detachment - against the Germans and against the Polish partisans of the right camp.

Near Vyshkow the detachment named after. Mordechai Anielewicz was divided into three teams. Soon, in a battle with an AK detachment, one team was exterminated. A complaint to the AK headquarters in Warsaw was unsuccessful. The second team of the detachment successfully derailed the German military personnel. The Germans staged a punitive operation, in which the second team was defeated, and the survivors joined the third - Podolsky's team. A significant part of Podolsky’s team died in battles with the National Defense Forces, another part returned to Warsaw, and the third joined the Soviet partisans.

In 1943, in the Ivenets region, a detachment of the 27th Lancer regiment of the Stolbtsy AK unit of the AK Zdislav Nurkevich (pseudonym “Night”), which numbered 250 people, terrorized civilians and attacked partisans.

In November 1943, 10 Jewish partisans from Sholom Zorin’s detachment became victims of the conflict between Soviet partisans and Nurkevich’s lancers. On the night of November 18, they prepared food for the partisans in the village of Sovkovshchizna, Ivenetsky district. One of the peasants complained to Nurkevich that “the Jews are robbing.”

AK soldiers surrounded the partisans and opened fire, after which they took away 6 horses and 4 carts of the partisans. The partisans who tried to return the property to the peasants were disarmed and, after bullying, were shot. In response, on December 1, 1943, the partisans disarmed Nurkevich’s detachment.

After the war.

By the mid-sixties, the number of Jews living in Poland was less than one percent of their pre-war number, that is, about 35 thousand people. But in 1968, the remaining Jews were expelled from the country...After the deterioration of relations with Israel, antisemitism in Poland flared up with renewed vigor. The first secretary of the PUWP, Wladyslaw Gomulka, in March 1968 accused the Jews of organizing student unrest. He declared that this was a “Zionist conspiracy” and actually ordered new persecution of Jews. Jews were faced with a choice: to emigrate, or to completely abandon their national, cultural and religious identity. In 2002, only 1,133 Jews were counted in the census in Poland... At the same time, during the war, many Poles were ready to sacrifice their lives to save Jews. During the war, the Nazis in Poland executed over 2 thousand people who saved or helped Jews.

Original taken from

Reflections on the Jewish pogrom of 1946 in Kielce

Jerzy Dabrowski

On the Fourth of July 1946, one of the most terrible events of our time took place - the pogrom in Kielce. The pogrom followed about a year after the Holocaust, which killed millions of Jews.

Funeral of the dead.

Few of the survivors fell victims to the bloody massacre.

Kielce is the administrative center of the voivodeship, a medium-sized city in Central Poland. Several hundred Jews who escaped extermination lived in this city in 1946, most of them on Planty Street in house No. 7, which belonged to the Jewish community.

For several hours, a rumor spread throughout the city that a missing nine-year-old Polish boy had become the victim of a ritual murder committed by Jews from a house on Planty Street. Soon a crowd of Kielce residents gathered in front of this house. The fact that the missing boy had already returned home did not interest anyone at that moment. A bloodthirsty crowd burst into the house. Jews, men and women, old people and children, were thrown out of windows. Those lying injured on the street were finished off with iron rods, clubs, and hammers. By the end of the day, the street in front of the house was covered with a bloody human mess. 42 people were brutally killed.

Yitzhak Zuckerman - “Antek”, one of the leaders of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, remained in Poland after the war. When news of the pogrom reached him, he hurried to Kielce. There he saw a terrifying picture. Mutilated corpses, murdered pregnant women with their bellies torn open. He would later write about this in his autobiography. Fear reigned among the Jews living in Poland. Many of them left the country over the coming months.

Even before the drama in Kielce, Jewish passengers were thrown out of the carriages while the train was moving. After the pogrom, such killings became more frequent. Julian Tuwim, a famous Polish poet, wrote to his friend J. Staudinger in July 1946: “...I wanted to go by train to Lodz. In connection with the events known to you, it is safer for me to postpone the trip to a more favorable time...”

After the pogrom, a variety of guesses circulated among shocked people about which political circles had inspired this crime. Stanislaw Radkiewicz, the Polish Minister of Security, during a meeting with representatives of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, who demanded energetic steps from the government, said: “Perhaps you want me to exile 18 million Poles to Siberia?”

The head of the Polish Catholic Church, Cardinal Hlond, in a much-attracted statement about the pogrom, expressed the opinion that the blame for the deterioration of relations between Jews and Poles “... should largely be placed on the Jews who occupy leadership positions in Poland today, trying to introduce structures and orders , rejected by the majority of the Polish people.”

Public opinion in Poland kept this tragedy quiet for decades. It was only in 1996 that Foreign Minister Dariusz Rosati, in a letter to the World Jewish Congress on the 50th anniversary of the pogrom, stated: “We will mourn the victims of the Kielce pogrom. This act of Polish anti-Semitism should be seen as our common tragedy. We are ashamed that Poland committed such a crime. We ask for your forgiveness."

It was the first time such words were uttered by a Polish politician. For whom did he ask forgiveness?

He asked for forgiveness for the grinder Marek from the metallurgical plant, who, with hundreds of other workers, stormed a house in Plante to kill Jews.

He asked for forgiveness for Mrs. Chezia, who, returning from the market, raised a stick to smash the face of a Jewish girl thrown out of a 2nd floor window, still showing signs of life.

He asked for forgiveness for the shoemaker Jurek, who, having hammered the soles of the shoes he was repairing, hastily closed the workshop and smashed the heads of the victims with this hammer.

He asked for forgiveness for the lady Asya and her fiancé Henrik, who threw stones at the people being dragged out of the house.

He asked for forgiveness for the greengrocer Janusz, who left his shop, taking an iron rod, and returned there 3 hours later, covered in the blood of the victims.

He asked forgiveness for the millions of Poles who remained indifferently silent.

Of course, this is a crime, if you compare it with what the Germans did to the Jews, just a line in the history of this century, and yet... It was simply impossible to imagine that a year after the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people in the center of one of the cities they brutally killed people.

But didn’t much that happened in this century seem impossible - and yet happened?..

Monthly literary and journalistic magazine and publishing house.

Interview with the author of the book “Cities of Death: Neighborhood Jewish Pogroms” Mirosław Tryczyk.
Newsweek Polska: The book “Neighbors” by Jan Tomasz Gross was published 15 years ago. All these years we lived in the belief that the murder of 300 Jewish neighbors in Jedwabne by the Poles was a monstrous but isolated event.

-Who did this?

- Poles. On September 17, 1939, according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the territory of Podlasie was occupied by the USSR. A spontaneous partisan movement, a popular underground, appeared there, which was not associated with the Home Army. There were many such units with their own hierarchy, structure, weapons and anti-communist beliefs. On June 22, 1941, when the Third Reich attacked the USSR, the Russians retreated, and the Germans drove through these territories, stopping for several hours in some settlements. They gave the order to form local authorities and went further to the front, to Minsk. In this no-man's land, power was taken into the hands of the partisans, who created militia units, people's squads, which Gross does not mention in a single word.

“The partisans felt responsible for maintaining order in these territories.

“And they believed that they had to deal with the Jews and those people who collaborated with the Soviet side. They gave orders prohibiting the sheltering of Jews, and they themselves were forbidden to move on the roads.

The extermination actions were planned and criminal in nature.

It all started on July 5, 1941 in Wonsos, where 1,700 people lived - 700 of them Jews. On the night of July 6, the village was surrounded by Poles specially selected for the action. One of the participants in the pogrom gave the following testimony: “Jozef L. told me to go behind the barns in Wonsosz, to the rye field, and watch where the Jews would hide, because they would run that way. You will return them, and we will deal with them.” He went on to say that he “went there with a stick, like a fence picket.” So the action had leaders, they gave orders, placed people on the outskirts of the town and in the fields, wherever Jews could hide. Some had to take out the bodies on carts, others had to cover the blood stains with sand. In their testimonies, witnesses emphasized that the killers used pre-prepared tools: iron-studded sticks, weighted springs... To make such objects requires time, planning and ideas

The bodies were buried in the best place: in a deep anti-tank ditch, which was dug by the Red Army. Then this pattern of actions was repeated in Radzilov, Jedwabne, Shchuchyn, Graevo, Raigrud, Goniondze and other settlements in the region.

-Who were the killers?

— The myth should be debunked that peasants, illiterate people, or some kind of masses were behind the murders. The police that organized and instigated the murders consisted of local elites: doctors, businessmen, pre-war policemen. From people who were respected and listened to. In Rajgrud, the main one was L., a teacher of ancient Greek, who, after the next murders, rested, talking with the priest or wrapping his favorite books on ancient history in paper. In Brańsk, everything was headed by the pre-war leader of the local branch of the Polish Peasant Party, in Szczuczyn - by the school director.

The Laudanski brothers are considered the leaders of the events in Jedwabne; in Gross's book they are depicted as primitive monsters. But they were representatives of the local elite: they have photographs together with the Bishop of Lomza, and this speaks of their social status. They had a construction company, they built schools and churches. When they were looking for a barn in Jedwabne to burn the Jews, they offered whoever agreed to provide his own to give wood to build a new one. And they kept their promise.

— Many witnesses in your book say that the pogroms were carried out on the orders of the Germans, who threatened that if the Poles refused, they would burn the entire village. The Germans were in Radzilow, Jedwabne, Suchowol, Kolno... And you insist that the Poles killed the Jews.

“The Germans instigated, threatened, and sometimes simply hinted. They sought to ensure that the Poles killed themselves, wanting to achieve a propaganda effect and show that even the Slavic peoples wanted to get rid of Jews on their lands.
In most stories about pogroms, however, it is noted that there were no Germans in these settlements at the time of the crime. Where they remained, they behaved passively and took photographs.
After the war, the Poles formed a myth that they had no other choice, otherwise they would have been shot. But in fact, the Germans took power in these territories only in late autumn. Throughout the summer of 1941, the Polish police were in charge, who could have helped the Jews, but did not. On the contrary: in Gonondza she gave the Germans a list of Jews to be executed. In Bransk the German post consisted of three or four people. 800 Jews fled the city, and only a few dozen survived the war. The Poles killed the rest in the surrounding forests.

“For many days and even weeks, the criminal atmosphere grew gradually. At first, police or people's patrols arrested Jews who collaborated with Soviet forces. This was a signal that Jews could be killed quickly, without trials and with impunity. Then the spiral of violence began to spiral into isolated incidents. Czesław Laudański hits a Jew he accidentally met on the street in the face, someone else is shot outside the city, someone is drowned in a well. The first night arson attacks begin, accompanied by the looting of Jewish property. Later, the Poles gave the following testimony: “At night I heard screams, but I was afraid to go out.”

When the pogromists began to feel more confident, they began killing during the day. In Shchuchyn, according to the testimony of Leon K., “Vincenty R. and Dominic D. attacked Jews with a knife, this happened on Sunday, people were returning from church.” Nobody reacted. Then one night a call appeared: “Whoever has the courage, come with us to beat the Jews.” Mass killings begin: in Wonsos, 1,200 people were killed on the streets and in their homes, in Shchuchyn - 100. Then the Germans usually appeared, gave permission for the pogrom, or approved of the current situation, making an announcement that the law did not apply to Jews, so they could be killed. In some settlements, pogroms were not isolated: in Gonondza, the extermination of Jews lasted two weeks, every night.

— How did the residents react to the mass pogroms?

“Over time, violence began to seem so normal that no one hid it. One witness in Vonsos said that two residents were “quite bold killers. In broad daylight they walked around with their sleeves rolled up, carrying knives with which they slaughtered Jews.” “Vincenty R. killed a Jew, whose last name I don’t remember, in front of everyone in Shchuchin,” another witness testified.

— Is it true that the Jews were so terrorized that they even turned to the Germans for help?

— It’s hard to believe, but such cases happened in Graevo, Jedwabno, Goniondze. There, the local police locked the Jewish men in a barn, and the women left unprotected became the target of attacks. Only on one night from July 20 to 21, 1941, the Poles killed 20 Jews: someone was hit with a crowbar, someone was hanged, someone did not want to hide their neighbor and did not open the door... There were no Germans in the town, they were located nearby in a fortress Osovets. The next day, desperate Jews paid the Germans to come to Goniądz and protect them by patrolling the city. The following mechanism worked: pay, otherwise we will allow the Poles to kill you.

— The topic of rape also appears in the testimony. What was their scale?

“Violence against Jewish women was the norm. Witnesses talk about gang rapes: in houses, in parks, squares, near churches, on the street. Nobody reacted. A Polish woman from Goniądza recalled: “Franczyszek K. raped young fourteen-year-old Jewish girls, I saw blood in the yard with my own eyes.” One woman said that her neighbor raped Jewish women. But she did it as if she saw savagery not in the very fact of violence, but in the fact that they were Jewish: for her this was worse than using the services of prostitutes.

Descriptions of sadistic scenes appear from Wonsos and Kolno, where women were forced to run naked along the street. In Gonondza, Jews were driven out to “graze in the meadow” and forced to eat grass. Helena A. said that in Raigorod she saw one Pole “breaking glass, and then driving barefoot Jews across it to swim in the lake, urging them on with blows of a rope.” In Suhovol, Jews were driven into the river. From the testimony of Jan V. we can learn that “everyone came running to see how these Jews were drowned.” The murder was perceived as a performance.

-What was used for the murder?

— Everything that was at hand in the village or town: saws, sticks, bayonets, axes. Some killed with a butcher's cleaver, others said that the Poles “forced people to lie down on their backs, put shovels to their throats and kicked them in. And that’s it, the person was gone.” The children were spared bullets; they were killed by hitting the pavement and walls. In Radzilov, for the sake of economy, a policeman tried to kill 10 children with one bullet, placing them in a row. Not everyone died; some were buried alive.

— The motif of the moving earth, under which still living people are buried, often sounds in the stories of witnesses.

“The Poles, who did not have such experience, learned to commit mass murder. The first reports say that people were drowned in wells, ponds, and drainage ditches. Then it became clear that killing people on the streets and taking the bodies out of the city was inconvenient. They began to dig holes in the surrounding forests and fields and take the victims there. “Felix B. took a bayonet and stabbed each Jew in turn under the left shoulder blade, the people who were with him broke their heads with spades, (...), then they were covered with earth,” this is a story from Raigorod. It turned out that it was most effective and cheap to burn people in barns.

— After the pogroms, the Germans organized a ghetto. Who controlled them, since, as you say, the Germans themselves were not in these territories?

- At the turn of 1941-42, the Germans formed their own administration in the towns, and with it the so-called hilfspolizei, auxiliary police, the ranks of which included those Poles who had previously been in the people's squads and had proven themselves to be murderers. They gained the trust of the occupiers. Some of these people went into the service of the Germans, and some, having dealt with the Jews and communists, went into the Home Army or the National Armed Forces (right-wing underground military organization of the resistance movement in Poland during the Second World War and in the post-war years - approx. lane). In Shchuchin, R., who served in the people's squad, joined the German police, and he was appointed commandant of the ghetto created in early 1942. He organized a whole system of hiring Jewish women to work in Christian fields.

— Have Jews been reduced to the role of serfs?

— Intimidated, humiliated, people who had lost loved ones were used as cheap labor in Shchuchin, Raigorod, Gonendza. Local peasants turned to the Polish police, which had complete power over the Jews, and hired them to work. The peasants paid the Poles, and they had to share with the Germans. They paid in eggs, butter, gasoline, and valuables stolen from Jews. The stories convey pleasure in the fact that a Jew could be turned into a slave; this was perceived as a kind of revenge.
— Why did you even start reading these documents?

- This is a personal story for me. My family comes from Podlasie, my beloved grandfather lived in a village near Terespol. I lived in Wroclaw and went there on vacation. In 2011, in this village, literally a couple of hundred meters from our house, a mass grave was discovered. I felt that my childhood Arcadia was in a cemetery. I was surprised why grandfather never spoke about these graves, because he could not have known about them. Grandfather was an anti-Semite, as was my father; for him, “Jews” were always to blame for all the ills of the world. At the same time, he recalled with great warmth the German officers who spent the night in his hut. My grandfather and father were no longer there, so I started looking for information in the archives.

- What did you find?

— The state of documents related to crimes against Jews at the Institute of National Remembrance in Bialystok reflects the level of interest of historians and prosecutors in describing and clarifying those events. When I took these papers, they told me: “why read this, these stories have already been described.” According to the archive documentation, it was clear that some testimonies were read for the first time. Unsystematized, with incomplete descriptions, in poor condition, often practically covered with mold... But if we take the documents related to the “damned soldiers” (participants of the anti-Soviet and anti-communist armed underground in the 1940-50s - approx. per.): professionally processed, laminated, described down to each surname, locality, and division.

From court documents it follows that 80% of the cases of people who committed crimes against Polish citizens of Jewish origin during the Second World War ended in their acquittal.

The myth of a peaceful pre-war multi-ethnic symbiosis in these eastern border towns has collapsed. The testimony demonstrates that the Poles knew nothing about their Jewish neighbors, very often they did not even know their last names! When they were asked to list the names of the dead, they used nicknames: “Carrot”, “Parsley”. This shows that they related these people only to the occupation by which they earned a living. In this case, selling vegetables.

— When I go to my native Augustow, I pass through the cities you mentioned. But neither at school nor at home did anyone talk about the pogroms.

“Because we pushed these murders out of our memory and erased our traces.” In Raigorod, in the forest where 40 Jews were shot, local authorities after the war first set up a site for the disposal of animal bones from the slaughterhouse, and then a landfill. There is still no memorial plaque there. They say it is impossible to identify the mass grave because human bones are mixed with animal bones. I don’t want to upset you, but there were pogroms in Augustow too.

Before I started reading these documents, I was a city activist, a scout, a teacher, I constantly wanted to do something to make people and society better. But since I started reading these testimonies for several hours a day, I have lost faith in man.

- What about your village?

“It turned out that Jews from Terespol, which is nearby, were killed there. One day my grandfather gave me a collection of coins and a silver watch. I was very happy about this gift; these are sacred objects for me. But now I ask myself a question: where did a peasant, whose only property was a cow or a horse, get the royal watch? Or a collection of coins from different parts of the world with silver royal rubles?

- And how did you answer yourself?

— Perhaps grandfather took part in the executions? Perhaps he dug up graves or took part in pogroms. I didn’t delve into this topic, I didn’t have the courage.

The Polish Sejm here adopted a resolution on the genocide of Poles in Volyn in 1943-1944 - wonderful. I have a lot of relatives in Poland, with whom our families have not lost contact since 1939, and which of our ancestors was the first to convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy is a controversial issue hidden in the darkness of centuries. Because which of our common ancestors was Pole and which was Ukrainian was determined only by whether he attended church or church on Sundays.
One of my grandfathers served in the Polish army in the 30s, Polish was his second native language, but he was Orthodox, considered himself a Ukrainian, and who genocided whom in Volyn could tell a lot.
But let’s leave oral history and talk about generally accepted documented facts, on the basis of which the Knesset is simply obliged to adopt a resolution on the genocide of Jews in Poland during the Second World War and after it.

Polish Jews, 1939

Jews have lived in Poland since the 11th century, and around the same time anti-Semitism began to form there, resulting in the privilege “Privilegium de non tolerandis Judaeis” (from Latin - “Privilege about the impatience of Jews”). As a result of its use, mass emigration of the Jewish population began to the territory of today's Ukraine, and the number of Jews in the Kiev Voivodeship by 1648 reached up to 200 thousand people.
On September 1, 1939, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.3 million (the largest community in Europe). Of these, 2.8 million died during the war, that is, 85%, and not all of them were killed by the Germans - the Poles, both collaborators and Polish nationalists, gladly killed the Jews.

Poles in Tomaszow Mazowiecki (Lodz Voivodeship) at the cutting of a Jewish beard, October-November 1939

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So on July 10, 1941, a pogrom was carried out in the village of Jedwabne, in which about 1,500 Jews, including women and children, died, and it was proven that the pogrom makers were Poles living in the surrounding areas. In 2001, Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski officially apologized to the Jewish people for this crime. Well, Poroshenko recently made an official apology to the Polish people.
In total, during World War II, the Poles committed war crimes against Polish Jews in at least 24 regions of the country, and the Germans did not organize them - they simply observed. And some historians (for example, Princeton University professor Jan Tomas Gross) argue that the Poles killed more Jews during the war than the Nazis.

Jewish families in the Warsaw Ghetto, 1943

When the Red Army knocked the Germans out of Poland, there were about 250 thousand miraculously surviving Jews (who had returned from concentration camps and territories of the USSR, or former partisans), and you can’t drag the Germans into those Jewish pogroms. Polish authorities officially admit that, according to documented information, from November 1944 to December 1945, 351 Jews were killed by the Poles. However, they agree that it is not possible to determine the exact number of dead Jews in POST-War Poland.
The Polish authorities have officially recognized the pogroms of Jews by the Poles after the expulsion of the Germans in Kielce, Krakow, Lublin, Rzeszow, Tarnow, and Sosnovichi. The pogrom in Kielce on July 4, 1946 was the last pogrom in Europe. It documents the death of 43 Jews, among whom were children and pregnant women, but only the Jewish God knows how many actually died there. Polish President Lech Kaczynski called the Kielce pogrom “a huge shame for the Poles and a tragedy for the Jews,” and also apologized.

Coffins withJews,killed during the pogrom in Kielce, July 6, 1946

The pogrom in Kielce caused a massive emigration of Jews from Poland - 19 thousand people left during July, 35 thousand in August, and the wave of departures subsided only towards the end of 1946, when the situation in Poland returned to normal, mainly thanks to the punitive measures of the Soviet military command. And by that time there were practically no Jews left in Poland - according to the 2002 census, only about one thousand Jews out of the country’s 39 million population now live in Poland (for information, about 80 thousand Jews live in Ukraine).
At the same time, the expulsion of Jews from Poland should be considered in the context of the general ethnic cleansing carried out by the Poles at that time - this includes the expulsion of Ukrainians from the eastern provinces, and the expulsion of Germans from the western regions annexed to Poland.

The reasons for the Jewish pogroms by the Poles were typical for all times and peoples:
- spreading rumors about the ritual murder of a Polish child by Jews;
- killings of Jews in order to seize their homes and property and the reluctance of the Poles to return Jewish property appropriated during the war;
- “Judeopolonia” is a Polish variation of the theory of a worldwide Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.
But there were also specific reasons - in the new government of Poland there were a disproportionate number of Jews, and the Poles’ hatred of Russians and communism spread to the Jews.

Swastika at the Jewish cemetery in Wysokie Mazowieckie (Podlaskie Voivodeship), March 19, 2012

I repeat - given the above, the Israeli Knesset is simply obliged to adopt a resolution on the genocide of Jews by the Poles. Well, about the genocide of Jews by Russians, at the same time, so as not to get up twice...