Between 1945 and 1946, Poland witnessed three large anti-Jewish pogroms. The infamous Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, which claimed the lives of over 40 Holocaust survivors was preceded by outbursts ...of collective violence in Rzeszow and in Krakow. All three pogroms were perpetrated by police officers, soldiers of the Polish army, and civilians forming a pogrom mob, and all were preceded and inflamed by rumors about Jews kidnapping and harming Christian children. Studies of widespread antisemitism and the common belief in blood libel do not seem to offer an adequate explanation of how the people of Rzeszow, Krakow, and Kielce could have believed the rumors that Jews were abducting and murdering children. They explain even less what made possible the social mobilization leading toward mass violence against Holocaust survivors in Poland in the immediate aftermath of WWII. We address this issue by using the concept of moral panic as proposed by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda and examining possible reasons why Polish society after the WWII seems to have been particularly attuned to the fate of children. We argue that in the early postwar years there was a moral panic in Poland associated with the vulnerability of children. It was propelled by wartime experience but also by omnipresent violence and hideous crimes committed against children in the wake of WWII. Although there was no fact-based connection between these crimes and the Jews, many Polish Christians eagerly put the blame on "the Other," that is, the Jews, and sought facts that could serve as confirmation of an old prejudice - the blood libel. Polish Christians who accepted the blood libel as truth could have found confirmation of their belief when Jewish relatives or Jewish organizations undertook to "recover" - through legal procedures, by payment, by subterfuge or by force - children who had been hidden in Christian families during the Holocaust.
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The poignant story of Holocaust survivors who returned to their hometown in Poland and tried to pick up the pieces of a shattered world. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the lives of ...Polish Jews were marked by violence and emigration. But some of those who had survived the Nazi genocide returned to their hometowns and tried to start their lives anew. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of this largely forgotten group of Holocaust survivors. Focusing on Radom, an industrial city about sixty miles south of Warsaw, he tells the story of what happened throughout provincial Poland as returnees faced new struggles along with massive political, social, and legal change. Non-Jewish locals mostly viewed the survivors with contempt and hostility. Many Jews left immediately, escaping anti-Semitic violence inflicted by new communist authorities and ordinary Poles. Those who stayed created a small, isolated community. Amid the devastation of Poland, recurring violence, and bureaucratic hurdles, they tried to start over. They attempted to rebuild local Jewish life, recover their homes and workplaces, and reclaim property appropriated by non-Jewish Poles or the state. At times they turned on their own. Krzyzanowski recounts stories of Jewish gangs bent on depriving returnees of their prewar possessions and of survivors shunned for their wartime conduct. The experiences of returning Jews provide important insights into the dynamics of post-genocide recovery. Drawing on a rare collection of documents-including the postwar Radom Jewish Committee records, which were discovered by the secret police in 1974-Ghost Citizens is the moving story of Holocaust survivors and their struggle to restore their lives in a place that was no longer home.
Ghost Citizens Krzyzanowski, Lukasz; Levine, Madeline G
2020, 2020-06-16
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Few Polish Holocaust survivors went home after liberation. Lukasz Krzyzanowski recounts the story of a group who did--the returnees of Radom. Bureaucrats tried to hold back their property and ...possessions to prop up the ruined state. And the returnees faced pogroms and even gangs of fellow Jews. Against it all, they struggled to rebuild their lives.
The rapidly growing historiography on the aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland has focused primarily on post-war anti-Semitism. Scholars have traditionally concentrated on the post-war death, ...community destruction and emigration of Holocaust survivors rather than their attempts to return to their former homes. This article explores who these survivors were and what their return was like. Using the medium-sized industrial town of Kalisz in western Poland as a case study, the article argues that the composition of survivors' communities and the difficulty of adapting to the new economic reality, together with the already well-researched anti-Jewish violence, played a significant role in preventing a revival of Jewish communal life in provincial Poland in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.
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ARCHIVES CONSULTED Krzyzanowski, Lukasz
Ghost Citizens,
06/2020
Book Chapter
Abstract
Despite a growing historiography on Holocaust survivors, few scholars have focused on the fates of those who returned to their places of origin in Poland in the immediate aftermath of World ...War II. Even less is known about those who attempted to recover their property in medium-sized Polish cities in the late 1940s. The following article analyzes court cases in two such cities: Kalisz (in the former German territorial administration of the Warthegau) and Radom (the former General Government). By addressing the problems related to the appropriation and recovery of Jewish private property, the author sheds light on the agency of Holocaust survivors and the social processes that shaped postwar Central and Eastern Europe.
VIOLENCE LUKASZ KRZYZANOWSKI
Ghost Citizens,
06/2020
Book Chapter
WRITING ABOUT ANTI-JEWISH violence in the postwar context presents one with particular difficulties. The broader issue of anti-Jewish violence has been studied many times in recent years, yet it ...remains highly politicized. One must be aware of at least two serious risks in analyzing its post-Holocaust occurrence. The first is extreme reductionism, the attempt to ascribe to Jews’ ethnic origins every act of violence to which they fell victim.¹ But after all, Jews, like Poles, Americans, or Chinese, can be attacked, battered, or murdered for many reasons, not only because of their ethnicity. The second danger is acceptance of the
EPILOGUE LUKASZ KRZYZANOWSKI
Ghost Citizens,
06/2020
Book Chapter
THE SURVIVORS OF THE HOLOCAUST who found themselves in Radom immediately after the war were castaways on a familiar-looking island that soon turned out to be completely alien and hostile. For many of ...them, arrival in the city meant a return in the strict sense of the word. They recognized the streets and houses, but the world after the Holocaust was entirely different from the one they remembered. Every aspect of their postwar existence was marked by the Nazi genocide. These people had lost everything—their families, workplaces, homes, and often, too, the entire social milieu in which they had
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