Cursed: A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom

By Joanna Tokarska-Bakir

In Cursed, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the July 4, 1946, Kielce pogrom, a milestone in the periodization of the Jewish diaspora. This massacre compelled thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust to flee postwar Poland. It remains a negative reference point in the Polish historical narrative and represents a lack of reckoning with the role of antisemitism in postwar Polish society and identity politics.

Tokarska-Bakir weaves together the voices of the Kielce pogrom survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators with a myriad of other archival sources. Her meticulous research exposes wartime and postwar biographies of local factory workers, city and church officials, local police officers, and members of the security service, some of whom participated in the Holocaust and then directly or indirectly participated in the Kielce pogrom. Tokarska-Bakir paints a social portrait that explores people's behavior in light of forces and emotions greater than themselves. She reconstructs a postwar communist system that, despite promises to combat deeply rooted antisemitism, not only failed to prevent its spread but turned a blind eye to it and eventually used it to legitimize itself.

Cursed is a microhistory that recreates the events of the Kielce pogrom step by step and examines the dominant hypotheses about the pogrom through the prism of previously classified archival evidence. It offers readers a nuanced analysis that cuts across social and ideological divisions. The resulting narrative is filled with new discoveries not only about the Kielce pogrom but about the nature of antisemitism, hostility toward minorities, and collective violence.

Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501771491

Book preview

CURSED

A SOCIAL PORTRAIT OF THE KIELCE POGROM

JOANNA TOKARSKA-BAKIR

Translated by Ewa Wampuszyc

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

CONTENTS

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

PART I. M OVEMENT

1. Voices

2. Physical Evidence

3. Henio and Others

PART II. F RAMING

4. The Authorities

5. The People’s Authorities and the Jews

6. Rashōmon

7. Dog Days

8. A Moveable Feast

9. The Custodians of Freedom Square

10. Trains

PART III. T REMORS

11. The Office of Public Security (UB)

12. The Kielce Police (MO)

13. Provincial Governor Wiślicz-Iwańczyk and His People

14. The Military Men

15. The Boogeyman

Abbreviations and Notations Used in the Appendixes

Appendix A. List of Victims

Appendix B. Kielce Survivors and Witnesses

Source List (SL)

Index of Names

Cover

Title

Contents

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

PART I. MOVEMENT

1. Voices

2. Physical Evidence

3. Henio and Others

PART II. FRAMING

4. The Authorities

5. The People’s Authorities and the Jews

6. Rashōmon

7. Dog Days

8. A Moveable Feast

9. The Custodians of Freedom Square

10. Trains

PART III. TREMORS

11. The Office of Public Security (UB)

12. The Kielce Police (MO)

13. Provincial Governor Wiślicz-Iwańczyk and His People

14. The Military Men

15. The Boogeyman

Abbreviations and Notations Used in the Appendixes

Appendix A. List of Victims

Appendix B. Kielce Survivors and Witnesses

Source List (SL)

Index of Names

Copyright

Guide

Cover

Title

Contents

Preface to the English-Language Edition

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Start of Content

Abbreviations and Notations Used in the Appendixes

Appendix A. List of Victims

Appendix B. Kielce Survivors and Witnesses

Source List (SL)

Index of Names

Copyright

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iv

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

In a commentary on Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine, essayist Neal Ascherson compared Russia’s relations with her neighbors to those of a peculiar insect known as the ichneumon wasp. The ichneumon wasp does not kill its caterpillar prey but injects a toxin, leaving it paralyzed and submissive. Russia has always been ichneumonic to its neighbors.¹

That comparison also applies to the postwar history of Poland, which after the Second World War found itself in the Soviet sphere of influence. The march of the victorious Red Army on its way to Berlin completely changed the country, enabling the installation of a Communist regime. Two issues—the external (meaning the geopolitical position of the country), and the internal (meaning the Communist authorities’ monopoly on power)—have determined Poland’s recent history.

Anti-Communist visions of this history emphasize the alienness of the Communist regime. And although they are true in part (the government was imposed), the choice of words reveals that these opinions result from a nationalist point of view. Labeling the former government alien overlooks the hope that communism inspired among Jewish Poles and others whom nationalists traditionally excluded from Polishness (polskość). While it is true that the decimated Polish Jewry²—in particular those who were religious—decidedly rejected communism, there was a relatively small group of secular Jews who supported it and who remained in the country. The Communist system seemed to guarantee them their longed-for civil equality and access to public institutions; it endowed them with essential agency. It soon disappointed them, however, and eventually drove out the majority following the student protests in 1968.

Although Polish Jews’ support for communism in the early postwar period was rooted in their experience of prewar exclusion, it was generally explained, in accordance with the stereotype of żydokomuna (Judeo-Communism), as a supposedly ingrained tendency of Jews toward communism. Not surprisingly, the anti-Soviet Polish majority reacted with animosity. The arrow of causality is reversed here because, after all, it was the hostility of their environment that required the Jews to seek help from soldiers of the Red Army and inclined some of them to join the organs of power—the security service and the police. Anyone familiar with the security situation of the Jews in Poland after World War II, as described recently by Julian Kwiek, would refrain from calling this decision one of free choice.³ Moreover, joining the UB (security service) or the MO (postwar police) provided Holocaust survivors with the same kind of agency that an incomparably greater number of non-Jewish Poles also enjoyed. Yet only Jews were blamed for repressive acts and stigmatized with the label Communist collaborators.⁴

Another stereotype influencing perceptions of the Kielce pogrom was the hypothesis that it was provoked by the NKVD or the Polish equivalent of the secret police, the UB or bezpieka. Many historians supported such conspiracy theories, including the distinguished, pioneering researcher Bożena Szaynok, the author of the first study of the Kielce pogrom after censorship was abolished.⁵ The authors of a study sponsored by the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN) from the early 2000s summarizing the second investigation into the Kielce pogrom also included such theories.⁶ I would like to emphasize that after examining all available sources, including some newly discovered ones, I have found no evidence to support the hypothesis of an NKVD provocation. Yet, for years the Kielce pogrom—a milestone in the history of European Jewry—was treated in Poland as another wickedness on the part of the Soviets. And as such it did not burden the Polish collective conscience.

And yet, as Krystyna Kersten has observed, the worst thing that could happen to research on the history of Poland would be the replacement of Communist propaganda with anti-Communist propaganda. In this vein, in creating a social portrait of the pogrom, I have applied the methods of historical-anthropological discourse. Indeed, when we set aside the ideological interpretive framework and look at the postwar history of the Kielce region from up close and from below, an ambivalent and disturbing picture appears. Above all, the dichotomy żydokomuna versus Polish nation, so essential to this ideological framework, disappears. From the moment the new system was established after the war, representatives from all spheres of society, including ethnic Poles, emerged on the side of the Communists, serving in the party structure as well as in the organs of repression. In turn, there were more Jews on the anti-Communist side than expected; many of them had endured the German occupation in Soviet prison camps only to become victims of violence in their country of origin. From this new perspective the war of the Polish nation against żydokomuna is replaced by a brutal, fratricidal Polish-Polish war.

Familiarity with this context reveals that the Kielce pogrom occurred as a result of the weakness, not the strength, of the Communist authorities; in a certain sense it occurred due to the insufficient presence, not the excessive presence, of the Soviets and the UB that day on Planty Street. Suffering from drastic staff shortages, Communist institutions in Kielce attracted not only enthusiasts of uniforms and free cafeterias but above all people who had become accustomed to the idea that Jews were to be killed. It was these people—for the most part prewar officers, policemen, and lawyers, and not the scum of society or Communist provocateurs—who made the Kielce pogrom possible.

The first part of the book’s title refers to the curse that, according to legend, was placed on Kielce by Rabbi Dawid Kahane. The subtitle, A Social Portrait of the Kielce Pogrom, represents my attempt to use the methods of historical anthropology—inquiry and critical microanalysis—to allow us to see the pogrom through the eyes of as many witnesses as possible. To accompany the text, I have included images of some of the actors involved in the events; as historical sources, photos are sometimes more eloquent than documents.

To facilitate the accessibility of the narrative, which was written with the broadest possible readership in mind, I sometimes abridge and paraphrase sources. For those interested in delving more deeply, I have provided a comprehensive list of the primary sources used.

Before 1989 archival documents from the first Kielce pogrom investigation in 1946 were dispersed; some of the sources were concealed, others were destroyed, and still others were lost. The research that I began in 2013, and which is still ongoing, revealed an extensive inventory of untapped information about the pogrom scattered across archival collections in the IPN, the Bureau of Military History, and local archives—collections whose content continues to be better known and understood with time.

The vast majority of the materials on which I base my research were created by Communist institutions of authority: the police, the security services, the prosecutors, and the courts. These sources must be treated with caution—but not more so than any others. I do not agree with those who assert that these are unreliable documents. Most were classified, and after all, no authority would, in the long run, blind itself. Even so, wherever possible, I confront these documents with other points of view—above all with the views of the underground, as preserved in the original archive of the Freedom and Independence Union (Wolność i Niezawisłość, WiN). One important collection I have relied on is the personal archive of Michał Chęciński, which was made available to me by his family. Materials that are just as extensive concern Kielce residents whose stories are among the unused footage for the film Świadkowie (Witnesses), made available to me by the director Marcel Łoziński.

Every piece of information I use, every detail concerning the topography and atmosphere in Kielce, finds support in the historical sources: transcripts of hearings; reports by authorities at various levels; autopsy reports; press reports and photos; letters and memoirs.

Even more important is the perspective of the Jewish victims of and witnesses to the pogrom, whose voices until now have been largely neglected. As a result of archival searches for this book, I found more than thirty such accounts, not only from 1946, but also from much later. The Jews who gave these accounts were present on Planty Street during the pogrom, and every one testifies that policemen and servicemen attacked the building. If we add to this the collection of statements from the second Kielce investigation in the nineties, when Prosecutor Zbigniew Mielecki interviewed witnesses in Israel,⁷ this number doubles. It will triple when we add to these the transcripts of conversations with survivors that were filed with the Institute of National Remembrance by the film director Andrzej Miłosz,⁸ as well as memoirs I was able to locate.

To write this book, I read hundreds, perhaps thousands, of personal documents written by Poles during the period 1939–1946. These were statements and CVs of soldiers, policemen, railroad workers, building custodians, laborers, secret agents of the security services, the Ministry of Public Security, the Polish Armed Services, officials of the new authorities and of the old, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, repatriated persons and future emigrants, openly identified and secret soldiers of the Home Army (AK), the People’s Army (AL), the Polish Peasants’ Battalions (BCh), the National Armed Forces (NSZ), and the Freedom and Independence Union (WiN). Some of the documents were written inaccurately, in a clichéd style, with mistakes. Others were skillfully written and fascinating. It is impossible to read such texts without being persuaded by them. All were about life and survival—and therefore about the values that heroic histories despise.

Translated from the Polish by Claire Rosenson

Notes

1. Neal Ascherson, Foreigners are Fiends! London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 9 (May 12, 2022).

2. It is estimated that 1–2 percent of Jewish Poles survived the Holocaust. Of these, the largest group was made up of those who had fled to the USSR when the war broke out. According to some estimates Jews had a greater chance of survival in a concentration camp than by hiding in the Polish countryside. See the CKŻP report titled Sprawozdanie z działalności Komitetu Żydowskiego w Krakowie za 1945, AŻIH 303_II_75, k. 145.

3. Julian Kwiek, Nie chcemy Żydów u siebie. Wrogość wobec Żydów w latach 1944–1947 (Warsaw: Nieoczywiste, 2021).

4. See Christopher R. Browning, "A New Vision of the Holocaust. Review of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder," New York Review of Books 62, no. 15 (October 8, 2015), 42. Quoting Snyder, Browning writes: Psychologically, the Soviet occupation generated feelings of shame and resentment in Eastern Europeans. ‘Jews were never the majority of local collaborators’ with the Soviets. They had ‘never held real power’ in areas occupied by the Soviets, and in reality had ‘suffered as much or more than any other group under Soviet rule’ from disproportionate confiscations and deportations. Yet the Jews necessarily saw the Soviets as ‘the lesser evil’ and this made them ‘collectively vulnerable’ for acts of revenge.

5. Bożena Szajnok, Pogrom Żydów w Kielcach 4 lipca 1946 (Warsaw: Bellona, 1992).

6. Jan Żaryn and Łukasz Kamiński, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego, vol. 1 (Warsaw: IPN, 2006); Leszek Bukowski, Andrzej Jankowski, and Jan Żaryn, eds., Wokół pogromu kieleckiego, vol. 2 (Warsaw: IPN, 2008).

7. See various materials concerning the matter of the Kielce pogrom in 1946 (S.3/92/NK); copies of interview transcripts of witnesses from Tel Aviv (AIPN Ki_53_4742).

8. AIPN Ki_53_4749, t. 8. Referred to throughout as Miłosz (raw footage).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book as detailed as this one must depend on the kindness of colleagues and friends who supported me, paving my way. My deepest gratitude goes to of Sara Arm; Manny Bekier; Andrzej Białek, Stowarzyszenie im. Jana Karskiego, Kielce; Bogdan Białek, Stowarzyszenia im. Jana Karskiego, Kielce; Barbara and Marek Brandys; Anna Brzezińska; Michał Chęciński; Jarosław Dulewicz; Martyna Fabisiak; Józef Fajngold; Ame Gilbert; Anka Grupińska; Ewa Gwóźdź; Eugenia Hinton-Pocałun; Wisława Keizman-Majtlis; Artur Karp; Adam Koński; Ewa Kossowsky; Yaacov Kotlicki; Mirosława Kropiwnicka; Bartłomiej Krupa; Julian Kwiek; Renée Levkovitch; Dariusz Libionka; Steve Lippman, Jewish Week, Boston; Marcel Łoziński; Anna Majdanik; Małgorzata Maliszewska; Steve Montag; Niusia Nestl (Henrietta Borensztajn-Nester); Anna Niklewicz; Margalit Suchoy and her husband, Eitan; Henryk Pawelec; Anna Piątek; Sharona Roffman; Andrzej Ropelewski; Joachim Russek; Joan W. Scott; Wojciech Wilczyk; Marcin Zaremba.

The research that forms the foundation of this book was carried out with the support of a Marie Curie Fellowship funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and the European Commission (2013–2015, in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey) as part of the Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Central and Eastern Europe research theme of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

I would like to thank the Czarna Owca Publishing House, especially its director, Paweł Książkiewicz, for comprehensive assistance in the writing of the original Polish-language edition of this book, including the funding of costly translations and supplemental archival searches, as well as countless copies of archival documents and images.

I would like to express my gratitude to the staff of the Institute of National Remembrance (the branch at Krasiński Square in Warsaw and the branch in Kielce) for their efficient, patient, and comprehensive help during my many years of research in these archives. I am especially grateful to the Warsaw archivists Olga Laskowska and Andrzej Smolarek, whose advice I could always count on, and likewise archivists in the Kielce branch—Monika Adach, Monika Szczerba, and Andrzej Strzelecki. The archival documentation was transcribed by Wanda Ostrowska. The electronic documents were reviewed against the originals by Jolanta Sheybal, who is also the editor of both volumes of the original, Polish-language edition. The literary editing of the first volume of the Polish edition was carried out by Juliusz Kurkiewicz, and the proofreading was performed by Aleksandra Kiełczykowska. The footage for Marcel Łoziński’s film Witnesses was transcribed by Miroslawa Kropiwnicka. The materials from the second Kielce investigation, which professor Krzysztof Persak from the Institute of National Remembrance helped me to obtain, were photographed by Magdalena Prokopowicz. The search in the State Archives in Kielce was carried out by Jarosław Dulewicz; in the National Archives in Krakow by Karolina Panz; and in the Central Military Archives (today’s Military Historical Office, with branches in various locations) by Martyna Bójko. The photos of contemporary Kielce were taken by Wojciech Wilczyk; Alina Skibińska lent her own photo of 7 Planty Street for the cover of the second volume that was published in Polish. Rafael Blumenfeld’s account was translated from Hebrew by Anna Piątek, and Anczel Pinkusiewicz’s account from Yiddish by Sara Arm, to whom I am also indebted to for making many other valuable materials available to me. I am also grateful to Dr. Łukasz Śleszkowski for formulating a pathomorphological opinion on the 1946 reports of the external examinations of the bodies of pogrom victims, as well as to Ewa Kossovsky and Wojciech Tochman, who put me in contact with him. I thank Dr. Christi Cavaliere, MD, and Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls for their expert assistance with the translation of the medical and forensic terminology in chapter 2 and elsewhere.

I thank the family of Dr. Michał Chęciński for their trust in opening his archive to me, and for their repeated hospitality. My husband, Michał Pawilno-Pacewicz, helped me to review this archive. I am grateful to Marcel Łoziński for providing recordings of conversations that were not included in his film Witnesses, and to Michał Jaskulski for generously providing access to visual materials collected during his work on the film Planty 7/9. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all the survivors of the Kielce pogrom, as well as to their families and friends, for providing access to their accounts and archives. I am especially grateful to Sharona Roffman, and Chilik Weizman, who enthusiastically brokered my contact with Niusia Borensztajn-Nester, the hero of chapter 1; and to Bronek and Julietta Bergmans and Ame Gilbert, who made it possible for me to meet Józef Fajngold, as well as the youngest survivor of the pogrom, Renée Levkovitch, for their patience and long talks.

I am grateful to all the readers of the early versions of this book for their critiques: Natalia Aleksiun, Sara Arm, Baruch Bergman, Anna Bikont, Helena Datner, Andrzej Friszke, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Jan T. Gross, Ewa Gwóźdź, Michał Jaskulski, Katarzyna Koschany, Yaacov Kotlicki, Bartłomiej Krupa, Łukasz Krzyżanowski, Marcin Kula, Juliusz Kurkiewicz, Marek Maciągowski, Leonard Neuger, Joanna Roszak, Szymon Rudnicki, Alina Skibińska, Aleksander Smolar, Michael Steinlauf, Mirosław Tryczyk, Izabella Wagner, and others. Their good will and perceptiveness allowed me to avoid many errors. I did not always listen to all the advice, so the responsibility for the present shape of the book rests entirely with me.

Many thanks to Rosie Cain and Steven Feldman of the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as Susan Specter from Cornell University Press, for their engagement and assistance in the final stages of the book’s publication. I am especially grateful to Dorota Głowacka and Claire Rosenson, who believed in this book. Claire’s editorial talents are visible on every page. And finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Ewa Wampuszyc, my invaluable translator, for her tenacity and perseverance. The combination of her linguistic skills and area studies knowledge brought a level of nuance and understanding to this project that is uncommon when moving between languages and cultures. It was a privilege and rare opportunity to work with her.

I thank the sponsors of the English-language translation of the book from the bottom of my heart:

Yaacov Kotlicki (Kieltzer Society of Israel), in memory of his father Herszel Kotlicki, a survivor of the Kielce pogrom;

Manny Bekier, president, Kieltzer Society of New York;

Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak on behalf of Beit Polska, Friends of Jewish Renewal in Poland, and the Ballonoff Family Foundation;

The Jack Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, thanks to which the English-language edition was made possible.

Last but not least, I thank my husband, Michał Pawilno-Pacewicz, always the first reader of my works, for creating a safe space where everything becomes possible.

ABBREVIATIONS

SL Source List (at the end of this book)

Archives and Archival Terms

Listed in Abbreviations and Notations Used in the Appendixes and at the beginning of the Source List (SL)

Communist Party Authorities

KCPPR Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (Komitet Centralny Polskiej Partii Robotniczej)

KRN Homeland National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa)

PKWN Polish Committee for National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego), also known as the Lublin Committee

PPR Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza)

Security Apparatus

KBW Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego [name changed in 1946 to Wojska Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego,]); a military formation under the MBP created by the Communist authorities in 1945 to combat underground independence (anti-Soviet) groups remaining in Poland after the war

MBP Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego)

PUBP County Office of Public Security (Powiatowy Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego)

UBP, UB Office of Public Security (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego), referred to colloquially as UB, bezpieka , herein also referred to as security service. A person who worked for the UB was referred to colloquially as an Ubek (pl. Ubecy).

WUBP Provincial Office of Public Security (Wojewódzki Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego)

Military

2DP 2nd Warsaw Infantry Division, also 2nd Infantry Division (2 Warszawska Dywizja Piechoty)

AL People’s Army (Armia Ludowa); Polish guerilla forces backed and supplied by the Soviet Union; established as the Gwardia Ludowa (People’s Guard, GL) in 1942 and renamed in 1944

GL See AL above.

WP Polish Army/Armed Forces/Military (Wojsko Polskie, WP); the regular Polish military forces established after Poland regained independence in 1918

WSR Regional Military Court (Wojskowy Sąd Rejonowy)

Police

KW MO Provincial Headquarters of the Citizens’ Militia (Komenda Wojewódzka Milicji Obywatelskiej; usually referred to throughout as provincial headquarters of the MO.

MO Citizens’ Militia (Milicja Obywatelska); the postwar police established by the Communist authorities. Before World War II and since the end of communism, the Polish police force was known, and continues to be known, as Policja , equivalent to the term Police in English; herein referred to as the police/policeman or the MO.

Cross-Institutional

WKB Provincial Security Committee (Wojewódzki Komitet Bezpieczeństwa); these committees were established under the MBP in 1946 to coordinate responses to attacks by the underground or other perceived threats. They reported to the MBP but were made up of representatives of all force institutions: UB, MO, Red Army, Polish Army.

Polish Underground (Wartime/Postwar)

AK The Home Army (Armia Krajowa); the military wing of the Polish government-in-exile headquartered in London; the main resistance force in occupied Poland, incorporating most of the resistance movements that emerged in response to Poland’s military defeat

BCh Peasants’ Battalions (Bataliony Chłopskie); armed resistance movement formed in 1940 by the military wing of the People’s Party (Stronnictwo Ludowe), an agrarian populist party. The BCh for the most part cooperated with the AK, and was partially integrated with it at the end of the war.

NSZ National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne); a right-nationalist, anticommunist and antisemitic underground independence movement formed in 1942 and partially integrated with the AK at the end of the war

WiN Freedom and Independence Union (Zrzeszenie Wolność i Niezawisłość); a civil, anti-Soviet underground resistance movement established in September 1945

Jewish Communal Organizations

CKŻP Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce); established in late 1944 to provide care and assistance to Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors

TSKŻ Socio-Cultural Society of Jews in Poland (Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów w Polsce); the successor to the CKŻP as of 1950

PART I

Movement

CHAPTER 1

Voices

The Morning of July 4, 1946

Of all the protagonists on this day, Anczel Pinkusiewicz* is up and about the earliest.¹ In order to catch the 2:30 a.m. train from Wrocław to Częstochowa, he has stayed up all night. He spent the war in Siberia and has only recently arrived in Poland.² He left his wife, Lea, and three-year-old Izaak just outside of Głogów. Now he’s on his way to his hometown, Kielce, by himself. On the train, he sits next to the Polish Christian woman whose luggage he helped load through the train window. She’s also from Kielce. Before the war Pinkusiewicz worked as an administrator in the Teatr Polski. They soon discover that they have some acquaintances in common.

In addition to the two of them, there’s a Jewish family in the train car: two sisters and their husbands. The sisters only recently returned from the Soviet Union, and one of them is seven months pregnant. While most of their friends and acquaintances are seeking their fortunes in the West, they’re traveling against the current—to Chełm, to meet up with their father, who somehow managed to survive the war.

While Pinkusiewicz dozes on the train as it approaches Częstochowa, workers in Kielce who start their jobs at five in the morning are just waking up. They work at Sawmills no. 1 and 2, at the Fosfat chemical plant, at the brickyard and the tilery, at the Granat metal manufacturing plant, and the Kadzielnia Industrial Plants. The first shift at the Ludwików steelworks will start soon. The Błaszczyks—eight-year-old Henio’s uncle Andrzej and Henio’s brother Jan—will arrive at work. Henio finally turned up yesterday, after he’d gone missing for three days. Just yesterday evening Henio’s father, Walenty, went to the nearby police station to report to the police that he had returned.³ But since Walenty was not entirely sober, they told him to come back the following day.⁴ In a couple of hours, a meeting of the Factory Council will be called in the steelworks. Quite unexpectedly, the matter of Henio’s disappearance will come up during the meeting.

Commander Edmund Zagórski supposedly gets up at five thirty. During the war he was in the Home Army;⁵ today, he’s head of the police station located at 45 Sienkiewicza Street. At six o’clock he sets off on rounds with his deputy. Returning to the station by eight, he begins his lecture on hygiene.

It will be just before nine when Master Corporal (plutonowy) Stefan Kuźmiński will report to Zagórski that the boy just came forward and reported the guy who supposedly held him for three days in a basement. The guy’s here.⁶

Before all this transpires, mothers will be up at seven. So what if it’s summer vacation? You have to make breakfast for the kids regardless. Heading off to the market, one of the mothers will leave her six-year-old daughter playing in the courtyard. When she returns, the child will be gone. Also gone will be Antonina Biskupska’s five-year-old son, Staś, who ran off with his friends to the Silnica River; Ludwik Pustuła’s ten-year-old daughter, Leokadia, who went to the train station to sell lemonade; and Maria Binkowska’s eight-year-old, Janek, who disappeared in June but will be found two weeks from now, healthy and whole, on Pocieszka Street.⁷ These parents wouldn’t be so desperate if they hadn’t already heard about the Błaszczyk boy from Podwalna Street earlier that morning. It’s not that he disappeared. Rather, it’s about where he was found. Rumor has it that Jews from Planty Street held him in a basement for three days. This is why Zofia Prokop, Maria Binkowska, and Antonina Biskupska will go to the Jewish Committee building later today. And policeman Pustuła will also go there, in his official capacity, but only after tossing back a few drinks.

Around eight in the morning the city is already bustling with people. Shops, restaurants, hair salons and barbershops are opening up. Breakfast has just finished at the station at 45 Sienkiewicza Street, where Walenty Błaszczyk has just returned, this time with his son. The policemen from the night shift are punching out as those scheduled for the day shift start to show up.

Before fourteen-year-old Czesław Nowak gets on the train to Częstochowa, where he peddles lemonade and milk, he goes to the city park to catch a couple of fish.

Two scouts, brothers Feliks and Stanisław Kowal,* are in a hurry to get to church to attend a mass being said for the repose of General Sikorski’s soul.

Nineteen-year-old Niusia Borensztajn and Szmulek Nester,* who’s just a year older than she is, are taking a stroll together along Sienkiewicza Street for the first time.

Ignacy Herman* is eating breakfast at a café with a schoolmate.⁸

Marysia Machtynger,* who works for the Jewish Committee in the repatriation department, has already crossed the intersection of Sienkiewicza and Planty streets.

Twenty-two-year-old Borys Wajntraub, who lives in the kibbutz in the Jewish Committee building on Planty Street, has just stepped out for a newspaper. As he returns, he sees small groups of people along the Silnica River conversing in lowered voices.

A couple of minutes after eight, Władysław Sobczyński, head of the Provincial Office of Public Security, is getting his hair trimmed at the barbershop located on the corner of Sienkiewicza and Focha streets,⁹ when his adjutant and son-in-law, Roman Nowak, brings him the news that something is going on in front of the Jewish Committee building.¹⁰ It is this adjutant who will go back to the office and spread the rumor about Jews who murdered Polish children.¹¹ He believes this rumor just as much as the other Kielce residents do.

A Men’s Shoe Store

While Ignacy Herman is finishing his breakfast in the café, raised voices can suddenly be heard coming from the street, and a crowd of agitated people appears outside the window.¹² At the insistence of the proprietress, the customers of the café quickly leave the premises. A group of women, crying, stands near the Silnica River. I asked what happened, Herman recalls. They answered: You don’t know? And pointing to the Jewish Committee building on Planty Street, they added, Over there, in the basement, lie the little heads of Christian children murdered by Jews for blood to make matzo.

He and his friend go their separate ways, and Herman comes up with an idea: he’ll go to the officers’ mess located not far from here. But they don’t let him in. He sees that people are hunting for Jews on the street. How should I protect myself? First, he tries to get a room in a hotel, but three hotels turn him away. Finally, Mr. Woś, who was a tenant in his grandmother’s apartment building, comes to mind. Mr. Woś owns a men’s shoe store, and Herman goes there. The owner immediately recognizes him and sits him down behind the counter. He gives Herman a newspaper, so that he can hide his Semitic features. Bootmakers, shoemakers, and, of course, customers stop by the shop. I couldn’t see any of them, Herman recalls, but I heard them say through their gritted teeth that it was time to completely finish off the Jews and finish what Hitler had started.

That same morning, Jakub Aleksandrowicz,*¹³ a tailor from Łódź who has come to Kielce on business, is wandering around the city. He is staying at the Hotel Polski, just a few hundred meters from the Jewish shelter. When I woke up and looked out the window, I saw crowds making their way toward Planty, he recalls. I went out onto Sienkiewicza and asked what was going on. People said, The Jews need to be beaten, they’re murdering our children, they’ve killed one or two After an hour, they were already saying that ten had been killed. People in the crowd were carrying wooden posts, chains, canes, stones in their hands; boys were running along, and shop owners, and I saw a couple of scouts with canes. But the authorities—I saw neither government nor local authorities.

I kept walking with this crowd. I felt safe because in Kielce I wasn’t known as a Jew. But I was registered in the hotel as Aleksandrowicz, Jankiel Mendel, something the people at the reception desk understood full well. As I was leaving breakfast, I could feel them pointing fingers at me. I got scared, and since I knew what all this meant, I grabbed my suitcase and slipped out the back door.

On the main street I ran into an acquaintance of mine who owned a hosiery shop. We had business contacts in common. I went with her into her store. What are you doing here? she asked. Don’t you know what’s going on with the Jews? They killed our children I asked her how many children they had killed. She said ten. Her words are burned into my memory.

I joined the crowd and went with them all the way to Planty, where several of my acquaintances lived. That was at about ten. There were a whole lot of people there already. They were all yelling, Give up the Jews, drag them out, we need to kill them for what they did to us There were shop owners, housewives, firemen, workmen—even priests in cassocks. Policemen were hanging around with smiles on their faces, as if encouraging the crowd. There were also members of the scouting movement in their uniforms. They had canes—called ciupagas—in their hands. Suddenly I heard screams. I went closer and saw clubs raised and lowered in beatings.

There’s also Dina Szaroni’s account.¹⁴ She was a resident of Kielce and the widow of Mr. Lemberg, whose first name we do not know. The building where she lived was located across the street from the Soviet headquarters on Focha Street, and in a moment Szmulek Nester will take shelter there. We arrived in Kielce in May, on the fourth or the fifth, Dina recalls. We first moved into an apartment on Czysta Street, later called Focha, building number 18/20, where there were a few apartments abandoned by fleeing Germans. The offices of the Municipal Jewish Committee were also located there. A lot of Jews lived there, the more religious kind also lived there, including my husband and me, my brother, and the Baums*. This was the other Jewish building in Kielce, just like the one on Planty, but Jews left for America from this one rather than for Palestine.

My husband ate breakfast and went out to take care of something. He came back after three minutes. I made a joke: I knew you would come back. But he wasn’t laughing. He asks, Have you heard what’s going on? There’s a pogrom. People are walking around the streets looking for Jews. They’re saying that we want to take children to make matzo. As it turned out, when my husband went out into the street he ran into a crowd of people who were walking around looking for Jews. They were looking for them because a father and son were looking for the Jew who had hidden a boy in a little shed to take his blood. So we immediately locked the doors and sat as quietly as mice.

Our neighbors across the hall were Russians. Russian officers. That’s why all those Poles around us didn’t have the courage to come in. They just yelled that those Jews need to be seized and that revenge should be taken on them. I had an aunt who lived on Planty, and she asked a good Russian officer from there to save her. But he told her she had no right to go anywhere that day, and that she had to stay home. There were always guards at the gate down below in front of the Russians’ building. On that day, the gate was sealed shut. There wasn’t a guard in sight.

Niusia and Samuel Take a Stroll

At seven thirty breakfast is also being eaten at the Ichud kibbutz in the building of the Jewish Committee located at 7 Planty Street.¹⁵ Calling it a kibbutz, though, is an overstatement. We’re talking about three rooms on the second floor with windows facing the courtyard.¹⁶ One room for the young girls and another for the boys. Ewa Szuchman, the secretary to the chairman of the Jewish Committee, lived on the other side of the stairwell, on the Planty Street side.¹⁷ The chairman of the committee was Seweryn Kahane,* a well-respected former partisan from Lwów. His deputy was the chairman of the kibbutz, Jechiel Alpert, who lived with his wife in a separate apartment on the second floor. The main office of the committee was located on the first floor.

Altogether there were thirty-eight mouths to feed in the kibbutz. Downstairs, in the soup kitchen funded by the [American Jewish] Joint Distribution Committee, there were just as many nonmembers’ mouths to feed. From 160 to 180 soups were served per day. According to a report by the Repatriation Department from the first half of 1946, these soups were nutritious and tasty.¹⁸ The overwhelming majority of those who ate there were young people who had survived the camps or returnees from the Soviet Union. Most, like Tania and Fania Szumacher, were born in the 1920s. Some were even younger, like seventeen-year-old Balka Gertner or Rachelka Sonberg (Zander), who was a bit younger than that. All four will perish in the pogrom. There were a few older Holocaust survivors there: Aron Binsztok, age seventy; Berl Frydman, an old tinsmith from Kielce, age fifty-two; Róża Rajzman, age fifty; Estera Proszowska, a nurse, age forty-three; Julian Bertinger, a demobilized soldier, age forty-eight; and forty-year-old Kalman Zinger, the Jew in the green hat, who will be arrested in just a moment.

After breakfast Borys Wajntraub is going back to 7 Planty Street with the newspaper he just bought when he sees a small crowd standing in front of the building. When he asks what is going on, the people answer that Jews murdered a boy, and there’s a pogrom. What do you mean, a pogrom? Wajntraub laughs. He is blond and doesn’t look Jewish.¹⁹ He wears a Soviet military overcoat. This overcoat will save his life.

Meanwhile, at that moment, Niusia Borensztajn and Szmulek Nester are strolling along Sienkiewicza Street.²⁰ They are going for a walk for the first time as an engaged couple. A passing police patrol gives them a strange look. They don’t understand his look until a group of people appears from behind the patrol shouting that Jews murdered a Polish child that night. Among the group is a woman, more or less thirty-five years old, a tall brunette dressed in a light-colored dress, with her hair combed up. Niusia and Szmulek hear her saying that ten children have been found in the Jews’ basement.

Figure 1. A woman in a print dress (left) and man in a white shirt and dark pants (right) stand together and pose for the photo on a ship.

FIGURE 1. Niusia Borensztajn and Szmulek Nester (her fiancé) on shipboard just before their arrival in Israel. Courtesy of Niusia Nestel and Chilik Weizman.

Szmulek, who survived the August pogrom in Kraków, does not want to wait for events to unfold.²¹ As he and Niusia head further down Sienkiewicza Street, passersby ask them what’s happening on Planty. They decide to take the side streets. Following a roundabout route, they reach the local headquarters of the Soviet troops, located on Focha Street. But today the heavy iron gate that is normally wide open and guarded by at least one sentry, is bolted shut. Even the guard is inside the gate. Szmulek remembers that a rabbi friend of his lives not far from there, at 18/20 Focha Street. They see that the rabbi’s gate is opening every few moments; someone enters, and then someone else enters. So others must be looking for shelter here too.

I said to my girlfriend, Come on, let’s also go in, recalls Nester.²² But she objected. No. Let whatever happens to the kibbutz, also happen to us. I repeated my suggestion, she repeated hers. I’m going back. And in a moment she was no longer beside me. She went back there, and I went into the rabbi’s. On the following day, when Szmulek gives a statement to an officer from the security service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB), he still won’t know what has happened to Niusia.²³

Meanwhile, Niusia was pushing her way through the crowd that was besieging the building on Planty Street.²⁴ I was heading back, she says, and along the way I saw that the entire city had flocked to this place, in front of this building. I saw that the entire city was standing there. The factories were at a standstill, people were coming—young, old, children, everyone—with posts taken from fences, clubs, iron bars pulled out of the ground, everyone was running in this direction. The entire city came out to beat the Jews. The schoolyard was enormous; there was a school next to our kibbutz, St. Kinga’s Middle School. I don’t know how I managed to get through this throng. They asked me. Where are you going? I said, I live here. They laughed in my face and said, You’re going to die.²⁵

Rafael Blumenfeld Looks out the Window

After breakfast we were sitting in the kibbutz on plank beds, says one of the oldest kibbutzniks, twenty-five-year-old Rafael Blumenfeld.*²⁶ We were getting ready to go to work—we were leasing a small plot of land outside Kielce, learning how to work the soil before leaving for Palestine—when suddenly our friend Niusia, very frightened, rushes in, telling us that crowds were moving along the streets shouting: Death to the Jews, let’s go, let’s kill the Jews the same way they killed our children. We started to laugh, thinking that the boys who were standing on the street had given her a scare. We said she was being hysterical, that she was imagining things, that it was not possible. And suddenly, maybe after a quarter of an hour, we start hearing some kind of disturbance downstairs in our building. We go up to the window and see that people are beginning to gather and shout, that they’re starting to throw stones at our windows.

We sat down on the beds and tried to figure out what to do. We took the girls to the last room—we had three rooms there on the second floor—and told them to lock themselves in from the inside, move the beds in front of the door and not open it for anyone. And we stood outside the door with weapons for which we had a permit, and wondered what to do next. Suddenly, our chairman, Chilek [Jechiel] Alpert, who also lived in this building, came over to us and tried to calm us down, saying that everything would be all right, because the police were here and they would look after us, and there was no reason to panic. It’s easy to say don’t panic, but how can you not if you’ve seen those crowds below and heard the shouting?

Figure 2. A group of eight people standing together outside in a field with some buildings in the background.

FIGURE 2. Pogrom survivor Niusia Borensztajn (center) with friends in prewar Kielce. Courtesy of Niusia Borenstein and Chilik Weizman.

I saw a few policemen standing in front of the door. I look again and see: the door has opened and a Jewish man has gone out into the street. Suddenly some woman cries out. She’s holding a young boy, and he shouts, That’s the Jew! We didn’t know what he meant by the Jew.

And a policeman grabbed the Jew, and together with yet another policeman took him away somewhere. They led him away through the crowd, even though that crowd charged at him and wanted to beat him. But they escorted him to the station. Chilek Alpert went up to the chairman of the Provincial Committee, Dr. Seweryn Kahane, and asked him to communicate with the security service (UB) and to ask them to detain that man and not let him leave, because people might kill him. And they detained him there. That Jew’s name is Kalman Zinger.* He is a resident of Kielce.

Figure 3. A portrait of a man in round-framed glasses.

FIGURE 3. Pogrom survivor Rafael Blumenfeld in 1956. Courtesy of Itzhak Peled, Blumenfeld’s son.

I didn’t know that Błaszczyk at all, and I don’t know anything about his family because we were careful not to cross paths with any Poles. The atmosphere in Kielce was tense. They had just held the referendum.²⁷ There was fighting between the underground—they were called the boys from the forest—and the authorities. There was fighting, so we were on our guard not to be out in the streets too much, not to get involved. From time to time we heard that here or there someone had been killed, so we avoided any contact.

They weren’t saying anything about kidnappings for matzo. The rumor was that Jews kidnapped the child because they were returning from the camps emaciated and that now they were giving themselves transfusions using the blood of Polish children. The mother of that Błaszczyk boy, she came with that child to look at the basement where they held him, only there’s no basement in this building at all. It took a bit of time, about an hour, to get those crowds going. That mother, that mother was shouting the entire time, as were others in the crowd. The boy was little, he stood with his mother, just playing the role of an extra. She was shouting, Our children are here, a lot of children are still inside in the basement.

We were barricaded in the kibbutz, but we made sure that Chilek Alpert, who was our liaison, could get in to tell us what was going on outside. Through the window I saw the crowd grow and grow. It started with individuals, then there were dozens, hundreds, and by the third series of shots, already thousands, maybe two thousand people. The policemen came along with this crowd. They marched at the head of the crowd. We saw how they entered our yard—we watched from the balcony. After nine o’clock, they started to come en masse, but they had been coming one by one since just after eight.

And we didn’t know what to do. Suddenly we saw that policemen and officers of the Polish Army were entering the building. The policemen were downstairs, and upstairs there were only soldiers. When they came inside, they started to take away our weapons. They ordered us to hand over our weapons. And when we handed over the weapons, at that moment the shots started, they started shooting at us. I don’t know where the shots came from—from downstairs, from upstairs, I don’t remember—I can’t say now where that first shot came from. I only remember that the soldiers disarmed us and right after disarming us they started shooting at us. They started to disarm [us] on the second floor, then they went down. Those in military uniforms—only they had weapons, our weapons were taken away. They started to shoot, and they started to shout that we should come down, those soldiers who came up to us, shouted that we should go down. At eleven, eleven thirty, around that time, they started to push us out of the building. Our weapons were taken away, I don’t know, at around ten, ten fifteen. And right away, after they took our weapons, the shooting began. We were terribly afraid.

We didn’t want to move, and then they were storming the doors that we had blocked. In the end, they ran to that last room where the girls were, they started to beat on [the door] with their rifle butts and kick [it down]. That’s when the girls opened up, and we started to hear screaming from there, because there were already some wounded. The panic began, a great panic.

Yes, I saw them shoot Symcha Sokołowski.* He was one of the members of our kibbutz. In the midst of this shooting, he suddenly grabbed his heart and shouted, I took a bullet, I took a bullet. He started to bleed and fell onto one of the bunk beds that was standing there. And the screaming started, the hysterical kind, especially from the girls, because he was barricaded in there, where the girls were. The screaming began, screaming that made an awful impression on me, because I felt I was responsible for them.

In the meantime, a different Sokołowski* was seriously wounded, and one of our female members fell out a window, but by then I was already downstairs. I knew they were throwing someone down, but I couldn’t make out who it was. I remember a girl screaming, and later I learned that it was Balka Gertner.* I knew that they were throwing girls off the balcony and that she was screaming, but I couldn’t think about it because I was getting hit with a stone here, a stone there, my pain drowned out her scream. I only heard the scream and saw someone falling from the balcony.

Because at the same time the soldiers started to push us out into the stairwell and down toward the exit. We resisted, we didn’t want to move, so they started to push us with rifle butts. And they pushed us toward the schoolyard. And when we got there, the crowd positioned itself on both sides of the exit and started to beat us with stones, and started to beat us with clubs, canes. The civilian population stood in two rows with stones, with iron [rods]. Everyone was holding something, was holding something in his hand, either an iron rod, or bricks, or stones, or some sort of stick. I took a blow to the head with a stone, from two sides they hit me in the head with rocks. When I walked out, I couldn’t even scream. I saw an enraged mob, I saw eyes that wanted to devour me, I don’t know. If they could have, they would have killed me with their eyes.

I saw women among those beating us, shouting hysterically, a lot of women, and they were also beating us with stones, beating, using whatever they could, but there was no shortage of men either. They shouted, Death to the Jews, death to the Jews. I saw they were beating us, but this beating wasn’t enough for them. "Kill the Jews that [sic] killed our children, kill the Jews!" It was a sort of mass hysteria, they were overcome by hysteria. I don’t know what it was: screaming, and shouting, and beating, and shouting, it was just awful.

I was covered in blood. I felt dizzy and lost consciousness. I fell on the stones, on the cobblestones. When I fell, I could still hear, as if through a fog, This one is still alive. I was afraid they would shoot me in order to finish me off, like they did to a man next to me.

I lay on the street for a few hours before they threw me into an ambulance. It was well after the midday meal—I don’t know—at 15:00, at 18:00, it seems, I can’t say, because I wasn’t completely conscious. But it was already darker than in the morning, the sun wasn’t as strong. Suddenly I felt they were coming up to me, that they were lifting me, throwing me into an ambulance and onto a pile of corpses that were lying in there, and they threw someone else on top of me. That’s when I began to vomit, yes. I began to vomit and that vomiting woke me up a bit. We were already moving by then, and there were still a bunch of corpses on top of me when the vehicle drove away. The vehicle drove away, and we went to the hospital. They took the corpses to the mortuary, and me, they took me to wash me up, to dress my wounds, to put me to bed.

Who pushed us out? There were only soldiers in the building. Soldiers, I don’t know where they were from, maybe from the Internal Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, KBW) or wherever, but they were not policemen. The policemen were only downstairs, by the door, in front of the crowd. The policemen pushed us into the courtyard. There weren’t any civilians in the building. The civilians were standing just outside the doors, and when they opened the doors and pushed us out, the two rows were already standing there. Chilek Alpert knows what happened next because he was out there. I don’t know, I didn’t see.

Jechiel Alpert and His Wife, Hanka

²⁸

Both Jechiel and Hanka Alpert were from Kielce, and both survived the camps. They lived on the second floor of the building annex next to the kibbutz. Before the war, he completed a degree in mathematics and then taught math in the Jewish middle school in Kielce. She was just now beginning her studies. They had been married for a year.

The windows of the Jewish Committee and Seweryn Kahane’s office faced the courtyard, says Alpert. At around nine o’clock I went down to the office, and there I learned that one of our residents, Kalman Zinger, a religious Jew, had been standing on the street and was arrested by the police. He supposedly kidnapped a Polish child and held him in the basement for three days. I asked the head of the committee to immediately go to the police and free this Jew, because this could turn into a very unpleasant provocation. Kahane went. He returns after a few minutes. Everything is taken care of, he says. They will release him right away. I go up to the window and see that the police are surrounding the building. What did you take care of? I shout. Because, as it turns out, the policemen came to conduct a search, to look for those hidden children because apparently more than one child had been captured.

I call the UB and ask them to come. I remember one of them, Captain Mucha. They said they would get the situation under control right away, we can rest assured. But they couldn’t give any orders, because there were four officers, not even in uniform, but in civilian clothes, and they couldn’t influence the police. And the police treated us very boorishly. As a matter of fact, [they also treated the UB officers badly]. Mucha says to me, Listen, everything is all right. To that I answer, What does ‘all right’ mean? Leave a guard here! Take a look, what’s it look like to you? Don’t worry, he answered. And they left.

A thick crowd was already gathered on Planty Street. The police were standing in small groups and those policemen were probably saying that there’s a mortuary full of children here. An army captain, a Jew, wanted to check the identity papers of some policeman who had hit a Jew right in front of him, but the guy reacted to him very arrogantly, threw himself at him as if he wanted to kill him, murder him. That captain got scared and disappeared somewhere. Only one fellow from the UB, Lieutenant Albert Grynbaum, stayed with his sergeant, Jan Rokicki. He was with us until 13:00.

We were sitting. My wife, Hanka, didn’t even manage to get dressed; she came down in her nightgown, in her robe, she said that she was afraid of being alone in the room. It was ten thirty when the fire brigade arrived. They wanted to disperse this crowd using water, but supposedly someone cut their hoses. I call the commander of the Russian unit—his name was Shpilevoi—and I say to him It’s not safe, something might happen, please send help. He says that he can’t because he doesn’t have any units in Polish uniforms, he only has Russian uniforms, and then they could say that the Russians are murdering Poles—he can’t send anyone.

Anyway, the Polish Army arrived at eleven o’clock and surrounded the building. The army arrived, so we breathed a sigh of relief. I go out into the foyer, and there’s some young missy, a Pole, yelling at me: You drank our blood! You killed Christ, we’ll show you! I want to escort her out, but two soldiers are standing nearby, and they warn me: You better watch it, sir!

Then in the office I wanted to go over to the window, to see what was going on, when the shooting began. First, a bullet shot from the courtyard hit the tile stove. A major arrives; Kahane says to him, Major, sir! They’re shooting! What is this? He didn’t react, he left. And they started to shoot at our building. Suddenly, Ewa Szuchman, Kahane’s secretary, comes down from the second floor and shouts, They’re murdering people in the kibbutz! So I rush to the second floor. I rush upstairs together with Kahane, I go out onto the stairwell—the kibbutz was on the left side, on the right was the entrance to my apartment and a large foyer. I want to walk past, but