The Crime in Kielce, 4 July 1946

On 4 July 1946, a pogrom took place in Kielce, in which a mob murdered several dozen Jews, Holocaust survivors who were trying to rebuild their lives there after the war. The event did not take place in Lower Silesia, but its effects reached the region almost immediately and proved decisive for it. Until July 1946, the situation of Jewish settlement in the Lower Silesian lands was favourable, and many survivors tied their future to this place. The Kielce pogrom changed that within a matter of days.

Panic Engulfs the Lower Silesian Communities

A mood of panic after the pogrom gripped Jews across the whole country, including Lower Silesia - a region that had until then been free of antisemitic incidents and was considered safe. A week after the pogrom, a representative of the Voivodeship Jewish Committee visiting the branch in Wałbrzych noted "the apparatus giving in to moods of depression and panic caused by the recent events". In Boguszów, at a meeting with parents, it was heard that a school for Jewish children was unnecessary, because everyone was planning to leave anyway. In the Jewish community, a phrase was repeated: "There is no place for Jews in Poland".

The administrative authorities assessed the situation similarly. The Settlement Office at the Wałbrzych City Board wrote at the end of July 1946 about "a restratification of the Jewish population" - people running shops were massively transferring their rights for payment and leaving the city. The PPR Faction at the local County Jewish Committee described it directly: "After the Kielce pogrom, under the strong propaganda of certain Jewish parties, a panic of departure spread through the Jewish street, and Jews began leaving en masse for abroad".

Escape Routes: Kudowa, Mieroszów and the Bricha Organisation

A key role in organising the departures was played by the underground organisation Bricha, and Lower Silesia became the main transit corridor for Jews fleeing from across Poland. Assembly points were located in Kudowa and Mieroszów. Trucks carried people from Wałbrzych to Mieroszów, and from Kłodzko to Kudowa - a night was spent on site, and the Czechoslovak border was crossed the following day. Those leaving were identified on the basis of documents issued by Zionist parties, and officers of the Security Office checked whether among them there were people of other nationalities, opponents of the regime, or people smuggling out foreign currency. The first transport set off on 30 July 1946. The Polish authorities agreed with representatives of the Zionist movement that emigration through the Lower Silesian territory would be conducted on a semi-legal basis, so for several months this movement took place almost openly.

The Scale of Departures in Numbers

In the three months after the pogrom, around 70,000 Jews left Poland, using, among other routes, the Lower Silesian border crossings - Lower Silesian Jews made up half of the emigrants. Wałbrzych County alone was left by around 4,000 Jews in under five months; at the end of December 1946, more than 10,000 still remained in the region. The process resembled a domino effect - newcomers from central and eastern Poland persuaded Lower Silesian Jews to leave, and they in turn persuaded their relatives, neighbours and acquaintances. The emigration movement weakened in the autumn of 1946, and on 22 February 1947 the authorities withdrew the border-crossing facilitations, which closed this stage of the exodus.

The Dispute Over What Comes Next: Communists versus Zionists

The Kielce pogrom forced all sides of Jewish life to revise their existing plans. For Zionist activists, the crime was proof that the only alternative was emigration and the building of their own state in Palestine. The PPR Faction and the Bund defended the view that, despite everything, some Jews would remain in Poland, and that the existence of the local settlement was in the interest of both local Jews and world Jewry. The communists organised rallies and conferences in Wałbrzych, Boguszów, Sobięcin, Szczawno-Zdrój, Głuszyca and Mieroszów, attended in total by around 3,000 Jews, explaining that the democratic Polish government would not allow a repeat of the Kielce events. This propaganda, however, reached only a small part of the audience - even some activists of the PPR Faction were themselves considering leaving. One activist in Wałbrzych County asked directly whether, given that Polish society was steeped in antisemitism, the communists should not rather stand at the head of the Zionist movement.

What Remained After the Wave of Panic

The closing of the border in February 1947 did not mean the end of migration - instead, a new stage began, in which Jews had to remain in the country for longer. The wave of departures accelerated internal migration: residents of smaller centres moved to larger communities, and the local Jewish committees in Szczawno-Zdrój, Gaj and Jarze were dissolved. Only those centres where the Jewish population remained largest survived - among them Wałbrzych and Dzierżoniów, where more than 12,000 Jews already lived by the summer of 1946, the second-largest community in Lower Silesia after Wrocław. The Jewish community in Lower Silesia survived the Kielce pogrom, but the panic of July 1946 turned out to be only the first of several waves that would systematically diminish it in the years that followed.