History of Sorts

I know this will be disputed by many Poles reading this blog, however, this did happen. It happened only a few months after World War II ended in Europe. In fact, it was only 95 days after the end of the Holocaust.

It all started on 27 June 1945, a Jewish woman was brought to a local police station falsely accused of attempting to abduct a child. Despite the fact that the investigation revealed that the mother had left her child in the care of the suspect, rumours started to spread that a Jewish woman abducted a child in order to kill it.

On 11 August 1945, a crowd of Polish citizens broke into the Kupa synagogue in Kraków’s Kazimierz district during Shabbat services, destroying the synagogue and setting it on fire, killing at least one person in the process and wounding an unknown number of Jews who had been at prayer. Jews were attacked and robbed in the neighbouring streets, and there were also attacks on Jewish apartments.

Earlier that day, an attempt to seize a 13-year-old boy who was throwing stones at the synagogue was made, but he escaped and rushed to the nearby marketplace screaming, “Help me, the Jews have tried to kill me.”

Instantly the crowd broke into the Kupa Synagogue and started beating Jews, who had been praying at the Saturday morning Shabbat service, and the Torah scrolls were burned. The Jewish hostel was also attacked. Jewish men, women, and children were beaten up on the streets; their homes were broken into and robbed. Some Jews wounded during the pogrom were hospitalized and later were beaten in the hospitals again. One of the pogrom victims witnessed:

“I was carried to the second precinct of the militia where they called for an ambulance. There were five more people over there, including a badly wounded Polish woman. In the ambulance I heard the comments of the escorting soldier and the nurse who spoke about us as Jewish crust whom they have to save, and that they shouldn’t be doing this because we murdered children, that all of us should be shot. We were taken to the hospital of St. Lazarus at Kopernika Street. I was first taken to the operating room. After the operation, a soldier appeared who said that he will take everybody to jail after the operation. He beat up one of the wounded Jews waiting for an operation. He held us under a cocked gun and did not allow us to take a drink of water. A moment later two railroad men appeared and one said, ‘It’s a scandal that a Pole does not have the civil courage to hit a defenceless person’, and he hit a wounded Jew. One of the hospital inmates hit me with a crutch. Women, including nurses, stood behind the doors threatening us that they were only waiting for the operation to be over in order to rip us apart.”

Although the pogrom of the Krakow Jews remains overshadowed by the more widely known bloody Kielce pogrom of 1946, both instances of anti-Jewish aggression are structurally similar. In both Kraków and Kielce, a spark was ignited by a rumour about ritual murders committed by Jews on Polish children. The belief in this superstition dating back to the Middle Ages was then completely real and widespread in Poland. The postwar, modernized version of a blood libel said that “exhausted Jews would infuse themselves with the blood of Christians.”

There is one record of a death relating to Kraków events in the archives of the Forensic Medicine Department in Kraków. The victim was a 56-year-old Auschwitz survivor Róża Berger, shot while standing behind closed doors.

She escaped Kraków during the war and was deported to Auschwitz in August of 1944 (prisoner identification number 89186) with her daughter and granddaughter. After the liberation of Auschwitz, she returned to Kraków where she was shot and killed while standing behind closed doors in her home during the Pogrom on 11 August 1945. She was buried in the New Kraków Jewish Cemetery at 55 Miodowa Street.

This is what makes it even sadder, she survived the most horrible place on earth, just to be murdered in the relative safety of her own home.

sources

https://polin.pl/en/krakow-pogrom

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Krak%C3%B3w_pogrom

https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/this-week-in-jewish-history–krakow-pogrom-ends-with-synagogue-demolished-at-least-one-dead