EVENTS FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II

Only Soviet-trained intelligence agents were trusted by the Soviet government among Polish prewar Communists. Among those "the Jews ... were ... considered less susceptible to the lures of Polish nationalism, to which even impeccable Polish communists were not thought immune" (Checinski, p. 71). During 1945, the Soviets recruited to the Office of State Security a very large number of Jews. Mostly Jews, including Holocaust survivors, were assigned to carry out the Soviet policy of de-Nazification in the former German territories which Poland was to annex on the basis of the Potsdam Agreement in compensation for provinces lost to the Soviet Union in 1939.

After the War, over 1,200 former Nazi camps were used to hold German nationals, 99% of whom were noncombatants. Under the guise of de-Nazification, members of the pro-Western Polish resistance and their families were processed together with the Germans. In a brief period of time between 60,000 and 80,000 people died in the de-Nazification camps. Starvation diets, typhoid fever, and mistreatment caused the high death rate. Torture was commonplace. Jewish officers of the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa, Office of State Security], including those who themselves survived unimaginable suffering at German hands, were now used by the Soviets to inflict the same on others. Again, to quote Simon Wiesenthal, "I always say that I know what kind of role Jewish communists played in Poland after the war. And just as I, as a Jew, do not want to shoulder responsibility for the Jewish communists, I cannot blame 36 million Poles for those thousands of blackmailers."

John Sack, a former CBS News bureau chief in Spain and a journalist for 48 years, spent seven years doing research and conducting interviews in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States to document the story of Jewish actions taken directly after the end of World War II in response to the wartime atrocities. On November 21, 1993, the CBS program 60 Minutes, presented an interview with Mr. Sack and footage of interviews with the survivors who testified to torture and killings in those camps. A Polish woman, Dr. Dorota Boreczek, former inmate of the Swientochlowiche camp, testified that she was arrested and tortured together with her parents. Her father, a member of Polish Home Army, was executed. (See John Sack, "An Eye For An Eye," Basic Books, Division of Harper Collins Publishers, 1993.)

THE SOVIETIZATION OF POLAND

It is important to remember that the end of World War II did not mean the liberation of the Polish people or of Poland, in any sense of the word. After World War II, Poland did not have self-determination. Its government, police, and military were under the complete and absolute control of the Soviet Union. Poland was forcibly made to be a communist state that was not formally a part of the Soviet Union, but a "satellite state" that was tightly ruled as part of the Soviet empire. Several months before the July 1946 events took place in Kielce, Winston Churchill eloquently articulated the realities for the Soviet Union's satellite states. On March 5, 1946, Churchill made his famous "Sinews of Peace" speech in which he popularized the term "Iron Curtain" originally coined by a Yugoslav writer:

"From Stettin [Szczecin] in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in ... the Soviet sphere ... I do not believe that ... Russia desires war [but] the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and their doctrines ... There is nothing they admire so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness."

The Soviet strategists who were in control of Poland saw significant advantage in fostering an animosity between Jewish and gentile Poles. This animosity was used as a tool to aid in the subjugation of Poland early in its capture into the Soviet empire in 1944. After World War II, Soviet machinations in this regard succeeded in converting the image of Jewish victims of German-Nazi genocide into the image of Jewish oppressors (Kersten, p. 130). This was purposely done to put the Polish gentile population between "a rock and a hard place." Polish gentiles were left with two options: either don't respond to the Soviet oppression, or respond to the Soviet oppression and thus appear to be anti-Semitic.

Although the image of Jews as oppressors was spread beyond Poland, this phenomenon was very noticeable in Poland, where there was a steady flow of news and often well-substantiated (if sometimes exaggerated) rumors of executions of anti-communist Poles by Jewish executioners serving in the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. Kersten describes this unfortunate development when Soviet policies created the impression that Jews played the main role in the subjugation of Poland and other satellite countries to the communist system. At the same time, the communist propaganda machine equated opposition to the "socialist" regimes with anti-Semitism. So, if a Polish person opposed the socialist Sovietization of Poland, that person was branded as an anti-Semite. This smoke screen was used successfully to obscure the reality of the Soviet subjugation of Poland by the Soviet Union.

The Soviet terror apparatus in Poland included the so-called Polish military counterintelligence. It was initially integrated with the Soviet Smersh [Death to Spies] organization directed against German spying and subversion. However, when the front crossed the prewar Polish territory, Smersh was used increasingly against the significant Polish resistance to Soviet domination. In November 1944, the Polish section of Smersh became renamed Informacja, in which Col. Checinski later served for 10 years. Informacja remained under the close supervision of Smersh and was at first headed by Soviet Col. Nicolai Kozhushko. Soviet officers assigned to the Polish army were considered vulnerable to Polish influence and were under close surveillance by a special Informacja [Information] department. Informacja was clearly a Soviet-led force, not at all an independent force loyal to Poland.

At the time of the most intensive terror, between 1944 and 1955, Smersh used its Informacja branch to have agents pose as members of the military prosecutor's office. They used this apparatus to conduct political trials in military courts in Poland. Tortured witnesses were "prepared" for these trials and later were secretly executed "to remove any trace of the provocation" (Checinski, p. 57). In that period, of the 120 officers serving in Informacja, only about 18 were Polish-born. Most of these 18 were Polish Jews and the rest were Soviet citizens, some of them Jews.

The Soviets were creative in inventing their own opportunities to manufacture conflict between Polish Jews and gentiles. For example, it was Soviet policy in Poland to change Yiddish names of Jews into Slavic-Polish names. This practice was resented by both Jewish and gentile Poles. An American journalist, Samuel Loeb Shneiderman, who visited Warsaw in 1946, wrote in his book "Between Fear and Hope" (New York, 1946) that under the cover of Polish names Jews were continuing their ethnic identity and must have felt like their ancestors forced into conversion to Christianity during their persecution in Spain (Kersten, pp.76, 108). The name-changing became widespread. It served to deprive the Jews of their cultural heritage in order to form a "progressive Jewish nation," to use Stalin's expression.

Checinski describes how Stalin ordered the NKVD to prepare a civilian network of police terror and repression, called the UB [Urzad Bezpieczenstwa), to work in parallel with the Informacja in Poland. The "Polish intelligentsia boycotted the security service, which was treated with universal contempt as an instrument of foreign domination" (Checinski, p. 61). Thus, the NKVD, despite its deep-rooted anti-Semitism, "could not do without Jews. Jewish officials were often placed in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for all of the regime's crimes" (Checinski, p. 62). The Soviet strategy of using people with striking Semitic features as the most visible executioners of Soviet policy in Poland was also aimed at presenting understandable anti-communist feelings within Poland as anti-Semitism. In 1945, the upper echelons of the terror apparatus were staffed with Jews. This created the appearance that many Jews in Poland were members of the Soviet-controlled terror apparatus. A public proclamation, made at a convention of Jewish members of the ruling communist party [PPR, Polska Pania Robotnicza] on October 7-9, 1945, stated that in postwar Poland, conditions were created for the Jews to find an outlet for their political, social, and national ambitions. Needless to say, neither Poles nor Jews trusted this official statement. The Zionists openly advocated a massive emigration to Palestine (Kersten, p.80), which for different reasons was also desired by the Soviet leadership.

SOVIET AIMS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

In Soviet Cold War policy, the Middle East was very important because of its vital oil reserves. It is well known that after World War II the Soviets systematically used to their advantage the desire of Jews to fight for the establishment of the state of Israel. Bernard Lewis of Columbia University ("Semites and anti-Semites," New York, 1986) as well as other Jewish historians state that, until the creation of the State of Israel, the only source of weapons for the Jews fighting for their independence was the Soviet Union and its Czechoslovak satellite. Early in 1996, Ewa Weisman the President of Israel officially thanked Moscow and Prague for these weapons, while visiting the Czechoslovakia and Germany. In 1946, the United States government was in possession of "a number of official and semi-official indications provided by the [Soviet controlled] Warsaw government that it is encouraging the migration of [a major] part of its Jewish population" (George Lenczowski, "The Middle East in World Affairs," New York, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 330).

The Soviet postwar aim was to get rid of the British mandate in Palestine and play a more active role in the strategically vital Middle East while consolidating their grip on the newly acquired satellite empire. Toward this end the Soviets committed numerous acts of terror to pressure Jews to emigrate out of the satellite states to be able to join the struggle for Israel. However, once they were out of Soviet control, only about one third of Jewish emigrants were willing to go to Palestine. About two thirds preferred to remain in the West and go to the United States, France, or other western countries. This high attrition rate from what the Soviets hoped would be a large Jewish exodus to the Middle East resulted in Soviet efforts to intensify Jewish emigration. They did it by staging pogroms in all of the satellite states in order to deliver the largest possible number of able-bodied men, many of them trained soldiers, to the Palestinian battlefield where the Jews were short of manpower.

The year 1946 was one of intensification of Soviet-sponsored anti-Jewish violence throughout the region. The Soviets staged several anti-Jewish riots in Poland, including the one in Kielce. In nearby Czechoslovakia, a two-day anti-Jewish riot was staged in Bratislava and simultaneously in nearby Zilin. The Soviet-provoked riots at these two localities occurred on August 2 and 3, 1946, during a convention of the Slovak association of former guerrillas controlled by the Soviets. Scores of Jews were injured and Jewish apartments were ransacked. In Zilin alone 15 Jews were severely wounded. So the occurrence of Soviet-provoked anti-Jewish riots was not unique to Poland. What was unique to Poland was the additional necessity felt by the Soviets to severely embarrass Poland, primarily because of the significant Polish resistance the Soviets encountered during and after the war. The Bratislava riot served its purpose to frighten the Czechoslovak Jews so that they would depart. Since Czechoslovakia was permeated with communist influences predating World War II, there was no significant Czech resistance to the communist takeover by the Soviets like there had been in Poland.

Soviet news releases of the pogroms in Hungry followed a policy similar to that used in Czechoslovakia. Namely, they received relatively low or non-existent amounts of promotion to the western press.

Actually the 1946 wave of anti-Jewish riots under Soviet occupation was preceded with an earlier similar wave in 1945 in all areas that the Soviets had occupied and converted into their satellite empire. The earliest was on May 2, 1945, in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, which was followed on September 24, 1945 in Velke Toplocany in eastern Czechoslovakia, where a riot was perpetrated by uniformed police and military under the Soviet control. It lasted 6 hours and wounded 49 Jews. The riot engulfed neighboring villages. Anti-Jewish riots followed in the Czechoslovakian towns of Chinorany, Krasno on the Nitra River, Nedanovce, etc. No show trials were staged after all the pogroms in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Ukraine. An exception was made of the riot of the July 4, 1946, in Kielce which was advertised as much as possible in the media because the Soviets wanted to accomplish more in Poland than simply to press Jews to emigrate. The Soviets wanted to present Polish people to the world as anti-Semites in order to strengthen the Soviet totalitarian hold on Poland without arousing pro-Polish sympathies in the West.

THE ERUPTION OF VIOLENCE IN KIELCE

The Kielce Pogrom was an event provoked by the Soviets in conjunction with their attempt to Sovietize Poland that started in 1944. They were successful, but not flawless, in making it look as if there was just a random uprising of Polish gentiles against Jewish citizens. Although the Soviets took pains to destroy much specific evidence relating to this event, they made a number of mistakes that clearly reveal that this was a staged event, one that could only be provoked and carried out by the Soviet authorities in charge. To this day, the Soviet Union (and now Russian) authorities have refused to release their official files containing information relating to these events, files that would corroborate other indications that this was a Soviet-provoked event.

Some of the Soviet mistakes in staging the Kielce Pogrom will be discussed. In particular: (1) Twelve of the victims were found to be killed by gunshot wounds, though the general Polish citizenry alleged to have randomly conducted the violence did not have guns, as was admitted in the show trial which followed. (2) Soviet authorities had firm control of the populace; there was no right of free assembly, including the formation of crowds in the streets, in Soviet-occupied Poland. (3) Soviet security leaders thwarted efforts by the local district attorney, who wanted to take actions to stop the violence. (4) After the initial violence was ended, it was re-ignited by secret police agents who apparently attempted to pose as steel mill workers. (5) Normally stern and brutal security police turned temporarily friendly as they spread false rumors of ritual killing of Christian children by Jews. (6) A selected group of people were permitted to cross a perimeter of sentries that surrounded Kielce; Catholic priests attempting to break up the violence were not allowed to pass. (7) A clumsy Soviet-style show trial was hastily held five days after the event that purported to show the complicity of the general Polish population in this event; the inconsistencies in the conduct of the trial itself provided ample evidence of the Soviet plot to institute the violence in Kielce.

The focal point of the Kielce Pogrom was a residential compound at 7 Planty Street. Most of the occupants were Jewish, and many were members of the communist party. Among the residents were members of an armed "kibbutz" composed mainly of people who had recently arrived from the Soviet Union. Some were former German prisoners, and others had escaped captivity by hiding in forests or in homes of Polish gentiles. The kibbutz members were undergoing military training and thus had permission from the Soviet-led authorities to own and use firearms. This fact was well-known in Kielce, because the kibbutz members would occasionally parade through town with their firearms. The only other residents who had permission to be armed worked for the Soviet terror apparatus in Kielce. Ordinary residents of Poland, people who did not work for the Soviet terror apparatus, were not allowed to be armed. There was a death penalty for the illegal possession of firearms.

On July 3, 1946, a cobbler and secret police informer, Walenty Blaszczyk, whose UB code name was "Przelot," reported to the local police that his eight-year-old son Henryk was missing. The boy had been given a ride out of town on July 1, 1946, and upon his return was abducted by Antoni Pasowski, a Jewish agent of the Office of State Security, the UB. Henryk was taught by Pasowski to say falsely that he was kidnapped and held at 7 Planty Street. Further, he was coached to say that he saw dead bodies of recently missing children at that location. (Kersten, p. 129). On July 4, the boy was released by Pasowski and returned home. He went with his father to the police station to cancel the missing child report and to tell the false story of his abduction, the story that was fabricated by Pasowski.

Next, the boy was manipulated by Pasowski to falsely identify a passing Jew as his abductor who, the boy was made to say, held him in the basement of the compound at 7 Planty Street. There was one critical problem with this completely false accusation: 7 Planty Street in actuality did not have a basement! Meanwhile, a crowd was permitted to gather and a rumor was planted about the attempt of "another" ritual murder of a Christian child in addition to the supposed murders of previously missing children. A crowd of 200 to 300 people was allowed to form in the streets. Later communist propaganda expanded the number to 15,000 people.

Some people in the crowd were allowed to move toward the compound at 7 Planty Street. The staged riot in downtown Kielce was under tight control at all times by the Soviet-led police force.

At 10 a.m. on July 4, before the crowd members reached Planty Street, 15 to 20 police officers, including five or six officers of the Informacja arrived at the compound. The officers of the Informacja were men unknown in Kielce. Once there, they were in control of who could and could not approach, enter, or leave the compound in which Henryk Blaszczyk claimed to have been imprisoned. The uniformed police were ordered to enter the building but were met with automatic gun fire from the Jewish occupants. One officer and one patrolman were killed, and several uniformed men were wounded. After the gunfire from the compound, the security officers and policemen attacked and began shooting the trapped Jews and expelling them out of windows into the street. In Soviet-controlled Poland, of course, the uniformed military, the secret police, and the local police officers were Soviet-controlled forces, not independent Polish forces.

Despite the best efforts of the Soviet agents to keep the riot going, the violence stopped on its own before noon. The riot was restarted at noon when a hit squad of secret police agents disguised as workers arrived from a local steel mill. Many of them were hired shortly before the pogrom and of course, since they were not real steel mill workers, did not report to work after the July 4 Pogrom. They came to the site of the violence armed with pieces of scrap steel, which they were ordered to leave at the murder site as tangible evidence that steel workers were involved in the violence. Before departing the hit squad was addressed by Antoni Blaszczyk, an older brother of Henryk (who was used to provoke the riot). The departure of the storming party from work was organized by the personnel manager in the steel mill who at the same time served as the district head of the voluntary riot police, the "ORMO" and was an agent of the UB (Krzysztof Kakolewski "I apologize for Dariusz Rosati," Warsaw: Konflikty, March 7, 1996). The riot was allowed to spread in the form of sporadic killings and robberies. Shortly after 2 p.m. a train was attacked at a station, Piekanowa, near Kielce. Several Jewish passengers were killed by a mob led by agent provocateurs who controlled the railroad personnel during the attack.

In the meantime, a crowd of onlookers was allowed to gather in the streets. The security men were repeatedly spreading a rumor that a "Jewish ritual murder of another Christian child" might be in progress. Police and military men spoke to the crowd in an unusually friendly fashion and abandoned their usual stern and authoritarian demeanor (Szaynok, 62). The rumor that the Jews were murdering Polish Christian children was connected with earlier reports about missing children who were allegedly kidnapped to be used for blood transfusions and then murdered (John Micgiel, "Catholic Church and the Kielce Pogrom," Jozef Pilsudski Institute: Niepodleglosc, volume XXV, New York: 1992, p.146). These rumors were spread by agent provocateurs, who thus kept attracting people to the scene of the riot. After 6:00 p.m., the pogrom came to an end as security forces arrested 62 rioters.

In all, throughout the city of Kielce and its outskirts, thirty-nine Jews and two gentiles were killed. Other deaths followed among the wounded.

Some of those wounded but not killed by the security officers were killed by the mob that included the bogus steel workers. The question is, who was permitted to cross the perimeter of sentries around downtown Kielce at that time? Krzysztof Kakolewski, an investigative reporter and writer, determined that it was a hit squad of secret police agents in civilian clothes. These people pretended to be a mob while in reality they were agents acting under strict orders. The few bystanders who joined the fake mob of disguised secret police agents were marked with chalk on their backs by two secret policewomen. Those marked bystanders were later put on trial along with others including uniformed men who were not a part of the UB operation. Secret police agents disguised as civilians were exempt from any charges in exchange for strict secrecy about their mission and were permitted to keep the items stolen from Jewish victims. Obviously, if they broke their silence, they would incriminate themselves in the murders and robberies of Jewish victims (Krzysztof Kakolewski, "I apologize for Dariusz Rosati," Warsaw: Konflikty, March 7, 1996).

Some of the murders in the Kielce violence were committed by common criminals who robbed and murdered their victims as the riot was permitted to spread. However, many of the murders could only have been committed by members of the security forces. In particular, bullet wounds were discovered in twelve of the murdered Jewish victims. Bullets could originate only from the uniformed police, soldiers, and functionaries of the security forces as the mob members did not have any guns (as was admitted in a show trial). Dr. Seweryn Kahane, the head of the local Jewish association, the "Kibbutz," was murdered by an Informacja officer who shot him in the back of the skull. He was executed because he became an inconvenient witness to the provocation. A few days later, another inconvenient witness died on a butcher's hook. The false story maintained that behind the Rabbi, on the floor, were the dead bodies of 16 children. The provocation did not work because the few Jews in town were forewarned and left Rzeszow. Since the provocation didn't work and those who had bungled the scheme were potentially embarrassing witnesses, the members of the police patrol who reported the allegation against the rabbi were arrested and never seen again (Kersten, p. 110). A year later, the same man in charge of the security force that attempted to provoke an incident in Rzeszow, Sobczynski-Spychaj, was in the identical position of being in charge of the security office in Kielce in time for the occurrence of the Kielce riots. Sobczynski-Spychaj reported to the Soviet authority Dyomin during the time of the Kielce riots.

In Kielce, the agents who staged the violence on July 4 were paid to do so. According to the deposition of the widow of Col. Wiktor Kuznicki, the chief of police in Kielce, a man fitting the description of Dyomin delivered to Kuznicki's apartment the money (in foreign currency) for paying off the agent provocateurs needed for the eruption of violence in Kielce. Kuznicki died on December 26, 1946, under unexplained circumstances. He was most likely killed on NKVD orders as he became inconvenient because he knew too much about the Soviet provocation in Kielce. This style of eliminating inconvenient people was a familiar pattern in the Soviet terror apparatus. To make sure that the traces of Soviet provocation were eliminated the files of the Informacja attached to the 2nd Infantry Division in Kielce were recently destroyed by fire in November 1989 [it was near the end of communist rule in Poland.] (Szaynok, p. 93)

Some of the specifics of Dyomin's intelligence career are well-documented. Dyomin was the key Soviet agent in the 1946 Kielce provocation, and stayed in Kielce only long enough to accomplish his assigned task. He arrived three months before the outbreak of the riot. He stayed through the riot, interrogated witnesses of the riot, and then two weeks later he left Kielce. Later in his career, Dyomin was stationed in the Soviet Embassy in Tel-Aviv in 1964-67 as a specialist in Jewish matters and in 1969 was assigned to the Soviet Embassy in West Germany. In the American literature he was described as a high-ranking officer of Soviet military intelligence, the G.R.U. (John Barron, "KGB: The Street Work of Soviet Secret Agents," New York: Macmillan, p. 385)

MILITARY TRIALS FOLLOWING THE POGROM

The murders and other crimes committed by the non-Soviet participants during the pogrom were within the jurisdiction of the local civilian court. Instead, the Supreme Military Court, closely supervised by the Soviet Smersh, was selected to try civilian perpetrators of the pogrom. The show trial was preceded by Soviet-style investigations, during which tortures were often used to extract confessions. The role of uniformed men and armed security agents who inflicted bullet wounds in Jewish victims was excluded from the investigations and the show trial of the rioters.

The show trial was conducted from July 9 to July 11, 1946. Though they acknowledged that an organized provocation had occurred (Checinski, p. 23), the military court did not reveal who was responsible. Of the mob, 12 men were tried of which nine were sentenced to death. These included seven of the onlookers who joined in the murders conducted by agents of the terror apparatus, and two uniformed men who were not a part of the UB operation. Those who did most of the killing were never tried. The prosecutor, Kazimierz Golczewski, a Polish Jew known as an old NKVD hand, consistently violated all normal legal procedures during the trial. He did this with full approval of the three military judges, namely, Marian Barton, Stanislaw Baraniak and Antoni Lukasik (Antoni Czupinski, "Recent History of Poland: People's Poland 1944-1989," Poznan, 1992, p.113). At one point during the trial, Golczewski went as far as to threaten a defendant with additional bodily harm when the man was complaining about tortures inflicted upon him during the interrogation.

The entire show trial was a mockery of the law. It was a Soviet-style show trial conducted in Poland to fulfill political and propaganda purposes. The very conduct of the show trial was a proof of the complete Soviet domination of life in Poland. It was absolutely impossible for anyone other than the Soviets to provoke and stage a pogrom in which security forces either directly participated in the riot or stood by and let the pogrom go on under their noses for eight hours. The sentries who were posted around the riot area did prevent Catholic priests Roman Zelek and Jan Danielewicz from reaching the places of the violence, because it was their intention to try to pacify the mob. (Kersten, p. 128; also S. Meducki and Z. Wrona, "Anti-Jewish Riots in Kielce, July 4, 1946: Documents and Materials," Kielce Historic Society, Kielce: 1992. p. 94). Because of Moscow's control over the Polish communist government, the global Soviet policies determined the events in Poland. This explains why a high-ranking intelligence officer like Dyomin, who was also a Jewish specialist, was sent to Kielce and stayed there only long enough to supervise the staging of the riots, then to interrogate witnesses, and then departed immediately as soon as his short assignment was completed.

The weaknesses of the show trial created a need to announce the arrest of the officers who "did not show enough resolve during the riot." Military and police officers associated with the pogrom were arrested and were given very light sentences by the Military Regional Court in Warsaw on December 16, 1946 (Kersten, p. 128). The most immediate instigator of the Kielce violence, Antoni Pasowski, a Jewish member of the Public Security Agency, was never tried. Henryk Blaszczyk was not asked to testify. Other less-advertised trials were held in Kielce on September 24, October 10, December 3, 1946 and March 1947 (Szaynok, pp. 74-93).

Maj. Sobczynski-Spychaj, the head of the Kielce State Security Forces was promoted to head the regional Informacja soon after the Kielce event. This promotion was typical, for he was in the middle of a long career of being used by the Soviets to betray Poland. According to testimony of Jozef Swiatlo-Fleischfarb (former NKVD an UB agent who defected to the West), Sobczynski-Spychaj was the Soviet agent who was parachuted to Poland during the war and brought with him instructions for the communist underground to collaborate with the Gestapo in betraying to the Germans the organization of the Polish Home Army controlled by the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. While in Poland, Sobczynski-Spychaj worked as radio-code operator for communication with Smersh under the command of Gen. Iwan Sierow. Sobczynski-Spychaj was flown to the USSR in 1944 by a special NKVD plane. (Kersten, p. 96, 129). Later in his career, in the Summer of 1950, he was appointed to head the passport office in Warsaw. As the head of the passport office Sobczynski-Spychaj persecuted Jewish applicants for passports. He was reported to have used foul language and threw a number of persons down the stairs. At the request of the Soviets, Sobczynski-Spychaj was promoted to the rank of colonel and was elevated the head of personnel office of the Ministry of Defense. He was kept in sensitive posts as a useful agent of the NKVD. In June 1958 he earned his high school diploma. He died in 1988 in Warsaw. (Szaynok, 92).

The hurriedly-organized show trial did not give any chance for the defense lawyers to prepare themselves. There was, however, plenty of effort made to bring a large crowd of Polish and foreign news correspondents. The communists counted on the ignorance of foreign reporters of Soviet show-trial techniques and they assumed that Polish newsmen would be too intimidated to report on the abuse of the law. It was clear that for the Soviets, anti-Semitism was a convenient political and propaganda tool used to disrupt Polish society. It also served to identify anyone smeared with anti-Semitism as a "fascist" guilty of collaboration with the Nazis during the war.

DISBELIEF, PAIN, SHAME

In Poland, the news of the details of murders in Kielce caused first disbelief, then pain and shame that a Polish mob could be capable of such horrible atrocities and brutal killing frenzy no matter whether the crimes were provoked by the Soviets or not. Throughout Poland meetings were held condemning the pogrom of Kielce as a horrible atrocity. Mikolajczyk, the leader of the opposition peasant party, immediately condemned the pogrom. However, reports of his condemnation in the media were censored. The demand for a parliamentary investigation of the pogrom was rejected by the communist government. The Soviet-led government promised formation of an investigative commission composed of all political parties. It never materialized.

Since one of the aims of the Soviets was to cause an exodus of Jews from Poland, the Soviet authorities took actions to make the exit from Poland as easy as possible. A few days after the funeral of the victims of violence staged by the Soviets in Kielce, Russian General Gwidon Czewinski, the chief of border guards, called his Jewish assistant, Michal Rudawski, and ordered him to establish two more "illegal" crossing points for Jews on the Czechoslovakian border. (Krzysztof Kakolewski, "I apologize for Dariusz Rosati", Konflikty, Warsaw: March 28, 1996). These crossing points were supposedly illegal, but in reality they were purposely established by the Soviets and allowed free egress for Jews but not for anyone else. The new crossings were added to those existing already in Szczecin (Jewish code name Khyzar, or bristle in Hebrew, because Szczecin in Polish means bristle market) and in Klodzko (Jewish code name Dorom). The southern crossings were to serve Jewish emigrants going though Austria to Palestine and the northern crossing at Szczecin served those Jews who travelled to West German displaced persons' camps arid from there south though Austria or Italy to Palestine. As stated before, about two-thirds of the Jewish emigrants preferred to go to the United States, France, or other western country. As a result of Jewish emigration, by the end of 1946, there were 100,000 Jews left in Poland of the quarter of a million that were there at the beginning of the year. At the same time, over 200,000 Polish Jews were in West Germany and Austria waiting for further migration. The Anglo-American Commission promised admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine. In the West German Displaced-Persons' camps, Jewish socialists advocated returning to Poland while Zionists insisted on immigration to Palestine. (I.C. Pogonowski, "Jews in Poland: A Documentary History," New York: Hippocrene Books Inc., 1993, p. 349).

A Polish motion picture, "The Witnesses," illustrates the feelings of pain and shame inflicted on the Polish society by the Kielce Pogrom. Many realized that the Soviet provocation succeeded in damaging the good name of the Polish people by cynically staging the vicious pogrom and playing up the card of anti-Semitism. Soviet occupation and policies conditioned a limited number of people in Kielce to respond to the provocation. Also, no one familiar with the Kielce Pogrom claimed that it was a spontaneous violence. (Kersten, pp. 96, 130). The Catholic Church clearly stated that the provocateurs and perpetrators of the murder in Kielce must be absolutely and without any reservations condemned in the light of God's and human laws and that all rumors about Jewish ritual murders are lies (July 7, 1946, Bishop Teodor Kubina). Cardinal Hlond, the Catholic Primate of Poland, stated on July 11, 1946: "Catholic clergy always and everywhere condemn murder. Murder must be condemned also in Poland: against Poles, against Jews in Kielce and other locations. The violence in Kielce was not brought by racism, but by entirely different painful and tragical causes." (Kersten, p. 102). Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel price laureate for Polish literature, called these tactics "socialist terrorism." Among victims of the Soviet or socialist terrorism were many Polish democratic leaders who were neither anti-Semitic nor reactionary.

Unfortunately, the Moscow files on the Kielce violence have never been opened. These perhaps contain the reports of NKVD/KGB Col. Natan Shpilevoy and G.R.U. high-ranking officer Mikhail Dyomin, who apparently was in charge of choosing the site and staging the provocation in Kielce. Thus, in the absence of direct evidence from Moscow, the Soviet provocation remains the most likely hypothesis, one that is corroborated by all of the available evidence. Clearly, the presence and activities of these two Soviet officers preclude any possibility that the violence in Kielce erupted spontaneously.

CONCLUSION

The Pogrom of Kielce was ignited by the Soviet introduction of an organized provocation based on planting false reports of ritual murders, a method of provoking violence originally started by the czarist governments. As was detailed, a very similar provocation was staged a year earlier in Rzeszow by the same NKVD agents. The Pogrom of Kielce was timed for anti-Polish propaganda purposes to persuade the Western powers that Poland should remain a colony of the Soviets, rather than being allowed to return to freedom as did other Allied nations. For that reason it was singled out for extensive news coverage which was to convince Western politicians that "Polish anti-Semitism" could only be tamed by the Soviets and that allowing Poland to become free would cause another wave of anti-Semitism and murders of Jews.

The Kielce Pogrom, perhaps more than any other historical occurrence, has been used to falsely show evidence of Polish actions to exterminate Jews. This view, clearly put forward by a 1940's Soviet establishment keen to subjugate Poland, has been allowed to become the commonly accepted "conventional wisdom." In this case, the conventional wisdom is wrong: it does not square with the historical facts. Those who can examine the historical record, but then choose to ignore it and purposely libel an entire nation and ethnic group, are on the wrong side of history: they are using the methods of Hitler and Stalin.

It is sometimes said that throughout history people and their nations are inclined to gear up to fight the last war. So it may be with attempts at ethnic destruction. In the Information Age, new Holocausts may be possible not so much by gas chambers, the technology of genocide for World War II, but by printing presses and their modern-day electronic equivalents. Is hatred for a person simply because of his ethnicity more acceptable today, as long as the object of the hatred is a Pole rather than a Jew? And once it is decided that it is important to instill hatred against members of a given ethnic group, can there be any limit to the perpetration of lies, myths, and mischaracterizations to drive the hatred home? And once ethnic hatred is started and nurtured in a people, where will it end? The Holocaust itself unfortunately provides one answer, one such ending point.

Clear and reprehensible evidence of anti-Polonism can be seen by inclusion of the events at Kielce, horrible though they were, as a Polish continuation of Hitler's evil work of the Holocaust. This defamation of Polish people can be seen in downtown Washington, D.C., at the Holocaust Museum. This type of anti-Polonism can be read in occasional press accounts that slur the Polish people and sometimes can even be heard in informal discussions. Despite these open sores, it is not too far-fetched, I think, to imagine that Jews and Poles, two peoples who survived a twin Holocaust perpetrated by the same country, could develop a new relationship based on friendship and goodwill. It may well be time, fifty years after this tragic event took place, to put the Kielce Pogrom in its proper perspective as an event unconnected with the Holocaust and an event not conducted by a free and willing Polish population, a population that in actual fact abhorred this violence. The Soviet design to falsely discredit the Polish people through this staged event has amazingly outlived even the Soviet Union itself. The spirit of hatred of World War II and the associated Holocaust, and the habit of hate against Poles promoted by the former "evil empire" of the Soviet Union will still exist as long as its tentacles still reach into the minds and actions of ordinary people. Shalom, my friends, and pokoj.

Peace to all.

 

 

Prof. Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, , 0000-00-00

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