Mass Murders in Poland

Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland After Liberation

In 1945, after the defeat of the German armies and the opening of the concentration camps, a few Jews had survived. Some of these Jews returned to the towns and cities in Poland where they were born and where their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years.

Normally a nation claiming to be devoted to Christian principles would have welcomed back the few survivors of the Nazi horrors. But this was not the case in Poland. An example of what happened to the survivors of the Nazi murder camps after returning to their Polish homes was the Kielce massacre. This was by no means the only massacre of Jewish survivors by the Polish population after the defeat of the German Army and the absence of any Germans on Polish soil.

The consequence of the horrors and mass murders of 42 Jews in Kielce led the survivors to flee from Poland at the rate of 1000 Jews per month until June of 1946. Thereafter 30,000 Jews left a month until there were hardly any Jews left in Poland.

     It has been estimated that as many as 2000 Polish Jews were murdered after the Second World War by the Polish Christian population. The horrors committed against the Jews by their own countrymen in Kielce were also committed in other towns. Other examples are the murder of Jews in Wlodawa, in Losice, in Klementow, in Przemysl,  in Rabka, in Kaziemerz, in Lodz, and in Krakow.

Anti-Jewish conduct in Poland was not always murderous. For example, 1000 members of a Polish political party met in Bochnia, where thunderous applause accompanied a proposed resolution that thanked Hitler for destroying the Jews.

In Rapka, hand grenades were thrown into a hospital for Jewish orphans, as anti-Jewish propaganda appeared in newspapers.

The Polish population pretended to know that Jews killed Christian children in order to use their blood for the purpose of making unleavened bread known as matzoh (Matzoh is related to the Hebrew word for Exodus). This insane accusation would usually be attributed to someone who is both psychotic and paranoiac and belongs in a mental hospital. However, among Poles, this crazy belief is a pretense used to murder Jews.

After the Second World War, in several small towns, and even in large cities, Christians stood in front of synagogues while Jews prayed inside and threw stones at the buildings. In Kazmierz,  Christians  broke into the synagogue, looking for Christian children’s corpses. Finding none, they destroyed and plundered the synagogue, tore the scrolls of the Torah to pieces, and attacked the Jews in the building as well as Jews outside. Some Jews were wounded and sent to a hospital, where other patients and soldiers beat them and nurses said they were waiting to rip the Jews apart.

About 200 Jews were living in Kielce in 1946. They had returned home after surviving the death camps. Seeking an excuse for murdering Jews, priests at mass read the names of children reputedly murdered by Jews. There were no murdered children. Nevertheless, Jews were shot and beaten to death, a tinsmith named Fridman was thrown out of the window, and other Jews were shot in the back and murdered in any way possible. The police and soldiers participated in these killings. At a train station, Jews were struck with iron objects such as a rail sections, which crushed their skulls. Newborn babies were murdered by shooting them in the head. Former concentration camp survivors said they had never seen such sadism and bestiality, even in the Nazi camps. Among the 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors who were killed in Kielce were pregnant women, infants, and small children.

A number of efforts have made to explain this brutality. Perhaps the best explanation for these brutalities is that the Christian population in Poland had stolen all the possessions, including the houses, of the Jews they thought were dead. When some of these Jews returned, the Christian population feared that they would demand their property back. They therefore killed Jews and drove others out of the country.

The Polish murderers are today denying all of these brutal events. They use insulting and offensive language to denounce those who record and publish these events. But calling those who witnessed all this and who publish this in American media liars changes nothing. It would be far better if the Polish population would admit having committed these horrors and take an example, believe it or not, from the German government. This is not to say that there are not many Germans who don’t want to hear about this either and who deny their guilt. Nevertheless, in Berlin and other German cities there are memorials to the Jews slaughtered in the 1930s and 1940s. The most effective of these memorials are the so-called Stolpersteine. That German word means “stumbling stones.” A German artist named Demig invented the idea of inserting small 4 x 4 brass plaques into the sidewalk in place of a cobblestone in front of a victim’s last address, thereby commemorating his place in his neighborhood and community. The first of these stones was inserted in 1996. Since then, 60,000 memorials have been placed all around Western Europe. The stones display the birth year and fate of the individual victim, including the date of deportation and death, if known.

There are in addition large monuments in Germany, such as the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe, which stands in the center of Berlin.

There are of course towns in Germany whose inhabitants are still mostly Nazis and who refuse categorically to install any memorials to the Jews whom they murdered.

It is a matter of historical fact that although Eastern Europeans participated with enjoyment and delight in the slaughter of their Jewish countrymen, the Germans alone are guilty of precipitating all of these horrors. At least now the German government is very supportive of Israel and is honest in admitting Germany’s past atrocities. This is not true in Eastern Europe, whose governments named streets for such murderers as Stefan Bandera and Roman Shukheyvich, who murdered Jews during the Holocaust. These killers are openly honored by the Ukrainian government, who invent all kinds of excuses for murder and for robbing the Jews.

The friendly relations between the Catholic and Protestant Christian community in America and American Jews makes the behavior of European Christians seem utterly incomprehensible. It is therefore by no means an exaggeration to assert that those Europeans who call themselves Christians had long ago abandoned all Christian morality and teachings, as I have explained in my book The Jew in Christian Theology.

Shalom u’vracha.

Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications, including The Assault on Democracy (2017).

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