Krakow pogrom

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Place of the pogrom: Kupa Synagogue, Krakow

As Kraków pogrom on 11 August, 1945 in the Polish city of Krakow carried riots against Polish Jews referred, as a result, there was one death and five injuries.

After the liberation from Nazi occupation in Krakow in January 1945 there were around 500 Jews; Their number grew significantly in the following months due to migrating survivors of the Nazi terror, to almost 9,000 by the end of 1945. Before the Second World War , the number of Jews in the city of around 250,000 inhabitants was around 60,000.

The riots began in the summer of 1945 with rumors about Jews that circulated on Krakow's marketplaces and that were rooted in the ritual murder legends of Christian anti-Judaism that had been propagated for centuries . On June 27, 1945, a Jewish woman was taken to a militia guard on charges of child robbery. Even if it turned out that the Jewish woman's mother had given the child to watch, a crowd angry about this news gathered on Kleparskiplatz and began to demolish a shop, but was stopped by the militia. The rumor mill, however, soon spoke of more and more kidnapping victims and of 13 Christian child corpses in Krakow; The Kupa Synagogue in the Jewish district of Kazimierz was then repeatedly pelted with stones by boys during church services. Events escalated on August 11th when boys again threw stones, one of them broke into the synagogue and shouted, "People, help me, they want to kill me!" At around 11 am, a crowd broke from the nearby market on the Szerokastraße entered the Kupa Synagogue, demolished the facility, trampled on sacred objects and drove those gathered for the Sabbath out of the synagogue with insults and beatings. Of the 25 tried because of the incidents, twelve were members of the security authorities (the police or the army), the rest were mainly unskilled or unemployed residents. Riots broke out in the Kazimierz district, apartments were broken into, and even injured Jews were beaten. The 56-year-old Auschwitz survivor Róża Berger was shot through a closed door.

As far as is known, Róża Berger was the only person killed in the pogrom, even if the historian Anna Cichopek does not rule out one or two more deaths. Five other people were admitted to hospitals with injuries , according to a report by the Central Committee of Jews in Poland ; Cichopek assumes that there may have been more injuries. The communist party leadership used the pogrom to discredit opposition groups as reactionary enemies of the Jews, especially the Polish government-in-exile in London vis-à-vis the Western powers.

Research into the pogrom played a role in the critical appraisal of contemporary Polish history, which began in 2000 with scandalous books by Tomasz Szarota and Jan Tomasz Gross about the Jedwabne massacre and the Polish involvement in crimes against Jews postulated by them. Unlike these polemical pamphlets, Anna Cichopek soberly worked on this pogrom in her study published in 2000 - the first monograph on the subject - in order to achieve “a thorough documentation of the event”. Her study became important in the debate because it proved that anti-Semitic behavior was not limited to eastern Poland or to cooperation with the Nazi regime - as cited by critics of the Jedwabne books (see also Pogrom von Kielce ).

literature

  • Julian Kwiek: Wydarzenia antyżydowskie 11 sierpnia 1945 r. w Krakowie: Documenty. In: Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego. No. 1, 2000, pp. 77-89.
  • Anna Cichopek: Pogrom Żydów w Krakowie, 11 sierpnia 1945 r. Żydowski Instytut Historyczny , Warsaw 2000.
  • Anna Cichopek: The Cracow Pogrom of August 1945. In: Joshua D. Zimmerman (Ed.): Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2003, pp. 221-239.
  • Anna Cichopek-Gajraj: Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-03666-6 , chapter Case study: Kraków. Pp. 122-125 .

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Anna Cichopek-Gajraj: Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, p. 122 .
  2. ↑ On the events also in the following Anna Cichopek-Gajraj: Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, p. 123 f.
  3. ^ A b Anna Cichopek-Gajraj: Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, p. 125 .
  4. ↑ In the book from 2000 and in the article from 2003 (see literature) Cichopek had given five fatalities because five coffins were to be seen in a photo. Citing Cichopek, Jeremi Sadowski also wrote: Books from Poland of five deaths . Polish coming to terms with the past. PDF. In: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung -Auslandsinformationen. No. 6, 2001, pp. 121–132, here p. 128, and Bożena Szaynok: The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations. In: Robert Blobaum (Ed.): Antisemitism And Its Opponents In Modern Poland. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 2005, pp. 265-283, here p. 272 . In her 2014 book, Cichopek retracted the statement; she had wrongly assigned the photo to the pogrom, see Anna Cichopek-Gajraj: Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2014, p. 125, fn. 63 .
  5. ^ Bożena Szaynok: The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations. In: Robert Blobaum (Ed.): Antisemitism And Its Opponents In Modern Poland. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 2005, pp. 265-283, here pp. 274 f.
  6. ^ Bożena Szaynok: The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations. In: Robert Blobaum (Ed.): Antisemitism And Its Opponents In Modern Poland. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 2005, pp. 265-283, here p. 265 . Cichopek's book is based on her master's thesis Z dziejów powojennego antysemityzmu - pogrom w Krakowie 11 sierpnia 1945r , Krakau 1998. Quoted from Jan Tomaz Gross: Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 2001, ISBN 0-691-08667-2 , p. 237.
  7. ↑ See for the paragraph the review of Cichopek's work in Jeremi Sadowski: Books from Poland. Polish coming to terms with the past. PDF. In: Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung -Auslandsinformationen. No. 6, 2001, pp. 121-132, here p. 128.