04 July , 2006
Poles and Jews are gathering in the town of Kielce to mark the 60th anniversary of what many consider to be Europe's last pogrom. The massacre still darkens relations between Jews and Poles. On 4 July 1946, little more than a year after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Polish citizens of Kielce, supported by police, set upon Jewish Holocaust survivors with guns, clubs and metal bars in a murderous rampage. Spurred by a false rumor that Jews living in the neighborhood had kidnapped a Christian boy a mob attacked the Holocaust survivors living in the building, killing 42 people, almost all Jews, over several hours, and about 30 more were also killed in a violent frenzy that spread across the area. Kielce still looms as a symbol of a double tragedy suffered by some European Jews: to survive the years of the Nazi terror in concentration camps or in hiding, only to be massacred as they tried to rebuild their lives in their prewar hometowns. An estimated 1,500 Jews were killed in such violence in Poland after the war, according to AP. The pogrom set off a mass emigration of many of Poland's estimated 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors and pushed other Polish Jews to hide their identities. About 60,000 Jews fled Poland in the three months after the Kielce pogrom. Before World War II, an estimated 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland. Most of them perished in the Nazi death camps.
