On July 1, 1946, a nine-year-old non-Jewish boy, Henryk Blaszczyk, left his home in Kielce, without informing his parents. A minority were able to reclaim some property which had been confiscated by non-Jews during the German occupation. By the summer of 1946, about 200 Holocaust survivors had returned to or settled in Kielce. Almost all of them were murdered during the Holocaust. In 1939 there were approximately 24,000 Jewish inhabitants in Kielce or one-third of the town's population. Coming just one year after the end of World War II, the massacre shocked people around the world. While the pogrom was not an isolated instance of anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland, the Kielce massacre convinced many Polish Jews that they had no future in Poland after the Holocaust and spurred them to flee the country. The mass violence of the Kielce pogrom drew on an entrenched local history of antisemitism-especially false allegations accusing Jews of using the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes (a charge known as a “ blood libel”)-with the intent of discouraging the return of Jewish Holocaust survivors to Poland. During the Kielce incident, a mob of Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians murdered at least 42 Jews and injured over 40 in the worst outburst of anti-Jewish violence in postwar Poland. Pogromis a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire. The term Kielce pogrom refers to a violent massacre of Jews in the southeastern Polish town of Kielce on July 4, 1946.
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