Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (37 page)

Jews had been fair game during the war, and their property regarded as a resource that could be shared by everyone. It is quite clear that many people, and some governments, still viewed them the same way once the war was ended.

Jews as Capitalists, Jews as Communists

The pogrom at Kunmadaras was only one of many such incidents that took place across Hungary in the immediate postwar years. Anti-Semitic violence included the looting of homes and shops (for example, in the mining town of Ózd), lynchings and murders (as in Miskolc), and the burning down of Jewish buildings such as synagogues (as in Makó). Alongside the violence, Jews were obliged to suffer all the usual forms of non-violent anti-Semitism: discrimination, intimidation, verbal abuse and so on. The level of racial hatred was so high, and so universal, that it clearly cannot be explained away as a mere squabble over property. Something much deeper was going on.

To begin with, the people who indulged in such excesses were often themselves suffering from unbearable hardship. The economy of the whole region was close to meltdown in 1946, but it was especially bad in Hungary, where the rate of inflation reportedly rose to a peak of 158,486 per cent
per day
.
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In his memoirs, the writer György Faludy gives an indication of what this meant to ordinary people: when his publisher printed a new edition of one of his books in 1946 Faludy was paid 300 billion peng
s – an amount that in 1938 would have been equivalent to around 60 billion US dollars. And yet, after collecting this bounty he was obliged to race directly to the market, knowing that the money would have devalued by at least 90 per cent by the time he got there. He spent the entire amount on just a single chicken, two litres of olive oil and a handful of vegetables.
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Inflation like this had a devastating effect on the lives of ordinary people, who were obliged to barter possessions for food. Workers often relied on the meals they received in the factory canteens, because their wages were effectively worthless. Eventually some employers abandoned money altogether and began paying their workers in food.

The blame for this state of affairs was, generally speaking, aimed at two groups of people. Firstly, the Soviets were blamed – for the destruction they had wrought, for their widespread looting and for the punitive sums they had demanded in reparation for the war. The Communists were guilty by association, and in the minds of the people the Communists were almost universally regarded as Jews. This was not unique to Hungary – the Communist Party was regarded as the ‘party of the Jews’ across eastern Europe, and not entirely without justification.
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But since the Communists were widely hated, this did not reflect well on the Jews. For example, when the Jewish leader of the Communist Party, Mátyás Rákosi, came to Miskolc to deliver a speech on the economic situation, graffiti appeared on the factory walls calling him ‘the king of the Jews’ and the man who ‘sold the country to the Russians’.
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The second group of people to be blamed for the desperate economic situation in Hungary were the black marketeers and speculators who hoarded foodstuffs in the hope of driving up prices. Popular opinion also considered
these
people Jewish. When the women of Kunmadaras started beating up the Jewish egg vendor in the market place, for example, one of the accusations they hurled at him was that he was charging excessively high prices for his eggs. Jews everywhere were accused of overcharging customers, exploiting the economic disaster, and hoarding food and gold. Such claims appealed to a stereotype that was centuries old – the Jew as miser.
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The Communists, who were keen to shake off their image as ‘the party of the Jews’, saw this latter stereotype as an opportunity to win some much-needed popularity. In the summer of 1946 they began to make speeches against the black market which condemned Jews in veiled terms as ‘speculators’. When they printed posters about the subject, these ‘speculators’ were depicted with exaggerated Semitic features: in fact, there was very little difference between these posters and the images of ‘Jewish parasites’ from the Nazi era. There is even compelling evidence that the Communists orchestrated the lynching of Jews in Miskolc, as an experiment in directing popular anger.
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In the political and economic turmoil of 1946, Jews in Hungary had very few places to turn. Mór Reinchardt, a Jew from Janoshalma, summed up their plight in a letter to the president of the Hungarian Jewish Bureau that August:

Regrettably, following the events in Miskolc and other similar occurrences it is obvious that Jews are hated equally by the Communist Party and the Smallholders Party. The slogan and posters of one say ‘Death to the Communists and the Jews’ and the slogans and posters of the other say ‘Death to the Smallholders and the Jews!’ Jews are universally hated and all political parties are ready to annihilate every one, whether guilty or innocent … In my view there is no other possibility but to seek protection from the occupying forces. We need to seek their help. Here – that is in Hungary – it is impossible for a Jew to exist. Therefore, we need to leave. We need to emigrate. We need to petition the Soviet military authorities to allow us to leave the country … and while the emigration takes place … the Red Army should continue to occupy the country in order to afford us their protection.
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This letter is a perfect expression of the sentiments held by hundreds of thousands of Jews all across Europe, who believed that the continent would never again be a safe place for them to live.

The Kielce Pogrom

If anti-Semitism in Hungary was bad after the war, it was even worse in Poland. In the summer of 1945, having survived a series of Nazi labour camps, sixteen-year-old Ben Helfgott and his cousin travelled back to Poland from Theresienstadt. While they were changing trains at Cz
stochowa, however, they were stopped by two armed and uniformed Poles who asked for their papers. They examined the documents, then told the boys to come with them to the police station for a routine check. The pair had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong, and so followed them into the city. For a while Helfgott tried to make conversation with the strangers, but then one of the men turned to him violently and said, ‘Shut your fucking mouth, you fucking Jew.’ The boys knew immediately that they were in trouble.

The men did not take them to a police station but to a dark apartment, where they were made to open their suitcases. After taking everything they could find of any value, the men took them back out into the night, again claiming that they were going to the police station. The boys no longer believed them, of course, but since the men were armed they had no choice but to comply. They were led to a derelict and deserted area of town, where the two men drew their revolvers and told the boys to walk towards the nearest wall. Ben Helfgott immediately started pleading with them, appealing to their patriotism, exclaiming that they were all fellow Poles who had suffered together during the war, and should be helping each other now that the war was over. Eventually one of the men took pity on them, saying to his partner, ‘Let’s leave them. They’re only boys.’ So they put away their revolvers, laughed, and walked away, leaving the cousins to find their own way back to the railway station.
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Poland was easily the most dangerous country for Jews after the war. At least 500 Jews were murdered by Poles between the German surrender and the summer of 1946, and most historians put the figure at around 1,500.
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It is impossible to be sure because individual incidents like the one described by Ben Helfgott were rarely reported, and even more rarely recorded – even when they resulted in murder. Jews were thrown from trains. They were robbed of their possessions and taken to the forests to be shot. Letters were sent to Jews by local nationalist groups warning them to get out or be killed. Corpses were left with notes in their pockets reading, ‘This will be the fate of all surviving Jews.’
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As in Hungary, the ancient calumny of blood libel was invoked again and again. In Rzeszów there were rumours that ‘Jews who needed blood after returning from the camps’ were performing ritual murders. These murders supposedly included the killing of a nine-year-old girl named Bronislawa Mendo
, whose ‘blood was sucked out for ritual purposes’ in June 1945. During the riot that followed these rumours several Jews were beaten up, Jewish properties were looted, and one or two Jews possibly also killed.
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In Kraków a full-blown pogrom broke out after stories circulated that a Christian child had been killed inside a synagogue. Polish police and militiamen were amongst a mob that descended upon the synagogue and pursued Jews through the town. In the resulting violence dozens of Jews were wounded, and possibly as many as five were killed. Those Jews who ended up at hospital were beaten again, while nurses looked on and called them ‘Jewish scum’ who ‘should be shot’.
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The most famous postwar pogrom, however – and easily the worst - occurred at Kielce in southern-central Poland.
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It began on the morning of 4 July 1946, after an eight-year-old boy named Henryk Blaszczyk falsely accused a local Jew of abducting him and imprisoning him in the basement of the Jewish Committee’s building at 7 Planty Street. The particular Jew accused by the boy was immediately arrested and beaten up. A lynch mob was assembled to break into the building and rescue the other children who were supposedly being held there, waiting to be ritually sacrificed. Rumours quickly spread throughout the community that children were being kidnapped, and that the Jews had ‘killed a Christian child’. Attempts by the head of the Jewish Committee to calm things down fell upon deaf ears.

When the police came to search the building in question an hour later, they discovered that it did not contain any Christian children – in fact it did not even have a basement. They told the boy off for lying and sent him home, but the damage had already been done. By now a large crowd had gathered outside the building, which began to throw stones at the windows. Shortly afterwards more than a hundred soldiers arrived, supposedly to re-establish order – but after a gun was fired (it is unclear by whom) these soldiers joined policemen in storming the building, grabbing hold of men and women they found there and forcing them out into the arms of the baying mob outside.

Baruch Dorfman was on the third floor of the building, where he and a group of twenty others had barricaded themselves in a room.

But they started shooting at us through the door, and they wounded one person, who later died from the injuries. They broke in. These were soldiers in uniform and a few civilians. I was wounded then. They ordered us to go outside. They formed a double row. In the staircase there were already civilians and also women. Soldiers hit us with rifle butts. Civilians, men and women, also beat us. I was wearing a uniformlike vest, perhaps that’s why they did not hit me then. We came down to the square. Others who were brought out with me were stabbed with bayonets and shot at. We were pelted with stones. Even then nothing happened to me. I moved across the square to an exit, but I must have had such a facial expression that they recognized that I was a Jew who’d been taken out of the building, because one civilian screamed, ‘A Jew!’ And only then did they attack me. Stones flew at me, I was hit with rifle butts, I fell and lost consciousness. Periodically I regained consciousness; then they hit me again with stones and rifle butts. One wanted to shoot me when I was lying on the ground but I heard somebody else say, ‘Don’t shoot, he’ll croak anyway.’ I fainted again. When I came to, somebody was pulling me by the legs and threw me onto a truck. This was some other military, because I woke up in a hospital in Kielce.
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