Local officials, clergy and school pupils yesterday commemorated the 80th anniversary of a massacre in which the German Nazi occupiers murdered 45 Jewish children who had survived the liquidation of Kielce’s ghetto.
During the ceremony, the young people in attendance, from local high schools, read out the names of the victims and placed children’s toys on their grave.
The massacre took place on 23 May 1943. The previous year, Kielce’s ghetto had been liquidated, with around 20,000 of the Jews imprisoned there transported to Treblinka death camp. Another 1,000 who were difficult to transport – the sick, elderly and disabled – were killed on the spot.
A small number of Jewish skilled labourers, as well as members of the Judenrat – the Jewish council that helped administer the ghetto – and the ghetto police, were kept on in the former ghetto by the Germans in order to clean it up, including collecting valuables.
In May 1943, those remaining Jews were moved to forced-labour camps, but 45 of their children were taken to the local Jewish cemetery and shot. The victims were aged between 15 months and 13 years.
The Polish town of Nowy Sącz has unveiled a monument listing the names of 12,000 of its Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Holocaust survivor Sara Melzer, whose family are among the names, thanked the town for "writing a beautiful chapter in Jewish history" https://t.co/SuQab7D5AH
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) August 30, 2022
“The tragedy of these children is incalculable,” said Włodzimierz Kac, head of the Jewish community in Katowice, at yesterday’s ceremony. “It is hard to imagine what they felt.”
“But it is also curious how the people who made the decisions about this murder felt, what those who murdered the children felt, how they could go on living,” he added, quoted by broadcaster TVP. “It is incomprehensible, it was simply the murder of defenceless children.”
“We must be aware that ideologies obscure common sense and…breed hatred,” said Dorota Koczwańska-Kalita, from the Kielce branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, a state body. “Where hatred is born, man forgets who he is.”
Events were held yesterday to mark the 75th anniversary of "Europe's last pogrom", in which 42 Jews who had survived the Holocaust were killed in Kielce in 1946 following false rumours that a Christian child had been kidnapped https://t.co/Xm9ppYymCb
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 5, 2021
Main image credit: Urząd Miasta Kielce
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
