The history is tied to a child’s lie about being held in a basement. His father went to the police and they immediately rushed to start killing Jews, including Holocaust survivors.
…instead of protecting the people inside the house, militia members and soldiers shot at the Jews inside and dragged others out to where the crowd could beat them, sometimes to death. Men and women were thrown from second-floor balconies.
“The soldiers started shooting, but not at the attackers, at us,” Chil Alpert, who survived the pogrom, later testified. “The soldiers shot at our windows. Inside the house, the military murdered the Jews. They initially shot through the doors, then forced their way in, shooting at people, throwing the victims into the crowd where they were beaten to death.”
The massacre was triggered by a young boy who fabricated a story to avoid getting into trouble. Henryk Blaszczyk, who was either eight or nine at the time, had visited another village near Kielce but didn’t tell his parents and was gone for two days. His parents reported him missing.
To avoid getting into trouble, Blaszczyk said he had been lured into a trap by a Jew and held captive in a basement with other Polish children.
After his father reported the incident at the nearest police station, the boy went on a walk with police officers and identified a Jewish man, a resident of the house on Planty Street, as the alleged kidnapper. The child even pointed out the “Jewish House” as the place he was held captive, although later it became clear that could not have been true. The house does not have a basement.
The house had no basement.
You have to wonder about how an eight year old Polish child’s parents had raised him during the war, such that just 14 months after Nazi Germany was defeated, he’s confidently making up stories to kill all the Jews.
Poland to this day resists admitting their hands-on role in the Holocaust and pogroms after.
Krakow historian Julian Kwiek documented approximately 1,100 murders of Jews between 1944 and the end of 1947. “Violence against Jews was a widespread phenomenon,” Kwiek writes in his book “We Don’t Want Jews in Our Place. Hostility Towards Jews in 1944-1947.”
Polish cultural anthropologist Joanna Tokarska-Bakir says that the “blood libel” myth was revived after World War II and that this was a major cause of the various pogroms. But, she adds, disputes over property were also a driver of antipathy towards Jews, who returned home after the war and wanted their houses and apartments back.
It’s worth remembering that the “Pizzagate” conspiracy in America traded on the same narrative, about children abducted to “the basement of a pizza place in Washington DC“.
The earliest of these tweets, which was on November 8th, came from an account with the handle: Calvin Chambers. It also tagged Conservative Fox media personalities, Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs.