“Our children”: Moral panic associated with children and collective violence against the Jews in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Poland

Abstract

Between 1945 and 1946, Poland witnessed three large anti-Jewish pogroms. The infamous Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946, which claimed the lives of over 40 Holocaust survivors was preceded by outbursts of collective violence in Rzeszów and in Kraków. All three pogroms were perpetrated by police officers, soldiers of the Polish army, and civilians forming a pogrom mob, and all were preceded and inflamed by rumors about Jews kidnapping and harming Christian children. Studies of widespread antisemitism and the common belief in blood libel do not seem to offer an adequate explanation of how the people of Rzeszów, Kraków, and Kielce could have believed the rumors that Jews were abducting and murdering children. They explain even less what made possible the social mobilization leading toward mass violence against Holocaust survivors in Poland in the immediate aftermath of WWII. We address this issue by using the concept of moral panic as proposed by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda and examining possible reasons why Polish society after the WWII seems to have been particularly attuned to the fate of children. We argue that in the early postwar years there was a moral panic in Poland associated with the vulnerability of children. It was propelled by wartime experience but also by omnipresent violence and hideous crimes committed against children in the wake of WWII. Although there was no fact-based connection between these crimes and the Jews, many Polish Christians eagerly put the blame on “the Other,” that is, the Jews, and sought facts that could serve as confirmation of an old prejudice—the blood libel. Polish Christians who accepted the blood libel as truth could have found confirmation of their belief when Jewish relatives or Jewish organizations undertook to “recover”—through legal procedures, by payment, by subterfuge or by force—children who had been hidden in Christian families during the Holocaust.