Jewish ghetto Lodz - the city of the dead (Poland). Krakow Ghetto during the German occupation of Poland (Krakow)

In 1939 fascist Germany invaded Poland and ghettos immediately appeared in large cities, in which Jewish residents were isolated.

Henryk Ross was a news and sports photographer in Lodz. In the city ghetto, he was hired to work in the statistics department to take portraits for identity cards and take propaganda shots in factories where Jewish labor was used to produce goods for the needs of the Wehrmacht.

In his free time, Ross documented the realities of the ghetto. Risking his life, through holes in the walls, cracks in the doors and from the folds of his coat, he removed hunger, disease and executions. The photographer continued to photograph as tens of thousands of ghetto Jews were sent to the death camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz.

Ross's photographs also captured tiny glimpses of joy - performances, concerts, holidays, weddings - acts of resistance to an inhumane regime.

1940. A man walking along Wolborska Street through the ruins of a synagogue destroyed by the Germans in 1939.

1940-1944. Sign on the fence of the Jewish quarter: “Residential zone of Jews. No entry allowed."

1940-1944. Bridge on Zigerskaya (Aryan) street.

Being the official owner of a camera, I was able to capture all the tragic periods in the Lodz ghetto. I did this knowing that if I had been caught, I and my family would have been tortured and killed. Henryk Ross

1940. Henrik Ross photographs a group of people for identification purposes. Jewish Administration, Department of Statistics.

1940-1944. A group of deported women walking with their belongings past the ruins of a synagogue.

At the end of 1944 Soviet army continued to push out the Germans, and it became clear that the Lodz ghetto would soon be liquidated. Ross understood that at any moment he could be deported to a death camp. So he collected 6,000 of his negatives, placed them in cardboard boxes and buried them near his house in the hope that someday they would be found.

January 19, 1945 Soviet troops those who survived the ghetto were released. Of more than 200,000 Jews, only 877 survived. One of them was Henrik Ross.

In March 1945, he returned to his home on Jagiellonska Street and dug up his time capsule. Moisture destroyed half the negatives, but enough frames were preserved to preserve the memory of those who lived and died in the ghetto.

Photographs by Henrik Ross have been added to the collections Art gallery Ontario. They are currently on display at the Museum fine arts in Boston at the exhibition “Memories Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto in the Photographs of Henryk Ross.”

1940. The man who retrieved the Torah from under the ruins of the synagogue on Volborskaya Street.

I buried my negatives in the ground to preserve documents about our tragedy.... I expected that Polish Jews will be completely destroyed. And I wanted to leave a chronicle of our martyrdom. Henrik Ross.

1940-1944. Portraits of a couple.

1940-1944. A nurse feeding children in an orphanage.

1940-1944. Holiday.

1940-1944. Performance at the “Shoemaker from Marysin” factory.

1940-1942. A woman with a child (the family of a policeman in the ghetto).

1940-1944. Wedding in the ghetto.

1942. Children are being taken to Nazi camp death of Chelmno (Kulmhof).

1940-1944. Boy looking for food.

1940-1944. Girl.

1942. Men dragging a cart with bread.

1940-1944. "Soup for lunch."

1940-1944. Sick man on the ground.

1944. Buckets and plates left behind by ghetto residents who were deported to death camps.

1940-1944. Smiling child.

Photo source: Henrik Ross,

The Warsaw Ghetto is a residential area created by the Nazis during the occupation of Poland, where Jews were forcibly moved in order to isolate them from the non-Jewish population. During the existence of the ghetto, its population decreased from 450 thousand to 37 thousand people. The German soldier-radio operator and part-time photographer Willy Georg, while in Warsaw in 1941, managed to illegally sneak into the ghetto and shoot four films of the horror taking place, after which, upon arrest, his camera was confiscated, but the films survived until our days.

Newspaper vendor at work

After the entry of the Third Reich troops into Poland in October 1939, the occupation authorities issued an order according to which Jews were ordered to hand over cash to financial institutions. It was allowed to leave no more than 2000 zlotys per person.

Young Jewish woman in the crowd

IN public transport The Nazis put up offensive posters with the aim of inciting ethnic hatred.

Street second-hand book dealers

Speaking about the reasons for creating ghettos in populated areas of Poland, the Nazis argued that Jews were carriers of infectious diseases, and their isolation would help protect the non-Jewish population from epidemics.

Passerby

In March 1940, a number of urban areas with a high concentration of Jewish populations were declared quarantine zones. About 113 thousand Poles were evicted from these areas and 138 thousand Jews from other places were settled in their place.

Street vendor

The decision to organize a ghetto was made on October 16, 1940 by Governor General Hans Frank. By this time, there were about 440 thousand people in the ghetto (37% of the city’s population), while the area of ​​the ghetto was 4.5% of the area of ​​Warsaw.

Unconscious man at a shop window

Initially, leaving the ghetto without permission was punishable by 9 months in prison. Since November 1941 it began to be used death penalty. On November 16, the ghetto was surrounded by a wall.

Street beggar

The officially established food standards for the ghetto were designed to allow the inhabitants to die from starvation. In the second half of 1941, the food standard for Jews was 184 kilocalories.

Trade of firewood by weight

However, thanks to food products illegally supplied to the ghetto, actual consumption averaged 1,125 kilocalories per day.

Old men begging on the street

Some of the residents were employed in German production. Thus, 18 thousand Jews worked in sewing factories. The working day lasted 12 hours without weekends and holidays. Of the 110 thousand workers in the ghetto, only 27 thousand had permanent jobs.

Group of women with baskets on the street of the Warsaw ghetto

Illegal production of various goods was organized on the territory of the ghetto, the raw materials for which were supplied secretly. Products were also secretly exported for sale and exchange for food outside the ghetto. In addition to 70 legal bakeries, 800 illegal ones operated in the ghetto. The cost of illegal exports from the ghetto was estimated at 10 million zlotys per month.

An elderly Jew on the street of the Warsaw Ghetto

The corpse of a Warsaw ghetto resident lying on the sidewalk

In the ghetto there was a stratum of residents whose activities and position provided them with a relatively prosperous life (merchants, smugglers, members of the Judenrat, Gestapo agents). Most of the residents suffered from malnutrition. The situation was worse for Jews resettled from other areas of Poland. Having no connections and acquaintances, they experienced difficulties in finding income and providing for their families.

Two women selling goods on the street of the Warsaw ghetto

In the ghetto, youth was demoralized, youth gangs formed, and street children appeared.

Old man begging

Rumors circulated in the ghetto about the mass extermination of Jews in the provinces of Poland. To misinform and reassure the ghetto residents, the German newspaper Warschauer Zeitung reported that tens of thousands of Jews were building an industrial complex. In addition, new schools and shelters were allowed to open in the ghetto.

Tea party on the street

On July 22, 1942, the Judenrat was informed that all Jews, with the exception of those working in German factories, hospital workers, members of the Judenrat and their families, members of the Jewish police in the ghetto and their families, would be deported to the east. The Jewish police were ordered to ensure that 6,000 people were sent to the railway station every day. If the order was not followed, the Nazis threatened to shoot the hostages.

Shoe traders

On the same day, a meeting of members of the underground Jewish network was held, at which those gathered decided that the residents would be sent for the purpose of resettlement in labor camps. It was decided not to resist.

Vegetable stall in the Warsaw ghetto

Every day, people were driven from the hospital building designated as the collection point to the loading dock. Physically strong men were separated and sent to labor camps. In addition, those employed at German enterprises were exempted. The rest (at least 90%) were herded 100 people into cattle cars. The Judenrat made statements denying rumors that the carriages were heading to extermination camps. The Gestapo distributed letters in which, on behalf of the residents who had left, they talked about employment in new places.

Exhausted man sitting on the sidewalk

In the early days, the police captured beggars, disabled people, and orphans. In addition, it was announced that those who voluntarily came to the collection points would be given three kilograms of bread and a kilogram of marmalade. On July 29, houses were surrounded and documents were checked; those who did not have certificates of work at German enterprises were sent to a loading dock. Those who tried to escape were shot. Lithuanian and Ukrainian collaborators also took part in these checks. By July 30, 60,000 people had been removed.

Exhausted child

Two children begging on the sidewalk in the Warsaw ghetto

On September 21, the houses of the Jewish police were surrounded, most of the police, along with their wives and children, were sent to extermination camps.

Tea party on the street of the Warsaw ghetto

Within 52 days (until September 21, 1942), about 300 thousand people were taken to Treblinka. During July, the Jewish police ensured the dispatch of 64,606 people. In August, 135 thousand people were deported, and from September 2-11 - 35,886 people. After this, between 55 and 60 thousand people remained in the ghetto.

Street sellers of wood and coal in the Warsaw ghetto

In the following months, the Jewish Combat Organization, numbering about 220-500 people, and the Jewish Fighting Union, numbering 250-450 people, took shape. The Jewish fighting organization proposed to remain in the ghetto and resist, while the Jewish Fighting Union planned to leave the ghetto and continue operations in the forests. Members of the organizations were armed primarily with pistols, homemade explosive devices and bottles with a flammable mixture.

Elderly Jews

From April 19 to May 16, 1943, an armed uprising took place in the Warsaw ghetto. The uprising was suppressed by SS troops. During the uprising, about 7,000 ghetto defenders were killed and about 6,000 were burned alive as a result of massive arson of buildings by German troops. The surviving inhabitants of the ghetto, numbering about 15,000 people, were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Group portrait of residents of the Warsaw ghetto

A passerby serves children on the street in the Warsaw ghetto

Street traffic in the Warsaw ghetto. In the foreground there is a horse-drawn hearse and a cyclist.

Lodz Ghetto in Poland- one of the most terrible places-evidence human cruelty. It was organized by the Nazis in February 1940, mainly Jews and Gypsies served their sentences here, working for the needs of the Wehrmacht. Recently there was a presentation of the works of a Polish photographer Henryk Ross, who served in the Department of Statistics under the Judenrat. His photographs show life in the Lodz ghetto during the years of Nazi occupation.

At the start of World War II, more than 3 million Jews lived in Poland. The fate of most of them is tragic; they lived in isolation, becoming slaves of the occupiers, many were taken to concentration camps. Ross worked as a sports photojournalist before the war, and when the Nazis arrived, he and 160 thousand other Jews were imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto. The population density here reached 40 thousand people per square kilometer. The Nazis turned the historical district of Lodz into an industrial complex that carried out orders from the Wehrmacht, supplying the German army.

Ross's photographs show scenes of mass deportations of Jews to the death camps of Chelmno and Auschwitz, rare moments of joy on national holidays, and the everyday life of prisoners. These photographs were taken unofficially in 1940-1944, securely hidden during the liquidation of the ghetto. The author hoped that in the future these photographs would serve as important evidence of Nazi atrocities in Lodz.

Ross said that he was given a camera to work in the Judenrat, so he was able to take not only the photographs required for the statistics department, but also go out into the streets to capture the real state of affairs. He was well aware that if these images were discovered, he and his family would face a painful death, but he continued his work out of a sense of civic duty.

Ross's assistant was his wife Stefania; it was she who hid her husband's camera when they went outside. At the right moment, she took out the camera to Ross, making sure that no one was watching them. It was dangerous to film openly, for example, photographs of the deportation of Jews were taken through a small hole in the wall at a railway station.

Original taken from al_lobanov c How do you imagine a Jewish ghetto?

The light editing of the original text and immersion in the material made me want to devote a separate post to the life and uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto. I’ll write when the information is settled and the feelings subside.

Why don’t Jews explore life in the ghettos of Chernivtsi, Proskurov, Kremenchug, Vinnitsa, Zhmerinka, Kamenets-Podolsky, Minsk and dozens of other cities? Is it because the Jewish Judenrat and the rabbinate collaborated with the Nazis, and the Jews were terrorized not by the Germans, but by their own Jewish police?

Photos of German soldier Willy Georg. Subsequently, they were included in the book “Warsaw Ghetto: Summer 1941”.
Everything for lovely ladies...

Ghettos are residential zones that existed on the principles of Jewish self-government in territories controlled by the Germans, where Jews were forcibly moved in order to isolate them from the non-Jewish population. The body of self-government of the ghetto was the Judenrat (“Jewish council”), which included the most authoritative people in the city or town. In Zlochev (Lviv region), 12 people with a doctorate degree became members of the Judenrat. The Judenrat provided the economic life of the ghetto. Jewish police kept order.

The leader in references to the ghetto in the context of the Holocaust is the Warsaw Ghetto, formed in 1940. The maximum number is up to 5,000,000 people. Jews worked under German orders both inside and outside the ghetto.

The upper layer in the ghetto consisted of successful businessmen, smugglers, owners and co-owners of enterprises, senior Judenrat officials, Abwehr and Gestapo agents. They organized lavish weddings, dressed their women in furs and gave them diamonds, restaurants and nightclubs with exquisite food and music operated for them, and thousands of liters of vodka were imported for them.

“Rich people came, hung with gold and diamonds; there, at tables laden with food, under the popping of champagne corks, “ladies” with brightly painted lips offered their services to war profiteers,” this is how Vladislav Shpilman, whose book “ The Pianist" formed the basis of the film of the same name by Roman Polanski. "Graceful gentlemen and ladies sat reclining in rickshaw carriages, in expensive woolen suits in winter, in French silks and expensive hats in summer."

http://hmmb-web.f17y.com/ru/panel/ghettos.html

In the ghetto there were 6 theaters, restaurants, cafes, private brothels of both sexes, of any skin color and age, card, billiard and tobacco clubs that appeared in almost every home... Bribery and extortion in the Warsaw ghetto reached astronomical proportions. Members of the Judenrat and the Jewish police made fabulous profits.

For example, the ghetto city government accounted for the work of 70 bakeries, paying appropriate taxes. At the same time, there were another 800 underground ones. They worked on smuggled raw materials. So much bread was baked that it was sold on the streets around the clock. The underground bakeries themselves were subject to large bribes from the police, the Judenrat and gangsters.

Many smugglers who were caught became Gestapo agents - they reported hidden gold and gang activity. Such were the primary smugglers Kohn and Geller, who monopolized the entire transport business within the ghetto. In the summer of 1942, they were both killed by competitors.

The Warsaw ghetto was a nationwide center for illegal currency transactions - the ghetto black exchange determined the dollar exchange rate throughout the country. Personally, I was most struck by another fact from the life of the black ghetto exchange: one miraculously surviving Jew recalled that they traded plots of land in Palestine!
A photo of rebel girls wearing caps is popular on the Internet. Far right - Malka Zdrojevic,
she was captured with a weapon, but she was not shot, but was sent to work in Majdanek, of course she “miraculously survived the Holocaust.”

It is extremely interesting why Jews call the cleansing of the Warsaw ghetto, which was drowning in unsanitary conditions, debauchery and corruption, an “uprising” by the Germans in April 1943?
Why are they afraid to tell the truth about who “revolted” and against whom? The German cleansing of Jewish neighborhoods was provoked by heavily armed Jewish thieves, racketeers and smugglers.

Jewish militants “revolted” not against the Germans, as the legend says, but killed the Jewish police inside the ghetto and
Judenrat - Councils of Jewish Power - local self-government bodies under the tutelage of the rabbinate.

ZOB militants killed the entire cultural and media layer - journalists, writers, artists, musicians. Those who helped keep the exploited Jewish masses of the ghetto in line. Of the 60 employees of the propaganda leaflet of the rabbinate and the SS "Zhagev" (Torch), 59 people were liquidated. One of the leaders of the ghetto, a prominent Zionist and sculptor, 80-year-old Alfred Nosik, did not escape the people's anger.

The people's avengers terrorized the population of the Warsaw ghetto, imposing a racketeer tax on almost everyone. Those who refused to pay had their relatives and children kidnapped. They were kept in underground prisons on the street. Mila 2 and on the territory of the Tebens enterprise.

The slogan “rob the loot” was implemented 24 hours a day. Raids on rich houses were interspersed with street sweeps, when watches and jewelry were taken from passers-by, money and not yet worn-out clothes were taken. The city guerrillas terrified the Jewish public. Often in the silence of the night the sounds of gunfire were heard between partisan detachments and the heart-rending screams of the late-arriving man in the street, who eventually found himself at home in only his underwear.

Three times the Judenrat cash register was robbed in broad daylight. Evil tongues claimed that money from the International Red Cross and private charities in the USA and Canada, stored there to feed homeless children, treat patients with syphilis and typhus and other social needs, never arrived there.

The real scale of the wealth collected by the Judenrat is indicated by the size of the indemnity imposed people's avengers, - 250,000 zlotys. The supply department of the Judenrat paid 700 thousand zlotys separately.

The Judenrat paid the indemnity on time, but the supply department refused. Then the gangsters kidnapped the son of the department cashier and, under the threat of subjecting him to torture, received the required amount.

The Germans carefully avoided interfering in such Jewish disputes. This happened after cases of attacks on patrols with the aim of seizing weapons became more frequent. In the ghetto itself, only the Zionist police operated. Robbery attacks on German military personnel were carried out outside the ghetto.

A “raid against thieves and bootleggers” began. The German command posed the question bluntly - either the rabbinate and Jewish police units would restore order themselves, or the Warsaw police would take care of it.

As a result, through the efforts of the rabbinate's security forces, a raid was conducted against the thieves. smugglers and bootleggers resulted in a banal redivision of the criminal market. All means were used - mass murders of gang members and the local population who fell into the hands, explosions of houses and underground passages, arson of residential areas. Hundreds of innocent people died in the fire of a huge fire. The Germans tried to put out the fire, but to no avail - the bandits set fire to new buildings.

Here’s how one of the militants, Aaron Carmi, talks about the unsuccessful attempt to mine the building: “And they didn’t lay mines there... Three of our guys went down to the basement to blow it up. And what? They stick out there with their tongue stuck to their ass. And I’m spinning here... and it was a tragedy!”

One of the militants, Kazik Ratizer, admitted many years later: “What right did we, a small group of youth from ZOB (one of the gangs), have to decide the fate of many people? What right did we have to start a riot? This decision led to the destruction of the ghetto and the death of many people who might otherwise have survived."

Photos of rebel girls wearing caps are popular on the Internet. Far right - Malka Zdrojevic. She was captured with a weapon in her hands, but she was not shot, but was sent to correctional labor in Majdanek. Miraculously surviving the Holocaust, Malka successfully explored this topic until the end of her life.

How did the “uprising” end? The ghetto was completely destroyed, the ghetto residents were sent to labor camps - almost all of them survived. At the request of the rabbinate, the lives of the militants captured with weapons were spared.
http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/warsaw/w_pages/warsaw_ghetto_scenes.html

Historical apocrypha claims that the commander of the “uprising”, Mordechai Anilevich, together with his headquarters, committed collective suicide in the basement at 18 Myala Street, where the headquarters of one of the gangs was located. Whether this is true or not is difficult to say. Departure from life through collective self-detonation was not their strongest character trait. This is not why they accumulated such wealth!

A few words to the portrait of the leader of the uprising: gang members recall that when Anilevich ate, he covered the bowl with his hands. They asked: “Muzzle, why are you covering the bowl with your hands?” He answered: “I’m so used to it so that the brothers don’t take it away.” He was the son of a fishmonger from a Warsaw suburb, and when the fish were not taken for a long time, his mother made him tint the gills with paint so that it would seem fresh.

At the beginning of May, the leaders of another gang discovered a passage through the sewer and left the ghetto (perhaps they would have left earlier, but did not know about this pipe), abandoning scattered groups of their fighters who were located in other places.

According to the recollections of one of the members of the leadership of this gang, they refused to take with them several peaceful Jews who asked for help... The Germans neutralized the last gang of criminals on June 5 on Muranovskaya Square. Thieves, racketeers and smugglers who fled outside the ghetto formed new gangs robbing Polish peasants.

General Bur-Komorowski, commander of the Polish underground Home Army, issued an order on September 15, 1943, directly ordering the destruction of bandit Jewish criminal groups that had left the ghetto.

Perhaps someone will continue to look for the evil intent and guilt of the Germans in the death of the Warsaw ghetto, but I will suggest to these researchers to think about why the Germans did not touch hundreds of other ghettos, where there was no corruption, smuggling, racketeering, unsanitary conditions, and Krasny’s ​​parcels were not stolen Cross, were the enterprises working?

As an example, we can cite the Theresienstadt ghetto, comparable to Warsaw in terms of the number of people, where German and Czech Jews maintained exemplary order. The Jewish Council of Elders of Theresienstadt repeatedly reported to Red Cross inspectors that they were enjoying surprisingly favorable conditions, given that Germany was heading towards defeat in the war and world Jewry had been the first to call for its destruction back in 1932.

The head of the Judenrat in the ghetto of Bialystok (a city in north-eastern Poland), Efraim Barash, managed to convert residential buildings into workshops, obtain tools and machines, and organize the work of more than 20 factories that honorably carried out orders from the German army.

Regular commissions, including from Berlin, have always noted the exemplary order, cleanliness and hard work of its residents. In the German part of the city, Barash repeatedly organized exhibitions demonstrating the sincere desire of the Jewish people to contribute to the German war effort.
Moreover, in November 1942, the Germans enlarged the Bialystok ghetto by optimizing the useless surrounding ghettos.

It should be noted that in many ghettos Eastern Europe Jewish quarters, due to total unsanitary conditions, turned into a zone of increased epidemiological danger - epidemics of typhoid and dysentery broke out there.
http://rassenia.info/index.php?q=http%3A%2F%2Fru-an.info%2Fnews%2F5064%2F

The cause of death among the Jewish population in the ghetto was 80% infectious diseases, due to the rejection of European hygienic procedures by religious Judaism.

The history of the Warsaw Ghetto given here looks quite unusual, but everything that was written here was 100% taken from Jewish sources, and the entire article is based on them by about 80%.

If you learn to clear Holocaust stories of propaganda husk, get rid of obsessive subjective assessments and extract “bare information”, you will most often discover the exact opposite meaning of what happened.

An elderly Jew was forced to stand near the cemetery with a “Jewish star” placed around his neck. Lublin, Poland

Probably the only thing in which the Poles willingly and en masse collaborated with the Nazis was in the extermination of Jews. Cases of helping Jews were so rare that books are written and films are made about it. On the eve of the German occupation, the Jewish community of Poland numbered 3,300,000 people. It was the largest in Europe and accounted for 10 percent of the country's total population.
After the war, only 380,000 Polish Jews remained alive. Today there are less than a thousand of them in Poland.
Of the Jewish pogroms committed by the Poles during the Nazi occupation, perhaps the most famous is the pogrom in Jedbavne. At first, the Poles killed Jews in Jedbavne and its environs one by one - they beat them with sticks, stoned them, cut off their heads, and desecrated the corpses. On July 10, 1941, the Poles gathered about 40 people from among the surviving Jews in the central square of the city. They were ordered to break the monument to V.I. erected there. Lenin. Then they were forced, while singing Soviet songs, to carry the fragments of this monument out of the city, which were then buried in the Jewish cemetery. At the head of this funeral column was a local rabbi. After this, all the Jews, including women and children, were taken into an empty barn, shot in cold blood, and their bodies were buried there. However, the matter did not stop there. By evening, the rest of the Jews from among the residents of Edbavne, including women and children, were driven into this barn and burned alive. Total quantity the victims were at least 1,600 people.
Several German Schutzmanns who were present did not interfere.
About ten years ago I had to witness a terrible conversation. The correspondent (an American, as I remember) asked an elderly Polish woman, a witness to the incident, who was talking about the pogrom: “How do you feel about these events today, almost 60 years later?” The answer shocked me to the core: “I myself would do the same today.” Maybe I would have doubted her answer if the question “What happened to the houses and property?” She did not answer completely indifferently, “They took it for themselves, of course.”
The incident was carefully hidden after the war, and only at the end of May 2001 did the Polish Catholic episcopate repent for the extermination of Jews in Jedwabne. And in July 2002, the Polish government officially admitted that the crime was not committed by German soldiers.
A Jew is forced to shave the beard of Abraham Ishayakh Apelstein, the city's shochet (skilled butcher). Olkusz, Poland
Is it any wonder then that a memo from the Polish authorities at the beginning of 1946 said: from November 1944 to December 1945 (that is, after the Nazis left), according to available information, 351 Jews were killed. Most of the killings took place in the Kieleck and Lublin voivodeships, the victims were returnees from concentration camps or former partisans. The report mentioned four types of attacks:
- attacks due to the spread of rumors about the murder of a Polish child (Lublin, Rzeszow, Tarnow, Sosnovichi).
- blackmail in order to evict Jews or seize their property.
- murder for the purpose of robbery.
- murders not accompanied by robberies, in most cases committed by throwing grenades into Jewish shelters.
German soldiers on a train on the way to Poland; on the train there is an inscription: “We are going to Poland to whip the Jews.” Germany, 1939
The most famous pogrom in Krakow on August 11, 1945. Having begun with throwing stones at the synagogue, it ended with an attack on Jews and their homes and was stopped only by the forces of the Polish and Soviet Army.
The city's chief rabbi is carried through the streets riding on a garbage can with the inscription: “The Jews are our misfortune”; in his hands is a poster in German: “We wanted to start a war.” Lodz, Poland

The second - July 4, 1946 in Kielce. Before the war, half the population was Jewish. By the time of the pogrom, out of 20 thousand, 200 survived. Mostly former prisoners of concentration camps.
The reason was the story of an 8-year-old boy who disappeared from home on the 1st and returned on the 3rd. They say Jews kidnapped him and wanted to kill him. Later it turned out that his father sent him to the village, where they explained to him what to say.
At 10 o'clock in the morning the pogrom began, in which many people took part, including military uniform. By noon, about two thousand people had gathered near the Jewish Committee building. Among the slogans heard were: “Death to the Jews!”, “Death to the killers of our children!”, “Let’s finish Hitler’s work!” At noon, a group led by police sergeant Vladislav Blahut arrived at the building and disarmed the Jews who had gathered to resist. As it turned out later, Blakhut was the only police representative among those who entered. When the Jews refused to go out into the street, Blahut began hitting them on the head with the butt of his revolver, shouting: “The Germans did not have time to destroy you, but we will finish their work.” The crowd broke down the doors and shutters, the rioters entered the building and began killing with logs, stones and prepared iron rods.

During the pogrom, about 40 Jews were killed, among them children and pregnant women, and more than 50 people were injured.
During the pogrom, two Poles who tried to resist the pogromists were also killed.

The finale of this pogrom was 9 Poles shot and three imprisoned. But the goal was achieved. If in May 1946 3,500 Jews left Poland, in June - 8,000, then after the pogrom during July - 19,000, in August - 35,000 people.