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29 Part Two Sans Pays The Kielce Pogrom and a Gash on the Head We lived about a year and a half in Tarnow after the liberation. I know now that the Kielce pogrom was July 1946. Kielce is not far from Tarnow. On 4 July 1946, a mob of locals, Polish government officials, and military attacked and killed forty-two Jewish survivors who had returned to Kielce. It was only one of many deadly assaults on Jews in Poland after the war. It is estimated that fifteen hundred survivors returning to Poland or coming out of hiding were killed after the Holocaust. Every one of these deaths shocked Jews around the world but particularly Jews in Poland. I have no doubt my parents would have heard about Kielce and the other killings. Many Polish Jews who had somehow survived the Holocaust tried to leave at that point. But as a child I did not put the Kielce pogrom together with our departure. There were also a couple of personal incidents that convinced my parents that we had to leave. First I was beaten up after school. I went to school for the first time in my life in the fall of 1945 at age seven. I walked to school; it wasn’t far. I must have learned the Polish alphabet at least because I knew there were letters that do not exist in English, like the “Ł” with a slash through it which is pronounced like the English “W.” But I don’t know when actually I learned to read and write. First thing every morning at school the priest would come in and teach catechism to the students and I would leave the room and come back when the priest left. It did not take long for the other students to realize that I was “different.” There was one other older boy who was Jewish, but he was not in my classroom. My teacher might have been a woman, because when I was beaten up it was a female teacher who came to speak with my parents. One day on my way home from school, I was attacked by a group of students. They knocked me down and banged my head against the curb. They didn’t continue to beat up on me. It was brief but it produced a gash on my forehead. My parents made 30 sans pays more out of it than I did. It did not even hurt very much and I didn’t have to go for medical help; I was treated at home. My parents decided that I would not return to school. After I was attacked, a teacher came to our apartment and talked with my parents. Why exactly she came I do not know, but I have put the two things together in my head. I suspect that it was not a normal thing for a teacher to come to a pupil’s home. I used to have a scar on the left side at the temple. It became faint with time. Then another incident occurred. There was a small Jewish children’s camp that my brother went to, like kids go to summer camp now. That would have been in the summer of 1946. There might have been a half dozen kids at the camp. My brother was supposed to be there for a week, but he came back after just three days in the middle of the night. He was brought home by the camp director. There were two attacks on the camp. At the time there were Polish partisans who were trying to free the country from the Russians. The Russians were a formidable foe—Jewish kids were a far easier target. The camp was in a country house, and the first night the kids were there a grenade was thrown at the house. There was a detachment of Russian soldiers nearby and among them there were at least two who were Jewish. So they went over and stayed with the kids. Two nights later there was apparently a full-scale firefight. Polish partisans attacked that house. The Jewish Russian soldiers beat them back. At that point the man who was in charge of the camp decided they could not keep the kids there safely and brought them back to Tarnow. So now I had been beaten up by school kids and my brother had been attacked at the camp. And there was the Kielce...

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