On 4th July 1946 a pogrom took place in the city of Kielce. It was the deadliest pogrom against Polish Jews after the Second World War: 42 Jews were killed, more than 40 were wounded and many more concluded that Poland was - although the war had ended - no safe country to live in. Today, an "official version of the events" is being told, which for the most part excludes Polish responsibility. Dr. Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, cultural and historical anthropologist, who is a professor at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences at Warsaw conducted her research on the pogrom and wrote a "Social portrait". Doing so, she referred to biographies and used anthropological theories. In an interview we asked her about the study, as well as a new law regarding the Holocaust in Poland, that has recently been established.
"A abundance and diversity of sources"
L.I.S.A.: Professor Tokarska-Bakir, you have written a voluminous study on the Kielce Pogrom in 1946, which has been recently published. Before we go into detail, what has motivated you to start research on this pogrom? What were your considerations in the beginning of the scientific process?
Professor Tokarska-Bakir: Frankly speaking, in terms of the technical side of the research, there were two things about the Kielce pogrom that especially drew me to the topic: the abundance of sources and the limited time in which the events took place, namely 8 to 12 hours.
As far as the first aspect is concerned, the abundance and diversity of sources was connected with two investigations, the ones that were conducted by the communist authorities immediately after the pogrom, and then the second one from the late 1990s and early 2000. Moreover, due to the fact that the Kielce pogrom proved to the Jewish Poles that despite the end of the war, Poland still remained a dangerous country for them to live in, there was an outpour of memoir-type of literature in all the languages of the world with Yiddish and Hebrew in preponderance. It was thus rather clear that, considering such a huge volume of sources, the anthropological method of thick description must generate results – provided, of course, the right choice of theories.
The second aspect, namely the temporal isolation of the different events, was just as important in the practical sense. The thick description mentioned above is made by laying different accounts one on top of the other, regardless of whether they are mutually confirmative or divergent. For them to be identifiable, their physical coordinates cannot be too far apart. To put it in Aesopian language of Buddhist parables, it all could be compared to the famous description of an elephant by blind people, where some say that it has a trunk, others that it has large ears, and others still that it has got a thin tiny tail. If we were unable to recognise these elements as aggregates belonging to a collection known as “elephant” we would never be able to sum them up – they would simply not fall in together. But in the case of the Kielce pogrom, they were all next to each other. This was a short paroxysm indeed.