A NYTimes review of a new book about anti-Semitism in Poland after WWII:

In the most notorious episode, 60 years ago this month, residents of Kielce, among them policemen, soldiers and boy scouts, murdered 80 Jews. “The immense courtyard was still littered with blood-stained iron pipes, stones and clubs, which had been used to crush the skulls of Jewish men and women,” the Polish-Jewish journalist Saul Shneiderman wrote the following day. It was the largest peacetime pogrom in 20th-century Europe, Gross says. But he maintains that Kielce was nothing special: during this era, it could have taken place anywhere in Poland. Polish intellectuals, Gross notes, were mortified by what was happening in their country. Only a psychopath, one wrote, could have imagined such cruelty.

Days before the pogrom, the Polish primate, Cardinal August Hlold, had spurned Jewish entreaties to condemn Roman Catholic anti-Semitism. Afterward, he charged that by leading the effort to impose Communism on Poland — Jews were in fact prominent in the party, though hardly in control — the Jews had only themselves to blame. The point was seconded by the bishop of Kielce, who suggested that Jews had actually orchestrated the unrest to persuade Britain to hand over Palestine. It was a neat trick: being Communists and Zionists simultaneously. Only the bishop of Czestochowa condemned the killings, and was promptly reprimanded by his colleagues. One wonders how Karol Wojtyla, then a young seminarian, later Pope John Paul II, viewed this cesspool of ignorance and intolerance.

If the Church gave the Jews short shrift, the same was true of the Communists, even the Jewish ones. For them, ignoring the Jewish plight, as well as Polish complicity in wartime atrocities, offered a way to ingratiate themselves with a wary nation. Besides, what was to be done? When Polish Jewish leaders called for the Communists to do something to stop the hatred, one official had a ready rejoinder. “Do you want me to send 18 million Poles to Siberia?” he asked.