The hell after hell
Survivor recalls post-war pogrom

by Elaine Durbach
NJJN Bureau Chief/Central

In the air-conditioned elegance of his home in Hillside earlier this month, Alec Horowitz recalled another July and an event that changed the course of his life After years of silence on the subject, he wants people to know about it.

In 1946 he was living in a displaced persons camp in Germany, recovering from three years in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. He was about to leave to head back to Kielce, his hometown in Poland, when terrible news reached the camp: The townspeople had killed 42 or more Jews — all Holocaust survivors who had returned in hopes of rebuilding their lives — and injured dozens more in a building at 7 Planty Street.

“They were kids,” Horowitz said, his normally bright face flushing as he recalled that day. “There were some older people killed too. I knew three or four of them. One was a close friend. They threw his body out a window and into the river that passed by the building.”

Having survived the horrors of ghetto life in Kielce, the loss of his parents in one of the first rounds of deportation, and three years in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, he had hoped that finally the horror was over. This new outburst of hatred was deeply disillusioning. “It gets you so down,” he said.

Official reports say that 42 people — all Holocaust survivors — were killed on July 4 and 30 more injured in a riot fueled by a father’s claim that the Jews at 7 Planty Street had kidnapped his young son to serve as victim the supposed ritual killing of Christian children.

Horowitz marks not just July 4, the day of the massacre, but also July 17, when it was finally established that the child was alive, in his parents’ care, and the Jews had been the entirely innocent victims. In the aftermath, eight people were indicted for the crime and executed, but nothing more was done to bring to justice all the others who shared the blame, including the local police who sat back and allowed the attacks — and even took part.

On July 4 this year, a ceremony was held in Kielce to mark the 60th anniversary of the pogrom. Polish president Lech Kaczynski was said to be too ill to attend, but an aide read a statement from him in which he condemned the event as a crime and said, “This is a great shame and tragedy for the Poles and the Jews, so few of whom survived Hitler’s Holocaust.” He went on to say that there was no room for such racism and anti-Semitism in democratic Poland, but he also protested the stereotyping of modern Poles as anti-Semitic.

The pogrom is also the subject of a just-released book by Princeton University history professor Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.

The pogrom was a turning point for Horowitz. “I had wanted to return to see if any of my family had survived, but that ended any plan I had to go back. I decided to come to America.” In fact, none of his three siblings or any of his other close relatives did survive.

Of the 28,000 Jews who had been in Kielce in the early years of the war, only a few hundred survived. Of those, about 100 had returned to the town. Those who came through the Planty Street massacre immediately left the country, together with around 100,000 other Polish survivors.

Horowitz said that his wife, Ellen, who grew up in a village in the Galicia region of Poland and survived the war with her family in Russia, felt the force of Polish anti-Semitism too strongly to go back to Poland before 1987, when the couple finally visited the country. During that trip, she went to her old home but found the experience too upsetting to repeat.

Alec Horowitz said he would like to go back. “Let’s have peace. It’s over,” he said. He is a successful builder and a philanthropist, and the couple’s two daughters and their husbands and seven grandchildren live nearby in Marlboro; life has been good, he said. But he isn’t about to forget the past.

Out of silence

In 1987, Horowitz became president of the Kielce Society, a group founded in New York in 1905 by former residents of the town. He served until 1990, when he had a heart attack and had to step down. The group still meets a few times a year in Brooklyn, but the membership has dwindled to around 180.

Horowitz and some of the other members organized a cleanup of the old Jewish cemetery in Kielce and the erection of a fence to protect it, and arranged for the placement of a plaque there bearing the names of the 1946 massacre victims. Elie Wiesel spoke at the unveiling of the plaque in 1996.

Ellen Horowitz recalled that her husband would go to Brooklyn for the Kielce Society meetings. “They would spend the time talking to each other about the camps, but he wouldn’t talk about it to anyone else. I only knew a bit of what happened to him. For many years he said nothing about it to our kids.”

“I didn’t want to ruin their lives,” her husband said. “And I couldn’t talk about it without getting very emotional. But then I realized that it was important that the young people be told what happened.”

That change in attitude began when one of his grandchildren, as part of a school project, asked if he could interview his grandfather about his experiences in Auschwitz. Horowitz said that he also told his grandson about when, as a teenager forced to feed the furnace in Gestapo headquarters in Kielce, he found a stash of bullets and smuggled them out to a neighbor who made grenades out of them.

When the teacher saw the boy’s report, she called Horowitz and asked him to speak to the class. Initially he demurred, but after months of persuasion, he agreed — and found that now the school wanted all the students to hear him.

The experience turned out better than he had expected. “I was very nervous, and I lost the notes I had prepared, but when I finished, they gave me a standing ovation,” he recalled.