Fear and Loathing

Ruth Franklin's review from the New Republic of Jan T. Gross's book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, is reproduced here. An excerpt:

Polish Jews who had the amazing fortune to survive the camps were "unwelcomed" upon their return home with brutal violence. In June 1945, several Jews traveling by train in eastern Poland were murdered by their fellow passengers. In August, a mob attacked the synagogue in Krakow and then pursued Jews throughout the city, killing several and wounding dozens. The writer Zofia Nalkowska, visiting a Jewish orphanage that fall, noted that the children were unable to enroll in public school because of "beatings and persecution." The following spring, the French Catholic intellectual Emmanuel Mounier reported that more than a thousand Jews had been killed in the Polish countryside over the past nine months. And on July 4, 1946, scores of Jews were killed and hundreds injured in a day-long citywide bloodbath in Kielce that has become notorious as the deadliest peacetime pogrom in modern Europe.