Some 300,000 Polish Jews survived the war, and their return home from concentration camp, hiding or deportation in the Soviet Union was often traumatic. When they had been removed by the Germans, their houses had usually been occupied by the poorer, and often criminal, elements of the local community, and their reappearance met with resentment and sometimes violence. They encountered the same fear and suspicion as all other displaced groups, and in their case resentment was heavily tinged with the anti-Semitism prevalent in provincial towns such as Kielce.
On 3 July a nine-year-old boy who had gone to visit relatives in the country for a couple of days without telling his parents re-appeared and in order to avoid punishment told them that he had been kidnapped, pointing out a house in which he had supposedly been held. This happened to be the home of several Jewish families. The parents reported the matter to the militia, which sent three armed patrols to investigate. The militia’s appearance outside the house drew a crowd of onlookers, and rumours began to circulate that Jews were kidnapping Polish children. When the militia entered the building they began confiscating arms, and for reasons unknown shot a couple of the inhabitants. They then evacuated the house and the inhabitants found themselves pushed out into the street, where a by now threatening crowd was howling abuse. A detachment of a hundred soldiers had turned up to control the crowd, but stood by idly, along with the militia, while the crowd attacked the Jews. The head of the Jewish community was shot by one of the soldiers when he tried to get help from the militia headquarters only a hundred metres away, where the local commander and his Soviet superior ignored the events. Wild rumours flew around town, and more Jews and their homes were attacked. By the end of the day, over forty Jews and two Christians had been killed. News of this, along with instances of aggressive anti-Semitism elsewhere, caused many of Poland’s surviving Jews to opt for emigration.
The creators of the People’s Republic of Poland liked to stress that it was a truly Polish state and to represent it as a kind of socialist reincarnation of the Piast kingdom. The Poland of 1952 was certainly more ethnically and religiously homogeneous than it had been at any point since the days of the Piast dynasty. But the process that had led to this had not given rise to a new Polish society, only to a profoundly damaged mass of individuals, many of them reduced to a feral day-to-day existence. And those in power did nothing to bring anything resembling a normal human society into being.
All the active elements which had survived the war, such as the Church and various social organisations, and including even the nationalist right-wing parties and members of the aristocracy, readily involved themselves in the process of rebuilding the country. This manifested itself as much in the spirit of piety with which the shards of its cultural heritage were rescued and the meticulous rebuilding of historical city centres as in the recreation of pre-war social and cultural institutions. But it soon became clear that those in power had no intention of allowing Polish society to reconstitute itself: a new social order was to be imposed from above, along lines dictated by the Central Committee of the Party, enforced by its own cadres and Party-directed organisations such as the Association of Polish Youth (ZMP), the trade unions, cooperatives, and so on. Not only were groups or organisations outside the ambit of the Party harassed and censored, their access to both information and publication was severely limited. Even where they were permitted to publish papers or periodicals, they were only allowed miserly allocations of paper. The same was true of independent publishers, which withered before being eliminated in 1947. All information and the possibility of disseminating it was gradually brought under the sole control of the Party.
The Sejm, theoretically the expression of the will of the people, was entirely dominated by the Party, since the Party decided whose names appeared on the list of candidates. So while the Sejm nominated the Council of State, the Council of Ministers, the legislature and the holders of all major offices, it was the Party that dictated the choice. For the purposes of window-dressing, a small group of Catholic deputies was allowed to stand and be elected, but while they were listened to during debates, in which they served as a kind of bad conscience, they were otherwise ignored.