Introduction

1 In addition to the regularly published subsequent volumes of the periodical Zagłada Żydów. Studia i materiały (21 by 2026), at least a few books should be mentioned: B. Engelking, Jest taki piękny słoneczny dzień... Losy Żydów szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942-1945, Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011; J. Grabowski, Judenjagd. Polowanie na Żydów 1942-1945. Studium dziejów pewnego powiatu, Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011; Zarys krajobrazu. Wieś polska wobec zagłady Żydów 1942-1945, ed. B. Engelking and J. Grabowski, introd. K. Persak, Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011; Dalej jest noc. Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski, vols. 1-2, ed. by B. Engelking and J. Grabowski, Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2018.

2 In 2012, the late Prof. Bogusław Wolniewicz from the University of Warsaw demystified the juggling with numbers (from "tens of thousands" to "200,000") by researchers associated with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research (Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów) and the press enunciation of Prof. Paweł Śpiewak, then director of the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) in Warsaw, expressed in an interview with R. Mazurek ("Żyd przestaje się kojarzyć," Rzeczpospolita, 26-27 November 2011, pp. 8-9). Wolniewicz has established, after researching the initial information quoted by the historians mentioned above, that Szymon Datner (ŻIH) made a general and casual assumption expressed in 1968 on the number of Jews who survived in Poland, for propaganda (it can be said: psychological) purposes only, and its sense/context has been misinterpreted, to publicize, a few dozen years later, the round number of 120,000 Jewish victims killed by Polish peasants during the German occupation. The professor has proved logically that the number, now quoted without faltering, is a pure invention; fiction devoid of methodological foundations at the present stage of research in the field of microhistory. See B. Wolniewicz, "Fikcyjne 10%. Czyli ilu Żydów zabili Polacy?" Najwyższy Czas, 15 January 2012, https://www.bibula.com/?p=50105 (accessed 4 September 2025).

3 J.T. Gross, Strach. Antysemityzm w Polsce tuż po wojnie. Historia moralnej zapaści, Cracow: Znak, 2008. (Originally published in 2006 as Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 - t.n.).

4 M.J. Chodakiewicz, Po Zagładzie. Stosunki polsko-żydowskie 1944-1947, trans. Anna Madej, Warsaw: IPN, 2008, pp. 200-201, 204, 205; D. Engel, "Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944-1946," Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), pp. 43-85, http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203128.pdf (accessed 28 August 2025).

5 M. Zaremba, Wielka trwoga. Polska 1944-1947. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys, Cracow: Znak, 2012, p. 584.

6 A. Żbikowski, "Morderstwa popełniane na Żydach w pierwszych latach po wojnie," in Następstwa zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944-2010, ed. F. Tych and M. Adamczyk-Garbowska, Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, ŻIH, 2011, p. 93.

7 Symbolically, this profound transformation was personified by Chil Grynszpan himself. After the "liberation," at the end of July 1944, he personally carried out an act of revenge on a German who was taken prisoner in the village of Horostyta (Krzywowierzba community). Eyewitness Jerzy Chlebowicz recalled: "The next day before midday we witnessed an execution, which Chil Grynszpan carried out on some high-ranking Nazi officer. The armed escort of 'Chil's' detachment led the officer out to the road next to the cemetery. They stopped at the pine tree beams lying on the side of the road, just where I had stood on guard during that memorable night. 'Chil' personally read the death sentence in Hebrew, after which he delivered the justification verbally, from memory. Standing next to him, I understood what he was talking about. He mainly based [the sentence] on the Nazi crimes that the occupiers committed on the Jewish nation. He mentioned larger ghettos and death camps. Among other things, he mentioned Sobibór, from where the smell of burned human bodies used to come with the wind as far as the distant Dubeczno. My outrage grew and intensified. I looked at the representative of Nazism, numbered member of the NSDAP, sitting humbly at the heap of the wood beams. I wanted to shoot him myself between those eyes, blank with fear. Our brothers shot in Chełm behaved in a more dignified way. During interrogations, they spat in the eyes of SS-men with blood and broken teeth. This would-be master of the world was trembling with fear like a common coward." See Czas dokonany. Mój udział w tworzeniu i utrwalaniu władzy ludowej na Lubelszczyźnie, ed. I. Caban, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1977, p. 100. This attitude aimed at taking a bloody Old Testament retaliation by the surviving Jewish victims on their persecutors soon adopted the form of a secret organization "Nekama" (Hebrew for 'revenge'), established in the summer of 1944 in 'liberated' Lublin on the initiative of Aba Kowner from Wilno and several Jewish partisans from Communist and Soviet troops from the General Governorate and the eastern borderlands of pre-WWII Poland. Apart from Kowner, it also included Pasza Reichmann (later known as Icchak Awidow) along with other Jews from the Soviet partisan organization. Already at that time they worked closely with the NKVD on the liquidation of 'collaborators.' The strict core of the group apparently initially consisted of just five people who recruited more members. They soon moved to Bucharest in Romania, where the number of "avengers" rose to about forty. See T. Segev, Siódmy milion. Izrael - piętno Zagłady, trans. B. Gadomska, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2012, pp. 135-136. Although at the present stage of research we have circumstantial rather than irrefutable evidence, it is assumed that kpt. Chil Grynszpan "Chil" from the Lublin Voivodeship MO HQ may have also been one of the founders of "Nekama" in Lublin. It could also have been a conspiracy of Communist political police members of Jewish origin, which had organizational connections with "Nekama" or only referred to its general idea of bloody account-settling with those guilty of the Holocaust on Polish soil. At the same time, this aggression affected both the organized forms of resistance (the armed underground movement) and the civilian population. Regarding revenge on the German population, Silesians, and Poles in Upper Silesia, see J. Sack, An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, New York: Basic Books, 1993.

8 Both Leon Taraszkiewicz and his brother Edward were commissioned as officers in the WiN by kpt. Zdzisław Broński "Uskok," most probably in the fourth quarter of 1946. During the Parczew operation, Edward Taraszkiewicz used the pseudonym "Grot," and not "Żelazny," with which he is commonly associated. He did not adopt the latter one until late 1946 or early 1947.

9 P. Kołakowski, NKWD i GRU na ziemiach polskich 1939-1945, Warsaw: Bellona, 2002, pp. 235-236.

10 The name 'Polish People's Army' (Ludowe Wojsko Polskie) was a customary description of the Communist armed forces, referred to officially as 'Polish Army' (Wojsko Polskie). The former is used here to avoid confusion with non-Communist formations - MG.

11 P. Kołakowski, NKWD i GRU na ziemiach polskich, pp. 234-235.

12 It is worth noting that during the census of 1931 people were not asked about their ethnic identity, but about their mother tongue and religion - t.n.

13 S.E. Michalski, Włodawa. Monografia statystyczno-gospodarcza, foreword by Prof. Dr. W. Krzyżanowski, Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1939, p. 265.

14 Rocznik statystyczny 1947, ed. Stefan Szulc, Warsaw, 1947, p. 15.

15 W. Ćwik, J. Reder, Lubelszczyzna - dzieje rozwoju terytorialnego, podziałów administracyjnych i ustroju władz, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1977, pp. 135, 168.

16 Journal of Laws (Dziennik Ustaw, DzU) No. 35, Item 167 (1947). It is worth mentioning that the national affiliation of Włodawa county to the so-called Lublin Poland has been, for a while, an element of a little-known political game undertaken between January and August 1944, with Stalin's knowledge, by the Ukrainian Communists with the Polish government in London and with Polish Communists from the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich, ZPP) and the PKWN. Under the pretext of implementing the postulate of uniting the Ukrainian people and the ethnic Ukrainian lands, Nikita Khrushchëv, at the time the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (Vsesoyuzna Komunistychna Partiya [Bil'shovykiv] Ukrayiny) and the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Rada Narodnykh Komisariv) of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, proposed in March 1944 to incorporate the Chełm region into Soviet Ukraine. The territorial claims of the Soviets for the lands west of the Curzon Line caused the reaction of the Polish government in London, which demanded respect of the Polish-Soviet border from before World War II (which was cynically depicted in Moscow as a manifestation of the 'imperialist policy' of the Polish Government directed against friendly unneighborly relations between the two countries after the war). This has put the Government of Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk in London in a rather awkward situation in his negotiations with the Soviets, who have cleverly taken the initiative in the diplomatic game with the West over the future of Poland, always supported by the obsequious collaborators from the ZPP. Unexpectedly, the pro-Soviet delegation of the Country National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN) that had resided in Moscow since May 1944, has performed the role of a defender of the endangered border on the river Bug. The delegates have apparently convinced Stalin to maintain the variant of the border delineated along the ideas of the Curzon line. They realized that the cession of a territory of the already cut down country would have compromised them in the eyes of their less politically educated compatriots, showing them as passive tools of Soviet imperialism. However, on 20 July 1944, Khrushchëv appealed to Stalin again, asking for permission to set up the Soviet Chełm Oblast with Chełm as the center, and he even drew the borders of this new administrative unit with an area of 12,320 square kilometers, inhabited by 797,039 people. It was going to include parts of the Biała Podlaska and Radzyń Podlaski counties, the entire Włodawa county, a part of the Lubartów county, the entire Chełm county, the eastern part of the Sokal county, the entire Tomaszów Lubelski county, the greater part of the Zamość county, parts of the Biłgoraj, Jarosław, Przeworsk, and Nisko counties. By means of Khrushchëv's aggressive rhetoric, Stalin blackmailed (with tearing another part of Polish lands away) Prime Minister Mikołajczyk during his Moscow talks with the PKWN delegation in early August 1944 and made him compromise with the Communists in the spirit of political realism that accepted the political domination of the USSR in this part of Europe. See A. Wawryniuk, "Plany polityczne Chruszczowa w sprawie włączenia części powiatu radzyńskiego do Ukraińskiej Socjalistycznej Republiki Sowieckiej," Radzyński Rocznik Humanistyczny 10 (2012), pp. 50-65. This inevitably evokes associations with the plans of tsarist Russia to separate the Chełm Governorate in 1912, as the "Russian Ulster" in the "Privislinskiy Kray," and formally incorporate it into the Russian Empire in 1915.

17 R. Ziętek, "Konflikt polsko-ukraiński na Chełmszczyźnie i południowym Podlasiu w okresie okupacji niemieckiej," Rocznik Chełmski 7 (2001), p. 251.

18 National Archives in Lublin (Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie, APL), Komitet Powiatowy Polskiej Partii Robotniczej we Włodawie (hereinafter KP PPR Wł), Materiały I sekretarza - sprawozdania sytuacyjne, ref. no. 23, Sprawozdanie z działalności Powiatowego Komitetu PPR we Włodawie na dzień 10.10.1944 r., 8 [sic!] October 1944, p. 5.

19 G. Makus, Powiatowy Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego we Włodawie w walce z polskim podziemiem niepodległościowym w latach 1944-1947, Włodawa, 2009, p. 12, from: http://www.fundacjapamietamy.pl/images/artykuly/PUBP-Wlodawa.pdf; M. Szumiło, "Egzekutywa Komitetu Powiatowego PPR we Włodawie (1944-1948)," in Dzieje biurokracji na ziemiach polskich, vol. 3, ed. A. Górak, K. Latawiec, and D. Magier, Radzyń Podlaski: Radzyńskie Stowarzyszenie Inicjatyw Lokalnych, Radzyńskie Towarzystwo Naukowe Libra, 2010, p. 715.

20 Quotes from archival sources and memoirs were translated to reflect their sometimes ambiguous and inaccurate wording where applicable. Also, foreign names and military ranks in Polish documents were often polonized. These were quoted verbatim from the sources, with transliterations of names in brackets - MG.

21 APL, KP PPR Wł, ref. no. 39, Sprawozdanie z działalności Powiatowego Komitetu PPR we Włodawie na dzień 10.11.1944 r., 12 November 1944, p. 1.

22 Literally People's Party, but referred to in this way here to avoid confusion with various Communist groupings; the faction did represent the interests of the rural population - MG.

23 APL, KP PPR Wł, ref. no. 39, Sprawozdanie z działalności Powiatowego Komitetu PPR we Włodawie na dzień 10.11.1944 r., 12 November 1944, p. 1.

24 Communist-controlled Poland of the time was commonly informally known as 'Lublin Poland,' after the city of Lublin where the Communist authorities were based initially - t.n.

25 The underground resistance operation in Parczew is repeatedly erroneously dated in the literature on the subject either to 2 February 1946 (see I. Caban and E. Machocki, Za władzę ludu, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1975, p. 320) or 23 February 1946 (see E. Horoch, Parczew w latach 1918-1989, in E. Horoch, A. Koprukowniak, and R. Szczygieł, Dzieje Parczewa 1401-2001, Parczew-Lublin: Urząd Miasta i Gminy Parczew, 2001, p. 228).

26 General Governorate was the term used by the Germans for those parts of pre-WWII Poland that they considered occupied Polish territory, as opposed to the parts of Poland that they annexed and incorporated into Germany - t.n.

27 K. Ostapowicz, "Wóz albo przewóz," in Strzały o świcie. MO i KBW w walce z bandami, Warsaw: Iskry, 1962, pp. 74-104.

28 M. Olbromski, Przemijanie, Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1971, pp. 125-147. These confessions of Marian Chmielewski, the county secretary of the PPR in Włodawa, from 1947, were republished in the mid-1980s, see M.R. Olbromski, "Miał sześć wyroków śmierci," Rzeczywistość, no. 30 (1986), pp. 4-5.

29 See T. Łabuszewski, "Bandy reakcyjnego podziemia czy zbrojne podziemie niepodległościowe," Zeszyty Historyczne WiN-u, no. 19-20 (2003), pp. 7-34.

30 This is a reference to Władysław Michalski and Bazyli Winniczuk, who in fact survived the armed operation of the underground resistance. Neither is mentioned in the summary listing of RBP members killed in the Lublin voivodeship! See I. Caban and E. Machocki, Za władzę ludu, pp. 507-561.

31 W. Góra and Z. Jakubowski, Z dziejów organów bezpieczeństwa i porządku publicznego w województwie lubelskim 1944-1948, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, 1978, p. 141.

32 D. Libionka, "Polskie podziemie niepodległościowe a mniejszości narodowe (koreferat)," in Polskie podziemie niepodległościowe na tle konspiracji antykomunistycznych w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej w latach 1944-1956, ed. S. Poleszak, Warsaw-Lublin: IPN, 2008, pp. 175-176.

33 A. Kopciowski, "Zajścia antyżydowskie na Lubelszczyźnie w pierwszych latach po drugiej wojnie światowej," Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, no. 3 (2007), pp. 193-195.

34 D. Engel, "Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence," pp. 70-72.

35 J.T. Gross, Strach, pp. 59-62.

36 A. Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego. Żydzi na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej wrzesień 1939 - lipiec 1941, Warsaw: ŻIH, 2006, p. 251. The same historian repeated his own errors in a later, slightly extended assessment of the event: "Sometimes post-war murders occurred as a result of 'unplanned events.' For example, three Jews were killed on 2 February 1946, when the town of Parczew was briefly under the control of an armed troop of the anti-Communist partisan organization Wolność i Niepodległość [sic! - Niezawisłość] (WiN). This murder was the result of a denunciation by Christian neighbors who pointed these people out to the WiN fighters as members of the ORMO [sic! - MO], an auxiliary para-police organization. According to the troop's chronicle, both political motives and common robbery were the reasons behind the attack on Parczew." See A. Żbikowski, "Morderstwa popełniane na Żydach," pp. 79-80.

37 E.E. Taraszkiewicz "Żelazny," Trzy pamiętniki, ed. A. Filipek and B. Jarocińska, Warsaw-Lublin: IPN, 2008, pp. 92-98.

38 The editors of a selection of sources, connected with the ŻIH, commented on it rhetorically in their commentary to "Żelazny's" chronicle, referring to the 'pogrom' in Parczew as follows: "The WiN troop that carried out the pogrom in Parczew was one of the most indomitable: it did not lay down its arms after the war and fought until the end, until 1951, when it was destroyed in an ambush. The partisans belonging to this troop undoubtedly considered themselves patriots. But did their actions in Parczew have any significance for the situation in the country? Did they bring any advantage to Poland?" See Dzieje Żydów w Polsce 1944-1968. Teksty źródłowe, ed. A. Cała and H. Datner-Śpiewak, Warsaw: ŻIH, 1997, pp. 37-39.

39 D. Magier, "Pogrom ubeków," Najwyższy Czas!, 14 February 2004, p. 36.

40 B. Urbankowski, Czerwona msza, czyli uśmiech Stalina, vol. 1, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Alfa, 1998, pp. 583-584.

41 H. Pająk, "Jastrząb" kontra UB, Lublin: Wydawnictwo Retro, 1993, pp. 82-97.

42 M.J. Chodakiewicz, Po Zagładzie, pp. 137-140.

43 G. Makus, "Jastrząb" i "Żelazny." Ostatni partyzanci Polesia Lubelskiego 1945-1951, Włodawa: Fundacja Pamiętamy, 2008, pp. 32-39.

44 M.J. Chodakiewicz, Po Zagładzie, pp. 137-140.

45 R. Wnuk, Lubelski Okręg AK DSZ i WiN 1944-1947, Warsaw: Volumen, 2000, pp. 199-219.

46 National Archives in Lublin, Radzyń Podlaski Branch (Archiwum Państwowe w Lublinie Oddział w Radzyniu Podlaskim, APL ORP), Sąd Grodzki w Parczewie (hereinafter SG Pa), Akta w sprawie napadu na miasto Parczew i Posterunek Milicji Obywatelskiej w Parczewie z art. 22 dekretu z dn. 16 lipca 1945 r. (hereinafter AwSN), ref. no. 317.

47 Ibid.

48 D. Magier, "Pogrom ubeków," p. 36.

49 G. Makus, "Jastrząb" i "Żelazny," pp. 32-39. This historian has subsequently written an as yet unpublished work that introduces new findings regarding the local Polish underground resistance. See G. Makus, "'Bracia Wyklęci.' Działalność oddziału partyzanckiego Obwodu WiN Włodawa Leona Taraszkiewicza 'Jastrzębia' i Edwarda Taraszkiewicza 'Żelaznego' w latach 1945-1951 (zarys monograficzny)," M.A. thesis prepared at the Eastern Europe Countries' History Unit (Zakład Historii Krajów Europy Wschodniej) of the Institute of History (Instytut Historii) of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin (Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie) under the direction of Prof. Marek Mądzik, pp. 114-121 (the fragments referring to the WiN action in Parczew on 5 February 1946).

50 S. Jadczak, "Żydzi w Parczewie," Rocznik Parczewski 3 (2011), pp. 54-58.

Foreword

According to Fryda Aharonson (Szpigner), whose husband Eliezer was a Soviet military veteran, anti-Jewish violence was rife in the Polish lands during and after the German Nazi occupation (1939-1945). She claims that the violence stemmed from anti-Semitic prejudice of the Christian Poles. Aharonson offers the following remarks about her husband's hometown, shortly after the entry of the Red Army into central Poland in 1944: "A pogrom occurred in Kałuszyn, and two Jews were murdered, Szmuel Lew, Kałuszyn Chief of Police, and Jaakow [Jankiel] Komorowski. Poles couldn't bear the idea that a Jew was Chief of Police, and walked around freely in Kałuszyn with a pistol."1

This is a rather standard account available and purveyed in the West of the early period of the second Soviet occupation of Poland (1944-1989) during the Second World War and its aftermath. It is, of course, unverified and far from exhaustive. Because of, first, Communist terror, second, Stalinist propaganda, and, third, censorship, virtually neither independent confirmation nor scholarship on the subject was possible before 1989.

Consequently, a rather skewed and misinformed picture has emerged and ensconced itself in Western scholarship as far as Jewish-Polish relations, in particular regarding the aftermath of the Holocaust, are concerned. Based on a limited and limiting pool of evidence, Western scholars have tended to miss the essence of the Soviet occupation and the context of the tragic post-war events that influenced the very core of the Polish-Jewish conflict.

That this conflict was separate and different from the Holocaust is beyond dispute. It stemmed from a variety of factors, of which anti-Semitism was one, and not the most important at that. The conflict featured, on the one hand, the ethnic Polish Christian population - and in particular the war-time pro-Western, pro-independence, and anti­-Nazi underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) and its offshoots - and, on the other, all supporters (and persons perceived as such) of the new, Soviet-installed Communist occupation regime.

There indeed occurred anti-Jewish violence, including in Kałuszyn. However, anti-Jewish prejudice was not its primary driver. It was rather fueled by the complex context of the Soviet occupation of Poland and the perceptions of the role of some members of the Jewish minority in the new post-war Communist system. For example, what got the two men killed in Kałuszyn was not primarily anti-Semitism but, rather, the fact that they had joined the Communist terror apparatus and its ruling party and also happened to be Jewish.

Both Jaakow (Jankiel) Komorowski and Szmuel Lew were Communist Party members. Both were armed militiamen and part of the Red terror apparatus. After the flight of the German Nazis in 1944 during the onslaught of the Red Army, these Jewish Communist militiamen became, under the leadership of the Soviet NKVD secret police, part and parcel of the new occupation regime. They rained terror on all pro-Western and pro-independence as well as anti-Nazi and anti-Communist elements in the area of their operation. Both Komorowski and Lew were therefore executed by the Polish underground on 12 April 1945.2 The execution had nothing to do with the targeted men's ethno-cultural origin. It had everything to do with their ideological choices.

Before the execution took place, however, one must bear in mind that after the westward flight of the Germans, the Soviets and their collaborators suppressed the free Polish government, which had hitherto operated clandestinely under German Nazi occupation, when it emerged into the open to claim its rightful place in Poland in 1944. The Communists destroyed and terrorized the anti-Nazi and pro-Western Polish Underground and its armed forces, chiefly the Home Army. They sometimes killed but more often imprisoned and deported its soldiers to the Gulag; and they brutalized and extorted the local population.

Thus, the local Christian Poles almost uniformly considered the Soviet forces and their adherents as occupiers. There was no liberation; there was enslavement by Stalin. That was the typical Polish experience at that time, a point almost entirely missing in Western scholarship, in particular that dealing with Jewish issues.

It is undeniable, however, that most Poles, who did not collaborate with the Soviets, resented the new occupiers and their puppets. The newly conquered people, underground soldiers in particular, hated the fact that they were forcibly prevented from establishing a free government and even from marching into their own localities, towns, and villages as rightful liberators, despite having fought against the Germans for five long years.

The pro-independence Poles were furious at Communist collaborators, their background notwithstanding, for showing off their power and flaunting their guns and uniforms in public: an honor that the Polish pro-Western freedom fighters were denied and, indeed, for which they were punished.

Kałuszyn was but one of hundreds, if not thousands of localities, where similar events took place, including multi-layered violence. Although Kałuszyn unfortunately has not yet merited its own case study, Parczew has found its able micrographer in Dr. Mariusz Bechta. He focused on the Jewish-Polish conflict in the wake of the Second World War and, in particular, on the so called "raid on Parczew" of 5 February 1946, which targeted the town's Jewish population.

The author argues that the raid on Parczew, in the southern part of the Podlasie region in the east of the country, was the Polish underground's revenge on the local Jewish community for perceived collaboration with the Communists, and not an "antisemitic pogrom." Bechta has penned the most exhaustive, in-depth, nuanced, and insightful case study of the Parczew foray by the guerrillas of the Freedom and Independence Association (Zrzeszenie Wolność i Niezawisłość, WiN), a post-AK organization.

What took place on that day, was a punitive expedition against real and perceived Communist collaborators. The action resulted in a minimal number of lethal casualties. The guerrillas, who lived off the land, limited themselves to despoiling the Jewish community, rather than exterminating it. However, fearing for their lives and uncertain about their property, the Jewish survivors evacuated the town en masse. Thus, ultimately, the result of the "raid on Parczew" was ethnic cleansing. The Jewish community was no more.

Mariusz Bechta painstakingly contextualizes the brutal events in their proper social, economic, political, military, and cultural setting, doing justice to its broadness and complexity. His microstudy should prompt a serious discussion of post-war violence and its reconceptualization, including the phenomena of collaboration, accommodation, and resistance.

The author notes that the aim of the raid was to punish the Jewish population for its collaboration with the Communists. Simultaneously, however, he admits that the majority of Parczew Jews did not belong to that political faction. Nevertheless, according to Bechta, most of them cooperated with the new puppet Communist regime imposed by the Soviet occupation, either passively or actively, by the force of inertia or out of free choice. This regime was forced on the Poles by Stalin, both in Parczew and in the rest of Poland.

Bechta argues that this collaboration consisted in helping to terrorize, control, and surveil the captive Polish Christian population. It also manifested itself in support, conscious or not, for the policies of the Communist occupation government and resulted in economic, political, and cultural benefits for the collaborators. After the Red Army arrived in the Podlasie region in 1944, a few active supporters of Communism and the Soviet occupation - chiefly from wartime Jewish forest survival groups that sometimes overlapped with Stalinist partisans - brutally imposed 'people's power' on the locals. The rest of the Jewish population adapted to the dictates of such self-anointed, pro-Communist leaders.

Further, according to Bechta, the remnant of the traditional Jewish elite (thus usually non-Communist and, because of its religious beliefs and free market preferences for private property, essentially anti-Communist) cooperated in general both with the new Jewish leaders within their own community and the Communist occupation authorities. The aim of the traditional Jewish leaders was to secure the best possible conditions of existence for their own ethnic group after the harrying ordeal of the Holocaust.

Bechta shows that traditional Jewish leaders did not allow their personal anti-Communism to interfere in any serious way in the interests of their community. They assessed the situation realistically, concluding that the balance of forces encouraged the minority population to back the strongest party in Parczew: the Communists. And the latter desperately needed anybody to support them among the local population.

Thus, according to the author, in a way, a classical convergence of interests occurred. Afetr the war, the Jewish people wanted to survive and to restore their lives under the best possible conditions. The newly established Red regime wanted power and the swiftest possible stabilization anchored in any source of popular support. Meanwhile, the Poles cared about both independence and the domination of the majority Christian population in the life of the region (and state) predicated upon democratic rules - a system where, after all, the majority decides on all public matters.

However, there was no democracy. Instead, there was a "people's democracy," or the Soviet proxy occupation regime. The Polish majority, which supported independence, rebelled and resisted the red terror, both actively and passively, even if - deceptively at first, and then increasingly not so - the Poles themselves began employing various accommodation strategies to cope with the Soviet occupation. As a result of all this, conflict raged in the Parczew region. Ubiquitous features of the early post-war period included destabilization, breakdown of law and order, and the gradual undermining of traditional norms by the occupiers. According to Bechta, under the circumstances, the exhausted Jewish population, sick, and traumatized by the German extermination, sought protection in three main forms. First, the Jewish traditional elite protected their co-religionists from the Communist occupation regime by turning to Jewish collaborators within the government. Second, these Jewish collaborators protected their co-ethnics against the arbitrariness of the regime they served and against negative reactions of the Christian population, which they terrorized. Third, the Communist authorities, at least as far as their ostensible declarations, protected their supporters, including Jews, against all enemies, including the overwhelming majority of the Christian population of Parczew and its environs, which remained under the influence of its pro-independence elite.

Thus, a strict relationship based on a quid pro quo existed between the Jewish community and the Soviet occupation system. Traditional Jewish leadership practiced realpolitik par excellence; the Communists performed their customary dialectical exercises. Local Jewish Communists drew from both sources, oscillating between them.

Bechta insists that the Parczew Jews exploited this synergistic relationship for political, social, and material benefits. They adapted to the occupation system and took advantage of its benefits at the expense of the majority population, which was conquered and terrorized by the Soviets and their local supporters. Moreover, the Jewish population and its organizations became a part of the Red system. A few Jews also became integral to the regime and local institutions, including the Communist terror apparatus. At the same time, local Jews returned to their pre-war endeavors, including trade and brokerage. Bechta claims that their undertakings were privileged by the Communist regime both in propaganda and - to a lesser extent - in practice.

According to Bechta, thanks to the attitude of the Communist authorities and the dexterity and flexibility of the Jewish population, the Jews began to dominate the local Polish Christians of Parczew both economically and politically after the summer of 1944. Some of its representatives, particularly within the Red terror apparatus, were in a position to discriminate against the subjugated Poles. Perceptions mattered the most, perhaps. Bechta shows that the local Christians widely commented on the presence of the former Jewish partisans in local bars and restaurants. For the local community, this was a clear and unequivocal sign of prominence and social domination. While Jewish former fighters could enjoy such perks, their Polish Christian pro-independence guerrilla counterparts found themselves in shallow graves, trains heading for the Gulag, in jails, or, at best, forcibly drafted to the "Polish" Communist army under Stalin's leadership. Others endured in the underground, pursued, persecuted, and exterminated.

For the veterans of the Polish struggle for freedom against both enemies - Hitler and Stalin, the Third Reich and the Soviet Union - since 1939, there was no greater humiliation than the inability to rejoice at the German Nazi retreat and celebrate victory in their own neighborhood or town.

This was an unequivocal symbol of a certain hierarchy under the Communist regime. It was not merely a perception on the part of active independence fighters of the Home Army, but, in general, of practically all observers. It became symbolic that the Jewish partisans, who subsequently became part of the Red terror apparatus, could show off, walking around Parczew openly, while members of the Polish independence underground were not allowed to exist publicly. They were not allowed to celebrate in bars and restaurants.

The same principle applied as far as the Jewish militiamen's inspection of the horse-drawn paddy wagons during market days was concerned. In the pre-war era, Polish police carried out the task; during the German occupation it was the German gendarmerie and the "blue" police that inspected the market.

Popular perceptions were unambiguous. As Bechta shows, the people of Parczew derived from all this a stereotype that "the Jews are in power" (Pol. "Żydzi rządzą"). In this sense perceptions are more important than reality.

The author goes on to argue that the local Jews were mostly able to take advantage of the system of the Soviet occupation by proxy, therefore dominating the life of the city and its environs and naturally favoring their own ethno-religious group. Thus, the Christian Polish population, including the independence insurgents, became all the more convinced that the Jews behaved like triumphant victors, celebrating along with the Soviets, Polish ethnic renegades, and the representatives of the Ruthenian minority, the misery of the conquered and persecuted Poles. The latter were driven to desperation.

Consequently, the local Christian population complained to the anti-Communist underground. This triggered revenge against the entire Jewish community. Thus, in the short run, the raid on Parczew inflicted small losses on the Communist terror apparatus, in particular among the former Jewish partisans. In the long run, the operation planted the seeds of panic and forced virtually the entire Jewish community to leave the town. This was not an explicit aim of the underground. The goal was to punish the Jewish community collectively.

Bechta describes in detail the operation that resulted in ethnic cleansing, as a whole ethnic group disappeared from the town. However, the author stresses that the goals of the independence fighters were much more limited. The operation did not aim to remove the Jewish community from Parczew, but rather to punish the community as a whole for its real and imagined role in the occupation system. Further, according to Bechta, the operation took place not because there were Jewish inhabitants in Parczew, but because it was universally perceived that the local Jewish population collaborated with the Communists. Thus, the violence did not stem from the fact that the Parczew Jews merely existed but it was a response to the way in which they acted, or to how their actions were viewed.

Moreover, Bechta argues that, all things considered, the operation was relatively mild. By targeting the Communist authorities of Parczew, the Polish insurgents largely limited themselves to punishing individual Jewish members of the terror apparatus and to a massive expropriation of the Jewish community with the help of the local Christian population. Bechta stresses that if the aim of the independence fighters had indeed been genocide, they could have easily murdered if not all, then at least an overwhelming majority of the local Jews.

The aim of the insurgents was neither genocide nor even ethnic cleansing. It was not to expel the Jews from Parczew. The aim was to punish them for collaboration, real or alleged. The flight of the Jewish population from the town, which took place after the operation, seems to follow the law of unintended consequences. For most Poles it was an important local victory of the underground. However, in general, the operation was treated as an episode in the tragic period of the enslavement of Poland by the Communists, following a bloody German occupation. For the Jewish people, the raid on Parczew was a continuation of the tragedy which had culminated in the Holocaust.

Mariusz Bechta's meticulous microstudy of Parczew should prompt a reexamination of popular assumptions about the post-1944 Soviet occupation of Poland. This includes the fate of the Jewish community in Parczew, or elsewhere, such as in Kałuszyn.

Dr. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz

Professor of History at the Kosciuszko Chair of Polish Studies,

Director of the Center for Intermarium Studies at the Institute of World Politics

Washington, DC, 4 January 2025

Introduction

This study focuses on a specific armed operation carried out by the Polish anti-Communist underground resistance in the town of Parczew, located in the Lublin Voivodeship, on 5 February 1946. In the twentieth-century historiography of Polish-Jewish relations, this event has gained the status of one of the most notorious 'pogroms' of Jews in Poland. Within this interpretation of the historical narrative, the event allegedly confirms the blind hatred and destructive fury of the Poles toward defenseless Holocaust victims. Some historians and researchers from related social sciences, led by the Warsaw-based Center for Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences1, consistently promote the idea that the 'pogrom' confirms the Poles' undeniable and widespread participation in the crimes of the German occupiers and their exploitation of the property of their Jewish neighbors killed during World War II. These scholars often attempt to assess the exact number of Jews killed by Poles. It was last 'established' at 120,000.2 The true number of people on the Jewish side who suffered death at the hands of Poles in the post-war period is, nonetheless, still in dispute. Some Jewish historians and, for example, Prof. Jan Tomasz Gross claim that after the so-called "liberation" of Poland in 1944, some 1,500-2,000 or more Jews were allegedly killed.3 These estimates have been questioned by Professors David Engel and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz (their studies mention lower numbers, of the order of 400-700 Jewish victims).4 Similar estimates are reported by other researchers: Dr. habil. Marcin Zaremba, who accepts the number of 650-750 and quotes his sources,5 or Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski, who is willing to count them at a similar level, although he makes it clear that these are minimal estimates, which do not include cases that are missing from written records.6

What occurred in the town of Parczew - then in the Lublin Voivodeship of Soviet-occupied Poland - on 5 February 1946, was a spectacular retaliatory and preventive action on the part of the Polish pro-independence underground resistance against the Communists and their local supporters. The strategic goal of the anti-Communist attack was to neutralize the local power center of collaborators from the Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR), as well as to eliminate the source of the Communist terror (the Security Department [Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB] and the paramilitary Jewish 'town protection force') that was aimed directly at civilians, as well as the local regional structures and partisan units of the Polish underground resistance that had fought against both occupiers: the Germans and the Soviets, since the autumn of 1939. These intimidatory actions intensified after the Red Army crossed the Curzon Line in July 1944.

It is worth noting that such neutralizing operations were in a way a continuation of identical preventive actions from the time of the Bolshevik invasion of Poland in the summer of 1920. From this perspective, the attack of the underground resistance fighters from the Włodawa WiN District in February 1946 is a part of the permanent political conflict between the institutions of independent Poland and the pro-Soviet agent network, inspired from the Kremlin and active in the Polish provinces, which had its roots in the pre-WWII Poland.

From a tactical standpoint, the attack on Parczew was also a provisioning and propaganda action that demonstrated the strength and determination of the anti-Communist partisans. The WiN armed operation has unexpectedly echoed across the nation and it even had international repercussions, because Communist propaganda branded it with the ominous epithet of a 'pogrom.'

The current work has a clear structure determined by chronology and particular research questions. After summarizing the extremely poor state of knowledge (that in some cases includes downright disinformation), a starting point for my deliberations on the causes and consequences of the WiN partisan troop entering Parczew will be provided by discussing the "Polish-Communist" war that had already smoldered before the outbreak of World War II against a background of the political panorama of the town and the surrounding area. This allows capturing the right proportions of the spectrum of political views of the inhabitants of Parczew, the Poles and the Jews, and in the villages additionally the Ruthenians (Ukrainians). It also clarifies the limited potential of the pro-Soviet groups of the Communist Party of Poland (Komunistyczna Partia Polski, KPP) and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (Komunistychna Partiya Zakhidnoyi Ukrayiny, KPZU). These groups agitated for a revolution of the proletariat against the independent Polish state. The text also exposes the personal details of individuals who joined the local Communist regime's collaborators after 1944. Locally, the phenomenon of collaboration was exceptionally dynamic, and although it only affected a handful of people, it took different forms among the Jews who survived until the re-entry of the Red Army in 1944, and different ones among the Ukrainians who had diligently used the pro-Ukrainian gestures of the Third Reich's party and state institutions, only to, unexpectedly, gain the favor of the 'liberators' from the East after the change of the occupiers. I will remind of the murders of retreating officers and soldiers of the Polish Army (­Wojsko Polskie, WP) by Ukrainian Communists during the lost war of 1939, and of the cases of cooperation between the Communists and the Germans against the Polish population in the Włodawa area in late 1939 and early 1940. These events are proof of the collaboration between the two aggressors after the revision of spheres of influence in occupied Poland in September 1939, in the spirit of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 23 August 1939, that was awkwardly ignored in the Polish People's Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, PRL).

The period of the German occupation (1939-1944) is discussed in order to provide the basic information about the military potential of the Polish pro-independence and Communist underground resistance in Parczew. I present the methods and scale of assistance offered to the persecuted Jews by the two opposing political and military structures. The attitude of the Polish Underground State, on the one hand, and of the pro-Soviet vanguard, the PPR, on the other, towards the mass extermination of Jews reveals the intentions of both these structures with regard to the problem that was beyond their capacity, namely, to the possibility of organizing effective assistance for the Jewish population condemned to death by the Germans. The surviving handful of Jews was partly clustered in the ranks of the Communist People's Army (Armia Ludowa, AL) - in 1944 most of them were in a Jewish company commanded by AL officer por. Chil Grynszpan aka "Chil," from Sosnowica - and partly in the apolitical survival groups. These people had functioned in the Parczew Woods under the conditions of 'revolutionary banditry,' stimulated by "Stalin's partisans," and were pushed into the embrace of the Communists by their experiences during the German occupation. After more than two years of hiding and struggling for survival "Jewish avengers"7 had emerged from the forest family camp (called "Bazar"), who did not hesitate to oppose the enemies of his political protector, the PPR 'democrats,' in the name of the struggle for a common interest. We are dealing here with a classical situation, where an ethnic minority becomes a hostage of particular interests of an 'internationalist' political group that rules against the will of a suppressed majority of the population. Amidst this growing political conflict, Jewish survivors were treated with reluctance. Their representatives, who were affiliated with Communist political police organizations such as the UB and MO, were feared by Poles, who were now stripped of their personal freedom and harassed because of their religion. The new occupier also unscrupulously deprived them of their right to property. The capture of Parczew by the Red Army on 22 July 1944 is the key turning point in the story of the 'pogrom' under study. It marked the beginning of the end of the concept of Polish identity as a civic commitment to cultivating historical memory and working selflessly for the benefit of the local community. The growing domination of the 'Soviet people' from the PPR, who demagogically called themselves 'democrats,' in the town government, was equivalent to the annihilation of the dreams of political freedom and to the loss of a sense of responsibility for the well-being of the community in the interpersonal dimension. With time, social solidarism was replaced by the cunning and opportunism of the oligarchy from the Polish United Workers' Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza, PZPR). Breaking the anti-Communist underground's resistance after the 1947 amnesty only accelerated the triumph of spiritual stuntedness. As I have mentioned above, the first years of the new occupation were marked in Parczew and the surrounding area by collaboration with the Soviets of members of ethnic and religious minorities (Jews and Ukrainians), who were pro-Communist either for ideological reasons or, more often, because of simple opportunism. This quickly led to a rapid accumulation of Polish-Jewish and Polish-Ukrainian resentments. Additionally, the investigation of the personal details of members of the Citizens' Militia (Milicja Obywatelska, MO) and the UB, as well as local PPR activists, reveals the scale of alienation of the Communists from the local community, which quickly transformed into a protracted political conflict in the Town and Community National Councils in Parczew during 1944-1946.

I have paid a lot of attention to the reconstruction of the key military action of the concentrated troops of the Włodawa WiN District under ppor. Leon Taraszkiewicz "Jastrząb" (1925-1947)8 carried out in Parczew on 5 February 1946; from the mobilization of the partisans, through the action in the town, and up to the engagement with the operational group of the Interior Security Corps (Korpus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego, KBW) and UB in the the vicinity of the village Marianka on 12 February. I ponder over the nature of the military operation itself, without losing sight of the propaganda aspect of the analyzed events. Apart from discussing the account-settling among the officers of the Public Security Administration (Resort Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, RBP) due to the embarrassing behavior, as their superiors saw it, during the attack of the Polish underground resistance, I reveal the inside story of an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute several residents of Parczew in revenge for the mass support given by the town's population to the anti-Communist insurgents.

Capturing the core of the research problem and understanding what actually happened in Parczew makes it possible to confront the recollections of witnesses and the archival documents produced by all sides of the conflict: the Soviets (NKVD), the Polish Communists (the political police - UB, the military - KBW, and the party - PPR), the Jewish ethnic minority, and the Polish pro-independence activists (AK/WiN). It is worth noting that some of them overlap. For example, Jewish testimonies are uncannily similar to the visions and images created and publicized by Communist propaganda.

* * *

The 'thick' narrative in my book was possible thanks to the unsparing support of many people who spent their time on arduous criticism and supplementing at various stages of its writing. And it is them who I would like to thank in the first place. Particularly, my deep gratitude extends to Professor Marek Jan Chodakiewicz from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, for his discreet supervision of the methodological integrity of this publication. His works on Polish-Jewish relations have played the role of an icebreaker of the post-PRL fossil in the world of humanities in Poland. This achievement is difficult to overestimate. It outlines the research framework of which my microstudy is a part. I am grateful to him for authoring the foreword to this work.

Dr. Ryszard Tyndorf from Canada has proved to be a patient titan of work and erudition. Without his in-depth knowledge of historical facts and literature, the content of the book would have been much poorer. In the field of historical investigations, I lack words of appreciation for the historian Grzegorz Makus from Włodawa, who has splendidly introduced me to the inside story of the underground resistance struggle of Leon Taraszkiewicz and his brother Edward ("Grot," "Żelazny") against both occupiers in the Włodawa area. Similarly, for Arkadiusz Karbowiak from Opole for a clear discussion of the Ukrainian underground (Ukrainian Insurgent Army [Ukrayins'ka Povstans'ka Armiya], UPA) in the area of the river Bug. Dr. habil. Dariusz Magier from the National Archives in Radzyń Podlaski has opened the archive to me, enabling me to obtain key information required for the reconstruction of the WiN partisan attack on Parczew. Historian Paweł Styrna has provided meaningful assistance in listening to and editing the accounts of the Holocaust survivors stored in the United States. I express my thanks.

Having traveled to Parczew several times during my studies, I was met with a friendly reception by many of its inhabitants. But I would like to offer my special thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Macech from Kolano. The late Mr. Jan Macech became my guide to places and people, able to enrich my knowledge with invaluable information. This great enthusiast of Polish history introduced me in a very vivid way to the intricate local customs and unique regional features of the historic borderland of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and to the Uniate Church martyrdom of his family, also recalling memories from the period of both occupations. His deep rooting in his homeland should be envied. May he become a model for others. I also want to mention the late Tomasz Tyszkiewicz from Parczew who, although he lived in poverty and struggled with health problems, each time shared with me his unusual experiences, drawing a panorama of people and events from his beloved home town. The mayor of the town, Paweł Kędracki, provided further meaningful assistance.

The last surviving officer from the Parczew AK headquarters, the late Mieczysław Jędruszczak "Jastrząb" from Warsaw, has placed his trust in me, which I consider an honor. In spite of his advanced age, this Siberian Deportee (held in the Soviet camp system near Borovichi) surprised me with his remarkable memory of the events of the German occupation and he was able to bring closer the arguments of the Polish and Jewish population in Parczew in the face of the German terror with a great deal of impartiality. I believe that I have not abused his faith in my intentions to write the truth about the times of contempt for human life.

Karol Skibiński from Włodawa has given me invaluable assistance at every step, and, thanks to his innate passion for finding historical truth, he was able to reconstruct facts that seemed to me impossible to recreate.

The director Mariusz Telepko from the Łęczna-Włodawa Lake District Museum (Muzeum Pojezierza Łęczyńsko-Włodawskiego) in Włodawa has shown much understanding for my search. My warm words of thanks go to the employees of the Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, ŻIH) in Warsaw, the Archive of Modern Records (Archiwum Akt Nowych, AAN) in Warsaw, and the National Archives in Lublin and their branch in Chełm for patiently enduring my requests for intensifying queries on topics that interested me. I am also extremely grateful to the archivists from my parent Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN).

I dedicate this work to my wife Monika who passed away several years ago - thanks to her diligent editorial work, reading this book will be a pleasure.

* * *

The current English edition is a shortened version of a work published originally in 2014 under the Polish title Pogrom czy odwet? Akcja zbrojna Zrzeszenia "Wolność i Niezawisłość" w Parczewie 5 lutego 1946 r. by Wydawnictwo Zysk i S-ka in Poznań. Those interrested in the issues raised here, can find additional source material in 39 annexes to the Polish edition. The text of the book has been minimally amended and re-edited; several inaccuracies have been corrected. As the general studies on Polish-Jewish relations that appeared since the first edition have not significantly re-evaluated the state of knowledge or established new facts in the local perspective that interests me, I have not expanded this work as to include the literature on the subject from that period.

Post-War: An Outline of the Problem

Despite Poland's significant military contribution to the victory of the anti-German coalition during World War II (1939-1945), the country suffered a political defeat. By the will of Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, and with the consent of Britain and the United States, the Polish state was geopolitically shifted to the West, to the 'Piast borders' on the Oder and Lusatian Neisse rivers. The country fell into the sphere of influence of the aggressive Communist ideology from the East, utterly anti-European and anti-Christian. On 5 July 1945, after the Allies had withdrawn their recognition of the Polish government-in-exile in London, Poland lost the attributes of independence on the international arena, and its inhabitants slowly degenerated under the imposed Communist system. Garrisons and military bases of the Red Army continued to occupy Polish territory until 1993 (when they evacuated in response to the progressive break-up of the former USSR).

The Polish state suffered huge territorial losses (the eastern provinces of pre-WWII Poland, lost to the USSR, covered almost half of the country's area within the borders of 1 September 1939), with irreparable damage to its historical heritage (loss of key cultural centers of Wilno and Lwów) and with national wealth looted. The historical Polish elites, subjected to destruction by the German and Soviet occupiers, were now ousted from the legal mainstream of social and political life during the "revolutionary war" imposed on the Poles by the Communists from the PPR and UB.

During 1944-1945 Poland's occupier has changed. Thus, the processes that have been fracturing (since the very beginning of World War II) the unanimity of the Polish people as regards the regaining of independence after the end of hostilities have only accelerated. The attitudes of servility towards the triumphant policy of Soviet imperialism in the Polish population were now being reinforced with determination. 'Native' structures of the Communist political police started to be formed. Activities of the Soviet security forces the NKVD Interior Forces, in Polish territory were undertaken with the full approval of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN) in Lublin. On 26 July 1944, in Moscow, Edward Osóbka-Morawski and Vyacheslav Molotov signed an agreement between the PKWN and the Soviet Union, which gave Joseph Stalin the supreme military authority in the Polish territories captured by Red Army soldiers, for the time necessary to scrupulously clean the rear of the front line (its scope has never been specified). Legal jurisdiction over Polish citizens was transferred to Soviet special courts. And thus, all activities of the Soviets towards Poles were considered perfectly legal. The supreme goal of the Soviet military authorities was to provide political support to the PKWN collaborators by not recognizing any other state authorities (primarily the civilian structures of the Polish government-in-exile in London) and by assisting in the creation pro-Communist state and self-government bodies. Soviet sovereignty was also manifested by arrests of persons who acted openly in the 'liberated' territory as representatives of the London government, and by consistent disarming of all kinds of military formations of the Polish underground resistance and internment of officers by the Soviet military counterintelligence (Smersh).9

The outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising on 1 August 1944 intensified the actions of the Soviets, who wanted to accelerate the liquidation of the structures of the Polish Underground State. On the same day, directive No. 220169 was issued, which ordered the disarming of AK troops and other pro-independence formations that did not recognize the authority of the PKWN. It required commanders of the Soviet fronts (army groups) to intern all AK officers, while the non-commissioned officers and men who wanted to fight the Germans were to be transferred to the Polish 'People's' Army ('Ludowe' Wojsko Polskie, LWP)10 in Lublin, commonly known, after its commander, as the Berling Army. The same directive required Polish citizens to give up their weapons, military equipment, ammunition, and radio stations to the Soviets within three days.11

A spontaneous anti-Communist uprising in the provinces was a reaction to this almost civilizational threat to the Poles' national existence. In the spring of 1945, when the Red Army successfully stormed Berlin, this rising covered a large part of Poland (including Polish lands east of the Curzon line). The uprising faded away in the following months and years of struggle, in the illusory hope of an inevitable political and armed conflict, World War III in Central and Eastern Europe, between the recent allies: the English-speaking powers and the Soviets. The cold war between the East and West, announced publicly by the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Fulton, USA, in March 1946, shattered any plans to remove the Communists from Poland by force.

The January 1947 elections to the Legislative Sejm (Parliament), rigged by the Communists, and then the amnesty for the anti-Communist underground resistance fighters announced on 22 February 1947 by the RBP, ended the bloodiest period in the recent history of Poland, when the PPR Communists radically broke up with institutional forms of the independent Polish state. Subsequent years saw the triumphant Communist order annihilate any survivors of the underground resistance, any legal political opposition, and exert pressure on the Roman Catholic Church - the mainstay of national imponderables in the conquered country.

The territories that offered strong and determined armed resistance to the Sovietisation of the country included a strip of land along the new eastern border of post-war Poland with the USSR as imposed by the Yalta-Potsdam decisions. The regions of Białystok, Podlasie, Lublin, and Podkarpacie became bastions of the struggle against the Communists that continued until the beginning of the 1950s. The Włodawa county, located on the outskirts of 'new' Poland, on the river Bug that formed the new border, was one of the front-line areas where the intensity of military operations was significant.

Breaking the resistance of the Polish population caused a lot of trouble to the Communist political police: the County Public Security Department (Powiatowy Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, PUBP) in Włodawa and the Voivodeship Public Security Department (Wojewódzki Urząd Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, WUBP) in Lublin, and to the 'people's' military formations, the KBW. In the Włodawa area, the Communists carried out a long-term pacification operation on a large scale, considering the small number of people living in this relatively small area.

Until the outbreak of World War II, the Włodawa county had been the largest in the Lublin Voivodeship as it covered, according to the census of 9 December 1931, an area of 2,325.9 square kilometers (including 43% of arable land and 22.3% of forests); it was inhabited by 113,566 people (of that number about 51% were Catholic Poles). Thus, the county had the lowest population density in the region (approximately 48.8 people per 1 square kilometer).12 In 1931, the number of those identifying as Eastern Orthodox reached 33,382 (29.6%); these were mostly Ukrainians.13 After the war ended, the county that had been liquidated by the Germans was revived within its pre-war borders. The population had decreased by over 30,000 people. In 1946, the Włodawa county was inhabited by 82,200 people (35 people per 1 square kilometer), and three years later the population dropped by another 17,000 (of which almost half were Ukrainians who were deported during the Communist "Wisła" operation).14 Administratively, the Włodawa county included three towns (Włodawa, Ostrów, and Par­czew) and 16 municipalities: Dębowa Kłoda, Hańsk, Krzywowierzba, Opole, Ostrów, Parczew, Romanów, Sławatycze, Sobibór, Tyśmienica, Uścimów, Wisznice, Włodawa, Wola Wereszczyńska, Wołoskowola, and Wyryki.15

Table 1. Number of inhabitants of the Włodawa county divided by mother tongue and religion (census data from 1931)

Declared mother tongue

No.

Language

Number of speakers

1.

Polish

86,866

2.

Yiddish (żydowski)

13,537

3.

Ukrainian

9,077

4.

German

2,268

5.

Ruthenian

586

6.

Belorussian

412

7.

Russian

402

8.

Hebrew

360

Declared religious denomination

No.

Religion

Number of adherents

Percentage

1.

Roman Catholic

57,939

51%

2.

Eastern Orthodox

33,382

29.4%

3.

Jewish

18,188

16%

4.

Evangelic

3,522

3.6%

Source: Drugi powszechny spis ludności z dn. 9 XII 1931. Mieszkania i gospodarstwa domowe. Ludność. Stosunki zawodowe. Województwo Lubelskie, ed. E. Szturm de Sztrem et al., Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, 1938, statlibr.stat.gov.pl/exlibris/aleph/a22_1/apache_media/H9DCNPXPXFXY9EHHJHC37AMXJQY76B.pdf (accessed 29 August 2025).

When the Soviets entered the Włodawa area in mid-1944, it was still a borderland region in ethnic and religious terms. The post-war county boundaries were temporarily set in mid-August 1944, and finally regulated by an inter-state agreement of 16 August 1945 (although the delimitation of the eastern border of Poland has only been completed in May 1948).16 According to the calculations of the State Repatriation Office (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny) 19,581 Ukrainians (5,418 families) lived in the area as of 1 October 1944.17

There had already been previous tensions between the Poles and the ethnographically Ruthenian population (who, due to poor ethnic consciousness, often self-identified as "local" until the outbreak of World War II). The latter then willingly declared Ukrainian ethnic identity, influenced by the cynical policy of the German occupier. After the Red Army invasion in July 1944, Włodawa county experienced a significant rebellion and rejection by ethnic minorities (including a few Jews who had survived the Holocaust) of the Polish people's call to defend the independence of the state, given the imminent threats. This divergence of expectations and fears towards the new occupier became the source of conflict situations between all parties. Ultimately, the compliance of the Eastern Orthodox population with the Soviet aggressor failed to prevent their mass deportation from Włodawa County as part of the forced population exchange between 'People's Poland' and Soviet Ukraine. This culminated in the Communist operation "Wisła" in 1947. Attempts to rebuild Jewish religious communities in Parczew and Włodawa from 1944 to 1946 failed. In August 1944, Communists from the PPR undertook organized activities in Włodawa itself and in the county. A ten-member County Committee of the PPR was established. The PPR structures in the Włodawa area were significant in comparison with the local pro-independence underground resistance. According to a report (of early October 1944) of Paweł Kosobucki, the secretary of the Włodawa County Committee of the PPR, at the time when the Red Army entered the area, there were 472 members of the Communist Party in 69 cells. An overwhelming majority (447 peasants) lived in villages and functioned in rural structures (nine community party committees). There were just eighteen blue-collar workers (which was understandable due to the agricultural nature of the county) and only seven members of intelligentsia who were active in the single municipal committee.18

From the early days of the Soviet occupation, the number of committed Communists in the Włodawa area grew systematically. In December 1944, the number of PPR members in the county was 738, and in April 1945 it rose to 1,126. This dynamic was possible mainly thanks to the arrival of more than 600 Ukrainians, 485 Poles, and a handful of Jews (37 people). In November 1944, influence in the nineteen-member County Committee of the PPR in Włodawa was divided between the individual ethnic groups as follows: five members were Polish, one was Jewish, and thirteen were Ukrainian. At the same time, the executive of the party consisted of five Ukrainians and three Poles. In December 1945, due to the deportation of some of the local Ukrainians to the USSR and the increased activity of the anti-Communist Polish and Ukrainian underground resistance, the number of active Communist Party members dropped to 640.19

In the autumn of 1944, under the pretext of the 'agrarian reform,' the local Communists deliberately destroyed, despite armed resistance, the social group of landowners, the historic mainstay of Polish national identity in the Włodawa county. From the viewpoint of the Marxist class revolution, this was considered a priority issue. At a rapid pace (in late September and early October 1944), the Communists organized community commissions, supported by manor farm committees, and drew up lists of smallholders and landless peasants, to whom they wanted to generously donate the land reclaimed from the 'reactionists.' The Communists thwarted the plans to save the threatened agricultural tradition by the land commissioner from Włodawa, Szawłowski, who had a perverse plan to lease the best-managed properties to administrators, for the price of dividing up only 7 out of the 42 estates designated for the 'land reform.' This brutal experiment in social engineering was described dispassionately, in the spirit of the intensifying 'class struggle,' by the secretary of the Communist Party from Włodawa, Kosobucki, in his report from 12 November 194420 [wording reflects the original]:

The matter of conducting the Agrarian Reform in Włodawa county is as follows: three brigades working in the county have divided up 36 landed estates and handed over [?] ha of the landowners' land to farm workers, smallholders, and landless peasants.

The landowners who interfered with the implementation of the Agrarian Reform were imprisoned and sent to Lublin. [...]

The reactionary elements are doing everything they can to prevent the implementation of the Agrarian Reform. They send in armed AK-men and take the measuring instruments from the surveyors.21

War tribute was forced upon the impoverished peasants, which was no different from the tributes imposed by the Germans. In the same report, the PPR activist has involuntarily revealed not only the increasing resistance of the people, but also the opposition of the administrative authority: the Włodawa county governor from the Peasants' Party22 (Stronnictwo Ludowe, SL), who held the office by the authority of the PKWN [wording reflects the original]:

County governor [Kazimierz] Markiewicz has little interest in the levy, on the contrary, he only tries to save the landowners and the AK members held in prison. Soviet commanders work instead of him in this direction - without them no work would be done.

The PPR organization helps by all means after the war tributes are delivered.

The communities controlled by us, such as Ostrów [Lubelski] and Wisznice, Uścimów, are worst-off.

The reactionary elements work intensely, using hostile propaganda, and hinder the delivery of war tributes by all means. [...]

In the Włodawa county, [more precisely in the] Wola Wereszczyńska community, an armed AK troop lured the MO and the Soviet commandant into an ambush. Then they opened fire on them, killing four militiamen, a carter, and the Soviet commandant on the spot. In a second incident in the Uścimów community, the Soviet commandant and two members of the commission responsible for evacuating the population to Ukraine were killed and burned alongside the buildings. Then, two Soviet soldiers were killed and brutally maltreated.23

Introducing the 'agrarian reform' by force, the Communists deprived the underground resistance organization of material support, forcing them to conduct, in the near future, supply (expropriation) actions in state-owned cooperatives or in Ukrainian villages that opted for the new political order in Lublin Poland.24

Historiography: Erosion of Historical Truth

In 'People's Poland,' in the time of Communist censorship of scientific research, the ideologized assessment of the armed operation carried out in Parczew on 5 February 1946 by the anti-Communist underground resistance was not subject to any verification by independent historians. The scale of this mystification was so broad that even the date of the 'pogrom' was often quoted incorrectly.25

Under the conditions at the time, there was no space for honest discussion, exchange of opinions, or dispute among researchers to determine the actual roots of the Polish-Jewish antagonism in Parczew after World War II. The ideological dogmatism of the PZPR has denied a priori the hitherto unresearched phenomenon of the reluctance to defend the independence of Poland among the handful surviving Jews. As a result, Polish-Jewish relations have been burdened by unnecessary clichés. Attention focused solely on Jewish martyrdom in the General Governorate (Generalgouvernement, GG)26 during the German occupation of Poland, which, due to the scale of the genocide committed on Jews by the Germans, was an understandable research postulate. There were more methodological mistakes like this. For example: the motives of Ukrainians living in villages near Parczew, who enthusiastically embraced Communism, joining the ranks of the political police (RBP) in Parczew and Włodawa, have not been studied, even though this was important in order to understand the intensity of anti-Communist attitudes of the inhabitants of Parczew. The identity of those who murdered Poles in 1939 was also not linked to those who joined the structures of the secret police in 1944 and later. There were so many omissions that the consequences were disastrous for the credibility of the historical sciences in the PRL. Propaganda won over historical truth and over painstaking microhistory.

Turning to lies was common practice in the coarse reality of early PRL, which was entangled in the process of legitimizing the power of the revolutionary left, exercised in Poland by the will of the comrades from the Kremlin. For many years, the highly doctored recollections of RBP officers were the basis for the 'pogrom' interpretation (about which there were no doubts!) in the Communist historiography of the Parczew events. Following in their wake, syntheses claiming to be reliable scientific studies were published in the 1970s. Memoirs of Kazimierz Ostapowicz, a Włodawa UB officer, and a participant of the incident, gained the status of a 'founding myth,' although the record of the anti-Communist operation in Parczew presented by him is downright grotesque in places. This UB officer emphasized with satisfaction the anti-Jewish aspects and stigmatized the alleged despicable motivations of the men led by ppor. Leon Taraszkiewicz "Jastrząb" from the flying troop (oddział lotny) of the Włodawa WiN27 during the armed operation.

The promotion of the black legend of the Taraszkiewicz brothers, who led the Parczew operation of the underground resistance in February 1946, continued for several dozen years. Obedient journalists and Communist Party propagandists portrayed them as anti-Semites and Volksdeutche with psychopathic inclinations.28 This allowed removing the odium of similar accusations, completely justified in this case, from the PPR activists of that time, and thus from the ruling Communist Party (PZPR). The exaggeration of brutality and disregard for human life on the part of the pro-independence underground resistance, so often emphasized by the Communist Party propaganda, was supposed to justify why the 'people's authority' had no pardon for the 'reactionaries.'29 This was a typical practice of demonizing a class or racial enemy in totalitarian regimes.

At the end of the 1970s, Communist Party historians, Władysław Góra and Zenon Jakubowski, described the WiN troop operation in Parczew in the following way:

On 2 [sic! - 5] February 1946, several groups numbering about a hundred people, commanded by "Jastrząb," attacked Parczew. Having terrorized and disarmed several persons of a local self-defense group on duty, the troop attacked the MO station. In view of the effective defense of the station's staff, they abandoned the intention to capture it. They only left guards around it, so that the militiamen could not leave, and started looting the town. Telephone devices of the post office were destroyed, and over 32,000 zlotys were taken from the cashbox. A number of shops were robbed, and more than 95,000 zlotys were stolen from the "Społem" Cooperative. Watches, money, and more valuable pieces of clothing were taken from over forty residents. Four civilians were shot and two militiamen were kidnapped30 and later murdered.31

The sequence of events, apart from ideological considerations, is confirmed by the sources available today. The factual material, known to Communist historians (despite some inaccuracies), has strongly stressed the robbery nature of the WiN armed operation. In this way, the truth falsified by Communist propagandists survived intact until the times of the 1989 'rationed revolution.' But even later, it has not been subject to any reappraisal for a long time.

After the collapse of institutional Communism, the complex problem of the attitudes of the pro-independence underground to ethnic and religious minorities (especially the Jews) has evoked violent emotions in contemporary historical discourse, due to the build-up of ideological resentments in public life. This has little to do with balanced scientific criticism. Some researchers of modern Polish history found it difficult to conceal their ideological or personal sympathies and dislikes under the guise of professionalism. For some time, apart from the dominant judgments that fit into the popular postmodernist trend of finding 'shameful' pages of Polish patriotism, there are also findings of researchers that are consistently obscured by the political correctness of the mainstream public opinion that takes the form of a new censorship. Publicizing unpopular assessments of historians euphemistically referred to as 'controversial,' may result in their professional ostracism due to demagogic accusations of anti-Semitism. The most fervent contemporary critics of the WiN action in Parczew in February 1946, Lublin historians Dr. habil. Dariusz Libionka32 and Dr. Adam Kopciowski,33 see it as undisputed evidence of the extraordinary vitality of 'Polish anti-Semitism.' According to both researchers, it was rooted in the infamous anti-Jewish tradition of pre-WWII Poland and would not be forgotten after the Holocaust. It revealed itself in the Lublin region. The WiN attack was, in their view, an unjustified, 'bandit' act of expropriation, and above all contributed to the death of people of Jewish origin, who were already burdened with the trauma they had experienced in the GG during the recent German occupation of Poland. The underground resistance operation, according to both historians, was, essentially, a 'pogrom.' Libionka is categorically opposed to qualifying this event as a 'repressive action' of the anti-Communist underground. For him it was an ideologically and culturally anti-Semitic act with a strongly pronounced purpose of material gain. The researcher does not shy away from making a rather daring claim that the purpose of the WiN troops' armed operation in Parczew was not to fight agents, supporters, or representatives of the Communist system (which is raised by the vast majority of historians investigating the military and political aspect of the conflict). Instead, "the goal of the [WiN] operation in Parczew was to terrorize the Jews and to loot their property." It was also supposed to be a poor copy of the 'pogroms' organized by Nationalists in pre-WWII Poland (Libionka is trying to find an analogy with Adam Doboszyński's 'march on Myślenice' in 1936). He concludes that in the long run, this raid, although it had a highly negative effect on the reputation of the underground resistance, achieved its main goal: the Parczew Jewish community ceased to exist and many of its members emigrated abroad. These are very superficial observations, not to say slick, tantamount to giving up any understanding of the intricate combination of circumstances that underlay the post-WWII confrontation of the underground resistance with the Parczew Jewish community.

The historians mentioned above, perhaps unconsciously, have sharpened the official paradigm of historical reflection in force among Israeli and American historians writing about the post-WWII aggression of Poles against Jews in Parczew. Prof. David Engel, who is an undisputed scientific authority among scholars of the Holocaust, has referred in several sentences of his extensive essay on models of anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland, published in Yad Vashem Studies, to the motivations of the "murderers" from the troop that conducted the operation in Parczew in February 1946. The historian did not deny that this particular operation of the Polish underground had the features of "a political attack" and he has taken into account a number of factors that support such a qualification. He has also stressed the fact that the partisans were in soldier's uniforms during the action, that the unit operated in one of the areas most affected by "antigovernment violence" in the Polish state, and that the WiN troop did not differ from other underground groups in terms of composition and numbers. Engel has noticed the underground resistance's necessity of food acquisition by expropriation and sustenance from "plunder" during the fight of the "antigovernment forces" against the Communist regime. He noticed the fact that although the Poles were looking for loot in Jewish homes in Parczew, only four men from the 150-strong Jewish community were physically injured. He has asked the principal question: were these victims selected from among other Jews because of their behavior (regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation), or perhaps the attackers were guided by the ethnicity of the victims? The behavior of the partisans towards the inhabitants of Parczew, such as checking the identities of detained persons, indicates that specific people were sought. There was no question of randomness in this case. Engel explicitly states that the "motif of selection" is subject to various interpretations that do not match the real goals of the underground troop's action. He warns other researchers against mechanically applying the generalized assessment of the Parczew incidents to anti-Jewish violence in post-WWII Poland, which was allegedly exclusively political in nature. According to him, this does not quite reflect the historical truth. The historian has defined the liquidation of Parczew Jews using the term "surgical strike" against selected enemies, in contrast to other underground operations in the occupied country that were of a 'pogrom' nature.34

Without noticing such nuances, Prof. Jan Tomasz Gross, an American sociologist of Polish origin, follows in the footsteps of Libionka and Kopciowski in his accusatory essay, Fear, which explicitly qualifies the action of the anti-Communists in Parczew as an "episode of anti-Jewish violence." Sharing the viewpoint of these historians from Poland, he can see only the anti-Semitic and plundering context of the February 1946 events, and then comes to an unsophisticated conclusion that "anti-Jewish violence in post-war Poland, including acts of murder, had social acceptance."35

The fact that historians are treading uncertain grounds when they write about events that had previously not been thoroughly researched becomes apparent when reading the work of Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski, a researcher associated with the ŻIH. On the basis of his reflections on the cliché of 'Jewish Communists' in post-WWII Poland, he referred to the WiN operation in Parczew rather briefly. Still, even though he wrote only two sentences about it, he made at least three factual errors in these! He misquoted the date of the action, the name of the commander, and the organizational affiliation of the killed Jews. He wrote:

Jews became victims [of Polish violence] somewhat by accident, for example, three Jewish ORMO-men [sic! - MO-men] were killed in Parczew during the attack of the WiN troop of Edward Taraszkiewicz "Żelazny" on 2 February 1946. Moreover, according to the chronicle of the troop, both ideological elements and the desire for common robbery had contributed to the motives of the attack.36

Żbikowski's explanation of the underlying causes and the development of the confrontation that took place in Parczew also requires further discussion.

The researchers mentioned above (with the exception of Engel) have willingly emphasized the anti-Jewish propaganda of the pro-independence partisan organization in the Włodawa area, but they did so without delving into the intricate post-war context. To this end, they quote profusely from the chronicle of ppor. Edward Taraszkiewicz "Grot," "Żelazny" (1921-1951), one of the commanders of the anti-Communist underground resistance groups that attacked Parczew, published by the IPN in 2008.37 They elevate this unique historical testimony to the level of evidence that settles all doubts in the matter.38 At the same time, they ignore many important archival sources, probably in an attempt to emphasize the voices of the Poles that are hostile to the Jews. One cannot resist the impression that it is a selective and ahistorical view of the past.

An opposite opinion is expressed by a large group of historians and writers: Dr. ­habil. Dariusz Magier,39 Dr. Bohdan Urbankowski,40 Henryk Pająk,41 Prof. Marek Jan ­Chodakiewicz,42 and Grzegorz Makus.43 Their argumentation is more complex, it takes into account more determinants and is expressed in the belief that in a short time the growing influence of the PPR Communists, supported by the brutality of UB and MO officers, had contributed to taking control of key areas of economic life in the town (trade and craft) by its Communist-Party privileged residents, including people of Jewish origin, often convinced of their complete impunity. Such development of events has forced the local anti-Communist underground to take firm measures to stop the arbitrariness of the RBP members and their supporters.

Chodakiewicz has drawn attention to the convergence of the anti-Communist attitudes with the reluctance of the pro-independence activists towards the Jews. He also notes that there were some anti-Jewish operations, which cannot be explained by anti-Communist attitudes. According to this historian, living in the USA, the attack of the underground on Parczew was important for Polish-Jewish relations for at least several reasons (some of the research theses formulated by Chodakiewicz proved to be only interesting speculations in the light of later findings):

1. Chronologically, during an earlier action of pro-independence activists in Parczew, on 20 September 1944, a Communist mayor (Polish) and other PPR members were killed, while the Jewish community suffered no casualties or losses;

2. Podporucznik Edward Taraszkiewicz "Żelazny" is the only officer of the underground resistance who has himself admitted that the Jews were the main target of the action, although UB functionaries of non-Jewish origin have also suffered; this shows the scale of the Polish commander's dislike towards that ethnic minority;

3. The factor that makes this attack different from the others in occupied Poland was the widespread participation of Polish civilians in anti-Jewish expropriations;

4. The WiN raid on Parczew was supposed to show an increase of animosity towards the Jews among a part of the underground movement and local population, and thus, in the opinion of some contemporary researchers, it deserved to be called a 'pogrom,' although no Jews as such were killed;

5. The attack on the town was to be a grassroots initiative, showing the independence of local Polish underground commanders;

6. As a result of the raid on the town, relatively few people were killed compared to the bloody Polish-Ukrainian clashes, and the WiN troop showed much more moderation in Parczew than during clashes with the Ukrainians. This may suggest that the anti-Semitism of the Polish pro-independence activists, although real and "often leading to murders, was not genocidal."44

Let me remind here that Chodakiewicz wrote his conclusions about the 'pogrom' in English, based on a limited source base, for the benefit of English-speaking readers. Until the publication, in 2003, of his work After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II, subsequently translated into Polish and published by the IPN in 2008, the public opinion in the West had only known the versions and arguments of the Jewish side (first of the witnesses and journalists, and then of researchers who usually ignored painstaking field research), advertised today in Poland by historians Libionka and Kopciowski. As such, the statements of Chodakiewicz have been considered anti-Jewish by many in the United States and in Europe.

An interesting approach to the problem is proposed by Dr. habil. Rafał Wnuk from the Lublin Catholic University (Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, KUL) in a study preceding the publication of Chodakiewicz's book by a few years, about the post-AK underground resistance in the Lublin region in 1944-1947. This work is based on an interesting, though at times somewhat narrow, analysis of the issues selected by the author that focus on the post-war realities of the occupied country with the Lublin region as an example. The researcher sought to capture the essence of the Polish-Jewish antagonism and, therefore, through common sense he avoided both the propaganda clichés of the Communist historiography, and the uncritically duplicated slogans of anti-Jewish propaganda of the AK/WiN underground movement from the 1940s in the area he researched. To this end, he has identified three conceptualizations of the Jews by the Polish population and the underground resistance after 1944: a Jew-Communist, an alien Jew, and a Jewish usurer. He also answered the question of whether, and to what extent, this "verbal anti-Semitism" of the pro-independence activists was reflected in their armed operations in the Lublin region aimed at the surviving Jews? On the basis of preliminary estimates, Wnuk stated categorically that this happened "only to a small extent." He has categorized the capture of Parczew by the WiN partisans in February 1946 as an expropriation operation with elements of economic struggle and did not once mention a 'pogrom.'45

An article by Dr. habil. Dariusz Magier, published in the Najwyższy Czas! weekly in 2004, provided a crucial breakthrough in the study of the WiN operation in Parczew. The historian has brought the whole discussion down to concrete facts, repudiating the accusations of 'banditry' and 'anti-Semitism' levied against WiN soldiers and the civilian population. This was possible due to his discovery in the National Archives in Radzyń Podlaski of the files of the trial conducted by the Parczew Municipal Court on the order of the Lublin District Prosecutor's Office following the action of the anti-Communists in February 1946.46 Significantly, the case was dismissed by the 'people's' justice system in 1947 due to the fact that the Jewish witnesses had left in an unknown direction and could not be questioned again, and due to the objection raised by the military prosecutor, that in the panic caused by the incidents, these witnesses could not [wording reflects the original]:

[...] accurately observe the people indicated by them, moreover, those people could have found themselves at the scene as a result of coercion by the attackers. In any case, it was determined that [...] the witnesses are in error or have testified falsely...47

Moreover, Magier has dismissed the correctness of qualifying the combat operation as a 'pogrom' in the ordinary sense of the word and wrote that:

[...] if it was a pogrom, it was only aimed at the hit men of the Communist minority who, through duress, tried to take total control over a society that was ideologically alien to them. The partisans' activities clearly showed their intention to search for MO and UB officers and those who cooperated with them. And these were mostly Jews.48

In 2008, Grzegorz Makus referred to the deliberately distorted image of the Parczew operation of the WiN troops in an academic essay for the general public about the fate of the Taraszkiewicz brothers in the post-war underground. In a polemical tone, he focused on demonstrating the frequent departures from historical truth by Gross and Libionka, who, according to this historian, go as far as to quote selectively chosen fragments from the "Żelazny" chronicle to support the preconceived thesis about the 'pogrom' of the Jews. While reconstructing the course of events of 5 February 1946, Makus strengthened his arguments (apart from a comprehensive discussion of the town records mentioned above) by quoting interesting fragments of the account of Ryszard Jakubowski "Kruk," a WiN partisan and a participant of the operation. He mentioned an unnamed WiN member from Wołoskowola murdered by the RBP in Parczew. That death of a comrade was apparently the last straw that finally led the Włodawa WiN District headquarters to make the decision that the partisans should enter the town and subdue the members of the RBP and of the Jewish paramilitary formation, who acted with impunity.49

Within the 'soundbox' of a solidifying quasi-historical narrative, the term 'pogrom' as a qualification of the armed operation of the Polish underground resistance in Parczew in February 1946, emerged again with the extremely interesting historical essay authored by Stanisław Jadczak about the Parczew Jewish community. The author, despite laying out many important arguments (including fragments of previously unknown documents by the county governor of Włodawa) that suggest the retaliatory nature of the WiN partisans' action, mechanically uses the pejorative term 'pogrom' as if not realizing the importance of the historical sources he quoted.50

Post-PRL historiography has been dominated mainly by emotions and propaganda clichés - both consequences of the lack of a deeper reception of new archival sources. On the one hand, due to the pressure of political correctness some researchers often cannot break away from the fixed stereotype of a 'pogrom,' and this happens despite full access to sources that explicitly deny such interpretation adopted a priori by those researchers. On the other hand, these new historical facts, which are fundamental for proper scientific discourse, are being unearthed very slowly and usually reach only a hermetic group of regionalist historians, while their ground-breaking findings remain unknown due to the difficulty in reaching a wider audience that is showered with the slogans about Polish 'anti-Semitism' after World War II.

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