This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A one-day outbreak of mob violence struck Kielce, Poland, on 4 July 1946, when a crowd of civilians, soldiers and police attacked a building at 7 Planty Street housing around 150 to 160 Jewish Holocaust survivors, after a Polish boy's disappearance was rumored to be a Jewish ritual blood libel kidnapping. The killing was set off by that rumor, the centuries-old antisemitic accusation that Jews murder Christian children for ritual purposes, revived when the boy went missing and was said on his return to have been held by Jews in the building. The building's residents were beaten, shot and thrown from windows over several hours before the violence spread into the streets, with further attacks on Jews found on passing trains.
It was the deadliest single attack on Jewish survivors anywhere in postwar Europe. A hasty military trial opened five days later; nine of twelve defendants were sentenced to death and executed on 12 July 1946, eight days after the pogrom, and the remaining three received long prison terms. News of the killings accelerated the flight of Poland's surviving Jewish population, tens of thousands of whom left the country within months, in a decision the pogrom itself did more than any other single event to provoke.