1946: the forgotten year of anti-Jewish violenceIn

In 1946, Europe was supposed to be the continent of reconstruction. For Jews who survived the Holocaust, however, it was the year in which anti-Semitism reemerged in a systematic and documented manner.

The post-war pogroms: hunting down survivors

In 1946, Europe was supposed to be the continent of reconstruction. For Jews who survived the Holocaust, however, it was the year in which anti-Semitism reemerged in a systematic and documented manner.

These were not isolated incidents: between 1945 and 1947, Polish administrative records count 103 pogroms.

In total, between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Czechoslovakia, there were over 1,500 victims, including deaths and injuries.

Kielce, with 42 Jews killed on July 4, 1946, remains the most notorious case. But it is only the most visible episode of a much broader phenomenon.

In Topolčany, Slovakia, on September 24, 1945, a pogrom left 47 wounded and one dead. In Kunmadaras, Hungary, on May 21, 1946, an attack on Jews returning to their homes left four dead and 15 wounded. In Miskolc, on August 1, 1946, further attacks left two dead and ten wounded. In Krakow, in the Kazimierz district, the lynching of survivors who had returned to their neighborhood showed how close anti-Semitism was, which the war had not erased at all.

The pattern was recurring and recognizable: return → hostility → aggression → flight. Behind this violence were structural elements that postwar documents record with precision. Jewish property in Eastern Europe had been confiscated almost everywhere: 94% in Poland, 96% in Hungary, 92% in Romania, 89% in Czechoslovakia. Post-war laws made it almost impossible to recover homes: in 1950, actual restitutions did not exceed 3%. In this context, the return of Jews was seen as a real threat to a redistribution that had already taken place and become established.

In the summer of 1946, these tensions exploded: over 100,000 Jews left Poland in three months, driven not by a plan to migrate, but by a need to survive. She’erit Hapletah — the “remnant that escaped” — quickly realized that the postwar period offered neither protection nor a possible return. The year 1946 therefore gives us a clear and often overlooked picture: the Shoah did not end with the end of the war.

It continued in the violence against those who returned, in the impossibility of recovering a home, in the social hostility that turned the presence of survivors into a problem.

Remembering this means recognizing that the post-war period in Europe was not only about reconstruction. It was also a new cycle of persecution, documented and widespread, which forced thousands of Jews to leave Europe, which had already expelled them once.