Pinsk massacre

Mass execution

The battle for Pinsk was won in March 1919 by General Antoni Listowski of the Polish Army commanding the 9th Infantry Division, wrote Dr Andrzej Nieuważny (pl) of Copernicus University. The city was taken over in a late-winter blizzard with considerable human losses sustained by the 34th Infantry Regiment under Major Narbut-Łuczyński who forced the Bolsheviks to retreat to the other side of the river. Before their withdrawal however, the Russians had raised an armed militia composed of a small, non-representative group of local peasants and young Jewish communists who kept on shooting at the Poles from concealment.

An interim civilian administration was set up in Pińsk, but the hostilities continued. There were instances of Polish soldiers being singled out at night and murdered. On April 5, 1919, seventy-five Jewish residents of the city met at a local Zionist center to discuss the distribution of American relief aid according to eyewitness accounts. Public meetings were banned at the time because random shots were still being fired. Some accounts allege that the meeting had received approval from Polish military authorities although the language barrier was severe, as many locals had no idea what it meant to be part of the newly-reborn Poland after a century of foreign rule. When Major Aleksander Narbut-Łuczyński heard, that the meeting was a Bolshevik gathering, he initially ordered his troops to arrest the meeting organizers. He was told that the purpose of the meeting was to plot an armed anti-Polish uprising and, without further investigation, ordered the execution of the hostages. Within an hour, thirty-five detainees were put against the wall of the town's cathedral, and executed by a firing squad composed of the Polish soldiers. It was claimed that some men and women were stripped and beaten.

According to historian Norman Davies, the executions were intended as a deterrent to those planning any further unrest.

The pogrom allegations received much attention in organs of American liberals and leftists, already inclined to distaste for [the newly-reborn] Poland as a supposedly militaristic and excessively nationalist beneficiary of the "punitive" Treaty of Versailles. — Jerzy Tomaszewski, "Pińsk, Saturday 5 April 1919" in: Polin 1 (1986)

Initial Reports

Initial reports of the massacre, echoing the claims that the victims were Bolshevik conspirators, were based on an account given by an American investigator, Dr. Franciszek (Francis) Fronczak, who was a former health commissioner of Buffalo, New York. Fronczak became member of the Paris-based Polish National Committee (Komitet Narodowy Polski, KNP), where he directed the organization's Department of Public Welfare helping thousands of refugees. He arrived in Europe in May 1918, with permission of the State Department. Back home, he was a leader of the National Polish Department of America, a major organization of Polish-American expats. Upon his arrival, he identified himself to local authorities as the ARC mission's Lieutenant Colonel sent to investigate local health conditions in hospitals. Although not an eyewitness, Fronczak accepted Luczynski's claims that the aid distribution meeting was actually a Bolshevik gathering to obtain arms and destroy the small Polish garrison in Pinsk. He himself claimed to have heard shots being fired from the Jewish meeting hall when Polish troops approached. He also claimed he had heard a confession from a mortally wounded Jew when he arrived at the town square where the executions had taken place. The initial wire reports of the massacre and a Polish military report which cleared the local authorities of any wrongdoing and denounced the Jewish victims, was based largely on Fronczak's testimony.

The version of the events cited by Jewish sources were based on the account of Barnet Zuckerman, a representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee reporting from Brest some 170 kilometres away. Zuckerman was known as an "ardent Jewish nationalist". At the time, he was in charge of delivering the relief aid from the Committee, negotiating the appropriate way to distribute it. He was not in Pinsk even once. Instead of personally investigating the matter, he went from Brest to Warsaw as soon as he learned of what had happened, where he publicized his version of the events as -"A Massacre of Innocent Civilians".

Despite attempts of the Polish authorities to suppress the story, accounts of the incident in the international press caused a scandal which would have strong repercussions abroad.

Polish army

The Polish Group Commander General Antoni Listowski claimed that the gathering was a Bolshevik meeting and that the Jewish population attacked the Polish troops. The overall tension of the military campaign was brought up as a justification for the crime. The Polish military refused to give investigators access to documents, and the officers and soldiers were never punished. Major Łuczyński was not charged for any wrongdoing and was eventually transferred and promoted reaching the rank of colonel (1919) and general (1924) in the Polish army. The events were criticized in the Sejm (Polish parliament), but representatives of the Polish army denied any wrongdoing.

International

In the Western press of the time, the massacre was referred to as the Polish Pogrom at Pinsk, and was noticed by wider public opinion. Upon a request of Polish authorities to president Wilson, an American mission was sent to Poland to investigate nature of the alleged atrocities. The mission, led by American diplomat Henry Morgenthau, Sr., published the Morgenthau Report on October 3, 1919. According to the findings of this commission, a total of about 300 Jews lost their lives in this and related incidents. The commission also severely criticized the actions of Major Łuczyński and his superiors with regards to handling of the events in Pinsk.

Morgenthau later recounted the massacre in autobiography, where he wrote:

Who were these thirty-five victims? They were the leaders of the local Jewish community, the spiritual and moral leader of the 5,000 Jews in a city, eighty-five percent of the population of which was Jewish, the organizers of the charities, the directors of the hospitals, the friends of the poor. And yet, to that incredibly brutal, and even more incredibly stupid, officer who ordered their execution, they were only so many Jews.

Commemoration

In 1926, kibbutz Gevat (Gvat) was established by emigrants from Pinsk to the British Mandate of Palestine in commemoration of the Pinsk massacre victims.

Controversy

English historian Norman Davies has questioned whether the meeting was explicitly authorized and notes that "the nature of the illegal meeting, variously described as a Bolshevik cell, an assembly of the local co-operative society, and a meeting of the Committee for American Relief, was never clarified". American historian Richard Lukas described the Pinsk massacre as "an execution of a thirty-five Bolshevik infiltrators...justified in the eyes of an American investigator", while David Engel has noted that the Morgenthau report, the summary of an American investigation into the Pinsk and other massacres led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., contradicts the accounts presented by Davies and Lukas. In its summary of its investigation of the Pinsk massacre, the Morgenthau report notes that, with respect to the claims of the Polish authorities that the meeting was a gathering of a Bolshevik nature,

We are convinced that no arguments of a Bolshevist nature were mentioned in the meeting in question. While it is recognized that certain information of Bolshevist activities in Pinsk had been reported by two Jewish soldiers, we are convinced that Major Luczynski, the Town Commander, showed reprehensible and frivolous readiness to place credence in such untested assertions, and on this insufficient basis took inexcusably drastic action against reputable citizens whose loyal character could have been immediately established by a consultation with any well known non-Jewish inhabitant.

The report also found that the official statements by General Antoni Listowski, the Polish Group Commander, claiming that Polish troops had been attacked by Jews, were "devoid of foundation."