...The police and the military entered the building and forced its inhabitants outside for the crowd to attack with pipes, stones, and their bare hands. Once they saw the soldiers engaged in violence against the residents, the mob let loose. One policeman testified that "Jews were brought from the building into the square, where the population cruelly murdered them, and the armed soldiers ... went back into the building and kept bringing out other Jews." A Jewish woman deposed two days later recalled that a policeman threw two girls off a third-floor balcony "and the crowd in the courtyard finished them off." The head of the Jewish Committee was shot in the back while telephoning the Security Service for help. Despite efforts from individual army commanders to restore order, the violence went on all morning. A second surge began when workers from a nearby foundry showed up on their lunch break to join in. Injured Jews lucky enough to escape were assaulted in the hospitals by other patients and even the staff. A Polish nurse who came from a town more than seventy miles away to help--only she and a single Jewish doctor were willing to minister to the victims--testified that some of the patients had been treated so cruelly that when she first approached them, they tried to hide under their beds.

The violence spread throughout the city: according to one historian, up to one-quarter of Kielce's adult population was actively involved. Anyone who appeared to be Jewish was in danger. There was no coordination; in many cases, people who banded together to carry out attacks did not even know each other. The incidents that Gross reports are unbearable to read. Regina Fisz, a mother with a newborn baby, was taken from her home, along with a male friend, by an impromptu gang of four men, among them a police corporal. The men had no plan for how to dispose of their victims, so they flagged down a truck driver to ask for a ride, telling him, in the corporal's words, "we had Jews whom we wanted to take out to kill. The driver agreed, he only asked for a thousand zloty, and I said, 'It's a deal.'" (It is worth remembering that the "Jews" in this case consisted of a man, a woman, and a baby.) The driver took them to a forest outside the city, where Fisz and her baby were shot, while the friend escaped. Afterward, the four men left the bodies for locals to bury and adjourned to a restaurant with the truck driver, where they enjoyed a meal together and split the proceeds from the sale of the two adults' valuables...