The number of refugees in the '' Sh ' erit ha-Pletah '' continued to grow as displaced Jews who were in Western Europe at war 's end were joined by hundreds of thousands of refugees from Eastern Europe . Many of these were Polish Jews who had initially been repatriated . Nearly 90 % of the approximately 200,000 Polish Jews who had survived the war in the Soviet Union chose to return to Poland under a Soviet-Polish repatriation agreement . But Jews returning to their erstwhile homes in Poland met with a generally hostile reception from their non-Jewish neighbors . Between fall 1944 and summer 1946 as many as 600 Jews were killed in anti-Jewish riots in various towns and cities , including incidents in Cracow , around August 20 , 1945 ; Sosnowiec , on October 25 ; and Lublin , on November 19 . Most notable was the pogrom in Kielce on July 4 , 1946 , in which 42 Jews were killed . In the course of 1946 the flight of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe toward the West amounted to a mass exodus that swelled the ranks of DPs in Germany and Austria , especially in the U.S. Zone
pogrom in Kielce
Kielce pogrom
Sh'erit ha-Pletah