July 10

On July 10, 1941, in the small northeastern Polish town of Jedwabne, a large group of Jewish residents were rounded up, brutally murdered and many burned alive in a wooden building. The killings occurred in the chaotic weeks after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet-held Poland; historical investigations since 2001 have shown that local non‑Jewish residents participated in the massacre while German forces were present and created the conditions for violence. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred (the conservative figure settled on by official Polish investigators is in the mid‑300s) to higher totals reported in earlier accounts; many questions about exact numbers and command remain. Read more

On July 10, 1921, Belfast convulsed in some of the worst sectarian violence of the partition era. Over the course of a day and into the nights that followed, gunmen and mobs attacked streets in mixed working‑class districts — the Markets, Short Strand, New Lodge and adjacent shipyard neighborhoods — leaving scores dead or wounded, thousands displaced, and whole terraces blackened by fire. The fighting came at the end of a season of growing hostility tied to partition, job scarcity and the rise of irregular security forces; its effects hardened residential segregation and deepened mistrust of state policing for decades to come. Read more