During the German occupation of Poland, Kielce and the villages around it were completely ethnically cleansed by the Nazis of its pre-war Jewish community, most of which perished in The Holocaust. By the summer of 1946, some 200 Jews, many of them former residents of Kielce, had returned from the Nazi concentration camps or refuge in the Soviet Union. About 150-160 of them were quartered in a single building administered by the Jewish Committee of Kielce Voivodeship at Planty, a small street in the centre of the town.