There has been a very long and very dark history of anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia, Germany, and France, even without factoring in the horrors of the Holocaust, which was a culmination of those episodes of oppression. During the height of the medieval Black Death, Jews up and down the Rhine were rounded up indiscriminately, and forced by authorities to confess to hideous crimes such as spreading and facilitating the plague by poisoning wells and unleashing toxic smoke into the air. Most of these confessions were extracted through various horrific tortures, like thumbscrews, the strappato, and the ordeal by boiling water. Thousands of civilians were reported to be killed during the multiple pogroms that flared up as a result of the plague's course of destruction. Many Jews fled to Poland, where the king, who had fallen in love with a Jewess, at the point of the sword expressly forbade anyone from harming them, and some parts of the country, which was still under the rule of invading Mongol warlords, also granted the Jews numerous protections.
