This book examines the history of the 150,000–300,000 Polish Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust after fleeing Poland for the Soviet Union and were then evacuated to the Soviet interior. By integrating the experiences of those Jews who spent the war years in the Soviet Union into the realm of Holocaust studies, Eliyana Adler fills an important historiographical lacuna. As the author notes, “Despite the fact that the majority of Polish Jews fortunate enough to see the end of the war did so in the Soviet interior, little is known about their experiences” (279). This double shift—both geographic and paradigmatic—is Adler's most important intervention in the study of the Holocaust and related fields, including modern Polish history and the history of the Soviet Union.
Basing her impressive study on a large number of interviews with Holocaust survivors that were conducted and preserved by the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, and other institutions in Jerusalem and Washington, DC, as well as a wide array of ego-documents published in Hebrew and Yiddish, Adler divides her book into five chronologically-oriented chapters: Jewish flight from Poland to the Soviet Union, expulsion into the Soviet hinterlands, life in labor installations, relocation to other parts of the Soviet interior, and Jewish return to post-war Poland.
The turn to memoirs leads to a detailed, moving narrative, one that is particularly apparent in Adler's skillful account of the experiences of Jewish deportees in various “labor installations” in the Soviet interior. Through the author's discussion of these events, the reader learns a great deal not only about the trials of forced labor and moments of dire poverty and hunger in absolutely bewildering conditions, but also about attempts to maintain human dignity and continue various aspects of pre-war Jewish life, including the observance of religious holidays and the organization of different Jewish communal activities (136–43, 171–74). After the Soviet Union granted Polish and Polish-Jewish refugees amnesty in 1941, many Jews migrated to other, oftentimes warmer locations in the Soviet Union, including, but not only, Kazakhstan. Still loyal to their country of origin, many of these Jews joined the Polish Anders Army in exile and then continued on to British Palestine where approximately 3,000–4,000 Polish Jews, including Israel's future Prime Minister Menachem Begin, remained (199). In a twist of historical fate, most of those Jews who fled Poland and were then deported to the Soviet interior survived the trying experiences of flight and refuge, and many were even able to record their experiences as survivor-witnesses in the final decades of the twentieth century.
Adler's decision to write a history based on sources narrated by Jewish survivors reflects the changing nature of Holocaust studies as well as the growing importance of the survivor-witness in this and other, related fields, including Genocide studies. As Adler notes, “Truly integrating the Polish Jewish refugees into Holocaust history, and thus memory, would necessitate rethinking the paradigm. A victim-centered chronology, as opposed to the conventional perpetrator-one, would go a long way to enabling this transformation” (287). While some may question Adler's turn to these sources, the author's extensive use of memoirs, diaries and other ego-documents helps create a rich, detailed narrative that emphasizes the fundamentally human aspects of this history.
At the same time, the book's methodological framework, narrative structure, and disciplinary borders often reflect the survivor-witness accounts that Adler carefully mines. As other scholars have shown, however, memoirs, archives, and other ostensibly objective source collections often have deeply-rooted agendas that help shape scholarly studies and communal memories. In this case, the large amount of source material that USC's Shoah Foundation, Yale's Fortunoff Archive, and other invaluable institutions have amassed have been produced and preserved to present a particular perspective on the past, one that emphasizes the role of Jews as victims of Europe's short, bloody twentieth century. Hence, even Adler's claim that by “narrating a marginal story, this book thus encourages a reexamination of existing maps of the war and the Holocaust—expanding the compass of survival” reflects the fundamental guidelines that shape this particular field. As in many other cases, historical narratives are often grounded in and bound by the very sources that institutions preserve and that scholars then use as the discipline of history repeatedly exposes itself to be a wicked circle of memory, history, and more memory (279).
These digressions, however, should not detract from Adler's impressive scholarly achievement. This is a rich, detailed, and moving analysis of a critical chapter in Jewish, Polish, and Soviet histories that was often overlooked by earlier scholars who preferred, for whatever reason, to research the history of the Holocaust in Polish lands. One can only hope that other scholars and students will embrace Adler's call to integrate the story of Jewish survivors from the Soviet Union into the larger history of the Holocaust.
