Jeffrey Koerber's Borderland Generation is a microstudy of two communities: the Jewish communities of Grodno and Vitebsk, cities that in 1914 belonged to the Russian Empire but found themselves on opposite sides of the Polish-Soviet border after World War I. The study examines the contrasting fates of these two communities, one that came under the newly established Second Polish Republic (Grodno), a multi-party, parliamentary state, and the other (Vitebsk), that found itself inside the Soviet Union under communist rule.
Borderland Generation retells the story of the two Jewish communities in much the same way as the sifrei yizkor, the Memorial Books of destroyed east European Jewish towns. It follows the same general pattern as these memorial books, using testimonies to reconstruct each community's history before, during, and after the Holocaust. The book is divided into Jewish life before 1939, Jewry during the first two years of WWII under Soviet occupation, the fate of the two communities during the German occupation (1941–44), and the survivors. In contrast to the yizkor books, Borderland Generation integrates secondary and primary sources that shed more light on the nature of the Jewish experience. The testimonial base is impressive, drawn not only from archives in the US such as at USC Shoah Foundation, Yale, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, but also from archives in Belarus, Israel, and Poland in a variety of foreign languages.
On Soviet Vitebsk before the war, Koerber recounts the impact of the Great Terror on four Yiddish writers, including Moishe Kulbak and Iza Kharik, who were tried in Minsk in October 1937 and executed the same day along with sixty-six others for alleged anti-Soviet conspiracy (43–44). At the zenith of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, Koerber shows that the most numerous victims were ethnic Poles followed by Belarussians (47). The purge targeted, among others, Yiddish writers in the Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). This included the faculty of the Vitebsk Jewish Pedagogical Institute, many of whom were arrested and executed in 1937 on charges of spying for the Polish government (49). Koerber likewise demonstrates how the leading Yiddish writers of the BSSR fell victim to the purges while, by 1940, all Yiddish-language schools had closed as part of a larger government program to liquidate Yiddish culture (51–52). He describes how teachers at a Vitebsk Jewish school were abruptly instructed in Fall 1938 to employ Belarussian in the classroom instead of Yiddish (56). The situation was dire for Yiddish writers throughout Soviet Russia as a whole, evidenced by the closing in 1938 of the Moscow-based Yiddish paper, Der emes, and the arrest and execution of the main editors and staff writers (54).
The most valuable parts of the book are the chapters on the wartime period, when Grodno and Vitebsk first fell under Soviet rule. Koerber provides a testimony-based description of those various phases with original maps illustrating the location of ghettos. Here, we learn that the Jewish community in Grodno was given one or two days’ notice for relocating to ghettos on November 1, 1941. He cites the memoirs of one man who recalled taking what he could and, while looking back on the way to the ghetto, saw local neighbors pillage his home within minutes of his departure (177). Other testimonies recalled Jews carrying heavy items and bundles while wearing numerous layers of clothes.
In the sections on mass genocide, starting in late 1941 and 1942, the author provides new materials on Jewish responses. One testimony, for example, explained why flight was not ever considered due to the large multi-generational family he was supporting. Others called on the Jews to flee to the forests, arguing that certainly some of the Jews would survive (190–91). Koerber reminds us how early the entire Jewish community of Vitebsk was liquidated (November 1941), compared to Grodno, whose ghetto remained intact for another year (191).
The description of life in the Grodno ghetto is also unique and offers new insights based on a variety of firsthand accounts. Koerber shows why Grodno ghetto inhabitants had some hope of survival during its year of existence: widespread work was offered in German army workshops, in the Jewish Council administration, and in German factories. Jews also worked as plumbers, electricians, locksmiths, handymen, bookkeepers, seamstresses, cobblers, and in manual labor according to firsthand testimony (197–99). But when the author speaks of paths to survival, especially that of passing as Poles in Grodno, the explanatory framework is weak. He uses the case of Chasia Bielicka, who fled the ghetto and found work as a maid and cook passing as a Polish Catholic. Koerber states that “she possessed the essentials—shelter, food, and camouflage—to carry out her true mission: resistance” (247). Missing from that list are two essential prerequisites for hiding on the Aryan side: false papers, “good looks,” and fluency in Polish.
While Koerber seems to be on solid ground when discussing Soviet Jewry, the same cannot be said for the section on Grodno and Polish Jewry in general. On the period before 1939, he characterizes Poland unqualifiedly in the abstract as a country that discriminated against Jews (61). According to this narrative, there was one, undifferentiated Polish government during the interwar period and one, antisemitic Jewish policy, a view that harkens back to the outdated historical consensus of the 1970s. In a paragraph characterizing the situation of the Jews in Grodno under Polish rule before 1939, he makes no reference to the historical literature (61). Koerber subsequently writes that “young law and engineering graduates could not find work because they were Jews, and medical students worked in shops owned by their parents” (78). Attached to the latter statement is an endnote consisting of a press account from an undated newspaper clipping found in an archive in Belarus. Neither the writings of Antony Polonsky nor Szymon Rudnicki, experts on the legal status of Jews in interwar Poland, are cited.
In the 35-page chapter on Grodno Jewry under Polish rule, the main secondary works are from the 1980s and before. It is notable that although Polonsky's authoritative The Jews in Poland and Russia (2012) is listed in the bibliography, it is not cited anywhere in the book. It is also notable that from the thirty-two volumes published since 1986 of POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry, the flagship scholarly journal in Polish Jewish Studies, Koerber cites one article on one occasion (302, note 122).
When discussing the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the reader is left with the strange impression that Poland was not a party to the conflict; that the German invasion was not an invasion of Poland but an attack on Polish Jews: “German troops arrived in Bialystok on 16 September 1939,” Koerber writes, “and stayed for nearly a week, killing about 100 Jews during their brief occupation. In Sokolka, halfway between Bialystok and Grodno, German troops harassed and robbed Jews at random” (98). No mention is made of the high number of losses among Polish soldiers who battled the German army in Bialystok nor of the higher civilian casualties among the 50,900 ethnic Polish residents of the city.
The discussion of Jews in Soviet-occupied Grodno in 1939–41 is likewise presented in a vacuum without reference to the debate in the literature over Polish Jewish behavior under Soviet occupation. Instead, the author deduces broad generalizations about Polish Jewish reactions to Soviet rule: “The young Jews of Grodno, like Sarah Fishkin of Rubiexewicze,” he writes, “were swept up by the promises offered by the Soviets….most young Jews were simply dazzled by the prospects before them and followed paths that were not to reach fulfillment by the time the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941” (97). To Polish nationalist historians today, the latter observation merely confirms their thesis that Polish Jews collaborated with the Soviets and celebrated Poland's collapse. The historical literature in the last thirty years demonstrates that only a tiny portion of Jews, Poles, and Belarussians were zealous supporters of the Soviets. The notion that Polish Jews not only welcomed the Red Army in September 1939 but wholeheartedly embraced communist rule has long been debunked.
Some of the mistakes could have been avoided. For example, one of the most frequently cited testimonies is that of Efim Markelis-Domnin. Yet this name is not in the index. Some digging is required to figure out that this is the same person as Fivel Markelis, whose name is indexed without any cross-reference back to Markelis-Domnin. In the map on page 157, which distinguishes the lands of the Third Reich from the German-occupied eastern territories in the years 1941–42, Grodno and Vitebsk are placed in the occupied zones. Yet the caption informs the reader that Grodno was formally annexed to the Third Reich. This lack of attention to detail can even be found in the book's subtitle, “Soviet and Polish Jews under Hitler”: in fact, four of the book's seven chapters chronicle Jewish life in Grodno and Vitebsk under Polish and Soviet rule. It is for these reasons and others that the reader comes away with the impression of a manuscript rushed to publication without proper editorial oversight.
