Most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust had escaped or been forcibly deported into the Soviet interior between September 1939 and summer 1941. Probably more than 300,000 of the 700–780,000 Polish citizens who found themselves in Soviet territory after the western parts of the Soviet Union had been occupied by German troops in summer 1941 were Jews. Though their chances of survival here were significantly higher than under German occupation, many of them also —some estimates are as high as thirty percent—died in the Soviet Union by the end of the war, mostly because of the harsh living conditions for the refugees and deportees.
For a long time the history of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union attracted only small attention in research, but in recent years a number of studies on this subject have been published, including Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion 1939–1946 (Berlin, 2019); Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 2020); Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit, 2017); and Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla, eds., Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warszawa, 2020). The twelve articles in this volume, based on a workshop at the Polin Museum of Jewish History in Warsaw in 2018, demonstrate the rich results of the recent research. The main sources of most articles are memoirs and testimonies, primarily by Polish Jews, but often also by non-Jewish Poles and, in some cases, Soviet Jews. Thereby, most articles rather strongly focus on experiences, perceptions, and views of the Polish Jews or of others about them. Only rarely do the studies use sources of Soviet origin.
The volume starts with a comparative discussion of the escape of Jews from German occupation in September 1939 and summer 1941 by Markus Nesselrodt (2–29). In the following article Eliyana Adler contributes to the strongly experiential approach of most articles by analyzing how Jewish children and youth remembered flight and exile (30–56). Albert Kaganovitch's contribution describes the experiences with the antisemitism of Poles did Polish Jews in the Soviet Union confront (57–69). In earlier research this has been one of the most controversial questions. Most Poles in the Soviet Union, but also many Jews, had been forcibly deported from the Polish eastern territories to the interior of the Soviet Union between September 1939 and June 1941. The Soviet occupation of these territories had led to a considerable rise in antisemitism because many Poles considered Jews, against the backdrop of the stereotype of “Jewish Bolshevism,” to be supporters of Soviet rule and collaborators of the Soviet security organs. They blamed them for the deportations, too, and this had an impact on relations in the Soviet Union. The issue of antisemitism is also addressed in Katharina Friedla's rich and nuanced article on Jewish soldiers in the Polish army that was established in the Soviet Union in 1943 (70–109).
Two other contributions discuss the return of the refugees from the Soviet Union to Poland after 1944. Wojciech Marciniak outlines Polish diplomatic efforts to convince the Soviet government to enable the return (110–29). Serafima Velkovich examines a hitherto little-noticed aspect of the return, namely, how the Chabad movement and Zionists used the agreement between the Polish and the Soviet governments to also secretly organize the evacuation from the Soviet Union of several hundred of their followers who had not been Polish citizens before 1939 (130–42). Two articles explore contacts between members of the Yiddish language cultural scene from Poland with their Soviet counterparts during and after the war. Here, Gennadiy Estraikh discusses the activities of the writer and editor Hersh Smolar (175–99), while Miriam Schulz explores the perception of the Soviet Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia as “Soviet Marranos” and its implications by Polish Jews (143–74).
In a second section of the volume, four contributions analyze how the exile of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union has been remembered in the decades after the war. Natalie Belsky examines how Polish Jews appeared in the memories of evacuated or escaped Soviet Jews (200–13). John Goldlust discusses difficulties for Polish Jews to incorporate their experiences of survival in the Soviet Union into Holocaust remembrance (214–35). Lidia Zessin-Jurek analyzes the factors that for a long time excluded Jews from the Polish memory of the “Siberian exile” (236–60). This section on memory closes with a description of objects and documents in the collection of the Polin Museum related to the exile in the Soviet Union (261–78).
The volume ends with an epilogue by Mark Edele in which he places the topic of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union in the context of a history of experiences of Soviet society during the German-Soviet war and outlines further perspectives for research. He sees deficits especially in research on Jewish soldiers in Polish military units, and on the fate of those who did not return to Poland after the end of the war, but remained in the Soviet Union (280–89).
Overall, the volume demonstrates the strong development that research on Polish Jews in the Soviet Union has taken in recent years, and it also hints at the direction that future research may further evolve. While the previous focus mostly was on controversial issues of Polish-Jewish relations, more research now is coming to the fore in which the Polish Jews’ exile experiences are explored in view of a social and experiential history of the Soviet Union during the war and the early post-war years.
