Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival 9781644697504

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Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959)

Jews of Poland Series Editor Antony Polonsky (Brandeis University)

Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959)

History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival

Edited by Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt

BOSTON 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Friedla, Katharina, editor. | Nesselrodt, Markus, 1984- editor. Title: Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939-1959) : history and memory of deportation, exile and survival / edited by Katharina Friedla, and Markus Nesselrodt. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Series: Jews of Poland | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039730 (print) | LCCN 2021039731 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697498 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697504 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697511 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews, Polish--Soviet Union--History. | Jews--Poland-Relocation--Soviet Union. | Forced migration--Poland--History. | Jewish refugees--Soviet Union--History. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)--Soviet Union. | Holocaust survivors--Soviet Union. | Jews--Persecutions--Soviet Union--History--20th century. Classification: LCC DS134.85 .P65 2021 (print) | LCC DS134.85 (ebook) | DDC 947/.004924043809044--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039730 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039731 Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2021 All rights reserved. Book design by Kryon Publishing Services (P) Ltd. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Note on Translations, Transliterations, and Place Names vii Forewordviii Antony Polonsky Introductionxvii Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt Part One—History

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  1  Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941 2   Markus Nesselrodt   2   Children in Exile: Wartime Journeys of Polish Jewish Youth 30   Eliyana Adler   3  Together and Apart: Poles and Polish Jews in the War-Torn Soviet Union57   Albert Kaganovitch   4  “I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”—Jewish Soldiers in the Polish Army in the Soviet Union, 1943–1946 70   Katharina Friedla   5  Repatriation of Polish Catholics and Jews from Distant Parts of the Soviet Union in Polish-Soviet Relations (1944–1947) 110   Wojciech Marciniak   6  Polish Citizenship as a Way to Freedom: How Soviet Jews Escaped the USSR Using Polish Documents 130   Serafima Velkovich   7  “The Deepest Self Denies the Face”: Polish Jewish Intellectuals and the Birth of the “Soviet Marrano” 143   Miriam Schulz   8  Hersh Smolar: A Polish Personage in the Soviet Jewish Cultural Scene, 1940s–1960s175   Gennady Estraikh

Part Two—Memory

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  9  Contested Memories: Soviet and Polish Jewish Refugees and Evacuees Recount Their Experience on the Soviet Home Front 200   Natalie Belsky   10  Neither “Victims” nor “Survivors”: Polish Jews Reflect on Their Wartime Experiences in the Soviet Union During the Second World War 214   John Goldlust   11  A Matzeva Amid Crosses: Jewish Exiles in the Polish Memory of Siberia236   Lidia Zessin-Jurek   12  Before, During, and After: The Objects and Archival Material in the POLIN Museum 261   Przemysław Kaniecki and Renata Piątkowska Epilogue279 Mark Edele Bibliography290 Acknowledgements305 Notes on Contributors 307 Index of Places 311 Index of Names 315

Note on Translations, Transliterations, and Place Names

Translations Given the transnational and the multilingual character of this subject, many primary sources are written in languages other than English. Each contributor was responsible for the correct translation from the original into English.

Transliterations Concerning the spelling of non-English words, we tried to follow well-established guidelines in transliterating Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew into English. We used the transliteration systems by YIVO for Yiddish, the Library of Congress for Russian, and Encyclopedia Judaica for Hebrew. An exception was made with Polish characters, which we left unchanged.

Place names Many cities and towns of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were subject to frequent border changes in the time period covered in this volume. Since names of cities and towns are a sensitive matter in this context, we tried to stay as neutral as possible. As a rule, we use the spelling of a town or city as it was commonly used before the outbreak of World War II and added today’s name in parentheses. Those city names that are familiar to a general English reader such as Warsaw or Moscow have remained unchanged.

Foreword

Antony Polonsky As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. (Amos 5:19 [King James Version]) What was one to do—to flee to Russia or to remain at home under the protection of God? (Reuven Katz)

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his important and moving collection of essays deals with a topic which is now attracting scholarly interest—the fate of those Polish Jews who survived the war by fleeing or being deported to the interior of the Soviet Union. There is a large literature both on the Holocaust and on the fate of Poles in the Soviet Union during World War II, but the history of this “Siberian odyssey of Polish Jewry” seemed until recently to have largely disappeared from public memory, particularly in Poland. In recent years it has aroused increasing attention, one product of which is this volume. It was the subject of a conference at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in October 2018 and has begun to create an impressive body of scholarship which is documented in the introduction to this book. In particular, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of archives have acted as a major stimulus to research.1 The great majority of Jews who survived the Nazi genocide in Poland did so in the interior of the Soviet Union. According to the research of Albert 1

Among recent works on the topic, one could mention Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017); Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion,1939–1946 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins. Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020) and Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla, ed., Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020).

Foreword

Stankowski and Piotr Weiser, the prewar Jewish population of Poland in 1939 numbered 3,330,000 of whom some 425,000 survived the war—a figure which some have seen as too high, with others giving a figure of around 380,000.2 Indeed, it should be stressed that all population estimates of those who spent the war in the Soviet Union and subsequently returned to Poland need to be treated with caution. According to the records of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland (Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce, CKŻP), the principal Jewish body in postwar Poland, around 74,000 people had registered with it by June 1945. Of these, 5,500 had returned from concentration camps in Germany, 13,000 had served in the pro-communist Polish Army established in the USSR after the withdrawal of the Anders Army, about 30,000 had made their way back from the Soviet Union, 10,000 had been freed from concentration camps in Poland, and the remainder, just under 16,000, had survived on the “Aryan side.”3 In the next two years nearly 137,000 Jews returned from the USSR and by July 1, 1946, nearly 244,000 Jews had registered with the CKŻP.4 By the end of the year, an additional 35,000 had been repatriated from the Soviet Union. They were part of a much larger group of Polish citizens who by 1946 numbered around 1,016,000 who moved from the Soviet Union to Poland after the war. Detailed figures based on the now-open Soviet archives are to be found in an article by Albert Kaganovitch.5 A further group of 19,000 Polish Jews returned to Poland in the years between 1956 and 1959 but very few remained in the country.6 In all, if we add the number who remained in 2

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Albert Stankowski and Piotr Weiser, “Demograficzne skutki Holokaustu,” in Następstwa Zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2011), 15–38. For the lower figure, see Shimon Redlich, Life in Transit: Jews in Postwar Lodz, 1945–1950 (Newton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 54. Józef Adelson, “W Polsce zwanej Ludową,” in Najnowsze Dzieje Żydów w Polsce w zarysie (do 1950 roku), ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), 388–389. The figure for those who survived in hiding is certainly too low because many Jews either retained their new identities after the war or for other reasons did not register with the CKŻP or registered subsequently. It should probably be doubled or even trebled. It would give a figure of 32,000–48,000 Jews who survived thanks to Polish assistance. It may have even been higher. Jan Czerniakiewicz, Repatriacja ludności polskiej z ZSRR 1944–1948 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1987), 12, 54, 58–59, 102–103, 130, 154–155. Kaganovitch, “Stalin’s Great Power Politics, the Return of Jewish Refugees to Poland, and Continued Migration to Palestine, 1944–1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 59–94. In accordance with the treaty between Poland and the USSR, over 260,000 Poles, including Polish Jews, returned to Poland between 1955 and 1959, see American Jewish

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the Soviet Union, perhaps as many as 385,000 Jews survived the war there. This figure is, however, probably too high, as is clear from the research of Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik where the lowest figure for those surviving in the Soviet Union is given as 146,000.7 Some had fled the advancing German army heading east in September 1939, most believing the Soviets a lesser evil. Jews seem to have numbered between 300,000 and 350,000 of the total of 600,000 people who fled eastward, with the lower figure seeming more plausible.8 Not all of them went to the areas recently annexed by the Soviets and around 13,000 refugees escaped to Vilna, which after six weeks of Soviet rule was transferred to Lithuania on October 28. In all 18,000 Jews fled after the outbreak of the war to Lithuania, which retained its independence until the summer of 1940.9 A further wave of refugees accompanied the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Under the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression agreement of August 1939, the Soviets occupied considerable parts of eastern Poland and their goal was to

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Joint Distribution Committee, Jerusalem, Sig. 76 B/R-501 Poland, Poland—Immigration and Emigration, Letter by Samuel L. Haber to Charles H. Jordan dated June 6, 1959. See also Gennady Estraikh, “Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s,” Jewish History 31 (2018): 291–317. The most recent discussion of the existing estimates can be found in the article by Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union in the Soviet Second World War,” in Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al., 113. The authors estimate the number of Polish Jews saved from Holocaust by removal to the Soviet Union from around 146,000 to 384,600. Maciej Siekierski, “The Jews in Soviet-Occupied Eastern Poland at the End of 1939: Numbers and Distribution,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 116; Andrzej Żbikowski, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, Vol. 3, Relacje z Kresów (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2000), 13; According to the documents issued by Soviet authorities the number of refugees was lower (150,000 to 200,000), see Gennadii V. Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Stalina: Vlast’ i antisemitizm (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2003), 187; Natalia S. Lebedeva, “The Deportation of the Polish Population to the USSR, 1939–41,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 16, no. 1–2 (2000): 36; Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union,” 98. For a discussion concerning the flight to the East see Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun, “Seeking Relative Safety. The Flight of Polish Jews to the East in the Autumn of 1939,” Yad Vashem Studies 46, no. 1 (2018): 41–71. Šarūnas Liekis, “The Transfer of Vilna District into Lithuania, 1939,” Polin 14 (2001): 216; Simonas Strelcovas, “Refugees: Between Myth and Reality,” in Casablanca of the North: Refugees and Rescuers in Kaunas, 1939–1940, ed. Linas Venclauskas (Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University, 2017), 46; Zorach Warhaftig, Refugee and Survivor: Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988).

Foreword

Sovietize these areas, described as “western Belarus” and “western Ukraine,” as rapidly as possible. One way of doing this was by mass deportations of “anti-Soviet elements.” Jews made up around 70,000 of the 315,000–325,000 citizens of the Second Polish Republic who were deported in four stages into the depths of the Soviet Union.10 The opening of the archives of the NKVD and the Ministry of the Interior in the Soviet Union, has made it possible to confirm these figures as has the research of Edele and Warlik.11 To them should 10 After evaluating the available NKVD reports, Grzegorz Hryciuk comes to the following ethnic distribution of the deportees: 181,200 Poles (57,5 percent), approx. 69,000 Jews (21,9 percent), approx. 32,900 Ukrainian (10,44 percent) and approx. 24,000 Belarusian (7,62 percent), Grzegorz Hryciuk, “Victims 1939–1941: The Soviet Repression in Eastern Poland,” in Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, ed. Elazar Barkan et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 195; Similar estimates can be found by Aleksandr Gurjanow, “Żydzi jako specpieriesieleńcy-bieżeńcy w Obwodzie Archangielskim 1940–1941,” in Świat NIEpożegnany. Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodniej Rzeczpospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku, ed. Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2004), 109; Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 99. 11 Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union,” 95–131. The literature on the deportations is fully reviewed in Stanisław Ciesielski, “Masowe deportacje z ziem wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1940–1941 i losy deportowanych. Uwagi o stanie badań,” in Wschodnie losy Polaków, ed. Stanisław Ciesielski (Wrocław: DTSK Silesia, 1997), 85–116; Ciesielski et al., Masowe deportacje ludności w Związku Radzieckim (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2003). Of particular value are Aleksandr Guryanov, “Cztery deportacje 1940–41,” Karta 12 (1993): 114–136; Aleksandr Chackiewicz, “Aresztowania i deportacje ludności zachodnich obszarów Białorusi (1939–1941),” in Polska–Białoruś 1918–1945, ed. Wiesław Balcerak (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Współpracy Polska-Wschód, 1994), 133–160; Małgorzata Giżejewska et al., eds., Społeczeństwo białoruskie, litewskie i polskie na ziemiach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczpospolitej (Białoruś Zachodnia i Litwa Wschodnia) w latach 1939–1941 (Warsaw: Inst. Studiów Politycznych PAN, 1995), 120–137; Nikolay Bugaj, “Specjalna teczka Stalina. Deportacje i reemigracja Polaków,” Zeszyty Historyczne 107 (1994): 76–140; Albin Głowacki, “O deportacji osadników wojskowych w głąb ZSRR (w świetle materiałów NKWD),” Mars 2 (1994): 111–144; Albin Głowacki, Ocalić i repatriować. Opieka nad ludnością polską w głębi terytorium ZSRR (1943–1946) (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1994); Albin Głowacki, “Deportacje obywateli polskich do Kazachstanu i ich osiedlenie w latach 1940–1941,” in Polacy w Kazachstanie. Historia i współczesność, ed. Stanisław Ciesielski and Antoni Kuczyński (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1996); Stanisław Ciesielski, Grzegorz Hryciuk, Aleksander Srebrakowski, Masowe deportacje radzieckie w okresie II wojny światowej (Wrocław: Instytut Historyczny Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1994); and Ewa Kowalska, “Zesłańcze przesiedlenia obywateli polskich z Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczpospolitej w głąb Związku Radzieckiego w latach 1940–1941 w świetle dokumentów Wojsk Konwojowych NKWD,” Dzieje Najnowsze 4 (1994): 67–73.

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be added those who were arrested by the Soviet authorities (approximately 23,600) and between 10,000 and 21,000 who were drafted into the Red Army; in addition, some 100,000 to 115,600 were deported to the Soviet hinterland after the outbreak of German-Soviet war, and approximately 50,000 had earlier volunteered to work in the interior of the Soviet Union.12 In 1944, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs estimated that 52 percent of those deported were Poles, 30 percent Jews, and 18 percent Belarusian or Ukrainian, figures which do not diverge greatly from those of Grzegorz Hryciuk.13 These people were sent to the famine-ridden steppes of Kazakhstan or to the taiga of the Komi Republic and other parts of Siberia where they were surrounded by totally alien and hostile natural conditions. The death rate in the convoys and across Siberia exceeded ten percent. The young men forcibly enlisted into the Red Army served as compulsory workers in construction battalions,14 while tens of thousands of prisoners of war were employed as laborers in, to use the highly euphemistic phraseology of the period, “the distant regions of the Soviet Union.” Like the ethnic Polish deportees, many of the Jews lost relatives and found themselves in exile where they endured poverty, hunger, and disease— whether in the Soviet forced labor camps, in prisons, penal camps, and other sites of banishment or on collective farms and in urban industrial centers like Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Omsk. Others ended up in Central Asia in towns like Tashkent, Bukhara, and Samarkand. In retrospect, however, most considered deportation to have been a blessing since it ensured their survival. 12 Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union,” 15. 13 Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Records, Box 588, Obliczenie ludności deportowanej do ZSRR w latach od 1939 do 1941; Hryciuk, “Victims 1939–1941: The Soviet Repression in Eastern Poland,” 195. Some of the statistics issued by the Polish government-in-exile, especially those regarding the deportations, are overstated. 14 According to the statistics compiled by the Polish Foreign Ministry approx. 20,000 to 30,000 Jews were drafted into the Red Army, HIA, Poland, Ambasada (United States) Records, Box 30, Folder 8, Deportations of Polish citizens from Soviet-occupied Poland to the USSR; HIA, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Records, Box 525, Folder 15, Obliczenie ludności żydowskiej wśród deportowanych do Rosji obywateli polskich, stan na 24.04.1943 r., sporządzono przez Min. Pracy i Opieki Społecznej, Londyn 28.09.1944. Estimates listed by Edele and Warlik are lower (10,000 to 21,000), Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union,” 105. See also Kiril Feferman, “‘The Jews’ War’: Attitudes of Soviet Jewish Soldiers and Officers Toward the USSR in 1940–41,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 27, no. 4 (2014): 574–590.

Foreword

The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union made Poland and the Soviet Union allies in the struggle against the Axis Powers. After protracted negotiations a Polish-Soviet agreement was signed on July 30, 1941, which made provision for an amnesty of Polish prisoners, the release of prisoners of war, and the creation of a Polish army on Soviet territory.15 The signing of this agreement drastically changed the position of those Polish citizens who found themselves in the USSR, whether as prisoners of war, political prisoners, deportees, refugees, or “voluntary” workers. Their number may have been as high as 780,000 and included a substantial number of Jews, perhaps as many as 350,000.16 Given the history of Polish-Soviet relations, it is not surprising that the implementation of the agreement should have led to disputes. The amnesty was duly proclaimed on August 12, and the Soviets agreed that the Polish government could provide relief supplies to its citizens on their release from captivity. This led, after some difficulties, to the establishment of a network of Polish welfare offices to supervise the distribution of relief supplies. These were also to be given to Jews with Polish citizenship.17 The deportees, including the Jews among them, were certainly in a perilous state, with a large proportion lacking any of the basic requirements for survival. Some, particularly women and children, died even before the amnesty was proclaimed while more perished while trying to make their way to the southern republics of the USSR (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tadzhikistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan) where the Polish Army was being created and where welfare supplies were more plentiful. The main priority was to provide food and medical supplies, clothing, and blankets. These could only be obtained from outside the USSR, and though there was great public goodwill in Great Britain, the British government had reservations about sending large quantities of goods 15 For this agreement, see Antony Polonsky, The Great Powers and the Polish Question, 1941–45 (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 1976), 18–20. 16 Włodzimierz Borodziej assumes there were around 700,000 Polish citizens who were affected by Soviet forced resettlements and found themselves in the interior of the Soviet Union, Geschichte Polens im 20. Jahrhundert (München: C.H.Beck, 2010), 195. The number of 720,000 can be found by Grzegorz Hryciuk, “Victims 1939–1941,” 199. Daniel Boćkowski estimates their number from 750,000 to 780,000, Czas nadziei. Obywatele Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej w ZSRR i opieka nad nimi placówek polskich w latach 1940–1943 (Warsaw: Neriton, 1999), 92. 17 The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum Archive in London, Akta Ambasady R.P. w ZSRR, 1941–1943, A.7.307/40, Report on the Relief Accorded to Polish Citizens by the Polish Embassy in the USSR with special reference to Polish Citizens of Jewish Nationality, September 1941–April 1943.

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which were in short supply in Britain itself to the USSR. Appeals were made to the British public and also to Anglo-Jewry.18 The largest contribution to the relief effort came from the United States. Voluntary American organizations played a role, including Jewish bodies such as the Jewish Labor Committee, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the American Federation of Polish Jews.19 The distribution of relief supplies proved a difficult task, and although it included Jews, who benefited greatly, some complained that these were not always fairly handed out. The activity of the relief network was often obstructed by mistrustful Soviet officials, and in the summer of 1942, as Polish-Soviet relations began to deteriorate, the Soviets arrested a substantial number of the welfare delegates. Although some were subsequently released, relief now tapered off and came to an end when the Soviets broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish government in London in April 1943. The creation of a Polish army also proved a bone of contention between the Poles and the Soviets and ultimately it was allowed to leave the USSR rather than fight on the Eastern Front as had been the original intention of the Polish Prime Minister, Władysław Sikorski. On March 25, 1942, Stalin gave permission for 40,000 troops to be evacuated to Iran and by April some 33,000 soldiers and 10,000 civilians had left the country. Two weeks later he allowed the departure of the remaining three Polish divisions still in the USSR. By the end of August these too had left for Iran, numbering 45,000 soldiers and 25,000 civilians. From the start Jews had found it difficult to enlist in this army. The impact of the policy was apparent when the army was evacuated to Iran. Of the 78,000 soldiers, barely 3,500–4,000 were Jews while Jewish civilians accompanying the forces numbered perhaps between 1,700 and 2,500. Jews amounted to five percent of the soldiers (five percent of men, one percent of the officers) and seven percent of civilians.20 Very few of these were to return to Poland after the war and many found a home in Palestine/Israel.

18 On relief see Keith Sword, “The Welfare of Polish-Jewish Refugees in the USSR, 1941–43: Relief Supplies and their Distribution,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, 145–160. 19 Atina Grossmann, “Joint Fund Teheran. JDC and the Jewish Lifeline to Central Asia,” in The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism, ed. Avinoam Patt et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 205–244. 20 HIA, Poland, Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Records, Box 143, Folder 11, Report on Polish Refugees in Persia, April 1942 to December 1943.

Foreword

After the departure of the Polish Army and the breach in Polish-Soviet relations in May 1943, Stalin sanctioned the creation of a communist-controlled military force, initially in the form of the first Polish (Kościuszko) Division, headed by a prewar Polish officer, Colonel Zygmunt Berling, which first engaged the Germans at Lenino in mid-October and, then, in the creation of two Polish armies. By April 1944, the force numbered nearly 100,000 soldiers and when it entered Poland on July 21, 1944, it was made up of six infantry divisions, five artillery brigades, one tank corps, and one tank brigade; in all nearly 108,000 men.21 The presence of Jews in this army was considerable; many of them saw this as their only way to return to Poland. Some were encouraged to adopt Polish names to make their presence seem smaller. At the same time, strong efforts were made to dispel antisemitic prejudice. According to the deputy commander of the Second Division, “The heroism of the Jew, Bubental, was used to combat the antisemitic attitudes held by some soldiers.”22 In February 1944, Jews made up over a fifth of recruits. By April 1944, this percentage had fallen to around twelve percent, or perhaps 13,000 soldiers. The Jewish percentage of the officer corps was still higher. There was a shortage of officers because of the murder by Stalin of most of those taken prisoner in 1939. Soviet officers, often of Polish origin, made up more than 50 percent of the officer corps in 1944 and of the remainder nearly half were Jews. In addition, many of the important posts in the political apparatus of the army were held by Jews, including Hilary Minc and Roman Zambrowski. In all, Jews probably made up around a third of the political officers.23 As we have seen, Jews made up a considerable proportion of the more than one million Polish citizens who were removed in stages after the war from the former Polish territories now annexed by the Soviet Union and from the interior of the country. Most of the Polish Jews who returned to Poland were resettled in Lower Silesia, now in Polish hands. However, they did not remain there but took part in the organized emigration to Palestine or fled to the Western zones of Germany because of their unwillingness to live in a coun21 On these developments see Klemens Nussbaum, “Jews in the Kościuszko Division and the First Polish Army,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, 183–213. 22 Organizacja i Działania Bojowego Ludowego Wojska Polskiego w Latach 1943–1945, 4 volumes (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1963), vol. 4, 194. 23 See Kalman Nussbaum, Ve-hafakh lahem le-roets: ha-Yehudim be-tsava ha-amami ha-Polani be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Center, 1984); Klemens Nussbaum, Historia złudzeń. Żydzi w Armii Polskiej w ZSRR 1943–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Tetragon, 2016).

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try where an unpopular communist system was being imposed, where most of their relatives had perished, and which was marked by anti-Jewish violence in the immediate postwar period. Many memoirs and literary works, both prose and poetry, of those deported to the Soviet Union during the war, which are extensively discussed in this volume, stress their suffering and the oppressive nature of the Soviet system. This was what most Polish Jews, like their non-Jewish counterparts, experienced but many also remarked on the hospitality and courage of ordinary Russians and other ethnic groups in Central Asia which led them to an understanding of why the Soviets, in spite of all the negative features of their political system, were able to mobilize their people to defeat the Nazi behemoth. Some express their support for the Soviet system. They also describe their often tense relations with their non-Jewish Polish fellow citizens. However, because most of those who experienced the war in the USSR did not remain in Poland their wartime experiences have, until recently, fallen into oblivion. In addition, they were at odds with the Polish nationalist understanding of the Polish experience in Siberia during World War II. Those in the Displaced Persons camps who wished to move to the United States also often remained silent about their wartime experiences for fear of being seen as communists. One issue which arose in these camps was the way those who had survived the Nazi occupation or imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps believed that their experiences entitled them to look down on those who had survived the war in the Soviet Union in somewhat less difficult conditions. I very much hope that this remarkable volume will remedy the unwillingness to see those who fled to the Soviet Union as also survivors of the Holocaust and enable us to understand all the complex aspects of the Siberian odyssey of Polish Jews.

Introduction

Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt

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ather than recounting the history of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union in this introduction,1 we place our volume in the historiographical context. Why should we deal with the history of Polish Jews in Soviet exile today? More than 75 years after the end of World War II, we are now in a situation where understanding the Holocaust is less a matter of dealing with huge blank spots in research than making sense of libraries full of scholarly knowledge. A growing interest in a spatial turn of Holocaust Studies or a “remapping of the Holocaust”—as Atina Grossmann has put it—has given rise to new research perspectives.2 The history of the Holocaust but more specifically the experience of those who escaped it outside Nazi-occupied Europe has received more attention on a global level. Holocaust refugee routes connecting Europe with every continent on earth opened up a new path to writing a global history of Jewish but also non-Jewish wartime experience.3

1

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3

Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky, eds., Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 1–59; Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 1–27; and Katharina Friedla and Lidia Zessin-Jurek, eds., Syberiada Żydów Polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020), 17–47. Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 61–79. For a recent take on the spatial dimension of Holocaust studies see Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová, eds., Places, Spaces, and Voids in the Holocaust (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2021). Just to name a few recent studies: Marion Kaplan, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees. Hope and Anxiety in Portugal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); Joanna Newman, Nearly the New World. The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism 1933–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2019); Jochen Lingelbach, On the Edges of Whiteness: Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War (New York: Berghahn, 2020).

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This collection is hardly the first volume delving into the history and memory of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during and after World War II. It was inspired by the groundbreaking volume Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–464 published in 1991. Edited by Antony Polonsky and Norman Davies, the volume originated in the Cold War with many archives still closed and oral history collections only then emerging as an important source. Thirty years after it was published, we invited scholars of various disciplines—historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists—to share their research on the topic. Indeed, in recent years scholars have been paying increasingly close attention to the fate of Polish Jews in the USSR. Until recently, this was true mainly for the Hebrew and English-speaking academic world.5 In 2017, a group of scholars published Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union6—part original research, part reprints of past work; a visible sign that the subject of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union became a focus of research in a variety of perspectives. Katharina Friedla and Lidia Zessin-Jurek’s volume Syberiada Żydów Polskich7 (The Siberian odyssey of Polish Jews) was the first of its kind in Polish. Similar to Shelter from the Holocaust, it includes several chapters that were translations of previously published articles into Polish. All three volumes inspired the shape and content of this collection. With regard to the subject of this book, Markus Nesselrodt and Eliyana R. Adler have published comprehensive histories of the Polish Jewish exile in the Soviet Union.8 Katharina Friedla, Natalie Belsky, and others9 will follow with the results of their research in the near future. But the rather late interest of scholars of the Davies and Polonsky, Jews. The first extensive analysis of the issue of Polish Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union during World War II was provided by Josef Litvak, Pelitim Yehudim mi-Polin be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot, 1939–1946 ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1988). In 1959, Israeli historian Meir Korzen called for a historical analysis of the lives of Polish Jewish expatriates in the Soviet Union and demanded the inclusion of this important chapter of Jewish history in the field of Holocaust studies. Korzen, “Problems Arising out of Research into the History of Jewish Refugees in the USSR during the Second World War,” Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959): 119. On the Jewish presence in the Berling Army see Kalman Nussbaum, Ve-Hafah lahem le-Roeits: Ha-Yehudim be-Tsava ha-Amami ha-Polani be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Center, 1984). 6 Edele, Fitzpatrick, and Grossmann, Shelter. 7 Friedla and Zessin-Jurek, Syberiada. 8 Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion (1939–1946) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 9 Katharina Friedla, Natalie Belsky, Na’ama Seri-Levi, Serafima Velkovich, and Lidia ZessinJurek are currently working on monographs closely related to the subject of this book. 4 5

Introduction

Holocaust and East European Jewish history in the topic raises two questions: Why has this story remained in the shadows of public and scholarly interest for so long and is it fair to say that this field of study is now reaching maturity?

“On the Margins of the Holocaust”10 There are four explanations for the delay in scholarly interest and publications examining the fate of Polish Jews in the USSR. Beyond political context, they all point to the global character of this particular scholarly endeavor. Both the primary sources and the early research on the topic are multilingual. In order to fully comprehend this story and access the relevant materials, scholars need to have fluency in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German, and English. This is a difficult if not almost impossible task that calls for international and multilingual scholarly cooperation. Moreover, the sources have been scattered across numerous countries. This was a result of Polish Jews migrating to various countries on virtually every continent after the war. Researchers therefore must either travel the world by themselves or again, cooperate internationally. So far, travel has been the preponderant approach but informal working groups have been established with centers in North America, Europe, and Israel. Scholars of Eastern Europe are all too familiar with the reality of closed archives and classified collections. Despite the opening of some archives in the territory of the former Soviet Union, many collections remain inaccessible to researchers, regardless of their language skills, funding opportunities, or level of international cooperation. At the same time, other archives have provided access to underexplored sources. We will return to the question of archival sources below. There are two more reasons for the delayed historiographical and public attention: the effect of the Cold War on Holocaust memory and the establishment of Holocaust studies as a separate field in history. As Antony Polonsky notes in his foreword to this collection, it was very uncommon in the early postwar period to openly tell the story of survival in the Communist Soviet Union. While their goal of immigration to the United States led surviving Polish Jews to leave out their connections to the Soviets in their written records, immigrants to Palestine and later Israel equally faced a lack of public interest in their

10 This is what Israeli Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer called the story of Polish Jewish survival in Soviet exile. Bauer, foreword to From the Gestapo to the Gulags: One Jewish Life by Zev Katz (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), XIV.

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past.11 Jewish returnees from Soviet exile were not alone in their survivor guilt or their strong will to look forward instead. Indeed, it was very common for Holocaust survivors in general to focus on establishing new lives in new environments before some of them began talking or writing about their wartime experiences.12 While this does not mean that there was no discourse—even if limited—on the Holocaust, it was only in the 1970s that public interest in listening to survivors grew significantly.13 An expanding body of Holocaust historiography, Holocaust museums, as well as works of art such as movies and books have created an environment in which survivors felt comfortable telling their stories.14 The last reason has to do with the evolving field of Holocaust studies, its scope, methodological assumptions, and focus. When Jewish survivors began collecting documents and testimonies by fellow Jews in postwar Europe, many of them were not professional historians with the exception of Philip Friedman, 11 Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 373–399. 12 Beth Cohen, Case Closed. Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). It must also be stressed that in the early years after the Shoah some memoirs and recollections on the Soviet experience written in Yiddish were published. Moreover, the Soviet exile appeared in a few Yizker-bikher memorial books though not in great detail. Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, above all in South America and Israel, some Yiddish publishing houses produced an important body of literature which has not been used in research so far. Zusman Segalowitsh, Gebrente Trit (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1947); David Lederman, Fun Yener Zayt Forhang (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1960); Jakov Kahan, Unter di Sovyetishe Himeln (Tel Aviv: Farlag J. L. Peretz, 1961); Gershon Lustgartn, In Vander un Gerangl (Tel Aviv, 1968); Yizchak Ichiels, Fun Bug biz Pyetshora (Tel Aviv: Yehiels, 1966). Markus Nesselrodt has shown the importance of early postwar Yiddish poetry. Markus Nesselrodt, “‘I bled like you, brother, although I was a thousand miles away’: postwar Yiddish sources on the experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet exile during World War II,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 1 (2016): 47–67. For a similar approach towards literary sources: Magdalena Ruta, “Gułag poetów, doświadczenie uchodźstwa, łagrów i tułaczki na terenie ZSRR w twórczości polskich pisarzy języka jidysz (1939–1949),” in Zessin-Jurek and Friedla, Syberiada, 307–337; Magdalena Ruta, Without Jews? Yiddish Literature in the People’s Republic of Poland on the Holocaust, Poland, and Communism (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2018). 13 Hasia Diner argues that there has never been a silence among the survivors of the Holocaust within American Jewish communities. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 14 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

Introduction

Nakhman Blumenthal, Joseph Kermisz, and a few others.15 Nevertheless, survivors, among them returnees from the Soviet Union, established several historical commissions whose archival collections are among the most valuable sources of information about the Holocaust and its aftermath.16 One center of an early reflection on Polish Jewish survival in the Soviet Union were the camps for Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) in Allied occupied Germany. Since the late 1990s, growing research on postwar DP history highlighted the fact that most Polish Jewish DPs had spent the war in the depth of the Soviet Union.17 Preceding the research on Jewish DPs, the Holocaust had moved to the center of twentieth-century history writing in the United States and Western Europe.18 Yet, wartime and postwar history have very much remained separated issues in Holocaust historiography. At the same time, research on refugee experiences in the Soviet Union, Iran, Palestine, China or elsewhere has contributed to widening the definition of the Holocaust and Holocaust survival. We will return to this matter later. According to a well-known anecdote, Raul Hilberg, one of the pioneers of Holocaust studies, was told by his adviser that he was ruining his career by writing what became his masterpiece, The Destruction of the European Jews, in the late 1950s.19 The history of the emergence of Holocaust studies was told elsewhere.20 What is important in this context is that it took several decades to 15 Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Natalia Aleksiun, Conscious History. Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021). 16 Jockusch, Collect. 17 Some landmark studies were: Israel Gutman and Avital Saf, eds., She’erit Hapletah 1944–1948, Rehabilitation and Political Struggle ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990); Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz, eds., “We are here.” New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), and Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 18 Boaz Cohen, Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution (London: Routledge, 2013) and Stephan Stach, “The Central Jewish Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland,” in Crimes Uncovered. The First Generation of Holocaust Researchers, ed. Hans-Christian Jasch and Stephan Lehnstaedt (Berlin: Metropol, 2019), 208–231. 19 Robert P. Ericksen, “‘Ordinary Christians’ in Nazi Germany,” in “Beyond Ordinary Men”: Christopher R. Browning and Holocaust Historiography, ed. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, Jürgen Matthäus, and Mark W. Hornburg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019), 45. 20 David Bankier and Dan Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (New York: Berghahn, 2008).

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establish international cooperation among key players within the multilingual field of Holocaust studies.21 From the beginning of early Holocaust studies, discussion centered around methodological debates on how to incorporate them into a comprehensive approach to writing the history of the Shoah. In 1997, historian Saul Friedländer introduced his concept of an integrated history of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.22 His idea was to combine various sources and perspectives—in this case victims, perpetrators, and witnesses of the mass murder—into one narrative. When Friedländer published his magnum opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, this was a muchneeded synthesis. An integrated history was necessary in order to simultaneously explain the perpetrators’ motives and actions, give voice to the victims, and help understand the role of millions of Europeans who were in one way or another involved in the persecution and destruction of Jewish communities. It took four decades from the early groundbreaking works of Holocaust historiography to Friedländer’s book which made extensive use of Jewish ego documents. Raul Hilberg himself—whose research relied on German perpetrator sources—indicated the need for a new direction in Holocaust research in 1988: Even if we keep searching for more documents in archives . . . or generate more testimony in oral history projects . . . the resulting picture will surely be more detailed, but it will not contain a sharply new perspective. And that is only half of the problem, because the question is not confined to what we should describe; it is also a matter of how we should write.23

One important reason for the challenges in developing methodological approaches to the study of the Holocaust was its scale and complexity. This is why Friedländer’s work was necessary and may serve as a model for the history of Jewish flight and exile during World War II.

21 See for example the biennial Lessons and Legacies of the Holocaust Conference (since 1989), and the two academic journals Yad Vashem Studies (since 1957) and Holocaust and Genocide Studies (since 1986). 22 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). 23 Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 20.

Introduction

While it may still take time for a fully integrated history of Jewish exile in the Soviet Union, the body of research in English has been growing considerably over the past 15 years, and we hope that scholars from other fields of expertise will contribute. It brought to our attention both old and new questions. Importantly, perceiving Polish Jewish returnees from the Soviet Union as survivors of the Holocaust is hardly new. As this volume suggests and the extensive body of Yiddish poetry, novels, short stories, and memoirs from the 1940s and 50s shows, many Polish Jews considered themselves part of a survivor collective long before such questions arose in legal terms or memory politics. Such a move may be necessary to add new perspectives on the subject of this volume, for example from Holocaust, migration, East European, war, Gulag and genocide studies. Getting to know the history of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union may lead to a better understanding of research topics that have not been associated with this story so far. One example may be the discussion of the term survivor in Holocaust studies; still being hotly debated both in academia and the public sphere.24 The survival of three-quarters of the small number of surviving Polish Jews is a history of forced Soviet refuge but at the same time part of a larger story of World War II and the Holocaust. In the official Polish and Soviet contemporary documentation as well as in the historiography this group is categorized mostly as refugees, sometimes also as deportees, evacuees, or as flight survivors.25 Many of those who survived in the East were refugees from Central and Western Poland. Some of them found themselves in the USSR as POWs, political prisoners, deportees, voluntary workers, or evacuees after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Therefore this is a complex and complicated history of survival marked by very different experiences.26 This is why it is so difficult to apply a single integrating term for all Polish Jews who survived the war in the unoccupied Soviet Union. While the majority survived due to their arrival on Soviet soil, others fell victim to the Soviet security police, died in battle against the German army or starved to death. There is no unifying Soviet experience, but a variety of it. 24 Alina Bothe and Markus Nesselrodt, “Survivor: Towards a Conceptual History,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (2016): 57–82. 25 Adler, Survival on the Margins, 5. 26 Recently, John Goldlust and Eliyana Adler analyzed the changes in the identity of refugees over time in their self-perception as “refugees” or “Holocaust survivors,” Eliyana Adler, “Crossing Over: Exploring the Borders of Holocaust Testimony,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 247–274; John Goldlust, “Identity Profusions: Bio-Historical Journeys from ‘Polish Jew’/‘Jewish Pole’ through ‘Soviet Citizen’ to ‘Holocaust Survivor’,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 219–246.

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Another example of the need for a cross-disciplinary conversation is the fascinating interaction between Polish Jewish refugees, Soviet evacuees, and the local populations in the Soviet Union. Here Soviet and Jewish studies could mutually benefit from each other’s insights. The classic disciplinary crossing between migration and Jewish studies may also broaden their perspectives by studying the border transgressing movement of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union and beyond.

New Research Perspectives There is a growing need for interdisciplinary mining of the rich body of sources. The political transformation which began in Poland in 1990 and continued with the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in opening previously sealed archives. They revealed a plethora of information critical to the understanding of the wartime and postwar era. More importantly, the growing public awareness of the history of the Holocaust spurred Jewish survivors, especially in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, to share their experiences and memories of life in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1946.27 Both survivors and their children discovered the Soviet chapter in their family history which resulted in several publications and exhibitions.28 Moreover, several research institutions including the Yad Vashem Archive in Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, and Ośrodek KARTA Eastern Archive in Warsaw began to show interest in the topic, collecting and publishing numerous inter27 For example, Moshe Ajzenbund, The Commissar Took Care (Melbourne: Globe Press, 1986); Toby Flam Klodawska, Toby: Her Journey from Lodz to Samarkand (and Beyond) (Toronto: Childe Thursday, 1988); Moshe Prywes, Prisoner of Hope (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1996); Bernard L. Ginsburg, A Wayfarer in a World in Upheaval (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1996); Harry Altman, Memoirs of a Stormy Life: May We Never Be Tested With That Which We Can Be Punished (San Jose, CA: Writers Club Press, 2000); Mietek Sieradzki, By a Twist of Fate: The Three Lives of a Polish Jew (London: Vallentine Mitchel, 2002); Zev Katz, From the Gestapo to the Gulags: One Jewish Life (London: Vallentine Mitchel, 2004). Many of these memoirs were self published, see Marie Brandstetter, Mania’s Angel: My Life Story (1995); Anna Bruell, Autumn in Springtime: Memories of World War II (Melbourne: A. Bruell, 1995). 28 Ellen G. Friedman, The Seven. A Family Holocaust Story (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017); Mikhal Dekel, Tehran Children. A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Exhibition From Home to Home. A Tale of the Wartime Exile and Survival of the Pisek Family, Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow, Poland (November 2019). A new exhibition (2021–2022) in the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main on Our Courage: Jews in Europe 1945–1948 features a section on Polish Jewish survival in the Soviet Union.

Introduction

views with Polish Jewish survivors of Soviet exile. These projects resulted in collecting a broad spectrum of recorded testimonies accessible for researchers. Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum collected thousands of video testimonies. Both archives also offer large visual documentation which can also be used for research purposes. The largest archive worldwide which collected more than 50,000 video testimonies is the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. We can also access testimony collections in Ośrodek KARTA, the Jewish Historical Institute and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, also in Warsaw. This exceptional body of testimonies allows selective insights into the past while documenting emotions and reactions people were preoccupied with at the time. They have extraordinary informational value, especially because of the fragments which draw a broad picture of postwar life: the repatriation from the Soviet Union to Poland, confrontation with the catastrophe of the Holocaust, visions of restoring postwar Jewish life in Poland, as well as escape to the Displaced Persons camps in Germany and further emigration. The access to new archival collections in post-communist Europe as well as developments in digital humanities have led scholars to raise new questions concerning social and everyday life of Polish Jewish refugees in the USSR, interethnic relations in the Soviet hinterland, or issues related to identity and collective memory. Despite the increasing growth of scholarly work, the subject of the Polish Jewish experience in the Soviet Union still leaves many issues to be explored by researchers. Some of these topics remain politically controversial. Among these is the attitude of the Polish government-in-exile towards Jews in the USSR and in particular the so-called amnesty29 announced for Polish citizens after the Polish-Soviet agreement of August 1941.30 The amnesty has been presented as a turning point in the Polish Jewish relations in exile, and a catalyst for rejection of Polish Jews who sought to be drafted into the Polish army, 29 The word amnesty was used in the above-mentioned Polish-Soviet agreement. Yet, the Polish government-in-exile stressed that Polish citizens on Soviet territory were held captive for no legitimate reason which is why most historians reject the term. From the Soviet standpoint the imprisonment of those who were held in special settlements and other forced labor camps was legal. 30 Two volumes by David Engel give some fragmentary insights into this topic. Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Engel, Facing a Holocaust. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

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resulting from privileging ethnic Poles. At stake was a place in the army and protection from the government in London, since many Polish Jews had lost their Polish citizenship during the war. Therefore, very important issues for further research could be the activity of the Polish embassy delegations and their attitudes toward Polish-Jewish citizens and the question of Jewish soldiers in Anders’ Army, especially the fate of those who took part in the battle on the Western front.31 It would also be worth looking at the aid operations and international reactions of Jewish organizations, among others in the Yishuv, towards Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union.32 Still much is left to be written about the daily life of Polish Jews in Soviet exile, and the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish Polish deportees. Likewise, additional issues such as gender and the consequences of political affiliation should be integrated in the research. Another potential subject for future research may concern the attitude of the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich) toward Jews in the USSR, the activities of the Steering Committee of Polish Jews in the USSR (Komitet Organizacyjny Żydów Polskich), but also the question of Jewish support for the Soviet regime. The myth of “żydokomuna” ( Judeo-Communism)33 was reactivated intensely during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland (1939–1941) and culminated after the war, when Jews appeared in political positions where they have never been seen before. This perspective is the object of unending debates that has bred its own literature on the subject.34 As a matter of fact, 31 The first attempt to explore the question of Jewish soldiers within the Anders’ Army was the investigation by Yisrael Gutman, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies XII (1977): 231–296. See also Tomasz Gąsowski, Pod sztandarami orła białego. Kwestia żydowska w Polskich Siłach Zbrojnych w czasie II wojny światowej (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2002). Interestingly, Norman Davies does not explore the subject in depth in Trail of Hope. The Anders Army. An Odyssey Across Three Continents (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 32 Atina Grossmann has shown the importance of the relief work in the USSR undertaken by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Grossmann, “Joint Fund Teheran. JDC and the Jewish Lifeline to Central Asia,” in The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism, ed. Avinoam J. Patt et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 205–244. See also Keith Sword, “The Welfare of Polish Jewish Refugees in the USSR, 1941–43: Relief Supplies and their Distribution,” in Davies, Polonsky, 145–160. 33 The political antisemitic stereotype of “żydokomuna” or “Judeo-Bolshevism” came from the prewar period, when the image of Jews as profiteers, rulers and servants of the Soviet Union was wide used. 34 See, for example, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Rzeczywistość sowiecka 1939–1941 w świadectwach polskich Żydów (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, RYTM, 2009).

Introduction

also this chapter of the history of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union requires more extensive analysis. The Polish Jewish experience of repatriation has raised increasing interest.35 What seems important in this context is the reflection on the impact of the Soviet experience on the reestablishment of Jewish life in postwar Poland and the question of networks and support among this group of Jews. What is still missing is research on those Polish Jews who stayed in the USSR until the second repatriation in the mid-1950s as well as on those who stayed permanently. There are no exact figures how many Polish Jews decided to stay in the Soviet Union after the war. There is one more issue that continues to bedevil historians working on this topic, namely the question about statistics. Given the enormous fluctuation of this group of refugees, historians will perhaps never be able to determine exact numbers of Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet occupied territories, who were deported into the interior of the USSR, who volunteered to work in the East, who were imprisoned, who went after the “amnesty” to Central Asia, lost their lives in the Soviet Union or survived the war and were “repatriated” to Poland. Recently, Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik published a comparative evaluation of the extensive sources which provide a good overview on these statistics.36 It is to be hoped that in the future historians will make more use of the extensive and rich archival collections in their historical examinations. The chapters in this volume indicate the enormous potential of unexplored sources and validate that this field of research still has the potential to be expanded.

Overview of the Book Twelve chapters are divided into two chronologically arranged sections: history and memory. The first deals with events that took place between 1939 and 1959 with a focus on politics and culture; the second focuses on debates and reflections about the historical events during wartime specifically. In his chapter, Markus Nesselrodt analyzes various ways of escaping to the East by comparing the first flight movement in the fall of 1939 with the second wave of escape into the Soviet hinterland after the German invasion of the USSR in 1941. Using several biographical sketches, Nesselrodt analyzes successful attempts by Polish Jews to escape. He describes individual decision-making 35 See e.g., Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen, 270–323. 36 Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 95–131.

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processes, shows complex circumstances under which the flight occurred, and reflects on the differences in the size and dimension of the flight movement. Eliyana Adler sheds light on the experiences of Polish Jewish children and youth in the Soviet Union during World War II. The Soviet exile through the lens of children remains a relatively unexplored part of the historical narrative about Jewish fates in war-torn Soviet Union. Adler provides an in-depth analysis of twelve early children’s testimonies from the collection of the so-called Palestinian Protocols. Children’s statements include an extraordinary wealth of information describing the German invasion of Poland, flight into the Soviet occupation zone, deportation to distant parts of the Soviet Union, and religious and ethnic relations between Catholic Poles and Jews. While exploring some methodological and analytical questions, Adler highlights the enormous potential for research in this valuable corpus of sources. Albert Kaganovitch’s chapter provides an analysis of interviews, archival documents, and memoirs of Polish Jewish refugees addressing the complex subject of relations between Polish Jews and Catholic Poles in the Soviet exile. His contribution examines their contact zones on the individual and the official level, including Polish orphanages, and the representatives of the Polish government-in-exile. In her chapter, Katharina Friedla presents new insights into a hitherto largely neglected topic—the experiences of Polish Jewish soldiers within the Polish Army in the USSR. She examines Polish Jewish soldiers’ motivation for fighting, Polish and Soviet recruitment policies towards Jews, as well as Polish-Jewish relations and the participation of Jewish women in the army ranks. Entering the prewar Eastern Polish territories in the summer of 1944, Polish Jewish soldiers were the first to come face-to-face with the unimaginable destruction of the Shoah. Friedla explores how it affected Jewish soldiers, how they confronted German soldiers and civilians, and finally focuses on their visions of rebuilding their existence after the war. Wojciech Marciniak’s chapter recounts the repatriation of Polish and Polish Jewish citizens from the Soviet Union to postwar Poland. Marciniak offers an overview of Polish diplomatic activities which resulted in the organized return of Polish citizens, among them thousands of Polish Jews, in the immediate postwar period. In her chapter, Serafima Velkovich shows that the repatriation of Polish citizens from the Soviet Union offered an opportunity for a group of Soviet Jews to escape Stalin’s regime. Based on ego documents as well as on Soviet secret police (NKVD) files, Velkovich reconstructs the escape methods supported by the Zionist organization Brichah of mostly Zionists and religious orthodox Jews.

Introduction

Miriam Schulz focuses on Polish Yiddish intellectuals and their perception of Soviet Yiddish culture. She analyzes the role of Polish intellectuals who survived the war in the Soviet Union and adapted the concept of Marranos to the Soviet Yiddish literary scene, in particular for the murdered Soviet Yiddish elite, and transmitted this term to Western countries after the war. The relation between the Soviet and Polish Yiddish writers is also the subject of a chapter by Gennady Estraikh. He analyzes the biography of Hersh Smolar—a communist functionary in the Polish People’s Republic—and his activities from the late 1940s through the late 1960s. He examines Smolar’s contacts with the Soviet Jewish elite, and shows how he succeeded in influencing Jewish life in the USSR. The second part of the book focuses on the Polish Jewish memory of survival in the Soviet Union. Based on interviews, and testimonies, Natalie Belsky’s chapter sheds light on the interactions between Polish and Soviet Jews, simultaneously analyzing how the protagonists remember the past and the way in which they described one another. The testimonies reveal the importance of a shared Jewish identity of Soviet and Polish Jews. John Goldlust discusses how Polish Jews remember and reflect on their Soviet experiences in accounts written decades after the events. While examining these testimonies and memoirs, Goldlust reflects on the problem of marginalizing and privatizing survival stories and sheds light on the tensions in self-perception of this group between “survivors” and “non-victims.” Lidia Zessin-Jurek focuses on the Polish context of the so-called non-memory. She analyzes the remembrance politics of Siberia and the absence of the Jewish experience in broader Polish memory. The last chapter of the volume by Renata Piątkowska and Przemysław Kaniecki describes various items in the collection of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Through these objects, documents, and letters, Piątkowska and Kaniecki reconstruct a broad spectrum of Polish Jewish experiences in the Soviet Union and demonstrate the need for a visual history approach to the subject. In his epilogue, Mark Edele summarizes the recent historiography and identifies future perspectives in researching the history and memory of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. Finally, a bibliography listing selected publications on this book’s subject in English, Polish, German, Hebrew, and Russian seeks to give an overview on available primary and secondary sources.

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CHAPTER 1

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941 Markus Nesselrodt

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leeing to the interior of the Soviet Union offered Polish Jews the greatest chance of surviving the genocide of European Jewry. Most historians agree that between 160,000 and 230,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust because they made it beyond Germany’s grasp deep inside the Soviet Union in a wide variety of ways.1 This chapter analyses the causes for, as well as the development and successes of, the Polish Jewish flight from German persecution between September 1, 1939, and the fall of 1941. This refugee movement occurred in two phases. The first phase encompassed the time frame between the German invasion of Poland in 1939 and June 22, 1941. The second phase began with the German invasion of the Soviet Union and ended in the fall of 1941. Polish Jews are the focus of my analysis, specifically those Jewish citizens of the prewar Second Polish Republic who managed to flee into the interior of the Soviet Union. Due to size limitations, the experiences of forced deportation, recruitment into the Red Army, resettlement following arrest and internment, as well as flight through Lithuania by

I want to thank Katharina Friedla, Frank Grelka, Jesse Lillefjeld, and Michael Bedwell for their valuable comments and assistance. 1 Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 123; Albert Kaganovitch, “Stalin’s Great Power Politics, the Return of Jewish Refugees to Poland, and Continued Migration to Palestine, 1944–1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 75; Albert Stankowski and Piotr Weiser, “Demograficzne skutki Holokaustu,” in Następstwa zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika AdamczykGarbowska (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2011), 36.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

means of a transit visa will not be dealt with here.2 However, the mass evacuation of Soviet citizens in the summer and fall of 1941 will be included, as Polish Jews were among them. From a comparative perspective, through the use of biographical accounts, we will see if the refugee movements of the two phases differ from one another or if they reveal similar characteristics. These accounts from people of different ages, family backgrounds, political beliefs, and personal ties to the Soviet Union. Their life stories come from journal entries, memoirs, letters, and personal conversation, and they were chosen because they reflect the experience of the majority of Polish Jewish refugees.

Phase One: September 1939 until June 1941 The German invasion of Poland and subsequent terror campaign against the civilian population confronted every Jew with the question whether to flee their homes or to stay and attempt to continue with daily life. After September 1, 1939, around 300,000 Jews fled eastward to escape the advancing Wehrmacht—into the very territory that the Red Army would occupy after September 17, and would subsequently be annexed by the Soviet Union in November 1939. The refugees’ arrival raised the number of Polish Jews under Soviet control to around 1.6 million. The other half, the 1.7 of the 3.3 million Polish Jews, found themselves under German administration either in the Generalgouvernement or the territories incorporated into the Reich.3 Given the violence of the German occupation, it is important to emphasize that flight in the first phase between 1939 and the summer of 1941 was an exception.4 During this timeframe, around one in six or seven Jews fled. Leon Zelman, a survivor of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, explains why the overwhelming majority of Jews did not flee to the Soviet side of the border, describing the surrounding mood in his memoirs: Here and there one heard of a Jew who had killed himself out of desperation [about the conditions of the German occupation]. Others 2 For a state-of-the-art research overview see Katharina Friedla and Lidia Zessin-Jurek, eds., Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020). 3 Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939– 1946 (Berlin: De Gruyter–Oldenbourg, 2019), 40. 4 See also the chapter by Eliyana Adler in this volume.

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David Fiszering recorded a very different account in his diary—nearly all of the 450 Jewish inhabitants of the small town of Chorzele fled after the war began. Who remained? “Only the poor, who couldn’t afford to stay anywhere else or to keep going, came back.”6 Or as Lea Prais revealed, many refugees decided not to go east but set off in the direction of the Polish capital instead.7 Although these figures should be looked at with caution,8 they still reveal that only a minority of the Jewish population fled the advancing German army and chose to cross the German-Soviet border into the eastern part of occupied Poland. Every attempt to analyze this refugee movement has been confounded by a wide array of factors.9

The Decision to Flee Eliyana R. Adler calls the complex and difficult decision-making process of fleeing the Germans between 1939 and 1941 “a fluid decision.”10 Adler identifies the interplay between differing motivations and actors and their influence, one with fateful consequences for Polish Jews. She also emphasizes the fact that all too often a decision made could be amended or revised.11 The decision to stay or go is to be understood as a dynamic process, one that could be influenced by a variety of factors. Here, geography, time, information, resources, and family constellations were the most important factors. In practice these

5 Klaus-Peter Friedrich and Andrea Löw, Introduction to Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, vol. 4, Polen. September 1939–Juli 1941, ed. Klaus-Peter Friedrich and Andrea Löw (Berlin: De Gruyter– Oldenbourg, 2011), 30. 6 Lea Prais, Displaced Persons at Home: Refugees in the Fabric of Jewish Life in Warsaw, September 1939–July 1942 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2015), 58. 7 Prais, 56–57. 8 For an in-depth discussion of numbers see Edele and Warlik, “Saved by Stalin?” 9 Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun, “Seeking Relative Safety: The Flight of Polish Jews to the East in the Autumn of 1939,” Yad Vashem Studies 46, no. 1 (2018): 41–71. 10 Adler, “Hrubieszów,” 21. 11 Andrzej Żbikowski, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma. Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawskiego, vol. 3: Relacje z Kresów (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000).

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

influence factors interact with each other, however, for analysis it is important to deal with them separately. The decision to flee was overwhelmingly influenced by the distance of one’s home from the German-Soviet border. The closer a Polish Jew lived to the border the greater the potential for both fleeing and its chances of success.12 Another factor was the timeframe within which the decision was made. After the Red Army invaded Poland and occupied the country’s eastern half on September 17, 1939, for the majority the option to flee only existed during the first weeks of the war. After the German-Soviet border was sealed in late October/early November 1939, crossing it became more expensive, dangerous, and physically challenging than before.13 The overwhelming majority of Jewish refugees who crossed into Soviet-controlled territory did it within the first eight weeks. The number of those who successfully crossed over to the eastern side of the border between November 1939 and June 1941 is small by contrast.14 The decision to flee also greatly depended upon what information was available to Poland’s Jewish population regarding the German menace and the political situation within the Soviet Union before and after September 17, 1939. There was a certain amount of information that traveled in family circles, generated from newspaper articles and personal contacts, about the antisemitic policies of the National Socialists in Germany. The so-called Polenaktion, the forced deportation of around 17,000 Polish Jews from the German Reich in October 1938, was especially well known among the politically informed. An array of conclusions was drawn from the varying amounts of information available. While some doubted the reports about the brutal German occupation regime during the first weeks of the war, and dismissed the accounts from refugees as merely rumors or exaggerations, others promptly decided to flee. After Poland was partitioned into German and Soviet spheres of control, crossing the new border was an option. But even the decision to immigrate to the Soviet Union depended upon the level of knowledge that the Polish Jews possessed about their eastern neighbor. Here, too, opinions were influenced by information from newspapers and personal accounts. Many testimonies 12 Adler, “Hrubieszów,” 1–2; Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen, 42. 13 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 44. The exact location of the border was laid down in the German-Soviet treaty of September 23, 1939. 14 For a discussion of the so-called “no man’s land” see Lidia Zessin-Jurek, “Neither this way nor that, nor any other—Polish Jewish refugees facing the no man’s land on the German-Soviet border (1939–1940),” East European Jewish Affairs (accepted for publication in 2022).

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describe the decision as choosing the lesser evil—Germany or the Soviet Union—illustrating the inherent complexity of their decisions. Fleeing after September 17, 1939, meant spending the foreseeable future in the Soviet Union. Flight required multiple resources: money or personal valuables, transportation, contact with porters and those who could help underway, and above all someone on the other side of the border whose address provided the refugee with a physical destination. Taking the chaotic conditions during the first days of the war into account, the ability to move quickly and unhindered sometimes meant life or death, be it by train, horse-drawn cart, or on foot. As refugees often had to change their routes multiple times, it was immensely important to have a concrete destination beyond the German-Soviet border. Often it was the address of a relative, a business partner, or political friend; in many cases it was the seat of a local Jewish community.15 Typically, the decision to flee was not just that of an individual but part of a greater family discussion. Both age and gender were importation factors in deciding who would go and if the attempt would be made at all. Disputes between younger and older family members were not uncommon, as were disagreements between male and female heads of family. Often the decisions made by parents or grandparents were altered or simply ignored. In some cases, the decision-making process took so long that the window of opportunity closed and flight became impossible.16 When historiographical discourse estimates some 300,000 Polish Jewish refugees in Soviet-occupied territory, then one must assume that thousands were unsuccessful in their attempt to cross the border,17 or they changed their minds during the attempt and returned to the German side.18 The biographies of three refugees help us better understand successful flight attempts in the first phase before June 22, 1941.

In Search of a Safe Haven—Herman Kruk Herman Kruk, born in 1897 in Płock (present-day Poland) was a librarian by trade, journalist, photographer, and active Bundist. At the onset of the German 15 Prais, Displaced at Home, 60. 16 For an in-depth discussion see Aleksiun and Adler, “Seeking Relative Safety.” 17 Daniel Boćkowski, “Losy żydowskich uchodźców z centralnej i zachodniej Polski przebywających na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich w latach 1939–1941,” in Świat NIEpożegnany. Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodniej Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku, ed. Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Rytm, 2004), 93. Boćkowski mentions “thousands of Jews” who died while trying to cross the German-Soviet border. 18 Żbikowski, Relacje z Kresów.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

invasion, he lived with his wife and child in Warsaw, the country’s capital. In an account written in January 1940, Kruk describes his flight from Warsaw to Vilnius which was the capital of Lithuania at the time.19 Kruk’s account, translated from Yiddish by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, is a valuable source of information about the movement of refugees during the first days of the war as it was written within weeks of the events taking place. He details how he and a group of acquaintances decided to head east together on September 6, 1939. The impetus came from the decree issued by Polish armed forces high command ordering all men fit for military service to head east of the Vistula River.20 He left his wife and child behind in Warsaw as he did not want to leave them stranded in an unfamiliar place in case he was mobilized. He describes over-crowded streets full of refugees. “Everyone gives the impression that he knows it is too late.”21 During their journey, the group was routinely strafed by German aircraft—to the detriment of the refugees’ morale. At about 9 in the morning [on September 7, 1939, near Otwock] we had the first air raid, and it lasted all day without letup. That day was extremely hard. Dozens of times we ran from the carts to hide from the bombs. Horrible scenes took place in the forest. People look for family members who got lost in the dark of the night. Women and children shudder. Men, tired from running, throw off their shoes and run barefoot. Horses are frightened by the bombing and run away with the wagons, leaving the passengers in the forest. Everyone trembles with fear. As soon as we hear explosions, people cling to each other. People can’t lie still and simply run off aimlessly. People chase after one another. In some cases people lose their senses and run away from the crowd thinking this will save them. People run after them and bring them back. Everybody’s eyes blaze. The ground shakes. The forests rise up. The rattling of machine guns is jolting, 19 Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. and trans. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 1–23. Following a Soviet-Lithuania agreement, Vilnius (Wilna) was declared the capital of the Republic of Lithuania on October 10, 1939. In August 1940, the Red Army occupied Lithuania and incorporated the country into the Soviet Union. 20 Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007), 43. According to Friedländer, the Polish army broadcast took place on September 7, 1939, urging all men to head east of the Vistula River where they would establish a new line of defense. 21 Kruk, Last Days, 3.

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Markus Nesselrodt and the fear keeps rising. The road from Otwock to Garwolin was then a horrible hell.22

Upon seeing the mass exodus of military, police, and firefighting vehicles, Kruk worried about the fate of his family in Warsaw but he continued his journey nonetheless. After several days of traveling on foot and by horse-drawn carriage, Kruk and his companions were near exhaustion. One night as they were camped in a dark forest near Wisznice, desperation took hold of his fellow refugees. “The[ir] faces are terrified. Women weep. We stop our wagon and go into the forest. Scores of families from Radzyń are there: with bundles, bedclothes, everything they could grab—they lie on the ground and cry to one another. Even men cry. Everyone asks us what to do.”23 Despair and uneasiness about what was to come overwhelmed Herman Kruk as well. It seemed there was no one with any reliable information. Even the Polish soldiers they encountered seemed resigned and lacked any sign of fighting spirit. Kruk remembered the questions that crossed the minds of so many other refugees. “Where is the road? Where is the way out of their situation?”24 In Mielnica, Kruk heard Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s radio broadcast about the coming “Liberation of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus from the Polish yoke.”25 At first there was a great deal of uncertainty about how the group should react to this information, but nonetheless they continued on towards Kowel (present-day Kovel’, Ukraine). Along the way they encountered a group of Jewish refugees who asked, “‘Where are you running? . . . You want to go to the Germans?’ We stop again. Talk with people again—now everyone advises running to Luck [present-day Lutsk, Ukraine] . . . .”26 They passed some Soviet tanks and arrived at Łuck in the night where they encountered a mix of Bundists, journalists, and intellectuals from Warsaw and Lublin: “Everyone tells of horrible events.”27 Kruk did not stay long in Sovietoccupied Łuck as he wanted to find his brother who was on his way to Vilnius. As chance would have it, they ran into one another and continued their journey to Vilnius together. On October 10, the brothers reached their destination. For the time being, they seemed to have reached safety. 22 Kruk, Last Days, 4. 23 Kruk, Last Days, 9. 24 Kruk, 17. 25 Kruk, 18. 26 Kruk, 19. 27 Kruk, 20.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

The account that Kruk wrote in the weeks after he arrived in Vilnius illustrates some of the fundamental phenomena of the refugee flight from West to East.28 Kruk did not travel alone but in a group who had the means to finance their common transportation. The catalyst for their flight, as it was for many other men from Warsaw, was the order to head east in order to construct a new line of defense. In order not to jeopardize their safety, Kruk left his wife and child behind. The clear and vivid descriptions of chaos on the roads, the collapse of state authority, and the feeling of panic and hopelessness among the refugees appeared in many eyewitness accounts. Kruk’s flight to Vilnius was successful because he left Warsaw at the right time and because he encountered people along the way who knew ways to escape the wartime chaos.

Fear as A Reason to Flee—Simon Davidson Simon Davidson, born in 1892 in the Russian Empire, was an accountant and Bundist from Łódź, Poland, who left his hometown and headed east just five days after the war began. Davidson was a keen observer of the political developments in Europe, and especially in neighboring Germany. In his memoirs (1978–1981), he wrote that after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact on August 23, 1939, he felt that war with Germany was inevitable.29 Ever since the Polenaktion of October 1938 he had grave concerns about German antisemitism. After the German Luftwaffe bombed the rail lines in Łódź on September 1, 1939, Davidson consulted his fellow Bundists and decided that, as Jewish Socialists, they could not fall into German hands. On the morning of September 6, Davidson and his son set off on foot to cover the 140-kilometer trek to Warsaw. Like Hermann Kruk and so many other male refugees, Simon Davidson left his wife and daughter behind with the assumption that under German occupation women would face less danger than men. Davidson, like Kruk, also wrote in his memoirs that he intended to join up with the Polish army. On the way to Warsaw, Davidson’s group passed villages like Sochaczew where they tried to convince the Jewish residents to flee the oncoming Germans. Most decided against leaving as they had no place to go to.30 Upon arrival in Warsaw, the group stayed at the home of a fellow Bundist but they 28 Edele and Warlik, “Saved by Stalin?,” 99. By February 1940, 14,000 Jewish refugees had arrived in Vilnius. 29 Simon Davidson, My War Years, 1939–1945 (San Antonio: University of Texas, 1981). The first edition was published in Yiddish in 1978: Mayne milḥome-yorn, 1939–1945. 30 Davidson, My War Years, 18.

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were forced to move on after a bomb destroyed much of the building. While in Warsaw, Davidson heard about the imminent Soviet invasion on the radio and tried to convince his comrades to join him and flee east; however, most decided to stay in Warsaw.31 Davidson anticipated that the Vistula River would become the future border between the two occupying powers. He proceeded to push his way through burning Warsaw and finally reached the suburb of Praga on the eastern bank of the Vistula. When he learned that the border was to be the Bug River further east, he had to quickly decide once more: “Again running became imperative for us. To move on from where we thought we found haven and be on the run again and the sooner the better.”32 Exhausted and feeling hopeless, some in his group decided to head back to Łódź but Davidson, with his son and a few others, decided to continue on foot to Wyszków, Poland.33 There they encountered a group of Jewish refugees who had recently been driven from their homes in Grajewo by Germans who had started indiscriminately shooting Jews with machine guns. With assistance from local Poles, Davidson’s group was able to cross the Bug by boat. From there, with the aid of a Polish smuggler, they made it safely through the woods to Zaręby Kościelne where they first saw Soviet soldiers at the train station.34 In his memoirs, Davidson recalled asking how things were going to proceed on the Soviet side. Relieved to have escaped the “bloodthirsty German beast,” Davidson began to reevaluate his opinion about the Soviet Union—the country he left in 1923 for Poland and was just now revisiting. “In that country with its brutal and unpredictable regime we will have to make our new life; my mind wanders to the alternative—life under the German occupation. What I saw in Wyszkow, the sample of what is in store for us Jews, showed clearly what is to be expected.”35 In his memoirs, Davidson argued that he deliberately chose to flee into the Soviet Union. Although he had no illusions about the difficulties he would face there, he saw the Soviet Union as the lesser evil compared with Germany. His decision was strengthened by his knowledge of German antisemitism and the stories he had heard from other refugees about the atrocities Germans were committing against Jews. From Davidson’s account, it becomes apparent how vitally important it was to be able to travel long distances on foot. Equally 31 32 33 34 35

Davidson, 36. Davidson, 41. Davidson, 42. Davidson, 48–50. Davidson, 51.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

important is his mention that all too often Jews decided not to flee or, like some of his comrades, decided to return home.

Driven to the Soviet Side—Artur Szlifersztejn In many towns near the German-Soviet border along the Bug and San rivers, the Germans expelled Jews from their homes and forcefully drove them over the rivers to the Soviet side.36 In spite of Soviet protest, the Germans continued their campaign of targeted expulsions across the rivers until the end of December 1939.37 In Eastern Upper Silesia, the Germans did not accompany their Jewish captives to the border, rather they expelled them from the cities, towns, and villages and ordered them to head east and to cross the San River by any means at their disposal—often by ramshackle wooden raft.38 In a letter from October 1939, Warsaw refugee Artur Szlifersztejn described how he was driven toward the Soviet border by the Germans. After the war broke out, Szlifersztejn fled to Łuków near Lublin which still was in the German occupation zone. “There they [the Germans] simply ordered all men to exit their homes and assemble in groups of four. At night they force marched us to the next town—and after a single day of rest—onward to the next. Thanks to our presence of mind, we were able to flee and escape the grasp of these hangman’s abettors.”39 After they escaped the Germans, the men continued on foot toward Białystok which had been incorporated into the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Only after enduring such harsh conditions and constant harassing fire from German aircraft did Szlifersztejn reach the home of a friend in Białystok. The feelings after crossing into Soviet territory and of escaping the pressing danger are described in numerous Jewish refugee accounts. After September 17, 1939, the Polish army was faced with an utterly hopeless situation against two overwhelming aggressors, 36 Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 31. Adolf Hitler had personally approved the policy of expulsion over the German-Soviet demarcation line. 37 Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939– 1945 (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1968), 51–52; Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust, 44; BenCion Pinchuk, “Jewish Refugees in Soviet Poland 1939–1941,” Jewish Social Studies 40, no. 2 (1978): 144. According to Pinchuk, expulsions ended only in early 1940. 38 A copy of the order is included in Friedrich and Löw, Verfolgung, 83. See also David Silberklang, Gates of Tears. The Holocaust in the Lublin District ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem Publications, 2013), 95–96. 39 Friedrich and Löw, Verfolgung, 109.

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and the prevailing opinion in eyewitness accounts was that the Soviet Union represented the lesser evil—but an evil none the less. Many Polish Jews were aware of the Soviet reign of terror, its poor economic state, and its anti-religious policies either from newspapers or from personal experience. When compared with Germany, most Polish Jews saw the Soviet Union as the lesser evil primarily because of the fact that it officially rejected all forms of antisemitic discrimination and persecution. In the first days of the war, very few could imagine that the Red Army would invade Poland, but in light of the German threat most eyewitnesses expressed relief upon seeing Red Army soldiers. Artur Szlifersztejn expressed his appreciation for the Soviet soldiers in the aforementioned letter written in October 1939 to his relatives in the United States: Our language lacks the proper terms to describe the bestiality of the Germans. When we sighted the first red flags, we were finally able to exhale. The land up to the Bug—including Lemberg—has been taken by the Soviets and everything further west has been occupied by the Germans. Within a few weeks, they have defeated the Polish army. It’s hard to believe, but it’s the truth. Poland in a political sense—has ceased to exist. [We] will stay inside the Soviet Union. The Germans have tormented us so that we can’t even entertain the idea of going back. I have no plans, and I have no idea what awaits us. I only do know that we are being treated humanely, and this is something that we all have been longing for.40

In his letter, Szlifersztejn describes the dilemma that plagued so many Jewish refugees. On the one hand the Soviet occupation forces were allied with Germany against Poland, and most Poles regarded the Soviet invasion as an act of aggression against the sovereign Polish state. On the other hand, the Soviet state posed no life-threatening danger to Polish Jews, and thus many refugees decided to remain on the Soviet side.41

40 Friedrich and Löw, Verfolgung, 109. 41 Jerzy Gliksman, Jewish Exiles in Soviet Russia (1939–1943), Part I (1947), YIVO Archives (YA), New York City, Jerzy Gliksman Papers, RG 1464, Box 4, Folder 41: 5. Polish Bundist Gliksman highlighted the widespread expectations among Jewish refugees that the Soviet Union would protect the Jews.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

Polish Jews under Soviet rule, 1939–1941 The German-Soviet occupation of Poland and the Soviet Union’s annexation of large swaths of prewar Polish territory on the first and second of November 1939 increased the Soviet Union’s Jewish population by 1.6 million people. After the war began, the Soviet Union became the largest place of refuge for European Jewry.42 The Polish Jewish population within the former Polish territory can be broken down into three groups: (a) the estimated 1.3 million Polish Jews who were already living in territory annexed in 1939 by the Soviet Union; (b) the nearly 300,000 refugees from the German-occupied parts of Poland and (c) the around 15,000 refugees who fled to Lithuania and came under Soviet control after Lithuania was annexed by the Soviets in the summer of 1940.43 The process of Sovietization, i.e., the integration of annexed Polish territory into the Soviet political and economic system, has been thoroughly addressed in other works.44 To a much lesser extent, the predicament of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union has been the subject of historical study. Here the focus has mainly been on the persecution and deportation of Jews from the annexed territory, including some refugees. Boćkowski states that, “among the Jewish population, the refugees were the primary victims of Soviet occupation policies.”45 Recent studies have focused on the situation of those who were not arrested or forcibly deported.46 When comparing the two phases of refugee flight it is important to ask: who found themselves in the Western regions of the Soviet Union just before the German attack—and who would be in a position to choose between flight or staying in the summer of 1941? 42 Arieh Tartakower and Kurt R. Grossmann, The Jewish Refugee (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, 1944), 1; Pinchuk, “Jewish Refugees,” 142. Arad, The Holocaust, 42. Between 2.12 and 2.15 million Jews residing in the Soviet-annexed territories became Soviet citizens. 43 Edele and Warlik, “Saved by Stalin?,” 102. See also the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume. 44 Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad. The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, expanded edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule 1939–1941 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995); Marek Wierzbicki, “Soviet Economy in Annexed Eastern Poland, 1939–1941,” in Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953, ed. Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114–137. 45 Boćkowski, “Losy żydowskich,” 91. 46 Boćkowski, “Losy żydowskich”; Andrzej Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego: Żydzi na kresach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej wrzesień 1939-lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2006).

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After the Soviet annexation of Polish territory in November 1939, the majority of Polish Jews residing in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus automatically received Soviet citizenship.47 Only a small minority of Polish Jews rejected this forced measure, and most of them were refugees from Germanoccupied Poland.48 In the spring of 1940, they were forced to either accept Soviet citizenship or to return to their prewar homes. Between 64,500 and 67,700 Jewish refugees who chose the latter option were subsequently deported to special state security (NKVD) camps in the Soviet interior in June 1940.49 This meant that nearly one quarter of the Jewish refugees were victims of Soviet deportations.50 By comparison, local Polish Jews with Soviet citizenship were 47 Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 86. All Polish Jews who had been residing in the eastern half of the Second Polish Republic before November 1, 1939, automatically became Soviet citizens by a decree of the Supreme Soviet on November 29, 1939. Whereas all Polish Jewish refugees who arrived in the new Soviet territories after November 1, 1939, kept their Polish passports. 48 Yosef Litvak, “Jewish Refugees from Poland in the USSR, 1939–1946,” in Bitter Legacy. Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 129. 49 The low number of Jewish deportees is from Grzegorz Hryciuk, “Victims 1939–1941: The Soviet Repression in Eastern Poland,” in Shared History—Divided Memory. Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, ed. Elazar Barkan et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 191. The figure of 65,500 can be found in Aleksandr Gurjanow, “Żydzi jako specpieriesieleńcy-bieżeńcy w Obwodzie Archangielskim 1940–1941,” in Świat NIEpożegnany. Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodniej Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII-XX wieku, ed. Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Rytm, 2004), 109. The higher estimate is from Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees,” 99. A total of about 315,000 Polish citizens were forcibly resettled from the annexed territories to Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the northern regions of the Soviet Union. Grzegorz Hryciuk’s analysis of the available NKVD reports leads to the following ethnic distribution of the deportees: about 181,200 Polish Catholics (57.5 percent), about 69,000 Polish Jews (21.9 percent), about 32,900 Ukrainians (10.44 percent) and about 24,000 Belarusians (7.62 percent). If one considers the entire spectrum of Soviet repression against the civilian population in the annexed former Polish eastern territories, ethnic Poles were the group most affected among the native population. By contrast, Jews made up the vast majority (80 percent) of the oppressed refugees from western and central Poland while the proportion of persecuted Jews among the native population was only a few percent. Hryciuk, “Victims,” 195, 200. 50 Mieczysław Wieliczko, “Migracje przez ‘linie demarkacyjną’ w latach 1939–1940,” in Położenie ludności polskiej na terytorium ZSRRi wschodnich ziemiach II Rzeczypospolitej w czasie II wojny światowej, ed. Adam Marszałek (Toruń: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1990), 137. Wieliczko estimates that around 1,600 Jewish refugees managed to return as part of the German-Soviet agreement. Rachel Erlich, Interviews with Polish and Russian Jewish DP’s in DP Camps on Their Observations of Jewish Life in Soviet Russia (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1948), Interview no. 3, 1. Interviewee L. Witkowska stated

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

one of the least persecuted groups in the annexed territories. The arrest and deportation of Polish Jews has been described by Shelia Fitzpatrick as symptomatic of greater Soviet ethnic policies in the annexed territories. The Soviets approached all of these new citizens with their habitual suspicion, arresting some and deporting large numbers of others whom they regarded as unreliable and potentially disloyal for social or political reasons, including the socialist Bund leaders Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter. This happened in all the newly annexed regions, and Jews were among the victims, along with members of core nationalities of these regions (Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, and so on). The punitive actions were not specifically anti-Jewish [. . .].51

Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik estimate that between 101,600 and 115,600 Polish Jews were deported from the annexed territories against their will and sent to the interior of the Soviet Union. Another 40,000–53,000 voluntarily moved to the interior for work. This would mean that at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union between 1.3 and 1.4 million Polish Jews were still living in the formerly Polish territory annexed by the Soviets.52

Phase Two: June 22, 1941–Fall 1941 A significant change from the first phase of flight was that in the summer of 1941 Polish Jews only represented a small percentage of all Jews fleeing the German invasion. This especially applies to the Polish Jews who became Soviet citizens between November 1939 and the spring of 1940. Those unaffected were the Polish Jews who had been deported to special camps far from the German-Soviet border. Most Polish Jewish Red Army recruits joined in Central Asia quite far from the front. In the first few weeks of hostilities, an estimated 100,000 Polish Jews fled the annexed territories into the Soviet hin-

that she saw a train from Brest-Litowski to Warsaw containing around 500 Jews who had been registered for return to the Generalgouvernement. 51 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Annexation, Evacuation, and Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, 1939– 1946,” in Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 136. 52 Edele and Warlik, “Saved by Stalin?,” 105; Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust. A Social and Demographic Profile ( Jerusalem: Centre for Research of East European Jewry, 1998), 323; Arad, The Holocaust, 76.

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terland.53 This meant that from the annexed territories, only one in fourteen fled the oncoming German army.54 All in all, between 1 and 1.5 million Soviet Jews (including Polish Jews on Soviet soil) escaped the invaders either through organized evacuation or by personal initiative.55 The second significant difference from the first phase of flight was the state-organized nature of the evacuation, something that did not exist in the fall of 1939. However, during both periods of flight similar key factors played a critical role in the decision-making process for or against fleeing into the Soviet Union: time, location, available information on the pressing danger, and understanding the Soviet evacuation authorities’ policies. The evacuation of Soviet citizens (including both Soviet Jews and those Jews who had been citizens of the Polish Republic before accepting the Soviet passport) from the frontlines to the interior of the Soviet Union has been well documented.56 But in order to better comprehend the range of possibilities in the individual decision-making process, it is necessary to summarize the Soviet civilian evacuation measures taken.

Evacuation Soviet evacuation plans existed before June 22, 1941, however, none of the scenarios accounted for an enemy advance so deep into Soviet territory as the German army achieved in the first months of the war.57 Two days after the 53 Dov Levin, “The Fateful Decision. The Flight of the Jews into the Soviet Interior in the Summer of 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 20 (1990): 141. Levin estimates that 80,000 Polish Jews managed to flee from the annexed territories to the Soviet interior. Vadim Dubson, “On the Problem of the Evacuation of Soviet Jews in 1941 (New Archival Sources),” Jews in Eastern Europe 40, no. 3 (1999): 51. Dubson states that between 75,000 and 100,000 Jewish refugees from all annexed territories including Poland reached a safe destination in the Soviet interior. 54 Levin, “Fateful Decision,” 142. Only 7 percent of the Jewish population in the annexed territories fled to the Soviet interior. The percentage was higher among Jews residing in the western parts of pre-1939 Soviet borders. Dubson, “Problem of Evacuation,” 53. According to Dubson, 32 percent of them had been evacuated by July 1941. Their number rose to around 55 percent by October 1941. 55 Dubson, 38. 56 Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Paul Stronski, Tashkent. Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); and Kiril Feferman, “Jewish Refugees and Evacuees under Soviet Rule and German Occupation: The North Caucasus,” in Revolution, Repression and Revival. The Soviet Jewish Experience, ed. Zvi Gitelman et al. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 155–178. 57 In 2009, Yitzhak Arad stated that “the Soviets had prepared no evacuation plans prior to the outbreak of war.” Arad, The Holocaust, 73. Dubson, “Problem of Evacuation,” 39–41.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

German attack, the Soviet evacuation authority was created under the leadership of Lazar Kaganovich. Although prewar evacuation plans called primarily for the evacuation of material goods from the front areas, a resolution dated June 27, 1941, also included: “qualified workers, together with their to-be-evacuated enterprises, families of the head of staff of the Red Army, of NKVD officials and of high Soviet and Party officials, and children up to age 15.”58 The resolution affected eight Soviet Republics including the entirety of the territory annexed in 1939 in the western Soviet Union.59 In the first four weeks of the German invasion, the evacuation from the frontlines was chaotic in many places. The main reason for this was the sheer speed of the German advance. Lithuania was occupied within a few days, Latvia and Belarus in around a week, and western Ukraine, eastern Galicia, and northern Bukovina within two weeks. In many regions there was neither time for an organized evacuation nor individual flight.60 The chaos was further exacerbated by the coordinated bombing campaign of city centers and railways by the German air force. The Soviet leadership further contributed to the precarious situation near the front. The mass evacuations of both Leningrad and Moscow tied up so much of Soviet rail capacity that it was in critical short supply in the territories near the front. Furthermore, the transportation of military units and equipment to the front took precedence over evacuation. The stipulations on the timeframe for evacuation and those to be evacuated, as well as its actual implementation at the local level, also made a timely escape impossible in many places.61 Under these conditions, it is not surprising that thousands of people set out on their own despite official decrees to the contrary. It was quickly clear to Soviet authorities that people were fleeing without official permission and/or they were not arriving at the officially designated destination points. Instead they were meeting up with friends and family at destinations of their own making.62 Thus, the official Dubson was able to prove that such plans existed, but Stalin apparently terminated existing plans for an evacuation of Moscow in a state of war on June 5, 1941. 58 Dubson, “Problem of Evacuation,” 42; Mordechai Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941– 1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki et al. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 79. According to Altshuler, the resolution was only put into practice on June 29, 1941. 59 Levin, “Fateful Decision,” 118. 60 Levin, 115–116. 61 Dubson, “Problem of Evacuation,” 44, 48; Levin, 119. 62 Dubson, “Problem of Evacuation,” 48–49. According to the Evacuation Council, over one million evacuees did not reach their scheduled destination during the first month of the war.

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Soviet terminology failed to differentiate between state-organized transportation from the war zone and those who fled on personal initiative. The two phenomena were categorized under the umbrella term evacuation in order to avoid the negative connotation of mass flight, one that could evoke the image of a collapsing state authority.63

Reasons for Staying The Polish Jews who lived in the territory annexed in 1939 were among the first victims of the German attack against the Soviet Union. The decision to flee had to be made promptly if there was to be any chance of success. It was crucial to know where, with whom, and how they would escape the threat. As mentioned, most of the Jews in the contested frontline territories stayed put but, in retrospect, fleeing or being evacuated provided the greatest chance for surviving the Holocaust. Altshuler described the situation after summer 1941: For Soviet Jews, escape and evacuation marks the watershed between a chance to live and almost certain death. Most of the Jews who were able to flee or be evacuated to the rear had as reasonable a chance of staying alive as the rest of the population. Those who remained in the Nazi-occupied territories, by contrast, were marked for death.64

It was very much the same for Polish Jews.65 Why then, did so many Jews decide not to flee? One explanation that has been mentioned often is the role of the media. The Soviet media had regularly and routinely reported on the persecution of Jews in Germany until May 1939, and after the Hitler-Stalin-Pact the issue completely vanished from press and radio. Altshuler, therefore, concluded that Soviet Jews were “insufficiently” informed about the threat posed by the Germans. Admittedly, due to the secretive nature of the Nazi regime, many did not anticipate their impending annihilation.66 Most information found its way through unofficial channels. Here, Altshuler mentions personal recollections from conversations with refugees, along with letters and smuggled reports that circulated between the German and Soviet occupied parts

63 64 65 66

This is a general and not specifically Jewish phenomenon. Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees,” 87. Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation,” 77. Stankowski and Weiser, “Demograficzne skutki Holokaustu.” Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation,” 83.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

of Poland. Even though much of this information was incomplete and often contradictory, Altshuler accurately claims that, “a relatively large segment of Soviet Jewry had access to a significant amount of information on the subject [of Jewish persecution].”67 Polish Jewish refugees had either experienced the German persecution personally as described above, or they had escaped it at the last moment. Letters from the Generalgouvernement and sporadic reports from Jews who made it across the German-Soviet border by summer 1941 only reinforced the impression that the decision to flee had been the right one despite all the hardships in the Soviet Union. Many Soviet Jews lacked firsthand experience, therefore finding the reports hardly credible and consequently had quite differing expectations about what a possible German occupation regime would bring.68 The prospects of an uncertain future as a refugee in the Soviet hinterland was much more terrifying for many than what would be surely a harsh but presumably not life-threatening future at home surrounded by one’s family under the Germans.69 In some instances, state evacuation policies, or rather the practical implementation of an evacuation, was hindered by local authorities or the military so that more people could be evacuated elsewhere. Especially in the first days of the war, many followed the decree to not leave their workplace under any circumstances. In other cases, the local administration prohibited the widescale fleeing of civilians, only to flee themselves at the last minute; all too often with the last available means of transport.70 The prewar Soviet border (August 1939) would also come to play a fateful role for many refugees fleeing the front. An unknown number of Polish Jewish refugees lacked the official authorization to cross the former Polish-Soviet border. Many refugees felt compelled to return home, while others held out and waited until the border was opened at the last minute—and often too late. Others were able to bribe their way across the border or successfully cross it undetected. This prewar border proved a difficult obstacle to overcome for all those living inside the territory annexed in 1939. This constitutes a significant difference when compared with those living in prewar Soviet territory.71 67 Altshuler, 84–85, 87. 68 Altshuler cites one Jewish resident from Lechitsy who remembers sharing his house with a Jewish refugee family from Poland: “They had fled from the Germans and told us everything . . . but we didn’t believe them.” Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation,” 86. 69 Levin, “Fateful Decision,” 124, 126. 70 Levin, 128; Altshuler, 95. 71 Levin, “Fateful Decision,” 131–132; Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation,” 96.

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Reasons for Fleeing Levin divides the Soviet Jews who could flee in the summer of 1941 into three groups: (a) members of the Soviet party and state apparatus; (b) those responsible for Sovietization, especially the economic sphere; (c) individuals sympathetic to the Soviet cause, or considered so by officials.72 The majority of Polish Jews (local inhabitants and refugees) belonged to the latter. As a rule, the group was not made up of high-ranking functionaries or factory directors and thus the majority fled without permission. In many cases, Soviet evacuation authorities or military personnel supplied them with proper documentation and/or made room for them on transports headed east.73 As for the reasons for fleeing, next to the fearing the Germans themselves was a general fear of antisemitic violence from local anti-Bolshevik and pro-German elements—many considered Jews to be de facto collaborators of the hated Soviet regime.74 The withdrawal of Soviet authorities created a power vacuum in many parts of the annexed territories, one which facilitated a wave of antisemitic violence.75 As Soviet party functionaries and factory heads were evacuated first, and Polish Jews were a part of this group only rarely, their survival depended heavily upon their own willingness to flee. However, this readiness was only a precondition not a guarantee that they would successfully make it into the Soviet hinterland. Altshuler therefore viewed both factors as potentially decisive: “In the absence of a comprehensive, clear-cut evacuation policy, the scale of flight depended largely on people’s subjective willingness to leave their homes and on the objective conditions that permitted them to follow through on such a decision.”76 Based upon Polish Jewish biographical accounts, I want to present three archetypal examples of the decision-making process and manner flight.

72 Levin, 122. 73 Levin, 133–134; Gennady Estraikh, “The Missing Years: Yiddish Writers in Soviet Białystok, 1939–41,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 2 (2016): 187. An exception to that rule were members of the pro-Soviet intelligentsia such as Dovid Sfard and Ber Mark who boarded their evacuation trains along with their families. 74 See the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume. 75 Levin, “Fateful Decision,” 117; Arad, The Holocaust, 42; and more generally Żbikowski, U genezy Jedwabnego. 76 Altshuler, “Problem of Evacuation,” 83.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

Flight before Impending Violence—Fayvel Vayner Fayvel Vayner was born in 1898 in the Russian Empire, and at the time of the German invasion he was working as a forester in Postawy (present-day Pastavy, Belarus), his hometown east of Vilna. Vayner was a loyal communist, and in 1926 he was sentenced and imprisoned for eight years for “subversive activities.”77 Therefore, the Soviet annexation of the Polish eastern territories was not necessarily disadvantageous for him. Vayner continued making journal entries during his flight from the Germans in June 1941, and he proved to be an accurate observer of this period. In it he describes himself as an “honest man and communist”78 who feared not only the antisemitism of the Germans but also that of his Polish neighbors. In his journal, it emerges that Vayner saw the Soviet Union as a bulwark against antisemitic hostility and violence. By comparison, Vayner felt neither allegiance nor loyalty to the Polish state which had imprisoned him for his political beliefs. His relationship with the Soviet Union soon developed further as he accepted Soviet citizenship with full conviction in November 1939. Vayner’s statements indicate that he was not blind to the realities of Soviet communism.79 It is also clear from his journal that he quickly recognized the Germans as an existential threat to the Soviet Union’s Jewish population. Shortly after June 22, 1941, he characterized the German-Soviet war as a “decisive war, as they want to conquer other powers once and for all, all nations, all peoples to be enslaved under the fascist boot, and they want to annihilate—our [ Jewish] people first.”80 Although the civilian population remained confident in the Red Army and were “quite calm” when cut off from information from the front, Vayner quickly decided to flee knowing full well that “hunger and suffering”81 awaited 77 Vayner (1898–1973) was sentenced to eight years imprisonment in Poland in 1926 for “hostile activities against the state.” Until 1941 he worked as a forester in Postawy (Wilna region). After the German invasion he was evacuated and worked as a miner. Vayner returned to Poland in 1946 and became director of a Jewish educational institute in Nowa Ruda. Later he immigrated to Israel. Bert Hoppe and Heidrun Glass, eds., “Sowjetunion mit annektierten Gebieten I: Besetzte sowjetische Gebiete unter deutscher Militärverwaltung, Baltikum und Transnistrien,” Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, vol. 7, 133. 78 Fayvel Vayner, diary entry from June 24, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, Verfolgung und Ermordung, 134. 79 Based on Vayner’s diary entries, it seems that he considered himself a Soviet communist, and only to a lesser degree identified himself as Polish or Jewish. 80 Vayner, diary entry from June 22, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, 133. 81 Vayner, diary entries from June 22 and 24, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, Verfolgung und Ermordung, 133, 134.

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him and his family. On June 24, 1941, Vayner set out on foot with his wife and their three-month-old twins towards Duniłowicze (present-day Dunilavičy, Belarus) some twenty-five kilometers from his hometown. There he observed party functionaries and bureaucrats in the process of evacuating their families by motor vehicle. The evacuation of the local administration contributed to a growing mood of anxiety, agitation, and depression. After Vayner spent days unsuccessfully trying to organize a carriage to transport his family, he and his wife reached a grave decision. Vayner writes: My wife began to plea that I should flee on foot and leave her and the children behind, and I did just that. I did it knowing full well that I was leaving my family behind in the jaws of a predator, the Germans and their atrocities. However, it was perfectly clear to me that if I stayed behind, that the Poles, and plenty of them had remained behind, would tear me to shreds even before the Germans could arrive.82

Vayner justified his decision as he saw the greatest threat coming from a looming power vacuum, one in which his communist convictions—and presumably his Jewishness—put him at great risk with his Polish neighbors before the Germans could seize him. Ultimately, upon his wife’s urging he left on foot the evening of June 24, 1941, spent the night in Glębockie (present-day Hlybokaye, Belarus), and reached the village of Plisa (present-day Plissa, Belarus) on June 26. Along his journey he observed a Jewish population that seemed completely clueless about the true danger posed by the Germans and yet deeply troubled and unsure by the streams of refugees they witnessed. Vayner estimated that only about 5 percent of the Jewish population decided to flee.83 The omnipresent danger posed by the rapidly advancing Germany army meant that the flight took on a “chaotic, panicked nature,” according to Vayner: “who once had walked, now ran with all of their remaining strength. Those who had until now been transported by cart, now began to throw their belongings over the side. Strewn along the treks were bed linen, suitcases and their contents, clothing, shoes, etc.”84

82 Diary entry from June 25, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, Verfolgung und Ermordung, 135. 83 Vayner, Diary entry from June 26, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, Verfolgung und Ermordung, 135. 84 Diary June 26, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, 136.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

The panic and resulting chaos caused by the German army was the key reason why so many refugees arrived at their destinations completely destitute. Since so many had to leave all their luggage behind, many arrived only with the clothes they were wearing. One ostensibly secure location was a kolkhoz just over the former Polish-Soviet border. There, according to Vayner, a rare moment of calm settled over the refugees. The “panic completely subsided after crossing the border. At the border checkpoint, upon seeing the border guards our fear of the Germans came to an end, and the atrocities and suffering.”85 The erstwhile feeling of safety was destroyed on June 29, 1941, when Polotsk was bombed, and Vayner, too, lost all of his belongings. Eventually Vayner was able to board a train, and within weeks he arrived in Kurmoyarsk, Stalingrad Oblast. According to his own account, Vayner did not stay there long due to the “unbearable antisemitism” which he believed that the party and militia leadership would have dealt with had they known about it.86 The openly antisemitic slurs shocked Vayner and reinforced his desire to leave on foot, if necessary, in the direction of Saratov. I am well accustomed to traveling on foot. I’m leaving. Whereto? Why? I [don’t] know what fate awaits me there, but it’s impossible for me to stay here for so many reasons, it saddens me. But there is some dark force conducting it all, and the antisemitism grows stronger day by day, quicker, than I could have imagined a month ago. If it’s not stopped, then it can quickly lead to disaster. If I had been able to get work, something befitting my skills and talents, then I wouldn’t be leaving, but alas I depart Verkhni Kurmoyarsk today.87

He reached Kotel’nikovo on September 26, 1941. There he boarded an overloaded train full of evacuees from Odessa and Bessarabia and noticed many Jews in the crowd. After two days the train reached its destination: Stalingrad.

85 Ibid. 86 Vayner, August 10 and September 23, 1941, Hoppe and Glass, Verfolgung und Ermordung, 297, 298. 87 Vayner, September 24, 1941, diary entry, Hoppe and Glass, Verfolgung und Ermordung, 298.

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Evacuation—Benjamin Harshav Benjamin Harshav’s88 parents also did not experience persecution under the Soviets in their hometown of Vilna, rather they were promoted in the state educational system. Both had worked as teachers before the war in Polish Vilna’s Yiddish schools.89 After all of Vilna’s Hebrew language schools were closed, only four Yiddish language secondary schools remained where the Hrushovskis were both given positions as school directors in 1940.90 Despite their traumatic experiences in Siberian exile during the First World War, the couple decided to remain in Soviet Vilna and continue their careers under the new circumstances.91 The German invasion of the Soviet Union brought this new life to an abrupt end. On the first day of the war, June 22, 1941, the Luftwaffe bombed Vilna. In an interview with the author, Harshav recalled that his parents had initially hesitated on whether or not to flee into the unknown. As soon as they saw their neighbor, a Russian Red Army officer, fleeing their building in panic, the Hrushovskis did, too. With only a few belongings, they made their way to the train station on June 23, 1941, where an already overloaded train from Kaunas was waiting at the platform bound for Minsk where his aunt lived and they could wait for the end of hostilities.92 They reached their destination only with a great deal of luck as their train was forced to halt at the old PolishSoviet border and was shot up by an air attack. Upon their arrival in Minsk they realized that it, too, had been heavily bombed. Everywhere they encountered “panic, chaos, [and] fire,” and only with great difficulty were they able to make it from the train station to the edge of the city. For days they traveled through forests until they reached a crossroads jammed with vehicles full of people and equipment. There they encountered a young Russian officer who demanded that every truck driver take civilians with them including the Hrushovskis. After traveling seventy kilometers to Borisov they boarded a freight train of open-air cars headed to an unknown destination beyond the frontlines. Soon 88 Né Binyomin Hrushovski in 1928, after his arrival in Palestine in early 1948 he adopted the Hebrew name Benjamin Harshav. 89 Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 17. In one of his few autobiographical writings, Harshav notes that his mother was a mathematics teacher and schoolmaster of the Sophye Makovne Gurevich Shul. 90 Benjamin Harshav, preface to Kruk, Last Days, 16. 91 In the documentary film The World Was Ours (2007), Harshav mentions that both his parents had been exiled to Siberia during World War I. Thus, they were familiar with the conditions there. 92 Harshav, interview by author, September 2013, New Haven, CT.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

they learned that the train was transporting the refugees to Buzuluk (Oblast Čkalov) in Russia.93 The Hrushovski family was one of the few Jewish families from Vilna who were able to escape. A few weeks after the beginning of the German-Soviet war the family reached the Urals. There they lived the next five years in relative safety far away from the front.94 The decisive success of their flight—albeit strengthened by the frantic departure of their Red Army neighbor—was due to the fact that Harshav’s parents quickly chose to flee their bombarded hometown. A family member’s home provided them with an intermediary destination, and upon realizing that it too was no longer safe, by luck they were able to travel by train into the Soviet hinterland.

Fleeing Once Again—Simon Davidson Unlike the Vayner and Hrushovski families who came from the former Polish eastern territories, as described above Simon Davidson had already escaped the Germans in the fall of 1939. He was well aware of the threat posed by the Germans, and viewed the Soviet Union as a difficult but secure place to live. With a degree of luck and sufficient financial means, he was able to smuggle his wife and daughter across the German-Soviet border to Orša where he had been living with his son since late 1939. There they found work as an accountant and a teacher while their daughter was enrolled in a Soviet school. Upon hearing about the German invasion of the Soviet Union on the radio, he wrote in his memoirs that: “It was all too familiar to us, we had gone through it once and we knew the mood of helplessness, the chaos and disorientation accompanying the first blow.”95 The situations did resemble one another, but this time the major difference was that, unlike the fall of 1939, in the summer of 1941 Davidson did not know where to flee with his family: “We feel that our situation here is worse than in Poland in 1939 where we still had an option of fleeing east and the terrain was familiar, peopled with friends and relatives. Here, we are strangers with no friends, in a rather precarious situation of refugees from an alien country.”96

93 Interview with Harshav. 94 Harshav reports the story of his family’s flight from Vilna to the Ural in Harshav, preface to Kruk, Last Days, 16. 95 Davidson, War Years, 124. 96 Davidson, 125.

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As a factory accountant, Davidson learned from his superiors that the children of high-ranking functionaries were to be evacuated by truck to a kolkhoz twenty-five kilometers away. Davidson quickly ran home to inform his family. His wife and daughter traveled in the truck to the kolkhoz while Davidson and his son followed on foot. Reunited shortly thereafter, they learned about the planned evacuation to Vyaz’ma not far from Moscow. After a column of horsedrawn carts arrived at the kolkhoz from Orša for transporting the children and baggage, the refugee column headed toward Vyaz’ma. Davidson described the mood among the refugees as tense as they never knew how close the Germans were.97 He argues in his memoirs that his experience in the fall of 1939, and his knowledge of the pressing danger posed by the Germans, were fundamental reasons for his decision to flee again. His description of the Jewish shtetls between Orša and Vyaz’ma provide an enlightening insight into the problematic decision-making process that confronted Jewish communities near the frontlines. Local Jews along the way repeatedly asked the refugees why they were running away from the Germans, and suggested that maybe life under the Germans could be better than under the Soviets.98 Davidson again gives the line of argumentation against taking flight that greatly parallels the situation in 1939–40. They [Jewish residents of various towns] eye us with curiosity when I tell them that we are fleeing the Germans; as little as they have, they are afraid of leaving it. “Why should we run away? Where to?” “How can one leave everything one has and flee into the unknown, leaving the place where one’s forebearers lived and died?” “God is everywhere. If he should deem us to die, we shall die wherever we would be, so why wander around?”99

Even some refugees in the column began to have doubts as time wore on, as to how great the danger posed by the invader actually was. Some families decided to return home convinced that they had nothing to fear from the Germans. In July 1941, the remaining refugees crossed the Belarusian-Russian border and passed through the city of Smolensk. After another two weeks of marching on foot they finally reached their goal, Vyaz’ma. There the Soviet 97 Davidson, War Years, 130. 98 Davidson, 131. 99 Davidson, War Years, 132.

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

functionary in charge of the evacuation column divvied up the remaining rations among the evacuees before they parted ways.100 Unsure where to go next, the Davidsons made their way to the Vyaz’ma train station where they saw a train bound for Tashkent pulling into the station. It was immediately clear to him that the capital of Uzbekistan “suited our needs perfectly. Taszkent’s [sic] climate being mild and warm, we would not need winter clothes we didn’t have, located deep in the Russian continent where the Germans certainly would not get was ideal so, Taszkent [sic] be it.”101 Simon Davidson’s example shows that fleeing from the Germans in the first phase of the war in September 1939 was still not a guarantee of security for Polish Jews under Soviet administration. Davidson was justifiably evacuated as both a Soviet citizen and accountant of a factory. From his experience in the fall of 1939, he knew that his family would have to move quickly, and that under no circumstances could they fall into German hands. As in the similar situation two years earlier, he was confronted with arguments from Jews who did not recognize the danger and failed to give any validity to the reports they heard.

Conclusion As the fortunes of Herman Kruk, Simon Davidson, Artur Szlifersztejn, Fayvel Vayner, and Benjamin Harshav illustrate, the plight of Polish Jewish refugees fleeing into the Soviet Union is a multifaceted history. When comparing the two phases of flight between 1939 and 1941 it becomes clear that despite the considerable differences the similarities are overwhelming. The differences primarily lie in the size and dimension of the flights. The number of Polish Jews who fled from the German into the Soviet occupation zone is three to four times greater than the number of those who fled between June and July 1941. Beginning in September 1939 around one in seven (300,000 of 2.1 million) made their way east, and as of June 1941 only one in fourteen (100,000 of 1.4 million). The reasons for this relatively low number are a combination of the rapid German advance in June and July 1941 cutting off possible escape routes, Soviet evacuation policies that in many places impeded the rescue of the Jewish (and non-Jewish) population, and, finally, the fact that many Polish Jews were unprepared for and/or lacked the individual resolve to flee into the unknown. 100 Davidson, War Years, 135–137. 101 Davidson, 139–141.

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Although the two refugee movements differ from one another in scale, the decision-making processes clearly resemble one another. In both phases, one’s situation at home and the distance to the frontline played an important role. Geography correlates with the timing when the decision was reached. The window of opportunity for a successful departure during both phases was only open for a few weeks at best, before the German occupation made an escape all but impossible. Even though some Polish Jews were able to cross into Soviet territory (and vice versa) after the border was closed in October 1939, they only represented a fraction of the Jewish refugees in Eastern Poland. Similarities can also be identified with regard to the role which the family played in the decision-making process. In both phases the heads of family (both male and female) often made the ultimate decision, although sometimes young adults chose for themselves. Even though there is no comprehensive data set available on the age and gender of all the Polish Jewish refugees in both phases, general trends can be deduced. In many cases after the German invasion of Poland, complete families spanning the generations from infants to geriatrics were able to cross the border—sometimes involuntarily as the German drove them to the Soviet side whereas in the summer of 1941 it was overwhelmingly young healthy men who successfully escaped. Assuming that the decision to flee was made rationally and reached upon the basis of existing information about the German threat, then the line of reasoning in both phases is quite similar. In both 1939 and 1941, many Polish Jews knew that persecution and violence awaited them under the Germans. Though the available Jewish media in Poland reported on how the Nazi regime was discriminating against and jailing German Jews until September 1939, the phase between the start of the war and the German invasion of the Soviet Union was categorized by utter silence from the Soviet media. The German atrocities committed against Polish Jews were not widely reported by the Soviets in this period. The lack of utterly crucial information on the German threat was partially compensated for by information traveling through unofficial channels. In both phases, however, there were considerable doubts about the legitimacy of the reports, and they were often discounted as mere rumors or exaggerations. Polish Jews in both 1939 and 1941 had limited space for maneuver and means at their disposal. It was possible to flee, but it was always life-threateningly perilous and in no way a guarantee that one would survive the war. Only a relatively small number of Polish Jews escaped the June 1941 German invasion of the western Soviet Union and successfully made it to safety in the hinterland. In the fall of 1941, in what was a historical coincidence, hundreds of thousands

Who, When, and Why? Escaping German Occupation in 1939 versus 1941

of evacuated Polish Jews ran into the Polish Jews who had just been released from Soviet prisons and labor camps as part of a so-called “amnesty.” More than anywhere else in the Soviet Union, Polish Jews gathered in the southern Soviet republics between the fall of 1941 and the spring of 1946 where they successfully maintained Polish Jewish life in Soviet wartime exile. Here the lives and experiences of the evacuated and former prisoners slowly began to synchronize. To be sure, Soviet and Polish citizens were handled by the authorities differently for geopolitical reasons, however their living conditions in Soviet central Asia and elsewhere grew visibly more similar. The differing context of Polish Jews in exile was not much more than regular Soviet daily life under wartime conditions. They all escaped the Germans. In the years to come, surviving the war came to be paramount.

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CHAPTER 2

Children in Exile: Wartime Journeys of Polish Jewish Youth Eliyana R. Adler In my practice as a writer, I have found children’s accounts more reliable than accounts of the adults, because children rarely have ideological, political, or other reasons to manipulate information.1 (Henryk Grynberg)

I

n 1943 Shmuel Labin, age 15, and his three younger siblings, arrived in Palestine as part of what came to be called the Children of Tehran. They had been taken, along with their entire Polish orphanage in Tashkent, by truck to Yangiyul, then by train to the Caspian Sea and by boat to Bandar-e Pahlavi (Bandar-e Anzali), Iran where they spent several months before receiving transport to Palestine. Shmuel told the agent from the Polish government-in-exile who interviewed him that his mother walked behind the truck from Tashkent for seven kilometers. He was unsure if she and his two remaining older siblings would be able to survive the starvation and disease raging on the kolkhoz (collective farm) where they lived and wondered if they even knew how to reach him.2 This chapter focuses on the stories of Polish Jewish children, like Labin, who were evacuated from the Soviet Union in the midst of the Second

I would like to thank the editors of this volume for taking the time to read this chapter closely and provide invaluable writing and bibliographic suggestions. 1 Henryk Grynberg, “In Defense of Eyewitness Testimonies: Reflections of a Writer and Child Survivor of the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 249 (emphasis in original). 2 Testimony of Shmuel Labin, Ganzach Kiddush Hashem (GKH), Flinker Collection, 45587 (Protocol 19), 21.

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World War and then interviewed in Palestine. In addition to this volume, several recent works examine the experiences of Polish Jews who survived the war in the unoccupied regions of the USSR.3 What can we learn by adding the perspective of children and how should their sources be assessed? Between 1942 and 1943 the Polish government-in-exile succeeded in evacuating as many as 115,000 Polish citizens from the USSR via Iran. After the German invasion in 1941, with the Soviets losing territory on a daily basis, the Poles in London, with help from the British, were able to negotiate a deal with Stalin to first amnesty and then evacuate a portion of the many Poles trapped in the Soviet Union in order to form an army to join in defeating their now shared enemy. In addition to the officially sanctioned soldiers, however, the Poles also managed to take out around 40,000 civilians, including the entire staffs and charges of as many Polish orphanages as possible.4 Whereas Jews were overrepresented among Polish citizens in the USSR during the war compared to their share of the prewar Polish population, forming 20–30 percent of the exiles, they were actively discouraged from joining the army by both the Soviet and Polish authorities, and thus formed a much smaller percentage of the evacuees. Between 6,000 and 7,000 Jews evacuated, approximately 5 percent of the soldiers and seven percent of civilians.5 While the British had hoped to deploy the Polish soldiers immediately, the deplorable conditions they had faced in the USSR meant that they were weak, malnourished, and unprepared to enter the fray. Between this concern, the lack of trained officers, and logistical matters, the Polish evacuees spent months in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East before joining the fighting in Italy. It was during this lengthy period of waiting that the Polish military and civilian authorities began to collect testimonies from their newly evacuated citizens. Some of the early ones were the result of exit interviews, with the Poles trying 3 See for example Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017); Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust Entkommen: Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion (1939–1946) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Katharina Friedla and Lidia ZessinJurek, eds., Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020); Eliyana R. Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 4 Using Polish government-in-exile documents, as well as corroborating sources, scholars have reached different numbers within the same basic range. See for example Keith Sword, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–48 (Hampshire: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 86; Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” Shelter from the Holocaust, 115. 5 Israel Gutman, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies XII ( January 1977): 285–286; Edele and Warlik, “Saved by Stalin?,” 112.

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to gain information about Soviet mistreatment of their citizens for eventual political gain. Later a number of forms were developed, but the military and civilian branches of the government used different questionnaires. In all, the Polish authorities collected and transferred to London approximately 30,000 testimonies.6 On the whole, these remarkable and early sources on the war have received relatively little scholarly attention. There are some important exceptions.7 A few scholars have even focused on the children’s words.8 To my knowledge, the documents do not reveal why the Poles chose to interview children as well as adults. After all, if the goal was to collect evidence against the Soviets, children would appear to be less reliable witnesses due to their lack of political awareness, attention to dates, and general context and perspective. On the other hand, these very deficits may make the children’s testimonies valuable for the historian. Research for this article is based on twelve testimonies: six in Polish and six in Yiddish, with six girls and six boys between the ages of 11 and 17.9 Following an opening discussion of these sources within the context of scholarship on children’s testimonies of the Holocaust, the paper will analyze three important 6 Maciej Siekierski, “Hoover Institution’s Polish Collections and the History of the Testimonies of Deported Jews,” in Widziałem anioła śmierci: losy deportowanych Żydów polskich w ZSRR w latach II wojny światowej, ed. Maciej Siekierski and Feliks Tych (Warsaw: Rosner i Wspólnicy, 2006), 30. See also Tomasz Gąsowski, “Polscy Żydzi w sowieckiej Rosji,” in Historyk i Historia. Studia dedykowane pamięci Prof. Mirosława Frančicia, ed. Adam Walaszek and Krzysztof Zamorski (Cracow: Historia Iajellonica, 2005), 223–236. 7 See for example Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002) and the works based on children’s testimonies cited in the following footnote. 8 To date three very different attempts to acquaint the public with these testimonies have been published. One, prepared by a novelist, uses excerpts of the Jewish children’s testimonies to tell their story, but without any academic apparatus, including even notations to which testimonies he cites. See Henryk Grynberg, Dzieci Syjonu (Warsaw: Karta, 1994) or the translations in German, Hebrew and English. Another includes translated examples of testimonies but focuses mainly on the experiences of ethnic Poles. See Irena GrudzińskaGross and Jan Tomasz Gross, eds., War through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939–1941 (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University: Hoover Institution Press, 1981). The third includes the Polish language testimonies of Jews, children and adults, recorded in Palestine and a useful introduction. See Siekierski and Tych, Widziałem anioła śmierci. 9 This is essentially the age range of the collection rather than my own definition of childhood. Younger children seem not to have been interviewed and anyone older than 17 would not have been accepted into an orphanage. It is worth noting that the testimonies cover a period of 4–5 years, which was a significant portion of the lives of many of these youth.

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issues in their wartime experiences. The first section examines the children’s recollections of the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939. The second section looks at interactions between Polish Jews and Soviet citizens and customs throughout their time as refugees. The third section will explore relations with non-Jewish Polish citizens in the USSR as well as during and after evacuation to Iran. Before offering some conclusions, the final section will provide a comparative analysis of the testimonies.

Children as Witnesses Much has been written about early silences regarding the Holocaust, with survivors encouraged to go on with their lives rather than dwell on their losses and tell their stories. Particularly in the United States and the State of Israel, but more generally as well, scholarship has also focused on the particular cultural and historical events that led to a greater interest in the Holocaust and what Annette Wieviorka termed “the era of the witness” beginning in the latter decades of the twentieth century.10 Even more than adults, children were pushed to abandon the past and embrace their postwar lives and countries. As Dalia Ofer has noted, even when children had been separated from their parents for part of the war, often it was still their parents who told their stories.11 This led, in some cases, to child victims unsure of their status as survivors. Psychologist Eva Fogelman, among others, has written about the importance of the First International Gathering of Children Hidden During World War II, in 1991, in allowing many childhood survivors to begin coming to terms with their wartime experiences.12 All of this is true and crucial to understand, yet recent scholarship has also uncovered a number of early efforts to capture the testimonies of children. Boaz Cohen, for example, has written about three separate books of children’s Holocaust testimonies published in 1947 as well as testimonies published in the DP newspaper Fun letstn khurbn and many others collected by the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH) in Poland. He explains these efforts as both a continuation of prewar 10 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 11 Dalia Ofer, “Forward,” introduction to Child Survivors of the Holocaust in Israel “Finding Their Voice”: Social Dynamics and Post-War Experiences, by Sharon Kangisser Cohen (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), iix. 12 Eva Fogelman, “Holocaust Child Survivors, Sixty-Five Years after Liberation: From Mourning to Creativity,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017).

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programs such as the YIVO youth autobiography contest, and a response to the Nazis’ unique cruelty toward children.13 Children also provided a powerful symbol through which to publicize the devastation of the war and hope for the future.14 As the work of Nick Baron has shown, nation states began paying attention to the category and potential of children in the early twentieth century.15 Tara Zahra has written about the ways that relief work aimed at children after the war was often subsumed within larger national building projects.16 In this vein, Boaz Cohen and Gabriel Finder note that the Hebrew and Polish books of child survivors’ testimonies clearly reflect the political leanings of their editors and national contexts.17 The national framing is particularly evident with the Polish government-in-exile testimonies—produced during the war—when there was still the possibility that the material they gathered might influence the postwar prospects for Poland.18 Maciej Siekierski adds that the attention given to collecting Jewish voices stemmed from a desire to combat international press claims regarding Polish antisemitism.19 In some cases, talking or writing about their experiences was also seen to have a therapeutic benefit for children.20 This is also the premise of the postwar film Undzere kinder, although, as Gabriel Finder demonstrates, this endeavor was not fully developed. “Indeed, the film’s approach to the therapeutic value 13 Boaz Cohen, “The Children’s Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 89. 14 Boaz Cohen, “Representing the Experiences of Children in the Holocaust: Children’s Survivor Testimonies Published in Fun Letstn Hurbn, Munich, 1946–49,” in “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 94. See also Gabriel N. Finder, “Child Survivors in Polish Jewish Collective Memory after the Holocaust: The Case of Undzere kinder,” in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 1915–1953: Ideologies, Identities, Experiences, ed. Nick Baron (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 220–224; Laura Jockusch, “Historiography in Transit: Survivor Historians and the Writing of Holocaust History in the late 1940s,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 58 (2013): 80–81. 15 Nick Baron, “Placing the Child in Twentieth-Century History: Contexts and Framework,” in Displaced Children in Russia and Eastern Europe, 2. 16 Tara Zahra, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe’s Families after World War II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 19–20. 17 Boaz Cohen and Gabriel N. Finder, “‘I Will Not Be Believed’: Benjamin Tenenbaum and the Representation of the Child Survivor,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 201–202. 18 Jolluck, Exile and Identity, xv. 19 Maciej Siekierski, “Hoover Institution’s Polish Collections and The History of the Testimonies of Deported Jews,” in Widziałem anioła śmierci, 31. 20 Cohen, “The Children’s Voice,” 73.

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of recounting painful experiences is inconsistent, if not paradoxical.”21 There is no evidence that an effort to help children to deal with trauma was an element of the Polish government’s testimony project. Notwithstanding the multiple motivations that led to their creation, these testimonies now serve as important—and complex—historical sources. Debórah Dwork has written about the way that classical narrative structures shape all testimonies, but especially those by children. While she found that children’s stories had to be cross-checked for facts such as dates and locations, she also found the overall structure to be an accurate reflection of their experiences.22 Joanna Michlic emphasizes that early testimonies highlight the agency of children, as well as their unique vulnerabilities continuing into the postwar period.23 Rita Horvath’s work has examined the ways that trauma is communicated even in laconic and factual testimonies.24 Beate Müller’s analysis of the role of adults in shaping children’s testimonies from the CŻKH is particularly relevant to this study. Müller shows that the dominant mode of recording testimonies in the immediate postwar period was for interviewers to ask questions, take notes, and then prepare a written summary. She refers to the resulting text as “polyphonic.” The polyphony observed in the testimonies under investigation here is twofold: when one person puts into writing what another person has told him/her, the immediacy of orality gives way to the mediatedness of writing which will retain some elements of the spoken word, and the written text will polyphonically reflect the language of all persons involved, to a greater or lesser extent.25

Additionally, as the CŻKH hoped to use their collection in legal proceedings, they strove to produce objective rather than emotional texts.26 These factors all shaped the testimonies they produced. 21 Finder, “Child Survivors in Polish Jewish Collective Memory,” 230. 22 Debórah Dwork, introduction to Children With A Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), xxxix–xl. 23 Joanna Beata Michlic, “Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory—An Introduction,” in Jewish Families in Europe, xviii, xxiii–xxiv. 24 Rita Horvath, “Memory Imprints: Testimonies as Historical Sources,” in Jewish Families in Europe. 25 Beate Müller, “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony: Adult Voices in the CJHC’s Early Postwar Child Holocaust Testimonies,” History & Memory 24, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2012): 159. 26 Müller, “Trauma, Historiography and Polyphony,” 172.

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For Müller, the testimonies of children stand out as exceptional within this greater context as the adult interviewers sought to write “from a posited child’s first-person point of view” while simultaneously imposing order and excising sentimentality.27 Her work clearly emphasizes the importance of understanding the conditions and specifications of the CŻKH collection. Yet she also notes the diverse stories the children told. Müller uses the children’s testimonies to locate both trauma and individuality within the confines of the genre and circumstances of collection. Many of these same conditions apply to the testimonies collected by the Polish government-in-exile as well. The majority of testimonies of Jewish children in the collection are typed in Polish or Yiddish and divided into clearly titled thematic and chronological sections. The orderly and factual first-person narratives show the clear stamp of the adults who produced them. Indeed, novelist Henryk Grynberg writes that while assembling excerpts of the children’s testimonies for his published anthology, he at times had to correct for the “overwriting” of the bureaucrats.28 Presumably Grynberg found the editorial voice intrusive, but he does not explain how he endeavored to recover the authentic children’s voices. As Siekierski points out, translation is another potential mediating factor. The children spoke in Yiddish or Polish, but the testimonies forwarded on to London had to be in Polish.29 There is no notation of the original language in the text. Siekierski and Tych published all of so-called Palestine Protocols— testimonies of Polish Jews recorded in Palestine in 1943—retained in the files of the Hoover Institution Archives. These came from the papers of the Polish government-in-exile in London, but the collection is clearly incomplete. There are gaps in the numbered protocols.30 And it is easy to imagine batches of testimonies being lost in the mail in the midst of the war.31 Some of the missing numbers, as well as some that are found in the book, are held by the Ganzach Kiddush Hashem (GKH) archive in Israel. All of these texts are in Yiddish and they came to GKH through its founder, Rabbi Moshe 27 Ibid., 183. 28 Grynberg, “In Defense of Eyewitness Testimonies,” 250. 29 Siekierski, “Testimonies of Deported Jews,” 32. 30 For example, the numerically arranged protocols in the book begin with number 27 (Widziałem anioła śmierci, 40). 31 For correspondence regarding testimonies sent between Palestine and England, see for example Hoover Institution Archives (HIA), Poland, Ministerstwo Informacji i Dokumentacji, Box 14, File 1. Siekierski also mentions some testimonies left behind and discovered in 1950 (31).

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Prager, who received them from journalist Dovid Flinker. Although the archive does not have further records on the provenance of the materials, Flinker reached Palestine from Warsaw in 1940 and later apparently worked for the Poles recording testimonies in Yiddish.32 However, Flinker’s association with the Ministry of Information and Documentation (MID) of the Polish government-in-exile can be inferred only through his retention and subsequent distribution of a selection of Yiddish testimonies. His name does not appear on staff lists or in the few books devoted to the topic.33 Indeed, despite a good deal of Polish scholarship on the Anders Army and its military campaigns, and important books in English about the Polish government-in-exile and the Jews, relatively little has been written about the MID’s Center for Information in the Near East (CIW) and its activities in Palestine.34 Additionally, as Siekierski notes, the CIW’s archive did not survive the war.35 As a result, it is not possible to accurately reconstruct the setting and staffing for the children’s testimonies. Kazimierz Zamorski, who worked in the MID in Palestine, later published a book of remembrances of that time. In the midst of the terrible war, he describes a collegial and productive environment where both women and Jews held important roles.36 The initiative to interview the Teheran Children may have come from Dr. Teresa Lipkowska, a Catholic Pole who came to appreciate the struggles of the Jewish people and spent the rest of her life in Israel. She certainly received support from Dr. Menachem Buchwajc, a Jewish Pole involved in the CIW.37 However, given their prominent positions and important portfolios, it is unlikely that they conducted the interviews or produced the typed testimonies themselves. This work, presumably, was handled by Polish and Yiddish speaking contract workers such as Flinker. 32 He describes leaving from Odessa in late 1939 or early 1940 in his memorial volume. David Flinker, ‘Arim ve-emahot be-Yisrael: matsevet kodesh le-kehilot Yisrael she-nitharvu be-yede ‘aritsim ve-temaim ba-milhemet ha-‘olam ha-aharonah, vol. 3 ( Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1945), 289. 33 See for example Valentina Brio, Pol’skie muzy na sviatoi zemie. Armiia Andersa: mesto, vremia, kul’tura (1942–1945) (Moscow and Jerusalem: Mosty kul’tury Gesharim, 2017); Kazimierz Zamorski, Dwa Tajne Biura 2 Korpusu (London: Poets and Painters Press, 1990). 34 In English, see for example the scholarship of David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), and Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 35 Siekierski, “Testimonies of Deported Jews,” 31. 36 Zamorski, Dwa Tajne Biura. 37 Siekierski, “Testimonies of Deported Jews,” 31–32.

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This chapter is based on six testimonies from the Flinker Collection at GKH and six from the larger collection of the Palestine Protocols, on the assumption that the former were originally recorded in Yiddish, as there would have been no reason to translate them into Yiddish. The latter may have been recorded in Polish, although it is not possible to be certain.38 Yet despite the issues regarding translation and standardization, the testimonies retain the stamp of the individual children. For example, although the interviewers added section headings to the written testimonies, the headings are not uniform. They reflect the children’s stories. Eliezer Hochmeister’s testimony has section titles such as “W Białymstoku” (In Bialystok), “Na zesłaniu” (In Exile) and “Wojna i amnestia” (War and Amnesty) that appear in most of the texts. However, he also has a section devoted to “Śmierć generała Sikorskiego” (The Death of General Sikorski) that is unique to his retelling of events.39 In Yehudis Patash’s testimony, the section on labor “Oyf arbet” is followed by one on the death of her mother, “Di mame shtarbt.”40 Additionally, the language is different, the use of idioms and loan words from Russian varied, and the length and style of the testimonies non-standardized. When Yosef Weizenfeld ironically states that his family’s deportation to one of the furthest and worst locations in Siberia was bashert (destined) or jokes that its distance of two thousand kilometers from the nearest city of Vladivostok was considered close by Russian standards, one can hear the 14-year-old’s sarcastic tone.41 In a similar vein, most of the testimonies begin with a contextual statement about the children’s situation before the war, such as Luba Milgraum’s “I was 8 years old when the war broke out.”42 The first lines provide a taste of their lives before everything changed and introduce a chronological narrative. On the contrary, Sima Siebcesser chose a circular narrative structure in opening 38 Several testimonies appear at GKH and in the Hoover collection. Some protocol numbers are missing in both collections. In the absence of a master list including original language, one can only surmise about the origins of the individual testimonies. 39 Testimony of Eliezer Hochmeister, Protocol 113, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 230–233. 40 Testimony of Yehudis Patash, GKH, Flinker Collection, 45629 (Protocol 37). Her testimony can also be found in Polish as Testimony of Judyta Patasz, Protocol 37, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 67–71. Where a Yiddish original exists, I have followed the Yiddish spelling of the name. 41 Testimony of Yosef Weizenfeld, GKH, Flinker Collection, 45714 (Protocol 123), 1. The Polish version lists his name as Józef Wajdenfeld, which would appear to be a mistake. The Hebrew letters for ‘z’ and ‘d’ are similar looking in print. See Widziałem anioła śmierci, 258. 42 Luba Milgraum, Protocol 115, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 237.

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her testimony with the precipitous: “Our family consisted of five children, three of whom died in Russia.”43 The listener thus already knows the ending, and follows along in order to hear the details of the loss and suffering in the 13-year-old’s family. Siebcesser’s subversion of the typical opening—or of the typical answer to an interview question about the prewar period—is retained in her testimony. Nor is there any obvious effort to homogenize factual details. Many of the children provide very exact numbers for items such as the amount of bread provided in the special settlements or the number of hours of work per day, but they differ from one another. Gitla Rabinowicz recalls her daily bread ration declining from one kilogram to 600 grams, whereas Ziwja Elsan specifies that minors received only 400 grams.44 Clearly the Polish government-in-exile wanted to collect as much information as possible about the conditions Polish citizens faced in the USSR. Children were asked to provide the name and location to which their family was deported. Whether or not they specifically asked about the bread ration, many children provided exact details, and these were duly recorded. The Polish authorities had their goals and created a series of reports based on the testimonies they collected. Sometimes, it would appear, the children had their own agendas.

First Encounters Of the 800 or so Tehran Children, most encountered the German invasion before the Soviet occupation.45 In order to have had the paradoxical good fortune to be deported by the Soviets and thus in a position to escape the genocide and have the opportunity to evacuate the USSR in 1942 and 1943, they would most likely have been refugees from the German-held areas. The numbers of Polish Jews deported for other reasons or who managed to self-evacuate were far smaller.46 Thus, when asked about the start of the war, these children began with their experiences of the Holocaust on Polish soil in 1939.

43 Testimony of Sima Siebcesser, Protocol 112, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 227. 44 Testimony of Gitla Rabinowicz, Protocol 77, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 182 and Testimony of Ziwja Elsan, Protocol 36, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 63. Elsan’s first name was not recorded correctly in the written testimony. It is not clear what her name really was. Throughout the paper I have used the name Ziwja, which corresponds most closely to the extant letters. 45 For more on the Tehran Children see chapter 9 of Dvora Hacohen, Yalde ha-zeman: ‘aliyat ha-no’ar, 1933–1948 (Sde Boker: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2011). 46 See the chapter by Markus Nesselrodt in this volume.

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Shmuel Burshteyn, age 13 in 1939, describes the terrible bombing and bloody battles around his hometown of Tarnobrzeg during the first two weeks of September. It was only on the 20th of the month, with the arrival of the Gestapo, however, that the real horror started. On that day, in Burshteyn’s words, “the destruction (hurbn) began.”47 Soon afterward the entire Jewish community was expelled. His family tried to reestablish themselves in Radomyśl (present-day Radomyšl, Ukraine), but the Germans made it too difficult for them. Finally, Burshteyn’s father could not take it any longer, “Enough, I will not remain any more with the Germans,” he proclaimed, and the family fled to the Soviet side of the border.48 Like Burshteyn’s, Shmuel Labin’s family, mentioned in the introduction, was also chased from their home by German soldiers. They were awaiting help crossing the border, and most worried about their marriageable daughter, when Shmuel’s older brother Avram, coming home from attending classes at the local yeshiva, was assaulted and repeatedly held under water in the river by German guards. Shmuel says that Avram was never the same afterward and that at that point the family crossed to the Soviets in fear and desperation.49 Eliezer Hochmeister and his family offer yet another expulsion story. They fled the bombings in Warsaw to family in Ostrów Mazowiecka. While there, Hochmeister’s older brother was arrested by the Germans and miraculously survived both a firing squad and imprisonment without food or water. After his release, all Jews were driven to the Soviet border.50 Ziwja Elsan and her parents and two siblings left their home in Kętrzyn when the bombing began. They self-evacuated to relatives in Ostrów Mazowiecka as well, just in time for the Soviet troops to arrive. Several days later, when the Soviets withdrew, Elsan says that the Germans and Poles killed 600 Jews in a pogrom. That was when the family reluctantly smuggled themselves eastward into the territory to be annexed by the USSR.51 Yosef Weizenfeld, on the other hand, credits local Poles with staving off a pogrom. He states that his family, along with all of the other Jews, had fled from their home in Bielsko-Biała, on the German border. Not long after they reached his paternal grandfather’s house in Grzymałów (present-day Hrymailiv, Ukraine), Polish forces withdrew. In the period before the arrival of the Red 47 48 49 50 51

Testimony of Shmuel Burshteyn, GKH, Flinker Collection, 45585 (Protocol 17), 2. Burshteyn, 3. Labin, 1–4. Hochmeister, 230. Elsan, 1.

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Army, Weizenfeld describes Ukrainians carrying out robberies and a threat of escalating violence. A couple of Polish police officers stepped in to quell the anarchy before Soviets troops occupied the area.52 For Gitla Rabinowicz and her family, residing in Siedlce, the German bombing was ruinous. They and all their local relations lost their homes. Nonetheless, flight with five children seemed impossible and they were living in a shack when the Germans entered the town. Although they were only there a few days, the Germans managed to terrorize the local Jews and shoot at Rabinowicz’s father. The family thus took up the Soviet offer of transport east during the brief period they ruled before the Germans returned.53 Sarah Halbershtadt and her family, also residing in Siedlce, made the same decision. Although she does not mention experiencing atrocities beyond the calamitous bombing campaign, Halbershtadt recalls that once the family reached her grandmother in Siemiatycze, other refugees continued to arrive daily. “And they all told their terrible tales of what the Germans were doing to the Jews.”54 Luba Milgraum, age twelve, describes the first days of the war in an entirely matter-of-fact manner. Her father had already fled east when their home in Kałuszyn was destroyed in the bombing. While escaping the fire, her fouryear-old sister went missing. After two days of searching, they concluded that she must have perished in the house. Then they discovered her in the home of peasants in a village outside of the town. While in the village, Milgraum’s mother gave birth to another child. As she lay recovering, the Germans arrived and beat her and the small children with a horse whip. Not long afterward, Milgraum’s father returned and took the family with him to Brześć (present-day Brest, Belarus).55 All of these children, despite the passage of time and having to endure other hardships, had sharp memories of the German invasion and subsequent dislocations. This is particularly interesting as the Polish authorities’ main interest was in gathering evidence of Soviet crimes. Yet, for these Jewish children, the war—and their experience of it—began with German atrocities. For them, the Soviet invasion, and the opportunity to flee into Soviet-held territory, was an escape from terror. 52 Weizenfeld, 1. 53 Testimony of Gitla Rabinowicz, Protocol 77, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 180–181. 54 Testimony of Sarah Halbershtadt, GKH, Flinker Collection, 45806 (Protocol 215), 2. Halbershtadt’s testimony is also available in a Polish version in Widziałem anioła śmierci (441–444). The spelling there is Sara Halbersztat. 55 Milgraum, 237.

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Soviet Life The Polish Jewish refugees spent time in a number of distinct locations during their time in the Soviet Union. This section will treat the months they spent in the formerly Polish border areas newly incorporated into the USSR, their deportation and year spent in special settlements or labor camps in Siberia and other distant locations, and their time in the Central Asian republics following their amnesty in late 1941. In each of these areas the Polish Jews interacted with a variety of different ethnic groups as well as different sides of Soviet society.56 Along the way they also all had to learn to deal with the NKVD or security services. Khanina Teitel and his parents had no direct experience with the Germans; they left their home six days into the war, before the Germans reached their town. Life in the newly annexed Soviet territories, however, proved impossible. Neither of Teitel’s parents was able to find work and the entire family spent all of every day waiting in lines for insufficient handouts. They were still looking for ways to sneak back into the German-held Polish territories when they were deported to the Arkhangel’sk oblast. Life was terribly difficult there although Teitel’s mother, with a university degree, was able to earn a little extra in her office job. Both the commandant and the doctor of their labor camp had no pity on the Polish citizens. The Jews were not allowed to hold a weekly minyan, but they did refuse to work on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the first day of Pesach. Teitel adds that relations with the local deported Ukrainians were terrible, but does not specify whether the problem was antisemitism, hatred of Poles, or just resentment of further strain on meager resources.57 Lack of resources was a major issue for Dina Stahl and her family. When they first arrived in Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), they found that there was insufficient housing and relocated to Stryj (present-day Stryi, Ukraine). There they managed to rent a room and Stahl’s father and grandfather both found work but cashing in their various ration cards for food meant Dina, her brother Meir, their mother and grandmother standing in lines all day every day. Things only got worse in the camp they were sent to in Asino. Despite her father’s privileged position as a locksmith, the family never had enough to eat. Stahl says that without the periodic packages they received from relatives in the Nazi-held Polish territories, they would have starved. Upon their release in late 1941, they really did begin to starve. After several stays in the hospital, and 56 See also the chapters by Albert Kaganovitch and Natalie Belsky in this volume. 57 Testimony of Khanina Teitel, GKH, Flinker Collection, 45591 (Protocol 26), 1–6.

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the loss of Dina’s baby sister and father to disease, her mother placed Dina and Meir in a Polish orphanage.58 Yosef Weizenfeld also referred to hunger, long lines, and packages from relatives left behind. When his grandfather sent butter to their special settlement in Siberia from the annexed territories, his mother cried with joy. Weizenfeld’s father refused to back down when the camp commandant tried to stop his prayer services, but his health declined, and soon only 13-year-old Yosef could work in the forest. They had hoped that conditions would improve after amnesty, but in fact they had great difficulties in Samarkand. Weizenfeld describes Uzbeks driving them out of bread lines with antisemitic shouts and his father dying of hunger, at which point his mother placed the children in a Polish orphanage.59 Although schooling was free in the Soviet Union, the Burshteyn family was not interested in education in Ukrainian. Upon their arrival in Soviet-held Lwów, instead of going to school, the children engaged in black market trading while the father found work as a tailor. They managed to make a decent living. Things got harder after their deportation to the Mari SSR. However, despite the harsh life, Burshteyn describes inconsistent Soviet personnel and policies regarding the refugees. On the one hand the Polish and Jewish children were punished for speaking either Polish or Yiddish and forced to learn about Stalin at the school they attended. On the other hand, the commandant of their camp allowed both groups to observe their traditional burial and mourning customs as their members succumbed to the inhuman conditions.60 Ziwja Elsan does not describe the conditions her family faced upon crossing into Soviet territory. She only states that her father refused to take Soviet citizenship and instead signed up for repatriation through a population exchange. When the family arrived on the scheduled day, they were loaded into a train wagon and taken to barracks in the forest in the Arkhangel’sk oblast. At the age of 13, Ziwja had to work eight hours per day. When a tree crushed her father’s leg and the commandant refused to seek medical care, Ziwja’s sister Zlata organized a strike. She succeeded in having their father hospitalized but was herself arrested as a result. Ziwja says that their commandant hated the Jews and punished them severely for not working on Yom Kippur, but that he hated the Poles even more. After the amnesty, the Elsans were sent to a kolkhoz 58 Testimony of Dina Stahl, Protocol 110, Widziałem anioła śmierci, 224. 59 Weizenfeld, 2–4. 60 Burshteyn, 3–12.

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in Uzbekistan. There, Ziwja narrates, the Uzbeks stole their belongings and refused to give them either work or food.61 Because her father was a rabbi, Gitla Rabinowicz and her family faced discrimination during their time in the newly incorporated Soviet territories. They survived by engaging in black market business and attempted to get passage to Lithuania where there was some hope of gaining certificates for Palestine. Instead they were deported to the Soviet interior. Rabinowicz’s father categorically refused to work on the Sabbath in the labor camp, no matter the inducements or the threats. Eventually the commandant left him alone, but as the High Holidays approached, he warned him that although the Stalin constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, congregating was not allowed. Rabinowicz’s father retorted that he also believed in religious freedom, including the freedom of others to join him in prayer if they wished to do so. He was arrested in the middle of Rosh Hashana services, but released before Yom Kippur. By that time none of the other Jews wanted to risk their freedom for the freedom of praying with him. When Pesach came around, he managed to organize matza baking within the camp, according to his daughter.62 Despite the horrors they had faced under the Germans, after eight months under the Soviets, Shmuel Labin’s family was ready to return. Their father was heartbroken that his children had to make a living on the black market instead of studying Torah. “I don’t know which is worse,” he said, “the German troubles or the Russians making them into goyim.”63 But of course the decision did not really lie with the family. They were taken to a labor installation in the Molotov oblast. There the older children worked to try to earn enough bread for ten mouths. Their mother took care of housekeeping and the younger children while their father studied Torah. Labin discusses very little about their interactions with Soviet citizens, but it is clear that the camp administration allowed the Jews a measure of freedom in that Labin’s father held a weekly minyan in their barracks.64 After the amnesty, the Labins moved to Andizhan, where they knew another Polish Jewish family. Evacuated and refugee Jews there were pleased to use Labin’s father’s services as a ritual slaughterer, and the family started to get settled. Soon, however, in an effort to get the refugees to move from the cities onto collective farms, the Soviets told them to gather at the train station on a 61 62 63 64

Elsan, 2–5. Rabinowicz, 182. Labin, 6. Labin, 13.

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given day for transport to England. The Labins eagerly arrived. In the course of waiting for several days in crowded and unsanitary conditions, Labin’s father became ill and died. They were able to bury him and observe the seven days of mourning without the NKVD agents noticing. Then the family was shipped off to a kolkhoz were two of Shmuel’s siblings died of hunger. It was at this point that his mother entered the four youngest children into a Polish orphanage.65 Hunger and insensitivity characterize all the children’s testimonies. Often, they discuss the terrible conditions they lived under without explicitly placing blame. Luba Milgraum, for example, describes being locked in the crowded deportation train for three days without food or water, and then forced to work—as an eleven-year-old—at the special settlement, with no reference to the particular camp guards or to the Soviet system more generally.66 Similarly, Sima Siebcesser narrates the death of her two younger brothers in the special settlement with little rancor. Only when the original camp commandant was replaced by a Ukrainian, who targeted them for especially bad treatment, does she express indignation.67 Children accepted the Soviet mores more readily than their parents. Although children are certainly influenced by their parents’ ideological commitments, they tend to have less fully developed political worldviews. Whereas testimonies of adults in this same collection make reference to the betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to Stalin, or to Soviet policies or promises, children describe what stood out to them. It is noteworthy that hunger, standing in lines, and observing Jewish holidays and rituals despite official disapproval made such strong impressions on the Polish Jewish children.

Poles and Jews According to Shmuel Burshteyn, relations were excellent between Poles and Jews in the special settlement.68 Before they reached the camp in the distant Mari SSR, men considered particularly dangerous had been separated from their families and sent to harsher prisons. Burshteyn’s father was aware that one of the Polish men in their wagon was an officer in the Polish army but did not tell their Soviet guards. This turned out to be beneficial because this man 65 66 67 68

Labin, 20. Milgraum, 238. Siebcesser, 228. On Polish-Jewish relations in the interior of the Soviet Union see also the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume.

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had more experience with physical labor than the other exiles and was able to organize and train their group to fell trees more efficiently.69 Later, as the poor nutrition and terrible conditions began to take their toll, the Polish and Jewish prisoners helped one another to bury their dead and follow their traditional mourning practices.70 Not long after they were released, and relocated to Tashkent, Burshteyn’s father died of a lung infection and his mother, unable to procure sufficient food, placed the four children in an Polish orphanage. The majority of the children were Jewish there and Burshteyn and his younger siblings did not experience antisemitism.71 Shmuel Labin and Khanina Teitel also mention good relations with non-Jewish Poles. When Labin’s older sister contacted the Polish delegate in their region of Central Asia, she was sent 400 rubles and an invitation to enroll the children under 15 in the orphanage.72 Teitel contrasts the troubles his family faced with deported Ukrainian “kulaks” in their labor camp with the positive interactions with ethnic Poles. Later, in discussing starvation conditions in an Uzbek kolkhoz, he points out that the Catholic Poles suffered as much as the Jewish Poles did.73 Ziwja Elsan paints a far less rosy picture of Polish-Jewish relations. Not only does she open her testimony with reference to the pogrom perpetrated by the Nazis and local Polish collaborators in Ostrów Mazowiecka, but she goes on to describe inter-ethnic tensions in the special settlement as well. Both the Poles and the Belarusians targeted the Jews, in Elsan’s retelling, although the Belarusians were worse.74 Then, after her mother’s death and her father’s decision to place the two younger children in an orphanage, Ziwja and her younger brother were tortured by the Polish children and not given soup by the administrators. When she reached Tehran and the care of an English medical team, Ziwja says that the doctor’s first response to seeing her was, “Whom have you sent us? Corpses or children?”75 Gitla Rabinowicz does not mention relations with other Poles in the camp, or even in the kolkhoz. They only appear at the point when her father made contact with the Polish Delegatura in order to become a military chaplain 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Burshteyn, 5. Burshteyn, 11–12. Burshteyn, 14. Labin, 21. Teitel, 5, 7. Elsan, 2. Elsan, 7.

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and have his family evacuated from the Soviet Union. When the Poles refused to accept him, Rabinowicz explains that he was able to get her accepted into a Polish orphanage due to her blond hair and non-Jewish looks. She kept up her Polish identity until the convoy reached Tehran and she contacted Jewish leaders there. Meanwhile her father found another orphanage that was willing to accept her three surviving brothers and she met up with them before they all traveled to Palestine.76 Like Rabinowicz, Yehudis Patash makes no reference to ethnic relations until the end of her testimony. After the death of both of her parents and her eldest brother, Patash tried to place the remaining four children, including herself, in a Polish orphanage. Only after prolonged pleading, they accepted the youngest, Abraham and Tsvi. Then, after only a few days, Abraham ran away due to the beatings and insults he received. As a result, little Tsvi left on the first transport on his own.77 In addition to teasing from children, Sima Siebcesser claims that the administrators of her Polish orphanage decided not to take the four Jewish children as they prepared for the evacuation. In her retelling, a teacher took pity on them and brought them to the station and onto the train at the last minute. They left without their belongings and without saying goodbye to their parents.78 As Siekierski has written, given the interests of the Polish authorities—and the methods of recording—it is instructive that Polish antisemitism remains prominent in these testimonies.79 Nor is there any obvious difference between those in Polish and those in Yiddish. Across the board, children describe positive and negative interactions with non-Jewish Poles with specificity and candor. Whether or not the interviewers and their managers wanted to know these details, they were vividly described by the children.

Comparative Approach Looking at these twelve testimonies as a sample of the whole collection, a general structure emerges, but with significant differences in regard to individual experiences and interpretation. Most of the children describe wrenching experiences under the Germans, often leading directly to escape eastward. With some exceptions, the overall narrative of life in the USSR is bleak. The children 76 77 78 79

Rabinowicz, 183. Patash, 11. Siebcesser, 229. Siekierski, “Testimonies of Deported Jews,” 32.

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suffered from hunger, loss, and disease. Once again, the suffering is often directly linked to the decision to place them in orphanages in their retelling. Antisemitism appears in many, although not all, of the children’s testimonies. Chiefly it comes from Poles, and often other children, although other sources of hatred appear as well. There are also commonalities of style, but it is hard to know how much of these can be attributed to the fact that the witnesses were all children and how much relates to the goals and procedures of the collection as a whole. All of the Palestine Protocols tend to be rather short, although those of adults are often longer than those of the children. They all follow roughly the same structure, beginning before the war and then moving through the first months in Soviet territory, deportation and forced labor, amnesty, and then evacuation. Although there is some room for personal expression, the tone is generally straightforward and factual. The Polish officials wanted to use the testimonies to compile statistics and evidence and certainly directed the staff and subjects accordingly. One might imagine that the children would be less attentive to detail than adults. In fact, certain details interested them. All children could name most or all of the locations they traveled to on their flight paths and after deportation and amnesty. Most of them also kept close track of the food allowances and cited the exact number of grams of bread to which they were entitled at various points. However, they are considerably less reliable about dates and duration. Several of the children described being deported immediately upon registration to return to the Nazi-held territories, or even within weeks of reaching the Soviet-annexed areas. It is often unclear how long their families moved around Central Asia before placing them in orphanages, as well as how long they stayed in the orphanages before evacuation. They are more likely to cite seasons or days of the week than exact dates. Josef Weizenfeld actually did recall having been deported on Friday night June 29, 1940.80 Eliezer Hochmeister mentions only that it took place on a Friday evening.81 Shmuel Labin, on the other hand, refers to the extreme discomfort of sitting in closed train cars in the Hebrew month of Tamuz (corresponding roughly to July).82 Luba Milgraum, only twelve when she reached Palestine, does not seem to have realized the reasons her family was either 80 Weizenfeld, 1. 81 Hochmeister, 231. 82 Labin, 7.

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deported or amnestied. In her retelling, one day the NKVD put them into train cars to the Komi SSR and some time later they were allowed to go to Samarkand.83 Testimonies by adults in the same collection almost always contain exact dates. The larger collection of testimonies amassed by the Polish government-in-exile contains hundreds of ego-documents related to non-Jewish Polish children. Some of these were produced as school projects, written by hand by the children themselves, although frequently with a structure imposed by the teachers. Other formats exist as well, but none entirely parallel to the Palestine Protocols. With these caveats in mind, in addition to the fact that I have not devoted the same attention to these other texts, some comparative notes are possible. Firstly, it is important to point out that the ethnic Polish children mostly did not experience the German invasion. The vast majority of non-Jewish Poles deported to the Soviet interior resided in the eastern regions of Poland annexed by the USSR in 1939. Thus, they recalled the Soviet invasion. Unlike the Polish Jews, they did not flee, become refugees, or have reason to juxtapose the two occupying powers. This crucial difference of course influenced the framing of their testimonies. The Soviets were the villains in the stories told by the Polish Catholic children. Occasionally Jews appear as allies of the Soviets, although antisemitism is far more prominent in the testimonies of adults.84 In addition to comparing the Jewish children’s testimonies to those of Jewish adults and non-Jewish children taken around the same time, it would be ideal to be able to examine how the same children might have adjusted their stories over time. Yet the search for such evidence is hampered both by the dispersal of testimonial gathering agencies, and by the fact that many Polish Jews who survived the war in the USSR never recorded testimonies. Names are also an issue. Differences between Polish and Yiddish spellings, as well as transcription errors, make tracing individuals tricky. Add to that women changing their last names upon marriage and many immigrants to Israel choosing to Hebraicize their names, and it becomes nearly impossible. Fortunately, on two different occasions, people who heard me give academic talks including references to their relatives approached me afterward. In both of the cases discussed 83 Milgraum, 238. 84 For a sophisticated analysis of the role of antisemitism in the testimonies of Polish Catholic women, see Katherine R. Jolluck, “Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile,” in Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

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below, I was able to give them access to their loved ones’ childhood testimonies and they shared with me information about their later lives. In her recent book—a combination of a personal memoir and research about her father’s life—Mikhal Dekel describes the unnerving experience of encountering her father’s adolescent self in his testimony, several decades after his death. Khanina Teitel recorded his testimony in 1943, at age 15, shortly after arriving in Palestine.85 While touched by the clarity of his voice, Dekel is unable to compare the testimony to his later stories, because he so rarely discussed his wartime experiences.86 Learning about the challenges he faced in the USSR, as well as in transit and in Palestine and the early State of Israel, thus helped her to better understand the man he became, but did not shed light on the construction of his early testimony. Toward the end of her life, Dina O. produced a three-page Hebrew memoir for her family.87 At the time, neither she nor anyone else in the family remembered that she had produced a three-page Polish testimony for the Polish government-in-exile in 1943, aged eleven, as Dina Stahl.88 The most obvious difference between the two is that half of the later text focuses on arrival in the Land of Israel and what it meant to be a Tehran Child. These are the musings of an older woman, looking back on her association with a major event in her country’s history. The Yishuv was understandably proud of being able to take in Jewish children orphaned by the war. Photographs of their warm welcome became symbolic of the desire of Jews in Palestine to help their coreligionists trapped in Europe. Indeed, one of the most iconic photos actually shows Dina Stahl surveying the well-wishers from the train’s open window with obvious satisfaction. The Polish interviewers undoubtedly asked fewer questions about the time in Iran and passage to Palestine, but it is also a matter of perspective. Viewed from the early twenty-first century, Dina O. placed emphasis on different aspects of her wartime journey. Similarly, Bob Golan, a Tehran Child who 85 Teitel, 1. 86 Mikhal Dekel, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019), 56–57, 67. Throughout the book, she refers to her father by the Hebraicized name that he took: Hannan Dekel. 87 Dina O.’s cousin, who had been with her in the USSR, gave me a copy of her memoir after hearing me mention her in a public presentation. As she is no longer living, and I have not received permission from her heirs to use her name, I will use only the first initial of her married name. 88 Stahl, 222. Her cousin explained to me in an email that the original name was actually Stahr. He was not sure how it came to be recorded as Stahl.

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published a memoir in 2005, devoted over half his book to his life after evacuation from the USSR.89 For Golan, reaching Palestine and fighting in the Israeli War of Independence, was an integral part of his wartime trajectory. Beyond that, while the overall stories are largely the same, Dina included different details in the two testimonies. Hunger comes up in both, albeit illustrated with alternate examples. In the earlier text, a rabbi had to convince Stahl’s grandparents to eat the food provided in the special settlement even though it was not kosher, because it was a matter of life and death.90 By the later version, she recalled the cries of her starving baby sister which, she writes, “split the heavens.”91 Hunger is the main theme of the section on forced labor in the first testimony. In the later one, family separation becomes more important. She recalls missing her father, who was sent to a work camp some distance from their special settlement.92 The choice of these two specific examples in the adult testimony may also be related to the fact that both her sister and her father died in Soviet exile. With the passage of decades, the awareness of having lost those two loved ones may have called attention to her time with them, and separation from them. A similar dynamic is evident in placing the 1943 testimony of Yehudis Patash side-by-side with her younger brother Zvi Potash’s 1998 interview with the Shoah Foundation. Yehudis refers to their eldest sister Leah—already out of the house—in passing, and without mentioning her name. She is relevant to the family’s struggles in Soviet territory only when they briefly considered joining her in Wilno (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania). For Zvi, however, looking back on the war and the Holocaust after the passage of a lifetime, Leah’s murder is an open wound. Despite contacting the Red Cross and other organizations, he has no information about the circumstances of her death.93 Zvi begins to cry when asked to name his siblings at the beginning of his video testimony and returns to her again towards the end.94

89 Bob Golan, A Long Way Home: The Story of a Jewish Youth, 1939–1949, ed. Jacob Howard (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2005). 90 Stahl, 224. 91 Dina O., untitled memoir, 1. 92 Ibid. 93 Interview with Zvi Potash, May 24, 1998, Melbourne, Australia, University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USC VHA), 44731, tape 4, minutes 10–12. I am grateful to Katharina Friedla for drawing my attention to this source. 94 Potash, tape 1, minute 8.

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The other major difference is that the earlier testimony is largely a collective, familial narrative while the later one is much more of a personal tale. In the 1943 testimony, just as the other members of the family are finally recovering from typhus, Dina’s father falls ill. When her mother visited one day and he was no longer in his bed, she came home and said, “Children, you no longer have a father.”95 In the version from the 2000s, Dina explains that her father was not allowed to visit her in the hospital because of contagion. However, when he saw through the window that she was covered only in her coat, he snuck into the typhus ward in order to bring her a blanket, thus exposing himself to the disease that would take his life.96 The later version also includes much more detail about her time in Tehran, including another dramatic hospital scene. Dina had taken ill in Iran and been hospitalized for some time. The day after she underwent a procedure, her younger brother Meir visited to let her know that the children’s transport would be leaving the following day. Dina’s doctors were reluctant to let her go, but with the help of an unknown adult willing to take responsibility, she was able to win her release. The woman soon disappeared, and ten-year-old Meir had to take care of Dina en route.97 A corollary of the more individualistic later testimonies is that the children appear as more active in directing their own fates. Dina O. uses her wits to get herself out of the hospital and onto the critical transport. Likewise, whereas Yehudis Patash presents the reunion with her youngest brother in Iran as largely a matter of chance, Zvi Potash’s later account includes him running away from his Polish orphanage, managing to find a Jewish orphanage, going to meet the arrival of a new transport of children, and identifying his older siblings despite their not recognizing his newly healthy and chubby self.98 This differs from the pattern described by Markus Nesselrodt in postwar testimonies from adolescents collected by the Central Historical Commission and Benjamin Tenenbaum in DP camps in Germany. Nesselrodt charts a “shift from passivity to activity” in the transition from wartime to postwar in these texts.99 However, the testimonies he read were written by the children themselves, and with the 95 96 97 98 99

Stahl, 224. Dina O., untitled memoir, 1. Dina O., 2. Potash, tape 3, minutes 16–25. Markus Nesselrodt, “‘I bled like you, brother, although I was a thousand miles away’: Postwar Yiddish Sources on the Experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet Exile during World War II,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 1 (2016): 53.

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war and Holocaust behind them. They saw themselves as starting a new chapter of their lives while the Tehran children remained focused on what they had so recently escaped and those they had left behind. The overwhelming feeling of Dina O.’s brief testimony is one of ongoing emotional pain. She states that she did not see her mother between the ages of nine and 17. By the time her mother finally reached Israel, she had remarried and had a young daughter with her new husband.100 It is interesting to note that although Dekel was not able to speak to her father about his response to his parents’ decision to allow the children to evacuate without them, she did hear from his younger sister, who expressed ambivalence. “Maybe if they knew what we will endure . . .” she paused. “But our parents wanted to save us. It was the right thing to do.”101 Bob Golan’s memoir, although less emotionally charged, presents a rupture as well. He writes that by the time his parents reached Israel, he and his brother had developed completely independent lives.102

Conclusions Much more could be said about these testimonies and what they reveal. This paper has focused on three main areas of inquiry within the children’s lengthy and complicated migrations. Further research could call attention to other areas or narrow in on these more deeply. Additionally, while this paper noted the gender, age, and place of origin of the children, it did not point to differences based on these or other biographical factors, including language. A larger sample could enable more discussion of demographic divergences. Furthermore, although the section on children’s testimonies placed these texts within scholarship on the Holocaust, the comparative section makes no attempt to place them in conversation with testimonies from child survivors or from other Polish Jewish refugee children who left the USSR only after the war. This close reading of a small set of testimonies from the larger collection demonstrates a set of findings, as well as the potential for ongoing inquiry. Part of the novelty of these testimonies lies in their early dating. All of them were collected well before anyone could be sure of the outcome of the war, as well as before full knowledge of the Holocaust had leaked out. Information about interactions with Germans, Soviets, and Poles is thus uninflected by later occurrences and knowledge. That, however, is true of the entire collection. 100 Dina O., 2. 101 Dekel, Tehran Children, 235. 102 Golan, A Long Way Home, 130.

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The question for this paper is what we can learn from the testimonies of children in exile. In other words, is Grynberg, quoted in the epigraph, correct that children’s relative lack of outside knowledge and political agendas makes their depictions more dependable?103 And even if not, do they grant us access to information or perspectives that adults’ testimonies lack? As we have seen, this set of testimonies is highly mediated. The children’s stories and recollections were elicited through a structured interview and then condensed, organized, and recorded by an adult working for the Polish government-in-exile. The entire collection of testimonies was employed to show the world evidence of Stalin’s Soviet Union denying basic rights to Polish citizens.104 At times, the subset of Jewish testimonies was used to call attention to Soviet anti-Jewish policies. A lengthy report by Dr. Menachem Buchwajc, “Polish Jews under Soviet Rule,” for example, includes quotations from testimonies as illustrations of Soviet practices. One twelve-year-old is cited lamenting that he was tormented as both a Pole and a Jew in a Russian orphanage.105 However, neither the process of gathering and recording the testimonies, nor their eventual uses, should cause us to reject their value out of hand. Despite a certain economy of language, the testimonies of the children still manage to convey not only their individual stories, but also their distinct interests. Hunger plagued all of the children, but they discuss it in different words. Even if the structure of the testimonies is somewhat formulaic, the language is not. That said, there are also similarities among the children’s testimonies. Grynberg is perceptive in noting that the children are far less likely to bring in outside information about the conditions they faced. The children do not refer to Stalinist repressions. Frequently they do not even blame the Soviet authorities for their difficulties. While they always comment upon unfair treatment, and note whenever Germans, Soviets, or Poles single them out as Jews, when everyone is suffering equally, they tend to accept the situation. In testimonies produced by adults, or well after the war, inter-ethnic interactions often reflect both prewar and postwar experiences and expectations. 103 Laura Jockusch argues that this belief was central to the collection efforts of the postwar Central Jewish Historical Commission as well. Jockusch, “Historiography in Transit,” 81. 104 See for example a spreadsheet of notes on facts from protocols received in HIA, Poland, Ministerstwo Informacji i Dokumentacji, Box 124, Folder 1, 3. 105 Dr. M. Buchwajc, “Żydzi Polscy pod władzą sowiecką,” HIA, Władysław Anders, Box 72, Document No. 556, 71. For more on the report see Gąsowski, “Polscy Żydzi w sowieckiej Rosji.” For a remembrance of Buchwajc, see “Menachem,” Kazimierz Zamorski, Dwa Tajne Biura, 51–68.

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The children’s testimonies carry less of this baggage. Naturally, the children were influenced by what they heard, so that Ziwja Elsan’s description of Polish involvement in the pogrom in Ostrów Mazowiecka was probably based on hearsay rather than her own eye-witness reporting. At the same time, they have less of an agenda, political or otherwise, to vilify either the Soviets or the Poles. Some of the depictions of the degree of religious observance allowed under the very noses of the NKVD, for example, complicate later Cold War stereotypes. Similarly, some of the children refer to poor relations with Poles around evacuation, but this does not color their entire stories. The same children can also tell positive stories about fellow Poles. Additionally, there are certain issues that children can raise with less shame than their parents. The children in these testimonies speak of trading on the black market as a norm of Soviet life; simply what everyone had to do to get by. In Sarah Halbershtadt’s matter-of-fact retelling, everyone had a role in the family’s upkeep. Her father and older brother traveled back-and-forth between Białystok and Siemiatycze with goods to sell, her mother stood in lines, and her grandmother prayed. After her father was arrested and threatened with a long sentence, Sarah’s mother had to take over his role.106 Gitla Rabinowicz simply states that the only way her family could live was by engaging in trade. She does not mention that this was illegal or dangerous.107 Adults, when discussing these activities, generally feel a greater need to justify their actions and put them in a better light. Children are less aware of the decline in status and less embarrassed about engaging in criminal behavior. In these ways, Grynberg might well be correct to rely on the children’s testimonies. In other ways, the children can be vague and mistaken about dates, confused about cause and effect, and limited in their perspective. Beyond just providing facts, however, the children’s testimonies also offer an affective gauge of responses to what they have just been through. As we saw with Dina Stahl, the children are writing family stories. They see themselves as part of family units that left home together and faced challenges and losses together. Indeed, when I was unsure based on the mangled name whether one testimony in Polish came from a girl or boy, and tried to find clues in the text, I realized that the entire story was written in the first-person plural. While this did not help to determine gender, it illustrated to me the degree to which the children were telling collective—familial—stories. 106 Halberstadt, 3. 107 Rabinowicz, 181.

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Only at the end of the testimonies, with the evacuation meant to save their lives, does this narrative break down. And like Shmuel Labin, in the introduction, watching his mother follow his evacuation train on foot and unsure if his siblings would be able to survive the starvation he had escaped, and Sima Siebcesser sharing her anguish at not having been able to bid her parents farewell before leaving, the experience of salvation was bittersweet. For adults, exile meant leaving Polish territory. Many of them use patriotic language in their testimonies to discuss decisions about Soviet citizenship, deportation, and their desire to return. For children, as it turns out, the experience of exile was separation from their families. In their largely unvarnished testimonies, where the deaths of siblings and parents are narrated as occurrences along the way, some of the most emotional passages depict leaving their family members behind. In a related manner, for Yehudis Patash, evacuation provided one of the only bright spots in an otherwise devastating testimony. After losing her parents and older brother to starvation and disease in the USSR, and then having her youngest brother evacuated on his own, she and her two remaining siblings managed to get on the next transport and find him in Tehran. “We, all four, greatly rejoiced.”108

108 Patash, 11.

CHAPTER 3

Together and Apart: Poles and Polish Jews in the WarTorn Soviet Union Albert Kaganovitch

R

elations between Poles and Jews during World War II were a continuation of the complex set of sympathies and antagonism that had developed in Poland over centuries of coexistence.1 Dramatic events that occurred in Eastern Poland in the autumn of 1939 added new dimensions to these relations. During a brief period of anarchy, after the Polish administrators had fled and before the Red Army soldiers had arrived, several antisemitic riots occurred in Eastern Poland. In a pogrom, arranged by some Poles in Grodno (present-day Hrodna, Belarus), twenty-five Jews were killed. There were killed and wounded Jews during the pogrom in Skidel (present-day Skidzyel’, Belarus).2 In many places, Jews were threatened and robbed. These incidents disappointed the Jews given that many of their men in the army defended the country. Because of this, as well as falling under the influence of Soviet propaganda, some Polish Jews, mostly at the bottom of the social ladder, welcomed the arrival of the Red Army. 1 There is considerable research about this subject. For example: Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe: with a historical survey of the Jew as fighter and soldier in the Diaspora (London: Paul Elek, 1974), 191–192; David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 17–45; Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 10–22; Emanuel Melzer, No Way Out: The Politics of Polish Jewry 1935–1939 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1997), 54–94; Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 111–130. 2 Tikva Fatal-Knaani, Zo lo otah Grodnoh: Kehilat Grodnoh u-sevivatah ba-milḥamah uvaShoʼah, 1939–1943 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2001), 72.

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Many Jews saw the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as a better alternative to German occupation. And so it turned out. Even repressive measures of the Soviet government such as deportations,3 accompanied by the nationalization of their real estate and other property, turned out to be of benefit for the displaced Jews. They were often joined by Poles in places of exile and forced labor camps, and most of these 341,838 prisoners had been released by September 27, 1941, following the so-called amnesty declared on August 12 of that year.4 Most former inmates moved to Siberian and Central Asian cities. Towards the end of summer 1941, Polish Jews fleeing Nazi forces in the western Soviet Union found themselves in the same areas. Though both groups were referred to by the Soviets as evacuees (evakuirovannye), I call them refugees.5 In this chapter, I explain how the relations between Polish Jews and Poles developed in the Soviet Union during wartime, in the midst of deadly conditions of poverty, disease, and hunger.6 According to some estimates, 30 percent of Jewish refugees from Poland died between the autumn of 1939 and the autumn of 1946.7 Given the same status and similar resettlement and living conditions, it is unlikely an erroneous assumption that the Poles who did not leave the Soviet Union with General Władysław Anders’ Army (Polish Armed Forces in the East) in 1942 had a similar mortality rate as the Polish Jews. After the Soviet invasion, many Poles became stronger in their doubts about the loyalty of Jews to Poland. In a report to the Polish Council of Ministers dated January 12, 1942, Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski noted that only Jews took part in the creation of a communist regime in the former Polish eastern regions (although he made clear that not all Jews were involved).8 In a questionnaire distributed by Anders’ Army, Andrzej K., a non-Jewish Pole, 3 For details on the number of deportations, their terms, and the number of deportees, see Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 98–100. 4 Calculated from: “Stalin, Beriia i sud’ba armii Andersa v 1941–1942 gg. (Iz rassekrechennykh arkhivov),” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2 (1993): 65–67. For details of the order and instructions of the release see Stalinskie deportatsii 1928–1953, compilers Nikolai Pobol’ and Pavel Polian (Moscow: Materik, 2005), 174–176. 5 For explanation and details see Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities,” 86–87. 6 See also the chapter by Eliyana Adler in this volume. 7 Shimon Redlich, “The Jews under Soviet Rule during World War II” (PhD diss., New York University, 1968), 44; Yosef Litvak, Peliṭim Yehudim mi-Polin be-Berit ha-Mo‘atsot 1939–1946 (Tel Aviv: Kibuts Meukhad, 1988), 359; Shalom Cholawsky, The Jews of Bielorussia During World War II (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 32n20. 8 Edward Raczyński, ed., Documents on Polish-Soviet Relations, 1939–1945 (London: Heinemann, 1961), vol. 1, 265–266.

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wrote: “Some peasants and Jews most of all, greeted the Bolsheviks with flowers . . . . The Bolsheviks established ‘selsovety’ [rural councils], ‘raikomy’ [regional party committees], and other committees which the Jews, local communists, and those who arrived from Russia joined. The first founder of the militia was a Jew, Srol Zelikman, a local citizen.”9 Slaw R. said about the same: “They [Russians] abolished Polish offices and put Bolsheviks and Jews in place of Poles.”10 From Zdzislaw J.: “Soviet troops entered . . . Krzemieniec . . . . When I went out on the streets that day, numerous patrol units, militiamen composed of Jews, were circling the streets. . . . At that time, either Bolsheviks or local communists, mostly Jews, were appointed to the higher offices in the city.”11 Numerous other testimonies accusing Jews of disloyalty survive.12 In reality many Poles heavily overestimated the participation of Jews in the newly formed Soviet administrative authorities in the occupied territory. The overestimation even affects some modern Polish historians.13 Analysis of relevant statistical information shows that the percent of Jews in local authorities and among delegates to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union usually did not exceed eight percent, and reached an unusually high rate only in Białystok, incorporated into the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). According to the available archival data on 1940, among those who found themselves in high positions of communist party committees and administrative and economic work in Białystok, Jews and Poles were highly represented—21 percent and 44.8 percent respectively. However in the same year in the Drogobych region

9 Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Jan Tomasz Gross, eds., War through children’s eyes: the Soviet occupation of Poland and the deportations, 1939–1941 (Stanford: Stanford University, 1981), 155. 10 Ibid., 178. 11 Ibid., 184. 12 Sara K., in Joachim Schoenfeld, Holocaust Memoirs: Jews in the Lwów Ghetto, the Janowski Concentration Camp, and as Deportees in Siberia (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1985), 276–277, 280–281, 286, 292; Nakhum-Shmeriahu Sasonkin, Zikhronotai: Pirke zikhronot ( Jerusalem: [n.p.], 1988), 251; Michael Zimmermann, How I Survived the Wars and Peace: My Life in the Gulag, Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors in Canada (Montreal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies, 2002), 134–137; Dina Gabel, Behind the Ice Curtain (New York: CIS Publishers, 1992), 290–292; Moshe Grosman, Ba-Arets ha-agadit ha-keshufa: Sheva shenot ḥayim be-Berit ha-Mo‘atsot (Tel Aviv: N. Twersky, 1951), vol. 2, 444–446, 573. 13 See for example Tadeusz Piotrowski, Poland’s holocaust: ethnic strife, collaboration with occupying forces and genocide in the Second Republic, 1918–1947 ( Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland, 2007), 55–56.

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of the Ukrainian SSR, among the same categories of officials, Jews were 7.5 percent and the Poles 4.9 percent.14 Even fewer Jews ended up in local elected authorities. In the same Drogobych region, Jews accounted for 1.3 percent while Poles accounted for 5.2 percent of all deputies. In the Ternopol region, Jews made up 2.7 percent and Poles made up 5.3 percent of all deputies. In Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), Jews accounted for four percent and Poles 27.8 of all deputies.15 Among 916 delegates from Western Belarus to the Supreme Council of the Belarusian SSR, there were 72 Jews (7.9 percent) and 127 Poles (13.9 percent). Among 1,592 delegates from Western Ukraine to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR there were 61 Jews (3.8 percent), and 44 Poles (2.8 percent).16 It should be noted that among the Jewish administrators there were quite a few who were not former Polish citizens but sent from the eastern regions of Ukraine and Belarus.17 One may ask why so many Poles considered such a low proportion of Jews in the new power structures as excessive? Antony Polonsky argues that the reason for such a distorted view was the unprecedented participation of Jews in the state apparatus in Poland’s entire history.18 That is true, however behind this widespread myth was one more reason. In terms of understanding the collapse of Poland, this myth overrode the contradictions among Poles, separating the “Jewish traitors” and the “Polish patriots.” Later, in places of exile like Siberia and the Ural, discussions on the topic of mutual relations arose between Jews and Poles who found themselves working together. Although the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews were not going to remain in the Soviet Union, some of them gloated over the liquidation of Poland in their arguments with Poles, as Katherine Jolluck pointed out.19 14 Calculated from Sergei Filipov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov VKP(b) v zapadnykh oblastiakh Ukrainy i Belorussii v 1939–1941 gg.,” in Repressii protiv poliakov i pol’skikh grazhdan, ed. Aleksander Gur’ianov (Moscow: Zven’ia, 1997), 47. 15 Calculated from Pavlo Kalenichenko, Pol‘s‘ka progresivna emіgratsіia v SRSR v roki drugoї svіtovoї vіini (Kiev: Akademiia nauk Ukraïnskoi RSR, 1957), 39. 16 Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from abroad: the Soviet conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 107. 17 Filipov, “Deiatel’nost’ organov VKP(b),” 47; Mordechai Altshuler, “The Distress of Jews in the Soviet Union in the Wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,” Yad Vashem Studies 36, no. 2 (2008): 91. 18 Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), vol. 3, 405. 19 Katherine R. Jolluck, “Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile,” in Antisemitism and its opponents in modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 218, 222.

Together and Apart

Interviews with Polish women, recorded after their release from Anders’ Army in Iran in 1942, lead Jolluck to conclude that 67 percent of them had a negative perception of Jews, 18 percent were neutral, and only 15 percent viewed them positively.20 Terrible working conditions, starvation, and high mortality served as catalysts for an already tense relationship. The stereotypical attitude of Poles towards their Jewish compatriots clearly appears in postwar memories and testimonies. Elżbieta P. stated: “They [the Jews] didn’t pay for shelter. They occupied themselves with profiteering and lived carefree. Poles, on the other hand, suffered hunger and labored hard on the kolkhozes.”21 During the most difficult period of refugee life, from the end of 1941 to the end of 1942, the tension was expressed in three ways. First of all, it was expressed in the beliefs held by some Jews that delegatury (regional branches) working for the Polish embassy gave them less assistance than non-Jews. David Engel and Yosef Litvak argue that despite the fact that most of the foreign charity aid to Polish citizens in the Soviet Union was provided by Jewish organizations, the delegatury discriminated against Jews in its distribution. According to the sources, there were hundreds of cases of Jews converting to Catholicism for the sake of receiving this food aid. Litvak’s evidence includes a case in Kermine (present-day Navoiy, Uzbekistan) where a member of a local Polish distribution committee pushed a Jewish teenager out of the line, crying: “I won’t allow for the contamination of air breathed by Poles.”22 In Tashkent, another representative of the same committee told Jews to leave the line because according to him the bread was not meant for them.23 According to the memoirs of Aleksander Wat, a Polish writer of Jewish origin, a Polish delegation in Alma-Ata (present-day Almaty, Kazakhstan) excluded Jews from aid distribution which the head of delegation did not even deny.24 This situation appeared to be resolved in March 1943 after the distribution of aid was taken over by the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich, ZPP) created by the Soviets as a result of a break in diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile. But even 20 Ibid., 214–215. 21 Grudzińska-Gross and Gross, War through children’s eyes, 177. 22 Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 126–128; Litvak, Plitim Yehudim, 221; About discrimination, see also Dorit Bader-Whiteman, Escape via Siberia: A Jewish Child’s Odyssey of Survival (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999), 72. 23 Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 269. 24 Aleksander Wat, My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 341–342.

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after that the situation varied by region. S. Sakshewsky, the deputy chairman of “Komitet po delam pol’skikh detei v SSSR” (Committee on Polish Children in the USSR) stated in Uzbekistan in August 1943 that non-Jews were their priority among the Polish citizens, and then Jews and, in exceptional cases, Ukrainians and Belarusians.25 However, there were cases of fair distribution of assistance. In 1944, the “Orthodox Jewish Bulletin” in Jerusalem published an article by a rabbi who wished to remain anonymous in which he calls Andrzej Jonitz, the head of the Polish delegatura in Yangi-Yul (Uzbekistan), among the righteous of the world in 1942. He was not only very responsive to urgent food and domestic problems of Jewish refugees but also helped several rabbis go to Iran along with the Polish army.26 In some regional committees of the ZPP, Jews got the vast majority of seats because the committees had difficulty finding suitable Poles to join the board with representative aim. For example, in Bukhara, Zyga Elton, a member of such a committee, recalled that the efforts were finally successful with Mikolay Nosiadek, a former miner and member of the Polish People’s Party. He was approved despite his lack of education and poor vocabulary.27 Elton does not mention any ethnic tension in the committee at that time, but Bina Grantserska-Kadari who worked as secretary of the ZPP committee in Kostroma did. There, Franciszek Cybulski, former landowner from the Białystok region, was elected as chairman of the committee. To some extent, he was forced to reckon with Polish Jews, although it was clear that he did not like them. When former Polish citizens boarded railcars for repatriation to Poland in 1946, he managed to segregate Jews and Poles. This upset Bina, an internationalist at that time, who put a lot of effort into creating two Polish-speaking schools in the Kostroma region and organizing their work.28 The second source of tension was the restrictive drafting of Polish Jews into Anders’ Army. It was the result of the antisemitism of many Polish officers. Captain Tadeusz Deduszycki declared in February 1942 that after the war Poland would have to solve the Jewish question by “evicting a part of the Jews

25 Olga Medvedeva-Natu, “V atmosfere liubvi k strane Sovetov,” in Istoriia, Pamiat’, Liudi: Materialy VI mezhdunarodnoi nauchno-prakticheskoi konferentsii, ed. Alexander Baron et al. (Almaty: Assotsiatsiia Mitsva, 2013), 171. 26 Rav-Pelit, “Mi-khasidey ha-‘olam,” Nerot Shabat 2 (1943), 87–88. 27 Zyga Elton (Elbaum), Destination Buchara (Melbourne: Dizal Nominees, 1996), 245. 28 Bina Grantserska-Kadari, Ha-Meah ha-esrim sheli: Rasisei Zikhronot ( Jerusalem: Moreshet, 1995), 226–240.

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from Poland.”29 This approach to the Jews was also favored by Anders himself. In a secret letter to division commanders on November 30, 1941, he explained antisemitism among Polish soldiers by the alleged disloyalty of Jews in 1939– 1940. Anders ordered suppression of overt manifestations of antisemitism in order to ameliorate the Polish government’s strained relations with American and British Jewish organizations.30 In informal conversations, Anders stated that he did not want to see Jews in his army.31 According to the intelligence information transmitted to Joseph Stalin at the end of November 1941 by Lavrentiy Beria, the head of his secret police: “Anders, although accepting Jews [into his army, A.K.], nevertheless, openly shows antisemitic sentiments.”32 The same report emphasized that Jews in this army are being insulted by soldiers and officers. Indeed, even those Jews accepted into the army were constantly subjected to insults and harassment from other soldiers and officers. David Azrieli recalled: “Me and Adam were constantly humiliated. As a rule, we were the ones always sent to clean the lavatories, and during morning formation the sergeant forced me to unlace my boots, stepping on my feet and chastising me before the whole rank. . . . One day . . . an officer passing by me began to scream at me no reason. Among other curses, he called me a dirty Jew.”33 It came to beatings as well. In Kermine, Jewish soldiers were taken out of line and sent to their tents, and at night Polish soldiers beat them.34 This also occurred in a military camp in Guzar (Uzbekistan). After Polish soldiers beat up some Jewish soldiers in the night, about twenty Jews left the army according to eyewitness 29 Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia 14 (3-1): SSSR i Pol’sha 1941–1945 (Moscow: TERRA, 1994), 75. For additional examples see Yad Vashem Archive (YVA), O.3/9598, 18; O.3/2120, 10; O.3/1852, 6–7; Meir Kozhen, “B’eyot be-mekhkar korotihem shel ha-plitim ha-yehudim be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot byimyi milkhemet-ha-‘olam ha-shniyha,” Kovets mekhkarim Yad Vashem 3 (1959): 118; Barukh Cherpichnik, “Ba-aretz ha-zahav ha-lavan,” in Sefer Kostopol’: Khaeya vemuta shel’ kehila, ed. Arie Lerner (Tel Aviv: Irgun yots’ay Kostopol, 1967), 256; Israel Gutman, “Yehudim be-tsava Anders be-Berit ha-Mo‘atsot,” Kovets mekhkarim Yad Vashem, 12 (1977): 203; Litvak, Plitim Yehudim mi-Polin, 239; Wat, My century, 306. 30 See a quote from this letter Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 135–136. For more on Anders’ attitude, see Albert Kaganovitch, “Stalin’s Great Power Politics, the Return of Jewish Refugees to Poland, and Continued Migration to Palestine, 1944–1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 61. 31 Gutman, “Yehudim be-tsava Anders,” 179. 32 “Stalin, Beriia i sud’ba armii Andersa,” 71. 33 David Azrieli, Na shag vperedi ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 102–104. 34 Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia 14 (3–1), 90.

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I. Lieberman.35 Soviet agents reported that about 2,000 Jews deserted Anders’ Army overall because of heavy antisemitism. There were even instances of murder.36 Obviously, the ultimate goal of the attacks was to cause desertion of the Jews. Sometimes the Polish command used bureaucratic methods to get rid of the Jews. In the Reserve regiment on construction, only Jewish soldiers were ordered to repeatedly undergo medical examination after which a significant number of them were dismissed from the army.37 The same methods were practiced in some other Polish regiments.38 It should be noted that a new belief was added to the old one about the disloyalty of the Jews: that many Jews were agents of Stalin’s secret police, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). Polish officials knew that the NKVD was aware of many of their anti-Soviet conversations, and suspected the Jews, as alleged outsiders, of being their source. Assistant Ambassador of the Polish government-in-exile Marian Geytsman asked the secretary of the Polish Embassy in Barnaul, Tadeusz Iżycki-Hermann, in the winter of 1942 to compile a list of Jews, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who collaborated with the NKVD, but did not ask for such data regarding Poles.39 The third source of tension came as a result of some Poles spreading antisemitism throughout the Soviet population. According to one testimony, Muslims began to feel worse towards Jews due to the influence of Polish propaganda which led to open clashes on one collective farm in Kyrgyzstan. Only the NKVD’s intervention prevented a greater conflict between Jewish refugees and Muslims.40 Shlomo Leser testifies that in Kyrgyzstani kolkhozes where Poles lived alongside Polish Jews, the attitude towards the Jews was worse than where Jews lived with locals.41 According to another witness, when he and 35 AJC Archives, Interview Rachel Erlich no. 2 with I. Liberman, in Interviews with Polish and Russian Jewish DP’s in DP camps on their observations of Jewish life in Soviet Russia (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1948), 5. 36 Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia 14 (3–1), 103. 37 “Stalin, Beriia i sud’ba armii Andersa,” 71. 38 Interview with Daniel Grossman, July 10, 1996, Bronx, New York, University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USC VHA), 17126, segments 87–88; Interview with Henry Galler, September 8, 1995, Willowdale, Ontario, Canada, USC VHA, 6574, segments 143–145. 39 N.I. Razgon, comp., Sud’by. Vospominaniia, dnevniki, pis’ma, stikhi, putevye zametki, protokoly doprosov (Barnaul: Piket, 2001), 339. 40 Klevan, Avraham, Le-toldot ha-Yehudym be-Asyah ha-tikhonah ba-meʼot ha-teshaʻ-ʻeśreh ṿeha-ʻeśrim ( Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 1989), 118. 41 Letter of Shlomo Leser, May 27, 2007, author’s archive.

Together and Apart

other deported Polish Jews were sent to one kolkhoz in the Kirov region, they were mistaken for Catholics. However, after locals found out from actual Poles that the new arrivals were Jews, “who crucified Christ,” the attitude towards them worsened.42 Some Poles went even further, spreading the myth of the “blood libel” that Jews murder Christian children in order to use their blood as part of religious rituals. Samuel Honig writes in his memoirs that because of this local residents of one of the settlements in the Mari ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) began to hide their children before Passover in 1942 from the Polish Jews who had been sent there.43 He complained to a local NKVD representative who, although did not find the rumor distributors, nevertheless conducted an outreach conversation with the local population. In August 1943, ZPP representative Bolesław Drobner even spoke out against the spread of antisemitism at a meeting of Polish refugees.44 Perhaps the sensible or insensible reason for the spread of antisemitic rumors was the desire of some Poles to distance themselves from the stereotype of a refugee parasite who did not perform agricultural work and pin such a stereotype on the Jews instead. Several pieces of evidence show that in some places Poles suffered from a biased attitude of the local population.45 A native of the Lwów region, Adam R., said this about the kolkhoz he lived at during the war: “The attitude of the local people (Uzbeks) was very hostile. They made no difference between us and the Russians and they took it out on us any way they could.”46 Another Pole named Mieczysław S., also a native of the Lwów region, testified to the cruel treatment of his family by the Uzbek population.47 It was

42 AJC Archives, interview Rachel Erlich no. 8 with K. Red., in Interviews with Polish and Russian Jewish DP’s in DP, 9–10. 43 Samuel Honig, From Poland to Russia and Back, 1939–1946 (Windsor, Ontario: Black Moss Press: 1996), 130–131. 44 Shodmonkul Pirimkulov, “Evrei v sostave pol’skikh grazhdan, deportirovannykh v Kazakhstan,” in Evrei v Kazakhstane: Istoriia, religiia, kul’tura, ed. Isaak Grinberg (Almaty: Assotsiatsiia Mitsva, 2003), 131. 45 Stanisław Ciesielski, “Władze i miejscowa ludność wobec Polaków,” in Życie codzienne polskich zesłańców w ZSRR w latach 1940–1946, ed. Stanisław Ciesielski (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1997), 233–235, 238. 46 Grudzińska-Gross and Gross, War through children’s eyes, 63. 47 Jan Tomasz Gross and Irena Grudzińska-Gross, eds., “W czterdziestym nas matko na Sybir zesłali . . .”: Polska a Rosja 1939–42 (London: Aneks, 1983), 109.

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a widespread stereotype among the Soviet population that Polish refugees did not want to work for the Soviet Union’s victory.48 For their part, some Jews became convinced that Poles were antisemitic and tried to present them as promoters of pogroms to the local population..49 Although such accusations used the Soviet propaganda rhetoric of druzhba narodov (friendship of the Nations) they could not reach the broad strata of the population. By this time, very few Soviet citizens were influenced by Soviet internationalist propaganda, and therefore such accusations could only improve the image of Poles given that most of the population disliked Jews just as much. Katherine Jolluck notes the popular belief among interviewed Polish women that Jewish women are denouncing them to the NKVD.50 She also provides an example of one Jewish woman, who refused to betray Poles to the NKVD during the war.51 In fact, not one of the several hundred interviews, government documents, and memoirs of former Polish Jewish refugees that I have examined mention any instance of them reporting Polish antisemitism to Soviet authorities. Instead, these sources testify to the loyalty of most Polish Jews to Poland. Perhaps it is because Polish Jews planned to return to Poland after the war and the desire to avoid dangerous contacts with the NKVD. Some attitudes towards Polish Jews were affected by gender. More social within their ethnic community, Polish women often generalized the behavior of Jews in a negative direction. By contrast, Polish men more often tried to blame specific Jews or find external factors to explain their “bad” behavior.52 For example, Klemens Rudnicki believed that the reason for the strained relations was the deliberate incitement of Polish Jews against Poles by the Soviet authorities.53 However, this more personal approach did not extend to the welcoming of the Red Army in September 1939. Antisemitism was not uncommon in Polish orphanages.54 Many of those who spent time there testified in interviews that they were beaten, mocked, 48 Kalenichenko, Pol’s’ka progresivna emіgratsіia, 101; Olga Medvedeva-Nathoo, Crossroads: A True Story of Gina Dimant in War and Love (Vancouver: K&O Harbour, 2014), 98. 49 Ciesielski, “Władze i miejscowa ludność wobec Polaków,” 222. 50 Jolluck, “Gender and Antisemitism…,” 216. 51 Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 216. 52 Jolluck, “Gender and Antisemitism…,” 215–226. 53 Klemens Rudnicki, Na Polskim szlaku: Wspomnienia z lat 1939–1947 (London: Polska Fundacja kulturalna, 1984), 180, 200–201. 54 See the chapter by Eliyana Adler in this volume.

Together and Apart

and mistreated in every possible way.55 As Ruth Cohen testified, Jewish children were deprived of food and clothing.56 According to another testimony, Jewish children were given smaller portions of food compared to Catholics, the injustice of which children were especially acutely aware of.57 One of the manifestations of the negative attitude on the part of those responsible for the education of the Polish army, Anders, was the removal of many Jewish children during the evacuation of Polish orphanages to Iran in 1942.58 Many of the former residents of these orphanages remember bitterly the pre-evacuation ethnic selection. Sometimes Jewish children found sympathy with the Poles. Leia Lerer spoke with gratitude about an unknown Polish captain who during the selection said that she was his daughter and not Jewish at all.59 In some orphanages, there were normal relations with Jewish children which depended on the position of the educators and management.60 Yaffa Iras, Joseph Barten, and Fraida Celnikier testified that while the Catholic children mocked them the teachers defended them.61 It would be wrong to represent Polish-Jewish relations in the Soviet home-front solely as disagreement and confrontation. Sharing Polish as a common language largely contributed to a relationship of help and cooperation between the Jews and Poles. According to the testimony of one Polish woman, several Poles found employment at a Jewish business on a collective farm near Semipalatinsk (present-day Semey, Kazakhstan). When the same witness entered accounting courses, the Polish Jews who studied with her helped her with studies.62 In September of 1941, a Jewish woman named Malka helped Jadwiga (a Polish Catholic woman) feed her six children on the Poltavka farm in the Ural region of Russia.63 In a diary entry dated March 10, 55 YVA, O.3/9521, 31; Maciej Siekierski and Feliks Tych, eds., Widziałem Anioła Śmierci: Losy deportowanych Żydów polskich w ZSRR w latach II wojny światowej (Warsaw: Rosner & Wspólnicy, 2006), 66, 71, 216, 222, 233, 283, 286, 376, 407, 440; Henryk Grynberg, Children of Zion (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 152–160; GrudzińskaGross and Gross, War through children’s eyes, 237. 56 YVA, O.3/1850, 6. 57 Siekierski and Tych, Widziałem Anioła Śmierci, 66, 175, 213. 58 YVA, O.3/12368, 10; Ibid., O.3/8303, 31–33; Grudzińska-Gross and Gross, War through children’s eyes, 237. 59 YVA, O.3/9521, 33–34. 60 YVA, O.3/10894, 29; Ibid., O.3/12287, 8; Grynberg, Children of Zion, 152–159. 61 Siekierski and Tych, Widziałem Anioła Śmierci, 219, 258, 325. 62 Barbara Piotrowska-Dubik, Kwiaty na stepie: pamiętnik z zesłania (Warsaw: Soli Deo, 2007), 242, 301. 63 Jadwiga Ihnatowicz-Suszyńska, We will uproot you (Lublin: Arlon, 2005), 256–257.

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1942, Jadwiga reproached herself for an act against another Jew as she and her children suffered from hunger on a Kazakhstani collective farm: “How could I have refused a beggar a meal? Well, it does not matter that she was Jewish. I did not have to give her any blini (thin pancakes) because there is so little flour, but I could have given her some hot soup . . . . I wish it had never happened.”64 A month and a half later, she was very grateful to an unknown Jewish sergeant who bought tickets for her and later helped her and her children on the train to Yangi-Yul (Uzbekistan).65 The aforementioned poet Aleksander Wat described in his memoirs an incident on a train in Central Asia: “. . . I was all skin and bones and horribly hungry. The two Poles were on some sort of plank bed; they knew I had nothing to eat and generously—but with a certain disgust because they could see I was a Jew—gave me something to eat twice . . . .”66 The writer Wanda Wasilewska, the head of the Union of Polish Patriots, also helped the Jewish refugees.67 Some Poles sympathized with the Polish Jews left behind by Anders’ Army when it moved to Iran in 1942. A Polish woman named Сygankow helped several Jews get into Anders’ Army by passing them off as Catholics so they could come, too.68 Mr. Kwapinski, the head of a Tashkent committee, helped Dora Werker’s family leave as well.69 A Jewish man named H. spoke in an interview from the late 1940s about a Catholic woman who was the only one who brought him food in the district hospital in Uzbekistan and also when he ran away from there fearing that he would die due to poor care. When he recovered, she was going to pass him off as her dead son so that he could go with her to Iran. However, H. refused, fearing antisemitism in the Polish army.70 In conclusion, wartime in the Soviet Union was a peculiar time for the relations between Polish Jews and Poles in that it was the first time they were not an ethnic minority and a majority who considered itself to be the indigenous population. During the war, both Poles and Polish Jews were minorities on a foreign territory with its own laws and systems. Despite this, Catholic 64 Ibid., 288. 65 Ibid., 292. 66 Wat, My century, 310; Klemens Nussbaum, “Jews in the Kościuszko Division and First Polish Army,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and in the USSR, 1939–1946, eds. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Macmillan, 1991), 203. 67 YVA, O.3/3656, 8–9. 68 Interview with Sabina Anstendig, July 6, 1995, New York, USC VHA, 3020, segments 42–43. 69 Siekierski and Tych, Widziałem Anioła Śmierci, 44–45. 70 AJC Archives, interview Rachel Erlich no. 14 with H., in Interviews with Polish and Russian Jewish DP’s, 11–12.

Together and Apart

fellow citizens suspected Polish Jews of denouncing them to the NKVD, which most Jews avoided. This is due to their plans to return to Poland after the war, as well as the agency’s reputation as dangerous and unpredictable. Only a few of the Jewish natives of the Polish lands annexed by the USSR at the beginning of the war returned to their previous places of residence in 1944–1950. The vast majority of Jewish returnees or survivors preferred, first of all, to move into postwar Poland. In any case, whatever the reason may be, such a position contradicted the stereotypical idea of “Jewish traitors” and “patriotic Poles” held by many Poles at the end of 1939 and later.

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CHAPTER 4

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”— Jewish Soldiers in the Polish Army in the Soviet Union, 1943–1946 Katharina Friedla Shema Yisrael, Hear O Israel! These are not only the words of a prayer, but also, a herald of hope sent to the father on earth. Did you know, Israel, that I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield? Did the echo of the wind carry the roar of our cannons and the soldiers’ steps? (Adam Broner1)

T

he biography of Eugene Elsner,2 an artillery captain in the 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division, could be used as the basis of a screenplay resembling Agnieszka Holland’s film Europe, Europe (1990). After the outbreak of World War II, 20-year-old Eugene and his younger brother, Marek, fled towards Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine).3 In June 1940, the Soviet secret

I would like to thank Markus Nesselrodt, Antony Polonsky, and Lidia Zessin-Jurek for their valuable comments and suggestions. 1 Interview with Broner, February 5, 1998, Sarasota, Florida, University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USC VHA), 38733, tape 7. 2 Thanks go to Lidia Zessin-Jurek for drawing my attention to the wartime experiences of the Elsner brothers. 3 Interview with Eugene Elsner, May 19, 1997, Zkhron Ya’akov, Israel, USC VHA, 31734, tape 1; See also Alan Elsner, Guarded by Angels: How my Father and Uncle Survived Hitler and

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

police (NKVD) deported these two young men to a White Sea labor camp in the Karelian ASSR. Forced to perform hard labor in arctic conditions and suffering from terrible hunger, Eugene and his brother heard about an “amnesty” for Polish citizens announced in the summer of 1941, after the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement was signed. Like the majority of Polish citizens deported to the north, the Elsners decided to join the exodus towards the south. Their journey, which lasted several months, took them to Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. In Buzuluk, Eugene and Mark tried to enlist in Anders’ Army being formed in the south of the Soviet Union but were rejected. The Elsner brothers then reached Georgievsk in the northern Caucasus. After their experience with antisemitism when trying to join Anders’ Army, the brothers changed their surname to the Ukrainian-sounding Olesiuk and claimed to be former Polish residents of Lwów. It soon turned out that this decision saved their lives. In the summer of 1942, German troops entered the Caucasus and Eugene and Mark faced great danger. They were saved by their quick reactions, their sharpness of mind, and their accurate assessment of the situation. Eugene, who spoke fluent German, was assigned as an interpreter to a German army unit stationed in the city. The brothers lived under extreme pressure, trying not to disclose their Jewish origin while witnessing German cruelty and the extermination of the local Jewish community. Shortly after the Germans pulled out of northern Caucasus after their defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, Eugene and Mark enlisted in the 1st Kościuszko Division then being formed. Eugene became an artillery battalion captain and followed the battle across Poland reaching Western Pomerania. Seriously wounded near Szczecin, he was captured by the Germans. He ended up in a military hospital in Szczecin where German doctors discovered he was a Jew. Soon after, Eugene was evacuated to a hospital in a prisoner-of-war camp near Hamburg, Germany. There, he was liberated by the British army and transferred to a specialist hospital in the United Kingdom where he spent over a year undergoing various operations. However, the story of the Elsner brothers has a happy ending: after years of separation, Eugene and Mark settled in Israel, where they lived next to each other.4 Like Elsner’s biography, the fate of many Jewish soldiers in the Polish Armed Forces in the Soviet Union5 reflect the various paths of persecution, Cheated Stalin ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005). 4 Interview with Eugene Elsner, tape 6. 5 Here, I use the formal name Polish Armed Forces in the USSR, as well as interchangeable terms: Polish Army in the USSR, Polish Army in the East, Polish Army, and Berling’s Army.

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exile, escape, and deportation, but also a return to the homeland, an attempt to rebuild one’s existence after the catastrophe of the Shoah, and often an escape or emigration from the country. Rather than tread the beaten tracks in historiography or public discourse concerning Jewish soldiers joining the Polish Army in the East, which usually address the way in which Jews participated in the structures and operations of the army’s political and formation apparatus or, right after the war, of the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of Poland, this chapter analyzes the fate and personal experience of ordinary soldiers, showing a wide range of backgrounds, politics, and ideological choices.6 These soldiers were not a homogeneous group. What they had in common was that they were Polish Jews and that, during World War II, they found themselves in the Soviet Union. This group of Jewish soldiers includes Zionists, Bundists, people with leftist sympathies, and those who were politically indifferent, as well as members of the intelligentsia, workers, and craftsmen, alongside students of prewar rabbinical schools. Some of them were strongly assimilated into the Polish culture, while others had very little knowledge of Polish, spoke mainly Yiddish, or were devoutly religious. Some of the future recruits of Berling’s Army had fled from German-occupied territories to the zone annexed by the Soviet Union.7 Others had simply come under Soviet occupation after September 17, 1939. Some Jewish soldiers had been deported to special settlements in Siberia, or to kolkhozes8 in Kazakhstan, where they were forced to per6 Among the political officers there were numerous Jews, prewar communists and later prominent party and state officials of the People’s Republic of Poland, among others Roman Zambrowski or Hilary Minc. For publications which address Jews participated in the structures and operations of the army’s political and formation apparatus or, right after the war, of the Ministry of Public Security of the People’s Republic of Poland, see, for example, Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, ed., Aparat bezpieczeństwa w Polsce. Kadra kierownicza, t. 1: 1944–1956 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2005), 59–63; Tadeusz A. Kisielewski, Janczyrzy Berlinga. 1. Armia Wojska Polskiego, 1943–1945 (Poznań: Rebis, 2014). There are also important and objective publications which include the insightful and thorough biography of two brothers, former solders of the Berling Army, Józef Różański and Jerzy Borejsza, see Barbara Fijałkowska, Borejsza i Różański. Przyczynek do dziejów stalinizmu w Polsce (Olsztyn: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna w Olsztynie, 1995). The latest, excellent biography of the famous sociologist Zugmunt Bauman (former political officer by the Berling Army) by Artur Domosławski, offers also comprehensive analyzes of the difficult and complicated choices of the former Berling Army soldiers, Artur Domosławski, Wygnaniec. 21 scen z życia Zygmunta Baumana (Warsaw: Wielka Litera, 2021), 83–192. See also careful and thorough account by Izabela Wagner, Bauman. A Biography (Oxford: Polity Press, 2020). 7 See the chapter by Markus Nesselrodt in this volume. 8 Collective farms.

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form hard labor in appalling conditions. Others were arrested and sent to the Gulag camps where they experienced torture, hunger, and backbreaking labor. Some soldiers managed to live through those hard times, experiencing the hardships of war like any ordinary member of Soviet society. They would cross the Soviet Union in search of employment or as volunteers seeking work while others found themselves in the Soviet hinterland as part of the general evacuation following the outbreak of the German-Soviet war. They began a long wandering tour of the Soviet Asian republics: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, finding employment in kolkhozes, factories, or mines. Others were conscripted into the Red Army and sent to perform forced labor in labor battalions (stroybattaliony). There are many common elements in the paths of fate of Jewish soldiers in Berling’s Army: almost all of them had a painful experience of discrimination and antisemitism as well as rejection during the draft to Anders’ Army.9 Joining the newly formed 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division, or later Polish Army formations in the USSR, was a watershed moment in the biographies presented here. For most of them, experiencing the life of a soldier and fighting in the ranks of the Polish Army dominate and represent one of the most important fragments of their wartime biography. The chapter raises questions about the process of enlisting recruits but also about the motivation to fight on the front and the factors contributing to the fact that many of them showed a heroic attitude across the battlefield as far as Berlin. In addition, I address Polish-Jewish relations and the participation of Jewish women in the army. Jewish soldiers with their units were the first ones to cross into Poland from the East in the summer of 1944. How did they feel when confronted with the unimaginable tragedy of the Shoah? What reactions surfaced during their encounters with the German population? Finally, I will discuss their return to their hometowns after the war as well as their visions of rebuilding their existence in the postwar period. I will try to find answers to these and many other questions based on the analysis of early testimonies from the initial postwar years, as well as interviews and memoirs from later years. In my analysis, I will use thirty early accounts from the Yad Vashem Archives collection, seventy-two later oral history interviews from the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation, and numerous published memoirs by Jewish soldiers. The most important collection of documents containing information about Jewish soldiers is located 9

See the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume.

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in the Central Military Archives in Warsaw. For the purposes of this article, I reviewed only materials describing the Polish authorities’ recruitment policy towards Jews and have used statistical and demographic data about Jewish soldiers. Particularly important for the study of the situation of Jews in the Soviet Union, but also for the fate of Jewish soldiers, are the records of the Union of Polish Patriots deposited in the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw. I have also studied records of the Union of Jews—Former Participants in Military Combat against Nazism at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. It is very difficult to determine unequivocally the number of Jewish soldiers serving in the Polish Army in the Soviet Union based on the archival materials studied for this chapter. It is not possible to determine the final number of fighting Jews on the basis of official documents mainly because recruits tried to hide their nationality—those accepted into the army polonized their surnames—but also due to incorrect record-keeping by Soviet officials who equated Polish citizenship with Polish nationality as well as the deliberate falsification of names which will be discussed later.10 One of the last statistical documents quoting the number of Jewish soldiers, the census of June 1945 prepared by the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, stated that 13,000 Jewish soldiers served in the Polish Army.11 Until now, historiography has not paid enough attention to the question of Jewish soldiers in the Polish Armed Forces on the Eastern Front. Generally speaking, to this day the questions concerning the participation of Polish Jews in various armies during World War II are still insufficiently investigated.12 The issue of Jewish soldiers in the Polish Army in the USSR was discussed in several Polish publications from the late 1960s and early 1970s.13 Yosef Litvak, the 10 According to existing estimates, there were between 13,000 and 20,000 Jewish soldiers in Berling’s Army. See Benjamin Meirtchak, Jewish Soldiers and Officers of the Polish People’s Army Killed and Missing in Action 1943–1945, Vol. I (Tel Aviv: Association of Jewish War Veterans of Polish Armies in Israel, 1994), 106; Kalman Nussbaum, Ve-Hafah lahem le-Roeits: Ha-Yehudim be-Tsava ha-Amami ha-Polani be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Center, 1984), 194. 11 Numbers of Jews in Poland (as of June 15, 1945), Warsaw, August 1945, Yad Vashem Archive (YVA), O.6/94, 19. 12 Exceptions include the work of Tomasz Gąsowski, Pod sztandarami orła białego. Kwestia żydowska w Polskich Siłach Zbrojnych w czasie II wojny światowej (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2002); Marek Gałęzowski, Żydzi walczący o Polskę. Zapomniani obrońcy Rzeczpospolitej (Cracow: Znak, 2021). 13 Ignacy Blum, Żołnierze Armii Polskiej w ZSRR (Stan osobowy, skład socjalny, czynniki integrujące) (Warsaw: Wojskowy Instytut Historyczny, 1967); Samuel Szulzycer, “Żydzi w 1 Dywizji Piechoty im. Tadeusza Kościuszki,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego

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author of the first monograph on the fate of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, dedicated a whole subchapter to Jewish soldiers in Berling’s Army.14 This topic is also briefly addressed in the latest monographs on the fates of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union by Markus Nesselrodt and Eliyana Adler.15 Benjamin Meirtschak’s publications and studies also merit attention. The author, a former soldier of the Polish Army in the Soviet Union, drew up lists of the fallen and missing soldiers of this formation.16 Definitely the most extensive analysis on the subject is a monograph by Kalman (Klemens) Nussbaum, also a former soldier of the Polish Army in the Soviet Union, published in Tel Aviv in 1984.17 Nussbaum’s work is so far the only publication entirely dedicated to the history of Jewish soldiers in Berling’s Army. In more general terms, the subject

(henceforth BZIH) 1, no. 81 (1972): 17–39; Szymon Datner, “Na polu chwały. Żydzi żołnierze 1 i 2 Armii Wojska Polskiego polegli w II wojnie światowej,” BZIH 3–4/139–140 (1986): 53–71; Henryk Hubert, Borem, lasem . . . (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1958); On Jewish War Veterans and their organizations in postwar Poland see August Grabski, Żydowski ruch kombatancki w Polsce w l. 1944–1949 (Warsaw: Trio, 2002). 14 Litvak, Pelitim Yehudim mi-Polin be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot, 1939–1946 ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1988), 307–316. 15 Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion (1939– 1946) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 237–241; Eliyana R. Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 178–180. 16 Benjamin Meirtchak, Żydzi-żołnierze wojsk Polskich polegli na frontach II wojny światowej (Warsaw: Bellona, 2001); Meirtchak, Jewish Military Causalities in the Polish Armies in World War II. Jewish Military Causalities in the Polish Armed Forces in Exile, Vol. II (Tel Aviv: Association of Jewish War Veterans of Polish Armies in Israel, 1995); Meirtchak, JewsOfficers in the Polish Armed Forces 1939–1945 (Tel Aviv: Association of Jewish War Veterans of Polish Armies in Israel, 2001). 17 Kalman Nussbaum, Ve-Hafah lahem le-Roeits; Ibid., Helkam shel ha-Yehudim be-Irgun uvife’ulot ha-lehimah shel ha-Tsava ha-Polani be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1979); See also, Nussbaum, “Jews in the Polish Army in the USSR 1943–1944,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 3 (1972): 93–104; Nussbaum, “Jews in the Kościuszko Division and First Polish Army,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Antony Polonsky and Norman Davies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 183–213; Nussbaum, Historia Złudzeń. Żydzi w Armii Polskiej w ZSRR, 1943–1945 (Warsaw: Tetragon, 2016). Nussbaum analyzes in his numerous publications the role Jewish soldiers played in the Polish Army in the USSR, also sheds light on the process of enlisting recruits. However, the author does not focus extensively on Polish-Jewish relations, the participation of Jewish women in the army, but also on the return of Jewish soldiers to Poland after the war, or their confrontation with the catastrophe of the Shoah.

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of Jewish soldiers in the ranks of the Red Army was covered by Arkadi Zeltser and Mordechai Altshuler.18

“We Want to Fight with a Weapon in Hand” The severance of diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile by the Soviets in April 194319 accelerated the mobilization of Polish communist and left-wing activists present in the Soviet Union.20 After the evacuation of General Anders’ Army in 1943, the Soviet authorities were asked by the Polish communist leadership to facilitate the creation of organized forms of activity by the Polish left and the Polish population in the Soviet Union as well as the formation of military units.21 The efforts by Polish communists led to the creation of the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP) which aimed to unite Poles living in the Soviet Union, supporting the fight against the Germans, restoring Polish sovereignty and independence, and providing material support to and satisfying the cultural needs of Poles.22 On April 1, 1943, Wolna Polska (Free Poland), the ZPP’s media outlet, published an article by Wiktor Grosz entitled “We want to fight with a weapon in hand.” It was the first time that information about the formation of Polish mil-

18 Arkadi Zeltser, To Pour Out My Bitter Soul. Letters of Jews from the USSR, 1941–1945 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016); Mordechai Altshuler, “Jewish Combatants of the Red Army Confront the Holocaust,” in Soviet Jews in World War II. Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Harriet Murav (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014), 16–35; Altshuler, “Ha-Mifgash bein Lochamim Yehudim ba-Tsava ha-Adom la-Shoah,” Dapim le-Heker ha-Shoah 23 (2010): 9–27. 19 The USSR broke off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government in London accusing it of an anti-Soviet campaign in the international arena on Katyn and the crimes committed there. 20 For example, since January 1941 Polish communist circles have been publishing the monthly magazine Nowe Widnokręgi (New horizons), which was published under the leadership of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow. 21 List Wandy Wasilewskiej i Alfreda Lampego do Wiaczeslawa M. Mołotowa w sprawie utworzenia ZPP, Archiwum Akt Nowych, Związek Patriotów Polskich w ZSRR (AAN, ZPP), 130, File 1. 22 Deklaracja ideowa ZPP w ZSRR, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 2. On the history and activity of the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP) see, Albin Głowacki, Ocalić i repatriować. Opieka nad ludnością polską w głębi terytorium ZSRR (1943–1946) (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1994); Krystyna Kersten, Narodziny systemu władzy. Polska 1943–1948 (Poznań: Kantor Wydawniczy SAWW, 1990); Wojciech Marciniak, “Związek Patriotów Polskich jako organizator repatriacji obywateli polskich z ZSRR w latach 1945–1946,” Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość 13/1, no. 23 (2014): 339–367.

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itary units in the Soviet Union was mentioned.23 A month later, in May 1943, the State Defense Committee of the USSR decided to establish the Tadeusz Kościuszko Division. Sel’tsy on the Oka River, located about 180 kilometers from Moscow, was chosen as the place where the division would be formed. Zygmunt Berling, who had served in Anders’ Army, was appointed as the division commander.24 For Stalin, the creation of a Polish army played into his plans and strategic goals, which assumed that, after entering Poland, it would secure both the military and political takeover of power by the communists, and also see to a continuation of their rule.25 Neither the division nor the later Polish Army were formally incorporated into the Red Army, but its operations and supplies were subordinated to the Soviet command to create an impression that the Polish formation was independent.26 Politically, the army was answerable to the Union of Polish Patriots, who naturally towed the Soviet line. Due to the lack of Polish officers—most of whom had been murdered in Katyn by the NKVD in 1940—with the rest leaving the Soviet Union with Anders’ Army, over seventy percent of its officers were Russians between May 1943 and July 1944.27 The mobilization of a new Polish military formation in the Soviet Union began in May 1943. It was led by the Soviet wartime recruiting boards: voyenkomats.28 Many Polish citizens were arriving in Sel’tsy where the division was being formed at their own initiative.29 As a result of the influx of a large number of recruits, in August 1943 the division was transformed into the 1st Corps of the Polish Armed Forces in the Soviet Union (under the command of Zygmunt Berling, who was promoted to brigadier general). In the autumn of that year

23 Wiktor Grosz, “Chcemy walczyć z bronią w ręku,” Wolna Polska, No. 5, April 1, 1943. 24 Nowe Widnokręgi, No. 10, 1943. See, Berling, Wspomnienia. Z łagrów do Andersa, Vol. 1 (Warsaw: Polski Dom Wydawniczy, 1990). After the Polish-Soviet agreement in summer of 1941, Berling joined the Anders’ Army and was nominated to be chief of staff of the 5th Infantry Division, and later become commander of the camp for Polish soldiers in Krasnovodsk. He refused to leave the Soviet Union with the Anders’ Army and instead was nominated to be the commander of the 1th T. Kościuszko Division. 25 See Nussbaum, “Jews in the Kościuszko Division,” 183. 26 See Czesław Grzelak, Henryk Stańczyk, Stefan Zwoliński, Armia Berlinga i Żymierskiego: Wojsko Polskie na froncie wschodnim 1943–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2002). 27 Edward Nalepa, Oficerowie radzieccy w Wojsku Polskim w latach 1943–1968 (studium historyczno-wojskowe), Vol. 1 (Warsaw: Wojskowy Instytut Historyczny, 1992). 28 Military commissariats. 29 See, Czesław Podgórski, “Zarys rozwoju organizacyjnego polskich sił zbrojnych w Związku Radzieckim, maj 1943–lipiec 1944,” Wojskowy Przegląd Historyczny 1 (1966): 7.

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it was sent to the front and fought in the Battle of Lenino.30 In March 1944, the Corps was transformed into the 1st Polish Army in the USSR.31 It took part in fighting in Ukraine and in the liberation of Polish lands from German occupation, and some of its units even reached Berlin. When it entered Poland, Berling’s Army consisted of over 100,000 soldiers of whom about 40,000 served in the front units.32 In July 1944, in Lublin, the 1st Polish Army was merged with the underground People’s Army (Armia Ludowa) thus creating the Polish People’s Army (Ludowe Wojsko Polskie). News about the creation of a Polish Army in the USSR were received enthusiastically by many Polish Jews. This is demonstrated by mass and voluntary applications to the army. General Berling’s army was joined by people who were ragged and emaciated. For many of them their road had led through gulags, prisons, and special settlements. Jack Figman, who had spent many months in harsh conditions working hard in Siberia and then in Kazakhstan, stressed that joining the army meant improving his living conditions. Figman states, “I wanted to go to the army. . . . There I had clothing, food. Because I had been constantly hungry for about three years. So, they took me, and gave me everything I wanted and needed as a soldier.”33 For most of the future soldiers joining a Polish Army meant that they could hope to improve their existence. Joining the Polish formation also offered the prospect of leaving the Soviet Union and returning to the homeland, and for many it meant getting rid of Soviet citizenship. The motive of longing for the homeland, for families and homes that had been left behind, is reflected in almost all testimonies of the soldiers. Given the very scarce information about the situation in the occupied country and the fate of Polish Jews most of the recruits drew up plans to restore Jewish life in postwar Poland. Additionally, the ZPP’s program spoke about return to the homeland and its reconstruction, and most importantly it 30 On October 12 and 13, 1943, soldiers of the First Division, despite not having finished their training, took part in the Battle of Lenino in Belarus, during which they suffered enormous losses. See, Grzelak et al., Armia Berlinga i Żymierskiego; Czesław Grzelak and Henryk Stańczyk, Lenino 1943 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Bellona, 1993). 31 The Army in the USSR consisted of five divisions, eight brigades, four independent regiments, seventeen independent battalions and smaller units, Grzelak et al., Armia Berlinga i Żymierskiego. 32 Polski czyn zbrojny w II wojnie światowej, Vol. III: Ludowe Wojsko Polskie 1943–1945, ed. Wacław Jurgielewicz (Warsaw: Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej, 1973), 126. 33 Interview with Figman, June 18, 1996, Evanston, Illinois, USC VHA, 16391, tape 1, 2; See also, Interview with Bolesław Badian, August 18, 1996, Warsaw, USC VHA, 19013, tape 2; Max Komito, Between two Crazy Dictators (New York: M. Komito 1991), 51.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

signaled the creation of a democratic and independent state in which Polish Jews would enjoy equal rights. Felix Flicker, from a wealthy family in Białystok, had been deported with his family to the special settlement in the vicinity of Pavlodar (Kazakhstan) in April 1940. In 1943 he was drafted into the Red Army and took part in several battles. Soon, however, he decided to transfer to Polish units. Flicker believed that, “only if the Germans would be beaten there would be a chance as a former army men to get my family out of Siberia, and bring them back to Poland.”34 Herman Beldegrin, who did not manage to get into the 1st Division, but who succeeded in reaching the town of Sumy in March 1944, where the 1st Corps were stationed, pointed out the goals that drove the future soldiers and motivated them to join Polish units, “But we still wanted to get into the army. Both for patriotic reasons, the fact that we would go to Poland, and because we wanted to fight against the Germans.”35 Another extremely important motive behind Jews’ willingness to fight in Polish units, as mentioned by Beldegrin, and one that had the most significant influence on the attitude of Jewish soldiers and their involvement in the struggle, was the desire to actively participate in the war against the Germans. In particular in the later period, at the turn of 1944, when news about the Shoah started to circulate more widely, thanks both to Soviet Jewish officers and the ZPP’s media outlets: Nowe Widnokręgi (New horizons) and Wolna Polska and Soviet newspapers.36 In addition, as units of Berling’s Army began to gradually take over prewar Polish territory, the extent of the extermination of Jews became horrifyingly clear. Adolf Eichenwald, a medical student, recounts that 34 Interview with Flicker, June 9, 1997, Melbourne, USC VHA, 32399, tape 4. See also, Interview with Leon Finver, January 9, 1996, Tamarac, Florida, USC VHA, 10770, tape 3. In many testimonies survivors use the general term “Siberia” for places of their imprisonment, incarceration and banishment, regardless the exact geographical name of the region in to which they were deported. Felix Flicker together with his family was deported to Kazakhstan, his father was arrested and deported to Vorkutlag, Komi ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic). 35 Interview with Beldegrin, May 27, 1997, Gdańsk, Poland, USC VHA, 31854, tape 4. 36 Andrzej Jarecki, “Hitlerowski plan eksterminacji Żydów w Europie,” Nowe Widnokręgi, No. 1, January 5, 1943; Jerzy Pański, “Po czasach pogardy,” Nowe Widnokręgi, No. 18, 1944; Zygmunt Modzelewski, “Kartki z pobytu w Lublinie,” Nowe Widnokręgi, No. 18, 1944. Jerzy Pański, “Ghetto w trzech aspektach,” Nowe Widnokręgi, No. 6, 1945; Those papers only gave a fragmentary picture of the fate of Jews in occupied Poland. See, Ewa Koźmińska-Frejlak, “The Adaptation of Survivors to the Post-War Reality from 1944 to 1949,” in Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk Garbowska ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 125–164.

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when his friend received a message from Poland’s territories liberated by the Red Army that his family had been murdered, they both decided to join Polish units after suffering a shock reading about it: This tragic letter came on the eve of Yom Kippur 1944. Although we had already heard about the fate of the Polish Jews, we were deluding ourselves that maybe our loved ones had managed to save themselves, and the letter we received took away the rest of our hopes. . . . We also decided to join the ranks of the Polish army that had been formed to avenge the death of our families.37

Not all future Jewish soldiers expressed their enthusiasm and willingness to fight in the ranks of the Polish army. Norbert Fluss, a young man born in a Polish Jewish family in Berlin, who was expelled from Germany to Poland in October 1938 and, after the outbreak of the war, was then deported by the NKVD from Lwów to a special settlement (spetsposelok) in the Maryiskaya SSR, did not want to fight in the army. Having spent many months fighting for survival, Fluss, unaware of the situation in occupied Poland, dreamt of returning to the country and reuniting with the family he had left there. In the voyenkomat, he was offered a choice: to be directed to a labor battalion or to the 1st Division that was being formed at that time. Norbert Fluss chose the latter.38 A similar aversion to serving in the Polish army was expressed by Henryk Dorski, a doctor from the city of Stryj (present-day Stryi, Ukraine). Until May 1943, Dorski had worked in one of the Polish offices (delagatury) organized at the initiative of the Polish government-in-exile. These, after the Polish-Soviet Agreement was signed in the summer of 1941, were created in the largest Polish population centers in the USSR with the intention of helping Polish citizens. Dorski reports, “I was mobilized as a Pole. As an employee of the delegation [in Kattakurgan, Uzbekistan], I had no positive attitude towards this army that was being formed under the aegis of Wanda Wasilewska, but there was no other way.”39 Dr. Dorski was guided by completely different premises than Norbert Fluss, emphasizing in his testimony that his reluctance to serve in the Polish

37 Testimony by Eichenwald regarding his participation in the Second World War, January 26, 1962, Holon, Israel, AYV, O.3/2127, 10. 38 Interview with Fluss, February 4, 1996, New York, USC VHA, 11710, tape 2. 39 Testimony by Dorski on his stay in Russia and participation in the Second World War, September 28, 1960, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/1680, 9.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

army was dictated by his political views and expression of loyalty to the Polish government-in-exile in London.

“I Am not Abram Moyshe but Adam”40 Most of the Jewish soldiers in Berling’s Army painfully experienced discrimination and dislike as well as rejection when they tried to join Anders’ Army.41 Upon reaching Sel’tsy, many of the future recruits were filled with anxiety over what the drafting committee would say. Would they send them back? Would they have a chance to join the 1st Division? In May and early June 1943, when the 1st Division was just starting to be formed, relatively many Jews were mobilized. The most likely reason for this was insufficient knowledge about human resources, and not very precise guidelines specifying who should be conscripted into the Polish Army.42 Hundreds of volunteers arrived in Sel’tsy on the Oka River every day without reporting to their regional drafting committees.43 One of them was Leon Batycki (Grinberg). When he came to Sel’tsy, he had already been through a war ordeal: he had fought in the ranks of the Red Army, had been injured on the front line and, in early 1942, had been released from the army as a so-called zapadnyik (westerner)44 and conscripted into a labor battalion near Rostov. In early May 1943, Batycki was called up to the 1st Light Artillery Regiment of the Kościuszko Division, where, as he points out, “many Jews served.”45 Upon hearing the first reports about the ZPP’s intention to form a Polish army, Abram Ryzenberg, like Leon Batycki, went to Sel’tsy in May 1943, where he was admitted to a noncomissioned officers’ school.46 Jerzy Fast, a doctor 40 Interview with Broner, tape 4. 41 Yisrael Gutman, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies XII (1977): 231–296; Gąsowski, Pod sztandarami, 56–133; Leon S. Rozen (Leon Szczekacz Rozen), Cry in the Wilderness. A Short History of a Chaplain Activities and Struggles in Soviet Russia during World War II (Tel Aviv: OM Publishing Company, 1966); Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen, 202–210; Eliyana R. Adler, Survival on the Margins, 193–200. 42 See Szulzycer, “Żydzi w 1. Dywizji,” 19. 43 Szulzycer. 44 At the beginning of 1942, because of doubts about the credibility of the recruits from the annexed territories, the Soviets started to move those soldiers to the labor battalions, See Kiril Feferman, “The Jews’ War: Attitudes of Soviet Jewish Soldiers and Officers Toward the USSR in 1940–41,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 27, no. 4 (2014): 583. 45 Testimony by Batycki on his participation in the Second World War in the ranks of the Red Army and Polish Army, August 31, 1960, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/1679, 3–7. 46 Testimony by Ryzenberg, January 23, 1948, Łódź, Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego (AZIH), 301/3133, 1.

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from Łódź, received a call-up from the voyenkomat in Namangan, Uzbekistan, and was sent to Sel’tsy. Upon his arrival, he was conscripted into the 4th Spare Regiment of the 1st Division and soon afterwards was sent to an officer candidate school in Ryazan.47 Women were also among the recruits for the future Polish Army. One of them was Anna Biłgoraj, who, like some of her comrades in arms, upon hearing that a Polish Army was being formed, reported to the voyenkomat in Ufa together with her husband. From there, she was sent to units of the 1st Corps being formed near Moscow, where she joined the 1st Westerplatte Heroes Armored Brigade.48 Even though Jerzy Fast and Anna Biłgoraj were sent by the voyenkomats to the Polish army units being formed at the time the majority of Jews faced difficulties or refusals from Soviet military draft committees. These problems were primarily attributable to the interpretation of the nationality of Jews then in force, especially when it concerned former inhabitants of Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union. According to Soviet officials they were Soviet citizens. Even though Soviet authorities assured the ZPP that former Polish citizens who declared themselves to be Poles would be considered as such, regardless of the documents they presented or the nationality stated in them,49 most of the voyenkomats usually refused to send Jews to the Polish Army. It was also common that Jews were not drafted due to pressure from local authorities, which were reluctant to let Polish citizens go, because of the severe labor shortage.50 Voyenkomats sometimes directed conscripts and volunteers to Red Army units.51 47 Testimony by Fast on his participation in the Second World War, November 21, 1961, Holon, Israel, AYV, O.3/2129, 5. 48 Testimony by Biłgoraj on her participation in the war against Germany, September 9, 1960, Be’er Sheva, Israel, AYV, O.3/1677, 8. Biłgoraj joined the army together with her husband, Marian Fuks. See also, Piotr Korczyński, “Fuks na wojnie. Rozmowa Piotra Korczyńskiego z prof. Marianem Fuksem,” Polska Zbrojna 4 (April 2019), accessed January 10, 2020, https://www.jhi.pl/blog/2019-06-11-fuks-na-wojnie. 49 Krystyna Kersten, Repatriacja ludności polskiej po II wojnie światowej (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Ossolineum, 1974), 38. 50 List Gecela Weinburcela z protestem wobec skierowania go do robót w kopalni po przeszkoleniu wojskowym, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 686, 65. See also Blum, Żołnierze, 226. 51 List Flattaua do wydziału wojskowego ZPP, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 675, 14. This happened also to Szmuel Cerendorf, who, in 1943, applied to a voyenkomat asking to be sent to the 1st Division. He was indeed sent to Divovo near Sel’tsy, the location of a railway station where conscripts’ transports arrived, but from there he was sent to a factory producing for the army. After a short while, he again applied to the voyenkomat asking to be conscripted into the Polish Army, and this time he was directed to Red Army units, Testimony by Cerendorf on his participation in the Second World War, January 4, 1961, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/2253, 7.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

A drafting committee operated at Divovo railway station. It was run by Soviet officers who conducted a preliminary selection of the new arrivals.52 As a result, large groups of volunteers were sent back home, some of whom were directed to labor battalions.53 Henryk Tron, who came from Łódź, arrived in Divovo in June 1943, “When we arrived, it turned out that we were not the first ones, and that they had far too many national minorities there. This was explained to us as gently as possible. . . . Ten Jews were sent back home in this way.”54 A similar situation is described by Marian Feldman, who, after reaching Divovo, received a referral to a labor battalion from a drafting committee.55 However, Feldman decided to fight for his right to join the Polish Army and sent a letter of complaint to the ZPP’s headquarters in Moscow. He received an answer that conscription to the Polish army was being handled by the Soviet voyenkomats and he was ordered to wait for his turn. As a result, Feldman was assigned to Red Army units.56 Marian Feldman decided to intervene with the ZPP authorities, and it turns out he was not the only protesting Polish Jew. In the ZPP’s files stored in the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw there are thousands of letters from potential recruits—most of them Jews— complaining about not being accepted by the Polish Army.57 One of the letters was written by Nuta Friszman from Zamość. This is how he expresses his protest against not being accepted to the 1st Division: I experienced my first disappointment in May 1943, when . . . Jews from the Polish T. Kościuszko Division, who had not been incorporated into the Division, who were refused the right to revenge the blood spilled by their brothers, just because they were Jews, were sent back. . . . At first, I reacted to the news with some disbelief. On 15 See also, Dywizja im. Kościuszki, May 24, 1943, The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum Archives (PISM), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), A.11, File 755, 74. 52 Blum, Żołnierze, 128. 53 List protestacyjny do wydziału wojskowego ZPP, siedmiu zmobilizowanych obywateli polskich, których odesłano do obozu pracy, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 624, 46–47. 54 Testimony by Tron, July 1959, Holon, Israel, AYV, O.3/1298, 8. 55 Marian Feldman biography is mentioned by Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Renata Piątkowska and Przemysław Kaniecki in their chapters in this volume. 56 Interview with Feldman, May 22, 1998, Warsaw, USC VHA, 47566, tape 6, 7; Feldman, Z Warszawy przez Łuck, Syberię, znów do Warszawy (Framingham, MA: Ryszard Feldman, 2009), 126. 57 AAN, ZPP, 130, Files 624–692.

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The decision-making chaos prevailing in voyenkomats which applied different criteria to the conscription of Jews continued almost throughout the period of forming the 1st Division, and later during the formation of the 1st Corps and the 1st Polish Army in 1944. Cases of Jews being discriminated against and refused enlistment were discussed at a meeting of the ZPP’s Main Board in Moscow in April 1944 which raised the issue of the nonacceptance of Jews into the Polish Army in the USSR, and the need to put an end to this practice.59 However, problems with the conscription of Jews persisted. In the summer of 1944, an avalanche of letters written in Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, and Russian were sent to the Organizing Committee of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union60 describing how difficult it was to be conscripted into the Polish Army.61 In June 1944, Emil Sommerstein, a representative of the Organizing Committee of Polish Jews in the USSR, sent a letter to the Main Board of the ZPP in which he demanded that the discriminating restrictions applied to the admission of Jews into the Polish Army be lifted. A month later the Presidium of the Main Board of the ZPP decided “after consulting with the War Council of the Polish Army and agreeing with it on a position to engage with the Soviet government in an effort to enlist Jews—Polish citizens into the Army.”62 Once they realized that the committee at the Divovo station was sending people of Jewish nationality back to their former places of residence many Jews resorted to various strategies that might get them into the army. Some of them hid their background, posing as Poles, while others crossed the Oka River and reported directly to the Division’s Polish command in the camp in Sel’tsy. Maria Dawidowicz, who had been deported to the Yakutia region of Siberia in June 1940, went to Irkutsk after the announcement of the “amnesty” with the intention of studying medicine. Soon afterwards she was drafted into 58 Pismo Nuty Friszmana do ZPP, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 674, 14. 59 Protokół z posiedzenia ZG ZPP w Moskwie, April 13, 1944, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 4, 8–16. 60 An organization established in July 1944, affiliated by the ZPP, chaired by Dr. Emil Sommerstein. The Committee provided support to Jews registered with the ZPP, and played an important role in the process of “repatriation” of Polish Jews from the USSR. 61 Centralne Archiwum Komitetu Centralnego PZPR, AAN, 216, File 10, 117–118. 62 Centralne Archiwum Komitetu Centralnego PZPR, AAN, 216, File 65, 21–28.

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the Polish Army. She went to Sel’tsy where she was assigned to the staff of the armored brigade and charged with registering conscripts. Maria described the registration process: In the beginning, I would accept Amchowiczes,63 that is Jews, into the army. I asked them where they came from, whom they had left behind, whether they wanted to go back. And then I would ask: “And you, you are a Roman Catholic, right?” So he already knew what I was hinting at. If I had written that he was Jewish, they wouldn’t have accepted him into the army. This is what that army of ours, and of Wanda Wasilewska’s too, was like. . . . You would write Roman Catholic and so he stayed.64

The practice described by Maria Dawidowicz was applied on a fairly large scale. Many Polish Jews decided to claim Polish nationality and Catholic faith which would then guarantee them the possibility of joining the army. Arie (Leon) Ruta from Warsaw also adopted this strategy. He had already failed to be conscripted into the 1st Division when, in the summer of 1943, he was sent back to Dzhambul (present-day Taraz, Kazakhstan) with a group of other Jews. During another draft of Polish nationals, “Polish Jews were still not accepted—I reported to the voyenkomat and pretended to be a Pole. I was sent to Divovo for the second time. Once there, I realized that almost all the newcomers were Jews pretending to be Poles.”65 Apart from claiming Polish nationality and Catholic faith, or pretending to have lost their documents, some Polish citizens of Jewish nationality changed their names to be more Polish in order to enlist to Polish Army units. For example, Henrik Cechanski (Chaim Cechanowicz) decided to change his surname and first name when Anders’ Army was being formed, having heard that they were reluctant to admit Jews into their ranks. In 1943, he was admitted as Henryk Cechanski to the 1st Kościuszko Division and sent

63 Hebrew word amchu (of your nation) is a code word used by Jews to reveal their identity to friends and fellows Jews with the implied meaning “are you one of us?” 64 Interview with Dawidowicz, April 14, 1997, Bielsko Biała, Poland, USC VHA, 33034, tape 3. 65 Testimony by Ruta, December, 1959, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/1628, 8–9. See also, Interview with Michal Friedman, June 25, 1996, Warsaw, USC VHA, 16793, tape 5; Testimony by Donat Kotowicz-Kornhaber on his participation in the Second World War, July 23, 1960, Haifa, AYV, O.3/1642, 9–10.

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to an officer candidate’ school.66 Enlistee Icchak Szteinberg did the same. In order to make it easier for him to join the army, he changed his name and surname to Michał Zagajewski and, in December 1943, he was drafted into Berling’s Army.67 The name-changing practice was quite common among officers who often acted on the initiative of their superiors. For this reason, not all Jewish officers appeared under their own names. There are many different reasons for this. The organizers of the division were undoubtedly aware of antisemitism among a large group of soldiers. In addition, the officer corps was dominated by Russians, and introducing representatives of a minority might not only intensify antisemitic feelings but also, more significantly, raise doubts about the “national character” of the division. Still, the share of Jewish soldiers in the officer corps, around 3,000 people, was apparent.68 Michał Rudawski, who had served in the Red Army as a volunteer since the summer of 1941 and was later transferred to a labor battalion, came to Sel’tsy when “everything was just being formed.”69 After a few days, he was asked to report to the education-formation department. Rudawski was received by a lieutenant70 confronting him with his personal questionnaire which he had filled out on the first day. The lieutenant asked him if he felt Polish to which Rudawski replied that, as a Pole, he had volunteered to fight in a Polish army. The lieutenant asked Rudawski why he had filled in the nationality section by writing “Jewish”; after all he had a Polish-sounding name and surname and he spoke and wrote good Polish, so would it not be more appropriate to state “Polish nationality”? To which Rudawski replied: Do you necessarily have to be either Polish or Jewish? Can’t you be a Jew and a Pole at the same time? . . . Do you think I should also 66 Interview with Cechanski, March 12, 1996, West Pymble, Sydney, Australia, USC VHA, 11516, tape 3. 67 Komisja Ewidencji Poborowej, Skierowania do 1. i 2. Dywizji, Protokół do karty ewidencyjnej nr 2572/2, January 13, 1944, Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe (CAW); See also, Komisja Ewidencji Poborowej, Protokół zeznania Szyji Holanda (zmienił nazwisko na Stefan Gałecki), karta ewidencyjna nr 2602/1, January 14, 1944, CAW; See also, List Szai Holanda do wydziału wojskowego ZPP w Moskwie, October 28, 1943, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 658, 5. 68 Meirtchak, Jews-Officers, 31; Nussbaum, Ve-Hafah. 69 Rudawski, Mój obcy kraj? (Warsaw: Agencja Wydawnicza TU, 1997), 136. 70 According to Rudawski, the lieutenant was Aleksander Zawadzki, communist activist, the Head of the Political Department of the 1th Corps of the Polish Armed Forces in the USSR.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield” change my parents’ given names which are typical Jewish? Would you want me, not personally, but as a commander, to go to church and perform religious practices? And if I don’t do all that, can I be a soldier in the Polish army?71

The lieutenant reassured him that this was just a formality for statistical purposes. Rudawski agreed to that proposal, and, as he emphasizes in his memoirs, whenever there was any doubt, especially in personal questionnaires, he would add in brackets, “of Jewish origin.”72 The surname-changing procedure was simple. A new surname was entered in a personnel file without mentioning the previous, proper one. In certain cases, when the surname was changed at a later time, one surname in the file was replaced by another. Therefore, the same individuals might appear under their real name in one officer roster and under an assumed name in others. The promises made by the ZPP to grant all Polish nationals equal rights—regardless of their religion or nationality—had not been entirely fulfilled in the case of conscription to the army. The conscription of people of Jewish nationality to the army was limited from the very beginning, being largely dependent on the current human resource needs, that is to say, on whether it was first of all possible to supplement units with ethnic Poles. Because of the problems with enlisting Jewish soldiers, the idea of creating a separate Jewish unit was put forward. In the autumn of 1943, Szaja Holand, a former student of linguistics and a prewar activist of Hashomer Hatzair, wrote to the Military Department of the ZPP: I would like to ask you to consider a plan to create a separate Jewish military unit in the 1st Polish Corps in the USSR. The immediate reason why I want to create a Jewish unit is the fact that, half a year into the formation of the 1st Corps, most of the Jewish young people from Poland in the Soviet Union are not in its ranks. It is not normal that, during an intense struggle against fascism, no use is being made of such an anti-Hitlerite element as the Jewish youth from Poland undoubtedly is.73

71 Rudawski, Mój obcy kraj?, 143–144. 72 Rudawski, Mój obcy kraj? 73 List Szai Holanda do wydziału wojskowego ZPP w Moskwie, October 28, 1943, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 658, 6.

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Also Chone Shmeruk, who became an outstanding expert on Yiddish literature after the war, turned to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee for help in creating a Jewish unit in the 1st Kościuszko Division. Shmeruk wrote, “What should a Polish Jew do who wants to fight with a weapon in his hands against the murderers of the Warsaw Ghetto? We are not accepted either into the Red Army or into the Polish Division. Where is our place?”74 The idea of creating separate Jewish units met with strong resistance from the Soviet leadership and, consequently, from the Military Division of the ZPP.75 As a result, it had no chance of being implemented, just like in Anders’ Army.76

“For Our Freedom and Yours” The atmosphere and relations between soldiers is a very important subject that comes up in all accounts and testimonies of former Jewish soldiers of the Polish Army in the East. In general, the climate was very different from the mood prevailing, for example, among the soldiers of General Anders’ Army or those of the Polish Armed Forces in the West in the United Kingdom.77 Even though the atmosphere in the Polish Armed Forces in the East was kinder for Polish Jews, for some of them the situation was not easy by any means. Sometimes their adaptation to the army was problematic. This was attributable to many factors, such as political beliefs or knowledge of Polish, though personal qualities and the ability to adapt also played a role. Joining Berling’s Army was easiest for those Jews who already held communist beliefs. They were usually promoted to officers and often met old colleagues among the officer corps who, like them, had been politically active during the interwar period. Adam Flinker, who came from Warsaw, belonged 74 Letter 99 from Shmeruk to the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee in the USSR about creating a separate Jewish regiment within the framework of the Polish Division [1943], in To Pour Out My Bitter Soul, ed. Zeltser, 258–260. 75 Aron Shneyer, Pariahs among Pariahs: Jewish Members of the Red Army in German Captivity, 1941–1945 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), 143–153. The issue of a separate Jewish unit has been also raised during the formation of Anders’ army. See Gąsowski, Pod sztandarami orła białego, 61–64. 76 Antony Polonsky, “The Proposal to Establish a ‘Jewish Legion’ within the Polish Army in the USSR. Two Documents,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 361–365. 77 Rozkaz dowódcy Armii Polskiej w ZSRR w sprawie stosunku do osób pochodzenia żydowskiego, Buzułuk, November 14, 1941, PISM, MFA, A.11, File 755, 2; Notatka z wizyty Dr. Schwarzbarta w wojsku, August 4, 1942, London, PISM, A.48, File 10/A; Julian Hochfeld w sprawie dezercji z Wojska Polskiego, May, 1944, PISM, A.5, File 6A, 19.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

to the Communist Union of Polish Youth before the war. After war broke out, he escaped to Słonim (present-day Slonim, Belarus) where he was sentenced to ten years of prison for espionage and was deported to the Urals to work in a mine. Despite the proclamation of an “amnesty” for Polish nationals it was only in the spring of 1943 that Flinker was released. He immediately went to Sel’tsy where the 1st Division was being formed. “In Sel’tsy they accepted me into the army. . . . I was glad to finally be among my people. They gave us such a warm welcome.”78 Adam Flinker was soon promoted to platoon leader; he took part in the Battle of Lenino and fought his way into Germany. Gerszon Kazdan, a dentist from Warsaw, testifies that he did not complain about being disliked by Polish soldiers or being exposed to antisemitism, although he adds that he was an officer and perhaps this fact mattered.79 While members of the Jewish intelligentsia were mainly recruited as political officers, access to an officer candidate school was also open to people from the working class and to those from very poor backgrounds. Harman Beldegrin, who came from a poor Jewish family from Nowy Targ, was sent to the officer candidate school of artillery in Ryazan immediately after joining the 1st Corps in March 1944. After several months of training he was sent to the front line in Germany.80 Jewish privates found it hardest to acclimatize and adapt. Many of them came from small towns and, quite often, from traditional Jewish communities. Inadequate knowledge of the Polish language or speaking Polish with a Yiddish accent were additional difficulties. These soldiers were particularly vulnerable to manifestations of antisemitism in the army. Max Blauner, a tailor from Grybów, who was sent to a labor camp in the Arkhangelsk Oblast, and, subsequently served in Berling’s Army, testifies: We went to a shower and one soldier started to beat one of the Jews. I defended him. And then I went over to the officer and I said: “If you are not gonna take this Polish guy, this anti-Semite, out from our unit, then eventually I will end up killing him. . . . This is too much already.” They took him away.81

78 Interview with Flinker, December 1, 1995, Warsaw, USC VHA, 6463, tape 1. See also, Interview with Aron Fainer, August 25, 1995, Toronto, USC VHA, 6006, tape 3. 79 Testimony by Kazdan, April 1971, Holon, Israel, AYV, O.3/3557, 25. 80 Interview with Beldegrin, tape 2. 81 Interview with Blauner, September 18, 1997, Yonkers, NY, USC VHA, 33607, tape 3.

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Joseph Ekstein, who came from Warsaw and served in the 1st Kościuszko Division from May 1943, went through a similar experience. After completing a course at an officer candidate school, Ekstein was promoted to corporal and sent to the front. Corporal Ekstein recounts that he experienced antisemitism in the 1st Division units. “If there were some dirty jobs in the army, we Jews did them. If you were lucky and had a Jewish officer it was better.”82 Leon Finver, who had served in the Red Army since the summer of 1940 and was transferred to Berling’s Army at the end of 1943, also recounts that he regularly experienced hatred and derision from his Polish comrades in arms due to his Jewish origin. Finver stresses, however, that in such situations he turned to superior officers who did not accept the antisemitic antics and tried to suppress them.83 It was the Jewish privates who were most severely affected by the manifestations of antisemitism. Due to their low position in the military hierarchy, they were the most exposed to various types of antisemitic behavior from fellow soldiers and noncomissioned officers. They were also the ones who endured the greatest hardships of military exercise and consequently combat. For example, Joseph Ekstein fought in the Battle of Lenino and took part in the battles for Pomerania during which he was seriously injured near Bydgoszcz while Leon Finver followed the battle across Poland and took part in the Battle of Berlin.84 Many accounts by Jewish soldiers fighting in Berling’s Army also contain positive opinions about the relations between Jewish and non-Jewish soldiers. Jakub Grubner, who had served in the sanitary platoon in the Polish Army before the war, passed an exam immediately after he was conscripted into Berling’s Army and was appointed commander of the sanitary platoon. He recalls in his diary that “antisemitism was not felt in the Polish Army at all. There were rare, individual shouts from individual soldiers as well as some mocking of the pronunciation of Polish words by soldiers of Jewish nationality.”85 A similar view is expressed by Sam Eker who underwent six months of military training in the Polish Army being formed in the town of Sumy in the summer of 1944 and went on to become platoon leader. Eker emphasizes that he enjoyed great respect among Army ranks, and that the soldiers in his platoon liked and valued him very much.86 82 Interview with Ekstein, November 27, 1996, Melbourne, USC VHA, 23321, tape 3. 83 Interview with Finver, tape 3. See also, Interview with Fluss, tape 2; Interview with Kopel Frank, August 13, 1997, Perth, Australia, USC VHA, 35237, tape 3. 84 Interview with Joseph Ekstein, tape 3; Interview with Finver, tape 3, 4. 85 Diary of Jakub Grubner, October, 1961, AYV, O.3/2500, 28. 86 Interview with Eker, September 21, 1995, Toronto, USC VHA, 7003, tape 3.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

In some accounts, the witnesses emphasize that they experienced great solidarity and acceptance from Polish soldiers. Familiarity usually came with time, especially after battles fought together. Extreme situations on the battlefield quite often stimulated acts of solidarity with the Jewish soldiers gaining recognition, admiration, and sympathy from their Polish comrades in arms owing to their brave and heroic fighting. These processes were particularly evident during the Battle of Lenino, fought October 12–13, 1943, in which the 1st Kościuszko Division took an active part. During this bloody battle, more than fifty Jewish soldiers lost their lives and more than one hundred received military decorations.87 Nathan Artenstein, who fought in the Battle of Lenino, emphasizes the special atmosphere of brotherhood among his comrades-in-arms in these words, “The first place we fought was Lenino. . . . The cost was terrible, so many people were killed. The Jews were treated there very well, with no antisemitism ever. Later on, many gentile Poles saved my life. We lived like brothers, slept and ate together.”88 On the other hand, Abram Ryzenberg, who served in Berling’s Army from August 1943, describes the moment when his company crossed the Bug River and reached the settlement of Zofiówka near Lutsk. Learning about the murder of the local Jewish population on the spot, Ryzenberg recalls how he and a group of Jewish and Polish noncomissioned officers and privates decided to build a makeshift monument out of wood to honor the murdered Jews in this town.89 Abram Ryzenberg also adds that after meeting the only surviving Jewish woman in the area the soldiers organized a collection of funds to support her, and that “fellow Poles helped in this undertaking. They showed a lot of heart and collected a serious sum of money for this purpose.”90 In addition, contact with the Jewish soldiers of the Red Army happened frequently and was usually very positive. During such meetings the soldiers of both formations most often communicated in Yiddish, met for common prayers, and supported and often celebrated war successes together.91 The possibility of obtaining an officer’s commission, something that was out of reach for Jews before the war, or in the Polish Armed Forces in the 87 Meirtchak, Jews-Officers, 30; Nussbaum, “Jews in the Kościuszko Division,” 200. 88 Interview with Artenstein, October 11, 1996, North Caulfield, Australia, USC VHA, 20739, tape 4. 89 Testimony by Ryzenberg, 2. 90 Ryzenberg. 91 Altshuler, “Jewish Combatants,” 24.

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West and in Anders’ Army, created an understandable sense of equality and confirmed hopes for future changes in the situation of Jews. Moreover, active Jewish participation in organizing and merging the army gradually led to them being identified with the formation, thereby deepening the process of commitment. The presence of other Jews in army units also proved important. The bonds and solidarity that were forged among them created a sense of confidence and strength. This allowed Jews to actively fight against various types of antisemitic incidents initiated by soldiers and noncomissioned officers which sometimes led to fist fights. This was particularly important for those soldiers whose first language was Yiddish. Henryk Tron, who received the first officer cadet’s rank in December 1943, reports that he spoke Yiddish with his Jewish soldiers outside the service, supporting them when they wanted to be excused from exercises on Jewish holidays, and that he also enjoyed this privilege.92 It should be noted that religious practices were introduced to Berling’s Army. Most of the soldiers were Catholic, and this religion had a monopoly in the army units which was intended to emphasize their Polish character.93 Therefore, at the morning and evening roll calls they sang religious songs, a military tradition dating back to the interwar period in Poland.94 Henryk Dorski, assigned as a surgeon physician to the sanitary battalion of the 3rd Division, recalls that “every day began with a morning prayer and the singing of the hymn “Kiedy ranne wstają zorze” (As the morning aurora rises), and these morning and evening prayers were also attended by Russians.”95 Every Sunday, military chaplains would celebrate Mass for the troops. Jewish soldiers were also required to attend Catholic religious services. For some soldiers coming from traditional and religious backgrounds participating in prayers and Catholic feast days was a painful experience. Some of them like Yitzchak Pomerantz, who was born into a Hasidic family and a member of the Gerrer Hasidim, from Długosiodło near Wyszków would put up resistance when told to attend Catholic religious ceremonies. Pomerantz, who served in the 1st Kościuszko Division, described his experience relating to religious matters:

92 Testimony by Tron, 9. 93 Edward Kospath-Pawłowski, Chwała i zdrada. Wojsko Polskie na Wschodzie 1943–1945 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Inicjał, 2010), 159–160. 94 Jan Zamojski, Miejsca postoju (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1989), 149. 95 Testimony by Dorski, 12.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield” One morning, the Catholic prayer was attended by a high-ranking colonel. He protested that it was not proper to show disrespect to the Catholic faith by leaving during the service; he proposed that everyone remain in place during the Catholic service, remaining silent. To my dismay, his proposal was accepted, leaving me in a difficult quandary. I asked to speak to this colonel. . . . I respectfully explained to the colonel that I was a dutiful soldier who had passed all his courses successfully. Under no circumstances, however, could I abide by the order to attend the Catholic religious service.96

The colonel granted Pomerantz his request and he was excused from attending Catholic prayers and services.97 Many soldiers recollect that even though there was no military rabbinate Jewish soldiers were entitled to leave during Jewish holidays provided that they were not on the front line.98 Even though there were many religious and practicing Jews in the divisions, no field rabbinate was created to serve them, contrary to the professed slogans of equality which led to many demands that the Moses’ Ministry be organized.99 Rabbis David Kahane, Jeshajahu Druker, and Aharon Beker provided religious services to the Jewish soldiers.100 No field rabbi was appointed until 1944 when the army had reached the Polish territory. The Chief Rabbinate of the Polish Army, with Rabbi Kahane as its head, was established in January 1945.101 There was also a large group of women among the volunteers who kept arriving in the military camp in Sel’tsy. Sometimes married couples set out together to the place where the Polish units were being formed. Donat Kotowicz (Kornhaber) recalls that when he found out that a Polish Army 96 Pomerantz, Itzik, be Strong!, trans. Avraham Y. Finkel (New York: CIS Publishers, 1993), 267. 97 On the deep religiosity, courage, and heroism of Pomenrantz see testimony by Leon Batycki, 11–12. 98 Testimony by Dr. Zwi Chanael (Henryk Chmielnicki), August 1969, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/3360, 10; Testimony by Tron, 9. 99 List Rabina Dawida Zaruckiego do ZPP w sprawie powołania rabinatu przy Pierwszej Dywizji, July 7, 1943, AAN, ZPP, 130, File 624, 13–14. 100 Natalia Aleksiun, Dokąd dalej? Ruch syjonistyczny w Polsce (1944–1950) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Trio, 2002), 79; Józef Guterman, Jak to na wojence (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo MON, 1966), 192–193; Jan Getzel, “Do Kazachstanu i z powrotem,” in Losy żydowskie. Świadectwa żywych, ed. Marian Turski (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Żydów Kombatantów, 1999), 112. 101 Organizacja i Działania Bojowe Ludowego Wojska Polskiego w latach 1943–1945, Vol. 1, Wybór materiałów źródłowych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo MON, 1965), 313.

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was being formed under the command of General Berling he reported to the 1st Kościuszko Division together with his wife, Renata, and his sister-in-law, Mira Efron. Renata and Mira were assigned to the 1st Independent Sanitary Battalion.102 Anna Biłgoraj reacted in similar fashion upon hearing the news that a Polish division was being formed, reporting to the local voyenkomat in Ufa with her husband. Anna was conscripted into the 1st Heroes of Westerplatte Armored Brigade with which she went to the front. Biłgoraj held various functions in the units such as working in field hospitals.103 In August 1943, following the example of the Red Army women’s corps, a separate unit was established: the Emilia Plater 1st Independent Women’s Battalion. Most of the women serving in the battalion were assigned to guard duty and to guarding military property. The battalion’s women soldiers also served as telephone operators, radio telegraph operators, typists, washerwomen, nurses, and doctors. Women fusiliers companies assigned to the 1st Infantry Division engaged in direct combat. In September 1943 women soldiers were sent to the front for the first time. They fought at Lenino. Out of the large number of women in the Polish Army only a few served in the women’s battalion. Most of them were assigned to other units, quite often performing command functions.104 An incomplete publication listing women officers contains over 500 names including the names of 148 Jewish women who accounted for nearly 30 percent of all the women officers.105 Women in Polish uniforms served across the entire battlefield: from Sel’tsy across the central Vistula, they took part in the Battle of Warsaw, conquered the Pomeranian Line, fought on the Odra and Elbe Rivers, and in Czechoslovakia. In his testimony, Abram Ryzenberg describes his experience of the Battle for Warsaw.106 In a long passage he mentions Lieutenant Lucyna Herc: The deputy commander of our company was a heroic Jewish woman Lucyna Herc, who, together with us, traversed the entire route from the Oka River to Warsaw. I witnessed the heroic death of this brave 102 103 104 105

Testimony by Kotowicz-Kornhaber, 9. Testimony by Biłgoraj, 8, 9. Women also formed a significant group of political and educational officers. Stanisława Drzewiecka, Szłyśmy znad Oki (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej, 1965), 302–368. 106 The 1st Army of the Polish Army and the Red Army took part in the Battle of Warsaw. The combat operations lasted from September 10–15, 1944, with the aim of seizing Praga, the central right bank of Warsaw.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield” young girl. . . . On September 17, 1944, during our battalions’ attack on Warsaw, she was hit by a mortar on the bank of the Vistula. The mortar tore both her legs off. I saw how Polish soldiers cried while they tried to save her, carrying her on their shoulders to a hospital, where she died three months later.107

In his testimony, Artur Pechner also talks about the heroism of Jewish women during the Battle of Warsaw. He vividly recalls “Dr. Maria Pomper, a Jewish woman in a group that successfully crossed the Vistula, who, unfortunately, died a hero’s death near Czerniaków.”108 In the fighting for the Pomeranian Line there was Bela Szpinak, a political section staffer, who had not hesitated to join the troops fighting at the front and carried the wounded away from the line of fire under a hail of bullets.109 In their testimonies, most of the Jewish women soldiers speak well about their relationship with non-Jewish male and female soldiers.110 Their accounts rarely mention bullying or sexual violence. The historiography of women’s service in the Red Army unequivocally confirms that sexual violence existed on a fairly large scale.111 Women soldiers in Berling’s Army also faced this problem. Maria Dawidowicz describes a situation where she stood up to her commander when he tried to force her to have sexual intercourse. “I asked my commander to give me a pass for a few days so that I could see how things fared in Lwów [where she had left her family after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war]. He did not give me the pass. And for what reason? Because he wanted to do the techtelmechtel with me, and I said no!”112 107 Testimony by Ryzenberg, 3. 108 Testimony by Pechner on his participation in the Second World War, September 25, 1961, Hadera, Israel, AYV, O.3/1794, 18. 109 Testimony by Roman Ritter ( Jagiełło, Jagiel) on his participation in the Second World War, February 10, 1963, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/2256, 23; Szulzycer, “Żydzi w 1 Dywizji,” 30. 110 Interview with Genowefa Klupinska, December 10, 1996, Warsaw, USC VHA, 25575, tape 4, 5; Interview with Helena Alster, June 3, 1996, Warsaw, USC VHA, 16046, tape 4; Interview with Sabina Halmin, September 29, 1995, Warsaw, USC VHA, 4758, tape 4; Testimony of Biłgoraj. 111 See Mascha, Nina und Katjuscha. Frauen in der Roten Armee 1941–1945, ed. Museum Berlin-Karlshorst (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2002); Swetlana Alexijewitsch, Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht (Berlin: Hanser, 2003); Anna Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat: A History of Violence on the Eastern Front (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Oleg Budnitskii, “Muzhchiny i zhenshchiny v Krasnoi Armii (1941–1945),” Cahiers du monde russe 2, no. 52 (2011): 405–422. 112 Interview with Dawidowicz, tape 4.

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The available biographical material concerning former Jewish women soldiers in Berling’s Army shows that many of them married other soldiers.113 A marriage boom of sorts occurred just after the army entered and liberated the Polish territories. Maria Dawidowicz married Zygfryd Dawidowicz, a dentist in a sanitary unit. “The army was nice because I met my future husband, a wonderful man, there. We got married after the war. But we waited two years. Because his wife didn’t come back, his son didn’t come back; they were murdered. But we said that we would wait at least two years.”114 The motives behind the soldiers’ desire to live together as couples and to get married while serving in the army are twofold: on the one hand, the need for closeness in very difficult front line conditions, as a way of easing the pain of longing for one’s family or dealing with its loss, and on the other, as far as women soldiers were concerned, marrying another soldier often guaranteed them protection against violence suffered from other soldiers. The abundant biographical documentation shows that many Jewish couples served in the army liberated Polish territories, where they came face to face with the unimaginable consequences of the Shoah, the most traumatic war experience for most of them.

“They Would Never Understand the Ruin of My Poor People . . .”115 On July 21, 1944, the troops of the 1st Belarusian Front, to which the 1st Polish Army was subordinated, broke through the German defense line on the Bug River and entered eastern Poland. When you listen to the accounts and interviews of former Jewish soldiers and come to the passages where they describe their entry into Polish lands many witnesses to the events are either unable to stop crying or the interview becomes interrupted with a long silence.116 Even though a long time had passed since those events what is striking in these accounts is that the former soldiers still felt traumatized by them well into their old age.117

113 Interview with Jan Drzewiecki, September 3, 1998, Warsaw, USC VHA, 49018, tape 4; Interview with Finver, tape 3, 4; Testimony by Dorski, 13. 114 Interview with Dawidowicz, tape 3. 115 Pomerantz, Itzik, be Strong!, 302. 116 Interview with Eker, tape 3; Interview with Finver, tape 4. 117 On the confrontation with the consequences of the Holocaust in the context of the experiences of Jewish soldiers serving in the Red Army see Altshuler, “Jewish Combatants,” 16–35.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

Nathan Artenstein describes the moment when he first saw the ruins and rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto. “So I went to the former ghetto. There was nothing left! . . . Impossible! . . . I wanted to cry, but I could not. I stood there for several hours. . . [cries] It’s hard to believe . . . I have been here for 45 years [in Australia] and this is the first time I am crying . . .”118 Some Jewish soldiers already had fragmentary information about the situation in German-occupied Poland when they crossed the borders. As I have already mentioned, they drew their knowledge mainly from articles published in the communist Polish press.119 Another source of information about the fate of Jews under German occupation were Soviet soldiers returning from the front, lying wounded in hospitals or released on leave, or Soviet officers serving in Polish units.120 However, none of them had believed the dramatic reports about the Shoah until they entered Polish territory.121 Lucien Feigenbaum described his doubts at the time: “But we did not know the details. I did not believe; I personally did not believe these rumors, what was happening to our loved ones, to our families on the other side.”122 Most of the soldiers still hoped that their loved ones whom they had left behind under German occupation would survive the war. After entering Polish territory, Felix Flicker also had such hopes. “What we thought, maybe the Germans had resettled them to some other places. . . The local Polish population gave us a little information. . . They preferred not to talk about it. But we realized that something had happened. That some Jews had been exterminated. But we couldn’t think about numbers and figures, which we found out later.”123 For soldiers who entered Poland with the Army the confrontation with the sheer extent of the catastrophe of an annihilated Jewish world was extremely traumatic. In Poland, they found traces of a tragedy whose enormity they could not imagine. Initially, most of them had no access to information about their 118 Interview with Artenstein, tape 5. 119 Interview with Lucien Feigenbaum, June 11, 1996, White Plains, New York, USC VHA, 16030, tape 6; Testimony by Kotowicz-Kornhaber, 10. 120 Interview with Michael Gable, February 13, 1996, Boca Raton, Florida, USC VHA, 11967, tape 2; Interview with Finver, tape 3; Testimony by Dr. Gustaw Auscaler, March 1960, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/1644, 32. 121 Interview with Fluss, tape 2; Testimony by Kotowicz-Kornhaber, 10; Testimony by Auscaler, 32; Testimony by Anna Biłgoraj, 9. On the reports and knowledge about the Shoah among the Polish Jewish refugees in the USSR see Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen, 258–267; Eliyana R. Adler, Survival on the Margins, 213–219. 122 Interview with Feigenbaum, tape 6. 123 Interview with Flicker, tape 5.

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loved ones.124 The first observations from the liberated villages were alarming. After entering Baranavichy, Szmuel Cerendorf decided to find the Jews in the town, because he wanted to know “if this is true, what we were told about the murder of Jews, because we did not believe it.”125 Baranavichy had been badly bombed, and there were no Jews in town. When the troops of the First Belarusian Front entered the area of the concentration camp at Majdanek, while the fighting over Lublin was still going on, Soviet soldiers found the last prisoners there. It was in Lublin in July 1944 that the 1st Polish Army was merged with the underground People’s Army to form the Polish People’s Army. It was also at that time, immediately after the liberation of the German concentration camp at Majdanek, when military barracks for Polish Army units were put up in one part of the camp.126 Felix Flicker arrived at the former camp at Majdanek just after its liberation. “What we learned, it is incredible, the memory it makes me feel like I don’t want to go back to it. Even just thinking about it. We found huge stockpiles of shoes, of clothing, and in the crematoriums there were still bones and ashes. There were some prisoners left in the camp, they looked more like walking skeletons than human beings.”127 Sam Eker had a similarly traumatic memory of his arrival to Majdanek, “We came to Majdanek. I felt . . . A grave [he cries]. A grave, big ditches, filled with bodies.”128 Even those who came to the area of Majdanek many months after its liberation testified to what a big shock it was for them to be confronted with that place. Marian Feldman was sent to the Polish Army’s 9th Reserve Regiment which had its headquarters in the former camp. Feldman says that he was “given accommodation on the 4th field at Majdanek in the former camp’s barracks where conditions were terrible. Even though destroyed, the crematorium was still there with bones still lying around.”129

124 Interview with Blauner, tape 3; Interview with Finver, tape 3. 125 Testimony by Szmuel Cerendorf, 7. 126 Michał Szychowski, “Plastyczne i przestrzenne formy upamiętnienia ofiar byłego KL Lublin na terenie Państwowego Muzeum na Majdanku w latach 1944–1969,” Pamięć i Sprawiedliwość 2 (2001): 304; Tomasz Kranz, “Majdanek—poobozowe lieu de mémoire w przestrzeni miasta,” in Lubelskie miejsca pamięci w przestrzeni publicznej i edukacyjnej, ed. Mariusz Ausz et al. (Lublin: Inst. Historii Uniw. Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2015), 117–118. 127 Interview with Flicker, tape 4. 128 Interview with Eker, tape 3. 129 Interview with Feldman, tape 7; Feldman, Z Warszawy przez Łuck, 135.

“I’m rushing with millions of others to the battlefield”

Most biographical sources of the Jewish soldiers contain poignant and extensive accounts of their stay at the former German camp at Majdanek.130 For most of them, passing through the camp’s gates was when they had to face up to the truth about the annihilation of Jews in Poland. Some of them express their open indignation that military barracks were put up in the place where their parents, siblings, or other relatives might also have been killed instead of commemorating the victims of this crime.131 Many former Jewish soldiers could not hide their resentment at the indifference and complete lack of empathy that was demonstrated, not only by their army superiors but also by some Polish soldiers and civilians.132 Daniel Rudnicki, a Polish soldier serving in the 3rd Infantry Division, provides an accurate account of the situation immediately after the liberation of Majdanek: People who saw this hell reacted very differently. Next to us, soldiers from the East, shocked and almost unconscious at the sight of this evidence of willful and deliberate human cruelty; there were some ladies moving around . . . seizing the opportunity . . . to rummage through a pile of leather soles left from old shoes of those who had been murdered [...]; in another barracks, they were going through small children’s shirts, the same that had been taken off babies who were sent to crematoriums! And perhaps this was the most horrible thing! This inexplicable indifference towards serial murder, a million times over! Indifference revealing incalculable losses. . . . Losses in the way that people under the occupation thought and how they reacted towards the fate of others.133 130 Adam Broner, My War against the Nazis. A Jewish Soldier with the Red Army (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007), 112; Interview with Broner, tape 5; Interview with Blauner, tape 3; Interview with Finver, tape 3; Interview with Abraham Lenkawicki, February 4, 1996, Hollywood, CA, USC VHA, 11646, tape 4; Testimony by Rubin Taub on his participation in the war against Germany, July 17, 1960, Be’er Sheva, AYV, O.3/1639, 9; Testimony by Dr. Icchak Freud, June 7, 1960, Tel Aviv, AYV, O.3/1611, 8; Testimony by Biłgoraj, 9; Testimony by Dorski, 18; Testimony by Eichenwald, 11; Testimony by Szmuel Cerendorf, 7; Testimony by Chanael, 9; Komito, Between two Crazy Dictators, 64. 131 Broner, My War, 112. The State Museum at Majdanek started its activities in November 1944 even though in the first years of the museum’s operation most of the grounds and camp facilities were under the control of Polish and Soviet military units stationed there. Kranz, “Majdanek,” 117–118. 132 Interview with Nathan Artenstein, tape 4. 133 Rudnicki, “Wspomnienia ze służby w 1. AWP. Kwiecień 1944–maj 1945,” in Relacje ze

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Both the accounts and contacts that Jewish soldiers had with Polish civilians display a full range of feelings from warmly welcoming soldiers who entered Polish territory through distrust and questioning of the Polish nature of the army to outright unfriendly and hostile attitudes.134 Images of large and small towns completely emptied of Jews complemented accounts of the few survivors of the Shoah met on the way. The moods of the Jewish soldiers were very adversely affected by Polish society’s attitude towards the few Jews who had survived the Shoah. The Jewish soldiers were well aware of the fact that as long as they wore the Polish Army uniform they were relatively safe. In areas already liberated they often met men and women who had been forced by circumstances to hide their Jewish origins. Włodzimierz Szer, serving in the 1st Kościuszko Division, thus describes his first meeting with survivors who had lived through the war in hiding in Otwock: We visited one Jewish family. . . . We didn’t want to arouse any suspicions; it was best not to be noticed by neighbors. . . . It was the first time that I heard the expression “on the Aryan side” and “good,” that is, “Aryan” appearance. I felt their incredible fear. They were afraid of practically everything, even the faintest noise. . . . It was that evening that I found out about the Holocaust.135

In his testimony, Dr. Henryk Dorski, who served as a surgeon in the sanitary battalion of the 3rd Division, mentioned a meeting with two survivors near Lublin. These two young men had been hiding in the forest during the war. It was from their mouths that Dorski heard about the terrible fate that the Jews suffered under the German occupation. The doctor states, “All these stories made an overwhelming impression on all of us and it was only then that we realized the enormity of the misfortune that had befallen the Jewish people.”136 Zbiorów Specjalnych Centralnej Biblioteki Wojskowej w Warszawie, z kolekcji płk. Józefa Margulesa, cited in: Świadkowie. Zapomniane głosy. Berlingowcy. Żołnierze tragiczni, ed. Dominik Czapigo (Warsaw: Karta, 2015), 177. 134 Testimony by Dorski, 13; Broner, My War, 112–113; Włodzimierz Szer, To Our Children: Memoirs of Displacement. A Jewish Journey of Hope and Survival in Twentieth-Century Poland and Beyond (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016), 105; Interview with Feigenbaum, tape 6. See also, Daniel Blatman, “The Encounter between Jews and Poles in Lublin District after Liberation, 1944–1945,” East European Politics & Societies 20, no. 4 (2006): 598–621. 135 Szer, To Our Children, 112. 136 Testimony by Dorski, 14.

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Dorski also added that, while advancing with the army up-country, in many houses and flats Jewish soldiers could see furniture and household appliances that undoubtedly came from Jewish dwellings.137 Nathan Artenstein, who served in the 1st Kościuszko Division, also came across a small group of Jewish partisans who had set up a Jewish family camp in the surrounding forests. They were in rags, dirty, and hungry. The Jewish soldiers took care of them and heard dramatic stories of their experiences, but also an account of mass murder committed by a Home Army unit on children, women, and elderly people who had lived with the Jewish partisans in the forest camp.138 At that point, the surviving Jewish partisans decided to join the Polish Army realizing that its uniform could protect them against revenge and persecution. This was also the tactic adopted by Boruch Mehl who survived the war with his family in hiding in Hrubieszów County. Shortly after liberation, in the autumn of 1944, he decided to join the Polish Army. He was asked by his superior, Lieutenant Michał Rudawski, about his war experience, to which Private Mehl replied that the lieutenant was “the first man in the army who showed any interest in his fate.”139 The Jewish soldiers took special care of and offered assistance to the Jewish survivors. They tried to provide them with protection from underground gangs, housed them in safe places, usually in large, already liberated cities, where the first Jewish committees were being set up, supplied them with food and clothing, and raised funds to support them. Karol Schein, a doctor serving in the 1st Corps, recalls a meeting with a Jewish doctor who “had gone completely wild as a result of the terrible conditions he lived in while hiding in the forests.”140 The Jewish soldiers gave him a uniform and helped him to join their unit. 137 See also, Testimony by Biłgoraj, 10. 138 Interview with Artenstein, tape 5. On the murders of Jews hiding in forests and on farms by the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) or National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne) see, for example, Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and Jews during World War II (New York: Holocaust Library, 1986), 120–134; Aleksandra Bańkowska, “Partyzantka polska lat 1942–1944 w relacjach żydowskich,” Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 1 (2005): 148–164; Dariusz Libionka, “Lokalne struktury Narodowych Sił Zbrojnych wobec ukrywających się Żydów w świetle powojennych materiałów śledczych i procesowych–przypadek powiatów miechowskiego i pińczowskiego,” Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały 16 (2020): 278–312. 139 Rudawski, Mój obcy kraj?, 164–165. 140 Testimony by Schein (Szaniewicz) on his participation in the Second World War, July 25,

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Artur Pechner, a doctor in the 1st Infantry Regiment of the Kościuszko Division, describes a meeting with a Jewish woman who was hiding in a nunnery in Warsaw. Pechner helped her and managed to get her a pass to travel to Białystok, where a Jewish committee was already operating at that time.141 Anna Biłgoraj, together with other Jewish soldiers, helped Jewish women survivors from the Gross-Rosen concentration camp: We met a group of Jewish girls from various countries who had been liberated from one of the camps. . . . They were in a lamentable condition—their heads were shaved and their clothes in tatters. They came from Hungary, Poland, and other countries . . . . The Jews of our unit, including myself, took care of them, provided them with clothing and food. They sought our protection against aggressive advances by Russian soldiers. Several of them became wives to our Jewish soldiers and followed us.142

Being confronted with the catastrophe of the Shoah very often intensified the desire of taking revenge on the enemy for the suffering and wrongs suffered individually, but also for the loss of the entire nation. This could most effectively be expressed and realized through direct, active participation in fighting Germans. In the descriptions and accounts of the fighting, the motive of revenge on the enemy is often invoked as a stimulus for the heroic behavior of Jewish soldiers on the front line. However, it also generated brutal acts of violence and executions or abuse of the captured German prisoners of war. Felix Flicker, who was seriously injured in the battle of Festung Breslau, when asked in an interview, “how was your attitude towards Germany at that time?” replied, “I hated them. Deep in my heart I hated all of them. Now my philosophy is different. You can’t say of a whole nation that all of them are bad. . . . But at that time for me, the only good German was a dead German.”143 Abram Ryzenberg gave a similar account of his first meeting with Germans near Płock, where, as he describes, he “saw German battle survivors, dirty, verminous, naked, and barefoot, arousing disgust.”144 Donat Kotowicz describes the executions of German prisoners of war, including members of the SS units, 141 142 143 144

1961, Haifa, AYV, O.3/1792, 8. Testimony by Pechner, 18. Testimony by Biłgoraj, 11. Interview with Flicker, tape 5. Testimony by Ryzenberg, 4.

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“We would only take the SS soldiers captive if we needed a ‘tongue’, that is a source of information about the enemy, otherwise—even after an order was issued not to shoot prisoners of war—we would kill them on the spot.”145 However, other eyewitness accounts present completely different stories, especially with regard to the civilian German population. In his memoirs, Adam Broner recalls a meeting with a German pastor in the town of Bad Polzin (present-day Połczyn-Zdrój, Poland), with whom he made friends. Broner paid him frequent visits, during which they held discussions; the pastor was enchanted by his fluent knowledge of Hebrew, Russian, and German, as well as his general erudition.146 Mieczysław Najman, who came from Drohobycz (present-day Drohobych, Ukraine), went to Wałbrzych just after the demobilization in July 1945 with plans to settle down. Polish Army veterans were given priority in the right to occupy German houses and flats. The action of driving out and resettling the German population from the Lower Silesia region was underway, but the German population still prevailed. In Wałbrzych, Najman took up residence in a house its German owner still lived in. “I took over a house, with a German lady still living in it. All furnished! I had never seen anything like that in my life! . . . The German woman gave us everything she had. . . . I said her that we will take nothing from her. I will guarantee her peace. . . . What the Germans did to us, we had the right to do to the Germans. But I, as a Jew, wasn’t interested in those things.”147 Najman decided not to return to his hometown of Drohobycz. However, the majority of the Jewish soldiers went back to the places where they had grown up, often just after the liberation, and were granted a short pass to this end. Some of them clung on desperately to the hope of finding someone else from their family who had managed to survive. Most often these hopes were dispelled immediately upon arrival. It is difficult to describe the bitterness, emptiness, and helplessness that the soldiers felt when they were confronted with the place of their childhood and youth. The world they had left behind before the war had ceased to exist, and soldiers mourned the loss of their loved ones. Michał Friedman, who joined the 1st Polish Army in February 1944, was passing through his hometown of Kowel (present-day Kovel, Ukraine) with 145 Testimony by Kotowicz-Kornhaber, 11. See also, Testimony by Szmuel Cerendorf, 9; Testimony by Chanael, 12. 146 Broner, My War, 105. 147 Interview with Najman, November 2005, Świnoujście, Poland, Centropa, accessed January 20, 2020, https://www.centropa.org/biography/mieczyslaw-najman.

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an army transport. He took the opportunity to stay there briefly. This is how Friedman describes his impressions of his visit to Kowel. I am walking around a town that has become a ghost town. In the streets, near the houses and in the waste bins, you can still find photographs and items of Jewish property, but I can’t see any people. And then suddenly I meet my sister’s friend. We fell into each other’s arms. She started to cry terribly and tell me what happened and how my mother and two sisters died. . . . I went into the synagogue in Kowel and there were inscriptions on the walls. Including those by my friends. One was written by a very close friend of mine, who wrote: “I am 21 years old and I do not want to die. Why do I have to die?” Another one was addressed to a husband, “I am going to die with [our] child, [please] avenge our death,” “if someone survives, they should tell of this.” And it was then that I decided not to stay in that town any longer. I went to the station to wait for the next transport.148

Jakub Grubner, who served as the commander of a sanitary platoon, was heavily wounded and taken to an evacuation hospital in Przemyśl in January 1945. Grubner lost his right eye and part of his right frontal bone. After his convalescence, as an invalid with the 2nd disability class, he decided to go to the nearby city of Tarnów where he had left his wife and son back in 1939. He found an overgrown patch where his house had once stood and learned about his family’s tragedy from a neighbor.149 In addition to the traumatic experience of hearing that their loved ones were no longer alive, soldiers from small towns and villages often faced hostility and antisemitism from the communities where they had lived before the war, sometimes also having to cope with news about murders and denunciations of Jews committed by their neighbors.150 In the summer of 1944, while 148 Interview with Friedman, tape 6; Interview with Friedman, January 2004, Warsaw, Centropa, accessed January 2020, https://www.centropa.org/biography/michal-friedman. 149 Diary of Grubner, 38. 150 See Andrzej Żbikowski, “The Postwar Wave of Pogroms and Killings,” in Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 67–94; Alina Cała, Ochrona bezpieczeństwa fizycznego Żydów w Polsce powojennej. Komisje specjalne przy Centralnym Komitecie Żydów w Polsce (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2014); Marcin Zaremba, Wielka trwoga. Polska 1944–1947. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Cracow: Wydawnic-

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briefly stationing in the town of Chełm, Lieutenant Michał Rudawski took the opportunity to visit his home village of Przytoczno. In a nearby village he received a warning from the commander of the local militia to stay away from the village since Jews were being murdered in that area. Rudawski’s superior in the army also tried to talk him out of going home and offered to assign several soldiers to accompany him on this trip. Rudawski declined the offer and went to Przytoczno by himself. Once there, he learned that some of his earlier neighbors and acquaintances had denounced Jews or actively participated in their capture or even murder.151 Adam Broner noted in his memoirs that soldiers returning from a victorious war should bring happiness and hope, and should have plans of how to rebuild their lives after the war. However, in his case, as well as in the opinion of other Jewish soldiers, there was no happy return. For Broner, the very moment of return seemed worse than the war with the Germans.152 Włodzimierz Szer, who had been promoted from private to lieutenant colonel, wrote in his memoirs how he felt immediately after the war was over. “People on the platforms were dancing and singing ‘Poland has not perished yet’. Germany’s unconditional capitulation was announced through loudspeakers. It was May 1945. The nightmare was over. Over? Mom had been murdered. Dad was in jail. What kind of end was it?”153

How to Recreate Life? Jewish soldiers, as well as survivors of the Shoah, were left alone with their fears, their helplessness, a sense of hopelessness and loss, and, above all, with the overwhelming sadness and trauma, the mental consequences of which they would bear for almost their entire lives. Most of them had lost their entire families and a return to their homeland proved impossible, whether because of strong antisemitism and hostility from their surroundings, the destruction of their homes, or, most often, because their property had been seized by new owners.154 Like other Shoah survivors, demobilized Jewish soldiers moved to larger towns and tended to live together in larger groups among Jews. two Znak, 2012), 584–587. 151 Rudawski, Mój obcy kraj?, 145–160. 152 Broner, My War, 113. 153 Szer, To Our Children, 127. 154 See, for example, Lukasz Krzyzanowski, Ghost Citizens. Jewish Return to a Postwar City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge

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Jewish committees helped to set up houses for demobilized Jewish soldiers; these committees provided support and a roof over the soldiers’ heads. On the one hand this provided security, and on the other it provided psychological support to a group that had shared similar war experiences and had largely been left to fend for itself after the Shoah. Jewish soldiers established a number of veteran organizations, including the largest, which was the Union of Jews—Former Participants in Military Combat against Nazism.155 As noted by August Grabski, who has researched the phenomenon of the Jewish veterans’ movement in postwar Poland, the motive behind setting up these organizations were “mental and wartime experiences which formed an important part of the social identity of former soldiers after the war.”156 In his monograph on the condition of the Polish society immediately after World War II, Marcin Zaremba notes that no psychological tests were performed on demobilized Polish soldiers.157 According to Zaremba, some of them presumably suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.158 As I have shown above, for the Jewish veterans the time right after demobilization was especially painful. It was not easy to leave the military community with which they could identify themselves, having spent many months or even years there, and having made friends there. Return to civilian life was all the more difficult because some of the soldiers were completely alone because their families had been murdered. In addition, the political situation had left the country in chaos, with strong antisemitism feeling still pervasive after the Shoah casting doubt on their wartime efforts—had they really fought and shed their blood for such a Poland? The situation in war-ravaged Poland alarmed many. Demobilized Jewish soldiers were leaving the army in a strong antisemitic and sometimes even pogrom-like atmosphere. Jews began leaving Poland as early as the middle of 1944. The first wave of departures took place just after the front line passed and lasted until summer of 1946. Fifty thousand or so Jews had left the country by University Press, 2014); Alina Skibińska, “The Return of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the Reaction of the Polish Population,” in Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 25–65. 155 Związek Żydów Byłych Uczestników Walki Zbrojnej z Faszyzmem, 1944–1949, AZIH, 318. 156 Grabski, Żydowski ruch kombatancki, 13. 157 Zaremba, Wielka trwoga, 207. 158 Zaremba.

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June 1946 including many former soldiers.159 Many of them decided to desert from the army. By June 1946 there were still about 220,000 Jewish survivors in the country.160 Following the Kielce pogrom until the end of 1947, most of them, that is 150,000 or so, had left Poland accompanied by a large group of Jews who had served in the Army and did not see a future for themselves in Poland.161 However, some Polish Jews, including Polish Army soldiers, decided to stay in their home country. This group was dominated by people who, either because of their beliefs or for personal reasons, had linked their fate with Poland’s. In many biographies, the relationship with communism starts with joining the 1st Kościuszko Division. For those who fought from Lenino to Berlin the political choice was not difficult. For the former soldiers of the Polish Army security offices were another place of work where they could serve the same idea as before.162 However, the majority of them have left Poland during the next exodus of Polish Jews in the mid-1950s or in the wake of the antisemitic campaign in 1968. Finally, many of them arrived in Israel where some joined the Israeli Defense Forces.

Conclusion For many years the participation of Jewish soldiers in the Polish Army in the East was not the subject of historical research or commemorated in Poland or in Israel where many former soldiers emigrated. In both countries the commemoration of Jewish military action during the first years of the postwar period and today, primarily honored the insurgents of the Warsaw Ghetto 159 David Engel, Bein Shihrur le-Brichah. Nitsolei ha-Shoah be-Polin ve-hama’awak al hanhagatam, 1944–1946 (Tel Aviv: Ha-amutah le-Cheker Ma’archot Ha’apalah al-shem Shaul Avigdor, 1996), 155. 160 Dariusz Stola, “Jewish emigration from communist Poland: the decline of Polish Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 47, no. 2–3 (2017): 171. 161 Jerzy Eisler, “Fale emigracji żydowskiej z powojennej Polski,” Biuletyn IPN 3 (2002): 59; Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence, 44, 233. 162 See Andrzej Paczkowski, “Żydzi w UB. Próba weryfikacji stereotypu,” in Komunizm—ideologia, system, ludzie, ed. Tomasz Szarota (Warsaw: Neriton, 2001), 192–204; Krystyna Kersten, Polacy, Żydzi, Komunizm (Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza, 1992). A number of Jews, including former Polish Army soldiers, have gained entree to government institutions and have occupied top position there, see, for example, Natalia Aleksiun, “The Situation of the Jews in Poland as Seen by the Soviet Security Forces in 1945,” Jews in Eastern Europe 37, no. 3 (1998): 63.

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and participants in the rebellion at the Sobibór or Treblinka death camps.163 Moreover, until 1989, the narrative about the Polish People’s Army in Poland was subject to censorship and was full of stories of veterans who had fought heroically. In those times it was very hard to find information about blatant mistakes committed by commanders during the Battle of Lenino, during the fighting for Warsaw, gambling with soldiers’ lives, the execution of prisoners of war, plunder, rape, and the role of the army in combating the postwar independence underground. Since the 1990s, only soldiers fighting on the Western front, especially those serving in the ranks of General Anders’ Army, have been present in Polish public discourse and in its historiography.164 For some years now, however, Polish historical policy, represented for example by the Institute of National Remembrance, has been pushing not for the commemoration of the soldiers of General Anders’ Army or of the Home Army but of the so-called cursed soldiers.165 And yet most of the soldiers of the Polish Army when liberating the country from German occupation were often unaware of all the political implications. The vast majority fought not for the communists or Stalin but did so in order to liberate their country and to live in a free Poland. The fate of the Jewish war veterans serving on the eastern front was, in a way, pushed out of collective memory twice: on the one hand, as refugees, fugitives, and deportees to the USSR, and on the other as soldiers fighting in the ranks of Berling’s Army. However, the abundant archive material, which also contains valuable ego-documents, fragments of which were cited in this article, clearly indicate the presence of Jews in the Polish Army, document their

163 Beside this, Israel commemorated Jewish soldiers of the Jewish Brigade who fought in the ranks of the British Army during World War Two as well as Jewish fighters in the resistance movement in Europe. Sveta Robman, “Commemorative Activities of the Great War and the Empowerment of Elderly Immigrant Soviet Jewish Veterans in Israel,” Anthropological Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2007): 1035–1064; Robman, “From Exclusion to Inclusion: Jewish WWII Soldiers in the Israel National Narrative,” Israel Studies 14, no. 2 (2009): 51–71. 164 Witold Biegański, Polskie Siły Zbrojne na Zachodzie (Warsaw: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1990); Normans Davies, Szlak Nadziei. Armia Andersa. Marsz przez trzy kontynenty (Warsaw: Rosikon Press, 2015). 165 See August Grabski, “Żydzi a ‘żołnierze wyklęci’,” in Pogromy Żydów na ziemiach polskich w XIX i XX wieku, Vol. 4, Holocaust i Powojnie (1939–1946), ed. August Grabski (Warsaw: Inst. Historii PAN, 2019), 239–255; August Grabski, “The Jews and the ‘Disavowed Soldiers’,” in New Directions in the History of the Jews in the Polish Lands, ed. Antony Polonsky et al. (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2018), 452–471.

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active participation in front line units fighting against the Germans, and testify to their bravery and heroism. An analysis of the individual fates of Jewish soldiers allows us to better understand their motives, dilemmas, and emotions that accompanied them when they lived in Soviet exile, in the Army, and then in postwar Poland. They express understandable bitterness in their subsequent witness accounts that their fates and stories have fallen into oblivion. These feelings are illustrated by a fragment of Arthur Pechner’s testimony: Many Jewish soldiers, noncomissioned officers, and officers of the 1st and the 2nd Divisions of the Polish Army died alongside Poles, heroically fighting against their nation’s greatest enemy. Many of them died under their assumed Polish names. Their heroic deeds and fighting were not in vain—they sacrificed their lives. . . . They saved the honor of the Jewish people on a par with the fearless ghetto insurgents and partisans. They died fighting the enemy—it is our duty to commemorate them.166

166 Testimony by Pechner, 33.

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CHAPTER 5

Repatriation of Polish Catholics and Jews from Distant Parts of the Soviet Union in Polish-Soviet Relations (1944–1947) Wojciech Marciniak

T

he German-Soviet non-aggression pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), signed on August 23, 1939, made it possible for Joseph Stalin to realize his imperialist plans for Poland. On September 17, 1939, the Red Army crossed Poland’s borders. As a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the SovietGerman treaty of September 28, 1939, Poland’s eastern districts were incorporated into the Soviet Union as Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. The Vilnius district became part of the Soviet Union in August of 1940 when Stalin annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.1 From 1939 to 1941, Soviet authorities practiced various forms of oppression on Polish citizens. Many of them were resettled to distant territories—Russia, Siberia, and Kazakhstan—including those who made up the largest portion of its population: Catholics, Jews, Belarusians and Ukrainians. From 1940 to 1941, Stalin’s secret police, the People’s Comissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) deported more than 320,000 Polish citizens from Soviet occupied Poland to the Soviet interior.2 1 Wilno (Vilnius) was ceded to Lithuania in October 1939. 2 Albin Głowacki, Sowieci wobec Polaków na ziemiach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej 1939– 1941 (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1998), 328–333.

Repatriation of Polish Catholics and Jews from Distant Parts of the Soviet Union

The goal of this chapter is to present the Polish diplomatic activities toward the repatriation of its citizens from the Soviet Union. Soviet authorities regarded Polish citizens who found themselves on Soviet territory after September 17, 1939, as Soviet citizens (except for those who were stateless persons).3 After the war, the Polish Embassy in Moscow, established in January 1945, wanted to repatriate them to Poland. Soviet authorities declared that only former citizens of the Second Polish Republic—Poles and Jews—could return to Poland. According to Soviet authorities, Belarusians and Ukrainians, who were deported from Poland between 1940 and 1941, were considered as Soviet citizens. That approach was the result of annexation of Polish territories by the Soviet Union in 1939. It is important to emphasize that for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw the nationality of repatriates wasn’t a prime question. In 1945 more than 150,000 Polish Jews lived in the Soviet Union. They were regarded by the Polish Embassy not as a distinct nationality group but simply Polish citizens who wanted to return to Poland. After the Katyń crime was disposed by Germans in 1943 Stalin broke diplomatic ties with the Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet dictator was preparing his own plan for the future of Poland. He initiated the establishment of the Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich—ZPP)—an organization which gathered Polish politicians and activists who were eager and ready for cooperation with the Kremlin. They were supposed to be the future staff of postwar Poland. In June 1943, a congress which established the ZPP took place in Moscow. The leader of the organization became the prewar Socialist and later Communist Wanda Wasilewska. During the first Soviet occupation of Poland (1939–1941) she cooperated actively with the Soviets, and attracted numerous Polish Communists residing in Lviv.4 The first issue of Wolna Polska (Free Poland), the weekly press organ of the ZPP devoted to Polish readers in the Soviet Union, was released on March 1, 1943. The initial issues contained articles slandering the prewar nationalist policy of Józef Piłsudski, the late de facto leader of the Second Polish Republic, and questioning the right of the Polish government-in-exile to its eastern regions. Written mainly by Wanda Wasilewska, the head of the ZPP, the articles anticipated territorial changes and, consequently, population resettlements. The question of repatriation of Poles appeared in the leading periodical 3 Some of the deported Poles refused to accept Soviet citizenship. 4 Albin Głowacki, Ocalić i repatriować. Opieka nad ludnością polską w głębi terytorium ZSRR (1943–1946) (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1994), 48–50.

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of Polish communists in the Soviet Union and their affiliates as early as the summer of 1943. Yet, the paper’s attention soon shifted to critical news from the warfront and current Polish-Soviet relations.5 The question of repatriation to Poland reappeared in the public discourse of the ZPP in July of 1944 with the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN). The PKWN manifesto (“July manifesto”) was released on July 22, 1944, having been prepared two days before in Moscow. It anticipated the significant territorial changes of Poland according to the following principle: “Polish lands to Poland; Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian lands to Soviet Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus.” The PKWN was a Polish quasi-government, conducting Stalin’s political aims (its vice-president was Wasilewska). One of those aims was to remove Polish citizens of both Polish and Jewish ethnicity from the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, which was supposed to become part of the Soviet Union after the war. After the Polish pro-Soviet administration had been installed, the implementation of Stalin’s territorial and ethnic ideas began. On July 27, 1944, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, chairman of PKWN government, signed an agreement with the USSR concerning the Polish-Soviet border, for which the “Curzon line” was pillar.6 This meant mass resettlements of Poles and Jews from the eastern districts of the Second Polish Republic, later incorrectly called “repatriation.”7 These migration movements took place on the basis of the agreements signed by Edward Osóbka-Morawski on August 1, 1944, in Lublin, Poland, on Stalin’s orders. The agreements concerning bilateral transfers of people signed with Belarus and Ukraine on September 9, 1944, and with Lithuania on September 22, 1944, initiated the process of subsequent waves of migration of Polish citizens (Catholics and Jews) from the East which were officially terminated in late 1947.

5 6 7

Wojciech Marciniak, “Problematyka repatriacyjna na łamach ‘Wolnej Polski’ (1943–1946),” in Polityka i politycy w prasie XX i XXI wieku, ed. Małgorzata Dajnowicz and Adam Miodowski (Białystok: Wydawnictwo HUMANICA Inst. Studiów Kobiecych, 2016), 273–291. Przesiedlenie ludności polskiej z Kresów Wschodnich do Polski 1944–1947: Wybór dokumentów, compilation and edition Stanisław Ciesielski (Warsaw: Instytut Historii PAN, Neriton, 1999), 13–17. In the case of the citizens of the Second Polish Republic who hadn’t moved but fell under the Soviet Union due to the change of the state borders during and after World War Two we do not use the term “repatriation.” They were supposed to be called re-settlers and only postwar propaganda in Poland wrongfully claimed they were repatriants.

Repatriation of Polish Catholics and Jews from Distant Parts of the Soviet Union

The details of preparing these so-called republican agreements are still unknown. The Soviets may simply have handed Osóbka-Morawski’s government the documents without even expecting any attempts of negotiation. The obedience to Stalin on the part of the Lublin government (which moved to Warsaw in February 1945) was obvious to Moscow despite official declarations of respecting the independence of the only Polish government approved by the Kremlin.8 The PKWN administration tried some steps towards regulating the legal situation and, later, the repatriation of Polish citizens from distant parts of the Soviet Union. These were the consequence of the decision on the part of the Soviet government not to apply the November 29, 1939,9 decree of the Presidium of Supreme Soviet imposing Soviet citizenship on the inhabitants of the annexed territories of Poland (Western Belarus and Western Ukraine) and the population of the Wilno district which had been incorporated into the Soviet Union as part of Soviet Lithuania in August 1940. On June 22 and July 14, 1944, the same Soviet organ issued decrees which allowed the soldiers of the Polish armed forces in the Soviet Union who originated from these territories, as well as their families and other people involved in any other ways in fighting against Nazi Germany, to apply for restoring their Polish citizenship.10 Those eligible were supposed to submit their application to the committee on citizenship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. An article in Wolna Polska on July 8, 1944, suggested that the June decision of the Soviet government provided good prospects for the return to their homeland of those who could be verified as Polish citizens (the additional condition was their Polish nationality). Four days later, the general board (Zarząd Główny, ZG) of the ZPP discussed assigning its members to the opcja committee on restoring Polish citizenship which was supposed to start its work soon.11 On July 14, 1944, Wanda Wasilewska brought her ZPP comrades positive news: the Soviets had agreed to include three representatives of the ZPP on the committee on citizenship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Then the belief prevailed in the ZPP that the question of reestablishing citizenship would soon be resolved through Polish-Soviet agreement at the highest government level. 8 Jan Pisuliński, Przesiedlenie ludności ukraińskiej z Polski do USRR w latach 1944–1947 (Rzeszów: Libra, 2017), 80–89. 9 On imposing Soviet citizenship. 10 On Polish Jewish soldiers in the Polish Army in the USSR see the chapter by Katharina Friedla in this volume. 11 Opcja—the procedure of changing one’s citizenship.

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The head of the ZPP, who was also vice-president of the PKWN, played a key role in the relations between the pro-Soviet government in Lublin and Stalin, as he trusted Wasilewska considerably.12 Meanwhile, at the beginning of August 1944, a representation of the PKWN was established in Moscow—the first diplomatic unit of the so-called “Lublin Poland.”13 The head of this unit was initially Wincenty Rzymowski, the PKWN minister of culture and art. Offended by the Soviets’ refusal to approve his accreditation letters—the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) regarded it as unnecessary—he returned to Poland and Stefan Jędrychowski took over his position. In the summer of 1944, Jędrychowski took rather inefficient steps towards establishing the legal status of former Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, which was the necessary condition for their future repatriation. He also sought to find the professionals necessary for rebuilding Poland. Yet, Osóbka-Morawski stopped these initiatives as he thought them too early. Meanwhile, the pressure on the members of the PKWN administration and the army to bring their families back from the Soviet Union was growing. Some of them even traveled to Moscow to discuss the repatriation of their loved ones directly with Soviet authorities. In August and September 1944, some small groups connected with the new government in Poland including Jewish and left-wing activists and professionals arrived in Poland; but the question of general repatriation was still unresolved. However, Jędrychowski paid more and more attention to the necessity of restoring Polish citizenship in his letters to the PKWN. In late September 1944, he addressed the Soviet People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs with a request for accelerating the opcja committee to which the ZPP representatives had been appointed. Jędrychowski noted that if the Soviets had agreed to mass restoration of Polish citizenship to Poles staying in the Soviet Union it would have been necessary to establish a network of Polish consulates there. Jędrychowski also tackled the problem of citizenship during his talk with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. He asked Molotov about the chances of resolving this question through the 12 Archiwum Ruchu Robotniczego, vol. 2, ed. Feliks Tych (Warsaw: Spółdzielnia WydawniczoHandlowa “Książka i Wiedza,” 1975), 138–139, 141, 151–153; Albin Głowacki, “Sytuacja prawna obywateli polskich w ZSRR w latach 1939–1945,” in Położenie ludności polskiej na terytorium ZSRR i wschodnich ziemiach II Rzeczypospolitej w czasie II wojny światowej, ed. Adam Marszałek (Toruń: A. Marszałek, 1990), 44–46; Wolna Polska, no. 25, 1944, 1. 13 Wojciech Materski, Dyplomacja Polski “Lubelskiej”: Lipiec 1944–Marzec 1947 (Warsaw: Rytm, 2007), 5.

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bilateral agreement, broader than any earlier ones. Yet, Soviet authorities did not agree to formalize the legal status of Polish exiles, labor camp workers, or prisoners, let alone their mass repatriation.14 By the end of 1944 only a few people returned to Poland legally. Soldiers, militia members, and ordinary citizens in Poland more and more often demanded the return of their relatives. They tried to reach out to Polish and Soviet authorities in various ways in order to help them. Nevertheless, the Kremlin made the decisions while Jędrychowski’s repeated efforts remained futile. Moreover, the committee on citizenship of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet with ZPP participants didn’t proceed. In the second half of 1944, while the treaties on resettlements from the Eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic were being prepared, the general repatriation of Poles from distant parts of the Soviet Union was impossible.15 On December 31, 1944, the PKWN was reconstituted as the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland with Prime Minister Edward OsóbkaMorawski, who was also the minister of foreign affairs. And, in Moscow, the PKWN agency was replaced by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland with its head Zygmunt Modzelewski. It had abundant information about the prevailing mood among Polish citizens still in the Soviet Union waiting nervously for any news about their repatriation. Many of the Polish Catholics and Jews, especially the exiles of 1940 and 1941, experienced “departure fever.” Those most impatient decided to try risky illegal travel to Poland on their own. Attempting to calm these emotions, Wasilewska and Modzelewski spoke on the radio in 14 Report from Jędrychowski to Osóbka-Morawski, August 15, 1944, Polish Diplomacy Archive, Archiwum Ministerstwa Spraw Zagranicznych (AMSZ), 27-2-15, 1; OsóbkaMorawski to Jędrychowski, August 18, 1944, ibid., 5; Report from Jędrychowski to OsóbkaMorawski, August 30, 1944, ibid., 9-9 verte; Marian Ciechanowski (performing the duties of the second secretary of PKWN agency in USSR) to Presidential Secretariat of PKWN, August 30, 1944, ibid., 27-2-24, 37; Stefan Jędrychowski, Przedstawicielstwo PKWN w Moskwie: Materiały i studia historyczne, vol.1 (Warsaw: Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych, Departament Informatyki i Dokumentacji, 1987), 67–69, 75. 15 Report from Jędrychowski to Osóbka-Morawski, October 7, 1944, AMSZ, 27-2-15, 35; Report from Jędrychowski to Osóbka-Morawski, October 26, 1944, ibid., 37; Michał Wołosiewicz, Wspomnienia z Syberii, Archiwum Komisji Historycznej Oddziału Wojewódzkiego Związku Sybiraków w Łodzi (ZSŁ), 104, 15; Stefan Jędrychowski, Przedstawicielstwo, 77–79; Czesław Neuman, “Moja Odysea,” My, Sybiracy 4 (1993): 135; Jan Prorok, Skazani na zagładę. Wspomnienia z lat 1939–1945 (Wrocław: Polskie Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze, 1992), 229–230, 234–235; Adam Szulgacz, “Wspomnienia Sybiraka-Kościuszkowca,” in Wspomnienia Sybiraków. Zbiór tekstów źródłowych, ed. Jerzy Kobryń (Bystrzyca Kłodzka: Koło Związku Sybiraków w Bystrzycy Kłodzkiej, 2008), 690.

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late March 1945 announcing that there would soon be a well-organized mass repatriation to Poland for all the people who were interested in it.16 On March 6, 1945, the Polish Ambassador in Moscow sent Warsaw a request for approval to start official negotiation. The priority of this agreement was to be the question of citizenship. Attached to the letter was a draft of a treaty. The central proposal was appointment of a “General Joint Polish-Soviet Committee on Repatriation Issues” with very broad powers. Its most important right would be making a final decision on granting Polish citizenship and the right to repatriation to a given person. The committee branches, in practice consisting of the ZPP representatives, were supposed to do this on a local level, virtually the role of Polish consulate agencies. At that time no one talked about establishing genuine Polish consulates.17 It was a very bold concept (included in Modzelewski’s draft), with no chance of success. The Soviet attitude remained unambiguous: the Kremlin considered the legal status of Poles residing in the Soviet Union under their exclusive control.18 In the following weeks, Ambassador Modzelewski took part in talks with the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs concerning repatriation. He sent the Soviets another draft of the agreement containing procedures favorable for Poles waiting in the Soviet Union. The first of the drafts reached Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Vyshinsky’s desk on April 2, 1945. It repeated the range of the powers of the joint committee as well as the principles of regaining Polish citizenship. They also added a regulation saying that after approval of the departure lists those waiting could use the rights formally guaranteed by the Soviet state until they left. The legal protection for future repatriates as the citizens of Republic of Poland, in turn, was to be provided by the Embassy of Poland.19 On May 20, 1945, Soviet authorities received another version of the agreement. In comparison with the April 2nd version, this one introduced some linguistic changes and a considerably expanded protocol. It contained regulations 16 Wolna Polska, no. 11–12, 1945, 1. 17 Mirosław Golon, “Moskwa, Kijów, Mińsk, Leningrad, Wilno… Problem utworzenia i działalności polskich placówek konsularnych w ZSRR w latach 1944–1972,” in Polska polityka wschodnia w XX wieku, ed. Mieczysław Wojciechowski (Włocławek-Toruń: Wyższa Szkoła Humanistyczno-Ekonomiczna, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 2004), 201–237. 18 Modzelewski to Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Republic of Poland (Ministerstwo Spraw Zagranicznych Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej [MSZ]), March 6, 1945, AMSZ, 27-10-155, 1; Draft of repatriation agreement, March 6, 1945, ibid., 2–7. 19 Modzelewski to Wyszynsky, April 2, 1945, AMSZ, 27-10-155, 15; Draft of repatriation agreement, April 2, 1945, ibid., 16–24.

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on Polish students at Soviet universities, on property which anyone returning to Poland could take with them, and particular victims of Soviet oppression (mainly former solders of the Home Army arrested by the Soviets).20 The ZPP was involved in drafting the repatriation agreement. On May 23, 1945, Aleksander Juszkiewicz—general secretary of the ZG ZPP—sent Ambassador Modzelewski some paragraphs for the draft. The most important proposal stated that those who were to be repatriated were Polish citizens until September 17, 1939, regardless of the identification documents they owned. The right to return to Poland would be granted even to those exiles who were unable to prove their citizenship in the Second Polish Republic. It seems that Juszkiewicz predicted complications in the opcja procedure. That the proposal rejected the powers of the joint committee as far as granting Polish citizenship was concerned while it preserved their power to make the final decision on the right of repatriation.21 The last draft of the agreement was submitted to the Soviet foreign ministry on June 20, 1945. Modzelewski asked Vyshinsky in an attached letter to take all necessary measures to accelerate the signing of the agreement by accepting the proposal of the treaty worked out by the Polish Embassy. This draft merely copied the one prepared the month before, including the ZPP suggestion of granting the right to repatriation to those people who did not have any documents identifying their Polish citizenship in September of 1939, and the powers of the joint committee concerning granting Polish citizenship to repatriates as well as making decisions on their right to return to Poland. Moreover, the new version stated that the Poles who were imprisoned by the Soviet authorities but caught on the territory of Poland should be transferred to Polish authorities.22 Between June 17 and 21, 1945, delegations of the State National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN), and the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland visited Moscow. Their mission was to use the Yalta Conference agreements for the appointment of the Provisional Government of National Unity. KRN President Bolesław Bierut and his team raised the problem of the repatriation agreement but received no clear answer. On June 23, 1945, Juszkiewicz urged the KRN president to accelerate “the accomplishment 20 Draft repatriation agreement of May 20, 1945, AMSZ, 27-10-155, 33–38. 21 Juszkiewicz to Modzelewski, May 23, 1945, AMSZ, 27-10-155, 25; Draft repatriation agreement of May 23, 1945, ibid., 26–31. 22 Modzelewski to Vyshinsky, June 20, 1945, AMSZ, 27-10-155, 39; Draft of repatriation agreement, June 20, 1945, ibid., 40–47.

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of negotiations.” Juszkiewicz pointed to the increasing impatience of Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, adding that, in his opinion, the summer of 1945 was the last moment suitable for signing the agreement as the repatriation from Northern and Eastern parts of the Soviet Union would be practically impossible in autumn and winter.23 But the proposals presented by Ambassador Modzelewski were rejected by the Soviet authorities. Instead they proposed their own agreement which did not contain the solutions proposed by Poles favorable for future repatriates. The Soviets forced the Polish government to accept text that made repatriation even more difficult. Dependent on Stalin, the Warsaw government made no protest.24 The agreement was signed on July 6, 1945, by Zygmunt Modzelewski and Andrey Vyshinsky. It remains unclear why the Kremlin delayed the signing. Probably Stalin had in mind Soviet citizens staying in Poland rather than the Polish ones staying in the Soviet Union. The agreement allowed for transferring people both out of and into the Soviet Union. Several Russians lived in and around Szczecin in northwestern Poland who arrived there between the years 1941 and 1945 for various reasons (most often as forced laborers of Nazi Germany). The Red Army handed over the city to Polish authorities on July 5, 1945. Thus, if the repatriation agreement had been signed earlier it would not have concerned the Soviet citizens whom Soviet authorities wanted to force to return to the Soviet Union. According to the agreement, those people would have stayed within the territory of the third state (for example in Poland).25 The agreement on the right to change citizenship and repatriate provided the possibility for citizens of the Second Polish Republic who were deported to 23 Juszkiewicz to Bierut, June 23, 1945, the Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Akt Nowych w Warszawie [AAN]), the set of records: the General Board of Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR (Zarząd Główny Związku Patriotów Polskich w ZSRR, ZG ZPP), 216/30, 62; Albin Głowacki, “Trudna repatriacja obywateli polskich z głębi ZSRR w latach 1945–1946,” in Władze komunistyczne wobec ziem odzyskanych po II wojnie światowej. Conference materials, ed. Stanisław Łach (Słupsk: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane WSP, 1997), 175; Krystyna Kersten, Repatriacja ludności polskiej po II wojnie światowej (studium historyczne) (Warsaw: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1974), 98; Edward Kołodziej, “Polityka Rządu RP w Warszawie wobec repatriacji i reemigracji obywateli polskich z ZSRR w latach 1944–1948,” Komunikaty Mazursko-Warmińskie 203, no. 1 (1994): 327. 24 Draft of repatriation agreement, AAN, ZG ZPP, 216/20, 8–15. 25 Cf. Wojciech Marciniak, “Polskie interpretacje umowy z ZSRR z 6 lipca 1945 roku w kwestii obywatelstwa osób przebywających na terytoriach państw trzecich,” Echa Przeszłości, no. 17 (2016): 211–227.

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the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941to return to their homeland (although in most cases not to where they lived before the war). The right to go to Poland was granted only to people with Polish Catholic and Jewish nationality— Polish citizens until September 17, 1939. Through signing the agreement the authorities of postwar Poland finally rejected the citizens of the Second Polish Republic of Belarusian, Lithuanian, Russian, and Ukrainian origin as well as those Polish Catholics and Jews who, under Soviet pressure, declared any other nationality. It is worth to add that the agreement concerned also people of Russian, Belarusian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationality inhabiting Poland, whom the Kremlin recognized as Soviet citizens. It is significant that there were no nationality limitations for Soviet citizens who wanted to leave Poland for the Soviet Union. The agreement also applied to people that the Presidium of Supreme Soviet decisions of June 22 and July 14, 1944 mentioned. It did not change the existing agreements on resettlement with Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine.26 The agreement provided for voluntary submission of the application for citizenship change (from Soviet to Polish) to the committee on citizenship of the Presidium of Supreme Soviet; it was to be done by November 1, 1945. The successful opcja procedure gave a person the right to participate in repatriation which was supposed to be finished by December 31, 1945. The family of the repatriate could go with him. The people who were imprisoned had the right to start the opcja procedure up to three months after regaining their freedom. Students who wanted to continue their studies in the Soviet Union and who got Soviet authorities’ permission could study at Soviet universities according to the principles applied to foreigners in general. The agreement provided for the establishment of a six-person “Soviet-Polish Joint Committee” headquartered in Moscow.27 The tasks of this intergovernmental committee were outlined very generally as the preparation and supervision of resettlement. Polish and Soviet plenipotentiaries of the committee were to operate locally and at border railway stations. The costs of the travel and care of repatriates were 26 “Porozumienie między Tymczasowym Rządem Jedności Narodowej RP i Rządem Związku Socjalistycznych Republik Radzieckich o prawie zmiany obywatelstwa radzieckiego i ewakuacji osób narodowości polskiej i żydowskiej, zamieszkałych w ZSRR oraz prawie zmiany obywatelstwa polskiego osób narodowości rosyjskiej, ukraińskiej, białoruskiej, rusińskiej i litewskiej, zamieszkałych na terytorium Polski, i ich ewakuacji do ZSRR,” in Dokumenty i materiały do historii stosunków polsko-radzieckich, vol. 8, styczeń 1944–grudzień 1945, ed. Halina Adalińska (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1974), 500–505. 27 Between the years 1945 and 1947, it functioned under the name “Polish-Soviet Joint Committee on Evacuation.”

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to be accounted for between the two governments on the basis of a separate agreement.28 On July 21, 1945, the NKID gave the Embassy of the Republic of Poland the list of the Soviet delegates to the Joint Committee.29 Six days later Edward Osóbka-Morawski approved the membership of the Polish delegation.30 The posts of responsible secretaries were held by Aleksander Pohoryles (for Poland) and Aleksander Moczalov (for the Soviet Union). The Polish group was working in the embassy on Tolstoy Street in Moscow. The Polish delegation was closely connected with the ZPP but lacked experience in diplomacy. Nevertheless, its chairman, Henryk Wolpe, was determined to handle repatriation matters which significantly influenced the realization of the agreement of July 6, 1945.31 It said that the Joint Committee should discuss all the matters during common meetings and that the meetings should be alternately led one by the chairman of the Polish delegation and the chairman of the Soviet delegation. Yet, in its initial period both groups were working separately, and only disputed matters were discussed during the common meetings. Advisors and experts from both sides as well as the ZPP representative also took part in the meetings. Only the responsible secretaries and the chairman were in continual touch. The reports from the initial period of the Joint Committee prepared by the Polish delegation listed the difficulties which prevented progress on repatriation. The Polish side sought to start the opcja procedure as quickly as possible and to appoint local plenipotentiaries. These were discussed during their first meetings. They met four times by the end of August and twice more in September. The Poles presented the draft of instructions, for example, the duties of the local plenipotentiaries. But members of the Soviet delegation strongly opposed appointing local plenipotentiaries. They argued that the procedure for changing the citizenship of Polish citizens was “the internal 28 This agreement was signed as late as July 21, 1952. 29 Alexei Alexandrov (chairman and the vice-head and, then, head of the Fourth Department of European People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs USSR), Ivan A. Prokofiev (vice-chairman) and Ivan W. Antipov (member). 30 Henryk Wolpe (chairman; communist activist, historian of literature; chargé d’affaires Polish Embassy in Moscow from 1945), Aleksander Juszkiewicz (vice-chairman, general secretary of ZG ZPP), Irena Kuczyńska (head of Social Care Department of ZG ZPP). 31 NKID to the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Moscow, August 21, 1945, AMSZ, 2710-155, 99; Polska Delegacja w Polsko-Radzieckiej Komisji Mieszanej Do Spraw Ewakuacji. Wybór dokumentów (1945–1947), ed. Wojciech Marciniak (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Księży Młyn, 2016), 21–23.

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matter of the Soviet Union,” and, hence, it was beyond the power of the Joint Committee.32 During one of the initial meetings, the Soviet delegation presented the requirement for the opcja procedure, proof that a given person had Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939—“evidence of their being Polish.” For instance: an identification card or an officer/soldier’s certificate, a university degree certificate or school report or birth certificate.33 Anyone who did not have such documents practically had no right to repatriation. Yet the Soviets promised that if local authorities had no doubts concerning the origin of the person they could get permission to return to Poland. But Alexei Alexandrov, head of the Soviet delegation, refused to include such regulation in the instruction.34 Large groups of Poles began submitting opcja applications in autumn 1945. Taking into account the terms of the agreement, the process was started too late—in the second half of September and in October in some places. Moreover, there was a lack of publication of detailed opcja procedures, incorrect instructions given by local NKVD and militia organs, delays in delivering the application forms, etc.35 The biggest difficulty was the lack of required documents affecting an estimated 70–80 percent of applicants whose applications were rejected without processing. It is difficult to estimate how high was the percentage of opcja applications delivered by Polish Jews. It is probable that question of Polish or Jewish ethnicity of the people taking part in the procedure was not of great importance for Soviet administration. Alarmed by local ZPP units, the Polish delegation brought this to a Joint Committee meeting together with proposals to resolve it. Wolpe suggested that sufficient evidence for being a Pole should include statements of witnesses, opinions presented by the ZPP, and the results of questioning applicants by local administrative authorities. Yet the Soviet delegation consistently rejected these proposals as “being against the interests of the Soviet Union.”36 Ibid., 22–40; Wolna Polska, no. 37, 1945, 1. See also the chapter by Serafima Velkovich in this volume. Polska Delegacja, 22–40. Report of the ZPP operation in the South Kazakhstan district (October 1–December 31, 1945), AAN; Union of Polish Patriots (Związek Patriotów Polskich) records in the Soviet Union (ZPP), 82, 73; Report of the work of the district board of ZPP in Poltava in November and December 1945, ibid., 1334, 84; Report of opcja action in the Kzylordynsk district, ibid., 1588, 22. 36 Polska Delegacja, 22–23. 32 33 34 35

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Polish Catholic and Jewish exiles had to prove to the same authority who had deprived them of their citizenship and deported them into distant parts of the Soviet Union that they had Polish citizenship. Since the deadline for applications was quickly approaching, success became less and less possible. In many regions of the Soviet Union, especially the North and East, winter started as early as October or November. Most of the exiles were not prepared with stocks of food and warm clothes because they believed they would return to their homeland before winter. As the process came to a standstill because of the rigid attitude of the Soviets, Wolpe suggested to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they try to solve the impasse at the intergovernmental level.37 Meanwhile the Polish Ambassador to the Soviet Union was changed. On August 20, 1945, Bolesław Bierut, President of the Polish State National Council, appointed zoologist and socialist activist Henryk Raabe who quickly traveled to the Soviet Union. He was not a professional diplomat and, thus, had no experience in talking to politicians; yet he showed great determination in facilitating repatriation not only of wartime exiles but also of Polish citizens who arrived in the Soviet Union after the end of the war. Raabe started with a series of meetings with Soviet diplomats in September 1945. The first secretary of the Polish Embassy, Władysław Matwin, accompanied him. On September 6, 1945, Raabe met Molotov in connection with submitting the accreditation letters, and brought up how little progress had been made. Molotov agreed but blamed “executive factors” for the delay, probably meaning local low-level clerks and officers. The problem was the Soviet interpretation of the agreement principles as well as the directives connected to it sent to local institutions.38 Raabe’s talk to Vyshinsky on September 14, 1945, failed. Accompanied by Matwin, the Ambassador raised the question of people who had no sufficient evidence of their Polish citizenship before the Soviet invasion; estimated at more than 100,000. Vyshinsky rejected the alternative of witness testimonies but admitted the possibility of committees deciding on applicants’ origin on the basis of talk with the administration and ZPP representative. Raabe reminded Vyshinsky of the opcja committee which was to start based on the June 22, 1944 Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decree. But Vyshinsky gave evasive answers, expressing no clear opinion on the matters in question.39 37 Ibid. 38 Report from Raabe to Modzelewski concerning talks with Molotov, Vyshinsky, and Pawlov, September 30, 1945, AMSZ, 6-29-447, 1–3. 39 Ibid., 4–6.

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Raabe’s third meeting was with Alexei Pawlov, the head of the Fourth European Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, on September 19, 1945. Pawlov forcefully rejected the Ambassador’s proposal of resolving the problem of people without necessary documents by taking into account questioning by Soviet agencies such as the militia in the presence of ZPP representatives. Pawlov said that this would provide the opportunity for abuses, “for propaganda and anti-Soviet intrigues.” “The question of people without Polish documents is now the central repatriation problem. If we here are unable to force the Soviets to accept our attitude towards the problem, government intervention will be necessary very soon,” Raabe wrote to Modzelewski, then the sub-secretary in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.40 Raabe knew that a successful opcja procedure was in jeopardy, made more complicated because the Soviets rejected Polish proposals without providing their own solutions instead. A solution was proving applicants’ Polish citizenship through questioning by the Soviet administration with ZPP participation, and he asked Warsaw for instructions. He was also afraid of organizing departures in winter, believing train travel from northern and eastern centers would be impossible due to bad weather. Raabe’s work was even more difficult because it was being carefully watched by Matwin who presented it to the Warsaw government in a negative light. His attempts to organize the return of Catholics and Jews to Poland displeased the Kremlin who often ignored the Embassy’s attempts to communicate with them, increasingly isolating him.41 Despite these challenges, Raabe persisted in trying to change the Soviet attitude towards repatriation. The Polish Embassy sent numerous letters to the Soviet Foreign Ministry suggesting ways of resolving the problems, for example, accepting documents with less “official value” such as various certificates, medical notes, and even photos. Still another obstacle was the Soviet delegation’s refusal to support appointment of plenipotentiaries to the Joint Committee.42 In mid-October 1945, Warsaw instructed the head of the Foreign Ministry, Wincenty Rzymowski, to insist on the participation of ZPP representatives in opcja procedures and an extension of the deadline for completion to May 31,

40 Ibid., 6–8. 41 Report from Raabe to Modzelewski, September 30, 1945, AMSZ, 6-30-452, 1–2. 42 Note from Olechnowicz concerning the talks which took place in Moscow, AMSZ, 22-10246, 5; Pamiatnaja zapiska, September 14, 1945, concerning repatriation problems, ibid., 27-10-155, 102–104.

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1946. The Polish Minister believed that people without any “evidence of being Polish” could get their documents from Poland.43 Ambassador Raabe followed the instructions. Jakub Berman, a member of the Politburo of Polish Workers Party who visited Moscow in October 1945, supported Raabe in his talks with the Soviets. Yet, Soviet authorities, apart from their declarations of goodwill, made no binding decisions.44 The uncertainty of repatriation frustrated the exiles; many thought that it would never take place. Some looked for various ways of leaving on their own to get into the eastern parts of the former Second Polish Republic and from there into Poland’s new borders. They got the chance if they got permission to resettle to another Soviet district (in this case, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine) on the basis of written invitations (vyzovs) from their relatives living there. The right to resettle was granted only to close relatives of the people who sent the invitations. Nonrelatives with invitations could be put on the departure lists by bribing Soviet clerks and officers. Some without invitations decided to travel by hiding on trains, for example, in coal carriages. In addition to the inherent danger, they could be punished if caught. November 1, 1945 was the deadline for Polish Catholic and Jewish exiles to submit application forms to change their citizenship. Because of the demands imposed by the Soviets, most applications were rejected. Then Vasily Chernyshyov, vice-head of the NKVD, addressed a letter to his superior, Lavrentiy Beria, saying that the opcja procedure was impossible under current circumstances. According to the estimates of the Soviet Ministry of Home Affairs, only 13,673 applications were registered out of which just 791 were directed to the committee of the Presidium of Supreme Soviet. This was about 8 percent of the expected number of applications. Czernyszow proposed extending the deadline for applying to July 1, 1946, but doubted that would solve the problem given Soviet demands.45 On November 9, 1945, Vyshinsky gave Beria the draft of the decision of the All-Union Communist Party on “the way of resettling to Poland the former Polish citizens of Catholic and Jewish nationality and ending their Soviet citizenship.” It was approved a day later by the authorities of the Bolshevik party 43 Rzymowski to Raabe, October 16, 1945, AMSZ, 6-30-452, 6. 44 Anna Sobór-Świderska, Jakub Berman. Biografia komunisty (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2009), 146–147; Historia dyplomacji Polskiej, vol. 6, 1944/1945–1989, ed. Wojciech Materski and Waldemar Michowicz (Warsaw: Polski Instytut Spraw Międzynarodowych, 2010), 134–136. 45 Przesiedlenie ludności polskiej, 306–308.

Repatriation of Polish Catholics and Jews from Distant Parts of the Soviet Union

and by the Soviet government, and extended the opcja deadline to January 1, 1946, and repatriation to June 15, 1946. The new instruction was to be sent to local organs of the militia as well as to leaders of army units. It ordered admitting the applications from everyone of Polish Catholic and Jewish nationality who said they had Polish citizenship until September 17, 1939, even if they had no appropriate documents as evidence. Moreover, in places where “former Polish citizens” were gathered, the Soviets, in connection with the governments of united and autonomous republics, Home Councils of Working Delegates, and District Executive Committees, were going to appoint the committee for gathering, processing, and admitting the exiles’ applications for the change of their citizenship and for a permanent resettlement to Poland. They were supposed to inform applicants about the method of repatriation as well as how to coordinate it locally. Soon the general committee was established at governmental level. Its head was Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Socialist Soviet Republic.46 The November 10, 1945, resolution of the Soviet government also entitled the Soviet Ministry of Finance to allocate money for the costs of food, travel, and medical care for the repatriates. The Ministry of Railway was supposed to prepare the schedule for their transportation by January 15, 1946.47 The Soviet authorities ultimately rejected the concept of appointing plenipotentiaries to the Joint Committee.48 The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decided on November 10, 1945 that the repatriates would regain Polish citizenship at the moment they left the Soviet Union rather than through the opcja process. The consequence of the Soviet authorities’ decision to change repatriation terms and simplify the opcja procedure was an additional protocol to the agreement of July 6, 1945. The protocol was signed by Raabe and Vyshinsky on November 20, 1945, but dated to November 11. On the basis of this protocol Polish exiles still had more than a month and a half to submit their applications for restoring their citizenship and returning to their homeland. This also gave the people organizing the repatriation process more time to arrange

46 The members of the committee were: Vasily Chernyshyov (NKVD), Pyotr Fedotov (NKGB), Alexander Lyubimov (People’s Commissariat of Trade), Evgeni Arutyunov (People’s Commissariat of Railway), and Alexei Alexandrov. 47 Ibid., 309–311; Nikolai F. Bugaj, “Specjalna teczka Stalina: deportacje i reemigracja Polaków,” Zeszyty Historyczne, no. 107 (1994): 129–130. 48 Nikolai F. Bugaj, “Specjalna teczka Stalina,” 122–123.

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resettlement which was to be finished by June 15, 1946.49 Soon, local organs of Soviet administration received the order to accept the applications of all the people entitled to repatriation. If appropriate documents confirming an applicant’s Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939, were missing, the instruction permitted to consider witnesses’ testimonies or the materials of the NKVD from the process of preparing passports in 1943. Moreover, many kinds of documents were to be taken into account in addition to those produced by institutions of the Second Polish Republic. The November decision by Soviet authorities provided for the appointment at national, republic, and district level of “Committees on the Resettlement to Poland from the Soviet Union of Former Citizens of Polish Catholic and Jewish Nationality.” These bodies consisted of the representatives of local executive authorities, militia, prosecutors, the NKVD, the NKGB, and state administration officers. The tasks of the committees included gathering, registering, and processing opcja applications, as well as approving the lists of people qualified for repatriation and, finally, monitoring the resettlement process.50 On November 14 and 20, 1945, Raabe and Vyshinsky discussed how to further realization of the repatriation agreement. Vyshinsky notified Polish diplomats on the changes in opcja regulations, on appointing local repatriation committees, and on the process of organizing the transports to which he invited the Polish Embassy representatives. Moreover, he said, “The Soviet government, after gathering comprehensive information locally, thinks that the executive instructions sent to local authorities in connection with the repatriation agreement are insufficient.” Vyshinsky promised that the repatriation process would be accomplished promptly and that in the case of any difficulties Soviet authorities were ready to cooperate with the Polish Embassy in overcoming them. Yet, he rejected the idea of the participation of ZPP representatives in the work of Soviet repatriation committees.51

49 Dokumenty i materiały, 639. 50 Nikolai F. Bugaj, “Specjalna teczka Stalina,” 127–128; Albin Głowacki, “Władze kirgiskie a repatriacja obywateli polskich (1945–1946),” My, Sybiracy, no. 17 (2006): 25; Obywatele polscy w Kirgizji. Wybór dokumentów (1941–1946), ed. Albin Głowacki (Warsaw: Naczelna Dyrekcja Archiwów Państwowych, Państwowa Służba Archiwalna Republiki Kirgiskiej przy Rządzie Republiki Kirgiskiej, 2010), 272–273; Z dziejów Polaków w Kazachstanie (1936–1956): Zbiór dokumentów z Archiwum Prezydenta Republiki Kazachstanu, ed. Elena Mihajlovna Gribanova et al. (Warsaw: Oficyna Olszynka, 2006), 197–200. 51 Report from Matwin to Modzelewski on the talk with Vyshinsky of November 14, 1945, AMSZ, 6-29-447, 9–11; Report from Raabe to Modzelewski on the talk with Vyshinsky

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On November 21, 1945, Raabe talked to Molotov again. The meeting was initiated by the Ambassador whom Modzelewski ordered to make Soviet authorities agree to the departure of at least two to three transports of repatriates from distant parts of the Soviet Union (the families of the soldiers from Eastern Ukraine) before the end of the year. The head of Soviet diplomacy agreed, and acknowledged it in writing on a formal note given to him by Raabe.52 The Polish Ambassador also insisted on the repatriation of Poles deported “preventively” to distant parts of the Soviet Union in 1944 and 1945, and those imprisoned in labor camps. Molotov cynically asked Raabe in reply: “Do you want all of them to be returned?” Raabe was dissatisfied with both the talk itself and with its result as he got nothing more than what Stalin had already agreed to.53 In February 1946, the first repatriation transports departed from distant parts of the Soviet Union. By July, more than 250,000 wartime exiles had returned to Poland (including about 65 percent Jews). Most of them were settled in areas attached to Poland after war. Soviet authorities declared the July 6, 1945 agreement fulfilled. Yet many exiles had no chance to return to Poland: those whose opcja applications had been rejected, those unaware of the agreement, those demobilized from the Red Army (the Soviet Army from March 1946 onward), people released from labor camps and prisons, as well as Polish orphans in Soviet orphanages. The Polish Embassy identified numerous groups of Polish citizens who were not included in repatriation (Polish Catholics and Jews exiled in 1940–1941). In July 1946, Polish Embassy officers began updating the number and categories of Polish citizens still in the Soviet Union subject to repatriation agreement signed in July1945. Soviet authorities, however, were not going to continue the repatriation discussion. In midJuly, Soviet resettlement committees were dissolved, and the Joint Committee ceased to meet. The Polish delegation headed by Henryk Wolpe and the Polish Embassy kept sending letters with inventories of people waiting for repatriation to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But the Soviet delegation consistently refused to do anything while accusing the Polish delegation of ill will and of November 20, 1945, ibid., 19–20; Report from Raabe to Modzelewski on the talk with Vyshinsky of November 14, 1945, ibid., 6-30-452, 9–10. 52 A handwritten note on the margin of the report of this discussion indicates that the transports from the eastern districts of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine included four to five thousand people. 53 Report of the meeting with Molotov from Raabe to Modzelewski, November 21, 1945, AMSZ, 6-29-447, 16–18; Pamiatnaja zapiska, November 21, 1945, ibid., 6-30-461, 76.

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negligence during the repatriation of Soviet citizens. The ministry also strongly objected to local committees continuing to collect repatriation applications.54 Another blow for the Polish delegation was the return of Ambassador Raabe to Poland in September 1946. The Warsaw government appointed no other head of the Embassy, but the institution underwent the controlling procedure on the initiative of Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The months of discrediting Raabe by Matwin brought very negative consequences, especially for Poles in USSR. On October 11, 1946, the Joint Committee met again. During the meeting the Polish delegation presented numerous arguments for resuming repatriation. The Soviets agreed but nothing happened in the following weeks and the Polish Embassy continued to gather documentation of those eligible including correspondence. There were some 125,000 records filling seventy-five large boxes. A significant part of the file was a list of surnames of Polish Catholic and Jews who returned to Poland during the mass repatriation action. By January 1, 1947, the Polish Embassy had sent twenty-five letters to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs with lists of people still in the Soviet Union entitled to repatriation including prisoners, deported inhabitants of Upper Silesia, Poles in Latvia and the Kaunas region, and Polish orphans. Henryk Wolpe repeatedly tried to convince the Soviets to approve, but became more and more isolated without sufficient support from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the Warsaw government was under pressure from the Soviet government to abandon any further repatriation efforts.55 That changed with the visit to Moscow in March 1947 of Polish Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz when he and Andrey Vyshinsky signed an agreement prolonging operation of the Joint Committee until August 1, 1947, and the resumption of acceptance of opcja applications by the militia and the departments of visas and registering foreigners. The meeting of the Joint Committee on April 25, 1947, began the last stage of the operation of this body. The Soviets formally agreed to the repatriation of people subject to the agreement of July 6, 1945, but excluded anyone arrested and deported to distant parts of the Soviet Union after 1945. Still, there were numerous difficulties at the central and local levels. The records of Joint Committee meetings in the spring of 1947 are full

54 Polska Delegacja, 77–82. 55 Ibid., 83–98.

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of arguments and misunderstandings between the delegations. Wolpe sought to continue repatriation; Alexandrov opposed it.56 In April 1947, Marian Naszkowski was appointed the new Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union, apparently wanting to close the matter. Wolpe continued his efforts for a few weeks but was dismissed from his post as chairman of the Polish delegation to the committee at the beginning of June of 1947 and a few days later his Polish Embassy counselor position, and recalled to Poland. He was replaced by Aleksander Juszkiewicz. Irena Kuczyńska no longer dealt with repatriation matters having been dismissed from her work in the Polish Embassy at the beginning of the year; her diplomatic career ending on May 31. At the beginning of July, the Soviet delegation informed Juszkiewicz that opcja and repatriation applications were no longer being accepted because “it should be finished.”57 The Polish-Soviet Joint Committee on Evacuation finished its work in August. However, in September the Polish Delegation managed to issue another 148 antedated evacuation certificates. Between the end of the mass repatriation action in the summer of 1946 and the end of the Joint Committee’s work only between 6,000 and 8,000 Poles managed to leave the Soviet Union while according to an estimate by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs almost 40,000 were still waiting for repatriation. This estimate was probably too low.58 Between 1944 and 1947, Poland underwent significant political, social, economic, demographic, and territorial changes which were not based on decisions made by Poles but rather the strength of the Red Army and Stalin’s influence on shaping the political reality in central and eastern Europe. The pro-Soviet government imposed on Poland created its own diplomacy apparatus which was neither professional nor independent. Nevertheless, it was this apparatus which made the attempts to get hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens back to Poland—Catholics and Jews who still hoped to see their homeland after the years of exile and wandering through the Soviet Union. The postwar Polish state had limited possibilities to positively affect the lives of its citizens being oppressed by her Soviet ally. But among the Polish representatives subordinated to Moscow were people whose determination to also represent Polish citizens in the East cannot be denied. Henryk Raabe and Henryk Wolpe deserve a balanced assessment of their work and place in the history of Polish-Soviet relations.

56 Ibid., 99–126. 57 Ibid., 16–18, 127. 58 Note by Janusz Zambrowicz, September 10, 1947, AMSZ, 6-34-535, 158.

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CHAPTER 6

Polish Citizenship as a Way to Freedom: How Soviet Jews Escaped the USSR Using Polish Documents Serafima Velkovich

A

t the end of World War II, approximately 350,000 Polish Jews were still alive. Among the survivors there were about 230,000 who were deported or evacuated to the Soviet Union (the numbers vary slightly depending on the different researchers).1 After six years of ordeals, beginning at the end of 1945, those who survived and held Polish citizenship could be repatriated back to Poland, according to a Polish-Soviet agreement, signed July 6, 1945. The agreement, which laid down the rules for repatriation, had a bearing on ethnic Poles and Jews, including the majority of the so-called special settlers or deportees who lived under police control.2 Most Polish citizens rushed back to Poland, but Polish Jews mostly did not stay in there. They moved illegally to Displaced 1 Robert D. Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska, eds., Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Semen Shveybish, “Evakuatziya I sovetskie yevrei v gody Katastrofy,” Vestnik Evreyskogo Universiteta 9 (1995): 36–55; Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (December 2010): 373–399; Mark Edele et al., eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 1–28; Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 95–131; Yosef Litvak, “Polish Jewish Refugees Repatriated from the Soviet Union at the End of the Second World War and Afterwards,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46. Studies in Russia and East Europe, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 227–239. 2 Gennady Estraikh, “Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s,” Jewish History 31 (2018): 291–317. See also the chapter by Wojciech Marciniak in this volume.

Polish Citizenship as a Way to Freedom

Persons (DP) camps in the American and British zones of occupation in Germany, Austria, and Italy, and waited for the possibility to emmigrate.3 It was the largest illegal movement of that time, called Brichah in Hebrew (literally flight or escape).4 One of the main actors in this escape process was the Brichah organization, which started its activity in 1944 just after liberation in Eastern Europe. It helped at least 250,000 Eastern European Jews from different countries to escape Europe. It is very difficult to give an exact number: Jews in the DP camps were unwilling to be accurately counted, and Brichah was an illegal organization and its statistics were therefore incomplete and often based on vague estimates. It should be mentioned that illegal Soviet border crossing started at the end of 1944, immediately after liberation.5 Not all the repatriates were former Polish citizens. Some left the Soviet Union as the repatriates’ spouses, their children, or the spouses’ parents. In addition, there were hundreds of former Soviet citizens who did not have the official right to repatriate but used the opportunity to escape the Soviet regime and flee to the West.6 On Soviet territory, Brichah mainly helped Jews from the Baltic countries (Lithuania and Latvia), the western part of the Ukraine (Lwów/Lviv region) and from the former Romanian territories (Bessarabia and Bukovina), as well as Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union, who, using this 3 By June 1946 (after the large repatriation wave from the USSR) there were 220,000 Polish Jews registered by the Central Jewish Committee in Poland. Until the end of 1947, approximately 150,000 left Poland. See, Albert Stankowski, “How Many Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust,” in Jewish Presence in Absence. The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944– 2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 205–217; Anna M. Rosner, Obraz społeczności ocalałych w Centralnej Kartotece Wydziału Ewidencji i Statystyki CKŻP (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2018). 4 Yehuda Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah (New York: Random House, 1970). 5 Bauer, Flight and Rescue, 319–320. 6 The exact number is unknown. According to the estimate there were about 450 Jews from Latvia and Lithuania. See Batia Valdman, “Nelegalnaya aliya utselevshikh v Kholokoste yevreyev v Stranu Izrail,” in Materialy konferentziy I seminarov, ed. Rita Bogdanova et al. (Riga: Shamir, 2015). Moshe Levertov mentioned “two train cars for the largest illegal group of Chabad members,” but there were many other groups. Levertov, The Man Who Mocked The KGB, ed. Daniel Goldberg (Brooklyn: M. Levertov, 2002), accessed June 30, 2020, https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/312439/jewish/Daring-Escape. htm. According to Irina Osipova, “The committee assisting the departure of religious Jews from the Soviet Union lasted only about six months, but even during this short time its members and numerous assistants were able to save hundreds of Chasidic families for traditional religious life.” Osipova, Khasidy: spasaya narod svoy (Moscow: Formika-S, 2002), 136–142.

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opportunity, tried to emigrate to Eretz Israel.7 The majority of them were Zionists and religious orthodox Jews (especially from the Chabad movement). Orthodox Jews, members of Chabad, showed remarkable resourcefulness in finding a way to leave the country that suppressed their way of life.8 They used phony marriages, falsified documents, and sent their children away with other families.9 One of the big centers of Brichah activity was in Łódź, Poland, while in the Soviet Union in Wilno (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania), Riga (Latvia), and Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine). On October 2, 1946, the Commander of the Counter Intelligence Directorate of the Northern Group of NKVD reported: From the data we have, it is known that the chairman of the Lwow religious Jewish community is associated with the Zionist underground and that he receives money and instructions from the leaders of Zionist organizations in Poland and instructions on sending Soviet Jewish citizens from the USSR to Poland.10

The aim of this chapter is to examine the process of escaping Soviet territory by two groups of Jews—Chabad movement members and Zionists— using the Polish-Soviet agreement of repatriation and taking advantage of the general organizational chaos. The sources of this research are archival material on NKVD trials kept in various archives, and memoirs of the people involved.

The Chabad Movement Rabbi Moshe Levertov, who managed to escape with his brother, leaving their parents and sister behind in the Soviet Union, wrote a book of memoirs. Levertov mentioned the operation organized by the Chabad movement in Lviv.11 It was the last Soviet city close to the border from where the trains carrying Polish refugees left for Poland. A committee of Chabad activists was established to facilitate the great escape. They were involved in forging hundreds of Polish passports and raising funds for the required bribes. These activ7 Biblical Land of Israel (Hebrew: ‫)ארץ ישראל‬. 8 Estraikh, “Escape through Poland.” 9 Osipova, Khasidy: spasaya narod svoy, 136–142. 10 Investigation case of Dobruskin, State Archives of Russian Federation, GARF, F. 10035. Op. 1. D. P-21161, 10035-1-211616. 11 Levertov, The Man Who Mocked The KGB.

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ities could have cost the lives of everyone involved, and a fierce debate ensued over whether the Torah permits taking such a grave risk. The first Chassidim,12 leaving their jobs and selling all their property, began arriving in Lviv from different cities of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1946. During the last days of November, the rabbis organized the illegal departure of Chassidim from the Soviet Union. There was one criterion—the first to be transported to Poland would be yeshiva students and families with children.13 There were wealthy people among them, but there were also poor people who received money for travel expenses from a mutual assistance fund raised by Chassidic communities. By the fall, the number of Chassidic families who ended up in Lwów was already in the hundreds.14 Sometimes it was difficult to find Polish documents even for native-born Poles, after years of wandering. In such circumstances, Polish representatives of the mixed repatriation commission signed an agreement with the Soviets to recognize the right to repatriation based on “reasonable documentation,” such as old enlistment certificates in the Polish Army, school certificates, wedding certificates, insurance documents, drivers’ licenses, and so on.15 In his memoirs, Rabbi Aharon Eliahu Gershuni describes the process of escaping the Soviet Union.16 During the winter of 1945 to 1946, a registration of the repatriates took place. Some Soviet Jews saw it as an opportunity to be included in the repatriation transports. As revealed by Gershuni, there were several legal possibilties: a) To marry a real Polish repatriate. It was legal, but it did not suit everyone. b) To get married fictively. It required a certain correspondence between two persons, and it was dangerous. There were cases when real Polish couples divorced with a permission of a rabbi in order to help Soviet Jews by fictitious marriage. c) To buy the documents of Polish citizens who died during the war. Many deaths were not recorded because of the chaos of war. Some relatives kept such documents and were ready to sell them. 12 In this case another name for Chabad. 13 Osipova, Khasidy: spasaya narod svoy, 136–142. 14 Osipova. 15 Litvak, “Polish-Jewish Refugees,” 227–239. See also the chapter by Wojciech Marciniak in this volume. 16 Gershuni, Kiddush HaShem: Preshiot mesirot nefesh etzel yehudim be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot ( Jerusalem: Mashavim Publications, 1981), 110–111.

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Gershuni wrote: After some time, I managed to buy documents. And it was with difficulties. Our family then consisted of four people: me, my wife, and two children. The oldest was seven years old, and the youngest was one year and nine months old. In the bought ID document, only three were recorded: husband, wife, and little child. My age as well as the age of the wife and youngest son approximately corresponded to the data entered in the document. But what about the older son? A fake handwriting specialist added another line. However, it turned out that the name of the older son was inscribed after the name of his younger brother. Now the document looked outright fake. Why was the older child recorded after the younger? An NKVD officer, checking passports at the border, might ask this question and a rather unsatisfactory answer will entail the known: twenty or twenty-five years in prison and exile, and maybe even worse . . . . We understood the danger of such an undertaking, but there was no other way out.17

Another difficulty arose for the refugees. These people did not speak Polish. Only a few could pretend to be deaf, and even then only within a large group could they get away with this. The most unfortunate fell into the hands of NKVD. Gershuni wrote: At dawn we arrived in Krakow. A train controller appeared to check if all repatriates had free travel permissions. He speaks to me, but I can’t answer him because I don’t speak Polish. “You are not a Pole,” he tells me (I understood these words), “pay for the ticket.” I do not mind, pay and . . . thereby expose myself. The controller could betray me to the authorities, but he did not do it. Polish passengers began to argue (my wife understood a little Polish and grasped the meaning): some claimed that I was Russian, others that I was a rabbi, and the rabbis, they say, do not speak Polish . . . .18

17 Gershuni, Kiddush HaShem, 16–17. 18 Gershuni, 20.

Polish Citizenship as a Way to Freedom

Zionists One of the Brichah leaders in the Soviet Union was Samuel (Mulka) Joffe, born in Riga. He was a member of Hashomer Hatzair Netzach19 before the war. He managed to escape from the Soviet Union in 1945, and arrived in Italy where he encountered members of the Jewish Brigade. In a letter to a friend in Israel, written in Milan, September 28, 1945, he wrote: . . . I can’t be satisfied to just have saved myself while leaving behind hundreds of helpless people . . . . In our city nearly everyone was exterminated . . . . And all that has happened to us can’t be written down. . . . And so I can’t be quiet, I can’t rest until I have done everything I can to save the remnant, even if that puts me back in the den of the evil beast, with no certainty that I will get out again.20

In an October 2, 1945 letter to Lyuba Golani, who had emigrated to Palestine, he wrote: Among the Jewish survivors who have gathered once again in Latvia and others who are spread around Russia there is a whole group of longtime Zionists who have been sentenced to prison, expulsion or death21 for their attempts to cross the border, but despite these setbacks most of them are not discouraged and are still looking for a chance to get out.22

In December 1945, Pavel Fishman, born in Białystok, arrived in Wilno. Very few people knew his real identity. People thought he was an emissary from Eretz Israel. However, this was Joffe. Risking his own life, he returned to the Soviet Union using a falsified Polish passport. This was the beginning of Brichah’s activity in the Soviet Union.23 Joffe and Yakov Yankelovich (Yanai)

19 Zionist Jewish youth movement. 20 Yacov Yanai, Mulka: Escape from the USSR, 1945–1946 (Washington, DC: Vita Hollander, 2013), 86. 21 Contrary to Joffe’s belief, in general, the majority of these people were not sentenced to death but sent to labor camps. 22 Yanai, Mulka, 87. 23 Shlomo Kless, Be-derekh lo Slula: Toldot ha-Brichah, 1944–1948 (Givat Havivah: Moreshet, 1994), 151–171.

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organized the so-called “Polish way.”24 Jews who wished to leave the Soviet Union received false certificates of former Polish citizenship from Soviet officials for a bribe. Most participants were members of Zionist movements and their family members. They managed to help about 450 Jews from Lithuania and Latvia.25 Though the exact number is unknown, there were many others also escaped via Lwów. The activists were aware of the dangers. Convinced of the importance of their actions, they were ready to endanger themselves. This action was unique for the members of Zionist youth movements because of their strong desire to travel to Eretz Israel.26 The cooperation between the two groups—Zionists and Chabad movement members—was minimal. Their goals were different. The Zionists’ dream was to go to Eretz Israel, while religious Jews wanted to live a religious life openly inside the community: to keep Sabbath and holidays, eat kosher food, provide their children with a Jewish education, and so on. All of this was impossible under Soviet rule. The sources of financial support also were different. Zionist movement participants received money via the Brichah organization from abroad.27 Moreover, as expressed by Rabbi Moshe Levertov after arrests of Zionist leaders, Chabad Chassidim had learned not to rely on anyone else, and preferred to organize their own operation, cooperating with the Brichah only when necessary. The special court, established by the Chabad movement, ruled that all were obligated to give up any money and jewelry they had to a communal fund for food, accommodation, tickets, passports, and bribes. These were loans to be repaid in the future, after crossing the border to freedom. Everyone complied without hesitation, and these funds helped many families survive.28 Cash transactions, that is, receiving money from the mutual cash desk, issuing them for settlements for documents obtained, compiling statements on accounting for the money received in the general cash desk, and spending on the needs of the committee—all this was done by the rabbis.29

24 Kratkaya yevreyskaya entsiklopediya. Dopolnenie III ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 2003), 192–194. 25 Valdman, “Nelegalnaya aliya.” 26 Kless, Be-derekh lo Slula, 151–171. 27 The Investigation Case of Feldman, Khmelnitzkaya, and Kharash, LVA F1986/2532, Volume 1. 28 Levertov, The Man Who Mocked The KGB. 29 Osipova, Khasidy: spasaya narod svoy, 136–142.

Polish Citizenship as a Way to Freedom

Trials In 1946, several groups of Brichah activists were detained at the Soviet-Polish and Soviet-Romanian borders. Joffe and Yankelovich were captured by the NKVD on September 27, 1946, in Baranavichy, Belarus. In addition to them, several other activists were on trial. During one of many interrogations, Joffe told the NKVD officer: I had no personal connection with Ilya Zaidin regarding the criminal work. He was in contact with Yankelovich Yakov, who, together with me, was engaged in the illegal transfer of the Zionists to Poland for their further movement to Palestine. I carried out this work on the instructions of the head of the illegal Zionist organization Brichah, who was in Lodz at the time of my arrest.30

After several months the investigation was transferred to Moscow. On April 17, 1947 Joffe testified: - Fishman was a fictitious last name. I took it in order to leave for Poland. The goal was to leave the Soviet Union. - The prosecutor: Does it mean you committed treason against the motherland? - Joffe: Yes.31

Yankelovich also had false documents with the name Fishman. During the investigation he was asked: - What is the goal of having false documents on Fishman name? Yankelovich answered: - I wanted to leave illegally for Poland. - With whom were you going to leave together? - With my friend. We were arrested together in Baranavichy. He also had a false document with a name Pavel Fishman.32 30 The Investigation Case of Samuel Joffe (Pavel Fishman), Yakov Yankelovich and Other Members of Brichah Movement, The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP), RU/2678.01-07. 31 The Investigation Case of Samuel Joffe, Volume 1. 32 The Investigation Case of Samuel Joffe, Volume 3.

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The questioning lasted several exhausting hours. Under Article 58 of the criminal code, both Joffe and Yankelovich received twenty-five years of imprisonment in the GULAG.33 According to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Penal Code, the well-known Article 58 was treason against the motherland.34 Other members of the organization including Zaydin Ilia, Gurevich Greinom, and Krol Ilia were sent to the GULAG for seven to eight years. Ruth Jakobson, Joffe’s sister, appealed several times for his pardon based on the fact he was seriously ill. The requests were denied and he died in prison in 1955.35 Yankelovich was released in 1957, and emigrated to Israel in 1961. He became a leader of the Nativ36 organization.37 After these arrests, the organized activities in the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Not only were the leaders arrested, but the refugees who did not manage to escape were arrested by NKVD, sentenced, and sent to a GULAG for ten years of imprisonment. Khmelnitzkaya Sheyna was deeply investigated during the winter and spring of 1946–1947. She was born in Wilno, and was a member of the Zionist organization BritTrumpeldor until 1940. During the war she was in Sverdlovsk, got married just before the war, and gave birth during the period of evacuation. Her husband was killed during his military service. At the time of her arrest she was a student at the medical faculty of the Latvian State University, living in Riga with the child. The court accused her of “being hostile to the Soviet regime and having close contacts with other members of the organization; she tried to betray the motherland and flee to Poland.”38 There are two volumes of Khmelnitzkaya’s case. They were revised in 1954, and the second volume shows this sentence amended as “Khmelnitzkaya Sheyna, being dissatisfied with living conditions

33 GULAG is an acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. 34 Vladimir Kozlov et al., eds., 58.10. Nadzornye proizvodstva prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagande: annotirovannyi katalog (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond “Demokratiia,” 1999). 35 The Investigation Case of Samuel Joffe, Volume 7. 36 “The ‘Nativ’ organization was founded in 1952 at the initiative of the then prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in order to preserve the ties between the State of Israel and the Jews in the Diaspora,” Prime Minister’s Office, “Nativ,” https://www.gov.il/en/departments/ about/about_office. 37 Yanai, Mulka. 38 The Investigation Case of Feldman, Volume 1.

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in the Soviet Union, intended to betray the motherland illegally and to move to Poland.”39 She was released in 1954, and her sentence cancelled. After many years of attempts to leave the Soviet Union, it was only in 1971 that the family was allowed to emigrate to Israel. Berl Levertov, Moshe’s father, was one of the leaders of the Chabad movement in Moscow. When his children managed to escape, he was arrested by the NKVD. In 1947 he was sentenced to ten years in a forced labor camp and died there on September 1, 1949. In the documentation of the NKVD investigation the officer wrote: The aim of the anti-Soviet organization of Chassidim, according to directives received from Schneersohn, is to facilitate the massive exodus of Chassidim abroad. Practical means exist to transport illegal immigrants over the border. This enabled many families to leave, mainly to Poland.40

His name also appears in other investigation files: It turned out that Levertov was one of the main organizers in illegally sending Jews abroad. He had great authority among Jews and collected large sums for this purpose.41

His sentence was according to the same Article 58 under which Brichah leaders had been convicted: Considering that Levertov Berka Sheilovich has been exposed as an enemy of the Soviet government; a member of an illegal Jewish national organization of Chassidim, working under the direction of leader Schneersohn from America; a participant in illegal smuggling of Chassidim from the Soviet Union to Poland and Palestine; actively involved in anti-Soviet gatherings during which anti-Soviet propaganda material was disseminated to crush the Soviet spirit; tried to cross the border into Poland. It is thus decreed Levertov Berka 39 The Investigation Case of Feldman, Volume 2. 40 The Investigation Case of Levertov B., GARF, F. 10035. Op. 1. D. P-31401. 10035-1-31401. 41 The Investigation Case of Dobruskin, GARF, F. 10035. Op. 1. D. P-21161. 10035-1-211616.

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Serafima Velkovich Sheilovich is accused of criminal code 58-1a and is sentenced to ten years in exile.42

All the participants who were captured by the NKVD received very heavy sentences. Some of them died in custody, others survived until their release from the camps and prisons and eventually left the Soviet Union.

Poland and Continued Escape Most of the refugees who successfully escaped from the Soviet Union to Poland did not stay there. The combination of the political situation with traditional and economically motivated antisemitism among the Polish population resulted in instances of anti-Jewish violence, and reached a dramatic climax with the Kielce pogrom of July 1946.43 The Jews had come out of the Soviet Union with very bitter memories. They had seen the worst sides of the Soviet regime.44 And when they arrived to communist Poland, there was no need for the Brichah propaganda urging Jews to leave. Jews by the thousands joined the Zionist organizations helping them leave the country.45 Their emigration was also motivated by their experience of the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union. Many of Chabad members and Zionists were persecuted there. The largest Jewish community in Poland at that time was in Łódź. According to a Polish Security Office report, Brichah activities, including preparation of false Polish passports, were being carried out in Łódź as early as the fall of 1945. Throughout 1946, the year of the greatest flight of Polish Jews, it served as the overall center for Brichah in Poland.46 During the aforementioned NKVD investigation, Khmelnitzkaya testified about Brichah’s activities there: In September 1946, an unknown woman arrived at my apartment. She was Jewish and told me that she couldn’t tell me her name because of conspiracy, but she arrived from Łódź, and she knew my friends. She told me that she lived in Łódź and helped Jews who arrived from 42 Ibid. 43 David Engel, “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 43–85. 44 Bauer, Flight and Rescue: Brichah, 125–126. 45 Bauer, 115–116. 46 Shimon Redlich, Life in Transit: Jews in Postwar Lodz, 1945–1950 (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2010), 156.

Polish Citizenship as a Way to Freedom the USSR to find an accommodation. She also said that she was in Riga several times already and helped many Jews to leave for Poland.47

Jewish refugees leaving Poland with the help of Brichah continued to make their way illegally to Displaced Persons camps, mostly to the American occupation zone of Germany. Jews were afraid to tell the truth fearing they would be sent back to the Soviet zone of occupation and ultimately back to the Soviet Union. For example, in the documents kept in the Arolsen Archives, Gordon Chaim mentioned that he was born in Wilno and during the war he was in several forced labor camps.48 A person born in Wilno could request to be repatriated from the Soviet Union to Poland because Wilno (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) was part of Poland until 1939. In a testimony given to Yad Vashem in 1971, Chaim revealed his true story: he was born in Dvinsk (present-day Daugavpils, Latvia). He was in the Dvinsk Ghetto, and after his escape to the other side of the Dvina River he joined the partisan brigade in the Kazan forests.49 The fictional story helped him escape the Soviet Union and emigrate to Australia. Later some of the Jewish refugees applied for American visas, which were denied because they had spent the war years in the Soviet Union.50 David Nasaw mentioned the American government policy regarding such refugees:51 in 1948, the State Department’s Policy Planning published the document “The Utilization of Refugees from the Soviet Union in the U.S. National Interest.”52 The publication mentioned that Polish Jews who came back from the USSR were undesirable for the USA’s national security, because were at risk of bringing with them Soviet communist ideology. When refugees arrived at DP camps in Germany, Austria and Italy, they became a significant part of broader Jewish DP population, which changed constantly, making it difficult to assess the exact number of people in those camps. According to Hagit Lavsky, in early 1946, close to 70,000 Jewish displaced persons lived in Germany in the three Allied occupation zones, including Berlin, 12,000 were kept in Austria, and 10,000 found a temporary home in

47 48 49 50 51

The Investigation Case of Feldman, Volume 1. Arolsen Archives (AA), 6.3.3.2/787170. Yad Vashem Archive (YVA), O.3/3563. Jockusch, “Paradise Lost?,” 373–399. David Nasaw, The last million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), 468–507. 52 The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, 1948, vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1983).

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the camps in Italy.53 By the end of that year, the number of displaced Jewish survivors swelled to 230,000, 180,000 of them in Germany alone.54 Some DP left the camps during 1946–1947, but the majority did so only in 1948–1949, after the establishment of the State of Israel in May of 1948. We can see all types of people mixed together in the DP camps: Jews from different countries, with different socio-economic backgrounds, attitudes toward religion, and political views. These people had also gone through disparate experiences during the Holocaust. And all together they ultimately formed a new community in the DP camps, where Zionism became one of the central factors of their new life. The majority of Chabad Chassidim arrived together at Pocking DP camp and several other smaller DP camps in Germany and Austria after leaving Poland. They organized Chabad communities and waited for visas. Many of them wanted to emigrate to the United States, where Lubavitch Rabbi lived, others to the Holy Land (Mandatory Palestine). The emissary of the Rabbi made a list of Chabad participants and appealed to the JDC and American embassy. But receiving permission was a long process. While waiting for visas, many young people moved temporarily to Paris. They thought it would be easier to get to the United States from there. Not all the community members moved on: some stayed in Paris and established a French Chabad community.55

53 Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–1950 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). 54 Ada Schein, She’erit ha-Peletah: Women in DP Camps in Germany. Jewish Women’s Archive: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, accessed December 9, 2020, http:// jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/sheerit-ha-peletah-women-in-dp-camps-in-germany 55 Eliyahu Matusof, Hayetzia Merusia (Israel: Chabad, 2019).

CHAPTER 7

“The Deepest Self Denies the Face”: Polish Jewish Intellectuals and the Birth of the “Soviet Marrano” Miriam Schulz With a nod to Edward Said: FOOL: They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. (King Lear, 1.4.)

I

n 1993, the Hebrew University published an essay collection entitled Baym leyenen penimer (Reading faces1). Originally included in the Israeli Yiddish journal Di goldene keyt (The golden chain) as early as 1954, they were penned by celebrated Yiddish poet and gifted storyteller Avrom Sutzkever (1913– 2010), the journal’s editor in chief. Sutzkever, a Vilna native,2 survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to become a towering figure of the small-butbudding Yiddish culture in the young state of Israel.3 A significant portion of

I am indebted to Profs. Jeremy Dauber, Gennady Estraikh, and Harriet Murav, to the participants in my seminar as a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Jewish History, to Yayra Sumah and Ishai Mishory, and the editors of this volume. Their invaluable feedback improved this chapter immensely. 1 No English version was published. 2 Given the multiethnic makeup of the city as well as due to changing national belongings, present-day Lithuanian capital Vilnius is known under differing names. I am sticking to the one commonly used in English, namely Vilna. In Polish the city is called Wilno, in Yiddish Vilne. 3 For biographical notes, see Ruth R. Wisse, “Sutzkever, Avrom,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, July 21, 2017; accessed September 13, 2018, http://www.yivoencyclope-

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Baym leyenen penimer dwells on his encounter during the fateful 1940s with the Soviet Yiddish cultural elite—exactly on the eve of its liquidation in the Stalinist antisemitic campaign that culminated with the so-called “Night of the Murdered Poets” of 1952. As Sutzkever never tired of pointing out, this group could allegedly already feel the looming end—the inevitable telos of what was increasingly read in the West as the cultural genocide of Soviet Jewry, likened to the way Jewish victims of the Nazis were already able to foresee the final unfolding of the Endlösung several years prior.4 Like several other intellectuals among the estimated 230,000 Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust in the Soviet interior,5 Sutzkever served as witness-by-proxy to these two Jewish catastrophes and took it upon himself to explain to Western audiences what Jewish life under Communism was actually like. Thus, in the paranoid Muscovite environment of the 1940s, he tells the reader of Baym leyenen penimer that all that the Polish Jewish newcomers could rely on to elicit the true—but anxiously hidden—feelings, thoughts, and aspirations of the Soviet Yiddish speakers they had encountered was, as it were, physiognomy. Often the Yiddish-speaking world’s only available source of information on the life of its confined Soviet sons and daughters, these Polish Jewish intellectuals had to try and read their brethren’s Soviet Yiddish faces for clues. “We understood,” said Rokhl Korn (1898–1982),6 another poet and Soviet exile survivor who settled in Montréal, “that all the writers and cultural activists who are state-supported, live like Marranos. . . . We did not have the keys yet to decipher their

dia.org/article.aspx/Sutzkever_Avrom. For more on Sutzkever during wartime and in the immediate postwar period, see Hannah Pollin-Galay, “Avrom Sutzkever’s Art of Testimony: Witnessing with the Poet in the Wartime Soviet Union,” Jewish Social Studies 21, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 1–34; Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), Chapter 1. On Yiddish in Israel, see Yael Chaver, What Must Be Forgotten: The Survival of Yiddish in Zionist Palestine (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004). 4 Sutzkever, Baym leyenen penimer ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1993), 77. 5 Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen: Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939–1946 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 2; and Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). 6 For biographical details, see Esther Frank, “Korn, Rokhl,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, accessed February 11, 2020, https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Korn_Rokhl.

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self-protection. One had to sing hymns for Stalin after all. This was a safeguard to survive.”7 The term that Korn uses—maran, Marrano—was, in fact, used by Yiddish writers in the West from the late 1940s interchangeably with ones (Hebrew: anus; a Jew forcibly made to convert to another faith) and a farshtelter (one who hides their true identity), as quasi synonyms for the murdered Soviet Yiddish intellectuals. The latter were the representatives of a uniquely secular, inherently anti-Zionist modern Jewish cultural project that expressed its Socialist convictions through the framework of the chosen Jewish national language: Sovietized Yiddish.8 These Soviet Jews, long regarded as having left the Jewish world with their conscious conversion to Communism despite the continuing use of Yiddish, were now explicitly framed as a reincarnation of those Sephardic Jews who, under varying degrees of duress, converted to Christianity in the wake of the 1492 Expulsion and subsequent Inquisition and allegedly kept the tenets of Judaism in secret.9 Gradually, Marrano as a label for the murdered Soviet Yiddish elite was extended to symbolize Jewish life under Communism and incorporate Soviet Jewry as a whole that was deemed to be undergoing exactly this post-Holocaust cultural genocide. From the very outset, though, this process, which I will term the “Marranification” of Soviet Jews, often happened against explicit protests by many of the Soviet Jews in general and the Yiddish speakers and cultural agents among them in particular who still remained loyal to the Soviet project. Tsipa Bergelson, wife of Yiddish writer Dovid Bergelson (1884–1952), for one, stated as late as 1971 that “[b]y calling him [Dovid] a Marrano, people imply that he only played the role of a devoted and convinced Soviet citizen, that he was not 7 Elie Wiesel and Rachel Korn, “Memorial Evening for the Murdered Soviet Yiddish Writers 20 Years on Part 1,” November 9, 1972, Jewish Public Library of Montreal, Canada, MP3, 1:07:04, https://archive.org/details/ MemorialEveningForTheMurderedSovietYiddishWriters20YearsOnPart1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 8 There is a growing research corpus highlighting the distinct character of Soviet Yiddish culture, see for instance: David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Gennady Estraikh, In Harness: Yiddish Writers’ Romance with Communism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005); Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Harriet Murav, Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: the Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 9 Sutzkever, Baym leyenen penimer, 71.

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genuine.”10 In this chapter I assert that voices such as Bergelson’s have been silenced in the public and scholarly debate on Soviet Jewry, a debate which has amplified and privileged minority voices11 of Jewish dissidents and migration activists who happily employed the reductionist Marrano label. The invocation of the Marrano trope by a certain group of activists and thinkers inscribed their struggle for a Soviet exodus into a perceived linear Jewish history that thrived in the nation-state model, trumpeting a Soviet Jewish return to “pure” Jewishness in the West as the modern equivalent to the actual Biblical Exodus.12 I read the history of Soviet Jewish Marranification against the grain and address diverse Soviet Jewish subjectivities that the essentializing discursive hegemony has so far muted. My aim, beyond analyzing the Marrano discursive mechanism (and its ramifications for the study of Soviet Yiddish culture), is to suggest an answer to why those Polish Jewish refugee-intellectuals who settled in the West deemed it necessary to employ it in the first place.

A Cultural Genocide? For Western onlookers, the exact details of Jewish life behind the Iron Curtain were especially murky in the years 1948 to 1953. Little information had crossed over regarding what would subsequently be termed Stalin’s secret pogrom.13 What was initially known was that “in year four a.H. (ante Hitler)” a significant 10 Khaym Shoshkes, “Bay Dovid Bergelsons almone in Moskve,” in Dovid Bergelson. Oysgeklibene verk: Roman, dertseylungen, drame. Fragmente fun forsharbetn tsu der kharakteristik un zikhroynes, ed. Shmuel Rozhanski (Rollansky) (Buenos Aires: Ateneo Literario en el Iwo, 1971), 316–317; also mentioned in Estraikh, “The Missing Years: Yiddish writers in Soviet Bialystok,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no. 2 (2016): 176–191. 11 One should be mindful that at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1970s the stratum of Soviet Jewry that the movement directly catered to constituted not more than a quarter to a third of the two million Jews in the Soviet Union. Mark Tolts speaks of “more than 290,000 Soviet Jews (and their non-Jewish family members)” who left the USSR between 1970 and 1989. See Tolts, “Trends in Soviet Jewish Demography since the Second World War,” in Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Ya’akov Ro’i (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 365–382. 12 While the Biblical Exodus, as well as Leon Uris’s 1958 novel Exodus 1947, were common references in the circles of activism for Soviet Jewish emigration, the most blatant embrace of the Marrano label on the Soviet side can be seen in the 1972 article “Who are the Marranos?” in the samizdat journal Jews in the USSR. See Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 291, digital edition. 13 I am referring to Rubinstein’s and Naumov’s edited volume on the trial against the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Rubinstein and Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

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but yet unknown number of Soviet Yiddish writers had disappeared.14 As we know today, Yiddish writers Peretz Markish (b. 1895), Dovid Bergelson (b. 1884), Itsik Fefer (b. 1900), Leyb Kvitko (b. 1890), and Dovid Hofshteyn (b. 1889) were among the thirteen members of this cultural vanguard convicted on trumped-up charges of treason and executed on August 12, 1952. Others lost their lives earlier, in the postwar anti-Jewish purges of the intelligentsia beginning in 1948, among them Shloyme Mikhoels (1890–1948), Pinkhes Kahanovitsh (1884–1950, better known as Der Nister), and Arn Kushnirov (1890–1949), while others were incarcerated in the Gulag.15 Various sporadic reports that reached the United States in 1948 which pointed to the dissolution of the state-sponsored Jewish Antifascist Committee ( JAFC, established 1941/2) prompted anxious speculation in the Jewish world about the fate of these Jewish luminaries and that of the larger Soviet Jewish community. For many, the still-fresh horrific experiences of the Holocaust were hovering like poltergeister, providing a gruesome script for reading what was happening under Stalin through the murky data: if not physical genocide, then surely a cultural one. Sutzkever’s fellow Polish Jewish refugee, the diplomat, anti-communist lobbyist and legal scholar Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), an ardent Zionist who coined the term “genocide,”16 lent credence to this claim, The term pogrom, however, was used in the West soon after the Soviet Yiddish cultural figures had disappeared. 14 For this curious way of post-Holocaust chronological calculation, see the German American Jewish newspaper Aufbau: Wolfgang Bretholz, “Im Jahr 4 n.H.,” Aufbau. Reconstruction. An American Weekly published in New York XV, 13, April 1, 1949, 1. 15 I follow Jeffrey Veidlinger’s excellent reconsideration of the so-called Black Years of Soviet Jewry as in line with the Soviet persecution of diaspora nationalities writ large, and not simply an “atavistic throwback to pre-Revolutionary pogroms,” pursuant to certain policies by Lenin and Stalin marked as antisemitic. See Veidlinger, “Soviet Jewry as a Diaspora Nationality: The ‘Black Years’ Reconsidered,” East European Jewish Affairs 33, no. 1 (2003): 4–29. For the traditional theory of premeditated antisemitism in Soviet Jewish historiography which understands the persecution as a product of popular antisemitism (integral within Russian society and increased in the time of Nazi occupation), see for example, Yehoshua A. Gilboa, The Black Years of Soviet Jewry, 1939–1953 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Alfred D. Low, Soviet Jewry and Soviet Policy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: Free Press, 1990); Gennady V. Kostyrchenko, V plenu u krasnogo faraona: politicheskie presledovaniia evreev v SSSR v poslednee stalinskoe desiiatiletie: dokumental’noe issledovanie (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1994). 16 James Loeffler has recently shown how the celebration of Lemkin as a powerful symbol of human rights is buttressed by an underplaying of the Zionist dimension to his thought. See Loeffler, “Becoming Cleopatra: The Forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin,” Journal of Genocide Research 19, no. 3 (2017): 340–360.

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orchestrating many different anti-Soviet campaigns for a host of Eastern European ( Jewish) diaspora associations “around the theme of genocide, thereby allowing this concept to pass into everyday parlance and into debates in the United Nations.”17 The exact scope of the Lemkin-inspired legalistic refashioning of Soviet state aggression as genocide falls outside the boundaries of this chapter,18 but I do wish to focus on how Polish Jewish intellectuals such as Sutzkever emerged as a distinct group of perceived “expert witnesses” that informed and ultimately radicalized Jewish memory-making in the anti-communist environment of the early Cold War. Fleeing the Nazis eastward, these intellectual refugees often played a significant part in the wartime Soviet Yiddish cultural milieu—only to ultimately find themselves, as Gennady Estraikh, for one, notes in his study in this volume in what was then demarcated as the West. This group of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors—the so-called exile survivors—has only recently been embraced by Holocaust research; they were earlier shunned from the category of Holocaust survivors by those who deemed their histories to fall outside of the Holocaust in the strictest sense,19 overshadowed by the histories of the so-called “direct survivors” of ghettos, concentration, and death camps.20 As Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky have shown, Polish Jewish exile survivors who migrated to the West followed different, often politicized, routes in telling the story of their specific survival experience in the Soviet Union. They had to 17 Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on ‘Soviet Genocide’,” Journal of Genocide Research 7, no. 4 (2005): 551–559; John Cooper, Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 209–213. See also Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 101. 18 Lemkin started several successive campaigns: first came the Soviet genocide against the Lithuanians, then the Latvians, then the Estonians, and finally the Jews. For a discussion of Soviet genocides in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as the role of Holocaust memory within them, see Jelena Subotic, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism (New York: Cornell University Press, 2019). On the formative, often radicalizing, role of diaspora voices within discourses of national trauma, see Tarik Amar, “Politics, Starvation, and Memory: A Critique of Red Famine,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, no. 1 (Winter 2019): 145–169. 19 Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2; Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 117 (2012): 61–79; Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 373–399. 20 For a general overview of these developments and debates, see Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen, 15–20. See also the chapter by John Goldlust in this volume.

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fit their stories to autobiographical wartime and postwar narratives, their societal positionality, and their professional ambitions as well as to the Cold War politics of the day. Different Polish Jewish exile survivors mobilized the facts of their survival: it could be presented as happening either thanks to the Soviets or while suffering under them; in keeping with either an untarnished commitment to Communism or thanks to an irrevocable allegiance to capitalism rooted in bitter personal experiences.21 The stakes involved in this narrative formation were high; but the crucial role they played in the formation of the discourse on Soviet Jewry and the nascent Western rescue mission has so far been overlooked. The complicated stories that the Polish Jewish “expert witnesses” began piecing together, I argue, had a double aim. First, they were aimed at “Westwashing” their authors’ Polish Jewish biographies, as it were: the story of surviving the Holocaust thanks to a satanic bargain with Stalin had to be changed to one of stubborn Jewish resistance leading to postwar redemption in the West. This discursive transformation was pivotal to secure the second aim which was fashioning oneself as the true bearer of Yiddish culture, which now had to be resurrected outside of the European heartland against the double danger of both Hitler’s Endlösung and what now began being formulated as Stalin’s long-planned cultural genocide. I am specifically interested in the role the Soviet Marrano figure played in this formulation: far from serving only literary and historiographical aims, the Polish Jewish “expert witness” discourse was to have a far-reaching effect on the politics of the Soviet Jewry emigration movement,22 especially as it slowly moved from the Yiddish-only space into the mostly English-speaking Western Jewish mainstream in its postvernacular form.23 The following pages trace the unfolding of the Soviet maran discourse from its introduction in Polish Jewish witness accounts through the Cold War battle for hearts and minds and finally the course of scholarship on 21 Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost?,” 391–392. 22 See, for instance, Lazin Frederick, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel Versus the American Jewish Establishment (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005); Stuart Altshuler, From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005); Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin, eds., A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1999). 23 Jeffrey Shandler introduced the term “postvernacular Yiddish” to signify Yiddish’s transition from a language spoken daily by millions into a postvernacular language after the Holocaust, primarily in America. See Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

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Soviet Jewry, arguably to the present.24 I hope to show how the cementing of Communism as the antithesis of Jewishness in the West during the Cold War has had far-reaching, surely tragic, and arguably problematic racialized implications to the very definition of Jewishness itself.

Overture In a strictly chronological sense, the story begins prior to the twentieth century. Far from a natural deduction or state of affairs, the understanding according to which the original Sephardic Marranos and their descendants were essentially Jewish was most effectively popularized by Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) in his History of the Jews (1852–1875). Here we read that “even after they had received their baptism [the Marranos] remained the same as before, blind and obstinate, that is, loyal to the faith of their ancestors.”25 Graetz’s concept of Marranos fits into a romantic, proto-Zionist vision of a unified Jewish world history which is based on a specifically racialized, zero-sum notion of a monolithic “Jewishness” that cannot be overcome.26 The figure of the Marrano is thus also constitutive of the decades-long scholarly dispute on this groups’ “degree of Jewishness”—a debate that David Graizbord has correctly termed “somewhat sterile”—and which was simply applied, in the post-Holocaust period, to Soviet Jews.27 This essentializing application is especially striking given that from an image of a secret suffering Jew yearning to return to full-fledged Judaism the figure of the Marrano has historically become one of the most popular objects “for reflections on the inner contradictions of modern Jewish identity” itself, thus offering modern secular Jews a path to a “usable past” (David Roskies) quite divorced from an objective engagement with Iberian Jewish history.28 24 See for example Olga Litvak, “The New Marranos,” in Studies of Contemporary Jewry: A Club of their Own. Jewish Humorists and the Contemporary World, ed. Richard Cohen et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 245–267. 25 Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, vol. 8 of Geschichte der Juden von Maimuni’s Tod (1205) bis zur Verbannung der Juden aus Spanien und Portugal (Leipzig: Ries’sche Buchdruckerei [Carl B. Lorck], 1864), 198. 26 See Carsten Wilke, “Heinrich Graetz’s Neologism ‘Marrano’ and the Historiographical Paradox of the non-Jewish Jew,” Jewish Studies at the CEU 8, no. 2011–2016 (2017): 95. 27 Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity among ‘Men of the Nation’: Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 32; and see also Ira Robinson, “Who Is a Marrano?: Reflections on Modern Jewish Identity,” in History, Memory, and Jewish Identity, ed. Ira Robinson et al. (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016), 341. 28 Wilke, “Heinrich Graetz’s Neologism,” 84.

“The Deepest Self Denies the Face”

Every generation of Jews since Graetz, it seems, has its Marrano. And so effective is this figure for secular Jewish self-building that it served no less disparate figures than the deconstructivist thinker Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and American Yiddish poet and literary critic Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971). While the former Marranifies himself to the quintessential philosopher-outsider,29 the latter styles, according to Leah Garett, a “self-as-Marrano” in his 1930s autobiographical novels,30 recycling the theme to portray secular Yiddish identity in post-1945 America along more traditional lines.31 Even Soviet Yiddish writers played with the figure of the Marrano in their own work: Markish, in his 1937 Lider fun Shpanye, depicts Franco’s Spain as still haunted by the long shadow of the original Marranos; and Bergelson, in his wartime play and Holocaust parable Prints Ruveyni, takes us back to sixteenth-century Spain and follows the steps of the historical figure David Reuveni (1490?–1538) in his futile attempt to save the Jews from the Inquisition.32 Neither Markish nor Bergelson conceived of themselves as Marranos in the Graetzian sense, though—certainly not as crypto-Jews living secretly under, or in opposition to, the Soviet system. On the contrary, both writers introduce a curious genealogy of fascism, akin to postcolonial thinkers stretching from medieval Spain to Hitler, and thus interpret Marranism as a form of heredi29 In Aporias, a study of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Derrida associates himself with the Marrano—a Jew within and simultaneously not, while being Christian and also not, living oppressed in the French Catholic culture of Algeria. Let us figuratively call Marrano anyone who remains faithful to a secret that he has not chosen, in the very place where he lives, in the home of the inhabitant or of the occupant, in the home of the first or of the second arrivant, in the very place where he stays without saying no but without identifying himself as belonging to . . . . [I]n the dominant culture that by definition has calendars, this secret keeps the Marrano even before the Marrano keeps it. Is it not possible to think that such a secret eludes history, age, and aging? (Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993], 81) Derrida’s self-Marranification was later taken up by scholars, for example, Erin Graff Zivin, ed., The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 30 Garett has written about Glatshteyn’s novels Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash went forth) and Ven Yash iz gekumen (When Yash arrived). See Garett, “The Self as Marrano in Jacob Glatstein’s Autobiographical Novels,” Prooftexts 18, no. 3 Part 2 (September 1998): 211. 31 Glatshteyn, “Zuntog-shtetl,” trans. Cynthia Ozick, in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe et al. (New York: Viking, 1987), 474. 32 For studies on Prints Ruveyni, see Harriet Murav, David Bergelson’s Strange New World: Untimeliness and Futurity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 292–304; Jeffrey Veidlinger, “‘Du lebst, mayn folk’: Bergelson’s Play Prints Ruveni in Historical Context (1944–1947),” in David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism, ed. Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh (London: Legenda, 2007), 269–284.

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tary Jewish antifascist resistance which they happily take up as Soviet Jews. In doing so, they directly contradicted those Polish Jewish wartime exiles in the Soviet Union who tended to Marranify Soviet Jews that they encountered in the Soviet peripheries of Central Asia, portraying them as secret Jews in the traditional Graetzian sense living under a Spanish system.33 In the context of the Cold War, and against the backdrop of the already-extant state of Israel, the figure of the Marrano could be marshalled to conceptualize Soviet Jewry as still Jewish to the core—stubbornly resistant to a criminal ideology and regime out to extinguish it, and eager to return to its ancient homeland, which in its own turn was in dire need of (white) Jewish bodies. And the ideas which this field of partisan research provided in regards to human life under Soviet conditions can be read as an internal Jewish, Zionist-inflected iteration of Sovietology that unsurprisingly argumentatively anticipates studies of Soviet Communism in the most recent post-Socialist period with the enemy long gone.34 To invoke the figure of the Marrano in this context is to invoke the landscape of pre-Reconquista Spain, a space which, as Gil Anidjar has noted, both promises and threatens with “pluralism, integration, and identity” under Muslim rule only to be stamped out by Christian top-down cultural and “racial” homogenization.35 Those Polish Jewish intellectuals who moved to the West now simply discussed the Soviet Union as resuming the work of the Inquisition. But the question of how Jews should act within such a system became that much more pressing in a post-Holocaust world in which the JewGoy relation was deemed forever altered: the Marrano is always shadowed by a converso—a person who has, as it were, fully switched their loyalties, exchanging their former belief for another. 33 See Katharina Friedla, “‘When the Shabbat became Sunday . . .’: Religious and Social Life of Polish Jews in the USSR,” in Memories of Terror. Essays on Recent Histories, ed. Mihaela Gligor (Frankfurt am Main: CEEOL Press, 2021), 107–108; and Natalie Belsky, “Fraught Friendships: Polish and Soviet Jews on the Soviet Home Front During the Second World War,” in Shelter from The Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 161–184. 34 For a good summary, see Enzo Traverso’s discussion of the (primarily French) school of post-Socialist anti-communism which employs many of the arguments of anti-communists discussed in this chapter. Traverso, “Der neue Antikommunismus: Nolte, Furet und Courtois interpretieren die Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Nach Auschwitz: Die Linke und die Aufarbeitung des NS-Völkermords (Cologne: IPS, 2000), 153–176. 35 Anidjar, “Medieval Spain and the Integration of Memory (On the Unfinished Project of Pre-Modernity),” in Islam and the Public Controversy in Europe, ed. Nilüfer Göle (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 217–225.

“The Deepest Self Denies the Face”

Another interesting perspective in what I have termed the post-1945 Marranification of Soviet Jews is Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (first published as Réflexions sur la question juive in 1944) which in its own way summarizes the shift in debates regarding the constructed nature of “the Jew” in non-Jewish “host societies.” Not only is the Jew both constructed and othered by their opponent, the antisemite,36 claims Sartre, but “[t]he one thing Jews can never choose is not to be a Jew.”37 A Jew can be inauthentic when they attempt to deny the personality attributed to them by the Other, ultimately paradoxically only reinforcing the antisemitic conditions that led to their creation. In this reading, conversos lose nothing of their inherent Jewishness while still willfully working against a free, Jewish-centered existence in this world— they lend a hand to ethnic suicide. So, were those Soviet Jews who converted to Communism Marranos or conversos? This was the question of the hour, and the Polish Jewish intellectual had an expert answer: they could indeed be both and the Jewish world had to be cautious whom to rescue.

“A Dense Fog Hangs over the Vanished Yiddish Writers”:38 Uncertainty and the Consolidation of the Marrano After 1948, it was becoming more and more evident that the Soviet regime’s treatment of “its” Jews had changed significantly—though it was unclear exactly why and how. Simply accepting this anti-Jewish turn was difficult not only to non-Soviet communists;39 but as Estraikh has shown, even the American Embassy in Moscow was puzzled.40 As early as 1949, Shmerke Kaczerginski 36 As opposed to Sartre, I am using this spelling since the alternative “anti-Semitism” or, for that matter, “anti-Semite” affirms the racist premise that there indeed is something like “Semitism.” 37 Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1965), 69, 89, 93. For an intriguing study on Jewish Studies and its inclination to apply Sartre’s model rather than think about Jewishness as “difference” and/or as a culturally contextualized performance, see Lisa Silverman, “Beyond Antisemitism: A Critical Approach to German Jewish Cultural History,” in Nexus: Essays in German Jewish Studies 1 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 27–45. 38 Yoysef-Shimen Goldshteyn, “Bagegenish mit Itsik Fefer ven er iz geven in zayn gdule,” Forverts, June 18, 1950. 39 Mayzel recounts the struggle to find out more regarding the situation in the Soviet Union and the dilemma facing Jewish progressives when confronted with rumors. See Mayzel, “Vos vet dokh zayn der sof?,” in Dos yidishe shafn un der yidisher shrayber in Sovetnfarband (New York: YKUF, 1959), 96–104. 40 See Walter Bedell Smith, Moscow Mission 1946–1949 (London: William Heinemann, 1950), 266, cited in Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War (Leeds: Legenda, 2008), 14.

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(1908–1954), still unsure about the exact reasons but certain about the fact that a state-directed destruction of Soviet Yiddish culture occurred, published the first version of his Tsvishn hamer un serp (Between hammer and sickle), in the temporary haven of Paris.41 Kaczerginski’s contribution to the Marrano discourse is important to explore as he sets up a certain discursive constellation for its elaboration. A famed left-wing poet, Kaczerginski had escaped the Vilna ghetto together with Sutzkever, liberated his hometown as a partisan, and settled in Soviet Lithuania. Later disillusioned with Communism, he moved first to Paris (a postwar hub for Yiddish intellectuals) and then to Argentina where in 1950 he published a second, extended version of his history of the liquidation of Jewish culture in Soviet Russia. Consciously referring to Nakhmen Blumental’s important work on Nazi speech, Słowa niewinne (Innocent words, 1947), Kaczerginski deliberately used the word “liquidation” for what happened to Jewish culture in the Soviet Union. Once a simply bureaucratic term, it now evoked images of yamen fun blut (oceans of blood), mentshlekhe korbones (human victims), and oysmordung fun yishuvim (extinction of Jewish communities).42 “‘Liquidation’ as it was understood by the Nazis,” he wrote, “was understood in exactly the same way by the Soviet regime.”43 He added that it was not limited to the simple murder of bodies: [A]t the end of the day for the Jewish people it is all the same whether Jews die at the hands of the Germans or whether they live in the Soviet Union. For the Jewish people . . . the living and the dead won’t figure in the numerical calculations. . . . The arrest of the most important writers now in Moscow, Kiev, etc. and the ban on printing a Jewish letter, etc. are no coincidence and not some sort of punishment for a specific nationalism or . . . cosmopolitanism. These incidents just accelerated the end which would have come in any case a little later.44

41 See Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp (tsu der geshikhte fun der likvidatsye fun der yidisher kultur in sovetn-Rusland) (Paris: Fraynd fun Vilne, 1949); the extended edition: Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp: tsu der geshikhte fun der likvidatsye fun der yidisher kultur in sovetn-Rusland (Buenos Aires: Der emes, 1950), 5. 42 Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp (1949), 7. 43 Kaczerginski, 8. 44 Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp (1949), 8, 10. (emphasis mine)

“The Deepest Self Denies the Face”

Kaczerginski called upon Jews of the free world to come up with strategies to unmask (demaskirn) this spiritual and physical liquidation, and warned of a certain kind of internalized antisemitism that it entailed: “Jews who do not yearn to commit national suicide have to remind themselves that in our whole history we considered the murderers of our souls no less soyne-yisroel (enemies of the people of Israel) than the murderers of our bodies.”45 The willful erasure of one’s innate Jewishness, sold as a form of redemption (read: Communism), is far from new; it can be traced back, predictably, to the Catholic Inquisition. Therefore, Kaczerginski recommended starting by building a wall against those among the Jews (read: Jewish communists) who defend the “devils,” “even though they often dress in Jewish letters.”46 A new holy duty (heylikn khoyv) presented itself here: to publicize the danger inherent in these Soviet conversos and juxtapose it with the need to rescue the Marranos especially while masses of Holocaust survivors are knocking on the doors of the West and asking “what did you do when we were imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and disgraced?”47 Kaczerginski exemplified the discourse of what would grow to be called the “Soviet Jewry Movement” avant la lettre: this primarily Jewish American Cold War rescue mission, initiated by Israeli covert action and usually understood to have started in the 1950s, ended up mimicking the tactics of the black civil rights movement in the United States and interweaving the Holocaust-induced plea to break the silence with the language of human rights activism.48

45 46 47 48

Kaczerginski, 94. Kaczerginski, 93. Kaczerginski, 6, 96. Research on the global movement for Soviet Jewry is substantial and can be only partially mentioned here. For Israel’s involvement, see Frederick Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel versus the American Jewish Establishment (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 28; Nehemia Levanon, “Israel’s Role in the Campaign,” in A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews, ed. Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1999), 70–83; Benjamin Pinkus, “Israeli Activity on Behalf of Soviet Jewry,” in Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, ed. Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus (London: Frank Cass, 1992), 373–403. For a robust study (disregarding Soviet Yiddish entirely, however), see Beckerman, When They Come for Us. For critical takes on the Soviet Jewry movement, see Scott Ury, “Migration as Redemption: the Myth and Memory of Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe to the New World,” Jewish Culture and History 20, no. 1 (2019): 3–22; Dina Zisserman-Brodsky, “The ‘Jews of Silence’—the ‘Jews of Hope’—the ‘Jews of Triumph’: Revisiting Methodological Approaches to the Study of the Jewish Movement in the USSR,” Nationalities Papers 33, no. 1 (2005): 119–139; and Fran Markowitz, “Retrospective and Afterological Considerations of the Contemporary Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora:

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Kaczerginski was pivotal in formulating a certain discourse that Polish Jewish émigrés, newly arrived in the West in the mid-1950s, could use. In 1950, Morgen-zhurnal (Morning journal) and Forverts (Forward) published stories on Fefer’s death and Markish’s hospitalization in a mental institution based on (false) reports of Polish Jews who had just arrived in Paris en route to Israel. These future olim (immigrants to Israel) denounced the Warsaw “Yevsektsia”; for example, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party who chose to remain in Poland,49 as well as Dr. Adolf Berman (1906–1978), former chairman of the Central Committee of Polish Jews, asserting that they knew exactly what the gruesome details of what had happened were but chose to keep silent.50 This strategy of calling out people who failed to “speak truth to power” was an essential feature in the denunciation campaign of self-identified pro-Soviet Jews. In their silence they were working together with the actual murderers, converso villains in the making. Yoysef-Shimen Goldshteyn (1894–1978), also an exile survivor originally from Łódź,51 followed shortly after with a scathing unmasking of Fefer’s “actual” persona: a kosherer Bolshevik who hot keynmol nisht geblondzshet (never went astray), he became mashgiekh iber kashres (inspector of communist purity), towering over the milieu of the JAFC and its organ Eynikayt (Unification) like a paranoid apparatchik who always sought to police and dominate.52 Goldshteyn’s account of his involvement with Eynikayt—after Whence and Whither?,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 18, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 336–357. 49 A term originally designating the Jewish section of the Communist Party, Yevsektsia is used here as shorthand for Polish Jews who remained in Poland and worked in Jewish sections of state institutions and were deemed collaborators in the destruction of Jewish culture. 50 “Itsik Fefer iz dershosn,” Forverts, June 5, 1950. 51 For biographical notes, see Joshua Fogel, “Yoysef-Shimen Goldshteyn,” in Yiddish Leksikon, accessed June 15, 2020, http://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2016/01/yoysef-shimen-goldshteyn.html. 52 While Eynikayt is usually translated in the secondary literature as “unity,” that is, a completed state of unification, I follow Redlich’s documented study of the JAFC which showcases original documents that render the name as “unification,” specifically highlighting the process of unifying as in fareynikung. The journal’s name is instructive: by narrativizing the ( Jewish) war, heroism, and death which were constructed simultaneously to the ongoing events unfolding around them, the JAFC was tasked with unifying global Jewry behind the Soviet Jewish war effort. This was precisely the kind of understanding that did not regard the Jewish communities spread across the globe as an Eynhayt, that is, one nation. See Shimon Redlich, War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (London, New York: Routledge, 2013); and Yoysef-Shimen Goldshteyn, “Bagegenish mit Itsik Fefer ven er iz geven in zayn gdule,” Forverts, June 18, 1950.

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seeking to write about Jewish life in Palestine he was demoted to writing satirical cartoons—highlights an animosity between a subversive Zionist who tried to support Yidishkayt and his counterpart, a fervent gatekeeper of Soviet un-Jewishness. But who gets to write about whom, for what audience, and when?53 Fefer, after all, was not unknown in the West. Many had heard of the Bolshevik Wunderkind, the Soviet Yiddish poet whose wartime poems like “Ikh bin a yid” (I am a Jew) brought him lasting—yet ambivalent—renown due to the odd poetic pairing of Jewish empowerment in the face of Hitler and an explicit celebration of Stalin. Fefer was always a suspicious figure.54 He took part in a trip by the Soviet Jewish delegation to the United States in 1943 with the face of Soviet Jewry, famed actor, and director Shloyme Mikhoels—a watershed moment in wartime Jewish history and postwar justification for the anti-Jewish purges. Mikhoels was murdered in 1948. Rumored to be somehow connected to if not outright responsible for his death, Fefer’s reputation was tarnished forever.55 Goldshteyn’s portrait of Fefer arranges Soviet Yiddish archetypes in hierarchical order from good to bad. It uses Fefer as a synecdoche for the duplicity of certain Soviet Jews against which the author can exhibit an untainted “pure” Jewish subject, that is, a Zionist-leaning and somewhat religious one still centered around and conversant in modern Yiddish literature. This type of self-presentation however was not without its own ambivalence. It was emblematic of a certain tendency in Polish Jewish intellectual self-representation meant not only to prove ( Jewish) Western cultural superiority—and inscribing the 53 Besides being self-serving, Goldshteyn’s representation of Fefer is, as Edward Said has claimed of any representation, “eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth’.” See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 2014), 272. 54 Estraikh, “Itsik Fefer: A Yiddish Wunderkind of the Bolshevik Revolution,” Shofar 20, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 14–31; Frank Grüner, “Soviet Patriot and Yiddish Nationalist: The Poetry and Tragic Biography of Itsik Fefer,” in Yiddish Poets and the Soviet Union, 1917–1948, ed. Daniela Mantovan (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012), 109–126. 55 Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 31. In the early 1970s, Mikhoels’ daughter, Natalya VovsiMikhoels, emigrated to Israel and made several conjectures about her father’s as well as Itsik Fefer’s active involvement in it. Her indictment of Fefer was first popularized by Esther Markish. Markish, The Long Return (New York: Random House, 1978); and also: Nataliia Vovsi-Mikhoels, “Ubiytsvo Mikhoelsa,” Vremya i my (Tel Aviv, 1976): 190. In 1984, Nataliia Vovsi-Mikhoels published her memoirs, including a detailed section about her father’s murder and Fefer’s alleged involvement. Vovsi-Mikhoels, Moi otets Solomon Mikhoels: vospominaniia o zhizni i gibeli (Tel Aviv: Iakov Press, 1984).

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self into it—but also, as Estraikh has argued, to alleviate “some of the Polish writers’ own moral burden” for having “collaborated” during their stay in the Soviet Union.56 Facing the ruins of Soviet Yiddish culture, many started to write quasi obituaries for writers they had encountered during the 1940s—combining Kaczerginski’s and Goldshteyn’s models to arrive at a full embrace of what I have been calling Marranification. Avrom Ayzen (1909–1958), 57 for instance, a Polish Yiddish poet who survived the Vilna ghetto and a German work camp only to immigrate to Mexico and later Canada, published an article in the New York literary journal Di Tsukunft (The future) in 1951 about his encounter with Soviet Yiddish poet-turned-Red Army soldier Arn Kushnirov (1890–1949) in newly liberated Vilna. A few months later, Sutzkever published in Di goldene keyt a letter written to him the year before by Bergelson.58 Both authors were unaware at the time of respective publication that Kushnirov had died of cancer in September 1949, and that Bergelson, while still alive, was imprisoned at an unknown location. Both articles use the Marrano paradigm, however, to portray Kushnirov and Bergelson as hidden under a Soviet mask while still trying to safeguard their Jewishness as if Sovietness and Jewishness were mutually exclusive by nature. And both writers chose to overlook the fact that during the war Jewish life and culture on Soviet soil was threatened most of all by the Nazis and their helpers, even if simultaneously abused for Soviet propaganda. The actual Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis gradually disappeared from the discussion on Soviet Jewry while serving as the script used to frame what was happening in the Soviet Union in real time. Later in 1951, New York-based literary critic Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) used Ayzen’s and Sutzkever’s articles as the basis for an essay with the telling title “Zaynen geven tsvishn zey anusim?” (Were there anusim [plural of ones] among them?), referencing them explicitly. Ones is the Jewish legal equivalent to Marrano—a halakhic category of Talmudic derivation delineating Jews who were forcibly converted to another religion but remain kosher according to Rabbinic law. Similarly to how Graetz had qualified the status and mindset of medieval crypto-Jews, Niger asks:

56 Estraikh, “The Missing Years,” 188; and Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost?,” 390–392. 57 For biographical notes, see “Avrom (Abraham) Ayzen (Ajzen),” Yiddish Leksikon by Joshua Vogel, accessed September 13, 2018, http://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2014/06/avromabraham-ayzen-ajzen.html. 58 Sutzkever, “A briv fun Dovid Bergelson,” in Di goldeney keyt 7 (Tel Aviv, 1951): 223.

“The Deepest Self Denies the Face” Is there in him [the Soviet Yiddish writer] something that is reminiscent of the ancient anusim? Is there, in other words, a kind of similarity between him and his great-grandfather in the times of the religious inquisition? . . . Well, one group of anusim is never identical to another. But it seems to be true that social totalitarianism, just like the religious one of former times, marks the bodies—and souls—of Maranen.59

Applying the term totalitarian, Niger declares the end of Soviet Yiddish culture, proclaiming, however, that what is past ought to be studied not battled. Indeed, he proclaims that he is eager to embrace his former archenemies as they were victims of a gaystiker genosid (spiritual genocide): “each one of them became a fellow sufferer. A persecuted person, especially one that is being chased and tormented as a Jew, is one of us (mi-anshe sholemnu).”60 Paradoxically, while the non-communist Jewish press increasingly featured portrayals of Soviet Yiddish writers and embraced their allegedly hidden, persecuted Jewish voices as of us, their works all but disappeared from the pages of such leading American communist journals as Morgn-frayhayt (Morning freedom). Kaczerginski’s demaskirn suggested a problem: how to deal with the overflow of articles hypothesizing about the whereabouts of Soviet Yiddish writers, declaring their certain death or their deportation to Siberian camps? What to do when rumors were presented as facts? Silence seemed to be the safest option for many on the pro-Soviet side to avoid adding fuel to the anti-Soviet “slander.” But silence certainly does not engender trust—something the Soviet government had in very little supply to begin with. By 1955, following almost seven years of painful waiting, even the self-identified progressive Yiddish leftist Nakhmen Mayzel (1887–1966) lost his patience, urging the Soviet authorities to finally unravel the mystery.61

59 Niger, “Zaynen geven tsvishn zey anusim?” (1951), in Yidishe shrayber in Sovet-Rusland. Geklibene verk fun Shmuel Niger, ed. Kh. Leyvik (New York: Sh. Niger Bukh-Komitet baym alveltlekhn yidishn Kultur-Kongres, 1958), 445–453. 60 Niger, “Zaynen geven tsvishn zey anusim?,” 446–447. Niger was presumably inspired by Yitskhok Bashevis Singer’s article on Bergelson (which he published under a pseudonym), although he never mentions it. See Yitskhok Varshavski, “Dovid Bergelson,” Forverts, August 27, 1950. 61 Mayzel, “Vos vet dokh,” 96–104.

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Mnemonic Authority and Marranism: 1956 and Its Aftermath In March 1956, following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” the fog finally cleared. On March 7, Forverts correspondent Leon Crystal broke the news about the murder of Markish, Fefer, Bergelson, Kvitko, and Hofshteyn in a front-page article.62 Those in left-leaning circles, however, were certainly not going to just accept such a sensitive revelation—especially coming hot on the heels of a seven-year partisan controversy—from the anti-Soviet Forverts alone; they would need confirmation from a communist organ. On April 4, 1956, Polish Yiddish newspaper Folks-shtime confirmed Crystal’s account.63 Approved by the highest echelons of the Polish state, the article—which still painted a bright future for Jewish culture under the new Soviet leadership—was the first time a communist periodical denounced the repression of Soviet Yiddish culture as such.64 The combined Forverts/Folks-shtime coverage made waves in global Yiddishland, throwing communist Yiddishists into turmoil and placing anti-communists on the offensive. On April 11th, Paul Novick (1891–1989) quickly reprinted the Folks-shtime account in the New York Morgn-frayhayt; a full English translation appeared a month later in the American communist journal Jewish Life.65 Wasting no time, the Yidisher Kultur Farband (Yiddish Culture Association) transformed its April “Sholem Aleichem Evening” honoring the writer’s 40th yortsayt into a memorial for the murdered Soviet Yiddish writers.66 The New York Yiddish Pen Club followed suit. Glatshteyn was invited to recite Soviet Yiddish masterpieces under the title “mir zukhn 62 Leon Crystal, “5 barimte idishe shrayber in Rusland dershosn in 1952,” Forverts, March 7, 1956. 63 “Undzer veytik un undzer treyst,” Folks-shtime, April 4, 1956. For more on this episode, see Hersh Smolar, Oyf der letster positsye mit der letster hofenung (Tel Aviv: Y.L. Perets, 1982), 214–215. See also the chapter by Gennady Estraikh in this volume. 64 The episode, however, irked Soviet propaganda officials, leading to the newspaper’s ultimate censure, ending the option of subscription for Soviet Jews. On this, see Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 18–23; also “Warsaw Yiddish ‘Folks-Sztyme’ Banned in Soviet Russia,” March 7, 1956, HU OSA 300-1-2-68623; Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute: General Records: Information Items; Open Society Archives at Central European University, Budapest. 65 Novik, “Der dokument vegn yidisher kultur in sovetn-farband,” Morgn-frayhayt, April 13, 1956; David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Communist Party of the United States since 1945 (Chatham, NJ: Chatham Bookseller, 1959), 284; and Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 21. 66 Mayzel, Dos yidishe shafn, 112–115.

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shpurn fun maranentum in sovetish-yidishe lider” (We are looking for traces of Marranism in Soviet Yidish poems).67 Not everybody was ready to embrace the slain Soviet Yiddish writers, however. In an op-ed he published in Forverts in May, Workmen’s Circle Secretary-General Nathan Khanin (1885?–1965) summarized the opposition to a call by the Jewish Labor Committee to openly condemn Soviet authorities. “We don’t feel obliged to protest when one group of communists slaughters another. Additionally, many of the writers that Stalin killed were ready to kill each and every one of us if they were only able to . . . Oh, how they breathed fire and brimstone at us.”68 Khanin stresses that his is not simply a political point. Had these writers died a natural death, he admits, no tears would be shed for them: but the Soviet Yiddish intellectuals ensnared (farfirt) by an inherently criminal ideology against their better judgment were murdered for the mere fact of being Jews. Continuing the whitewashing of Soviet Yidishkayt from any sincere Soviet attachment, Khanin argues that Bergelson and his comrades were blinded by naïveté and seduced by Communism’s false promises. And he concludes his narrative, as per convention, with a sequence of bagegenishn (encounters) with a few of the murdered writers—Bergelson, Moyshe Kulbak (1896–1937), and Esther Frumkin (1880–1943)—during a European tour in 1927. The point was not lost on Khanin’s readers: he was the one best able to evaluate and comment. The burgeoning Israeli Yiddish scene quickly followed suit. While celebrating the journal’s 25th issue in the spring of 1956, Di goldene keyt editor in chief Sutzkever and secretary Mendl Man (1916–1975), another Soviet exile survivor originally from Warsaw and former Red Army soldier, dedicated it in large part to the tragedy: But our festive day is dishonored and spoiled by the pogrom of the Yiddish writers in the Soviet Union; a pogrom which is unprecedented in its cruelty, and which was perpetrated in a time of peace, in a world of peace . . . True, the pogrom was a permanent one, with a program, in the course of a few decades when hundreds of Yiddish 67 Yankev Glatshteyn, “A lid tsum gedenken,” in In tokh genumen. Eseyen 1949–1959, vol. I (Buenos Aires: Kiem Farlag, 1960), 317–319. 68 Khanin, “Hoben mir a rekht tsu protestiren gegen der oysrotung fun di idishe sovetishe shrayber?,” Forverts, May 11, 1956. Regarding Khanin’s recollections of the 1927 trip through Europe and the Soviet Union, see Khanin, Sovyet-Rusland vi ikh hob ihr gezehn (New York: Farlag Der veker, 1929).

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As Steven Zipperstein has shown in his history of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, it was in the wake of this historical event that the term pogrom as popularly understood “would come to be seen as the most transparent of ways to describe the condition of Russian Jewry.”70 Understood as being perpetrated openly by the government, the term pogrom captured centuries of Jewish vulnerability and was connected to an increasing urge in the West to rescue Jewish brethren from an unbearable Russian yoke.71 And with the wide prevalence of pogroms as instruments of war during the Russian Civil War—a widely forgotten atrocity that cost the lives of up to 200,000 Jews perpetrated primarily by anti-Bolshevik White forces—scholarship has arrived at the consensus that pogroms could have a genocidal dimension.72 On the surface, Sutzkever and Man agreed with this assessment. On a deeper level, however, their addition of crucial qualifications to the understanding of how the murder of Soviet Yiddish writers should be understood expanded the overarching definition of pogrom, echoing what was at the time the state of the art in Holocaust research.73 Their reading would have serious ramifications for the understanding of Soviet Jewish history past, present, and future. With the “permanent pogrom,” perpetrated maddeningly in the time of peace,74 what Sutzkever and Man formulated was an understanding of the 69 “Finf un tsvantsik numern Di goldene keyt,” Di goldene keyt 25 (1956): 5–6. 70 Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018), 2. 71 Zipperstein, 9, 11. 72 Jonathan Dekel-Chen et al., eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 73 As Gerd Korman noted as early as 1972, “[i]n 1949 there was no ‘Holocaust’ in the English language in the sense that word is used today. Scholars and writers had used ‘permanent pogrom’ . . . .” See Korman, “The Holocaust in American Historical Writing,” Societas 2, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 251–270. 74 That is, exactly along the lines Raphael Lemkin formulated his idea of “genocide” as distinct from “war crimes” as codified during the Hague Convention of 1899 and in the Geneva Protocol of 1925. See Philip Spencer, Genocide since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2012), 4–5.

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pogrom itself as a kind of ongoing or partial Soviet final solution. In this understanding, Jewish life in the Soviet Union was an impossibility. Accordingly, true Jewishness had to be lived out elsewhere, secretly or in opposition. Their reading finally foreclosed on the possibility of a self-identified Jewish, and distinctly Yiddish, cultural subject in the Soviet Union, who also identified full-heartedly with the communist project in the past, present, and for the future. Sutzkever and Man determined, on the contrary, that the Soviet Yiddish martyr-writers “were forced to use their talents in two domains: in the domain of eternity and in the permanent struggle for their own life.”75 While the figure of the Marrano still exemplified a balance between mere physical survival—“bare life” in Giorgio Agamben’s sense76—and a desire to stay culturally pure, the idea of Marrano martyrdom already presupposed medieval Inquisition-like conditions, as represented in the Soviet permanent pogrom. These conditions, which mark the Marrano body (of work), demanded careful selection on the part of the surviving true Yiddish cultural agents in the West: only “the pure, the not-coerced, will live in our literature.”77 Di goldene keyt’s 25th issue inaugurated a kind of global genre of “expert witness” testimony meant to, again, demaskirn the dishonest double game that the Yiddish writers in Soviet Russia were allegedly forced to play. A report by Yitskhok Yanasovitsh (1909–1990), Mit yidishe shrayber in Rusland (With Yiddish writers in Russia), perhaps its most comprehensive exemplar, introduced der khurbn-beys-rusland (the destruction of the temple/house of Russia) to follow the destructions of the First and the Second Temples and khurbn-Hitler of the Holocaust.78 Yanasovitsh, who had been in Soviet exile during the war and later settled in Argentina,79 painted the varying degrees of Marranism Soviet Yiddish veteran writers suffered from: split personalities, masks, double speech, and secrecy. The most extreme cases, Yanasovitsh found, were Fefer, who “wouldn’t repent even at the gates of hell”80 (truly the most villainous 75 “Finf un tsvantsik numern,” 5–6. 76 Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 77 “Finf un tsvantsik numern,” 6. 78 Yanasovitsh, Mit yidishe shrayber in Rusland (Buenos Aires: Farlag Poaley Tsion-Hitakhdot, 1959), 221. 79 For biographical notes, see “Yitskhok Yanasovitsh,” in Yiddish Leksikon by Joshua Vogel, accessed September 12, 2018, http://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2016/11/yitskhok-yanasovitsh-itzhak-yanasowicz.html. 80 “Er hot afile bay di toyern fun gehenem nisht tshuve gemakht.” See Yanasovitsh, Mit yidishe shrayber, 129.

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Yiddish converso), contrasted with Der Nister (fittingly, the hidden one), whose authentic, untainted Jewishness made him “the absolute heretic (koyfer) to the core of communist dogma and its redemption of the Jewish people.”81 Thus, when Der Nister died he was represented as facing the heavenly court (beys-din shel oylem) with a pure (reyn), transparent (loyter), and immaculate (umbaflekt) soul. His Jewish righteousness, indeed, holiness, Yanasovitsh wrote, was admired even by younger Soviet Yiddish writer conversos such as Arn (Aron) Vergelis (1918–1999), Moyshe Teyf (1904–1966), and Shike Driz (1908–1971). This younger generation of writers, who “according to their upbringing, their way of life, and their mentality were at odds with exactly those ethical qualities they praised [Der Nister] for . . . must have felt and known that they praise characteristics that they themselves do not possess.”82 There was another important essay in Di goldene keyt’s 25th issue dedicated to the Soviet Yiddish literati that caused a furor.83 The concluding essay of what I call the Marrano section is by the Polish Jew Bernard Turner (1907–1987). The Moscow correspondent (1941–1943) for both the London Daily Herald and the Palestinian left-Zionist daily Davar (Word), Turner had been sentenced to ten years forced labor in 1943, languished in a gulag until Stalin’s death, finally immigrating to Israel.84 His fictitious memoir, “Mayn bagegenishn mit Dovid 81 Yanasovitsh, 250. 82 Yanasovitsh, 216. Countering these allegations of Marranism, some writers (mostly communist fellow travelers) came to the defense of Soviet Yiddish writers, claiming they had in fact been “national Jewish writers” all along. These arguments were, however, still made within the confines of an idea of a unified Jewish nationhood. I am thinking, for instance, of Yekhiel Shraybman, as mentioned in: Moyshe Lemster, “Vos heyst a natsionaler yidisher poet?,” Forverts, February 28, 2014. Interestingly, the writer whose work has been researched the most besides Bergelson and Markish is Der Nister for whom it seems there is no need to explain or apologize for any staining Soviet phase. See, for instance Mikhail Krutikov, Der Nister’s Soviet Years: Yiddish Writer as Witness to the People (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); Ber Kotlerman, Broken Heart / Broken Wholeness: The Post-Holocaust Plea for Jewish Reconstruction of the Soviet Yiddish Writer Der Nister (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2017); Gennady Estraikh et al., eds., Uncovering the Hidden: The Works and Life of Der Nister (London: Legenda, 2014); Delphine Bechtel, Der Nister’s Work, 1907–1929: A Study of a Yiddish Symbolist (New York: P. Lang, 1990). 83 This section included speculation on Fefer by Melekh Ravitsh who wondered “to which famous Yiddish poet Fefer would have gravitated were he to have lived and worked in America. There is no doubt in our mind that he would stand creatively somewhere between Mani Leyb and Itsik Manger.” See Ravitsh, “Vegn Itsik Fefer,” Di goldene keyt 25 (Spring 1956): 27. The other articles include: Avrom Sutzkever, “Perets Markish,” 10, and Yekhiel Hofer, “Dovid Bergelson,” 11–24. 84 For two other versions, see Boris Frezinskii, “Poshemu i kak tri pol’skikh evreyakh oklevetali Il’yu Erenburga (fakti i razmyshlenya),” in Narod knigi v mire knig 119 (December 2015),

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Bergelson un Itsik Fefer in sovetishn arbet-lager Bratsk” (My encounter with Dovid Bergelson and Itsik Fefer in the Soviet labor camp Bratsk), describes an encounter in a gulag camp with a significantly aged Bergelson, already unfit for labor, and with Fefer, “looking thin and evaporated—all skin and bones and a bundle of nerves.”85 Both were, in reality, incarcerated in the Lubyanka in Moscow and executed in 1952. Turner’s account ends with a bang: not only did the Yiddish intellectuals he’d supposedly met fill him in on the plan for a “total war against Jews and Jewish culture in the Soviet Union” of which the mass arrests of Yiddish intellectuals was only the first step. They went on to reveal that it was none other than Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg (1891– 1967)—the ultimate converso villain who, as opposed to Fefer, his Yiddish counterpart within this logic, had even abandoned Yiddish for Russian—who had been working with his NKVD inquisitors to save his own skin. Sutzkever may have declared Turner’s account false a decade later, but by then the sensationalist phantasmagoria had already helped shape the discourse on Soviet Yiddish writers. Upon its publication it was taken to be true in Yiddishland, a document to be reckoned with. Sometime later it exited the Yiddish-speaking universe to enter the English and French-speaking cultural scenes, now as “historical evidence.”86 Clearly a gifted fiction writer, Turner knew how to use the correct triggers in his narrative like Kaczerginski before him: Nazi terms like aktsyes (Aktionen) and “total war” invoked images of Soviet labor camp life forever haunted by Auschwitz, Majdanek, etc. Turner’s memoir fell like ripe fruit into the hands of those already convinced that, rather than simply limited to intellectual circles, the Stalinist anti-Jewish purges were directed at all Soviet Jews (who in this accessed June 15, 2020, http://narodknigi.ru/journals/119/pochemu_i_kak_tri_polskikh_evreya_oklevetali_ilyu_erenburga_fakty_i_razmyshleniya_2/. 85 Turner, “Mayn bagegenishn mit Dovid Bergelson un Itsik Fefer in sovetishn arbet-lager Bratsk,” Di goldene keyt 25 (Spring 1956): 34. 86 See, for example Turner, “With the Yiddish Writers in Siberia,” Dissent 4, no. 1 ( January 1957): 88–91, reprinted in The Spectator, May 24, 1957; Le Monde, August 22, 1957; The Canadian Jewish Review, June 14, 1957. The English translation was later also included in Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews 1948–1967: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 214–217. Among other sources, Turner’s “evidence” also served as the basis for Léon Leneman’s La tragédie des juifs en U.S.S.R (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1959), first published in a Yiddish edition in 1958. Another Polish Yiddish exile survivor, Leneman’s “Tragedy of the Jews” is similarly a manufactured analysis widely used as historical “evidence.” On Leneman, see Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 15, and Frezinskii, “Poshemu i kak tri pol’skikh evreyakh oklevetali.”

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understanding made up 40 percent of the forced labor camps).87 My aim is not to doubt the veracity of what actually happened to Soviet Jewry, but to clarify the role the Holocaust played in the ways the Soviet tragedy was being read— an immense urgency, quite disconnected from the real events unfolding, was attached to it. This had a tremendous effect on the unfolding of actual Soviet Jewish history in real time. Turner’s “revelations” affected the discourse on Soviet Jewry in less obviously overt ways, as well: they affected one of the greatest Yiddish poets of the twentieth century, Chaim Grade (1910–1982).88 Stirred by the events of 1956, Grade confessed to being moved by Turner’s story. He referenced him in a lecture manuscript as “der yidisher zhurnalist in lager mit Bergelson un Fefer” (the Jewish journalist in a camp with Bergelson and Fefer).89 A prominent member of the Polish Jewish exile survivor group and a famous postwar figure in the transnational Yiddish world, Grade was in a unique position to shape the discourse on Soviet Yiddish material through his editorializing, and his reaction to the memoir had far-reaching consequences. While he shied away from a complete Marranification of the Soviet Yiddish writers in his Yiddish writing—the Soviet intellectuals stood in the way of his very own complete rehabilitation— that was exactly the outcome when his writing was translated into English. In what follows, I explore Grade’s role conducting the arrival of the Marrano figure in the West. Having escaped Vilna during the war, Grade was recruited by the JAFC to Moscow in 1943 and returned to the ruins of Jerusalem de Lite to find what he had long feared: both his mother and wife had been killed at Ponary by the Nazis and their local helpers. Ultimately settling in New York, he published a memoir, Der mames shabosim (My Mother’s Sabbath Days), a decade-in-themaking, carefully refashioning his autobiographical narrative to fit a radically 87 See An Appeal to the Conscience of Mankind. Memorializing the United Nations for an Inquiry into and the Redress of the Cultural and Spiritual Genocide Systematically Pursued against the Jewish People by the Soviet Union (New York: Jewish Labor Committee, 1951), 6, mentioned in Estraikh, Yiddish in Cold War, 15. 88 For biographical notes see Justin Cammy, “Chaim Grade,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, accessed September 13, 2018, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article. aspx/Grade_Chaim. On his Soviet period, see especially Ben Furnish, “Chaim Grade’s Yiddish Poetry written in the USSR, 1941–1945: An Artistic Rendering that Forms a Primary Historical Source,” in Yiddish Poets and the Soviet Union, 1917–1948, ed. Daniela Mantovan (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012), 67–77. 89 Literary Estate of Chaim and Inna Grade, Series II: Chaim Grade in his American Period, 1947–2006, Subseries III: Grade’s Notebooks, YIVO Archives, RG 1952, Folder 758, 14.

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altered postwar world.90 Grade had to renegotiate his positionality within and loyalty to the wartime Soviet Yiddish circle which had not only facilitated his physical survival but allowed for a very productive tsveyte shafungs-period (second creative period).91 He had to comb through the text and purify it of any semblance of a Red complexion.92 And he had to subject his poetic work, too, to similar critical scrutiny: his own Soviet-era writings were carefully (but far from objectively) analyzed to ascertain their ideological purity.93 After 1956, Grade felt more and more that in order to be embraced by postwar Yidishkayt in the West as the true bearer of the culture, he must dissociate himself from the murdered Yiddishists who, for him, were Marrano-like at best. In the late 1950s, he was prone to giving rather sober lectures in Yiddish North America about the Soviet Yiddish situation as he saw it, responding to both communist and non-communist critics. And in 1960 he published, first in Di goldene keyt and then in several other Yiddish organs across the world, arguably his most famous poem: Ikh veyn oyf aykh mit ale oysyes fun dem alefbeys (I Cry for You with All the Letters of the Alphabet). The original poeme (epic poem), which still deplores the writers’ deaths, albeit in a critical and equivocating fashion, slowly transformed into a self-proclaimed elegye (elegy) by 1962.94 Speaking from a position of convenient retrospection, much like 90 Grade, Der mames shabosim (Chicago: L.M. Shṭayn, 1955); a second edition was published, notably, in 1959, see Grade, Der mames shabosim (New York: Tsiko, 1959). For the English translation, see Grade, My Mother’s Sabbath Days: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1986). 91 Nakhmen Mayzel, “Chaim Grade,” in Forgeyer un mitsaytler (New York: YKUF, 1946), 408–423. 92 Grade had worked with Soviet functionaries like Noyekh Prilutski before the war in Vilna and published his work in Morgn-frayhayt as well as Untervegns, an anthology published in Soviet Vilna in 1941. In the Soviet Union he published poems both in Yiddish anthologies and the newspaper Eynikayt. 93 Immediate postwar verdicts ranged from Glatshteyn, who declared that Grade’s Soviet work does not compare to his prewar Yung Vilne quality to Shmuel Niger who stressed that Grade’s most remarkable feature is his freedom from any Sovetish-speak. Mayzel, for his part, understood Grade’s prewar and wartime output as forming a coherent whole which, however, rises to the specific occasions of the moment—from antebellum, poverty-stricken Vilna to the horrors of the Holocaust. See Glatshteyn, In tokh genumen, 55, my emphasis; Niger, “Pleytim,” in Grade, Shayn fun farloshene shtern: lider un poeme (Buenos Aires: Tsenṭral-farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argenṭine, 1950), 182, reprinted from Niger, “Pleytim,” Der tog, April 10, 1949; and Mayzel, “Chaim Grade.” And see also Furnish, “Chaim Grade’s Yiddish Poetry,” 70–71. 94 Notice the change in subtitles in the two versions from poeme to elegye. Grade, Ikh veyn oyf aykh mit ale oysyes fun dem alef-beys: poeme vegn di sovetish-yidishe shrayber, Di goldene keyt 36, 1960: 5–10; and Grade, Ikh veyn oyf aykh mit ale oysyes fun dem alef-beys: elegye oyf di sovetishyidishe shrayber, in Der mentsh fun fayer. Lider un poemes (New York: Bikher-farlag, 1962),

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Kaczerginski before him, Grade ultimately ended up condemning the anusim for getting wrapped up in the Soviet project in the first place, and in so doing for contaminating Yiddish culture.95 Read together with Kaczerginski’s material, one concludes that Grade’s poeme is not simply haunted by the Holocaust: rather, he suggests that the Soviet Union itself is somewhat responsible for it as much as for its very own cultural genocide, and that the Soviet Yiddish writers were complicit in these catastrophes as well. I saw how you silently shivered and were astonished, Jewish poets from Minsk, from Moscow and from Kiev, when the rescued ones, who fate had spared, informed you about the evil misfortunes of Job. I saw you trembling from rage and grief, when your belief: “I believe wholeheartedly in the friendship of the people!”—was lying dead in Babi Yar with the corpses of Kiev in secret graves. ................................. Remember the poet from Vilna standing on wooden feet! The German threw them after him on the hearse. And when I lament you [Peretz Markish], I’m hurt by your pride, since I have to mourn your poems through a terrible comparison. Like my fellow townsman Grodzenski, the poet and invalid, after whom a German threw his feet with mockery, also your idol threw in your grave—your poem, in which you vehemently praised him in a storm of words. (Grade, Ikh veyn oyf aykh mit ale oysyes fun dem alef-beys)

103–109. For a recitation of an extract from the elegy and discussion of its context, see Josh Price and Emma Morgenstern, “Episode 0020: Chaim Grade’s Elegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers,” April 24, 2012, White Goat Radio, podcast produced by The Yiddish Book Center, MP3 audio, 1:00:29, https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/theshmooze/20-chaim-grades-elegy-soviet-yiddish-writers. 95 Victims of my Yiddish language, rest in peace to your dust! To the father of the peoples . . . . The pockmarked murderer, celebrated in dozens of languages; to the remaining villain of the deluge in the days of Noah –to him you had to sing your Jewish song? I was in this very hell and I know the reason why! You were delighted that to sing a long in the choir was also allowed to the Jew, and because eerie fear can turn itself into love. You heard: in the West, hatred of Jews rages, and you had only one way out: to die or to sing. So you sang: “A festival will be with us as well.” (Grade, Der mentsh fun fayer, 103–109)

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Grade is making a chilling analogy. While the collaboration of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Poles in Nazi crimes is well-documented (and widely discussed within the JAFC milieu in the 1940s), the Holocaust would not technically have happened without the German occupation of Eastern Europe. Not only does Grade push this point to suggest that the Soviet Union was itself responsible for the atrocity of Babi Yar, he goes on to stress that it was those Soviet Yiddish intellectuals who had fought tooth and nail against Nazism that shared the blame. After 1952, for Grade, all that was left of an illustrious and thriving Yiddish literary culture were mere traces, the poems of those Soviet Yiddish writers which “resemble a river that reflects the true world—but upside down.”96 Their betrayal led to a disconnected, young generation that didn’t remember Yiddish, cared little for Yiddish literature, and was unable to commemorate recent catastrophes. The fall of Yiddish culture, according to Grade, was the exact outcome of the phenomenon of Yiddish Communism itself—and it was now left to him to pick up the slack and return Yiddish to its prewar/pre-communist glory.97 Thus when Grade repels the charges laid against him by Yiddish communists—“yidishe komunistn fun Lodzsh, Pariz un Nyu-York, [vos] zidlen undz, shrayber-pleytim” (Yiddish communist from Łódź, Paris, and New York, [who] curse us, refugee writers)—he is quick to assure his Jewish American audience using a Marranifying trope: “The majority of the Soviet writers […] convinced themselves to believe in it [the regime]. For sure, they were anusim. . . . Are we allowed, we, the opposition to the regime, to protest against their annihilation and mourn for them? Yes! . . . When a Jew dies because he is a Jew, he is a martyr, even if he didn’t want to die because of his Jewishness.”98 While their lives may have not, the writers’ murder represents another chapter in the long history of antisemitism which inadvertently inscribes their whole story into the “lachrymose” history of the suffering Jewish people.99 In Grade it seems death does not only part—it sometimes also reunites. For those 96 Grade, Der mentsh fun fayer, 109. 97 This is connected to the trope of the “last Yiddish writers.” See Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles. 98 Literary Estate of Chaim and Inna Grade, Series II: Chaim Grade in his American Period, 1947–2006, Subseries III: Grade’s Notebooks, YIVO Archives, RG 1952, Folder 758, 18. 99 I am referring to Salo Wittmayer Baron’s assertion that earlier Jewish historians of the Wissenschaft des Judentums school such as Heinrich Graetz and Leopold Zunz had overstated the extent of Jewish suffering, offering a “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Recent writers have taken positions either for or against the lachrymose conception. See Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” The Menorah Journal 14, no. 6 (1928): 515; and

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Polish Jewish intellectuals now settling in the West, this was simultaneously a performance of mnemonic authority—“we are the ones worthy of telling this story”—and a form of self-colonization through that very memory to fit it to a certain audience. For Soviet Jewry, on the other hand, the very invocation of this mnemonic authority meant a reconceptualization of their story by others.

Conclusion With every passing year, English gradually replaced mame-loshn in the Western discourses on the cause of Soviet Jewry which gained in urgency as State Zionism cemented its ultimate hegemony. Israel’s 1967 victory over its Arab neighbors fundamentally altered post-Holocaust conceptions of Jewish identity globally—including the Soviet Union—helping to shift the Holocaust’s historical meaning to a now ontologically unparalleled, exclusively Jewish story of destruction.100 Thus, the very creative 1969 translation, bordering on a second original, by Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928) of Grade’s Elegy, published in an anthology edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, transforms the once-indicted anusim into “Marranos—your deepest self denies your face.”101 Ozick goes one step further, casting Grade himself as a fervent advocate for these Marranos: “And so I tell your merits, have always looked to your defense / not to justify / for pity of your deaths.”102 Almost overnight, Ozick’s translation became mandatory reading at memorials for these Soviet Yiddish luminaries, beginning with an event entitled “The Night of the Murdered Poets” in 1971—the last step in these writers’ process of Marranification.103 David Engel, “Crisis and Lachrymosity: On Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the Study of Modern European Jewish History,” Jewish History 20, no. 3/4 (2006): 243–264. 100 Beckerman, When They Come for Us, 291. 101 See Ozick’s translation, Grade, “Elegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers,” in A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, ed. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), 339–345. These sentences are not included in the Yiddish original. 102 Grade, “Elegy for the Soviet Yiddish Writers,” 339–345. 103 Leonard Schroeter, “The Night of the Murdered Poets,” op-ed, The Jerusalem Post Magazine, August 12, 1971. Beginning in 1971, there were several radio broadcasts by the National Conference on Soviet Jewry entitled “The Night of the Murdered Poets.” See National Conference on Soviet Jewry, records, I-181 and I-181A, Part 1, Series VII: NCSJ Activities, undated, 1966–1981, American Jewish Historical Society Archives (AJHS), Box 37, Folder 5; National Conference on Soviet Jewry, records; I-181 and I-181A, Part 2, Series XV: Audio Materials on Soviet Jewry and ASJM, 1966, 1968, 1970–1979, AJHS, Box 363, Folder 15 and 16, digitized. For more on this, see Meyer Levin, “Foreword,” Special Commemorative Edition August 12, 1952, vi.

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Observed around the globe under that title to this day,104 the designation of August 12 as a global memorial for murdered Soviet Jewish poets alone consigns any other Jewish Soviet subjects killed on Stalin’s orders but not as the purveyors of Soviet Yiddish high culture to obscurity—as if their murders hadn’t taken place. “Even up until today, this story of the Holocaust of Russian Jewish authors remains virtually untold,” wrote Meyer Levin (1905–1981) in his foreword to a 1973 booklet published by the New York-based National Conference for Soviet Jewry, the American Jewish umbrella organization for Soviet Jewry activism. Echoing Kaczerginski, he likened US ignorance of the great Soviet Yiddish poets’ liquidation to US ignorance in general and the Jews living in it in particular of Hitler’s genocide.105 Just as the term Holocaust began circulating widely in America, ushering in what Peter Novick has termed its budding Americanization,106 Jewish life under the Soviet regime was beginning to be given the same title (haunted as it was by catastrophic narratives and images since 1948)—a process which was detrimental to the actual lived experience of post-1952 Soviet Yidishkayt and which had a hand in ultimately writing the latter out of history. The Polish Jewish “expert witnesses” whose careers I have outlined above, I argue, played a crucial role in pronouncing Soviet Yiddish culture dead. In making Soviet Yiddish culture “grievable” at the same time they helped in commodifying it, transforming it into a political tool in the Cold War struggle for the fate of Soviet Jewry.107 104 On its 25th yortsayt (1976), the date August 12, 1952, was designated as a global day of mourning in a Yiddish resolution produced at the Velt-konferents far yidish un yidisher kultur in Jerusalem. See “Protest kegn der farnikhtung fun di yidishe shrayber in SovyetRusland,” in Barikht fun der velt-konferents far yidish un yidisher kultur, edited by Velt-byuro far yidish un yidisher kultur (Tel Aviv, 1977), 234–235, as cited in Estraikh, “The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 139–148. 105 Levin, “Foreword,” vi. A decade later, Soviet Jewish émigré, Hebrew University Sovietologist, and historian Mikhail Agursky would second Levin’s equation. Basing himself almost entirely in émigré literature, Agursky said in 1975 that “[i]n fact, the new Jewish Holocaust was part and parcel of Stalin’s plan to take over Western Europe via a new military thrust against the West.” See Agurysky, “The Abortive Soviet Plan to Persecute Jews in 1953 and its Political Background,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies 9 (1985): 199. On the exact nomenclature of the August 12th memorial date, see Estraikh, “Why did Stalin murder Yiddish writers?,” 60th memorial event for August 12, August 12, 2012, video, 37:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIQaRPvQJL8&t=1443s. 106 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 2. 107 I borrow the term “grievable” here from Judith Butler. See Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2016), 2–12.

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At a time when Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust in Soviet exile were still not considered survivors in the strict sense, their life stories were regarded as irrelevant for the gradually growing archive of Holocaust survivor testimonies. It was exactly in this nexus—the contemporaneous refashioning of a Soviet Holocaust—that their experiences, insights, and survival mattered, where they were allowed to reenact for the outside world what living in the abyss looked like. These “expert witnesses” had to formulate public personas that could sustain their careers as Yiddish intellectuals in a radically altered world: their contribution to discussion of the Soviet Yiddish writers’ murders and their larger representation of Jewish existence under Soviet rule had to fit both with their own war experiences and that of a Western Jewish collective identity that began its formation in a Cold War world. They thus introduced a new way of thinking about the events of 1952 into post-Holocaust Yiddish literature and discourse that was both haunted by the Holocaust and entangled with Cold War anti-Communism constructing both khurboynes (destructions) as one brutal continuum. Their writing had the effect of throwing Yiddishland into a fever of psycho-archaeology, combing through Soviet Yiddish works to ascertain whether they should be reclaimed as part of a Western Jewish canon or discarded. In this chapter, what I have termed the Marranification of Soviet Yiddish writers achieved a recalibrating of Soviet Jewish subjectivity: it now appeared as a self-chosen part of Communism, but only until the fallacy was ultimately uncovered. David Shneer and others have long warned about the kind of fetishization these writers were engaged in: not only of some kind of imagined pure Jewish agency that remained untainted with Communism and the idea of final and inevitable destruction but also of the teleological narration of Soviet Jewish story backwards from 1952.108 The stakes of engaging in this post-1952 discourse of Marranism, I would argue, are even higher. In cementing the year 1952 as the endpoint of Soviet Yiddish life, what this conceptual framework factors out ipso facto is the ability to engage seriously with Soviet Yiddish culture in its temporary entirety—where the “Soviet” and the “Jewish” converged into a distinct expression of modern 108 See David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially the introduction. For other, popular reflections, see Rob Adler Peckerar, “How We Remember Soviet Yiddish Culture,” Yiddishkayt, accessed February 12, 2020, https://yiddishkayt.org/august-12-and-after/; Rokhl Kafrissen, “Night of the Murdered Poets,” Tablet Magazine, accessed February 12, 2020, https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/289530/night-of-the-murdered-poets.

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Jewishness up until 1991 and, arguably, beyond. The art of “reading faces” is, after all, by definition a study of surfaces rather than depth. To Marranify Soviet Jewry by necessity means to de-Sovietize it and colonize it—to fit pre1952 Soviet Yiddish culture into an essentializing paradigm of Jewishness and exclude the continuing histories of those not deemed Marranos before and after 1952, namely those Soviet Jews with no aspirations for Western immigration who identified with the Soviet project until 1991 through the framework of Sovietized Yiddish. Furthermore, to Marranify the slain Yiddish writers in particular and Soviet Jewry in general ultimately meant equating Hitler’s Holocaust with Stalin’s anti-Jewish campaigns. Through the figure of the Marrano, Soviet Yidishkayt—but only in its in death—was made intelligible in sharing exactly in that inevitable diasporic precarious Jewish fate that State Zionism had finally overcome. Those remaining mired in this predicament could now, naturally, only be saved through a return to one of two Zions: Israel or capitalist America. Selective and differential, the Marrano frame, a political construct, deliberately excluded (post-1952) Soviet Yiddish Communism as a form of Jewishness. The Marrano is always accompanied by the converso who within this logic can neither be lost nor grieved over in the Butlerian sense, as they had never been “apprehended” as constituting a Jewish life to begin with.109 Nor, apparently, was any grieving deemed necessary in a cyclical conception of Jewish time. Fast-forwarding to the 1970s, we see that the Polish Jewish “expert witnesses” passed the torch to a younger group of Soviet émigrés who, mimicking the return of some historical Marranos to the fold of Judaism as New Jews, now returned to Judaism through aliyah to Israel or emigration to the United States. The fact that this younger group to a large part spoke no Yiddish and lived outside the Soviet Yiddish cultural milieu was, in this context, no accident. A function of the complicated array of Jewish divisions within the Soviet Union itself, the long-standing Western stance of anti-communist marginalization, and the politics of the US movement for Soviet Jewry, this development keenly mirrored the recalibration of Holocaust memory in America, especially as espoused by its “godfather,”110 Elie Wiesel (1928–2016). Speaking at an 109 On the difference between “apprehension” and “recognition” of life, see Butler, Frames of War, 2–12. 110 Wiesel was approached by all branches of the Soviet Jewry Movement and asked to be engaged in the local activities, mostly in the form of speeches. He was called the “godfather” in a letter by Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive director Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, dated November 1, 1971, regarding his involvement in “Freedom Lights

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event commemorating the slain Yiddish Soviet writers in 1972, Wiesel used perhaps the most conservative Jewish trope, that of family affiliation, to transform their memory from that of a group of secular modernist communists into, of all things, a “link in the golden chain” of Jewish tradition itself. In his paean to Jewish return—understood not only geographically and chronologically, but indeed religiously, Wiesel claimed that [t]he children of these victims became the heralds, the prophets of a Jewish renaissance. . . . I knew . . . these youngsters, these Dovid Markishes and so forth . . . . And suddenly when you . . . see it happen you think that a son of an Itsik Fefer who did not believe in a Jewish God and in Jewish history but . . . believed in Jewishness and in Communism, the son becomes a shames [synagogue beadle] . . . and maybe one day, why not, they will be even rabbis in the best sense of the word. We shall follow them as we are following them already. They began the awakening in the world for Soviet Jewry.111

for Soviet Jewry” rally at Madison Square Garden, New York, in December 1971, see Box 89, Folder 5: Wiesel, Elie, Jews, Soviet Union, Correspondence 1966–1975, Elie Wiesel Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. 111 Elie Wiesel and Rachel Korn, “Memorial Evening for the Murdered Soviet Yiddish Writers 20 Years on Part 2.”

CHAPTER 8

Hersh Smolar: A Polish Personage in the Soviet Jewish Cultural Scene, 1940s–1960s Gennady Estraikh Communists are reared as people with two souls, one for themselves, the other for the outside [world]. (Hersh Smolar)1

I

t is a recorded history of a person who for more than fifty years struggled for a better world, of a person with a reverent attitude to Jewish people, to their wellbeing and salvation. Unfortunately, it was the oylem-hatoye, the world of confusion with shadowlike beings shifting and drifting, where Smolar, like so many others, sought the routes to this goal.2

A Soldier of Revolution Following the post-1917 decline and disintegration of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the communist state on its ruins, Ukrainian and Belarusian Jewry made up the bulk of the Soviet Jewish population. The resulting geographical and dialectal peculiarity affected Soviet Jewish cultural policy, including the Yiddish language planning and construction of a literary canon with Sholem Aleichem, a “Kyivan” (rather than Y. L. Peretz, a “Varsovian”), as the top 1 All quoted translations made directly from non-English sources are mine. Bernard Mark, “Dziennik (opr. Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikow),” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 2 (2008): 166. 2 Abraham Baraban, “Der nekhtn fun Hersh Smolyar,” Zayn 22, no. 78 (1975): 12.

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classic author. Still, Jews from the territories making up the interwar Republic of Poland, or Rzeczpospolita, never stopped playing a palpable role in various domains of Soviet Jewish life. In fact, some cultural and political activists defied the categorization as “Soviet” or “Polish.” One of them was Hersh/Grzegorz/ Grigorii Smolar (also rendered Smolyar, 1905–1993), a “Polish and Soviet Yiddish writer and editor,” as I described him in an encyclopedia article.3 Smolar was indeed a person of a literary bent who left a legacy of several insightful books, mainly of an autobiographical nature, making it easier, sometimes deceptively so, to write about him. Nevertheless, the narrow definition of him as a man of letters leaves out important phases in his eventful life, namely his activities as a professional revolutionary, resistance fighter, and Communist Party functionary. The following analysis focuses mainly on the late 1940s through the late 1960s when Smolar, a Communist functionary in the Polish People’s Republic, tried and somewhat succeeded in exerting influence on Jewish life in the Soviet Union. Smolar was born in the town of Zambrów northeast of Warsaw, Poland, and while still a teenager joined local socialist circles, influenced apparently by his elder brother, Nathan, an active Poale (Labor) Zionist and a committed Yiddish educator.4 Hersh, however, transformed from being a young Poale Zionist into an ardent devotee of Bolshevism, which was a rather widespread political evolution at that time.5 A leader of the local branch of the Jewish Socialist Youth Association, he belonged to a revolutionary committee formed in Zambrów when it fell under Red Army control during the 1920–21 PolishSoviet War. Following the retreat of the Red Army, he wisely fled Poland and, as a consequence, found himself among the Jewish left-wingers from various countries, including re-emigrants who came to the nascent Soviet Union to build the beckoning bright future of communism. Such “foreigners” formed a visible contingent in the Jewish, essentially Yiddish-speaking, sections that functioned in the Communist Party from 1918 to 1930.6 3 Gennady Estraikh, “Smolar, Hersh,” The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1764–1765. 4 The Zambrow Memorial Book: In Memory of a Martyred Community That Was Exterminated (Mahwah, NJ: Jacob Solomon Berger, 2016), 109, 222–223. In the Warsaw ghetto, Nathan Smolar belonged to the circle of Emanuel Ringelblum—see Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 119. 5 The Zambrow Memorial Book, 302–303. 6 Smolar’s Vu bistu khaver Sidorov? (Tel Aviv: I.L. Peretz Farlag, 1975) and Fun ineveynik: zikhroynes vegn der “yevsektsye” (Tel Aviv: I.L. Peretz Farlag, 1978) give an excellent insight

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From Kyiv where he initially settled, Smolar moved to Moscow in 1923 to study in the Yiddish Department of the Communist University for the Peoples of the West, known in Yiddish as Mayrevke (from mayrev, “west”). That university, named after its first rector, the Polish communist Julian Marchlewski, trained cadres, in particular, for the Communist International, or Comintern, established in 1919 to ignite and coordinate the pro-Soviet revolutionary movement worldwide.7 1928 was the year when Smolar began a new role as a Comintern agent operating in the underground of the Communist Party of Western Belarus, outlawed by the Polish authorities. When World War II broke out in September 1939, Smolar served a prison sentence in the town of Łomża after being caught during his second clandestine mission in Poland. Liberated in the turmoil of the war, Smolar came to the Sovietcontrolled territory where he, a person without any documents proving his identity, endured intense interrogation. It happened, though, that an officer recognized and vouched for him as a comrade from the early 1920s. In a private conversation the old friend told Smolar, hinting about the purges in recent years, “You were lucky to be sitting [in prison] here. In our country you would have been lying [in a grave].”8 Indeed, numerous Polish Jewish activists had vanished during the wave of repression unleashed across the country following the August 1937 secret directive targeting “Fascist insurgence, espionage, sabotage, defeatist and terrorist activities of Polish intelligence in the USSR.”9 Later, Smolar learned that his file at the Communist Party archive in Minsk contained a 1937 telegram saying that the Soviet secret police were looking for the “well-known Polish spy” Smolar.10 Being, however, deemed reliable and efficient, Smolar became a significant figure in Białystok, which now, following the German-Soviet partition of Poland in September 1939, functioned as the administrative capital of Western Belarus. He worked as the secretary of the regional chapter of the Soviet Writers’ Union and the managing secretary of the Yiddish newspaper Byalistoker shtern (Bialystok star), established by the Soviet authorities soon after taking the city into the work and atmosphere of the Jewish sections. For this and similar universities, see Evgenii V. Panin, “Sozdanie i funktsionirovanie vysshikh uchebnykh zavedenii dlia natsional’nykh men’shinstv, 1920–1930-e gg.” (Kandidat diss., Moscow State University, 2012). 8 Smolar, Vu bistu khaver Sidorov?, 156. 9 See, for example, Nikita Petrov and Arsenii Roginskii, “The ‘Polish Operation’ of the NKVD, 1937–8,” in Stalin’s Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, ed. Barry McLoughlin and Kevin McDermott (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 153. 10 Smolar, Vu bistu khaver Sidorov?, 253. 7

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under their control.11 In the fall of 1940, Smolar was elected or, given the nature of the one-candidate “elections,” appointed to the city council in Grodno, then a town in the Białystok Province.12 He wrote and lectured about both Yiddish and Belarusian literature.13 In Białystok he met and married Walentyna Najdus (1909–2004), also a seasoned, prison-hardened communist. A sister of the Yiddish poet Lejb Najdus, she wrote poems and stories but in Polish, and worked as a staff writer on local Polish newspapers. In his report to the authorities, mainly to the Writers’ Union, on the literati brought by the war to Białystok, Smolar placed Najdus in the group of “young or beginner” authors.14 Hersh and Walentyna’s son, Aleksandr, was born in 1940. His younger brother, Eugeniusz, would be born in Minsk in 1945. In June 1941, when World War II engulfed the Soviet Union, Smolar did not join the evacuees, though Walentyna and Aleksandr left the city before it fell to the Germans on the fifth day of the warfare. Together with David Richter, a literary critic and a Party supervisor of the Białystok literary milieu, Smolar prepared the last issue of Byalistoker shtern and plastered copies on the walls around the city.15 The beginning of the war in June 1941 might have saved him from being persecuted: the arrests of several Yiddish writers in Minsk on the very eve of the war could probably have been the first step in an interrupted Soviet secret police operation targeting Yiddish literati.16 Against all odds, Smolar survived (Richter did not) the war in German-occupied Belarus. A leading member of the resistance in the Minsk ghetto, he later fought as commissar of a partisan group operating in Belarusian forests. From July 1943 to July 1944, he edited one of the newspapers published in the areas controlled by the partisans.17 11 Joanna Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu: rzecz o żydowskich komunistach w Polsce (Warsaw: Neriton, 2009), 113–114; Gennady Estraikh, “The Missing Years: Yiddish Writers in Soviet Bialystok, 1939–41,” East European Jewish Studies 46, no. 2 (2016): 176–191. 12 “Kandidaty v deputaty sovetov,” Literaturnaia gazeta, November 24, 1940, 1. 13 “Internatsional’nyi vecher,” Literaturnaia gazeta, April 20, 1941, 1. 14 Wojciech Śleszyński, “Białostockie środowisko pisarzy sowieckich (1939–1941),” Białoruskie Zeszyty Historyczne 13 (2000): 108. 15 Smolar, Vu bistu khaver Sidorov?, 165. 16 See Gennady Estraikh and Oleg Budnitskii, “From the Great Terror to the Terror in 1941: The Case of Yiddish Writers in Soviet Belorussia,” East European Jewish Affairs 50, no. 3 (2020): 292–308. 17 Sofia A. Pavlova, “Podpol’naia pechat’ Baranovichskoi oblasti v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” in Biblioteki i muzei v sovremennoi obrazovatel’noi i sotsiokul’turnoi srede, ed. V. P. Iazykovich (Minsk: Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts, 2019), vol. 2, 156–157.

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By the end of the war, Smolar settled in Minsk, working there at the Belarusian-language weekly Literatura i mastatstva (Literature and art). He also had established contacts with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee ( JAFC) headquartered in Moscow. In 1946, his wartime Yiddish memoirs, Fun Minsker geto (From the Minsk Ghetto), were published in 10,000 copies by Der Emes (Truth), the Moscow publishing house for Jewish literature which bureaucratically was not subordinate to the JAFC but operated de facto, at least partly, under its control. A year later, the same publisher printed 50,000 copies of the Russian translation of Smolar’s book, entitled Mstiteli geto (Avengers of the Ghetto). Whereas Fun Minsker geto was one of several Moscow-published Yiddish books written by Jewish resistance and partisan fighters, Mstiteli geto was unique as a Russian-language publication of this kind. Characteristically, in April 1962, Vladlen Izmozik, later a well-established Soviet historian, shared his thoughts with the writer Ilia Ehrenburg, whom many Jews (including Smolar) saw as a figure of moral authority. Izmozik, who complained, in particular about the lack of literature on the Holocaust, wrote: “How many years has the book Avengers of the Ghetto, about the Minsk ghetto, remained out of print?”18 The JAFC, conceived as nothing more than a propaganda unit of the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo), increasingly and, as it turned out, self-destructively, fulfilled functions of a public organization, concerned in particular with preservation of Yiddish culture. In Minsk, where all influential Yiddish cultural figures (notably the writers Izi Kharik, Moyshe Kulbak, and Zelig Akselrod) perished during the Stalinist purges between 1937 and 1941, Smolar, given his status of a decorated war hero and party veteran, led the attempts to revive Yiddish cultural activities. However he met insurmountable resistance with, as he believed, distinct antisemitic undertones from top functionaries of the Belarusian republic including Panteleimon Ponomarenko, the head of the republican Communist Party organization.19 While the Belarusian State Yiddish Theater could return to Minsk from evacuation, no Yiddish periodical was relaunched in the city, and the June 1944 decision to establish an academic unit for studying Jewish culture “from Middle Ages to our days” apparently led to nothing.20

18 Yad Vashem Archives, P. 21. 3, File 45. 19 Smolar, Vu bistu khaver Sidorov?, 235–247. 20 “V Akademii nauk BSSR,” Izvestiia, June 7, 1944, 2.

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In 1946, Smolar was summoned to the Party’s Central Committee in Moscow where Jan Dzerzhinsky (born in the Warsaw Pawiak prison to Zofia Muszkat, the Jewish wife and Party comrade of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet repressive apparatus) told him about a plan to dispatch him to Palestine to work there among local communists. As a disciplined Party veteran, Smolar felt he had no choice but to agree to take on such a mission, though, in reality, he and his wife preferred to return to Poland. Ultimately, following an intervention of Smolar’s influential contacts in Warsaw, they were allowed to repatriate.21 By leaving the Soviet Union, in all likelihood, he once again inadvertently rescued himself from being imprisoned by the Stalinist secret police when it began a campaign against the JAFC and its associated people.22 Retrospectively analyzing his life, Smolar identified two categories of Polish Jewish communists among those who survived the war in the Soviet Union: first, former members of illegal Party groups, mainly from Muranowska Dzielnica (or Murdziel for short), a poor Warsaw district, who usually cared very little about preservation of Jewish culture; second, cultural activists who before the war worked in legal Jewish organizations. Smolar did not belong to either of the two groups. In the Polish underground he had little to do with Jewish organizations, but he knew very well and partly belonged to the Soviet Jewish cultural milieu, which made him close to the second group.23 Once in Poland, Smolar actively participated in shaping the nusekh Poyln, or the “Polish style,” developed for Jewish social and cultural life in the newly communist country. This was a model of ostensibly autonomous, albeit in reality state-supervised governing over a range of cultural, educational, and publishing institutions working predominantly in Yiddish.24 Significantly, the model also 21 Hersh Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung (Tel Aviv: I.L. Peretz Farlag, 1982), 12–17. 22 See, for example, Shimon Redlich, ed., War, Holocaust and Stalinism: Documented Study of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995); Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov, eds., Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, trans. Laura Esther Wolfson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 23 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 8–9. Jakub Wasersztrum, a veteran of the Polish communist movement who worked with Smolar in Poland, criticized Smolar’s classifications as oversimplified—see Der tsadik in pelts: zamlung fun artiklen (Tel Aviv: Fraynd tsum shuts fun mentshn-rekht fun lebedike un fun varfn geshtorbene fun kvorim, 1985), 10–14. 24 According to Kamil Kijek, “on the level of official politics, independently of internal Jewish matters, there was no Jewish autonomy in postwar Poland, even in its first years. Jewish committees were fully subjugated to the policies of the state.” See “Aliens in the Lands of

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had a socioeconomic foundation, mainly in the form of producers and other cooperatives, established with the help of foreign Jewish organizations. Smolar held key positions in the Jewish bureaucracy as chair of the Central Committee of Polish Jews (CCPJ, or Centralny Komitet Żydów w Polsce) from 1949, and of its new weaker incarnation—the Jewish Social-Cultural Association ( JSCA, or Towarzystwo Społeczno-Kulturalne Żydów)—from 1950. The latter was fully controlled by the communist party known as the Polish United Workers’ Party. From 1950 Smolar also edited the Yiddish newspaper Folks-shtime (People’s voice) appearing four times weekly in Warsaw. Characteristically, Folks-shtime’s design, structure, and approach to presenting international, domestic, and specifically Jewish material was initially modeled on the Soviet prototype—the JAFC’s newspaper Eynikayt (Unity, 1942–1948). In general, it seems that at the beginning Smolar and people in his circle, mainly returnees from the Soviet Union, considered themselves, to an extent, Polish-based counterparts of the JAFC.

Pain and Little Consolation Before returning to Poland, Smolar spent some time in Moscow where he became a member of the CCPJ formed in 1944. He was appointed to head the Culture and Propaganda Department and act as a member of the committee’s presidium. Evidently it was important for him to work in close coordination with the JAFC though it is unclear the degree to which it stemmed from his personal initiative. In any case, he suggested, for instance, cultural exchange by sending to Poland a group of Soviet writers and actors. The JAFC could not accept Smolar’s plan without getting permission from its overseers in the Communist Party’s Central Committee. Mikhail Suslov, then the head of the Foreign Policy Department at the Central Committee and later known as the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal” in charge of ideology, reacted to this suggestion negatively. In the same year, Solomon Mikhoels, chairman of the JAFC, and Itsik Fefer, the JAFC’s secretary, were not allowed to participate in a conference on Jewish culture in Poland.25 To all appearances, the nature of the nusekh Poyln with the inclusion in the early stages of non-communist activists in the CCJP and other Jewish bodies worried Soviet ideologues. Moreover, by the end of the Piasts: The Polonization of Lower Silesia and Its Jewish Community in the Years 1945– 1950,” in Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe: Shared and Comparative Histories, ed. Tobias Grill (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 245. 25 Redlich, War, the Holocaust and Stalinism, 84–85.

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1946 the future of the JAFC looked very bleak. The committee had even to prepare a plan for its phasing out, but ultimately was allowed to continue its work.26 In 1948 Smolar was charged with maintaining contact with Viktor Lebedev, Soviet Ambassador to Poland and formerly a functionary of the Sovinforburo, to ensure that a delegation of the JAFC would come to the unveiling of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters’ monument. He also remained in constant touch by telephone with Fefer. Smolar would call one week, Fefer would call the other— usually midday Friday. Smolar sought Fefer’s advice, for instance, in his fight against the Bundists, the representatives of foreign Jewish relief organizations, and the Zionists reviled as “the agents of Anglo-Saxon reaction in Poland.”27 In the beginning of 1948, however, Smolar and Fefer spoke mainly about organizing the Soviet delegation’s visit. Ultimately the unveiling took place on April 19, the fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, but, disappointingly, with no Soviet Jewish representatives present at the ceremony.28 Seven months later, in November 1948, a stranger responded rudely to Smolar’s routine Friday telephone call: “There is no Itsik nor Fefer here.” Smolar immediately understood that something really calamitous had taken place in Moscow. The liquidation of the JAFC and all Soviet institutions for Jewish culture had a devastatingly demoralizing effect among Polish Jewish communists and their sympathizers. In addition to worrying about their friends and colleagues, they feared that a similar situation could arise in Poland. Some diehard veterans such as Smolar’s comrade-in-arms Joel ( Julian) Łazebnik, then the Secretary General of CCJP, tried to calm his comrades, arguing: “The Party knows what it is doing.” Still, according to Smolar: “The deep, dark shadow of the events in the Soviet Union followed me at every step. The suspicion drilled into my brain that the ‘Moscow practice’ might affect us, too; that nothing would come out of our hope that our extensive and diverse Jewish

26 Gennady Estraikh, “The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee,” East European Jewish Affairs 48, no. 2 (2018): 143. 27 Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006), 219. In the post-Stalinist climate, Smolar deplored the suspension of contacts with relief organizations in 1949 and 1950 and welcomed their return to Poland in 1957. See Gennady Estraikh, “ORT in Post-Holocaust Poland,” in Educating for Life: New Chapters in the History of ORT, ed. Rachel Bracha et al. (New York: ORT, 2010), 214–215. 28 Michal Mirski and Hersh Smolar, “Commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Reminiscences,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 3, no. 1 (1973): 100; Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 103–117; Redlich, War, the Holocaust and Stalinism, 85.

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work could change the attitude of the Soviet Union toward millions of its Jews and their needs.”29 Two things must be said about this statement. First, by the end of the 1940s, the Jewish autonomous structure in Poland, created for a broad field of economic and cultural activities, had lost many of its “extensive and diverse” functions. In 1949 Smolar himself reported the communists’ opposition to the “nationalist theories of Jewish autonomism,” while Łazebnik explained that: “The only justification for all organizations in Poland . . . is that they serve to translate into deeds the ideological principles in which the reality of Poland is built today.”30 Second, more important for us here, the aforementioned statement implies that Smolar was unhappy all along with the Soviet experience and sought a new formula for Jewish life in communist society. We read in his memoirs that at the time of his repatriation he already wanted to create in Poland a pattern that should also ultimately help rebuild Jewish life in the Soviet Union. According to Smolar, “In Poland, after the war, we laid the foundation for ‘being different’, for becoming an example for Soviet Jews, to [encourage them to] demand their elementary ethnic civil rights.”31 We don’t know if these words, written many years later and carrying a heavy burden of disillusionment, reflected his idealism, naivety or simply retrospective wishful thinking. Meanwhile, in mid-December 1948, Panteleimon Ponomarenko suggested an “explanation” of what had happened with the JAFC. Ponomarenko led the Soviet delegation to the joint congress of the Polish Workers’ Party and the Polish Socialist Party, the congress that resulted in the formation of the governing Polish United Workers’ Party. According to the head of the Belarusian government and party apparatus (in 1955–57, when his star declined, Ponomarenko would serve as the Soviet ambassador to Poland), the Kremlin had sound reasons for closing down the JAFC. First, it became functionally obsolete following the end of the war. Second, the committee included many “nationalist elements.” Third, no decision had been made concerning a different body dealing with Jewish-related issues.32 Lack of reliable information about the events of 1948–52 gave rise to rumors and fabrications. One came from the pen of Bernard Turner, a journalist and former inmate of Stalinist prison camps. His misleading “memoirs” 29 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 163–164. 30 Leon Shapiro, “Poland,” American Jewish Year Book 52 (1951): 339. 31 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 445. 32 Ibid., 162–164.

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appeared in 1956 in the Tel Aviv Yiddish literary journal Di goldene keyt (Golden chain).33 The truth was further blurred by the writings of Léon Leneman, a Parisian journalist and also a former inmate of the Gulag. Leneman based his story of the 1948–52 persecutions on various tidbits, including Turner’s “evidence.” He even fictionalized farcical courtroom antics and details of the Yiddish writers’ appearances during the trial in July 1952.34 A good deal of disinformation was fabricated and spread by the Soviets. In April 1949, at the World Peace Congress in Paris, the novelist Aleksandr Fadeev, chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union, told the following deceptive story: Itsik Fefer, recruited to work for American agent during his 1943 visit in the United States as a representative of JAFC, later lured almost all members of the committee in his anti-Soviet cell.35 In September 1955, Leonid Ilyichev, the head of the Press Department of the Soviet Foreign Office, who came to New York as a member of the Soviet United Nations delegation, reassured American journalists that the Yiddish poet Perets Markish was alive in Moscow.36 In October of the same year, several Soviet literati visited New York where they denied all the rumors about executions of Yiddish writers.37 The truth soon began to catch up. In March 1956, Leon Crystal, a special correspondent of the New York Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward), brought information from Moscow about the August 1952 executions of leading figures in the JAFC including the top Yiddish writers David Bergelson, Itsik Fefer, David Hofshteyn, Leyb Kvitko, and Perets Markish.38 This tragic fact had become known to the Israeli embassy in Moscow, but the Israelis preferred to leak it using a source that could not be traced directly to them. Therefore Crystal’s trip had been planned in such a way that he could claim gleaning the information on his own initiative. Nevertheless, his sensational publication could not convince everyone, especially in the leftist camp, because Forverts was reputed as a newspaper holding strongly biased views on the Soviet Union. 33 For more on Turner, see Leib Rochman, “Di Yisroel-ambasade in Moskve hot aroysgeratevet a yidishn zhurnalist,” Forverts, December 10, 1955, 2, 5. See also the chapter by Miriam Schulz in this volume. 34 Léon Leneman, La tragédie des Juifs en U.S.S.R (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1959), 74–78, 89–100; Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–67: A Documented Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 214–217. 35 Papers of Paul (Pesach) Novick, YIVO Archive, RG 1247, File 55, “Fast, Howard.” 36 Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–67, 50. 37 Y. Khaimson, “Literaturnaya gazeta shtelt-fest az der poet Perets Markish iz toyt,” Forverts, January 28, 1956, 1, 10. 38 See also the chapter by Miriam Schulz in this volume.

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The moment of shocking clarity came on April 4, 1956, when a Folksshtime article entitled “Undzer veytik un undzer treyst” (Our Pain and Our Consolation) provided revealing information of how Stalinist repressions had devastated the Yiddish cultural circles. The article, which did not carry a byline but was written or at least drafted by Smolar, essentially repeated what Crystal had reported from his fact-finding trip. This was no coincidence. On his way back from Moscow, during a stopover in Warsaw, Crystal briefed Smolar about the results of his investigation. Significantly, however, “Our Pain and Our Consolation” did not contain any reference to Crystal and could not be easily dismissed as a hoax because it appeared in the newspaper of Polish communists. The permission of Smolar’s party overseers to publish the exposé reflected the contemporary tumultuous atmosphere in Polish society and in the party establishment. Smolar, and not he alone, was emboldened by the atmosphere of change created in the Soviet Union after the 20th congress of the Communist Party which launched the process of de-Stalinization.39

The Impact “Our Pain and Our Consolation” was widely redistributed and interpreted in the world press as the first semiofficial source of information on the liquidation of Soviet Yiddish cultural institutions and their leading personalities between 1948 and 1952. Some people even imagined that the Warsaw newspaper had published it for the benefit of the Soviets. While Nikita Khrushchev, the new First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, did not mention the Stalinist suppression of Jewish institutions in his “secret speech” in February 1956, delivered in the end of the 20th Communist Party congress, the Folks-shtime article inadvertently played the role of a supplement to that.40 The impact of the article was felt in many corners of the world, consequentially triggering a decline in the number of Jewish organizations, groups, and individuals unconditionally supporting Soviet politics. At the same time, the article remained almost unknown in the Soviet Union where any information about the August 1952 executions could not be published or otherwise publicly discussed until as late as December 1989, when, in the atmosphere of Mikhail

39 Gennady Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War (Oxford: Legenda, 2008), 18–21. 40 Gennadii Kostyrchenko, Tainaia politika Khrushcheva: vlast’, intelligentsiia, evreiskii vopros (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2012), 237.

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Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness), the authorities finally admitted it as a historical fact.41 On May 2, 1956, Smolar wrote to Paul Novick, editor of Morgn-frayhayt (Morning freedom), the Yiddish daily of American communists, emphasizing that the article only reflected the newspaper’s understanding of the situation rather than aimed to be an official declaration. Like Novick and many others, Smolar was waiting in vain for a statement emanating from the Kremlin with a condemnation of what had been done and a plan for rebuilding the destroyed Yiddish cultural landscape.42 Instead, the appearance of the Folks-shtime article irritated Soviet propaganda officials. Leonid Ilyichev called it “slanderous and anti-Soviet” and accused the Warsaw newspaper of picking up facts and distorting them “according to a certain tendency.” According to Ilyichev, the principal mistake was that the article presented the tragic fate of the JAFC as an “isolated anti-Semitic drive,” whereas the Soviet ideologists insisted on universalizing it as “a part of an anti-intellectual campaign which brought a similar fate to many nationalities—Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, Belarusian, and Armenian.”43 The Warsaw editors wrote to Ilyichev asking him to be more specific in clarifying what he had found fallacious in the article. He, however, never favored them with an answer. In November 1956, Smolar and his comrades, apparently feeling insulted by his not responding, published “An Open Letter to Comrade Leonid Ilyichev.”44 Over three months later, in February 1957, the newspaper returned to the issue of Ilyichev’s accusations, quoting Joseph Gershman, editor of the Toronto communist Yiddish newspaper Kanader vokhnblat (Canadian weekly newspaper). Gershman visited Moscow and met with Ilyichev’s deputy who admitted that Ilyichev was not authorized to discuss the Folks-shtime article.45 Meanwhile the top brass of the Soviet contingent stationed in Poland read a Russian translation of “Our Pain and Our Consolation.” It was rumored that the article had also been discussed in the Kremlin during a Politburo meeting and that Anastas Mikoyan, the First Deputy Chairman of the Soviet Council 41 “O tak nazyvaemom ‘dele Evreiskogo antifashistskogo komiteta’,” Izvestiia TsK KPSS 12 (1989): 34–40. 42 Papers of Paul (Pesach) Novick, YIVO Archive, RG 1247, File 264, “Smolar, Hersh.” 43 Pinkus, The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948–67, 59–60. 44 “An ofener briv tsum kh’ Leonid Ilyitshov,” Folks-shtime, November 3, 1956, 4. 45 “Nokhamol vegn Leonid Ilyichovs intervyu mikoyekh der Folks-shtime,” Folks-shtime, February 17, 1957, 4.

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of Ministers, said during the meeting he could not see anything wrong in it.46 Nevertheless, the grievances of Soviet ideologists—and, probably, of Polish ones as well—had consequences. In the beginning of 1957, Folks-shtime lost its status as an organ of the United Polish Workers Party and was downgraded to an organ of the JSCA.47 The French Communist Yiddish writer Chaim Sloves, who visited the Soviet Union in 1958, described his conversation with several Yiddish speakers in the periodicals reading room of the Moscow Lenin Library. All of them were keen to read the available foreign communist Yiddish newspapers, published in Paris, New York, and Tel Aviv.48 Sloves, however, did not mention the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper. It seems that in the aftermath of its April 1956 sensational publication Folks-shtime at least for some time did not appear in the general reading room. Its issues went to the “special preservation” department whose collection was inaccessible to the general reader. A few months after the publication of the article, during a visit to Bucharest, Smolar had a chance to speak with Yakov Shternberg, a Soviet (formerly Romanian) poet and theater director. In 1956 Shternberg, recently liberated from the Gulag, was allowed to visit Romania as a consultant for organizing a jubilee performance dedicated to Abraham Goldfaden, the founder of Yiddish theater. He told Smolar about the arrests and interrogations of Yiddish writers.49 Smolar could also speak with other survivors of the Gulag. One of them was Moyshe Broderson, a well-known Yiddish poet and playwright in pre-1939 Poland. Freed in September 1955, Broderson arrived in Warsaw in June 1956 and died of a heart attack a mere three weeks later.50 In fact, Smolar certainly had already heard stories about the Gulag from those who were lucky enough to be liberated in the late 1930s or in the 1940s. “Our Pain and Our Consolation” was a cathartic reaction of Smolar and his circle to the events in the Soviet Union. For years they remained under heavy psychological pressure, trying to understand and justify the repressive nature of the Soviet regime. Now they found healing in turning to “unblemished” 46 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 217. 47 Itche Goldberg and Yuri Suhl, eds., The End of a Thousand Years: The Recent Exodus of the Jews from Poland (New York: Committee for Jews in Poland, 1971), 35. 48 Chaim Sloves, “Jewish Culture in the Soviet Union,” The New Leader, September 14, 1959, 17–20. 49 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 221. 50 Hersh Smolar, “Azoy moyredik umgerikht, azoy paynlekh umgerekht,” Folks-shtime, August 25, 1956, 4.

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Leninism, to Lenin’s “positive program concerning Jewish workers and popular masses,” the program distorted by “the creators of the anti-Leninist system of [Stalin’s] personality cult.”51 From the mid-1950s onward, “Lenin,” “Leninism,” and “restoration of Leninist norms” were invocations reiterated by communists in many countries in an attempt to draw a line between their beliefs and the Soviet reality. In 1957 Smolar marked Lenin’s eighty-seventh anniversary by pointing out that it was “contrary to Lenin’s tradition” to keep silent about crimes committed against Soviet Jewish culture and cultural leaders and to refuse to renew Jewish activities in the country.52 In March 1958, Smolar and David Sfard, the leading Yiddish writer and editor in Poland, requested—and to all appearances did not get—their Party leadership’s permission to send a letter to Khrushchev. They still wanted to learn what the Soviet leader had in mind concerning Jews and their cultural needs.53 Joshua Shindler, president of the Federation of Polish Jews in England, reported after his visit to Poland that some local Jews expressed concern about the still existing ban on Yiddish publications in Soviet Union, which in the long run could have an adverse effect on Yiddish cultural activities in their country.54

Contacts with Soviet Readers and Writers The press distribution agency Souzpechat, which operated as a monopoly under the Soviet Ministry of Communications, did not include foreign Jewish periodicals in its catalogues, even if they were, like Folks-shtime, communist outlets. It meant that a Soviet citizen normally could not subscribe to such publications. Meanwhile, in the second half of 1956 the Soviet censorship agency, or Glavlit, confiscated 44,000 copies of Folks-shtime.55 Indeed, according to an American communist Yiddish journalist who met with his Warsaw colleagues in the summer of 1956, close to 2,000 copies of each of the paper’s four weekly issues would go to the Soviet Union.56 Apart from some “difficult” periods, censors regarded Folks-shtime as a periodical that a Soviet citizen could receive 51 Hersh Smolar, “Lenins zorg un lere far di yidishe arbeter un folks-masn,” Folks-shtime, April 21, 1956, 3. 52 Hersh Smolar, “Vegn eynike leninishe normes,” Folks-shtime, April 20, 1957, 3. 53 Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu, 235–236. 54 Joshua Shindler, “A Visit to Poland,” Jewish Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1958): 32. 55 Timur A. Dzhalilov, “TsK KPSS o pol’skoi intelligentsii (1953–1958 gg.),” Problemy slavianovedeniia 2 (2000): 180. 56 Chaim Suller, “Jewish Culture in the USSR Today: Another Look One Year Later,” The New Leader, September 14, 1959, 12.

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through mail. As a result, the editorial office of the newspaper became inundated with letters from Soviet Jews asking for the paper. The paper’s editorial staff sponsored subscriptions for a number of their Soviet colleagues, and many Poland-based readers participated in raising funds to cover the expenses incurred from printing additional copies and mailing them to the Soviet Union. From 1955 when the Soviets simplified and eased their requirements for visitors from satellite countries, thousands of Polish tourists went to the Soviet Union, and many of them were Jewish.57 As a result, relatives, friends, and colleagues could renew their contacts. The editors would receive from various Soviet locations parcels with salami, stoned fruits, and caviar as barter payment. The most significant contribution, however, came from the American Federation of Polish Jews.58 An additional readership was important for the survival of the Warsaw newspaper, too. Interestingly, a Leningrad-based Zionist group, formed in the late 1950s, disseminated literature received through the Israeli embassy as well as letters from Israel, and articles from Folks-shtime.59 Also in Leningrad, an amateur Yiddish troupe organized language classes using, for lack of a textbook, an alphabet cut from copies of Folks-shtime.60 In 1954, Smolar made attempts to start getting copies of the newspaper Birobidzhaner shtern (Birobidzhan star), the only surviving Soviet Yiddish periodical, published in Birobidzhan, the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Region ( JAR).61 Smolar had visited Birobidzhan two decades earlier between his two missions to Poland. Although many people knew him personally, he came there under the name of Joseph Brin, a representative of 57 Y. Berger, “Toyznter poylishe yidn zaynen in 1956 geforn bazukhn kroyvim in sovetn-farband,” Morgn-Frayhayt, February 4, 1957, 5; Krzysztof Podemski, “The Polish Tourist Abroad: From Stalinism to Schengen and Wizz Air,” Folia Turistica 25, no. 1 (2011): 211– 230; Dariusz Stola, “Opening a Non-Exit State: The Passport Policy of Communist Poland, 1949–1980,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 29, no. 1 (2015): 106. 58 Smolar, Oyf der letster positsye mit der letster hofenung, 256–257. 59 Yaakov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration 1948–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 278–279. A former Moscow Jewish activist would get Folks-shtime from an Israeli diplomat—see Barukh Podolskii, Besedy ob ivrite i o mnogom drugom (Tel Aviv: Sefer Israel, 2004), 220. In the early 1970s, I was a “second-hand reader” of Folksshtime. An old friend of my father, who settled in Novosibirsk after his liberation from the Gulag, would get the newspaper and send it to us after reading it. 60 Alexander Frenkel, “Iz istorii evreiskoi kul’tury v SSSR epokhi ‘ottepeli’: Leningradskii evreiskii muzykal’no-dramaticheskii ansambl’,” in Idish: iazyk i kul’tura v Sovetskom Soiuze, ed. Leonid Katsis et al. (Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, 2009), 319. 61 Nalewajko-Kulikov, Obywatel Jidyszlandu, 209–210.

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Polish communists sent to welcome the establishment of the Jewish region in the Far East of Russia.62 Like other provincial Soviet newspapers, Birobidzhaner shtern had (until 1970) only local distribution. Beginning in August 1955, the Warsaw newspaper became the only foreign recipient of complimentary copies of the Birobidzhan paper and began to reprint some material, including poems by Aron Vergelis whose literary career started in Birobidzhan.63 In the summer of 1956, after learning that the foreign press cited material published in Birobidzhan, local functionaries raised alarm and reported the problem up the chain of command to Moscow, zeroing in on Folks-shtime as the source of the information leak. In fact, Smolar and his colleagues meant well: their reprints from Birobidzhaner shtern and the reproduction of the postmark bearing the official stamp of the JAR were meant to refute the claims that the Birobidzhan area had lost its Jewish definition. To local officials’ surprise and relief, Moscow’s ideological overseers issued an instruction that Birobidzhaner shtern should expand contacts with “progressive Jewish newspapers.”64 Smolar tried to establish direct contacts with Soviet writers. However, the first attempts were unsuccessful. Emmanuil Kazakevich, a friend from Smolar’s youth, rejected his invitation to publish something in the Warsaw newspaper. A promising Yiddish author in the 1930s and a heroic frontline officer during the war, Kazakevich reinvented himself as an accomplished Russian prose writer and never returned to writing in Yiddish. An attempt to engage Iakov Rives, a veteran communist writer, also came to nothing.65 Gradually, nevertheless, Soviet authors began to send their works for publishing in Warsaw in the pages of Folks-shtime and the Warsaw literary journal Yidishe shriftn (Yiddish writings), especially as—apart from the obscure Birobidzhaner shtern—they did not have an outlet for their poems, stories, and essays. Similarly to Smolar, they, or at least some of them, had grown bolder after the February 1956 20th congress. In some cases, a publication in Folks-shtime was the first sign of life received from a survivor of Stalinism. Meanwhile, the JSCA focused its efforts on facilitating the repatriation of writers and other cultural figures who had been living in the Soviet Union since 62 Smolar, Vu bistu khaver Sidorov?, 126–136. See also Shifra Lipshitz, Khaloymes un virklekhkayt: Biro-bidzhan un arbets-lagern (Tel Aviv: Egns, 1979), 71–72. 63 Aron Vergelis and David Bronfman, “Lirishe lider,” Folks-shtime, October 30, 1955, 5; Aron Vergelis, “Tayge un dzhunglyes,” Folks-shtime, January 14, 1956, 5. 64 See Gennady Estraikh, “Birobidzhan in Khrushchev’s Thaw: The Soviet and the Western Outlook,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 18, no. 1 (2019): 61. 65 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung, 204–205.

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1939. Some of them were directly untouched by the repressions and did not suffer imprisonment, whereas the less fortunate ones were not liberated until after, albeit not immediately after, Stalin’s death. In addition to the newspaper Folks-shtime, the nusekh Poyln infrastructure included a literary journal, a publishing house, a theater, clubs, summer camps, and schools. Yet these institutions lacked a sufficient cadre of journalists, writers, editors, actors, and educators. The majority of those who returned to Poland from the Soviet Union in the wave of repatriation in the second half of the 1940s sooner or later emigrated to Israel or elsewhere. When the new repatriation agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland made emigration of former Polish Jewish citizens once again possible in 1956–59, Smolar and his associates saw it as a chance to supplement their thinned-out ranks. In reality, only a few of the repatriated intellectuals settled permanently in the country.66 In 1961, Smolar once again complained about the dearth of intellectuals.67 It would be an exaggeration to say that the emigration of several cultural activists seriously affected the Soviet Yiddish cultural milieu. In the 1950s the main problem was not the size of the circle of Yiddish writers, journalists, and actors. The Soviet Writers’ Union still had among its member about seventy writers, critics, and translators associated with Yiddish literature.68 The real stumbling block was the lack of infrastructure for Jewish creative activity. By 1958 American historian Leon Shapiro who closely monitored the situation in the Soviet Union, wrote that Soviet writers effectively had no other way to publish their works in Yiddish than to send them to the foreign communist press, particularly Folks-shtime.69 For Yiddish contributors, writing in Yiddish was often a sort of therapy, as poet Moyshe Teyf, who was imprisoned twice, in 1938 and 1951, and fought as a soldier during World War II revealed. In his 1960 poem “I Sing” he wrote: “I sing . . . in order not to cry, / in order not to go out like a light, / if not my song, my bloody-clean one, / I would have lost my mind.”70 In 1959 Itsik Kipnis, also a recently freed Gulag inmate, serialized in the Warsaw newspaper his autobiographical novel, Mayn shtetl Sloveshne 66 See Gennady Estraikh, “Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s,” Jewish History 31, no. 3–4 (2018): 291–317. 67 “Gekirtster protokol fun dem tsuzamentref mitn hoypt-redaktor fun der Varshever tsaytung ‘Folks-shtime’ Hersh Smolyar,” Di yidishe gas 4 (1995): 64–65. 68 Estraikh, Yiddish in the Cold War, 51–52. 69 Leon Shapiro, “Soviet Union,” American Jewish Year Book 59 (1958): 320. 70 Moyshe Teyf, Lider, balades, poemes (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1985), 16.

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(My shtetl Sloveshne). In 1961 the Warsaw publishing house Yidish Bukh (Yiddish book) brought out a collection of stories, 33 noveln (33 novellas), by Shira Gorshman, and the next year a children’s book by Kipnis, Zeks epl; di kluge binen (Six apples; the wise bees), came out under the same imprint. In 1965 they printed the Yiddish version of Masha Rolnik’s autobiographical story Ikh muz dertseyln (I must tell). Rolnik (or Mariia Rolnikaite) wrote it in the form of a diary of a teenage inhabitant of the Vilna ghetto which has often been compared with Anne Frank’s diary. The Lithuanian and Russian versions came out in the Soviet Union while the Yiddish version was published in Warsaw in cooperation with the Novosti Press Agency, successor in 1961 to the Sovinformburo. Its Jewish specialist Semen Rabinovich, also a former Gulag inmate, coordinated this joint venture.71 Apart from publishing stories, poems, and articles by its Soviet authors, Folks-shtime chronicled developments in Soviet Jewish life. Judging by the geographical distribution of its Soviet contributors, the paper had readers in many cities and towns, most notably in the Baltic republics. It also had permanent correspondents in the Soviet Union such as Itshok Katsnelson in Moscow, Joseph Pertsovski in Leningrad, Yona Rodinov in Riga, and Shmuel Kolanski in Vilnius.

Sovetish heymland In August 1956, Joseph Baruch Salsberg, a popular Jewish political activist, came to Moscow with several other leading Canadian communists. He was included in the delegation because Jewish party membership insisted on Salsberg’s participation in searching for the truth about anti-Jewish repression and the post-Stalin Soviet leaders’ plans concerning Jewish life in Soviet society. The delegation held a series of meetings with high-ranking Soviet functionaries including Mikhail Suslov, now a member of the Politburo. Khrushchev took part in their last meeting. During the meetings, Salsberg raised the question of the status of Soviet Jews, particularly whether they were regarded as a community entitled to have their own press, theaters, and schools. He argued that Soviet Jews should be given a chance to decide what kind of institutions they needed. For this purpose, he proposed opening local Jewish workers’ clubs and creation of a ruling body—the All-Union Jewish committee. Clearly,

71 Mariia Rolnikaite, I eto vse pravda (St. Petersburg: Zolotoi vek, 2002), 523, 555–567.

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Salsberg’s suggested borrowing the model of Jewish communal organization implemented in post-war Poland. In their response, the Soviet representatives explained that only Birobidzhan-based Jews qualified to be considered a special community, whereas in all other parts of the country Jews were treated “like all other Soviet citizens.”72 Nevertheless, five years later, in August 1961, it was in Moscow rather than in Birobidzhan that the first issue of a new Yiddish journal appeared. Entitled Sovetish heymland (Soviet homeland) and based in the capital, the journal effectively undermined the Birobidzhan-centered model of Soviet Jewry. Aron Vergelis, editor of the journal, became the voice of the Soviet policy towards Jews. And this was quite an unpleasant voice to many people in the country and abroad. Vergelis and Smolar, two abrasive characters, had a confrontation in November 1961 when Smolar visited the office of the Moscow journal. They knew each other from the time when both were associated with the JAFC. In fact, Smolar knew all or almost all the participants of the meeting. He had worked with some of them in the 1920s. During this “friendly” meeting, with many fine words said about Folks-shtime’s role in “saving” Soviet Yiddish literary culture, Vergelis and several other Moscow writers sharply rebuked Smolar for “indiscriminately” publishing materials without approval from the Moscow-based Yiddish editors. For example, they resented the publication in Folks-shtime of an article by Odessa writer Irme Druker who claimed that poet Shmuel Halkin, a highly respected figure in the Yiddish literary community, had passed the baton to veteran writer Joseph Rabin.73 This was a particularly sensitive issue for Vergelis and his supporters whose opponents (falsely) maintained that the launch of Sovietish heymland was purposefully delayed in expectation of Halkin’s death. According to Vergelis’s detractors, Halkin was the most obvious person to edit the Moscow journal. From the very beginning, Vergelis kept a jealous eye over the authors who were in a “non-exclusive relationship” with his journal. He sought to re-establish the conditions of the 1940s when no direct contacts existed between Soviet authors and non-Soviet communist periodicals. Manuscripts would be 72 Gennady Estraikh, “Metamorphoses of Morgn-frayhayt,” in Yiddish and the Left, ed. Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: Legenda, 2001), 151–156; Gerald J. J. Tulchinsky, Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 104–108. 73 “Gekirtster protokol fun dem tsuzamentref mitn hoypt-redaktor fun der Varshever tsaytung ‘Folks-shtime’ Hersh Smolyar,” 62–71; Smolar, Oyf der letster positsye mit der letster hofenung, 261–262.

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sent only through such official channels as the Sovinformburo. Although the Novosti Press Agency played a similar role in the post-Stalinist period, many poems, stories, and essays would reach Warsaw bypassing Soviet censorship.74 Significantly, when the writers or their widows sent a text for publication in Poland, a socialist country, they did not regard themselves as dissidents. Push came to shove. Smolar saw himself as a custodian of real Leninism and an “elder brother” for the surviving Soviet Yiddish literati. He was thirteen years older than Vergelis and, like many Soviet Yiddish writers, looked at him as an insolent upstart with an arguably murky reputation concerning his conduct in the 1940s, particularly during the Stalinist repression. Smolar met separately with those writers who opposed Vergelis. The alternative meeting took place at the apartment of Vergelis’s archenemy, Moyshe Belenky, who headed the Yiddish Theater School before the repression of 1948 and also was editor-inchief of the publishing house Der Emes. Belenky enjoyed support among the group opposing Vergelis and believed that he, rather than Vergelis, deserved to edit the Moscow journal. Smolar promised the writers he would publish their works, disregarding Vergelis’s complaints.75 Ironically, the Warsaw newspaper became a kind of “dissident periodical”—not, of course, in terms of communist ideology but of Vergelis’s “domestic policy.” On November 29, 1962, Konstantin Fedin, a prominent Russian writer, chaired a meeting called by the Writers’ Union in response to a letter from a group of Yiddish writers who wanted to remove Vergelis from his editorial post. In particular, he was accused of ignoring the 19th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In protest, “the Polish comrades” sent back the March-April issue of the journal.76 Vergelis kept the job, but learned the lesson: in 1963 some fifty pages of the journal’s March-April issue were devoted to the 20th anniversary of the uprising. This material included an article by Hersh Smolar. In April 1965 Vergelis visited Warsaw. However, his travel notes contained little traces of personal contacts with local Yiddish literati.77 It seems that Smolar had much better relations with Semen Rabinovich, a veteran Soviet Yiddish journalist, who, after his release from the Gulag, worked 74 Hersh Smolar, “Zikhroynes fun gevezene redaktorn fun yidish tsaytungen in Poyln,” in Yahadut Be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot ba-aspaklaryah shel ‘itonut yidish be-Polin, ed. Mordechai Altshuler ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1975), lamed-giml, lamed-tes. 75 Smolar, “Zikhroynes fun gevezene redaktorn fun yidish tsaytungen in Poyln,” lamed-zain. 76 Stenogramma zasedaniia sekretariata ot 29 noiabria 1962 g., Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, 631-30-952. 77 Aron Vergelis, “Rayzes: Poyln,” Sovetish heymland 11 (1965): 122.

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at the Sovinformburo and, then, the Novosti Press Agency. (Novick, whose relations with Vergelis turned sour by the end of the 1960s, wrote to Smolar on December 28, 1971, following Rabinovich’s death, that the deceased was “a decent person, not like the Red-Haired”—Vergelis’s nickname.)78 Rabinovich was also the Moscow correspondent for the New York Morgn-frayhayt. His main responsibility at the Novosti Press Agency was preparing material recommended for publication in the foreign Jewish press. This was a source of income for Yiddish writers because the Agency paid them honoraria.79 As editor of one of the Agency’s partners, Smolar received an invitation to come to Moscow to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.80 However, the invitation was cancelled following Smolar’s trip to Israel in March 1967. The problem was that Smolar went to the twentieth jubilee of Kol-Haam (meaning in Hebrew the same as Folks-shtime—“People’s voice”), which was a communist newspaper, but since the 1965 split in the Israeli communist movement it had been an organ of the “revisionist” New Communist List (Rakah) formed in opposition to the dogmatically pro-Soviet Israeli Communist Party (Maki). During a meeting with a group of Israeli journalists Smolar posited that, in the current political climate, his newspaper remained for Polish and Soviet Jews the only link with the outside world.81 In the end, the trip, initially approved by the Polish authorities, was denounced as an ideologically harmful act that revealed Smolar’s Zionist mindset.82 The atmosphere created after the June 1967 war in the Middle East made Smolar’s “wrongdoing” more consequential, especially as in the first days of the conflict Folks-shtime did not rely on the Polish and Soviet news agencies and reported Israel’s decisive victory and its acclaim by the world Jewry. This disobedience provoked condemnation from the Polish authorities.83

78 Papers of Paul (Pesach) Novick, YIVO Archive, RG 1247, File 265, “Smolar, Hersh.” 79 See, for example, Mordechai Altshuler, Briv fun yidishe sovetishe shraybers ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1979), 433. 80 Smolar, “Zikhroynes fun gevezene redaktorn fun yidish tsaytungen in Poyln,” lamed-zain. 81 “Hersh Smolyar, redaktor fun Varshe ‘Folks-shteme’ bagrist in Yisroel,” Forverts, March 13, 1967, 8. 82 Anatol Laszczyński, “Sprawa redaktora naczelnego ‘Fołks-Sztyme’ Grzegorza Smolara na tle wydarzeń lat 1967–1968,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 3, no. 2 ( July 1995– June 1996): 131–152. 83 Anat Plocker, “Zionists to Dayan”: The anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland, 1967–1968. Ph.D dissertation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2009), 41, 69, 75–76.

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1968 and Later Polish Jewish life, recreated in the first years after the liberation from German occupation, looked like an oasis compared with the Soviet wasteland. Significantly, the organizational structure of Jewish life in communist Poland resembled that in the Soviet Union of the 1920s and early 1930s. This contrasting picture between the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and Poland on the one hand and between Poland before and Poland after 1968 on the other hand helped create a separate mythology for Polish Jewish communist activities. According to that narrative, such people as Smolar followed Leninist norms in their work in national policies, whereas Josef Stalin and Poland’s postwar Communist leader Władysław Gomułka formed hostile, anti-Leninist environments. In 1968, in the wave of the Polish authorities’ sweeping removal of “Zionist” intellectuals and apparatchiks, Smolar found himself being punished by the authorities. In March he lost his job, and in April lost his party membership.84 He wrote to Gomułka recalling sententiously his experience of writing to Lenin nearly half a century earlier when as a young worker in Kyiv he had faced a time of great personal difficulty—and Lenin’s secretary had answered him.85 Adoration of Lenin and Leninism remained an important part of his outlook even after the collapse of the Polish experiment of Jewish life and the dramatic changes in his own life. In 1970 he was allowed to go to Paris on the invitation of Dora Teitelboim, a Yiddish poet. His sister Esther, married to the Yiddish writer Benyomin Shlevin, also lived in Paris. Smolar’s wife, a well-established historian in Polish academia, did not follow him nor their sons, active participants in 1968 student protests who were arrested in Poland and later settled abroad. In 1971, Smolar moved to Israel and lived there until the end of his life, working tirelessly on writing books which recounted his rich experiences.86 He also made changes to his previously published works. Thus, in his revised book, Sovetishe yidn hinter geto-tsoymen (1985, called Fun Minsker geto in 1946),87 he deleted the reference to the inspiring and leading roles of Stalin and Ponomarenko in organizing the 84 Piotr Smolar, Mauvais juif (Paris: Équateurs, 2019), 123–128. 85 Marci Shore, “‘If We’re Proud of Freud . . .’: The Family Romance of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’,” East European Politics and Societies 23, no. 3 (2009): 307–308. 86 Laszczyński, “Sprawa redaktora naczelnego ‘Fołks-Sztyme’ Grzegorza Smolara na tle wydarzeń lat 1967–1968,” 134. 87 It was translated into English as The Minsk Ghetto: Soviet-Jewish Partisans Against the Nazis (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989).

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anti-Nazi resistance.88 Some of his former comrades were unhappy with the version of the events in his memoirs and even compared him with “a righteous person in a fur coat” referring to a Hassidic parable about things one can do in freezing cold: build a fire to warm many people or wrap oneself in a fur coat.89 No doubt, the memoirs are self-serving and not always reliable. For all that, his literary legacy provides a unique informative insight into, and a hindsight evaluation of, the bygone world of Jewish communists in the Soviet Union and Poland. In December 1969, not long before leaving Poland, Smolar wrote a letter to the editors of the Parisian communist Yiddish newspaper Naye prese (New press) reassuring them of his loyalty to communism.90 Publishing the minutes of the November 1961 meeting, Vergelis added a footnote to Smolar’s words “We will not make any ideological compromises.” The footnote read: “In the coming years, following his moving from Poland to Israel, H. Smolar backed off from his extreme ideological position and went to the other extreme of anti-communism.”91 In reality, he remained loyal to communism as he understood it and, at the same time, rejected the ideology practiced in the Soviet Union and its Polish satellite. All in all, despite leaving the Soviet Union in 1946, Smolar remained a significant presence in Soviet Jewish life for over two decades. The newspaper under his editorship had a relatively sizable readership in the Soviet Union and functioned as an important, sometimes sole outlet for Soviet authors. He also played a historical role in exposing Stalinist crimes against Jewish cultural figures. It was painful for him to learn that some Soviet authors of anti-Zionist books described him as a profiteer in the ghetto rather than a resistance fighter. However, later publications gave his heroic reputation back to him.92 Contemporary historians recognize Smolar’s paramount role in the resistance

88 Franziska Exeler, “Reckoning with Occupation: Soviet Power, Local Communities, and the Ghosts of Wartime Behavior in Post-1944 Belorussia” (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2013), 362. 89 See Der tsadik in pelts. 90 “Farvos mir hobn nisht gemakht far im keyn reklame…,” Naye prese, July 29–30, 1975, 3–4. 91 “Gekirtster protokol fun dem tsuzamentref mitn hoypt-redaktor fun der Varshever tsaytung ‘Folks-shtime’ Hersh Smolyar,” 65. See also Aron Vergelis, A vort afn ort: polemishe notitsn [Supplement to Sovetish heymland, nos. 6–7, 1984] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1984), 47–48. 92 See, for example, Emanuil Ioffe, “Eto bylo v Minskom getto,” Belaruskaia dumka 10 (2018): 45–51.

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groups formed in the Minsk ghetto.93 His three books written and published in Israel—Vu bistu khaver Sidorov? (Where are you, comrade Sidorov?, 1975), Fun ineveynik (From inside, 1978), and Oyf der letster pozitsye, mit der letster hofenung (On the last position, with the last hope, 1982)—are a must-read (in original Yiddish or in Hebrew translation) for students of Soviet and Polish Jewish history in the twentieth century.

93 See, in particular, Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941–1943: Jewish Resistance and Soviet Internationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008); Evgeny Finkel, “The Phoenix Effect of State Repression: Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust,” The American Political Science Review 109, no. 2 (2015): 339–353.

CHAPTER 9

Contested Memories: Soviet and Polish Jewish Refugees and Evacuees Recount Their Experience on the Soviet Home Front Natalie Belsky

U

pon first embarking on the study of Jewish deportees and evacuees during the Second World War, one of my main interests was examining the interactions between Soviet Jews and Polish Jews on the Soviet home front.1 I believed that relations between these two groups would provide fertile ground to explore the role a shared ethnic identity and, potentially, shared beliefs and practices, played in creating communities and social networks in the wake of wartime displacement. I also hoped that the topic would help further clarify how “Jewishness” was defined and understood by distinct actors. I found this question particularly interesting because most Soviet Jews and Jews from Eastern Poland had roots in the shtetls of the Pale of Jewish Settlement in the Russian Empire. In other words, Polish Jews and Soviet Jews more often than not shared a common background but their experiences and trajectories in the 1920s and 1930s differed markedly depending on which side of the SovietPolish border they lived. 1

In this chapter, I use the term “Polish Jews” to refer to Jews who lived in Poland prior to 1939; many of whom were arrested and deported in 1940 and 1941. I use the term “Soviet Jews” to refer to those who lived in the USSR and were Soviet citizens prior to 1939. Interestingly, in some of the accounts of the Polish Jews they use the term “Russian Jews” to refer to the latter. I do not mean to suggest here that Soviet Jews and Polish Jews saw themselves as cohesive social entities—rather to point out that there are two distinct categories here.

Contested Memories

In this chapter, I will discuss the way in which Soviet Jews and Polish Jews described one another and their interactions in the context of wartime displacement.2 The examples examined here derive from memoirs, testimonies and interviews, most of which were recorded decades later.3 Thus, it is critical to point out that while these examples shed light on the kinds of encounters that took place, the information survivors chose to include (and not include) also tells us a great deal about how individuals remembered the past and how they chose to construct their life stories.4 The importance and emphasis (or lack thereof) that survivors placed on these encounters and the meanings they derived from them sheds light on the way in which they understood their own sense of belonging and community in the context of wartime displacement. The social history of Jewish flight and survival in the unoccupied areas of the Soviet Union has received renewed attention in the last decade or so and has increasingly brought about a reconceptualization of traditional notions of Holocaust survival.5 The present chapter contributes to a growing scholarship 2

On Polish Jews and their reflections on their wartime experiences in the USSR see the chapter by John Goldlust in this volume. 3 In conducting research for this chapter, I examined many published and archival memoirs, as well as a large collection of testimonies of Soviet Jewish evacuees at the Evakuatsiia: Vospominaniia o detstve, opalennom ognem Katastrofy site at www.lost-childhood.com and a large collection of oral histories stored at the Judaica Institute in Kiev and at the United States Holocaust Museum Archives (USHMM, RG 31.027, “Transcripts of Oral Histories of Ukrainian Jews from the Project ‘Jewish Fates—Ukraine—20th Century’,” 1930–1950; 1995–2004.) 4 In this chapter, I refer to both Soviet and Polish Jewish evacuees and refugees as survivors, seeing as most would have likely perished had they remained in their homes. In using this broader definition of the term, I am referencing the definition used by the authors and editors of a recent edited volume. See Mark Edele et al., eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). Here, I will also be working primarily with postwar sources since my focus is to consider the way in which individuals recalled these events afterwards. 5 For some examples of the recent scholarship, see Eliyana R. Adler and Natalia Aleksiun, “Seeking Relative Safety: The Flight of Polish Jews to the East in the Autumn of 1939,” Yad Vashem Studies 46, no. 1 (2018): 41–71; Mordechai Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion: Policies and Realities,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993); Vadim Dubson, “Towards a Central Database of Evacuated Soviet Jews’ Names, for the Study of the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Territories,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 95–119; Edele, Shelter from the Holocaust; Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 61–79; Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities During World

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that analyzes the postwar memory of the Soviet sojourn for Polish and Soviet Jewish survivors.6 In testimonies penned by Soviet Jews, I found relatively few references to interactions with Polish Jews. In these accounts, Polish Jews tend to play a relatively symbolic role; they are often characterized, particularly by survivors who were children at the time of the war, as enigmatic foreigners. In an account written in 1990, Abram Tseitlin, who was evacuated from central Ukraine to Uzbekistan with his parents and brother, writes that his family and the other Soviet evacuees had very little in common with the Polish Jews who arrived in the area.7 In fact, he writes quite disparagingly of the Polish Jews and appears to unwittingly engage in typical antisemitic stereotypes, characterizing them as pushy, loud, obnoxious, and greedy. Tseitlin describes them as arriving with lots of belongings which enabled them to quickly dominate the local barter economy.8 Tseitlin’s testimony suggests that the Soviet Jews and Polish Jews in Kermine (present day Navoiy, Uzbekistan) the town where his family was displaced, did not associate with one another, despite the fact that he himself helped gather fabric and cotton for a Polish Jewish woman who made quilts for the local population. In return for the fabric and cotton, the woman rewarded the kids with candy, but her attitude and behavior clearly turned him off: “it was unpleasant to have to deal with this forever grumbling, loud-mouthed, and foul-smelling old woman, who was afraid to let us into her home.”9 It is conceivable that Tseitlin’s evident revulsion derives from a sense that his family and friends, belonging to the class of Soviet professionals, would not stoop to behaving in such a manner. War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 85–121; Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Markus Nesselrodt, “’I Bled like You, Brother, Although I Was a Thousand Miles Away’: Postwar Yiddish Sources on the Experience of Polish Jews in Soviet Exile during World War II,” East European Jewish Affairs 46, no.1 (2016): 47–67. 6 See Eliyana Adler, “Crossing Over: Exploring the Borders of Holocaust Testimony,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 247–274; Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 373–399; Anna Shternshis, “Between Life and Death: Why Some Soviet Jews Decided to Leave and Others to Stay in 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 477–504. 7 Memoir of Abram Tseitlin, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives (USHMM), RG 31.053, Ch. 6., Original Source: Judaica Institute, Kiev, Ukraine. 8 Memoir of Abram Tseitlin, Ch.6, ll.1-2. 9 Ibid,, Ch.6, l.3.

Contested Memories

In recounting an anti-Jewish pogrom that broke out in Kermine in the spring of 1942, Tseitlin takes pains to emphasize that it targeted the Poles exclusively: There was not a small number of Jews living in Kermine who had been evacuated from Ukraine and the western regions of Russia. The pogrom did not touch them, and this can only be evidence of the fact that they [the locals] saw the Poles [Polish Jews] as their competitors and as outsiders. The evacuees on the other hand were more like “their own” people, especially as they did not set themselves against the local residents and their menfolk were either fighting or working.10

Thus, Tseitlin draws a clear distinction between the Soviet and Polish Jews, particularly because of their supposedly differing attitudes and economic activities. Tseitlin and others emphasize that Polish Jews did not understand Soviet principles and values. In an interview, one woman reflected that she looked down on the Polish Jews, including her Polish Jewish suitor, because they criticized the USSR and were, in her view, “poorly educated (malogrammotnye).”11 In her memoir, Elena Aksel’rod, the daughter of Russian Jewish artist Meer Aksel’rod, recalled that “the Poles [Polish Jews]” would often spend the night on the floor or on the table in the room her family secured in evacuation in Alma-Ata (present-day Almaty, Kazakhstan), highlighting her parents’ generosity as well as the Polish Jews’ lower status.12 In other testimonies, Soviet Jews characterize the Polish Jews as exotic-looking outsiders who remained attached to an antiquated world of religious observance and ritual. One young woman noted that the Polish Jews “followed all Jewish traditions” and the detail that stuck in her mind was that of a wedding being conducted under a chuppah, a canopy traditionally used for Jewish weddings.13 Children raised in the ostensibly atheist Soviet Union reported being struck by the odd appearance and mannerisms of some of the 10 Memoir of Abram Tseitlin, Ch.6. l.4. 11 Transcripts of Oral Histories of Ukrainian Jews from the Project “Jewish Fates–Ukraine– Twentieth Century,” 1930–1950; 1995–2004, USHMM, RG 31.027, Box 12, Folder 51, 1.125. Original Source: Judaica Institute, Kiev, Ukraine. 12 Elena Aksel’rod, Dvor na Barrikadnoi: Vospominaniia, pis’ma, stikhi (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008), 116. 13 USHMM, RG 31.027, Box 7, Folder 50, l.32. Original Source: Judaica Institute, Kiev, Ukraine.

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Polish Jews they encountered. For these youngsters, the Polish Jewish refugees represented as much a novelty as the other minority populations (for example Uzbeks, Kazakhs, etc.) they encountered in Central Asia. Elena Aksel’rod described the Polish Jews as people “with a bizarre and unfamiliar appearance (dikovinnogo neprivychnogo oblika),” despite the fact that her parents associated with Polish Jewish artists and writers and helped them a great deal.14 In the course of his family’s journey to the east from Kamenetsk-Podol’sk, Semen Ar’ev recalled seeing a Hasidic Jewish family for the first time. Ar’ev noted the man’s odd appearance–his clothes, his side-locks, and beard, while his grandmother explained that these were refugees from Poland.15 Evacuated from Kiev to the Volga German region, Viktor Radutskii recalled an almost mythical encounter with a Polish Jewish man who came to ask for hot tea from Radutskii’s grandmother (evidently because he guessed that Radutskii’s family was Jewish). Radutskii and his siblings were struck by the man’s appearance and manner of speaking.16 Despite the fact that Radutskii would meet the man more than once during the years of the war, he does not provide his name. Instead, he chooses to describe him as an archetype, a representative of the “wandering Jew”: “Later, already in my other life, when a dear friend brought me from Hungary a volume of Marc Chagall’s reproductions as a gift, I saw that Jew again. Look at the painting ‘Loneliness’ (1933)—that is certainly him!”17 This comment seems to encapsulate the notion that, from the Soviet Jewish perspective, the “Polish Jewish refugee” was, more than anything, a mythical figure. In describing the Polish Jewish woman who made quilts in Kermine, Tseitlin wrote that he associated her with a character from Gogol’s satirical masterpiece Dead Souls—the inveterate hoarder and miser Pliushkin.18 Thus, the Polish Jew becomes a two-dimensional literary character rather than a genuine interlocutor.

14 Elena Aksel’rod, “Kazakhstanskaia purga,” Evakuatsiia: Vospominaniia o detstve, opalennom ognem Katastrofy, accessed December 23, 2019, http://www.lost-childhood.com/shkola-vyzhivaniya/220-elena-akselrod. 15 Semen Ar’ev, “Doroga,” Evakuatsiia: Vospominaniia o detstve, opalennom ognem Katastrofy, accessed December 23, 2019, http://www.lost-childhood.com/index.php/evrejskie-bezhentsy/62-semen-arev. 16 Viktor Radutskii, “Stranitsy odnoi evakuatsii,” Evakuatsiia: Vospominaniia o detstve opalennom ognem Katastrofy, accessed December 23, 2019, http://www.lost-childhood.com/ index.php/shkola-vyzhivaniya/141%C2%ADviktor-radutskij. 17 Ibid. 18 Memoir of Abram Tseitlin, Ch.6. l.3.

Contested Memories

While this is certainly limited evidence, it does raise some interesting questions. It is important to keep in mind that most memoirs and testimonies were written and recorded decades later by individuals who were children during the years of the war. At the same time, these examples demonstrate a clear desire on the part of the authors to differentiate between themselves and their families, seen as modern, professional, Soviet citizens, and the supposedly more traditional Polish Jews.19 Moreover, it is notable that the Polish Jews are described in stereotypical terms and often remain nameless. Intentionally or not, the Polish Jews in these narratives seem to function as a symbolic “Other” against which the Soviet Jews define themselves. The Polish Jew is the foil that represents those qualities which Soviet citizens were expected to have overcome—specifically an attachment to religious traditions and rites and a bourgeois attachment to material goods. Now, I would like to shift attention to the perspectives of the Polish Jews and the ways in which their narratives addressed relations between themselves and the Soviet Jews. Here we have many more examples and a richer set of accounts to draw on. First of all, we have many more accounts by Polish Jewish survivors and they are more likely to mention their encounters with Soviet Jews. There are several potential reasons for this. On the one hand, Soviet Jews often played important roles in helping Polish Jews who were in dire financial straits and had little familiarity with the Soviet system. Moreover, I would argue that Polish Jewish survivors are more likely to frame their accounts in the context of their Jewish identity. Most Polish Jewish refugees repatriated to Poland from the Soviet Union after the war and returned home to learn about the tragic fates of their loved ones under Nazi occupation. Many would later make their way to DP camps in Germany and then onto the US, Israel, and other destinations. Their understanding of their own wartime experience was informed and framed by a consciousness of their Jewish ethnicity and the knowledge of the Holocaust.20 On the other hand, for Soviet Jews who remained in the 19 For more information on Soviet Jewish identity and culture, see the work of Anna Shternshis, David Shneer, Jeffrey Veidlinger and others. David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture, 1918–1930 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anna Shternshis, Soviet & Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Shternshis, When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine, 1919–1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 20 For a discussion of the ways in which Polish Jewish accounts of their time in the USSR changed over time, see the excellent article by Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky.

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USSR, their accounts tend to be contextualized within the Soviet experience and mythology of the Great Patriotic War. The particularity of the Jewish experience and a reliance on the aid of fellow Jews plays a much smaller role in shaping their memory of their wartime experience. In the narratives of Polish Jews, the authors often recount turning to Soviet Jews for help at difficult moments. The Soviet Jew who shows up in the nick of time to help the Polish Jews out of a difficult situation is a common trope in these accounts. At the same time, they relate that Soviet Jews were eager to hear about their lives because the Poles represented a connection with Jewish tradition and culture, some of which had been lost or suppressed in the context of the Soviet anti-religion campaigns. For example, Polish Jewish accounts indicate that Polish and Soviet Jews gathered together to celebrate Jewish holidays; these events were almost always spearheaded by the Poles, and the Soviet Jews exhibited, on the one hand, an interest to take part and, on the other, a hesitancy to do so because of the potential dangers of openly practicing their religion in the USSR. In a memoir written in the 1990s, Jack Pomerantz writes of his fortuitous encounter with a Soviet Jewish Red Army officer upon escaping from a Siberian camp; the officer helped him gain passage to Alma-Ata and shared his food supplies with Pomerantz. Pomerantz describes observing the officer on the platform, noting his high rank, and deciding to approach him: “I do not know what possessed me to approach him or to ask, in my still awkward Russian, if he wanted help loading his suitcases on the train.”21 The description suggests that Pomerantz was somehow drawn to this man and chose to confide in him, despite the fact that he had every reason to expect that the officer would turn him in, given that Pomerantz was an escapee carrying false papers. Indeed, the officer turned out to be Jewish and a Yiddish speaker to boot, and, according to Pomerantz’ account, their shared language served to forge an immediate connection between them: “he spoke to me in a whisper, in Yiddish…My heart was swelling inside of me. The words were like music, like the first sounds of home.”22 While Soviet Jews write about the lack of familiarity between themselves and the Polish Jews, the emphasis here is explicitly on the connection between two people from distinct walks of life, borne exclusively from a shared Jewish background. Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost?,” 373–399. 21 Jack Pomerantz and Lyric Wallwork Winik, Run East: Flight from the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 79. 22 Pomerantz and Winik, Run East, 79.

Contested Memories

Curiously, the memoir of Yitzkhak Erlichson, published originally in Yiddish in 1953, describes an encounter that is markedly similar to Pomerantz’ account. Erlichson, a Polish Jew from the Kielce area, was desperate to make his way from Novosibirsk to Kuibyshev (present-day Samara) where he hoped to visit the representatives of the Polish government-in-exile. To sneak onto the train, Erlichson offered to help a Jewish man on the platform, an evacuee from Kiev, with his bags. The man accepted the offer despite the fact that, as Erlichson writes, “neither the circumstances nor my appearance would have filled him with overwhelming trust,” and even rewarded Erlichson with 400 rubles for his help.23 Like Pomerantz, Erlichson implies that an imperceptible bond brought the two together. The account provided by Michael Kesler details an even more fortuitous encounter. Kesler and his sister Luba fled east from their hometown of Dubno immediately after the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Upon arrival in Kiev, Kesler’s sister immediately met a Jewish Red Army soldier, one Leonid Kaganovich, who not only directed them to go to Kirovograd (present-day Kropyvnytskyi) where they could find shelter with his parents, but also helped them secure train passage to the town. Kaganovich’s parents, who had good jobs and a comfortable home in Kirovograd, welcomed the refugees into their home and provided them a much-needed respite on their difficult journey.24 As the Nazi assault continued into central Ukraine, the couple provided them with travel documents and provisions to travel further east. Of their departure from Kirovograd, Kesler wrote: “I felt saddened and lonely, without roots, without destination, yet thankful for having met these wonderful people.”25 Their time with the Kaganovich family provided the refugees with a rare glimmer of warmth and kindness at a time dominated by fear, loss and anxiety. Incredibly, the Keslers encountered the Kaganovich couple over a year later in Tashkent. Yet again, the Kaganovichs, though now less well-off as evacuees, hosted the Keslers while they found their bearings.26

23 Yitzkhak Erlichson, My Four Years in Soviet Russia, trans. Maurice Wolfthal (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 107–108. Erlichson’s memoir was originally published in Yiddish in Paris in 1953, under the title Mayne fir yor in sovyet-rusland. The English translation was published by the Academic Studies Press in 2013. 24 Michael G. Kesler, PhD. Shards of War: Fleeing to & From Uzbekistan (Durham, CT: Strategic Book Group, 2010), Chapter 3. 25 Michael G. Kesler, Shards of War, 47. 26 Ibid., 80–84.

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The trope of the Soviet Jewish “rescuer” surfacing at critical moments is repeated in other memoirs. In his biography of David Kleinman, Herman Taube relates an episode in which Kleinman, a young refugee from Łódź who was separated from his family and had been wounded in the course of his flight, was warned by a Soviet Jewish lieutenant in Poltava to change his name and alter his wartime narrative to better fit the political realities within the Soviet Union. Significantly, the lieutenant addressed Kleinman in Yiddish, a signifier of their shared identity. He then provided Kleinman with the necessary paperwork to match his new credentials.27 In another case, Rita Blattberg Blumstein, a Polish Jewish refugee from Kraków, recounts that a Soviet Jewish couple offered her family critical advice about where they should settle after their release from the camps in 1941. The Soviet Jews warned them against heading south to Central Asia because Blumstein’s mother suffered from malaria. Instead, they advised them to go to the Udmurt region and helped put them in touch with relatives who lived there.28 Thus, in Polish Jews’ accounts, Soviet Jews are cast in the role of advisors, helping their Polish counterparts adapt to and navigate the intricacies of the Soviet bureaucracy. Moreover, the narratives reflect an implicit assumption that Soviet Jews’ desire and willingness to help was borne, at least in part, out of their recognition of a shared Jewish identity and a resulting sense of trust and perhaps even obligation, in spite of their differences. They highlight that it was specifically Soviet Jews who came to their rescue, rather than Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, or Poles. Thus, it is important to consider the possibility that these encounters were more likely to be remembered and recorded by survivors precisely because of their own presumptions about the significance of a shared Jewish identity. While Soviet Jewish accounts highlight the stark differences between Soviet Jews and Polish Jews, the Polish Jewish accounts underscore the commonalities in spite of their distinct circumstances. In some cases, the descriptions of the bonds that developed between Soviet and Polish Jews were particularly evocative. Upon his arrival in Astrakhan, Samuel Honig recounts an almost mystical encounter with a Soviet Jewish woman: 27 Herman Taube, Surviving Despair: A Story About Perseverance (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2007), 53–54. 28 Rita Blattberg Blumstein, Like Leaves in the Wind (Portland, OR: Valentine Mitchell, 2003), 38.

Contested Memories I walked deep into the city. It was drab and unfriendly, teeming with civilians, soldiers and trucks. Refugees were everywhere, some on foot with bundles going in every direction…People looked at me strangely…As I watched the passersby, I noticed in the distance an elegantly dressed lady walking in my direction. She wore a dark coat and a hat and stood out from the others. As she got a little closer, she resembled my mother. I started to tremble and tears welled up in my eyes. She must have noticed me looking at her. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her as she passed by…I stood like a statue, following her every move. She came to me, looked at my face and without saying a word pointed her finger, beckoning me to leave the line and follow her. Dreamlike, I did so…I was sure she was Jewish and I mentioned that I was Jewish, too.29

Honig’s first sighting of the woman occurs in the context of him finding the Soviet city dreary and unwelcoming; Honig clearly feels like an outsider. In contrast, the woman that he spots represents the very opposite. The description here is striking in that Honig’s response to seeing the woman is both immediate and intense and the woman’s reaction to his odd behavior, especially in a society where people were urged to be suspicious of foreigners, is surprisingly positive. The woman invites him home, feeds him an opulent meal, and enlists her husband to find a good work placement for Honig and his relatives. In this case, an imagined sense of kinship between Honig and the woman he spotted on the street was later reaffirmed by the fact that they shared a common background and by her willingness to help him and his relatives. In Polish Jewish memoirs, Soviet Jews often assume some of the roles of the missing network of friends and family that the refugees lost in the course of their wartime travails. Originally from Suwalki, Poland, Regina Kesler (née Chanowicz) and her family had been deported from Wilno (present-day Vilnius, Lithuania) to Siberia. After their release they settled in Osh (Kirgiz SSR; in present-day Kyrgyzstan) where Regina befriended a classmate of hers, Luba Lurie, a Jewish evacuee from Odessa. Regina became close with Lurie and her family, and Lurie’s father came to her aid on a number of occasions.30 In fact, Kesler wrote that she “adopted him as my Russian father” while her 29 Honig, From Poland to Russia and Back, 140. 30 Regina Kesler, M.D. and Michael G. Kesler, Grit: a Pediatrician’s Odyssey from a Soviet Camp to Harvard (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2009), 47–49.

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own father languished in a Soviet prison.31 In another account, Rita Blattberg Blumstein (originally from Lwów but resettled to the Udmurt region with her family) mentions that she referred to the Soviet couple that her family had befriended as “Mamasha” and “Papasha,” underscoring the sense of kinship between them.32 Still, it is important to mention that Blumstein, Kesler and others remained cognizant of the very real differences and barriers that separated them from their Soviet Jewish friends and acquaintances. Polish Jewish memoirs and testimonies reveal a clear tension between the authors’ desire to befriend Soviet Jews alongside a recognition of the differences in political beliefs and commitments between them and their Soviet Jewish interlocutors. In fact, they often honed in on the Soviets’ Communist Party affiliations and expressed frustration with the Soviet Jews’ ideological positions and their unwillingness to discuss specific topics. While Regina Kesler wrote of her admiration for and gratitude to Dr. Lurie for his help, she was perplexed by his loyalty to the Soviet system, writing that “he seemed to have memorized many writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and quoted them profusely.”33 She further reflected that “Dr. Lurie’s views fascinated me, although my views often differed sharply from his.”34 The accounts reflect an implicit understanding that there were certain limits to the friendships between Polish and Soviet Jews, some topics they could not discuss because of the political realities of their circumstances. Notwithstanding these differences, the accounts highlight both the emotional and pragmatic circumstances that brought these families together. Refugees and evacuees across the Soviet home front (and, indeed, across Europe) had been separated from loved ones and often had little knowledge about the fate and welfare of family and friends at the front and under occupation. Moreover, survival in the Soviet Union was dependent on one’s network of “connections”—ration cards, work placements, housing, and other scarce resources could often be secured by appealing to the right people. Michael Kesler’s description of bidding farewell to the Kaganovich couple illustrates his perception of the depth of the relationship that had been forged between them in a relatively short amount of time: 31 Ibid., 48. 32 Blattberg Blumstein, Like Leaves in the Wind, 67. 33 Kesler and Kesler, Grit, 48. 34 Ibid.

Contested Memories “Don’t forget,” Neena said, hugging Luba [Michael Kesler’s sister], “if things don’t go well for you in Sir Darya [Uzbekistan], consider our abode. Wherever we are is your home.” “Yes, you are part of our family,” exclaimed Mikhail. Neena embraced me, as we said goodbye, and I felt tears on her cheeks. The picture of Mother holding me tight on parting a year earlier came to my mind.35

There is no doubt that the Kaganovichs had played a key role in the Keslers’ survival in the Soviet Union. On two separate occasions, they had opened their home to the refugees and took care of them while they planned their next moves. However, Michael Kesler’s account suggests the connection was deeper than that. In the quote above, Kesler casts Neena Kaganovich in a maternal role. For her part, Neena had lost touch with her own son who was fighting at the front. Kesler seems to position himself as a surrogate son for the Kaganovichs and the object of the care and affection that they were unable to show their own son. According to the Polish Jews, these bonds were reinforced through sharing of information about communities left behind and through cultural and religious practice. While Soviet Jews were hesitant to participate in any kind of religious practice, the Polish accounts argue that they eventually came to find these meaningful. These accounts emphasize Soviet Jews’ curiosity about Jewish life and culture and their yearning for a stronger connection with their Jewish identity. In his encounter with the Jewish Red Army officer on the train, Jack Pomerantz wrote that the officer was eager to hear Pomerantz’ story, while being tight-lipped about his own experiences.36 In Erlichson’s memoir, he noted that Soviet Jews in Dzhambul (present-day Taraz, Kazakhstan) were pleased to witness a Jewish wedding celebration. For the occasion, Erlichson’s friend made a speech in Hebrew which, according to Erlichson, the Soviet Jews found truly poignant: The Russian Jews were really beaming when they heard a speech in the holy language. They swallowed every word as if it were pure honey. Moreover, most of them had not attended a Jewish wedding in a long time. They were moved and congratulated us warmly. They 35 Michael G. Kesler, Shards of War, 84. 36 Pomerantz and Winik, Run East, 80.

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Natalie Belsky also wished to see their own children married, though many did not live with their children and did not know where they were or how they were. We also wished each other to be liberated soon, which we said with a special wink. We knew from the wink exactly what kind of liberation was meant.37

Erlichson’s last observation raises many interesting questions. He suggests that both Polish Jews and Soviet Jews were hoping not only for the defeat of the Nazis but also for liberation from Soviet yoke. Erlichson here seems to blatantly ascribe his own beliefs and views onto his Soviet Jewish acquaintances by implying that Soviet Jews’ true loyalties lay elsewhere. This could be seen as an expression of an imagined sense of kinship between the two groups. Interestingly, while Soviet Jewish accounts tend to look down on the Poles for what they characterize as antiquated beliefs or practices, the Polish Jewish accounts express sympathy for the Soviets’ inability to express and practice their religious beliefs. While the Soviet Jews see their Polish Jewish interlocutors as beholden to burdensome religious rules, the Polish Jews presume that the Soviet Jews behavior and responses are dictated by an oppressive regime. In point of fact, these differences reflect different visions of modernity and freedom. In this chapter, I have offered just a few examples of the kinds of encounters and relations between these two groups. I would like to offer some concluding remarks. These examples do demonstrate that a shared Jewish identity brought Soviet and Polish Jews together and, in many cases, these encounters proved to be mutually beneficial. Moreover, these relationships enable us to better understand the social networks among Jews in the Soviet interior that enabled the emergence of Jewish community life at sites of resettlement. However, I also argue that these testimonies have something to tell us not just about the wartime period but also about the postwar era. Specifically, they demonstrate how individuals with differing postwar trajectories remembered their wartime experiences and constructed their narratives.38 Soviet Jews who lived in the USSR before 1939 and remained in the USSR in the postwar period tend to construct their narratives within the context of the history of the Great Patriotic War. For them, the Polish Jew symbolizes the non-Soviet 37 Erlichson, My Four Years in Soviet Russia, 133. 38 On the narratives of testimonies and interviews see also chapters by Eliyana Adler and John Goldlust in this volume.

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“Other” whose appearance, traditions, and behavior clearly set him apart from the Sovietized population. On the other hand, Polish Jews who left the USSR after the war, conceive of their stories within a larger narrative of the Holocaust and reflect a sense of a communal Jewish identity. In their recollections, the Soviet Jew plays a critical role in their survival, coming to their rescue at critical moments and embracing, albeit hesitantly at first, a shared Jewish identity. Thus, these accounts and testimonies shed a great deal of light on how these individuals conceived of the significance and meaning of their Jewish identity at this critical moment in their lives.

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CHAPTER 10

Neither “Victims” nor “Survivors”: Polish Jews Reflect on Their Wartime Experiences in the Soviet Union During the Second World War John Goldlust

A

cross the extensive geographical landscape of Europe through which the Nazis maniacally pursued their notorious “Final Solution”— the total annihilation of Europe Jewry—the shadow of the terrible fate of Poland’s Jews during the Second World War looms large. Within the territory of the reconstituted post-First World War Poland that fell under the military and administrative control of occupying German forces between September 1939 and January 1945, the feverish and unrelenting application by the Nazis of their genocidal plans resulted in the direct murder, or led to the deaths, of ninety percent of the prewar Jewish population of Poland, by far the largest national Jewish community in Europe. When Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, of the three and a half million Jews in Poland in 1939, only a few hundred thousand remained alive.1 1

While a precise figure remains elusive, recent estimates suggest the number lies somewhere between 350,000 and 425,000. Thus Laura Jockusch writes: “Of a surviving remnant estimated at 350,000 Polish Jews, some 30,000–50,000 found themselves in Polish territory upon liberation.” In addition, between 70,000 and 80,000 Polish Jews were freed from camps in Germany and Austria. See, Collect and Record!: Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85. At the higher end,

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All available sources confirm that, at the end of the war, only a relatively small number of Polish Jews emerged from the territory of prewar Poland, or from the abandoned Nazi camps recently liberated by the Allies. While as many as 250,000, representing between half and two-thirds of all Polish Jews who managed to survive, only did so because through a fortuitous combination of circumstances—both micro (personal agency, age, physical condition, stamina, luck, chance) and macro (geopolitical maneuverings, military contingencies, shifting national interests, security concerns)—for much of the Second World War they found themselves under the authority of the Soviets rather than the Nazis.2 At the time it was widely known that, of the Polish Jews still alive in 1945, by far the numerically dominant cohort consisted of either those who fled into, or had been living in, the Soviet controlled areas of eastern Poland and, through various trajectories, later moved inside the USSR where they remained for much of the period of the European war. So an important question I wish to address here is: why, given the intense scrutiny over many decades of various “modes” of Jewish survival in wartime Europe—as a focus for scholarly study and research, as well as the subject matter of cinema, television and other forms Albert Stankowski draws on a range of documentary sources to arrive at a final figure of 425,000 Polish Jews still alive at the end of the war, of whom more than half had survived in the USSR. See, “How Many Polish Jews Survived The Holocaust?,” in Jewish Presence in Absence: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, eds. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 215. 2 Again, there is no definitive figure for the number Polish Jews who survived the war in Soviet controlled territory. Nora Levin recognizes this necessary imprecision when she writes there were “200,000 or so” Polish Jewish refugees who survived in Soviet Russia. See, The Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917: Paradox of Survival, vol. 1 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 378. Laura Jokusch (Collect and Record, 85) puts the number at 230,000; while Joanna Michlic begins with a total of 380,000 Polish Jews who survived the war, of whom 70 percent did so in the territories of the Soviet Union, suggesting a number approaching 270,000. See, “The Holocaust and Its Aftermath as Perceived in Poland: Voices of Polish Intellectuals, 1945–1947,” in The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WWII, ed. David Bankier ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 209. More recently, in a critical overview of the often ambiguous and inconsistent documentary sources, Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik conclude: “The most conservative estimate, then, would be for, at the very least, 157,000 Jews from Poland who would not have survived the Nazi genocide had it not been for the existence of Stalin’s state [. . .] Including those who remained in the Soviet Union and taking into account higher estimates, their maximum number might have been as high as 375,000, but was more likely somewhere in between these two signposts.” See, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, eds. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 123.

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of popular culture—has this group’s unusual and significant mode of escape from the Nazis been relegated to a largely under-examined and shadowy presence within the larger Holocaust narrative?3 And, as I have noted elsewhere, it is “not that the ‘story’ has remained unknown or untold but rather that [. . .] it has gradually receded further into the background and, therefore, much of the complexity and detail surrounding these experiences is no longer widely known or coherently understood.”4

Neither “Victims” . . . A considerable number of both the Polish Jews who had survived the war under the Nazis, as well as the larger number who were in the Soviet Union during those years, found themselves together again–if only briefly–in Poland, soon after the war ended. But, as Eliyana Adler has observed, “their experiences during the war were in fact distinct. Over time one narrative, that of the Holocaust, came to dominate, and the other largely disappeared.”5 In this chapter I focus on some possible reasons why this has also meant muting, marginalizing and “privatizing” the “survival stories” that detail the manner and circumstances through which several hundred thousand Polish Jews in the Soviet Union managed to evade the fate of the three million Polish Jews who died or were murdered in Nazi occupied Poland.6 3

The more intensively studied and most frequently portrayed survival “modes” tend to focus on: Jews who managed to stay alive in, or occasionally escape from, concentration and labor camps; those who remained in hiding among the local populace, with or without false papers; and some who participated in resistance activities against the Nazis, either independently, with other Jews, or with one of the local partisan groups. 4 John Goldlust, “A Different Silence: The Survival of More than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II as a Case Study of Cultural Amnesia,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 32. 5 Eliyana Adler, “Crossing Over. Exploring the Borders of Holocaust Testimony,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 266–267. See also, Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 61–79; and, Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 373–399, in which the authors give considerable attention to identifying and discussing possible reasons why, given the obviously expanding interest in Holocaust stories both in academic and broader public circles, this one has remained so under-explored. 6 In doing so I draw upon my research into this area which has, so far, explored 14 published memoirs (nine written by Polish Jews who settled in Australia after WW2) and 50 video testimonies collected in Australia in the 1990s by The Shoah Foundation and now lodged in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education searchable archive. For

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As tens of thousands of Polish Jews began returning to Poland from the USSR they were confronted with evidence of the unimaginable devastation and loss, along with the terrible realization that most, if not all, of their families, friends and even entire communities left behind only a few years before had vanished, leaving barely a trace. In their encounters with Polish Jews who survived the war in territories controlled by the Nazis, they now heard how they had been confined in ghettos, hidden in the forests; were in perpetual fear of imminent exposure after adopting a false “Aryan” identity; had been used as slave labor; starved and beaten in concentration camps; or, had somehow managed to evade the ghoulish “selections” that ended the lives of many they knew and loved in the extermination camps. So, understandably, from the Jews who had come back to Poland from the USSR there emerged a general reticence to share the relatively “benign” tribulations and hardships they had experienced during their wartime sojourn in the Soviet Union. Even more so as, among Jews who had survived in Europe and were now recounting and sharing their wartime stories, it would appear that a broadly accepted “hierarchy of suffering” very quickly established itself “with concentration camp experience at the top and the Soviet experience at the bottom.”7 Every Jew still alive at the end of the war recognized their collective group as the principal victim of the implementation by the Nazis of their “Final Solution” that led to the deaths of more than sixty per cent of the prewar Jewish population of Europe; and all were well aware that during the latter years of the war each of them had been a potential target of the Nazi plans. And while almost all the Polish Jews who spent the wartime years under the Soviets had suffered considerable hardship and deprivation, when they arrived back in Poland after the war they were quickly made aware who the “real Jewish victims” were, and so began consciously and deliberately to dissociate their own experiences from those of Jews who survived the war in Nazi-occupied Europe. Atina Grossmann cites an early memoir by a Polish Jew who had been in the Soviet Union, in which the author, Esther Hautzig, observed: “Better to have been deported with them as a capitalist and enemy of the people than to fall into the hands of the Nazis as a Jew.” In the end, “we were alive. Our exile had saved our lives. Now we felt ourselves supremely lucky to have been bibliographical details of the published memoirs see Goldlust, “A Different Silence,” note 12, p. 82. 7 See, Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost?,” 384. In their article the origins and early development of this hierarchy—which the authors suggest was already in place in the postwar European DP camps—are discussed in considerable detail.

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deported to Siberia. Hunger, cold, and misery were nothing; life had been granted us.”8 Similar reflections emerge in quite a few of the later memoirs and testimonies I explored. When interviewed in the 1990s, one informant who had been in the Soviet Union observed that her friends still “talk all the time” about their lives during the war, but “my experiences were not so tragic against theirs, so I never open my mouth . . . because I see that their life was hanging on a very thin string.”9 After June 1941, with the Soviets now fighting on the Allied side against the Nazis, some Polish Jews (mostly younger males) were able to participate in military actions against the Germans. But fortuitously, many who had earlier been deported from Eastern Poland, along with some who, following the German attack on the USSR in June 1941 had managed to flee or be evacuated further into the Soviet heartland, were now far removed from the war zone, and therefore, as it turned out, no longer even “potential victims” of the Nazis’ genocidal intent. But what about during their years under the Soviets when the Polish Jews were almost inevitably subjected to at least one, and often a number, of the following: arrest, imprisonment, deportation, forced labor? Despite the prevalence of such experiences, from my sample of published autobiographical memoirs and oral testimonies—most of which emerged since the early 1990s—in their extended reflections on their time under the Soviets I found few informants who placed much emphasis on “group persecution,” or of Jews as specifically targeted “victims” of Soviet wartime policies. Indeed, among Jewish residents of the Soviet annexed areas of Poland, as well as the Jewish refugees who had arrived from German-occupied Poland between late 1939 and mid-1941, some responded very differently.10 As Ben Cion Pinchuk notes, a number benefitted from the “new rulers” abolishing 8 Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue,” 74. Esther Hautzig’s memoir, “The Endless Steppe” was published in New York in 1968. 9 Interview with Cyla Fersht, September 21, 1997, Melbourne, University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education (USC VHA), 35908. I encountered quite a few examples along similar lines in memoirs and testimonies from Polish Jews who had been in the USSR during the war. See also the discussion by Eliyana Adler (“Crossing Over,” 258) of the video testimony of Eva Blatt who, after the war, had returned from the Soviet Union to Lodz and tells of meeting a man there interested in starting a relationship with her. She notices, and asks about, the numbers on his arm: “So he started to tell the whole story. I thought I have a story, a better story than he. Then when I met him, forget it. I didn’t say nothing anymore.” 10 See also the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume.

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“the discriminatory practices of the former Polish government.” Jews were employed in the Soviet administration, industrial enterprises, the health and the education sectors. Jewish professionals—especially engineers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants and teachers—“were now sought after.” Access to higher education “became free and accessible to Jewish youth.”11 As Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski suggest, “The new employment opportunities gave the Jews the sense of full equality in civil rights not enjoyed before.”12 Among the younger Polish Jews, some took full advantage of the possibilities now open to them to receive education and training, apply specialist knowledge and expertise they already possessed, as well as acquire new skills, learn the local language and integrate into their new surroundings. Only a relatively small percentage among the tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from Poland chose to take up the offer of Soviet citizenship, but some who did reported that within a surprisingly short time they had settled reasonably well into Soviet life. In a previous publication I cite from four autobiographical memoirs by Polish Jews in which each person writes of this early period under Soviet authority in a generally positive and appreciative tone. Thus: Zev Katz reports that among those who took jobs offered by the Soviets, skilled workers such as tailors or shoemakers “who could produce goods in the ‘Western style’” often managed to settle quite well. Leo Cooper who registered himself for work in his trade as a turner was provided with free transport to travel to his assigned location inside the USSR, and later given a Soviet “passport” that listed his status as “resettled” person as distinct from “refugee.” Zyga Elton formally accepted Soviet citizenship, moved to a small town in the Soviet Ukraine and later was able to take up a scholarship at a teachers’ college there. He completed one year of his course, but then his studies were interrupted by the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Toby Flam first took up a job that was offered to her in Soviet Belarus, later found other work there as a dressmaker and, in the summer of 1940, was accepted as a student in a technical training school in Minsk.13 More significantly, as it turned out, when German troops attacked the Soviet Union in late June 1941, some of these Polish Jews who had earlier signed up for work and relocated out of the larger cities of eastern Poland were 11 Ben-Cion Pinchuk, “On Facing Hitler and Stalin,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During The Holocaust And Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 66. 12 Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims (New York: Holocaust Library, 1986), 37. 13 See Goldlust, “A Different Silence,” 41–42.

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now inside the pre-1939 USSR border, and a considerable distance from immediate danger. They also had a greater chance—by being evacuated or fleeing independently further to the east—of evading the SS roundups that accompanied the rapidly advancing German army.14 Their lives then mostly followed a pattern similar to the significant cohort of “amnestied” Polish deportees and prisoners, among whom were a considerable number of Polish Jews, gradually being released from labor camps and remote settlements after July 1941. By the end of the year several hundred thousand Polish Jews—refugees who had fled from the areas of Poland occupied by the Nazis prior to June 1941, as well as former residents of the eastern territories annexed by the Soviets in 1939— were located deeper inside the vast territory of the USSR. And notwithstanding further movement and dislocations a considerable number of both Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, now scattered across Siberia and Soviet Central Asia, managed to remain in these “safe havens” until the end of the war in Europe. Of special significance to many Polish Jews was the very different social status they were accorded while they were in the Soviet Union. During their time under Soviet authority—and this point recurs in a number of memoirs and testimonies, even from some who were imprisoned or deported—as Jews they felt they were treated no differently from non-Jews in a similar situation. As Polish writer and political activist Aleksander Smolar wryly observed, the Soviet Union was seen “as a country that allowed Jews full civic rights, or, more precisely, deprived them of rights in the same measure as it deprived others.”15 In his video testimony, Abraham Amaterstein is keen to emphasize that although the wartime Soviet Union had been a “poor country,” everyone there was treated the same: “I didn’t get less and I didn’t get more. I feel this feeling of thankfulness and appreciation.”16 In the written and oral reflections by Polish Jews, more than a few expressed similar appreciation at having been treated as “social equals” by the Soviets. So, for example, I heard such views clearly and forcefully articulated in a number of the testimonies recorded in Australia in the 1990s: As a refugee in Belarus, Joseph Eckstein had refused Soviet citizenship, was afterwards arrested as a “German spy” and sent to a prison camp near Novosibirsk. Yet, in his testimony he comments on the kindness of the local 14 See the chapter by Markus Nesselrodt in this volume. 15 See Aleksander Smolar, “Jews as a Polish Problem,” Daedelus 116, no. 2 (1987): 38. 16 Interview with Abraham Amaterstein, July 31, 1996, Melbourne, USC VHA.

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Russians who did not discriminate against the prisoners as Jews and who helped whichever way they could with cigarettes or scraps of bread. Dora Huze, a refugee deported to a labor camp in Siberia notes that while some Russians were anti-Semitic, discrimination or using racist language was forbidden, and Jews were treated just like all the Russian prisoners. In the camp they were even permitted to have a “spokesperson” elected by refugees to pass on any complaints or suggestions to the authorities. In her video testimony, when the interviewer asks whether there was different treatment for Jews in her arctic Soviet labor camp, Anna Kalfus replies with a firm “no”—and then adds that the authorities made it clear to inmates that not even the derogatory word “Zhid” was permitted to be used.17 Comments like these stand in marked contrast to the way many of the same Jewish informants reflected on the situation in 1930s Poland where they had either personally experienced, or were certainly made acutely aware of, the widespread increases in both personal prejudice and discriminatory practices directed against Jews by ethnic Poles. Despite their formal status as full citizens of Poland, many Jews felt ethnic Poles had not treated them as equal members of the “Polish Nation.” Many of the younger Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during the Second World War had grown up in the new Polish state, re-established in 1918 in the aftermath of World War I, and supposedly committed to a policy of “ethnic pluralism.” However, in a recent article, Kamil Kijek points out that: “Although it was meant to be democratic and all its citizens were to enjoy equal rights, the failure to put this into practice fully led to serious tensions between the ethnic minorities and the government, which defined the new polity in exclusivist terms as the state of the Polish nation.” So, in practice, the “democratic promise” of the Second Polish Republic was offered to young Jews, while at the same time, they were made aware that this promise would in no way be fulfilled. There were two basic reasons for this failure. The first was the dominance of the ethno-religious concept of the Polish nation and the lack of a similarly strong narrative of the communal bond linking all the state’s citizens. The other was widespread antisemitism. Because of the strength of these two 17 All the citations are from video testimonies collected in Australia in the 1990s by The Shoah Foundation and now lodged in the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education archive. John Goldlust, “Identity Profusions: bio-historical journeys from ‘Polish Jew’/‘Jewish Pole’ through ‘Soviet Citizen’ to ‘Holocaust Survivor,’” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 225.

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This is important, I would suggest, for understanding why the more typical Jewish evaluation of their wartime Soviet experience differs so markedly from how this period is generally depicted within the mainstream historical narrative of the “Polish nation.” It was not only Jews, but also an even larger number of non-Jewish Poles who were caught up in the Soviet deportations and “forced exiles” of 1939–41, and many thousands from both groups chose to move voluntarily into Soviet controlled areas rather than remain in the Polish territory under German occupation.19 Indeed, the wartime vicissitudes experienced by ethnic Poles during their years in the Soviet Union were, in the main, not that dissimilar to those confronted by the Polish Jews. However, in both historiographical and personal narratives, ethnic Poles tend to place considerable emphasis on valorization of the “heroic victims” who died in the Soviet Union.20 Polish experiences under the Soviets are typically recounted as an endless litany of forced deportations, deprivations, exploitation, starvation and misery that resulted in an extraordinarily high death rate amongst this group, while the ultimate fate of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles, presumed to have been permanently trapped or imprisoned somewhere deep inside the USSR, still remains unknown.21 So the entire episode is often contextualized as another bitter chapter in the long-standing and ongoing 18 Kamil Kijek, “Between a Love of Poland, Symbolic Violence, and Antisemitism: The Idiosyncratic Effects of the State Education System on Young Jews in Interwar Poland,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 30 (2018): 237, 263. 19 The first Polish citizens, approximately 55,000 refugees from central and western Poland were displaced in October 1939. Many were resettled in the eastern region of Ukrainian and Belorussian SSR. See Daniel Boćkowski, “Przesiedlenie ludności uchodźczej—tzw. ‘bieżeńców’—do wschodnich obwodów Białoruskiej SSR jesienią 1939 roku,” Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, no. 1 (1997): 78. 20 See the chapter by Lidia Zessin-Jurek in this volume. 21 Under the same criteria as Polish Jews, ethnic Poles were of course eligible for postwar “repatriation.” And, according to Keith Sword, between 1945 and 1948, 258,000 returned to Poland from the USSR “interior” (meaning east of pre-1939 borders), and a further 245,000 came back in a later round of “repatriations” between 1955 and 1959. See, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–48 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 197. Yet, as recently pointed out, while highlighting their victimization in the USSR during the war, conspicuously absent is: “that for some ethnic Poles, too, flight or even deportation to the Soviet Union might have been lifesaving . . . how many of them might have been killed as a direct result of German occupation policies? Clearly, even where ethnic Poles are concerned, the

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oppression and persecution suffered by the “Polish People” at the hands of “the Russians,” not only for centuries prior to the Second World War but continuing until the final collapse of the Soviet Union and other subservient “Eastern Bloc” communist regimes in the early 1990s.22 Of considerable significance to the very different perceptions of “victimhood” later held by many Polish Jews and ethnic Poles, were a complex interplay of wartime confrontations and allegiances in Poland involving Germans, Poles, Jews and “Russians.”23 For while Poland was invaded in 1939 and its history of Soviet occupation and—later—liberation can be told in more than one way.” See, Mark Edele et al., “Introduction,” in Shelter From The Holocaust, 14. 22 The titles of a number of historical accounts, including some written or edited by professional historians, are indicative of the significant themes pursued in the content of these works: So, Sword, Deportation and Exile; Tomasz Piesakowski, The Fate of Poles in the USSR, 1939–1989 (London: Gryf Publications, 1990); Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women In The Soviet Union During World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002); Tadeusz Piotrowski ed., The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollection of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout The World ( Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2004); Anna M. Cienciala, “An Unknown Page of History: The Poles Deported to the USSR in 1940–1941,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 22, no. 3 (2009): 301–314; Anna Kant and Norbert Kant, Extermination: Killing Poles In Stalin’s Empire (London: Unicorn, 1991). See also, the documentary film directed by Jagna Wright, The Forgotten Odyssey: The Untold Story of 1,700,000 Poles Deported to Siberia in 1940 (London: Lest We Forget Productions, 2001). And worth mentioning is the interactive “Kresy-Siberia” website “dedicated to researching, remembering and recognizing the Polish citizens deported, enslaved and killed by the Soviet Union during World War Two. It was established by a number of survivors and their descendants to tell the stories of the ‘Polish Gehenna’ to the world.” The site includes a “Virtual Museum” (incorporating more than 1700 “survivor testimonies”) seen as necessary because: “one aspect of Poland’s wartime history is hardly known to most people—the deportation, imprisonment, and other repression of the inhabitants of the Kresy, or Eastern Borderlands, on Josef Stalin’s orders, to Soviet slave labor camps and Gulags in Siberia, Kazakhstan and eastern Asia. Almost two million Polish citizens suffered this ‘Gehenna’. Many died in the camps from hypothermia, lack of nutrition, or diseases like typhoid or malaria. Others survived to join the Polish Forces under Allied command battling Nazi Germany in Africa and Europe, or to see out the war in refugee camps in the Middle East, Africa, India, New Zealand and Mexico. Most never returned to their fatherland because it was annexed by the Soviet regime after the war.” See, http://kresy-siberia. com, accessed August 7, 2018. As Hanna Maischen observes, “The resurgence of a memory of victimhood under the Soviets during the war and after its end, which had been suppressed in Communist Poland, seems to pander to a national focus.” See, “The Historicity of the Witness: The Polish Relationship to Jews and Germans in the Polish Memory Discourse of the Holocaust,” in Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe: Shared and Comparative Histories, ed. Tobias Grill (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 232. 23 While the geopolitical makeup of the USSR incorporated numerous ethno-linguistic regions and distinctive communities, many Poles, including Polish Jews, preferred to use

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territories divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as Gutman and Krakowski emphasize: “The Poles saw the Russians and the Germans as occupiers, one as bad as the other. For the Jews the difference was enormous.”24 Within the areas of Poland controlled either by the Nazis or the Soviets, the often already ambivalent relationships between Jews and ethnic Poles now found each group taking on reciprocal, but inverted, roles in relation to the other. The Nazis unambiguously identified Jews as their “primary victims,” and by 1941 were implementing plans to exterminate them all. “The Poles, on the other hand, were to be reduced to slave labor, and even this goal was not largely achieved.”25 Upon occupying the eastern territories, the Soviets presented themselves, ostensibly at least, as “liberators” of the local and “minority” populations—meaning Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews—from the “yoke of their Polish oppressors.” In these circumstances the ethnic Poles became the “primary victims,” with the Jews (and other minorities) elevated to an “intermediary” role in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. So, given the very different political and ideological priorities of the two occupation regimes, the position of Poles and Polish Jews under the Soviets on the “hierarchy of victimhood” was the inverse of each group’s relative status under the Nazis. What subsequently emerged from both situations, greatly encouraged by the policies put in place by these two highly authoritarian regimes, were parallel accusations between Poles and Polish Jews of “collaboration with the oppressor” and “treason.” These very soon became widely shared views held by considerable numbers of each group against the other and already well entrenched by the end of the war. Since then, both in mainstream historiography and popular memory, it would appear they have been amplified even further. A great deal of what became the normative “Jewish perspective” on Poland in the decades following the war was “shaped by survivor testimonies that often spoke of widespread Polish antisemitism and indifference to the fate of European Jewry

“Russians” as a shorthand, if inaccurate, collective noun when referring to Soviet civilians and military personnel. 24 Gutman and Krakowski, Unequal Victims, 38. 25 Konstanty Gebert, “Separate Narratives: Polish and Jewish Perceptions of the Shoah,” accessed April 6, 2019, http://www.rzym.pan.pl/images/files/artPDFvarie/Gebert_PJ_ Narratives_UNESCO.pdf

Neither “Victims” nor “Survivors”

during the Holocaust.” And furthermore, “Jewish historiography . . . tended to mirror popular memory about the degree of antisemitism in wartime Poland.”26 Poles were accused of assisting the Nazis and further facilitating the persecution of fellow Jews, some of whom they knew personally or were acquainted with as neighbors. They did this in various ways: voluntarily identifying for the Nazis the Jews standing in food queues, or those seeking to evade forced labor round-ups or internment in ghettos; informing on Jews trying to pass as “Aryans”; betraying Jews in hiding or, after having taken payment from them, informing on Jews they had been hiding themselves; denouncing Jewish children placed in the care of Poles; taking advantage of Nazi deportations to acquire Jewish property and goods; and participating in, and on occasions instigating, the murders of Jewish victims.27 From the other side we have the virtual mirror image of the above in the dominant narrative shared by many non-Jewish Poles, accusatory and resentful of the way Jews had behaved during the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland.

26 See, Joshua D. Zimmerman, Changing Perceptions in the Historiography of Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During The Holocaust And Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 1, 3. 27 A pungent comment from a video testimony succinctly captures a widely shared Jewish view that the main difference between Germans and Poles behavior towards Jews was: “Poles didn’t kill, they just pointed.” From video interview with Jewish survivor, Lucy Goldfeld, March 22, 1998, Melbourne, USC VHA, 41758. See also: Barbara Engelking-Boni, “‘Dear Mr. Gestapo:’ Denunciatory Letters to the German Authorities in Warsaw, 1940–1942,” in Inferno of Choices: Poles and the Holocaust, ed. Sebastian Rejak and Elżbieta Frister (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza RYTM, 2011), 166–181; Andrzej Żbikowski, “Antisemitism, Extortion Against Jews, Collaboration with Germans and Polish-Jewish Relations Under German Occupation,” in Inferno of Choices, 182–235. Over recent decades more serious accusations have emerged in publications documenting instances of Poles directly instigating or participating in the killing of Jews. See, Jan Tomasz Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Barbara Engelking, “Murdering and Denouncing Jews in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945,” East European Politics and Societies 25 (2011): 433–456; Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2013); Barbara Engelking, Such a Beautiful Sunny Day… – Jews Seeking Refuge in the Polish Countryside, 1942–1945 ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016). Recent scholarship draws our attention to a more complex and nuanced relationship between Poles and Jews in the former Polish territories overrun and occupied by the Nazis after June 1941. As Hannah Maischen points out, “Poles could have been victims themselves, could murder or harm the Jews and therefore be considered perpetrators, and they could also help the Jews and therefore be remembered as heroes.” See Maischen, “The Historicity of the Witness,” 225.

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As Elazar Barkan and others noted, following the German attack on the USSR when both groups were together in the Soviet Union: The prevalent view among Poles was that the Jews had joyously welcomed the Soviet invasion in September 1939; in addition, Jews supposedly had played an important role in the local Soviet power apparatus in the subsequent period, and in this role had contributed significantly to the persecution of the Poles, profited from their suffering and thus had committed “treason.” This narrative was already widespread among the Polish population during World War II. Apparently, it also constituted a central factor in the hostile attitude during the war toward the Jews under German occupation. After World War II, it remained alive in Polish memory.28

As one writer points out “in the Polish unwritten code universally rejecting the occupation and in the call for at least passive resistance, there was no room for exceptions: who is not with us is against us. Given this attitude, every Jewish doctor, clerk, agronomist, or bookkeeper who accepted a job in a Soviet office took upon himself the odium of a collaborator.”29

28 Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, “Introduction,” in Shared History— Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, ed. Elazar Barkan et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 26–27. Many writers and scholars have explored the broader historical context of the complex and often fraught relationship between ethnic Poles and Jews over many centuries leading up and since the Second World War. See, for example, Joanna Beata Michlic, Poland’s Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). As Zvi Gitelman notes: “Whether it was by the Turks and Islam, by the Russians and Orthodoxy, or the conquering Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and Imperial Russians—and later the Bolshevik Russians (twice) or the Nazi Germans—Poles seemed to be under constant attack. Like other such groups, they regarded those who were living among them but who were very different as potential or real allies of their enemies. The most recent expression was the belief among some Poles that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy, the Zydokomuna, and that both the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 and the installation of a communist government after the Second World War were the work of Jewish Bolsheviks.” See, “Collective Memory and Contemporary Polish-Jewish Relations,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 274. 29 Andrzej Żbikowski, “Polish Jews under Soviet Occupation, 1939–1941,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 59.

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So, under the Germans some Poles were seen to “collaborate” with the Nazis against the Jews. And under the Soviets, some Jews were seen to “collaborate” with the Bolsheviks against the Poles. For both, these “collective memories” were widely shared within the group and hardened over the years, so that in reflecting on this period the examples have moved from “a few” or “some” to “all.” And for Jews, there are also strong memories of the hostility and violence directed at Polish Jews by ethnic Poles after the end of the war (including at least several hundred murders).30 The Jews who returned from the USSR were both experiencing this widespread animosity and rejection, and at the same time hearing from other survivors of the part some Poles had played in “assisting” the Nazis in the victimization, exploitation and murder of Jews during the war. For Polish Jews, the dominant narrative that emerged held the Germans to be the perpetrators of the genocidal assault on European Jewry, but also noted, with considerable bitterness, the role played by some of their Polish “accomplices.” Around two-thirds of the surviving Jews stayed in Poland for only a short period of time after the war.31 Many who left carried these negative views with them wherever they later settled, and they were often passed on to later generations through personal reminiscences, oral testimonies and autobiographical memoirs.32 So, it is perhaps not surprising that, in the decades since the war, already existing grievances, antagonisms and resentments between

30 For extended discussions of antisemitism and outbreaks of violence against Jews in postwar Poland, see, for example David Engel, “Patterns Of Anti-Jewish Violence In Poland, 1944– 1946,” Yad Vashem Studies XXVI (1998): 43–85; Jan T. Gross, “After Auschwitz: The Reality and Meaning of Postwar Antisemitism in Poland,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry XX (2004): 199–226; Joanna Michlic, “The Holocaust and Its Aftermath,” in The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to their Countries of Origin after WWII, ed. David Bankier ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 206–230; Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “Cries of the Mob in the Pogroms in Rzeszów ( June 1945), Cracow (August 1945), and Kielce ( July 1946) as a Source for the State of Mind of the Participants,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (2011): 553–573; Monika Rice, “What Still Alive?!”: Jewish Survivors In Poland And Israel Remember Homecoming (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2017). 31 These included a considerable number of Polish Jews returning from the USSR who had arrived back in Poland not long before, or around the time of, the notorious “Kielce Pogrom” of July 4, 1946. 32 As Zvi Gitelman (“Collective Memory,” 277) has observed, “Jews who have never been in Poland ‘inherit’ memories from relatives, or even from teachers, acquaintances, or books and films, and make them part of their weltanschauung.”

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ethnic Poles and Polish Jews have remained firmly rooted in each group’s selective memories of the past.33

. . . Nor “Survivors” In their recent article exploring the conceptual history of the term “survivor,” with specific reference to the Holocaust, Alina Bothe and Markus Nesselrodt draw attention to its complexity and fluidity. They note that, both in relation to self-identification and acknowledgement by others, whether one is included in the “collective” of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust has been “subject to ongoing transformation since 1945.” A continuous reshaping, they suggest, has been taking place across four “spheres of discourse” identified as: “academic, politico-institutional, restitution and memory.” This process, they observe, reflects the “long-term tension” between Jews in Europe who survived the war, both as individuals and as a collective category, and the morally weightier “concept of survivor.”34 In the sphere of academic discourse, by the time Polish Jews began returning from the USSR after the war a number of Jewish historical commissions in Poland had already begun collecting testimonies and administering questionnaires. Their intended purpose was to ensure the early documentation of individual Jewish memories that would serve as an irrevocable, cumulative record of the group’s collective wartime experiences. Their attention was focused firmly on Jews who survived in Jewish ghettos and Nazi camps, by hiding in the forests, joining with partisan groups, or under a false identity on the “Aryan side.” They expressed little interest in “other groups of Jewish survivors, such as returnees from the Soviet Union, who were not mentioned in contemporary publications on the history of the Holocaust.”35 As it was being constructed after the war, the category of “survivor” assumed any Jew who had suffered through these ordeals was also a “witness,” and therefore “one who carries the burden of speaking about her or his experi-

33 See, Piotr Wróbel, “Double Memory: Poles and Jews after the Holocaust,” East European Politics and Society 11, no. 3 (1997): 560–574. Also, Antony Polonsky, “Poles, Jews and the Problems of a Divided Memory,” Ab Imperio 2 (2004): 125–147; and, David Engel, “On Reconciling the Histories of Two Chosen Peoples,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (2009): 914–929. 34 Alina Bothe and Markus Nesselrodt, “Survivor: Towards A Conceptual History,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 61 (2016): 57–82, here 58–60. 35 Ibid., 69. See also, Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost?,” 376–387.

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ences during the Holocaust.”36 But the Polish Jews who had been in the Soviet Union through most of the war years could contribute few, if any, eyewitness accounts that might help document the physical and psychological horrors experienced by the Jews under the Nazis. And despite constituting around twothirds of the Jewish population of the postwar DP camps in Europe and, during their years in the USSR, having endured difficult nomadic lives punctuated by considerable hardships that sometimes included periods of forced labor, “their suffering differed markedly from the concentration camp survivors who had lived under Nazi rule, which sought to kill them and to exploit their labor potential until exhaustion.”37 It has been noted that, between August 1946 and December 1948, in ten issues and 1100 pages of “Fun Letstn Khurbn,” the widely circulated DP camp magazine that sought to document every aspect of the Holocaust: “Not a single article told the story of Polish Jews who had escaped to the Soviet Union,” while “the Jewish participation in the Red Army was passed over in silence.”38 As Margaret Taft observes, by the late 1940s the question of ‘How did you survive?’ ceded primary authority to Jews “who survived the horrors of the camps and the deprivations of the ghettos” and now “held public ownership of survivor identity.” And more importantly, “it was a collective identity that was readily accepted and shared by other survivors.”39 Following the rapid departure of the majority of the Jews who had gathered in Poland in the immediate postwar period—including many who had been in the Soviet Union—within a short time most emigrants re-settled in Palestine/Israel or the United States; and the rest departed for Australia, Canada, Argentina and elsewhere. Wherever they began their new lives, recently arrived Polish Jews became actively involved in establishing forms of collective memorialization that would enable all Holocaust survivors to express 36 Bothe and Nesselrodt, “Survivor,” 58. See also, Annette Wieworka, “From Survivor to Witness: Voices from the Shoah,” in War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129–141; and, Margaret Taft, From Victim to Survivor: The Emergence and Development of the Holocaust Witness 1941–1948 (Middlesex UK: Valentine Mitchell, 2013), 165–171. 37 Na’ama Seri-Levi, “‘These people are unique’: The Repatriates in the Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–1946,” Moreshet 14 (2017): 54. 38 See, Ada Schein, “‘Everyone Can Hold a Pen’: The Documentation Project in the DP Camps in Germany,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics And Achievements, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 124–125. 39 Margaret Taft, From Victim To Survivor, 168.

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both personal grieving and participate in public mourning for lost families and extinguished communities. By the early 1950s, in scores of Jewish communities across the world, public rituals were in place to commemorate the loss and to honor the memory of the victims of the Nazi extermination camps and the ghettoes.40 Jews from larger Polish cities such as Warsaw, Łódź or Białystok, as well as some from smaller towns with sizeable prewar Jewish populations, helped create and participated in Landsmanshaft organizations. These groups often coordinated additional commemorations of special significance to Jews who came from their particular town or city in Poland. Almost every Jew who had survived in the Soviet Union shared these feelings of loss, mourning and guilt, remembering close family members and friends who had remained in Nazi-controlled Poland, most of whom did not survive. For them, and later for many of their children and grandchildren, there has remained a strong impetus to express feelings of collective solidarity through participation in their local Jewish community’s Holocaust commemorations. However, unlike the first-hand accounts and extensive public information describing, often in considerable detail, what had happened to the Jews in the towns, in concentration camps, during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or the final “liquidation” of the Lodz Ghetto, the stories of Polish Jews who had been in the Soviet Union remained personal and individualized. The often complex and elaborate details surrounding their particular mode of escape and the convoluted pathways that led to their personal “survival” were rarely shared with “outsiders” and, if spoken about at all, usually remained within their immediate family.41 Importantly, unlike camp survivors or Jews who originated from the 40 Margaret Taft (From Victim to Survivor, 154) notes that in 1944: “Already, just one year after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the anniversary of the event was being commemorated in diaspora Jewish communities. And these included public meetings in Sydney and Melbourne addressed by local politicians and prominent rabbis.” For an extended discussion of how early and how widespread Holocaust commemoration and memorialization was taken up in US Jewish communities see, Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009). 41 A few Polish Jews who had been in the Soviet Union did write or record accounts of their experiences soon after the war, but mostly in Yiddish (or less frequently Polish). Two published examples, later translated into English: the memoir of Moshe Grossman (a wellknown writer of novels and short stories from Warsaw), originally published in 1949 in Yiddish and titled, with obvious irony, In The Enchanted Land: My Seven Years in Soviet Russia (Tel Aviv: Rachel, 1960); and another early account from Melbourne writer Moshe Ajzenbud, first published in Yiddish in 1956, presented a fictional story of a protagonist named ‘Michael,’ what clearly is a thinly veiled personal memoir of the author’s years in the Soviet Union, The Commissar Took Care (Brunswick, Vic: Globe Press, 1986). Magdalena

Neither “Victims” nor “Survivors”

same city or town in Poland, or even others who had managed to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe (the multi-national group of Jewish refugees who spent the war years in Shanghai, or the Kindertransport children sent to the UK from Germany and other places in Central Europe in the late 1930s), this considerably larger cohort of Polish Jews who had been in the Soviet Union never developed or exhibited any sense of collective identity. There was no impetus coming from them to form special organizations, to be with others who had similar experiences or, even though there were deaths of family and children while they were in the Soviet Union, to create any special public rituals of commemoration for the Polish Jews who had died in the USSR.42 All of these factors both reflected and further amplified the mutually agreed upon “hierarchy of suffering” which, as noted above, was in evidence almost immediately after the war among surviving Polish Jews, many of whom spent time together in the DP camps of central Europe in the mid and late 1940s. For Polish Jews who had been in the Soviet Union, their “place” in the “survival hierarchy” does seem, very quickly, to have become firmly embedded as part of their self-identity.43 And in recent decades, even as they began, hesitantly, to declare their presence in the more expansive “memory discourse” around the Holocaust, by publishing written memoirs and recording oral testimonies, the lasting power of this tendency towards self-exclusion from the “real survivor category” remained very much in evidence. A clear and unequivocal example appears in a joint memoir by Fela and Felix Rosenbloom, published in Melbourne in 1994. Both Polish Jews, Fela was a survivor of Auschwitz under the Nazis while her husband, Felix, had moved into Soviet territory in October 1939, and later enlisted in the Soviet-sponsored Polish Army under General Ruta notes in her recent book, Without Jews? Yiddish Literature in the People’s Republic of Poland on the Holocaust, Poland, and Communism (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2017) that there were published literary texts by Yiddish writers in postwar Poland that did reference the wartime Soviet experience. 42 While estimates for the overall death rate among the Polish Jews in the Soviet Union as high as 35 per cent have been presented in scholarly publications, no convincing documentary evidence has yet emerged to support such a figure. See, Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees And Soviet Authorities During World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): footnote 121. 43 As Margaret Taft writes in relation to the immediate postwar years: “Those who survived while in hiding or fled to the relative safety of neutral countries, or those not occupied by the Nazis, did not during this period constitute part of the Jewish public’s equation of a ‘true’ survivor, one who had experienced the full brunt of the Nazis’ Final Solution. Even as late as the 1970s, the term ‘Holocaust survivor’ referred only to one who had survived death and witnessed death.” From Victim to Survivor, 165.

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Berling. In a foreword that precedes their separate “stories,” Felix observes pointedly that, as he “survived the war years in the comparative safety of the then Soviet Union,” for decades he had resisted his family’s request to write down his experiences, because he firmly believed that “only people who were incarcerated in ghettos or concentration camps or had been in hiding from the Nazis, should leave eye-witness accounts of those terrible years.”44 Similarly, in his Shoah Foundation video testimony recorded in 1997, Mojsze Ganc tells the interviewer that when he first received the preliminary questionnaire he assumed he was “not suitable to be interviewed” because he had never been in a camp or ghetto, nor ever seen an SS officer in uniform.45 In a recent publication, historian Eliyana Adler has focused particular attention on responses by Polish Jews who were in the Soviet Union to the very last section of the Shoah Foundation video interviews, at which point the informant is prompted by the interviewer for his or her personal “reflections on the Holocaust.” It is not merely self-effacement, Adler suggests, that lies behind the following anecdote she cites from the 1997 interview of Symcha Burstin. In his response to the final question, Burstin, who had settled in Australia after the war, recalls attending a professional conference with work colleagues, at which, following a dinner, he was asked about his wartime experiences in Europe. For the rest of a long evening he holds the rapt attention of his colleagues with stories of ghettos, camps and the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis, but tellingly says nothing of his own experiences in the USSR during the war.46 Similarly, from another video testimony recorded in Melbourne in 1998, when asked by the interviewer if, in Australia, she ever talks about her wartime experiences, Stefania Chaskiel replies: “They [are] only interested in Germany.”47 Yet, somewhat paradoxically, many comments cited above come from testimonies lodged with the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the stated goal of which is to help document as many as possible of the personal wartime stories and experiences of Jewish “Holocaust survivors.” Indeed, as Bothe and Nesselrodt have noted, the numerous oral history projects that have sprung up all round the world since the 1980s now play a central role in both the “institutional” and “memory” discourses of the Holocaust, and have been extremely influential in broadening the definition of “who is a survivor.”48 44 45 46 47 48

Fela and Felix Rosenbloom, Miracles Do Happen (Melbourne: Scribe, 1994), viii. Interview with Mojsze Ganc, January 27, 1997, Melbourne, USC VHA, 26790. Adler, “Crossing Over,” 263. Interview with Stefania Chaskiel, March 29, 1998, Melbourne, USC VHA, 42862. See, Bothe and Nesselrodt, “Survivor,” 73–82.

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While previously more restrictive criteria predominated, particularly in the “academic” and “politico-institutional” spheres, the new guidelines emanating from these increasingly prominent and influential memorial institutions—in particular, Yad Vashem, the Shoah Foundation and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—present few barriers to Jews who wish to contribute oral testimonies about their wartime experiences to their archives. So according to current definitions a “survivor” is “no longer only a camp survivor but every Jew who lived on mainland Europe between 1933 and 1945.”49 On this question, after examining a number of Shoah Foundation testimonies from Polish Jews who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, Eliyana Adler suggests they fall into one of three categories: “most of the flight survivors interviewed clearly differentiate their own experiences from those of Holocaust survivors [. . .] a smaller number do consider themselves Holocaust survivors and claim that mantle proudly. The smallest group of witnesses do not seem to know to which group they belong, and so fumble over the questions.”50 From my own explorations of memoir and testimony materials from Polish Jews who were in the Soviet Union during the war, I would offer a less categorical and considerably more ambiguous interpretation. I came across very few who were unequivocal in placing themselves in the category of “survivor.” Rather, direct articulations differentiating themselves from “Holocaust survivors” were much clearer and more pronounced.51 While confirmation of their eligibility from the Shoah Foundation now meant their interviews would be lodged in the same archive as Jews who had survived under the Nazis, this did not necessarily change their sense of liminality around whether they did, or did not, “belong” to the survivor group. They were pleased for the opportunity to place on record—mostly, they thought, for the benefit of their immediate families and perhaps later generations—more extended narratives thereby providing a more coherent chronology, detailed descriptions and personal observations about where and how they had managed to survive during their years in the Soviet Union, but in their own eyes this did not necessarily move them into the category of “Holocaust survivor.” Or, as Margaret Taft pointedly 49 Ibid., 80. As Anna Green has observed, “the interesting issue is not that individuals draw upon contemporary cultural discourses to make sense of their lives, but which ones, and why.” See, “Individual Memory and ‘Collective Memory’: Theoretical Presuppositions and Contemporary Debates,” Oral History 32, no. 2 (2004): 42. 50 Adler, “Crossing Over,” 257. 51 I cite a number of examples in my chapter “Identity Profusions,” in Shelter From The Holocaust, 234–235.

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observes, in their communities and even amongst themselves: “Such people were no doubt seen as ‘survivors’, but of a different order.”52 Some who were interviewed not only welcomed the opportunity to “leave a testimony for future generations,” but also considered their stories and experiences important precisely because they were so “different from those who were under the Germans.”53 And with the passing of many decades, as Bothe and Nesselrodt point out, Jews who continued to live long after the war became increasingly recognized within their families and communities both “for their survival and their value as keepers of memory.”54 So, in the end: not really “victims of Soviet Communism” and not really “survivors of the Nazi camps.” And, while acknowledging there are questions around the reliability of memories set down so long after the events, the rich material now emerging through memoirs and testimonies from these Polish Jews can tell us a great deal that is not available from written documents about a very different kind of survival in a very different place, where they lived for a number of years in conditions that were invariably harsh and uncompromising. In contrast to the degradation, brutality and imminent death most Jews faced under the Nazis, as refugees in the Soviet Union they retained a certain degree of personal agency, but were also continuously confronted with difficult and potentially dangerous choices. Their lives were subject to the structural constraints and the bewilderingly impenetrable logic of decisions made by an ideologically driven, fiercely authoritarian regime. Many arbitrarily experienced deportation, hard labor, imprisonment, loss of citizenship, and various other punitive measures inflicted by the Soviet authorities. It is therefore unsurprising that very few Polish Jews departed the USSR after the war with a particularly favorable view of Soviet communism as a political system. Yet despite all of this, many decades later a number still expressed considerable gratitude to the refuge offered by the Soviet Union that in the end saved so many Jewish lives.55 52 Taft, From Victim to Survivor, 165. 53 The quotations are from, Interview with Wolf Kamer, September 27, 1997, Melbourne, USC VHA, 35958, and Interview with Irena Feiler, March 16, 1995, Sydney, USC VHA, 1356. 54 Bothe and Nesselrodt, “Survivor,” 82. 55 As I have written elsewhere (Goldlust, “A Different Silence,” 69), “many did retain positive feelings about the people—Russians, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and others—who, in the main had treated them decently and with compassion and also a heartfelt appreciation for the relatively safe and peaceful refuge they had been fortunate enough to find inside the USSR. Toby Klodawska Flam, in her memoir, recalls her rather effusive parting words on the train leaving the Soviet Union in March 1946: ‘Goodbye, my friends! . . . Goodbye, friendly country! . . . I’ll never forget you, goodbye!’ [Leo] Cooper is more measured, but also quite open,

Neither “Victims” nor “Survivors”

Most of these Polish Jews were well aware at the time, and certainly later, that both their fortuitous pathway to survival as well as the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union after the war came not because the Soviets had any special concern for the situation of the Jews. They were merely pawns in the gigantic geo-political chess game played out by the major powers during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, yet at the end of it most of them were still standing.56 In acknowledging the inherent contradictions, ambivalences and complexities that make the experiences of the Polish Jews in the Soviet Union such a fascinating and challenging area for research and further study, perhaps the last words should come from the poignant reflection offered by Felix Flicker in his Shoah Foundation video testimony: [Compared] to German concentration camp survivors our sufferings were not of the same scale. But, for historical truth and for historical knowledge I feel that future generations must also know about the type of holocaust we went through. And the tens of thousands of Jews that died in the Siberian Steppes, in the gulags, where their bones are strewn all over the frozen country.57

about feeling some ambivalence when it was time for him to take his leave of the Soviet Union. He writes: ‘At this moment I was overcome by a strange feeling. It was a feeling of uncertainty about what lay ahead mixed with sadness of leaving behind the people amongst whom I lived for over seven years of my prime youth, of leaving my Russian friends who treated me with so much kindness and understanding.’” 56 Not only were they alive, but for many their years in the Soviet Union had not depleted their physical and psychological resources to the extent experienced by those who had managed to survive under the Nazis. In fact, as Atina Grossmann points out, certain positive attributes of the “repatriates” (Polish Jews who had returned from the USSR) were very noticeable in the postwar DP camps. “Many had grown used to working and supporting themselves while they were in the Soviet Union: some worked in professions they had learned while they were still in Poland, and others learned different professions in the Soviet Union.” Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 161. 57 Interview with Felix Flicker, June 9, 1997, Melbourne, USC VHA, 32399.

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CHAPTER 11

A Matzeva Amid Crosses: Jewish Exiles in the Polish Memory of Siberia Lidia Zessin-Jurek

“I

f Auschwitz for Jews, then Siberia for Poles”? In 2018, a controversy arose around the first memorial dedicated to the victims of Katyn which was erected in the United States some 17 years earlier. The mayor of Jersey City planned to remove the Katyn memorial on the grounds that the dramatic composition of the monument might offend mothers strolling along the Hudson River Waterfront with their children. The reaction of the American Polonia was quick.1 In no time the Polish lobby won broad support from the public, and created a movement for leaving the monument in place. Among the most prominent supporters of the monument were the Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich and the American Jewish Committee. The Committee pointed out that “Among the victims [of Katyn] were members of religious minorities, including the Chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Dr. Baruch Steinberg. It is estimated that 5–10 percent of the victims were Polish Jews.”2 This support—much sought-after by the Polonia—was not unanimously appreciated by all of its representatives. As usual, the negative voices found their outlet mainly through social media: many users did not agree with the strategy * 1 2

The author wishes to thank Theodore R. Weeks for his comments, as well as twelve of her Polish Jewish interviewees of the war generation for contributing their thoughts and memories to this article. “Polonia” refers to people of Polish descent who live outside Poland. “AJC Central Europe post,” Twitter, accessed June 15, 2018, https://twitter.com/AJC_CE/ status/993503331439046657/photo/1. Up to seven percent of officers murdered in Katyn were Jews, see Benjamin Meirtchak, Żydzi. Żołnierze wojsk polskich polegli na frontach II wojny światowej (Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Bellona, 2001).

A Matzeva Amid Crosses

of defending the monument on the basis of the fact that a rabbi and other Jews were killed in Katyn — “In that case, Katyn is going to be soon all about the Jews killed there. Not smart! Exactly what happened with Auschwitz….”3 By this logic, if Auschwitz for Jews, then Katyn for Poles—is how one could summarize this gruesome and inaccurate division of memory. It originates from the efforts of the so-called mnemonic warriors, as coined by Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, those who tend to espouse a single and reduced version of the past.4 This unidirectional vision was however regularly challenged by the mnemonic pluralists, among them the presidents of Poland, who regularly invited Rabbi Schudrich to the commemorative ceremonies in Katyn (Sabbath was the only reason why he wasn’t aboard the plane to Smolensk in 2010).5 Yet, the general Polish consensus remains that Katyn as well as Siberia as lieux de mémoire are about “indigenous Poles.”6 So too is the narrative presented by the monument in Jersey City. The memorial—in addition to the tall bronze statue of a soldier, gagged and bound, impaled in the back by a bayoneted rifle—includes a bronze relief depicting the likely fate of the soldier’s family—his wife and children starving in Siberia. The central figure is a mother carrying her dead infant, her daughter lies fainted to her left, and on the opposite side stands her son who resembles a young Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish leader of eighteenth-century independence struggles in Poland and America. They are all dressed in rags, and they all carry religious symbols — mother a large rosary, the children — medallions with the Holy Mother and the infant — a cross on a chain around the neck. With no doubt this memorial depicts a Catholic Polish family. Obviously, the private sponsors of this memorial saw their suffering in terms of a national-cum-religious repression.7 They had no intention of sharing the mnemonic space they

3 “Jan Wisniewski,” Twitter, accessed June 1, 2018, originally in Polish https://twitter.com/ JanWisniewski. 4 Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik, Twenty Years After: The Commemoration of the End of Communism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), 11–15. 5 Michael Schudrich, “Saved by Keeping Sabbath: Interview with Poland’s Chief Rabbi,” interview by Tovia Singer, Arutz Sheva, accessed April 14, 2010, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/137018. 6 “Indigenous Poles” comes from the writings of the Polish ambassador in exile, Stanisław Kot. This is how Kot actually drew a line between the Catholics and the Jews, Kot, Listy z Rosji do gen. Sikorskiego (London: Jutro Polski, 1956), 252. 7 The author of the monument Andrzej Pityński is interviewed by Ewa Winnicka, see, Ewa Winnicka, Green point. Chronicles of Little Poland (Wołowiec: Wyd. Czarne, 2021), 22–29.

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were granted by Jersey City with their former Polish–and later American fellow citizens of a Judaic descent. If there were five to ten percent Jewish Poles killed in Katyn, there were around 30 percent of them among Polish citizens sent to Siberia, also children and mothers, fathers and rabbis, such as one of the most respected public figures in the Polish Second Republic, rabbi, scholar and MP, Mojżesz Schorr. One may expect that in the postwar New York area the number of Polish Jewish survivors of Siberia was comparable to the number of non-Jewish former Siberian deportees from Poland who settled there after the war. Yet, there are New York Jews who in 2018 feel it their duty to defend the memorial which does not make the slightest allusion to their share in the story. The trajectory of memory, which leads to situations like this one is the topic of this chapter. The question arises why there is no independent monument to the suffering of Jewish refugees in the Gulag and in Siberia more broadly, neither to their survival? As vital is the question why Polish memory activists would do not include their Jewish co-citizens into the community of memory about Siberian exile? To find answers to those questions one should travel from New York across the ocean to what had been the second biggest Jewish city in the world before the war—Warsaw. Here we find a conspicuous memorial as well—it is the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East, which was erected along the Muranowska Street in Warsaw. The railway wagon with crosses is set on tracks heading East and is devoted to the Polish victims of the Stalinist crimes—the Gulag and Katyn victims in the first place. Interestingly, the composition of the monument—apart from the large group of Catholic crosses— includes Orthodox crosses, a Tatar Muslim symbol and one matzeva, Jewish tombstone. The monument was built on Muranowska Street, on the former Muranowski Square, where the fiercest struggle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had taken place. Hence, years later, the location of this monument aroused critical reflection.8 And although there are countless monuments relating to Siberia in Poland, I only know about two that provided some space for other (than crosses) religious symbols, including Jewish ones. The first one is located at the Central Cemetery in Szczecin (1994) featuring the Star of David and the second one is the above-mentioned monument in Warsaw (1995). Against the overall singularly Catholic background of the culture of memory conveyed by Polish Siberian monuments, one should recognize these two rare attempts at a 8

Elżbieta Janicka, Festung Warschau (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2011).

A Matzeva Amid Crosses

more inclusive approach to the memory of the Soviet deportations. At the same time, if the two monuments were to be fair about the events they are referring to, the proportions of the religious symbols—if it is they that should speak for the victims—ought to be quite different. As was mentioned, the Jewish Poles constituted up to one third of the Poles exiled in the Soviet Union and thousands of them perished in the USSR.

The memory in the wait state Beyond the universal themes of postwar trauma, this chapter engages with the specific reasons for the exclusion of Jews from the rich memory of Siberian deportations in Poland. The Polish landscape is simply peppered with references to deportations, including monuments, memorial stones and symbolic graves of deportees. That said, commemorating the Siberian deportations is of a rather peculiar nature given that it is largely a result of grassroots initiatives, without matching efforts from national authorities or mainstream media. Initially, the limited interest of central memory actors had much to do with a large number of other cases requiring attention and further clarification once Poland awakened from the period of postwar memory hibernation. Furthermore, many of these historical lacunae had a hidden political potential, just as Siberia had had far earlier. In the years that followed World War II, Poland found itself in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Consequently, the experience of exile in the USSR was either a taboo or, in the case of Jews, could not be interpreted otherwise than salvation from an impending destruction. In such cases, the memory in the wait state could officially emerge from the shadows no sooner than around the time of the change of political circumstances. For these reasons, the history of Siberian deportations attracted a lot of attention in the 1980s. The more taboo they were, the more thrilling became the forbidden topics, providing fuel for mobilizing opposition against the communist regime. Nearly from the beginning, the authorities of communist Poland allowed for a controlled presence of the theme of Siberia in popular culture in a bid to weaken it subversive potential. The topic emerged in films whenever protagonists returned with the Soviet army from exile in Siberia. The circumstances in which they had ended up in Siberia in the first place were “unclear.” The inquisitive viewers could look for necessary clarification in memoirs concerning deportations or Soviet policy (by

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such revered authors as Herling-Grudziński, Miłosz, Czapski and others), distributed since the end of the war as samizdat and among Polish emigrants.9 The 1980s turned out to be a carnival of the dissident memory. Three topics with the biggest subversive potential in Poland at that time included Katyn, Siberia and Jewish issues (which had been shunned since antisemitic campaign in 1968). Those three topics could easily offer points of intersection for the experience of Polish Jews in the USSR. In spite of their convergence, this experience never received special, double attention. That said, it was quite extraordinary that Siberian memoirs penned by Poles of Jewish origin were among the most popular reads. They continued to be published predominantly as underground literature, alongside reissues of books such as The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The work of the Russian author was translated into Polish for the Paris-based journal “Kultura” by a Jewish writer from Łódź Jerzy Pomianowski (1921–2016), who also lived through the war in the USSR. Aleksander and Ola Wat’s accounts (My Century and Wszystko co najważniejsze), along with Brest Litovsk-born Nobel Prize Winner and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s (1913–1988) memoirs White Nights were also widely read. Many titles were hastily prepared for printing amidst Solidarity-led dissident outbreak against the communist authorities. As it seemed, the author’s ethnic or religious background was of no importance; what mattered was how powerful his or her account from the Siberian exile and forced labor was. And the Polish Jewish accounts were among the most powerful. Each of these relations was expected to contribute to de-legitimization of the Soviet rule over Poland, like constant dripping that wears away a stone which already has cracks in it. After 1989, the memory of Siberia fulfilled its original dissident role both in Poland and in other East European countries.10 And it had to compete now with other previously rationed topics from the past (both centered around Polish victims like the so-called Cursed Soldiers, and around victims of Poles– Jews) as well as with the new opening in Polish relations with the Russian Federation. In the meantime, with their insistence on own martyrology and demands of veteran additional payments and calls for repatriation of the Polish Józef Czapski, The Inhuman Land (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951); Czesław Miłosz, The Seizure of Power (New York: Criterion Books, 1955); Edward Czapski, Pamiętniki Sybiraka (London: B. Świderski, 1964). 10 Lidia Zessin-Jurek, “Forgotten Memory? Vicissitudes of the Gulag Remembrance in Poland,” in Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe, ed. Simona Mitroiu (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 50. 9

A Matzeva Amid Crosses

families left behind in Russia and Kazakhstan, the Sybiraks11 were largely considered a burden. Also, some of the deportees made political careers in communist Poland (including General Jaruzelski responsible for the Martial Law), a thorn in the side of tellers of a tale about the innocent Polish victims. Both the State and media in free Poland would occasionally treat deportations like a red-headed stepchild. Deported as a child to the East with his mother, historian and philosopher Krzysztof Pomian (born in 1934) notes that historians too, with few exceptions, failed to show any special inquisitiveness or impartiality regarding the population of exiled Poles.12 However, a modest interest from the opinion-making elites was hardly an insurmountable obstacle for the former Polish deportees. One could venture a statement that, being used to rely on themselves to foster the remembrance under the communist regime, they simply took matters into their own hands. The theme of Siberia is present in both the national consciousness of Poles and the public realm largely owing to the relentless efforts of the ageing members of the Association of Siberian Deportees (Związek Sybiraków). Rarely successful on a central level, they gradually managed to secure support from local governments, hence so many toponymic references to their experience in the Polish landscape.13 The burden of keeping the memory of Polish Siberian deportees alive is mostly on the association’s shoulders. Therefore, the culture of remembrance of Siberia, as well as decisions on who to include in it, have depended to a large extent on the activity of its members.

No remembrance for Polish Jews There are barely any Jews among these unrelenting Sybiraks who put much energy into having the victims of several waves of deportations from Poland commemorated. Very crucial is here the physical absence of Jews in Poland and scarcity of memory actors who could engage themselves on the same grassroots level as the non-Jewish Siberian activists to cherish the memory of the Soviet exile. For the same demographic reasons, with time inevitably passing, the con11 Sybiraks (Polish: Sybirak–singular, and Sybiracy –plural) is the name for the former deportees to the USSR in Poland. 12 Interview conducted by the author with Krzysztof Pomian, September 20, 2018 (the author’s archives). More on the problem of historiography in the Polish context, Lidia Zessin-Jurek, “Macewa pośród krzyży. Żydzi w polskiej pamięci Sybiru,” in Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady, ed. Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 2020), 61–128. 13 Hundreds of streets, roundabouts, parks and schools in Poland are named after Sybiracy.

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strained transmission of memory to subsequent generations of “rememberers” does not bode well for any positive change in this respect. The disparity in absolute numbers between Jewish and non-Jewish Poles repatriated from the USSR, who constituted a group potentially interested in commemorating Siberia, was not very big. What is extremely important, however, is that the majority of Jews returning from Siberia chose not to stay in postwar Poland. They felt the country ceased to be their home after the war and they did not feel welcome there. In view of the fact that a vast majority of Polish Jews who survived the war had gone through the experience of the “Soviet refuge,” those few who stayed in Poland until 1990s most likely had the “Soviet past.” But they did not become “advocates for the Siberian culture of remembrance” in post-1989 Poland. Today, they are nowhere to be seen during the events for the Sybiraks or the annual March of Remembrance of Siberian Deportees in Białystok. They do not appear to be involved in the efforts aimed at erecting memorials dedicated to victims of deportations to Siberia. At the same time, Jewish survivors of the German occupation of Poland, who are considerably fewer in number, attend ceremonies commemorating Holocaust victims. From the 1990s onwards, the attitude of Polish Jewish survivors towards the Siberian past was no longer so strongly shaped by political circumstances; also, the importance of psychological inhibitors (trauma) was diminishing. While many survivors remained silent, others found consolation in the fact that they were finally offered a chance to commemorate their lost families and share their tragic experience. In Poland, same as elsewhere, the cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust manifested itself by a keener interest in life and death of the prewar Jewish minority. Ceremonies, festivals and debates took place, films and books were created, memorials were erected, associations and museums were set up. The Holocaust survivors, few as they were, would be interviewed, their accounts written down and recorded. The memory of the history of Polish Jewish exile in the USSR did not enjoy a similar revival after 1989. The public oblivion about their Soviet experience has continued into the contemporary times in Poland. And this despite the significance and numerous implications of the fact that the vast majority of Polish Jews, who still lived after 1945, survived the war in a difficult Soviet “asylum,” and not in the territories occupied by the Germans. With some exceptions few have been interested in interviewing the Jewish survivors from the East about the nature and costs of their “Soviet rescue” from the Shoah. In the early 1990s in the US, a distinguished Polish reporter Hanna Krall interviewed renowned surgeon Janusz Bardach, who had miraculously survived

A Matzeva Amid Crosses

the war in the deadly Kolyma camp. The reporter did not explore the topic of Siberia; instead, she wanted to find out about the world lost in the Holocaust.14 Most interviews with Polish Jewish refugees who fled to the East would revolve around the Holocaust, as it was the case with the American recordings.15 Polish interviews were often about settling old scores and focused predominantly on the interviewees’ views on the communist system;16 occasionally they would touch upon issues of identity, the so-called Polish Jewish relations or the events of 1968 in Poland, like in Joanna Wiszniewicz’s conversations with mostly the children of survivors in the East.17 There are no events or ceremonies organized for the Jews who survived the war in the East, while the survivors themselves seem reluctant to set up separate remembrance groups and do not have their own memorial. It would seem natural to look for such individuals among the members of the Holocaust and Gulag remembrance associations. Asked about the Jewish children who survived the war in the USSR, professor Aleksandra Leliwa Kopystyńska, president of the Polish Branch of the Association of Children of the Holocaust founded in 1991, replies that “these persons are not members of the Association of Children of the Holocaust as they survived the war in Russia.” She adds that “the Polish Jews who survived the war in the East are nearly completely abandoned here.” She was very happy to hear about plans to undertake research into their memory, particularly that her colleagues in Warsaw and relatives abroad “also lived through an ordeal. They did not go to Russia for an excursion. Nobody takes interest in them.”18 That said, “the Polish definition” of a “Holocaust survivor” does not seem to be sufficiently flexible to include the children who survived the war in the East. The fact that the deportees were among those few Polish Jews who managed to escape death from the hands of the Nazis is not enough for them to qualify as “Holocaust survivors.” Krzysztof Pomian supports this view, considering an opposite trend (existing primarily in the US) as appropriation of the Shoah by more victims. Deported with his mother from Lviv (after escape from Warsaw) to Kazakhstan, Pomian does not think of himself as a “Holocaust child survi14 Hanna Krall, Tam już nie ma żadnej rzeki (Cracow: Wydawnictwo a5, 1998), 64–75. 15 Those who survived the war in the East were interviewed by visual and sound archives as part of the process of collecting Holocaust Survivor testimonies. 16 Magdalena Bajer, Blizny po ukąszeniu (Warsaw: Biblioteka Więzi, 2005); Teresa Torańska, Aneks (Warsaw: Świat Książki, 2015). 17 Joanna Wiszniewicz, Życie przecięte. Opowieści pokolenia Marca (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2009); Ruta Pragier, Żydzi czy Polacy (Warsaw: Rytm, 1992). 18 The author’s correspondence with Aleksandra Leliwa Kopystyńska, May 15–June 11, 2017 (the author’s archives).

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vor.” He refuses to interpret his exile either as a form of persecution of Jews or a lifeline thrown to them unintentionally; instead, he sees it quite soberly as a consequence of the war and predictable measures that could “hardly be called acts of insanity” as they were in line with Stalin’s war logic and Soviet practices.”19 Based in Warsaw, the Association of Jewish Combatants and Injured in the World War Two is the only Polish association whose mission mentions fostering the memory of Jewish fugitives and deportees to the USSR. Established at a political turning point, this umbrella organization was expected to place primary focus on those who were persecuted during the Holocaust and fought the German occupier. The Association has been active in the areas of education and publishing, but a special emphasis is placed on living and housing conditions, as well as fighting for combatant allowances and the so-called ghetto pensions.20 In this context, another problem shared by Jewish Sybiraks comes to light, as pointed out by the president of the Association Marian Kalwary (born in 1930), who claims that “Siberian matters are dear to his heart.” He underlines the Jewish exiles’ “belief that an injustice was done to them as they were deprived of all forms of compensation and damages from the Germans, unlike other Polish Jews. The Germans seem to believe that deportation to Siberia must have been a study tour, not a harrowing flight from the Nazis in hope of saving one’s life. According to the Germans, the Jews who were victimized on the territory of the USSR are entitled to compensation from Russia.”21 In Kalwary’s view, this is “the main problem preoccupying these few Polish Jewish deportees to Siberia who are still alive” as well as “Siberian exiles’ offspring, whose childhood was passed in hunger and cold.”22 His views are confirmed by 92-year-old Halina (Birencwajg) Leszczyńska (born in 1929). She was a child when her parents decided to flee Łódź and head east. She, too, complains about unfair exclusion from commemoration and compensation of those refugees who escaped from Hitler: “We are stigma19 Interview with Krzysztof Pomian, September 20, 2018, Warsaw (the author’s archives). 20 In 1996, the Association published three volumes of the source materials: Losy żydowskie. Świadectwo żywych, also containing accounts of the “Jewish fugitives fleeing to the East.” In the afterword, the volumes’ editor Marian Turski points to an exceedingly difficult matter of interpretation of such experience, “encrusted in myths and clichéd judgments.” Losy żydowskie. Świadectwo żywych (Warsaw: SŻKiP, 1996), 291–292. 21 Renata Jabłońska in an interview mentions that there were Israeli talks with Konrad Adenauer’s government to pay damages to the Soviet exiles in the 1950s. Interview with Renata Jabłońska, September 17, 2020 (the author’s archives). 22 Interview with Marian Kalwary, October 13, 2018, Warsaw (the author’s archives).

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tized. I do not envy those who stayed, but we are like a second category citizens. We are entitled to nothing. Everybody thinks that we went to Russia for the love of comrade Stalin.”23 Among politicians of Jewish origin involved in the functioning of the Polish communist state, the majority survived the war in the USSR and came back to Poland along with the Soviets’ arrival. That is probably how this simplified connection was made. According to Pomian, the visibility of those people seemingly added legitimacy to the statement that all Jews had left for the USSR of their own volition and received better treatment there than “native Poles.”24 Similarly, a 98-year-old popular writer Józef Hen (born in 1923) feels that he still needs to ensure that the Jewish experience in the USSR is not undermined and things are called by their proper name; that the Jews returning from “the dear USSR (Związunio) are referred to as ‘deportees’ or, at the very least, ‘refugees’ who were corralled into the mines of Karaganda”25 and not as “visitors from the communist world” to Poland.26 Hen’s bestselling and largely autobiographical novel penned in 1957 had been shelved (despite the well-liked author’s endeavors) for 33 years until 1990.27 The novel tells the story of a young Jewish fugitive from Warsaw who was not sentenced to forced labor, yet experienced the horrors of famine, diseases and political hostility—all parts of the refugees’ experience in the Soviet Central Asia. Other works by this author that were less frank in their depiction of the Soviet reality, such as Kijów, Taszkient, Berlin (1947), were published in the first years after the war. Today, Hen admits that it is hard for him to form an opinion on that Soviet period as he, unlike his parents and the majority of his classmates from Nowolipie in Warsaw, managed to escape the Germans.28 Referring to the fact that the USSR was not an easy refuge, he concluded: “Had it been the land of plenty, it would not have taught us much; instead, it was the land of a parable.”29 The case of Hen alone shows that political circumstances were not the only reasons for confining the Soviet experience to the memory’s waiting room. Psychological factors were important, too. In addition to the frequent awareness that fate gave them, after all, a greater chance of survival in the East, 23 Interview with Halina Birencweig Leszczyńska, October 11, 2018, Warsaw (the author’s archives). 24 Interview with Krzysztof Pomian. 25 Józef Hen, “Ja, Deprawator. Dzienniki,” Odra, October 10, 2018, 12. 26 This is how the Polish communist leaders who came from the USSR to help install the Stalinist system in Poland would be referred to. 27 Józef Hen, Nikt nie woła (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1990). 28 Interview with Józef Hen, November 6, 2014, Warsaw (the author’s archives). 29 Józef Hen, Najpiękniejsze lata (Warsaw: W.A.B., 2011), 462.

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postwar sense of guilt towards the nearest and dearest who remained in the German zone (all abundant in the ego-sources) would get in the way of active, externalized remembrance.30 The story of the deportation of Polish Jews to Siberia has not produced a single strong narrative as it contains both a story of salvation and oppression. This is also how the voices of Polish Jews are sinusoidal and would not unequivocally support only one of the groups of victims. The Holocaust victims suffered most. On the other hand, the fate of Jewish victims of Stalin has often been overlooked or distorted, and they themselves in no way compensated. The issue of compensations, but this time from Russia (not Germany), was also brought up by the writer Henryk Grynberg (born in 1936). After the war, he worked as an actor, first in Łódź and later in the Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, where he met a number of artists who survived the war in the USSR, such as the prewar comedians Izrael Szumacher and Szymon Dżigan, as well as the famous Ida Kamińska and her family. Grynberg, a “Holocaust child survivor” himself, authored a book on deportations to the East entitled The Children of Zion based on sources documenting the fate of children deported far into the depth of the Soviet Union.31 Later, independently of the prevalent narrative, he would draw his own conclusions concerning the slave labor of Siberian exiles, particularly those from the Gulag. He ventured a provocative statement that Stalin, who had the Polish Jewish refugees deported far into the country’s interior and consequently saved them from the lethal effects of the German occupation, was not the only unintentional savior. He argued that the same could be said about Hitler, who invaded the USSR, thus saving those same Jews who would have otherwise been worked and starved to death by the Soviet dictator. Hitler’s attack prompted Stalin to grant a so-called amnesty to Polish citizens so that they could join the united front against the Germans.32 Indeed, a considerable percentage of Polish Jews regained their freedom and was offered a second/third chance to live a bit longer despite the complementary, yet differ-

30 See the chapters by Adler and Goldlust in this volume. 31 Henryk Grynberg, Dzieci Syjonu (Warsaw: Karta, 1994). Similar initiative with published accounts: Feliks Tych and Maciej Siekierski, eds., Widziałem anioła śmierci: Losy deportowanych Żydów polskich w ZSRR w latach II wojny światowej (Warsaw: Rosner, 2006). See the chapter by Adler in this volume on “Tehran children” evacuated from the USSR to Palestine. 32 Henryk Grynberg, Pamiętnik 3 (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2017), 75; Interview with Henryk Grynberg, February 18, 2018, McLean (the author’s archives).

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ently motivated, efforts of the two systems. Therefore, Grynberg’s opinion on the compensations is different: The “Tehran Children’s” accounts indicate the Nazis’ murderous intentions even before the so-called “Final Solution” that began after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. They also confirm that inhuman mass deportations by freight trains to slave labor camps were a Soviet, not Nazi, invention. Which leads to a question: why a great power that carriers on a lucrative trade in oil, natural gas, weapons, and nuclear technology does not pay–and is not even asked to pay–compensation for the slave labor and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians, mostly Poles and Polish Jews?33

Only a couple of names of Jewish deportees are featured on the lists of the Association of Siberian Deportees. Among those decorated with the Siberian Exiles Cross is the daughter of well-known Warsaw solicitor Henryk Kon, an accomplished translator Elżbieta Wassongowa (1908–2007), who had been deported to the Soviet Union with her husband. Jews’ membership in the Association of Siberian Deportees is more of an exception than a rule. Characterized by a higher incidence in localities in western Poland (most Jews were settled in towns vacated by the Germans on the so-called “Recovered Territories” after the war), this kind of membership requires a very special type of personality; these are very open-minded and serene people, engaged in their local communities, just like Alicja Skowrońska (born in 1941) from Nowa Sól. Deportations beyond the Ural Mountains took a tragic toll on her family. Of the thirteen members of her exiled paternal family, her father, his daughter born in exile (Alicja) and his sister were the only ones who came back.34 Today, Alicja Skowrońska is active both in the chapter of the Jewish Socio-Cultural Society in Żary and the Association of Siberian Deportees in Nowa Sól. She fosters the Jewish memory of Siberia in the Association of the Jewish Combatants in Warsaw, while the Association of Siberian Deportees helps her cultivate the

33 Henryk Grynberg, “In Defense of Eyewitness Testimonies. Reflections of a Writer and Child Survivor of the Holocaust,” in Jewish Families in Europe, 1939–Present. History, Representation and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2017), 252. 34 Mateusz Pojnar, “Opowieść o ostatniej żydowskiej rodzinie i cmentarzu, którego nie ma,” Gazeta Wyborcza. Magazyn Lubuski, September 20, 2016, 11.

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Polish memory of the Siberian experience.35 She simply chooses not to attend anniversaries celebrated in churches. Maria Borkowska-Flisek (born in 1933), an activist living in Gdańsk, returned from the USSR without her father. She was invited to join the Association of the Children of the Holocaust because she survived the first few months of the war in Częstochowa. However, she says: “I feel closer to Sybiraks, because finally I survived the war in Siberia.” She eagerly joined the association, but admits to having great difficulty enduring its “God-and-Fatherland” as well as its utterly lachrymose idiom.36 For this same reason Marian Feldman (born in 1922) kept his distance from associations. He says today that his Siberian story was tough, but it was a story of refugee hardship, rather than martyrdom, as the case is seen in Poland. Before he spoke to me, this 100-year-old resident of Warsaw was asked twice to give testimony about his experiences in Siberia.37 Significantly, this occurred not for Polish audience among whom he lived his entire adult life, but once for the Shoah Foundation and another time in Moscow, at the invitation of the Russian remembrance organization Memorial.38

Polish Calvary of the East Speaking of the Church, we arrive at a very important obstacle to the inclusion of Jews in the local memory of Siberia, that is Poles’ proclivity for expressing national suffering through Catholic symbols (also abroad, as illustrated by the case of the Jersey City Memorial mentioned in the introduction). Prevalence of Catholic symbolism in a country of a Catholic culture is hardly surprising. It can be attributed to the postwar homogenous culture in Poland, as well as strong ties between the public sphere and the Church after 1989. Furthermore, the memory of Siberia has been expressed by means of religious imaginary nearly since the beginning of the deportations dating back to the Tsarist Russia. Offering spiritual consolation in the first place, it fit the Romantic interpretation of political adversities faced by Poles as messianic 35 Interview with Alicja Skowrońska, August 14, 2018 (the author’s archives). 36 Interview with Maria Borkowska-Flisek, April 17, 2021 (the author’s archives). 37 Interview with Marian Feldman, December 29, 2020 (the author’s archives). Marian Feldman self-published his story: From Warsaw, Through Luck, Siberia and Back to Warsaw (Warsaw: Copyright Marian Feldman, 2019). On Marian Feldman’s experiences as a soldier of the Polish Army in the East see the chapter by Friedla; about artefacts of the Feldman family in deposit of the POLIN museum see the chapter by Kaniecki and Piątkowska in this volume. 38 Interview with Marian Feldman, May 22, 1998, Warsaw, USC VHA, 47566.

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martyrdom, assigning special moral qualities to a persecuted nation. A posh deportee of the nineteenth century, Adam Mickiewicz penned these words about the less fortunate exiles sent far into the depth of Russia: “If I forget them, O You, God high in heaven, forget about me too!”39 Today, this is the most commonly used motto of the Polish Sybiraks. We cannot be sure which God was invoked by Mickiewicz, who himself was born to a family of Frankists and later belonged to the religious sect, but the messianic idea was explicitly tied to the Catholic religion before the end of the nineteenth century. After all, it was a potent element distinguishing many Poles from their Orthodox, and later, in the Soviet era, atheist, as well as unwanted political protectors. The motif of the katorga labor in Siberia has always been present in the Polish patriotic iconography, emerging as one of Poland’s most important lieux de mémoire.40 In the interwar period, other, non-religious forms of commemorating deportations came to life, such as the earlier mentioned Association of Siberian Exiles. Its honorary membership badge Number One was awarded in 1928 to Józef Piłsudski, the Church’s prodigal son and Sybirak from the times of the Russian Empire.41 The lists of members of prewar Sybiraks’ associations are hard to get hold of, but one can safely assume that a statesman who, like Piłsudski, gave up Catholicism was more likely to obtain membership in the association than somebody born to Judaism. It goes back to the rivalry over who should inherit the right to suffer, and exclusion from the community of memory, already identified in the nineteenth century in the context of Siberia.42 Poland has long had a problem with assigning the victim status to Jews. Initially, the difficulties arose from the rivalry-ridden notion of Poland as the Chosen Nation. After the war, the Jews’ unique tragedy would dissolve in a universal, anti-Fascist (replaced in time by communist-national) discourse on the memory of World War II. Since 1989, it has been replaced by the national-Catholic narrative. The memory of the deportees became completely 39 Adam Mickiewicz, Forefathers’ Eve. Part III, many editions, this translation from Polish by Michael J. Mikos, Polish Romantic Literature: an Anthology, selected by Michael J. Mikos (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2002), 48. 40 Deportations as the central topos of the Polish political imagination in, inter alia, Jan Trynkowski, Polski Sybir. Zesłańcy i ich życie. Narodziny mitu (Warsaw: Neriton, 2017). 41 Józef Piłsudski converted to Protestantism for matrimonial purposes. 42 One of Poland’s best novelists Bolesław Prus in The Doll created a protagonist Henryk Szlangbaum who was a friend of the book’s main character Stanisław Wokulski from the times of his exile in Siberia (after 1863–1864’ the so-called January Uprising). Aware of the Jewish origin of Szlangbaum, the Warsaw society refused to acknowledge his participation in the uprising as an act of patriotism.

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permeated with Catholic symbols after the transition in 1989. When the topic of Siberia ceased to be of interest to the opinion makers, the Catholic Church proved the only loyal friend from the dissident times showing true commitment to the cause. Feeling isolated, the Sybiraks were more than happy to accept the Church’s support and eventually made it the guardian of their memory. The Church was keen to offer patronage, despite the fact that among the members of the Association of Siberian Deportees re-activated after 1988 were social and political activists drawing on their experience acquired during work in the Polish People’s Republic. For a start, the Association’s key re-activator Ryszard Reiff (1923–2007) was a former president of the pro-communist PAX Association. Over the following three decades, hundreds of Polish churches and graveyards welcomed commemorative plaques and symbolic graves dedicated to the victims of deportations. No other non-religious topic has been so extensively represented by means of church plaques as the Siberian exile. The associations’ practices of commemoration became religious in nature. The annual March of the Living Memory of Siberia in Białystok is the most important of the events organized by the associations. In 2018, as many as seven out of ten items on the event’s agenda were held in churches or took the form of a holy mass or prayer.43 This cannot be put down to the region’s specific nature. Several days later, on the anniversary of the Soviet invasion, the ceremony of unveiling of a new memorial for the Siberian exiles was held at the other end of Poland—the town on the Oder River across from Germany—in Słubice. Among the invited guests were politicians, local institutions, schools, kindergartens and representatives of clergy from the Polish-German border twin-towns Frankfurt-Słubice. During these celebrations, five priests and pastors of different denominations together consecrated the new monument. There was neither a representative present nor a mention of the Jewish exiles. It cannot be taken for granted that the Church, which turned into the main space for the memory of deportees, should see to the historical correctness of the ceremonies and make sure that Polish Sybiraks representing other religions are commemorated. On the other hand, such broader perspective on deported citizens should be expected of representatives of national bodies. In 2018, the March in Białystok was organized under the auspices of the head of the Office for War Veterans and Victims of Oppression (Urząd do spraw Kombatantów 43 Agenda of the 18th International March of Siberian Survivors “From Siberia to Independent Poland,” Białystok, September 6–7, 2018, ephemeral print.

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i Osób Represjonowanych) due to the centennial of the Polish independence. Still, it had no bearing on commemoration, or rather the lack thereof, of the Jewish deportees. The snubbing of Jewish citizens stood out all the more given the otherwise ecumenical nature of the celebrations in Białystok; the event’s agenda, next to the Catholic, featured an annual benediction in the rituals of both the Orthodox Church and the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, which shows the organizers’ awareness and sensitivity to the Siberian suffering of other believers (as long as they were Christians). Even if these believers involuntarily bring to mind former enemies: that is Germans and (particularly in eastern Poland) Ukrainians, always to be called out on the Volhynia Massacre (1943–1945).44 Left out of the ceremony were again the Jews, despite the fact that they are the second largest religious community of Polish citizens deported to Siberia, and the biggest one in Białystok.45 The slowly emerging Museum of the Siberian Memory in Białystok is a state-owned institution. Organized at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, one of the museum’s first temporary exhibitions was entitled Mój Bóg był cierpliwy (My God was patient). The exhibition curator attributes the prevalent Catholic view of the deportees’ spirituality to the nature of the available collections. However, he is familiar with the accounts, or even artefacts, associated with the Polish Jews and Orthodox Christians (the latter were represented by one artefact only).46

Question about the Matzeva Bearing in mind that the Church has been the main advocate of the Polish memory of Siberia, the low participation of Polish Jews in this culture does not come as a surprise. This makes the presence of a Jewish tomb stele in the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East even more intriguing. Naturally, one may wonder whether it was not intended as a fig leaf covering up a general tendency in the Polish culture of memory to express itself through Catholic symbols. According to Michael Meng’s theory of redemptive cosmopolitanism, societies of Central Eastern Europe often pose as open and tolerant by seemingly cultivating the memory of Jews, a safe approach in view of the fact 44 Credit for this interesting comment on Wolhynia goes to Antony Polonsky. 45 Failure to mention the Jewish deportees appears even more befuddling in view of the fact that the majority of the exiled Catholics came from the eastern territories of interwar Poland and had always had Jews for their neighbours as part of their prewar everyday lives. 46 Correspondence with Piotr Popławski, June 6, 2018 (the author’s archives).

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that there are virtually no Jews left in these societies.47 Michael C. Steinlauf came to the same conclusion earlier in his analysis of commemoration of Jews as a strategy of promoting the country’s international image.48 Joanna Michlic dubbed this phenomenon “remembering to benefit.”49 However, it cannot be ruled out that the monument in Warsaw, erected in 1995 as a result of years-long efforts of anti-communist opposition activist Wojciech Ziembiński, is an expression of a genuine nostalgia for ethnically diversified “Eastern Borderlands.” If so, the monument would be an actual attempt to do justice to the history of deportations. At the same time, it can be perceived as one of the final endeavors of the dissident community close to the Solidarity movement to communicate its vision of a free Poland of shared memory (just before the beginning of the ongoing process revising this idea). Most likely by force of habit practiced in the dissident time, the memory in the first half of the 1990s was relatively inclusive. References to the country’s multi-ethnic past were common. This reminiscing was not a result of some scrupulously outlined agenda; simply, an opportunity finally came to express the longing for what was lost. The Zeitgeist hypothesis also applies to Jewish memory of the Soviet experience, as supported by now officially published memoirs, such as Ocalony na wschodzie by Julian Stryjkowski and Piotr Szewc (1991) or the somewhat ironic Widziane z oddali by Bolesław Gleichgewicht (1993). Memoirists of Jewish origin are partakers of the Polish misery in their own right and they are represented accordingly in the memoirs of other authors of that time, for instance in Grażyna Strumiłło-Miłosz’s Znad Świtezi w głąb tajgi50 (1988) or in some accounts from the Eastern Archives (Archiwum Wschodnie) gathered by the KARTA Centre in Warsaw.51 The same can be said about a variety of artistic works of that period with the Jewish Siberia in the background and feature films made after 1989 and dealing with the topic of deportations to the USSR. 47 Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011). 48 Michael C. Steinlauf, Pamięć nieprzyswojona. Polska pamięć Zagłady (Warsaw: Cyklady, 2001), 101. 49 Joanna Michlic,“‘Remembering to Remember’, ‘Remembering to Benefit,’ ‘Remembering to Forget:’ The Variety of Memories of Jews and the Holocaust in Post-Communist Poland,” Kultura i Społeczeństwo, 4 (2012): 225–246. 50 Grażyna Strumiłło-Miłosz, Znad Świtezi w głąb tajgi. Rozmowy z moją matką (Olsztyn: Pojezierze, 1990). 51 See account by Krystyna Kępińska, collection Zapomniani Świadkowie XX wieku, Archiwum Historii Mówionej_0279.

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In aforementioned films, Jews are natural protagonists of the events. Waiting to cross the German-Soviet border on the Bug River, Jews blend with the world depicted in Leszek Wosiewicz’s movie Cynga (1991). Made a year later, the other film tells a story of a deported family of Polish Jewish intellectuals. All that Really Matters (1992) by Robert Gliński is based on the memoirs of Ola Wat, the wife of Aleksander Wat.52 Made much later, another Polish film about deportations, Syberiada polska (2013), features a motif of a Jewish girl deported with her family from Poland’s eastern territories. Directed at the beginning of the 1990s by Agnieszka Holland, Europa, Europa (1990) is undeniably the best known Polish film addressing the Jewish experience in the USSR. Heavy with symbolism, one of the scenes in the movie shows how the main protagonist Salek is separated from his brother amid the mayhem during the crossing of the Bug River on 17 September. In a voice-over narration, Salek explains: “Poles ran away from the Bolsheviks in one direction, Jews ran away from the Germans in the other.” Today living in Israel, the reallife protagonist of this story Salomon Perel (born in 1925) is happy to answer questions concerning the USSR.53 He emphasizes his gratitude to the Soviets for making the Jews’ escape possible, as well as for their “paradoxical rescue.”54 After the flight to the East, the family of his future wife Dora Morecka signed up for the return under the German occupation, which resulted in their deportation to Siberia. She managed to survive the war there; that most likely would not have happened had she come back to her hometown Siedlce. It is worth mentioning that the family history of the film’s director made her familiar with the topic of the Polish Jewish refugees who looked for shelter in the east of Poland and found it in the USSR. Her father Henryk Holland fled to the East in 1939 and survived, while his family died in the Warsaw ghetto.

Non-Europeanized memory Those several films notwithstanding, popular remembrance about Siberia was mostly shaped by the memoirs published in Poland and the Catholic authors wrote increasing number of them in the last two decades. They were resorting to traditional narration and means of symbolic expression and cultivating rather anachronistic rituals of memory. From a broader perspective this is 52 Ola Watowa, Wszystko co najważniejsze (Warsaw: Zona, 1985); Aleksander Wat, Mój wiek (London: Polonia Books Fund, 1977). 53 Shlomo Perel, Hitlerowiec Szlomo (Warsaw: Graffiti, 1991). 54 Correspondence with Salomon Perel, February 24, 2017 (the author’s archives).

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particularly clear in relation to other themes that dominated the memory in Poland and which were more susceptible to the processes of “Europeanization.” It may be attributed most probably to the lack of an outside interest in the culture of memory of the Siberian exiles. Consequently, there were hardly any opportunities for critical introspection and modern consideration. Although the topic of the Gulag was chosen as a counterpart for the Holocaust by some Eastern European memory activists in Brussels, those people never tried to deliver their more modern message (Gulag as a universal lesson learned about the human rights and dignity), methodological expertise and European funds to the local associations of Siberian deportees.55 These associations have to this day relied on their own initiative, fundraising and the only body of symbols that they know, which are national symbols.56 There has been no effective exchange of experience, nor has the grassroots memory of the Siberian exile ever been negotiated. Without a more modern message, it will be hard to get the buy-in for this memory from the younger generations, as well as make room in the national-religious rhetoric-ridden narratives for the memory of suffering of other nations and religions. Grassroots in nature and lacking central support from European lay institutions, the memory of Siberian deportees remained a largely patriotic narrative, with little emphasis on the more universal values such as the need to protect human rights.

“They were dancing on Poland’s Grave.” The Myth of “JudeoCommunism”—żydokomuna What constitutes another barrier to including Poles of Jewish origin in the community of Siberian exiles is seeing them through the lens of Judeo-communism. Such attitude does not leave much room for recognizing them as victims of the Stalinist regime. A search for keywords “Jews, Siberia, Poland” via popular Polish browsers has long been returning results which tell an entirely different story to what constitutes the subject of this analysis. The page name “How jews [sic] from the neighborhood of Jedwabne would deport Poles to

55 Lidia Zessin-Jurek, “The Rise of an Eastern European Community of Memory? On lobbying for the Gulag Memory in Europe,” in Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives, ed. Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 56 The dynamically growing Museum of the Siberian Memory (mentioned above) in Białystok has recently succeeded in its efforts to secure EU funding for development of a permanent exhibition.

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Siberia” about sums this story up.57 In the majority of cases, the originators of the theory of an extraordinary collaboration between Polish Jews—those who “danced on Poland’s grave”—with the NKVD, replicated on the Internet in a number of ways usually remain anonymous (and some not, see the case of Jerzy Robert Nowak, known from his antisemitic proclivities). The stereotype of the Judeo-communism and the theory of “both parties being at fault” are typically brought to life whenever Poles are forced to confront their own complicity in the Holocaust. In the year 2003, three years after Jan Tomasz Gross’s groundbreaking publication on the complicity of Catholic Poles in the killing of Jews in Jedwabne (1941), in the town’s central market square (as opposed to peripherally located small “Jewish” obelisk), a large monument was unveiled–honoring the Siberian exiles. Marta Kurkowska, a researcher of memory of the region, notes that the unwritten context of this monument is the persistent though false belief that the Jews conducted the deportations. She asks whether this Siberian monument in Jedwabne “is in fact an expression of a bidding contest of grievances, a war of memories.” Throughout the years, it has occasionally been interpreted as a monument of defense on the side of the local townspeople or even a monument to enduring anti-Jewish sentiment. In the heat of the debate over the amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) of 2018, one Polish MP resorted to the Siberian argument in the following words, “whether among Poles or Jews, there is a lot to be explained. … And I, Paweł Kukiz, say it: the man who showed forgiveness despite the fact that a Jewish communist murdered his grandfather and dispatched his father to Siberia.”58 This way or the other, the association between the Jewish component and communism is expected to produce a discrediting effect. During the 2021 trial against Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski–historians working on Polish complicity in the murder of Jews during the WWII, right-wing readers called for such researchers to be “loaded into cattle wagons and sent to their place, to the east.”59 57 Piotr Wiśniewski, Jak Żydzi w Radziłowie przyczynili się do wywózki Polaków na Syberię 1941. Z pamiętnika Piotra Wiśniewskiego (1898–1993), mieszkańca Radziłowa, accessed August 13, 2018, http://www.awans.net/strony/historia/wisniewski/wisniewski1.html. 58 Kukiz: Mówię to ja, któremu Żyd-komunista zamordował Dziadka, a Ojca wysłał na Syberię, Fronda.pl. Portal poświęcony, accessed August 11, 2018, http://www.fronda.pl/a/ kukiz-mowie-to-ja-ktoremu-zyd-komunista-zamordowal-dziadka-a-ojca-wyslal-na-syberie,105970.html. 59 Readers’ voices collected by Wojciech Czuchnowski, Dopaść naukowców od Holocaustu. Reduta Dobrego Imienia ściga za książkę “Dalej jest noc,” Gazeta Wyborcza, January 22,

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The theme of “Judeo-communism” also often creeps into the statements and minor materials issued by some Siberian exiles. Following the vision of the alleged chumminess between Polish Jews and the Soviets, the Jews are often mentioned not as companions in distress, but as those who would actually contribute to the misery. It was believed that they were either snitches or (together with the Ukrainians) NKVD officers paying nocturnal visits to families and supervising their deportations. The myth of the Jewish pro-Soviet communists is of course inconsistent with the scale on which the Jewish population was deported to Siberia for all possible reasons: communist ideals or socialism, or, quite the contrary, for capitalism; for Zionism, as well as for being part of the Polish State apparatus; for cosmopolitism, travelling and knowledge of foreign languages, as well as for staying true to humble shtetl religiosity (rabbis and yeshiva students). It is important to note that similarly to some of the Jews who fled the Nazis (such as the famous sociologist Zygmunt Bauman) a fairly strong representation of a “polokomuna” came back from the USSR “converted to communism.” Contrary to Jews, these Polish communists are not considered en bloc representatives of the whole nation. After their return from Soviet camps, prisons and rural settlements for exiles, Polish communists either succeeded in redeeming their “faults” (like writer Zbigniew Domino), became polarizing figures (Marshal Konstantin Rokossowski) or were excluded from the community amidst outrage (Wojciech Jaruzelski). Krzysztof Pomian ponders the extent to which social, and not necessarily religious, differences account for the difficulties in building a common memory of Siberia. What made his mother different from the rest of the Polish deportees sharing a shack in Siberia were her views of a left-wing and atheist representative of intelligentsia from the Warsaw borough of Żoliborz. Natives of the “Eastern Borderlands” (Kresy) were to her as alien as Martians, and the feeling was reciprocated. As a result of failure to establish sufficient common ground, the mother of the future professor never developed the sense of shared fate with the other Poles.60 Jewish Poles who spent the time of World War Two in the USSR were a socially much less coherent assemblage than Catholic families inhabiting one–even if extensive–region of the Kresy (borderlands). Catholic exiles belonged to the fairly coherent strata performing similar social functions 2021, accessed February 1, 2021, https://wyborcza.pl/7,75398,26709016,zaszczuc-naukowcow.html. 60 Interview with Krzysztof Pomian.

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and sharing specific religiousness and social mores and so they later developed similar understandings of the repression they fell victim to. Even if there were social disparities among those deportees, wealthier farmers would eagerly embrace the patriotic narrative of the so-called upper classes and its theme of national suffering. Jewish Poles aimed in their majority to escape the advancing Germans, coming to Kresy from all over Poland, and thence deported as “an alien/potentially dangerous element” from this territory. Among them were residents of big cities, shtetls and villages, people from religious and lay families, the poor and the affluent, the educated and the unschooled, representatives of all sorts of political viewpoints with various degrees of fluency in Polish. This wide range of traits of the Jewish Sybiraks is coupled with another fact of fundamental importance, that is that these Jews arrived in the USSR under various circumstances. Not all of them were “simply” deported; the majority first fled to the eastern territories of Poland. Next to those working in the Gulag, Siberian settlements for exiles in taiga or kolkhozes in Kazakhstan were the Jews who had been earlier recruited by the army or for labor (paid, albeit poorly) in the so-called brigades, and who—as refugees—were even allowed to study. Even if there were a number of non-Jewish Poles who had the same possibilities, all of them were first arrested or deported and later often excluded from this memory culture as well. This means that more diverse Jewish experience led to many more versions of memory about it which did not fit within the unified “Polish” version of victimhood.

This is not meant to be a story of rescue Differences in the scope of the Soviet experience (deportation or refugeedom-cum-deportation) and its perception are undeniably responsible for the difficulties in establishing a common Polish Jewish narrative concerning the stay in the USSR. These significant discrepancies in the experience do not fit the consistent, martyrdom-based narrative of the Polish Sybiraks. Interestingly, the Polish culture of the Siberian memory is not devoid of non-martyrdom yet patriotic accents; they are associated with the nineteenth-century deportees who later became explorers of the Siberian fauna and flora or local founders.61 There is also a motif of adventure, as represented in the memoirs of Polish wartime children who left Siberia at the end of the war for India, Africa and 61 Wojciech Lada’s recently published book describes this “bright side” of the exile in Siberia. Meaningfully entitled Benefits of the katorga. Original: Pożytki z katorgi (Wołowiec: Czarne, 2019).

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New Zealand. However, these stories unfold against the unmistakable backdrop of national suffering. It would be hard to imagine an account of a Catholic deportee perceiving his or her exile as a fortunate twist of fate as part of the Polish sanctioned narrative. In the meantime, the “positive” aspect of the Jewish survival of the German occupation in the USSR conflicts too much with this consistently martyrologic narrative of the dominant mnemonic group. On top of the motif of rescue, another positive theme sometimes emerges in the accounts of Polish Jews. Some deportees claim that Siberia turned them into “artists of survival.” One needed skills, perseverance, gift and luck to get by in such a challenging environment. Those who managed to leave the USSR were confident that life could only get better now. When asked about the impression made on him by a nearly five-year long exile, acclaimed film director and Oscar nominee Jerzy Hoffman said: “It toughened me up. I learned … to eat frozen rowan fruit and potatoes. In difficult moments in my life, my father would always tell me: we survived Siberia, we’ll survive everything else.”62 Hoffman never denied his origins and would mention that he owed his survival to his stay in Siberia during the war. This fact appears to be of marginal interest in his biography.63 Na marginesie (At the margin) is the title of lawyer Edward Kossoy’s autobiography (1913–2012).64 It is one of the few writings of a Polish Jewish prisoner of the Soviet labor camp who lived abroad after the war and whose book would be published in Poland. It enjoyed a relative success (it was nominated to the Nike Literary Award in 2007). However, such memoirs are hardly a rare commodity. The books that have been published abroad over the last three decades portray the experience of the Siberian exile in a captivating detail, at the same time bringing a surprisingly diverse Jewish perspective to the prewar Poland (deeply nostalgic, but not free of bitter memories of the prewar discrimination),65 as well as a typically more unified, critical view of postwar Poland. This could explain why they do not seem to be very popular in contemporary Poland. The accounts of Jewish refugees/deportees that have been published to date are not too harsh on their Christian fellow citizens. 62 Jerzy Hoffman, “Miałem hopla na punkcie Trylogii,” interview, TV Movie, March 15, 1999, 8. 63 Jerzy Hoffman also gave interviews as a “Jew,” but they did not have a wide appeal among readers. They reveal that four of his close relatives deported to Novosibirsk died in exile. “Oddly enough, I am alive only because we were deported to Siberia,” he often says, for example in an interview with Piotr Paziński, “…nie można przestać być Żydem,” Midrasz, April, 2001, accessed August 19, 2018, http://www.midrasz.home.pl/2001/kwi/kwi01_3.html. 64 Edward Kossoy, Na marginesie… (Gdańsk: słowo, obraz, terytoria, 2006). 65 See for example, Simcha Shafran, Fire, Ice, Air. A Polish Jew’s Memoir of Yeshiva, Siberia, America (New York: Hashgacha Press, 2014), 5–6.

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They belong with the national narrative referencing primarily the battle trail of General Władysław Anders, an experience which in a sense compensated for the protagonists’ Jewishness. Another group of authors single-handedly neutralized their Jewishness. In his memoirs Wspomnienia uchodźcy published right after his return from Russia (only in 1997), poet Jan Sztern does not make a single reference to his native culture. The account of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, who chooses to conceal his Jewish origin and probable motives for his escape to the East, while not sparing Jews in his book, remains the most evocative portrayal of the experience in the Polish literary canon to date.

Antisemitism of deportees versus the “Polish Moses” We have thus arrived at the next important reason for divergence of the respective Polish and Jewish memories of Siberia, namely the manifestations of antisemitism among members of the Polish diaspora in exile. While testimonies of friendly relations can be found, what prevails are recollections of various forms of exclusion, refusal to help in emergency situations (life of children in danger), as well as verbal assaults. These are clearly the social and political products of the interwar period in Poland. Among those best identified is the aforementioned issue of discrimination of Jews in recruitment for both Polish military formations in the USSR, particularly for the Army of General Władysław Anders. The General himself splits apart authors of memoirs and historians. Some think of him as a rabid antisemite, while others come to his defense, dubbing Anders the “Polish Moses” who managed to lead some of the Jews out of the Soviet bondage.66 Outside of a broadly understood memoir prose, there are very few tokens of remembrance in the public realm that would address the Soviet experience of Polish Jews. Outside Poland, in 2006, Sławomir Grünberg and Robert Podgursky made a documentary Saved by Deportation. An Unknown Odyssey of the Polish Jews. It follows the trials and tribulations of several Jewish deportees from Poland, later domiciled in the US. The second and most recent documen66 Mike Levy, In the steps of the Polish Moses, accessed September 10, 2018, https://www.thejc. com/lifestyle/features/in-the-steps-of-the-polish-moses-1.64019. George Landau (born 1932) and his older brother Henry were born in Poland, but their childhood was marked by the hunger experience in Siberia, Tashkent and Tehran. Now living in California, George is preparing the publication of his father's memoirs. He himself no longer feels part of the Polish community of memory. Interview with George Landau, February 19, 2021 (the author’s archives).

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tary originates in the US as well: Nancy Margulies’ Lies and Miracles (2018) is based on the Soviet story as written down by Meier Landau from Mościska and told by his son George and a fellow deportee from Piotrków Trybunalski, Irena Taurek.67 The families of authors of those documentaries survived the war in the Soviet Union, as did other Jewish filmmakers who had first taken up the general theme of Poles in the wartime USSR in cinema, such as the already mentioned Jerzy Hoffmann in his Do krwi ostatniej (To the Last Drop of Blood, 1978) and Michał Waszyński in Wielka droga (The Great Trail, 1946). As long as the memory of the Holocaust lives on, the Soviet theme is bound to emerge, be it occasionally or as a reference in the memoirs of the second and third generation, both in literary works and scholarly publications. At some point, the build-up of these references may lead to a concentration of information, raising awareness among the Polish public of the fact that the majority of the Polish Jews who survived the war owe it to their Soviet exile. This information has been most often conveyed in brief biographical notes or morsels of literature, but is absent from other forms of memorialization, be it the international memory culture of the Holocaust or the Polish memory of the Gulag (the international memory of the Gulag is still underdeveloped). What inspired the deliberations in this chapter is the marginality of the theme of Polish Jewish refugees and deportees to the USSR in the Polish culture of the memory of Siberia. While deportations to Siberia were given a place in Poles’ historical awareness, only the families of deported Polish Jews and historians realize that among the Poles forced into exile were disproportionally many Polish citizens of Jewish origin.68 An incentive to break the Polish memory of Siberia out of well-worn patterns of the local memory could certainly come from the outside. However, Jewish deportees and their descendants living abroad rarely feel the need to influence the Polish public opinion; they are already part of other “opinions.” Films and publications typically have a more powerful impact on emigrants (and in general) if they are published in their current places of residence. Therefore, the catalyst for change and expanding the boundaries of the memory (instead of dividing it) of Polish exiles in Siberia should come from Poland. This chapter is an attempt to address this need and obligation. 67 Irena Taurek features also in another poignant recent documentary: Who’s afraid of Alice Miller? (2021), by Daniel Howald. 68 Jews constituted around ten percent of Polish prewar population, but up to 30 percent of the Polish deportees to Siberia.

CHAPTER 12

Before, During, and After: The Objects and Archival Material in the POLIN Museum Przemysław Kaniecki and Renata Piątkowska

P

OLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened to visitors in 2013 but began to build its collection in the second half of the 1990s. In 2006, a project to compile family memorabilia began through which many future donors learned about the museum who were eager to donate their family keepsakes and archives (as well as to share their family stories for the oral history project). The objects they donated are on display in the core exhibition and temporary exhibitions—organized by both the Museum and other institutions1—shared online, and made available to researchers visiting the museum. Many of these over two hundred objects and archival items—letters, official documents, and photos—are related to the period of World War II which several families spent in the Soviet Union. We present selected items from this section of the museum collection. Translated by Zofia Sochańska. 1 Some of the objects described in the article were also presented at POLIN Museum’s core and temporary exhibitions. The most important amongst them was the exhibition titled Biographies of Things. Gifts in the Collection of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews (2013–2014), featured: Beniek (Abraham Dow) Kirszbaun’s razor, keepsakes left by Ryszard Henryk Rozental and the Feldman family. Each year in January, POLIN Museum organizes special displays of selected artefacts to mark the Holocaust Remembrance Day (to date, these were, i.a.: Grania Klitenik’s dress, letters of the Justman family, keepsakes of the Diatłowicki family). Keepsakes of the Webers, Diatłowickis, Włodawers will be loaned to enrich the permanent exhibition of the Siberia Remembrance Museum in Białystok (planned opening: September 2021).

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We believe it is imperative not to dissociate the eastern experience of Polish Jews from the periods right before and right after their stay in the Soviet Union. The life stories connected to the vital experience of having been “saved in the East,” to quote Julian Stryjkowski,2 must be told in context. They must include whatever happened immediately before the stay in the Soviet Union, namely why the people in question found themselves in the Soviet Union (for example, as a consequence of a decision reached at the spur of a moment, or as a result of pure coincidence),3 as well as what happened afterwards, that is to say, the aftermath and what it entailed (psychologically, ideologically, materially, etc.). The text revolves around these very aspects linked to the titular objects.

Beniek’s Razor4 Following the September 1939 defeat, flight to the east of Poland—namely to the territories under Soviet occupation—seemed like the only hope for salvation. 16-year-old Jakub Kirschbaun (Kirszbaun)5 set off in the direction of the Bug River together with his oldest brother Dawid and Dawid’s wife Leonia. Jakub was the youngest offspring of Eliasz and Rebeka Kirszbaun. At the time, he was too young to shave, and yet his older brother Beniek (Abraham Dow, b. 1910) gave him his own razor in an elegant case. Jakub had it with him while in exile in Siberia, when he joined the Berling Army in 1944,6 and after the war, in Paris, and in Israel. It is his only possession from his family home. Father, Eliasz, passed away when I was seven, but he has sure left an imprint on my memory . . . . I remember him as a serious man— Ocalony na Wschodzie. Z Julianem Stryjkowskim rozmawia Piotr Szewc (Montricher, CH: Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc, 1991). 3 See the chapter by Markus Nesselrodt in this volume. 4 Prewar safety razor, metal, 6 × 10 × 5.5 cm, Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich (MHŻP), MHŻP-B112. 5 Jakub Kirschbaun (Kirszbaun), born on December 1, 1923, in Warsaw, currently a resident of Haifa. His father Eliasz (Elijachu) Kirszbaun (1882, Warsaw–1931) was a well-known activist of Agudat in Poland. Mother Rebeka, née Bukszpan, brother Abraham Dow (Beniek), and married sister Dwora all perished in the Holocaust. Rutka Rachel (1914–1939) was killed in September 1939 during an air raid in Warsaw. Brother Aleksander (1907–1942) died in Palestine where he had emigrated in 1933. After fleeing to the Soviet Union, Jakub, Dawid (1907–2002), and Dawid’s wife were exiled to Siberia, returning to Poland in 1946. In 1948 they left for Paris. Registration at the Central Committee for Polish Jews (CKŻP): October 28, 1946, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (ŻIH), no. 8956. 6 On the Berling Army see the chapter by Katharina Friedla in this volume. 2

Before, During, and After handsome, good looking, very intelligent. He was rarely at home—he was chairman of the Jewish kahal and a member of Parliament for two terms running. He was also President of Agudat Israel in Poland, and one of the cofounders of the world Agudat during the party’s conference in Katowice, I think it was in 1912. And yet, for me, he wasn’t an MP, or a chairman—he was simply my father, my daddy.7

This precious (and priceless) gift of Beniek Kirszbaun is a razor blade shaver in an elegant leather case. The case holds a profiled handle with special grooving which makes it easier to hold it, the razor, and a razor guard. It was made of stainless steel, resistant to water damage or scratching. It is quite heavy, but that just made the shaving process easier. The leather case is padded inside with material that prevented any damage. Thanks to it, the razor was so durable, an object for life. One could use it for shaving even today.

The Diamond8 Hana and Dawid Diatłowicki left Warsaw in September 1939 and stayed with Dawid’s parents in Łuck (present-day Lutsk, Ukraine). In April 1940, they were all arrested and exiled by the NKVD to Siberia. It was the so-called second deportation, one of the four waves of deportations of prewar Polish citizens to the Soviet hinterland. The second wave involved families of people deemed to be enemies of the Communist system. Recalls Jerzy Diatłowicki, son of Dawid and Hana, born in exile: When the Russians entered the city, on the 18th or perhaps the 19th, some high school students allegedly were shooting at the Red Army. My father’s youngest brother, Abraham, was allegedly among them. Beautiful, sixteen-year old boy. Were they really shooting, or weren’t they—nobody knows. . . . What we do know is that they took the boy and he vanished without a trace. And that is how the Diatłowickis, being the family of an anti-Soviet subversive, were selected for the second round of deportations . . . .9 7

Anka Grupińska, “Z opowieści polskich Żydów (12),” accesed November 11, 2019, https:// www.dwutygodnik.com/artykul/3558-z-opowiesci-polskich-zydow-12.html. 8 Diamond to cut glass; diamond, ivory, metal, 15 × 2.8 cm, R. Baranczikow, 19/20w., MHŻP-B655/3. 9 Judyta Pawlak and Przemysław Kaniecki, eds., Przynoszę rzecz, przynoszę historię. Rozmowy z darczyńcami (Warsaw: Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich, 2016), 145.

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They had two hours to pack. Dawid’s mother, Klara Diatłowicka, took the most necessary things. His father, Józef, on the other hand, clearly dazed and unable to think straight, took items such as a heavy mortar with a pestle and a large Ćmielów10 platter. By accident, he also packed a diamond which was used to cut glass and eventually saved the family, allowing Józef to earn enough money to support them. The family was deported to Kazakhstan. A year later the Soviet German war broke out, and a great evacuation began—not only of industrial plants but also offices. Some ended up in Kazakhstan, too. “An office is an office once it has a signboard,” explains Jerzy Diatłowicki. “It needs to say: a such-and-such office is located here. They all knew it, and began to produce signboards frantically. But they needed resilient material to produce them, and glass was the only one available. Information may even be written on a piece of paper, as long as it is shielded by glass—then it will withstand both rain and snow. They did have glass, but in large sheets that needed to be cut.”11 That is how Józef Diatłowicki became a very popular craftsman. He did not accept money for his work; instead, he asked for food, or anything that could be exchanged for food. The Diatłowicki family brought the diamond back to Poland. It does look well-used. A grandson donated it to the POLIN Museum. Other items returned to Poland as well. Jerzy Diatłowicki gave some of them to his son; the rest—including the diamond—he donated to the POLIN collection: the Ćmielów platter (chipped, allegedly after the return to Poland), a cane purchased by his grandfather in Kostanay, one of his tefillin.

The Siberian Ketubbah12 Aron Goldstein (Goldsztajn) was born on September 1, 1918, in Tomaszów Lubelski, the son of Shaya and Perla, née Fajberg. Aron considered emigration to South America. A copy of his birth certificate, issued on May 30, 1938, in Tomaszów and attached to the visa application, was submitted at the General Consulate of Argentina in Poland (August 19, 1938). But Aron never left. When the war broke out he was in the territories occupied on September 17, 1939, by the Soviet Union. During his wartime wanderings he never parted with his birth certif10 Ćmielów is the oldest still operating Polish porcelain factory. 11 Pawlak and Kaniecki, Przynoszę rzecz, 146. 12 Ketubbah: the Jewish marriage contract. Documents of Aharon Goldstein (loaned by daughter Pnina Stern): a ketubbah written down in Siberia from 1941, MHŻP-D35/9; birth certificate of Yeshyahu, son of Chawa and Aron, Togol, Siberia 1942, MHŻP-D35/13.

Before, During, and After

icate or his family photos. Two years later, in Siberia, Aron married Chawa Stang. In order to validate the wedding held at the local registry office, Chawa’s father, Beniami Stang, wrote down a ketubbah from memory which Aron then handed to his bride. The document was written in Aramaic on the back of an Association of Artisan Guilds of the Republic of Poland’s propaganda poster.13 We do not know how the poster made it all the way to Siberia. Today, even though some fragments of the text are illegible, the document—damaged, folded endlessly, glued together, creased, frayed—still confirms that a wedding took place in 1941. Szaja, son of Aron and Chawa, was born on October 13 of the same year. On January 3, 1942, in Togul (in Altai Krai) another document was issued, this time in Russian. Szaja’s official birth certificate no. 138535 was produced by the Registry Office.

“Let These Signatures Remind You of Many”14 A young man, presented in the form of a bust, en face. His facial expression is peaceful, hair neatly combed. The cardboard has yellowed and bears visible marks of cutting. It is not damaged though. This cherished keepsake is a portrait of Ignacy Feldman, drawn in January 1946 by one of the fellow prisoners (alas, the signature in Cyrylic is illegible). On the back is a dedication and signatures of comrades from the camp, both men and women. “Pusteti podpisy napomniat tyebe o mnogom!” (Let these signatures remind you of many people). 1. Merenkow Step. [Stepanowicz] Lwow 2. Jaroszczuk Iwan [Iwanowicz] Fiodor 3. Darowskaja Wiera Iwanowna 4. Mogilewski Borys Grigorewicz 6. Ryżowa Lidia Aleks. [Aleksandrowna] 7. Kisielew Dmitrij Artiom. [Artiomowicz] 8. Czujrima Fedsia Leont. [Leontiewna] 9. Zabiechaja Dora Matwiejew. [Matwiejewna] 10. Oreszyn Iwanow. [Iwanowicz] 11. Martynowa Raja 12. Kulbiakin Misza 13 The Association of Artisan Guilds of the Polish Republic was established in 1933. Its purpose, among others, was to determine the problems faced by the crafts as well as raising the level of craftsman ship training. 14 Portrait of Ignacy Feldman, 1946, paper/pencil, 26 × 20.5 cm, MHŻP-B221.

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Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, the Feldmans resided in Warsaw. When the war broke out, Ignacy, together with daughter Janina and son Marian, fled to the East.15 They managed to survive the war there. The mother stayed in Warsaw because she did not want to leave her aging parents alone and moved into the ghetto with them. The parents passed away in the ghetto; in all likelihood, the mother perished in the Treblinka extermination camp.

A Beautiful Dress from Krasny Kut16 Leon and Grania, née Juziuk, Klitenik lived in Telechany (present-day Telekhany, Belarus) where they were born. They had a son, Józef, born in 1938. The Kliteniks’ daughter, Helena Klitenik-Primik, was born after the war. She believes that her parents fled to the East with a baby not so much due to their Jewish origin but to Leon’s political activity. He was a communist, and it was widely believed that the Germans would arrest the communists first. Leon’s father was certain they would. Leon returned home to fetch the family, but the father refused to go once again. The entire family of Leon and Grania from Telechany perished during the mass murder of the Jewish population in August 1941. Leon’s return to Telechany had its dramatic consequences. Someone took 1½-year-old Józef from lonely Grania’s arms and gave him to a group of people going east by car. Later, Leon managed to catch up with the car on a bike and got the child back. He reached Gomel with Józef and decided to wait for his wife there. He joined the Red Army and left Józef at a 24-hour nursery while he fulfilled his military service. Alas, the nursery was evacuated in his absence and the Kliteniks never managed to find their child. And, unable to find him in Gomel, Grania Klitenik did not have any contact with her husband until after the war; in 1946. She reached Krasny Kut on the eastern bank of the Volga River and got a job as a seamstress; her profession since she had turned 17. It must have been autumn when she made a warm woolen dress for herself using pieces of blue air force overcoats. The dress was donated to the museum by Helena 15 See Marian Feldman, Z Warszawy przez Łuck, Syberię, znów do Warszawy (Framingham, MA: Ryszard Feldman, 2009). On Marian Feldman war experiences see also the chapters by Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla in this volume. 16 Dress made by Grania Klitenik from military overcoats, Krasny Kut near Saratov, 1941/1942?, MHŻP-B660.

Before, During, and After

Klitenik-Primik. The cut is simple, with no waistline. Reaching to Grania’s ankles, its long sleeves ended with cuffs. The dress has a collar, a cut along the front bottom, and twelve buttons with loops across the bust. She recalled wearing it throughout the war. The dress is a unique item in the POLIN Museum collection, drawing attention with both its beauty and craftsmanship. It serves as proof of a simple truth of life: it was really cold in the east.

The Soviet Union—Near East—UK—Canada and the US—Poland17 Ryszard Henryk Rozental fled to the Soviet Union with his parents. We do not know their story in detail. According to the account of Janina Rozental, who married Ryszard over a dozen years after the war, his parents were killed in an assault and robbery incident in the Soviet Union. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Janina donated keepsakes left by her deceased husband to the museum and told us his life story. The preserved documents indicate Ryszard studied at the Medical Institute in Tomsk. However, his student book shows that he completed only the first term of the academic year 1941/1942. Ryszard, 18, joined the Polish Military Forces in the Soviet Union, the so–called Anders Army which, as we know all too well, was by no means easy due to obstacles faced by Polish Jews in the Soviet Union and the antisemitism of the army’s leaders and the majority of Polish soldiers.18 Ultimately, Ryszard ended up in Great Britain but left to attend flight training in Canada and the US. He worked as a pilot for the Royal Air Force. The POLIN collection includes his pilot’s hat, a small aeronautic measuring apparatus, photos, and playing cards. After the war, he returned to Poland and worked as an interpreter using his fluent knowledge of English. Paradoxically, even Ryszard’s memorabilia from the US, Canada, and Great Britain can be considered a part of the story of his survival in the East.

17 Archival collection of Henryk Ryszard Rozental, MHŻP-251/1-24. 18 See, for example, Israel Gutman, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union,“ Yad Vashem Studies XII (1977): 231–296; Klemens Nussbaum, Historia złudzeń. Żydzi w Armii Polskiej w ZSRR 1943–1945 (Warsaw: Tetragon, 2016), 2nd chapter in particular; David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-In-Exile and the Jews, 1939−1942 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 114–156. On drafting of Polish Jews into the Anders’ Army see the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume.

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The Letters19 The POLIN Museum collection also boasts the archival documents of Paulina Włodawer, née Justman; mainly letters dating to wartime written by her family members from the Warsaw ghetto. The family consisted of eight members: Aron Justman (b. 1884) and Miriam, née Rozenstrauch (b. 1888), as well as Rywka (Regina, b. 1913?), Paulina (Pesa Fajga, b. 1914), Emanuel (b. 1915), Lejb (Lebek, b. 1917?), Bluma (b. 1920?) and Pinchas (b. 1922?). Paulina married clerk Artur Włodawer (Aron, known as Artek, b. 1911) in December 1936. She and Artur crossed the green border in the East in October 1939. Emanuel Justman also fled Warsaw, independently from Paulina and Artur. Regina Justman, however, stayed in Warsaw to look after her parents. The younger siblings also remained in Warsaw. This entire section of the family perished, most likely in Treblinka in 1942. Having fled, Emanuel Justman initially stayed in Bila Tserkva, later in Buynaksk, and after the war he settled in Israel where he passed away in 1980. In 1940, the Włodawers were deported from Łuck to Siberia, to Asino. In 1941, they were released from the camp, following the amnesty of Polish citizens announced in August 1941. They lived and worked in educational facilities in Uzbekistan. Letters from the Justmans kept arriving until Spring 1941. The last one to reach Paulina (the eleventh) is dated April 24, 1941. These are mainly letters from Regina, with notes in German by Aron, and Miriam Justman. The sister wrote: I do not want you to worry, my dearest Pepcia, but indeed it’s getting increasingly hard here, and basically hopeless. It’s like a nightmare: the numbing fear and the feeling of falling into a bottomless abyss. I have only one wish: I do not want any more torment, I just want it all to end soon. I am not really interested in anything anymore–I have been feeling numb and don’t seem to care about anything anymore.20

The collection also includes letters from the Justmans to the son and brother, Emanuel Justman, as well as letters which Emanuel exchanged with his 19 Correspondence, photos, documents of the Włodawer and Justman families from the period of WW2, and diary of Paulina Włodawer from 1980‘s, MHŻP-B113/1-41. 20 Regina Justman, Miriam Justman, Aron Justman to P. Włodawer, April 24, 1941, Warsaw, manuscript, 29 × 21.6 cm, MHŻP-B113/11.

Before, During, and After

sister. They show Emanuel becoming mature in the Soviet Union, and testify to the changes in his character. For example, in the surviving letter from Regina Justman to Emanuel dated July 30, 1940, the sister warns him against idealizing the past, most likely in response to his unknown letter in which he must have confessed to the feeling of nostalgia. “Perhaps you have already forgotten, but I do remember it very clearly—we were unhappy and complained all the time, and for a reason, too.”21 Regina’s letter sent several months later is even more explicit: It turns out that [fleeing to the East] was the right thing to do, and you really mustn’t be stricken with remorse. You wouldn’t be of much use here; there, you have a chance to become a self-reliant, independent human being, and as such you can prove yourself useful to us, and to others. . . . I am truly baffled by the fact that you long so much for our prewar life, for it was indeed far from perfect.22

Emanuel’s letter to Paulina Włodawer dated May 1942 shows that Emanuel has made significant professional progress and is eager to learn. Emanuel compares his current situation to the humiliating work in Poland before the war. “I, the man nobody ever needed, am currently holding a post that requires utmost responsibility.”23 He also seems to have changed his opinion on the question of Polishness. While in Bila Tserkva, he yearned for any contact with Poland.24 While in Buynaksk, he distances himself from the Poles, and has a low opinion of those whom he met there (“moral cripples).”25 At the same time, he stresses the importance of maintaining contact with the representatives of technical intelligentsia from Moscow and Leningrad. 21 R. Justman to Emanuel Justman, July 30, 1940, Warsaw, manuscript, 20 × 12.4 cm, MHŻP-B113/2. 22 R. Justman to E. Justman, Warsaw, September 3, 1940, Warsaw, manuscript, 20 × 24.6 cm, MHŻP-B113/23. 23 E. Justman to P. Włodawer, May, 1942, Buynaksk, manuscript, 20.3 × 17.2; 20.3 × 17 cm, MHŻP-B113/15. 24 E. Justman to P. Włodawer, October 30, 1940, Bila Tserkva, manuscript, 20.4 × 14.5 cm, MHŻP-B113/5. “Each Polish word, or rather every word that is connected with our oldtime Poland, evokes enormous sentiment. It is indeed a curious phenomenon. I have never felt particularly attached to Polish culture, or to Polish life, and yet now I have all these feelings.” 25 E. Justman to P. Włodawer, May 1942, Bila Tserkva, manuscript, 20.3 × 17.2 cm, MHŻPB113/15. On Polish-Jewish relations in the Soviet home front see the chapter by Albert Kaganovitch in this volume.

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Several photos and documents accompany the collection, together with three letters from Samarkand, written by Fanny Landau (we do not know for sure whether this is the full version of the woman’s name—she was referred to as Paulina), who was in Asino at the same time as the Włodawers. In a letter from December 2, 1941, she wrote: All Polish citizens are being sent to Kazakhstan. They are very adamant about it. We are in for a very tough and disturbing time. Echelons pass by every single day. With the help of various справок [?] we—the entire gang—were granted a week-long respite. People talk—or rather, they claim with conviction, that no Polish citizen is going to stay here. So, apparently, they have gathered us here to help us.26

In yet another letter from early 1942, also from Samarkand: “As for us, we’re in for the toughest times in our lives. We have sold everything we owned, and we are still miraculously alive.”27 However, in the last surviving letter, written less than a month later, Landau already mentioned the passing of her husband, Mieczysław, passing as a result of complications after typhoid fever.28 Eventually Fanny Landau also died–of hunger and exhaustion. The Włodawers returned to Poland in 1946. In July, in Ząbkowice Śląskie, Paulina Włodawer gave birth to a child. From 1948, she worked as a lipid biochemist in the reconstructed Marceli Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Łódź, then in Warsaw after the Institute moved to the capital city in 1953. She was granted professorship in 1966. The Włodawers left Poland for Sweden in 1969. They lived just outside Stockholm, and continued to pursue their professional careers. Their son, Aleksander Włodawer, emigrated to the US where he became a professor too. He is a world-renowned crystallographer. In 2008, he donated his parents’ memorabilia to the POLIN Museum collection.

26 Fanny Landau to P. Włodawer, December 2, 1941, Samarkand, manuscript, 14.4 × 10.2 cm, MHŻP-B113/21. 27 Landau to P. Włodawer, February 23, 1942, Samarkand, manuscript, 20.3 × 14.2 cm, MHŻP-B113/22. 28 Landau to P. Włodawer, March 15, 1942, Samarkand, manuscript, 25.5 × 17.1 cm, MHŻPB113/18.

Before, During, and After

In the early 1980s, having retired due to poor health, Paulina Włodawer wrote her wartime memoirs very matter-of-factly.29 She began writing in a thin notebook; each time she ran out of space, she took another one, and then another still, each time reaching for thicker notebooks. She noted her surprise at the bulk of her writing and at how time-consuming it was. Her changing handwriting in the three densely written notebooks reflect her slowly deteriorating eyesight.

A Batiste Cover for a Baby Pram from a German Woman The wartime Soviet Union experiences of Chana Terbiler, Abram Kacman, and their son, Walisz, constitute another, predominantly archival collection. Above all, the objects pertain to two stages: until mid-1941 and after the outbreak of the German Soviet war. In addition to the archival material, the collection includes items linked to their lives in the course of the first years after their return to Poland as well as surviving prewar photos of family and friends they had taken with them while fleeing to the East. We know the family history from the account of Perła Kacman, Chana and Abram’s daughter (b. 1948) who donated the family memorabilia to the museum. Chana (Anna, 1902–1987) and Abram (1904–1983) lived in Warsaw before the war. In his youth, Abram attended a yeshiva (in Chełm) but quit his studies, having gotten involved—with Chana’s persuasion—in the activities of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine in Lublin, a branch of the illegal Communist Party of Poland (KPP). Chana was arrested in the late 1920s, and spent four and a half years in prison for her political activity. Following her release, the couple moved to Warsaw where their son was born in 1936. On September 1, 1939, they were on holiday visiting Abram’s family in Chromówka (near Chełm). There is a photo in the collection of the three of them wearing bathing suits, in all likelihood taken during that summer as the 29 Paulina Włodawer, Pamiętnik, Täby, manuscript, 1980–1982, 21 × 14.7 cm, MHŻPB113/42 (the memoir is currently being prepared for publication by Anna Pyżewska of the Siberia Remembrance Museum). She wrote her memoirs as if she were writing a diary; each consecutive entry is accompanied by a date: 2.09.1980–9.10.1980 (notebook 1), 10.10.1980–30.03.1981 (notebook 2), 1.04.1981–31.01.1982 (notebook 3). More importantly, in her memoirs, Paulina Włodawer provides details of the various events mentioned in the correspondence to her, making additions on the basis of information obtained years later from survivors of the Warsaw ghetto (concerning the Justman and Włodawer families) or other former Asino inmates (concerning, for example, the Landau family–entry dated 17.11.1980).

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reverse features a stamp of a photography studio in Chełm. The Kacmans fled the Germans to the other side of the Bug River together with Abram’s entire family: his mother, sisters, and two brothers, and with the wife and son of one brother (Moses). Towards the end of October, they (possibly all of them) were still in the territory that had belonged to Poland prior to September 1939. We know this because Chana obtained a document which testified to her activity in the Ukrainian Communist party, issued in Huszcza near Chełm (October 24, 1939; Polish stamps, text in Ukrainian). This document, along with all other documents from that period, demonstrate another kind of challenge during wartime. It was issued on a recycled fragment of a card; a part of a table from an unidentified print is visible on the verso side (blank). Later, the family was given a referral to Steckówka (near the town of Sumy, present-day Steckivka, Ukraine) where most of them worked in the “New Life” kolkhoz. Three documents of Chana and Abram survived from Steckówka— two issued on a packing paper (small format, torn rather than cut from a larger piece of paper), one on a fragment of reused print. The documents, all issued in November 1940, testified to their stay in the village and employment in the kolkhoz. Following the outbreak of war between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, Abram and Moses were conscripted to the Labor Batallions (the Trud Army). Chana decided to flee, and soon set off with Walisz further to the east. Almost all those who had stayed behind in Steckówka after June 22, 1941, were murdered by their Ukrainian neighbors. Abram’s sister, Żenia, was the only one to survive. She ran away after going to town on the day of the murders and being warned by one of her Ukrainian neighbors on her way back.30 Chana and Walisz ended up in Kazakhstan. The story of their odyssey— supposedly the most important stops on their way—is retold by a number of documents, all issued on recycled pieces of paper. In August 1942, they were staying in Kalachinsk (around 80 km east of Omsk) where Chana worked as a nurse. In March 1943, they were in the town of Sastobe in south Kazakhstan, several dozen kilometers from Tashkent (proof of employment at a tailor’s shop). There is also a document written in Cyrillic in the Kazakh language —a certificate from an unidentified “Tshapayev” kolkhoz (an official, undated form on a recycled piece of red paper with tables in Russian and in Kazakh, only written in the Latin alphabet). We know from the postwar accounts that Chana 30 Perła Kacman’s relation, based on information given by family member Żenia Kacman-Horman.

Before, During, and After

travelled with her sewing machine which allowed her to get some income. In Kazakhstan, she mainly sewed bras of her own simple design, a product not known at that time among local women. The document from Sastobe—a permit to leave for Tulkybas—was in all likelihood issued when Chana planned to travel to meet Abram whom she located in late 1943/early 1944 following correspondence with the Moscow branch of the Red Cross. Abram Kacman’s battalion’s task was to transfer a plane factory to inland Soviet Union and to relaunch production. As it turned out, the factory was being moved to the vicinity of Kuybyshev (present-day Samara) on the Volga River. Interestingly, the only surviving document issued by Kacman’s workplace does not include the factory’s address for reasons of security. Abram Kacman continued to work there until the end of the war and demobilization. He tried to join the Anders Army but was rejected on the grounds of his Jewish origin.31 He met his brother Moses at the Anders Army recruitment point (most likely in the town of Kuybyshev where most diplomatic posts had been moved, including the Polish Embassy). The brothers lost touch after Abram had joined the Trud Army. Chana Terbiler and Walisz most likely joined Abram Kacman in the spring of 1944. Two objects from their stay as a family in Kuybyshev have survived: a pot which Abram had made using aviation aluminum before Chana and their son arrived (a testament to the material side of life), and Walisz’s school certificate. He likely began his formal education in Kuybyshev. The family arrived in Poland towards the end of 1945. Abram and Moses had located their sister Żenia in the Soviet Union before repatriation. A photo of the three siblings taken in the Soviet Union is in the family collection. Chana met with the few surviving family members only after she had returned to Poland. Coincidentally, the family of Chana’s eldest brother, Dawid Terbiler, was offered accommodation on the same street in the Lower Silesian town of Bielawa where Chana, Abram, and Walisz Kacman resided. The Terbilers also survived the war in the Soviet Union. It is common knowledge that the majority of Jews who had survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union were relocated to the so-called Recovered Territories (Lower Silesia and Western Pomerania). Chana’s youngest brother, Uszer (Asher) and his family were also sent to Bielawa at a later date. They left for Israel in 1948.32 31 Gutman, “Jews in General Anders’ Army.” 32 Two nieces of Chana survived the war in the Soviet Union: Rachela and Rojza Justman as well as Szmul Terbiler, son of Chana’s brother, Herszl, and Chana’s aunt, Zelda Goldman with her three children.

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All the members of the extensive Terbiler family (Chana had eight siblings, and they all had large families of their own) who had decided to remain in Poland in 1939 perished in the Holocaust. In line with the thesis formulated in the introduction, the immediate postwar history of the family is as important as the Soviet chapter. The tale of their postwar existence, based on memorabilia and archival materials donated to the museum, not only reveals how they strove to rebuild their lives but also encourages a psychological analysis of their condition after they returned to Poland. The collection also includes proofs of purchase of items left behind by the town’s former German residents.33 A group photo with the Jewish knitters has also survived. Abram got involved in ORT activity (the Society for Handicraft, Industrial, and Agricultural Work among Jews of Poland) in Lower Silesia which set up knitting cooperatives and occupational training for Jewish women returning from the Soviet Union. The Kacmans wanted to return to Warsaw. In 1948, Abram went to the capital which was in the process of being rebuilt to look at the options to move. Chana was pregnant at the time. She returned from the Soviet Union in ill health, weighing merely 38 kilograms. Doctors recommended 45-year old Chana get pregnant as the hormonal changes offered a chance for recovery. She befriended the German woman in whose house the family had been living, and, surprisingly, the two women had a great deal in common. Both felt lonely and ostracized: one for being a Jew, the other for being a German. Perła Kacman drew our attention to this peculiar bond; she could not stop wondering how her Jewish mother who used to wake up every morning in tears, mourning her near and dear ones murdered by the Germans could possibly have grown so close to a German woman. Would this bond be possible had Chana miraculously survived in the occupied territories, an eyewitness to the atrocities of the Holocaust rather than in the Far East? A farewell gift from the German woman, a batiste cover for the baby pram she’d sewed and embroidered right before she was deported, illustrates the close bond between the two women.34 There are also Dr. Oetker brochures with cooking recipes in German, printed especially for the times when shortages were commonplace, for example, butter. Chana’s favorite was a honey cake, baked precisely according to the recipe from one of the brochures. 33 E.g., a certificate of owning a piano; District Liquidation Office in Dzierżoniów, August 28, 1947, print, typescript, manuscript, 30 × 21 cm, MHŻP-B1139. 34 Bielawa, mid-1940s, 61 × 47 cm, MHŻP-B1106.

Before, During, and After

Several items in the collection are connected to the family’s move to Warsaw, and the 1950/1951 transport of the property purchased after the war. Their move to Warsaw might be regarded as an epilogue of their rescue in the East.35

Wooden Suitcase, Wooden Shoes Marek Oberländer (1922–1978) was a painter and cofounder of the breakthrough “Against War, Against Fascism” Polish National Exhibition of Young Visual Arts held in July 1955 at Warsaw’s Arsenal. When prisoners of gulags, exiles, soldiers, and residents of the territories of the former Polish Second Republic decided to return as part of the repatriation action in 1946, he chose to head back to Poland too.36 He set off, equipped with a wooden suitcase and leather shoes.37 He was returning to his country but not to his hometown. He was born in the small town of Szczerzec (present-day Shchyrets, Ukraine) near Lwów (present-day Lviv, Ukraine). Halina Oberländer used to say that her husband “went to Szczerzec, hoping he’d find his relatives. Alas, he didn’t even find a chimney of his own family home, as all the chimneys of the burnt down houses were all the same now.”38 He arrived in the Soviet Union as a soldier of the Red Army. Conscripted in 1941, he served in the army until 1943 when his commanders were informed of his planned desertion. He was sent to demilitarized labor battalions39 and to work in a mine in the Urals.

35 Despite the pressure, Abram did not accept a job in the Security Service. Following a short spell at the Warsaw Committee of the United Polish Workers’ Party (PZPR), he decided to take employment at the ELPO lamp factory in the district of Ochota where he held the post of administrative director until his retirement in 1964. Chana did not seek employment after the war. In 1969, Walisz emigrated to the US with his wife and children. Perła studied physics. She is now a professor and continues to reside in Warsaw. 36 Oberländer registered at the Central Committee for Polish Jews (CKŻP) on August 28, 1946, in Warsaw, registration card no. 7655, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (AŻIH) O37; O80. 37 Suitcase, timber, MHŻP-B650/1; shoes, leather, timber, MHŻP-B650/2ab. 38 Anna Wrońska, “Rozmowa z Haliną Oberländer o Marku Oberländerze,” in Marek Oberländer. Wystawa malarstwa, ed. Wrońska and Joanna Stasiak (Warsaw: Galeria In Spe, 1998), 8. 39 Alina Skibińska, “Powroty ocalałych i stosunek do nich społeczeństwa polskiego,” in Następstwa zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika AdamczykGarbowska (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2011), 44. Militarised Labor Batallions were a form of forced labor. The so-called stroytbayter worked mainly in the mines like Oberländer or at construction sites.

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After the war, Oberländer cut himself off from his past. “Marek never spoke about his experiences during the war. He didn’t talk about his family or his birthplace. He never recalled his childhood,” wrote Bohdan Czeszko, a writer and friend of the painter. “He shut it all down in his head, and threw away the key . . . .”40 The only keepsakes from wartime are the wooden suitcase and shoes. Halina, the artist’s widow, does not recall her late husband ever talking about them. They had simply been an element of the interior design for as long as she could remember. And now they are here to retell Marek Oberländer’s story. The cuboid-shaped suitcase was made of plywood and wooden boards, its corners linked using a logging method which did not require nails. The bottom and the lid were connected with metal hinges. The suitcase interior was reinforced with slats fixed with three metal screws similarly to the hinges. A handle made of leather, folded using metal rivets, was attached to the longer side with two metal fixtures. The suitcase had a metal lock installed inside with the two rectangular metal endings protruding in the lid. The key was lost. The suitcase wood was not stained; it was visibly used but by no means tattered. The shoes, possibly made to measure, have a solid wooden sole, leather handmade uppers made of fair dressed (pig?) skin. They have no lining or padding but are reinforced from the inside and outside. The heel is reinforced with a double-stitched leather belt and also reinforced on the outside. A piece of triple-stitched leather is sewn on the top. The shoe is tied; the part between the tongue and the casing is reinforced with stitched metal studs. Tongue and holes are reinforced with metal ferrules, shoelaces are of light brown color. The circumference—the part between the sole and the upper—is covered with a narrow, one-centimeter piece of leather attached with nails approximately every centimeter. The high wooden soles with heels are protected both from the cold and from uneven road surfaces. Made from a solid raw piece of wood, they were not, as can be assumed judging by their condition, glued on a thinner rubber or leather sole or specially protected. The heel and front of the shoe are reinforced with flat metal crescent-shaped flees attached with four nails. The shoes are well-worn; the leather is now stiff, cracked, and dirty. Leather shoes with a wooden sole demonstrate how carefully Oberländer was preparing for his long journey home. The suitcase, as one might guess by 40 Czeszko, “Moje Kazimierze,” in Nostalgie mazurskie. Opowiadania. Quoted from: Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, ed., Kazimierz vel Kuzmir: miasteczko różnych snów (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS, 2006), 333.

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looking at it, was made by a carpenter. Its format, on the other hand, makes it clear how few things were in the painter’s possession.

A Besamim Holder41 A besamim holder is an ornamental spice container used at home and in synagogue during the Havdalah, a Jewish ritual that marks the end of holy Shabbat, and symbolically indicates the return to daily routine after the holy day. The myrtle, cloves, cinnamon, vanilla, and allspice are placed in an openwork container and the blessing is recited, accompanied by the smell of incense. Kurt Weber’s home was not very religious, despite the fact that his father Edward Weber was the last chairman of the Jewish Religious Community in Cieszyn. Kurt recalled that the Webers attended services at the shul twice a year. The family was well-rooted in Cieszyn; they lived in a tenement house on Głęboka Street. Edward Weber owned a small plant on Przykop on the Olza River. Kurt recalled: “We spoke German at home, I used Silesian dialect talking to my pals in the streets. It wasn’t until I went to school that I learned proper literary Polish.”42 In September 1939, Germans entered the town. Kurt with his mother, Regina, and his younger brother, Piotr, reached Przemyśl and next Lwów where his father caught up with them. In 1941, the NKVD arrested the family by pure accident. They were rounded up with their detained neighbors43 and deported to the east of the Soviet Union. There, in the Tadzhik Leninabad (Asia Minor, present-day Khujand) they spent the subsequent wartime years. It was likely there that they purchased or were given the besamim holders observed Kurt when donating them to the museum collection. He did not remember them from his prewar family home. After the war, he became a cinematographer, and worked on many important Polish movies from the 1950s and 1960s including Zaduszki (All Soul’s Day) and Salto ( Jump) directed by Tadeusz Konwicki and Ludzie z pociągu (Panic on a train) directed by Kazimierz Kutz. In 1955, he made the first Polish documentary on the Warsaw ghetto, Pod jednym niebem (Under this same sky). He decided to emigrate to West Germany in the aftermath of the antisemitic campaign of March 1968. He passed away in 2015. 41 Besamim holder shaped like a spire, silver, 18 × 4.7 x 4.7 cm, maybe from Russia, MHZPC30; besamim holder shaped like a pomegranate, 11.2 × 6.3 × 8 cm, maybe from Russia, MHZP-C46. 42 Kurt Weber, Dokumenty podróży (Gdynia: Novae Res, 2014), 17. 43 Weber, 27–28.

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Conclusion Among the things that have survived, there are all sorts of objects: poor, humble, ordinary. These things, some saved as keepsakes such as Jakub Kirschbaun’s razor, testify with their sheer existence to their owners’ lives. They tell the story of survival. They can be read like a book, often in the strict sense—human lives recorded in the preserved letters and documents. Other objects require a written narrative with which we can present people’s individual life stories. The objects, as well as their micro-histories, manifest their fragmentation, incompleteness, maybe even, to some extent, randomness in terms of which objects have been preserved although it is widely known that in the case of documents in the Soviet Union every piece of paper with a stamp or even the right signature was vital. Their physical layer, especially in the case of paper—often very fragile, requiring special conservation treatment—suggests some of the reasons why so few keepsakes have survived until today. They also suggest a great variety of experience which is impossible to document in its entirety, and can only be described in fragments. On the one hand incomplete, on the other they complement one another and collections held at other museums. They also complement the dominant historical narrative. They give it nuance, and perhaps even question it to some extent.

EPILOGUE by Mark Edele

Epilogue

Mark Edele

Contributions Once largely forgotten, the fate of Polish Jews in the war-torn Soviet Union is increasingly capturing the imagination of historians. After pioneering studies by Yosef Litvak and others in the 1980s and early 1990s,1 a new wave of research resulted in important essays in the early teens of the new millennium.2 1 See also the introduction in this volume for an overview on the existing research literature. Yosef Litvak’s path breaking study was never translated into English: Pelitim Yehudim mi-Polin be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot, 1939–1946 ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1988). But his essays have paved the way for further English-language historiography. See, “The Plight of Refugees from the German-Occupied Territories,” in The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41, ed. Keith Sword (New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1991), 57–70; “Polish-Jewish Refugees Repatriated from the Soviet Union to Poland at the End of the Second World War and Afterwards,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 227–239; and “Jewish Refugees from Poland in the USSR, 1939–1946,” in Bitter Legacy. Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 123–149. Other early contributions are contained in Davies and Polonsky, Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR. Also note Mordechai Altshuler, “Escape and Evacuation of Soviet Jews at the Time of the Nazi Invasion: Policies and Realities,” in The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941–1945, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffrey S. Gurock (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1993). 2 Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 373–399; Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities During World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 85–121; idem, “Stalin‘s Great Power Politics, the Return of Jewish Refugees to Poland, and Continued Migration to Palestine, 1944–1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 1 (2012): 59-94; Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees During World War II,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 61–79; John Goldlust, “A Different Silence: The Survival of More Than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union During World War II as

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An attempt at mapping this growing field was made at a 2015 conference at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, which led to an edited collection in 2017.3 Since then, two important monographs, one in German, the other in English, and a further book of essays in Polish, have rounded out the literature.4 The current volume, again emerging from a conference, this time at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw in 2018, consolidates what we know and charts the path ahead. The essays collected here contribute to four distinct historiographical traditions. Most obvious is the history of the Holocaust and Holocaust survival. The volume’s position within this debate has been put in admirable context in the introduction by Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt, two authors who have made significant interventions into this debate. It hence needs no further discussion here beyond an endorsement of Antony Polonsky’s plea in the foreword for considering this history as part of “Holocaust survival.”5 Second is the history of Poland during and after the Second World War. The deportations of 1940–41 form a central part of Poland’s war trauma. They are usually narrated, quite reasonably, as a history of victimization,6 an “endless litany of forced deportations, deprivations, exploitation, starvation and misery,” as John Goldlust writes (222). Less reasonably, as Lidia Zessin-Jurek points out, Polish Jews are mostly excluded “from the rich memory of Siberian deportations in Poland” (239). At issue here is more than a struggle between “mnemonic warriors” and “mnemonic pluralists” (237). A confrontation of this history with its Jewish variant opens up more subtle ways of thinking about this history. As Goldlust stresses, “the wartime vicissitudes” experienced by the

3 4

5 6

a Case Study in Cultural Amnesia,” Australian Jewish Historical Journal 21, no. 1 (2012): 13–60; and Markus Nesselrodt, “From Russian Winters to Munich Summers: DPs and the Story of Survival in the Soviet Union,” in Freilegungen: Displaced Persons – Leben im Transit: Überlebende zwischen Repatriierung, Rehabilitation und Neuanfang, eds. Rebecca Boehling, Susanne Urban, and René Bienert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 190–198. Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, eds., Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939– 1946 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2020); Lidia Zessin-Jurek and Katharina Friedla, ed., Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020). For another thoughtful discussion see Adler, Survival on the Margins, 284–288. A now standard English-language history is Katherine R. Jolluck, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).

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two groups “were, in the main, not that dissimilar” (222). The Jewish variant, however, can sharpen our view of the alternatives Catholic Poles faced back home as well. While not subject to a concerted genocidal campaign as their Jewish compatriots, many of those who returned at war’s end might well have not survived the war, had they stayed behind. As we wrote in Shelter from the Holocaust: How many of the Poles in prisons, labor camps, and special settlements in the Soviet interior would have survived the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1943 in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, for example? And how many of them might have been killed as a direct result of German occupation policies?7

Third, this volume also belongs to the history of the Polish diaspora after World War II, another growing field of research in need of coming to terms with its Jewish version;8 and fourth it contributed to Soviet history, my own field of specialty, on which I shall expand below. We should not conceive of these historiographies as well-contained boxes.9 One of this volume’s many merits is that it does not, instead transcending such boundaries and entangling histories often torn asunder by sub-disciplinary specialization. Most radical in this respect is Gennady Estraikh’s wonderful essay. It demonstrates that any attempt at classifying Hersh Smolar as exclusively “Polish,” “Soviet,” “Jewish,” or “Communist” misses the point of this remarkable life entirely.

Polish Jews as Soviet Subjects Smolar was, among other things, a Soviet subject–as were the vast majority of Polish Jews we meet in the pages of this book. Their fate opens up distinctly Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, John Goldlust, and Atina Grossmann, Introduction: “Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 14. 8 For example, Paul Sendziuk, “Forgotten people and places. ‘Stalin’s Poles’ in Persia, India and Africa, 1942–50,” History Australia 12, no. 2 (2015): 41–61, and Wanda Warlik, “Polish refugees in Africa during and after the Second World War,” PhD diss., The University of Western Australia, 2019 (both contributions include the Jewish experience). 9 Indeed, from a Jewish perspective, the histories of the Russian Empire, Poland, and the Soviet Union form one unit. See Antony Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, 1–3 vol. (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010–2012). 7

Epilogue

new perspectives on the Soviet experience more broadly and of the Soviet version of World War II in particular.10 The Polish Jewish experience helps rethinking what it means to be “Soviet” during this war. As several contributors to this volume point out, many Polish Jews lost their Polish citizenship, either by default or by choice, after they made it to the relative safety of Stalin’s empire. They shared this experience with some 12 percent of fellow Soviets. Like these other “new Soviet citizens,” they had been “acquired” by the Soviet Union during the years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Like this larger group, formerly Polish Jews who survived the war spent part or all of their war as Soviet citizens, contributing, like others, to Stalin’s war effort by working or fighting (or both). Like many other Soviet citizens, they experienced this war as a series of displacements. Like all, they worked the system to their least disadvantage. Their ideological commitments and personal war goals overlapped at times with those of Stalin, but also diverged from them: they both wanted to see Nazism destroyed, but for quite different reasons and to quite different ends. That, too, was typical for Soviet citizens more generally,11 as were the feelings of mutual incomprehension and the glimpses at commonality which Natalie Belsky chronicles for “Russian” and “Polish” Jews. The war’s catastrophic levels of displacement mixed the populations of the Soviet empire, leading to new encounters between people and peoples who otherwise might have never met. In these interactions, Soviet citizens both reasserted their political, social, or ethnic differences and overcame them in recognition of shared fates.12 Central Asia, which looms large in the histories analyzed in this volume, was a particularly fertile ground for such cross-class and cross-cultural encounters.13

10 Hence the important role Polish Jews play in Mark Edele, Stalinism at War. The Soviet Union in World War II (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). 11 The “typicality” of Polish Jews as Soviet citizens is developed in more detail in Mark Edele, “Escaping the Holocaust: Restoring the Soviet Contribution to the Survival of Polish Jews During World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 48, no. 1 (2020): 209–222, here 215. 12 See Mark Edele, Stalinist Society 1928–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 29–32; idem, Stalinism at War, chapter 7. 13 Paul Stronski, Tashkent: Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 72–144; Moritz Florin, “Becoming Soviet through War: The Kyrgyz and the Great Fatherland War,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17, no. 3 (2016): 495–516; Roberto J. Carmack, Kazakhstan in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019); and Adeeb Khalid, Central Asia. A new History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 265–280.

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The similarities between Polish Jewish and other Soviet experiences even extend to the on first sight extraordinary experiences of Jewish women in the Berling Army, which Friedla describes in her contribution. They were but a special case of Red Army women more generally.14

From the margins But as non-Slavs and as new Soviet citizens, Polish Jews were quite different from how most historians imagine “the Soviet subject.” Despite the fact that nearly half of the Soviet prewar population were non-Russians, it is still very common to think of this war as “Russia’s” and of the typical soldier as “Ivan.”15 Ideological consent to the Soviet regime and active self-fashioning as a “Stalinist subject” are construed as central to the success of the Soviet war effort.16 In reality, motivations to serve either as a civilian or at the frontline were as diverse as the Soviet population and as complex as the human soul.17 And they were changing in lockstep with the failures and successes of the Red Army.18 The genius of the Soviet war effort was not its success in indoctrinating everybody to think and act the same, but its ability to coordinate these multi-sides, plural, and often contradictory motivations and channel them towards victory: with repression, with propaganda, with indoctrination, with 14 The best treatment of this topic remains the path-breaking oral history from Soviet times, now available in a new English translation: Svetlana Aleksievich, The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (New York: Random House, 2017). 15 Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead. The Rise & Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Richard Stites, ed., Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); Marius Broekmeyer, Stalin, the Russians, and Their War (Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999); Amir Weiner, “Saving Private Ivan: From What, Why, and How?,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 2 (2000): 305–336; Catherine Merridale, Ivan‘s War. Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Chris Bellamy, Absolute War. Soviet Russia in the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); Robert Edwards, The Winter War. Russia‘s Invasion of Finland, 1939–1940 (New York: Pegasus, 2009); Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War. Russia and the USSR 1941 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Gregory Carleton, Russia. The Story of War (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2017). 16 Jochen Hellbeck, Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich (New York: Public Affairs, 2015). 17 For an excellent study of the motivations of frontline soldiers see Roger Reese, Why Stalin’s Soldiers Fought. The Red Army’s Military Effectiveness in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011). 18 Mark Edele, “‘What are we fighting for?’ Loyalty in the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945,” International Labor and Working Class History 84 (2013): 248–268.

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social pressure, with encouragement, and with ideological self-motivation and self-mobilization.19 The Polish Jews surviving war and genocide in the lands of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century provide more than just one case study of “atypical” Soviet subjects–one group among many, in the time-honored fashion of social history as a history of clearly bounded groups. The studies in this volume, by contrast, demonstrate the diversity of backgrounds and the multiplicity of experience hidden behind the collective term “(former) Polish Jews.” The closer we look, the more diverse the group becomes. Eventually, it dissolves within a bundle of individual experiences and trajectories, overlapping and interrelated, but still distinct. Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II did not all have the same experience, the same politics, or the same loyalties. Both their paths into and their exits from the Soviet Union varied considerably, as Nesselrodt’s, Wojciech Marciniak’s, and Serafima Velkovich’s contributions show. In between these moments, their journeys through the wartime Soviet Union followed diverse itineraries. Even those who joined the Berling Army–a group one might imagine sharing basic traits–were, in reality, “not a homogeneous group,” as Friedla stresses. They included “Zionists, Bundists, people with leftists sympathies, and those who were politically indifferent, as well as members of the intelligentsia, workers, and craftsmen, alongside students of prewar rabbinical schools” (72). Here again, Polish Jews were typical, even in their atypicality: other Soviet citizens, too, were divided by as much as they were united by a common fate. As Friedla and Nesselrodt write in the introduction to this volume: there was “no unifying Soviet experience, but a variety of it” (xxiii). Thus, these stories of “survival on the margins” afford us the possibility to observe the Soviet experience more generally, as it were, from the margins.20 19 On propaganda see Mark Edele, “Paper Soldiers: The World of the Soldier Hero according to Soviet Wartime Posters,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 47, no. 1 (1999): 89–108; Lisa Kirschenbaum, “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families:’ Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 825–847; and Karel C. Berkhoff, Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). On coercion see Oleg Budnitskii, “The Great Terror of 1941. Toward a History of Wartime Stalinist Criminal Justice,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, no. 3 (2019): 447–480; and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, “Deserters from the Labor Front. The Limits of Coercion in the Soviet War Economy,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, no. 3 (2019): 481–504. 20 Adler, Survival on the Margins.

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History Wars The experience of Polish Jews surviving in the Soviet Union is also an important test case for the current history wars over World War II. There is a tendency in part of the current historiography to see Hitler and Stalin as equally evil and their regimes as two versions of the same deadly totalitarianism.21 Some go as far as implying that Stalinism was maybe the worse of the two.22 This scheme works to a degree, for example if we focus on non-Jewish Estonians.23 But it breaks down immediately when confronted with the Polish Jewish lives explored in this book.24 “It would be difficult to find,” writes Eliyana Adler in her monograph, “a set of historical circumstances more constitutive of Jewish luck than the bizarre fact that Joseph Stalin’s deportation of a selection of Polish Jews effectively saved them from Adolf Hitler’s murderous reign.”25 Albert Kaganovitch drives home the same paradoxical point when he writes that “even repressive measures of the Soviet government such as deportations… turned out to be of benefit for the displaced Jews” (58). And, indeed, the “great majority of Jews who survived the Nazi genocide in Poland did so in the interior of the Soviet Union,” as Polonsky remarks (viii). Obviously, their experiences in the land of the Soviets were harsh, often lethal. As Adler notes tersely of children’s testimonies in her essay: “the overall narrative of life in the USSR is bleak. The children suffered from hunger, loss, and disease” (47–48). More bluntly, Polonsky stresses that many of the deportees lacked “any of the basic requirements for survival. Some, particularly women and children, died even before the amnesty was proclaimed while more perished while trying to make their way to the southern republics of the USSR” (xiii). But, on aggregate, this terrible fate was clearly better than what would have awaited them in German occupied territory. In the land of the Soviets there was, at least, a good chance of survival and the hardships the displaced Polish Jews faced were shared with many other Soviet subjects. And the survivors knew it: as Goldlust points out in his contribution, it was exactly the realization of how much worse it could have been which made 21 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Bodley Head, 2010). 22 Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War (New York: Basic Books, 2021). 23 Olaf Mertelsmann and Aigi Rahi-Tamm, “Soviet Mass Violence in Estonia Revisited,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, no. 2–3 (2009): 307–322. 24 Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941 (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1995). 25 Adler, Survival on the Margins, 101.

Epilogue

“flight survivors” (Adler) self-exclude for a long time from the concept of “Holocaust survivor.”26 In Goldlust’s words: While almost all the Polish Jews who spent the wartime years under the Soviets had suffered considerable hardship and deprivation, when they arrived back in Poland after the war they were quickly made aware who the ‘real Jewish victims’ were, and so began consciously and deliberately to dissociate their own experiences from those of Jews who survived the war in Nazi-occupied Europe (217).

At the same time, the mere fact of their survival is no endorsement of the Soviet Union’s war record. There was no attempt by Stalin’s state to save the Jews; in fact, many survived because Stalin had deported them as class enemies; a large share experienced forced labor; there were arrests, even executions. Hence, their history does little to support the other end of the again increasingly polarized historiographical spectrum: a celebration of Stalinist war making and the reassertion of the old Soviet line of the Soviet Union (now read: “Russia”) fighting a just war from start to finish.27

Paths ahead After the profusion of research on Polish Jews in the Soviet Union since the 1980s, is there anything left to be said? The contributions to this volume have charted the state of the field and the introduction to this volume has already pointed to themes which require further research: the “amnesty” of 1941 and its effect on Jews; Jewish soldiers in the Anders Army; aid operations in support of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union; daily life and relations between Jewish and 26 John Goldlust, “Identity Profusions: Bio-Historical Journeys from ‘Polish Jew’ / ‘Jewish Pole’ through ‘Soviet Citizen’ to ‘Holocaust Survivor,’” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 219–246. 27 A high-quality English-language celebration of the Soviet war record, based on meticulous archival research, is Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). More polemical are many contributions from Russia, where the President himself set the tone. For a discussion see Mark Edele, Debates on Stalinism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 207–234. The wider political implications of this debate are lucidly examined in Marlene Laruelle, Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021), chapters 3 and 4. On the share who experience force labor see Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust entkommen, 143, and Edele, “Escaping the Holocaust,” 213.

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Non-Jewish deportees; the gendered dimension of this history; political affiliations; repatriation; and the fate of those who remained in the USSR. These are all important avenues for further inquiry, but two deserve to be highlighted in particular. First is the investigation of Jews in the Anders Army, which might well be broadened into a larger investigation of Polish-Jewish participation in combat more generally. Polish Jews served in the Anders Army, the Berling Army, and in regular units of the Red Army, both in labor battalions and in combat units.28 Like Smolar, they joined, and in some cases founded, partisan squads as well.29 There is increasing interest in Jewish combat experience in World War II, a growing field of research such a study could be in dialogue with.30 And it is the part of the history of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union which has received least attention. Neither Adler’s nor Nesselrodt’s monographs afford much attention to combatants; the book I helped edit pays no more than a few sideway glances at them; and the current volume includes but one contribution exploring this issue.31 The fate of those who remained behind on Soviet territory is the second avenue of future research worth emphasizing. The reasons for staying behind were, yet again, diverse. Some could not manage to produce papers which showed that they were Polish citizens; others had fallen in love and remained behind because they would not separate their spouses from their families; others were arrested for various reasons and hence missed the repatriation campaigns; those who had been convicted for “anti-Soviet” activities or utterances were often denied exit from the Soviet Union; and some stayed out of ideological conviction or because they had managed to carve out a life and a 28 A classic on labor army and combat participation is Gabriel Temkin, My Just War. The Memoir of a Jewish Red Army Soldier in World War II (Novato: Presidio, 1998). The wider context of Soviet Jews in the Red Army is provided in Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II. Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014). 29 Nechama Tec, Defiance. The True Story of the Bielski Partisans, 2nd ed. (Oxford: oxford University Press, 2008). For the wider context (Soviet Jews more generally) see Jack Nusam Porter, Jewish Partisans of the Soviet Union during World War II (Boston: Cherry Orchard Books, 2021). 30 An important resource for such a history is the Blavatnik Archive https://www.blavatnikarchive.org It was among the sponsors of an important international conference on “Jewish Soldiers & Fighters in World War II,” November 14–15, 2021, https://www.accelevents. com/e/jewishsoldiersinwwii 31 See Friedla’s chapter in this book.

Epilogue

career in the Soviet system.32 We know very little, nearly nothing about them, and lifting the veil of silence from their postwar lives will require a determined historian (or, indeed, a whole team of them) with great skill, creativity, and perseverance: the sources are sparse, fragmentary, and dispersed. But the payoff might be great. If we have learned anything from the recovery of the history of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, it is how their histories change the way we look at an otherwise well-known past, be that the history of the Holocaust, the histories of Poland and its diasporas, or the history of the Soviet Union at war.

32 See the short sketch in Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust, 122.

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Selected Bibliography

Secondary Literature Adamczyk-Garbowska, Monika, “Patterns of Return. Survivors’ Postwar Journeys to Poland,” in Levine Annual Lecture. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 2007. Adelson, Józef, “W Polsce zwanej Ludową,” in Najnowsze dzieje Żydów w Polsce w zarysie (do 1950 r.), ed. Jerzy Tomaszewski (Warsaw: PWN, 1993), 387–477. Adler, Eliyana R., Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). ———, “Crossing Over: Exploring the Borders of Holocaust Testimony,” Yad Vashem Studies 43 (2015): 83–108. Adler, Eliyana R., “Hrubieszów at the Crossroads: Polish Jews Navigate the German and Soviet Occupations,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (2014): 1–30. Adler, Eliyana R. and Aleksiun, Natalia, “Seeking Relative Safety: The Flight of Polish Jews to the East in the Autumn of 1939,” Yad Vashem Studies 46 (2018): 41–71. Aleksiun, Natalia, “The Situation of the Jews in Poland as Seen by the Soviet Security Forces in 1945,” Jews in Eastern Europe 3 (1998): 52–68. Altshuler, Mordechai, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964 (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012). Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). ———, Gulag Voices: An Anthology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). Arad, Yitzhak, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln/ Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press & Yad Vashem, 2009). Baberowski, Jörg, Scorched Earth: Stalin’s Reign of Terror (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). Barkan, Elazar, et al. ed., Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007). Bauman, Zygmunt, “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” Poetics Today 4 (1996): 569–597. Belsky, Natalie, “Fraught Friendship: Soviet Jews and Polish Jews on the Soviet Home Front,” in Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Atina Grossmann (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 161–184.

Selected Bibliography Berkowitz, Michael and Brown-Fleming, Suzanne, “Perceptions of Jewish Displaced Persons as Criminals in Early Postwar Germany: Lingering Stereotypes and Self-fulfilling Prophecies,” in We are here. New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, ed. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 167–193. Blatman, Daniel, For Our Freedom and Yours. The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (London: Vallentine Mitchell & Co Ltd, 2003). Blum, Ignacy, “Polacy w Związku Radzieckim. Wrzesień 1939—maj 1943,” Wojskowy Przegląd Historyczny 1 (1967): 146–173. Boćkowski, Daniel, Czas nadziei. Obywatele Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w ZSRR i opieka nad nimi placówek polskich w latach 1940 – 1943 (Warsaw: Neriton, 1999). ———, “Losy żydowskich uchodźców z centralnej i zachodniej Polski (bieżeńców) przebywających na terenie obwodu białostockiego,” Studia Podlaskie 16 (2006): 85–126. ———, “Wspólnota cierpień. Żydzi polscy na zesłaniu w ZSRR w latach 1940–1946,” in Żydzi i stosunki polsko-żydowskie w regionie łomżyńskim w XIX i XX wieku. Studia i materiały, ed. Michał Gnatowski (Łomża: Łomżyńskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 2002), 59–75. Bothe, Alina and Markus Nesselrodt, “Survivor: Towards a Conceptual History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 61 (2016): 57–82. Borzymińska, Zofia, “I ta propaganda zapuszcza coraz nowe korzenie…“ (Listy z Polski pisane w 1946 roku),” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 2 (2007): 227–234. Cichopek-Gajraj, Anna, Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Ciesielski, Stanisław, Życie codzienne polskich zesłańców w ZSRR w latach 1940–1946. Studia (Wrocław: Wyd. Uniw. Wrocławskiego, 1996). ———, et al., eds., Represje sowieckie wobec Polaków i obywateli polskich (Warsaw: Ośrodek Karta, 2002). ———, eds., Masowe deportacje ludności w Związku Radzieckim (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2003). Czerniakiewicz, Jan, Repatriacja ludności polskiej z ZSRR. 1944–1948 (Warsaw: PWN, 1987). Davies, Normanm and Antony Polonsky, eds., Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). Dunn, Dennis J., Caught Between Roosevelt and Stalin: America’s Ambassadors to Moscow (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Dwork, Deborah, “Refugee Jews and the Holocaust. Luck, Fortuitous Circumstances, and Timing,” in “Wer bleibt, opfert seine Jahre, vielleicht sein Leben.” Deutsche Juden 1938–1941, ed. Susanne Heim et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 281–298. Edele, Mark and Wanda Warlik, “Saved by Stalin? Trajectories of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 95–160. Edele, Mark, “The Second World War as a History of Displacement: The Soviet Case,” Hitory Australia 12 (2015): 17–40.

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Selected Bibliography ———, Stalinist Society 1928–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Edele, Mark, et al., eds., Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). Engel, David, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-In-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993). ———, In the shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish government-in-exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Estraikh, Gennady, “The missing years: Yiddish writers in Soviet Białystok, 1939–41,” East European Jewish Affairs 46 (2016): 176–191. ———, “Escape through Poland: Soviet Jewish Emigration in the 1950s,” Jewish History 31 (2018): 291–317. ———, and Harriet Murav, eds., Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2014). Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). ———, “Annexation, Evacuation, and Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, 1939–1946,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 133–160. Friedla, Katharina, “Flucht, Deportation und Leben im Transit – Erfahrungen polnisch-jüdi scher Kinder in der Sowjetunion,” in Kindheit im Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Francesca Weil et al. (Haale: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2018), 110–128. ———, “Stories of Migration and Repatriation from the Soviet Union. Shifting Borders and Population Groups,” in Our Courage. Jews in Postwar Europe 1945–48, ed. Kata Bohus et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 86–103. ———, “‘When the Shabbat Became Sunday’: Religious and Social Life of Polish Jews in the USSR during World War II,” in Memories of Terror. Essays on Recent Histories, ed. Mihaela Gligor (Frankfurt am Main: Ceeol Press, 2021), 79–124. ———, “’From Nazi Inferno to Soviet Hell’: Polish-Jewish children and youth and their trajectories of survival during and after the Second World War,” Journal of Modern European History, Special Issue: 1918, 1945, 1989: Childhood in Times of Political Transformation: Part II, 1–18 (2021): 1–18. Gall, Alfred, Schreiben und Extremerfahrung. Die polnische Gulag-Literatur in komparatistischer Perspektive (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012). Gąsowski, Tomasz, “Polscy Żydzi w sowieckiej Rosji,” in Historyk i Historia. Studia dedykowane pamięci Prof. Mirosława Francicia, ed. Adam Walaszek and Krzysztof Zamorski (Cracow: Tow. Wydawnicze Historia Iagellonica, 2005), 223–236. ———, Pod sztandarami Orła Białego. Kwestia żydowska w Polskich Siłach Zbrojnych w czasie II wojny światowej (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2002). Geith, Jehanne M. and Jolluck, Katherine R., Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Selected Bibliography Gitelman, Zvi, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union. 1881 to Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Głobaczew, Michaił, “‘Nowe Widnokręgi’ (1941–1946). Zarys problematyki,” Kwartalnik Historii Prasy Polskiej 1 (1980): 63–74. Głowacki, Albin, “Uwagi o Komitecie Organizacyjnym Żydów Polskich przy Związku Patriotów Polskich w ZSRR,” in Dzieje Żydów w Łodzi 1920–1944. Wybrane problemy, ed. Wiesław Puś and Stanisław Liszewski (Łódź: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1991), 282–298. ———, Ocalić i repatriować. Opieka nad ludnością polską w głębi terytorium ZSRR (1943–1946) (Łódź: Wyd. Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 1994). ———, “Czy i dokąd wracać? Dylematy repatriacyjne Żydów polskich w ZSRR (1944–1946),” in Świat niepożegnany. Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodnich Rzeczpospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku, ed. Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2004), 160–181. Goldlust, John, “Identity Profusions: Bio-Historical Journeys from ‘Polish Jew’/ ‘Jewish Pole’ through ‘Soviet Citizen’ to ‘Holocaust Survivor’,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2017), 219–246. ———, “A Different Silence: The Survival of More than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II as a Case Study of Cultural Amnesia,” in Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, ed. Mark Edele et al. (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2017), 29–94. Govrin, Yosef, The Jewish Factor in Relations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union 1933– 1941 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009). Grodner, David, “In Soviet Poland and Lithuania,” Contemporary Jewish Record 2 (1941): 136–147. Gross, Jan T., Revolution from Abroad. The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton/ Oxford: Princeton University Press 2002). ———, “The Sovietization of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan 1991), 60–76. ———, Żydzi i Sowieci. Opowieści kresowe, 1939–1941 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2020). Gross, Jan T., and Irena Grudzińska-Gross, War through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportation, 1939–1941 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1981). Grossmann, Atina, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 117 (2012): 61–79. ———, “‘Joint Found Teheran’. JDC and the Jewish Lifeline to Central Asia,” in The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism, ed. Avinoam Patt et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 205–244. Gurjanow, Aleksandr, “Żydzi jako specpieriesieleńcy-bieżeńcy w Obwodzie Archangielskim 1940–1941,” in Świat niepożegnany. Żydzi na dawnych ziemiach wschodniej Rzeczypospolitej w XVIII–XX wieku, ed. Krzysztof Jasiewicz (Warsaw: Inst. Studiów Politycznych PAN, 2004), 109–121.

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Selected Bibliography ———, “Transporty deportacyjne z polskich Kresów wschodnich w okresie 1940–1941,” in Utracona ojczyzna – Przymusowe wysiedlenia deportacje i przesiedlenia jako wspólne doświadczenie, ed. Hubert Orłowski and Andrzej Sakson (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1996), 75–92. ———, “Cztery deportacje 1940–41,” Karta 12 (1994): 114–136. Gutman, Israel, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union,” in Unequal Victims. Poles and Jews During World War Two, ed. Israel Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski (New York: Holocaust Library, 1987), 309–349. Hirsch, Helga: Gehen oder bleiben? Juden in Schlesien und Pommern 1945–1957 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011). Hoffmann, Kaline, “Die Erfahrungen der ‚anderen Welt’. Polinnen und Polen im Gulag,1939– 1942,” in Stalinistische Subjekte: Individuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern, 1929–1953, ed. Heiko Haumann and Brigitte Studer (Zürich: Chronos, 2006), 455–468. Hofmann, Andreas R., Die Nachkriegszeit in Schlesien. Gesellschafts- und Bevölkerungspolitik in den polnischen Siedlungsgebieten 1945–1948 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2000). Holmes, Larry E., Stalin’s World War II Evacuations: Triumph and troubles in Kirov (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2017). Hornowa, Elżbieta, “Powrót Żydów polskich z ZSRR oraz działalność opiekuńcza CKŻP,” Biuletyn ŻIH 133/134 (1985): 105–122. Hurwic-Nowakowska, Irena, A Social Analysis of Postwar Polish Jewry ( Jerusalem: Salman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1986). Hryciuk, Grzegorz, “Victims 1939–1941: The Soviet Repression in Eastern Poland,” in Shared History – Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, ed. Elazar Barkan et al. (Leipzig: Univerlag Leipzig, 2007), 173–200. Jacobmeyer, Wolfgang, “Polnische Juden in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone Deutschland 1946/47,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1977): 120–135. Jockusch, Laura, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Jockusch, Laura and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise lost? Postwar memory of Polish Jewish survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 3 (2010): 373–399. Jolluck, Katherine, Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union During World War II (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). ———, “Gender and Antisemitism in Wartime Soviet Exile,” in Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 210–232. Kaganovitch, Albert, “Stalin’s Great Power Politics, the Return of Jewish Refugees to Poland, and Continued Migration to Palestine, 1944–1946,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (2012): 59–94. ———, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 2 (2010): 85–121.

Selected Bibliography ———, “Evreiskie bezhentsy v Kazakhstane vo vremia Vtoroi Mirovoi Voiny,” in Istoriia. Pamiat’. Liudi: Materialy vi Mezhdunarodnoi Konferentsii, ed. Alexander Baron (Almaty: Mitsva, 2011), 13–31. Kaminsky, Anna, et al. eds., Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt 1939 in den Erinnerungskulturen der Europäer (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011). Kersten, Krystyna, Polacy, Żydzi, komunizm. Anatomia półprawd 1939–1968 (Warsaw: Niezależna Oficyna Wydawnicza) 1992. ———, The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Kersten, Krystyna and Paweł Szapiro, “The Contexts of the so-called Jewish Question in Poland after World War II,” in From Shtetl so Socialism. Studies from Polin, ed. Antony Polonsky (London: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 457–470. Kochanski, Halik, The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Kołakowski, Piotr, “Revolutionäre Avantgarde. Der NKWD in den polnischen Ostgebieten,” in Gewalt und Alltag im besetzten Polen 1939–1945, ed. Jochen Böhler and Stephan Lehnstaedt (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2012), 155–172. Korzen, Meir, “Problems Arising out of Research into the History of Jewish Refugees in the USSR during the Second World War,” Yad Vashem Studies 3 (1959): 119–140. Kotecki, Andrzej, “Z Tobolska do Warszawy przez Sao Paulo. Pamiątki rodziny Wawelbergów w Muzeum Niepodległości w Warszawie,” Niepodległość i Pamięć. Czasopismo humanistyczne 1–4 (2012): 219–226. Koźmińska-Frejlak, Ewa, “The Adaptation of Survivors to the Post-War Reality from 1944 to 1949,” in Jewish Presence in Absence: the Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, ed. Tych, Feliks and Monika Garbowska-Adamczyk ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 125–164. Krzyżanowski, Łukasz, Ghost Citizens: Jewish Return to a Postwar City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). Kuczyński, Antoni, ed., Syberia w historii i kulturze narodu polskiego (Wrocław: Wyd. Silesia, 1998). Landau, Julia, and Irina Sherbakova, eds., Gulag. Texte und Dokumente 1929–1956 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014). Lebedeva, Natalia, “The Deportation of the Polish Population to the USSR, 1939–1941,” Communist Studies and Transition Politics 16 (2000): 28–45. Leibovich, Oleg, “Antisemitiskie Nastroeniia v Sovetskom Tyle,” in SSSR vo Vtoroi Mirovoi Voine. Okkupatsiia. Kholokost. Stalinizm, ed. Olek Budnitskii and Liudmila Novikova (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014), 280–296. Levin, Dov, “The Jews of Vilna under Soviet Rule, 19 September–28 October 1939,” Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 9 (1996): 107–137. ———, The Lesser of Two Evils. Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule 1939–1941 (Philadelphia/ Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society, 1995).

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Selected Bibliography ———, “The Fateful Decision. The Flight of the Jews into the Soviet Interior in the Summer of 1941,” Yad Vashem Studies 20 (1990): 115–142. Levin, Nora, Paradox of Survival: The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, Vol 1 & 2 (New York: New York University Press, 1990). Levin, Zeev, ed., Evreiskie Bezhentsy i evakuirovannye v SSSR, 1939–1946. Sbornik statei, dokumentov i svidetel´stv´ (Ierusalim: Assotsiatsiia Khazit kha-kavod, 2020). ———, “Antisemitism and the Jewish Refugees in Soviet Kirgizia, 1942,” Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 1 (2003): 191–203. Litvak, Yosef, “Jewish refugees from Poland in the USSR, 1939–1946,” in Bitter legacy. Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 123–150. ———, Pelitim Yehudim mi-Polin be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot, 1939–1946 ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1988). Mankowitz, Zeev W., Life between Memory and Hope. The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Manley, Rebecca, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation und Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press, 2009). Marciniak, Wojciech, Powroty z Sybiru. Repatriacja obywateli polskich z głębi terytorium ZSRR 1945–1946 (Łódź: Dom Wydawniczy Księży Młyn, 2014). Mick, Christoph, “Incompatible Experiences: Poles, Ukrainians and Jews in Lviv under Soviet and German Occupation, 1939–44,” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (2011): 336–363. Mitsel, Mikhail, “American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Programs in the USSR, 1941– 1948: A Complicated Partnership,” in The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism, ed. Avinoam Patt et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 95–133. Myers Feinstein, Margarete, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Nesselrodt, Markus, Dem Holocaust entkommen. Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939–1946 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). ———, “‘I bled like you, brother, although I was a thousand miles away’: Postwar Yiddish sources on the experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet exile during World War II,” East European Jewish Affairs 1 (2016): 47–67. ———, “From Russian Winters to Munich Summers. DPs and the Story of Survival in the Soviet Union,” in Freilegungen. Displaced Persons. Leben im Transit: Überlebende zwischen Repatriierung, Rehabilitierung und Neuanfang, ed. Rebecca Boehling et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 190–198. ———, “Między egzotyką a zażyłością: polscy Żydzi wobec mieszkańców sowieckiej Azji Środkowej w latach 1941–1946,” in Syberiada Żydów polskich. Losy uchodźców z Zagłady, ed. Lidia Zessin Jurek and Katharina Friedla (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020), 474–509.

Selected Bibliography Nussbaum, Klemens, “Jews in the Kosciuszko Divison and First Polish Army,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 183–213. Nussbaum, Kalman (Klemens), Ve-Hafah lahem le-Roeits: Ha-Yehudim be-Tsava ha-Amami ha-Polani be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot (Tel Aviv: Diaspora Research Center, 1984). Pagel, Jürgen, Polen und die Sowjetunion 1938–1939. Die polnisch-sowjetischen Beziehungen in den Krisen der europäischen Politik am Vorabend des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1992). Patt, Avinoam J., Finding home and homeland. Jewish youth and Zionism in the aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009). Peck, Abraham, “‘Our eyes have seen eternity’. Memory and self-identity among the She’erith Hapletah,” Modern Judaism 17 (1997): 57–74. Penter, Tanja, Kohle für Stalin und Hitler. Arbeiten und Leben im Donbass 1929 bis 1953 (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2010). Person, Katarzyna: Dipisi. Żydzi z Polski w obozach DP w amerykańskiej i brytyjskiej strefach okupacyjnych Niemiec, 1945–1948 (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2019). Pickhan, Gertrud, “Das NKVD-Dossier über Henryk Erlich und Wiktor Alter,” Berliner Jahrbuch für osteuropäische Geschichte 2 (1994): 155–186. Pinchuk, Ben-Cion, Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule. Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990). ———, “Jewish Refugees in Soviet Poland 1939–1941,” Jewish Social Studies 2 (1978): 141–158. Pinchuk, Ben-Cion, “Facing Hilter and Stalin: On the Subject of Jewish‚ Collaboration’ in Soviet-Occupied Eastern Poland, 1939–1941,” in Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. Joshua D. Zimmerman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 61–68. Polian, Pavel, Against their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest/ New York: Central European University Press, 2004). Polonsky, Antony, The Jews in Poland and Russia, Vol. 3, 1914–2008 (Oxford/ Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011). Pufelska, Agnieszka, Die “Judäo-Kommune” – ein Feindbild in Polen. Das polnische Selbstverständnis im Schatten des Antisemitismus 1939–1948 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007). Redlich, Shimon, “The Jews in the Soviet Annexed Territories 1939–1941,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 1 (1971): 81–90. Rozenbaum, Włodzimierz, “The Road to New Poland: Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union, 1939–1946,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 214–226. Ruchniewicz, Małgorzata, Repatriacja ludności polskiej z ZSSR w latach 1955–1959 (Warsaw: Volumen, 2000). Rusiniak-Karwat, Martyna, “Bundists under the Soviet Occupation: The Case of Matwiej Bernstein,” Studia Polityczne 45 (2017): 141–151.

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Selected Bibliography Ruta, Magdalena, “‘Nusech Pojln’ czy ‘Jecijes Pojln’? Literackie dyskusje nad żydowską obecnością w powojennej Polsce (1945–1949),” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 2 (2013): 272–285. ———, Bez Żydów? Literatura jidysz w PRL o Zagładzie, Polsce i komunizmie (Cracow/ Budapest: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2012). ———, “The Principal Motifs of Yiddish Literature in Poland, 1945–1949. Prelimary Remarks,” in Under the Red Banner. Yiddish Culture in the Communist Countries in the Postwar Era, ed. Elvira Grözinger and Magdalena Ruta (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 165–183. Sariusz-Skąpska, Izabela, Polscy świadkowie GUŁagu. Literatura łagrowa 1939–1989 (Warsaw: Universitas, 2013). Sauerland, Karol, Polen und Juden zwischen 1939 und 1968. Jedwabne und die Folgen (Berlin/ Wien: Philo Verlag, 2004). Schatz, Jaff, The Generation. The Rise and Fall of Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Seri-Levi, Na’ama, “‘These People are Unique’: The Repatriates in the Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–1946,” Moreshet 14 (2017): 49–100. Shlomi, Hana, Ausupat mehkarim le-toldot she’erit ha-peletah ha-Yehudit be-Polin, 1944– 1950 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001). ———, “The Reception and Settlement of Jewish Repatriants from the Soviet Union in Lower Silesia, 1946,” Gal-Ed 17 (2000): 85–104. ———, “The Jewish Organizing Committee in Moscow and the Jewish Central Committee in Warsaw, June 1945–February 1946. Tackling Repatriation,” in Studies on the History of the Jewish Remnant in Poland, 1944–1950, ed. Hana Shlomi (Tel Aviv: University Tel Aviv, 2001), 7–21. Shore, Marci, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism. 1918–1968 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Shternshis, Anna, ‘When Sonia met Boris’: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Siekierski, Maciej, “The Jews in Soviet-Occupied Eastern Poland at the End of 1939: Numbers and Distribution,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 110–115. Siemaszko, Zbigniew, “The Mass Deportations of the Polish Population to the USSR,1940– 1941,” in The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–1941, ed. Keith Sword (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 217–235. Siewierski, Henryk, “Jewish Issues in the Polish Literature of Exile in the USSR,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 116–123. Skibińska, Alina, “The Return of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the Reaction of the Polish Population,” in Jewish Presence in Absence: the Aftermath of the Holocaust in Poland, 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014), 25–66. Snyder, Tymothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Book, 2010).

Selected Bibliography Sternfeld, Lior, “‘Poland is not Lost while We Still Live’: The Making of Polish Iran, 1941– 45,” Jewish Social Studies 23 (2018): 101–127. Stola, Dariusz, “Jewish Emigration from Communist Poland: the Decline of Polish Jewry in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 47 (2017): 169–188. Stronski, Paul, Tashkent. Forging a Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010). Sword, Keith, Deportation and exile. Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–1948 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994). ———, ed., The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). ———, “The Welfare of Polish-Jewish Refugees in the USSR, 1941–1943. Relief, Supplies and their Distribution,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 145–160. Szaynok, Bożena, “The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations,” in Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press, 2005), 265–283. ———, Ludność żydowska na Dolnym Śląsku 1945–1950 (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2000). Tartakower, Arieh and Grossmann, Kurt R., The Jewish Refugee (New York: New York Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish and World Jewish Congress, 1944). Viola, Lynne, The Unknown Gulag. The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Weber, Claudia, Krieg der Täter. Die Massenerschießungen von Katyń (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2015). Weinryb, Bernard D., “Polish Jews under Soviet Rule,” in The Jews in Soviet Satellites, ed. Peter Meyer et al. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1953), 329–372. Węgrzyn, Ewa, Wyjeżdżamy! Wyjeżdżamy?! Alija Gomułkowska 1956–1960 (Cracow: Wydawnictwo Austeria, 2016). Wierzbicki, Marek, “Soviet Economy in Annexed Eastern Poland, 1939–1941,” in Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928–1953, ed. Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114–137. ———, “Der Elitenwechsel in den von der UdSSR besetzten polnischen Ostgebieten (1939– 1941),” in Gewalt und Alltag im besetzten Polen 1939–1945, ed. Jochen Böhler and Stephan Lehnstaedt (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2012), 173–186. ———, Polacy i Żydzi w zaborze sowieckim. Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach północno wschodnich II RP pod okupacją sowiecką (1939–1941) (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Kulturalne Fronda, 2001). Woźniczka, Zygmunt, “Die Deportationen von Polen in die UdSSR in den Jahren 1939–1945,” in Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation: Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der

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Selected Bibliography Sowjetunion und in Deutschland 1933 bis 1945, ed. Dittmar Dahlmann and Gerhard Hischfeld (Essen: Klartext, 1999), 535–552. Wróbel, Janusz, Uchodźcy polscy ze Związku Sowieckiego, 1942–1950 (Łódź: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2003). Wróbel, Piotr, “Class War or Ethnic Cleansing? Soviet Deportations of Polish Citizens from the Eastern Provinces of Poland, 1939–1941,” The Polish Review 59 (2014): 19–42. Zaremba, Marcin, Wielka Trwoga. Polska 1944–1947. Ludowa reakcja na kryzys (Cracow: Znak, 2012). Zessin-Jurek, Lidia, “The Rise of an East European Community of Memory? On Lobbying for the Gulag Memory via Brussels,” in Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives, ed. Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak (New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 131–149. ———, “Uchodźstwo jako manifestacja wolności i oporu na przykładzie relacji polskich Żydów o jesieni 1939 roku,” in Pola Wolności, ed. Alicja Bartuś (Oświęcim/Poznań: WSB, 2020), 39–58. Zessin-Jurek, Lidia and Katharina Friedla, eds., Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2020). Żaroń, Piotr, Ludność polska w Związku Radzieckim w czasie II wojny światowej (Warsaw: PWN, 1990). Żbikowski, Andrzej, U genezy Jedwabnego: Żydzi na kresach północno-wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej wrzesień 1939–lipiec 1941 (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2006). ———, “Jewish Reaction to the Soviet Arrival in the Kresy in September 1939,” Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry 13 (2000): 62–72.

Primary Sources Published Sources ADAP, Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918–1945. Serie D 1937–1945. Vol. 8: Die Kriegsjahre: 4. September 1939 bis 18. März 1940 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961). Anders, Władysław, Bez ostatniego rozdziału. Wspomnienia z lat 1939–1946 (Londyn: Instytut i Muzeum Gen. Sikorskiego, 1949). Asher, Ben-Natan, Die Bricha. Aus dem Terror nach Eretz Israel. Ein Fluchthelfer erinnert sich (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2005). Begin, Menachem, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia (London: MacDonald, 1975). Ben-Eliezer, Josef, Meine Flucht nach Hause (Schwarzenfeld: Neufeld Verlag, 2014). Ciesielski, Stanisław ed., Umsiedlung der Polen aus den ehemaligen polnischen Ostgebieten nach Polen in den Jahren 1944–1947 (Marburg: Herder Institut, 2006).

Selected Bibliography Cywiak, Samuel, with Swesky, Jeff, Flight from Fear: A Rabbi’s Holocaust Memoir (Lubec, ME: Dreamer Publications, 2011). Czapski, Jozef, The Inhuman Land (London: Polish Cultural Foundation, 1987). Davidson, Simon, My War Years, 1939–1945 (San Antonio: University of Texas, 1981). Davidson Pankowsky, Hanna, East of the Storm: Outrunning the Holocaust in Russia (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999). Dokumenty i materiały do historii stosunków polsko-radzieckich, Vol. 8: Styczeń 1944–grudzień 1945 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1974). Eibuszyc, Suzanna, Memory is Our Home: Loss and Remembering: Three Generations in Poland and Russia, 1917–1960 (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2015). Elton (Elbaum), Zyga, Destination Buchara (Melbourne: Rizal Nominees, 1996). Engel, David, “An Early Account of Polish Jewry under Nazi and Soviet Occupation Presented to the Polish Government-In-Exile, February 1940,” Jewish Social Studies 1 (1983): 1–16. ———, “Moshe Kleinbaum’s Report on Issues in the Former Eastern Polish Territories,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–1946, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 275–300. Erlichson, Yitzkhak, My Four Years in Soviet Russia, trans. Maurice Wolfthal (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013). Feinzeig, Dovid, Faith and Flight: A young Boy’s Memories of the Prewar Shtetl, Shavuos in Ger, a Family’s Travels through Russia, Rebuilding in Postwar Poland and France (Lakewood, NJ: Israel Bookshop Publications, 2013). Feldman, Marian, From Warsaw, through Luck, Siberia, and back to Warsaw (Framingham, MA: Ryszard Feldman with LuLu, 2009). Friedman, Ellen G., The Seven: A Family Holocaust Story (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2017). Friedrich, Klaus-Peter and Andrea Löw, ed., Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Vol. 4: Polen. September 1939–Juli 1941 (München: Oldenbourg, 2011). Gacki, Stefan, “Paszportyzacja. Przebieg paszportyzacji obywateli polskich i likwidacji sieci opiekuńczej Ambasady RP w ZSRR,” Karta 10 (1993): 117–131. General Sikorski Historical Institute (GSHI) ed., Documents on Polish-Soviet relations, 1939– 1945, Vol. 1& 2 (London: General Sikorski Historical Institute, 1961). Ginsburg, Bernard L., A Wayfarer in a World in Upheaval (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1993). Gliksman, Jerzy, Tell the West (New York: Gresham Press, 1948). Golan, Bob, A Long Way Home: The Story of a Jewish Youth, 1939–1949, ed. Jacob Howland (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005). Hautzig, Esther, The Endless Steppe: Growing up in Siberia (New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1968). Herling, Gustaw, A World Apart: A Memoir of the Gulag (London: W. Heinemann, 1951). Herzbaum, Edward H., Lost Between Worlds: A World War II Journey of Survival (Leicester, UK: Matador 2010).

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Selected Bibliography Heymont, Irving, Among the Survivors of the Holocaust, 1945: The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymont. United States Army (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1982). Honig, Samuel, From Poland to Russia and Back 1939–1946. Surviving the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Windsor: Black Moss Press, 1996). Hoppe, Bert and Glass, Hildrun eds., Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Vol. 7: Sowjetunion mit annektierten Gebieten I: Besetzte sowjetische Gebiete unter deutscher Militärverwaltung, Baltikum und Transnistrien (München: Oldenbourg, 2011). Kahan, Yakov, Unter di sovyetishe himlen (Tel Aviv: J. L. Peretz, 1961). Katz, Zev, From the Gestapo to the Gulags. One Jewish Life (London/ Portland: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004). Kessler, Michael G., Shards of War: Fleeing to & from Uzbekistan (Durham, CT: Strategic Book Group, 2010). Kot, Stanisław, Listy z Rosji do Gen. Sikorskiego (London: Jutro Polski, 1955). ———, Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Kruk, Herman, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Libeskind, Daniel, Breaking Ground. Adventures in Life and Architecture (London: John Murray, 2004). Lipski, Leo, Dzień i noc: Opowiadania (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1957). Lustgartn, Geitsl, In vander in gerangl, 1939–1968 (Tel Aviv: G. Lustgartn, 1968). Man, Mendel, Di shtilkeyt mont. Lider un baladn (Lodsh: Borokhov Farlag, 1945). Margolin, Julius, Journey into the Land of the Zeks and Back. A Memoir of the Gulag, translated by Stefani Hoffman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Mirski, Michal, Bez stopnia (Warsaw: Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej, 1960). Perlov, Yitzkhok, Mayne zibn gute yorn. Roman fun a freylekhn plit in rotnfarband (Tel Aviv: Kultur Lige, 1959). ———, The Adventures of One Yitzchok (New York: Award, 1967). ———, Undzer likui-hamah (Minkhn: Poyle-Tsien in Daytshland, 1947). Pragier, Ruta, Żydzi czy Polacy (Warsaw: Anagram, 1992). Prywes, Moshe, Prisoner of Hope (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2002). Ruta, Magdalena ed., Niszt ojf di tajchn fun Bowl. Antologie fun der jidiszer poezje in nochmilchomedikn Pojln / Nie nad rzekami Babilonu. Antologia poezji jidysz w powojennej Polsce (Cracow: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2012). Shafran, Simcha, Fire, Ice, Air: A Polish Jew’s Memoir of Yeshiva, Siberia, America (New York: Hashgacha Press, 2010). Shvarts, Shmuel, Unter royte Himlen (Melbourne: York Press, 1981). Sieradzki, Mietek, By a Twist of History: The Three Lives of a Polish Jew (London, Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002).

Selected Bibliography Skorr, Henry, Through Blood and Tears: Surviving Hitler and Stalin (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006). Stryjkowski, Julian, Ocalony na Wschodzie. Z Julianem Stryjkowskim rozmawia Piotr Szewc (Montricher: Ed. Noir sur Blanc, 1991). Szer, Włodzimierz, To Our Children: Memoirs of Displacement. A Jewish Journey of Hope and Survival in Twentieth-Century Poland and Beyond (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016). Taube, Herman, Looking back, Going Forward: New & Selected Poems (Takoma Park: Dryad Press, 2002). Temkin, Gabriel, My Just War: the Memoir of a Jewish Red Army Soldier in World War II (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1998). Tshemny, Meylekh, Uzbekistan: tipn un bilder (Minkhn, 1949). Tych, Feliks and Siekierski, Maciej ed., Widziałem Anioła Śmierci: Losy deportowanych Żydów polskich w ZSSR w latach II wojny światowej. Świadectwa zebrane przez Ministerstwo Informacji i Dokumentacji Rządu Polskiego na Uchodźstwie w latach 1942–1943 (Warsaw: Rosner & Wspólnicy, 2006). Tytelman Wygodzki, Rachela, The End and the Beginning: August 1939–July 1948 (Bellevue: R. T. Wygodzki, 1998). Urban, Garri S., Tovarisch, I am not Dead (London: Weidenfeld, 1980). Wachtel, Joseph H. and Chayat, Sylvia, Escape from the Hounds of Hell (West Palm Beach, FL: Oceanco, 1993). Warhaftig, Zorach, Refugee and Survivor: Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1988). Wat, Aleksander, My century. The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Wat, Ola, Der zweite Schatten (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1990). Wenig, Larry, From Nazi Inferno to Soviet Hell (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2000). Whiteman, Dorit Bader, Escape via Siberia: A Jewish Child’s Odyssey of Survival (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999). Wielhorski, Władysław, Wspomnienia z przeżyć w niewoli sowieckiej (London: Orbis, 1965). Yafeh, Arye, Yoman milhamah Ivri: be-Berit ha-Mo’atsot (Tel Aviv: Moreshet, 2009). Zak, Avrom, Knekht zenen mir geven, Vol. 1 & 2 (Buenos Aires: Tsentral Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956). Zarnowitz, Victor, Fleeing the Nazis, Surviving the Gulag, and Arriving in the Free World. My Life and Times (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008). Zylbering, Abraham, A Survivor Remembers: The Gulag and Central Asia (Montréal: Concordia University Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies, 2002). Żbikowski, Andrzej ed., The Ringelblum Archive. Underground Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto. Accounts from the Borderlands, 1939–1941, Vol. 2 (Warsaw: Żydowski Institut Historyczny, 2018).

303

304

Selected Bibliography

Archives with Significant Sources on the Subject American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives, New York Archive of the East (Archiwum Wschodnie), Warsaw, Poland Archive of New Records (Archiwum Akt Nowych), Warsaw, Poland Arolsen Archives (formerly International Tracing Service), Bad Arolsen, Germany Ghetto Fighters’ House, Lohamei Ha-Geta’ot, Israel Hoover Institution Archive, Stanford Jewish Historical Institute (Żydowski Instytut Historyczny), Warsaw, Poland Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum Archive, London United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive, Washington, D.C. University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, Los Angeles YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel

Acknowledgements

T

he idea for this book originated at an international workshop at the POLIN Museum, Warsaw, in October 2018 titled “Deported, Exiled, Saved. History and Memory of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1940–1959).” Most chapters were presented at this meeting while a few contributors were later added. This book would not have been possible without the help of several institutions and individuals. Above all, we would like to thank the POLIN Museum for hosting the workshop and providing financial as well as organizational support. In particular, the assistance of Prof. Dariusz Stola, Dr. Krzysztof Persak, and Joanna Wójcicka-Warda made the event possible. Partners in organizing the workshop were the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. We would also like to thank Prof. Werner Benecke and Prof. Andrzej Żbikowski for their support for this joint effort. We would like to express our gratitude to Prof. Antony Polonsky who supported the idea of publishing this collection from the very beginning. Prof. Atina Grossmann helped raise international academic attention for the subject of survival in exile and was an inspiring commentator during the workshop. Prof. Natalia Aleksiun provided valuable feedback on the volume. We also thank all contributors who worked tirelessly and patiently with us on this project for more than two years. We are grateful to Michael Bedwell who read and edited the first manuscript, to Anastasia Koehler for her editorial support, and to Alessandra Anzani at Academic Studies Press who devoted a great deal of energy, time, and understanding to this project. In addition, Katharina Friedla would like to express her appreciation to a number of institutions who enabled her to work on this volume. She would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah Paris, and the Polish Institute for Advanced Studies by the Polish Academy in Warsaw for their invaluable financial support of her extensive research on the fate of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. The generous financial

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Acknowledgements

assistance from the Edith Sauerer Fund in Vienna gave her the opportunity to successfully finish this book project. Markus Nesselrodt would like to thank the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin, the Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Holocaust Studies, and the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) for enabling the research on this subject. Finally, we would like to thank the Szloma Albam Foundation in Berlin as well as the Zeit Foundation in Hamburg who recognized the significance of this project and made publishing this volume possible.

Note on Contributors

Eliyana R. Adler is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State University and a student of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Her most recent book is Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (2020). Currently, she is exploring the history of memorial books. Natalie Belsky is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She is currently completing a manuscript on encounters between evacuees and local populations on the Soviet home front during the Second World War. She recently published an article in Holocaust & Genocide Studies, titled “‘Am I a Jew?’ Soviet Jewish Youth and Anti-Semitism on the Home Front During the Second World War” (Fall 2020). Mark Edele is Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. His latest books include Stalin’s Defectors. How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941-1945 (2017), The Soviet Union. A Short History (2019), Debates on Stalinism (2020), and Stalinism at War. The Soviet Union in World War II (2021). Together with Sheila Fitzpatrick and Atina Grossmann he edited Shelter from the Holocaust. Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (2017). Gennady Estraikh is a professor at the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University. In 1988–91, he worked as the Managing Editor of the Moscow Yiddish journal Sovetish Heymland. His doctoral dissertation on peculiarities of Soviet Yiddish was defended at the University of Oxford in 1996. In 1995–2002, he worked at Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and at School of Oriental and African Studies (London). His most recent book is Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (2020). Katharina Friedla is Research Fellow at the Foundation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris, where she is working on her habilitation project “Topography,

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Note on Contributors

Experience, and Memory of Life in Transition: Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959).” She holds a PhD from the Department of History, University of Basel, and has published several books and articles on Jews in Germany, Poland, and USSR, before, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War. John Goldlust taught sociology at La Trobe University until his retirement in 2007. In 2011 he began exploring written and oral autobiographical accounts of the experiences of Polish Jews who survived the Second World War inside the Soviet Union. John Goldlust currently holds an honorary research positions at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Albert Kaganovitch is an independent scholar located in Winnipeg (Canada). He received his PhD from Hebrew University in 2003. He is the author of the books The Mashhadi Jews (Djedids) in Central Asia (2007), The Long Life and Swift Death of Rechitsa: A Jewish Community in Belarus, 1625–2000 (2013), and Reluctant Friends: Russia and the Bukharan Jews (2016). His current project focuses on Jewish refugees in the eastern parts of the USSR during World War II. Przemysław Kaniecki is a literary historian, film studies scholar, anthropologist; lecturer in the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw, and curator of collections at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He is the author of the monographs Wniebowstąpienia Konwickiego [Konwicki’s Ascensions] and Samospalenia Konwickiego [Konwicki’s Self-Immolations] (2013, 2014). In 2016 he co-authored Przynoszę rzecz, przynoszę historię [I Bring a Thing, I Bring a Story] with Judyta Pawlak. Wojciech Marciniak is Assistant Professor in the Institute of History University of Lodz and Head of Archive of Siberian Exiles in Lodz. He has published numerous articles on the deportations of Poles to the Soviet Union and their repatriation. He is author of Powroty z Sybiru. Repatriacja obywateli polskich z głębi ZSRR w latach 1945–1947 [Returns from Siberia. The Repatriation of Polish Cititzens from the USSR, 1945–1947] (2014). Markus Nesselrodt is a post-doc researcher of East European history at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. His doctoral dissertation was published in German under the title Escaping the Holocaust. Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, 1939–1946. The book received the Irma Rosenberg Award for Research on the History of National Socialism and the Fritz Theodor

Note on Contributors

Epstein Prize awarded by the German Association of Historians of Eastern Europe. He is currently working on a book project on the history of multiethnic Warsaw in the early nineteenth century. Renata Piątkowska is an art historian, graduate of the Institute of Art History at the University of Warsaw. For years she has been dealing with the art and culture of Polish Jews. Author of many books and articles, including Między Ziemiańską a Montparnassem. Roman Kramsztyk [Between Ziemiańska Café and Montparnass. Roman Kramsztyk] (2004). Since 1999 she works at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, now as Chief Curator of the Collection. Antony Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University and Chief Historian of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw. He is co-chair of the editorial collegium of Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry. His most recent work is The Jews in Poland and Russia volume 1, 1350 to 1881; volume 2 1881 to 1914; volume 3 1914 to 2008 (2010, 2012), published in 2013 in an abridged version The Jews in Poland and Russia. A Short History. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Warsaw (2010) and the Jagiellonian University (2014). In 2011 he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Polonia Restituta and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of Independent Lithuania. Miriam Schulz holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University and is currently the Ray D. Wolfe Postdoctoral Fellow 2021–23 at the Centre for Jewish Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. She works at the intersection of Yiddish/Jewish, Holocaust, Soviet, and Migration Studies and in dialogue with Postcolonial Studies, Marxist and Critical (Race) Theory. Miriam has received numerous fellowships for her work, is the author of the award-winning monograph Der Beginn des Untergangs: Die Zerst.rung der jüdischen Gemeinden in Polen und das Verm.chtnis des Wilnaer Komitees (2016) and the co-founder of the EU-funded Digital Humanities project We Refugees. Digital Archive on Refugeedom, Past and Present (https://en.we-refugees-archive.org/). Serafima Velkovich is a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her topics of interest are Displaced Persons’ Camps in Europe after World War II, and particularly babies who were born there, subject of a research project titled “The next chapter: DP born baby boomers in search of their identity.” A

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Note on Contributors

researcher at Yad Vashem Archives division, Velkovich was closely involved in the research of materials from Eastern Europe in Yad Vashem’s databases. Lidia Zessin-Jurek is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC Consolidator grant Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th Century” at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague (2019–2024). She holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and recently edited the book on the Siberian Odyssey of the Polish Jews Syberiada Żydów polskich, together with Katharina Friedla (2020).

Index of Places

A

Africa 223n22, 257, 282n8 Alma-Ata 61, 203, 206 Altai Krai 265 Andizhan 44 Argentina 154, 163, 229, 264 Arkhangel’sk oblast 42–43 Asino 42, 268, 270 Astrakhan 208 Auschwitz 165, 231, 236–237 Australia xxiv, 97, 141, 216n6, 220, 221n17, 229, 232

B

Bad Polzin 103 Bandar-e Pahlavi 30 Baranavichy 98, 137 Belarus vii, xi, 8, 14, 17, 21–22, 41, 57, 60, 78n30, 89, 110, 112–113, 119, 124, 137, 177–178, 219–220, 266 Berlin 72–73, 75, 78–81, 86, 88–92, 95–96, 107–108, 141, 232, 262, 284–285, 288 Bessarabia 23, 131 Białystok 11, 55, 59, 62, 79, 102, 135, 177– 178, 230, 242, 250–251, 254n56, 261n1 Bielawa 273 Bielsko-Biała 40 Bila Tserkva 268–269 Birobidzhan 189–190, 193 Borisov 24 Breslau 102 Brest 41, 240 Brussels 254 Bucharest 187 Bukhara xii, 62, 71 Bukovina 17, 131 Buynaksk 268–269 Buzuluk 25, 71 Bydgoszcz 90

C

Canada xxiv, 158, 229, 267 Central Asia xii, xvi, xxvii, 15, 29, 42, 46, 48, 58, 68, 152, 204, 208, 220, 245, 283 Central Europe 231 Chełm 105, 271–272 Chorzele 4 Chromówka 271 Cieszyn 277 Czechoslovakia 94 Czerniaków 95

D

Divovo 82n51, 83–85 Długosiodło 92 Drohobycz (Drohobych) 103 Dubno 207 Duniłowicze 22 Dvinsk 141 Dzhambul 85, 211

E

Eastern Europe xix, 129, 131, 148, 169, 251, 254 England 36n31, 45, 188 Estonia 110 Europe xvii, xix–xxi, xxv, 50, 108n163, 129, 131, 169, 210, 214–215, 217, 220, 223n22, 228–229, 231–233, 287

F

Frankfurt (Oder) 250, 305

G

Galicia 17, 282 Garwolin 8 Germany ix, xv, xxi–xxii, xxv, 2, 5–6, 9–10, 12, 18, 22, 52, 71, 80, 82n48, 89, 99n130, 102, 105, 113, 118, 131, 141–142, 205,

312

Index of Places 214, 214n1, 223n22, 224, 231–232, 246, 250, 277 Glębockie 22 Gomel 266 Grajewo 10 Grodno 57, 178 Grybów 89 Grzymałów 40 Guzar 63

H

Hamburg 71 Hrubieszów 101 Huszcza 272

I

India 257 Iran xiv, xxi, 30–31, 33, 50, 52, 61–62, 67–68 Israel xiv, xix, xxn12, 21n77, 33, 36–37, 49–50, 53, 71, 107, 108n163, 132, 135–136, 138–139, 142–143, 152, 155, 156–157, 164, 170, 173, 189, 191, 195–198, 205, 229, 253, 262–263, 273 Italy 31, 131, 135, 141–142

J

Jersey 236–238 Jerusalem xxiv, 62, 166

K

Kalachinsk 272 Kałuszyn 41 Kamenetsk-Podol’sk 204 Karelian ASSR 71 Kattakurgan 80 Katyn 76n19, 77, 111, 236, 236n2, 237–238, 240 Kaunas 24, 128 Kazakhstan xii–xiii, 14n49, 61, 67, 72–73, 78–79, 79n34, 85, 110, 203, 211, 223n22, 241, 243, 257, 264, 270, 272–273 Kermine 61, 63, 202–204 Kętrzyn 40 Kiev 154, 168, 201n3, 204, 207 Kirovograd 208 Kishinev 162 Kolyma 243 Komi SSR 49 Kostanay 264 Kotel’nikovo 23 Kowel (Kovel) 8, 103–104 Krakow 134

Kraków 208 Krasnoyarsk xii Krasny Kut 266–267 Krzemieniec 59 Kurmoyarsk 23 Kuybyshev 273 Kyrgyzstan xiii, 64, 73, 209

L

Latvia 17, 110, 128, 131, 131n6, 132, 135– 136, 141 Leninabad 277 Leningrad 17, 189, 192, 269 Lenino xv, 78, 89–91, 94, 107–108 Lithuania vii, x, 2, 7, 7n19, 13, 17, 44, 51, 110, 112–113, 119, 131, 131n6, 132, 136, 141, 154, 209 Łódź 9–10, 82–83, 132, 140, 156, 169, 208, 230, 240, 244, 246, 270 Łomża 177 London xiv, xxvi, 31–32, 36, 76n19, 81, 164 Lublin 8, 11, 78, 98, 100, 112–114, 271 Łuck (Lutsk) 8, 263, 268 Łuków 11 Lwów (Lviv, Lemberg) 42–43, 60, 65, 70–71, 80, 95, 131–133, 136, 210, 265, 275, 277

M

Majdanek 98–99, 99n131, 165 Mari ASSR (Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic) 65 Melbourne 230n40, 231–232, 281 Mexico 158, 223n22 Middle East 31, 195, 223n22 Mielnica 8 Milan 135 Minsk 24, 168, 177–179, 198, 219 Moscow vii, 17, 16n57, 26, 77, 82–84, 111– 117, 119–120, 123n42, 124, 128–129, 137, 139, 153–154, 164–166, 168, 177, 179–182, 184–187, 190, 192–195, 248, 269, 273 Mościska 260

N

New York 158, 160, 166, 169, 171, 184, 187, 195, 238 New Zealand 223n22, 258 North America xix, 167 Novosibirsk xii, 189n59, 207, 220, 258n63 Nowa Sól 247

Index of Places O

Odessa 23, 37n32, 193, 209 Omsk xii, 272 Orša 25–26 Osh 209 Ostrów Mazowiecka 40, 46, 55 Otwock 7–8, 100

P

Palestine xiv–xv, xix, xxi, 2, 30–31, 32n8, 36, 36n31, 37, 44, 47–48, 50–51, 135, 137, 139, 142, 157, 180, 229, 262n5 Paris 142, 154, 156, 169, 184, 187, 196, 262 Piotrków Trybunalski, 260 Płock 6, 102 Poland viii, ix, ixn6, x, xiii–xvi, xxiii–xxviii, 2–6, 9–10, 12–14, 14n49, 16n53, 19, 22n77, 25, 28, 33–34, 49, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 66, 69, 71–74, 75n17, 76–80, 87, 90, 92, 96–97, 99, 102–103, 105–113, 112n7, 114–121, 123–130, 131n3, 132–133, 137–142, 156, 156n49, 176–177, 180, 180n24, 181–183, 186–189, 191, 193– 194, 196–197, 200, 204–205, 209, 214– 215, 215n2, 216–221, 222n19, 222n21, 223, 223n22, 224–225, 227, 227n31–32, 228–231, 235n56, 236n1, 237–243, 245, 245n26, 247–250, 249n42, 251–255, 257–260, 262, 262n5, 263–265, 267, 269–275, 281, 286–287, 289 Poltava 121n35, 208 Pomerania 71, 90, 273 Postawy 21, 21n77 Praga 10, 94n106 Przemyśl 104, 277 Przykop 277 Przytoczno 105

R

Radomyśl 40 Radzyń 8 Riga 132, 135, 138, 141, 192 Russia vii–viii, 25, 39, 59, 67, 110, 135, 154, 163, 190, 203, 241, 243–246, 248–249, 259, 277n41, 287n27

S

Samarkand xii, 43, 49, 71, 270 Saratov 23 Sastobe 272–273 Sel’tsy 77, 81, 85–86, 89, 94 Semipalatinsk 67

Shanghai 231 Siberia xii, xvi, xxix, 14n49, 24n91, 38, 42–43, 60, 72, 78–79, 79n34, 84, 110, 209, 218, 220–221, 223n22, 236–244, 246–249, 249n42, 250–260, 260n68, 262–263, 265, 268 Siedlce 41, 253 Siemiatycze 41, 55 Silesia xv, 11, 103, 128, 273–274 Skidel 57 Słonim 89 Sloveshne 191–192 Słubice 250 Smolensk 26, 237 Sobibór 108 Sochaczew 9 South America 264 Soviet Union (USSR) viii, ix–x, xn7, xi–xiii, xv–xviii, xviiin5, xix, xxi, xxiii–xxvi, xxvin33, xxvii–xxix, 2–3, 5–6, 7n19, 10, 12–13, 14n49, 15–19, 21, 24–25, 27–31, 42–43, 47, 54, 58–61, 68, 71–77, 77n24, 78, 82, 87, 110–112, 112n7, 113–116, 118–122, 125–131, 131n6, 132–133, 135–141, 143, 146n11, 148, 152, 153n39, 154, 158, 160–161, 163, 165, 168–170, 173, 176, 178, 180–185, 187–192, 196–197, 201, 203, 205, 208, 210–211, 215n2, 216–222, 222n21, 223, 223n22, 224, 226, 228–230, 230n41, 231–235, 235n56, 239, 246–247, 260–262, 262n5, 264, 267, 269, 271–275, 277–278, 280, 280n2, 283, 285–289 Spain 151–152 Stalingrad 23, 71 Steckówka 272 Stockholm 270 Stryj 42, 80 Sumy 79, 90, 272 Suwalki 209 Sverdlovsk 138 Sweden 270 Szczecin 71, 118, 238 Szczerzec 275

T

Tadzhikistan xiii Tarnobrzeg 40 Tarnów 104 Tashkent xii, 27, 30, 46, 61, 68, 71, 207, 259n66, 272 Tehran 30, 39, 46–47, 52, 56, 259n66 Tel Aviv 75, 184, 187

313

314

Index of Places Telechany 266 Togul 265 Tomaszów Lubelski 264 Tomsk 267 Toronto 186 Treblinka 266, 268 Tulkybas 273 Turkmenistan xiii, 73

U

Ufa 82, 94 Ukraine vii, xi, 8, 14, 17, 40, 42, 60, 70, 78, 80, 103, 110, 112–113, 119, 124, 127, 131– 132, 202–203, 207, 219, 263, 271–272, 275 United Kingdom xxiv, 71, 88 United States of America (USA) xiv, xvi, xix, xxi, xxiv–xxv, 12, 33, 142, 147, 155, 157, 173, 184, 229, 233, 236 Ural 25n99, 60, 67, 247 Uzbekistan xiii, 27, 44, 61–63, 68, 73, 80, 82, 202, 211, 268

V

Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius) x, 7–9, 21, 24–25, 51, 110, 110n1, 113, 132, 135, 138, 141, 143,

143n2, 154, 158, 166, 167n92–93, 168, 192, 209 Vladivostok 38 Vyaz’ma 26–27

W

Warsaw vii, xxiv–xxv, 7–11, 37, 40, 74, 83, 85, 88–90, 94, 94n106, 95, 97, 102, 107–108, 111, 113, 116, 118, 123, 128, 156, 161, 176, 180–182, 185–192, 194, 230, 238, 243–248, 249n42, 252–253, 256, 262n5, 263, 266, 268, 270–271, 271n29, 274– 275, 275n35, 277, 281 Wisznice 8 Wyszków 10, 92

Y

Yalta 117 Yangiyul 30 Yangi-Yul 62, 68

Z

Ząbkowice Śląskie 270 Zambrów 176 Zamość 83 Zaręby Kościelne 10

Index of Names

A

Adler, Eliyana R. xviii, xxiiin26, xxviii, 4, 30–56, 75, 216, 218n9, 232–233, 286– 287 Agamben, Giorgio 163n76 Aksel’rod, Elena 204 Aksel’rod, Meer 203 Akselrod, Zelig 179 Aleichem, Sholem 160, 175 Alexandrov, Alexei 120n29, 121, 129 Alter, Viktor 15 Altshuler, Mordechai 18–19, 19n68, 20, 76 Amaterstein, Abraham 220 Anders, Władysław xxvi, 37, 58, 61–62, 64, 67–68, 71, 73, 76–77, 77n24, 81, 85, 88, 92, 108, 259, 267, 273, 287–288 Anidjar, Gil 152 Anzani, Alessandra 305 Ar’ev, Semen 204 Artenstein, Nathan 91, 97, 101 Ayzen, Avrom 158 Azrieli, David 63

B

Barkan, Elazar 226 Baron, Nick 34 Barten, Joseph 67 Batycki (Grinberg), Leon 81 Bauer, Yehuda xixn10 Bauman, Zygmunt 72n6, 256 Bedwell, Michael 305 Begin, Menachem 240 Beker, Aharon 93 Beldegrin, Herman 79, 89 Belenky, Moyshe 194 Belsky, Natalie xviii, 200–213, 283 Benecke, Werner 305 Bergelson, Dovid 145, 147, 151,158, 160– 162, 165–166, 184 Bergelson, Tsipa 145

Beria, Lavrentiy 63, 124 Berling, Zygmunt xv, 77, 77n24, 94, 232, 284– 285, 288 Berman, Adolf 156 Berman, Jakub 124 Bernhard, Michael 237 Bierut, Bolesław 117, 122 Biłgoraj, Anna 82, 82n48, , 94, 102 Blumental, Nakhmen 154 Blumstein, Rita Blattberg 208, 210 Boćkowski, Daniel xiiin16, 13 Borkowska-Flisek, Maria, 248 Bothe, Alina 311, 228, 232, 234 Brin, Joseph 189 Broderson, Moyshe 187 Broner, Adam 103, 105 Buchwajc, Menachem 37, 54 Burshteyn, Shmuel 40, 43, 45–46 Burstin, Symcha 232

C

Cechanski, Henryk 85 Celnikier, Fraida 67 Cerendorf, Szmuel 82n51, 98 Chaskiel, Stefania 232 Chernyshyov, Vasily 124, 125n46 Cohen, Boaz 33–34 Cohen, Ruth 67 Crystal, Leon 160, 184–185 Cybulski, Franciszek 62 Cyrankiewicz, Józef 128 Czeszko, Bohdan 276 Czujrima, Fedsia 265

D

Darowskaja, Wiera 265 Davidson, Simon 9–11, 25–27 Davies, Norman xviii Dawidowicz, Maria 84–85, 95–96

316

Index of Names Deduszycki, Tadeusz 62 Dekel, Mikhal 50, 53 Derrida, Jacques 151, 151n29 Diatłowicka, Klara 264 Diatłowicki, Dawid 263–264 Diatłowicki, Hana 263 Diatłowicki, Jerzy 263–264 Diatłowicki, Józef 264 Domino, Zbigniew 256 Dorski, Henryk 80, 92, 100–101 Driz, Shike 164 Drobner, Bolesław 65 Druker, Irme 193 Druker, Jeshajahu 93 Dwork, Debórah 35 Dzerzhinsky, Felix 180 Dzerzhinsky, Jan 180 Dżigan, Szymon 246

E

Edele, Mark x–xi, xxvii, xxix, 15, 280-289 Ehrenburg, Ilya 165, 179 Eichenwald, Adolf 79 Eker, Sam 90, 98 Ekstein, Joseph 90 Elsan, Ziwja 39, 39n44, 40, 43, 46, 55 Elsner, Eugene 70–71 Elton, Zyga 62, 219 Engel, David xxvn30, 61 Engelking, Barbara 255 Erlich, Henryk 15 Erlichson, Yitzkhak 207, 207n23, 211–212 Estraikh, Gennady xxix, 148, 153, 158, 175– 198, 282

F

Fadeev, Aleksandr 184 Fedin, Konstantin 194 Fefer, Itsik 147, 156–157, 157n53, 157n55, 160, 162, 164n83, 165–166, 174, 181– 182, 184 Feigenbaum, Lucien 97 Feldman, Ignacy 265–266 Feldman, Marian 83, 98, 248, 248n37 Finder, Gabriel 34 Finver, Leon 90 Fiszering, David 4 Fitzpatrick, Sheila 15 Flicker, Felix 79, 79n34, 97–98, 235 Flinker, Adam 88–89 Flinker, Dovid 37–38 Fluss, Norbert 80

Fogelman, Eva 33 Friedla, Katharina xvii, xxviii, 70–166, 281, 284–285 Friedländer, Saul xxii Friedman, Michał 103–104 Friedman, Philip xx Friszman, Nuta 83 Frumkin, Esther 161

G

Ganc, Mojsze 232 Gershman, Joseph 186 Gershuni, Aharon 133–134 Geytsman, Marian 64 Glatshteyn, Yankev 151, 160, 167n93 Gleichgewicht, Bolesław 252 Gliński, Robert 253 Gogol, Nikolai 204 Golan, Bob 50–51, 53 Goldfaden, Abraham 187 Goldlust, John xxiii, xxix, 214–235, 281, 286– 287 Goldshteyn, Yoysef-Shimen 156–158 Goldstein (Goldsztajn), Aron 264 Gomułka, Władysław 196 Gorbachev, Mikhail 185–186 Gorshman, Shira 192 Grabowski, Jan 255 Grabski, August 106 Grade, Chaim 166–167, 167n92–93, 168– 170 Graetz, Heinrich 150–151, 158, 169n99 Graizbord, David 150 Grantserska-Kadari, Bina 62 Greenberg, Eliezer 170 Grossmann, Atina xvii, xxvin, 32, 217, 235n56, 305 Grosz, Wiktor 76 Grubner, Jakob 90, 104 Grünberg, Sławomir 259 Grynberg, Henryk 30, 36, 54–55, 246–247 Gutman, Yisrael 219

H

Halbershtadt, Sarah 41, 55 Halkin, Shmuel 193 Harshav, Barbara 7 Harshav, Benjamin 7, 24–25, 27 Hautzig, Esther 217 Hen, Józef 245 Herc, Lucyna 94 Herling-Grudziński, Gustaw 240, 259

Index of Names Hilberg, Raul xxi–xxii Hitler, Adolf 18, 146, 149, 151, 157, 171, 173, 244, 246, 286 Hochmeister, Eliezer 38, 40, 48 Hoffman, Jerzy 258, 258n63, 260 Hofshteyn, Dovid 147, 160, 162 Holand, Szaja 87 Holland, Agnieszka 70, 253 Holland, Henryk 253 Honig, Samuel 65, 208–209 Horvath, Rita 35 Howe, Irving 170

I

Ihnatowicz-Suszyńska, Jadwiga 67–68 Ilyichev, Leonid 184, 186 Iras, Yaffa 67 Izmozik, Vladlen 179 Iżycki-Hermann, Tadeusz 64

J

Jakobson, Ruth 138 Jaroszczuk, Iwan 265 Jaruzelski, Wojciech 241, 256 Jędrychowski, Stefan 114–115 Joffe, Samuel (Mulka) 135, 137–138 Jolluck, Katherine 60–61, 66 Jonitz, Andrzej 62 Justman, Aron 268 Justman, Emanuel 268–269 Justman, Miriam 268 Justman, Regina 268–269 Juszkiewicz, Aleksander 117–118, 129

K

Kacman, Abram 271, 273 Kacman, Chana 273 Kacman, Perła 271, 274 Kacman, Walisz 273 Kaczerginski, Shmerke 153–156, 158–159, 165, 168, 171 Kaganovich, Lazar 17 Kaganovich, Leonid 207, 210–211 Kaganovich, Neena 211 Kaganovitch, Albert ix, xxviii, 14n49, 57–69, 286 Kahane, David 93 Kahanovitsh, Pinkhes (Der Nister) 147 Kalwary, Marian 244 Kamińska, Ida 246 Kaniecki, Przemysław xxix, 261–278, 317 Katsnelson, Itshok 192

Katz, Reuven viii Kazakevich, Emmanuil 190 Kermisz, Joseph xxi Kesler, Michael 210–211 Kesler, Regina 207, 209–210 Khanin, Nathan 161 Kharik, Izi 179 Khmelnitzkaya, Sheyna 138, 140 Khrushchev, Nikita 160, 185, 188, 192 Kirschbaun (Kirszbaun), Jakub 262, 262n5 Kirszbaun, Beniek 263 Kisielew, Dimitrij 265 Kleinman, David 208 Klitenik, Grania 261n1, 266 Klitenik, Józef 266 Klitenik, Leon 266 Klitenik-Primik, Helena 266–267 Koehler, Anastasia 305 Kon, Henryk 247 Konwicki, Tadeusz 277 Kopystyńska, Aleksandra Leliwa 243 Korn, Rokhl 144–145 Kościuszko, Tadeusz xv, 70–71, 73, 77, 81, 83, 85, 88, 90–92, 94, 100–102, 107, 237 Kossoy, Edward 258 Kotowicz, Donat 93, 102 Krakowski, Shmuel 219, 224 Krall, Hanna 242 Kruk, Herman 6–9, 27 Kubik, Jan 237 Kukiz, Paweł 255 Kulbak, Moyshe 161, 179 Kulbiakin, Misza 265 Kushnirov, Arn 147, 158 Kutz, Kazimierz 277 Kvitko, Leyb 147, 162, 184

L

Labin, Shmuel 30, 40, 44–46, 48, 56 Landau, Fanny 270 Landau, Meier 260 Landau, George 259n66 Łazebnik, Joel ( Julian) 182–183 Lemkin, Raphael 147, 147n16, 148, 148n18, 162n74 Leneman, Léon 165n86, 184 Lenin, Vladimir 188, 196, 210 Lerer, Leia 67 Leser, Shlomo 64 Leszczyńska, Halina (Birencwajg) 244 Levertov, Berl 139 Levertov, Moshe 131n6, 132, 136

317

318

Index of Names Levin, Dov 16n53, 20 Litvak, Yosef 61, 74, 280

M

Man, Mendl 161 Marciniak, Wojciech xxviii, 110–129, 285 Margulies, Nancy 260 Markish, Perets 147, 151, 156, 160, 162, 168, 184 Martynowa, Raja 265 Marx, Karl 210 Matwin, Władysław 122–123, 128 Mayzel, Nakhmen 153n39, 159 Mehl, Boruch 101 Meirtschak, Benjamin 75 Michlic, Joanna Beata 35, 215n2, 252 Mickiewicz, Adam 249 Mikhoels, Solomon 181 Mikoyan, Anastas 186 Milgraum, Luba 38, 41, 45, 48 Minc, Hilary xv, 72n6 Moczalov, Aleksander 120 Modzelewski, Zygmunt 115–118, 123, 127 Mogilewski, Borys 265 Molotov, Vyacheslav 8–9, 11, 44–45, 110, 114, 122, 127, 283 Morecka, Dora 253 Müller, Beate 35–36 Muszkat, Zofia 180

N

Najdus, Lejb 178 Najdus, Walentyna 178 Najman, Mieczysław 103 Naszkowski, Marian 129 Nesselrodt, Markus 228 Niger, Shmuel 158–159, 159n60, 167n93 Nosiadek, Mikolay 62 Novick, Peter 171 Nowak, Jerzy Nowak 255 Nussbaum, Kalman (Klemens) 75

O

Oberländer, Marek 275–276 Ofer, Dalia 33 Oreszyn, Iwanow 265 Osóbka-Morawski, Edward 112–115, 120 Ozick, Cynthia 170

P

Patash, Yehudis 38, 47, 51–52, 56 Pawlov, Alexei 123

Pechner, Artur 95, 102, 109 Perel, Salomon 253 Piątkowska, Renata xxix, 261–278 Piłsudski, Józef 111, 249 Pinchuk, Ben Cion 218 Podgursky, Robert 259 Pohoryles, Aleksander 120 Polonsky, Antony viii, xviii, xix, 60, 281, 286 Pomerantz, Jack (Yitzchak) 92–93, 206–207, 211 Pomian, Krzysztof 241, 243, 245, 256 Pomianowski, Jerzy 240 Pomper, Maria 95 Ponomarenko, Panteleimon 179, 183, 196 Potash, Zvi 51–52 Prager, Moshe 36–37 Prais, Lea 4

R

Raabe, Henryk 122–129 Rabin, Joseph 193 Rabinovich, Semen 192, 194–195 Rabinowicz, Gitla 39, 41, 44, 46–47, 55 Radutskii, Viktor 204 Reiff, Ryszard 250 Reuveni, David 151 Richter, David 178 Rives, Iakov 190 Rokossowski, Konstantin 256 Rolnik, Masha 192 Rosenbloom, Fela 231 Rosenbloom, Felix 231 Rozental, Janina 267 Rozental, Ryszard Henryk 261n1, 267 Rudawski, Michał 86, 86n70, 87, 101, 105 Rudnicki, Daniel 99 Ruta, Arie (Leon) 85 Ryzenberg, Abram 81, 91, 94, 102 Ryżowa, Lidia 265 Rzymowski, Wincenty 114, 123

S

S., Mieczysław 65 Said, Edward 143, 157n53 Sakshewsky, S. 62 Salsberg, Joseph Baruch 192–193 Sartre, Jean-Paul 153, 153n37 Schein, Karol 101 Schneersohn, Joseph Isaac 139 Schorr, Mojżesz 238 Schudrich, Michael 236–237 Schulz, Miriam xxix, 143–174

Index of Names Sfard, David 20n73, 188 Shapiro, Leon 191 Shlevin, Benyomin 196 Shmeruk, Chone 88 Shneer, David 172 Shternberg, Yakov 187 Siebcesser, Sima 38, 45, 47, 56 Siekierski, Maciej 34, 36, 36n31, 37, 47 Sikorski, Władysław xiv, 38, 58, 71 Skowrońska, Alicja 247 Sloves, Chaim 187 Smolar, Hersh/Grzegorz/Grigorii xxix, 175– 198, 282, 288 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 240 Sommerstein, Emil 84 Stahl, Dina 42, 50, 50n88, 55 Stalin, Joseph xiv–xv, 16n57, 18, 43–45, 63, 77, 110–111, 113–114, 118, 127, 145, 147, 149, 157, 161, 192, 196, 210, 245– 246, 283, 286–287 Stang, Beniami 265 Stang, Chawa 265 Stankowski, Albert viii–ix, 214n1 Steinberg, Baruch 236 Steinlauf, Michael C. 252 Stola, Dariusz 107n160 Stryjkowski, Julian 252, 262 Suslov, Mikhail 181, 192 Sutzkever, Avrom 143–144, 148, 154, 158, 161–163, 165 Szer, Włodzimierz 100, 105 Szewc, Piotr 252 Szlifersztejn, Artur 11–12, 27 Szpinak, Bela 95 Szteinberg, Icchak 86 Sztern, Jan 259 Szumacher, Izrael 246

T

Taube, Herman 208 Taurek, Irena 260 Teitel, Khanina 42, 46, 50 Teitelboim, Dora 196 Tenenbaum, Benjamin 52 Terbiler, Chana 271, 273–274 Terbiler, Dawid 273 Teyf, Moyshe 164, 191

Tron, Henryk 83, 92 Tseitlin, Abram 202–204 Turner, Bernard 164–165, 183

V

Vayner, Fayvel 21–23, 25, 27 Velkovich, Serafima xxviii, 130–142 Vergelis, Aron 164, 190, 193–195, 197 Vyshinsky, Andrey 117–118, 122, 124–126, 128

W

Warlik, Wanda x–xi, xxvii, 15, 215n2 Wasilewska, Wanda 68, 80, 111–115 Waszyński, Michał 260 Wat, Aleksander 61, 68, 253 Wat, Ola 253 Weber, Edward 277 Weber, Kurt 277 Weizenfeld, Yosef 38, 40–41, 43, 48 Werker, Dora 68 Wiesel, Elie 173, 173n110, 174 Wieviorka, Annette 33 Włodawer, Aleksander 270 Włodawer, Artur 268 Włodawer, Paulina 268–271, 271n29 Wolpe, Henryk 120–122, 127–129 Wosiewicz, Leszek 253

Y

Yanasovitsh, Yitskhok 163–164 Yankelovich (Yanai), Yakov 135–138

Z

Zabiechaja, Dora 265 Zagajewski, Michał 86 Zahra, Tara 34 Zaidin, Ilya 137 Zambrowski, Roman xv Zaremba, Marcin 106 Zelikman, Srol 59 Zelman, Leon 3 Zeltser, Arkadi 76 Zessin-Jurek, Lidia 252 Ziembiński, Wojciech 252 Zipperstein, Steven 162

319