Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior by Albert Kaganovitch

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior by Albert Kaganovitch Serafima Velkovich Albert Kaganovitch. Exodus and Its Aftermath: Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Interior. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 336 pp. Albert Kaganovitch’s Exodus and Its Aftermath discusses the topic of Jewish refugees in the USSR during the Second World War. After the Nazi invasion in June 1941, millions of people fled to the inner territories, trying to escape the war and save their lives. According to various estimates, there were about two million Jewish refugees among them, who were evacuated by the authorities or fled on their own to the interior of the Soviet Union. Some of the refugees were Soviet citizens; others arrived forcibly from Poland, the former Baltic states, and Romania. The book is rich with examples from memoirs and a multitude of archival materials, which are accompanied by much statistical data, based on large-scale quantitative studies. All of these sources give a detailed picture of the situation regarding the places where Jewish refugees arrived. Kaganovitch reconstructs the circumstances from different perspectives: the official position and those of the refugees themselves. He raises important topics, including local situations of famine, diseases, epidemics, and deaths. The death rate of the population (Jews and non-Jews) in some places in Siberia and the Urals was almost 44 percent higher in comparison to previous years. In some places, the mortality was even higher than in forced labor camps. “The hotbeds of epidemics were the railway stations, where refugees spent long hours and days, waiting for the possibility to move somewhere” (107). At the same time, the author pays extensive attention to job conditions. The Soviet prewar slogan “He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat” serves as the title of the chapter about employment problems, which were quite common. Only those who worked could receive some food and goods, but in many cases, it was impossible to obtain a job. As a result of the lack of work and the impossibility of buying anything, theft, bribes, and black market operations thrived. [End Page 236] Kaganovitch devotes a prominent place to a discussion of the authorities’ attitude and measures toward Jewish refugees. Quite a few sources show the antisemitic policies of top-ranking personnel of the Communist Party in various regions. At the same time, lower-level local functionaries demonstrated negative attitudes toward the refugees, not only because they were Jewish, but mostly because they were strangers. It is noteworthy that Communist Party officials spread the myth that they had successfully absorbed over ten million evacuees, including Jews. At the end of the book, Kaganovitch deals with the return to life after the liberation. When the war ended, the situation of Jewish refugees did not change dramatically. They coped with the reality of antisemitic propaganda, the absence of housing, and the lack of permission to return to their hometowns via bribes, changing names to less Jewish ones, and even sometimes traveling to distant regions of the USSR in order to find a new place to live (such as Birobidzhan in the Jewish Autonomous Region, for example). The author does not really differentiate between Soviet Jewish refugees and Jews who were deportees or refugees from Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania, each of which faced separate issues. The most salient difference was that the majority of Polish Jewish refugees had an opportunity to leave the Soviet Union in 1946, by the repatriation agreement, a feat that was almost impossible for Soviet Jews, who continued to suffer from antisemitic policies in the USSR. Traditional and religious Jewish life, or the lack thereof, also differentiated the experiences of the two groups of Jewish refugees. The plight of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union has recently become a focus of attention in the field of Holocaust studies. Within just the last few years, several books, in a number of different languages, have been published on the topic. Kaganovitch’s book joins Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile, and Survival, edited by Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt; Syberiada Żydów polskich: Losy uchodźców z Zagłady...