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

Abstract

Prior to the Holocaust, Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in the world. Although statistics remain inconclusive, an estimated 400,000 Polish Jews out of a prewar population of 3.3 million survived the Nazi onslaught. Approximately three-quarters of them survived all or some of the war years in Stalin’s USSR (pp. viii–ix, xxiii). Over the past decade, Holocaust scholars have increasingly turned their attention to these refugees, evacuees, and deportees, rescuing their history from the “cultural amnesia” to which it was once lost. A slew of articles, edited volumes, and, more recently, monographs have brought this group in from the margins of Holocaust studies. This literature has broadened our historical understanding of Holocaust survival, and, following Atina Grossmann’s imperative, contributed to a global remapping of the Holocaust and the frenetic population movements it wrought. This new volume of essays, which emerged out of a 2018 conference at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, enriches this growing field with three distinct contributions.