Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union by Eliyana R. Adler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union by Eliyana R. Adler Atina Grossmann Eliyana R. Adler. Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 456 pp. Eliyana Adler's richly researched and evocatively written Survival on the Margins is the first major scholarly monograph to present the story of Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union as a key—and precisely not merely marginal—part of Holocaust and World War II history. By focusing on the by-now hardly unknown but still not adequately integrated "Other Side" (yener zayt, quoted in the opening epigraph) of Jewish life and death during the war, beyond the borderlines of German occupation in the Soviet Union, Adler excavates a neglected history of the largest group of Eastern European Jews, perhaps a quarter million, to emerge alive from the catastrophe of the Shoah. At the same time, she deftly traces and analyzes the conditions of its marginalization and the long-standing consequences of that inattention for memory and memorialization as well as historiography. Over the past ten to twenty years, it has become a reflex to greet each new publication or even public lecture, including new or reprinted memoirs, articles, and edited volumes on this topic with strangely repetitive reference to the uncovering of an "unknown," little-known, or surprising aspect of Holocaust history. As numerous publications remind us, this historical terrain has in fact been plowed, especially in recent years, notably including: Markus Nesselrodt, Dem Holocaust Entkommen: Polnische Juden in der Sowjetunion, 1939–1946 (2019); edited volumes such as Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet [End Page 436] Union, edited by Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann (2017) or the valuable collection from Boston's Academic Studies Press Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959): History and Memory of Deportation, Exile and Survival, edited by Katharina Friedla and Markus Nesselrodt (2021)—both with contributions by Adler; powerful second-generation investigations such as Mikhal Dekel's Tehran Children (republished as In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust (2019, 2021), and scores of family memoirs, some essentially self-published or increasingly published by smaller university presses. Up until now, however, we have not had a synthetic study that pulls together the substantial and, as Adler reminds us, decades-old existing scholarship, memoirs, oral histories, and archival sources in multiple languages to produce a coherent narrative that considers both the geopolitical circumstances of this Polish/Soviet/Jewish experience and the complicated individual trajectories (with useful maps) of those Adler distinguishes as "flight survivors." This is a remarkable achievement built on fluency in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and Hebrew as well as familiarity with numerous national historiographies that have generally remained within their silos—precisely the desiderata that along with limited access to Soviet archives have hampered scholarship. Turning the necessity of working without "hard" statistics or comprehensive archival resources into a virtue, Adler has mined secondary literature and available archival materials but relied to an unusual degree on memoirs and oral histories, with a profound sensitivity to what might be called the "history of emotions" expressed in both written and oral testimonies, many, but certainly not all, composed well after the event. Her book gives us a recalibrated narrative that fulfills its goal of moving these survivors out of a "netherworld of history and memory" in order to "recover and reintegrate their stories" into the history of the "Nazi genocide" (2). She pulls together a dizzying array of memories of multiple transits—flight from the Germans, adjustment to life in newly Sovietized Poland, deportation to labor camps and special settlements in the Soviet interior (denoted by the cypher "Siberia"), renewed migration and hardship and resourceful endurance in Central Asia (marked by reference to Tashkent, known in a popular novel as the "City of Bread" as a "City of Want"), service in the Red or Berling Army, evacuation to Iran with the Anders Army for a small minority, repatriation to a virtually unrecognizable Poland or an entirely new Poland in the "recovered territories," another renewed flight to...