The dark legacy of the Holocaust overshadows the history of the Polish Jews. As a result of this phenomenon, historians have forgotten or neglected several important topics, even though some are linked to the history of the Shoah. The experiences of the Polish Jews who survived the Second World War in the Soviet Union belong to this category. After the partition of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in September 1939, about 1.5 million Polish Jews found themselves in the Soviet-occupied territories. They were joined by over 300,000 Jews who had escaped from the German to the Soviet occupation zone. In 1940 and early 1941, the Soviet authorities deported some 320,000 Polish citizens to Siberia and to other remote parts of the Soviet Union. Some 30 percent of the deportees were Jewish. After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, an unknown number of Jews escaped or were evacuated by the Soviets from the territories taken by the Germans.Altogether, between 260,000 and 400,000 Polish Jews were forcibly moved to the Soviet interior. Most likely, over ten percent of them died on their way to the East or in the Gulag camps, forced settlements, and kolkhozes where they were imprisoned. Most of them suffered from starvation, diseases, and exhaustive work. Yet, between 250,000 and 350,000 survived and left the Soviet Union. The Jews who stayed under German control perished at a rate of over 90 percent. When the Jews from the Soviet Union moved to Poland, Palestine, or the Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany and Austria after the war, they met Holocaust survivors and heard their stories. Haunted by feelings of guilt, the veterans of the Soviet Odyssey decided to keep their stories to themselves. Moreover, during the Cold War, it was not prudent to reveal any Soviet past experiences in the West. Finally, for various reasons, the former ethnic Polish deportees to Siberia removed Jews from their narrative of exile. For decades, the story of the war-time Jewish suffering in the Soviet Union was forgotten.The volume under review is the first extensive Polish-language study of this subject. It is edited by Dr. Lidia Zessin-Jurek, a graduate of the Łódź University and the European University Institute in Florence, currently a scholar at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Katharina Friedla, a graduate of the Free University of Berlin and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who is now a researcher at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris. The book contains sixteen essays, which are grouped into three parts; they are entitled “Today,” “Yesterday,” and “Then.” The essays are preceded by a short foreword from the dean of the Polish Jewish historians, Anthony Polonsky, and the editors’ introduction. The essays of the first part, written by Zessin-Jurek, Ellen G. Friedman from the College of New Jersey, and Atina Grossmann from New York's Cooper Union, are devoted to the memory of the Jewish Siberian Odyssey. They explain why this memory was revealed so late, what the obstacles were on the way to this revelation, and why and in what manner were Jews excluded from the Polish community of the Siberian survivors. The authors also discuss an ambiguous attitude towards the Soviet Union shared by many Jewish returnees from the USSR. They were deported and brutalized, but the Stalinist authorities treated them all like Soviet subjects and, unintentionally, saved their lives. The authors ask intriguing questions. Is the Siberian exile of the Polish Jews a part of the history of the Holocaust? How has the Catholic Church and the Polish religious Imaginarium contributed to the suppression of the Jewish Siberian memories?The second part of the book contains six essays by Laura Jockusch from Brandeis University, Tamar Lewinsky from the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Tadeusz Sucharski from the Pomeranian Academy in Słupsk, Magdalena Ruta from the Jagiellonian University, Eliyana R. Adler from Penn State University, John Goldlust from La Trobe University in Melbourne, and Hubert Chudzio from the Pedagogical University in Kraków. They analyze the silencing of the Jewish Siberian veterans, discuss the “hierarchy of suffering,” and show how the narrative of the Holocaust survivors prevailed over the memory of the Soviet exile. At the same time, Catholic “Siberians” (Sybiracy) removed Jews from their shared experience of exile and “Polonized” their memory. Also, the issue of human agency returns in the essays that make up “Yesterday.” In 1939 and 1940, Polish Jews could not predict the Holocaust, but they had to make decisions crucial to their survival: to stay under the Germans (who treated Jews during the First World War much better than the Russians), or to escape to the unknown and threatening Soviet East. Those who decided to run made another decision in 1942, and they tried to leave the Soviet Union with the Polish Anders Army for the Middle East in 1942. Some 6,500 Jews, both soldiers and civilians, were evacuated, including between seven hundred and one thousand “children of Teheran,” who reached Palestine in 1943.In the third part of the book, Friedla discusses the Siberian experience of the religious Jews, which was particularly difficult and heroic in the context of Stalinist anti-religious policies. Marcus Nesselrodt, a historian from Viadrina University in Frankfurt on the Oder, describes the encounter of the Jewish deportees with the local population of Soviet Central Asia. In a fascinating essay, Albert Kaganovitch from the University of Manitoba demonstrates how Stalin used the Jewish deportees and refugees as a bargaining chip in his relations with the Great Powers and the Polish Government-in-Exile, and he also discusses the complicated political operations preceding the establishment of the State of Israel. Altogether, some 280,000 Jews from the Soviet-controlled countries were able to move to Israel in the late 1940s, partially because Stalin hoped that they would help establish a Soviet anti-British bridgehead in the Near East. Serafima Volkovich, a PhD student from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, continues the topic of an illegal escape of Jews from the Soviet-controlled world directly after the Second World War. Dorota Sula from the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica and Naama Seri-Levi, also a PhD student from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, show the post-war fates of the Jewish survivors of the Siberian Odyssey in Silesia, which was incorporated into Poland after 1945, and in the Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany and Austria. A general reflection on the history of Jews in Russia, written by a Polish veteran journalist, Konstanty Gebert, closes the volume.The book under review touches on numerous aspects of the described grand theme. It is written by scholars (eleven women and seven men) belonging to three generations and coming from four continents, different branches of academia, and various scientific milieus. Even if they include some repetitions, these compelling essays present other statistical data, analytical approaches, and sensitivities. Most of the texts are translated from English. It would be easy to use their original versions, translate the rest of the essays from Polish and German into English and publish an English volume accessible to Holocaust students and those armchair and academic historians who do not read Polish. It is worth doing it!