Going Home: Jewish Survivors in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (original) (raw)
Related papers
The present study presents a few from the most well known Jewish memoirs written by Jewish intellectuals, active in the life of Jewish Community from Romania during the Holocaust years and in its aftermath, after the setting of communism in Romania. The books come with a personal note, an inner vision about the condition of Jews in fascist and early years of communism, about the ideal of “liberty” in a world of storm, of military confrontation, racism and anti- Semitism. From these memoirs, it emerges the particular spirit of Jewish Community with his fight for survival, between adaptation to the politics of spheres of influence and emigration.
Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 2012
An oft-repeated generalisation about the post-Second World War Australian Jewish community is that it includes an unusually high proportion of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Indeed it is well documented that the demographic make-up of Australian Jewry was changed significantly as a result of the intake of around 25,000 pre-war and post-war Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. The emerging global horror at the almost successful Nazi genocide policies, punctuated by the newsreels of the liberated death camps and their few remaining, emaciated inmates have seared these ideas, locations and images into our historical memory. So, when the term Jewish ‘Holocaust survivor’ is used, not unreasonably, we tend to think of the brave and fortunate few who managed to outlive the Nazi death machinery of the ‘camps’ to then go on to rebuild their lives and families (most of them also choosing to leave Europe for good). Poland, with over three million Jews, was home to the largest pre-war Jewish community in Europe, of whom fewer than ten per cent remained alive when the war ended. A considerable proportion (probably as high as two-thirds) of the 17,000 post-war Jewish immigrants to Australia were born in Poland, and their subsequent impact on the character of existing Jewish communities, particularly Melbourne, has been quite profound. These Polish immigrants lost most or even all of their family (parents, siblings, etc.) during the war, but a central characteristic that is little known, and even less discussed, is that the majority were neither ‘survivors’ of the concentration camps, nor escaped because they were assisted or hidden by-non-Jews. Rather, most owe their lives to a combination of personal choice and fateful circumstance. Some made the decision very early in the war, to move out of Nazi-controlled areas in which they were living and into the Russian occupied section of Eastern Poland. Others were living in these areas already when the Soviet troops arrived. As a result, of the 300,000 Polish Jews who did survive the war at least two-thirds did so because they were under the Soviets, rather than at the mercy of the Nazi authorities. I propose to explore this lesser-known pathway, one that is central to the family histories of a considerable number of Jews currently living in Australia, and which therefore deserves to be more widely known and understood. In the process, I also seek to examine why, until very recently, in the broader context of more than sixty years of both academic accounts and personal memoirs that tell of the wartime Jewish experience, the ‘stories’ associated with the overwhelming majority of Polish ‘survivors’ have remained almost invisible.
Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959), 2021
Every Jew in Europe still alive at the end of the Second World War recognized their collective group as principal victims of the Nazi “Final Solution” that led directly to the extermination of more than sixty per cent of the pre-war Jewish population of Europe; and all were well aware that during the war each of them had been a potential target of the Nazi plans. But of interest here is that in exploring a number of published memoirs and video testimonies by Polish Jews who spent the wartime years under the Soviets, very few thought of themselves, either individually or collectively, as potential victims of the punitive policies of the Soviet regime. Similarly, in the autobiographical and testimony material from this cohort of Polish Jews very few were unequivocal in placing themselves in the category of “survivor”. Rather, direct articulations differentiating themselves from “Holocaust survivors” were much clearer and more pronounced. And while affirmation of their “eligibility” from testimony gathering endeavors undertaken by numerous Holocaust memorial institutions worldwide meant their interviews would now be lodged in the same archives 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 families and later generations—more extended narratives that would provide 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.” For many, at least in their own eyes, neither “victims of Soviet Communism” nor “survivors of the Nazi camps.”
Introduction to Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish survival in the Soviet Union
Shelter From The Holocaust - Wayne State University Press , 2017
[Extract] Millions of Eastern European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Of those who escaped that fate—the surviving remnant, known as the She’erit Hapletah—most remained alive because the Soviet Union had provided an often involuntary, and by and large extremely harsh, refuge from genocide. This volume investigates aspects of this history and its implications for more established historiographies. The experiences of Poland, the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and postwar displacement and migration intersect here in dramatic ways. This entanglement has so far remained mostly unexplored. The chapters in this volume try to open up a new transnational field of research, bringing together histories that for the most part have been studied separately. Contributors focus in particular on the history of Polish Jews who survived in the Soviet Union