Deciding life or death: Polish Jews and the wartime Soviet Union dilemma

March 11th, 2021

Awake Goy

In Café Scheherazade, a semi-fictional memoir, Arnold Zable describes his experiences in World War II as “a tale of maps, both old and new. Maps with shifting borders, obsolete before the ink could dry… maps crisscrossed by trains shunting their cargoes of uprooted wanderers thousands of kilometers east, on… an interminable journey that came to an abrupt halt at a remote station.”In Survival on the Margins, Eliyana Adler, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University, describes journeys that took about 200,000 Polish Jews who were fleeing the Nazis or had been arrested and deported into the interior of the Soviet Union. Drawing on hundreds of firsthand accounts, Adler demonstrates how (in the words of a refugee), “One moment decides a person’s fate. One runs this way, the other that way…. Here it’s bad and there it’s no good.”Painful and poignant, harrowing and humbling, Survival on the Margins tells the little-known story of Polish Jews forced to leave their homes, suffer severe deprivations and the loss of family members. Adler makes a compelling case that these people should be considered Holocaust survivors.In 1939, many Polish Jews – disproportionately male, with progressive politics, non-Orthodox religious practices and residences close to the Bug and San rivers – decided to avoid the German invasion by moving to the region of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. The Soviets subsequently gave these refugees a choice: Become modified Soviet citizens (which effectively required them to leave the area) or retain Polish citizenship and return to the territory controlled by Germany. Many Polish Jews, however, were deported to slave labor camps in the Baltics or regions they called “Siberia.” When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, most of them were “amnestied.” Unable or unwilling to return to their war-torn homes, they scattered. When the war ended, those who remained in the Soviet Union were assigned to camps for displaced persons in Western Europe, from which they eventually emigrated to Israel, the United States, Australia and South America.Ironically, Adler points out, some 95% of the Polish Jews who remained in the territories annexed by the Soviet Union to avoid deportation perished at the hands of the Nazis and their local collaborators. At least one mother, we learn, was haunted by her well-meaning decision to leave her son in Vilna, where he was murdered.Indeed, Survival on the Margins is at its best when Adler examines decisions made by Polish Jews amid uncertainty. In 1939, she indicates, their direct experience (and awareness) of expropriation, expulsion and violence varied. Some Jews thought they could buy their way out of trouble. The question of whether to cross the border into the Soviet zone, a survivor recalled, “was the theme of everyone’s conversations in the streets and in the kitchens.” Especially important was a desire to remain at home so that multi-generational families could stay together.

Soviet treatment of deportees, Adler reports, was “inconsistent, ambiguous and ambivalent.” Traveling for weeks on trains built for freight or animals, deportees used buckets or holes in the floor as bathrooms. They subsisted on soup. Few deportees failed to mention the proliferation of lice and the kipiatok, the free hot water dispenser at every train station. At some Gulag camps, deportees had to build their own dwellings and forage in the forests for food.A lawyer from Krakow, Adler reveals, drew on Jewish tradition to describe his trials and tribulations: “We dress like on Purim; eat as on Yom Kippur; and work like in Egypt.” While religious practices were rarely permitted, Soviet authorities (unlike the Nazis, of course) did, at times, provide space for cultural life, including schools for children (who shrugged off the Soviet propaganda), Yiddish song nights and plays, Passover celebrations, and perhaps the first blowing of a shofar in the Ural forest.According to Adler, few refugees indicated that they experienced antisemitism from Soviet citizens. She discounts references to antisemitism in interviews with the American Jewish Committee in the late 1940s as vague rather than personal, and in response to direct questions about prejudice. Acknowledging that antisemitism was on the rise in the Soviet Union, Adler concludes, “It was not a major concern of Polish Jews,” that is, until they returned to Poland, where postwar violence in 1946 culminated in the Kielce Pogrom.Consumed by “the search for the living and facts about the dead,” returnees were concerned as well about the imposition of Communist rule in Poland and their meager numbers in a country where Jews had constituted 10% of the population. By the 1960s, most of the 25,000-30,000 Jews in Poland were highly acculturated, living in mixed or non-Jewish families. Some young people among them rediscovered their identities in response to the anti-Zionist campaign following the 1967 Six Day War, which led to another exodus, leaving fewer than 10,000 Jews in Poland.By then, many Jewish survivors, no longer strangers in a strange land, were sitting in living rooms around the world, surrounded by evidence of material success, telling tragic stories with happy endings. For some of them, like Arnold Zable, Adler indicates, a sense of loss and longing lingered. “To this day,” Zable wrote, “I no longer have a center of gravity. I feel rootless. I will always feel rootless. I have been stripped of everything. Of the scent of my youth, my known way of life.” Surprisingly, perhaps, Zable found a kind of freedom in the absence of belonging. “I am acutely aware that everything is temporary in life, a mere bridge. One does not build a house on a bridge. Instead, I find my true home inside. I can escape inside and go wherever my fancy takes me.” The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American studies at Cornell University.SURVIVAL ON THE MARGINS
By Eliyana R. Adler
Harvard University Press
433 pages; $49.95Source

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