“I bled like you, brother, although I was a thousand miles away”: postwar Yiddish sources on the experiences of Polish Jews in Soviet exile during World War II

ABSTRACT

An estimated 230,000 Polish Jews escaped Nazi persecution during World War II by flight or deportation to the interior of the Soviet Union. This article examines early postwar Yiddish and Polish sources on their survival in Soviet exile such as poems, newspaper articles, and witness testimonies. Two sets of sources are analyzed in-depth, testimonies written by young people in Jewish Displaced Persons (DP) camps in occupied Germany and Yiddish poetry from Poland and the DP camps. The author argues that many former exiles were eager to write down their experiences. In doing so, they were aware of the complex nature of deportation and flight that characterized the experiences of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. In their testimonies many young witnesses express their understanding that they too were “marked by the khurbn.” Whereas Yiddish poetry from the same period helps us understand how writers dealt with their own story of wartime survival outside the realm of German persecution. In their poetry they seek meaning in their own suffering and express their desire to establish a dialogue with other survivors.

KEYWORDS:

• Polish Jews
• Soviet Union
• World War II
• personal experiences
• personal accounts
• poetry
• Yiddish

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a dissertation thesis on the experiences of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union 1939–48 and the subsequent reflections of the survivors in postwar Poland and the Jewish DP camps in occupied Germany. I want to thank the anonymous reviewer as well as Anna Shternshis, Zeev Levin, and Agnieszka Wierzcholska for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Markus Nesselrodt is a Ph.D. candidate at the Free University Berlin and a research associate at the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany.

Notes

1. All numbers and statistics in this context have to be approached with caution, since there are almost no official data regarding Polish Jews in the Soviet Union. Even where they are available, they are fragmentary, contradictory, and subject to political interests. Yet, most historians agree on a number between 200,000 and 300,000 Polish Jews in Soviet exile during World War II. For a critical inquiry of statistics, see Albert Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees and Soviet Authorities during World War II,” Yad Vashem Studies 38, no. 2 (2010): 85–121.

2. In the context of this article I understand “exile” as the impossibilty of returning after flight, deportation, or evacuation to Soviet territory. After arrival on Soviet territory, return was not only illegal but also possibly lethal in light of German persecution. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, “exile is a place of compulsory confinement, but also an unreal place, a place that is itself out of place in the order of things. Anything may happen here, but nothing can be done here.” Zygmunt Bauman, “Assimilation into Exile: The Jew as a Polish Writer,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 569.

3. I am aware of the complexity of different literary and non-literary texts as historical sources. Nevertheless, these sources help to fill in gaps in the complex postwar Jewish life in Poland and the DP camps.

4. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from Polish and Yiddish are my own.

5. Magdalena Ruta shows that Jews in postwar Poland did debate their various wartime experiences but to an even lesser degree than in postwar Germany: Magdalena Ruta, Bez Żydów? Literatura jidysz w PRL o Zagładzie, Polsce i komunizmie (Kraków: Austeria, 2012). For documentation efforts in postwar Poland, see chapter 3 of Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 84–120.

6. Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 373–99; Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II,” New German Critique 39, no. 3 (2012): 61–79; John Goldlust, “A Different Silence: The Survival of More than 200,000 Polish Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II as a Case Study in Cultural Amnesia,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 21, no. 1 (2012): 13–60; Eliyana R. Adler, “Hrubieszów at the Crossroads: Polish Jews Navigate the German and Soviet Occupations,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 28, no. 1 (2014): 1–30.

7. Arieh Tartakower and Kurt R. Grossmann, The Jewish Refugee (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and World Jewish Congress, 1944), 263.

8. On the various terms and numbers, see Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky, “Introduction,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (London: Macmillan, 1991), 1–59.

9. See David Engel's seminal volumes: In the Shadow of Auschwitz. The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) and Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

10. Davies and Polonsky, “Introduction,” 3. The deportations targeted those Polish Jews who rejected Soviet citizenship in the spring of 1940. See Yosef Litvak, “Jewish Refugees from Poland in the USSR, 1939–1946,” in Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR, ed. Zvi Gitelman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 129.

11. Not all Jewish deportees were refugees. The NKVD also deported political leaders, religious authorities, and wealthy Jews. See Daniel Boćkowski, Czas nadziei : obywatele Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w ZSRR i opieka nad nimi placówek polskich w latach 1940–1943 (Warszawa: Neriton 1999), 83.

12. These figures are based on Polish and Soviet sources. See Boćkowski, Czas nadziei, 377. On the sovietization of Poland in general and its consequences for the Jews in particular see Keith Sword, ed., The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939–41 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Kaganovitch, “Jewish Refugees”; Davies and Polonsky, Jews in Eastern Poland.

13. Keith Sword stressed that the term “amnesty” implies an understanding of the Polish deportees being guilty convicts whose culpability the agreement emphasized in the aforementioned quotation. See Keith Sword, Deportation and Exile. Poles in the Soviet Union, 1939–1948 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 31. More generally on the history and meaning of the Sikorski-Maisky Agreement see Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz, 114–56.

14. On the evacuation, see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation und Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Manley does not focus on the Polish Jews among the evacuees but she frequently mentions the cases of Jack Pomerantz and Aleksander Wat.

15. For a detailed analysis of Jewish–non-Jewish relations among the Polish population in the Soviet Union see Litvak, “Jewish Refugees from Poland.”

16. Feliks Tych, “The Polish Jews in the DP Camps,” in Tamid Kadima – Heading Forward: Jewish Exodus out of Europe 1946–1948, ed. Sabine Aschauer-Smolik and Mario Steidl (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2010), 69–80. For an in-depth study of the so-called Erlich–Alter affair, see Daniel Blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland, 1939–1949 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 69–89.

17. Engel, Facing a Holocaust, 72. The mortality rate among ethnic Polish civilians in the Soviet Union is a matter of dispute. It can only be estimated that it would be close to the death rate of Polish Jews, since the living conditions were similar in many ways.

18. An “elaborate operation spearheaded by the JDC and centered in Teheran eventually provided the aid that enabled the survival in the Soviet Union of between 65 and 80 percent of the Polish Jews who did escape extermination.” Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue,” 72.

19. For the most up-to-date numbers see Albert Stankowski and Piotr Weiser, “Demograficzne skutki Holokaustu,” in Następstwa zagłady Żydów. Polska 1944–2010, ed. Feliks Tych and Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska (Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS i Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2011), 15–38.

20. On violent antisemitism in postwar Poland see David Engel, “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 43–85; Jan T. Gross, Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz: An Essay in Historical Interpretation (New York: Random House, 2006).

21. David Engel, “Poland: Poland since 1939,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Poland/Poland_since_1939 (accessed January 2015).

22. This paper focuses on Germany. For DP camps in Austria and Italy see Aschauer-Smolik and Steidl, Tamid Kadima.

23. On the different meanings of the term, see Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective. Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches and Fundamental Issues (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 329–32.

24. Zeev Mankowitz defines “repatriates” as those who “had not been personally and directly caught up in Nazi policies of terror, torture and killing. They had endured harsh and, for some, fatal years of exile; in most cases they lost their families from whom they were separated and, on their return, found their homes occupied by others, their property stolen or confiscated and facing a world that had turned alien and implacably hostile. Their situation, nonetheless, was very different from those who had survived the horrors of the Shoah.” See Zeev Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19.

25. Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost,” 377.

26. For a detailed analysis of Jewish historical commissions and their understanding of writing the history of the recent catastrophe see Jockusch, Collect and Record! 84–120; Mankowitz, Life, 192–225; and more generally on Zionism in Poland and Germany see Avinoam J. Patt, Finding Home and Homeland. Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).

27. Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue,” 79.

28. Markus Nesselrodt, “From Russian Winters to Munich Summers. DPs and the Story of Survival in the Soviet Union,” in Freilegungen. Displaced Persons. Leben im Transit: Überlebende zwischen Repatriierung, Rehabilitierung und Neuanfang, Yearbook of the International Tracing Service, vol. 3, ed. Rebecca Boehling, Susanne Urban, and René Bienert (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), 190–8.

29. The decision of most Polish-Jewish DPs not to reflect on their Soviet past in public can be identified as one of the reasons for the existing gap in historiographical research. See also Grossmann, “Remapping Relief and Rescue,” 73–4.

30. Tamar Lewinsky, Displaced Poets. Jiddische Schriftsteller im Nachkriegsdeutschland 1945–1951 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

31. This may also explain why the pace of collecting survivors' testimonies slowed down significantly after the end of 1946 when the majority of all Polish-Jewish DPs were repatriates. Jockusch, Collect, 144.

32. This number was the result of my research for Polish and Yiddish accounts inside Record Group M.1.E at the Yad Vashem Archive (YVA). Forty-two accounts were written in Yiddish, four in Polish.

33. Laura Jockusch describes how members of the CHC personally traveled to DP camps in order to encourage more survivors to give testimony: Jockusch, Collect, 141. Almost all accounts have a title along the lines of “My Experiences during the War” or “My Experiences during the German Occupation” and feature a class number and an identical date, indicating that many of the texts were written in class on the same day.

34. On Benjamin Tenenbaum and his testimony collection see Boaz Cohen, “The Children's Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (2007), 74–6.

35. Cohen, “The Children's Voice,” 75.

36. The collection of Benjamin Tenenbaum-Tene is held in the Ghetto Fighters' House Archive (GFHA), Western Galilee, Israel. The 24 testimonies were written in Polish (12), Yiddish (7), and Russian (5). I did not check the number of Hebrew testimonies.

37. According to Boaz Cohen, Tenenbaum published a selection of 83 testimonies in Hebrew in 1947 under the title Ehad me-ir ve-shna'im me-mishpakhah (Merhavia, 1947). None of them featured a description of life in the Soviet Union. Cohen, “The Children's Voice,” 83.

38. Testimony of Fajga D., YVA, M.1.E 2068. Polish, four pages, Zeilsheim, June 4, 1948.

39. GFHA, Catalog No. 4908. Russian, two pages, September 20, 1946.

40. GFHA, Catalog No. 4355. Polish, five pages, Rosenheim, September 22, 1946.

41. GFHA, Catalog No. 4206. Polish, two pages, no date.

42. GFHA, Catalog No. 4459. Polish, three pages, October 5, 1946.

43. GFHA, Catalog No. 4459. Polish, three pages, 5 October 1946.

44. YVA M.1.E 2183. Yiddish, six pages, Waldstadt near Pocking, June 9, 1948.

45. YVA M.1.E 2338. Yiddish, five pages, Waldstadt near Pocking, no date.

46. Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 62.

47. GFHA, Catalog No. 4227. Polish, five pages, no date.

48. Zionist emissaries from Palestine played an active and crucial role in the education and indoctrination of the Jewish youth, which cannot be discussed here. The subject is covered by Patt, Finding Home and Homeland.

49. Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost,” 389.

50. While a high number of all Jewish DPs chose to migrate to Palestine/Israel (100,000–142,000 DPs), roughly half of them left Germany for the United States (72,000–100,000), Canada (16,000–20,000), Belgium (8000), Australia (5000), France (2000), and other countries. See Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 251–2.

51. Jan Schwarz, Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture After the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 5.

52. Mark L. Smith, “No Silence in Yiddish,” in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, ed. David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–66; Jan Schwarz, “A Library of Hope and Destruction: The Yiddish Book Series ‘Dos poylishe yidntum' (Polish Jewry), 1946–1966,” Polin 20 (2008): 173–96; Zoe V. Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 100; Jack Kugelmass and Jonathan Boyarin, eds, From a Ruined Garden: The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

53. Khurbn is the contemporary Yiddish term for the destruction of the European Jews. It is closely tied to the double-bind annihilation of people and the cultural infrastructure, especially in Eastern Europe. See Benjamin Harshav, The Polyphony of Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 141–3.

54. Mendel Man (also Mann) (1916–75) was born in Warsaw, spent the war years in the Soviet Union, and fought in the Red Army. Before his flight to the US zone in Germany, Man was in charge of the Jewish Committee's Department of Culture and Education in Łódź and an active member of the Yiddish Writers' Union. He was later active in the she'erit ha-pletah in Bavarian Regensburg, where he joined the local committee and the editorial board of Der nayer moment. See Josef Schawinski and Hugh Denman, “Mann, Mendel,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd edn, vol. 13 (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 476.

55. Mendel Man, Di shtilkeyt mont. Lider un baladn (Łódź: Borokhov Farlag, 1945).

56. Nakhman Blumental (1905–83) was born in Borszczów, Galicia, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine; earned a master's degree in literature from the University of Warsaw; and was a teacher in Lublin until the outbreak of the Second World War. Blumental survived the war in hiding in Poland. He joined the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Lublin and became the first director of the Jewish Historical Institute in the years 1947–8. In 1950 he left Poland for Israel. See Jockusch, Collect, 209.

57. Nakhman Blumental, “Forvort,” in Man, Di shtilkeyt mont, 4.

58. Blumental, “Forvort,” 3.

59. Raul Hilberg, “I Was Not There,” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1988), 17–25.

60. Yeshaye Shpigel (1906–90) was born in Łódź, where he received a traditional Jewish education and worked as a teacher in TSYSHO (Di Tsentrale Yidishe Shul-Organizatsye, Central Yiddish School Organization) schools and later as an accountant. During World War II Shpigel was in the Ghetto Litzmannstadt, in Auschwitz, and in a German labor camp in Saxony. After the war he served as secretary for the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists. In 1951 he moved to Israel. Magdalena Ruta, ed., Nisht bay di taykhn fun Babel. Antologye fun der yidisher poezye in nokhmilkhomedikn Poyln / Nie nad rzekami Babilonu. Antologia poezji jidysz w powojennej Polsce, trans. Magdalena Ruta (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka, 2012), 418.

61. My own translation. For the Yiddish original and a Polish translation see Ruta, Nisht bay di taykhn, 76–86.

62. Yitskhok Perlov (1911–80) was born in Biała Podlaska and was a Yiddish poet, novelist, and editor. Until the end of World War I he lived in Minsk, then in Warsaw and in the Soviet Union (1940–6). In 1947 he sailed to Palestine on the Exodus but was returned to Germany by the British. In 1949 he emigrated to Israel, and in 1961 to New York. His works appeared in the Yiddish press in Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States. See Yekhiel Szeintuch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Yitskhok Perlov,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd edn, vol. 15 (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 780. See also Yitskhok Perlov's autobiographical novel The Adventures of One Yitzchok (New York: Award Books, 1967).

63. Yitskhok Perlov, Undzer like-khame (Minkhn: Farlag Poale Tsion, 1947), 149.

64. Benjamin Harshav (1928–2015) was born in Vilna, Poland, today Lithuania, as Benjamin Hrushovski. He left Vilna before the German Army entered the city, and spent most of the war in Central Asia, close to the border of Russia and Kazakhstan. In 1946 Harshav returned to Poland and settled in Lower Silesia, where he was recruited to the Zionist Socialist youth organization Dror-Hechalutz Hatzair. In spring 1947 he was sent to Munich in order to take part in the organization's world seminar. During his stay in Germany, Harshav published his first poems under his pen name “H. Binyomin” in various DP journals and became co-editor of a bilingual Hebrew/Yiddish literary periodical called Lehavot. See Jerold C. Frakes, “Harshav, Benjamin,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd edn, vol. 8 (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 367.

65. Interview with Benjamin Harshav, New Haven, September 2013.

66. Chana Kronfeld, “H. Binyomin – a Portrait of the Poet as Yiddish Scholar,” 2012, unpublished paper, 13. Cited with permission.

67. Published as H. Binyomin, Take oyf tshikaves. Geblibene Lider (Rowen: Dray shvester, 1994), 6.

68. H. Binyomin, “Ovnt in step,” in Shtoybn. Lider (Minkhn: Merkaz Dror), 11–12.

69. Anonymous, “Forvort,” in Binyomin, Shtoybn, 5.

70. “Yidish katastrofe-dor”: Taranowski, “Forvort,” 5.

71. Abraham Peck, “‘Our Eyes Have Seen Eternity': Memory and Self-Identity among the She'erith Hapletah,” Modern Judaism 17 (1997): 57–74; Patt, Finding Home and Homeland; Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope.

72. Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost,” 384.

73. Yitskhok Perlov, “Sheyres hapleyte,” in Undzer like-khame (Minkhn: Farlag Poale Tsion, 1947), 147–8.

74. M.D. Elihav, “A kapitl geshikhte geyt farlorn,” Ibergang, June 29, 1947, 3.

75. Patt, Finding Home and Homeland, 268.

76. This only refers to English publications. A number of memoirs in Yiddish were published in Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv after the war. Some examples in English: Samuel Honig, From Poland to Russia and Back 1939–1946: Surviving the Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Windsor: Black Moss Press, 1996); Bernard L. Ginsburg, A Wayfarer in a World in Upheaval (San Bernadino: Borgo Press, 1993); Henry Skorr, Through Blood and Tears: Surviving Hitler and Stalin (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); Zev Katz, From the Gestapo to the Gulags: One Jewish Life (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004).

77. Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies, 252.