Identity Profusions: Bio-Historical Journeys From "Polish Jew"/"Jewish Pole" through "Soviet Citizen" to "Holocaust Survivor

Shelter from the Holocaust Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union Edited by Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann Wayne State University Press | Detroit Contents Maps vii Introduction: Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union 1 mark edele, sheila fitzpatrick, john goldlust, and atina grossmann 1. A Diferent 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 john goldlust 29 2. Saved by Stalin? Trajectories and Numbers of Polish Jews in the Soviet Second World War 95 mark edele and wanda warlik 3. Annexation, Evacuation, and Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, 1939–1946 133 sheila fitzpatrick 4. Fraught Friendships: Soviet Jews and Polish Jews on the Soviet Home Front 161 natalie belsky 5. Jewish Refugees in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India: Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue 185 atina grossmann v CoNTENTS 6. Identity Profusions: Bio-Historical Journeys from “Polish Jew” / “Jewish Pole” through “Soviet Citizen” to “Holocaust Survivor” 219 john goldlust 7. Crossing over: Exploring the Borders of Holocaust Testimony 247 eliyana r. adler Epilogue 275 maria tumarkin Contributors Index 281 285 vi 6 Identity Profusions Bio-Historical Journeys from “Polish Jew” / “Jewish Pole” through “Soviet Citizen” to “Holocaust Survivor” John Goldlust On the lengthy wartime sojourn inside the USSR by several hundred thousand “foreign” Jews,1 while available statistical data and diplomatic documents served as the primary sources for earlier historical overviews, the complexity, nuance, and detail that surrounded these experiences under the Soviets is still not widely known, shared, or coherently understood.2 My interest in the topic was sharpened with the emergence in recent decades of a growing stream of richly detailed and widely accessible material, in the form of published autobiographical memoirs along with the burgeoning archive collections of personal oral testimonies.3 As I discovered, both memoir and testimony materials now include accounts of experiences from a number of Polish Jews who spent their wartime years under the Soviets. These represent for the researcher a valuable body of what Christopher R. Browning calls “collected memories.”4 And significantly, I would suggest, a careful exploration of these reflective biohistories, invariably enriched as they are by nuance and detail, add an important layer to the available academic and documentary accounts of the diverse, often dangerous, and territorially extensive odysseys undertaken by the considerable number of Polish Jews who survived the war inside the Soviet Union.5 219 JOHN GOLDLUST In this chapter, my research draws from the written texts of fourteen published memoirs, supplemented by fifty video testimonies collected for, and now lodged in, the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.6 All recollections and observations cited below come from Polish Jews who spent the war under the Soviets. And, except for five of the memoir writers, all the remaining informants subsequently settled in Australia.7 With these as the principal data sources, and in the spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry, I sketch out an approach that revolves around the concept of “social identity.” This is not the place for a detailed exposition on the extensive literature in the disciplines of social psychology and sociology on social group identity.8 However, in what follows, I outline, briefly, how this concept might serve as a useful prism through which to engage with the wealth of material that emerges in the personal recollections, reminiscences, and memoirs I have been exploring, and I draw on a few examples to illustrate. As used here, I do not consider “social group identity” to be based on “primordial” shared attributes that are embedded in the individual from an early age—what is often called the “essentialist” perspective—rather, I view it as a particular set of relationships that emerge through a dynamic historical process, and one that is continuously being reconstructed, shaped, and sustained by a combination of externally applied and subjectively affirmed symbolic and behavioral practices.9 Therefore, at its most basic, personal identification with, for example, an ethnic, national, or religious community requires an assumed, but not always mutually affirmed, agreement between, on the one hand, how others see or define the individual’s social group identity and, on the other, the individual’s ongoing selfidentification with that group. In the context of the modernizing frameworks and associated social and political transformations that began to spread across the nineteenthand twentieth-century world, this “constructionist” view of how social group identities are both formed and sustained has gradually come to be seen in the social sciences as a pivotal explanatory principle.10 It seems particularly pertinent to the study of intergroup social relations in the decades immediately following the First World War, especially given the dramatic political collapse of imperial conglomerations and the subsequent creation, reorganization, and, in some cases, reemergence of a 220 IDENTITY PROF USIONS number of “national entities” as independent states (processes often accompanied by volatile, ethno-political tensions and conflicts across much of Europe). In many instances, the constituent characteristics of the particular “social identity” being promoted—usually some combination of religion, language, history, culture—around which “a sense of belonging” to such nation-state societies was conceived, sustained, and symbolized were forcefully imposed on recalcitrant minorities, in some instances sought to exclude them, and at times were vigorously challenged by them.11 Of particular relevance here is the post-1918 reconstitution of Poland as an independent nation-state—a historical political entity whose territory had been absorbed and its authority apportioned, among three powerful imperial neighbors for the previous 120 years. The social and political tensions that duly emerged in post–World War I Poland revolved around the aggressive assertion, by some among the population, of an “ethnically purer” (and unambiguously “Roman Catholic”) Polish group identity, in contrast to— and often seeking to exclude from political “membership”—other ethnic/national/religious minorities within its new borders, inevitably amplifying existing intergroup antipathies. The three largest minorities—Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews—together made up around 30 percent of Poland’s population between the two world wars.12 Of these three groups, “Jewish social identity,” unlike the others, was not necessarily derived from or tied to a particular geographical territory or language. On the contrary, as Jews were supposedly the descendants of an ancient and non-Christian religious heritage, the post-Napoleonic period of European nation building presented a major challenge to them in relation to how they and others conceived Jewish social and political status within the nation-states in which they now lived. Some, encouraged by the promise of access to rights associated with citizenship, often limited or in some instances completely denied to Jews, were quite prepared to “divest themselves” of their “Jewish baggage” (to the extent of voluntary religious conversion to Christianity); others sought to be acknowledged as members of a religious (or, for the more secularist-oriented, an “ethnic”) minority and, at the same time, recognized as “equal citizens” of the nationstate; a small minority of Jews were drawn to “radical” universalist-oriented political ideologies, such as socialism and communism, that promised possibilities for the future “transcendence” of existing particularistic religious, ethnic, and even national social identities. 221 JOHN GOLDLUST However, regardless of the kind of political formation or legal acknowledgment of “minority rights” Jews might prefer or struggle to attain, non-Jewish advocates and supporters of more “exclusivist” nationalist ideologies, including those in post–World War I Poland, often championed views and policies that reaffirmed “essentialist” assumptions around questions of “Jewish” social identity. From this perspective “the Jew” would always remain an “inassimilable other,” a “universalist,” a “rootless transnational,” and potentially a “subversive enemy of the nation.”13 SOCIAL GROUP IDENTITY IN POLAND BEFORE 1939 It is not surprising, then, that in their autobiographical accounts, my Jewish informants, many of whom were born in the first decades of the twentieth century, frequently express strong views about whether there existed a hierarchy, duality, or total incompatibility between “Jewish” and “Polish” social identities—in the years before, during, and immediately following the Second World War. As “Polish Jews,” would they always be “outsiders” in relation to “ethnic” Poles, destined to remain part of an “inassimilable” ethno-religious minority, or could they attain a level of social acceptance appropriate to their nominal legal status as equal citizens of Poland? By the late 1930s, even among the minority who thought of themselves in this latter category—as “Jewish Poles” rather than “Polish Jews”—many began to observe in their surroundings, and on occasion also personally experience, an increase in antisemitic attitudes and behav iors from their “ethnic Polish” neighbors, including from some they had previously considered close friends. Their reflections often support the view that the immediate prewar period accentuated feelings of social separation, with a growing emphasis on the inherent incompatibility between “Polish Jews” and “ethnic Poles.”14 And, they suggest, these changes delivered a severe blow to those Jews (and Poles) who still held the view that the “blending” of the two social identities was desirable or even possible. Sara Bergman recalls that growing up in Poland she had a “tremendous lot of non-Jewish friends” but that a “different atmosphere” emerged around 1933–34, after which she became very disappointed in the way many Poles now responded toward Jews. By 1939, “even the Polish socialists 222 IDENTITY PROF USIONS started wearing black ties” and she “saw in their eyes so much hate.”15 Paula Blum, in her video testimony, remembers that she had a couple of close non-Jewish friends, but in the late 1930s one friendship came to an end because her friend’s father had a “government job” and children of government officials were “not supposed to have Jewish friends.” Also, around 1936–37, she recalls, her brother was “constantly” being beaten up by his non-Jewish peers. At school Blum had some Polish teachers who were increasingly more abusive toward Jewish students, and, as she came to realize, “we were at home, but we were not.”16 Similarly, Eugenia Biggs remembers being told by ethnic Poles, “We don’t belong here.”17 And in the blunt words of Moishe Blum: “They were Poles, we were Jews.”18 This increasing social polarization had more direct, and often quite unpleasant, consequences for Jews soon after the German occupation of Poland in 1939. As reported in a number of the personal testimonies, it was often ethnic Poles who would voluntarily assist German soldiers in identifying and ejecting Jews trying to “pass” as Poles in food queues or seeking to avoid the German roundups of young Jewish males and females for daily forced labor duties. Indeed, a pungent comment drawn from one of the testimonies reflects a more widely held Jewish view that the most significant difference between Germans and Poles in their behav ior toward Jews was that “Poles didn’t kill, they just pointed.”19 SOCIAL GROUP IDENTITY UNDER THE SOVIETS For many, the growing gulf between “Polish Jew” and “ethnic Pole” widened even further through the wartime experiences of the Poles who either fled to or were already residents of the territories of eastern Poland occupied and later annexed by the Soviets between September and November 1939. Among the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens who chose to move from German-occupied into Soviet-occupied areas of Poland between 1939 and 1941, there were at least twice as many ethnic Poles as Jews. And, while “officially,” Soviet authorities were directed to treat all Polish citizens similarly, a number of Jewish accounts affirm that a mutual suspicion and hostility continued between the two groups.20 Under the Soviets, existing antagonisms were sharpened further by the view, shared by many ethnic Poles, that “all” Polish Jews were, at best, sympathetic to and, at worst, closely aligned with the “Russian 223 JOHN GOLDLUST Bolsheviks,” who once again were set on destroying— alongside their German allies—the recently renewed and still fragile “Catholic” Polish nation.21 On the Jewish side, according to the recollections of a number of the Polish Jews who found themselves under the Soviets, the manner in which they were received and treated, and the opportunities for personal “improvement” or “advancement” available to them in the USSR, represented an almost total “status inversion” to the situation they had experienced in prewar Poland. This view emerges quite strongly in some of the memoirs and testimonies, both from Jewish residents of eastern Poland who became Soviet citizens through a decree imposed by the Soviet authorities in late 1939 and among Jewish refugees from central and western Poland who, soon after their arrival in eastern Poland, were being encouraged by the occupying authorities to voluntarily take up Soviet citizenship. For those prepared to relocate away from eastern Poland and inside the prewar USSR borders, along with their newly acquired “Soviet citizenship” came opportunities for employment, training, and education.22 Leo Cooper writes in his autobiographical memoir that after arriving alone as a young refugee in eastern Poland in late 1939, he enlisted himself for work at a Soviet labor recruitment office. Having trained as a turner, he found his trade skills “appreciated in Russia because of a shortage of skilled labour.” Cooper also felt very quickly “integrated” into “the community of the Russian people at the factory,” who, he notes, were mostly ethnic Belarusians: “They accepted me as if I were one of their own and not a foreigner. I could converse fluently in Russian and I made many friends.” He reflects on “the irony of the situation. Here I was amongst strangers, people I hardly knew, speaking a language I only recently learned, living in a country whose regime I abhorred, yet feeling relatively free as a Jew.”23 And even among Polish Jews subjected to much harsher treatment by the Soviets because they had been identified by the state security organization (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD), as “class enemies,” “dangerous elements,” or “spies,” the observations that emerge from the testimonies and memoirs repeatedly emphasize that, as Jews, they felt that they were not treated any differently from non-Jews in a similar situation.24 So despite periods during which they were con- 224 IDENTITY PROF USIONS fined, and under extremely difficult conditions in places of imprisonment or deportation, a considerable number still reflect quite positively on one important aspect—in sharp contrast to how they felt in 1930s Poland, they express genuine appreciation that, not only “officially” but also in practice, the Soviets treated them as “social equals.” As a Polish refugee in Belarus, Joseph Eckstein had refused Soviet citizenship and was afterward arrested as a “German spy” and sent to a prison camp near Novosibirsk.25 Yet in his testimony, he comments on the kindness of the local Russians who did not discriminate against the prisoners as Jews and who helped whichever way they could with cigarettes or scraps of bread.26 Dora Huze, a refugee deported to a labor camp in Siberia notes that while some Russians were antisemitic, discrimination or using racist language was forbidden, and Jews were treated just like all the Russian prisoners. In the camp, they were even permitted to have a “spokesperson,” elected by refugees, to pass on any complaints or suggestions to the authorities.27 When the interviewer asks Anna Kalfus whether there was different treatment for Jews in her Arctic Soviet labor camp, she replies with a firm “no”—and then adds that the authorities made it clear to inmates that not even the derogatory word “zhid ” was permitted to be used.28 Soviet-occupied Poland included, of course, adolescents and young adults in both the refugee and the resident Jewish populations. A number recall being encouraged either to continue their high school education or to enroll in trade schools, universities, or other tertiary-level courses. In retrospect, they often comment disdainfully on the preponderance of “propaganda” and ideological dogma that they encountered as part of their Soviet-inflected educational curriculum. But this doctrinaire form of pedagogy also acquainted them with their newly acquired citizenship “rights” under the Soviet constitution. Later some were quite prepared to petition higher authorities to have such “rights” duly recognized and acted on.29 As Jewish refugees in eastern Poland, Irena Feiler and her family were deported to a labor camp near Mongolia in 1940. Aged sixteen at the time, Irena is chastised by an NKVD officer for not doing her kitchen work competently enough. In response, she points out to him that the Soviet 225 JOHN GOLDLUST constitution stipulates that persons under the age of eighteen are supposed to be engaged in education—not labor—and that obviously he is ignorant of “Stalin’s constitution.” According to her testimony, not only does Feiler “win” the argument—from then on she is allowed to choose when and how long she works—but her “intervention” also improved working conditions for others in the camp.30 In 1940, as a former Polish refugee—but now a Soviet citizen—Kopel Frank is working eight-hour shifts in a quarry in the Urals. Looking to find less physically demanding employment, he points out to his foreman that “Stalin’s constitution gives every citizen in Russia the right to learn a trade.” The foreman is a little stunned but agrees to his request. A few days later he is sent for training as a plasterer—a twelve-month course that he completes just before the war with Germany starts.31 While working in a coal mine in Kizel in the Urals in 1940, Henryk Hornowicz completes a Russian-language course, from which he “graduates at the highest level.” On hearing there is an institute in nearby Perm offering foreign-language courses, he takes the entrance exam and is accepted. However, the authorities at the coal mine refuse his request to continue his language education. So Hornowicz writes a petition to Stalin, distributing copies to the appropriate authorities. After twenty days, he receives a telegram giving him permission to leave. In his video testimony, he makes a point of saying that he cannot recall any instance of discrimination or different treatment as a Jew in all the wartime years he spent in the USSR.32 It seems pertinent to draw attention to these recollections by Polish Jews in which they place particular emphasis on occasions when they felt that they were being treated as “equal Soviet citizens,” and more so in the context of the uneasy, suspicious, and frequently unsatisfactory encounters many Jews report with “ethnic” Poles throughout the wartime period when both groups were in the USSR. From the Jewish perspective, such feelings of discrimination and prejudice often come to the fore in the testimonies and memoirs of male informants when they recount their unsuccessful attempts to join the “Polish army” that was being formed in the Soviet Union by General Władysław Anders in late 1941 and 1942. As now part of the anti-German alliance, the Soviet government had agreed that soldiers recruited to this army would be permitted to leave 226 IDENTITY PROF USIONS the USSR to assist the Western Allies’ war effort in Europe. Sometimes (though not always) supported with “evidence” drawn from their own experience, the reason most often given by the Jewish informants for why they were rejected when they tried to enlist is that they had acknowledged themselves (or were identified by the Polish recruiters) as Jews. A few examples: Joseph Eckstein is in Buzuluk (in southeastern Russia near the border with Kazakhstan) on his way to Tashkent, when he hears about the “Anders army.” He wants to join but is not even allowed to enter the barracks. “We have enough Jews,” he is informed. Eckstein, together with a friend, tries again some time later. Eckstein gives the recruiter his own and his father’s name, declares himself “Jewish,” and is not accepted. His friend has a “Polish-sounding name” and is accepted. Eckstein wryly observes that they were both in the same physical condition, but his friend “had a better name.” But only a year or so afterward, Eckstein is accepted as a volunteer in the later—and this time Soviet-sponsored— Polish army recruited in the USSR under General Zygmunt Berling.33 Similarly, Mojsze Ganc is rejected on the two separate occasions when he tried to join General Anders’s Polish army, yet in January 1943 he is “called up” by the Red Army and remains an active Soviet soldier through the rest of the war.34 As several thousand Polish Jews did manage to leave the Soviet Union for Iran with General Anders’s Polish army in 1942, clearly not every Jew who applied was rejected, but the number who claim that they were suggests that many more were denied the opportunity to serve.35 And given that Jews constituted around a third of all Poles inside the war time USSR, they were certainly statistically underrepresented. Jewish troops made up only about 7 percent of the 70,000 Polish soldiers who left with General Anders’s army.36 So for the Jews from Poland, being treated as “equals” under the Soviets would have encouraged many thousands to embrace, or at least nominally accept, their newly available social identity as “Soviet citizens.” In the fight against Germany, some Polish Jews (who, like Mojsze Ganc, were now “officially” Soviet citizens) were “called up” to assist in the Soviet war effort, although most served as “reserve labor” rather than in a military role; others remained in employment (especially if their jobs, skills, or 227 JOHN GOLDLUST professions were strategically important); and some (usually the younger ones) were able to continue in training and education courses. Thus for these Polish Jews, their experiences as “new” Soviet citizens—particularly the opportunity to learn and develop technical and organizational skills, acquire credentials or professional qualifications, or contribute in the war against Germany—proved, both in the short and longer term, personally advantageous and psychologically rewarding.37 But as the Anders army episode illustrates, that was not always the outcome when they tried to assert their identity as “Polish nationals.” On the contrary, as Leo Cooper notes in his memoir, many Jews perceived what was a strong determination by “ethnic Poles” to keep the percentage of Jews who enlisted low, other wise “the Polish Army might be deprived of its purely Polish character,” as “Jews had not been considered as being Polish.”38 But while they were in the USSR, Jews from Poland did sometimes encounter situations when a mutual acknowledgment of their Jewish social identity led them to form a stronger personal connection with a Soviet citizen than might other wise have been possible.39 As recalled in a few of the memoirs and testimonies, this also sometimes resulted in the Soviet Jew providing the Polish Jew with some useful advice or assistance. In some instances, the Soviet Jew was even in a position to ensure that the Polish Jew was a beneficiary of “special treatment,” even though it was clear to both parties that, had such an action come to the notice of the authorities, the Soviet Jew would most likely have ended up in serious trouble.40 As a refugee in eastern Poland, Abraham Amaterstein quickly accepts Soviet citizenship and applies for coal-mining work in the Urals. However, he has already been rejected a number of times by Soviet doctors who consider him physically unsuitable for the job. On this occasion, he is attended by a matronly Jewish doctor, who seems more empathic to his situation and who speaks to him in Yiddish. But she also assesses him as unfit for work in a coal mine. Amaterstein becomes very distressed at this news and tells the doctor that, as he is unable to find other work, he will be forced to return to his home in German-occupied Poland. On hearing this, she becomes quite agitated, tells him to wait in her office, and returns later with an envelope. She hands him the envelope and informs him that he is being assigned to Kizel in the Ural district. She also tells him that there he will be under the authority of a Yiddish-speaking 228 IDENTITY PROF USIONS Russian colonel, to whom he should personally give the envelope. After the group of around 500 Polish refugees arrives at their destination, Amaterstein delivers the doctor’s letter as instructed and finds that he is the only one not assigned to a coal-mining job. The Jewish colonel tells him that “the doctor had made a mistake,” but there is no point in sending him back, so he is assigned to a job as a “surveyor’s assistant” in one of the mines.41 Also a refugee in occupied eastern Poland, Sam Goldman signs up for work in December 1939 and is sent inside the USSR, to Kiev. There he encounters local (Ukrainian) Jews and is befriended by a relatively welloff Jewish family, who regularly invite him to their home and feed him very well. After a while, he discovers that his “host” is a Yiddish-speaking NKVD officer, who offers Goldman helpful advice on how to avoid being arrested. He particularly warns Goldman not to publicly express hostility to the Germans—at the time, they are still allies of the Soviets—which he is prone to do. He also suggests that Goldman use “Mischa” rather than his Hebrew first name “Shalom,” which Russians identified as a “Zionist greeting.”42 Mojsze Ganc finds work in a factory in Vitebsk (eastern Belarus) and marries his Polish Jewish girlfriend there. But his new wife is not happy with the civil registry union and wants a religious wedding. To accommodate this wish, he thinks, would be very difficult under the Soviets, since any kind of religious ceremony is strongly discouraged. Fortuitously, Ganc meets a local who, he discerns, is a religiously observant Jew. After the man, who is at first suspicious, is assured that Ganc and his wife are “legitimate” Jewish refugees, he agrees to help them arrange a religious wedding ceremony. He introduces them to a (possibly clandestine) “congregation,” whose members are able to prepare every thing required for a religious wedding ceremony. About sixty to seventy local guests show up, although none, of course, know the “bridal couple.” Ganc is impressed by their hospitality and generosity—he is not asked to pay anything.43 However, the often treacherous and murky complexity of the political maneuverings and inexplicable shifts in international alliances that began in 1939 and continued throughout the war meant that, for the Jews from Poland now inside the USSR, there were two critical periods during which they were presented with the opportunity to “reclaim” their 229 JOHN GOLDLUST Polish identity and, more importantly, once again have their status as Polish citizens “officially” recognized by the Soviet authorities. The first period was in the later months of 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Now fighting against, rather than allied with, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union became for a time politically and militarily aligned with the London-based Polish government-in-exile. A subsequent diplomatic agreement resulted in the Soviets declaring an “amnesty” for Poles inside the USSR, including those in labor camps— and this was extended even to many (but not all) serving prison sentences— who were both freed from incarceration and entitled to have their status as citizens of Poland restored.44 The second period was from late in 1943 until 1946, when Soviet policy was directed toward securing support among the Poles inside the Soviet Union, particularly those who might later prove “reliable.” They were to be “groomed” to help ensure that a restored Polish state would be more accommodating to the future interests of a Soviet Union keen to assert its postwar authority over Eastern Europe. Aside from establishing a number of ideologically acceptable Polish political organizations in the USSR, to which the Soviets assigned important roles in future administrative responsibilities, a parallel initiative lay in the creation of a second, and more directly Soviet-compliant, Polish army under General Berling. In this new recruitment process, Polish Jews felt more accepted and, according to some sources, found it easier to join than had been the case with the earlier Polish army under General Anders.45 Most importantly, being a part of this army provided some Polish Jews the opportunity to participate directly in the military campaign to reclaim Poland and later to enter Germany in pursuit of the retreating German forces. From the testimonies and memoirs of individuals who were involved in these campaigns, there emerges considerable satisfaction and pride at the small part the Soviets allowed them to play in the eventual defeat of the Nazi threat.46 Of course, many thousands of Polish Jews died in the Soviet Union— from disease, from succumbing to the difficult physical conditions, from military action, and at the hands of the Soviets via imprisonment or execution. But most of the Polish Jews from eastern Poland who were imprisoned as “class enemies” survived; most of the refugee Polish Jews who were deported to labor camps as “dangerous elements” survived; most of 230 IDENTITY PROF USIONS the Polish Jews who accepted Soviet citizenship and moved into the USSR proper in 1939 and 1940 survived; but of the 3 million Jews who either remained in German-occupied Poland or, as residents of Soviet-occupied Poland, found themselves unable to flee eastward after the Germans attacked the USSR in 1941, only a tiny fraction were still alive when Germany surrendered in May 1945.47 POSTWAR IDENTITY ISSUES A large majority of Polish Jews who lived under Soviet authority for the best part of six years had no desire to remain there permanently. And, given the major global transformations that had taken place in the political and military landscapes since 1939–41, when most had come under Soviet control, along with the continuous changes in their locations and in their official status throughout their stay, by the last few years of the war many Polish Jews remained perpetually confused and anxious about exactly what might happen to them following an Allied military victory over Nazi Germany. However, a couple of months after the German surrender in 1945, Soviet leaders, as one element of their plans for the “new” Poland (and to the surprise of many of the Poles now in the USSR), announced that they would grant the right of return to virtually any persons who could prove their Polish origins. So once again a pathway, more meaningful than it had been after the first Polish “amnesty” in 1941, opened that provided an opportunity for Jews from Poland to reclaim their “Polish identity.” And furthermore, this time the offer included an exit ticket from the Soviet Union—an outcome, they had been informed many times over the course of their lengthy stay there, they should forget about (“Don’t think you’re here for a day or two—you’re here for always”; “You will never see Poland again”). Under this postwar “amnesty,” those Poles who wished to return were first required to register for “repatriation,” and, not surprisingly, most of the Polish Jews still in the USSR elected to do so—and they included some who had remained Soviet citizens, either voluntarily or by decree, since the very early period of the war.48 It also quickly became apparent that sufficient transportation would only become available some time later. 231 JOHN GOLDLUST As a result, most did not arrive back in Poland until late 1945 or even well into 1946.49 By the middle of 1946, sources suggest, more than 250,000 Polish Jews had made their way back to Poland.50 Some were survivors liberated by the Allies from Nazi camps, others had been in hiding under false identities or in the forests with partisan groups in German-occupied territories, but making up by far the largest component were the Jews returning from the Soviet Union. However, for most, the return to Poland proved both intensely traumatic (discovering the extent of personal loss of family and community and the physical devastation of their homes and towns) and extremely unsettling in light of the almost total absence of welcome that their reappearance elicited from resident Poles. On the contrary, and reinforcing the sentiments prevalent among the published autobiographical memoirs I drew from in my earlier work on this cohort of Polish Jews (see chapter 1), many who came back from the Soviet Union are also quick to recall in their USC Shoah Foundation video testimonies the immediate and often intense hostility they encountered.51 Faced with such generalized hostility from ethnic Poles, which at various times and places escalated into brutal attacks (at least several hundred Jews were killed, and many more were injured), it is perhaps not surprising that for the majority of the surviving Jews, the social identity of “Pole” ceased to hold much positive psychological valence.52 While family links often stretched back over many generations, whatever residues remained of cultural and political identifications with Poland were relatively quickly and easily discarded by two-thirds of the surviving Polish Jews, who, within the first few years after the war, chose to settle elsewhere.53 Yet, the above notwithstanding, tens of thousands of Jews, including some who had spent the war years inside the Soviet Union, did opt to remain in postwar Poland. But it is also perhaps some indication of the ongoing, and some suggest even exacerbated, tension between the social identities of “Jew” and “Pole” in postwar Communist Poland that, among those who stayed, a considerable number felt it prudent to discard “Jewish-sounding” for more recognizably “Polish” surnames—and this sometimes extended to giving their children identifiably “Catholic” first names. Some went beyond changing their names in seeking to take 232 IDENTITY PROF USIONS up a “wholly” Polish social identity. Thus in the postwar years, according to one source, as many as 20,000 Polish Jews continued to use the false names and identities they had lived under during the war.54 However, over the following decades, the periodic eruption of government-led antisemitic campaigns eventually persuaded almost all who had remained, and who continued to self-identify (or to be identified) as Jewish, to leave Poland; the late 1960s saw the last significant wave of post–Second World War Jewish emigration.55 While most Jewish refugees who spent the war in the Soviet Union did elect to return to Poland, there is another, not insubstantial, group about whose postwar lives we know almost nothing. I am referring here to the Polish Jews who chose to remain inside the Soviet Union.56 Certainly, up until early 1944 the eventual outcome of the war was not at all clear. So, throughout the years of their Soviet sojourn, for the Jews from Poland one option always available was to accept the situation and embrace their new life and future as Soviet citizens. Some undoubtedly chose to stay because they found spouses or partners there; perhaps there were opportunities to study and become professionals, receive specialist training, or gain trade qualifications; or maybe they found interest ing and rewarding work there or possibly a career in the military. Without any systematic research, we are left to speculate. It would be reasonable to assume that those who did stay found one or more convincing reasons to exchange their former “Polish identity” for that of “Soviet citizen.” But once settled into Soviet life, how they then related to their social identity as Jews is an intriguing topic that still awaits further research. And what of the more than 150,000 Jews who, following their departure from postwar Poland, were, by the early 1950s, living in Israel, North America, Argentina, and Australia or elsewhere? In these “countries of immigration,” they were encouraged to take up the citizenship of their new “homeland,” and most chose to do so as soon as they were eligible, with little concern that this also meant renouncing any remaining formal ties to Poland. While undoubtedly there were some Polish Jews who, in the process of their resettlement in the West, took the opportunity to leave both Europe and their Jewish identity behind, the majority appear to have reaffirmed and maintained at least an “ethnic” (if not necessarily a 233 JOHN GOLDLUST religiously observant) identity as Jews. In settling in their new countries, they often asserted such a commitment by choosing to live in residential areas with already established Jewish communities. In subsequent decades, many became active participants and often played important leadership roles in a range of Jewish community organizations and institutions. Here, in the context of both local-born and other immigrant Jews, they generally carried their “social identity” as “Polish Jews” and sometimes, in the early years after resettlement, as “displaced persons” or “postwar refugees.” However, for the next thirty or more years, what many Jews from Poland who spent the war years under the Soviets had in common was a shared reticence to identify themselves as “Holocaust survivors.”57 Their widespread reluctance to take on the role of “survivor” is consistent with the “constructionist” view of how social identities are formed and sustained. That they did not “belong” in this category appears to have been simultaneously accepted by the Jews who returned from the Soviet Union and affirmed by those who saw themselves as the “real” Holocaust survivors.58 Again, video testimonies often support earlier findings, drawn from autobiographical memoirs, that those who spent the war years in the Soviet Union were neither encouraged nor especially keen to draw attention to their particular experiences.59 For example, Pola Bilander observes that, compared to people who went through the camps, “I had a good time” and remarks that, when other people talk about Auschwitz or concentration camps, “I have nothing to say.”60 In a similar vein, Cyla Fersht says that she and her friends discuss their wartime experiences “all the time,” but that the emphasis is invariably on the stories of those who had been in concentration camps. “My experiences were not so tragic against theirs, so I never opened my mouth . . . because I see that their life was hanging on a very thin string.”61 However, in recent decades, along with the emergence of autobiographical memoirs that not only tell of the desperate struggle to evade death at the hands of the Nazis but also include authors who write of their wartime experiences under the Soviets, in addition to the ongoing, worldwide collection of tens of thousands of video testimonies, the previously more restricted “criteria” for admission to the “status of Holocaust survivor” seem to have become considerably more relaxed.62 234 IDENTITY PROF USIONS In this chapter, I have drawn from written and oral accounts illustrative of the various pathways taken by Jews born in Poland who spent the war years under Soviet authority. Over the course of the war and through the following postwar decade, most were subject to a series of often less than voluntary geographical relocations.63 As well as having to readjust to new places, people, and surroundings, they were also continuously required to negotiate a shifting, often bewildering, and frequently contradictory mélange of structural and political forces impinging not only on their family loyalties, communal connections, and personal liberties but in some instances also challenging the very core of their personal understandings, beliefs, and values. When taken together, such potentially destabilizing encounters required of this disparate group of serially displaced Jews continuous readjustments to, and reevaluations of, their subjective attachments to both previous and more recently acquired social, religious, political, and ethno-national identity(ies). Notes 1. The number is possibly as many as 300,000, but for an extended discussion of the continuing difficulties in securing reliable data establishing, with any precision, both the “real” number of Polish Jews who found a refuge and the number who also survived the war under the Soviets, see chapter 2, by Mark Edele and Wanda Warlik, in this volume. 2. For earlier overviews, see, for example, the works I list in notes 9 and 10 in chapter 1 of this volume. 3. With regard to oral testimonies, the largest—the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive—has accumulated together a worldwide collection of more than 50,000 video interviews. The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, housed at Yale University, holds 4,400 video testimonies. There are also scores of more locally focused archives around the world, including a valuable Australian resource—the Phillip Maisel Testimonies Project, housed in the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, which began collecting in the early 1980s and currently holds 1,300 video (as well as over 200 audio) testimonies. 4. In a methodological discussion on the issue of the reliability of memoir/testimony material in Holocaust research, Browning argues for the usefulness of “collected memories,” by which he means a body 235 JOHN GOLDLUST 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. of written or oral memoirs that together allow the researcher faced with a “variety of different, often conflicting and contradictory, [sometimes even] clearly mistaken, memories and testimonies of individual survivors . . . to construct a history that other wise, for lack of evidence, would not exist.” Christopher R. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 39. As Diane L. Wolf notes, “Although many survivors recount that they felt no one wanted to hear their stories after the war, there is now a great demand for them.” And yet, she observes, “Holocaust testimonials remain, however, surprisingly overlooked and underanalyzed by sociologists and other social scientists.” Diane L. Wolf, “Holocaust Testimony: Producing Post-memories, Producing Identities,” in Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas, ed. Judith M. Gerson and Diane L. Wolf (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 154, 155. I first encountered the memoir materials while researching an earlier paper. For full bibliographic details, see notes 11 and 12 in chapter 1 of this volume. A considerable proportion of the 17,000 European Jews who migrated to Australia soon after World War II were originally from Poland. According to the Australian census of 1954, more than 9,000 Jews born in Poland were resident in Australia; almost all had arrived after 1945, and most were living in Melbourne. See Charles Price, “Jewish Settlers in Australia,” Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal 5, no. 8 (1964): app. 3a and 3b. In the mid- to late 1990s, there were 2,500 videoed Jewish survivor testimonies collected in Australia by the Shoah Foundation, and these are now lodged in its USC Visual History Archive; from these Australia-based interviews, I have been able to clearly identify 155 Poland-born Jews who spent most of the war years under Soviet authority. As noted, for this chapter, I have drawn on a subsample of fifty of these video testimonies. See Karen A. Cerulo, “Identity Construction: New Issues, New Directions,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 385–409. Useful, book-length overviews are provided by Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (London: Routledge, 2014); and Steve Fenton, Ethnicity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003). On the essentialist perspective, see Fenton, Ethnicity, 12. The social constructionist approach to identity, most importantly, “rejects any 236 IDENTITY PROF USIONS 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. category that sets forward essential or core features as the unique property of a collective’s members.” Cerulo, “Identity Construction,” 387. For a recent example, see Hazel Easthope, “Fixed Identities in a Mobile World? The Relationship Between Mobility, Place, and Identity,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 16 (2009): 61–82. As emphasized in the titles and central arguments of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); and in the collection of articles by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For a demographic overview of the multiethnic composition of the interwar population of Poland, see Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry under Soviet Rule, 1939–1941 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 18–21; first published in Hebrew as Tekufa Be’Sograim in 1989. For a discussion of the emergence of modern Polish nationalism and its historical difficulties with the inclusion of Poland’s Jews as a legitimate component of the body politic, see Joanna Michlic, “The Jews and the Formation of Modern National Identity in Poland,” in Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture, and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations, ed. Athena S. Leoussi and Steven Grosby (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), 129–42. See Edward D. Wynot Jr., “ ‘A Necessary Cruelty’: The Emergence of Official Anti-Semitism in Poland, 1936–39,” American Historical Review 76, no. 4 (1971): 1035–58. Sara Bergman, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) interview 30068, Melbourne, 6 April 1997. Paula Blum, VHA interview 38469, Melbourne, 8 December 1997. Eugenia Biggs, VHA interview 11104, Sydney, 4 March 1996. Moishe Blum, Visual History Archive, VHA 15796, Melbourne, 27 June 1996. Lucy Goldfeld, VHA interview 41758, Melbourne, 22 March 1998. The denunciation of Jews to the Nazis was not limited to pointing but also extended to writing. See Barbara Engelking-Boni, “ ‘Dear Mr. Gestapo’: Denunciatory Letters to the German Authorities in Warsaw, 1940–1942,” in Inferno of Choices: Poles and the Holocaust, ed. Sebastian Rejak and Elżbieta Frister (Warsaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza RYTM, 2011), 166–81. It also led to other behav iors “condoning of the policy of 237 JOHN GOLDLUST oppression of the Jewish people” enacted by the German occupiers. See Andrzej Żbikowski, “Antisemitism, Extortion against Jews, Collaboration with Germans, and Polish-Jewish Relations under German Occupation,” in Rejak and Frister, Inferno of Choices, 182–235. 20. Moshe Grossman, a Yiddish writer who fled into eastern Poland in 1939, was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviet authorities but released during the “amnesty” declared in mid-1941. Soon after, he set out by train toward Central Asia, and in his autobiographical memoir he comments: “In the train there were also Poles who had been released from the camps. They had just been liberated from prisons and camps together with the Polish Jews, but they had not been able to get rid of the habit of flinging ‘cursed Jew’ in the faces of their comrades in fate.” Moshe Grossman, In the Enchanted Land: My Seven Years in Soviet Russia (Tel Aviv: Rachel, 1960), 123. 21. See Joanna Michlic, “The Soviet Occupation of Poland, 1939–41, and the Stereotype of the Anti-Polish and Pro-Soviet Jew,” Jewish Social Studies, n.s., 13, no. 3 (2007): 135–76. Michlic writes: “The image of the secularized and radically left-wing Jew who aims to take over Poland and undermine the foundations of the Christian world has a long history in Poland, going back to the first half of the nineteenth century” (139). And, as others have noted, this stereotype was further amplified following the occupation of eastern Poland by the Soviets: “The prevalent view among Poles was that the Jews had joyously welcomed the Soviet invasion in September 1939; in addition, Jews supposedly had played an important role in the local Soviet power apparatus in the subsequent period, and in this role had contributed significantly to the persecution of the Poles, profited from their suffering and thus had committed ‘treason.’ This narrative was already widespread among the Polish population during World War II.” Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, and Kai Struve, eds., Shared History—Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-Occupied Poland, 1939–1941, Leipziger Beiträge zur Jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur, no. 5 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 26–27. 22. And, as it turned out, when German troops began their attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, many of the Polish Jews who had previously signed up for work and relocated were now living inside the prewar USSR borders. They therefore had a greater chance of either being evacuated or escaping further east to a “safe haven” in Soviet Central Asia. 238 IDENTITY PROF USIONS 23. Leo Cooper, Stakhanovites and Others: The Story of a Worker in the Soviet Union (Melbourne: Hudson, 1994), 21, 41, 46–47. 24. The category of “class enemy” included wealthy individuals, large employers, landlords, persons holding religious or high local office, those with military backgrounds, and leading figures in social, political, and community organizations—for Jews this meant prominent Zionists, Bundists, and also active Communists, most of whom were invariably identified with currently unacceptable “anti-Soviet” factions or views. Many were sentenced to varying periods in isolated prison camps or forced labor settlements. It was usual for the families of “class enemies” to be also subjected to deportation, although, in the main, family members were banished to labor camps or “places of exile” rather than incarcerated in prisons. Polish Jews considered a “dangerous element” included, most prominently, around 70,000 Polish refugees now in the Sovietannexed territories who, by early 1940, were still stubbornly refusing to sign up for Soviet citizenship. Indeed, the majority of these refugees had indicated to Soviet authorities that they would prefer to be returned to German-occupied Poland. Instead, in the first half of 1940, they were rounded up and deported to various labor camps or isolated settlements in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Arctic regions of northern Russia. Those accused of being “spies” were sometimes arrested because they were suspected of communicating with families or contacts outside the USSR or had sought to escape over the border, and this category also included some who resisted a later Soviet drive, in 1943 and 1944, to impose citizenship on the considerable number of stubbornly recalcitrant Polish Jews. 25. Moshe Grossman writes in his memoir of being arrested by the NKVD in 1944 and charged with “counterrevolutionary agitation.” During his interrogations, and even at this late stage in the war, it was suggested that he and the other Polish Jews were sympathetic to the Germans and hated the Soviets and that the Germans had sent them as spies, assuming that, as they were Jews, they would not come under suspicion. Grossman, In the Enchanted Land, 248–49. 26. Joseph Eckstein, VHA interview 23321, Melbourne, 27 November 1996. 27. Dora Huze, VHA interview 32477, Melbourne, 13 June 1997. 28. Anna Kalfus, VHA interview 1915, Sydney, 4 April 1995. 239 JOHN GOLDLUST 29. See, for example, Zev Katz, From the Gestapo to the Gulags: One Jewish Life (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2004). Katz wrote letters to Stalin from a remote Soviet labor camp requesting that his “right” to continue his education be honored, as I recount in chapter 1 of this volume. 30. Irena Feiler, VHA interview 1356, Sydney, 16 March 1997. 31. Kopel Frank, VHA interview 35237, Perth, 13 August 1997. 32. Henryk Hornowicz, VHA interview 34353, Melbourne, 23 October 1997. 33. Eckstein, interview. 34. Mojsze Ganc, VHA interview 26790, Melbourne, 27 January 1997. 35. Most of those who left were soldiers, but some family members were also permitted to leave. On estimates of the number of Polish Jews who left the USSR with the Anders army, see the discussion in chapter 2 of this volume, in particular table 4. 36. See Yisrael Gutman, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union,” Yad Vashem Studies 12 (1977): 231–333; Shimon Redlich, “Jews in General Anders’ Army in the Soviet Union 1941–42,” Soviet Jewish Affairs 1, no. 2 (1971): 90–98; and Ryszard Terlecki, “The Jewish Issue in the Polish Army in the USSR and the Near East, 1941–1944,” in Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46, ed. Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 161–71. 37. For example, Zev Katz writes in his memoir that he was able to enroll in a university degree in Kazakhstan in 1942 and remain a student until after the end of the war and, in summer 1946, was even given “special consideration” that enabled him to graduate prior to the date on which he was to be repatriated back to Poland. Katz, From the Gestapo, 113. 38. Cooper, Stakhanovites and Others, 88–89. 39. For an extended discussion of such encounters between Polish and Soviet Jews in wartime USSR, see chapter 4, by Natalie Belsky, in this volume. 40. As Belsky notes in chapter 4 of this volume: “In some cases, a shared Jewish identity brought Polish and Soviet Jews together and fostered a sense of trust between them. At the same time, it is clear that significant differences in status, background, and political allegiance meant that these friendships were more complex and fraught than one might imagine.” 240 IDENTITY PROF USIONS 41. Abraham Amaterstein, VHA interview 17463, Melbourne, 31 July 1996. 42. Sam Goldman, VHA interview 43502, Melbourne, 22 June 1998. 43. Ganc, interview. As Belsky observes in chapter 4 of this volume: “Although few Soviet Jews would openly participate in religious ceremonies, some expressed a degree of interest in these events.” These included some of the older Soviet Jews, who “likely practiced Judaism earlier in their lives and were less concerned about the potential ramifications for their careers if their behav ior was discovered by the authorities.” 44. The agreement included plans for the formation of a “Polish army” under General Anders, from which, as discussed above, many Jews who sought to join felt unfairly excluded. However, tens of thousands of recently “amnestied” Polish Jews were now free to settle elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Most chose places far away from the war zones, seeking to find work in one of the Central Asian republics, in cities such as Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Dzhambul or sometimes in smaller towns and villages or on collective farms. Many remained in these areas until the end of the war. 45. See Klemens Nussbaum, “Jews in the Kościuszko Division and First Polish Army,” in Davies and Polonsky, Jews in Eastern Poland, 183–213. Nussbaum describes the “atmosphere” in this army as very different: “Unlike Anders’ Army, their commanders and superiors were not Polish prewar officers known for their anti-semitic attitudes” (204). Also, according to Nussbaum, at the time the Berling army entered Poland as part of the Soviet-led forces, about half of the 2,500 Polish officers at all levels were Jewish (195). For more on the Berling army, and also on the inconsistent information with regard to both the number of Polish Jews who enlisted and the extent to which Jewish recruits experienced antisemitism within its ranks, see also chapter 1 and chapter 2 (especially table 6) of this volume. 46. As reflected, for example, in the testimony of Joseph Eckstein: Accepted as a volunteer in General Berling’s Polish army in 1943, following noncommissioned officer training, he was assigned the rank of corporal. Eckstein fought in a number of battles as the Soviets advanced into Poland and was with his battalion when they entered Warsaw in January 1945. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, his unit was stationed one hundred kilometers west of Berlin. He was 241 JOHN GOLDLUST released from the army at the end of 1946 and left with six medals, including ones for “long ser vice” and “bravery.” Eckstein, interview. 47. According to data cited by Laura Jockusch: “Of a surviving remnant estimated at 350,000 Polish Jews, some 30,000–50,000 found themselves in Polish territory upon liberation.” Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85. In addition, around 70,000–80,000 Polish Jews were liberated from camps in Germany and Austria. Therefore, a considerable majority of the surviving Polish Jews spent the war years under the Soviets. Edele and Warlik (table 6 in chapter 2 of this volume) estimate that somewhere around 150,000 returned under the postwar repatriation agreements, while Jockusch’s sources suggest that perhaps as many as 50,000 Polish Jews opted to remain in the USSR after the war. 48. That most Polish Jews chose to depart the Soviet Union is understandable for a number of reasons, and certainly one of the strongest was that many had left their parents and, in many instances, large, extended families in German-occupied Poland, about whom, since 1941, they had heard little or nothing—and by the war’s end they had good reason to fear the worst. However, some of the Jews who returned to Poland after the war had been, for a number of years, Soviet citizens, and despite the vicissitudes of their time inside the Soviet Union, most tend to recall mainly positive encounters with “ordinary Russians” (not to mention Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and other Soviet minority groups). Yet there was also a widely shared distaste for the “Soviet system.” The latter assessment was strongly influenced by their inevitable periodic encounters with a shifting and seemingly impenetrable party ideology, the often puzzling administrative and judicial decisions applied by local cadres and higher officials, and the abrasive style and menacing power of police and disciplinary authorities— especially officers of the NKVD. Indeed, numerous comments in the memoir and testimony material echo the observations made as early as 1947 by Jewish journalist Mordkhe Libhaber, who wrote: “Hundreds and thousands of Jews returned from the Soviet Union, saved from certain death under Hitler. . . . Many experienced a historical irony. They were led to destruction through hard labor in the camps where they were saved from death. Many found a hospitable asylum in the Soviet Union when they escaped hell. We understand the feelings of both gratitude and accusation.” Quoted in Laura Jockusch and Tamar Lewinsky, “Para- 242 IDENTITY PROF USIONS 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. dise Lost? Postwar Memory of Polish Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 3 (2010): 381. For a careful consideration and evaluation of the data sources on the overall number of Jews who came back to Poland from the Soviet Union (this includes those repatriated, returning “under their own steam,” or returning with the “Polish army” under General Berling or with the Red Army), see, table 6 in chapter 2 of this volume. This figure represents the total number of Jews who spent some time in Poland between 1944 and 1947, although many did not stay long. See David Engel, “Poland since 1939,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon D. Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1407. Lucjan Dobroszycki gives the slightly higher figure of 275,000 Jews in Poland over the period from summer 1944 to spring 1947. See Lucjan Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records, 1944–1947 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 25. For some, it began as they were returning on the trains or at railway stations, with comments by ethnic Poles, such as “You think they killed a lot—look how many are coming off.” Fred Gold, VHA interview 17112, Sydney, 1 July 1996. A considerable number reflect bitterly on how stunned and disappointed they felt by the indifference and rejection they confronted all around them. For more examples, see the discussion in chapter 1 of this volume. For analyses and extended discussions of postwar antisemitism and outbreaks of violence against Jews in Poland, see, for example, David Engel, “Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1944–1946,” Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998): 43–85; Jan T. Gross, “After Auschwitz: The Reality and Meaning of Postwar Antisemitism in Poland,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 20 (2004): 199–226; Joanna Michlic, “The Holocaust and Its Aftermath as Perceived in Poland: Voices of Polish Intellectuals, 1945–1947,” in The Jews Are Coming Back: The Return of the Jews to Their Countries of Origin after WWII, ed. David Bankier (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 206–30; and Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, “Cries of the Mob in the Pogroms in Rzeszów (June 1945), Cracow (August 1945), and Kielce (July 1946) as a Source for the State of Mind of the Participants,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (2011): 553–73. Ruth Wajnryb, drawing on her Australian study of twenty-seven “second-generation” children of “survivors,” notes that this also 243 JOHN GOLDLUST 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. applied to many of the children of Polish Jews, so that the widespread ambivalence, if not total antipathy, expressed by their parents regarding the notion of Poland as their “home” and to “Polish” as their identity was effectively transmitted to the next generation. Ruth Wajnryb, The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2001), 130. See Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 84. And the desire not to draw attention to themselves as Jews also extended to some who returned from the Soviet Union. A pertinent example is provided in the video testimony of Diana Ackerman, referred to by Eliyana R. Adler in chapter 7 of this volume. Ackerman was a teenager when repatriated with her family from the Soviet Union to Poland. She recalls that “after consulting with other Jews they met, her parents insisted that the entire family should pretend to be Polish.” Some months later they departed Poland, and only “when they reached Vienna, did they return to outward Judaism.” See Dobroszycki, Survivors of the Holocaust, 27. Perhaps as many as 50,000, according to sources cited by Jockusch, Collect and Record!, 247n1 (chap. 3). Adler, in her extended exploration of this question in chapter 7 of this volume, examines a number of video testimonies from this subgroup of Jews who left German-occupied Poland and became refugees under the Soviets; she divides their responses as follows: “Most of the flight survivors interviewed clearly differentiate their own experiences from those of Holocaust survivors, sometimes even correcting or redirecting the interviewers in order to do so. A smaller number do consider themselves Holocaust survivors and claim that mantle proudly. The smallest group of witnesses do not seem to know to which group they belong.” This view, as a number of observers have noted, reflected the early postwar emergence of a widely accepted “hierarchy of suffering” or “victimhood,” with “concentration camp survival at the top and the Soviet experience at the bottom.” See Jockusch and Lewinsky, “Paradise Lost?,” 377–86. The origins and early development of this “hierarchy,” which was already in place in the European displaced persons camps, is explored here in some detail. See also the discussion by Adler in chapter 7 of this volume. See my discussion of “relative silence” in chapter 1 of this volume. 244 IDENTITY PROF USIONS 60. Pola Bilander, VHA interview 42995, Melbourne, 21 April 1998. 61. Cyla Fersht, VHA interview 35908, Melbourne, 21 September 1997. 62. See also my discussion in the concluding section of chapter 1 of this volume. Further indications that the accepted public definition of “Holocaust survivor” has now been significantly “expanded” may be found on the websites of the world’s two leading memorialization institutions, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC. Yad Vashem, on its website, responds to the question, “How do you define a Shoah survivor?”: At Yad Vashem, we define Shoah survivors as Jews who lived for any amount of time under Nazi domination, direct or indirect, and survived. This includes French, Bulgarian and Romanian Jews who spent the entire war under anti-Jewish terror regimes but were not all deported, as well as Jews who forcefully left Germany in the late 1930s. From a larger perspective, other destitute Jewish refugees who escaped their countries fleeing the invading German army, including those who spent years and in many cases died deep in the Soviet Union, may also be considered Holocaust survivors. No historical definition can be completely satisfactory. Yad Vashem, “FAQs: Historical Questions,” http://www.yadvashem .org/yv/en /resources/names/faq.asp (accessed 12 January 2016). On the USHMM website, the definition is even broader and does not even restrict itself to Jews. “How is a Holocaust survivor defined?”: “The Museum honors as survivors any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding.” USHMM, “Frequently Asked Questions,” http://www.ushmm.org /remember/the-holocaust-survivors-and-victims-resource-center / benjamin-and-vladka-meed-registry-of-holocaust-survivors/registry -faq#11 (accessed 12 January 2016). 63. The first-person accounts I explore are certainly supportive of Diane L. Wolf ’s summary of the central “threads” that inevitably reappear whenever we examine any group of “survivor” testimonies. 245 JOHN GOLDLUST As she notes, “The Jewish experience during and after the Holocaust was one of expulsions, involuntary transnational movements, statelessness, and postwar immigration. Like other refugees, Jewish survivors did not move simply from one point to another but had to endure multiple movements and few choices in the end.” Wolf, “Holocaust Testimony,” 173. 246