Survival on the Margins

“Jewish luck,” Eliyana R. Adler ironically writes, shines forth in the “bizarre fact that Joseph Stalin’s deportation of a selection of Polish Jews effectively saved them from Adolf Hitler’s murderous regime” (p. 101). One Jewish audience laughed bitterly at her reflection that Yad Vashem should plant “a particularly large tree” for the Soviet dictator (p. 284). Yet Stalinist policy enabled, as this book successfully aims to demonstrate, the expansion of the “compass of survival” among Polish Jews, so that in the postwar Displaced Persons camps of West Germany, the “Surviving Remnant” of East European Jewry consisted predominantly of Jews who found refuge after 1939 in the USSR and at war’s end were allowed to “repatriate” westward. Adler’s well-written and interestingly illustrated book offers the first macro-narrative of the wanderings of perhaps as many as three hundred thousand Polish Jews who in 1939–1940 fled Nazi-occupied western and central Poland into Soviet-seized

Ancient history · Archaeology · Deportation · Dictator · Economic history · German · Immigration · Judaism · Nazism · Persecution · Political science · Refugee · Soviet union · The Holocaust · World War II · European history and politics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies · History · Law