Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, editors. Shelter from the Holocaust

In September 1939, at the moment of the USSR’s annexation of Eastern Poland, about 1.3 million Jews lived in the region. According to various estimates, 230,000 to 500,000 Jewish refugees from the Nazi-occupied part of Poland joined them. Subsequently, some of them returned. As a result, between 1.4 and 1.6 million Jews found themselves in the former Eastern Kresy, now part of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. The vast majority died during the Holocaust. Paradoxically, may of the survivors were those who refused to accept Soviet citizenship and were deported to Siberia, or who were arrested for political or social reasons, and sent to places of detention in Soviet hinterland. There were also those who voluntarily enlisted for work in Soviet hinterland, who were drafted into the Red Army, and a few who managed to escape from the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht in June 1941. Not all Holocaust survivors survived Stalinism: many died under the difficult conditions of exile, in evacuation or during hostilities. Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann’s edited collection Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union is devoted to the fate of this group of Polish Jews.

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