Survival on the Margins

Eliyana R. Adler

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674250468
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia judía

Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research The forgotten story of 200, 000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200, 000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler's 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe's Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative.Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.

1

Esau or Laban?

Wrestling with the German and Soviet Occupations

And so one moment decides a person’s fate. One runs this way, the other that way, and neither of them knows what the future holds in store. But what—excuse the expression—can the future hold in store for a Jew? I ask. Here it’s bad and there it’s no good.

—BOGDAN WOJDOWSKI

IN THE THIRTY-FIRST chapter of the book of Genesis, God calls upon Jacob to leave the home of Laban, his father-in-law, and return to his homeland. The next few chapters detail Jacob’s painstaking efforts to reap some material benefit from his twenty-one years serving Laban, as well as his careful preparations for the inevitable reunion with his brother Esau. The tension in the story is palpable as Jacob attempts to steer between the perfidy of his father-in-law and the threat of violence from his estranged brother. Throughout Jewish history, thinkers have returned to this archetypal story as a way of discussing later dangerous situations and perilous decisions. Already in rabbinic exegesis Laban, and especially Esau, are identified with subsequent enemies of the Jews.¹ This deliberate obfuscation allowed Jews to avoid explicitly naming their adversaries and offered a way to connect their own troubles to those of their illustrious forebears.

In the fall of 1939, the patriarch of the Hendel family in Horodło, Poland, called upon these familiar tropes once again. On the second day of the celebration of the Jewish New Year, September 15, 1939, the Germans reached the town of Horodło and immediately began ransacking Jewish-owned shops. After several chaotic days they pulled out. On Yom Kippur, the Red Army arrived and was greeted by members of the Jewish community wearing prayer shawls. Yet soon they, too, prepared to retreat and invited the local Jews to accompany them across the nearby Bug River to the newly captured Soviet territory. With a heavy heart the Hendel father packed up his family to go with the Soviets.

When asked by other religious Jews how he could possibly risk the spiritual development of his children under the godless communists, Hendel compared himself to his forefather Jacob. Yet whereas Jacob chose to leave Laban for Esau, Hendel preferred his chances under Laban—the Soviets. Hendel understood that their way of life would be under siege in the Soviet Union, but concluded that this was better than struggling for their very lives under Esau—the Germans.²

Although their priorities and circumstances varied, ultimately all Jews in the western half of Poland faced versions of this question in the late summer and early fall of 1939. Their country had been partitioned—quickly and painfully—by the Germans and the Soviets, splitting the largest Jewish community in Europe roughly in half. Thousands of Polish Jews, like the Hendels, took to the roads to try to change their fate. Most, however, chose to remain in their homes. Individuals and families faced weeks and months of uncertainty and difficult decisions that began with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Polish Jews in 1939 could not have known the import of their choice between Esau and Laban, yet they knew that they faced a decision point and mustered their resources to respond.

“To Jest Koniec”

According to her postwar memoir, in September 1939 Krystyna Chiger’s father took her to the window of their Lwów (Rus. Lvov, Ukr. Lviv, Yid. Lemberg) apartment to see the German bombers and announced, “To jest koniec” (This is the end).³ Whatever exactly he meant by this ominous pronouncement, he was correct that the invasion would suddenly, and irrevocably, alter the future of Poland and its citizens. While the term blitzkrieg is most commonly associated with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, this new approach to warfare was in fact developed for the invasion of Poland roughly two years earlier. Germany initiated blitzkrieg warfare, according to Omer Bartov, in order to avoid the costly losses and stalemates of the First World War. Bartov describes it as “based on massive, concentrated, and well-coordinated attacks along narrow fronts, leading to encirclements of large enemy forces and aimed at achieving a rapid military and political disintegration of the opponent by undermining both his logistical apparatus and psychological determination at a minimum cost to the attacking force.”⁴ In Poland, as elsewhere, the approach proved very successful. After entering the country on September 1, 1939, German forces had surrounded the capital, Warsaw, within two weeks.⁵

Although unprovoked, the invasion was not a surprise after Adolf Hitler’s bloodless takeovers of Austria and Czechoslovakia—especially given his increasingly belligerent tone toward Poland. The signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union on August 23, moreover, meant that Hitler could invade Poland without any concern about rousing the sleeping bear to the east.

In the face of this nonaggression pact, and with German troops massing on the border, Poland began clandestinely mobilizing its own forces. Meanwhile, France and the United Kingdom, which had pledged to defend Poland, futiley attempted to avoid war through diplomacy.⁶ Even had the Poles been able to muster all of their forces and reserve units, they were ill equipped to take on the Wehrmacht. According to Norman Davies, the Poles had 150 tanks while the Germans wielded twenty-six hundred. The proportion of warplanes was slightly better, with four hundred to the German two thousand, but most of the Polish planes were destroyed in the opening bombing raids before even leaving the ground.⁷ Poland was a poor country and no match for Germany’s highly trained and heavily armed forces. England and France, despite their sympathy and promises, had not prepared for the campaign to begin so early or proceed so quickly. They were unable to contribute to Poland’s defense.

Fighting continued throughout the month, including the siege and heroic defense of Warsaw. The Germans bombed the city mercilessly, and as many as forty thousand civilians may have lost their lives.⁸ American photojournalist Julien Bryan, who entered Poland immediately following the invasion and spent much of September in Warsaw, described his emerging awareness of the German military’s deliberate targeting of civilians in a book published in 1940:

It was this ruthlessness against the civilian population that I found hardest to believe. Even when they bombed my own train within a few minutes after I had crossed the Rumanian border, I explained it as probably an isolated instance. Then I saw similar bombings. I talked with many peasants and refugees and finally with American citizens who had been machine-gunned from a height of no more than one hundred feet.

Then slowly it dawned on me that these were not isolated incidents, but a part of Hitler’s plan for terrorizing millions of people.⁹

By the time German forces entered the capital on September 30, the government and military command had long ago fled. Polish government officials entered Romanian territory on September 17. Eventually they established a government-in-exile in Paris, which evacuated to London via Angers after the German invasion of France. En route from the capital, Polish politicians were joined by thousands of civilians.

Fleeing the destruction, these civilians grabbed what they could carry and headed east ahead of the invading forces. Many witnesses recall harrowing scenes along the way. Jan Karski, at the time a second lieutenant in the Polish Army, had been mobilized to Oświęcim, near the German border. He describes his chaotic retreat, on the second day of the war: “We were now no longer an army, a detachment, or a battery, but individuals wandering collectively toward some wholly indefinite goal. We found the highways jammed with hundreds of thousands of refugees, soldiers looking for their commands, and others just drifting with the tide.”¹⁰

In the lightning war, Polish citizens of every ethnic and religious background were bombed in their homes and on the road, chased from their towns by fighting, and terrified by the German forces. Polish Jews, however, had particular cause for concern. In September 1939, Hitler’s antisemitism, his treatment of German Jews, his expulsion of Polish Jews, and his fanatical following were already well known. As Anna Landau-Czajka has shown, by 1939 even the conservative, nationalist, and antisemitic Polish press organs were expressing concern about the violence and excess of Nazi anti-Jewish policies.¹¹

When asked, decades afterward, whether their families had followed news of the Nazi rise to power in Germany, most Polish Jews interviewed by the Shoah Foundation answered in the affirmative. Shalom Omri, born in Hrubieszów, a small city in the middle of the country, describes his father reading the Warsaw Yiddish daily Haynt, which was affiliated with the Zionist movement. They knew about the Nazis’ growing strength and effort to push the Jews out of Germany.¹² Moshe Ben-Asher, born in 1912 in Piotrków Trybunalski, was already working as a ladies’ tailor by the 1930s. He followed the deteriorating situation of German Jews in Haynt as well as in Der Moment, another Yiddish daily.¹³

A number of survivors recall the so-called Polenaktion as a turning point in their awareness of Nazi intentions. On the night of October 28, 1938, roughly seventeen thousand Jews residing in Germany and Austria were pushed across the Polish border. They had previously been Polish citizens, with legal sanction to live in Austria or Germany. Now the Third Reich had rescinded their status, and neither side would take them in. The plight of the homeless refugees, forced to camp out in the no-man’s-land between Germany and Poland, gained worldwide attention. While it was soon surpassed in international import by the November Pogrom, instigated against Jews in the Reich after the assassination of a German consular official by the unbalanced son of an expelled Polish Jewish couple, the Polenaktion made a great impression on many Polish Jews at the time. State censorship limited coverage of the event in the general Polish press, but as Jerzy Tomaszewski has demonstrated, Polish Jewish newspapers were allowed to write about the daily difficulties faced by the refugees in Zbąszyń.¹⁴

Zyga Elton in Warsaw and Shaul Shternfeld in Sosnowiec both remember interacting with Jews expelled from Germany who eventually settled in their communities.¹⁵ Ann Szedlecki, born in 1925, fondly recalls a 1931 visit to her rich aunt and uncle in Berlin. Seven years later, the now impoverished aunt and uncle had to rejoin the rest of the family in Łódź.¹⁶ Boruch Frusztajer remembers a distinguished German Jewish gentleman who stayed with his family for a year, after his expulsion and before his immigration to the United States.¹⁷ Reading about the cruel treatment of the Polish Jews expelled from Germany, and especially talking with them about the alarming surge of state-sponsored antisemitism there, can only have increased the apprehension of Polish Jews regarding the invasion. Both Simon Davidson and Moshe Etzion directly credit their families’ knowledge of the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany with their decision to flee east ahead of the German forces.¹⁸ Etzion recalls breaking the toy German soldiers his refugee relatives had brought him before becoming a refugee himself.¹⁹

The November Pogrom, dubbed Kristallnacht by the Nazis, and the subsequent incarceration of many German Jewish men in concentration camps, also caugh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• Maps
• Introduction: On the Other Side
• 1. Esau or Laban? Wrestling with the German and Soviet Occupations
• 2. If a Man Did Flee from a Lion, and a Bear Met Him: The Soviet Embrace
• 3. Jewish Luck: Deportation to Siberia
• 4. City of Want: Survival in Central Asia
• 5. Nusekh Poyln, or Yetsies Poyln? The Polish Way, or Exodus from Poland?
• Conclusion: Expanding the Compass of Survival
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index