Sliwa on Adler, 'Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union'


Eliyana R. Adler. Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. Illustrations, maps, table. x + 433 pp. $51.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-98802-6.

Reviewed by Joanna Sliwa (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference))
Published on H-Poland (March, 2023)
Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=58136

In Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union, historian Eliyana Adler highlights marginalized personal stories and the geographic periphery of the Holocaust. Adler meticulously reconstructs the events, choices, decisions, and realities that Polish Jewish refugees faced during World War II. With his book, the first in English, Adler brings to the forefront the experiences of Jews who fled to, were deported to, and survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. For a long time, many of those Jews did not define themselves as Holocaust survivors. Nor were they considered as such by others; they did not endure ghettos, camps, life in hiding, or life under a false identity. This book charts a new direction in Holocaust studies by looking at this largely neglected group of Jewish victims and survivors and shows how flight comprised both a mode of persecution and a survival strategy. Then too, the book engages with Polish Jewish history and Polish history. It explains the composition of the postwar Jewish community of Poland, built by the over two hundred thousand repatriated former refugees. It reveals the interventions of the Polish government in addressing the plight of the refugees and resettling the survivors in the newly acquired western territories. And it depicts the challenges that Jewish survivors met in Poland after the war, analyzes their decisions whether to stay or to leave, and explains what happened to them once they left Poland.

The book consists of five chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. The first chapter delves into the turning points for prospective refugees and their decisions to flee. Here Adler dissects the various factors—including one’s age, gender, and geographic location—that individuals and families weighed to avoid Nazi oppression. In chapter 2, the narrative centers on the Jews’ arrival on Soviet-occupied Polish territory and on the challenges they navigated with finding accommodations and work. More dilemmas followed as the refugees were subjected to increased Sovietization. By 1940, the Polish Jewish refugees found themselves on the move again. This time, they were deported by Soviet authorities into Siberia where they toiled in labor camps. Chapter 3 describes the waves of deportations and the new, harsh, living conditions. When Soviet policy shifted in 1943, Jews were granted amnesty, and, released from camps, they settled in Soviet republics in Central Asia. There they comprised about 30 percent of the Polish exiles. They continued to suffer hardships, not least because of the antisemitism of non-Jewish Poles, for example, when attempting to join the Polish army. The fourth chapter analyzes these and other aspects of the refugees’ lives, as well as the directions of further flight, including of Jewish children to Iran. By 1945, Jews confronted the question of whether to repatriate to Poland or to stay in the Soviet Union. Having learned about the Nazi human and material destruction, and for other reasons that Adler explores, some forged their new lives in their place of wartime refuge. Others, about two hundred thousand, out of a total of about one million Polish citizens, returned to Poland in waves.

Adler tells this complex macro-story of wartime and postwar Polish Jewish refugees through the histories of individuals and families. This sweeping study of refugees during World War II and the Holocaust makes an extensive use of an array of previously untapped archival sources. By focusing on the Soviet Union, Adler expands our understanding of the geographies of the Holocaust. She does so by mapping Jews’ experiences of decision-making, flight, a new life, deportation, exile, and repatriation—of a life in transit. This is a history of how forced mobility shaped Jews’ fates. Adler demonstrates the extent to which Jews used their agency to survive. Family and communal networks became key in those endeavors. Among the factors that affected the Polish Jews’ trajectories was luck. Holocaust survivors often credit their survival with it, and Holocaust scholars often attribute this phenomenon to the elements that allowed some Jews to survive. Adler pushes this discussion forward by examining the concept of luck and its impact on Jews’ survival.

While this book is primarily about Polish Jews’ experiences during Nazi, and Soviet, persecution, it conveys much about the postwar directions and realities of Polish Jews’ lives. To understand the evolution of Jewish life in Poland after World War II, one must understand the wartime choices and experiences of the majority of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. What is more, Adler makes a strong case for integrating the history of Polish Jewish refugees into the Polish narrative of the war. For this reason, this book is a crucial source for scholars of Poland more broadly.

There are threads in this book that will surely spur more research. One that stands out is the self-definition and external understanding of Polish Jewish flight survivors as Holocaust survivors. Connected to that are the years-long efforts of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) to secure compensation from Germany for such survivors in the context of, for example, the Hardship Fund (opened in 1980).

Survival on the Margins belongs to the cutting-edge Holocaust scholarship that confronts the superficial treatment that the mass flight and survival of Jews in the East has received to date and redirects our attention to the history of Polish Jews that has been neither well understood nor documented until now. Therefore, this book is addressed also, and very importantly, to survivors and their descendants. Adler emphasizes the disbelief that she encountered when discussing her research and the confusion that the children and grandchildren of the flight survivors shared with her in trying to comprehend and narrate the experiences of their survivor loved ones. This book brings these complex personal histories together to weave a larger narrative about refugees and state-sponsored oppression.

Citation: Joanna Sliwa. Review of Adler, Eliyana R., Survival on the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union. H-Poland, H-Net Reviews. March, 2023.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58136

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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