Survival on the Margins by Eliyana R. Adler

Author:Eliyana R. Adler [Adler, Eliyana R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Jewish, Europe, Eastern, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9780674250468
Google: TFwBEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2020-11-17T01:11:47+00:00

Not long afterward they camped outside Radzyń, and Pomerantz received permission to take a day off to visit his home. Only six Jews survived. From them and former neighbors, he learned of his parents’ end. Throughout the liberation, Pomerantz kept in touch with his brother Moshe back in the USSR, communicating the news of their dear ones as he learned it.11

Bernard Ginsburg left Zamość with his parents and siblings in 1939. They resettled in Lutsk (Pol. Łuck), in the areas annexed by the USSR, but then separated for professional and educational reasons. Ginsburg moved deep into Soviet territory, while his parents and younger sister stayed behind in Lutsk. On January 11, 1945, Ginsburg learned from his brother Arthur, serving in the Red Army, that their parents and sister had not survived.12

Szymon Grajcar and his younger brother avoided mobilization into the Red Army because their work digging uranium in Uzbekistan was considered crucial to the war effort. However, they knew other Polish Jews who had been called up. In 1945, one of these acquaintances helped them to reestablish correspondence with their older brother Avrom, who had stayed in German-occupied Poland with his family and was serving in the Red Army. Szymon learned that Avrom had brought his carpenter’s tools on the deportation train to Treblinka and had removed the window in the train car and jumped out. Although he escaped the guard’s bullets with only a minor wound, his wife and daughter were not so lucky. No one else from their family survived.13

In these cases, as well as many more, Polish Jews serving in the Soviet forces passed their accounts of the devastation to larger networks of relatives, friends, and compatriots, including other Polish Jews in the Soviet interior. These accounts, which included specific information about hometowns and family members, were often far more convincing than newspaper articles. In her oral testimony, Tema Abel explains that she and other Polish Jews in Tashkent had read about the carnage in the Soviet papers but that no one wanted to believe it. Only the letter from her brother in the Red Army, recounting his visit with their janitor in Tomaszów (Mazowiecki), persuaded her.14

Brothers Gene and Mark Elsner learned about the genocide from their own close call with German forces. After their amnesty from a Soviet labor camp, they had settled in a Cossack village in the North Caucasus. Fortunately, while working with the locals, they had not revealed that they were Jews. This allowed them to continue passing as Poles when the Germans arrived in July 1942. They witnessed the separation and transport of the Jewish population, but only learned about the mass graves after they were mobilized into Berling’s Army and sent to the front.15

Other sources of information included public events and early interactions with survivors. Simon Davidson attended a lecture offered by the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR (Związek Patriotów Polskich w ZSRR, or ZPP) in Yoshkar-Ola (Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, ASSR) in 1943, shortly before his son was mobilized into Berling’s Army.

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