The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars

The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars
Author: Yisrael Gutman
Publisher: Tauber Institute Series for th
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1989
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780874515558

Original essays by distinguished scholars explore Jewish politics, religion, literature, and society in Poland from 1918 to 1939.

On the Edge of Destruction

On the Edge of Destruction
Author: Celia Stopnicka Heller
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1994
Genre: Antisemitism
ISBN: 9780814324943

The Holocaust virtually destroyed the Jews of Poland, once a community of more than three million, constituting ten percent of the population, and the oldest continuous Jewish community in a European country. On the Edge of Destruction looks at the rich and complex nature of that community and the tremendous pressures under which it lived before the tragic end.

Survival on the Margins

Survival on the Margins
Author: Eliyana R. Adler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674988027

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.

Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959)

Polish Jews in the Soviet Union (1939–1959)
Author: Katharina Friedla
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1644697513

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945

The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945
Author: Joshua D. Zimmerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2015-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107014263

Zimmerman examines the attitude and behavior of the Polish Underground towards the Jews during the Holocaust.

The Road to September 1939

The Road to September 1939
Author: Jehuda Reinharz
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1512601543

In European and Holocaust historiography, it is generally believed that neither the Zionist movement nor the Yishuv, acting primarily out of self-interest, energetically attempted to help European Jews escape the Nazi threat. Drawing on the memoirs, letters, and institutional reports of Chaim Weizmann, Zeev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, and many others, this volume sheds new light on a troubled period in Jewish history. Reinharz and Shavit trace Jewish responses to developments in Eastern and Central Europe to show that - contrary to recent scholarship and popular belief - Zionists in the Yishuv worked tirelessly on the international stage on behalf of their coreligionists in Europe. Focusing particularly on Poland, while explicating conditions in Germany and Czechoslovakia as well, the authors examine the complicated political issues that arose not just among Jews themselves, but also within national governments in Britain, Europe, and America. Piercing to the heart of conversations about how or whether to save Jews in an increasingly hostile Europe, this volume provides a nuanced and thoughtful assessment of what could and could not be achieved in the years just prior to World War II and the Holocaust.

Shelter from the Holocaust

Shelter from the Holocaust
Author: Mark Edele
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2017-12-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 081434268X

This pioneering volume will interest scholars of eastern European history and Holocaust studies, as well as those with an interest in refugee and migration issues.

Three Minutes in Poland

Three Minutes in Poland
Author: Glenn Kurtz
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2014-11-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374276773

"The author's search for the annihilated Polish community captured in his grandfather's 1938 home movie. Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome color film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community--an entire culture--that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four-year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States; to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel; to archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty-six-year-old man who appears in the film as a thirteen-year-old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival--a monument to a lost world"--

After the Holocaust

After the Holocaust
Author: Marek Jan Chodakiewicz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN:

Conventional wisdom holds that Jews killed in Poland immediately after World War II were victims of ubiquitous Polish anti-Semitism. This book traces the roots of Polish-Jewish conflict after the war, demonstrating that it was a two-sided phenomenon and not simply an extension of the Holocaust.