Mapping Wandering Routes: Exile and Nomadism Among Polish-Jewish Refugees During World War II

• In Event: Spaces of Suffering

Abstract

Most of the Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, about 230,000 people, made it through the war by becoming refugees in the Soviet Union. They fled Nazi occupation, suffered forced deportation, and/or were trapped by Soviet occupation. During the war and until their return to Poland after the war had ended, the Polish Jews had spread over thousands of kilometers throughout the vast territories of the Soviet Union.
My post-doctoral project focuses on the geographical and spatial experiences and aspects of this story. In my project, I implement an innovative approach and analyze and map the flight and exile routes of the refugees and deportees from Poland toward the Soviet Union and within it during WWII for the first time, by examining personal and familial narratives found in questionnaires, early and late testimonies, and memoirs.
Mapping the refugees’ wandering routes enables us to ask new questions about their experiences, such as: How far did they spread? Did the refugees adhere to their settlement preferences in the Soviet Union, e.g. did urban Jews find their way to urban settlements in the Soviet Union? Did refugees from a specific region in Poland find themselves moving en masse or did they disperse? Were the refugees able to preserve a family structure, and did their destinations vary depending on their familial status? Did gender play a role in the refugees’ movement patterns?
In my presentation, I will focus on a single case study: the city of Samarkand, which was one of the largest cities in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic at the time. I will explore the demographic aspects, particularly the geographical origins, of the Jewish refugees who arrived in the city between 1942 and 1946 according to a newly discovered burial registry book.

Author

• Naama Seri Levi, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem