Survivors of the Holocaust in Poland: A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records, 1944-47

A Portrait Based on Jewish Community Records, 1944-47

Lucjan Dobroszycki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315482798
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The fate of Jews in Poland after World War II is a dramatic and important topic of modern European history. This volume, using comprehensive documentation and statistical data, seeks to provide a solid foundation for further research on the subject.

1. The Reemergence and Decline of the Jewish Community in Poland, 1944–1947

In 1946 Dr. Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi of Palestine and a native of Łomża, a city well known for the yeshiva founded there in 1883 and later transferred to Eretz Israel, set out on a journey to liberated Europe. His mission was to seek out and give assistance to Jewish children scattered over hundreds of miles, lost and utterly alone in the world. He came to Poland with a heavy heart. No matter how familiar he was with the scale of the recent tragedy, the devastation Rabbi Herzog encountered there was horrifying. At the time he said:

I came to Poland, my native country, in order to visit the handful of my brethren—all that remains of three and a half million souls. Pity the eyes that see it! Is this the Polish Jewry, with its thousand-year-old golden tradition, the Jewry that occupied a foremost position in our Nation, that represented the center and source of the Torah and of pious devotion, of science and the Jewish spirit, of Jewish music and poetry—this Polish Jewry that for centuries shed its light upon the whole Nation, this Polish Jewry that made the greatest contribution to Palestine?¹

The Holocaust took the lives of three million Polish Jews, destroying an entire civilization. Only a small number miraculously survived the massacre under German rule or managed to escape beyond the reach of the Nazis. On July 23, 1944, the town of Lublin was liberated by the Red Army. Before the outbreak of the war the Jewish population of Lublin was about 40,000. According to a count taken that August, which also included people from the surrounding villages, the Jews now numbered 594.²

Four days later, Białystok was taken by the Russians. Here, of over 40,000 Jews only 114 were listed in a report written in August 1944.³

On January 19, 1945, after a long halt, the city of Łódź was freed from the Germans during the east-central Russian winter offensive. Once it had been the second largest Jewish community in Poland—after Warsaw—numbering 250,000 people. On the day of liberation, 877 Jews were found in the ghetto.⁴

The same is true as we move from village to village, town to town, and city to city … In prewar Poland Jews lived in about nine hundred different communities, spread throughout the country, from Zbązyn in the West to Łuniniec in the East, Kołłomyja in the South to Druja in the North.

Of necessity we must move beyond individual cases to make generalizations. Although it is very difficult to provide exact figures for the overall Jewish population, we shall still try to determine how many Jews survived or returned to Poland, and where they had come from.

The postwar Jewish population in Poland may be roughly divided into three basic groups, depending on the place and circumstances in which people survived. These groups are:

(a) persons who survived the German occupation in Poland on the so-called Aryan side, in hiding or living openly with false identification; also, Jewish children who found safety and care among Christians, that is, with families or in orphanages and convents; this group also includes former fighters in various partisan units (Jewish or general);

(b) former prisoners of concentration camps or labor camps in Poland, Germany, or other occupied territories; and

(c) the Jewish population that survived the war in the depths of the USSR, primarily in the Asiatic regions and in Siberia, to which they had been evacuated or deported from Poland’s eastern territories, seized by Soviet Russia after September 17, 1939, consequent to the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact.

Shortly after liberation, Jewish survivors returned to their native villages, towns, and cities, but no one awaited them; no relatives, friends, or neighbors were there to greet them. The houses and dwellings, businesses and workshops they had left behind years ago were occupied by others and no longer belonged to them. Each one had to begin anew, alone and without means, in a country that had been more extensively devastated than any other under the Nazi rule. There were, however, some factors that favored the initial steps toward resettlement for individuals, as well as for the entire Jewish community. One was the favorable attitude of the new Polish government. Another was the moral and financial support of Jewish organizations around the world, such as the American Jewish Committee, the Federation of Polish Jewry in the United States, Vaad Hahatzala in the United States and Canada, the Chief Rabbi’s Emergency Council in London, Representation of Polish Jewry in Palestine, the Jewish Labor Committee in America, and finally, the Joint Distribution Committee and World Jewish Congress.

When the Red Army drew near the Polish border in 1944, Dr. Emil Sommerstein received a message from Moscow that he was free and had been nominated to be a member of the forthcoming Polish government. This was not the first instance of a man in Soviet Russia stepping directly out of a prison into a government office. Nor was he the only Jew to be ...