More than Parcels

Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos

Philip Pascuzzo, Jan Lánícek, Jan Lambertz, Jan Lánícek, Jan Lambertz

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814349243
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Holocauste

More than Parcels: Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos edited by Jan Lánícek and Jan Lambertz explores the horrors of the Holocaust by focusing on the systematic starvation of Jewish civilians confined to Nazi ghettos and camps. The modest relief parcel, often weighing no more than a few pounds and containing food, medicine, and clothing, could extend the lives and health of prisoners. For Jews in occupied Europe, receiving packages simultaneously provided critical emotional sustenance in the face of despair and grief. Placing these parcels front and center in a history of World War II challenges several myths about Nazi rule and Allied responses. First, the traffic in relief parcels and remittances shows that the walls of Nazi detention sites and the wartime borders separating Axis Europe from the outside world were not hermetically sealed, even for Jewish prisoners. Aid shipments were often damaged or stolen, but they continued to be sent throughout the war. Second, the flow of relief parcels—and prisoner requests for them—contributed to information about the lethal nature of Nazi detention sites. Aid requests and parcel receipts became one means of transmitting news about the location, living conditions, and fate of Jewish prisoners to families, humanitarians, and Jewish advocacy groups scattered across the globe. Third, the contributors to More than Parcels reveal that tens of thousands of individuals, along with religious communities and philanthropies, mobilized parcel relief for Jews trapped in Europe. Recent histories of wartime rescue have focused on a handful of courageous activists who hid or led Jews to safety under perilous conditions. The parallel story of relief shipments is no less important. The astonishing accounts offered in More than Parcels add texture and depth to the story of organized Jewish responses to wartime persecution that will be of interest to students and scholars of Holocaust studies and modern Jewish history, as well as members of professional associations with a focus on humanitarianism and human rights.

I

Relief from the Allies and Neutral States

1

Ties That Bind

Transnational Support and Solidarity for Polish Jews in the USSR during World War II

Eliyana R. Adler

I would like to thank the editors of this volume and Marion Kaplan for thoughtful comments on drafts of this chapter.

In 1942, Salomea L. recorded a testimony for the clandestine Oyneg Shabes Archive in the Warsaw ghetto. She had recently returned from spending over a year in Soviet-controlled Polish territory, now under German occupation, and described her experiences there. As an aside, she mentioned that the Polish Jews living in the newly incorporated Soviet areas after 1939 were sending packages both east and west. They aided friends and relatives who had been deported east by the Soviets, as well as those in the German-held territories to the west.1 In doing so, they not only provided much needed sustenance to suffering members of their communities but also let them know that they were not alone. Additionally, they served as a conduit, passing information about life-cycle events and tribulations from the ghettos to the Gulag and back again.

It is well known that war leads to separation, dislocation, and death and that World War II decimated the Polish Jewish population. This is undeniable. Polish Jews on either side of the new border established by the German and Soviet occupiers in September 1939 had limited and diminishing resources. Occasional packages were not capable of turning the tide of the war or saving them. Thus, the prevalence and prominence of aid packages in testimonies about these years require explanation. This chapter will explore both the routes and the impacts of parcels sent and received by Polish Jews in the USSR during the war. It will argue that the psychological significance, especially of packages sent by friends and family, was ultimately greater than any demonstrable physical effects.

The chapter looks primarily to the written and oral testimonies of Polish Jews in order to assess the meaning and the memory of material aid. Archival documents provide statistical information about the quantity of goods collected and sent, but they rarely extend to listing individual recipients and their responses to the aid. Reflections from the time period and afterward tell an emotional story and provide a window on the efforts expended in preparing a parcel for posting or the supreme joy of receiving one. Furthermore, these sources also grant the reader a greater sense of the vast distances crossed by people and packages. Packages provided a bridge between Jews under Nazi occupation, in the USSR, and around the world, thereby demonstrating ongoing networks of association, despite the war.

Understanding how Salomea L. and others found themselves in the unenviable and unexpected situation of providing material aid to their friends and relatives in both German-occupied Poland and the Soviet interior requires some historical background. As a result of the division of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, several hundred thousand Jews fled from the western, German-held Polish territories to those soon to be annexed by the Soviets.2 In many cases, families chose to split up, believing that men or younger family members would be safer and have more opportunities in the USSR.3 Relatively good relations between the two occupiers, as well as continual border crossing in both directions by Polish Jews, meant that ongoing contact remained fairly easy until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Before that point, both the regular postal service and personal deliveries allowed letters and packages to pass back and forth.

Packages from German-Held Poland to Soviet-Annexed Poland

The Polish Jews who fled their homes under German occupation in the fall of 1939 frequently arrived in Soviet territory almost penniless. Even those fortunate enough to pack carefully before they left often had to abandon possessions or pay hefty bribes and fees along the way. Some had relatives or friends to stay with, at least temporarily, on the other side of the Bug or San Rivers. Those who did not found the new Soviet republics of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine overrun with new arrivals. Homeless refugees filled public buildings while Soviet officials from the east arrived and took over the better housing stock. Eventually most of the refugees managed to find work and places to stay, but their existence remained precarious. Goods from home made a real difference for them. They also kept in close touch with relatives left behind, as they constantly reevaluated their decision to flee and whether to return or bring family members to join them.4

The unsettled quality of refugee life, as well as the pushes and pulls of the two occupation zones, is evident in the testimony of Roza Buchman. She lived a comfortable life with her husband and two children in Radom before the war. In September 1939, the family fled the German invasion to Białystok. Yet, as the Soviets established control there, her husband, a well-known industrialist, feared arrest. Roza traveled back across the demarcation line to her parents in Warsaw to see if it was safe to return to the Nazi-occupied areas, but after suffering an assault on the street, she decided that it was not. Back in Soviet Bialystok, she tried to caution her husband, but he elected to go back to their home in Radom. For the next few months, they exchanged letters about the situation on both sides of the new border. Then in June 1940, Roza and the two children, as refugees who had not accepted Soviet citizenship, were deported to a special settlement in the Soviet interior. The labor there proved taxing, with pay and nutrition lacking. They survived on packages sent from Radom. Buchman, writing in 1943 before she knew about the genocide unfolding back in Poland, noted that the hardest part about the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was the ruptured contact with her husband. It was at this point that the children began to go hungry.5

Younger men had often been the first to flee the Germans, believing only they would be targeted, so the Buchmans’ choice proved somewhat unusual. In his Yiddish memoir from the 1950s, Avraham Zak, for example, recalls receiving packages of cash and messages from his wife in Warsaw while he lived in newly Sovietized Grodno.6 In both cases, what is noteworthy is that these families chose to separate physically but also managed to retain contact and support through packages. When people think of families separated by war, they imagine people torn apart without any agency. Such cases certainly existed, but in the period after the German invasion of Poland and before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, families also made tactical decisions to separate, while remaining intimately linked and in frequent contact.

Packages from Soviet Poland to German Poland

Aid did not flow just in one direction. As family members in Soviet territory gradually found their footing—and those under Nazi occupation were increasingly displaced and dispossessed—packages began to move from east to west. After Mike Weinreich and his father crossed the border to Bialystok in 1939, they kept in close touch with Weinreich’s mother, still living in their home with his sister in Grójec, a town southwest of Warsaw. Later the women were forced to move into the Warsaw ghetto, but the men were still able to send them packages from Kletsk, a city farther from the border where they had moved after accepting Soviet citizenship.7

The Davidson family moved in stages from their home in Łódź, across the new border to Soviet Bialystok, and then to Vitebsk, a city in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic before 1939, after registering for work in the Soviet interior. After the wife and children caught up with the father, Simon, who had fled earlier, they were able to build a relatively stable life together in the USSR. Both Simon Davidson and his daughter Hannah Davidson Pankowsky write of receiving disturbing news from the other side of the border and sending a package to their cousin Marie in the Warsaw ghetto.8 Peretz Opoczynski, who served as a mail carrier in the Warsaw ghetto and wrote for the underground Oyneg Shabes Archive, described the anticipation surrounding the arrival of such parcels:

Of course the sender of these packages from Russia would always alert the recipient with a letter stating that goods were on the way, usually arriving some time before the package itself. People therefore treated a letter from Russia as something much more than writing on a scrap of paper: it was greeted as if it were a living messenger of good news still to come. With trembling fingers elderly mothers would caress a letter sent by their sons that told them a package was on the way.9

Barbara Engelking’s research reveals that in the second half of July 1941, the Warsaw Judenrat’s postal service delivered 54,192 packages, 36,906 of them large and 17,286 small.10 According to historian Ruta Sakowska, before the summer of 1941, 84 percent of the packages reaching the Warsaw ghetto from abroad came from the USSR.11 In the Łódź ghetto, it proved closer to half of all packages, according to an entry in the ghetto chronicle lamenting the end of such deliveries after the start of the German-Soviet war.12 Opoczynski, the postman in Warsaw, noted this change as well:

As the nightmare of Jewish Warsaw darkens, hope is gradually extinguished: no more letters from Russia, no more packages, just walls—drab, red, and cold ghetto walls, like the walls of so many cheerless prisons. Who cares about the Jewish post office or the swollen feet of the Jewish letter carrier now?13

Packages Sent to Polish Jewish Prisoners in the USSR

Many of the initial family separations triggered by the war were voluntary, although, of course, they were meant to be temporary. Over time, however, more and more families underwent forced separations. In the Soviet territories, these were a result of the growing presence of the security state in the form of the NKVD (Soviet internal security forces). The first prisoners were captured Polish soldiers. Soon afterward, even as many refugees continued to stream across the border into Soviet territory, back to German territory, and into the independent Baltic states, Soviet border guards arrested others as alleged spies. The web of arrests spread to so-called speculators (large and small players in the black market), political leaders, and other suspect groups in Polish societ...