During World War II, between 280,000 and 290,000 Polish Jews found themselves in the eastern parts of the USSR, fighting for survival for 6–7 years. Compared to other refugees, they were in a worse situation there. The Polish language spoken by these refugees was similar to Russian, but many could not write in the language. They faced an unfamiliar environment, unemployment, and depression due to the loss of relatives in territories occupied by the Wehrmacht—as well as the hunger, disease, and housing problems from which all refugees suffered. Many of these Polish Jews did not survive.
Eliyana Adler's book, Survival on the Margins, sheds light on this experience. Divided into five chronological chapters, the study tells the wartime story of a specific set of Polish Jews. The author pays close attention to the motives behind their decisions to flee to the USSR or remain in the German-occupied part of Poland. She discusses the problem of separated families and describes the deportation to the east of those refugees who were considered disloyal by the Soviet authorities.
Adler divides Polish citizens in the USSR into two categories: deportees and refugees. The Soviet authorities, however, did not utilize “deported” as a category after the amnesty of August 1941, referring to them all as “evacuated former Polish citizens.” Although the author's approach is legitimate, there is a possibility of confusion when distinguishing between these two categories, especially when negotiating the eligibility for diplomatic patronage with representatives of the Polish government in exile. After all, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR retained Polish citizenship only for those who entered the territory of the USSR after 1–2 November 1939. It is also worth adding that the deportees made up about a third of all Polish Jews who later found themselves in the Soviet Rear.
Adler's synthesis of hundreds of memoirs, interviews, and diaries was an enormous undertaking. With the help of these oral histories, the reader is taken on a journey from September 1939 to 1948, with some reflections on the 1950s. She uses the motif that “individual stories become part of a larger history” and collects significant information on details that are still unknown or little studied, such as disputes in families, labor migration, the fate of Polish writers in Yiddish, conversion to Catholicism, recruitment of informants by the NKVD, sexual coercion, prostitution, and fictional marriage with the aim of migrating from the USSR. Turning then to postwar anti-Semitism in Poland, where Jewish refugees returned after their liberation, Adler examines their new encounter with an old dilemma, arising now under new circumstances and at a different time: the choice of whether to stay or emigrate. It is tough to find such information in Soviet documents of that time, and Adler is conscious of the methodological conflicts between collective memory, the selectiveness of individual memory, and historical research.
In the conclusion, the author contextualizes the suffering endured by these refugees in the USSR during World War II and discusses whether they can be considered Holocaust survivors. Considering Nazism guilty of their difficult fate, she suggests they be considered flight survivors. As for the treatment of Polish Jews by the German and Soviet regimes, Adler discusses the reception of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (New York, 2012). With some reservations, she believes that the concept proposed by Snyder about the similarity of the crimes of Stalin and Hitler deserves recognition.
Adler presents her monograph as a guidebook (12) for the descendants of these Polish refugees, the “flight survivors.” It will also, however, be very useful for students and scholars interested in this issue. Moreover, the book is a remarkable example of the transmission of social history. Survival on the Margins fills important gaps in Holocaust scholarship and brings the subject matter closer to a more salient position, as the author intended.
