The first book-length study of the survival of Polish Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union.About 1.5 million East European Jews—mostly from Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia—survived the Second World War behind the lines in the unoccupied parts of the Soviet Union. Some of these survivors, following the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, were evacuated as part of an organized effort by the Soviet state, while others became refugees who organized their own escape from the Germans, only to be deported to Siberia and other remote regions under Stalin’s regime. This complicated history of survival from the Holocaust has fallen between the cracks of the established historiographical traditions as neither historians of the Soviet Union nor Holocaust scholars felt responsible for the conservation of this history. With Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, the editors have compiled essays that are at the forefront of developing this entirely new field of transnational study, which seeks to integrate scholarship from the areas of the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the history of Poland and the Soviet Union, and the study of refugees and displaced persons.
