Homegoing after the Holocaust: Jewish women survivors in Soviet filtration camps

• In Event: Perspectives on Holocaust Heritage

Abstract

At the end of World War II, filtration camps were used by Soviet authorities to “purge the fronts” of ostensible traitors, collaborators, and spies. Citizens who had spent time outside the control of those authorities, as Soviet POWs, members of German military forces, or laborers for the Reich, were subject to filtration. Less well-known are the filtration experiences of Jewish survivors of Nazi camps and ghettos. Testimonies of survivors seeking to return to the USSR after liberation to find family reveal that filtration could be lengthy and harrowing. Liberated Jewish prisoners of Nazi camps were often treated not as victims, but as potential collaborators, suspect for their unlikely survival of a brutal genocide. A Lithuanian-born survivor recalls that interrogators “used to come in the middle of the night …and try to find out why we were alive. Why did Hitler kill everybody and you are not dead?”

This work uses testimonies to examine the experiences of Jewish women survivors from the Baltics and neighboring countries in Soviet filtration camps, a story largely obscured in Soviet wartime history, and undiscussed in Western accounts. Testimonies reveal that filtration camps, which dotted the post-war map, were sites of sexual brutalization, harsh interrogation, and labor exploitation.

This history is particularly relevant today, as the Russian Army has revived the terror of filtration camps in its war in Ukraine. The presentation will thus highlight ways in which filtration camps in 2022-23 showed commonalties and differences with those of the late-World War II and post-war period.

Short Bio

Dr. Daina Eglitis is an Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She holds degrees in Political Science (B.A., George Washington University), Russian & Eastern European Area Studies (M.A., University of Michigan), and Sociology (Ph.D., University of Michigan). She is the author of the book Imagining the Nation: History, Modernity, and Revolution in Latvia and co-editor of Central and East European Politics, 5th edition. She has published articles and book chapters on collective memory, socioeconomic inequality, and gender and demographic issues in the Baltic region. Her most recent co-authored articles, “Mortal Threat: Latvian Jews at the Dawn of Nazi Occupation” “Ghost Heroes: Forgetting and Remembering in National Narratives of the Past,” and “An Unlikely Refuge: Latvia's Women Volunteers in the Red Army in World War II” focus on Holocaust and World War II history and historical memory. Dr. Eglitis is a two-time Fulbright Fellow in Latvia and has taught courses at the University of Latvia, Riga Stradiņš University, and the Latvian Academy of Culture. She has also been a research fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

Author

• Daina Eglitis, George Washington University