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Lost Childhood and Lost Home: Jewish Youth and the Soviet Union during and after the Holocaust

Tue, December 18, 8:30 to 10:00am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

Numerous Jewish families from Eastern and Central Europe fled certain death or were deported by the Red Army to remote parts of the Soviet Union. The regime’s effort to simultaneously remove “undesired” nationalities from the frontlines and import a workforce into “Siberia” typically meant arrival in remote corners of Asia full of natural resources but with a harsh climate. Not only does my paper feature this understudied region: it explores the neglected story of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. After the war, thousands of Jewish children came back from the USSR to find their homes destroyed before they found refuge in German Displaced Camps. Using the Holocaust Eyewitness Accounts at the YIVO Institute, notably dozens of Russian in-class assignments from a DP camp in Berlin, I examine how only two years after the war ended, those Jewish children and adolescents recounted their stories of survival. Whereas considerable scholarship explores how governments have used propaganda on children, I focus on children directly, restoring their agency.
In their essays, Jewish students recounted their daily struggles and experience of Soviet antisemitism. Continuous resettlements left wondering where they belonged. How did traumas during the journey to “Siberia” shape their formative years? How did experiences in the Soviet Union impact their communal identity? How did their experience differ from that of adults? Ultimately, although they learned enough Russian to write these letters, they saw their stay in the USSR as temporary and transitory and yearned for a place to call home after repeated displacement and hardship. For them Palestine became, not just a place of physical safety, but their hope for a new life. Zionism helped them define, and for some redefine, what it meant to be Jewish, after having been persecuted for it.

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