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Fleeing, Remaining, Hiding and Returning during the Holocaust: Soviet Jews in German-Occupied Rostov-on-Don, 1942—1943

Tue, December 18, 10:15 to 11:45am, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Harborview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

The Soviet industrial city of Rostov-on-Don, located in Southern Russia, was occupied twice by the German military during the Second World War. The first, brief occupation lasted ten days in November 1941, while the second lasted nearly seven months, from July 1942 to February 1943. Prior to both occupations, some residents of the city were able to formally evacuate or flee eastward, including members of the city’s Jewish community, which by 1941 had swelled to 50,000. Still, many were unable to get away, and during the second occupation, Rostov became home to the largest massacre of Jews on Russian soil during the Holocaust (and one of the largest mass killings within the USSR).

Using a combination of archival documents from local and national Russian archives, along with German-language military documents created by the occupying forces, this paper will investigate why some Russian Jews remained behind in Rostov-on-Don during the city’s second occupation. Kiril Feferman has written about Jewish residents of Rostov-on-Don choosing to stay or flee prior to the first occupation in November 1941. (Feferman, “To Flee or Not to Flee”, Cahiers du monde russe, 56 no.2 (2015), 517—542). This paper builds on his work, using research conducted for my PhD dissertation, which examines the relationship between repeated occupations and the Holocaust within the city of Rostov. The paper will examine the information Jewish residents of Rostov had access to in the period between the first and second German occupations of the city, as well as the web of orders and bureaucracy German administrators issued in order to forcibly relocate people once they seized control of the Rostov region. Understanding the options available to Soviet Jews during the war, as well as the information people used to make decisions about where to go, will help to further our understanding of how the Holocaust was experienced within the USSR.

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