Jewish Return and Property Restitution: Jewish Survivors Confronting the Postwar Social Order in Poland

• In Event: Responses of Eastern European Holocaust Survivors to Liberation, 1944/1945

Abstract

This paper addresses the post-war efforts of Jewish survivors in the Lublin region to regain their real estate. Combining the historical and sociological methods (archival research, oral history interviews with both Jewish and non-Jewish interlocutors, and ethnographic fieldwork), I reconstruct the stories of Jewish survivors who, despite their vulnerable position, poverty, and hostility they experienced from non-Jewish locals, pursued the legal procedures to reclaim their property. Analyzing social transactions between Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants, as well as among Jewish survivors themselves, such as reclaiming, selling, or renting real estate throws new light on the agency, motivations, and emotions of Jewish survivors returning to their shtetls, as they negotiated their social position anew within a new power structure.

Author

• Marta Duch-Dyngosz, Jagiellonian University