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Life Turned Upside Down: Memories of Soviet Evacuees and Polish Holocaust Survivors about World War II and its Aftermath

Thu, November 10, 3:15 to 5:00pm CST (3:15 to 5:00pm CST), The Palmer House Hilton, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 1

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel will analyze the memories of Soviet Evacuees and Polish Jews - Holocaust survivors about the precarity of their life in evacuation in the Soviet interior and their difficult return home. The panel explores the ways in which precariousness defined evacuee experiences at resettlement sites. Specifically, it will consider the ways in which traditional hierarchies, systems of privilege, and family dynamics were turned upside down because of wartime conditions and the mass displacement that people and families experienced.
The panel will also explore Jewish children’s life in evacuation and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In addition to the difficulties faced by all other evacuees (severe shortage of food, horrible living conditions and epidemic diseases) Jewish children also often experienced anti-Semitism in evacuation and after their return home.
The panel will follow the trajectory of the Polish Jews during the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Polish Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union at the end of the war, returned to Poland but decided not to stay, “infiltrated” into Germany and became “displaced persons” under UNRRA’s care, and were finally, in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, resettled outside Europe, with Australia as the resettlement case study.
This panel will also examine the construction of memory of life in the Soviet interior in memorial books produced by Polish Jews after the war. It will show how this memory was shaped to fit within the dominant paradigm of the Holocaust.

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