Evacuee Encounters On The Soviet Home Front During The Second World War

This study is the first to examine the experiences of the millions of Soviet civilians evacuated to the interior of the country during World War II in the context of their encounters and relations with local communities and populations across Soviet Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Urals. The book considers the impact of this episode of massive population displacement across Eurasia on individuals, communities, and society more broadly. It explores how the challenges associated with wartime displacement gave rise to tensions between evacuees and local residents. These frictions, in turn, forced individuals to interrogate the meaning, terms, and limitations of citizenship and belonging in the Soviet Union. Evacuation thus played a critical role in the changing relationship between citizens and the Soviet state in the war and postwar periods. Furthermore, this study pays particular attention to the plight of Soviet Jewish evacuees, who constitute the largest contingent of Holocaust survivors in Europe, and the rise of antisemitism on the Soviet home front during the war. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the Second World War, migration and displacement, the Holocaust, Soviet Jewish history, and the Soviet experience more broadly.

This study is the first to examine the experiences of the millions of Soviet civilians evacuated to the interior of the country during the Second World War in the context of their encounters and relations with local communities and populations across Soviet Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Siberia, and the Urals. The book considers the impact of this episode of massive population displacement across Eurasia on individuals, communities, and society more broadly. It explores how the challenges associated with wartime displacement gave rise to tensions between evacuees and local residents. These frictions, in turn, forced individuals to interrogate the meaning, terms, and limitations of citizenship and belonging in the Soviet Union. Evacuation thus played a critical role in the changing relationship between citizens and the Soviet state in the war and postwar periods. Furthermore, this study pays particular attention to the plight of Soviet Jewish evacuees, who constitute the largest contingent of Holocaust survivors in Europe, and the rise of anti-Semitism on the Soviet home front during the war. This volume will be of interest to students and scholars of the Second World War, migration and displacement, the Holocaust, Soviet Jewish history, and the Soviet experience more broadly.

The first history of the Soviet home front experience during World War II and of the civilians who bore the burden of total war and played a critical role in the global victory over fascism. After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, German troops conquered the heartland of Soviet industry and agriculture and turned the occupied territories into mass killing fields. The country's survival hung in the balance. In Fortress Dark and Stern, Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell the epic tale of the Soviet home front during World War II. Against the backdrop of the Red Army's early retreats and hard-fought advances after Stalingrad, they present the impact of total war behind the front lines in a chronicle of spirited defense efforts, draconian state directives, teeming black markets, official corruption, and selfless heroism. In one of the greatest wartime feats in history, Soviet workers rapidly evacuated factories, food, and people thousands of miles to the east. After long and dangerous journeys in unheated boxcars, they built a new industrial base beyond the reach of German bombers. As the Soviet state reached the height of its power, imposing military discipline and sending millions of people to work thousands of miles from home, ordinary people withstood starvation, epidemics, and horrific living conditions to supply the front and make the Allied victory possible This book examines the dark and painful war years from a new perspective, telling the stories of evacuees, refugees, teenaged and women workers, runaways from work, prisoners, and deportees. Based on a vast trove of new archival materials, Fortress Dark and Stern reveals a history of suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate triumph largely unknown to Western readers.

This book is the first to present the unique story of the city of Jerusalem during the events of the Second World War and how it played a unique role in both the military and civilian aspects of the war. Whilst Jerusalem is usually known for topics such as religion, archaeology, or the politics of the Israeli–Arab conflict, this volume provides an in-depth analysis of this exceptional and temporary situation in Jerusalem, offering a perspective that is different from the usual political-strategic-military analysis. Although battles were raging in the nearby countries of Syria and Lebanon, and the war in Egypt and the Western Desert, the people who came to Jerusalem, as well as those who lived there, had different agendas and perspectives. Some were spies and intelligence officers, other were exiles or refugee immigrants from Europe who managed at the last moment to escape Nazi persecution. Journalists and writers described life in the city at this time. All were probably conscious of the fact that when the war came to an end, local rivalry and mounting conflict would take the centre stage again. This was a time of a special, magical drawn-out moment that may shed light on an alternative, more peaceful, kind of Jerusalem that unfortunately was not to be. This volume seeks to find an alternative approach and to contribute to the development of insightful research into life in an unordinary city in an unordinary situation. It will be of value to those interested in military history and the history of the Middle East.

This volume is both a study of the history of Polish Jews and Jewish Poland before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust and a collection of personal explorations focusing on the historians who write about these subjects. While the first three parts of the book focus on "text," the broad nature of Polish Jewish history surrounding the Holocaust, the last section focuses on subtext, the personal and professional experiences of scholars who have devoted years to researching and writing about Polish Jewry. The beginning sections present a variety of case studies on wartime and postwar Polish Jews, drawing on new research and local history. The final part is a reflection on family memory, where scholars discuss their connections to Holocaust history and its impact on their current lives and research. Viewed together, the combination sheds light on both history and historians: the challenges of dealing with the history of an unparalleled cataclysm, and the personal questions and dilemmas that its study raises for many of the historians engaged in it. Holocaust History, Holocaust Memory is a unique resource that will appeal to students and scholars studying the Second World War, Jewish and Polish history, and family history.

This work is a close examination of the conditions surrounding and precipitating the last gasp of British naval hegemony and events that led to its demise. Great Britain undertook a massive naval building program in the late-1930s in order to deter aggression and secure dominance at sea against her nascent enemies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. But the failure of the policy of Appeasement to deter war or delay it into the early 1940s left the building program only partially complete, and the exigencies of war led to the cancellation of the critical but costly and time-consuming “Lion” class battleships, and the slow delivery of the “1940 battlecruiser” (HMS Vanguard) and two vital fleet carriers. Adding to these issues, the fall of France spurred the USA to initiate her own, even larger, naval building program, and together with the entry of the powerful and capable Imperial Japanese Navy completely overwhelmed Britain’s position as the world’s premier naval power. This book will be of value to those interested in the history of the Second World War, British strategy, and the British navy.

Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s. Volume 3 explores how the Soviet Union’s changing relations with Nazi Germany between the signing of a nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the Soviet victory over German forces in World War II affected the lives of some five million Jews who lived under Soviet rule at the beginning of that period. Nearly three million of those Jews perished; those who remained constituted a drastically diminished group, which represented a truncated but still numerically significant postwar Soviet Jewish community. Most of the Jews who lived in the USSR in 1939 experienced the war in one or more of three different environments: under German occupation, in the Red Army, or as evacuees to the Soviet interior. The authors describe the evolving conditions for Jews in each area and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with and to make sense of their situation. They also explore the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, the role of the Soviet state in shaping how Jews understood and responded to their changing life conditions, and the ways in which different social groups within the Soviet Jewish population—residents of the newly-annexed territories, the urban elite, small-town Jews, older generations with pre-Soviet memories, and younger people brought up entirely under Soviet rule—behaved. This book is a vital resource for understanding an oft-overlooked history of a major Jewish community.

Class War or Race War is more than an anti-thesis of the master-narrative regarding the Soviet state antisemitism. Kende not only refutes the originally anti-Communist myth of the systemic nature of (state) socialism, but tries to re-, and deconstruct the origins of this myth. With intensive use of historical documents, memoirs and the related historiography, the book attempts to make historical sense from the myth it intends to refute. Kende goes beyond the contemporary perceptions of the "Jewish question" and antisemitism and with close reading of original documents, reconstructs the real frontlines of the Soviet society of the 1940s, which were not constructed along identity-political lines. The book reinvests the long forgotten understanding of social classes in an allegedly classless and monolithic society. The spontaneous formations of the actual frontlines in the hinterland, or on the actual fronts (battlefields, in the Red Army) lacked the participants’ class consciousness, thus its occurrences in the form of conflict producing historical records were recorded as acts of antisemitism. As the book advocates, Jews could have been found on both sides of the inner frontlines of the Soviet society during, and right after the WWII. An insightful read for scholars of Soviet history, that presents a bold and challenging interpretation of the regime and its flaws - both perceived and real.