From Nazi Inferno To Soviet Hell

"The story told in From Nazi Inferno to Soviet Hell turns the spotlight on an aspect of the World War II Jewish experience that will be unfamiliar to many readers, including historians and scholars. Its portrayal of the corruption, uncertainty, and constant danger of life under the Stalin regime is terrifying, yet a testimonial to the human spirit and man's ingenuity and will to survive."--BOOK JACKET.

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

Co-winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.

The first book-length study of the survival of Polish Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

During World War II, some two million Jewish refugees relocated from the western regions of the USSR to the Soviet interior. Citizens in the Central Asian territories were at best indifferent—and at worst openly hostile—toward these migrants. Unpopular policies dictated that residents house refugees and share their limited food and essentials with these unwelcome strangers. When the local population began targeting the newcomers, Soviet authorities saw the antisemitic violence as discontentment with the political system itself and came down hard against it. Local authorities, however, were less concerned with the discrimination, focusing instead on absorbing large numbers of displaced people while also managing regional resentment during the most difficult years of the war. Despite the lack of harmonious integration, party officials spread the myth that they had successfully assimilated over ten million evacuees. Albert Kaganovitch reconstructs the conditions that gave rise to this upsurge in antisemitic sentiment and provides new statistical data on the number of Jewish refugees who lived in the Urals, Siberia, and Middle Volga areas. The book’s insights into the regional distribution and concentration of these émigrés offer a behind-the-scenes look at the largest and most intensive Jewish migration in history.

A sparkling and eye-opening history of the Broadway musical that changed the world In the half-century since its premiere, Fiddler on the Roof has had an astonishing global impact. Beloved by audiences the world over, performed from rural high schools to grand state theaters, Fiddler is a supremely potent cultural landmark. In a history as captivating as its subject, award-winning drama critic Alisa Solomon traces how and why the story of Tevye the milkman, the creation of the great Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem, was reborn as blockbuster entertainment and a cultural touchstone, not only for Jews and not only in America. It is a story of the theater, following Tevye from his humble appearance on the New York Yiddish stage, through his adoption by leftist dramatists as a symbol of oppression, to his Broadway debut in one of the last big book musicals, and his ultimate destination—a major Hollywood picture. Solomon reveals how the show spoke to the deepest conflicts and desires of its time: the fraying of tradition, generational tension, the loss of roots. Audiences everywhere found in Fiddler immediate resonance and a usable past, whether in Warsaw, where it unlocked the taboo subject of Jewish history, or in Tokyo, where the producer asked how Americans could understand a story that is "so Japanese." Rich, entertaining, and original, Wonder of Wonders reveals the surprising and enduring legacy of a show about tradition that itself became a tradition. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

A comprehensive account of Jewish life in a country that carries the legacy of being at the epicenter of the Holocaust. Originally published in German in 2012, this comprehensive history of Jewish life in postwar Germany provides a systematic account of Jews and Judaism from the Holocaust to the early 21st Century by leading experts of modern German-Jewish history. Beginning in the immediate postwar period with a large concentration of Eastern European Holocaust survivors stranded in Germany, the book follows Jews during the relative quiet period of the 50s and early 60s during which the foundations of new Jewish life were laid. Brenner’s volume goes on to address the rise of anti-Israel sentiments after the Six Day War as well as the beginnings of a critical confrontation with Germany’s Nazi past in the late 60s and early 70s, noting the relatively small numbers of Jews living in Germany up to the 90s. The contributors argue that these Jews were a powerful symbolic presence in German society and sent a meaningful signal to the rest of the world that Jewish life was possible again in Germany after the Holocaust. “This volume, which illuminates a multi-faceted panorama of Jewish life after 1945, will remain the authoritative reading on the subject for the time to come.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung “An eminently readable work of history that addresses an important gap in the scholarship and will appeal to specialists and interested lay readers alike.” —Reading Religion “Comprehensive, meticulously researched, and beautifully translated.” —CHOICE

A major international bestseller. The little-known true story of a Nazi plot to kill Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the height of World War II, and how it was averted. In 1943 only three men stood in Hitler's way; Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. As the war against Nazi Germany raged, the Allied leaders desperately needed to meet face-to-face and discuss their strategy. Facing extreme danger, they travelled to Tehran to meet in secret. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own covert plan took shape-an assassination plot. A true story filled with daring rescues, body doubles, and political intrigue, The Nazi Conspiracy details this pivotal meeting of the Big Three and the deadly Nazi scheme that could've changed history. In page-turning detail, it shows the greatest political minds of the twentieth century at work and reveals how they strategized to defeat the enemy, all whilst coming close to world-shattering disaster.