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Olga Medvedeva
Published in Zachor, The Newsletter
of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Number 2, 2003
During the Second World War,
hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews found themselves in Central
Asia. Numerous documents preserved in the Samarqand Provincial
Archive in Uzbekistan (a former republic of the Soviet Union) shed
light on the experiences of these Jews.
When the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the western
border of the USSR remained open for refugees. However by the end of
1939 the passage from Poland to the USSR became illegal. At the same
time the Eastern Polish territories were taken by the USSR, forcing
Poles to accept Soviet citizenship. Some Polish Jews considered
Russia an area of destruction of traditional Jewish life, and a
place of violation of freedom in general. Others believed it the
site of an attractive social experiment. Both soon learnt how the
dream of social and national equality was actually being implemented
in the USSR. To the Soviets the Poles were strangers, local people
called them "the westerners". The authorities in Moscow considered
the Poles, now concentrated in great numbers at the frontier to be
"an undesirable element". From February 1940 to July 1941, hundreds
of thousands of Polish citizens, about a third Jews were deported to
the most remote regions of the USSR. They were often deported on
political charges ("intention to fight against the Soviet Union"),
and were imprisoned or put into labour camps in Siberia, in the
north of Russia, or in Eastern Kazakhstan.
In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR. Soon after Poland allied
itself with the USSR. As a result, the Soviet government and the
Polish government in exile established diplomatic relations and
signed a treaty granting former
Polish citizens the right to regain their Polish citizenship. In
December 1941 Soviet authorities deprived national minorities,
including Jews, of this right. Through an amnesty negotiated by the
governments, the Poles were released from prisons and labour camps
and resettled to Central Asia, a region with milder climate.
In the fall of 1939 when, in chaos and turmoil, many Jews left
Poland and headed eastward, they assumed that they would stop no
further east than in the city of Lvov. Instead, history brought them
to an unusual environment, among foreign peoples, languages,
ideology, religion and culture in the foothills of Tien Shan and the
Pamirs.
One example of refugee life is that
of Mikhail Blumenkopf who was born in 1913 in Warsaw. He had
received his University degree in 1935, worked as an engineer in
Warsaw, and had been a member of the Communist Party of Poland. In
1939 he found himself a refugee in the USSR. He first lived in the
Voroshilovgrad region (Ukraina) and then in Sverdlovsk (Ural). In
1942 he went first to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then worked in the Ural
mines. In 1944 he returned to Tashkent.
Another file describes the journey of refugee Rebecca Ferstenberg.
She left for Lvov in December 1939, where her husband had already
settled. She walked most of the way with her nine-month old child.
In June 1940 she was
sent to Arkhangelsk (in the north of Russia). She stayed there until
1941. Then settled in Kyrgyzstan working on a collective farm, Yangi
Turmush (New Life) Lenin region, then was resettled to Lenindzhol.
Her husband was called to the Labour Front in Siberia. These were
the main routes for refugees who finally arrived in Central Asia.
In May, 1943 the office of the Representative of the Department of
the Special Trade of the Ministry of Trade of the USSR (Uprosobtorg
Narkomtorg SSSR) was established in Samarqand to take charge of food
supplies to "evacuated" Poles. The documents in the Samarqand
Provincial Archive are filled with resumes, applications,
references, and health certificates of the refugees which reveal a
great deal about the life of Polish Jews in Central Asia.
Many of the Polish Jews who arrived in Central Asia were from
cities, others from small shtetls. Some of them were deeply
religious and others were assimilated. Some were highly educated and
some semiliterate. There were those who were well to do and others
who were paupers. The war evened them all.
Most were settled in villages where they lived in overcrowded and
unsanitary barracks or in warehouses, the more fortunate - in
hostels and rented mud-huts. Jews, mostly craftsmen and shopkeepers,
were placed in agricultural work where they picked cotton and looked
after camels. Others worked in the mines as rock breakers or coal
haulers. They worked hard and lived in constant want. "I am naked
and barefooted…", “I am dying of hunger...”
A plea for clothing and food
can be found in the applications for aid that were sent by the
thousands. There are official documents, such as instructions on the
use of defective (or simply rotten) eggs in the canteen for Poles.
Numerous medical certificates attest to the fact that many of them
died from hunger, severe cold or diseases such as tuberculosis,
malaria, typhus, and
intestinal dysentery.
Polish Jews faced constant uncertainty. They did not believe they
would see the end of the war. They felt that their lives had already
been laid behind them. They tried to collect some information about
the fate of their loved ones, many missing for years. They applied
to the organizations that dealt with Poles. Generally the answers
received showed that there was no hope. For example, the letter of
Mrs. Pekler on March 28, 1944 sent in a home-made envelope (written
on an invoice from a bakery) sent from Chew in Dzhambul region
(Kazakhstan) with photo enclosed, possibly, the only photo preserved
from her former life. She wrote: "I have not known anything about my
husband since 1941. Do you know something about the fate of my
husband Pekler Abraham Isakovich. I am sending my husband's photo to
you. May be you will not manage to keep his name in mind, but this
photo may help you to recognize him. I ask you, very-very much, for
a reply." There is a brief instruction of a clerk: "Send the photo
back. Advise that Pekler is not known to us". It had been sent back
to Mrs. Pekler, along with the photo. It came back to the office
with a note on it: "Returned in view of the removal of the addressee
from the list of residents." This letter is a symbol of the vain
hope of finding someone lost between two totalitarian states. It is
unknown whether Mrs. Pekler had died, or moved. All these fragments,
including the photograph are the only remnants of the Peklers
unhappy life.
It appears that these starving Polish Jews were strengthened by
their nostalgia for Poland. The further they moved away from their
native land in time and space, the more they dreamt about an
idealized Poland. In spite of the pre-war discrimination they had
experienced there, they dreamt of returning. The stronger the
attempts of the Soviet regime to convert them into citizens of the
"the Motherland of proletariat" were, the more they struggled at any
cost to restore their Polish citizenship. Poland still remained a
homeland for them.
They lived in an atmosphere of total bureaucratic and administrative
control. The governmental decisions that concerned Polish citizens
in Central Asia, such as protocols, explanatory notes, and reports
are preserved in the archive. Messages streaming to Moscow and, in
turn from Moscow to Samarqand, are full of instructions for the most
ludicrous occasions, often in a threatening tone: "In case of
misuse...." One report is on the results of an inspection of a
Polish home for the handicapped on June 10, 1944: "The most part of
food does not get into the right pots and goes elsewhere". The
Samarqand office was obliged to communicate with the centre on any
single question, even the least important ones. Permission from
local officials was necessary for solving even the most minor
problems; the director of the orphanage for children of Polish Jews
in Koqand, Uzbekistan had to file an application to approve the
exchange of
three pairs of foot-wear for a larger size.
An excessive bureaucracy resulted in an excessive number of
applications. All applications containing requests for aid were sent
to Samarqand from all over Central Asia. Applications had to be
certified by the seal of the place of work of the applicant and then
signed by the chief of the institution. Sometimes two seals and
signatures were required. Medical
certificates had to accompany the applications coming from sick
people. Everything was checked and rechecked, confirmed and
reconfirmed: a certificate is given regarding the fact that a
minimum ration of bread was obtained or that a minimum ration of
bread was not obtained, permission for the repair of foot-wear was
issued or it was not. Papers created more papers. Any draft was
kept, apparently it made easier to avoid the charges of misuse.
These documents reflect the atmosphere not only of poverty, but also
of the total suspicion and distrust.
The very paper used for applications is significant to understanding
the living conditions of those applying. Applications were written,
literally, on scraps of paper, on anything that fell into their
hands: on passes, on luggage receipts, on draughts, on ballot paper,
on the parcel's wrapping paper with the sender's address somewhere
in Palestine, on a postcard addressed to someone in Lvov, which had
never been sent. People wrote on top and across the text, which had
been written on earlier. Sometimes the same scrap of paper had been
used three times. It was a kind of palimpsest,
crowned by short but expressive words: "I am asking for help."
Pages of newspapers and books were used like blank sheets of paper.
Text in a language that Polish Jews did not know was of no value to
them. The tactics of communication demanded they know Soviet
"newspeak", spoken by those who distributed the goods necessary to
survival. Survival also required you join the Communist Party or the
Young Communist League. Among the Polish Jews were staunch
communists and opportunists and also freethinkers, but there is
little proof. Some documents in the archives were written "on
Stalin". Paper was scarce, but not for propaganda. A letter dated
January 2,1944 was written on the back cover of Stalin's book in the
Kazakh language. It was sent to the Representative with a request to
locate parcels which had been sent from the Polish Red Cross in
Palestine in 1941 and 1942.
In another example: the Representative, himself a Polish Jew,
nominated by Moscow to work in the local office in order to avoid
complaints on the misuses of aid wrote his message to the officials
in Moscow on the page of a book bearing Stalin's image. It testifies
to the state of his spirit. The senders dared to write "on Stalin".
Like anybody in the Soviet Union at that time fear was not foreign
to Polish Jews. But in contrast to the Soviet citizens, they were
not charmed by a love for Stalin, and were not paralyzed with dread
when seeing the name of the "father of the nation". It also
indirectly proves that the myth about the perfection of the Soviet
system, the illusion of which many in the Soviet Union had been
living for a long time, was perceived by many Polish Jews as a well
realized idea of a bad social system or as a badly realized idea of
a good society.
In July 1945 Polish citizenship was granted back to all former
Polish citizens, who had had Polish citizenship before September 17,
1939. Polish Jews exercised their right to repatriation. More than
200,000 Jews returned to Poland from the USSR. A large number of
them had survived in Central Asia. Back in the motherland they found
ashes. Their homes had been destroyed. After the pogroms of
1945-1946 many of the repatriates who had just come to Poland, moved
again. They will repeatedly recall life under the hot sun of
Central Asia in their new country - Israel.
Images:
Photo 1, 1a. A letter written
by a
Polish Jew to the officials in Moscow on the page of a book bearing
Stalin's image.
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