Remapping Relief and Rescue: Flight, Displacement, and International Aid for Jewish Refugees during World War II

This paper addresses a transnational Holocaust story that remains essentially untold, marginalized in both historiography and commemoration. Most of the quarter million Jews in the “saved remnant” of East European Jewry collected in DP camps in Allied occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy survived by being “deported to life” from Soviet-controlled Poland after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, first in forced labor camps in Siberia and then, after June 1941, in predominantly Muslim Central Asia. With aid of goods acquired throughout the British Empire from Australia to South Africa, Palestine, and India by an American Jewish relief organization (Joint), based in Teheran, Stalin’s Soviet Union provided a crucial if harsh refuge. Parcels sent from Teheran to Tashkent, packed by Polish and German Jewish refugees in Iran, funded by Jews in New York and Tel Aviv, organized via Jewish Relief Association in Bombay (staffed partly by refugees interned by the British as “enemy aliens”), transported by Red Army trucks and ships, and sanctioned by negotiations among the Joint, the Jewish Agency, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Iran, helped sustain about 80% of all Polish Jews surviving the war.

Using varied sources, including published and unpublished memoirs, feature and documentary films, and records of the Joint and other relief agencies, the paper integrates these unexamined experiences into our understanding of the Shoah, literally remapping the landscape of persecution, survival, relief and rescue, while tracing refugee routes and experiences from Poland to Siberia to Central Asia, back to Poland, into DP camps, and eventually to new homes in the US, Israel, and elsewhere across the globe. It asks how this “Asiatic” experience shaped Jewish understandings of persecution and extermination as well as definitions as “survivors,” in the immediate postwar context of displacement and the present highly politicized globalization of Holocaust memory.