“I Became a Nomad in the Land of Nomadic Tribes”: Polish Jewish Refugees in Central Asia during the Shoah

After their amnesty in the late summer and early fall of 1941, the Polish Jews who had been swept up in deportations to the Gulag and inadvertently saved from the Holocaust, suddenly found themselves refugees in distant lands. Most moved south to Central Asia, hoping for better conditions. In reality the millions of Soviet evacuees and prodigious needs of the military meant that resources were scarce. The refugees write in their memoirs from this period about hunger and disease. They also write about interactions with a variety of other people, including local Kazakhs and Uzbeks, other deported Soviet ethnic groups, and Soviet Jews in evacuation. This paper will seek to use testimonial and other literature to explore the encounters between the Polish Jewish refugees and their neighbors in Central Asia. Refugee testimonies from this period tend to focus on the deprivation and difficulty. Yet fascination with the other remains a frequent and important leitmotif. While in no way diminishing the centrality of struggle, this paper will pay special attention to the ways in which Polish Jews made sense of their environment and the various groups that peopled it. Native Central Asian ethnic groups were by far the most exotic and the refugees from the west viewed them with a certain trepidation. Often relations were difficult, as they competed for the same resources, but there were also instances of deep human understanding across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Other deportees, such as Lithuanians, Ukrainians and ethnic Germans were potential sources of antisemitism, but also fellow victims of Stalin hailing from familiar locations. Particularly compelling, for many Polish Jewish refugees, were the Soviet Jews. This exploration of impressions and interactions will seek to understand how these Central European Jews made sense of their foreign and multi-ethnic environment.