Introduction to Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish survival in the Soviet Union

[Extract] Millions of Eastern European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Of those who escaped that fate—the surviving remnant, known as the She’erit Hapletah—most remained alive because the Soviet Union had provided an often involuntary, and by and large extremely harsh, refuge from genocide. This volume investigates aspects of this history and its implications for more established historiographies. The experiences of Poland, the Soviet Union, the Holocaust, and postwar displacement and migration intersect here in dramatic ways. This entanglement has so far remained mostly unexplored. The chapters in this volume try to open up a new transnational field of research, bringing together histories that for the most part have been studied separately. Contributors focus in particular on the history of Polish Jews who survived in the Soviet Union.