Skip to main content

Jews In The Gulag After WWII.

 Jews In The Gulag After WWII.





Stalin sent to Siberia anyone who had contact with the “the West” – even Russian soldiers who fought for Mother Russia, but had the misfortune of being captured by the Nazis. Here is the amazing story how one Jew escaped.


Estimates vary, but there were approximately 250,000 Jews in the concentration camps when World War II ended. Many liberated survivors had no choice but to remain in the very camps where they were imprisoned. Instead of concentration camps they were now Displaced Persons (DP) camps and they were displaced persons.


Where was the world going to put them?


Most did not want to stay in Europe. About 25,000 Jews tried to return to Poland, because they were ideologically close to communism and the new Poland had a strong communist, Stalinist regime in place. However, when they came back to Poland they came back to pogroms. Literal pogroms. Tens of Jews, if not hundreds, were killed.


Jews who found themselves behind the Iron Curtain, especially in Russia, now found themselves under a completely different type of oppression – an oppression in many ways as dark as German oppression. To Stalin anyone who had contact with the virus called “the West” was sent to Siberia. Even Russian soldiers who fought for Mother Russia, but had the misfortune of being captured by the Germans – and who somehow survived that misfortune (only 20-40% of Russian prisoners survived; 3.3 million died) — were sent to Siberia by Stalin.


The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes it. In Stalin’s eyes they were contaminated and had no place in Russian society. Imagine the hell these people experienced: they fought for Soviet Russia, were prisoners of the Nazis for a year to four years, and then they came back home only to be sent straight to the labor camps of frozen Siberia. Many Jews followed this path.


I knew a Rabbi Greenwald form Toronto, an enormous Torah scholar, who at one point ended up in Siberia after the war. A Hungarian Jew, he had been forcibly conscripted into a work battalion of the Romanian army, which was allied with the Nazis. He survived a year-and-a-half in that battalion until the Russians captured them, and sent them all to Siberia.


Between the malnutrition and the winter cold, people were falling like flies. At least when they were fighting they had hope of the war ending. Now, there was no end. People were broken in their spirit even before their bodies.


Stalin sent to Siberia anyone who had contact with the “the West” – even Russian soldiers who fought for Mother Russia, but had the misfortune of being captured by the Nazis. Here is the story how one Jew escaped.


The commandant of the camp was a Jew. One day, he called him in and told him that he could tell that he was innocent; he did not belong there. But there was only one possible way to get out, he told him. “Write a note and address it Lazar Kaganovich, telling him how you were forced into the labor battalion, etc.”


Kaganovich was Stalin’s brother-in-law, a member of the politburo – and was Jewish too! (He was also a kohen!) The commandant told him that he would make sure the note got to Kaganovich.


The penalty for writing such a note was instant execution. Many times guards convinced prisoners to write a note – and then shot them for writing the note. Despite the danger, Rabbi Greenwald wrote the note.


About four months later an official car drove into the camp with a high-ranking officer. They lined up all the prisoners and then announced that prisoner Greenwald was there by mistake. However, the official said, he would not free Greenwald until he told him who smuggled the note out of the camp.


For an entire week he made believe he didn’t know how the note got out. Finally, they put him on a train toward the Romanian border, where they pushed him off as the train moved. But he survived and made it all the way to Canada.

Drop your comment in the comment section

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Two boys in this photograph from the early 1900s, taken by Dr. Allan Warner of the Isolation Hospital in Leicester

Two boys in this photograph from the early 1900s, taken by Dr. Allan Warner of the Isolation Hospital in Leicester, UK, had been exposed to the same source of smallpox.  One of them had received the smallpox vaccine, while the other had not. Dr. Warner captured these images as part of his study on the disease. The smallpox vaccine holds historical significance as the first vaccine developed to combat a contagious disease.  In 1796, British doctor Edward Jenner demonstrated that an infection with the milder cowpox virus could provide immunity against the deadly smallpox virus.  Cowpox acted as a natural vaccine until the modern smallpox vaccine became available in the 20th century. From 1958 to 1977, the World Health Organization led a global vaccination campaign that successfully eradicated smallpox, marking it as the only human disease to be completely eliminated. Don't forget to leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

THE LEGEND OF TRAPPER NELSON.

THE LEGEND OF TRAPPER NELSON. As you ride up the Loxahatchee River from its mouth in Jupiter, the canopy of slash pines and cabbage palms eventually starts to close in on you. Wildlife hides in the gnarled thickets of mangrove.  Everything about this place feels prehistoric. The turns become more and more hairpin, deceiving and disorienting you, as turtles and alligators eye you wearily before slipping beneath the murky water. Nearly eight miles up the northwest fork of the river, a weathered, wooden boathouse juts out into the dark water: the first sign of human existence seen for miles.  Alongside it is a dock that leads through a bamboo thicket into what was once the heart of wild Florida: Trapper Nelson’s homestead, zoo and jungle garden. The biggest attraction, though, was Trapper himself. Known as Tarzan of the Loxahatchee, he’d wrestle alligators, trap wildcats, and dazzle guests with his infallible good looks and stories of the wild.   He was a man who lived witho...

During the Vietnam War, one of the most dangerous jobs was undertaken by a select few known as "tunnel rats."

During the Vietnam War, one of the most dangerous jobs was undertaken by a select few known as "tunnel rats." These unsung heroes were American, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers specially trained as combat engineers, who crawled through Viet Cong underground tunnels to perform perilous covert search and destroy missions.⁠ ⁠ Tunnel rats gently prodded for armed mines in order to disarm them — and prayed that they survived with both their legs intact. Most men were volunteers and tended to be of smaller stature, making it easier for them to maneuver through the cramped subterranean spaces Don't forget to leave your thoughts in the comment section below.