Those Who Stayed: Polish Jews Who Remained in the Soviet Union after the Second World War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland in 1939, only 350,000 survived the Second World War. But of these, the majority—between 190,000 and 220,000—found sanctuary inside the USSR and thereby escaped becoming victims of the Nazi atrocities unleashed upon European Jewry between 1939 and 1945. After the war ended, most returned to Poland under the Soviet–Polish agreement on the repatriation of former Polish citizens from the USSR, and within a few years many had departed for Palestine, the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries. Their diverse survival paths during the war and later postwar emigration and dispersal have been thoroughly explored in recent historiography. However, nothing has been written on those Polish Jews who, despite the opportunity for repatriation, remained in the Soviet Union. This article is the first to explore the wartime and postwar experiences of some of the Polish Jews who continued to reside in one of the Soviet republics. Qualitative analyses of thirty-three USC Shoah Foundation testimonies recorded with Jewish Holocaust survivors in the mid-1990s and early 2000s provide insights into the various reasons, circumstances, and contingencies that caused them to stay. This research goes beyond the experiences of the majority and focuses on the postwar life trajectories of the roughly 10 percent of Polish Jews who survived in the wartime USSR and then settled in Russia, Ukraine, and other Soviet republics and made their lives as Soviet citizens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".