SUMMARY:

The archival publication includes three detailed interviews with Holocaust survivors. Aleksandr Kasha, Marian Balaban, and Tewel Pruzanski were born in Poland. After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939, they were deported to the inner territories of the USSR: one as a political prisoner, one as an exile, and one as a labor migrant. The tragic circumstances of their exile allowed them to escape the Holocaust. Aleksandr Kasha spent the war working in Central Russia; after the war, he remained in the USSR. Marian Balaban joined the Polish army formed by General Władysław Anders against the vehement antisemitic pressure of Polish officers. He fought in Italy, was there on Victory Day, and eventually settled in the United States. Tewel Pruzanski fought in the Soviet Army against the Nazis. Dismayed by Polish guerrilla anti-Jewish terror after the war, he made his way to Germany posing as a German refugee, and eventually emigrated to Australia. Despite the differences in their individual biographies, their life experiences were quite representative of Polish Jews who voluntarily or forcibly were resettled to the Soviet Union, where, although they had to survive horrible living conditions and repressions, they escaped the fate of their neighbors and families who were left behind in Poland.