on Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, etc.

Dear friends,

From earliest childhood, I understood the Holocaust as deeply embedded in my family story. My grandparents talked about their camp experience at the dinner table; a seemingly endless series of testimonies found their way to my bookshelf. I read these books, dutifully, but I didn't really need them. The history was in my bones.

But while I knew something terrible had happened to my grandparents, I never fully understood what it was. They were living in Poland when the Nazis invaded in September 1939; forced east by the advancing army, they were eventually deported by the Soviets. They told frightening stories of what happened to them in the place where they were imprisoned, which they always said was a camp in Siberia; the labor they did there, chopping down trees in freezing cold weather, sounded as painful and as punitive as forced labor anywhere. Yet they weren't persecuted for being Jewish, at least not by the Soviets; and no one was actually trying to kill them, except through labor and starvation. They weren't in a ghetto or a concentration camp.

The Polish deportees were "the lucky ones," people familiar with this history sometimes say—their lives paradoxically saved because they were exiled to the Soviet Union, unlike so many others who perished in Poland and other Nazi-occupied territories. But my grandparents didn't seem to think of themselves as lucky. They saw themselves as survivors of trauma, a trauma that fit uneasily into the category of "Holocaust" and seemed barely to register in comparison with the Nazi persecution.

[my grandmother with me, around 1975]

As I grew older, I searched for other stories like theirs in testimonies and history books and came up short. The details they had related were elliptical and confusing—of being asked to choose between Soviet and Polish citizenship; later, after their release, trying to find their way to Iran (Iran?) to join the Polish army. Why had they been deported in the first place? And what exactly had happened to them, in the camp and afterward, that left such deep marks on both their bodies and their psyches? Nowhere could I find answers to these questions.

Recently that changed. Thanks to groundbreaking new research by the scholars Mikhal Dekel and Eliyana Adler, an explanation of what happened to Polish Jews like my grandparents—there were around 250,000 of them—is now available in English for the first time. The places they were sent, it turns out, weren't technically camps at all, but "special settlements": a division of the Gulag that was separate from the better-known system of camps and penal colonies, and sometimes even deadlier. As many as six million people may have been deported to these settlements, which Stalin began using in the early 1930s as a destination for kulaks (well-to-do peasants) and ethnic minorities.

This aspect of Soviet history has been little explored. In her nearly 700-page Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum writes that another book of similar length would be required to tell the full story of the settlements, to which she devotes only a chapter. In the world of Holocaust studies, the Polish-Jewish deportees have been considered in a separate category and thus neglected by historians, left "in a sort of netherworld of history and memory," as Adler writes.

For years, I've searched for my grandparents' names in Holocaust databases and come up short. Last fall, Dekel put me in touch with a Russian researcher who, within 15 minutes of receiving my WhatsApp message, responded with the details of my grandparents' deportation, which he found in an online database of "Victims of political terror in the USSR." All my life, it turned out, I had been looking for my family history in the wrong place.

[translations via Google Translate]

The sight of these entries made me speechless. For the first time I felt as if my grandparents' experience was recognized. This was something that happened. There was a machinery of terror. Records were kept. It was done on purpose.

Notice the source: "Book of Memory of the Komi Republic - vol. 5." Volume 5! That's a lot of names. A lot of pain. 

I spent much of the last year working on this essay for the New York Review of Books, which pieces together an outline of what my grandparents went through. It draws upon Dekel's and Adler's work as well as a newly translated memoir by Julius Margolin, a Jew of Polish origin who was deported to a Gulag camp at around the same time. It also addresses some of the larger questions this history raises, such as the old game of "who was worse, Hitler or Stalin" and, more existentially, how we measure and understand human suffering.

This is the most personally meaningful piece I've ever written. My hope is that it will find its way to other descendants of the Polish-Jewish deportees. There must be a lot of us.

As ever,
Ruth

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream."—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House