Death, Survival, Resistance: What can we tell of the Holocaust in the USSR?

A few months ago, I posted a poll on several Facebook teacher groups, asking whether teachers of Russian and Soviet History explicitly taught the Holocaust in their A-Level and GCSE classes.

The poll was highly unscientific, with a limited and self-selecting sample (and all the accompanying risks for reliability that entails). Yet it indicated a clear and remarkable trend.

Just under 10% of respondents reported teaching the Holocaust explicitly; a little over one-third partly; and over one-half said they didn’t teach it at all.

In fact, none of this came as much of a surprise. When I had begun teaching Russian and Soviet History at A-Level, I had not originally considered including the story of the Holocaust on Soviet soil.

Why should I?

It wasn’t part of our exam-board’s specification. Accordingly, it also wasn’t part of the textbook I had originally used to plan my lessons. And in any case, couldn’t I assume my students had already learned about the Holocaust in Year 8 or 9?

The Holocaust on Soviet Soil

Despite these considerations, not teaching the story of the Holocaust in relation to Russia and the USSR is a missed opportunity. I’d actually go beyond that – if we teach the Soviet Second World War, I think not including a focused discussion of the Holocaust and wider impact of war on Soviet Jews is unjustifiable.

In raw numbers, the impact of the Second World War on Soviet Jews was enormous and devastating. With the exception of Poland, the USSR witnessed the largest killing of Jews anywhere in Europe during the Holocaust, with around 1.34 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their allies on Soviet soil.

At the same time, the experience of war on Soviet Jews was varied and complex in a way that the statistics alone cannot account for.

Stories of the Holocaust in the USSR

The murder of Jews in the USSR itself confounds common student stereotypes of the Holocaust, taking place not primarily in death camps such as Auschwitz but through mass shooting, including those of SS Einsatzgruppen who rounded up and shot Jewish men, women, and children as the Germany army advanced into the USSR during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The killing was exemplified, in all its horror, by the Babi Yar massacre in September 1941, where over 33,000 Jews were murdered in just two days, although this itself was just one of countless mass shootings.

At the same time, while huge numbers of Jews perished during the war, a great many escaped and survived, often in remarkable circumstances. The most astonishing stories of survival include those of Jews in what had been the east of Poland. In September 1939, following the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the German invasion of the west of Poland, Soviet troops invaded and annexed the east of Poland, with its population of some 1.5 million Jews.

Like other Poles in the Soviet occupied east of the country, these Jews were offered the “choice” to accept Soviet citizenship in 1940. Those who refused were assumed to be hostile to the Soviet state and Communism and faced repression, including mass deportation to Siberia and Central Asia. In June 1940, as many as 78,000 Polish Jews were indeed arrested by Soviet authorities and deported.

What was intended as brutal punishment in fact saved thousands of Jews by removing them from what would become the central killing zone of the Holocaust the following year. As the authors of one important recent work put it, “In the end, deportation turned out to be a life saver, sparing deportees nearly certain death in Nazi hands. In June 1940, however, no one could anticipate the horrors to come later under Nazi rule.” (Budnitskii et al, 34). Some of the stories of Jewish deportees have been retold by in a remarkable 2017 volume edited by historians Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Anita Grossman, Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union.

Other Soviet Jews fought – both militarily and in other ways – against the Holocaust. Between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews fought in the Soviet Red Army, which would eventually push German troops out of Soviet territory on their way to liberating eastern Europe from Nazi rule and capturing Berlin. Their contribution was recognised in Soviet military honours: although, numerically, Jews were the seventh largest “nationality” in the Soviet Union, they became the fourth most highly decorated in the Soviet military during this period. Other Jews joined anti-Nazi partisans, who attacked German troops behind the lines of war (although the history of Soviet partisans, which could themselves be virulently antisemitic, is fraught and complex).

Jewish public activists, including the Yiddish theatre director Solomon Mikhoels, rallied support of Jews internationally for the Soviet war effort through the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC), an organisation established with the approval of Stalin. Mikhoels, along with other Jewish public figures, was even allowed to travel abroad, visiting the USA, Britain, Mexico, and Canada as part of their campaign, something that would have been virtually unthinkable before the war.

Meanwhile, Jewish Soviet journalists played a central role in documenting the Holocaust on Soviet soil. As Soviet troops recaptured and advanced through previously German-occupied Soviet territory, they uncovered appalling evidence of genocide. Vasily Grossman, one of the most prominent Soviet journalists, advanced with the Red Army and wrote some of the first journalistic accounts of the mass killing of Jews. Grossman was under no illusions as to what he was witnessing. His December 1943 article, “Ukraine without Jews” ended with the chilling words: “A people has been murdered.” Grossman would later earn fame internationally for being one of the first journalists to report on the death camps, which he encountered as Soviet troops pushed on through areas of eastern Europe that had been occupied by the Nazis.

The Strange Afterlife of the Holocaust on Soviet Soil

The stories of Soviet Jewish experiences during the Holocaust would have a strange and tragic afterlife. After the Second World War, the narrative of Jewish suffering was subsumed within, and suppressed by, a broader narrative in the USSR of Soviet suffering, in which the Soviet people as a whole were emphasised to be the victims of Nazi oppression.

Vasily Grossman, the journalist who had begun documented the Holocaust during the war itself, found his efforts to publicise the fate of Jews blocked. Along with Ilya Ehrenburg, Grossman compiled information about the genocide against Jews in The Black Book of Soviet History. Its publication in the USSR, however, was blocked by Stalin’s censors.

By the late 1940s, Soviet support for Jews had turned into naked hostility, with the start of Stalin’s antisemitic anti-Zionist campaigns, directed nominally against the new State of Israel. Solomon Mikhoels, the leader of the wartime Jewish Antifascist Committee, was assassinated in 1948. Other Jewish Antifascist Committee members would be arrested and executed in a wave of repression against Jews which would peak in 1952 and 1953.

The story of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union has remained hidden in plain sight for many people, even in modern Russia. The startling ignorance of some young Russians was painfully revealed in 2012, when two teenaged school girls on a Russian quiz show guessed the Holocaust to be “wallpaper glue”.

Why do we not teach the Holocaust in the USSR?

Of course, that same story of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union seems to remain hidden in plain sight in our own History teaching. Why?

There are a few possible reasons – and the answer, almost inevitably, is likely to lie somewhere in between them all.

Firstly, the Holocaust presents itself usually as an international, or perhaps more accurately supra-national (i.e. above individual nations) history. Typically, it seems to be taught as something which stands apart from, and above, the experiences of individual countries (with the obvious exception of Nazi Germany). Insofar as the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War was a Europe-wide phenomenon with global consequences, this is absolutely correct. Yet doing so may lead us to overlook the specific characteristics of the Holocaust and Jewish experiences within individual countries.

Secondly, the Holocaust in English and Welsh schools seems to have been largely hived off into KS3. By mandating the teaching of the Holocaust to KS3 students, the National Curriculum may inadvertently have turned the topic into a stand-alone tick-box exercise, which, once completed, schools no longer need to worry about. (None of this, I should add, is to denigrate the excellent work teachers up and down the country do to deliver outstanding Holocaust education to their students, nor the efforts of teachers to re-integrate the Holocaust into KS4 and KS5 units, beyond what is expected by exam boards.)

Thirdly, the limitations of textbooks on Russian and Soviet History leaves many teachers stranded. For AQA, the exam board we study, four approved KS5 textbooks I surveyed, covering two Russia/USSR units (1H and 2N) which both include the Second World War, include between them around a paragraph and a half on the Holocaust. Strikingly, Oxford University Press’ recently revised textbook for the specification, despite acknowledging advice received from the Centre for Holocaust Education, still fails to discuss the Holocaust at all! If teachers are expected to teach from textbooks (which, one way or another, we all indeed are), then we are limited by what they do and don’t include.

Finally, exam specifications themselves have much to answer for. Put simply, textbooks follow specifications. And if those specifications omit crucial pieces of history, we can expect the textbooks to do likewise. At KS5, AQA, Edexcel, OCR, and WJEC all offer examined courses on Russian and Soviet History, including options that cover the Second World War. Not a single one includes amongst its bullet pointed list of specified content the Holocaust or experience of Jews in the Soviet Second World War (this is incongruous, given that several of the specifications do identify explicitly other aspects of Jewish history to be taught, including pogroms and Tsarist antisemitism and Stalin's Doctors' Plots). Little wonder, then, that our teaching, which follows on from our textbooks, which in turn follow on from our specifications, should likewise omit this topic.

The Place of the Holocaust in Russian and Soviet History

In the case of Soviet History, the Holocaust is a central and fundamental element of the experience of the Second World War, without which any telling of this period is incomplete. Teaching the Holocaust in a Soviet context, meanwhile, has wider value to our teaching of the Holocaust more generally. In particular, three points seem to me to be particularly important.

1. It complicates the narrative of the Holocaust. Genocide against Jews in the Soviet Union, which principally took the form of shooting rather than death camps, took place in a manner often overlooked or underappreciated by students.
2. It contextualises the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not the first mass murder of Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union; indeed, as historian Brendan McGeever has recently emphasised, the most deadly episode in modern Jewish history before 1941 was the Russian Civil War, which had seen huge and devastating pogroms across the former Pale of Settlement.
3. It helps to humanise victims. The broad and often surprising stories of Jews in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust and Second World War provides excellent opportunities to dig into and look beyond the category of victimhood, whilst not overlooking of denying the reality of that victimhood; integrating the stories of Jewish Red Army soldiers, partisans, JAC activists, journalists, and Polish deportees allows us to treat Jews as diverse, complex, and above all human, rather than statistics.

 

Interested in teaching the experiences of Jews in the USSR during the Second World War and Holocaust? Here is a lesson that seeks to do just that.

Any thoughts, comments, or critiques of the materials would be gratefully received!

Selected Further Reading

Oleg Budnitskii, David Angel, Gennady Estraikh, and Anna Shernshis, Jews in the Soviet Union: A History: Vol. III, War, Conquest, and Catastrophe, 1939-1945, NYU Press (2022)

Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Anita Grossman (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, Wayne State University Press (2017)

Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, Eleni Karayianni, and Helen McCord, Understanding the Holocaust at KS3: How and why did it happen? Hodder Education (2020)

Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, Indiana University Press (various editions)

John D. Klier, “The Holocaust and the Soviet Union” in D. Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillan (2004), pp. 276-295

Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation: JPEF Home Page | Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation

Yad Vashem, “Jews in the Red Army”: Jews in the Red Army, 1941–1945