TREBLINKA: - Holocaust Handbooks

Chapter IX: Transit Camp Treblinka 295
Urals. According to Abdul Akhmetov, the Bashkirian vice-commissar for
Agriculture, the evacuees worked side by side with the Bashkirians on the
kolkhoz fields and performed ‘outstanding labor.’ A certain portion of Jewish
kolkhoz peasants from the Ukraine settled in the area of Saratov in
their own kolkhoz. Thousands of other Jews, among them many elderly
people from Vitebsk, Kiev, and Riga, found employment in the factories
and textile industries of the same region.”
Kulischer reckons the number of the Jews who fled from the eastern Polish
provinces into Soviet territories, which never came under German control, at
500,000; to this are to be added 30,000 Jews from the Baltic states and
1,100,000 Jews from the Soviet territories who left before the Germans conquered
these areas. 920
In an Italian study entitled “The Jews in the USSR,” one reads: 921
“The Baltic states, White Russia, and the Ukraine suffered especially
severe losses. A certain number of refugees of the war period settled in
central Asia, so that the present [1966] Jewish population of Uzbekistan
consists of old Jewish inhabitants of Bukhara and immigrants from the
European territories. Others settled in various cities of the Urals as well as
Siberia or were evacuated there. Of the refugees, some returned to their
former place of residence after the war, others stayed, which explains the
large number of Jews in towns like Sverdlovsk and Cheliabinsk.”
The Jewish journalist Louis Rapoport draws a decidedly more pessimistic
picture; he writes: 922
“Of the approximately one million Polish Jews sent into the Urals and
Siberia – the journey lasted four to six weeks and proceeded under horrific
conditions – a fifth to a third died, according to a news sheet of the Joint
Distribution Committee from the year 1943.”
For the period from March to September 1946, “when the homeward trek
from the deep interior had only begun,” Reitlinger supplies Jewish population
figures for five Soviet cities, which are not too far below the pre-war numbers.
Reitlinger took these figures from an article in the Soviet Yiddish language
newspaper Ainikeit, whose date of appearance he does not give:
920 E. Kulischer, op. cit. (note 801), tables entitled “General survey of population displacements
in Europe since the beginning of the war”, outside the text.
921 Gli Ebrei nell’USSR, Milan 1966, p. 51.
922 Louis Rapoport, La guerra di Stalin contro gli Ebrei, Rizzoli, Milan 1991, p. 87.