Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat
Jewish Special Resettlers–Refugees (spiecpieriesielentsy–biezhentsy) deported during the third wave of deportations in the summer of 1940 constituted – according to NKVD sources – over 84% of all individuals deported at that time. They were placed in 251 special settlements (specposeloks) across the territory of the Soviet Union*, under the surveillance of 158 NKVD commandants’ offices.
The majority of deported Polish Jews came from urban environments and had fled German-occupied zones to areas under Soviet occupation. In 1939–1940, they were excluded from the German–Soviet population exchange and refused Soviet citizenship. Among them were craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, physicians, Hasidic Jews, Orthodox Jews, as well as assimilated and Polonised individuals. Many had never engaged in manual labour. Some left behind testimonies of their experiences, though often without specifying their exact locations, referring instead to deportation “into the interior of the USSR” or “to Sybir”. Many, especially in Yiddish-language accounts, recorded place names in ways that are now difficult to locate on modern maps. Furthermore, the term “Sybir” used in these testimonies did not always refer to Siberia in the strict geographical sense.
Four Jewish Deportees
This article presents Sybir as seen through the eyes of four Polish Jews: Zygmunt Blumenfeld and Henryk (Herman) Markiewicz (cousins), Moshe Berger, and Gecl Lustgarten.
Moshe Berger was born into a poor Orthodox Jewish family on 2 November 1919 in Olkusz. He completed evening vocational school and worked as a painter. He and his sister Fela fled their hometown on 14 November 1939; after several weeks of wandering, they arrived in Sambor. From there, on 29 June 1940, they were deported to the Angara River region of Irkutsk Oblast, and subsequently to Yakutia, near the settlement of Yur. Moshe was 20 years old at the time of the deportation.
Henryk (Herman) Markiewicz (born 16 November 1922) came from an assimilated Jewish merchant family in Kraków. He graduated from Bartłomiej Nowodworski State Secondary School. Polish was spoken at home, and the family always had a Christmas tree. His parents were members of the Jewish religious community. “Their religiosity, however, was shallow and lukewarm, limited to the most basic rituals and customs”, he later recalled. In early September 1939, together with his cousin Jan Ulreich, he fled the German invasion to Lwów. His mother and brother Adam, who was ten years younger, remained at home. In Lwów, Henryk resumed his studies, which he abandoned after the introduction of the Soviet educational system.
Zygmunt Blumenfeld was also born in Kraków on 1 August 1913, to Juliusz and Anna (née Horowitz). He was Henryk Markiewicz’s cousin and had a significant influence on his intellectual development. Zygmunt completed his education at the Stanisław Jaworski Gymnasium, and in 1935 he earned a degree from the Faculty of Law and Administration at Jagiellonian University. He worked as a legal apprentice and earned his doctorate in law in 1939. As Markiewicz later wrote: “He was not deeply involved in politics; at the time, he held liberal-democratic views. While not severing ties with Judaism, he expressed – so far as I recall – deistic beliefs. He clearly adopted an assimilationist stance”. The war separated him from his beloved fiancée, Irena Gutman, whom he could not marry for financial reasons. On 6 October 1939, together with his father and Henryk Markiewicz, he arrived in Lwów, where they reunited with Henryk’s father, Alfred. In Lwów, Zygmunt worked as a window display designer. After refusing Soviet citizenship, the Blumenfeld and Markiewicz families were deported on 29 June 1940 to a poselok approximately 20 kilometres from the Altynay railway station in the Sucholozhskiy District of Sverdlovsk Oblast, where they were employed in logging.
Gecl (Gecel) Lustgarten (also spelled Lustgartn) was born on 27 June 1906 in Siedlce**. Before the war, he lived in Warsaw, where he was active in the Bund and trade unions. By profession, he was a carpenter. After the outbreak of war, together with his two younger brothers (Srul-Lejb and Pesach), he left the capital. After several weeks, they reached Białystok. From there, on 29 June 1940, together with Srul-Lejb and his wife Ruchla (Rochcze), he was deported and, on 10 July 1940, arrived at the poselok “Zimne Jolike” or “Jalike” in Vologda Oblast, near Lake Onega. He worked there as a carpenter. At the time, he was 34 years old. Soon afterwards, he was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation and, on 15 March 1941, sentenced to five years in a labour camp. He was sent to the Buchta-Nakhodka camp in Primorsky Krai, and later to Buchta-Pevek in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. The period between his arrest and sentencing was spent in numerous prisons.
Why Did They Write Their Memoirs?
Blumenfeld and Berger kept diaries with the intention of eventually sharing their experiences with loved ones once they regained their freedom. Berger wrote that his diary was “the only friend to whom I could confide my worries, adventures, and sorrows. […] I recorded all my troubles in my diary […]. Only in its pages could I weep”. This diary later became the foundation for his memoirs, published in Hebrew in Israel in 1992, and in Polish in 2005 under the title W tajgach Sybiru [In the Siberian Taiga].
Blumenfeld wrote his diaries for his family, covering the period from 1 September 1939 to 30 August 1944. According to Markiewicz, the intention was to publish them, as evidenced by their careful literary form. The diary was published posthumously. He explained his motivations in a letter dated 25 June 1941 to his friend Alfred Lutwak (1912–1942), a lawyer and writer:
[…] memory is relative and fails us. Notes, however, are undoubtedly more faithful and reliable. That is why I decided to record these impressions. I must also mention a second motive for this decision. That motive is Irenka. Just like with you – I have now lost my last tenuous contact with her. And I want to one day tell her, with complete precision and sincerity, everything I have experienced during this already long separation. So, I write about what is happening to me and around me. Yet, it is hard to call this a diary or a chronicle. These will be – if possible – sketches forming a coherent picture of life here. Sketches I would like to read to you both as soon as possible. To read on a warm summer afternoon, somewhere in the Planty, between Szewska Street and the university. It will be warm and peaceful, people will stroll in light summer clothes, and we will speak of sad and nightmarish dreams.
(Z. Blumenfeld, Dzienniki zesłańca, pp. 69–70)
Berger, on the other hand, deliberately refrained from recording certain details, fearing that the authorities might accuse him of espionage.
Many Jewish deportees decided to document their wartime experiences only years later. For example, Lustgarten published his memoirs solely in Yiddish, in Israel in 1968. In the postscript, he explained his motivation: “I wanted to leave that task to professional writers. But the more I read and searched postwar literature, the more I realised that the issues I address were not being discussed. That is why I took on this difficult task myself”.
Markiewicz spoke about his wartime experiences in interviews. He never chose to write an autobiography, stating: “An autobiography is worth writing only if one can be completely honest – and for various reasons, I cannot. So, I decided to limit myself to an academic curriculum vitae”.
Siberia through the Eyes of Jews
The deportees did not know where they were being sent. Berger wrote: “We passed through Europe, through tunnels in the Ural Mountains. Under different circumstances, we might have admired the beauty of nature, but the train rushed toward Sybir, and even the thought of it made us feel cold and sad”. Blumenfeld noted: “Day after day passes. We travel through Belarus, Homyel (the city of Ilya Ehrenburg), and then […] northeast and north. Various speculations: Sybir, the Urals, Tashkent. The convoy provides absolutely no information”.
To the deportees, Sybir was synonymous with uncertainty, stagnation, and hunger, as well as plagues of insects, disease, and death. It was a vast geographical expanse, diverse in terms of ethnic populations, but uniform in its untamed nature. Lustgarten wrote: “We have crossed Russia from its western to its eastern border. The areas we are passing through are very sparsely populated. All along the way we see only forests, mountains, and frozen rivers. A few huts near shelters – and that’s all”. Two months after his arrival in exile, Lustgarten was arrested, thus Sybir for him became primarily a network of prisons and labour camps. He did not describe the natural landscape but rather listed the distances between the places to which he was transferred. When he worked aboard a ship sailing from Nakhodka toward the Arctic, he recorded the names of the ports they called at. He emphasised the ethnic diversity of the prisoners and noted that members of the same national or ethnic groups tried to support one another. Jews, too, believed that survival depended on staying together. Berger wrote: “Everything binds us together. Language, culture, worries, dreams, and hope”. For Markiewicz, books were the most important source of support throughout the deportation. He read everything he could find in Polish, German, and Russian:
Among the books brought by other exiles, there was a volume of Słowacki’s King Spirit. I intended to write an essay on the metaphors in that poem, but I realized I lacked the necessary knowledge, that the topic was too difficult for me, and besides – I was too exhausted from my work (loading wood) to make any intellectual effort in the evenings.
(H. Markiewicz, Mój alternatywny życiorys polonistyczny, p. 130)
Markiewicz believed they survived only because they were not sent to a labour camp but to a poselok, where he worked in logging. Years later, he reflected: “Living conditions in the poseolok were primitive and particularly difficult for someone as clumsy as myself; I don’t know how I would have managed without Zygmunt”. He was also one of the few to offer a judgment on the motives for the deportations:
During my stay in the poselok, my anti-Soviet attitude remained unchanged, but in comparison to the time in Lwów it probably did not intensify. I did not feel outraged by our deportation. I reasoned roughly as follows: from the Soviet Union’s point of view, we were an uncertain and disloyal element, and so we were removed from the border zone. I even came to like my work – loading those wagons gave me a certain satisfaction.
(H. Markiewicz, Mój alternatywny życiorys polonistyczny, p. 57)
In the poseloks, where the deportees lived, conditions were harsh and primitive for those unaccustomed to such hardship: “We lived in a house that consisted of just one room. In the middle stood a stove made from an iron barrel. Sacks filled with moss served as mattresses and pillows. And when sacks were lacking, moss alone was used. Twenty, mostly young, people lived in our house. My sister and I were given a spot in the middle, so we had a place near the stove and farther from the door, where the cold air came in. The days grew shorter. The evenings became longer. Our only light came from thinly sliced torches made from resinous wood. We lit the stove only once, and from then on, we took turns to ensure the fire did not go out. The stove was used both for heating and cooking. Food supplies were less than modest, so there were no queues at the stove” (M. Berger, W tajgach Sybiru, pp. 78–79).
Even in exile, Berger was able to appreciate the beauty of the surrounding nature. As a stoker on a ship navigating the Lena River, he admired the scenery, and the proximity to the Arctic Circle allowed him to observe the aurora borealis. He wrote with admiration: “I liked looking at the wild and beautiful landscape, at the high, eternally snow-covered peaks of the Dzhugdzhur Mountains. I longed to climb one of those summits […]. Wild, uninhabited, but beautiful is Yakutia in summer. Harsh and menacing in winter. Sometimes you could travel 100 kilometres without seeing a single lodge along the shore” (M. Berger, W tajgach Sybiru, pp. 112, 170).
Years later, he admitted: “I learned to love Yakutia – its severity, its frosts, and its natural beauty. I came to know kind-hearted Russians, who could be true friends even in such brutal climatic conditions”. Markiewicz, however, perceived nature differently: “I like beautiful views, especially those I enjoyed on trips and hikes in the Tatra Mountains. But in the taiga, I saw no charm. I remember the swamps, the gnats, and the mosquitoes”. Blumenfeld had similar impressions.
To Freedom!
Berger, Blumenfeld, and Markiewicz quickly learned of the outbreak of the German–Soviet war and the subsequent “amnesty”. On 3 August 1941, Zygmunt wrote:
My personal documents, which I had in my wallet, have regained their value, and the phrase ‘Polish citizen’ has weight! Someone who has not experienced this turning point cannot understand its significance. What joy! What a long-awaited sense of honour and superiority fills us – today, foreigners – over the mass of small and ignorant local people. Sometimes it is worth going through a procession of long, difficult, stormy, and rainy days to reach the moment when the sun breaks through the clouds and illuminates the earth with an unexpected fairy-tale ray.
Z. BLUMENFELD, Diaries of a Deportee…, p. 80.
However, both Berger and Lustgarten emphasised in their memoirs that the German attack on the USSR worsened their situation: “The attitude of the NKVD toward us changed. They stopped meeting with us. They forbade us to gather together after work. We had to sit at home after work, each in their own house. Something was in the air. […] The good times were over. Until then, they considered us good and capable workers, but suddenly we became unnecessary. They lost trust in us. They considered us enemies” (M. Berger, In the Taiga of Siberia…, p. 115).
Blumenfeld also described the deteriorating situation, the lack of money, and life in poverty. Meanwhile, Lustgarten recalled that although they knew about the “amnesty” and the formation of the Polish army in October 1941, they had become liberated prisoners, and their daily bread ration was reduced from 700 to 400 grams.
Farewell to Siberia
Berger left Yakutia in the summer of 1944. He bid it farewell with sentiment but also with a sense of happiness: “We are leaving Siberia. I will no longer wander in the cold, foggy night in the taiga. We will no longer risk our lives by crossing the Chortova Ulova. I will no longer be exposed to the danger of ice crushing our ship. Farewell, Siberia, you were very harsh and merciless to us, but I came to like your wild and beautiful landscapes, the beauty of the northern lights, the glaciers at sea, the endless, snow-covered taiga, and most importantly: the good, kind Russian people who helped us survive this difficult period. Farewell, Yakutia, I will never see you again, but I will never forget you” (M. Berger, In the Taiga of Siberia…, pp. 246). Freedom made him feel like a true follower of Judaism once more: “The first Saturday on the ship. Someone turned over a crate – a white cloth was laid out. My wife lit the candles. I recited the Sabbath prayer with others. I felt like a Jew again. I remembered my family home. The Saturday dinner.”
Blumenfeld, on 19 September 1941, went to work for the last time:
[…] Today, Esaulenko will still sign for me… fat and jealous of my freedom – the piece of paper known as the ‘leaving certificate’ with which I say goodbye to this dreadful work. The forced labour that, for 14 months (from 13 July 1940), drained my muscles and paralysed my brain. The work that destroyed and corrupted me (I worked from 13 July 1940 to 19 September 1941. I only missed [–] six days. I felled about 10,000 trees during that period). Goodbye, forest, with no regrets. Sometimes it seems almost unbelievable that tomorrow I won’t have to come here anymore and struggle with the hard body of pine or birch. Sometimes it feels like a dream. Not tomorrow! Not tomorrow! Everything in me rejoices… Goodbye, forest! Goodbye! Just run away. As far away as possible!
Z. BLUMENFELD, Diaries of a Deportee…, pp. 96–97.
The Longed-For Freedom!
As they made their way to the Polish army, Blumenfeld and Markiewicz temporarily lived and worked in the Naumanski Sielsoviet, the kolkhoz named after Karl Marx (in the Khodjabad district of the Andijan region) in the Uzbek SSR. They lived in extreme poverty and hunger. In 1942, Adolf, Henryk’s father, and Juliusz, Zygmunt’s father, died from disease and starvation.
At that time, the life paths of Zygmunt and Henryk diverged for many years. Henryk began working as a night watchman in Andijan and later in a nearby orphanage. There, he met his future wife, Maria (Mala) Milberger (called Mila by her relatives***), originally from Warsaw, who worked as an educator. He then joined the District Board of the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP) and enrolled in the Polish Workers’ Party:
[…] this better ‘existence’ shaped my political consciousness – it strengthened my ideological identification with the ZPP. […] At that time, my attitude toward the Soviet Union partly changed. The decisive factor was its role in the war against Germany. After all, it was the Red Army – I told myself – that saved the world from Nazi barbarism, and me personally – from inevitable holocaust. […] I came to believe in Stalin’s merits as an organiser of Soviet industrial and military power and as the supreme commander in the war. His cult amused and irritated me alternately, but I explained it to myself as the need to adapt propaganda to the mentality of society.
H. MARKIEWICZ, My Alternative Career in Polish Studies…, p. 71.
Zygmunt was sent to a transport column and later to the office of the 4th Battalion of the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division. On 3 May 1943, he was promoted to senior rifleman. He went through the entire combat trail and participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war, he joined the Polish Corps of Adaptation and Deployment in the United Kingdom. In northern Italy, he met his future wife, Anna (Lisa) Luiza Ratka (called Lilka), of Polish–German descent. His beloved Irena survived the war but became involved with someone else and did not want to return to Zygmunt.
Lustgarten was released from Nachodka as a result of the “amnesty” decree of 19 January 1942. In February, he received a ticket to Buzuluk but did not make it there. Through Vladivostok, Birobidzhan, and Irkutsk, he reached Novosibirsk, then travelled to the Kazakh SSR. From July 1943, he lived 7 km from Aktiubinsk (now Aktobe) in Zhil Gorodok. It was there that he began describing the surrounding nature and the places he had stayed. In 1945, through his acquaintances, he found his younger brother Srul and went to join him in distant Bukhara (Uzbekistan). There, he met Magda, a laboratory technician, and they married in 1945****.
Berger left Yakutia in the summer of 1944 and arrived in Saratov, where he was assigned to the Privolzhsky Sovkhoz. He described the day of his departure as “the longed-for day”.
After the War
Moshe Berger and his sister Fela returned to Poland in 1945, where they learned of the murder of their parents and sisters in the extermination camps. Initially, Moshe tried to settle in Wrocław, where he completed a course in fine arts. In 1948, he moved to Warsaw, where he worked at the Central Milk Industry Management Company. Gecel Lustgarten returned to Poland with his wife and brother in 1946. Srul settled in Warsaw, while Gecel and his wife moved to Kłodzko, where they became involved with the local Bund committee. Gecel worked as a shoemaker. Henryk and Maria Markiewicz returned to Poland as a married couple at the end of May 1946 – initially to Gostynin, and later to Kraków.
Both Berger and Lustgarten struggled to find their place in post-war Poland. In April 1948, feeling that further life in Poland was untenable, the Lustgarten family emigrated to Sweden and from there arrived in Israel on 26 June 1949. Gecel passed away in 1969, and Magda in 1973. In 1957, after his niece Bronia became the target of anti-Semitic attacks, Berger emigrated to Israel with his sister’s family. There, he worked as a medical equipment storekeeper in a hospital in Holon until the age of 72. His second wife was Ania. In his spare time, he devoted himself to his passion for painting. He never forgot his hometown. On 17 May 2011, he was made an Honorary Citizen of Olkusz by the City Council of Olkusz. He passed away in Holon on 21 March 2017.
Markiewicz initially worked in the Propaganda Department of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). At the same time, from the autumn of 1946, he studied Polish philology at Jagiellonian University and worked for “Przekrój” and “Życie Literackie”. In 1948, he became affiliated with the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and from 1950 with Jagiellonian University. In 1956, he was awarded the title of professor, and in 1964 he became a full professor. He passed away on 31 October 2013. “Henryk Markiewicz belongs to the group of the most outstanding authorities in Polish literary studies”, wrote Anna Łebkowska, adding, “With the death of Henryk Markiewicz, we lose one of the greatest representatives of Polish culture, a great scholar, a continuously admired master, and a good man”.
Zygmunt Blumenfeld remained in the United Kingdom, in Liverpool. For financial reasons, he did have his law degree revalidated. He married Lilka in June 1949 and started a family business, Simpsons Photographic Service, while also engaging in charity work. He passed away on 25 January 1975. The cousins met for the first time since 1942 in Vienna in 1955. Zygmunt never understood why Henryk chose to stay in Poland.
Conclusion
The memories presented here show a subjective picture of the experiences and places of exile and portray – particularly visible in Blumenfeld’s case – his emotional reactions to the place of exile. Berger, as an artist, vividly described the surrounding nature. Through his sensitivity, he recorded what is invisible and unnoticed by many others. Blumenfeld wrote continuously about his experiences, intending for them to be read after the war. For Markiewicz, the events and experiences of this time were merely a backdrop to his academic career, a fragment of life that slowed his academic development but was not significant enough to occupy much space in his biography. Lustgarten, on the other hand, wrote so that others could learn about life in exile from his experiences. Each of these memories represents a conscious or subconscious individual evaluation of these deportees’ experiences, and through that they reveal different facets of the vast geographical region of Siberia.
Footnotes
*According to Aleksandr Gurjanov’s findings, the third deportation involved between 75,267 and 78,339 individuals. They were relocated to the autonomous Soviet republics of Yakutia, Komi, and Mari, as well as the Altai and Krasnoyarsk regions and the provinces of Arkhangelsk, Chelyabinsk, Gorky, Irkutsk, Molotov, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Sverdlovsk, and Vologda.
** The date is according to the birth certificate found in the State Archive in Siedlce.
*** Mala Milberger (20 February 1920 to 21 October 2009) was deported in the third wave from Białystok on 29 June 1940. By 12 July 1940, she found herself in Miegorskij, in the Oshtinsk region of the Vologda province, from where she was released on 2 September 1941; she later stayed in Mirzachul in the Uzbek SSR. She left for Poland from Pachta-Abad on 24 May 1946.
**** According to her daughters, Magda Lustgarten was born in 1917 in Târgu Mureş, Transylvania, Romania. However, in her passport records she listed 8 November 1917, Budapest as her date and place of birth.
Martyna Rusiniak-Karwat – Ph.D. in Political Science and Administration, M.A. in History. She works at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Department of Research on the History and Memory of Eastern Europe. A recipient of the Minister of Education and Science’s scholarship for outstanding young scholars (2022–2024).
The title and subheadings are provided by the editor.
This text is a shortened version of the author’s article Syberia oczami Żydów polskich – spiecpieriesieleńców-bieżeńców in Syberia i Polska – miejsca wspólne w literaturze i historii, edited by M. Dąbrowska, P. Głuszkowski, M. Wyrwa, et al., Białystok, 2024, pp. 376–396.
Translated by Sylwia Szarejko