Fleeing Poland and surviving the Holocaust in the Soviet Union

This article analyses the flight and survival of Polish Jews during the Second World War in the Soviet Union, which was the main place of survival for Polish Jews. As part of the Lubartworld project, the article uses a microhistorical and transnational approach to study simultaneously the individual characteristics and the trajectories of the Jewish population from the town of Lubartów, near Lublin. Facing the German invasion, the Jewish population that fled the town during the autumn 1939 and even more so the one that survived in the Soviet Union, differed by a certain number of properties: youth, family network, lack of children, pre-war inclination for mobility, and male predominance. By analyzing the Soviet policies for managing these foreign populations and studying their trajectories, the article identifies the different forms of mobility suffered by the Lubartowian Jews, while underlining the entanglement of experiences on Soviet territory, marked by deportation to the gulag world, enrolment for work, evacuation and flight.