The second life of Jewish belongings–Jewish personal objects and their afterlives in the Polish and Belarusian post-Holocaust shtetls

This article examines the ways in which Jewish personal belongings that have been appropriated by gentiles during, and in the aftermath of, the Holocaust have been identified, demanded back, passed down from generation to generation, and commodified. Focusing on Biłgoraj and Izbica (Poland), and Mir and Iŭje (Belarus), our objective is to determine whether the Jewish identity of personal belongings appropriated by local non-Jewish communities during, or in the aftermath of, ‘Holocaust by bullets,’ survived in the postwar communities in which they have been circulating, and define what role they played for the postwar relations between Jews and non-Jews.Peer Reviewe

Holocaust Survivors Returning to their Hometowns in the Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian Borderlands, 1944–1948

This article looks at the initial return of Holocaust survivors to six shtetls: Izbica and Biłgoraj in eastern Poland; Iŭje and Mir in western Belarus; and Berezne and Brody in western Ukraine. Focusing on the period between the liberation in 1944 and the end of this phase of the first returns in 1948, we investigate the strategies that the returning survivors adopted to keep safe, reclaim their property, and confront their implicated neighbors. Based on oral testimonies of the survivors, as well as archival materials, yizkor bikher (memorial books), and our own oral history interviews, the article offers a comparative perspective on the predicament of Holocaust survivors in the immediate aftermath of World War II, identifying life choices and strategies that were common on both sides of the Polish–Soviet border, and national specifics that uniquely shaped the experience of the Jewish returnees in postwar Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.Peer Reviewe