Dr. Ellen Friedman, Professor of English Literature at the College of New Jersey, and Dr. Atina Grossmann, Professor of History at the Cooper Union, New York, will discuss their recent work on the fate of the Polish Jews who during the Holocaust found refuge in the Soviet Union and beyond. While both Friedman and Grossmann are daughters of survivors, Friedman is a literary scholar and Grossmann is an historian. Numbers provide the basic outline of the story. Approximately 3.3 million Jews resided in pre-war Poland, of whom approximately 10 percent survived (around 330,000 people), most of whom (between 66 and 80%) did so because they escaped to the Soviet Union. While their flight to the Soviet Union often entailed banishment to the prison settlements and Gulags of Siberia and Central Asia, it enabled them to survive.

Ellen Friedman’s The Seven, A Family Holocaust Story will be published in November. Also to be published later this year by Wayne State University Press is Atina Grossmann’s Shelter from the Holocaust Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union, which she edited with Mark Edele,and Sheila Fitzpatrick.