SCRIPTA JUDAICA CRACOVIENSIA Vol. 18 (2020) pp. 141–162 doi:10.4467/20843925SJ.20.010.13878 www.ejournals.eu/Scripta-Judaica-Cracoviensia The Gulag of Poets: The Experience of Exile, Forced Labour Camps, and Wandering in the USSR in the Works of Polish- Yiddish Writers (1939–1949)1 Magdalena Ruta https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0556-1694 (Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland) e-mail:
[email protected] Keywords: the Holocaust, WWII, the Soviet Union, Polish Jews, Yiddish literature, Communism, exile, Soviet Forced Labour Camps, wandering in the USSR Abstract: The literary output of the Polish-Yiddish writers who survived WWII in the Soviet Un- ion is mostly a literary mirror of the times of exile and wartime wandering. The two major themes that reverberate through these writings are: the refugees’ reflection on their stay in the USSR, and the Holocaust of Polish Jews. After the war, some of them described that period in their memoirs and autobiographical fiction, however, due to censorship, such accounts could only be published abroad, following the authors’ emigration from Poland. These writings significantly complement the texts produced during the war, offering plentiful details about life in Poland’s Eastern border- lands under Soviet rule as it was perceived by the refugees, or about the fate of specific persons in the subsequent wartime years. This literature, written in – and about – exile is not only an account of what was happening to Polish-Jewish refugees in the USSR, but also a testimony to their cop- ing with an enormous psychological burden caused by the awareness (or the lack thereof) of the fate of Jews under Nazi German occupation.