02:00pm - 04:00pm  NKVD Files: On the Margins of the Holocaust

Speaker: Andrew Zalewski Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and annexed the eastern Polish territories. This talk delves into the Jewish experiences in the region of former eastern Galicia, based on the files of the Soviet security apparatus (NKVD). The largest group among the Jews arrested by the NKVD were Polish Jews comprising both prewar residents and refugees fleeing from German-occupied Poland. Others included former Jewish citizens of Austria and Czechoslovakia, alongside a smaller number of Jews from Germany, Hungary, and Romania. With the initial batch of NKVD files made searchable on the ...