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 Gesher Galicia database, this presentation aims to showcase the extensive genealogical data that awaits family historians. Notably, research has unveiled confiscated personal artifacts like prewar and wartime photographs, letters, and various documents, offering invaluable insights into the Jewish experiences of that period.

Bio:

Dr. Andrew Zalewski is a former professor of medicine at Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He has authored two books on Austrian Galicia: Galician Trails: The Forgotten Story of One Family and Galician Portraits: In Search of Jewish Roots, both of which reconstruct the story of his ancestors in a broader historical context. As the vice president of Gesher Galicia, he previously led archival research on Jewish educational access, Jewish cultural transformation and legal rights in Galicia. He is currently coordinating a multi-year project that examines the Jewish experiences in the Soviet-occupied region of former eastern Galicia. Dr. Zalewski is a frequent speaker at cultural and academic institutions. His annual course on the Jews of Galicia examines the internal and external forces behind the Jewish path to modernity. Unique archival records provide the background for his in-depth description of multiethnic Galicia