Jewish destinies in the post-war USSR: a study from the Soviet police archives
Résumé
Police and court materials in Soviet archives make it possible to reconstruct the lives of Soviet Jews who survived the Holocaust but who then fell victim to Stalinist violence. These sources allow us to reconstruct a variety of experiences, and to understand how relations with the Stalinist authorities were experienced. Interrogations, complaints and appeals before the courts and other documents provide rare, if necessarily distorted, detail on the lives of survivors - a body of evidence which can be analysed in conjunction with what we know of how Jewish communities were rebuilt in Lithuania after the war. This study considers the Jews of the city of Siauliai in Lithuania, a territory which was both a place of Stalinist repressions before and after the Second World War, and where almost all the Jewish population was exterminated.