The Czechoslovak Jewish Refugees in the Gulag: Soviet Labour and POW Camps During World War II as Recollected by Jewish Refugees from Czechoslovakia

Containing meticulous research of a long under-represented part of the Holocaust, this book provides a rich pictorial documentation of the Gulag environment as told by Jewish refugees.

While millions of Soviet slaves awaited liberation from the Nazi troops, millions of German concentration camp victims put their last bit of hope in the Red Army.

An in-depth look into the Soviet persecution of Jewish refugees, this book offers twenty-one different interviews with Czechoslovak Jewish refugees who found themselves in Soviet labor and prison camps between 1939 and 1941. They represent around two thousand Czechoslovak Jews who escaped persecution from German and Hungarian occupational forces and Slovak fascists by fleeing to the East. The Soviets sentenced most of them to long stints of forced labor in the Gulags for illegal immigration, espionage, and other arbitrary accusations. A specific group was formed by the Jews from the Hungarian labor service who either defected to or were captured by the Soviets.

Dvořák and Hradilek chronicle four waves of escape--those from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nisko concentration camp, Carpathian Ruthenia, and the aforementioned labor service. Thorough and clear, every interview coincides with supplementary documents and photographs found in the NKVD archives, sourced from Ukraine.

Jan Dvořák is a historian specializing in Nazi and Soviet repressions and survival stories. Adam Hradilek is a publicist, expert on Soviet labor camps, and collaborator of the Russian Memorial Association. Both work at the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague.