Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Prewar Poland as Holocaust Sources

Abstract

Based on six autobiographical essays gathered in the 1930s by the Vilnius-based Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (YIVO, Jewish Scientific Institute), this chapter analyzes how experiences during the 1930s shaped behaviors applied during war and genocide. Antisemitism and limited economic opportunities in interwar Poland prompted YIVO to organize a series of essay contests to collect autobiographies from Jews aged 16 to 22. After the war, some 300 surviving essays surfaced in Germany among YIVO’s Vilnius archives. The six YIVO autobiographies are linked by location, as the writers (three female, three male) lived in the northeastern region of interwar Poland: Grodno, Białystok, and Bielsk Podlaski. These communities fell to Soviet occupation in September 1939 and to the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Holocaust in June 1941. Essay contest respondents discuss their social development in the home with family, at school, in youth groups, and in vocational training institutes. Analysis of these experiences demonstrates continuity in the responses of young Jews in the face of genocide.