Only Ashes? Jewish Visitors to the New Poland in 1946 and the Future of Polish Jewry

Abstract

In this article, I will take a fresh look at the allegedly universal belief in the immediate post-war period that the Jews had no future in post-Holocaust Poland. While providing new analysis of reports from Poland in 1946 that were written by Jewish travellers from United States, Western Europe and Palestine, my revisionist goal is to problematize and question the concept of the ‘Holocaust aftermath.’ I seek to demonstrate that the widespread view of post-war Poland as the cemetery of Polish-Jewish civilization in the immediate post-war period did not – contrary to common perceptions today – necessarily lead to the conclusion that the subsequent marginalization of Polish Holocaust survivors and their departure from Poland was inevitable. This logic of inevitability crystallized only over the course of a couple of years. From 1946 to at least the intensification of the Communist dictatorship in 1948–49, such logic was matched by ambivalence and the cautious belief that a collective Jewish life, centred on national expressions of Jewish identity, was still feasible in Poland.