To the “City of Bread”?

Holocaust Evacuation to Tashkent

Abstract

Composers, poets, academics, and even the state Yiddish theatre, were all evacuated between 1941 and 1942 as part of the Soviet intelligentsia. Evacuated families and intellectuals are an emerging category of Holocaust survivors. Soviet citizens were evacuated not according to levels of danger, but rather to the material value to the state. A comparison between the transit of Soviet evacuation, including Gulag transit, and the forced movement of Jews during the Holocaust links the victim groups and reveals the inextricable overlaps between the Holocaust and the Gulag. In both cases, there was uncertain language about travel vaguely “east” to the unknown republics of the central Soviet Union and to the death camps of the Generalgouvernement. The Jews who survived in the evacuation to Central Asia also had the memory of Soviet deportations to Siberian detention, the Gulag, and to Russian camps from which few returned. A discussion of Jewish life in Tashkent and evacuee interactions with local Bukharian Jews reveals the difficulties of life in Tashkent, the contributions of Jews both in the military and in home production that challenge pejorative post-war notions of cowardly Jews hiding from the front, and the various factors which led to integration – or the lack thereof – in the Central Asian community. The overlap between the Holocaust and the Gulag, the discussion of life in Tashkent, and a testimonial reading of evacuation establishes the frameworks for the rise of post-war Stalinist antisemitism in the Soviet Union and the preservation of Yiddish culture in exile in Central Asia.