Jews in Kazakhstan during the Second World War

Wartime arrivals followed different routes

In 1941 and 1942, Kazakhstan became one of the main destinations in the Soviet rear for evacuation. Alongside factories, institutions and specialists, civilians were moved from territories threatened by the German advance. Kazakhstan’s history portal records 386,492 evacuated arrivals between August 1941 and January 1942, and around 532.5 thousand evacuees from the western regions of the USSR across 1941 and 1942 as a whole.

These overall figures cover all evacuees and do not provide a separate total for Jews.

Jews arrived in Kazakhstan for different reasons.

• Soviet Jews officially evacuated with factories, institutions or families;
• people who left areas near the front independently and were registered as evacuees only later;
• refugees who managed to flee east before or during the German advance;
• Polish Jews who came under Soviet rule after the partition of Poland in 1939 and were subsequently deported to special settlements in Kazakhstan or elsewhere in the USSR;
• Polish citizens released in 1941 who, following the “amnesty”, moved to Central Asia in search of food, work, relatives or a chance to join Polish military formations;
• prisoners, exiles and special settlers for whom Kazakhstan was a destination of forced Soviet displacement, rather than evacuation.

These groups differed in their reasons for arrival and their living conditions.

Soviet evacuation was not a separate programme to rescue Jews

After Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, millions of people moved east. For Jews, successfully leaving territory that would come under German occupation often meant escaping the Holocaust. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than a million Soviet Jews managed to flee to the Asian parts of the USSR. They became the largest group of European Jews to survive Nazi extermination by escaping to the Soviet rear.

This does not mean that the Soviet Union carried out a separate state evacuation specifically for Jews as a group, intended to save them from genocide. Researchers of Soviet evacuation distinguish the nationwide evacuation of the population from its later portrayal as a targeted “operation to rescue Jews”.

General Soviet evacuation and the possibility of escaping east independently saved many Jewish lives. They moved within the same wartime and administrative system as other evacuees, without a separate corridor based on ethnicity.

The number of Jewish arrivals cannot be reduced to one reliable figure

Popular accounts give a figure of more than 100 thousand Jews arriving in Kazakhstan during the evacuations of 1941 and 1942. Differences in record keeping mean it cannot be treated as an undisputed total.

Historian Sergey Maksudov notes that even the total number of Soviet citizens evacuated in 1941 and 1942 has not been definitively established. Official registration did not capture everyone who left independently, moved more than once or did not pass through formal evacuation points.

Archival records provide dated snapshots, rather than a single nationwide total.

For example, by 1 September 1941, a source counted 8,218 Jews among 24,258 evacuees already settled in the Kazakh SSR. A separate study of Kyzylorda Region records 14,521 Jews among 30,062 arrivals during the early evacuation period, almost half the population registered in that snapshot. In Fort Shevchenko on 10 November 1941, 507 of 718 evacuees were Jewish; in Dossor, Jews accounted for 324 of 588 people.

These figures show very high proportions of Jews in particular flows and places. They cannot, however, be added together as independent components of a nationwide total without checking the periods covered, duplicate registration and methodology.

These different snapshots do not establish a single final figure for Jewish evacuation to Kazakhstan. Calculating it would require a compatible set of primary statistics.

Archives document arrivals and how people settled

The State Archive of West Kazakhstan Region preserves a separate collection of the commissioner of the Population Evacuation Administration. It contains lists of arrivals by district and in Uralsk, records of employment, arrangements for everyday living, financial assistance, complaints, bread coupons, medical staff and searches for relatives.

The arrival of a train was not the end of evacuation. People then needed housing, work, food, medical care and provision for children; families might move within a region or the republic several more times.

Such collections make it possible to search for someone through a general evacuee list, a district, a workplace, an application for assistance or a departure document.

Kyzylorda Region was a major centre of Jewish evacuation

A regional study of Kyzylorda shows how much evacuation could change local demographics within months. In one registration snapshot covering 1941 to early 1942, Jews accounted for 14,521 of 30,062 registered evacuees.

People were housed beyond Kyzylorda itself. Evacuees were sent to districts, collective farms and state farms, and their distribution kept changing.

Another route into Kyzylorda Region was Soviet internal exile. Levi Yitzchak Schneerson lived in exile in Chiili. His story belongs to political repression rather than the evacuation system, although the two existed side by side in the same region during the war.

Escape could be followed by extremely harsh conditions

The phrase “evacuated to the safe rear” can easily give a false impression of normal, organised life.

Kazakhstan’s archival records describe weeks of travel, shortages of railway carriages, interruptions to food supplies and sanitary care, overcrowded housing, illness, a lack of transport from stations, difficulties feeding children and the need to sell the last of one’s possessions for food. Some arrivals were sent to rural areas where work and food rations were linked.

People were outside the zone of German occupation and mass extermination, but the risk of death had not disappeared. Hunger, infectious disease, cold and exhaustion remained part of everyday life in the Soviet rear.

For Polish Jews who had already been through special settlements and camps, this experience might follow months or years of Soviet coercion.

Rescue and antisemitic conflict coexisted in Kazakhstan

Local residents welcomed evacuees into their homes and helped them survive and work. State bodies established evacuation centres, distributed assistance and tried to find places for people to settle. At the same time, archival documents record bureaucratic indifference, serious conflicts and antisemitism.

In October 1942, the USSR prosecutor reported that 20 people had been convicted in Kazakhstan during the first half of 1942 for agitation for pogroms, incitement and acts of hooliganism against evacuated Jews. Between 1 August and 4 September alone, another 42 people were brought to trial in such cases in Alma-Ata and Semipalatinsk regions.

Individual letters from evacuees describe attempts to evict Jewish families from collective farms and physical violence. Authorities intervened and held perpetrators accountable, but the existence of such cases shows that Jewish refugees and evacuees encountered antisemitism in the Soviet rear too.

Accounts of help from people in Kazakhstan and records of antisemitic crimes belong to the same wartime reality.

Polish Jewish experiences in wartime Kazakhstan

After the partition of Poland in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews found themselves on Soviet territory. Some had lived in eastern Poland; others had fled there from areas under German occupation.

Soviet authorities arrested Polish citizens and deported large numbers to Siberia, northern regions and Kazakhstan. A recent study in Holocaust and Genocide Studies estimates that between 68 and 71 thousand Polish Jews were deported and around 24 thousand arrested. These figures cover the whole USSR and do not give a separate Kazakhstan total, but they demonstrate the scale of forced migration.

Their situation changed after Germany attacked the USSR and the Sikorski–Mayski agreement was concluded in summer 1941. Polish citizens received the so-called “amnesty”, after which many left camps and special settlements and moved towards the south of the USSR, including Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics.

The same person might first flee the Nazis in Poland, then be deported by Soviet authorities, come to Kazakhstan after release and survive most of the war there.

Such a life cannot be described simply as “evacuation”.

Miriam Lewent’s family experienced several of these forms of displacement

USHMM preserves Miriam Lewent’s oral testimony. Her family fled after the German invasion of Poland, came under Soviet rule and was deported to Siberia. They were released after Germany attacked the USSR. They planned to return to Poland, but much of the family ultimately spent the remaining war years in Kazakhstan; Miriam’s father taught Hebrew to Jewish children there.

Adam Kahane’s account follows another route through Kazakhstan

Another personal testimony at USHMM concerns Adam Kahane. After Polish citizens were released, he travelled by train to Kazakhstan with relatives and lived on a collective farm near Lenger-Ugol. Later, Adam and his male cousin attended a nursing school in Chimkent and graduated in spring 1945.

After the war, Kahane returned to Poland and later emigrated to the United States.

Not all Polish Jews remained in the USSR until the end of the war

Some Polish citizens were able to leave the Soviet Union with General Władysław Anders’s army and civilian refugees in 1942. USHMM estimates that more than 116 thousand Polish military personnel and civilians left for Iran, including around 5 to 6 thousand Jews.

Another academic study estimates that between 6 and 7 thousand Jews left with Anders’s army and civilian groups. The counting boundaries differ; estimates of a similar scale cannot be presented as one exact number.

Some released Polish citizens travelled through Central Asia. The social and organisational network of the Polish government in exile also worked with people in Kazakhstan.

Deportation, special settlement and the Gulag were different systems

The word “exile” often conceals different forms of forced Soviet displacement.

• Deportation to a special settlement. Forced administrative relocation came with restrictions on residence and movement.
• Arrest and imprisonment in the Gulag system. These were measures of the criminal and repressive system of camps and colonies.
• Individual internal exile. Levi Yitzchak Schneerson’s case is one example.
• Labour mobilisation and other compulsory movements. These operated under their own separate regimes.

One person might pass through several of these statuses in succession. The general description “repressed” explains neither the form of coercion nor the date or basis of displacement.

Evacuation lists are not ready-made lists of Jews

Kazakhstan’s archival collections often record evacuees by surname, place of arrival, district, occupation or family composition, but not necessarily by ethnicity or religion.

A surname on an evacuation list does not by itself establish someone’s ethnic or religious identity.

Ethnicity can be used only where it is explicitly recorded in a source, or where identification is supported by independent biographical documents.

How the war changed the post-war community

The third major wave of Ashkenazi migration to Central Asia took place during the Second World War and the immediate post-war period. After the war, some evacuees returned to their former cities, Polish citizens were repatriated to Poland, and others stayed in Kazakhstan, started families and became part of local professional and urban life.

The sharp growth of Kazakhstan’s Soviet Jewish community in the mid-twentieth century was not explained by natural increase alone, or by a single evacuation campaign. It reflected pre-war internal migration, repression and exile, wartime evacuation, independent flight and the decision of some arrivals to remain after the war.

In brief

• 1941 and 1942. Kazakhstan became a major destination for the general Soviet evacuation of people and enterprises.
• By 1 September 1941. Sources record 8,218 Jews in the early registered flow to the Kazakh SSR. This is an early snapshot, not a wartime total.
• Kyzylorda Region. One regional record shows 14,521 Jews among 30,062 evacuees. These data show the scale of the local flow but are not a component of an already established nationwide total.
• A nationwide total for Jewish evacuation has not been established because of differing methods, incomplete registration and overlapping forms of migration.
• Soviet evacuation saved many Jews who escaped areas under German occupation. There was no separate evacuation programme based on Jewish identity.
• Polish Jews. Some arrived in Kazakhstan through Soviet deportations in 1940 and 1941, then moved to Central Asia following the “amnesty”.
• 1942. Some Polish Jews were able to leave the USSR with Anders’s army and civilian refugees via Iran.
• Kazakhstan’s rear offered relative safety from Nazi extermination. Living conditions nevertheless included hunger, illness, a housing crisis and hard labour.
• Antisemitism. Archival documents record antisemitic incidents and the prosecution of participants in Kazakhstan in 1942.
• After the war. Some people left and others stayed. Wartime migrations helped shape Kazakhstan’s post-war Jewish life.