Letters to the JDC as Autobiographical Sources of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Abstract

After the Holocaust, Jewish survivors in Poland relied on external help, including that of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint, JDC). They wrote letters to JDC both to request and to thank the American-based Jewish organization for i.a. food, clothes, medicine, and assistance with emigration from Poland. Many of those letters also contain autobiographical information about the authors, themselves Holocaust survivors and their families. The descriptions of wartime experiences and survival strategies as well as of immediate postwar life (1945–1949) entail details and snippets of historical and genealogical value. Therefore, the letters examined in this article offer both individual histories and a collective portrait of the Jewish population in postwar Poland. The epistolary material also captures JDC’s activities and their importance for reviving and sustaining Jewish life after the Holocaust.

Keywords

• Jewish survivors
• Holocaust
• postwar
• correspondence
• JDC
• ego-documents