From the Gestapo to the Gulags Book

Between September 1939 and 1941, several hundred thousand Polish Jews were deported by the Soviets from eastern Poland to the eastern reaches of the USSR, or fled there in the wake of the German invasion. For reasons that have not been properly researched, these people did not usually write their memoirs. Zev Katz is an exception. Today, a retired university academic, living in Jerusalem, Katz belongs to a tightly knit family from a small Jewish town in Poland, called Jaroslaw. They were first expelled by the Gestapo from their town into the Soviet-occupied eastern Polish territories, and were then deported to a desolate place in southern Siberia. They were finally permitted to settle in the city of Semipalatinsk in northern Kazakhstan. Thus, the family survived the German terror, the Gulag and 'civilian' Soviet life, and then, finally, returned to Poland after the War. However, the Katzes had to flee the anti-Semitism that was still rife in post-war Poland, and immigrated illegally to Germany, from where they managed to make it to Israel. Here, Zev Katz fought in the 1948 War of Independence, before finally settling down as a journalist and an academic.