A Memory of an Unknown Pogrom?

Abstract

The present text is a publication of “Testimony of L. Samoilov, born in Birobidzhan, regarding his experience as a Red Army Soldier”, which I discovered among personal testimonies coming from the USSR territory in the Yad Vashem Archives in the autumn of 2018. This document, titled “Birobidzhan fragments” and preserved in two copies (the first of them is in poor condition), describes life in Birobidzhan before the Second World War and in the spring and summer of 1945, anti-Semitic sentiments in the ranks of the Red Army, and an unknown pogrom in Birobidzhan carried out in 1945 by the soldiers of Rokossovsky’s army. The text is addressed to some unnamed “residents of Paris” and to some unnamed “residents of Israel”, who, as Samoilov puts it in both cases, “are interested in the character and further fate” of Birobidzhan. Although the text opens with the account of Birobidzhan history and current state, its major part focuses on the description of anti-Semitic behaviour of the Red Army soldiers, as well as military and labour exploits of Soviet Jews. The testimony produces the impression that it serves the purpose of undermining the conception, common in the USSR, that Jews had been sitting the war out upon being evacuated from the war zones, and giving evidence of anti-Semitism among the Red Army soldiers. The most enigmatic part of the document is the depiction of the “Birobidzhan St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre”: a Jewish pogrom orchestrated, as Samoilov asserts, by the soldiers of Rokossovsky’s army in 1945. This event is not reflected in the JAO inhabitants’ memory, nor it is mentioned in historical literature or regional studies. In my commentary on the document, I address the questions whether such pogrom could actually take place and why the account of this event ended up in Samoilov’s testimony.