This is the first Eng­lish lan­guage schol­ar­ly book to describe the expe­ri­ences of the over 200,000 Pol­ish Jews who sur­vived the war and the Holo­caust in the unoc­cu­pied regions of the Sovi­et Union. While pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal con­text and archival data, the book focus­es pri­mar­i­ly on the day-to-day lives of the Pol­ish Jew­ish refugees. Dur­ing the peri­od of the war, they faced impos­si­ble choic­es, bewil­der­ing Sovi­et poli­cies, hard labor, hunger, dis­ease and dis­place­ment. How­ev­er, most were for­tu­nate enough to sur­vive, only to return to Poland after the war and encounter the destruc­tion of every­thing and every­one they left behind.