Identity Profusions: Bio-Historical Journeys From "Polish Jew"/"Jewish Pole" through "Soviet Citizen" to "Holocaust Survivor"

Seeking to complement historical and documentary sources with personal memoirs and testimonies, in this chapter I explore written and oral accounts illustrative of the various pathways taken by Jews born in Poland who spent the war years under Soviet authority, and who later settled in Australia. Over the course of the war and through the following post-war decade, most were subject to a series of often less than voluntary geographical relocations. As well as having to readjust to new places, people, and surroundings they were also continuously required to negotiate a shifting, often bewildering and frequently contradictory mélange of structural and political forces impinging not only upon their family loyalties, communal connections and personal liberties, but in some instances challenging the very core of their personal understandings, beliefs and values. I suggest that taken together, such potentially destabilizing encounters required of this disparate group of serially displaced Jews continuous readjustments to, and reevaluations of, their subjective attachments to both previous and more recently ‘acquired’ religious, political and ethno-national social identity(ies).