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The Jews and the evacuation of Russians from the Kingdom of Poland in 1915
Konrad Zieliński
Abstract
It is estimated that during the first year of the war about 1,200,000 people were evacuated from the Kingdom of Poland (including tsarist officers, Russian teachers, officials, Orthodox clergy, workers from military factories and railroaders). The attempt to estimate the number of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland who were forced to move to Russia due to the war events is not easy. It is estimated that up to the moment when the Central States started to occupy the whole country, 800,000 to 1,000,000 people – besides ethnic Russians – were either forced to move or voluntarily left Poland, but those figures include also the part of Galicia occupied by the Russians. The data considers mostly Poles, and it’s difficult to establish the number of refugees of other nationalities, especially the Jews, who were often sent from place to place and did not leave the territory of the country. Accepting the most often quoted total number of 1,000,000 people displaced from the ‘Russian Poland’, Lithuania and Galicia and taking into consideration the fact that the Polish rescue organisations did not register and did not know about the fate of all the evacuated people, we may estimate the number of the escapees from ‘Russian Poland’ as 750,000 – 850,000 thousand. According to the statistics prepared by the Jewish aid committees in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Odessa for the day of 20 May 1915, 526,000 Jews from the Kingdom of Poland, the Lithuanian provinces, the Volhynia, Podole and Kurland, as well as the occupied part of Galicia were exiled, evacuated or escaped because of the approaching troops. According to some sources, ca. 340,000 of them were inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland. The evacuation of Russians in 1915 was accompanied not only by the most violent expulsions, but also by scorched earth policy. The peasants and the Jews were among those who suffered the most. However, for the Jews from Poland and Lithuania the war and evacuation was one of the most difficult experiences they had ever encountered. It turned out that the tsarist army was a true pillar of anti-Semitism, but robberies and destructions caused by the army were escalated by the local population.
Keywords:
The Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, Jews, warMost read articles by the same author(s)
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