Jewish Life in Postwar Poland – Searching for Traces

Jewish life in Poland immediately after the Holocaust was full of ambivalences and contradictory experiences: between self-determination and violence, mourning and new beginnings, reconstruction and emigration. In Lower Silesia, on former German territory, Jewish life briefly flourished again for a few years. At the same time, there were repeated attacks against Jews throughout the country, the largest of which was the Kielce Pogrom in the summer of 1946. This escalation of violence was one of the main reasons for the emigration of a large number of Holocaust survivors by the end of the decade.

The grandparents of Leipzig-based writer Rebecca Maria Salentin also experienced this. They came from shtetls in Eastern Europe. During the Second World War, the Germans murdered their families, but they themselves survived the ghettos and camps under adverse conditions. After the war, they both came independently to Szczecin, where they married. They left the city a year later. Two months before the birth of their first child, in the summer of 1946, they fled Poland to the Allied occupation zones. Rebecca Maria Salentin's father was born in a camp for displaced persons in Austria. For almost two years, the family lived as stateless persons in various camps, most recently in Cyprus, until they emigrated to Palestine/Israel in 1948.

Her grandparents never spoke again about their life in Poland and the murdered family members. That is why Rebecca Maria Salentin is attempting in her current book project to find traces of her Jewish grandparents and relatives in Poland and to trace what their lives were like before the Second World War and what happened to them during the Holocaust.

In a tandem tour of the exhibition »The Determining Gaze. Images of Jewish Life in Postwar Poland,« Rebecca Maria Salentin provides insight into her research and family history. Julia Roos, historian and curator of the exhibition, uses the exhibition to embed this personal story in the broader context of Polish-Jewish postwar history.

At the beginning of May 2025, Rebecca Maria Salentin was a guest at the Dubnow Institute as a scholarship holder. As part of the WRITE EAST program, she worked here on her current book project.