JDC Archives Names Index Adds Lists of Polish Jews Who Fled to the West in the Bricha

The JDC Archives has completed a two-year project to index lists of Polish Jews who fled to Displaced Persons camps in the American Zones of Germany and Austria as part of the Bricha movement. The lists provide the names of nearly 30,000 individuals who passed through the JDC-operated way station at Nachod, Czechoslovakia, just over the Polish border, during the period June–December 1946.

Bricha (or Brichah) is a Hebrew word meaning “flight” or “escape.” It refers to a clandestine Zionist mass movement that took place immediately after the Holocaust with the goal of transporting Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to Palestine. According to Yehuda Bauer in Flight and Rescue: Brichah (1970), approximately 250,000 Jews participated from its beginning in the spring of 1945 until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. Although Jews from Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia participated, they generally traveled via other routes. The JDC Archives lists from Nachod identify the refugees as Polish, although some Soviet citizens were among them.

As an underground movement, with both departure from the country of origin and entry into British Mandate Palestine mostly illegal, the Bricha was loosely organized. Local leadership emerged from partisan survivors of the war, many of whom had links to Zionist youth movements. Representatives from Palestine were sent by the Mossad Aliyah Bet (Institute for “B” [Illegal] Immigration, which was under the auspices of the Haganah and, later, The Jewish Agency).

JDC covered much of the cost of transportation, food, and lodging en route. Due to the illegal nature of the activity, this financial support was often masked as aid to Zionist youth training centers, orphanages, and religious groups, which then passed the funds to Bricha representatives.

An early route of the Bricha ran north-south from Vilnius through Belarus and Ukraine to Chernivsti (Rom., Cernăuți; Ger., Czernowitz), crossing the border into Romania and leading to Bucharest and the Black Sea coast at Constanța, where the refugees would board ships to Turkey or Palestine. This route was eventually shut down by the Soviet Union. Other routes led to ports in Italy or southern France; these also slowed to a trickle once it became clear that the British would block entry to Palestine. These circumstances caused the Bricha to shift course and tactics: by establishing routes to Germany and Austria, the refugees would reach the safety of the Displaced Persons (DP) camps, and by gathering large numbers of Jews in the camps who wanted to go to Palestine, the political pressure on the British would increase.

Initially, the U.S. Army, which operated the DP camps, tried to bar these arrivals from entering the DP camps. They were not eager to see the refugee problem increase, nor did they wish to bear the increased cost of feeding and housing an ever-growing population. Following the August 1945 publication of Earl Harrison’s report on conditions in the DP camps, which was critical of U.S. occupation officials and the treatment of Jews, the Bricha refugees were allowed into the camps and the American zones more generally (Aleksiun, 2008, p. 161).

The Bricha system operated as a network of transit hubs. Central points in larger towns served as gathering places. The people would then be formed into groups that were led to a smaller town near the border and then to a border village, where a local Bricha guide would lead them across, handing them over to a Bricha guide on the other side. The group would board trucks to assembly centers like the one in Nachod and then to a railway station to continue their journey. Routes were created by bribing border guards and local village officials; as routes became unsafe, they were abandoned and new routes had to be established. According to Bauer (p. 151), by late May–early June 1946, the route over the Polish border from Kłodzko and Kudowa to Nachod became the main transit point into Czechoslovakia.

That the JDC Archives lists are from the second half of 1946 is no surprise, as this period represents the height of Bricha activity. Two events combined to lead to a massive increase in the number of Jews fleeing Poland. First, the USSR allowed Polish citizens who had spent the war in the Soviet Union to return to Poland. Many of the thousands of Jews among the repatriates who might have expected to resume their prewar lives quickly realized that they were not welcome. Second, on July 4, 1946, there was a major pogrom in the city of Kielce. Although there had been other pogroms in Poland after the end of World War II, the publicity surrounding the Kielce pogrom led many Jews to flee the country. According to Natalia Aleksiun (2008, p. 161), in the summer of 1946, from July to September, about 95,000 Jews fled Poland; the vast majority via the Bricha.

The JDC Archives lists represent a significant number of those who fled during that period. These documents were found in the JDC Archives’ Czechoslovakia office collection, 1945-1950, the period immediately after World War II until the communist government forced JDC to leave the country.

The lists, amounting to 750 pages, are organized by the date each group arrived in Nachod, often totaling several hundred per day. Information includes name, date of birth (or birth year only), and birthplace. In the earlier lists, from June and July, we find very specific birthplaces. Eventually, instead of small towns and cities, large city centers or regions are mostly listed—Lodz, Lviv, Warsaw, Bialystok, Katowice, etc.

A significant challenge for the staff and volunteers indexing the lists was the fact that the language of the lists is Czech. For the names, this meant that women’s surnames often included the feminine suffix -ova (e.g., Grossmanova, Veissmanova). The Czech forms of some of the names themselves were unfamiliar, for example, Švarc = Schwartz, Šrajer = Shrayer, Veic = Weitz. Following our standard indexing processes, we rendered the names as they appear on the page rather than attempting to guess at how they would have been spelled in Poland. Browsing through a few pages of the pdfs of the complete set of lists to gain some familiarity with the forms of names will be helpful prior to beginning a search.

For place names, however, it made no sense to use Czech forms for locations now in Poland and Ukraine, and we used the current form. In most instances, interpreting the Czech forms was obvious: Varsava = Warsaw, Belistok = Bialystok, Kelce = Kielce. Others were more difficult to decipher; knowing the pronunciation of the name in Polish often provided helpful clues, but in some instances we had to conduct some research to determine the place being referred to. Thus, Čhenstohova = Częstochowa, Biton = Bytom, Rubesov = Hrubieszów. When we were unable to find or confirm a location name, we recorded the spelling as on the page.

The complete set of Bricha lists is divided into three sections: June–July 1946, August 1946, and September–December 1946. Explore additional photos in our Bricha Photo Gallery.