January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is a time to recall not only the murder of about 6 million Jews but also what happened to those who survived after the defeat of Nazism. Many remained in camps for a long time, had nowhere to return, and were forced to seek new lives in Europe, America, Australia, or the future State of Israel.
Historian Konstantin Pakhaliuk draws attention to a subject that scholars have only begun to study in detail in recent years: sexualized violence by Red Army soldiers against Jewish women who survived the Holocaust. Researchers say the issue remained under a triple taboo for decades: perpetrators stayed silent, victims feared speaking out, and society was unwilling to discuss abuse committed by those regarded as liberators.
“We went through hell after liberation. And nobody ever spoke about it — about the Russians,” recalled Warsaw Jewish survivor Lyuba Moskovits.
As historians including Nina Pavlovicheva, Anna Gaikova, and Carly Snyder note, testimony shows that fear of rape accompanied many former inmates of ghettos and camps. In the USC Shoah Foundation archive created by Steven Spielberg, more than 500 witnesses raised the issue themselves, although interviewers often did not pursue it further.
Research also covers violence inside Soviet partisan units. Historian Julia von Saal writes that Belarusian partisan detachments included 850 Jewish children, of whom 622 were aged 12 to 15; some later testified about abuse they endured. At the same time, some survivors also recalled Soviet Jewish soldiers who, on the contrary, protected women from assault.
Pakhaliuk argues that for many people liberation became an experience in which gratitude for survival coexisted with new fear and trauma. In his view, such testimonies challenge the simplified myth that opening the gates of a concentration camp was enough to bring freedom: for some survivors, violence did not end with the war.