From the End of the Second World War to the Collapse of the Communist System
This chapter studies the situation of the Jews from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the communist system. The Second World War left the world of east European Jewry devastated. Although the Nazis had been defeated, they had succeeded in murdering a large proportion of the Jews of eastern Europe. The end of the wartime Grand Alliance and the increasingly repressive character of the regimes in the Soviet Union and in Poland form the background against which attempts were made to rebuild the war-torn societies of eastern Europe and to recreate Jewish life. The Nazi occupation left a landscape laid waste by the effort to impose a racially structured New Order and the violent and often fratricidal resistance that it elicited. The departure of the Germans did not lead to the end of hostilities, and guerrilla war against the communist authorities continued in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania.