The battle of Victims plays out in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies

[Merlin300]

The Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies has been drawn into the Battle of the Victims...Who suffered more,
prisoners of the Soviets or prisoners of the Germans?

Early Deportations of Jews in Occupied Poland (October 1939–June 1940): The German and the Soviet Cases
by Alexandra Pulvermacher
Abstract
After the division of Poland in September 1939 following the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, deportations of Polish citizens were part of the Nazis’ plan to “Germanize” western and northern Poland, though the Jewish dimension of these events has hardly been investigated. [and blamed on the Germans]
Beyond the organized deportations by the German Security Police, there were local initiatives to expel Jews to the Soviet Zone of partitioned Poland. In the Soviet-occupied Polish territories, many Jews were deported in 1940 to remote areas of the USSR either as “unreliable” or “class alien elements,” or because of their refusal to accept Soviet citizenship. While the brutal Soviet policies unintendedly saved the majority of deported Jews from German extermination, the German deportations were the precursors to total mass murder. This article describes and compares the deportations on both sides, reconstructs the German transports, and concludes that the USSR’s deportations were part of its ongoing war against political opponents and “alien elements,” whereas the Germans’ were stepping stones on Karl A. Schleunes’s “twisted road to Auschwitz.”
[Unmentioned is the deportation of Polish and Jewish citizens from the Danzig Corridor in 1940 was a mirror of deportation Germans who were driven out of their homes in 1919-1922.]



Whose Victims and Whose Survivors? Polish Jewish Refugees between Holocaust and Gulag Memory Cultures
by Lidia Zessin-Jurek
Abstract
Holocaust and Gulag studies are witnessing the belated emergence of the Soviet experience of Jewish escapees from Nazi-occupied Poland as a lieu de mémoire in its own right. Although not commemorated in official ritual, museum spaces, or memorial sites, the sheer mass of published testimonies by survivors of this experience far outweighs the previous lack of attention to the refugees’ story. It was the agency of the refugee survivors themselves which subsequently put their Soviet experience on the mnemonic map of World War II. This article discusses both the reasons for that lack of attention and the current growing interest in their accounts. It proposes a typology based on questions of victimhood and perpetratorship, analyzed through the contrast between the way the Jewish exiles in the USSR interpreted their experiences and how those who experienced the Holocaust directly interpreted theirs. The article thus asks, whose victims did the refugees consider themselves, the Germans’ or the Soviets’?