Estimating the Number of Jewish Refugees, Deportees, and Draftees from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in the Non-Occupied Soviet Territories

What is it about?

Previous estimates of the number of Jews from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (annexed by the USSR in summer 1940) who fled the 1941 Axis invasion are based on the estimated total number of Romanian Jews as of June 1941, itself based on the Romanian census of 1930; on the estimated number of Jews the returning Romanians murdered or deported to newly occupied Transnistria; on estimates of the number who died therefrom starvation and disease; and on estimates of the number who survived in Transnistria. This work, by contrast, draws upon heretofore unexplored Soviet documentation. Though these materials, too, give an incomplete picture, they and other non-archival sources allow the author to improve upon previous guesses, as well as to reflect on the experience of the refugees in the unoccupied Soviet territories.

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