Why we stayed: Polish Jews’ reasons for remaining in Poland during two waves of postwar emigration

Abstract

Although Poland’s Jewish presence had been widely considered to be near-obsolete in 1980s, since the 1990s a small but visible revival of Polish-Jewish life has been taking place as many Polish Jews have opened up about and embraced their origins. By interviewing five Polish Holocaust survivors who never left their country of origin, I attempted to answer the question of why they remained while many others fled.