Transient identity

"I am fighting for nobody else, but England. I have no family, I have no country, and my only hope is England."

These words, written by a soldier named Lilienfeld in July 1944, speak to a question central to this project: what belonging could mean for men who had reason to distrust the very institutions meant to protect them.

We have found it useful to think about this through what we call "transient identity": the idea that identity, for these men, was not fixed from the outset but held provisionally, shaped and reshaped by the institutions that processed them. Two ideas from other historians inform this. Peter Gatrell's concept of "refugeedom" describes refugee status as something ascribed and administered by others, rather than simply chosen. Victor Turner's idea of liminality describes people caught "betwixt and between" recognised social categories. Both help make sense of the range of journeys that brought these men to Britain, and the reclassifications many underwent along the way. Testimonies collected by the National Council for Civil Liberties describe men released from Soviet exile routed through Uzbekistan, Iran, Palestine and South Africa, reassessed at each stage: a medical category here, a segregated camp in Tehran there, exclusion from a draft bound for Palestine. Others reached Britain by way of France, or escaped occupied Europe through Spain and Portugal, or crossed the Atlantic as volunteers from Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Whatever the route, arrival in the Polish Army rarely meant simply being accepted as a soldier; it meant being placed, and often replaced, within a series of categories not of one's own choosing.

What the uniform could not settle 

Having crossed continents to reach the Polish Army, some of these men then found themselves treated as outsiders within the force they had volunteered to join.

Seweryn Pomeranc's case is one we keep coming back to. He volunteered at eighteen, spoke fluent English, and came from a well-connected, assimilated family, by most measures a soldier well placed to be accepted. He worked as a journalist for the army's own newspaper, writing under the name Tommy Atkins. Despite this, a sergeant told him there was no place for him in the army, that this was where Hitler had dealt with "your kind," and would have dealt with him too. Pomeranc left with the second group in 1944. His later life took an unexpected turn: he returned to Poland under an assumed identity, was arrested, became an informer for the security services, and eventually resurfaced in New York in the 1960s as a university professor. His story shows how unstable a sense of belonging could be when it rested on the goodwill of an institution.

Not every soldier reached the same conclusion about the Polish Army. Walter Juliusberger joined hoping, in his own words, to fight for "a better future for the Jews in Poland." He suffered a nervous breakdown after sustained harassment, left with the third group in March 1944, and was arrested and court-martialled for it despite an otherwise good record. In his testimony, he stated that he would have stayed had he been permitted to apply for transfer through proper channels, continuing to serve while he waited. His attachment to Poland did not disappear because of what he experienced there. It remained alongside it.

One moment from the archive needs little comment. Abram Zyspel, deported to the USSR after the 1939 campaign, later transferred into the British Army and served as an interpreter at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. There, he called out in Polish, Yiddish and German for anyone from his hometown. Three girls came forward. Their words to him were: "you're the only one, you will not find nobody."

For some, the years after 1944 became a period of reasserting a Jewish identity that had been suppressed or denied within the Polish Army, often in very concrete, communal ways. Zyspel settled in Glasgow and married into the city's Orthodox Jewish community. Charles Stevens, who remained in London, became a Jewish spiritual healer. Others simply rebuilt their lives within local Jewish communities, particularly in London and Glasgow, communities that offered a sense of belonging the army had not. Interestingly, several would rarely speak of their service in the Polish Army at all, while readily sharing stories of their time in the British forces with their children, as in the case of the Tasgal brothers. The silence around the Polish chapter, and the comparative openness about the British one, is itself a kind of evidence: a quiet marker of where these men eventually located their sense of belonging.

Taken together, these cases suggest that Jewish identity in this cohort did not simply replace Polish identity for men who felt rejected by the army. The two often coexisted uneasily, and for some remained unresolved even after naturalisation, which came mostly between 1948 and 1950. Naturalisation tended to follow the uniform these men had ended up wearing rather than any prior sense of national attachment. Of the 165 men and women in this part of our cohort whose naturalisation records we have traced so far, 85 eventually became British citizens.