About 230,000 Polish Jews survived the German occupation, the war, and the Holocaust in the unoccupied interior of the Soviet Union. This article utilizes numerous ego-documents to trace the paths of the refugees and those deported to Soviet labor camps. Although the survival of both groups in a foreign land was never guaranteed, their stay in the Soviet Union proved to be life-saving in retrospect – a fact that long received little attention from the public and academia. The article ends by describing the long road from exile back to Poland and on to the camps for Displaced Persons in occupied postwar Germany.