Tehran Children A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey

Author Mikhal Dekel’s father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as “special settlements.” Then came a journey during which tens of thousands died of starvation and disease en route to the Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. While American organizations negotiated to deliver aid to the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who remained there, Dekel’s father and aunt were two of nearly one thousand refugee children who were evacuated to Iran, where they were embraced by an ancient Persian-Jewish community. Months later, their Zionist caregivers escorted them via India to Mandatory Palestine, where, at the endpoint of their thirteen-thousand-mile journey, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees (including over one hundred thousand Polish Catholics). The arrival of the “Tehran Children” was far from straightforward, as religious and secular parties vied over their futures in what would soon be Israel. Beginning with the death of the inscrutable Tehran Child who was her father, Dekel fuses memoir with extensive archival research to recover this astonishing story, with the help of travel companions and interlocutors including an Iranian colleague, a Polish PiS politician, a Russian oligarch, and an Uzbek descendent of Korean deportees. The history she uncovers is one of the worst and the best of humanity. The experiences her father and aunt endured, along with so many others, ultimately reshaped and redefined their lives and identities and those of other refugees and rescuers, profoundly and permanently, during and after the war. With literary grace, Tehran Children presents a unique narrative of the Holocaust, whose focus is not the concentration camp, but the refugee, and whose center is not Europe, but Central Asia and the Middle East.

From the celebrated historian of Nazi Germany, the story of a remarkable but completely unsung group that risked everything to help the most vulnerable In the early 1920s amidst the upheaval of Weimar Germany, a small group of peaceable idealists began to meet, practicing a quiet, communal life focused on self-improvement. For the most part, they had come to know each other while attending adult education classes in the city of Essen. But “the Bund,” as they called their group, had lofty aspirations—under the direction of their leader Artur Jacobs, its members hoped to forge an ideal community that would serve as a model for society at large. But with the ascent of the Nazis, the Bund was forced to reevaluate its mission, focusing instead on offering assistance to the persecuted, despite the great risk. Their activities ranged from visiting devastated Jewish families after Kristallnacht, to sending illicit letters and parcels of food and clothes to deportees in concentration camps, to sheltering political dissidents and Jews on the run. What became of this group? And how should its deeds—often small, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness and assistance—be evaluated in the broader history of life under the Nazis? Drawing on a striking set of previously unpublished letters, diaries, Gestapo reports, other documents, and his own interviews with survivors, historian Mark Roseman shows how and why the Bund undertook its dangerous work. It is an extraordinary story in its own right, but Roseman takes us deeper, encouraging us to rethink the concepts of resistance and rescue under the Nazis, ideas too often hijacked by popular notions of individual heroism or political idealism. Above all, the Bund’s story is one that sheds new light on what it meant to offer a helping hand in this dark time.

Golan's book is an eyewitness account of some of the most important events of the 20th century. This is a fresh and engaging story of the experience of Jewish refugees in the Soviet Union and Israel as seen through the eyes of a boy.

In 1939, as the Nazis closed in, Alfred Berger mailed a desperate letter to an American stranger who happened to share his last name. He and his wife, Viennese Jews, had found escape routes for their daughters. But now their money, connections, and emotional energy were nearly exhausted. Alfred begged the American recipient of the letter, “You are surely informed about the situation of all Jews in Central Europe.... By pure chance I got your address.... My daughter and her husband will go... to America.... Help us to follow our children.... It is our last and only hope....” After languishing in a California attic for decades, Alfred’s letter ended up in the hands of Faris Cassell, a journalist who couldn’t rest until she discovered the ending of the story. Traveling across the United States as well as to Austria, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Israel, she uncovered an extraordinary story of heart-wrenching loss and unforgettable love that endures to this day. Did the Bergers’ desperate letter find a response? Did they—and their daughters—survive? Did they leave living descendants? You will find the answers here. A story that will move any reader, The Unanswered Letter is a poignant reminder that love and hope never die.

The forgotten story of 200,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust as refugees stranded in remote corners of the USSR. Between 1940 and 1946, about 200,000 Jewish refugees from Poland lived and toiled in the harsh Soviet interior. They endured hard labor, bitter cold, and extreme deprivation. But out of reach of the Nazis, they escaped the fate of millions of their coreligionists in the Holocaust. Survival on the Margins is the first comprehensive account in English of their experiences. The refugees fled Poland after the German invasion in 1939 and settled in the Soviet territories newly annexed under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Facing hardship, and trusting little in Stalin, most spurned the offer of Soviet citizenship and were deported to labor camps in unoccupied areas of the east. They were on their own, in a forbidding wilderness thousands of miles from home. But they inadvertently escaped Hitler’s 1941 advance into the Soviet Union. While war raged and Europe’s Jews faced genocide, the refugees were permitted to leave their settlements after the Soviet government agreed to an amnesty. Most spent the remainder of the war coping with hunger and disease in Soviet Central Asia. When they were finally allowed to return to Poland in 1946, they encountered the devastation of the Holocaust, and many stopped talking about their own ordeals, their stories eventually subsumed within the central Holocaust narrative. Drawing on untapped memoirs and testimonies of the survivors, Eliyana Adler rescues these important stories of determination and suffering on behalf of new generations.

Winner of the 2022 PIASA Anna M. Cienciala Award for the Best Edited Book in Polish StudiesThe majority of Poland’s prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

For more than a century, much of the attention given to the Middle East has focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The rise of a Palestinian offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, transformed the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. According to Bard, the dispute, in the view of Hamas, is not over a division of Palestine, but rather about Jews ruling over Muslims and the presence of Jews on Islamic land. However, this Islamic-Jewish conflict is not simply confined to the Middle East. Muslim terrorist attacks have been directed at Jews all around the world, from Europe to Asia to Latin America. Radical Muslims in European countries are becoming more brazen, particularly in France, where the Muslims constitute nearly ten percent of the population. In just the last year, there have been several Muslim attacks on Jews throughout France. Death to the Infidels documents the growth of radical Islam in the Middle East and how, from the author's interpretation, it has transformed what had primarily been a political conflict into a one-sided religious war limiting the prospect for peace, particularly in Israel.

Barbed-Wire Matinee -- Five Shots -- Fire and Crystal -- The Rescuers -- Sunset Train -- The Basement and the Judge -- Spy Fever -- Nightmare Mill -- The Misted Isle -- The University of Barbed Wire -- The Vigil -- The Suicide Consultancy -- Into the Crucible -- The First Goodbyes -- Love and Paranoia -- The Heiress -- Art and Justice -- Home for Christmas? -- The Isle of Forgotten Men -- A Spy Cornered -- Return to the Mill -- The Final Trial.