Jacksonville Public Library

In the east, how my father and a quarter million Polish Jews survived the Holocaust, Mikhal Dekel

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages [401]-407) and index

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

In the east

bibliography

1233267418

Mikhal Dekel

how my father and a quarter million Polish Jews survived the Holocaust

"Despite decades of Holocaust scholarship, the full story of roughly a quarter million Jews -- the majority of Polish-Jewish survivors -- who escaped Nazi extermination in the Soviet interior, Central Asia, and the Middle East is largely unknown, even to their descendants. Literary scholar Mikhal Dekel, whose father was among these survivors, knew only that he had been rescued with a group called the "Tehran Children." To faithfully reconstruct his wartime experiences in the East, she delved into never-before-consulted files in Russian, Polish, Persian, and Hebrew, in archives on three continents. In person, she pursued traces of their past from deportations to gulags in Siberia to Uzbekistan and, with the help of an Iranian friend and colleague, to Tehran where the group lived until they were transferred to Karachi and then Tel Aviv. Dekel unearths the surprising and gripping history in order to reflect on the complex global politics behind refugee crises; on fate, identity, and memory; on her own family's past; and on the collective identity-creation that determines the histories we tell and those we forget."--Back cover

Introduction: New York City, 2007 -- "Each of us feels as if he is born again" : Iran, August 1942 -- "A liberal family" : Ostr̤w Mazowiecka, Poland, 1939 -- Border crossing : from Hitler to Stalin -- Ukazniks : laborers in Arkhangelsk and Komi, USSR -- "I am a Jew"; "I am an Uzbek" -- A Polish nation in exile, Jewish relief efforts : London, New York, and the USSR -- Samarqand : city of refugees -- Polish and Jewish nation building in Tehran -- Hebrew children : Kibbutz Ein Harod -- Epilogue: an untold story