In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust

By Mikhal Dekel

Book Overview

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 this 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. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393868451
• ISBN13: 9780393868456
• Release Date: December 2021
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.4" x 8.2"