Tehran Children, Mikhal Dekel
Tehran Children, Mikhal Dekel
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Tehran Children
A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey

Author: Mikhal Dekel

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 15 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/08/2019


Synopsis

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story—the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors—has never been fully told.

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 via Polish military transport to Iran. Months later, their Zionist caregivers escorted them via India to Mandatory Palestine, where, at the endpoint of their 13,000 mile journey, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Dekel fuses memoir with archival research to recover this astonishing story, with the help of travel companions and interlocutors, including an Iranian colleague, a Polish PiS politician, and a Russian oligarch.


About Mikhal Dekel

Mikhal Dekel is professor of English at City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Tehran Children; The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment; and Oedipus in Kishinev.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Nancy

This is probably one of the most complicated books I have ever tried to read. There is so much history here that I was completely unaware of. Like most American students, I had read and studied the Holocaust, but I had never read about all the refugees and the countries that took them in. The autho......more

Goodreads review by Kartik

A gripping narrative of Holocaust survival told from an almost vicarious viewpoint. A book about Holocaust unlike any I've read before, one where the focus is on the refugee. A journey that needs to be read to be felt. This book should be used to teach classrooms about the untold stories of the Holo......more

A story of guts, resilience, and luck -- and the true story of the author Mikhal Dekel's father, aunt and cousin -- and their journey as Jews in a small town in Poland, children of a brewery owner, a successful family generations in this town-- and how they flee east when the Nazis attack into Sovie......more

Goodreads review by Elliott

I've always had a fascination of what the holocaust was like for the younger generation of victims. This is one side of the story I had never really heard before.......more

Goodreads review by Mich

In this little known and harrowing story of the Holocaust, Mikhal Dekel traces the journey of 800,000 Poles and 400,000 Jews, along with her own grandparents and parents as they were forced out of their native Poland as Russia joined with Nazi Germany to carve up Poland. 250,000 out of the 350,000 P......more