Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, roughly a million and a half Polish Jews ended up in the Soviet Union at the onset of the war. Dekel's father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of them. After they fled their hometown town in eastern Poland, 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).
Beginning with the death of the inscrutable Tehran Child who was her father, Dekel recovers 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.

by Mikhal Dekel (Author)

Hardcover, 384 Pages 

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