3/3/23
The book starts in 2007 while working at City Collage NY at the dept. of Literature with a colleague Salar Abdoh who had fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Her father was a Teheran child but was not traumatized by the holocaust like most survivors. He arrived in Palestine after a journey of 13,000 kilometers in 1943.
By the time they arrived in Iran they had endured so much hunger and sickness that they were dying in droves. "Children of Zion" testimonies by Henryk Grynberg he also wrote some books in fictional form. "Children do not manipulate information the tell it as it is." With Poland occupied the Polish soldiers escaped to Paris and later to London under Wladyslaw Sikorsky's Polish Government in Exile. Norman Neumark at Stanford University found material that he sent to Grynberg
A few children kept diaries of the journey. They were taken by ship to the south of the Caspian to Bandar Pahlavi and arrived to see Chevrolet and Studebaker trucks parked at the port.
1942 by this time Persia had mandatory education and was being developed by German engineers and Iranian engineers trained in Germany. Germany wanted oil from Iran while Iran wanted protection from Russia. German Jewish engineers were trying to get visas at the Iranian embassy in Berlin. Iran declared neutrality in 1939. A pro German PM Ahmad Martin Daftari and ordered that Jews should not works in Government offices. * month later he was replace by a pro British PM Ali Mansour.
1941 August an Anglo, Soviet Alliance and Britain and Russia occupied Iran. The Iranian oilfields had been under the control of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company since 1909 and were worried about Germany getting them for the war. Initially the Iran embraced the refugees as victims of the Soviets.
1906 the situation for Jews improved when a constitutional revolution granted full rights of citizenship to all minorities. By 1942 besides Polish Jews the were Austrian and German Jews who had fled from Hitler. Bukharan Jews escaped the Soviets and Caucasian Jews used their Iranian passports to out of Soviet territory. Wealthy Iraqi merchants set up business in Teheran.. Solel Boneh was encouraged by the British to sent 450 skilled workers to set up a refining facility in Abadan . This occurred after Burma fell to the Japanese so making Iran one of the allied only oil facilities and it was encouraged by Churchill. Mossad Aliyah Bet agents also arrived. Their were over 5000 Polish non Jews who remained in Iran and married locals their children got Polish passports to go to Europe because of 1979 Islamic Revolution, but only after1998.
The Teitel family originated in Ostrow Mazowwieka Poland and ran a very big brewery. Before WW2 9.5% of Poland's population was Jewish compared to O.75% in Germany, 0.6% in France. By the beginning of the 20C half of Poland's urban population was Jewish.
1935 Persia changed its name to Iran as only half the population were Farsi speaking the others were minorities.
Once the war began the family took 2 Chevrolet trucks and used them to flee to the Soviets. Under the Soviets anything useful in Poland the carted away eastwards, entire factories furniture and food. The uncle Zindel Teital relinquished his Polish citizenship for Soviet and was appointed superintendent for breweries for the Bialystok area.
Some made a choice to return to the Nazi region and survived while others in the Soviet area did not.
His father registered to return home and they were all rounded up and sent to the Timber Amalgamation which was short of workers because of the Russo Finish war to be in special settlements not Gulags in Komi near Archangel . Adults chopped wood while children under 13 were sent to school. Soccer coach Avram Grants parents had been in this area. Ethnic Germans from the Volga region were also deported to here. They had been in the Volga Republic are since Catherine the great who brought them and offered them free land and there 800,000 of them there.
1940 April 22000 Katyn Massacre. Polish officers and intelligencia murdered by Soviets.
1941 June When Russia attacked by Hitler. Wladyslaw Sikorski the PM of the Polish gov in exile with Soviet Ambassador to London and in the presents of Churchill and Antony Edan. All Polish Citizens in the Soviets would be given an amnesty and a Polish army in exile would be established on Soviet soil, to fight the Nazis. About 300, 000 Jews were in this group. Colonel Wladyslaw Anders was released and given the task to form the Polish army in exile. Most Polish on Soviet soil headed for the Muslim republics of Central Asia.
1925 Uzbekistan became a Socialist Republics. Under the Soviets farmers were not allowed to grow wheat or rice but only cotton. Farmers grew a few vegetables at their homes but did not grow spare food to sell. Refugees were sent to Kolkhozes or refugee camps.
In the US there were 5 million Polish citizens. With the JDC or Joint million of dollars were collected and ship of food used clothing and medicines were sent via Iran to the Polish army in exile and Jewish refugees but they received very little of this even though the warehouses were bursting with supplies. This was negotiated through the Polish government in London but many of them were anti-Semites.
Initially Anders recruited Jews but when it transpired that between 40 to 60% of the soldiers in the first units were Jewish after that they only let very few Jews join, they kept this down to 10%. This they claimed were NKVD orders but it was really Poles that made the rules. Yurii Zhukov of the Tashkent NKVD claimed that this was entirely up to the Polish There was however a very successful Jewish army unit under Anders. The Polish military camps had been turned into feeding stations.
In Samarkand the Poles set up orphanages and later on when Catholic Poles started being evacuated so more Jewish kids came to these. They left their parents as there got Polish schooling and some food.
1942 August evacuations with Anders army started. Most children chosen for evacuation were sent by their parents even though they knew they would never see each other again. Around 116,000 were sent of which 5% or 6000 were Jewish. Moshe Shertok was the representative of the Jewish Agency who negotiated this with Britain.
The JDC were wary of funneling money through the Polish Embassy as some Polish Government in Exile member were professed anti-Semites. Trainloads of donated good and bustling warehouses but hardly any was being distributed to Jews.
Many Polish women became prostitutes' in Iran and many Poles remained or married iranians. After the Islamic revolution 1979 and end of Cold War in 1989 their children received Polish citizenship.
Initially the refugees were welcomed as victims of the Soviet but with their demand for food and clothing it unhinged the market and the local started complaining.
The Jewish agency Youth Immigration Department was under Henrietta Szold. In Persia the Jewish children started being taught to reclaim their Jewish Identify and self respect they had nothing left to claim of Polish identity.
1941 in Iraq British forces defeated the pro Axis government of Rashid Ali Al Gaylani he was now replaced by pro British Nuri as Said.
From this period Solel Boneh sent 250 technician to build in Persia including oil refineries under the British, later in the 1960 Israel became the modernizers of Iran replacing what the Germans had done in the past
1231 Refugees were put on a Red Cross ship of them 836 were children. It was from Iranians that the Aliyah Bet started the first mass movement of people. Instead of a 48 hour drive from Teheran to Tel Aviv it took 48 days by sea first they were taken to Karachi of British Colonial India. At the time ships moved in conveys , due to Japanese and German submarines mines as many as 70 British ships were sunk in the Indian Ocean in 1942.They sailed on to Aden and then to El Kantara where they were met by British troops who had been recruited from the Yishuv including Lova Eliav. From there put on a train from their to Haifa. The British wanted them at Atlit the Internment Camp to register and process them. Henrietta Szold had made sure that Atlit was clean and ready for them she was 82 at the time and had arrived in Palestine at the age of 60. She had had a social network with Jehuda Magnes Ernst Simon and Martin Buber who had a political party Ichud that believed that Israel would be a binational state. Szold died in 1945 and was replaced by Hela Gerlich. Hannan approached her to send food parcels to his parents and heard that they got there. Of the Polish Catholic orphans who were in Isfahan 733 were sent on a ship to New Zealand, some Jewish kids were definitely amongst them. Others children were sent to Kenya , Uganda and Tanzania. Non Jews lined up at the office to get visas to Palestine but were rejected. About 70,000 Anders army with many families and hundred of orphans were taken to Palestine across Iraq.
30,000 Poles were taken into Palestine which absorbed them and was now the principal Catholic Polish centre in the Middle East. They were spread around all the major cities and it became a big cultural centre. There were many Polish language newspapers and new editions of Polish books were published at the Hebrew University in fact 340 Polish language books were publish in Palestine. The Anders army trained and went off and fought at the battle of Monte Cassini.
Religious parties did what they could to get hold of these children and stop them from going to kibbutzim. The United kibbutz movement decided to take in 400 of the the thousand children.
1942 April it was now officially publish about the mass extermination of Polish Jewry through information by Jan Karski who escaped Poland and informed the Polish government in exile. Until them the British knew about this but kept it secret. Antony Edan read out a statement in the house of Lords.
Sikorski gave orders not to search for Jews that had left the Polish Army in Palestine. Anders did not oppose this but the British did.
Poles in Palestine were given a stipend to study by the Polish delegation at places like the Hertzlia Gymnasium and Hebrew University where the Jewish children like the writers father had to both study, learn Hebrew and work on the kibbutz.
The Home army in Poland did not help the Warsaw Ghetto when Mordechai Anielevicz called for help and to bring weapons.
1943 Jan this Amnesty of Polish citizens was revoked and Feb 1943 the German army in was defeated in Stalingrad.
The authors parents returned to Poland but discovered they were not welcome would never received back their assets and moved to Munich to a DP camp. Here her father who had Tuberculosis for a long time died. After independence her was able to get to Israel where she tried the kibbutz and then settled with her son in his Haifa flat where she lived for nearly 2 decades. In Israel her father changed his name from Teitel to Dekel which both mean date palm.
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