“Tehran Children”: How a Thousand Unaccompanied Child Holocaust Refugees Ended up in Tehran
My father was a Holocaust refugee in Tehran. It was a place of refuge that was largely accidental. On 6 September 1939, fearing approaching Wehrmacht forces, his family fled their hometown in northeast Poland and crossed into the Soviet Union. They became four of roughly 1.5 million Polish Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Christian Poles, who found themselves under Soviet rule after Poland’s partition into Nazi and Soviet zones on 29 September 1939. The Soviets arrested and exiled approximately half a million of these people, including my father’s family, to gulags (slave labour camps) in Siberia, Arkhangelsk, Komi and elsewhere in the Russian interior.
In 1941, after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR, the Soviets amnestied this group as a consequence of multilateral negotiations that resulted in the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement of 30 July 30 1941. Two weeks later, they agreed that released Polish citizens would form an army in exile to fight the Nazis alongside the Allied Forces. To lead this initiative, the Polish government-in exile nominated Władysław Anders, a formerly incarcerated Polish general, whom Stalin then appointed. The Anders Army, as it became known, was evacuated out of the USSR to ensure its soldiers did not perish from hunger before they had begun fighting, and it was with this great tide of more than 100,000 soldiers and Polish civilians that my father travelled as a child refugee to Iran.
Before reaching Iran, he, his younger sister and their parents had spent three hair-raising years as refugees, deportees, and gulag slave laborers in Bialystok, Siemiatycze, Kovel, Arkhangelsk, Alma Ata and Samarqand. At the age of 14, he was evacuated to Iran by British forces, without his parents or other adult guardians; as a general rule, Soviet, Polish and British authorities prevented Jewish adults from exiting the USSR and boarding the evacuations to Iran, each for its own post-war reasons. (The Soviets planned to Sovietize Polish Jews and annex their eastern Poland towns; the Poles wanted to keep them out of a future ethnic Polish state; the British feared they would reach Palestine and exacerbate rising Arab-Jewish tensions there). With my father were his 13-year-old sister, their 12-year-old cousin, and nearly 900 other Polish Jewish children, aged 2-17.
Why Iran? Because Iran had bread; because by August 1942, Iran was under Allied forces’ control; and because it was the nearest place of evacuation for the Anders Army, which crossed the Caspian sea from Turkmenistan to Bandar Pahlavi. Very few Jews were admitted into the Anders Army, and the inclusion of approximately 6,000 Polish Jews in the evacuation – including Jewish soldiers and their families as well as unaccompanied children like my father – was the result of negotiations between the Jewish Agency for Palestine (the quasi-government of Palestine’s Jewish population) and the American Jewish Distribution Committee (a refugee aid organization that was created after World War I) with the governments of Russia, Britain, Iran and Poland (whose government-in-exile was based in London).
In Tehran, my father and the other children were gathered in what was named “the Hebrew Children’s Home of Tehran”: three large tents and one building, which housed the youngest kids, inside a much larger refugee camp for Polish citizens, one of several such camps that were erected by Allied forces and Iranian officials in Tehran, Mashhad and Isfahan. Conditions at the Hebrew Children’s Home were harsh. Child refugees slept on the floors with one blanket each; most had no coats, sweaters and sometimes no shoes in freezing temperatures and snowy conditions. They received aid from international Jewish organizations as well as local Persian Jews and others who found refuge in Tehran (wartime Iran was home to German, Austrian, and Iraqi Jewish refugees), yet they continued to be hungry and neglected. Their caretakers, refugees only a few years older, were untrained and inadequate. Inside the larger Polish refugee camps, which became highly nationalistic, they were discriminated against and bullied by their Christian countrymen.
Nonetheless, conditions in Iran were better for these children, who were either orphaned or separated from their parents, than anything they had encountered in the three years prior. Certainly, they were better than those of the many Jewish children, including my father’s cousins, who remained in Nazi-occupied Poland. As refugees and even as slaves, they had a chance at survival when others did not. After the war, when it would become known that three million, or ninety percent of Polish Jews were murdered, they would become known as the “Tehran Children,” the “lucky ones” who were saved. That is how I thought of my father throughout my childhood: lucky.
A couple of decades later, the question of how and why my father found himself in Iran, over 5,000 miles away from his hometown of Ostrow Mazowiecka, set me off on a decade-long research project that ended up spanning three continents and culminated in a 400-page book, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (published in paper-back as In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust). To write this book, I recreated by plane and train much of the route my father had treaded by car, cart, train and foot. I interviewed former refugees, and those who came into contact with them in Poland, Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran, India and Palestine. I dug into materials in many archives: at the Hoover Institute in Stanford; the USHMM in Washington DC; the Sikorski Museum in London; the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem; the KGB Archives in Tashkent; the Iran State Archives in Tehran; Memorial Archives in Syktyvkar (the latter three via proxies), and others. In time my focus was no longer on Iran exclusively, but more broadly on the fate of these survivor refugees. What determined where they ended up and how they got there? How did they manage to survive (or die) in conditions of essential famine in the USSR? How did they understand what was happening to them? How do they, and others, understand these experiences today?
The history I recount in my book begins with my father’s prewar life in Ostrow Mazowiecka, Poland, where his bourgeois Jewish family had lived a relatively stable and secluded life as owners of a successful brewery. It continues with their exile and enslavement in a gulag in Arkhangelsk. Those who survived the gulags in the Arctic North – at least a quarter died – were then re-exiled to kolkozes – collective farms - in the five Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where many more died of starvation and starvation-related diseases. The majority of Polish Jewish refugees, including my grandparents, would remain in Central Asia for the duration of the war; after it ended, they found themselves in Displaced Person camps in Germany and Austria, sometimes for many years. A small minority would be evacuated to Iran, India, East Africa and Palestine, where most Christian Polish refugees, including many children, were evacuated as well. Christian Polish children studied in Catholic and other schools in Nazareth, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; Polish Army in Exile soldiers trained in the Galilee; and Polish civilians studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and elsewhere. Most Christian Poles were evacuated to Great Britain and elsewhere when the British Mandate ended. A few stayed put and became Israeli citizens.
This is a history that belongs to hundreds of thousands, but has curiously remained largely untold. Three and a half million Jews lived in Poland before the war; 350,000 were alive by the time it ended; and roughly 250,000 of these survived as refugees in the USSR and the Middle East. It is the history of most Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors. So why has the story that belonged to the majority of survivors not been told? Why does it remain largely neglected and un-commemorated today?
There are several answers to this question, both general and specific.
Refugee histories in general are not collectively documented and commemorated. Collective histories are largely curated by existing or aspiring nation-states, while refugee stories are largely transnational, falling outside the jurisdiction of any single memory regime. We know the story of Palestinian refugees within the context of the Palestinian national struggle; we know the story of Syrian refugees within the context of the Syrian Civil War. Uzbeks know the story of WW2 refugees like my father and grandparents mostly through idealized depictions of the aid and rescue provided by their countrymen. In Tashkent, there is a large public statue of Shaakhmed Shamakhmudov, an Uzbek blacksmith said to have adopted fifteen refugee children. In Israel, a “Tehran Children Street” exists in several cities, commemorating the group of children who were said to have been rescued by the budding Jewish nation-state. Until I wrote my book, I myself did not think of my father as anything else than a “Tehran child,” and especially not as a Holocaust survivor or refugee whose prewar life in Poland had been upended and become largely contingent and arbitrary.
One of the most startling revelations for me was the realization that every point of transit for my father had been an end point for many others. They stayed where my father passed through – Siberia, Uzbekistan - and in many cases they or their offspring still live there. Some refugees who were exiled to Arkhangelsk or Komi remained there even after they were released from gulags. Others married or were adopted in Samarqand, Alma Ata, or Tehran. They became, invariably, Soviet, Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh, or Iranian, just as my father became Israeli. They had children whose children in turn I met, and in whose image I saw my own fate had my father’s refugee trajectory been even slightly different. These children and grandchildren no longer presented themselves as refugees or descendants of refugees, but as Russian or Uzbek or Persian. Some did not even know their family refugee history, as research and commemoration of the gulag is still largely repressed in Russia, archives are partly inaccessible (as they are in Uzbekistan and Iran), and Holocaust education is non-existent or distorted.
Yet even in the United States and Israel, most descendants of these former refugees do not fully or even minimally understand their parents’ or grandparents’ experiences, so much so that scores of them wrote to me in amazement after my book’s publication. “It is startling to discover in a book written by a stranger, answers you have always been seeking, even unconsciously, to the most fundamental personal questions,” the journalist Ruth Franklin, the granddaughter of refugees, writes in a New York Review of Books piece about the book. She wonders, as do I, how this unacknowledged history of refugee survivors has shaped us and what we can learn from it today.
Header Image: A Jewish Orphanage in Tehran
For further reading:
Adler, Eliyana, Survival in the Margins: Polish Jewish Refugees in the Wartime Soviet Union (Harvard UP, 2020)
Bahari, Maziar, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (documentary). London, 2020. Iran Wire. https://vimeo.com/448465492/635a9b77f5
Dekel, Mikhal, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (WW Norton, 2019). Published in paperback with new material and epilogue as In the East: How My Father and a Quarter Million Polish Jews Survived the Holocaust (WW Norton, 2021)
--- ibid. “Between Hostility and Intimacy: Christian and Jewish Polish Citizens in the USSR, Iran, and Palestine.” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Vol. 35 (2023)
Edele, Mark, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Atina Grossmann, eds. Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Wayne State University Press, 2017)
Franklin, Ruth, “The Lucky Ones.” NYRB October 21, 2021
Kaveh, Yehuda and Dalia Guttman, The Children of Teheran (documentary). Tel Aviv, 2007. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt23836790/mediaviewer/rm177093377/?ref_=tt_md_3
Sinai, Khosrow, The Lost Requiem (documentary). Tehran, 1983. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry5ERzEOU5c
