The author’s father seldom spoke of the past. She knew only the bare outlines: he fled from Poland ahead of the Nazis and spent a year in a seemingly unlikely refuge, Iran, before arriving in Israel. Not until she was far from that past, teaching at the City College of New York, did the author begin to fill in the blank spaces. To research Tehran Children, Mikhal Dekel followed her late father’s journey from Poland through Soviet forced labor camps in Central Asia. She didn’t dare cross the border into the next leg of his journey, Iran, but an Iranian-born colleague from CUNY helped with the leg work. Teheran Children illuminates a forgotten chapter of the Holocaust concerning several thousand Jews who escaped annihilation via a dangerous route. Many stories of determination, cruelty and kindness are uncovered along the way.
