“One of the Greatest Untold Stories of WWII”: A Decade-Long Quest after my Father and a Quarter Million other Holocaust Refugees

It is a largely unknown and astonishing fact that most Polish Jews who escaped Nazi extermination survived as refugees in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran and India. Mikhal Dekel, whose then 13-year-old father was such a refugee, will share her archival research and global travel to retrace their 13,000 mile route. Dekel tells a story at once intimate and historically sweeping, conversing along the way with Polish nationalists, Russian oligarchs and human rights activists, Iranians, Korean Uzbeks and Israelis, and painting a story of interlinked and divergent histories, of death and survival, of hospitality and cruelty, and of 20th- and 21st-century politics.

Mikhal Dekel is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (W.W.Norton, 2019) and other books and articles.

Ticket Info: $5 general at dekel.bpt.me or 800-838-3006, free for JGS/CJH members (tickets not required)