Tales of Escaping Nazis Via Iran

Little researched or reported, the events related in “Tehran Children” form a highly significant chapter in the story of Jewish survival during World War II. On the one hand, this is a history of the agonizing experience of nearly 1,000 Jewish children, many of them orphans. Having suffered the profound dislocations — geographical, familial, psychological, spiritual — of the first stages of the German invasion of Poland in 1939, they went on to endure the horrific conditions of Soviet gulags before leaving for starving regions of Communist Uzbekistan. From there they were transferred to Iran. Ultimately, they arrived at kibbutzim in Mandatory Palestine in 1943, racked by malnutrition, typhus, dysentery, loss of family and loss of self.