Thread by @goldbe

My grandmother was one of these children.

https://twitter.com/RealTimeWWII/status/1363588105505296391

The stories my grandmother told me about her journey never really made sense, because she travelled so far. 🧵

“The children ... went via Bukhara to Kazan and Ashkhabad (on the Iranian border), and from there to Pahlavi.”

encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…

I know she spent a long enough time in Uzbekistan for it to figure regularly in her stories. She claimed to have learned to speak Uzbek at this time.

She lived in a hut, and it was muddy. There was not enough food. She always talked about the mud.

She lived with a boy and his parents in the hut in Uzbekistan. She would tell me that he didn’t know how to survive as well as he did, and she taught him.

By this point in the story, she’d already run away from her home in Poland, leaving her entire family.

After that, she’d been in forestry work camp somewhere very cold in “Siber” in the USSR. From there she somehow arrived at Uzbekistan. I never understood how.

What I know about “Siber” is that it was cold and she lived in a cabin in the forest with other girls. She didn’t have a proper coat. My grandmother had a droopy eyelid that bothered her her whole life. She claimed this was because the cold in “Siber” damaged her face.

So, as far as I can tell, my grandmother goes from the forestry work camp in “Siber” in the USSR, to Uzbekistan, somehow.

If anyone has an insight on how she managed that, I’d appreciate the insight. I really never understood how she did it.

Now that she gets to Uzbekistan, her story merges with the known story of the children on Teheran.

She arrives in Iran. She waits for a long time at a port. It’s very dusty and poor where she is staying. She told me “you cannot imagine the poverty”.

This port must be Pahlavi.

britannica.com/place/Bandar-e…

From the port in Iran my grandmother boards a boat for Palestine. She told us that the boat took her to India and then to Palestine.

This part of the story also did not make much sense - why go from Iran to Israel via India? I had always thought she was mistaken.

It turns out, as I discovered just this morning for the first time (!) that she really did go via India.

encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…

“On January 3, 1943, 716 children with their adult escorts, many of them also refugees, traveled by truck to Bandar Shahpour on the Persian Gulf, and from there on the freighter Dunera to Karachi, Pakistan.”

“From Karachi, the refugees traveled on the Noralea around the Arabian Peninsula and through the Red Sea to the Egyptian city of Suez.”l

“The children then crossed the Sinai Desert by train, and arrived at the Atlit refugee camp in northern Palestine on February 18, 1943, where the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) welcomed them.”

Looks like Dunera, the ship that took my grandmother from Iran to India, was used by the British to transport refugees during WWII.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMT_Dunera

By the time my grandmother arrives in Palestine in 1943, she speaks Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German and Uzbek.

She is around 18 years old.

Here’s a photo of her later in her life.

The reasons these stories are so muddled is because my grandmother only told them to her grandchildren (and not her children) once we were old enough to understand.

I don’t remember her ever telling me these stories in a linear order.

And she would get to certain parts of the story and then dodge our questions (eg “How did you get from X to Y?”) or jump to another part of the story.

On part of the story that stands out in my head is my grandmother in the forest with the partisans.

Which partisans? I don’t know. Which part of her journey? Don’t know.

I know it was a forest, and my grandmother was staying with the partisans while “running away”.

I have a vivid image of myself in the mid 1990s sitting at the kitchen table with my grandmother and her telling me about running away through the forest.

There was no food, so she ate grass.

I think she was by herself. I don’t know from where she was or where she was going.

Here is an incredible documentary from Iran in 1983.

It documents the Polish refugees in Iran during WWII. Many of the first-hand accounts remind me of things my grandmother told me.

(Thanks @Azarderakhsh for reading my thread and sending this to me.)

Amazingly just two years ago a book was written about the Teheran Children and afaik it seems like my grandmother’s story fits right in to the narrative.

None of this information was available to me while I was growing up and listening to my grandmother’s stories.

Chatting with my aunt this morning and have learned even more. Here's a photo of the Neuralia, which brought my grandmother from India to Israel.

the-weatherings.co.uk/pccship0457.htm

Another documentary on the Children of Teheran from Israel in 2007. I've never seen this one either.