Talked we will still be uncovering so much talking about refugees and we will talk a little bit about that. Thank you so much. So my book is that is not what i expected this and the reason its not what they expected because it tries to do other things and to tell and intimate history. Just of my life and relationships with other people. With a very intimate introduction and it is an introduction about my life. s i will just jump in and then we can talk some more. My parents and siblings and my grandmother. A thin woman with thin skin and sharp blue eyes like my father he had been separated from his mother during the war and then came to israel years later and moved in with him and then with my mother and him and then with all of us. As long as i could remember in 1981 she lived in the room off of the kitchen. We did not speak much to her she spoke little to us or in general spending weeks listening to the radio. My mother who cooks for her and washes her close resented her. My father would lash out at my mother or lash on us for the reason always treated her with care. Sometimes venturing out all day only when he came home. There was no tension but just delicate harmony. It was him in her and my mother and the children. When i was six or seven i composed a letter to my father asking why he loved his mother more than us. I tucked it under his pillow and waited anxiously. Scolding me he would never have dared write such a letter to his father. Remember the guilt and the shame wishing i could take my words back that is what plagued me for years. He did not speak a word to me for a long time after that so a lifetime of shared moments that were many were happy we were never completely at ease together again. This is page six and it is a formative moment that i later try to come to terms with on a personal level. My mother survived the war with her mother and she lived with m me. Saw my book was my mother with me and my father and there are these relationships. So asking your father why he loves his mother more in my mother loved hers more. I think the war and what they had gone through to find who they were that we did not know. So tell me how the book starts and i will tell you what it was about because its not about the father. So whatever you do you cannot call this memoir it doesnt sell as well as nonfiction. So we noted the title that my father was left out. But the book began that i live in israel you heard the introduction i went to army and law school i did an internship and that i came here for vacation that has lasted up until now. That was 1993. [laughter] you end up in new york and you meet somebody and life happens. So i started thinking about this and then in 2007 we had a faculty party i was teaching at city college. And he said about jewish refugees in iran . Yes i might know something. If you remember 2007 was the year where we adina john was in power and accused talking about iran was complicit with the nazis during the war and said we know we are not complicit we saved jewish children. So i said my father was he run he said how did he get there and i said i have no idea. That how it started with that question so now because you know that you write about these issues about the war and the legacy and how it shaped us is something thats in the back of ones mind so i finally explore explored. Your father died relatively young. Did he ever talk about his experience during the war or your grandmother quick. Nothing. Zero. I knew three things for going new he was from a town in polan poland. I knew it was the toronto children but to me he was not a survivor nor did he present himself as a survivor and the issue with this book is that polish jews survived in the soviet union and central asia and the middle east. They are not considered survivors technically speaking. He did not present himself as a survivor we were never invited to speak and in 1953 there was a reparation agreement between israel and germany and they were not included so they didnt get any reparations. He didnt speak about it. The only thing that happened is on his deathbed he died from degenerative brain disease which was mad cow disease which i later found out was probably related to his experiences but on his deathbed he started to speak polish and was calling his mother sister and that is the first time i had ever heard him speak polish. I heard him here and there speak a little bit of yiddish. One thing i did not know about i thought all of the polish went to the soviet union but they didnt have enough food everybody was fighting i didnt know that these camps that they went to her polish and polish jewish. So describe the journey that you went on on behalf of your fathe father. Yes and i have a big map and you can see it. And talking about kids who never even left their hometown and now they crossed half the world. They had been there for a while they were charitable and assimilated somewhat they were jewish but not orthodox berkeley think they had a choice. They left the town so the choice was in the beginning of the war was more rational. So can you politically describe how they wound up in the soviet union in these conditions. In 1939 poland is divided between the soviets and the germans. Many people lead from the german side to the soviet side. So the beginning of 1940 a million and a half polish jews there was three and a half before the war another of and a half end up on the soviet side whether they fled their or their town fell under soviet occupation and then one third are deported to labor camps and labor settlements. They are not considered a penitentiary but they are but you work 14 hours a day with no food. You just work. Mostly they were deported because they need slave labor to build their road. So they end up in the north. One year later they are released by amnesty and we can talk about that later but basically stalling gives amnesty to polish citizens and they go through a second migration through use pakistan turkmenistan and thats where most polish jews survived the war and those areas. That most polish christians and up being evacuated out of the soviet central asia to iran and then to palestine, lebanon, syria later to new zealand. This is the story. So my father and a group of jewish children were in iraq being evacuated to palestine. That eventually israel is founded and they grow up as israelis. Did you know that before your investigation quick. Not at all. I only knew the last leg in which that they came from tehran to israel. That wasnt even a place they were just iran children. Is just who he was i didnt think of him living there or in these places but when you start researching refugees you think they go from point a to point to be. Is not like that it is just a road and it is arbitrary. And people stay wherever they can. So they stayed in iran or siberia. People were released from the labor settlement in siberia and said where will we go . There is a war. Their small children. Now they said we will stay. I did not know any of this at all. So the horror of their deportation was horrible. So taken as a family and brought to these not the gulags but the conditions were atrocious deathly atrocious in some ways as a concentration camp but then there would definition between the catholic polls and the polish jew. In that theme that i thought was interesting in your book as well but the tension between poland and polish nationalism in the jews were patriotic polls through the polish army and how that treatment was affected by the army and who they belong to. Yes. These are unknown to the Holocaust Museum in washington. They havent collected it as material remember there was no story in the sense of auschwitz. We know what happened you can discover your parents went to a concentration camp and then you know what they went through. So i had to piece this together and thats not so easy because we talk about and looking at these decades of communist genealogy. Actually the genealogy to understand the context is also a political story not just a sense of what happened but how hard it is to discover what happened. The soviets tell a different story. The polls especially now with the current polish government tell a very different story. So this is a story that was very politically motivated and things shifted. You have christian and jewish polls and the soviet labor camp together because they share a language and they have these oppressors of the ukrainians in the soviets but now the polish nationalist is very strong and you have to be ousted from that. And then the zionist come into start educating children. The story is steeped in nationalism but the identity shifts all the time. How was your relationship formed quick. I did not know this but they speak a language that is part hebrew. So it is interesting so he helped to translate and he would help you go into these communities spec at and then he went to his pakistan. So in the beginning your relation with him informed a lot of the book and then something happened. Tell us about that. There is a lot of research on the holocaust second generation. And then the person that mediates between you and the traumatic past. We started working on this from the initial meeting he was very interested and he is a novelist i said you write this book i wont write about my father into a horrible history. Because there was a lot of parallels with the notion of what it meant for your homeland. Right. He himself was a child refugee separated from his parents so there were some parallels. I was very happy to give this to him as a writer and that he said maybe we will work on this together and we can write alternating chapters. But to writers really cant work together. That didnt go so well. But also as you work on your own history and dig deeper and deeper you own it more than become very protective so the parallels that you see its not exactly a parallel as horrible as his history was to be a child refugee in los angeles is different than use pakistan when there is no food. Zero. Nothing. Said he was the first of a number of people that were my interlocutors working with somebody. But also you cant just do this research. People dont just talk to you. Use pakistan as a dictatorship but i could not even go as the independent researcher parkway had to pretend i was a tourist i had a Research Assistant working on the side clandestinely as a presbyterian minister who was also in danger for helping me. All these people have their own history and stories. Hes going to hate me but im not calling him a nationalist but certainly he is much more with the iranian identity and less critical than he was when we started out. And this Russian Oligarch in russia so all these people sometimes would have political disagreements of their interpretation of the past. And then this book would not have been the same without him. We have a relationship still. Its very complicated. Believe it or not currently the Prime Minister of culture of the current polish government. Now she wasnt that she was just a historian but my ignorance was the best thing i had thankfully because i didnt realize i was in the presence of great nationalist intelligentsia of poland. That we are still in touch so jews them polls are great friends. So my Research Supports that. [laughter] so there is the friction around this but were still great friends. My friend my College Friend has not read the book. She plays a big part in it. Im actually besieged by polish nationalist who are really aggressive on their tweets brick what happened immediately the New York Times ordered a review of the book one week ago that mentions poland and i just started to get it immediately at 9 00 oclock a. M. That day. I wrote her and told her im going to send you a book you will not like parts of it i think that you will see that i care for you and i appreciate your help. We will see what she says. But the picture in the book is very complex. There are good parts and terrible ones in the way the polls that were treated in the concentration camps as a refugee settlement was very different. But even when your father comes to israel the people that are bored in israel and the refugees theres always that revisionist history. But tell what happened with the government with the holocaust and the war that changed everything in poland. Basically it said it is illegal to write anything about the polls to do any type of damage or prejudice against the jews. So thats a National Policy which is unbelievable but it is very complicated. But they are all dying so according to the politics of the leader and then you are caught up in the middle of it. It took me a long time so i shed a lot of my biases. I started out to save my first reaction to say of course that narrative is basically is taking over by israel but i was constantly revising myself when they literally reached out to me i never went there. I didnt know anything about it for quite didnt care about it. But then i found out my family was there for eight generations in this town. And im here for one generation. And this woman invited me. And said this is our home town. Your father and my father went to School Together so i bought into that narrative a little bit. Maybe it wasnt that bad. Maybe it is more complicated. But then again i realized it is a difficult story between the christian especially in the thirties. So i dont know if i got to the truth of things but i try to represent in a complex and truthful way. Thats why a really talk about it separate. I dont blame them for the genocide. On twitter i said read the book before you pounce. I do talk about christian suffering because they say jews dont care about the polish suffering or the children of Holocaust Survivors dont know anything. But i think my book shows that whatever horrible things are documented. There is nothing that i say that is speculative. So that political pingpong that was played with fresh i thought that was only at the end of the war but they are playing political games in terms of revoking citizenship and they were caught in the middle. Sinnott only jews and catholics and communist in all of these ideologies and those according to their own means. And even just life itself. You are a jewish child in iran it is israeli. But there was no other option to them. And then as a socialist corporate settlement and extremely as i now know but then they grew up and they milked the cows and they became a secular even though they lived in a religious home. So your place defines your identity. So i find my place as well. I interviewed people in his pakistan that knew my father she identifies as jewish but lives in the muslim community. That was her life. Shes 90 i said what about your life cracks she said it was a good life. It started off badly but i met a nice man. So that is her identity. And she is a polish girl born in the same town like my father. But with israel with the eastern europeans they did not use the yiddish language or encourage people to speak yiddish language or play the music so your father was in the air force so he kept his name until they told him he needed to change it so you were raised in that environment that is strong and independent but how did that change your attitude or relationship to his real quicks. From some kind of wound, like some kind of real wound. Yes, i grew up on this rejection of suffering. That was israels strength. It could be what it is by turning its back. Its all about its gonna be a new country. My generation really which is the first generation is the new generation that will abof course there were wars but without carrying the burden of the jewish fast. And thats how we grew and it was actually very liberating on some level. There is a price for that. Theres a big price becomes this neurotic country where you have symptoms that manifest themselves in different ways. You go to the beach and authority and you talk about a ayou dont talk about what happened. I grew up in israel, almost every home of my friends homes were ghosts of the dead, like a aghosts of dead parents and uncles and aunts and sometimes the whole other family. My children and their first wife and nobody mentioned those people at all. Now i think israel is actually changed in that regard a little bit. Theres a lot of study in israel and a study of the holocaust. People are more ready to do the kind of stuff that i did in this book. Whats the most surprising thing you uncover in your explanation of your Family History . There are a lot of surprising things. Even this idea there are eight generations in this town that i dont really think i had any consequence i discovered a lot of things in some ways my father was in a way a very enigmatic person. A very quiet person and there were a lot of Little Things about him i didnt even its like i got the key to understanding him. For example, Little Things like he was sort of obsessed with mushroom hunting. We dont have that many mushrooms in israel. Sometimes in the winter in the mountain it be like 6 00 a. M. We have to go to hunt mushrooms. He was really passionate and happiest when he was doing that. And i realize thats what they did every saturday, the family used to do that. Little things like that and then on a larger level, i set out to write a memoir of a man who was my father ended up writing a book about quarter a million polish survivors. Most polish jews who survived the war survived in this manner soil so ended up writing this kind of big book with a big impact that started out as a little book. That was also surprising. I didnt realize they were that many people and that they were a majority of survivors. 3 and a half million jews lived in poland before the war, 10 survived. So 350,000 survived. These are crude numbers, out of these, 250,000 survived in the soviet union and Central Asian and so on. To the story of the majority of refugees and survivors that really hasnt been fully told and explored. These are things that i think your book unintentionally reaffirmed for me one of the things i was constantly told by my father and my family was as long as there is in israel, you have a place to go to. One of the things your book really recounts is that its true that the jews had nobody to count on. That the polls may be in the beginning but ultimately the people who save them were jews. And told you i started i was a leftist israeli and still considered leftist but i think at the end of this journey theres a lot of moving stories nonjews helping including in iran and beautiful stories, individuals who intervene but on a larger level, yes, jews help jews. And American Jews who try to negotiate with the different governments to help these refugees and jews from hell establish who came to around they did come necessarily for these children, they wanted to cross the border into the soviet union and help those people who were stranded in central asia. They crossed the borders and people died. They would get shot by the so