MEET THE AUTHOR

MIKHAL DEKEL’s book Tehran Children reveals how Polish Jews – including her father – escaped the Holocaust to Iran

What was it like to write the book?

In some ways I set out to unearth and restore this whole big experience of what happened to my father during the war, and before it. But as I was doing the research it got more and more complicated and intense. I realised I wasn’t just telling the story of my father, or even the story of the Jewish children who were in Iran, but the story of most Polish Jewish survivors. Most of the 10 per cent of Polish Jewry who survived did so in the Soviet interior, mainly Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and in Iran and Mandatory Palestine and so on, and those places that we don’t usually think about as part of Holocaust history.

Was it difficult to research?

It was very hard, and that’s partly why the story is not better known. It was complicated in practical terms, but also in ideological terms. The collective memory is political – each country tells the story that best suits it. What my book does is marry all of these stories together, without being 100 per cent loyal to any one of them.

What were you most surprised to find out?

It was mostly the extent of the refugees’ suffering. When I was growing up in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, I did not think of my father as a Holocaust survivor. I thought of him as being very lucky. After doing my research, I do think that in the horrible economy of the Holocaust he was lucky because he didn’t die and he didn’t go to a death camp, but it’s hard to think of luck when you’re basically starving at three and a half years old; when you are separated from your parents at a very young age; when you end up losing a big part of your family. The suffering that they went through, its arbitrariness and scariness – just discovering that was really profound.

How does it feel to have written about Iran’s past when the country is in the news daily? I’m very glad to be telling a more complex story that doesn’t just demonise Iran. It’s not necessarily that Iran saved my father, but Iran was very pragmatic in allowing people in.

What other research are you doing into the lives of the Tehran children?

In conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum I’m looking for people who have a connection to the story, and collecting documents and photos. Readers can contact me via Twitter (@DekelMikhal) or mikhaldekel.com.