Tehran Children: Remembering Iranians’ Hospitality to Polish Jewish Refugees During the Holocaust
Growing up in the Israeli port city of Haifa, Mikhal Dekel was often asked about her parents’ background, as many Israelis are. When they asked her if her father was a Holocaust survivor, she’d say, “No, he was not. He was a Tehran Child.”
For generations of Israelis, the term “Tehran Children” has been an enigmatic designation. It denotes those who fled Eastern Europe during World War II, mostly from German-occupied Poland, and made their way to then Mandatory Palestine via Tehran. Many remained in Israel following its creation in 1948. Of course, the Tehran Children were Holocaust survivors too, having had to flee the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, but Dekel explains that she didn’t think of her father on those terms: “Survivors had a muted aura of shame and anxiety in the Israel of my youth,” she writes in her new book, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey. “But the Tehran Children were Israelis: kibbutzniks, army generals, media personalities, industrialists. They were not Europe’s rejected, but Israel’s desired.”
Tehran Children: Remembering Iranians’ Hospitality to Polish Jewish Refugees During the Holocaust