Dan Ford's Bookshelf: good reading

Book of the month

The Wanderers is a fascinating book, and sometimes an irritating one. Daniela Gerson checks all of the boxes for today's bien-pensant Californian: she's a journalist who's also a college professor, and she's married to a woman who's an immigration attorney. (Top that if you can!) They're both descended from Jewish families from Zamość in eastern Poland. In September 1939 the Germans got there first, but according to a secret agreement between Hitler and Stalin had to yield to the Russians: eastern Poland was fated to become part of the Soviet Union, while the western provinces would belong to Germany.

That was hard on ethnic Poles, including my 1955 heartthrob Basia Deszberg, but it turned out to be good luck for the Jews who accompanied the Red Army to the new frontier. Not that Russia was glad to see them! To the paranoid mind of Joseph Stalin, even the briefest exposure to the West marked one as a traitor. Basia, her mother, and her sister were deported to Kazakhstan in April 1940, by which time the Gerson and Irlander families had made their way to the city that as Yiddish speakers they called Lemberg, that the Deszbergs knew as Lwow, and that today is Lviv in western Ukraine.

All Poles were suspect! Christians and Jews alike were crowded into boxcars in four great waves of expulsion. In April, the Deszbergs traveled for 18 days and 3,200 miles; in June, the Gersons and Irlanders followed on the same wide-track railroad to Kyiv, Moscow, and Yekaterinburg. Ms Gerson speaks of "weeks" en route to "Siberia"; more likely it took 12 days to cross the Ural Mountains. (Fourteen years ago I easily found the record of Basia's train, even to the name of the NKVD officer commanding it. Alas, it seems that Russia's latest dictator has secreted the archives again.)

The Deszbergs escaped from exile with a British-sponsored Polish brigade, released from the Gulag when the German army stormed into the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Gerson brothers tried to enlist was well, but were refused and wound up in today's Uzbekistan. All the surviving Gersons and Irlanders would spend the rest of the war in the Soviet Union. "In the warming days of 1946," Ms Gerson tells us, "... our grandparents clutched tickets written in Russian on one side and Polish on the other.... To choose life, they decided never to return to Zamość," which by this time had been rendered Judenfrei. For his part, Stalin shoved Poland 130 miles closer to Berlin, seizing its eastern provinces for the Soviet Union and giving Poland a comparable slice of Germany. (Hitler only attempted ethnic cleansing; it was Stalin who achieved it.)

Alas, anti-Semitism wasn't done with Eastern Europe. "Poles mauled, beat, and stabbed concentration camp survivors and returned refugees" in the town of Kielce. Most of the Jews who returned postwar decided to keep going. The Gersons and Irlanders reached safety as DPs -- displaced persons -- in Germany, and in time made their way to Israel and the the United States. It's a compelling story. Grab a copy!

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