Category:Tehran Children (subject)

The Tehran Children were a group of about one thousand Jewish children who had fled eastward from Poland with their families at the outbreak of World War II. Many of them had lost their parents during their flight. These orphans were allowed to emigrate from the USSR along with 23,000 Polish soldiers and refugees, under an agreement signed by the Polish Government-in-exile and the Soviet government allowing for the enlistment of Polish refugees in the Soviet Union in the (Polish) Anders Army. In the spring and summer of 1942, the children were taken to Tehran along with the other refugees and soldiers. After immigration permits were obtained from the British, the children were brought to Palestine via Karachi and Suez on February 18, 1943.

Names of Tehran Children

Eli Melech, Batya Shahar (Karola Felsen, name before the war), Hadassah Montag, Chibi (Tzvi Achtenberg), Hadassah Lampel, Gabrila Knoebel (Gavriella Knoebel), Miriam Goldstein, Unidentified boy, and Michal Galina.

Hadassah Lampel was born in a little Polish town called Nowy Sacz, in the foothills of the Beskid Mountains, on February 12, 1929. She died in 1948 in the Independence War.

Hannan Teitel / Hannan Dekel (1927-1993), bother of Rivka Teitel (1931) Rikva Dekel]] and Noemi (1932)

Mikhal Dekel, daughter of Hannah wrote a book.

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Yehuda Zerzy Singer (M / Poland, 1928)

Biography

Yehuda Zerzy Singer was born in Kraków, Poland in 1928 and immigrated to Palestine in February 1943 with the "Tehran Children," a group of children and Holocaust survivors brought to the country by the Jewish Agency after staying in a camp arranged for them in Tehran, Iran. After arriving in Palestine, Yehuda was sent with a group of children to Kibbutz Ein Harod.

The Yehuda Zerzy Singer papers contain a handwritten diary, photographs, and documents relating to Yehuda Zerzy Singer’s experiences in Poland and Russia during World War II and his life in Palestine after his arrival with the "Teheran Children." The collection includes school certificates, a postcard, identification cards, and photographs of Yehuda in Kibbutz Ein Harod.

The diary was written, in Polish, by Yehuda from September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Nazi Germany into Poland, until the beginning of 1942, about one year prior to his arrival in Palestine. The diary documents the occupation of Poland; the plans of the family to escape to the east and the trip of the family to Lviv; the recruitment of his father to the army; the occupation of Lviv by the Russians; receipt of a letter announcing that his father was taken prisoner; his mother's work in sawing trees and his brother's work as a guard; and a trip by train and meeting new friends on his way to Tehran.

Salomon Wagner (1929-1948), born in Nisko, Poland, one of the Tehran Children (a group of Polish Jewish children, mainly orphans, who escaped the Nazi German occupation of Poland, found temporary refuge in the Soviet Union, and was later evacuated to Tehran, Iran, before finally reaching Eretz Israel in 1943), was killed during Israel War of Independence.

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Norbert Kurzmann / Natan Rom (M / Poland, 1929)

Norbert-Natan was born in 1929 in Katowice, Poland. His parents, Karol Kurzmann and Ethel née Aron, were bourgeois and traditional, with no Zionist tendencies at all. Karol was a salesman, and the family lived comfortably. Their eldest daughter Szuzana-Ziva was born in 1926. The family spent the summer of 1939 in Szczyrk, a holiday resort in the Beskid mountains in south-west Poland, as they did every year. Two weeks before the outbreak of the war, due to the tensions between Germany and Poland, they moved to Jaroslaw, to the home of Karol’s parents. They never returned to Katowice.

After the war broke out, the Kurzmanns fled eastward together with other relatives from Jaroslaw. Deciding that the men were in the most danger, the family split up. Karol Kurzmann and his brothers, Max and Zigmund fled to Romania. The women and children, including Ethel, Ziva and Natan returned to Jaroslaw.

When Jaroslaw was occupied by the Germans, the city’s Jews were robbed and abused, and enlisted for forced labor. On the eve of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, 29 September 1939, the Jews were gathered and ordered to leave the city immediately. They had to cross over the River San to the east bank, which was controlled by the Soviets. The eviction was carried out while robbing, beating and shooting the Jews. Ethel and her children were amongst those who crossed the river. They found refuge for the night in the barn of a local farmer. They continued on to Lwów, where they were reunited with Karol.

After about a year, Karol, Ethel and their two children were exiled to a Soviet camp in Yoshkar-Ola, on the Siberian border. Their son Stefan-Uzi was born there. Carrying their 2-week-old baby, the family continued its wanderings, reaching Samarkand via Novosibirsk. The money ran out and the Kurzmann’s situation deteriorated to the point of starvation. Natan and Ziva were placed in a Jewish orphanage. From his sick-bed, Karol told his children, “I will never see you again.” Their mother told them to stay together always, and gave them her only possession: the address of her brothers in the USA.

Ziva and Natan were evacuated together with the other children in the orphanage and reached Tehran in August 1942. There, emissaries from Eretz Israel gathered some 1000 Jewish children that had fled eastward with their families and lived a nomadic existence until reaching Tehran in various ways. In February 1943, these children – the Tehran Children – reached Eretz Israel.

We arrived as “elderly children”, relates Natan. They had no idea what had happened to their parents, Karol and Ethel, and their baby brother Uzi. After a year, they managed to make contact with their mother, and discovered that their father had perished in Samarkand. Ethel and Uzi returned to Katowice, lived in DP camps, travelled to Belgium to visit Ethel’s brother who had survived, and in 1948, the family was reunited in Israel.

Recalling the reunion with his mother, Natan relates:

“I had forgotten my German… I only spoke Hebrew…I was grown up, a soldier, and I came to meet my mother and this boy [Uzi], and we had no language in common… I could only stutter in German. We had not seen Mother and Uzi for five years…. and all I could do was stutter… There was communication, but not connection.” Ziva settled in Kibbutz Hatzerim, Natan in Kibbutz Afikim, and they both started families. They kept in contact with their mother and brother, and the three siblings – Natan, Ziva and Uzi – changed the family name to Rom.

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Zeev Schuss (M / Poland, 1937-2018),

graduated in composition, conducting, and theory from the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv 1963, at the same time he graduated in mathematics 1965 and got his PhD in mathematics from Northwestern 1970. He became professor at TAU and served the chairman of applied mathematics 1993-1995.

Schuss, Zeev was born on August 31, 1937 in Krakow, Poland. Son of Moshe and ajga Eugenia (Teitelbaum).

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Joe Rosenbaum (M / Germany, 1931), Holocaust survivor

"Holocaust Remembrance Day: The Tehran children, by Tom Arceneaux (Shreveport Times, Apr 22, 2016)

Joe Rosenbaum was one of the Tehran Children.

I had never heard of the Tehran Children until Shreveporter Randy Grigsby told me about Joe. You’ll be able to hear Joe’s amazing story in a week. He is the guest speaker for the 33rd annual Holocaust Remembrance Service of Northwest Louisiana at 3 p.m. at St. Mary of the Pines Catholic Church May 1.

When Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, hundreds of thousands of the country’s Jewsfled to Soviet Russia. Any feeling of safety was short lived. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Soviet Union moved them further into the country.

Also in 1941, British and Soviet troops jointly occupied Iran. Efforts of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, as the area now comprising the nation of Israel was known prior to May 1948, paved the way for Polish refugees, both Christian and Jewish, to resettle in Palestine from Iran. That is how a group of Jewish children came to be known as the “Tehran Children.” Rosenbaum was one of them.

Of course, the story of any group is an amalgamation of the stories of each member of the group, and Joe’s story varies some from the “typical” story of the Tehran Children. For a start, Joe is German not Polish.

He was born in Cologne, Germany on March 25, 1931, to Simon and Minna Rosenbaum. As the climate for Jews in Germany deteriorated after Hitler rose to power, Simon began making arrangements to immigrate to the United States. He hoped to move the entire family but his contacts in the U.S. could only make arrangements for Simon at that time. Simon planned to save enough to demonstrate that he could support his wife and three children so they could come to live with him in the U.S. Simon left for America in April 1938. Events in Europe moved too quickly for him to execute his plan.

Joe was the middle child. The family managed to get daughter Ines, the oldest (born in 1926), to Belgium, from where she ultimately escaped to America. Minna, Joe, and his younger sister Nelly, born in 1936, stayed behind in Germany.

In the spring of 1939, Germany sought to relocate thousands of German Jews to Poland. The Polish government initially refused them entry, but eventually accepted them. When Germany invaded Poland, the refugees fled to the part of Poland occupied by Russia but they did not receive a warm welcome there either.

The Russians relocated 400,000 refugees, including the remaining Rosenbaums, to Siberia in early 1940. They used freight cars on trains, then trucks, to move them like cattle. The refugees performed manual labor in an undeveloped area of the huge region. So isolated were they that there was no need for guards. Where would they go if they escaped?

While in Siberia, Minna became weaker and weaker. She was giving Joe and Nelly part of her meager food ration. She literally starved herself to save her children.

Joe, his sister, and some members of his extended family eventually found themselves on a collective farm in Turkestan. Food again was scarce. One morning, Joe’s sister complained of being hungry when she woke up. Joe comforted her by telling her that he would bring her food later in the day. When he finally did, it was too late. She was dead.

In time, Joe made his way to Iran, where he stayed and attended some school. From there, Jewish agencies assisted in bringing him and others on a roundabout journey to Palestine, then part of the British Mandate in the Middle East. He arrived on Feb. 18, 1943.

Hadassah and the Youth Aliyah, two Jewish organizations, helped him recuperate from his weakness and malnutrition after he arrived in Palestine, and he began to work on a kibbutz. He loved the family who took him in.

Joe’s father began to write to him, urging Joe to join him in America. Joe did not want to leave his adopted family, but eventually he joined his father in New York in 1946.

Joe Rosenbaum’s story illustrates vividly the ravages and tragedies of dislocation due to war and genocide. It has deep lessons for all of us. Let us learn well.

Not part of the group but with a similar experience:

Eliahu Eilam Kimel, born on July 30, 1934 in Galicia, Poland, discusses his childhood; his parents Avraham and Regina (Rivka), who were both in the photography business; their non-Jewish neighbors; his father being a Zionist while his mother did not want to go to Palestine; having a large extended family of 100 members, of whom six survived; the Germans occupying his town; his father being beaten by a German, after which his family fled east to Lvov (L’viv, Ukraine) to relatives; his father making money by taking photographs for IDs; traveling east by train for three weeks without getting off and arriving in Ozero, Siberia; living there from 1939 until June 1941; his father working in the forest; being liberated in June 1941 but ordered to stay in the Soviet Union; going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then to Seragana, where they stayed for one year; having little food since fields were used to grow cotton for uniforms; not attending school and being taught how to read by a cousin; his father joining General Anders’ Polish Army in 1941; moving with his mother and aunt to a town near the army base; his mother getting ill, being pronounced dead in a hospital, and then revived by a doctor; his father being sent with the army to the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, for which King George gave Avraham a medal; going with his mother and aunt to a port on the Caspian Sea; fainting on the pier as he tried to get on a boat after stepping on a dead child; sitting on wooden benches on the tanker without getting up for 36 hours; arriving on the shore of Pahlavi, Iran, and then going to Teheran; his mother being taken to a hospital while he stayed with his aunt in a barrack for Jews; not being a part of the “Teheran Children” who stayed in an orphanage but being saved by them when he was being pushed into a waste ditch; staying for 18 months; attending school; leaving with his mother by boat to Suez; crossing the desert by train and going to Atlit in Palestine then to Jerusalem; attending high school; being in the Israeli Army from 1954 to 1957; studying engineering in the Technion in Haifa; getting married and having three sons; and still suffering from the trauma of his childhood.

Not part of the group:

Serge Klarsfeld (born 17 September 1935) is a French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the records to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Serge Klarsfeld was born in Bucharest to a family of Romanian Jews. They migrated to France before the Second World War began. In 1943, his father was arrested by the SS in Nice during a roundup ordered by Alois Brunner. Deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, Klarsfeld's father died there. Young Serge was cared for in a home for Jewish children operated by the OSE (Œuvre de secours aux enfants) organization; his mother and sister also survived the war in Vichy France, helped by the underground French Resistance beginning in late 1943. Since the 1960s, he has made notable efforts to commemorate the Jewish victims of German-occupied France and has been a supporter of Israel. He helped found and have led the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France (Association des fils et filles des déportés juifs de France) or FFDJF. It is one of the groups that has documented cases and located former German and French officials for prosecution such as Klaus Barbie, René Bousquet, Jean Leguay, Maurice Papon and Paul Touvier, who have been implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of French and foreign Jews during the Second World War. The Klarsfelds were among organized groups who filed cases decades after the war, sometimes as late as the 1990s, against such officials for their crimes against humanity. In the years before 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Klarsfelds (Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate) frequently protested against the Eastern Bloc's support for the PLO and anti-Zionism. Recognition for their work has included France's Legion of Honor in 1984. In 1986, their story was adapted as an American television film starring Tom Conti, Farrah Fawcett and Geraldine Page. In 2008, a French television movie was made about them. On 1 January 2014, the Klarsfelds' Legion of Honor ranks were upgraded: Serge became Grand officer. On 26 October 2015, the UNESCO designate the Klarsfelds as "Honorary Ambassadors and Special Envoys for Education about the Holocaust and the Prevention of Genocide." Source: Online-Wikipedia

Not part of the group:

Rifka Glatz (née Muscovitz), born on October 26, 1937 in Debrecen, Hungary, describes moving to Cluj when she was in kindergarten; her father’s transport to a work camp in the early 1940s; being rounded-up with her mother and her brother in early spring of 1944; being taken to Budapest, Hungary, where they were kept in a synagogue; contracting the chicken pox but keeping it a secret; her and her family’s transport to Bergen-Belsen, of which she remembers little because of her young age; staying at Bergen-Belsen for eight months; being part of a group that was given their freedom by Rudolf Kasztner, who gave money and jewels to Eichmann; and recovering in Switzerland until her immigration to Palestine as part of the first legal Aliyah.

External links

• USHMM Encyclopedia]