BY MIKHAL DEKEL
In the summer of 1942, Bandar Pahlavi, a sleepy Iranian port town on the Caspian Sea, became a city of refugees. On its shores were clusters of tents, a quarantine area for typhoid patients, and a large area for distributing food. Outside the tented area, local peddlers hung baskets of sweet cakes and sewing thread, disappearing periodically when club-wielding policemen appeared.
The refugees were Polish citizens who three years prior, with the outbreak of World War II, had fled into the Soviet Union and now, having journeyed nearly 5,000 miles, sailed from Soviet Turkmenistan to northern Iran. More than 43,000 refugees arrived in Bandar Pahlavi in March 1942.
A second wave of almost 70,000 came with the August transports, and a third group of nearly 2,700 was transferred by land from Turkmenistan to Mashhad in eastern Iran. Of these, roughly 75,000 were soldiers, cadets, and officers of what was known as Anders’ Army, a Polish army in exile that had assembled in the Soviet Union under the command of Gen. Wladyslaw Anders.
The rest were mothers and babies, elderly men and women, and unaccompanied children. Three thousand, perhaps more, were Jewish, including four rabbis and nearly 1,000 unaccompanied children who were taken from Polish orphanages in the Soviet Union. There were also several hundred Polish Jewish stowaways, recent converts to Catholicism, women who pretended to be married to Polish officers, and the like.
From the vantage point of the world we live in today—a world of turmoil in the Middle East and peace in Europe, a world of refugees fleeing the Middle East into Europe, a world in which Iran and Israel are locked in a seemingly eternal conflict—it is hard to imagine that another world existed.
In that world, refugees fled war-torn Europe into Iran, Turkey, and Mandatory Palestine, and they lived there in relative peace for the duration of the war.
In the early 1970s, Iranian film director Khosrow Sinai stumbled on the story of the Polish refugees in wartime Iran accidentally, while attending a memorial service at Doulab, Tehran’s Catholic cemetery. His documentary film The Lost Requiem is a search for the traces of these refugees’ lives, first in the gravestones carved with Polish orthography, then in interviews with Poles who still lived in Iran and elderly Iranians who still remember their arrival.
“One day we woke up and saw them descend on shore,” a resident of Bandar Pahlavi, which was renamed Bandar Anzali after the Iranian revolution, recounts in The Lost Requiem. “They were in very bad condition, thin and ill.” Reader Bullard, then the British ambassador to Iran, also reported that the “thousands of civilian refugees—women and children and old men” descended in Iran very suddenly and unexpectedly.
Those who arrived in Bandar Pahlavi on the first transports in March 1942 were placed in small hotels and in the Cinema Shir-o-Khorshid movie theater. The gravely ill were transferred to local hospitals, the mildly ill were quarantined in a separate tent area, and the rest were shaved, stripped of their lice-infested clothes, given a blanket and a new set of clothing and underwear, and within weeks transferred to one of six refugee camps in Tehran, Isfahan, or Ahvaz.
From the vantage point of the world we live in today—in which Iran and Israel are locked in a seemingly eternal conflict—it is hard to imagine that another world existed.
The world that the refugees came to was one in which the British and Soviet empires had not yet collapsed; the State of Israel had not yet been born; and the Islamic Republic of Iran was decades away from existence. Months earlier, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Anglo-Soviet troops invaded Iran, deposed and exiled the Germany-friendly Reza Shah, and anointed his pro-British son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who would go on to rule Iran until 1979.
A combination of factors had spurred the invasion, not least fears that the Iranian oil fields, which had been under the control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company since 1909, would fall into German hands. Both the British and the Soviets now carved out spheres of influence in Iran, the former in southern Iran and the latter in the north. And by the time the Polish refugees arrived there, and despite continual, low-grade attacks by pro-German Iranian groups, Iran had become a center of gravity for Allied soldiers and an array of Jewish refugees from Europe, Soviet Central Asia, Iraq, and the Caucasus.
In an “Urgent Report on Polish Refugees in Persia,” British Col. Alexander Ross, who was charged with the care of civilian refugees, wrote that nearly all the new arrivals suffered from some disease due to prolonged malnutrition, and 40 percent had malaria. Gen. Anders said that he expected a quarter of the refugees to die in Iran, and Polish Ambassador Stanislaw Kot reported that of the 9,956 children who were evacuated during the August transports, 60 percent suffered from malnutrition and 366 had died on route.
But 15-year-old Emil Landau, a Jewish boy from Warsaw, recalled the arrival in Iran as momentous in his diary:
On the historic day of August 16, 1942, … In forty degrees and some weather, the first group of passengers leaves on the tugboat’s dock and after a half hour sail arrives at the small port Bandar Pahlavi. Difficult to transmit in writing the first impression. Each one feels as if he is born again, has come to a place out of this world. The port’s waters are littered with colorful boats; the surroundings are mowed lawns and flowerbeds; rows of impressive Chevrolets and Studebakers wait for transport, and everything seems good and beautiful, everything smiles together with the Persians, and with the Indian soldiers who gaze at the arrivers with pity. After we are on shore everyone hugs everyone.
Iran was the dream of every Jewish and Christian Polish refugee in Central Asia, a respite from years of starvation in the Soviet Union. It was the first country they had encountered since the beginning of the war that had not been ravaged by war, hunger, and disease.
“To us … it is a heaven,” Hayim Zeev Hirschberg, a Warsaw-born rabbi, wrote.
No comments:
Post a Comment