Hunted, Starved, Orphaned, Saved: The Odyssey of the Tehran Children

Echoes of Innocence: The Odyssey of the Tehran Children

By: Amil Imani

On 18 February 1943, a train pulled into Atlit, on the coast of Mandatory-Palestine. It carried some 861 children and 369 adults. Local residents were waiting for them with candy and small gifts. The children had been travelling for years and across thousands of miles. Many had lost a parent on the way, and some did not know whether anyone in their family was still alive.

History remembers them as the Tehran Children. Their path to safety ran through Siberia, Central Asia, Iran, the Indian Ocean and the Sinai, and it deserves to be remembered.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviet Union entered from the east soon after. Some 300,000 Polish Jews fled into Soviet territory, and the flight brought illness, starvation and cold, with many children losing their parents. Others did not flee at all. In 1940 – 41, Soviet authorities deported Polish citizens they labelled “unreliable elements” to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other remote regions. Whether a family arrived by flight or by deportation, the result was the same: hunger, disease and winters that many did not survive. Children who were left alone were often placed in orphanages, sometimes for safekeeping.

In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union and the political map shifted. An amnesty for Polish citizens followed, and survivors began moving south toward the milder climate of the Central Asian republics. Many died of typhus and starvation on the way.

In 1942 the Polish government-in-exile and the Soviet authorities agreed to let some 24,000 Polish refugees leave, among them about 1,000 Jewish children, mostly orphans, and 800 Jewish adults. Between April and August 1942, the Jewish children and their adult companions crossed the Caspian Sea to Iran. The Jewish Agency negotiated their onward passage with the British. David Ben-Gurion and the Polish minister Stanisław Kot took part in those negotiations.

The ships landed at Bandar Pahlavi, today’s Bandar Anzali. Iran was then under Allied occupation, with British forces in the south and Soviet forces in the north, after Reza Shah had been forced to abdicate in 1941. Some 116,000 Polish refugees and soldiers eventually reached Iran, far more than had been agreed.

The Jewish children were taken to an abandoned Iranian air force barracks outside Tehran, where a tent camp had been set up as the “Tehran Home for Jewish Children.” Local Jews, the Hadassah Women’s Organization and the Joint Distribution Committee all helped. The adult Jewish refugees set up the orphanage with the help of the Jewish community in Tehran, and the Jewish Agency then sent emissaries to help run it.

For children who had gone years without proper food or medical care, it was a place to recover. They were fed, examined and given a bed. They stayed for months while their immigration permits were arranged.

In January 1943, permits were finally issued for about 800 children and their caretakers. The Mediterranean was too dangerous, so the journey ran the long way round. It went from Tehran to the Persian Gulf, by sea to Karachi, by another sea voyage to Suez, and then by train across the Sinai to Atlit. Karachi was then part of British India. The British provided visas and a ship.

A second transport of 110 children came overland through Iraq and arrived on 28 August 1943, bringing the total to some 870 children.

Karachi was only one point on a much larger refugee map. During the same years, the subcontinent sheltered thousands of other Polish refugees, most of them not Jewish.

Between 1942 and 1948, more than 6,000 Polish refugees, mostly children, found shelter in India. The Maharaja Jam Saheb Digvijaysinhji of Nawanagar offered his summer palace site at Balachadi, on the coast of Gujarat, for a settlement exclusively for children. There the children were given a home, treated for disease and educated, and regular musical concerts helped keep Polish culture alive. Roughly 800 children and their carers lived in the Jamnagar camp at any one time.

A larger settlement was built at Valivade, near Kolhapur, in 1943 and grew into a Polish town of about 5,000 people. In 1989, former residents installed a plaque on the Balachadi school wall in thanks, and a school in Warsaw was later named after the Jam Sahib.

These were separate groups with separate fates, but they used the same corridor of survival, and much of it ran through India.

At Atlit, the Yishuv welcomed the children. Youth Aliyah then helped resettle them on collective farms and cooperative villages. Some found relatives. Many learned that their families were gone, and they grew up among new companions instead. Thirty-five of the Tehran Children died in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948-49. They had escaped Siberia, only to die in the wars that followed.

No single government rescued these children. A route came together because officials, aid workers, local communities and strangers in several countries each took the next step, from a Tehran barracks to a Gujarat palace garden.

The Truth Must be Told

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