02:00pm - 04:00pm  “One of the Greatest Untold Stories of the Second World War”: A Decade Long Quest After my Father and a Quarter Million Other Holocaust Refugees

Speaker: Mikhal Dekel It is a largely unknown and astonishing fact that most Polish Jews who escaped Nazi extermination survived as refugees in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran and India. Mikhal Dekel, whose then thirteen-year-old father was such a refugee, will share her decade long archival research and global travel to retrace their 13,000 mile route. This route began with deportations to gulags and “Special Settlements” in the Soviet Interior and continued on with collective settlements in the Soviet Central Asian Republics, refugee camps in Iran and India, and kibbutzim in Mandatory Palestine. Dekel tells a story at once intimate and historically sweeping, conversing ...