“Tehran Children” from Czarny Dunajec

It is September 1, 1939, five in the morning. Someone is knocking on the door of the Kleinzahler family on Sienkiewicz Street. They live near the synagogue, not far from where they run a dairy. Mendel, the head of the family, gets up and opens the door for a friend, who informs him that war has broken out and that he has seen German planes. In a few hours, shots and explosions will indeed be heard in the town. Mendel calls a quick family meeting and they make a decision. He, his wife Rose, their four children and his brother Szymon decide to evacuate to the east. All seven of them pack the most necessary things, hide some of their valuables in a hiding place and set off on foot to Nowy Targ. The Germans have already managed to bomb and damage the railway station in Czarny Dunajec and the tracks.

Mendel Menachem Kleinzahler, Ahidov family archive

The family, which until then had lived relatively peacefully and prosperously, suddenly becomes a group of refugees. The four children are most afraid of this sudden escape into the unknown. The oldest, Berek Dov, will only be 13 in December. Arie Leyb is two years younger than him, Josef is 10, and Leah, called Lola, is 9.

At the train station in Nowy Targ, they board train and travel to Lviv. The journey lasts three days, and on the way their train is bombed by German planes, but no one dies. From Lviv, they go to Podhorce (or Podhajce - in reports, the names of these towns are used interchangeably, Podhorce is located about 85 km east of Lviv. Podhajce is about 120 km south-east of Lviv), where they have friends and where it is easier to get food.

Two weeks later, right after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, the Russians enter the town. During the Soviet occupation, the whole family is engaged in trade to survive. The children help their parents sell sugar, spirits and wine. The Russians are increasingly asking whether they want to accept Soviet citizenship or go home. Repressions and arrests are beginning. It would be best to wait out the war in the town, so for now they wait. But in mid-July 1940, after ten months in Podhorce, they are taken to a camp in Siberia. NKVD officers come to them at 1 a.m. and announce that they will be sent home to German-occupied Poland. The children start crying. The Russians allow them to take only 100 kg of personal belongings per family, and in the early morning they take all seven of them to the railway station. There they pack them into a freight car and keep them under guard. An officer with a rifle watches over them, and they are not allowed to get out of the car. They set off, but to the east. 

After 12 days of hard travel, during which they receive meager food rations, their train stops at the Oschepkovo station. Over three thousand kilometers further east. 200 kilometers beyond Sverdlovsk (today Yekaterinburg), already beyond the Urals. They get off at the station, all around them are dense forests. There are about a thousand people in this transport, only Jews. They direct everyone to a camp. Russians who have been sent here from other regions are already living in the barracks. For the first three days, the new transport can rest and eat as much as they want. On the third day, the camp commander drives them to work. All around them are woodlands, so the work consists of cutting down trees and loading them onto freight cars. According to the regulations, all men between the ages of 16 and 55 have to work, but Mendel's two sons, although younger, also volunteer to help the family. They receive pittance for their hard work, and there is not enough food for everyone. They have to sell things to survive. They suffer from cold and hunger. 

The Russians begin a Russification campaign, they open a school for children, where they teach only in Russian. The incentive is additional rations of food. Lessons are also held on Saturdays, but Mendel's children do not want to take part in them. Raised by their grandfather and father in a traditional Jewish family, they do not want to violate the rules of the Sabbath. Other students do the same. The Russians arrest the mothers of those children who do not come to school on Saturdays, and introduce a ban on joint prayers and selling their belongings, which means that everyone has to work even harder.

The camp commander also introduces a ban on listening to the radio, and it is difficult to obtain information about the outside world. On July 30, 1941, the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement was signed, and on August 12, the so-called amnesty for Polish citizens staying in camps in the USSR was announced. But no one in the Oschepkovo camp knows about it yet. It was not until mid-September that a newspaper with an article informing about the signing of the agreement and amnesty was found in one of the food parcels from friends from Podhorce. The prisoners show the article to the commander and only then does he agree to let them leave the camp.

The exhausting work in the camp lasted 14 months, but to survive in freedom you also have to work hard. Parents with four children go to nearby Talica. Mendel finds employment as a truck driver, Berek works in a carpentry shop, Leyb becomes a coachman. Another winter in Siberia is again hard, some families decide to go south, to the warmer regions of the USSR. Kleinzahlers decide to get to Uzbekistan, from where they can evacuate even further, to Iran. Mendel sells a gold watch to cover the travel costs and after five weeks they are near Bukhara. This is again about three thousand kilometers away, but this time to the south. The conditions on the journey are very difficult, the wagons are cold, and food has to be bought at high prices along the way. Once there, it turns out that the evacuation train to Iran has left and they have to go on their own again. 

The next stop is Kyzyl-Tepa, still in the Uzbek SSR. Mendel becomes a driver again, the whole family works to survive. They manage to find work processing cotton. By chance, they meet Mendel's brother, Szymon. He is 28 years old, but looks much older. For illegally crossing the border, he was taken to a camp in the Komi Republic, in the north of the USSR. He has frostbitten hands, his body is destroyed by work, frost and difficult conditions. He soon falls ill with dysentery and dies. A similar fate befalls Mendel and his wife Rose. First they fall ill with typhus, then with dysentery and die in a short period of time, they are buried in Kyzyl-Tepa. The children also fall ill with typhus, but they survive.

Rose Kleinzahler, Ahidov family archive

It is early 1942. All four siblings are orphaned, without money to live on, without care. The oldest, Berek Dov, is now 16 and takes care of his younger siblings. Leyb is 14, Josef - 13, and Lola - 12.

There is a Polish orphanage about 20 kilometers from Kyzyl-Tepa, from where transports to Iran are organized (it is possible that this is the city of Kermine - Karmana). They go there on foot. All four are first taken to Kazan near Bukhara, and from there they go with other orphans to Ashgabat, today's capital of Turkmenistan. This is another several hundred kilometers of travel, this time to the southwest.

A Polish orphanage operates in Ashgabat, where children from all over the USSR are sent, and from there they are transported to the south. Older children live in tents, younger ones in barracks. 16-year-old Berek Dov helps the senior staff in childcare, organizing activities for younger children. After six months, they finally manage to leave for Iran. First, camps for Polish children operate in Mashhad and Pahlavi (today's Bandar-e Anzali) on the Caspian Sea, then in camps in Ahvaz and Tehran. The siblings get to Tehran through the camp in Mashhad, where a Jewish orphanage is already operating. Jewish orphans are cared for by activists from the Jewish Agency, who provide accommodation, food, treatment, and basic education. The children are to prepare for life in Palestine.

In January 1943, the British authorities allow Jewish children to leave for Palestine. However, they cannot take the shortest route through Iraq, because its authorities do not agree to issue transit visas. A group of several hundred children with guardians is first transported by train to the city of Ahvaz in southern Iran, and from there to the port of Bandar-e Shahpur (today's Bandar-e Emam Khomeini). After boarding the British ship Dunera, they set off on another long journey, this time to the east. The first stop is Karachi, about 2.5 thousand km away, which still belongs to India. There, the entire group of children and guardians spend about two weeks in a British transit camp. A document from this period registers four "Tehran children" from Czarny Dunajec. This is an addendum to "Polska Walcząca” (Fighting Poland) newspaper from 1943, which includes the names and surnames of the Kleinzahlers siblings. 

A fragment of the list of people evacuated from the USSR published in the addendum to "Polska Walcząca" newspaper in 1943, KARTA Centre Foundation

After two weeks of waiting, the group finally boards the ship Neurolia, which takes them from Karachi, with a stopover in Aden (in present-day Yemen), to the port of Suez in Egypt. After another several thousand kilometers by sea, they board the train again and travel across the Sinai Peninsula to the camp in El-Arish (in present-day Egypt), where they face another two-day quarantine. And finally, the last stop in their new home, in their new homeland: the camp in Atlit near Haifa, where they are warmly welcomed by crowds of people on February 18, 1943. The odyssey of four young, brave people ends after almost three and a half years. Berek Dov is almost 17, Leyb - 15, Josef - 14 and Lola - 13. Of the seven people who escaped the war, four survived, three died along the way. 

This could be the end of the story, but there is another important epilogue to this tragic tale. At that time, over 800 Jewish children, mostly orphans, who are called "Tehran Children", reached Palestine from the Soviet Union. Initially, they were kept in the Atlit camp, later they were distributed to other camps, where they could regain strength after the hardships of their long wandering and begin to learn to live in a new environment. Some of them were taken in by other Jewish families. 

The oldest of the Kleinzahlers, Berek Dov, was interested in carpentry while still in Czarny Dunajec and, like his uncle, wanted to become a carpenter. In the Oschepkovo camp, he completed a carpentry course and worked as a carpenter, first there, and after leaving the camp in other places. After arriving in Palestine, he learned the trade in the Aliyat ha-Noar organization and worked in furniture production. His younger brother Leyb learned agriculture at the Mikveh Israel school near Tel Aviv. It is from this period that a photo of the then 17-year-old Leyb comes from, which is in the collection of The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. It is not known who the second person in the photo is. 

17-year-old Arie Leyb Kleinzahler at Mikveh Israel, The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem

In addition to working as a carpenter, Berek Dov was also involved in youth organizations, wrote poems for local magazines, was interested in painting, and showed talent for the stage, to such an extent that he was offered studies at the theater school at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv, but ultimately chose the life of a kibbutznik. He settled in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, where he worked as a carpenter and joined the Haganah, after completing a communications course he was also an instructor in the kibbutz. After some time he was joined by his younger brother Arie Leyb.

In 1948, a few months before the announcement of the Declaration of Independence of Israel, the Arabs began to blockade and attack Jewish settlements in Palestine. In May, Kibbutz Kfar Etzion was attacked. Dov was killed on May 12, 1948, two days before the proclamation of Israel's independence. Arie was wounded in the face and eye, and was taken prisoner by Jordan, where he spent nine months. When he returned to Israel, he met his future wife, Tova Ginzburg from Chelm, in the hospital.

Dov Kleinzahler, izkor.gov.il

Dov was one of 35 “Tehran children” who died in war, mainly in the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was buried in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. In honor of his fallen brother, Arie changed his surname from Kleinzahler to Ahidov. For many years he worked as an official in Kiryat Ono, and on his initiative a partnership was established with the German city of Dormagen. He died in 1996 in Kiryat Ono. Near the place where he lived for many years, there is a small square named after him. Josef Kleinzahler died in Israel in 2019 at the age of 90. The fate of Lola is unknown.

Four Kleinzahler siblings in Israel, Ahidov family archive

Map of the the most important places where the "Tehran Children" from Czarny Dunajec stayed

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To write this article I used the account of Leib Kleinzahler written in 1943 in Israel (Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, California)

The account of Tova Ahidov, with whom I spoke in April 2023 in Kiryat Ono

The account of Rabbi Joel Landau from Lezajsk (Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, California)

The book “The Tehran operation: the rescue of Jewish children form the Nazis” by Devora Omer

The addnendum to issue 31 of “Polska Walcząca” newspaper (1943) - People evacuated from the USSR (KARTA Center Foundation) [Thanks to Łukasz Połomski for sending me this article]