{"id":6920,"date":"2026-05-15T20:13:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T20:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/6920\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T20:13:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T20:13:33","slug":"the-wanderers-tells-the-story-of-polands-holocaust-survivors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/6920\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Wanderers\u2019 tells the story of Poland\u2019s Holocaust survivors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like many Holocaust<\/a> survivors, Daniela Gerson\u2019s grandparents lived by the vow to \u201cnever forget, never forgive\u201d the annihilation of their Polish Jewish hometown at the hands of the Nazis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They took less interest in commemorating their own story of survival by leaving their beloved Zamo\u015b\u0107, Poland. Before understanding the mass extermination to come, they escaped to the Soviet Union, a route that turned into a decade of wandering exile, from Siberian labor camps to Central Asia and displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gerson, an immigration reporter and professor of journalism at California State University, grew up in Washington, D.C. Her Holocaust education detailed survivors who emerged from the concentration camps, hid in attics and forests, or posed as Christians<\/a>. She believed her family\u2019s odyssey in the east was relatively rare.<\/p>\n

Only recently did Gerson learn that her grandparents were part of the largest group of European Jews to survive the Holocaust. The Nazis killed 90% of Poland\u2019s Jews. Most of those who survived, nearly 300,000, fled east in 1939 to the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

Gerson chronicles her family\u2019s not-so-unique journey in her new book, \u201cThe Wanderers.\u201d This blend of memoir, history, and journalism took her to Zamo\u015b\u0107, Ukraine<\/a>, and Uzbekistan. (The Russia-Ukraine War prevented her from visiting Siberia, where Stalin sent her grandparents to labor camps.)<\/p>\n

\"DanielaDaniela Gerson and Talia Inlender traveled with their children to Zamo\u015b\u0107, Poland, to investigate their families\u2019 intertwined past. (credit: Daniela Gerson\/JTA)’I didn’t see their story anywhere’<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew that my grandparents had survived in Siberia in forced labor,\u201d Gerson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. \u201cThat was their story, but I didn\u2019t see their story anywhere.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The New York Jewish Week will host a free, online conversation with Daniela Gerson about \u201cThe Wanderers\u201d at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday, June 10. Register here.<\/p>\n

Her investigation of the past began with a modern-day love story. To her own surprise, having expected to marry a nice Jewish man, she fell for a nice Jewish woman: Talia Inlender, an immigration attorney. And in perhaps as great a surprise, Gerson discovered that Inlender\u2019s grandfather came from the same town as her own grandparents, Zamo\u015b\u0107, where their houses stood about 100 steps from each other across the town square.<\/p>\n

Gerson was even more stunned to realize that Inlender\u2019s family took nearly the same path as hers. Both of their grandparents made the calculation to cross the border to the Soviet Union during a brief opening in the fall of 1939, after Stalin and Hitler carved Poland between them.<\/p>\n

Both families became refugees at the same time in current-day Lviv in western Ukraine. They suffered from hunger and disease, which killed Mottel and Peshke Gerson\u2019s firstborn child, Daniela Gerson\u2019s uncle Arik. They saw other Polish citizens, accused as threats to the Soviet Union, arrested and disappeared by secret police. So when the Communists offered them a choice between Soviet citizenship and returning to Nazi-occupied Poland, not knowing what the future would hold, the Gersons and the Inlenders, like thousands of other Jews, said they wanted to go back home.<\/p>\n

Trick disguised as an offer<\/p>\n

But the offer was a trick: Stalin declared that the Jews who applied to leave were traitors and security risks. In 1940, they were deported in cattle cars to the Ural Mountains, where both families found themselves in forced labor camps in the Sverdlovsk province.<\/p>\n

A year later, their fates changed again when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and the Nazis marched into Lviv. Behind the Gersons and the Inlenders, the Jews left in Zamo\u015b\u0107 and Lviv would be systematically killed. Meanwhile, they transformed from Gulag prisoners into comrades. Britain, which housed the Polish government in exile, agreed to team up with the Soviet Union on the condition that Polish prisoners were freed.<\/p>\n

Thus began years of trekking for the Gersons and the Inlenders through the Soviet Union\u2019s Central Asian republics. Thousands of Jews migrated through Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. They continued to fend off hunger, illness and arrests, surviving on the black market.<\/p>\n

At the end of the war, the Gersons and the Inlenders briefly returned to Poland, though not to Zamo\u015b\u0107. They went to western Poland, which appeared to boast a Jewish revival. That was until antisemitic pogroms pushed them west again, and they arrived in displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany.<\/p>\n

Finally, 10 years after leaving their homes in the Zamo\u015b\u0107 town square, the two families\u2019 paths moved far apart. The Inlenders immigrated to Israel in 1949 and the Gersons to the United States in 1950.<\/p>\n

Gerson\u2019s and Inlender\u2019s fathers were both born during this long limbo. Allan Gerson, who would become a lawyer bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, entered the world in an Uzbek village. Nachum Inlender, an entrepreneur, was born in an Austrian displaced persons camp. He moved to the United States to study in his 20s, setting the stage for their daughters to meet in Los Angeles decades later.<\/p>\n

Both men also died within years of each other, Nachum Inlender in 2016 and Allan Gerson in 2019.<\/p>\n

The twists of history that saved the families also wound up obscuring their stories. In the postwar period, the Soviet Union celebrated its victory over the Nazis and its liberation of the death camps, a narrative that left little room for Soviet persecutions of Jews. After the Soviet Union fell, Poland saw growing efforts to unearth Holocaust memory, but those were soon clouded by a nationalist right-wing government from 2015 to 2023, which advanced a version of history focused on Polish victimhood and resistance. A member of that political movement was elected president last year, once again setting back research on Polish Jewish history.<\/p>\n

In the United States, Stalin was briefly portrayed as a heroic \u201cUncle Joe\u201d in a triumph of good over evil. Then, with the advent of the Cold War, Gerson said her grandparents sought to hide any connections to the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

On a personal level, Gerson said her grandparents were intent on drawing attention to those who did not survive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were consumed with guilt. I saw my grandfather focus on telling the story of the relatives who were left behind in Poland and who were killed,\u201d she said. \u201cIf they were going to do commemoration, it would be focused on those who were murdered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Officially, families like the Gersons and the Inlenders were not recognized for many years as Holocaust survivors at all. When Germany began to pay reparations to survivors through the Claims Conference in the 1950s, Jews who fled east did not qualify. As a result, Inlender\u2019s grandparents lied on their documents, saying that her grandmother survived two Lublin ghettos and her grandfather escaped from Zamo\u015b\u0107 to the forest.<\/p>\n

Gerson\u2019s grandparents also spent years lying. When a family called Blumstein abandoned their papers to enter a German displaced persons camp, the Gersons adopted their identity. It was their only way in after the United States stopped permitting new admissions to stem the flood of refugees from the east. They lived illegally as the Blumsteins in New York until 1957, when a lawyer cleared them of the trespasses.<\/p>\n

Gerson and Inlender, who have dedicated their careers to representing the experiences of immigrants to the United States, recognized the decision to lie.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a time when our country has closed its border to refugees, and calls other immigrants criminals who lie, knowing that my family lied, I have a much better understanding of why people lie,\u201d said Gerson. \u201cAnd it doesn\u2019t make them bad immigrants. It might make them actually good ones who are working so hard to keep their families safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Digging through visa applications, Gerson discovered that it was common for Polish Jews who survived in the Soviet Union to bend their identities in order to continue surviving and start new lives. While she empathized with such fabrications, they also complicated the historical record, as many \u201cwanderers\u201d themselves did not share their exodus as a survival story.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were all sorts of messages that you\u2019re not a survivor,\u201d said Gerson. \u201cBut if you\u2019re not a survivor, what are you? You\u2019ve survived the Gulag, you were in the Soviet Union, and your family members were killed. And do you get to consider yourself part of the Holocaust?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like many Holocaust survivors, Daniela Gerson\u2019s grandparents lived by the vow to \u201cnever forget, never forgive\u201d the annihilation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6164,417,792,2005,9],"class_list":["post-6920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-diaspora","tag-germany","tag-holocaust","tag-nazis","tag-poland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}