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we will stay. now. none of this at all. >> host: what was it? it keeps on falling. this magnificent microphone.

the horror of their deportation was as horrible as concentration camps. they were taken and brought in the middle of nothing and conditions were atrocious as the constitution there is the concentration camp to the division with the polls, catholic polls and the polish jews and that is the theme i thought was very interesting in your book as well that the tensions between poland and polish nationalism and the jews, patriotic polls, some fodder the polish army and how this was affected by who they belong to in these camps. >> that is right. the story, shale said the story is unknown. it is even unknown in washington so the big event of

this book, they haven't collected -- the material is there but they haven't collected it. there was no story in the sense that there is a story of auschwitz, we have art spiegelman. we know what happened, if you go to a concentration camp you know what they went through so i had to piece this thing together and piecing it together is not so easy because we are talking about, you have to work as an archaeologist in a way, you have to dig through decades of communist amnesia, american liberalism, all these ideologies that for which you understand the past so in other words it is almost a political story, not just the story of what happened but a story of how hard it is to discover what happened because everybody tells a different story, the

soviets told a different story, the polls, especially now with the current polish government tell a different story. designers tell a very different story. so yes, this is a story that was very political and things shifted so you could have christian polls in jewish polls in the soviet labor camp together and they would sort of get along because they share language and have these other people, oppressors or the ukrainians in the soviets but once they are released, the polish nationalism becomes very strong in the jews have to be ousted from that, then the jews have their own form of nationalism because of the scientist government and educate the children so the story is steeped in

nationalism, but also identities shift over time as we saw, i think. >> how was the book forms is influenced by your relationship, you went on a lot of, i didn't know this, bukhara, the park car in jews speak a language such as part hebrew and so pretty interesting, he helped translate and in a way transferred you into these communities in the sun, when you first went to turkmenistan, did you go? in the beginning your relationship with him informed a lot of the book and then something happened. tell us a little bit about that. >> there is a lot of research on the holocaust second-generation, the person that mediates between you and

the traumatic past, when we started working on this after that initial meeting he was interested, i'm not going to write a book about my father and delve into this horrible history. >> his family was expelled after the iranian revolution. a lot of parallels in terms of the notion of what it meant to be expelled from your homeland. >> he himself was a refugee separated from his parents so there were parallels. i was happy to give the story to him as a writer and then said maybe we will work on this together and write alternating chapters but two writers can't really work together so that didn't go very well but also as you work on your own history

and delve deeper and deeper you become more possessive of it in the parallel is flawed. he begin to understand it's not exactly parallel, it's a story of exile but it is different, as horrible as his history was, to be a child in los angeles is different than pakistan where there is no food, 0, nothing but also - the first of a number of interlocutors, i was always working with somebody. i find it very helpful and soothing and also you can't really -- the areas i went researching, you can do independent research and expect people -- people don't talk to you because pakistan is a dictatorship. i couldn't go as an independent research. i had to pretend i was a

tourist and i had this research assistant working on the side clandestinely, a korean is back presbyterian minister who is in danger for helping me so all these people have their own history in their own story and sometimes the stories clash. he is going to hate me when he his this but he's in iranian nationalists, much more, i guess -- much more connected to the iranian identity and less critical than he was when we started out and other people, i had an oligarch who was my host in russia which was great because otherwise all the avenues are closed if you don't have somebody powerful helping

you but all these people, sometimes we would have a real political disagreement about interpretation of the past and of the present but nonetheless this book wouldn't have been the same without them and we had relationship still, very complicated relationships, my host in poland as you saw, currently the deputy minister of culture. she wasn't that, she was just historian but my ignorance was the best thing i had going for me, i didn't realize i'm in the presence of a very nationalist catholic nationalist intelligentsia of poland but we are still in touch and it is a complicated relationship so jews and polls are great friends, i don't think my

archival research supports that so now. there -- the friction was around these political questions but we are still great friends. >> a read the book? >> my colleague, magda, my friends, mom polish friend has not read the book and played a big part in it. don't know if you saw my twitter but polish nationalists are aggressive, it happened immediately, the new york times wrote a review that mentioned poland and i started getting it immediately at 9 am, i wrote magda and told her i'm going to send you book, you're not going to like some parts of it i think that you will see that i care for you and appreciate

your help and we will see what she says. >> people pounds before they read because the picture you are painting in the book is very complex. there are some good polls and some terrible ones, the way polls were treated in the concentration camps or refugee settlements was very different whether they were jews or whether they were polls but it strikes everywhere even when your father comes to israel, between the people who were born in israel and the refugees there is always a tension between people and always a revisionist history. i want to get to the point don't know if people know, tell them about what happened with the government and what was the government's position on the holocaust and the war that changed everything in poland a few years ago that it is

illegal to write anything about the polls doing any kind of damage to or being prejudice against the jews so that became a national bucolic which is unbelievably and then the museum of polish jewelry now. you talks about that too but is very complicated and we are at this moment where all the survivors are dying so history is being revised on all these fronts according to the politics of the leaders and you get caught up in the middle of it so what is the truth? >> guest: it took me a long time - i spoke about ideologies. after a while i really shared -- should a lot of my bias, as much as i could. i started out the leftists israeli.

my first reaction when i realized the children were in iran, of course that narrative was completely basically taken over by israel and made to sound like a rescue story that they were in iran and so on. i wisconsin we revising myself was when this woman reached out to me poland didn't exist me, it wasn't even a place, never went there, didn't know anything about it, i am israeli, now american. my family was there for eight generations. israel in one generation i am here, and this woman invited me, her family hails from my father's hometown. this is my hometown and where your father and my father went

to school together and i bought into that narrative a little bit and i was thinking one of them and it is more complicated but i realized it is a difficult story, especially the 1930s and during the war so i don't know if i got to the truth of things but i tried to represent things in as complex and truthful way as possible. what do these polish nationalists want from me? i talk a lot about the suffering of christian polls. i don't blame them for the nazi genocide. i sent one twitter message, read the book before you pounds. i didn't -- i do talk, their messages are jews don't care

about polish suffering, children of holocaust survivors don't know anything and are always suffering but i think my book talks about these issues and whatever horrible things i document are documented by footnotes, there's nothing i say that is speculative. >> i knew nothing about the political ping-pong that was playing between germany and russia. i thought that was only at the end of the war. they were really playing political games with these territories in terms of revoking citizenship and caught in the middle and then you have not only jews and catholics the communists, nationalists, all these ideologies which are fighting for supremacy and have rewritten the history of these people according to their own needs.

>> guest: you have ideology but there is life itself. if you are a child, a jewish child in iran you are going to become is really, doesn't matter, a lot of these children did not come from zionist homes but there was no other option to them and so it is also and then they grow up in keyport's, this kind of socialist cooperatives settlement, my father grew up in this. walk home, extremely, between him and kibitzes now relationships but they grew up and worked the cows, became secular even though they came from religious homes. so your place defines your identity. we are all defined by place as well and i interviewed a woman who came with my father to is

becca stan, she remained in his pakistan, she's and is back woman now. i interviewed her, she lives, identifies as jewish but lives in the muslim community and that was her life and i said to her, she was 90, how would you summarize living your life? she said it was a good life. it started out very badly but i met a nice man. in other words that is her identity, a polish girl just like my father. >> there was a lot of denial about the eastern european past, 70s or 80s they didn't have yet his leg was, discouraging people from that,

no music, people changed names, he kept his name until then. and can't look back. very strong and independent. doing the research for this book. >> at the end of this process which is a decade-long process i have a lot of empathy towards a lot of people, the polish catholics also speak from a rule or a wound. i grew up on the rejection of suffering, israel's strength

was what israel could do, by turning back to the historic past, my generation will be a new generation that will grow up, that without carrying the burden of the jewish past, it was very liberating, there is a big price where symptoms without that but also you go to the beach and party and don't talk about what happened and i now know my friend homes were ghosts of dead, like toni morrison's beloved, ghosts of dead parents and uncles and

aunts and sometimes a whole other family and nobody mentions those people at all. everything changes in that regard a little bit and there's a lot of you to study in israel and a study of the holocaust. people are more ready to do the kind of stuff i did in this book. >> what's the most surprising thing you uncovered in your exploration of your family's history? >> there are a lot of amazing things, they were generations in this town i didn't think had any consequence. i discovered a lot of things. my father was a very enigmatic person, quiet person, things --

i got the key to understanding him, he was obsessed with mujahedin and we don't have that many mushrooms in israel but sometimes in the winter, 6:00 am you have mushrooms and it was really happiest when doing that and realized that is what we get every saturday in poland so little things like that and on a larger level i set out to write a memoir, writing a book about a quarter million polish survivors, most polish jews in this matter, i ended up writing this big big book with a really big impact rather than a little book. i didn't realize there were

that many people that were the majority of survivors. 3.5 million jews lived in poland before the war, 10% survived, rough crude numbers. out of these, 250,000 survived in the soviet union, central asia and so on. the story of the majority of refugees, survivors hasn't been fully told and explored. >> your book unintentionally reaffirmed for me one of the things i was constantly told by my father about our family, as long as those in israel we have a place to go to and one of the things your book recounts is that is so true, that the jews had nobody to count on except each other. the polls in the beginning but ultimately people who saved them were jews.

>> yes. started out as a leftist israeli and still, leftist, but at the end of this journey are a lot of moving stories of non-jews helping including in iran and people -- beautiful stories of individuals who intervened but on a larger level, jews help jews and american jews who try to negotiate with different governments to help these refugees, jews from palestine who came to toronto try, the jews from palestine who came to toronto and come necessarily for these children, they want to cross the border into the soviet union and help those people stranded in central asia and they crossed this border and people died doing that, they would get shot by the soviets at another person would try.

so yes, i think, i don't know if this is necessarily a reason to say we have to have israel but certainly much as i wanted to tell a different story ultimately this is a story of jews helping jews in a lot of ways. it was a big help. >> another thing that is very poignant, your father during the garbage at night and being caught eating cottage cheese because -- all from the time of his absolute starvation, your descriptions of what these children went through a horrifying and it brought the thing about all the refugees not being let in. this nationalism born out of deprivation. we have more than enough and still treating refugees in this way. it is heartbreaking. >> this horrible especially when it comes to children. one of the things, my father's

story is the story of children separated from their parents and with everything he went through, when they were taken out of central asia they were taken out without their parents only children -- on the genocide only children were allowed to be evacuated and were separated from their parents and their father ended up dying and didn't see their mother until 49, they were separated for 7 years from 42 to 49. i ended up thinking separation from the parents was the biggest trauma, bigger than the hunger, bigger than anything because, partly because these children were saved technically speaking but left their parents inside the war and their writing letters and saying what does it mean that we were saved, we have food but our parents are still charming and will die? in fact when these children were taken to keep the team,

talking about hoarding food they would hoard food and be fed and save food in their pockets, they were not hoarding food for themselves, they were not idiots, they were hoarding food for their parents, saving food for their parents and that seem comes up in letters and so on so to think we are just inflicting this on kids. there was a reason to do it, they had to be fed but now 2 separate children just because of that, what can i say? it is horrific. >> host: until that moment they stayed together in your father's parents made it into let the kids go and it was an active decision, not something that went from them but that guilty your father had about having a new life and parent

still suffering, they were still - >> they remained in his pakistan for the remainder of the war like many other people and at the end of the war of repatriation agreement in poland and the soviet union, some people can go back, they went back to poland, the grandparents and very quickly left poland and ended up in germany where my grandfather died and my grandmother came in 49 after israel's foundation but they separated from them, there are all kinds of stories, in some cases children, there was really no food, hard to imagine it. central asia was the labor front of the soviet army. so the idea was central asia will feed and dress the soviet army in order to enable to find

the massey army and the locals who have to die, they will die. so now of course locals find ways to hide food. the refugees don't know how to hide food, they are not farmers, they were under conditions of extreme malnutrition and as people want to get out of the soviet union they would do it. i know some families who said whatever will be our fate will be our children's fate. some places children ran off, parents didn't want to let them go and i'm starving, i want to leave. my grandparents decided to send their children. >> one more question of you. i feel your book is many books. the beginning book is your exploration of your family's past and there is incredible history of discovering the past of these 3 million jews and at

the end it is like a mystery novel when the israelis come, reminds me of an israeli army intelligence, how we going to get these kids across the border and then it has this incredible like energy and anticipation how these kids are going to get into israel so it does all these things that at the end you really close it with you will answer that question why did my father love my grandmother more than me? that question i want to ask is after doing this where his home for you? >> a repetition of the trauma so in some ways i am a migrant, but i have been in new york since 93. my life is here but i have to say i spend more and more time

in israel as time goes by and concurrently my love affair with new york has gone the way many love affairs go, quite ambivalent because of what new york has become and how hard it is to live here. i would really say, intellectually this is my intellectual home for sure i probably couldn't ever in this book in hebrew from israel. i had to have that distance and i had to have these other people who were only available here. not in israel to help me with this so my intellectual home is here but my heart is in israel. >> is the book going to get published in poland and israel? >> guest: let's see. it must get published in israel because there are a lot of survivors and their families who are there. it is about money for translation. this is a really long book and

there was just a frankfurt book fair a few days ago and people were there and they said there are footnotes and there are -- they are daunted by footnotes but eventually i am sure it will get published in israel and hopefully in poland and in germany. we will see. it is a complicated book for poland so there are plenty of leftist polish publishers but we will see. i hope so is the answer. >> a few minutes if anybody wants to ask questions. >> you mentioned about the reading endeavor. and that's you had to wait before you started. i am wondering how you want

about controlling a creative time if it has anything on it and how you learned about the you left or what was in your hand what you manage to get. >> a great question. i'm an israeli citizen. my american passwords is born in israel so i couldn't travel to iran. 's alarm went a number of times and was researching for me in iran but it is not just a matter of going to an archive and find everything. we found bits and pieces, we found some people who still live in iran. let's say they were polls, jewish, iranian men, remains in iran and one of them has a little archive in the basement of a shoe store in tehran so we were able to get material from him. i was able to meet the son of the man who was in charge of

these refugees on behalf of the iranian government, i was - i have memoirs and i have the one whereby -- polish rabbi who was a refugee in iran, he wrote a careful memoir, describes going to persian synagogues and what happened to these children so this is how it is reconstructed. it does feel a little -- i wish i could travel there. that would make a difference but i was able to know quite a lot but i was able to read material, clandestine - sort of pre-mossad - who came to iran

to try to help these refugees and they wrote things, they left a lot of records and they wrote letters to their children. this is my source material. >> how did your parents meet? they had a difficult relationship. did your mom know about that? >> guest: my mom was born in palestine in 38 and she did -- he didn't know anything and they were very mismatched in a way. they met on the beach or something like that and yeah, even now, shocked, married to this man for all these years and i had no idea.

>> anybody else? thank you all for coming and to mikhal dekel for writing this incredible book, i encourage you to read it, you'll find some copies if you want to buy it and thanks again for showing up. >> thanks for coming. please follow me on twitter and facebook. one of the things that has happened since the book is taken off and my publisher was like you have no presence on social media, atrocious so i have been trying to build my presence very very fast so a lot more even ands and stuff going on with the book so thank you again for coming on this rainy night. [applause]

>> you are watching a special edition of booktv now airing during the week while members of congress are in the district due to the coronavirus pandemic. tonight the supreme court, supreme court associate justice neil gorsuch reflects on his 30 year career and offers his fox on the judiciary and the u.s. constitution and then supreme court justice ruth bader ginsburg recounts her life and time on the high court, she spoke at the national book festival in washington dc and later legal analyst and supreme court biographer profiles chief justice john roberts. enjoy booktv now and over the weekend on c-span2. >> this weekend on booktv. >> richard cordray. >> it is about consumer finance and how it