This book is a semi-memoir that reads like an adventure story as it describes an odyssey halfway around the world of a family escaping from Nazi persecution during WWII. It was a difficult story to write as it is an aggregation of my memories from childhood, which as analysts know are often distorted, and stories told throughout my life by parents, relatives, and friends about the events of WWII.
I was carried out of Poland on my mother's lap just ahead of the advancing German army in September 1939. Many years later in 2002, I returned as a member of the IPA New Groups Committee to help establish a new psychoanalytic institute in Warsaw. During those visits I was able to explore some of the history of my family—descendants of the Jews who came to Poland at the invitation of King Kazimierz the Great in the 14th century—that eventually helped me to assemble the book. The part of the story that is, I believe, of interest to psychoanalysts is the incredible strength and resilience exhibited by my parents, my aunt, and uncle as they tried and succeeded in keeping three very small children alive during a three-year, 20-thousand mile journey halfway around the globe.
My parents, Markus and Regina (Rena) Finder, grew up in the comfort of upper-middle-class Jewish families. We lived in an elegant villa, overlooking the river, where I remember holding the leg of the piano my mother was playing.
On the first of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and our world came apart. After watching a refinery across the river in flames, my mother, with her brother, father-in-law, and two small children went east to escape the bombings. Six harrowing days and 200 miles later on the crowded, bombed road, we arrived in Lvov.
My father stayed behind hoping to maintain the functioning of the family mill and bakeries. A week after the Germans entered Krakow, he was barred from entering his office by German militia as a yellow star was placed on his chest. He carefully planned an escape, emptied a safe where family valuables were kept and headed east hoping to reconnect with the family.
His plans were derailed as Russia invaded from the east and Poland ceased to exist. The border between the occupied territories was the river Bug guarded on one bank by the German army and on the other by the Russian. My father was shot as he tried to cross the river. His injured hand was infected. He developed gangrene and required an amputation of his right hand upon finally reaching Lvov.
Miriam Finder Tasini, M.D., is compensated clinical professor at UCLA Medical School, training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Los Angeles New Center for Psychoanalysis, past president of The American College of Psychoanalysts, and former IPA North America Women's Committee chair.
The family, which included grandfather Jacob, moved into a one-bedroom apartment where my father (refusing to become disabled) spent his days learning to write with his left hand. In March 1940, Russia declared that one and a half million Polish citizens were an undesirable element, and we were imprisoned and sent to the Siberian Gulags.
I would like to believe that I do not remember the knocking on the door early in the morning in May because I was too young rather than too terrified as we were forced to collect a few belongings and taken to a train station where we were lucky to reunite with my father's sister, her husband, and daughter. A seven-day trip in a crowded cattle car with 40 other prisoners ended in a prison camp (Gulag Posiowek 45) in Siberia north of Krasnovodsk. Forty huts built by prior prisoners lined the only road in the midst of miles of impenetrable forest where we lived, a family of seven in one room. The prisoners provided cheap labor that sustained the Soviet economy. You worked or you did not eat. My father was unable to cut wood and so became the mailman walking 12 miles each day to the train station. Planted potatoes and cabbage were the main source of nourishment. We survived the arduous winter with six feet of snow and months of temperatures below zero.
I have been asked by many…to try to explain how I was not only able to survive but to go on to live a productive life, raise a family, and maintain relationships.
Germany invaded Russia in June 1941 and after 14 months of imprisonment we were no longer regarded as enemies and we were able to leave. Paying for train tickets by trading a few remaining pieces of jewelry, we embarked on a journey south to Samarkand in Uzbekistan. Illness and starvation became part of the daily experience. My mother and my uncle nursed their ill spouses.
We starving refugees made another decision and started on another journey, to a desert town, a recruitment center for the Polish army that would be allowed to leave Russia to join the British fight against the Germans. We succeeded through coincidences that might be seen as a fantasy. My father met an old high school friend who made it possible for us to depart to Persia as his adopted family.
After arriving in Persia, my father was hired by the British military to administer food supply distribution and there we experienced a transformation from hunger and poverty to a life of comfort. Disease still prevailed and I was admitted in a coma to a hospital in Teheran with a diagnosis of malaria. I have been asked by many who have read my book to try to explain how I was not only able to survive but go on to live a productive life, raise a family, and maintain relationships. As an analyst I realized that I was never left alone, and the only time I remember experiencing a true sense of horror was when I was hospitalized in Teheran and placed in a dying children's ward. My parents were not allowed to visit; they stole me out of the hospital in the middle of the night. My writing this is the testimony to their resourcefulness—they found treatment to keep me alive.
Our final destination was Palestine, at that time part of the British Empire, where Jewish immigration was restricted. Elaborate negotiations between Jewish agencies and the British finally secured our permits. After a journey of four weeks and 4000 miles, sailing across the enemy-submarine infested Indian Ocean, through the Red Sea, and Suez Canal, we arrived in Tel Aviv where I was fortunate to grow up.
Editor's Note:
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