JTA — Like many Holocaust survivors, Daniela Gerson’s grandparents lived by the vow to “never forget, never forgive” the annihilation of their Polish Jewish hometown at the hands of the Nazis.

They took less interest in commemorating their own story of survival by leaving their beloved Zamość, 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.

Gerson, an immigration reporter and professor of journalism at California State University, grew up in Washington, DC. Her Holocaust education detailed survivors who emerged from the concentration camps, hid in attics and forests, or posed as Christians. She believed her family’s odyssey in the east was relatively rare.

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’s Jews. Most of those who survived — nearly 300,000 — fled east in 1939 to the Soviet Union.

Gerson chronicles her family’s not-so-unique journey in her new book, “The Wanderers.” This blend of memoir, history and journalism took her to Zamość, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. (The Russia-Ukraine War prevented her from visiting Siberia, where Stalin sent her grandparents to labor camps.)

“I knew that my grandparents had survived in Siberia in forced labor,” Gerson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That was their story, but I didn’t see their story anywhere.”

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’s grandfather came from the same town as her own grandparents, Zamość, where their houses stood about 100 steps from each other across the town square.

Gerson was even more stunned to realize that Inlender’s 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.

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’s firstborn child, Daniela Gerson’s uncle Arik. They saw other Polish citizens,........

© The Times of Israel