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The Soviet Exile-- Into Central Asia
A thousand years ago, well before Marco
Polo, Jewish merchants, known as “Radhanites”, made their way from Europe to the
Orient and back. Because they were neither Christian nor Moslem, they could
travel freely across opposing lines, and at the same time, use their
connections with far flung Jewish communities to facilitate commerce. In the
middle of the 20th century, numerous thousands of Jews and non-Jews
traversed much the same routes in search of safety from the advancing Nazi
onslaught.
It is estimated that 1.1 million Jews were
evacuated by the Soviets from the front lines of the war and sent to central
Asia. My daughter’s father in law, who hails from Moldova, explained that at
one time, his family had a different last name, Kaiser. When the Germans
approached their town, Soviet officers came to evacuate the population
eastward. They also distributed false identification papers to provide cover
for Jews in case they were caught by the Germans before the trains could leave.
The papers stayed with them throughout their travels; so did their names, and
thus it came to be that my grandchildren have last names, Ferd, given their
forebears thanks to some Soviet officer in WWII. (Many Jews ended the war with
very different last names thanks to documents that helped them survive. Just
so, my mother’s my aunt, Dora Iger, became Kitzay).
Fascinating and amazing. My father had a cousin who fled from Europe to Shanghai in the late 1930s. He then made his way to South Africa after WW2. Sadly, he was murdered there.
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